Jacob Kuppermann – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Sat, 18 Jul 2020 09:50:50 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://stanforddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-DailyIcon-CardinalRed.png?w=32 Jacob Kuppermann – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 Interactivity is key in ‘All the Difference’ https://stanforddaily.com/2020/02/24/interactivity-is-key-in-all-the-difference/ https://stanforddaily.com/2020/02/24/interactivity-is-key-in-all-the-difference/#respond Mon, 24 Feb 2020 11:02:03 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1164316 That notion — of minor mistakes and wrong choices adding up into developments of much greater significance — is at the core of “All The Difference.” The play, which ran through February at the Prosser Studio Theatre, is focused on individual choices and the ramifications of these choices.

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“All The Difference” begins, as all plays should, with a discussion of zombie movies and copyright law. After a bit of introduction — the standard “welcome to the theater” shpiel, dressed up thematically through talk of beta testing and storytelling AIs — the first real exchange of dialogue in Ram’s Head’s production of Grace Goheen ’20’s work of interactive theater is about one of the most fascinating pieces of film nerd oral tradition. In 1968, as the story goes, zombie auteur George Romero was putting the finishing touches on his masterpiece: “Night of the Flesh Eaters.” The final change was its title, which went from “Flesh Eaters” to “Night of the Living Dead.” On the whole, it was a good move — “Flesh Eaters” doesn’t have the indescribable menace that “Living Dead” carries with it. But Romero made one critical error. In making the title card for his retitled film, the production company left off the copyright information, and therefore allowed the work to enter the public domain instantly. This small mistake allowed for the proliferation of zombie stories that cribbed heavy influence from Romero’s creations, and the cultural dominance that zombies have had on American culture for decades after. It was a good mistake.

That notion — of minor mistakes and wrong choices adding up into developments of much greater significance — is at the core of “All The Difference.” The play, which ran through February at the Prosser Studio Theatre, is focused on individual choices and the ramifications of these choices. Through the interactive show’s variable run time (my showing clocked in at roughly 60 minutes), the audience is compelled to choose different outcomes on an app designed specifically for the show by Abla Ghaleb ’21. These choices can be as arbitrary as a character’s choice of outfit, or as significant as relationship-shaping declarations of love, forgiveness or guilt. 

This interactive premise, reminiscent of Black Mirror’s “Bandersnatch” special, is a provocative gamble for a limited run, small-audience production. Unlike with “Bandersnatch,” there’s no way to re-do a scene to find a different ending, no path to retrace or puzzle over. We got one shot, and we had to live with it. In practice, we sat through a normal play — one where there were theoretical branching points but no way to see behind the curtain (unless you somehow managed to game the lottery system that assigned people tickets and times).

Yet “All The Difference” didn’t feel like a normal play in the experience of watching it. Control — even in the limited, single-point interventions offered by Goheen’s script — is an intoxicating thing, making every twist and turn of the plot feel more lurid. It helps that the core of the story is solid even without the conceit. It’s a tale of post-high school malaise and paranoia, of guilt and deception, but even the tragic parts of the story — gun violence, domestic abuse — don’t feel melodramatic. 

I only got a fraction of the parts of the world, but through compelling performances, it felt very lived in. In the iteration of the show I saw, the dramatic weight of the play was carried mostly by Valerie Trapp ’22, who plays the closest thing the show has to a viewpoint character, and Sameer Jha ’23, whose decisions both within and before the action drive the show’s conflict. 

At its best moments, “All The Difference” uses its structure to make its plot all the more resonant — by putting you in the heads of characters making impossibly tough decisions, their outcomes weigh all the heavier. The feeling of watching things go off the rails after those choices — a night of drunken partying evolving into something more fraught and angry, a punch that takes a character almost entirely out of the plot — is the feeling that “All The Difference” most successfully conjures.

“All The Difference” struggles more when it expands beyond those key moments. The sheer ground it has to cover leaves the play occasionally stretched thin — the performances from figures like Jack Thorell ’23 and Phoebe Kimm ’20 are compelling, but they’re given less to work with in any given iteration of the play. And despite the clarity of the show’s thematics of choice and consequence, the script often feels a stroke too obvious. This is most notable in the play’s pseudo-epilogue, where Goheen talks directly through us via the pre-recorded, flanged-out voice of a robot narrator. The show’s epilogue spells out its themes and moral messages one by one, boring didactics masked as heady philosophical talk. It doesn’t make the rest of the play worse, but it just feels unnecessary, an overly-studied flourish at the end of an otherwise compelling performance.

On the whole, though, “All The Difference” convincingly achieves its ambitious goals. Even its mistakes are charming — the kind of missteps necessary to make something all the more compelling and, well, different.

Contact Jacob Sujin Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Depth of talent, atmosphere are winners at this year’s Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival https://stanforddaily.com/2019/08/15/depth-of-talent-atmosphere-are-winners-at-this-years-outside-lands-music-and-arts-festival/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/08/15/depth-of-talent-atmosphere-are-winners-at-this-years-outside-lands-music-and-arts-festival/#respond Fri, 16 Aug 2019 02:05:47 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1156750 Some performers at the music festival were unsurprising in their goodness. But other top performances came, perhaps unexpectedly, from lesser-known acts, especially ones hailing from outside the country.

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The obvious highlight of this year’s Outside Lands weekend was Childish Gambino’s Saturday night headlining set, which felt like the ultimate manifestation of everything that makes the festival great — the loose, improvisational yet sincere atmosphere, the funk/jazz roots of his music, the larger-than-life spectacle of his performance and his earnest love for the Bay Area. 

“You always welcomed me here,” he said to an audience of 90,000, the festival’s largest-ever. “I’ll always love you for that.”

While there was certainly room to nitpick his performance (he didn’t play “Telegraph Ave” in the Bay, which almost felt like a calculated troll), the poise and joy made his set feel like a career milestone. It also made the best use of the mega-screens set up at the festival’s bigger stages of any set this weekend — through skillful camera operators and judicious application of film grain effects, the video presentation felt less like a crutch to accommodate the truly massive crowds but more like a well-thought-out cinematic production. 

Sunday night closer Paul Simon brought a similar energy to the Lands End stage, albeit one that held more cross-generational appeal, playing pretty much all of his best hits in a 70s-heavy set. The crowd for Simon was thinner than expected for a performance at the festival’s biggest stage — California native Anderson .Paak and his electrifying set on nearby Sutro stage was probably to blame. But the folk-rock legend and one-half of duo Simon & Garfunkel didn’t disappoint. Spanning more than two hours (the longest of any this year), his set had its highs and mellows, from the funky “You Can Call Me Al,” which ended his pre-encore set, to “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and everything in-between, including fan-favorite “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” As always, Simon was backed by his multi-talented band, which he arranged into a half-circle orchestra for a couple of songs. He brought out the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir for part of his encore, a definite nod to the older half of the crowd and the band’s esteemed pan-Bay Area history.

While certain other big names disappointed — Australian DJ Flume’s pre-Gambino set on Saturday was overcrowded and ungraceful, as Flume presiding exhibited little stage presence in front of a huge, energized crowd — Outside Lands included an especially impressive array of non-headlining acts that made up for the festival’s hefty near-Coachella price tag, if you let them. 

Some performers were unsurprising in their goodness. Judah & the Lion’s hilarious and playful early-afternoon set — the band donned jerseys and running shorts and put on a coordinated dance number for “Why Did You Run?” — attracted many fans as they trickled in for the festival’s last day. Kacey Musgraves’ vocals were as smooth as ever, though she avoided a lot of pre-Golden Hour songs in favor of the croons like “Butterflies” that launched her into Grammy-winning fame. Hozier didn’t offer Gambino’s visuals or Judah’s energy, but the humble Irish-born singer-songwriter never really needed much impress with his seductive, soulful sound. 

But other top performances came, perhaps unexpectedly, from lesser-known acts, especially ones hailing from outside the country. Dutch-Turkish hybrid psychedelic rock band Altin Gün, Congolese Afropop/funk group Jupiter & Okwess and Norwegian synth-pop singer AURORA all wowed on smaller stages, charming the crowd. For international artists, festival performances can be vital to further success, introducing their craft to broader audiences than they can normally expect. For those who performed at Outside Lands, the audition was a success.

Depth of talent, atmosphere are winners at this year's Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival
Outside Lands’ atmosphere mirrors San Francisco’s tree-hugger culture and love for the environment. (Photo: ELENA SHAO/The Stanford Daily)

If the onslaught of music wasn’t enough for you, Outside Lands had a variety of other attractions. This year was the first that of-age festivalgoers could buy and consume cannabis at the pre-sanctioned “Grass Lands” area of the festival. Outside Lands also had its usual Eco Lands and Flower Lands sections, showcasing local sustainability and environmental philanthropy efforts. The festival showcased a huge flower wall with locally-sourced flowers, in addition to other walls with colorful art displays. Much of the wall art was recycled from previous years, but there was still plenty of good material for the background of an Instagram post. 

Outside Lands doesn’t need to try too hard to distinguish itself from the likes of Coachella — it’s already got cooler weather and a chiller vibe, being less overrun with celebrities and social media influencers — but the atmosphere certainly mirrors San Francisco’s tree-hugger culture and love for the environment. After all, Paul Simon came out of retirement to headline the festival, which he only said he’d do if his appearance would help the charitable organizations he’s passionate about. Simon said he’d be donating the proceeds from his performance to Friends of the Urban Forest and the San Francisco Parks Alliance.

If there was one problem during festival weekend, it’d probably be resource distribution. Some lines for food and alcohol could end up jutting awkwardly into performance areas, while others seemed underused even at peak hours. The structure of the park, full of forested areas and narrow paths, also created transit bottlenecks — especially for the festival-goer who wanted to check out two acts with overlapping sets. Even the set times seemed a little off; booking Anderson .Paak at the same time as Paul Simon was maybe the most egregious example, but there were other unfortunately conflicting set times, like those of the similar pop-punk sets of Los Angeles’s Cherry Glazer and Australia’s Alex Lahey. 

The truly uplifting spirit of Outside Lands, though, showed when artists broke through the material distractions of the weekend, through the scheduling hassles and capricious weather, and made true connections with the audience. It showed during Gambino’s cinematic glory and Simon’s greatest hits show, Kacey Musgraves’ leading of her crowd in a triumphant “Yee-Haw” call and response and a cover of “I Will Survive.” It showed in Anderson .Paak’s encore performance of “Dang!,” a tribute to the late Mac Miller that sang and grooved with the joy that comes with memory. It showed when rap upstart Tierra Whack was serenaded with “Happy Birthday” by a crowd of enraptured teens. It showed as Ella Mai practically let the crowd sing the entirety of “Boo’d Up.” And it showed as the masses exiting the park Saturday night participated in the joyful tradition of singing Biz Markie’s “Just A Friend,” full of camaraderie and satisfaction.

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu and Elena Shao at eshao98 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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15 acts to look out for at the 2019 Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival https://stanforddaily.com/2019/08/09/15-acts-to-look-out-for-at-outside-lands/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/08/09/15-acts-to-look-out-for-at-outside-lands/#respond Fri, 09 Aug 2019 07:18:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1156622 To better introduce you to this weekend's lesser-known acts, we’ve paired some of them with bigger names based on shared appeal.

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The second weekend of August is upon us, and with it comes San Francisco’s annual Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival. The 12th edition of the festival is headlined by Paul Simon, Childish Gambino and Twenty-One Pilots — three acts that need no introduction. But beyond those obvious stars, a mix of established and up-and-coming artists make up the constellation of performers that will play the various stages of the weekend-long festival. To better introduce you to these lesser-known acts, we’ve paired some of them with bigger names based on shared appeal.

If you like Kasey Musgraves…

“Golden Hour” was the album of the year last year — both in the literal, won-a-Grammy-for-it sense, and for what it did in the broader culture. In a media landscape that’s increasingly fragmented and chaotic, with more and more artists made to essentially operate as niche acts, “Golden Hour” was an album that everyone could love. Musgraves, who broke through on the country scene around the start of the decade as an iconoclast that backed up progressive attitudes with old-school songwriting craft, used “Golden Hour” as a vehicle for musical experimentation. While the songs on the record revolve around a general pop-country feel, the mix of styles feels kaleidoscopic. Whether it’s the lite-disco of “High Horse” or the stripped-down balladry of “Mother,” Musgraves carries her songs confidently, and is sure to bring her charm to her set on Sunday at 4:10 p.m. at Land’s End stage.

then try Alex Lahey:

This Australian singer-songwriter hasn’t quite broken through in the U.S like she has in her native country, but we’re honestly missing out. Her “Best of Luck Club,” which came out in February, built on the deft songwriting of her 2017 debut album. At her best, like on album closer “I Want To Live With You,” Lahey can build a welcoming, cozy house out of a song, with precise lyrical details and a warm voice to carry them over well-wrought indie production. Watch her build on Sunday at 1:20 p.m. at Panhandle.

or Haley Heynderickx:

Hailing from Portland, this Filipino-American folk singer released one of the most underrated debut albums of last year with her “I Need to Start a Garden.”  With a low, wise-sounding voice and an earthy style of finger-picked electric guitar, Heynderickx’s songs felt like things somewhere between old wives tales and incantations, full of oddball writerly touches and jokes that kept the album feeling like a beautiful spring day. Catch her live on Saturday at 1:10 p.m. at Sutro.

If you like Hozier

The wildest thing about the large Celtic forest spirit who did “Take Me To Church” coming back from a four-year hiatus to drop a track explicitly playing tribute to the connection between American soul music and the Civil Rights Movement was that it kind of banged. Hozier’s return last year with “Nina Cried Power” was a surprise, but a welcome one— and “Wasteland, Baby!” his album from earlier this year, followed up on that promise. To get all folky and mystical, check out Hozier’s set at Sutro at 7:35 p.m. on Saturday.

then try Miya Folick:

Over the past 4 years, Los Angeles singer-songwriter Miya Folick has developed a resume as one of the most talented, versatile performers in indie rock. While her songs range from torch-y material like “God Is a Woman” (released two years before Ariana Grande, fyi) and grunge rock tracks like “Trouble Adjusting” to funky, horn-driven numbers like “Leave the Party,” Folick’s music is always anchored by her singular voice. It’s a dazzling instrument, capable of lending any lyrical sentiment a magical feeling. Hear it live at Panhandle at 2:55 p.m. on Friday.

or Weyes Blood:

Weyes Blood’s “Titanic Rising” is a leading candidate for 2019’s album of the year, and it doesn’t take long to see why. The songs on “Titanic Rising” are deep without being ponderous, novel in their sounds without being twee or obnoxious, diverse in palate while still feeling interlinked. Her observations about life and the world around her, carried by her calm, soothing voice, seem to have the wisdom of ancient proverbs, and the production flourishes around them almost seem theatrical, as if the whole album is some sort of grand production on an obscured stage. To recapture that magic live, see Weyes Blood on Sunday at 12:00 p.m. at Sutro.

If you like Lil Wayne…

Lil Wayne’s long awaited “Tha Carter V” finally dropped last year, and immediately reminded the world that Lil Wayne is one of the greatest rappers of all time. After years of slander from internet comedians and lazy guest verses from the Louisiana rapper himself, “Tha Carter V” made the case that years away from the limelight had strengthened his resolve and lyrical focus. He doesn’t have quite the chaotic energy of prime (2006-2008) Wayne, but he has a bit more introspection and songwriting craft. See what he’s up to (or just relive the glory days) at Lands End on Friday at 4:55 p.m.

then try CupCakKe:

If you’ve been keeping up with the Stanford music scene, you’ve probably heard of CupCakKe. The extraordinarily profane Chicago rapper was hosted by Kairos and EBF in Spring 2018, and it was one of the sweatiest gigs I’ve been to in my life. But CupCakKe’s appeal isn’t just in the obvious sex jokes (of course, there are a lot of those), but in her winning charisma and the wit she uses to string together those obvious sex jokes. Go get weird at Panhandle on Saturday at 6:10 p.m.

or Allblack:

One of the leaders of a resurgent Oakland rap scene (more on that later), Allblack manages to come off as incredibly hard and moderately goofy at the same time. Yeah, there’s the standard street rap tropes about moving drugs and being armed and dangerous, but Oakland rapper also has tracks like “P’s and Q’s,” which is entirely about being scammed in an Airbnb and getting your watch stolen by a girl. And really, we all can relate to that. Go commiserate at 12:40 p.m. on Saturday at Twin Peaks.

If you like Anderson .Paak…

Anderson .Paak is 100% having the most fun of anyone at Outside Lands. Not only is he playing two sets on Sunday (3:10 p.m. at GastroMagic, one of the Festival’s culinary attractions, and 7:30 p.m. at Sutro), but he makes music that’s perfect for the festival scene. Whether he’s focused on rap (like on last year’s “Oxnard”) or R&B (like on this year’s followup, “Ventura”), .Paak’s songs are full of life, crammed with live music flourishes and jokes. His set will likely tilt towards his dance-y, funky material — if and when you check him out, prepare to move.

then try Tierra Whack:

If you prefer your rap prodigies more straightforwardly rap-ish, then Philly’s Tierra Whack has you covered. Fresh off an appearance as an XXL Magazine Freshman, as well as last year’s 15-minute, 15-track EP “Whack World,” Ms. Whack has made her case as one of the most lyrically dextrous, creative MCs in the game. While her style incorporates influences from many different areas of rap— the melodic flows used by Chicago natives like Valee, the triplets made famous in Atlanta, the dense punchlines of backpackers— Whack’s fusion is unlike any others. Witness it live at 3:45 p.m. on Saturday at Twin Peaks.

 or P-Lo:

Another prominent new Oakland rapper, P-Lo’s blend of E-40-style flows and hyphy beats with more modern stylings is easy to like. He’s got an ear for a hook— I’ve had the hook for “Put Me On Somethin’,” his breakthrough single, stuck in my head for the better part of the summer. He might not have the most innovative take on Bay Area rap, but sometimes you just need something hyphy to get you going. Get hella lit at Lands End on Friday at 2:20 p.m. 

If you like Flume…

Flume’s comeback mixtape, the inventively titled “Hi This Is Flume,” was one of the best electronic releases of the first half of the year, a loose, freeflowing collection of experimental tracks by the Australian DJ. He collabed with rappers like Baltimore weirdo JPEGMAFIA! He remixed Scottish producer SOPHIE! He released a song called “╜φ°⌂▌╫§╜φ°⌂▌╫§╜φ°⌂▌╫§╜φ°⌂▌╫§╜φ°⌂▌”! It was a weird and wonderful time, and his set on Saturday at 6:25 p.m. at Lands End will likely be one too.

then try Yaeji:

Yaeji’s music feels submerged and glassy, all synth sustains and repeated melodies that loop and shift until they’re almost hypnotic. Whether she’s remixing Drake or singing and producing her own tracks, the South Korean-via-NYC DJ is a master of slow builds and grooves, the kind of electronic dance music that you can just as easily get down to at the club or or cry to in your room alone. Do one of those two things Friday at 6:00 p.m. at Sutro.

or Half Alive:

Not going to lie: I found out about these guys through the power of the almighty YouTube algorithm — they had a music video with an elaborate dance routine, which is impossible to avoid. But the indie pop purveyed by this Long Beach trio is compelling even beyond viral fame — it’s groovy and deftly written without ever straining too hard. They play with sonic textures and melodies with ease without being too showy, making pop confections that don’t get old after multiple listens. Check them out in person, rather than online, on Friday at 1:05 p.m. at Lands End.

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What you (maybe) missed: Vol. 1 https://stanforddaily.com/2019/05/24/final-at-what-you-maybe-missed-vol-1/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/05/24/final-at-what-you-maybe-missed-vol-1/#respond Fri, 24 May 2019 11:00:04 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1155434 What You (Maybe) Missed is the Daily’s new roundup of important, interesting and underlooked musical releases from the past few weeks, cataloging the stuff you may have missed out on while studying for your midterms, or whatever it is you kids do these days. Every week, we’ll have some singles, albums, and other musical discoveries […]

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What You (Maybe) Missed is the Daily’s new roundup of important, interesting and underlooked musical releases from the past few weeks, cataloging the stuff you may have missed out on while studying for your midterms, or whatever it is you kids do these days. Every week, we’ll have some singles, albums, and other musical discoveries for you.

Singles:

Lil Keed ft Young Thug — “Proud of Me”: Young Thug is the godfather of the past four years or so of Atlanta trap music. Everyone from ascendant hitmakers like Lil Baby and Gunna to that one Lil Yachty guy who played Blackfest this year traces their styles back to the melodic, off-the-wall flows that Thugger pioneered on his first few mixtapes in 2013 to 2015. “Proud of Me” can be traced back to that era, which is when it first leaked. Four years later, “Proud of Me” returns with a lot to like from the old version— including classic Young Thug quotables (“Suck my banana, no pudding”) and Goose’s production, which expertly flips a UK house track by Route 94 and Jess Glynne. But Lil Keed’s opening verse is what elevates “Proud of Me” into greatness, making his case as among the best of Young Thug’s descendants and capturing some of the wild-eyed energy of his prime.

Japanese Breakfast — “Essentially”: In the Renaissance, the bankers, merchants and nobles of Italy and Northern Europe served as patrons of the arts, providing financial support to the greatest artists of their day. These days, hotel chains commission tracks from indie rock groups, which is basically the same thing if you think about it. “Essentially” is the first new original song that Philadelphia-based Korean-American indie rocker Michelle Zauner has released since the 2017 release of “Soft Sounds From Another Planet.” It comes as part of W Hotels’ W Records program, which has enlisted indie rock stars to record new tracks as promotion. Regardless of its provenance, “Essentially” is prime Japanese Breakfast, merging the more ambient and electronic sounds that have always danced around the edges of her music with a power-pop edge.

Marika Hackman — “I’m Not Where You Are”: Marika Hackman’s 2017 transformation from weirdo folky to weirdo power-pop singer was criminally under-discussed— at their best, the hooks on “I’m Not Your Man,” her 2017 reinvention album, had the ability to stick in your head for weeks, never outstaying their welcome. “I’m Not Where You Are,” the first singer from her forthcoming third album, is more a continuation of the sound of “I’m Not Your Man” than another reinvention, but she seems more comfortable in the sound than ever. The added production touches from David Wrench, who’s produced for Frank Ocean and The XX, lend the song a richer feeling.

Albums:

03 Greedo — “Still Summer in the Projects”: The last year has been a tumultuous one for the Los Angeles rap scene, with its artists simultaneously achieving newfound chart successes (mostly in the form of thinkpiece lightning rod Blueface and the resurgent YG) and enduring personal tragedy, whether in the horrific murder of community leader Nipsey Hussle or the incarceration of Drakeo the Ruler and 03 Greedo, two of the city’s most promising new stars. Greedo, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison last July, has somehow only seen his stardom rise since then. On “Still Summer in the Projects,” his second studio album, Greedo partners with L.A. hitmaker Mustard, whose signature style has soundtracked nearly every hit from the city since 2013 or so. It’s a natural fit, with the two working off a shared worldview to make an album that’s distinctively L.A., whether in the form of bangers like “10 Purple Summers” or more thoughtful pieces like album closer “Visions.”

Big Thief — “U.F.O.F”: While it’s been two years since indie folk group Big Thief released their breakthrough album “Capacity,” it feels like less, due to lead singer/songwriter Adrianne Lenker releasing a solo album, “Abysskiss,” last October. That album stripped down Big Thief’s already restrained sound into an almost hermetic minimalism, leaving songs like “symbol,” sounding like incantations rather than fully formed songs. “U.F.O.F,” Big Thief’s third album, acts as a companion piece to “Abysskiss,” bringing more electric elements to the band’s sound and expanding its sonic universe. Yet the core of the band’s sound is still as strong as ever— at every song’s center, Lenker’s songwriting and unique voice are as clear as a lighthouse piercing through the fog.

Rico Nasty & Kenny Beats — “Anger Management”: Over the past year, rapper Rico Nasty and producer Kenny Beats have made their cases as two of the most provocative, energetic voices in alt-rap. Their pairing on collaborative mixtape “Anger Management” makes sense— their metallic, punk-like styles go well together, with each feeding off the other’s energy. Despite the tape’s short run-time (9 songs in 18 minutes), the pair never feels rushed. They even have time to bring in similarly oddball guests, from weirdo rap duo Earthgang to “Harlem Shake” producer Baauer. The mixtape’s highlight, though, comes on “Hatin,” where Kenny flips a classic Jay-Z sample (“Dirt Off Your Shoulder”) and Rico, improbably, does it justice.

Others:

Protomartyr — “No Passion All Technique” (Reissue): Midwestern punk group Protomartyr has been one of the most consistently skilled voices in indie rock over the past decade, with every song painting a picture of a grimly funny dystopian world. The reissue of the band’s 2012 debut reveals an embryonic version of their sound, not quite as polished but with their voice firmly locked down.

Toro Y Moi — Tiny Desk Concert: Chaz Bear, the mixed Filipino-American/Black producer known as Toro Y Moi, is known for his jazzy, chilled-out electronic beats. His appearance on NPR’s celebrated Tiny Desk series takes him out of his element, with his set consisting of four stripped-down takes on songs from his most recent album, this year’s “Outer Piece.” Yet the change of scenery doesn’t erase Bear’s tuneful songwriting and honed charisma, his performance recalling the greats of 70s R&B.

Sidney Gish — “Sin Triangle” (Music Video): Sidney Gish’s “No Dogs Allowed” was one of The Daily’s best-loved albums of last year, and lead single “Sin Triangle” was a piece of power pop perfection, complete with a ripping guitar solo and a sample from a 1950s educational film. The song’s long-awaited music video lives up to Gish’s idiosyncratic musical choices, combining computer-generated and filmed elements into a funny, vaguely horrific whole.

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Kali Uchis and Jorja Smith rejuvenate Frost https://stanforddaily.com/2019/05/20/kali-uchis-and-jorja-smith-rejuvenate-frost/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/05/20/kali-uchis-and-jorja-smith-rejuvenate-frost/#respond Mon, 20 May 2019 07:30:33 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1155153 Holding a music festival is, in general, a bad idea. The logistics on either end are hellish— you’re handling the specific needs of four or more performers and their accompanying entourages and stage sets, or wrangling thousands of people in various stages of coherence and intoxication as they loiter for hours waiting for headlining acts […]

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Holding a music festival is, in general, a bad idea. The logistics on either end are hellish— you’re handling the specific needs of four or more performers and their accompanying entourages and stage sets, or wrangling thousands of people in various stages of coherence and intoxication as they loiter for hours waiting for headlining acts or in bathroom lines. Organizing a festival is a fate I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy.

Holding a music festival in the rain sounds even worse, for reasons that should be fairly obvious (have you ever thought about the process of ordering 4,000 ponchos?). Despite all of this, though, Stanford Concert Network (SCN) pulled off the implausible on Saturday night, and orchestrated a magnificent return to the Frost Amphitheater in the seventh annual Frost Music Festival, headlined by R&B singers Jorja Smith and Kali Uchis.

The evening started out inauspiciously, though not for lack of valiant effort by SCN or the student openers. Through a combination of rain and the natural lateness of the Stanford student, the amphitheater was slightly less than half full for the student openers. But those attendees who did make it out in time to catch Mammoth and VII’s sets, the two lesser-known acts made a strong first impression.

Mammoth was perhaps the biggest surprise of the evening— the five-piece group, which plays southern-tinged blues rock, has not yet released any music on traditional platforms like Soundcloud or Spotify, and have mostly stuck to small shows on the Stanford party circuit. Yet their music, which mixes original compositions and classic rock covers, is compelling in its good-naturedness. It’s the kind of music that feels impossible to actively dislike, even though Mammoth’s songs sometimes feel like charming rough drafts rather than full compositions.

At their best, though, Mammoth revealed a vast potential for joy and fun. That was the case with their closing one-two punch of original “An Old Story,” an Allman Brothers-influenced barnburner, and a surprisingly lively cover of Beatles obscurity “Rocky Raccoon” that swung on a charming interplay between lead singer Jack Seigenthaler ’19, keyboardist Trent Peltz ’18 and a walking bass line provided by Ben Josie ’19.

VII, the other student opener, was more accustomed to the large stages of Stanford music festivals, and performed with an ease and confidence that spoke to that fact. If you haven’t seen Gabriel Townsell ’20 and his crew (drummer Johnny Weger ’18 and DJ Noah Anderson ’20, also known as “Big White”) perform at the past two Blackfests or at a score of other gigs across Stanford over the past few years, you’ve been missing out on the most thrilling live show on campus.

By now, the formula is clear: Townsell (who The Daily profiled in April) raps and sings with control and intensity through a set of original tracks, occasionally stopping to shout out his hometown of Chicago and banter. Townsell’s skills are as evident on the big stage at Frost as they are at Kairos or Haus Mitt, and his performance Saturday was perhaps his best yet.

After the student openers, and a DJ set from Los Angeles-based DJ Mia Carucci, who kept energy high with a keen eye for out-there transitions (going from punk rapper Rico Nasty into synth pop artist Grimes into Reggaeton singer Ozuna was my personal highlight) and a choice distribution of teddy bears into the crowd, the rain lifted, and, almost as if blessed by the weather gods, Jorja Smith was there.

And to the early evening crowd, she was heavenly. The British singer’s 2018 debut album “Lost & Found” received praise from critics for its “gentle vocals” and “downtempo, backbeat-laced grooves,” but in a live setting she turned up the intensity of her performance by several degrees. That intensity was noticeable both in her vocals, which filled the open air of the amphitheater whether Smith was singing or rapping, and in her band. Performing with a four-piece accompaniment, Smith allowed her songs to sprawl out into jazzy works of luxury, expanding beyond the trip-hop sketches they stand as on record. In her performance she staked out a claim as a true live performer, enlivening her sleepy studio tracks into something altogether more fun. At times it seemed she was purposefully playing with the audience’s expectations of her as a “chill,” loungey R&B artist by starting songs slow and letting them climax into furious jams. On penultimate track “Blue Lights,” her debut single, the atmosphere seemed to follow suit, with rain crashing down again as police car-like lights shone and Smith’s own performance peaked.

If Smith’s set was focused on allowing her jazzy artistry to shine through, her co-headliner instead made her case as a full-on show woman. Kali Uchis’ set was shock and awe from the first beat, as the Colombian-American singer appeared center stage on a rotating, multi-tiered platform, all surrounded by smoke and a band playing proggy, portentous funk. Throughout her set, Uchis played up her charm and bravado — lounging over her stage decorations, making use of a prop chair, and drinking from a champagne bottle that she opened onto the front rows of the venue. The difference in performance styles between the two was clear, and so was the audience response. Someone threw a bouquet of flowers on-stage for Jorja; someone threw their bra to Kali.

Yet even as Uchis moved around stage, her vocals did not flag one bit, still carrying a range that matched Smith’s. As she performed, she seemed overjoyed to be there — at one point, early in her set, she remarked that she “did not know Stanford fucked with” her to the extent that the enraptured amphitheater, now full, clearly did. And her set showed that joy, working in both tracks from her 2018 debut album “Isolation” but also her earlier projects and a few covers, including a left-field take on Radiohead’s “Creep.”

The night’s high point, though, came in the two artists’ shared encore. Starting with a medley of tracks, including two Destiny’s Child covers, the two tore up the stage with aplomb. Together, Uchis and Smith complement each other perfectly, with a chemistry that explained their co-headlining tour as not just an exercise in music industry synergy but a true artistic partnership. They finished the night with “Tyrant,” their collaboration off of Kali’s album, and as they traded verses over that unstoppable groove, I could only think that the rechristening of the newly renovated Frost Amphitheater couldn’t have been done more gloriously.

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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‘Old Town Road’ and the cowboy myth https://stanforddaily.com/2019/04/29/old-town-road-and-the-cowboy-myth/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/04/29/old-town-road-and-the-cowboy-myth/#respond Mon, 29 Apr 2019 07:30:36 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1153807 For the past month, the biggest song in America has been about cowboys. If you’ve managed to avoid “Old Town Road,” the unlikely viral hit by rapper/country singer/Twitter personality Lil Nas X, here’s the quick summary — it clocks in at slightly less than two minutes (making it the shortest number one hit in a […]

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For the past month, the biggest song in America has been about cowboys. If you’ve managed to avoid “Old Town Road,” the unlikely viral hit by rapper/country singer/Twitter personality Lil Nas X, here’s the quick summary — it clocks in at slightly less than two minutes (making it the shortest number one hit in a half-century), samples a Nine Inch Nails song from 2008, initially became popular through a meme that began on Gen Z video-sharing site TikTok, has a music video that is entirely composed of footage from the video game “Red Dead Redemption 2” and has a remix that features Billy Ray Cyrus, who last had a top 10 hit in 1992.

“Old Town Road” represents an oddity on the Billboard charts. It’s a debut single from a completely new artist— Lil Nas X released his first songs in 2018, the same year that “Old Town Road” was initially released— in an era where most hits come from artists who are known commodities like Ariana Grande or Drake or at least from the stables of major labels. In his sudden rise to prominence, Lil Nas X, born Montero Lamar Hill, resembles most closely a figure like Cardi B, who also parlayed social media fame into a number-one single and then into a position as one of the biggest rappers/pop stars in the world. But even Cardi had a few mixtapes under her belt and a stint on “Love & Hip-Hop,” as well as the approval of established names in the rap world like Migos. Lil Nas X had a song and two minutes of footage from a video game about cowboys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ho88VXJTBg

The popularity of “Old Town Road” can partially be explained by the memes around it— mostly featuring white teenagers drinking “Yeehaw Juice” and being transformed into cowboys— and partially due to the fact that it is absolutely a banger. Producer Youngkio perfectly transforms the Nine Inch Nails sample from a burnt-out husk of industrial ambient music to a beat that is at once Atlanta circa 2018 and Deadwood, South Dakota circa 1873.

Over that beat, Lil Nas X works his magic, staying fully in character as an old western outlaw with a black Gucci cowboy hat who’ll “ride ‘til he can’t no more.” It is extremely strange and extremely committed to being about being a cowboy. From the song’s first lines— a triumphantly yelled “Yeah” and an epochal declaration that Lil Nas X has “got horses in the back” — there is no ambiguity to the purpose of “Old Town Road.”

In fact, that connection to the Wild West may play some role in the success of “Old Town Road.” in claiming the mantle of the cowboy, “Old Town Road” enters a long and illustrious American cultural tradition, one that stretches back from contemporary rappers in Atlanta, industrial musicians in Ohio, and game developers in San Diego all the way to circus performers and historians in late nineteenth century America.

Wherever you look in the American media landscape, it’s clear that the Wild West is having a moment. In film, Antoine Fuqua’s 2016 remake of “The Magnificent Seven” and Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight,” as well as contemporary set takes on the western genre like Taylor Sheridan’s “Hell or High Water,” represent a renewed interest in a genre that peaked in popularity in the 1950s and 1960s. In television, HBO’s remake of “Westworld” is not only a western in itself but a deft commentary on our cultural fascination with the Wild West. In gaming, the “Red Dead” series has sold over 30 million copies across its two most recent games, with 2018’s “Red Dead Redemption 2” making $725 million in its first 3 days.

Even in the world of pop music, where invocations of the old west have typically come from country and its subgenres, the cowboy has shown up in unexpected places. There’s “Old Town Road,” of course, but over the past year, works by artists like Mitski and Solange have also used the mythology of the cowboy to great effect. The former’s “Be The Cowboy” used the solitude of the west and, in Mitski’s words, the “arrogance” of the cowboy archetype to reflect on love and loneliness. Solange’s “When I Get Home,” and its accompanying visual album, taps into a greater tradition of Black cowboys, as well as the singer’s roots in Houston, Texas.

All three of these musical works, whether small and large, have sparked debate within the musical world about who gets to claim the legacy of the cowboy. Mitski’s reading frames her use of the imagery as subversive, a reclamation of an archetype associated with whiteness, while Solange treats it as a fait accompli— all the cowboys she knows are Black already. Lil Nas X mostly just seems to think cowboys are fun— although the reaction of the Billboard charts, which refused to place “Old Town Road” on the main country chart, reflects the dominant conception of country & western music as a mostly White province.

These debates raise questions about the mythos of the cowboy in the American mind, as well as the history of the American West in actuality. To help unravel these debates, I sat down earlier this month to talk to Professor Richard White of Stanford’s History department. Professor White is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History and a 1995 recipient of the Macarthur Fellowship, and is widely known for his work on building a new history of the American West.

Central to his idea of the American West is a demystification of the cowboy. When I brought up the popularity of recent works about the cowboy to White, he quickly told me that the pop culture west “has nothing to do with the reality of Western settlement.” Historically, White said, the cowboy was just another “wage laborer” in a corporate old west, a job filled by poor young men of all races who quickly injured themselves into early retirements.

Despite these unheroic beginnings, the cowboy has become a core figure in American culture in the decades since the end of the Old West. According to White, this transformation can be traced back to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, which began in the 1880s. In Buffalo Bill’s travelling shows, White finds the roots of the mythic west— brave cowboys as the vanguard of a civilized settlement of the wild. These ingredients— the wild and the civilized, with the cowboy somewhere in between— are constant throughout the history of the cowboy in American culture.

But the meanings of each part of that equation are constantly in flux from generation to generation. To White, the enduring power of the cowboy comes from how it “can mean pretty much anything that you want it to mean.” Cowboys have been lawmen, outlaws and antiheroes, not quite part of society but bound to it in some way. In some works, Native Americans are faceless villains, in others the heroes themselves. And that flux also means, according to White, that the Western is the shared heritage of all Americans. There were Black and brown cowboys, yes, but even without that historical backing there would still be a mythos to draw on. In fact, White sees the continued popularity and new uses of the western as more about the current moment than anything else: to him, it’s clear that westerns, from the classic westerns of cinema to “Old Town Road” are “always about the present, never about the past.”

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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‘The Addams Family’ is a macabre marvel https://stanforddaily.com/2019/04/15/the-addams-family-is-a-macabre-marvel/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/04/15/the-addams-family-is-a-macabre-marvel/#respond Mon, 15 Apr 2019 07:30:45 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1152676 Most theatrical performances begin with a short, functional reminder to silence your cellphones and abstain from recording. It’s not really a part of the show itself — it’s a courtesy notice, the kind of thing you throw in more because it’d be bad if you didn’t rather than any positive force toward it. Ram’s Head […]

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Most theatrical performances begin with a short, functional reminder to silence your cellphones and abstain from recording. It’s not really a part of the show itself — it’s a courtesy notice, the kind of thing you throw in more because it’d be bad if you didn’t rather than any positive force toward it. Ram’s Head Theatrical Society’s production of “The Addams Family,” which runs this weekend and next in Memorial Auditorium, performs this reminder in full character, complete with multiple bits of prop comedy. It is extraordinarily extra, and therefore entirely fitting for the production. Ram’s Head’s “Addams Family” is a deeply cheesy, over-the-top show, and it’s at its best when it fully commits to that energy.

From the show’s opening number onwards, which deftly weaves in the classic theme of the 1960s television adaptation of Charles Addams’ original cartoons, “The Addams Family” reveals itself as a deeply campy production. For those unfamiliar with the term, camp refers to a certain style or artistic lens — one that emphasizes artifice, outlandishness and extravagance. For example, a musical that starts with a crew of the undead dancing the twist, as occurs in the first few minutes of  “The Addams Family,” could be considered campy.

Now, a lot of the outlandish energy of “The Addams Family” comes from the original production, which premiered in 2009. The musical’s music and lyrics are by Andrew Lippa, whose work Ram’s Head previously performed two years ago with their production of his “The Wild Party.” In that production, which received criticism for its treatment of abuse, Ram’s Head had to grapple with a musical that shifted wildly between gaudy jazz-age tropes and serious depictions of sexual violence. Here, though, they have an easier job — “The Addams Family” is a comparatively straightforward romantic comedy. Yet, they fully and seriously commit to the ridiculousness of the premise and Lippa’s music, never flagging in the two hours of musical hijinks they provide.

For those unfamiliar with the broader mythos of “The Addams Family,” which has had a bizarrely long legacy in American pop culture since the 1930s debut of Charles Addams’ cartoons in the New Yorker, the concept is simple. The Addams — a family centered around the core unit of smooth, charming patriarch Gomez, sharply witchy matriarch Morticia, sadistic and emotionless daughter Wednesday and chaotic son Pugsley — are macabre as all hell in a world that is significantly less so.

Lippa’s musical plays around with that concept, setting it a decade or so after the original material and focusing on the romantic escapades that ensue when Wednesday Addams, here played with a perfectly struck dose of cynicism by Amanda Lim ’21, falls in love with Lucas Beineke (George Hosono ’22), a boy from an apparently normal family. The Addamses and the Beinekes meet for dinner, and from there, two hours worth of romantic conflict ensue, enveloping both Wednesday and Lucas and their respective parents. Of those three pairs, Gomez and Morticia (played, respectively, by Rio Padilla-Smith ’19 and Eve La Puma ’20) get the lion’s share of the plot. Padilla-Smith and La Puma commit fully to their roles, with Padilla-Smith’s Gomez seeming concocted of equal parts charm and flop-sweat and La Puma’s Morticia a compellingly chilling force of sarcasm. But even Temi Bolodeoku ’22 and Brooke Hale ’20, who play the Beineke parents, make the most of what could’ve been thankless roles as the third couple in an already overstuffed romantic comedy.

But remarkably, “The Addams Family” works best when it’s at its most overstuffed. In fact, the musical’s second act, where the action slows in a series of reconciliations, is the weaker of the two. That’s no discredit to it — it’s perfectly good theater. But the scene that exemplifies the mad-cap, goofy energy of “Addams” comes at the close of the first act, instead. In an extended number spilling out of a Addams family drinking game based on “Full Disclosure” of secrets, the entire plot of the musical gets turned inside out. Also, Vincent Nicandro ’20’s wonderful Fester Addams, the secret emotional core of the play, sings about being in love with the moon. It’s a chaotic scene, full of moving parts that a lesser production could have fumbled. Under Ram’s Head’s care, it went off without a hitch.

That’s likely due to the skilled direction of J.B. Horsley ’19 and the technical skill of staff members like choreographer Madeline Lee ’19 and music director Joshua Chang ’21. More than anything else, “The Addams Family” is a production where every part is finely honed to help achieve a totally over-the-top, goofy goal. It’s corny, but most of all, it commits.

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu

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VII Wonders: Gabriel Townsell on Rap, Wrestling and Life https://stanforddaily.com/2019/04/05/vii-wonders-gabriel-townsell-on-rap-wrestling-and-life/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/04/05/vii-wonders-gabriel-townsell-on-rap-wrestling-and-life/#respond Fri, 05 Apr 2019 10:30:14 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1148901 Over the past few years, VII has built an impressive resume both at Stanford and his native Chicago — one that speaks to an artistic spirit and skill beyond his years, fueled by a dedication to his craft and a relentless pursuit of new creative avenues. You may have seen him performing at Blackfest in 2018, where he opened for 2 Chainz; he competed in the Stanford Concert Network’s Battle of the Bands in January of this year, and he was featured at Kairos’ Wine & Cheese night in November. Maybe you’ve heard the two mixtapes he dropped on Soundcloud this summer, in addition to Marketable Melancholy.

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When Gabriel Townsell ’20 arrived at The Stanford Daily building, he was wearing Mac Miller’s face on his shirt. For the 21-year-old, Stanford-via-West-Side-Chicago rapper, wrestler and political science student, Mac’s music has always been a guiding light for his own. And in listening to Townsell, who raps and produces under the name VII (pronounced “seven”), it’s easy to see how he was influenced by the late Pittsburgh rapper.

The similarity is not just in the sound itself. Though VII’s third album Marketable Melancholy, which came out in June, handles as eclectic a span of styles as Mac’s 2018 release, Swimming, the true point of comparison between the two, is in the joy in their music. It’s their joy for music as well as a childlike creativity and enthusiasm for artistic experimentation that shines through, no matter what emotions they’re rapping about.

Over the past few years, VII has built an impressive resume both at Stanford and his native Chicago — one that speaks to an artistic spirit and skill beyond his years, fueled by a dedication to his craft and a relentless pursuit of new creative avenues. You may have seen him performing at Blackfest in 2018, where he opened for 2 Chainz; he competed in the Stanford Concert Network’s Battle of the Bands in January of this year and he was featured at Kairos’ Wine and Cheese night in November. Maybe you’ve heard the two mixtapes he dropped on SoundCloud this summer in addition to Marketable Melancholy.

But even if you haven’t heard of VII yet, he’s making one hell of a case for himself this year, bringing a blend of hard-edged, lyrical rap, amped-up trap-influenced flows and surprisingly tender rhythm and blues hooks and production. This all establishes him as a sort of rap game polymath, able to deliver consistently over a full album but also wow you in each individual, devastating track.

VII Wonders: Gabriel Townsell on Rap, Wrestling and Life
Courtesy of Thomas Lau

Streams of Consciousness

In fact, a single, powerful track is how VII got his breakthrough making music in the first place. But even before he released his debut single in the summer of 2016, which has racked up around 100 thousand plays on SoundCloud since its release, Townsell was ready to rap.

Townsell had always had a connection to music, with everything from rap to gospel to Cuban jazz drifting between the walls of the Chicago home where he grew up. And from a young age, Townsell has had synesthesia: a perceptual condition where you see music as colors. That musical environment led to a few early attempts at writing rap lyrics. Townsell says that by the time he was 10 or 11, he was writing verses that were “structurally sound.” But his route to making music was a circuitous one. 

When Townsell started high school, his main focus wasn’t music but instead wrestling, the sport in which he still competes as part of Stanford’s NCAA team. His gateway into the world of professional rap was actually his school’s slam poetry team. Though he casually participated in school-wide poetry slams in his first few years of high school — even winning one in his sophomore year — it took a very direct intervention to get him seriously onto the path that would lead him to the rap game. As he arrived at weight training for wrestling one day, Townsell found himself almost ambushed by the spoken word team’s coach, who had shown up early to his practice to recruit him personally. That dedication was enough to convince Townsell to join. In his own words, “If you put in that much effort, I might as well.”

That appreciation for effort is key to understanding Townsell’s strengths in everything that he does. He doesn’t think he’s put out a bad verse yet — bad songs, sure (he recounts a particularly uninspired, sitar-heavy beat that he once did a feature on with a grimace) — but it’s never for lack of trying on his part. Yet such a claim doesn’t feel arrogant coming from him; it literally sounds earned — the product of a thorough education in the art of rap.

VII’s education didn’t just come from listening to rap — though he can certainly rattle off a list of his influences, from established legends like André 3000 and Lil Wayne to local heroes like Lupe Fiasco, Saba and Noname. It instead came from actually putting in the work, from joining his high school slam poetry team’s “Hip-Hop Wing” and meticulously developing his own cadences from a rap-oriented style into true flows. He made the switch because of how natural the fit was — he says that Adam Levin, who would be his mentor there, told him that “he was already rapping anyways.”

In Hip-Hop Wing, Townsell spent hours upon hours freestyling and writing under the tutelage of Levin (who raps under the name DefCee), who Townsell describes as “one of the best underground rappers in the city of Chicago.” With Levin, Townsell refined his writing skills and excelled by all measures. He would deliver 32 bars of rap when an exercise called for 16 — an example of his talent for writing “unnecessarily fast,” as he puts it.

Levin was the first person who seriously encouraged VII to actually get in the booth and record his music after seeing his promise in 2015-or-so. A few features followed — verses that showcase a young performer still developing his confidence in his own lyrics. But it took the protests in the summer of 2016 over the police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Minnesota to get VII to release his first solo record: “Stream of Consciousness.”

“Stream of Consciousness” is a three minute showcase for VII, a simple beat — just a piano melody and some hard drums for most of its runtime — that he sprawls hard-hitting lyrics over. He made the song in the heat of a passionate, righteous rage, inspired by seeing “Black women in a situation of strength, juxtaposed with people who have on armor, riot shields.” The track’s title reflects his state of mind — he estimates he wrote it in “five, seven minutes.”

VII Wonders: Gabriel Townsell on Rap, Wrestling and Life
Courtesy of Thomas Lau

Yet he’s poised throughout, stringing together bars that link his personal ambitions and the threat of racist violence with a sophisticated precision that belies his youth: “I love America but feel the need to question cops / I wonder if they gave me 16 shots, would my 16s live / when my limp knees dropped?” But “Stream of Consciousness” finds its peak when VII chooses to let other voices do the talking. When the song’s outro begins, he lets the voices of the police protests that inspired his music speak: “I have lost three brothers to this, sir. This is not alright! I’m hurting. You see my eyes? My people out, here hurting!”

The creative process underlying “Stream of Consciousness” and its ensuing success ultimately inspired Townsell to take rapping seriously. In the two years following the track’s release, he’s delivered on its promise, releasing hours upon hours of music on SoundCloud and Spotify. He’s developed his technical skills as well, improving as not only a rapper but also an engineer and a producer. While he doesn’t produce all of his tracks alone — he credits a network of producers, including Noah Anderson ’20, for many of his beats — he always makes sure to tweak his songs and bring out the parts of them that correspond best to the verses he’s written: another sign of his critical consciousness about his music.

An eclectic formula

Part of what made me interested in talking with Townsell in the first place was the divide between Gabriel Townsell — the Pac-12, All-Academic Second Team wrestler — and VII the rapper. But when I ask how he balances the demands of the notoriously, memetically strenuous life of a student-athlete with his rapid rate of music production, Townsell cuts me off.

“It doesn’t take that much effort,” he says breezily.

He doesn’t see rap as an obligation in the same way school or athletics is. Instead, he sees it like how many of us would see playing video games or pleasure reading.

“If I want to relax, I can write,” he explains simply.

VII Wonders: Gabriel Townsell on Rap, Wrestling and Life
Courtesy of Gabriel Townsell

And it’s that attitude that allowed VII to amass an impressive catalog of songs in remarkable time. It took him just above two years to release everything from “Stream of Consciousness” to his most recent single, “FALL $LOW.” In total, that’s more than four hours of music across more than 70 songs on a half-dozen projects. Just this summer, he’s released three full projects: the two “CHiCO DeBARS” mixtapes plus Marketable Melancholy.

That project stands as not only VII’s most impressive work but also as a legitimately impressive artistic statement in the world of rap today: a rap album above 12 songs whose length feels earned rather than tacked on. That was intentional, as he recalls.

“I couldn’t afford to make a 25 song project — I’m not Lil Wayne,” he said.

He instead had to make hard choices in narrowing down the track listing for MM each one of the album’s 17 tracks has a purpose, both on their own and in the context of the record’s broader concept. He makes clear to me that he wanted to make a project that wasn’t just a collection of songs.

“The concept came first,” he said with a certain finality to it.

VII only had the luxury of cutting songs from Marketable Melancholy because of the sheer volume of music he produces, day-in and day-out. He’s almost industrial in his production levels at this point. He says he has the problem of “too many beats,” with 60 or so on his phone alone, which allows him to be selective in the ones he spits over. Even so, he spends a couple hours each day rapping and recording after practice. His process usually starts from the beat, rapping and feeling his verses out until he has a solid lyrical foundation. After recording the tracks themselves, he plays around with plugins and mixes the tracks at least four times, taking hours just to perfect the sound of a given song. It’s a dedication that pays off. Despite his limited resources, VII’s tracks sound as polished as any major label release.

Despite his work ethic and dedication to his craft, VII isn’t a self-serious rapper in the backpacker mold. He’s quick to a joke or drop a hot take as we talk, opining on everything from A$AP Rocky’s disappointing year (“He’s the Carmelo Anthony of rap”) to Drake’s feud with Pusha T (On Drake’s “Duppy Freestyle:” “If you sound disappointed, you can just lie [and get away with it]”) to certain controversial musicians from his hometown of Chicago (no guesses as to who, but you’ve probably heard a lot about his misdeeds from certain documentaries that came out over winter break).

But the topic that VII has the most takes on is himself. He’s an artist at a crossroads, sure enough in his abilities to sample beats from rappers as established and diverse as Lil Wayne and Lil Pump and uniquely incorporate them in his mixtapes; yet, he’s young enough to continue experimenting and tweaking his sound. After improving his singing and R&B production on Marketable Melancholy’s first half, he’s interested in bringing more influences from rock and punk into his music. He shouts out the late Lil Peep, who bridged the divide between third-wave emo and SoundCloud rap for making “inspiring” music that didn’t force the connection to rock but instead came to it naturally as well as Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, whom he has listened to since childhood.

To VII, it’s not enough to just look like a rock star: “Any rapper can do that if they just want to be edgy for some reason.” As with all things, Townsell’s dedication to sonic experimentation is all about putting the effort in.

As for his own future, Townsell has a lot to look forward to. While he plans to slow his VII releases as the wrestling season ramps up through the winter (he dropped “FALL $LOW” — a single — on New Year’s Day to tide people over), he’s got big plans come spring: a three-part project, seven songs each, simply entitled VII as a shout out to the 773 area code of his hometown in Chicago. He thinks it will be his most cohesive and polished project yet. Half or more of the songs are already near-finished, giving him ample time to perfect them before release.

After VII drops, the future is wide open for Townsell. He plans to keep rapping for years to come, through Olympic training cycles and a few years wrestling post-college — and maybe even into his plans for law school. Despite all these non-musical ambitions, he’s not entirely opposed to the idea of eventually pursuing a full-time, professional rap career. He notes, with a laugh, that he’s already come further in rap than he ever thought he would. And with his potential and dedication, there’s no doubt Townsell will end up successful — whether in rap, wrestling or whatever he puts his mind to.

He’s sure of himself, with a confidence that’s contagious: “There’s no version of me that isn’t doing what I’m doing now.”

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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With ‘Double Vision,’ Olivia Popp ’21 envisions new creative paths https://stanforddaily.com/2019/03/14/with-double-vision-olivia-popp-20-envisions-new-creative-paths/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/03/14/with-double-vision-olivia-popp-20-envisions-new-creative-paths/#respond Thu, 14 Mar 2019 07:30:57 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1151110 You have never seen a musical like “Double Vision” because I am not sure one exists in the world. It’s not just that the show — written and directed by Olivia Popp ’21, and co-produced by Olivia Popp ‘21 and Niza Contreras ’20 — is an original sci-fi musical comedy about multidimensional travel and destiny. […]

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You have never seen a musical like “Double Vision” because I am not sure one exists in the world. It’s not just that the show — written and directed by Olivia Popp ’21, and co-produced by Olivia Popp ‘21 and Niza Contreras ’20 — is an original sci-fi musical comedy about multidimensional travel and destiny. That would be fairly unique on its own, but I’m sure you could find some production that matches “Double Vision” in ambition and genre-bending joy. The factor that truly makes “Double Vision,” which premiered last Thursday night at the Elliott Program Center, one of a kind does not lie in its premise but instead in the pure and chaotic energy with which that premise is pulled off.

When I sat down at EPC last Thursday evening for “Double Vision,” I quickly came to the realization that anything could happen on stage that night. Of course, that’s true of any live performance, but the unpredictability of watching an original production on its opening night is a higher sort of chaos.

“Double Vision” takes that chaotic energy and runs with it, delivering nearly three hours of musical comedy with a poise and dedication that never flags. The basic plot of “Double Vision” is simple — Luke Sheridan, played with a deep gusto by Daily staffer Bobby Pragada ‘19, is a physicist stuck in a professional rut. He builds a device that lets him connect with alternate dimensions, and in doing so meets Sam Connor (the earnest Gwen Le ‘22), a screenwriter who is linked to him through the strange logic of the multiverse.

But from that standard sci-fi premise, “Double Vision” gets deeply, deeply weird. This is a show whose first scene features one character — Ben Wu 19’s endlessly compelling Kirk River, a physics professor with a truly surprising twist in his character arc — mentioning in passing that he’s a character in a musical. This is a show where one of the two leads is a screenwriter whose script is also about multiverses. This is a show where three side characters sing a song about the need for reparations from straight men. This is a show with 35 musical numbers — 18 original songs and a truly dazzling array of reprises — that never feels like it’s running out of ideas.

Central to that is Popp’s writing, of course — she makes every character feel fleshed out and humanistically sketched, even roles that could have been thankless ones. Take the pair of Vanessa Connor and Sierra Scott (played, respectively, by Francesca Watkins ‘20 and Rosemond Ho ‘18, MS ’20), two inherently secondary characters who even sing songs about their tangential relation to the plot. In another writer’s hands, the joke would have ended there — two self-aware jokes that don’t resolve into a broader change. But in “Double Vision,” the two characters become central to the plot, with a romantic arc to themselves. The script goes beyond lazy meta-commentary and actually does something about the tropes against which it is pushing back, creating bold new ideas for the production as a whole to play with.

The creative energy of the writing trickles down to every other aspect of “Double Vision,” small or large. Of course, the live orchestra’s performance, arranged and conducted by Paul Gregg ’17, who also played lead keyboard parts throughout, loomed large throughout the night. How could it not, given the sheer amount of music in the show?

But even with the copious number of songs embedded within the production, the show’s musical touch remained light and quick-moving — though some songs felt as if they ran too long, the orchestra’s energy kept them from overstaying their welcome.

But in a production as ambitious as “Double Vision,” every member of the small cast and crew shone. Elements like the lighting, ably designed by Michael Espinosa ‘21, and the minimalist set, technical directed and coordinated by co-producer Niza Contreras ‘20, initially appear to merely be functional. Yet as the show blossoms outward, the little pieces of their designs become something altogether more playful and poetic, with facets like a rectangle of orange light representing an inter-dimensional portal and a rolling chair that serves as a set piece for a number of comedic chase sequences coming to life with a creative joy.

Yet, despite all of its inventiveness, “Double Vision” is a show that lives on simple moments of sincere emotion. When Luke reaches the climax of his emotional arc and takes a leap into the figurative and literal unknown, he does so with a joke and a callback to an earlier moment in the show. But those moments of levity don’t dull the impact of the big emotional beats of “Double Vision” but make them all the sweeter. It’s that kind of play, you know? It’s a sci-fi musical comedy about the anxieties of living in the Midwest. It’s a meta-commentary that’s 100 percent sincere about itself, a musical that knows that musicals are bullshit, and most of all, a truly original work.

With 'Double Vision,' Olivia Popp '21 envisions new creative paths
The cast and crew of Double Vision, an original sci-fi musical comedy directed and produced by Olivia Popp ’21. (Courtesy of Olivia Popp)

To get a better insight into the making of “Double Vision,” we talked to Olivia Popp last week while the show was running to get her point of view on doing creative work at Stanford.

The Stanford Daily (TSD): “Double Vision” is a completely original work of musical theater — what inspired you to write it and bring it to life at Stanford?

Olivia Popp (OP): After more than two years of doing theater at Stanford, I wanted to see if I, along with the close collaboration and support of my talented artistic peers, could make something that pushed the boundaries of the types of theater produced on this campus. The primary goals for this project were to produce self-reflective work that makes a narrative and industry critique of the musical theater form as well as challenge standards for student-produced theater, which primarily consists of canonically white, popular musicals in the Western canon. When we were hiring, I wanted to make sure our goals were represented from the ground up, so I sought folks who maybe didn’t have that much theater experience (or any at all!), but were passionate about their work, and by the end, we had an with an entirely POC cast and design team as well as a queer-led cast and leadership team. In a more whimsical sense, I wanted to see if anyone would actually show up to something completely new, potentially hazardously terrible and not directly supported by a student organization. There’s a certain possibility for something fun and something wacky and wild, and I knew that I’d be too jaded senior year to do this — hence doing it now.

TSD: What’s your most cherished memory doing creative work at Stanford?

OP: It’s tough to pinpoint one specific memory, but one that I remember very vividly is during strike for “Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery,” the first show I directed (about a year ago). The set was huge and we had to tear the entire thing down, but we just blasted music and had a blast dancing and making something fun of the process, which is often sad and a little bit wistful, given that productions usually only go up for three days and then everyone parts ways. I put up a 360-degree camera in the space and made a short video of the process of setting up and taking down the set, which is also a treasured piece — now I can always look back on it.

TSD: What’s your creative process like? How do you make time for art?

OP: I’ll be honest, I’ve gotten into this cycle where I put off school to do theater. As a director or creative lead for a project, I’ll go out of my way to ensure that everyone is enjoying the process and finding a community, and that requires spending time communicating, or going off-campus to get food or supplies. Thus, it’s not so much as making time for art as it is making time for school. I’ve begun to craft a lot of my work around my creative and artistic interests — papers I write are about science fiction, television, comedy, comics and the like. I’ve gotten to a place where even my academic and research interests, including my majors (STS and film and media studies) have spun out of spending so much time on my creative interests.

TSD: What’s a unique challenge of artistic expression at Stanford?

OP: Not so unique, but money is always a challenge. I say this because it’s less of a barrier and more of a challenge for theater, because theater can be made anywhere although a lot of art requires materials and resources in order to make. One pushback against musical theater I wanted to prioritize for “Double Vision” was to take away that common element of spectacle that is always associated with musical theater. I tried to make “Double Vision” as low-budget as possible — we had two set pieces (a table and a chair) and two props, and then we rented a few lights and speakers/microphones for sound. Maybe a better answer to this question is just finding time to do it all. I’ve had so many projects fizzle out because I’ve just run out of time — but finding other people who can keep you accountable is so helpful.

TSD: In addition to creating your own original works, you’ve also directed and worked on a number of plays and other productions here. What have you learned from those works that has helped you with “Double Vision”?

OP: Student theater is a beast of its own. Getting to work on a budget is both a blessing and a curse — I’ve learned how to deal with money and make something work artistically on a budget and to make sure that all aspects of a production are covered on a small budget. I’ve developed relationships with vendors in the Bay for technical equipment and assistance, which has come in handy because issues always arise. But to me, community is the most important thing. I’ll go out of my way to ensure that everyone is having a good time, especially if they’re doing theater for the first time (and sometimes that means cutting my other obligations). That’s what I see as my primary responsibility as the creative lead for a project — because at the end of the day, we spend so many hours together during tech week, the show happens, and then it’s all over. That sense of community is something that I’ve held close to me through all of my work, and it’s been fostered especially strongly in AATP.

TSD: You’ve been involved with the Asian American Theater Project for many years. How do community and identity shape your creative worldview?

OP: Honestly, this is something I still can’t answer. Community [is at the heart of my worldview], more so than anything, but the only thing that I know is that I still know so little. So community more so than anything — if you’re in a position of authority or a position of influence, it’s your responsibility to be providing those opportunities like I was provided when I started with AATP. It’s not enough to be passive or to just take on those who have experience. AATP has supported me from the start — I came in as an intern during freshman year. On a fundamental level, AATP has opened me up to the national Asian American theater scene as well as the Bay Area scene, which has been invaluable in learning about contemporary literature and art coming from artists and theatermakers of color. However, tying back to the last question, it’s more of a creative community than it is about identity that has shaped my creative interests and direction. I came to Stanford with a very specific view on my own identity and where I wanted to go, and AATP completely threw that for a loop. AATP has entirely shaped me as an individual as an artist — mostly through pushing me to reconsider what I think is art worth making and consuming as well as what stories I want to think about. Being part of AATP has pushed me to think beyond what I could gain from an artistic community and has me thinking more about what I can contribute or bring back into this community.

TSD: If you could go back to the start of freshman year, what would you change about the way you’ve done art here?

OP: Do more, probably? I overcame a lot of personal fears when I started doing theater and film at Stanford, but I just had to keep going at it until I found people who supported me and what I wanted to do, and in turn, I wanted to make sure that they were also learning and growing from the process just as I was. I still spent a lot of time in fear of not making good work or wanting to jump immediately to making work that was beyond the scope of what I knew I could create. I would have definitely loved to just make more films, try something totally new, or work with other communities beyond the ones I’m with now (even if I love them dearly).

TSD: If you could give one piece of advice to someone looking to do creative work at Stanford, what would you say?

OP: Find other people! I can only speak to theater and film, but other people are your artistic and creative roots. When you find other people who want to see your work and support your work, it’s the most rewarding feeling — they’ll tear it down only to bring it back up even higher, they’ll go out of their way to do wild things to help you succeed. Especially when resources are a necessity and being in a group just makes everything so much easier to get done, finding like-minded (or not like-minded) peers who also just want to make stuff is the best support system you’re going to get if you want to make anything.

TSD: What’s the elevator pitch for “Double Vision”?

OP: Boy meets girl. There’s a wormhole! They don’t fall in love. Everything goes awry.

TSD: Once “Double Vision” wraps up, what do you see yourself doing next, either at Stanford or in the wider world?

OP: I definitely want to spend more time working on film. I’ve completed a number of scripts, and I made a short film last summer that was an amazing experience to work on. I’m hoping to develop something a little longer, something beyond the shorts I’ve made. My work at Stanford has forced me into a position where I have no choice to reconsider my position as an artist and what I want that to really mean. I’ve kind of ended up in this weird limbo or liminal space where I’m floundering and I don’t know if I’m having an impact, or whether art can even make an impact, or what that even means, so I think my next few projects are going to be a little more introspective in an attempt to really find what I’m actually doing.

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Jorja Smith, Kali Uchis to headline 2019 Frost Music & Arts Festival https://stanforddaily.com/2019/02/12/jorja-smith-kali-uchis-to-headline-2019-frost-music-arts-festival/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/02/12/jorja-smith-kali-uchis-to-headline-2019-frost-music-arts-festival/#respond Tue, 12 Feb 2019 14:00:37 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1149508 Stanford’s annual Frost Music & Arts Festival announced on Tuesday its 2019 headliners: Jorja Smith and Kali Uchis. For the first time in its seven-year history, the signature event of the Stanford Concert Network (SCN), scheduled for Saturday, May 18 in Frost Amphitheater, will be headlined by female performers. According to Bella Cooper ‘20, SCN’s […]

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Jorja Smith, Kali Uchis to headline 2019 Frost Music & Arts Festival

Jorja Smith, Kali Uchis to headline 2019 Frost Music & Arts Festival
Jorja Smith (Top) and Kali Uchis (Bottom) will headline 2019’s Frost Music & Arts Festival. (Photos Courtesy of Stanford Concert Network)

Stanford’s annual Frost Music & Arts Festival announced on Tuesday its 2019 headliners: Jorja Smith and Kali Uchis. For the first time in its seven-year history, the signature event of the Stanford Concert Network (SCN), scheduled for Saturday, May 18 in Frost Amphitheater, will be headlined by female performers.

According to Bella Cooper ‘20, SCN’s co-director, “One major goal this year was to ensure that [SCN] provided more representation within [Frost’s] lineup,” especially in light of feedback from the student body that indicated a desire for more gender and racial diversity in the headliners.

While Frost’s performers in general have encompassed a wide variety of musical styles and personal backgrounds— just last year, the Festival paired Chicago-based R&B and rap artists like Monte Booker and Ravyn Lenae with UK dance-rock group Glass Animals— the festival’s headliners have in the past been male without exception, and nearly all have been white, with the exception of 2016 headliner Fetty Wap. This lack of diversity drew criticism in the past, with the Stanford Women’s Community Center and the Stanford Concert Network exchanging critical op-eds in The Stanford Daily in 2014 on the issue of festival’s alleged “problematic underrepresentation of historically oppressed populations.”

This year’s headliners reflect a greater focus on gender and racial diversity — Smith hails from the West Midlands of England, and is of mixed Jamaican and English descent, while Uchis spent her childhood moving between her parents’ native Colombia and the U.S. — but their appeal goes beyond just identity. Between Uchis’ “Isolation” and Smith’s “Lost & Found,” the two released two of the best R&B albums of 2018, and two of the most promising debut records in the genre in years. The two even collaborated on Uchis’ album, with the debut single of “Isolation,” “Tyrant,” serving as a passionate duet between the two singers about power, control and romance. And despite both singer-songwriters being broadly categorized as R&B singers, the two cover a significant amount of stylistic ground on their debuts, from the loungey, jazz-tinged material that Jorja Smith seems most comfortable performing in to the more funk and latin-influenced music Kali Uchis luxuriated in on “Isolation.”

Jorja Smith, Kali Uchis to headline 2019 Frost Music & Arts Festival
Courtesy of Stanford Concert Network

Beyond its headliners, Frost 2019 also marks a change from the past few years’ festivals: it’s actually in Frost Amphitheater. While the festival took its namesake from the outdoor concert venue in a callback to its long history hosting some of the most influential names in music, from Joan Baez to the Grateful Dead, the 2017 and 2018 festivals were moved to Stanford Stadium due to renovations. With Frost’s renovations due to be complete by the festival’s May date, the festival and its namesake venue will finally be reunited.

The booking process for artists of the stature of Frost’s headliners typically takes place many months before their actual show dates, and this year was no different. According to Cooper, SCN secured Frost’s headliners in October, earlier than in prior years. Additionally, Stanford Concert Network received assistance in contacting possible headliners from concert booking firm Goldenvoice, most well-known for running the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Though Goldenvoice recently announced a new partnership with Stanford Live for a concert series in Frost Amphitheater, SCN’s relationship with the company goes further back— according to Cooper, Goldenvoice “has helped” and provided “mentorship” to SCN since the Frost Festival’s inception in 2012.

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Spotify’s new block feature is worse than useless https://stanforddaily.com/2019/02/06/spotifys-new-block-feature-is-worse-than-useless/ https://stanforddaily.com/2019/02/06/spotifys-new-block-feature-is-worse-than-useless/#respond Wed, 06 Feb 2019 08:30:59 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1149261 Spotify’s recently announced “Don’t Play this Artist” feature, which would allow individual listeners to choose certain artists to effectively block from their streaming libraries, is beginning to be offered to select users as part of a roll out of the feature to the general public. While the company’s marketing for this feature showcases mundane usages […]

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Spotify’s recently announced “Don’t Play this Artist” feature, which would allow individual listeners to choose certain artists to effectively block from their streaming libraries, is beginning to be offered to select users as part of a roll out of the feature to the general public. While the company’s marketing for this feature showcases mundane usages like blocking the omnipresent-but-divisive Ariana Grande, it is clear that the streaming giant’s choice to announce this feature in mid-January was inspired by the recent rekindling of the “#muteRKelly” campaign after the release of filmmaker and activist dream hampton’s 6-part documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly” in early January.

That series documented in unflinching detail not only R. Kelly’s long history of sexual abuse, manipulation and predation but also how the music industry has enabled him for more than two decades. It also brought to renewed prominence an ongoing debate over what to do about the music, and art more generally, of artists accused of serious misdeeds.

The “#muteRKelly” campaign, founded in the summer of 2017 by Atlanta Arts Administrator Oronike Odeleye and social justice organizer Kenyette Barnes, has focused on deplatforming the R&B singer and accused serial sexual abuser through lobbying for the cancellation of his shows and radio appearances and encouraging a general boycott of his music. In May 2018, the campaign achieved a victory that quickly turned to defeat, as Spotify went back on a decision to remove the music of R. Kelly and artists like XXXTentacion (who was accused before his death in 2018 of aggravated battery against a pregnant woman) from its curated playlists after outcry from prominent music industry figures like Kendrick Lamar.

Six months later, the streaming company’s announcement of the “Don’t Play This Artist” feature may look like a victory for “#muteRKelly” and other activists fighting against the normalization of sexual violence and predation in the music industry. Yet the feature is a hollow victory at best, addressing the complaints of listeners as petty personal grievances rather than critiques of a music industry that aids, abets and continues to fund sexual predators. The problem that it actually addresses— having to listen to artists you don’t want to listen to— is a trivial one. Unless you’re truly inept at using Spotify, avoiding even the most omnipresent artists is simple. It’s easy to identify which artists are in a given playlist, even if you did not make the playlist yourself, and even if you get thrown a song by an artist you despise randomly through Spotify’s algorithm, you can just give it a thumbs down (a note to the algorithm that you’d rather not have it come up) and skip it. Even an artist like Post Malone, who (in my case) is a unique combination of awful-sounding, hyper-popular, and adjacent to enough artists that I enjoy sincerely, is easy to excise from my streaming universe.

But “#muteRKelly” was never just about personal consumption. Most people who already had a strong personal stance on R. Kelly’s misdeeds were probably not listening to him very much, if at all, even before the most recent round of horrific allegations. Instead, the drive to deplatform artists like R. Kelly or rapper Kodak Black (accused of rape in 2016) is more about a power analysis of the music industry.

It’s simple: By allowing his music to be streamed, Spotify is providing a key source of both fiscal revenue and cultural cachet to R. Kelly (or any other sexual predator). We can watch this happen in real time— after the release of “Surviving R. Kelly” in January, his streams on the platform went up by 16 percent. When Spotify walked back their May 2018 decision to remove Kelly’s music from curated playlists, they claimed that they didn’t want to “regulate artists,” to become the arbiters of what was acceptable conduct from figures in the music industry. Yet by allowing access to music by figures like Kelly— especially in Spotify-sanctioned playlists that are heavily promoted on the platform— Spotify is de facto arbitrating that R. Kelly’s conduct is acceptable within the music industry. And by virtue of Spotify’s overwhelming role in the profits of the music industry, where it makes up approximately 36% percent of the overall streaming user base worldwide in an industry where streaming makes up about 75 percent of revenue, what Spotify decides is acceptable is acceptable.

So where does Spotify draw the line? Despite their claims that they don’t want to “regulate artists” in a negative sense, the company clearly has some standards for what they think is appropriate for their platform. Beyond the obvious legalistic concerns about copyright infringement and the like, the platform has also decided in recent months to remove podcasts by Alex Jones’ conspiracy-theory-peddling Infowars for violating the company’s “hate content” policy. Spotify’s line, it seems, lies somewhere between R. Kelly singing about being the “Pied Piper” of R&B and Alex Jones calling for Robert Mueller’s head.

The company’s defenders would claim that the difference is merely one of actual content— Kelly’s misdeeds are outside of the sphere of the material (songs, podcasts, whatever) actually offered on Spotify, and so the company has no responsibility, or even purview, over them. But such a view ignores the reality of the music industry. For any star as big as R. Kelly, commercial appeal and personal identity are inextricably linked. Pop stars and rappers weave their life stories into their work, and our perception of even their more innocuous songs is shaped by what we know about their personal lives— Chris Brown’s loverman persona became a lot less compelling once the world knew he was a domestic abuser. It’s not that we as listeners are making a choice to unify the art and the artist— the 21st century capitalist logic of monetized identity has crossed that river for us.

You can even see this in how R. Kelly has reacted to being accused of a laundry list of sexual predation. In July 2018, the singer finally responded at length to the 2017 report that he operated what has been described as a “sex cult” that included underage women. He didn’t do it through a press release, or an unfiltered statement on social media— instead he released a 19-minute quasi-diss track, entitled “I Admit.” The content of the track isn’t the point— he’s unrepentant, as you could probably expect. But its medium is the interesting part. In practice, artists use their songs as facets of themselves, as symbols or diaries that we must take as such.

Which takes us back to Spotify, and the perplexing matter of the “Don’t Play this Artist” button. In choosing to give individual users the ability to mute artists as a way out of the complex ethical knots of regulating content, the streaming company is trying to elude its role in the creation of musical prestige and identity in the modern age. Spotify is not a just a platform for individual users to make ethically neutral, personal and limited choices on what they want to listen to— it’s a determiner of music taste, and therefore music listening patterns, and therefore musical and professional success for a certain elect of performers. And so the company has a certain responsibility— not just for the content it puts on its platform, but for the creators that cannot be extricated from that content.

Spotify seems to think it can get around that responsibility by shifting the burden of ethical consumption to its userbase. But it’s clear that the solution it has offered is a stop gap at best, and useless and counterproductive at worst. That’s not just my take, or the opinion of the activists with the “#muteRKelly” campaign— it can be seen in the actions of artists, from Chance the Rapper and Lady Gaga to Phoenix, who have removed their own collaborations with R. Kelly from Spotify since the start of January. The makers of the material that Spotify runs on are coming alive to the ethical implications of their choice. The only question is, when will the company itself come to the same realization?

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What does it feel like to be spoken over? https://stanforddaily.com/2018/12/05/what-does-it-feel-like-to-be-spoken-over/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/12/05/what-does-it-feel-like-to-be-spoken-over/#respond Wed, 05 Dec 2018 09:00:07 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1147657 When the Stanford College Republicans announced that they were bringing Dinesh D’Souza to campus, the response from the Jewish community on campus was swift and almost universally negative. It makes sense! We, as members of the Jewish community, have a lot to be mad at D’Souza for — his (since retracted) retweet of a tweet […]

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When the Stanford College Republicans announced that they were bringing Dinesh D’Souza to campus, the response from the Jewish community on campus was swift and almost universally negative. It makes sense! We, as members of the Jewish community, have a lot to be mad at D’Souza for — his (since retracted) retweet of a tweet with the hashtag “#burnthejews” and his penchant for comparing George Soros and Bernie Sanders (both Jews who either survived the Holocaust or had family who perished in it) to Nazis are probably enough to get the point across.

But maybe more infuriating than SCR’s invitation of D’Souza was the response to their Jewish critics. Instead of taking into account the wide-ranging condemnation of their invitation, SCR doubled down, condemning the “smear attacks that ooze through the pages of the Stanford Daily” and claiming that they, as an organization, have done the most of any group on campus “to combat anti-Semitism.” They even took the time to call out Jewish students for criticizing them for earlier actions, which is obviously the correct thing to do when accused of promoting anti-Semitism. SCR hid behind a vague aegis supporting Israel and “combating anti-Semitism” and spoke over the actual Jewish people who could speak to their opposition to SCR’s conduct and values. When SCR and D’Souza have a network of right-wing media outlets to amplify their voices over ours, it’s easy to feel like the voices of actual Jewish students don’t matter at all.

But what does it feel like to not be able to speak at all?

Every year, 40,000 Jewish young adults go on Birthright, a free 10-day trip to Israel. If you’re a Jewish student on campus, or even someone who’s friends with a few of them, you’ve probably heard of it.  It’s hard not to, with flyers throughout Hillel and Chabad and a concerted marketing push to young Jewish students. Those 40,000 students will go to Israel and see its sights — the beaches at Tel Aviv, the Dead Sea, a kibbutz or two — and its connections to Jewish history, from the Western Wall to Masada. But there’s one important piece to understanding Israel that Birthright withholds from young Jews: the Palestinian people and the experiences they have to share.

Birthright currently bans their trips from meeting with Palestinians — even those who are citizens of Israel. A Jewish student who goes on Birthright might hear about the Occupation of the West Bank from an IDF soldier or a knowledgeable tour guide, but never from an actual Palestinian voice on their trip. And without hearing from anyone who can speak to the perspectives of the nearly 6.5 million Palestinian people who live lives deeply interconnected with Israel, young Jews on Birthright trips are left with a fundamentally lopsided notion of what life is like in Israel and Palestine. Palestinian voices are systematically silenced and crowded out by Birthright, and both Jewish students and Palestinians lose out.

In fact, the only people who benefit from this status quo are the same people who are creating it. We as American Jews want a two-state solution, an end to the occupation and at least a partial dismantlement of some Israeli settlements in the West Bank — polling conducted by the polling firm GBA strategies indicates 83 percent approval from American Jews for a two-state solution as of this November, and a similar poll conducted by the American Jewish Committee found 60 percent approval for dismantling at least some of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank. By crowding out Palestinian voices and the voices of American Jews who want a peaceful solution in Israel and Palestine, the donors that are funneling tens of millions of dollars into Birthright every year reshape the conversation into one of unquestioning, uncritical support for the occupation.

We don’t have to let them win.

Just as we don’t have to just let the College Republicans control the narrative and claim that they are the strongest defenders of our community on campus, we don’t have to let the donors that control Birthright’s programming continue their stranglehold on American Jewish discourse. They may have the money — 90 million dollars of it, as per last year’s operating budget — but we have the people. Birthright only runs, only gets to control the narrative, if people actually want to go on its trips. That’s why I am proud to champion J Street U Stanford’s new campaign to ensure that Stanford Birthright trips meet with Palestinian speakers who can speak to the realities of the occupation of the West Bank. Our petition already has more Birthright-eligible signees on this campus than the number of people who went on Birthright last year. We, as members of the Jewish community on campus, have the power to shape this conversation. For our own sake and for the lives and stories of everyone in Israel and the Palestinian territory, we must use that power for good.

Sign our petition here.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu for more information.

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Drake combines success with social media spectacle https://stanforddaily.com/2018/10/22/drake-combines-success-with-social-media-spectacle/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/10/22/drake-combines-success-with-social-media-spectacle/#respond Mon, 22 Oct 2018 13:00:06 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1145293 Drake has had a weird year. By any objective metric, the Canadian rapper/singer/pop giant, who needs no other introduction, has had one of the best years a pop star has had since the dawn of recorded music. He held the number-one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart for 16 of the 21 weeks […]

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Drake has had a weird year.

By any objective metric, the Canadian rapper/singer/pop giant, who needs no other introduction, has had one of the best years a pop star has had since the dawn of recorded music. He held the number-one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart for 16 of the 21 weeks from the start of May to the end of September and has only missed nine weeks at the top spot since February, when “God’s Plan” dropped, and his album cycle began. All 25 tracks on “Scorpion,” his fifth album and seventh major release, charted in the Hot 100, with seven in the top 10. “Scorpion” itself went platinum the day it came out, charted at number one on the Billboard 200 for five weeks (a record on the year) and didn’t leave the top five of that chart until this week.

Yet, despite that dizzying array of chart accomplishments, the year of Drake has felt oddly quiet. While he never has been particularly fond of interviews, “Scorpion”-era Drake has given no quarter to the press at all. His social media presence has been largely boring — links to labelmates’ projects on Twitter, concert pics from his tour with Migos on Instagram, but nothing that sounds like he wrote it instead of some personal assistant. Even in his music videos he’s tended towards playing second fiddle — to a cast of women who are cooler than him on “Nice For What,” the cast of “Degrassi” on “I’m Upset,” the entire city of New Orleans on “In My Feelings.”

In a year filled with rap industry news storylines, Drake has been largely absent, overshadowed by both his contemporaries and his stylistic descendants. In terms of headlines, the summer has been dominated by Nicki Minaj and Kanye West’s ragings against the world. The two, who have both been among Drake’s chief rivals and collaborators over the past decade, have been beefing with everyone except for each other, lashing out against everyone from CNN and Spotify to Cardi B to Travis Scott and Kylie Jenner’s baby and a nonprofit named after Kanye’s mom. Even younger rappers heavily indebted to Drake have made more headlines than him and captured the zeitgeist better. From Post Malone and JUICE WRLD’s emo-rap conquest of the streaming charts to the deaths of XXXTentacion and Mac Miller, there have been plenty of cultural moments focused on rappers that feel more interesting and current than Drake.

Yet, Drake’s relatively quiet summer may be to his benefit. When he has been at the center of the music media’s conversation this year, it’s rarely been in his favor. In the month leading up to the release of “Scorpion,” Drake entered into a beef with Virginian Rapper Pusha T that can be traced back disputes that go back at least a decade but more proximately to “Infrared,” the final track on Pusha T’s most recent album, this May’s “DAYTONA.” The day after “Infrared” dropped, Drake shot back with a Soundcloud-only track, “Duppy Freestyle.” “Duppy” went with the tone of a disappointed fan and peer, hitting Pusha for his decline in success since his days as part of the duo Clipse and calling him a fake drug dealer. It was a compelling attack, passive-aggressive and restrained in a way that suggested poise on Drake’s part.

Then Pusha released “The Story of Adidon,” and all hell broke loose. Over three minutes of surgically precise rhymes, the older rapper went after Drake for everything from using his blackness as a minstrel-esque tool for performance to mistreating his producer and close collaborator Noah “40” Shebib, who has multiple sclerosis. But most potent of all of “Adidon”’s allegations was the plainly stated claim that Drake was “hiding a child” that he had with a French former porn star. Pusha claimed that Drake was simultaneously becoming an absentee father and planning on using his child, purportedly named “Adonis,” as a marketing tool for his upcoming Adidas shoe line.

Pusha’s attacks on Drake hit hard, becoming the stuff of memes for weeks on Twitter and leading some rap heads to pontificate on how Drake was finished after “Adidon”. Yet in the long run, the strangest thing about them is how little it impacted Drake. He still went ahead with “Scorpion”’s late-June release, adding in a few lines about how he “wasn’t hidin’ my kid from the world” but “hidin’ the world from my kid” (which, as a note, means absolutely nothing) and a final track, “March 14th,” about finding out he was going to be a father. But other than those acknowledgements, Drake seemed ultimately unphased by what would be a career-ending diss track to anyone else. He smothered the story by virtue of his own star status — he became too big to fail.

As autumn moves on, however, Drake has seemed increasingly restless in his hegemonic pop status. “In My Feelings” has finally moved out of the top 10 (it’s still in the top 20, along with Drake’s “Nonstop” and “Never Recover,” his collaboration with Atlanta rappers Lil Baby and Gunna), leaving Drake for the first time in 31 weeks without a song in those upper reaches of the chart. Sure, he still has an uncredited, song-stealing cameo on Travis Scott’s “SICKO MODE,” but for an artist of Drake’s world-dominating stature, that’s not enough.

And so Drake has taken to his favorite pastime — hijacking the hype cycles surrounding younger rappers and pop stars. Just as Drake’s appearances on BlocBoy JB’s “Look Alive” and Lil Baby’s “Yes Indeed” in the spring presaged “Scorpion”’s dominance of the early summer, Drake has followed the release of his album with a run of collaborations with lesser rappers that seem pinpointed for pop success. Beyond “SICKO MODE” and “Never Recover,” the two most successful of the collaborations so far, there’s also been “No Stylist” with New York’s French Montana, “FLIP A SWITCH” with Quavo and “MIA” with Puerto Rican Latin Trap superstar Bad Bunny, who just so happened to be on Cardi B’s “I Like It,” one of the few songs to dethrone Drake from the number-one spot this summer. That roster — from French Montana’s clubby New York Rap to Travis Scott’s psychedelic Houston style and then onto Quavo and Lil Baby/Gunna’s Atlanta Trap and Bad Bunny’s Latin take on it, represents a rolodex of nearly every proven B-list hitmaker still standing in 2018. No one on that list could claim to be a threat to Drake’s rap game dominance, but they aren’t obscurities either.

Even as he’s making all the right moves on a music business level, Drake seems dedicated to creating bad press for himself. Some of this bad press comes from rumors an speculation. In September, odd news about 14-year-old actress Millie Bobby Brown texting Drake, who is 31, about romantic matters came out, as well as reports that Drake may be dating an 18-year-old model whom he first met two years ago. But Drake also reignited the flames of the “Adidon” controversy last week. As part of his appearance on “The Shop,” Lebron James’ HBO talk show, Drake sighed at length about the beef, trying to repair his image and change the topic to Kanye West, who is an easier villain than Pusha T at this point. But his appearance there simply served to reactivate Pusha’s sense of competition — just days after Drake appeared on “The Shop,” Pusha T put out a three-hour appearance on Joe Budden’s podcast, a common stopping-by point for any rapper looking for industry credibility in 2018, talking mostly about the beef itself.

And so Drake has brought another round of scrutiny to himself, reawakening bygone controversies for no apparent benefit. It’s a puzzling move, especially for an artist as established as Drake. But it fits what has been a puzzling year for the artist. Everything he’s done, from surprise drops to nonexistent press tours to playing Fortnite on livestreams to beefing with Pusha T, feels like an intentional provocation, a test of what a music celebrity can do to undercut their own musical moves. In this case, at least for now, the answer seems to be that nothing, not even Drake, can stop Drake.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Mitski doesn’t need much time to devastate you https://stanforddaily.com/2018/09/23/mitski-doesnt-need-much-time-to-devastate-you/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/09/23/mitski-doesnt-need-much-time-to-devastate-you/#respond Mon, 24 Sep 2018 02:43:18 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1143758 Mitski doesn’t need much time to devastate you. On “My Body is Made of Crushed Little Stars,” the burning heart of her 2016 breakthrough album “Puberty 2,” it takes her exactly one minute and 56 seconds to break down her entire psyche into a mass of anxieties, from not knowing how to make rent to […]

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Mitski doesn’t need much time to devastate you.

On “My Body is Made of Crushed Little Stars,” the burning heart of her 2016 breakthrough album “Puberty 2,” it takes her exactly one minute and 56 seconds to break down her entire psyche into a mass of anxieties, from not knowing how to make rent to wanting to be killed in Jerusalem, dragging you headfirst with her. On that album’s last track, “A Burning Hill,” she completes the return half of that journey in six seconds fewer, painting a picture of resignation and emptiness that settles, beautiful and broken, into a sort of peace with the world. The two tracks are as different as any of the album — one embodying a frantic, punk-ish panic about your uncertain place in the world, the other a final, quiet acceptance of one’s fate — but what they share is how spare they are, how little they need to pull you in entirely. The songs on her follow-up to “Puberty 2,” August’s “Be The Cowboy,” follow suit.

Of the 14 tracks on “Be The Cowboy,” the Japanese American singer-songwriter’s second album on the independent label Dead Oceans, only two are longer than three minutes, and a full 11 fall between one-and-a-half and two-and-a-half. Yet none of them feel too short; on “Be The Cowboy,” Mitski cements her case as one of the great short story writers of our time, a master of the art of conservation of detail.

It helps, of course, that Mitski is able to convey entire songs’ worth of meaning in those tiniest details. On “Be The Cowboy,” she can do it in a line — “Lonesome Love” starts off with “I call you, to see you again/So I can win, and this can finally end,” which might not even be the most evocative line of the album (but is certainly the funniest.) She can do it in a word — anytime she says “kiss” or “touch” on “Be The Cowboy” she imbues them with a deep and metaphysical longing, one that can change the energy of an entire song to something more potent. She can even do it without saying a single word — the sigh that leads off “Me And My Husband” is almost worth as much as the rest of the song combined.

Mitski has always been a master artisan of those little moments — just take a listen to her two self-released albums that she put out during her time at Purchase College’s music school for evidence of her early talent — but “Be The Cowboy” recasts them in a different light. On her first few albums — “Puberty 2” and 2014 breakthrough “Bury Me At Makeout Creek” especially — Mitski’s detail and lyrical skill was often framed by raw, punk-like backings. Mitski was on those albums a woman in the middle of a hostile wilderness, only partly in control of what was going on around her. On “Puberty 2” especially, she sounds desperate and in crisis. Songs like “My Body is Made of Crushed Little Stars” feel like watching a friend go through an emotional breakdown in your dorm room. It’s hard to look away but almost too intense to look at in the first place. And so on the strength of those albums, in all of their heart-wrenching emotional detail and rawness, Mitski became known as a diarist, a writer of songs as confessions or personal therapy sessions. On Pitchfork’s (otherwise excellent) review of “Puberty 2,” Jillian Maples refers to the album as a “detailed chronicling of the day-to-day interior struggle” and a “resounding personal statement” in the first two paragraphs alone. Other publications beat a similar drum, and by the time “Be The Cowboy” and its press tour came around, Mitski’s reputation was firmly entrenched as “Indie Rock’s Foremost Sad Girl™.”

“Be The Cowboy” is at its core a reaction to this reputation, a demonstration that Mitski’s skill as a crafter of detail is clear and unimpeachable, no matter what she’s writing about. The Mitski of “Be The Cowboy” isn’t singing about herself (and maybe she never was). Her skill is not one of diary but of empathy, of seeing through the eyes of her subjects and vividly rendering their pains and joys. And so the songs on “Be The Cowboy” do two things to make this clear. In their aesthetics, they move beyond the raw guitar rock of Mitski’s prior two albums. And in the stories they tell, they broaden the world of Mitski’s artistic vision; her songs are no longer just sung from the point of view of the sad and anxious young people that she once embodied but also figures more far out, from the lonesome cowboy of “A Horse Named Cold Air” or the reminiscing old lovers of gorgeous album closer “Two Slow Dancers.” The themes are the same — love, loss, the liminal territory between them — but what could be once written off by critics or even admirers as personal and diaristic is rendered now as universal.

It’s a bold expansion of Mitski’s lyrical skill, one backed up by a corresponding evolution in her sound. It isn’t quite accurate to say that “Be The Cowboy” abandons the distorted, grunge-influenced guitar rock of “Puberty 2” — if you want distortion, just listen to the opening organ note of “Geyser” as it gets chopped up and twisted as Mitski sings her first lines there, or the fireworks on the hook of “A Pearl” as it transitions into a roaring guitar break and some arena rock drum fills. Instead, “Be The Cowboy” envelops the sounds that Mitski has used in the past — the heavy guitars and booming drums of “Puberty 2” and “Bury Me At Makeout Creek,” but also the orchestral arrangements and art-rock passages of her two self-released albums — using them, but also exploring new aesthetics, from the disco-by-the-way-of-“Lovefool” of “Nobody” to the uncanny valley country of “Lonesome Love.”

It’s a stylistic shift similar to the full leap onto the dancefloor that was St. Vincent’s “MASSEDUCTION,” but where that record used disco aesthetics to show that Annie Clark was opening up and singing more personally compared to the erudite but sometimes distant avant-garde material of her earlier work, “Be The Cowboy” uses dance music to do the opposite. The Nile Rodgers-esque guitar and disco drumbeat of “Nobody” lends the whole song a feeling of unreality — imagine the pre-chorus of “And I don’t want your pity/I just want somebody near me/Guess I’m a coward/I just want to feel alright” over gritted teeth and distorted guitars, and it becomes far more maudlin and dark. On the record, though, Mitski plays it with a wink that hides the tears — it’s ridiculous, but so is human tragedy in general. But to just say that the Mitski of “Be The Cowboy” has lightened up does her (and all her prior forms) a disservice — there was always humor in her music, it’s just heightened here, along with the rest of the emotions.

It’s that heightened atmosphere that lets Mitski slip into so many different stories on “Be The Cowboy.” The promotional artwork that accompanied “Geyser,” “Nobody” and “Two Slow Dancers” featured her as women that she clearly was not — old-timey film stars or high-class society women on the run. The video for “Nobody” even breaks away in its last beats, showing that Mitski herself was an actress on a set. And the songs on “Be The Cowboy” live up to that promise not just in their settings but also in the perspectives she sings from. Everyone’s sad and lost and nostalgic for some old love, but the ways in which Mitski’s protagonists react to their predicaments range wildly, from the closed-off, obsessed veteran-of-sorts of “A Pearl” to the almost-vampiric rock star of “Remember My Name.” And in rendering all of these disparate hearts in such loving detail, Mitski does what all the great short storytellers must do: telling the same story many times in different guises and drawing something new from it every time.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Frost 2018: Glass Animals performs with care, charisma and creativity https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/31/frost-2018-glass-animals-performs-with-care-charisma-and-creativity/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/31/frost-2018-glass-animals-performs-with-care-charisma-and-creativity/#respond Fri, 01 Jun 2018 06:44:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1142499 The Stanford Stadium is not anyone’s favorite piece of architecture. It’s a stadium, with all the logistical requirements implied in a venue of its size and stature — big concrete pillars, uncomfy seats, copious astroturf — and so it on its own, as just a building, is a dead, rigid place. It takes people — […]

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The Stanford Stadium is not anyone’s favorite piece of architecture. It’s a stadium, with all the logistical requirements implied in a venue of its size and stature — big concrete pillars, uncomfy seats, copious astroturf — and so it on its own, as just a building, is a dead, rigid place. It takes people — screaming crowds, electric athletics — to turn into something more than an industrial-sized corpse. And Saturday night, for five-or-so hours, the stadium, host to 2018’s Frost Musical Festival, came alive. The festival — the premiere offering of the Stanford Concert Network, now in its 7th year — was a wildly energetic affair, animated by the uniquely fluid styles of Monte Booker, Ravyn Lenae, and most of all Glass Animals, who closed out the night with a effortlessly inventive headlining set.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BjAy7c2hZft/?taken-by=sister.supply

While Frost’s non-student headliners defined the evening’s tone, the two student performers set the mood nicely. First up were Sister Supply, a bluesy five-piece group. They led the late afternoon crowd in a spirited mix of original songs and covers, delivering a classic rock-influenced performance under blue skies. Son Kuma (Barron Montgomery ‘19) was next, with the L.A-based rapper delivering a trap-tinged fusion of hip-hop and R&B touching on a range of topics centering on feeling some “type of way” about the world, from the lovesick ramblings of “Obsessed” to the money and fame talk of “Indica.” These aren’t necessarily new topics in rap (or in popular music in general), but Son Kuma brought a unique perspective (he’s the only rapper I know whose stage name comes from both Dragonball Z and Japanese language class) and most of all an incredible energy to his material. In the words of attendee Spencer Robinson ‘20, “the Stanford community was wholly unprepared for the intensity of Son Kuma’s spectacle.”

https://soundcloud.com/sonkuma/sets/indica

Even the energy delivered by Stanford’s very own, though, could not be matched by Frost’s headliners, who each brought fluid, genre-bending sets that spanned moods and styles with ease. Monte Booker, the Chicago-based producer who you may know from his work with acclaimed rappers like Noname and Smino, started the second stage of the festival off with a free-wheeling dj set that seemed to work as one constantly moving organism, with individual beats seeming to merge seamlessly into one another. He mixed his original compositions and beats made for other artists with an endlessly supply of remixes — from Estelle and Kanye West’s “American Boy” and Justin Timberlake’s “Rock My Body” to Crystal Waters’ 90s house classic “Gypsy Woman.” That last choice was telling — though the Chicago rappers that Booker is most associated with don’t exactly make dance music, Booker wore the history of Chicago music on his sleeve, including the deep roots of Chicago house.

Booker’s Chicago roots were also on display as Frost’s next performer joined him on the stage — not only is Ravyn Lenae another member of the loosely defined alt-rap/R&B scene bubbling up in Chicago, but Lenae and Booker’s rapport was clear as she began her set. While her music was perhaps more straightforward than Booker’s DJ set, Lenae’s voice lent the experience an otherworldly feel. It’s a magnificent instrument, sighing and drawing out lines and feelings in a way that almost felt superhuman. It was the perfect complement to the beats on songs like “Sticky,” a hard-edged piece of groovy funk produced by L.A R&B wunderkind Steve Lacy, who produced all of Lenae’s most recent EP. A less inventive vocalist would be tempted to go straightforward in vocal performance, especially in the high-pressure environment of a festival set. But Lenae stood firm to her style, giving us a performance that needed to be experienced live in all of its glory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keYOX0Fp_BQ

Yet it was Glass Animals, the night’s final headliners, that embodied the night’s spirit of fluidity to its fullest. From the first seconds of their set, the English four-piece group made clear that their music was difficult to tie down. Not quite electronic, not quite rock, with hints of hip-hop and dance music seeping in, the band lies in a sort of no-man’s land increasingly carved out by canny groups seeking to appeal to a large an audience as possible in an increasingly fragmented music atmosphere. It’s dangerous territory — witness the creative barrenness of Imagine Dragons or Post Malone — but Glass Animals, especially in a live setting, handled it well. It helps that their stage show was one hell of a spectacle — while their openers sufficed with relatively bare setups, the night’s headliners brought a full-on light show, complete with a TV set, an arcade game projection, and an enormous glowing pineapple. The band’s infectious energy, especially in frontman David Bayley, was perhaps their greatest asset — even hardened critical cynics like us were moved to dance to songs like “Pork Soda.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI0-1bw8f7w

As a whole, this year’s Frost Festival was not one to have missed — an unforgettable mix of genres and styles that absolutely should not have worked on paper, brought together by the pure energy of its performers and their sheer commitments to the weirdness of their music. Whoever comes next year will have a high standard to live up to (but if you’re reading this at SCN, definitely book a female headliner).

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu and Dylan Grosz at dgrosz ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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The Patience of Pusha T https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/31/the-patience-of-pusha-t/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/31/the-patience-of-pusha-t/#respond Thu, 31 May 2018 17:26:49 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1141726 Pusha T is a patient man. You can just tell from his music, the way the he sneers out every line he raps like he’s waited years to say it, to boast about how he’s made it and to look down on you from up high. You can also tell from his release schedule — […]

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Pusha T is a patient man. You can just tell from his music, the way the he sneers out every line he raps like he’s waited years to say it, to boast about how he’s made it and to look down on you from up high. You can also tell from his release schedule — unlike many of his rap contemporaries, Push has never felt the need to release music at any sort of consistent rate. While not quite at the levels of delay associated with hermit sages like D’Angelo, Fiona Apple or Frank Ocean, the wait between the announcement of his (then) second album, “King Push” in April 2013 and its release as “DAYTONA” last week still added up to more than five years.

It’s not that Pusha T has disappeared — the Virginia Beach rapper released a full album in 2015, intended as a “prelude” to “King Push,” and has taken on the role of president of Kanye West-founded label G.O.O.D Music since early 2016 — but that he’s learned how to take his time, to perfect his craft. And god, was “DAYTONA” worth the wait. Coming in at a riveting 21 minutes, Pusha T’s third album is the most essential rap release of the year so far, a perfect illustration of the rapper’s mastery of his craft.

He’s known as a cocaine rapper — mostly because he really does rap about coke more often and better than anyone else — but Pusha T raps about cocaine the same way that Prince talked about sex or Joni Mitchell sings about heartbreak: both as the thing itself and as a gateway into something deeper and more free. From the first bars of “Grindin,” his first hit with Clipse, the 2000s duo he formed with his brother Malice, it was clear that he had a gift.

While Malice’s verse is good, it’s standard coke talk, the kind of stuff that 90s rappers from Jay-Z to Scarface had already pioneered. Pusha instead delivers something weirder, a more stripped down and abstract take on the style — instead of talking about coke as part of an overall milieu of gangster excess, he runs his entire flow through cocaine references, letting white powder coat everything he does.

Since the 2002 release of Clipse’s commercial debut album, “Lord Willin’,” he’s done precious little but improve on that idiom, sharpening it to a point harder than anything in your favorite rapper’s arsenal. He’s not the most stylistically diverse rapper, but to watch him work, to stack references and euphemisms into songs, is an astonishing thing even decades into his career.

Yet Pusha T, despite his evident skill, has not had the easiest path to the pinnacle of the rap world. Label troubles postponed Clipse’s follow-up to “Lord Willin’” until 2006, and while “Hell Hath No Fury” was a worthy successor in terms of quality, it fell below commercial expectations and led to them being dropped from their label. After one more album, the duo broke up, with the brothers going their separate ways: Malice changed his name to No Malice and became a Christian rapper, while Pusha T joined forces with Kanye West and G.O.O.D Music.

Pusha’s first two albums on G.O.O.D fit the label’s name as well as its general vibe — they were good, but not great, albums, filled with glitzy, maximalist beats and hooks that would go equally well with verses by labelmates like Big Sean or Cyhi the Prince. And Pusha sounds good over those beats! He really does! But his deconstructed coke rap flows sound best when he’s rapping over beats as weird and unexpected as he is — from the lunch table percussion of “Grindin” to the mutant electric pianos of “Untouchable,” unorthodox production choices bring out the best in Pusha. On “DAYTONA,” he finally gets the album length canvas of production he deserves.

“DAYTONA” is a case of the form finally catching up to the function — it’s shorter and more concentrated than either of Pusha’s previous solo albums. The beats, all expertly produced by Kanye West, are spare and almost aggressively ugly. There are no silky R&B choruses here, just harsh guitars and synths cribbed from 70s soul and progressive rock. It’s simultaneously retro and futuristic, the perfect backdrop for a rapper who has always positioned himself as both a forward-looking innovator and an old-school kingpin.

And with a table setting as good as the one Kanye provides, Pusha T can’t help but feast. His rapping makes up more than 60 percent of the record as a whole, counting instrumental outros, and is only joined by two features in the form of lackluster verses from Rick Ross and Kanye himself. It’s in comparison to those two contemporaries that Pusha seems most magnificent, though — they’re all in their forties, but only Pusha is still rapping like he’s in his prime. It’s something that quotables don’t do justice — a couplet like “We don’t do vegetables, n***** get flatlined / Welcome all beef, then we heat ’em with flat irons” is clever enough on paper but is elevated to something higher when heard out loud, with Pusha’s voice layering in menace and a self-knowing satisfaction. It’s a satisfaction that’s earned, a product of two decades of patience.

It’s that same patience that becomes Pusha’s greatest weapon on what will end up being the most remembered moment from “DAYTONA.” On the album’s final track, the ominously-titled “Infrared,” he unloads four years worth of grievances against Drake, Lil Wayne and Birdman, rekindling a years-old beef with new ammunition and perfect poise. Unlike Drake’s prior opponents — shout out to Meek — Pusha sounds utterly unconcerned with stealing a sliver of his more famous opponent’s shine. When Drake shot back hours later with the “Duppy” freestyle, something about how his claim that Pusha owes him for “promotional assistance and career reviving” rang false. How could Pusha T need a career revival from anyone?

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Blackfest 2018 brings together 2 Chainz, Dreezy in raucous fun https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/07/blackfest-2018-brings-together-2-chainz-dreezy-in-raucous-fun/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/07/blackfest-2018-brings-together-2-chainz-dreezy-in-raucous-fun/#respond Mon, 07 May 2018 10:00:55 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1140577 I had never seen a crowd of Stanford students more joyful than when the opening bars of “No Problem” began to stream out of the speakers on the Blackfest stage. We had been waiting — some of us for hours — in the thick of an ever-growing crowd for this. The roar was deafening. And […]

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I had never seen a crowd of Stanford students more joyful than when the opening bars of “No Problem” began to stream out of the speakers on the Blackfest stage. We had been waiting — some of us for hours — in the thick of an ever-growing crowd for this. The roar was deafening.

And in the end, there was 2 Chainz.

Blackfest, the annual music and cultural festival put on by Stanford’s very own Black Family Gathering Committee, was many things — a joyful celebration of Black life and culture within the University and throughout the Bay Area, a triumphant showcase for student artists and one hell of a party, just to name a few — but for an hour or so, as the sun drifted low in the early spring sky over FloMo field, Blackfest 2018 became a shrine to 2 Chainz. But even before the Atlanta rapper took the stage Sunday evening, there was plenty to appreciate at Blackfest.

The festival began with some acts closer to home, with four openers from the Stanford student community starting us off in the afternoon. The performers all occupied some space in the fruitful land between rap and R&B, but their differing approaches showed the sheer diversity of the student musical community at the University. The slam-poetry tinged rap of Melinda Hernandez ‘21 segued into the hard-nosed, versatile flows of VII (Gabriel Townsell ’20), with the two rising Chicago musicians weaving their life experiences and perspectives into their music. The self-assured, trap-tinged R&B of Alexa Luckey ’21 and the smooth, fusion R&B of Tres Digital, a trio made up of Brandon Hightower ’15, Wesley Mitchell ’15 and Bernard Wang M.A. ’20, two alumni and an incoming grad student, provided a looser, poppier rejoinder, with Tres Digital’s closing song “All Good” serving as a refreshing aperitif to the student performances. VII’s set was the most dynamic of the afternoon — though fairly short time-wise, he ripped through a dizzying array of styles and flows from songs off his EPs, including this April’s “CHICO DeBARS VOL. 1: LIMITLESS.” Linking together all of the different songs in VII’s set was the drum work of Johnny Weger ’18, whose live kit playing accented the synth heavy beats on songs like “HARDWOOD FLOW$.” Weger anchored the set, allowing for Townsell to move the crowd with his blend of sheer technical skill and thoughtful, well-constructed rhymes and songs.

After the student acts completed their all-too-short sets, the Blackfest audience was tided over until the headliners came on by an array of DJ sets. The sets, started off by 106.1 KMEL and 92.3 KRRL’s DJ Amen, provided a decent mix of classic Bay Area rap like Mac Dre and more modern hits from Kendrick Lamar and Migos, but by the late afternoon the audience was getting antsy in expectation of the festival’s big acts.

Dreezy, an upcoming rapper who has been crowned in the past as the “Princess of Chicago Rap,” ably served as a prelude to 2 Chainz. Her dextrous flows and brash, uncompromising attitude and stage presence made her a perfect pairing for the night’s headliner, and her half-hour performance running through some of the harder hits in her catalog left the crowd hyped up for 2 Chainz.

By God, did 2 Chainz live up to the hype. While casual listeners who only have been exposed to 2 Chainz as the “TRUUU”-yelling jokester from hits like “Mercy” and “No Problem” may get the impression that Tauheed Epps is simply a party rapper, a one trick pony, his performance at Blackfest instead made the case for 2 Chainz as a living legend, a Trap lord with more than two decades of experience in the game and the performing skill to match. The course of his nearly hour-long set ran through his entire career, from his days as Tity Boi in the Atlanta rap duo Playaz Circle (founded in 1997) to his commercial resurgence in the 2010s with a string of instantly iconic features on songs like Drake’s “All Me” and Juicy J’s “Bandz A Make Her Dance.” Yet the bulk of 2 Chainz’s set relied on his own work — his three solo albums, from 2011’s “Based on a T.R.U. Story” to last year’s “Pretty Girls Like Trap Music,” provide him with more than enough material to rock the festival. He even played the Blackfest audience some of the material from his upcoming “Rap or Go to the League,” out this summer — “Proud,” an ode to his mom that he released as part of an EP earlier this year, was maybe the best song in his entire set.

It helps that, beyond his substantial catalog, 2 Chainz is simply an incredible MC, in the traditional sense of a Master of Ceremonies. He developed an instant rapport with the Stanford crowd, doing everything from listing his star sign — he’s an Virgo, if you were wondering — to giving advice on proper weed etiquette and challenging people to a jump shot competition on the FloMo courts.

Yet even a set by a performer as charismatic as 2 Chainz must end eventually, and as evening fell upon the field he departed, leaving the thousand-or-so in the crowd with nothing but good memories of his performance. Blackfest has come and gone this year, but the energy of both the big name headliners and the student openers is all the proof we need of the strength and vitality of the Black creative community on campus. If you weren’t at Blackfest this year, don’t miss it next year.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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The best independent music of 2018 (so far!) https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/01/best-indie-music-2018/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/05/01/best-indie-music-2018/#respond Tue, 01 May 2018 08:24:09 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1140288 The lack of particularly inspiring pop music for the first three months of the year doesn’t mean that there’s been a dearth of good music as a whole.

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The start of the year is a no-man’s land for music. Whether it’s the weather, the residual best-of-last-year lists that linger into late January, or the Grammys (though probably not that last one), the first few months of the year have been rather bereft of big music stories. Just look at the marquee musical releases of the first quarter of 2018 — we’ve got bloated, nigh-unlistenable releases from established superstars like Justin Timberlake and Migos (and yes, I know it’s wild that Migos and Justin Timberlake are now in the same conversation for top tier male pop acts), a half-assed but enjoyable soundtrack album from Kendrick Lamar and a total of 3.5 songs from Drake.  The second tier of pop musicians hasn’t exactly risen to fill the gaps left by the A-listers either — Camila Cabello, Lil Yachty, Logic and Fall Out Boy’s albums, while mostly fine, are unlikely to lodge themselves in the upper echelons of this year’s best albums. And while the spring has already brought us an instantly distinctive pop release in the form of Cardi B’s indomitable debut, “Invasion of Privacy,” the shape of pop in 2018 is still rough.

Yet the lack of particularly inspiring pop music for the first three months of the year doesn’t mean that there’s been a dearth of good music as a whole. And while my colleague Jacob Nierenberg has already gone through 10 of the best albums of the first part of 2018 (and made note of what to look forward to over the next few months), there are still many releases that may have flown under your radar. Here are ten singles from the first three months of 2018 from independent or unsigned acts that are far more worth your time than listening to all 105 minutes of “Culture II.”

 

  1. Cam O’Bi (featuring Smino), “TenderHeaded”

“TenderHeaded,” the lead single from Chicago/Las Vegas-based singer/producer/rapper Cam O’Bi’s debut album, “Good Ass Kid,” is one of those perfect little slices of soul-rap joy that feels as effortless as a spring day, effortlessly harnessing nostalgia in both its sound, filled with childlike laughter and “oohs” and “aahs,” and its lyrics, which tell stories of childhood barbershop experiences. Of course, such skill with the themes of adolescence is to be expected from Cam — his production work includes Chance the Rapper’s “Coloring Book” and “Acid Rap” mixtapes, as well as Noname’s “Telefone” and SZA’s “CTRL,” four of the most evocative alt-rap/R&B releases of recent years. On “TenderHeaded,” he takes the starring role, and with a welcome assist from St. Louis rapper Smino, whose more hardnosed style is a nice companion to Cam’s softer touch, he does so with aplomb.

Recommended if you like: Chance the Rapper, Noname, Anderson .Paak, Tyler The Creator

 

  1. Caroline Rose, “More of the Same”

“More of the Same” sounds unlike anything else. It’s retro in its stylings — note the perfectly layered organs and chorused-out guitar lines that welcome you to the song and undergird it — but utterly strange and futuristic in its lyrical tone, in the way that Rose sneers and chants out her lyrics. That disconnect, the old-fashioned and iconoclastic coexisting in one dynamo of a pop song, is the engine that fuels “More of the Same.” Rose, who also arranged the song (as well of the rest of her excellent sophomore album, “Loner”), excels in her vocal and lyrical performance, matching pointed barbs at “alternative hair cuts and straight white teeth” with a chorus that genuinely encapsulates the monotony of modernity without being boring itself.

Recommended if you like: Angel Olsen, Phoebe Bridgers, Parquet Courts, PJ Harvey

 

  1. Cosmic Johnny, “Useless Machine”

“Useless Machine” is a song about failure, about the kind of loss that reels through you and begins to inform your entire being, but it sounds like triumph. From the opening rave-up of the bass and drums to the song’s more contemplative, acoustic-guitar led bridge, the Boston-based Cosmic Johnny don’t let up the energy on the first single off “Good Grief,” their just-released debut album. Yet at the core of all of the glorious rock bombast and chaos here is lead singer and songwriter Mike Suh’s vocal performance, which marries the grim humor of Morissey’s delivery with something like the mysticism of “Hounds of Love”-era Kate Bush. “Useless Machine” is unabashedly a rock epic, one that would make a 70s arena rock group proud. But queer post-millennial recluses like me need rock epics too, and for that I am thankful for Cosmic Johnny.

Recommended if you like: Titus Andronicus, Car Seat Headrest, Against Me!, Cloud Nothings

 

  1. Drakeo the Ruler (featuring 03 Greedo), “Ion Rap Beef”

Drakeo the Ruler, the newly ordained king of Los Angeles’ rap underground, is a figure fully ensconced in his own world. Listening to any of Drakeo’s raps feels weirdly intimate for standard boastful gang talk — it’s almost like you’re intruding on some natural order of his world, one that should not be tampered with. when you hear him speak on a beat. That tendency is on full display on “Ion Rap Beef,” a technical collaboration with fellow L.A rap upstard 03 Greedo that nonetheless feels like a showcase for Drakeo. He starts rapping, unfurling his characteristic voice— somewhere between a snarl and a croak, and doesn’t stop, going for nearly two whole minutes before ceding ground to any other figure. And the thing about Drakeo is that his lyrics, filled with hyper specific libraries of slang and a unflinching glibness about his gang-affiliated lifestyle, draw you in so intently that you don’t want him to stop.

Recommended if you like: Vince Staples, Nipsey Hussle, Freddie Gibbs, Kamaiyah

 

  1. Illuminati Hotties, “Cuff”

“Cuff” spends a minute and change floating in a synth-driven haze, a spare poem with references to couches on the east side and drinking all night delivered delicately by Sarah Tudzin, the force behind the LA-based Illuminati Hotties, whose debut album “Kiss Yr Frenemies,” drops May 11. And that intro is perfectly nice! It’s fine! But it’s not the main event here — those honors fall to the chorus, a velvet sledgehammer of a thing that astonishes in its sheer bigness. Tudzin describes herself on her bandcamp as a “tenderpunk pioneer” and the hook here is a perfect manifestation of that style, a loud, uncompromising show of force that still finds the time and the skill to be vulnerable. It’s a tough line to walk, but Illuminati Hotties (who, by the way, have an excellent name) nail it on “Cuff.”

Recommended if you like: Mitski, Jay Som, Diet Cig, Khalid

  1. Jpegmafia, “Baby I’m Bleeding”

Jpegmafia is the musical equivalent of a shitposter — and that’s a good thing. The Baltimore rapper/producer’s sophomore album (after 2016’s “Black Ben Carson”) “Veteran” is full of profane, iconoclastic tracks with titles like “I Cannot Fucking Wait Until Morrissey Dies” and “My Thoughts on Neogaf Dying,” but “Baby I’m Bleeding” is one of the best songs of the bunch. After a 40 second intro of discordant, industrial rhythms, Peggy launches into two sweltering, stream-of-consciousness verses, tying together an all-consuming disdain for everyone from soundcloud rappers to the president — plus (more favorable) shout outs to Kanye West and AJ Styles.

Recommended if you like: Earl Sweatshirt, Death Grips, clipping, Brockhampton, “Yeezus”

  1. Miya Folick, “Deadbody”

“Deadbody” starts out spare and harrowing— a starkly defined, plainly-spoken description of a sexual assault over bare piano chords. Yet from that dark place, the song builds into something defiant and beautiful, largely on the strength of Los Angeles singer-songwriter Miya Folick’s voice and lyrics, which cover an astounding emotional range for a song that clocks in slightly under three-and-a-half minutes. Folick’s voice is one of those astounding natural instruments, able to compelling portray everything from dead-eyed determination and righteous anger to something altogether more tender. Her EPs and singles over the past three years have revealed a startling range, from the surf rock of “Pet Body” to the torch songs of “Strange Darling” and the grunge rock of “Give it to Me.”

Recommended if you like: Florence + The Machine, Screaming Females, Alanis Morissette, Destroyer

  1. Nightjars, “Natural History

“Natural History” is a spare song— just an acoustic guitar, a few ghostly notes of piano, and singer-songwriter Jade Matias Bell’s voice, which drifts like worried fire over the track. Yet despite its minimalist composition, “Natural History” feels titanic, rushing through you as it moves from the frantic, driving pace of its verse to the trickier rhythms of the chorus all the way to the song’s outro, which slows down and then speeds up to great effect. The song, the first single off of Nightjars’ forthcoming debut album “Body of Water,” pairs that masterclass in temporal variety with a starkly drawn lyrical picture— a story of loss and memory that is cryptic without being confusing, something mystical yet powerfully specific.

Recommended if you like: Andrew Bird, Julien Baker, Moses Sumney, Big Thief

 

  1. Typhoon, “Remember”

Typhoon is a ridiculous band. The group, an 8-piece Indie Rock ensemble based in Portland, Oregon, sounds exactly like what a band of that size and provenance would be expected to sound like— all grand, sweeping choruses and intricately crafted, pseudo-philosophical lyrics, over a backing of swirling guitars and strings. “Offerings,” the album from which “Remember” comes from, even quotes the work of classic Italian director Federico Fellini multiple times— it’s really that sort of album. In less steady hands, Typhoon would be a mess. And yet, there’s something in frontman Kyle Morton’s entirely earnest, unironic presence that makes songs like “Remember,” with its twisting, multipart structure and lyrics on death and the loss of memory, work. Another point in its favor— the guitar break fucking rips.

 

Recommended if you like: Arcade Fire, The Decemberists, The New Pornographers, Any Other Indie Rock Group From The Mid-2000s With More Than Six Members

  1. Woman Believer, “Maybe”

“Maybe,” the leadoff song on Woman Believer’s debut EP “DUNZO,” fits its name. It’s a song that shines in its embrace of ambiguity, from its gently rolling 60s-soul style beat to its lyrics, a constantly crossing-over set of zen koan-like couplets that never land on one topic or decision for too long. From certain lyricists such a tendency would be annoying, an exercise in psuedo-philosophical rambling, but in the adept hands of Christine Hucal, the Detroit-based vocalist, artist, and Vulfpeck collaborator at the center of Woman Believer, “Maybe” becomes something beautiful. In its bridge, a “soundscape” credited to Vulfpeck bandleader Jack Stratton provides a certain fantastical feeling, one that lets Hucal’s snap back to reality in the song’s last hook feel all the more grounding.

Recommended if you like: Vulfpeck, 90s Joni Mitchell, Lianne La Havas, Courtney Barnett

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

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The hyper-connected brilliance of Sidney Gish’s ‘No Dogs Allowed’ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/02/22/the-hyper-connected-brilliance-of-sidney-gishs-no-dogs-allowed/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/02/22/the-hyper-connected-brilliance-of-sidney-gishs-no-dogs-allowed/#respond Fri, 23 Feb 2018 04:20:21 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1137225 I’ve had Sidney Gish stuck in my head all year. That’s not hyperbole of any sort; the Boston-area singer-songwriter released her latest album, “No Dogs Allowed,” on Bandcamp in the closing hours of 2017, and I spent much of the first day of the year listening to it on loop. Since then, the 13 songs […]

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I’ve had Sidney Gish stuck in my head all year. That’s not hyperbole of any sort; the Boston-area singer-songwriter released her latest album, “No Dogs Allowed,” on Bandcamp in the closing hours of 2017, and I spent much of the first day of the year listening to it on loop. Since then, the 13 songs that make up “No Dogs Allowed” have taken their turns occupying my mind in roughly equal proportions — an instrumental hook from “Good Magicians” lodging itself there one day, a particularly clever line from “I’m Filled With Steak, I Cannot Dance” another — a testament not only to Gish’s skill as a writer and composer but her consistency. On her second full-length release, Gish expands her creative horizons while maintaining her idiosyncratic, charming songwriting voice, creating an album that perfectly captures the strange and anxious milieu of the internet and how it has shaped modern young adulthood.

“No Dogs Allowed” is a lonely album. That’s not to say that it sounds cold or uninviting — quite the opposite, in fact — but merely a reflection of the circumstances through which it was produced. Gish wrote, sang, mixed and performed all of the album’s tracks by herself, and the attention to detail required to create as meticulous a work as what she brings here is evident. While there’s a long lineage of modern indie rock auteurs who recorded key early works by themselves in their bedrooms, from Ariel Pink and Bon Iver to Jay Som and Frankie Cosmos, Gish’s music tends not towards the hazy, spare vibes of her bedroom pop forbearers and contemporaries but towards extreme specificity and precision.

It’s perhaps a harder formula to pull off — the layering of different instruments and guitar parts on the most complex songs on “No Dogs Allowed” is deep for any album, let alone a self-released Bandcamp project — but Gish’s approach, and the solitude used to get to it, is worth it, not least because of how genuinely unexpected the album sounds. While it’s easy to pigeonhole Gish’s music as one thing or the other— singer-songwriter, bedroom pop, anti-folk — the songs on “No Dogs Allowed” span a wide range of styles without losing her essential spark. It’s an album where the disco-pastiché “Not but for You, Bunny” can be sandwiched in between the somber “Rat of the City” and the wistful “Persephone” and feel like it belongs — the songs are linked by Gish’s distinctive, singular voice.

What that voice is exactly is hard to pin down, which is kind of the point. Gish is funny, sure — there’s a grisly line on “Good Magicians” about killing a certain rabbit mascot for a certain fruity cereal brand that gets me every time — but “No Dogs Allowed” isn’t a comedy album, really. There are too many songs that so precisely examine the anxieties of the modern condition for that to be entirely true. Yet even the more somber songs here aren’t entirely serious — “Mouth Log,” which reflects on solitude and loneliness, also contains references to the Barefoot Contessa and Japanese hikikomori.

The weird balance that Gish strikes here — the casual, tossed-off jokes and references, the stylistic flow, the solitude and the joy of the music — draws most not from any obvious indie rock ancestor but instead from the medium she’s working in: the Internet. Like any self-respecting late millenial (the ‘92-’98 contingent, roughly speaking), Gish has always existed in a world fundamentally weirded by the Internet. And her music speaks to this, both directly and more subtly — Gish directly references weird-internet touchstones like the hyperactive meme centrifuges of Facebook groups like Post Aesthetics, but the way her lyrics and music in general weave disparate references and stylistic elements together to create surprisingly emotional imagery evokes nothing more than how the memetic engines of the Internet work. The endlessly hook-y choruses on “No Dogs Allowed” rarely ever stay exactly the same from iteration to iteration — Gish’s writing is ever-changing.

Yet beyond all of the conceptual levels to Gish’s music, it’s important to note that “No Dogs Allowed” is a fun and imminently listenable album. It’s one of those works that rewards multiple rounds of listening — there’s always another reference you missed, or a guitar riff or vocal harmony layered deeper — and feels fresh every time. All of the gimmicks and surprises that Gish brings are held together because she’s a ridiculously adept songwriter. A song like “Sin Triangle,” which weaves together trigonometry, Japanese isolationism and a cut up sample of a 1950s educational film about personality, only works because of the backbone Gish gives it, anchored by a power pop guitar solo.

It’s a critic’s cliché to declare an album “timeless” as a sign of its classic status. Yet “No Dogs Allowed” achieves greatness not through its timelessness but its intense bond to the moment it exists in. It’s the sort of album that can only exist in this Internet era, an era that simultaneously feels hyper-connected and intensely lonely. By tapping into that spirit as only a denizen of the Internet can, Sidney Gish has made a deeply time-bound masterpiece.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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What was pop in 2017? https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/25/what-was-pop-in-2017/ https://stanforddaily.com/2018/01/25/what-was-pop-in-2017/#respond Thu, 25 Jan 2018 17:38:36 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1135560 2017 was the year streaming broke pop music. Not in a financial sense – though last year was the first year that on-demand streaming made up a majority of American music consumption – but on some deeper, more fundamental level. Where in prior years streaming felt like an added layer to the picture of the […]

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What was pop in 2017?
Kendrick Lamar performs at Outside Lands 2015. (RAHIM ULLAH/The Stanford Daily)

2017 was the year streaming broke pop music. Not in a financial sense – though last year was the first year that on-demand streaming made up a majority of American music consumption – but on some deeper, more fundamental level. Where in prior years streaming felt like an added layer to the picture of the music industry, augmenting but not really determining its core qualities, the pop music of 2017 was undeniably shaped by the peculiar logics of Apple Music and Spotify.

It’s not quite that the old rules of pop music didn’t apply in 2017 – artists still released singles and albums, pop singers still put out baffling collabs with rappers and vice versa – but instead that the relative importance of these rules shifted. The album, in particular, declined as a commercial and organizational force. Aside from a few high profile exceptions (Kendrick Lamar’s “DAMN.,” Jay-Z’s “4:44” and Taylor Swift’s “reputation”), artists eschewed the album as the focus of their work in favor of singles or features.

A number of pop icons managed to remain major parts of the zeitgeist without even releasing or announcing an album this year – Rihanna, Beyoncé and Justin Bieber all notched hit singles this year on features or non album tracks. In the case of the latter two, their guest appearances on songs as diverse as the reggaeton-pop remixes of J Balvin’s “Mi Gente” and Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito,” Bieber’s hook duty on the pop rap indulgence of DJ Khaled’s “I’m the One,” and Beyoncé’s dominance of the duet version of Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect” provided them with more chart success than either of their most recent, critically acclaimed & career reinventing albums. Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” and even her self-titled 2013 album produced no number one hits, but as I write this, the singer’s turn on “Perfect” still remains the number one song in the country. Even an album like Bieber’s “Purpose,” which produced three number-one hits, was outpaced by the “Despacito” remix, which maintained its berth at the top of the charts for longer than any of Bieber’s number ones combined.

Beyond this old guard of established pop stars that maintained relevance without hewing to the traditional album model, a new crop of rising artists achieved success in 2017 without or despite their albums. The obvious example is Cardi B. Despite the “Bodak Yellow” rapper’s omnipresence in pop radio over the back half of the year, her debut studio album doesn’t have a title or release date. A decade ago, such an absence would be clear evidence of label neglect, of an artist left in creative stasis. Now, it’s almost a sign of Cardi’s dominance; three out of her four mainstream follow-up singles since “Bodak Yellow” reached number one in September and have all ensconced themselves in the top 10, and she still has five songs (including “Bodak”) in the top 20. But this trend is also evident in other moves made by artists and labels – Lil Uzi Vert’s “Luv is Rage 2” was delayed due to the massive success of “XO TOUR Llif3,” a soundcloud “loosie,” or non album single, that he dropped in May. This isn’t just idle speculation as to the changing priorities of labels – Atlantic Records executive Michael Kyser said in May with regards to Uzi that “He’s doing 50 million streams a week. Why do I need to put an album out?”

In place of the album, the playlist has arrived as the medium of choice for pop musicians looking for a hit. Playlists like Spotify’s Rap Caviar have become integral to how labels distribute new would-be hits – the curated playlists made by Spotify or Apple Music staffers, or generated algorithmically, represent one of the few ways for new music to reach streaming service users who otherwise might be content to stay within the stable of their preexisting collections. In a way, these playlists have replaced not just the album as a curatorial tool but also the Top 40 radio station as a marketing one. Where an A&R at a record label might have focused on pushing a single to pop stations in major markets in the past, a figure in a similar position now might instead try to get a song onto a Spotify playlist with upwards of five million followers. The importance of the playlist is not lost upon artists, either – Drake, who has always had the canniest commercial instincts of this decade’s pop stars, took pains to refer to his 2017 release, the overly long “More Life,” as a playlist rather than the more conventional designations of album or mixtape.

Yet the weirdness streaming wrought upon pop music in 2017 went beyond just the containers we receive or categorize music in – it seeped into the very sound of the year’s music. The peculiar demands of the streaming market, where listeners have access to nearly every song they could possibly want to listen to, mean that pop writers and producers must try harder to get the attention of a listener to any particular song. In 2017, they did so in two distinct and diametrically opposed ways. The first is to make your song sound completely different from anything else in pop, to offer some escape from the monotony of modern music.

This approach is the approach favored by most of the auteurs of the pop world – think the uncompromising, in-your-face style of Kendrick Lamar’s “HUMBLE.” and “DNA.,” the exquisitely crafted disco pastiches of Calvin Harris’ “Funk Wav Bounces,” or the jarring electro of Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do.” Even less established artists came up using this method – soundcloud rappers like Lil Pump and 6ix9ine (who, it should be noted, is terrible and a terrible person) essentially brute-forced their way onto the pop charts with little radio or label support on the strength of unique, meme-able tracks. Not all of these songs were good, but they were distinctive, and they parlayed their distinct charms to the upper reaches of the Billboard charts.

The other approach, and by far the more common one, was to bring your song closer and closer to some ideal of a mid-2010s pop song, to approach pop centrism to the fullest extent. The precise sound of the average pop song is hard to pin down – it’s got a surprisingly diverse range of influences, from the early-2010s EDM-pop of David Guetta, Zedd and Avicii and the milquetoast bombast of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” and Mumford & Sons’ catalogue to the hazy, ambiguous style favored by rappers like A$AP Rocky and the cool new wave revivalism championed by performers like HAIM and Sky Ferreira.

It’s perhaps best defined by its lack of definition – it’s not overly dance-y, not hard-edged or too soft. It’s got drops or dramatic instrumental flourishes, but nothing too forceful. It’s never overtly offensive to anyone’s taste, but it never really catches you with a genius hook either – it’s intentionally good background music, able to stock a playlist you put on at a party and then forget about. It’s the sound of Kygo collaborating with Selena-Gomez-collaborating-with-Marshmello-collaborating-with-Florida-Georgia-Line-collaborating-with-the-Chainsmokers-collaborating-with-Halsey-collaborating-with-G-Eazy-collaborating-with-Cardi-B-collaborating-with-Migos-collaborating-with-Katy-Perry-collaborating-with-Nicki-Minaj-collaborating-with-a-Jonas-Brother-collaborating-with-Ty-Dolla-Sign-collaborating-with-Imagine-Dragons-collaborating-with-Kendrick-Lamar-collaborating-with-Maroon-5-collaborating-with-Future-collaborating-with-Taylor-Swift-collaborating-with-Zayn-collaborating-with-Sia. It’s the sound of everything and nothing at once.

It’s the sound of Post Malone. The Dallas musician, who is sort-of-a-rapper and sort-of-a-singer, epitomizes both the commercial possibilities of the streaming age and its stylistic muddling. His debut album “Stoney,” despite debuting to a tepid sixth place on the Billboard 200 albums chart, has sold more than two million copies since its December 2016 release, mostly on the strength of streaming services that don’t really care about when you put out an album. Singles like “Congratulations” and “I Fall Apart” outlived their album’s initial reputation, and occupied prime real estate on hit-making playlists like Spotify’s Rap Caviar and Teen Party lists for much of the year. He was the twelfth most streamed artist on Spotify last year, ahead of figures like Rihanna, Kanye West and Maroon 5.

Beyond whatever machinations may have caused his rise – “rockstar,” the lead single of his sophomore album (which is actually called “Beerbongs and Bentleys,” by the way,) reached number one of the Billboard charts partly due to a fraudulent youtube video of the audio for the song that just looped the chorus – his success in the age of streaming makes sense. He splits the difference between the sound of rap and the sound of pop in 2017 – there’s both the autotune trap-R&B of Future and Migos and the faux-earnest balladry of the Chainsmokers and their ilk in equal parts, with hints of bro-country and classic rock there too. His songs don’t start and stop so much as they drift in and out, almost sleepwalking – perfect material to be slotted indifferently into any playlist for a wide range of genres and vibes. It’s not interesting music, but it’s got interesting enough parts so as not to really be boring either.

But if Post Malone, musical embodiment of bloodless mediocrity, is the best we can hope for as the fruit of pop in the streaming era, then what’s the point? If pop musicians are to keep their relevance in the years to come, they must break from the flattening urge of streaming and create work that’s more than just background music.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.  

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Album(s) of the Year, part 5: Rising stars https://stanforddaily.com/2017/12/04/album-of-the-year-pt-5-japanese-sza/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/12/04/album-of-the-year-pt-5-japanese-sza/#respond Tue, 05 Dec 2017 00:10:26 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1134447 The Music Beat’s Album of the Year coverage concludes with two expansive, genre-defying albums from two of music’s brightest new stars: the waves of sound of Japanese Breakfast’s “Soft Sounds From Another Planet” and the unabashed self-love and critique of SZA’s “CTRL.” Japanese Breakfast, “Soft Sounds From Another Planet” — Jacob Kuppermann Roughly 57 seconds […]

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The Music Beat’s Album of the Year coverage concludes with two expansive, genre-defying albums from two of music’s brightest new stars: the waves of sound of Japanese Breakfast’s “Soft Sounds From Another Planet” and the unabashed self-love and critique of SZA’s “CTRL.”

Album(s) of the Year, part 5: Rising stars
Japanese Breakfast at Mohawk Place, April 23, 2017 (Courtesy of Zachary Anderson/FLICKR)

Japanese Breakfast, “Soft Sounds From Another Planet” — Jacob Kuppermann

Roughly 57 seconds into “Machinist,” the lead single of “Soft Sounds From Another Planet,” her sophomore album as Japanese Breakfast, Michelle Zauner gives the game away. As synths iterate behind her and a drum machine beat chugs on, she sings out four words that work as a good of an explanation of the beauty of her music as any: “a mist so palpable.” This line isn’t an intentional thesis statement, of course — Zauner’s music, whether in this solo project or in her work with Philadelphia indie rockers Little Big League, is never quite so didactic — but it can’t help but fit the hazy, dazzling indie rock of “Soft Sounds” perfectly. On her second album in as many years, Zauner refines her music, balancing layers of synths and guitars with direct, affecting lyrics and vocals.

“Soft Sounds From Another Planet” feels oceanic. Where “Psychopomp,” Zauner’s first album, was brilliant but tentative, with its short songs showing glimpses of greatness but only rarely sustaining it for more than a minute. On her follow-up, Japanese Breakfast rectifies that issue. Not only are the songs on “Soft Sounds” longer, with album opener “Diving Woman” sprawling out over 6 minutes, but they feel immersive, worlds within themselves that engulf you. “Soft Sounds” maintains this depth of feeling no matter what Zauner’s gifted, elusive songwriting lands on, whether that’s robot/human romance (“Machinist”), Korean women who dive for oysters (“Diving Woman”) or living with trauma (“The Body Is a Blade”).

It’s on that last song that Zauner best illustrates what’s so compelling about her style. The song builds from a simple, arpeggio-based guitar riff that feels like it’s constantly unfurling in front of you into something more propulsive in the chorus, before bringing in a massive, dazzling analog synth that leads the song into its final turns. All the while, Zauner sings with a wistful clarity, weighing the different tribulations and coping mechanisms of trauma. Even as the band around her rises in glorious noise, she’s calm, moving at her own pace to help you soak in the feeling of the song.

Even when Zauner strays from the shoegaze-influenced walls of sound that most of the album dwells in, she finds similar balance. “Boyish,” a Roy Orbison-esque pop song complete with harpsichord and a string section, couples its retro stylings with a bitterly funny musing on a partner with a wandering eye, singing “I can’t get you off my mind/I can’t get you off in general.” The style and lyric pair together perfectly, somehow — an earlier version of the song appeared as a straight-ahead rock song on a Little Big League album, and the extra space Zauner gives it here lets it bloom.

It’s that absolute control of sonic space, that deep understanding of how sound and silence layer and build, that sets the Japanese Breakfast of “Soft Sounds From Another Planet” apart. Every second of the album feels perfectly arranged, not a single note or word out of place.

Album(s) of the Year, part 5: Rising stars
SZA live in Toronto (Courtesy of The Come Up Show/FLICKR)

SZA, “Ctrl” — Clare Flanagan

Since the release of “Z”, her critically-acclaimed debut studio EP, critics and audiences alike have been eagerly awaiting SZA’s first full-length album. It took a lot longer than many listeners anticipated — the neo-soul singer spent three solid years in the studio, generating nearly 200 original tracks that she would eventually whittle down to a 14-song record. Her painstaking creative process, which relied heavily on freestyling and analog recording techniques, paid off in spectacular fashion. “Ctrl” was released this past June to an overwhelmingly positive reception, and has since sold over 500,000 copies and earned 4 Grammy nominations.

This success is both hard-earned and wholly deserved. “Ctrl” is composed of soaring, candid and wildly creative songs that traverse a wide breadth of musical and emotional territory. SZA herself admitted that the vast amount of material she generated — and the care she took while paring it down to a final product — was driven by a fair amount of anxiety and perfectionism. As a result, there’s not a weak song in the bunch. However, some certainly stand out — the single “Love Galore,” which peaked at #32 on the Billboard chart, comes to mind. It’s a certified banger, driven by spare, melancholy bass and augmented by a glittering guest verse from Travis Scott.

But what distinguishes “Love Galore” from its Top 40 cohort — and really, what makes Ctrl” a remarkable album on the whole — is its frank discussion of what it’s like to negotiate the distorted, treacherous landscape of millennial love. Public dialogue is flooded with hypotheses as to why today’s twenty-somethings struggle so profoundly with commitment, loneliness and mutual respect. “Ctrl” exhibits remarkable insight into these issues, and it’s all thanks to SZA’s unfiltered storytelling. She exhibits a razor-sharp understanding of both self and other, delivered in lilting verses that unfurl beautifully over thoughtful, trap-tinged production.

In the span of a single song, she can express envy, lust, insecurity, frustration and longing, mapping the terrain of a modern relationship in all of its maddening complexity. She wavers between self-possessed cynicism — see “Love Galore”, where she asks, point-blank, “Why you bother me when you know you don’t want me?” — and unabashed, moving admissions of hope and need. She’s no fool — her lyrics make it clear that she’s been through the romantic wringer, that she understands fairytale love to be the exception, not the rule. But, like all of us, she wants to believe. In the transcendent “Garden (Say it Like Dat)”, her rich, clear vocals reach for an emotional and sonic ceiling. “You’ll never love me,” she admits, “but I believe you when you say it like that.”

Though shaped and driven by the experience of love, “Ctrl” is more than an album of love songs. It’s evidence of a hard-won self — an unabridged account of a woman who, through long hours in the studio and trials of the heart, has emerged as a genuine artist. Its technical virtuosity is undeniable, but what sets it apart is SZA’s ability to convey the difficulty and nuance of forging human connection in times like these.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu and Clare Flanagan at ckflan ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Album(s) of the Year, part 1: The personal https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/27/albums-of-the-year-part-1-the-personal/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/27/albums-of-the-year-part-1-the-personal/#respond Tue, 28 Nov 2017 01:00:36 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1133878 This article is the first in a five-part Music beat series for our candidates for Album of the Year. While these albums span a wide range of musical and stylistic territory, they all deeply affected at least one of our writers. We’re starting off our accounting of the year in (exceptional) music with two intensely personal […]

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Album(s) of the Year, part 1: The personal
Kendrick Lamar performs at Øyafestivalen 2013. (Courtesy of Jørund Føreland Pedersen)

This article is the first in a five-part Music beat series for our candidates for Album of the Year. While these albums span a wide range of musical and stylistic territory, they all deeply affected at least one of our writers.

We’re starting off our accounting of the year in (exceptional) music with two intensely personal narratives from the West Coast — Los Angeles rapper Kendrick Lamar’s breathtaking self-atomization on “DAMN.” and Pacific Northwest singer-songwriter Phil Elverum’s confrontation with grief on Mount Eerie’s “A Crow Looked at Me.”

 

Kendrick Lamar, “DAMN.” — Jacob Kuppermann, Desk Editor

On first glance, “DAMN.” seems to be Kendrick Lamar’s least ambitious album since “Section.80,” his 2010 debut. Unlike 2012’s “Good Kid, m.A.A.d City” and 2015’s “To Pimp A Butterfly,” which are both widely considered to be modern masterpieces of musical storytelling, “DAMN.” doesn’t have an overarching narrative, or at least not a particularly obvious one. There are repeated audio samples and themes, but no leitmotif as consistent or meaningful as the voicemails on “Good Kid, m.A.A.d City” or the poem that he recited at the end of many of the tracks on “To Pimp a Butterfly.” Where those two albums telegraphed their stories fairly obviously, “DAMN.” leaves a lot unsaid.

In that way, it’s really Kendrick’s most ambitious undertaking — an album that doesn’t tell its listeners what to think about as they listen to it. Kendrick’s first two albums rewarded relistening for all of the additional depth their stories gave you when you really paid attention to the motifs and individual narrative details. “DAMN.” instead opens up entirely new interpretations with every playthrough.

If “Good Kid, m.A.A.d City” was a beautifully rendered slice of life story and “To Pimp A Butterfly” a grand statement of political art, “DAMN.” is instead a postmodern short story collection, an avant-garde work that works as both an album and as a guide to its own listening. The final track, “DUCKWORTH.” segues into a sped-up, reversed version of the album, ending with the first line of the album’s first track, “BLOOD.” In “DAMN.”’s very structure, then, is the hint that its true meaning requires you to listen to it more than once.

All this heady conceptual material, though, would be a waste if its star weren’t so radiant. No matter how much any critic praises Kendrick’s grand narratives, his music ultimately succeeds on the sheer juggernaut-like strength of his rapping. That Kendrick Lamar is good at rapping is not a particularly profound observation — an anthology’s worth of writing has been expended for the cause of talking about Kendrick Lamar’s skill at rapping, of the way he bends syllables and pronunciations to flow effortlessly over beats as disparate as “m.A.A.d City” and “For Free?” and of the intensely layered metaphors and webs of symbolism he seems to craft on the fly with a deftness that most rappers could spend an entire career trying, and failing, to attain.

Yet on “DAMN.” he reaches new heights, whether he’s telling stories on tracks like “FEAR.” or boasting on “DNA.” or “HUMBLE.” or turning contemplative on “LOVE.” or “PRIDE.” Lesser rappers than Kendrick have tried to span such a stylistic range before, yet few have achieved the success Kendrick has. No matter what he’s rapping over, he’s the unquestioned master of the proceedings. “DAMN.” is an artistic statement that can hold its own, even in the context of Kendrick Lamar’s already masterful oeuvre.

 

Album(s) of the Year, part 1: The personal
Phil Elverum performing as Mount Eerie alongside Earth and Ô Paon at Het Depot in Leuven, Belgium on March 14, 2012. (Courtesy of Frédéric Minne)

Mount Eerie, “A Crow Looked at Me” — Jacob Nierenberg, Staff Writer

When you die / you wake up / from the dream / that’s your life

Thing is, that dream goes on even if you’re not a part of it. When you leave that dream, you leave people behind, and they’re left to make sense of that dream after you’re gone. Your life ends, but its mark on the lives of others does not.

Those italicized words are from Joanne Kyger’s poem “Night Palace,” which appears on the cover of “A Crow Looked at Me,” Phil Elverum’s latest album as Mount Eerie. In a cruel twist of fate, Kyger died of cancer two days before the album was released, at the age of 82. “A Crow Looked at Me” is about Elverum’s wife, Geneviève, who was only 35 when cancer claimed her, leaving behind a daughter who will never know her and a husband tasked with preserving her memory.

There have been a lot of albums about death that have been released since I started college — hell, I even have a theory that David Bowie’s “Blackstar,” Nick Cave’s “Skeleton Tree” and Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker” form a musical Deathly Hallows for 2016 — but “A Crow Looked at Me” is the most visceral album of them all. Elverum wrote and recorded these songs in the room where his wife died, and he sings and plays his guitar in hushed tones, careful not to wake his sleeping daughter in the next room over. Across the record, Elverum’s suffering is palpable and inescapable. A sunset and waves on the sea make Elverum wonder what’s become of Geneviève’s scattered ashes; a forest fire symbolizes emotional devastation; ravens and crows, two black shadows of birds, are omens of death. Elsewhere, everyday activities, such as going to the grocery store, taking out the trash and checking the mail, serve as little reminders of crushing loss. Elverum’s lyrics have always explored the space between metaphor and mundanity, but here, everything points to real death.

I’ve listened to “A Crow Looked at Me” once, and frankly, that’s as many times as I hope to hear it. A month before this album came out, someone very close to me died — a woman whom I’ve known since before I was able to form memories. I listened to this album in front of her mobile home, and it was like losing her all over again. I won’t listen to this album again until the next time I lose someone close to me, and it’ll hurt like an exorcism. I can’t listen to it any other way.

Love is a tether that binds us to others. When that tether breaks, two things happen. First comes the shock when that tether snaps back, hitting us in the chest. That’s the immediate pain of loss, but what comes afterward is far more complicated. We are left to hold that tether, feeling its dead weight, knowing that there is no one holding it on the other end. “A Crow Looked at Me” is the sound of grieving. It’s the sound of Elverum carrying that tether — feeling his wife’s presence on the other end weaken, flailing it at the heavens in anguish and vowing to hold onto it until he meets Geneviève again, in whatever afterlife lies beyond our dreams.

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu and Jacob Nierenberg at jhn2017 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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St. Vincent’s messy, dazzling ‘MASSEDUCTION’ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/03/st-vincents-messy-dazzling-masseduction/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/03/st-vincents-messy-dazzling-masseduction/#respond Fri, 03 Nov 2017 23:20:19 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1132426 “MASSEDUCTION” is a disorienting album. This is a good thing, as when you’re six albums into a decade-and-a-half-long, critically acclaimed indie rock career like Annie Clark’s — the multi-instrumentalist who goes by St. Vincent — is, you need to disorient your listeners. While it’s certainly possible to screw up the artistic experimentation that creates this […]

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St. Vincent - Los Ageless
Courtesy of Loma Vista Recordings

“MASSEDUCTION” is a disorienting album. This is a good thing, as when you’re six albums into a decade-and-a-half-long, critically acclaimed indie rock career like Annie Clark’s — the multi-instrumentalist who goes by St. Vincent — is, you need to disorient your listeners. While it’s certainly possible to screw up the artistic experimentation that creates this disorientation — witness Arcade Fire’s “Everything Now,” which aimed for pointed social critique but mostly achieved annoyance — the alternative is to sink into monotony and self-plagiarism, recreating your old hits until you end up giving up the ghost and just doing a 20-year anniversary tour around an album people actually liked.

So it’s a relief that St. Vincent sounds as willing to surprise as she has ever been on “MASSEDUCTION.” What’s most interesting about “MASSEDUCTION,” over the course of its 13 tracks, is the precise way it disorients. In order to make the most direct, emotionally affecting music of her career, St. Vincent adopts the trappings of pop, a genre often maligned for its superficiality and shallowness.

Of course, St. Vincent has always been a pop artist. A songwriter as clever and gifted with melody as Clark can’t help but make pop records. Her first five records were collections of tuneful pieces that, despite Clark’s penchant for experimental noise and awe-inspiring guitar solos, stood best as songs — songs that you could see getting played on the radio in some alternate universe slightly cooler than our own.

Yet St. Vincent’s pop songs always were coated in some affectation, whether it be the slightly-too-clever chamber pop of her debut, “Marry Me,” the gauzy shoegaze of her best album, 2011’s “Strange Mercy” or the analog synth and horn-driven pomp of her 2014 self-titled record, which won her the Grammy for Best Alternative Album in 2014. What’s different on “MASSEDUCTION” is that the veil has been lifted — for the first time, it feels like Annie Clark has decided to shed the guises that the alter ego of St. Vincent has provided and cut to the feeling.

This change is evident from the opening seconds of the album. The vocals on prior St. Vincent records were mixed in some eerie, slightly sterile way, making Clark’s ethereal voice float above you as some untouchable force. On “Hang On Me,” though, she sounds desperate and human, shorn of the protective auras she once built around her. Her sonic trappings are sparse — accompanied by just a simple drum machine beat and a few gorgeous descending synth and guitar lines, she sounds lonely where she once would have sounded solitary, like Napoleon at Elba.

The small, honest tragedy of the opener, with its declaration that “you and me/We’re not meant for this world,” sets the tone for the rest of the album — music that uses the superficial production of pop to plumb deeper emotional depths.

Aiding St. Vincent on this journey is producer Jack Antonoff, who most recently produced Lorde’s “Melodrama,” an album similarly concerned with making deeply personal pop music. Antonoff’s sonic influence on “MASSEDUCTION” is perhaps overstated — only lead single “New York,” a compelling ballad let down by Antonoff’s love for overly clean, quantized piano sounds, really sounds like him — but Clark’s decision to bring him in shows her seriousness in the pursuit of pop.

Not all the album’s tracks succeed as pop experiments. The aforementioned “New York” falls flat, despite the real emotion of Clark’s voice — it’s the most natural pop song here but somewhat paradoxically is also the one hurt most by the album’s production style. Certain other songs, like “Fear the Future” and the album’s title track, also don’t quite work, sounding more like outtakes from an earlier St. Vincent album dressed up in a slightly different style of glam.

Yet when “MASSEDUCTION” works, it hits like a coordinated missile strike. Fast-paced, maximalist songs like “Pills” and “Sugarboy” draw you in with their dizzying arrays of synths and distorted guitar, but their hooks and codas slow down, surprising you with their emotional depth.

The album’s best tracks, though, are its ballads. The album’s centerpiece, “Happy Birthday Johnny,” is the most direct Clark has been on record — backed only by a few slide guitar and piano accents, she sings with a resigned sorrow of Johnny, a real estranged friend. She has sung about “Johnny” before on her first and fourth albums, but only here, at the conclusion of the trilogy, does she break, leaving the St. Vincent persona and referring to herself as “Annie.” Equally impressive and emotionally affecting is the album’s penultimate track, “Slow Disco.” Co-written with half of the country duo The Civil Wars, it’s as pure a ballad as any track in St. Vincent’s catalog. Over a string quartet and a lightly distorted guitar, she narrates through the metaphor of a dance floor the slow decay of a relationship in only a few expertly crafted lines. It’s the most serene and sincere the album gets, a moment where even the last bits of artifice fade away.

“MASSEDUCTION” is a mess, but a deeply compelling one. An album with this many different ideas and stylistic urges shouldn’t quite work — you can tell the strain at the edges here and there — but listening to an artist as dynamic and skilled as St. Vincent experiment in a new milieu is worth your time on its own. To hear her make some of the most direct and compelling music of her career in that new milieu is all the greater reward.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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On the impossibility of separating art from artist https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/21/on-the-impossibility-of-separating-art-from-artist/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/21/on-the-impossibility-of-separating-art-from-artist/#respond Sat, 21 Oct 2017 23:30:07 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1129841 There is perhaps no story repeated more often in the annals of pop culture than that of the brilliant artist who is revealed to be a vile person. The only phenomenon that could possibly rival it in sheer pervasiveness is the chorus of voices that respond to any accusation of serious wrongdoing by an artist […]

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On the impossibility of separating art from artist
Hip-hop artist R. Kelly performs in Chicago in 2012. (Courtesy of The Chicago Tribune)

There is perhaps no story repeated more often in the annals of pop culture than that of the brilliant artist who is revealed to be a vile person. The only phenomenon that could possibly rival it in sheer pervasiveness is the chorus of voices that respond to any accusation of serious wrongdoing by an artist with the rejoinder that we must “separate the art from the artist.” Whether it’s being used to defend Caravaggio, Woody Allen or Nate Parker, the idea that we must not abandon works of art solely because of the misdeeds of their creators is a popular one. It’s an appealing concept — I wish I was able to listen to David Bowie without feeling a twinge of guilt after finding out about his coke-fueled fascism-endorsing statements and the stories about his alleged statutory rape of a teenage groupie in the 1970s — and does have some validity. Listening to the Ronettes and luxuriating in the Wall of Sound Phil Spector constructed on those records does not, of course, make you an apologist for his murder of Lana Clarkson.

Yet the practice of separating the art from the artist is far murkier than the lofty ideal. The theory goes, according to its proponents, that the only thing that should matter when experiencing a work of art is what’s actually going on in the work itself. It doesn’t matter who made the work — the same painting painted by a black man and a white man deserve the same critical consideration and praise, and so on — merely the reaction one has to it. You don’t have to feel guilty about liking “Ignition (Remix)” because of who made it, though of course R. Kelly is a reprehensible man. I agree that personal guilt is not a useful part of the work of critically assessing artists who have done reprehensible things, but the idea that a work must only be evaluated based on its direct content is trickier. For as much as we like to imagine art as something higher, something beyond the petty concerns of this world, in reality every work of art is deeply imbued with a number of outside influences, from the geopolitical situation of the world to the sordid personal details of an artist’s life. The artists themselves don’t separate themselves from their work, so a critical approach that refuses to consider outside factors is limited and foolish, blinding us from a full consideration of any creative work. Of course the focus of any analysis of a piece pop culture must be on what’s actually in the work, but “what’s in the work” is never as limited a category as those who want to separate artist from art want to believe.

In modern pop culture, persona and identity so deeply intermingle with art that the artist themselves often becomes impossible to fully disentangle from their art. Consider the films of Woody Allen. The protagonists of movies like “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan,” in all of their neuroticism and sexual dysfunction, are less characters and more proxies for the director himself, who plays all three. To appreciate one of these films while simultaneously remaining aware of the molestation accusations against Allen is an exercise in cognitive dissonance — it’s hard to enjoy characters written and portrayed by Woody Allen who share obvious resemblance with the man when you’ve read Dylan Farrow’s accusations against her adoptive father. While Allen’s case is an extreme one — most actors, for example, accused of wrongdoing do not play themselves to nearly the same extent as Allen — every creative work is inherently the unique product of the person (or persons) who made it. The same mind that pioneered the depiction of Black Middle Class families on primetime television through “The Cosby Show” also conspired to sexually assault over 60 women. There are not two Bill Cosbys, two Woody Allens, two R. Kellys or two Mel Gibsons — the personal elements of their crafts are powered by the same people who have done despicable things.

This ever-present blurring of the lines between the personal and creative spheres is even more pronounced in the world of music and especially in internet culture. Where fans of Woody Allen can at least claim plausibly that Max Singer from “Annie Hall” is something distinct from Woody Allen the person, and that appreciating the fictional characters is far enough away from appreciating the real person who made them, a more tenuous barrier exists for music fans. All music performers put up a persona different than their true self, but aside from obvious cases like the face-painted theatrical rock of KISS or the cartoon depictions used by Gorrilaz, these personas generally claim authenticity. Rap, punk and country artists place an especially heavy focus on this authenticity — claiming a rapper, for example, does not have as real a background in crime or gang life than he claims, is a serious accusation, and rappers like Rick Ross have been dogged by such accusations for major parts of their careers.

The intermingling of musical popularity and mainstream celebrity further contributes to the difficulty of separating a musician’s performed work, their public persona and their true self. The celebrity musician (and most musicians you know are celebrities of some scene or another) sells two cultural products. The first is their songs, but the second is their persona. This persona, the carefully crafted identity of a pop singer like Lady Gaga or a rapper like Drake, is as much a work of art as any of their individual songs. In this case, then, the misdeeds of the artist inherently affect their art. The loverman personae of Chris Brown and R. Kelly are rendered unconvincing, ineffective craft by the revelations that they, respectively, assault and molest women in their private lives. More generally, fans of a musician want to be able to like the object of their fandom, to imagine them as a sort of far off friend or ally — this is especially true of celebrities that champion social causes relevant to their fanbase. In the case of Brooklyn-based glam punk group PWR BTTM, who actually played a show at Stanford co-op Kairos in February, this penchant for social activism made the accusations of serial sexual assault against guitarist Ben Hopkins all the more shocking and the reaction against them in the punk and indie rock community even more forceful in its punishment. The allegations against Hopkins are horrifying, tracing a years-long pattern of predatory behaviors, and they essentially ruined the message of compassion and radical queer acceptance cultivated by the band’s art.

Yet these arguments are all ultimately based around subjective critical assessments of an artist’s work. Maybe the dissonance felt from watching “The Cosby Show” or listening to Chris Brown doesn’t bring you out of the art as much as it does for others. Beyond these artistic considerations, though, there are less ambiguous material reasons to refuse to separate the art and artist in all cases. The fact of the matter is, in our capitalistic, fame-obsessed culture, being a critically or commercially successful artist gains you a significant amount of influence. This influence, when in the hands of certain unfortunate individuals, can be leveraged to do harm to others.

The case of R. Kelly is perhaps the most illustrative in this matter. At nearly every stage of his career, R. Kelly’s fame, wealth and skill at songwriting have shielded him from consequences for his long history of sexual predation. In 1998, amid scrutiny over his possibly sexual relationship with underage R&B singer Aaliyah, Kelly settled a separate allegation of statutory rape against him out of court for $250,000. In 2001, he settled (paying an undisclosed sum) to another accuser on similar charges. The Chicago Sun-Times’ Jim Rogatis received a tape claiming to depict R. Kelly engaging in sexual relations with and urinating on an underaged girl. A later police raid of Kelly’s Florida home uncovered more photographic evidence of his sexual relations with teenage girls. Yet despite the fairly obvious fact that it was R. Kelly in the video (even though he was one of the most recognizable musicians in the world in the mid 2000s, the singer’s main defense was simply claiming that it wasn’t him, which few outside the court believed), and repeated testimony that the girl depicted in the video was underaged at the time of its filming, R. Kelly suffered no legal consequences in either case due to mishandling of evidence and the reluctance of the girl involved to testify. And even through his legal battles and worrying statements, like when he responded to the journalist Touré asking if he had sexual interest in “teenage girls” with “When you say teenage, how old are you talking?” or his insistence on referring to himself as the “Pied Piper of R&B,” Kelly’s fame and musical success remained constant — during the six years between the discovery of the sex tape and the singer’s acquittal, he released five platinum-selling albums and 26 top 40 singles.

Only the most recent accusations against R. Kelly have caused him any real career trouble. In July of this year, Jim Rogatis published a 5000 word exposé in Buzzfeed detailing the “sex cult”-like arrangement the singer has had for nearly a decade. Young women, many of them aspiring singers who are lured into R. Kelly’s circle with promises of professional mentorship, are made to follow a strict code of conduct while living in properties owned by R. Kelly. The women must “ask for food” and “ask to go use the bathroom, according to the singer’s former personal assistant, and Kelly reportedly controlled their appearances and sexual activities, playing the women off each other by instructing them to report on each other’s behavior. After Rogatis’ story spread through social media, R. Kelly cancelled four out of 10 upcoming tour dates due to low ticket sales.

Both parts of this story follow the twisted logic of the music industry’s implicit policy on sexual predators. R. Kelly was only able to build his “sex cult” because of his fame — the girls around him willingly, at least at first, entered into relationships with him to pursue fame, only to be trapped in something much more sinister. On the other end, the (relatively minor) professional consequences suffered by R. Kelly are reflective of not only the gravity of these accusations but also the singer’s waning starpower — his most recent album, 2015’s “The Buffet,” is by far his worst selling release. Yet even a diminished Kelly is still a commanding figure in the industry — when Buzzfeed asked 43 of the singer’s former collaborators if they would work with him again in light of the allegations, none returned a response, and the only pop musician with any degree of relevance to condemn him was Chicago rapper Vic Mensa. In the music industry, it seems, abusers have nearly infinite leeway as long as they can still make a hit.

The structure of the music industry itself, with its onerous contracts that often strip personal and creative control from artists, can be used as a tool of abuse. The ongoing legal battle between Kesha and mega-producer Dr. Luke is illustrative of this potential. Dr. Luke (real name Lukasz Gottwald), who has written and produced hits like Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” and Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A,” groomed Kesha for stardom for four years before she achieved fame with 2009’s “Tik Tok.” Kesha alleges that throughout that period, from her signing with Gottwald’s production companies in 2005 to the aftermath of the release of her sophomore album “Warrior” in 2013, Gottwald abused her in a variety of ways, from the psychological to the sexual. The most striking claim alleges that Gottwald drugged her and raped her in 2005. Many of Kesha’s claims have been dropped or stymied in the courts, and the overall  fate of Kesha’s relationship with Dr. Luke-founded label Kemosabe records is murky. Yet despite the legal ambiguities of the case, the evidence revealed, including a set of emails from Gottwald on Kesha, paints a picture of Dr. Luke as an emotional abuser fueled by the cold financial logic of the music industry. Gottwald is shown to be controlling of Kesha’s diet and belittling of her creative intelligence, all the while justifying his statements as important parts of ensuring Kesha’s professional success. Gottwald’s logic, couching abuse in purely professional considerations, is mirrored by the statements of the New York Supreme Court, who denied Kesha’s injunction to leave her contract with Kemosabe and Sony because her contract was “typical for the industry” and “the commercially reasonable thing.”

Kesha has managed to salvage her career, once in limbo due to disputes relating to her lawsuits, but only through extreme effort. While her legal battle has reached a kind of impasse, with neither party willing to admit defeat, Kesha has won the battle of public opinion. Her fellow pop stars, including Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and Adele, have all come to support her cause, and her latest album, “Rainbow,” debuted at the top of the Billboard charts. The album is a triumph — its best songs, especially the ballads like “Praying,” which is fairly obviously about Dr. Luke,” are career highlights for Kesha and would be for any other singer. “Rainbow” covers many sounds, covering a wide swath of Americana, but the one thing it never sounds like is a Dr. Luke production. The success of “Rainbow” and the corresponding career downturn of Dr. Luke — he no longer runs Kemosabe records and hasn’t released a top 10 single for more than two years — represent a sort of vindication for Kesha. But not every person abused by a powerful artist has the power or talent to fight back as Kesha has — greatness should not be the requirement for justice.

Separating the art from the artist would be a perfectly sound critical school among many in an ideal world, one where the power dynamics and imbalances fueled by fame and industry influence did not exist and were not vital tools used by sexual predators of all stripes. That is not the world we live in, though. The choices we make in media consumption matter in a certain material sense — playing an PWR BTTM song on Spotify or buying a Woody Allen movie on DVD literally funds them, and even modes of media consumption that don’t involve spending money still grants artists the influence and celebrity they can use to abuse others and evade consequence. This isn’t, strictly speaking, a moral matter — you aren’t a bad person for watching “Annie Hall” — but merely a matter of tracing cause and effect. By creating a culture that excuses the misdeeds of the powerful, talented or rich, we make it harder for their victims, from fellow celebrities to anonymous teenagers, to retain their dignity in society.  

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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‘Lil Pump’ is not worth your time https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/18/lil-pump-is-not-worth-your-time/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/18/lil-pump-is-not-worth-your-time/#respond Wed, 18 Oct 2017 08:00:18 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1131228 “Lil Pump,” the self-titled debut by 17-year-old South Floridian rapper Lil Pump, is a waste of your time. This is not to say that it’s a bad mixtape — it is, but that’s almost beside the point — but simply that there’s barely anything new here, nothing of note that hasn’t been done better and smarter […]

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'Lil Pump' is not worth your time
Lil Pump stars in the music video for his song ‘D Rose.’ (Courtesy of Lil Pump)

“Lil Pump,” the self-titled debut by 17-year-old South Floridian rapper Lil Pump, is a waste of your time. This is not to say that it’s a bad mixtape — it is, but that’s almost beside the point — but simply that there’s barely anything new here, nothing of note that hasn’t been done better and smarter by Pump’s trap predecessors and contemporaries.

Lil Pump’s only innovation is to do everything faster and dumber, creating a raw sort of punk rap that’s almost charismatic in its shamelessness and flaunting of the norms of the genre. It’s a shame that Pump seems almost disinterested in rapping, song construction or really anything at all. “Lil Pump” is perhaps the laziest mixtape of the year — of the mixtape’s 15 tracks, not a single one feels finished, with songs lurching into gear and ending equally arbitrarily without leaving much of an impact. This is disposable music, too lazy to even be catchy.

These flaws, and the inherent disposability “Lil Pump”’s particular lane of Soundcloud rap, could perhaps be ignored if the musician at the heart of the tape showed any signs of life. Music as raw and elementary as this lives and dies on the charisma of its performers, but after 36 minutes of “Lil Pump,” Lil Pump remains an entirely anonymous presence.

This isn’t even a criticism of Pump’s limited subject matter, which consists mostly of his Xanax use, his family’s Xanax use, the Xanax use of his crew, and so on — it’s a criticism of the complete lack of panache with which he talks about it. It’d be one thing if Pump took to drug rap with the skill shown in Pusha T’s cocaine monomania, or even the dominant sort of glee that Migos and Gucci Mane bring to their dope talk, but instead he has nothing to say. Across the 36 minutes of his debut mixtape, Lil Pump uses only 500 unique words, and he strings them together without joy or wit of any sort.

“D Rose,” one of Pump’s more popular songs on streaming platforms, feels less like a coherent rap and more like the world’s least inspired free association. He spends most of the track repeating, mantra-like, the phrases “80 on my wrist, 100 on my wrist” and “D Rose, D Rose, D Rose, D Rose,” but these hooks are, frankly, preferable to his verse, which sits, inert, at the center of the track. It’s not offensively bad, but it’s not anything else either. It simply isn’t there at all, a set of bars that fill time but nothing else.

The problem at the heart of Lil Pump’s music is that he, and by extension his music, is not as interesting as he thinks he is. This problem becomes all the more apparent on any of the mixtape’s tracks with guest verses. The roster here is fairly standard of pop trap stars — Gucci Mane, Rick Ross, 2 Chainz, etc. — but their phoned-in verses feel revelatory when compared to Pump’s nonexistent craft. When Gucci starts his verse on “Youngest Flexer” with, “Somebody please tell me where my money machine at/My money dirty, I’m tryna think of ways I can clean that,” the sort of drug kingpin couplet he’s done on hundreds of tracks before, it’s as if the fog has lifted from the Xanned-out haze in which the rest of the tape is mired. Even Lil Yachty, who has received much of the same criticism from older hip-hop fans that Pump is currently getting, sounds like Kendrick Lamar compared to the weak offering Pump brings to “Back.”

But the most damning thing about this whole tape is simply how unnecessary it is. Even if you’re just looking for fun music to turn up to, you can do so much better than this. Migos’ “Culture” is, of course, the gold standard for this years’ trap releases, but Lil Uzi Vert’s “Luv is Rage 2,” 21 Savage’s “Issa” and Playboi Carti’s self-titled tape all represent more interesting variants on Lil Pump’s punk-trap. Carti’s tape is perhaps the most similar to Pump’s — they’re both new artists that seem less concerned with structured raps than some of their peers and predecessors, but the sonic palette of just Carti’s breakout single, “Magnolia,” surpasses the beats of Pump’s entire tape.

In short, “Lil Pump” is nothing more than a half-hour of filler and first drafts, anchored by a Xanned-out teenager who doesn’t tell us anything interesting about himself or his world. There’s no reason to listen to it.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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‘Bodak Yellow’: 2017’s most unlikely pop hit https://stanforddaily.com/2017/09/29/bodak-yellow-2017s-most-unlikely-pop-hit/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/09/29/bodak-yellow-2017s-most-unlikely-pop-hit/#respond Fri, 29 Sep 2017 07:40:03 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1130356 The pop charts have been boring this year. There’s no way to sugarcoat it, no other adjective to describe a year where “Shape of You” and “Despacito” ruled the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 28 of the 41 weeks of the pop year so far. This is not a statement on […]

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'Bodak Yellow': 2017's most unlikely pop hit
Cardi B at the Post Show for the 2017 BET Awards on June 25, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. (MAURY PHILLIPS/Getty Images)

The pop charts have been boring this year. There’s no way to sugarcoat it, no other adjective to describe a year where “Shape of You” and “Despacito” ruled the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 28 of the 41 weeks of the pop year so far. This is not a statement on the quality of these songs — “Shape” and “Despacito” are, respectively, on the bad and good ends of mediocre — but merely a judgment on how little movement there’s been in the upper reaches of the chart. Interesting things have happened in the top 10, of course — the ascendancy of Kendrick Lamar and Migos from critical and street favorites to bona fide superstardom and the arrival of a new wave of rappers like Lil Uzi Vert, Post Malone and 21 Savage both feel like real shifts in the pop/rap ecosystem. Nevertheless, these pockets of engaging story have been largely drowned out by the tropical house-lite of Ed Sheeran or Luis Fonzi and Daddy Yankee’s pop-reggaeton.

Enter Cardi B. As of the October 7 edition of the Billboard Charts (the charts are postdated — the October 7 edition corresponds to songs played on radio, bought, and streamed in roughly the week of September 17), Cardi B’s debut single, “Bodak Yellow” is the number one song in the country. It dethrones Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do,” a truly dire song that seemed to occupy the top spot on the chart by a sort of popular inertia — a hit not because it’s a good, or even listenable, song, but because it’s by a mega-famous pop singer that people talk about a lot. That Swift single ascended to number one nearly immediately, setting various streaming records, but “Bodak Yellow” took a much longer and circuitous journey, mirroring Cardi’s own path.

Cardi B sounds like no one else on the radio right now. In a pop moment where pop singers typically subsume their styles into the aggressively nondescript sounds of EDM producers like Zedd, Kygo and the Chainsmokers and rappers tend towards a slurry, Future-and-Migos inspired Southern trap sound, regardless of where they’re actually from, Cardi B sounds like a figure from another era. Born Belcalis Almanzar, Cardi B, who is Trinidadian and Dominican, was raised in the Bronx and Washington Heights, and she sounds like it. Her aggressive, almost bleating voice is the most New York-sounding rap voice to top the charts in a long while, evocative more of late 90s rappers like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown than the current crop of prominent rappers.

While New York rap never died, rappers like Joey Badass, Action Bronson and A$AP Ferg have achieved some degree of success with more traditionalist approaches to the style and stars like A$AP Rocky and Nicki Minaj blended hometown style with Southern influences — it’s been a while since a rapper this blatantly New York has topped the pop charts. The beat here — a riff on Florida rapper Kodak Black’s “No Flockin,” whose name also inspires the song’s title — is a fairly standard trap track, but the star of the show is Cardi, who takes a hyper-confrontative, straightforward approach, immediately setting her apart from most of the other pop-rap hits this year. The difference is most apparent on the song’s remix, which brings on Kodak Black — where Kodak slithers and rasps his lines, Cardi is right in your face the whole time.

The hard-nosed magnetism that Cardi shows off on “Bodak Yellow” makes sense — it’s a riff on the persona that has taken her from a performing arts school in the Bronx to rap stardom, with a few bouts of fame in the worlds of stripping, social media and reality shows. Cardi B rose to fame in the New York club ecosystem around 2014, aided by her near-simultaneous rise to social media notoriety on Vine and Instagram. Cardi B’s social media posts from 2014 and 2015 offer an early view into the bold, charismatic persona on display in her music  — she’s funny, vulgar and seemingly completely unfiltered — in one, she hits back at those who claim that stripping isn’t a real job by asking “How the fuck we buying weaves, then? How the fuck we buying ass shots, hah? With fake money from our fake job?”

By late 2015, her fame as a social media influencer, a sort of psuedo-celebrity that gets paid to promote various things on Instagram and Twitter, allowed her to leave stripping behind. Around the same time, Cardi became a central part of the VH1 reality show “Love & Hip-Hop: New York,” quickly becoming the breakout star of the show’s sixth and seventh seasons. Her rise to prominence on television allowed her to pursue her music career, releasing her first mixtape, “Gangsta Bitch Music Vol. 1” in March 2016. From then, her rise was first steady — she appeared on digital cover of Vibe magazine, a hip-hop institution, in November 2016 and signed to Atlantic Records in February of this year — and then meteoric, starting with the release of “Bodak Yellow” in June.

It’s that song that turned Cardi B from a New York rap curiosity to perhaps the biggest new rapper of 2017. “Bodak Yellow” isn’t a perfect song — its beat is a generic, maddeningly repetitive trap loop that’s mostly just an excuse for Cardi to air her grievances, and Cardi’s flows aren’t particularly inventive — but it is a perfect showcase of Cardi’s appeal, condensed into 224 seconds of braggadocio. “Bodak Yellow” is mostly a celebration of her come up — she doesn’t have to “dance” anymore because of the “money moves” she’s making — but the specific details she chooses, the references to how she “fixed her teeth” and how her rolex looks like “frosted flakes” reveal the same honesty and comic sensibility that brought her social media fame.

It’s in this persona-first style that Cardi sets herself apart. While all pop stars are defined by the identities they construct for themselves — “Look What You Made Me Do,” the song that “Bodak” displaced at the top of the charts, exists essentially only as a hamfisted attempt by Taylor Swift to change the narrative surrounding her — many pop stars either are forced into an identity by a record label or come into a defined identity only later in their careers, only after wallowing in generic pop tropes. Cardi B took the opposite route, coming to music with a clearly defined, charismatic persona as her main selling point. Where other rappers have had to shave off their rougher edges to reach the top 10 — witness fellow New York rapper French Montana’s faceless hit single “Unforgettable,” which hit number 3 on the Hot 100 and sounds like an average of every other rap hit from the past 12 months — Cardi B’s edges are the point. “Bodak Yellow” couldn’t have been made by anyone other than Cardi B, and that’s enough reason to celebrate its place at the top of the charts.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Two points of view on Arcade Fire’s ‘Everything Now’ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/08/25/two-points-of-view-on-arcade-fires-everything-now/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/08/25/two-points-of-view-on-arcade-fires-everything-now/#respond Fri, 25 Aug 2017 22:59:15 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1129774 Sometimes, an album comes out and creates so much critical discussion among the members of the Daily’s music beat that we feel that it deserves more than one point of view. Arcade Fire’s “Everything Now” is one of those albums, for better or for worse: Nick Burns: High points and low on Arcade Fire’s long-awaited “Everything Now” […]

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Two points of view on Arcade Fire's 'Everything Now'
Arcade Fire at the Roskilde Festival on July 1st, 2017 (Krists Luhaers/Flickr).

Sometimes, an album comes out and creates so much critical discussion among the members of the Daily’s music beat that we feel that it deserves more than one point of view. Arcade Fire’s “Everything Now” is one of those albums, for better or for worse:

Nick Burns: High points and low on Arcade Fire’s long-awaited “Everything Now”

A specter is haunting Arcade Fire’s music: The specter of contemporary society. Like its modern-rock peers Radiohead and Wilco, society plays a central role in each Arcade Fire album, a source of both dread and inspiration. While the other two bands, older and later in their careers, have lately cooled down on modern anxiety (cf. Wilco’s “Schmilco,” Radiohead’s “A Moon Shaped Pool”), Arcade Fire has only been getting more panicked about the tendencies of its own civilization.

Since 2007’s “Neon Bible,” Arcade Fire has used each album to explore themes close to the fractious heart of contemporary life. “Neon Bible” took on religion, “The Suburbs” the strangeness and alienation of suburbia. 2013’s “Reflektor” found unity more in a common tone and musical quality than in a theme: The double album’s dance-influenced sound, engineered in part by LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, gave the band room to develop its trademark dark irony and Joan Didion-esque worry.

The theme of “Everything Now” theme is self-explanatory: The overstimulated, unthinking, cannibalistic quality of the modern capitalist world. The title track and opener are anthemic and alienated in a familiar Arcade Fire way, but with a different kind of tongue-in-cheek, eighties-influenced pop-conformism.

Arcade Fire have long been considered part of indie rock’s avant-garde, a reputation confirmed by “Reflektor,” which sparked a wave of dance-influenced indie rock. This time, they’re following a popular trend in indie rock — borrowing from eighties sounds — but doing so in a consciously uncool way.

“Everything Now” is indeed, and (fitting, considering its gaudy title) packed with 80s allusion. If listeners didn’t get the hint on the title track, the rather uninspired “Signs of Life,” which follows it, makes the album’s retro stylings even more obvious, featuring saxophone, handclaps, and even a Talking Heads–style hysterical vocal flourish.“Creature Comfort,” next on the track listing, opens with a low, menacing synth beat before Win Butler gives his best, gloves-off j’accuse of modern society: “Some girls hate themselves / Stand in the mirror and wait for the feedback / Say, ‘God, make me famous / If you can’t, just make it painless.’”

It’s familiar Arcade Fire lyrical territory: a conditional prayer juxtaposing girls and boys against a grim backdrop (like the title track on “The Suburbs”). Though there are certainly moments on the album where Butler’s attitude towards society seems simplistic, unoriginal or superior, “Creature Comfort” is a triumph, mixing themes of fame and suicide that run through the rest of the album.

There’s a palpable anger in Butler’s words that makes the song the most satisfying on the album to play loud, and the sentiment is both genuine and ambivalent. Who is that anger directed towards? The girls and boys tearing themselves apart surely aren’t to blame. The song even hints at an awareness that the band itself is part of the malevolent cultural gestalt eating away at young people. One line references an apparently true story of a young fan who almost found the drive to end her life in the band’s music: “She told me she came so close / Filled up the bathtub and put on our first record.”

The remainder of the album does not manage to recapture the lyrical depth of “Creature Comfort.” There are plenty of eighties references that will interest aficionados of that decade’s music. On “Peter Pan” alone there are several lyrical references to Bruce Springsteen, along with what seems to be a reference to U2’s “One,” and a few tracks (the foot-thumping “Chemistry”) preserve just enough of a sense of irony and unease to keep its almost Aerosmith-esque chorus riff from seeming cheap.

But especially disappointing are the twin tracks “Infinite Content” and “Infinite_Content”: the same song done in imitations of punk and country, respectively. Employing rather rudimentary wordplay, Arcade Fire make a simplistic effort at displaying a variety of musical styles meant to suggest the flat mélange that is, in their view, modern culture.

“Electric Blue,” the title likely a Bowie reference, resembles Blondie’s hit “Heart of Glass,” and contains a chilling, gossamery vocal performance by Régine Chassagne, but is lyrically unsophisticated, while “Good God Damn” is musically unstimulating and doesn’t go to any ground that was treated more compellingly on “Creature Comfort.” “We Don’t Deserve Love,” is familiar as a slow-paced Arcade Fire closer. It builds to a moving crescendo with Chassagne’s high background vocals and Butler’s falsetto, and its Christian allusions and themes of unworthiness are compelling, if somewhat out of place.

“Everything Now” as a whole lacks the scope, as well as the sense of musical self-assuredness that its predecessor “Reflektor” displayed, but it likely does not deserve the scorn and feigned shock that most of the rock establishment has displayed towards it. There are flashes of lyrical brilliance on “Everything Now,” and the album is generally enjoyable to listen to. Arcade Fire remains the biggest band to watch in modern rock, and their worries about the psychic ravages of a culture like a runaway train are current and worth paying attention to. The attention to disco and facets of eighties music still unredeemed in the eyes of contemporary rockers demonstrates that Arcade Fire is willing to defy current tastes without becoming an archaism — a tendency without which the band could not have made 2013’s “Reflektor” and which promises good things for its future.

Jacob Kuppermann: Arcade Fire’s “Everything Now” is a Waste of Your Time

“Everything Now,” the fifth album by critically acclaimed Canadian indie rock group Arcade Fire, is exceedingly bad.

That could almost be the whole review. The album’s sheer incompetence at all facets of being an album is so evident from listening to any ten seconds of almost any of its songs that it’s a bit too easy to critique. “Everything Now” feels like a compilation of lyrical first drafts and musical goofs, like something that should have been locked away in a vault in Montreal for thirty years and only released as part of a late career retrospective.

In an ideal world, an aged Win Butler would dismissively gesture towards to the masters for “Everything Now” on a livestream of the Arcade Fire museum and say, “Oh, ha, those are the tapes from when we looked at a lot of Banksy and made a reggae-disco album.”

Instead, “Everything Now” is a very real album that all six members of Arcade Fire decided was a good idea to release. The most galling thing is that, after three and a half years of anticipation since their last album “Reflektor,” “Everything Now” arrives lazy and lightweight. Despite the overall strength of its grooves and songwriting, “Reflektor” was ultimately too long and bloated to achieve the greatness of Arcade Fire’s debut, “Funeral,” and third album, “The Suburbs.” “Everything Now” has the opposite problem. Despite its 47 minute run-time, the record doesn’t feel like it’s saying that much. This is not to say albums have to make grand statements to be great — I like plenty of albums that are just fun collections of songs (Migos’ “Culture,” which no one would confuse for a concept album, is one of the best albums of the year so far.)

The issue here, though, is that Arcade Fire is clearly trying to make grand statements.

“Everything Now’s” ad campaign made it clear that the album would be Arcade Fire’s grand statement on modern technology, social media and the damned millennials. Unfortunately, that ad campaign, with its barrage of parody news articles and so-bad-its-good marketing gimmicks, was far cleverer than anything actually on the album. The album itself has nothing to profound to say, and whatever it does have to say is expressed with all the grace of a sledgehammer through brick. “Signs of Life,” a track that begins with an image of “cool kids stuck in the past,” starts its third verse by simply reciting the days of the week— “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday/Friday, Saturday, sometimes Sunday”— a move that wasn’t even cute when the Black Eyed Peas did it 8 years ago. The nadir of the album, a stretch lasting from “Signs of Life” to the unnecessarily doubled “Infinite Content,” is the longest, most pointless 19 minutes you’ll find in an album this year. “Infinite Content,” which is included as both a punk rave-up and a chilled-out country pastiche, is the biggest waste of time— essentially, its only lyrics are “Infinite content, infinite content, we’re infinitely content.” This wordplay is almost offensively banal, and completely devoid of any actual social commentary.

The band’s musical performances are not quite as bad as their lyrics, but there are a fair number of tracks here that just sound flat-out ugly. Win Butler chooses to half-sing/half-rap most of his lyrics, lending the whole proceedings an uncomfortably amateurish vibe. On tracks like “Creature Comfort,” which in theory deals with serious topics like self-hate and suicide, he sounds like a middle school principal trying to tell the kids that smoking the weed is bad in a hip way. Even the arrangements, which have always been the strongest points of Arcade Fire’s prior albums, sound tired. Gone is the baroque-pop sweep of “Funeral” and the gorgeous space-disco of “Reflektor.” Instead, the tracks here sound mostly like bad ABBA pastiches and white person reggae. While the last few tracks on the album (especially the David Bowie tribute “Electric Blue” and the new wave-influenced “Put Your Money on Me”) are at least prettier than the rest, “Everything Now” as a whole is stylistically confused and ineffective.

Most of all, the Arcade Fire of “Everything Now” sounds old. Not just old in the literal sense — the band has been around for more than fifteen years, but plenty of groups manage to make albums that don’t sound quite as fogeyish as this a decade and half or more into their careers. No, “Everything Now” sounds old precisely because of the subject matter it wants to tackle. Arcade Fire decided to make an album about technology and cultural experiences that they don’t seem to fully understand, and it shows. It’s possible to make a great Indie Rock album after age 35 — Sleater-Kinney’s “No Cities To Love” and Dinosaur Jr.’s entire post-2007 output certainly speak to this — and it’s possible to make interesting pop music about the modern technological landscape (just go look at Poppy’s YouTube page). It may be possible to do both at the same time. However, “Everything Now” fails on both counts.

 

Contact Nick Burns at njburns ‘at’ stanford.edu and Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Lorde’s ‘Melodrama’ is the most interesting album of the summer https://stanforddaily.com/2017/08/15/lordes-melodrama-is-the-most-interesting-album-of-the-summer/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/08/15/lordes-melodrama-is-the-most-interesting-album-of-the-summer/#respond Tue, 15 Aug 2017 12:00:27 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1129775 “Melodrama” is not the best album of the summer. The album, Lorde’s long-awaited followup to her 2013 debut “Pure Heroine,” is an often frustrating affair — despite the three-and-a-half year wait between the two releases, the lyrics on “Melodrama” often seem like first drafts. Of course, Ella Yelich-O’Connor will likely be regarded as one of […]

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Lorde's 'Melodrama' is the most interesting album of the summer
Lorde performs at the Roskilde Festival on June 30th (Krists Luhaers/Flickr).

“Melodrama” is not the best album of the summer. The album, Lorde’s long-awaited followup to her 2013 debut “Pure Heroine,” is an often frustrating affair — despite the three-and-a-half year wait between the two releases, the lyrics on “Melodrama” often seem like first drafts. Of course, Ella Yelich-O’Connor will likely be regarded as one of the great young songwriters of my generation by the music historians of the future, so even her rough drafts have flashes and even sustained periods of brilliance. Yet there are too many misshapen ideas here — the ticking onomatopoeia that pervades “Homemade Dynamite,” the line “She thinks you love the beach, you’re such a damn liar,” jarringly delivered as the climax to the first verse of “Green Light” and the entire coda to “Hard Feelings/Loveless” are the most awkward — for “Melodrama” to truly live up to its (admittedly potential) hype. Jack Antonoff’s production doesn’t help — the guitarist tends to turn everything he produces into an intentionally artificial faux-80s mush, robbing the songs, and especially the piano ballads, of a lot of their dynamic range.

None of this is to say that “Melodrama” is bad — the album’s high points, mostly in its back half (“Supercut,” “Perfect Places”) are near perfect pop songs, balancing sentimentality and wit over some of Antonoff’s more inspired beats. The album’s absolute best track, though, is also its most ambitious. From its first seconds, “The Louvre,” the album’s fourth track, sets itself apart from the rest of the album in terms of its sonics. “The Louvre” is one of the few tracks on the album not produced primarily by Antonoff — instead, electronic producer Flume and Frank Ocean collaborator Malay contribute a beat that’s more epic in scope than most of the rest of the album, building from a muted rhythm guitar and Lorde’s voice to a grand instrumental coda that seems to play on a number of motifs that recur throughout the album. The lyrics are also some of the best on the album, an evocative portrayal of obsessive love built through a number of clever lyrical setups, especially in the second verse, where she sing-talks through indecision and ambivalence into the rush of love.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXI88ipyQ3c

Yet the most interesting thing about “Melodrama” is not any individual track, no matter how great that track may be. “Melodrama” is best discussed as a messy, deeply human concept album. I’ve talked about the album with more people than any other album that’s come out this year (with the possible exception of Kendrick Lamar’s “DAMN.) — not just with other music nerds but with people I’ve never really talked music with. Of course, no two people I’ve talked have agreed on the album; I’ve talked with friends whose assessments on the album ranged from masterpiece to hot mess, and I can’t say I truly disagreed with any of the points they made — even the contradictory ones. That’s the kind of album “Melodrama” is, though. It’s not a work that’s obvious in its perfection or its awfulness, not a cold product of any sort or merely a collection of well-written songs. Instead, it is so detailed and alive with the singular presence of its performer that it teeters on the brink of un-listenability. “Melodrama” is a deeply personal album (which is part of why Antonoff’s hyper-obvious production sometimes jars), which makes it all the harder to pin down.

This is all intensified by the particular personal moments that “Melodrama” captures. As a 19-year-old, listening to an album about being 19 and making a bunch of stupid decisions is a strange experience. I am not a hyper-famous New Zealander woman, so my experience as a young adult may differ from that of Lorde’s, but there are certain experiences of young love and uncertainty that sing through as universal on “Melodrama,” largely on the strength of how specific Lorde is in her use of language (though I still can’t get over that one line on “Green Light”). In fact, the only truly weak moment on the album is “Loveless,” an extended outro that’s based on a half-mocking chant talking about how we’re a “L.O.V.E.L.E.S.S generation.” It’s the one moment on the album that makes a big, purposeful stab— no matter how sardonic — at a broad generational statement, and it’s the one part of the album that doesn’t work towards that purpose. On the rest of “Melodrama,” Lorde makes those statements instead through the strongly personal, making an album that deserves all of the intense discussion it’s received.

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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2017 winter music recap and spring preview: albums you missed and ones to look out for https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/08/2017-music-recap-and-preview/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/08/2017-music-recap-and-preview/#respond Tue, 09 May 2017 06:55:42 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1127160 Keeping up with new music can be difficult. Between the stresses of the new year and the big name releases from artists like Future or Drake that often crowd out smaller releases from social media attention, you’ve probably missed out on a lot of fascinating albums from the first quarter of the year. With that […]

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2017 winter music recap and spring preview: albums you missed and ones to look out for
Vince Staples in 2016 (Andy Moran, Flickr)

Keeping up with new music can be difficult. Between the stresses of the new year and the big name releases from artists like Future or Drake that often crowd out smaller releases from social media attention, you’ve probably missed out on a lot of fascinating albums from the first quarter of the year. With that in mind, here are six albums from the first three months of the year that you may have overlooked:

  1. Theo Katzman — “Heartbreak Hits” (released Jan. 6): “Heartbreak Hits” sounds like the best of mid-’70s pop rock blended together, melding guitar and vocal harmonies, a tight rhythm section and witty, well-crafted songwriting while ditching the pretentious bloat that dogged even the most talented acts of that decade. Katzman, who you may know as the co-guitarist/drummer/singer of Vulfpeck, is a skilled bandleader, playing guitar, drums and percussion as well as singing. He’s joined by a skilled set of collaborators, including Woody Goss and Joe Dart, two of his Vulfpeck bandmates, but he’s always the center of attention. A compelling frontman for this well-constructed genre pastiche. Key track: “Lost & Found”
  2. Julie Byrne — “Not Even Happiness” (Released Jan. 13): “Not Even Happiness” is the most beautiful album of the year so far, and I doubt a worthy challenger will approach. Julie Byrne, a roving folk singer who originated in Buffalo but has spent time in cities as far afield as New Orleans and Seattle, fills the half hour runtime of her second album with an artfully arranged set of airy, economical pieces of folk. Over simple guitar pieces, Byrne’s vocals, which hint at a certain serenity, carry with clarity beautifully written songs of love and melancholy. Key track: “Sleepwalker”
  3. Vagabon — “Infinite Worlds” (Released Feb. 24): Vagabon’s music is all about delicate interplays — between the moments of potent noise and equally powerful quiet that Lætitia Tamko wields skillfully on her debut album, between the grungy rock and atmospheric synth music, she sings her achingly beautiful songs of loneliness and heartbreak. “Infinite Worlds” could have been an overwhelming mess, a muddled mixture of interesting concepts that fail in practice, yet Tamko succeeds without reservation, expressing her distinctive voice and creating a refreshing take on modern indie rock. Key track: “Cold Apartment”
  4. Stormzy — “Gang Signs and Prayer” (Released Feb. 24): When “Gang Signs and Prayer,” British rapper Stormzy’s debut album, came out in the UK in February, it became the first grime album to hit number one on the British album charts. Grime, a distinctly British fusion of rap, dancehall and various electronic styles, has been waiting just outside the mainstream of British music for around a decade; so in a sense, Stormzy is just the grime star to break big at the right moment. Yet “Gang Signs and Prayer” makes perfect sense as the first grime number one. On it, the Croydon MC effortlessly moves between hard-edged braggadocio and heartfelt near-R&B tracks, mastering a sort of crossover appeal that many rappers can never seem to reach. Key track: “Velvet”
  5. Jay Som — “Everybody Works” (Released March 10): “Everybody Works” sounds like it was recorded by an entire band, a group of four like-minded Dinosaur Jr. enthusiasts jamming together and creating scuzzy power-pop gems. Yet Jay Som’s debut album is solely the creation of Oakland-based songwriter Melina Duterte, who plays all the instruments and sings all vocals over these 10 songs. From the kaleidoscopic string arrangements on “Lipstick Stains,” the album’s opener, to the epic, washed out guitar fuzz of “For Light,” the album’s seven-minute-long closer, “Everybody Works” offers what feels a direct line into the headspace of one of indie rock’s brightest new talents. Key track: “One More Time, Please”
  6. Freddie Gibbs — “You Only Live 2wice” (Released March 31): Freddie Gibbs is one of those rappers who sounds like he can rap over anything — his flow, hard-driving but never monotonous, effortlessly meshes with his beats in a way that very few rappers can surpass. On “You Only Live 2wice,” his first album since his 2016 acquittal on sexual assault charges in Austria, Gibbs once again wields his flow to tell stark tales of his life, focusing especially on his time stuck in the Austrian legal system. The project is sparse — eight tracks coming in at just over half an hour, with no features — but hearing thirty minutes worth of one of the hungriest, most talented MCs in America is certainly worth your time. Key track: “Crushed Glass”

And here are six to look out for over the next few months:

  1. Gorillaz — “Humanz” (Released April 28): “Humanz,” the fifth album by cartoon alternative pop primates Gorillaz, has technically been out for a week or two. Yet it’s just that weird of an album, a freewheeling mix of futuristic, apocalyptic synth pop, that it felt wrong not to talk about it here. Everyone from ’70s legends Carly Simon and Mavis Staples to modern rappers like Pusha T and Vince Staples is featured here, subsumed in the weird world of Damon Albarn’s creation. It doesn’t always work, but it’s the sort of album that demands your attention.
  2. Vince Staples — “Big Fish Theory” (Release TBA): Speaking of Vince Staples, the Long Beach MC’s second studio album, a follow up to 2015’s incredible “Summertime ‘06,” is due out sometime this spring. If lead single “Bagbak” and last year’s “Prima Donna” EP are any indication, “Big Fish Theory” is likely to feature some of the wittiest, most intense rap you’re likely to hear from anyone this year.
  3. PWR BTTM — “Pageant” (Release May 12): PWR BTTM, who you may have seen at Kairos last quarter, are releasing their second album this May. The three singles released so far have ranged from the fuzzy power pop explosion of “Big Beautiful Day” to the epic punk opera of “LOL,” and “Pageant” is likely to showcase the queer punk duo’s creative diversity and growth even further.
  4. The Mountain Goats — “Goths” (Release May 19): The Mountain Goats, the folk-punk project started by singer-songwriter John Darnielle in the early ’90s, have released fifteen studio albums and 23 EPs worth of passionate, frequently lo-fi music, focused on Darnielle’s bleating voice and driving acoustic guitar. “Goths,” the group’s 16th album, features no guitars. The two singles released from the album so far, especially “Rain in Soho,” hint at a bold new direction for the group, and potentially an album full of dramatic, gothic stylistic experiments.
  5. Marika Hackman — “I’m Not Your Man” (Release June 2): Marika Hackman’s 2015 debut album, “We Slept At Last,” was an intriguing mix of atmospheric folk music, full of understated arrangements and powered by Hackman herself, who sold songs about Shakespeare and werewolves with a mysterious wit. “I’m Not Your Man,” her sophomore release, looks to be a louder affair — London rock group The Big Moon serve as her backing band — yet based on lead single “Boyfriend,” Hackman remains an immensely compelling songwriter, no matter what’s playing behind her.
  6. Shabazz Palaces — “Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star” (Release July 14): There’s no group in hip hop quite like Shabazz Palaces, the experimental, jazzy duo composed of Ishmael Butler, formerly of ‘90s alternative hip-hop legends Digable Planets, and producer and composer Tendai Maraire. Listening to any Shabazz Palaces album feels like being immersed in the pages of a vividly illustrated Afrofuturist comic book, and “Quazarz,” their third, looks to be an equally engrossing experience. Of special note are the featured players — both The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas and Thundercat are set to appear to help tell the story of Quazarz, “a sentient being from somewhere else, an observer sent here to Amurderca to chronicle and explore as a musical emissary.”

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Chairlift in concert: Or, when a band ends https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/20/chairlift-when-a-band-ends/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/20/chairlift-when-a-band-ends/#respond Thu, 20 Apr 2017 07:00:37 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1126176 Bands break up. It happens, sometimes acrimoniously — as in the case of the literal blood feud between the two Gallagher brothers, who made up the English rock group Oasis until one of them threatened to smash a guitar into the other’s face — but sometimes amicably. These peaceful breakups make for much worse stories […]

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Chairlift in concert: Or, when a band ends
(Jeff Lagasca, Flickr)

Bands break up. It happens, sometimes acrimoniously — as in the case of the literal blood feud between the two Gallagher brothers, who made up the English rock group Oasis until one of them threatened to smash a guitar into the other’s face — but sometimes amicably. These peaceful breakups make for much worse stories for the annals of rock history, but are much better, practically speaking, for everyone involved. The fans get proper notice of the demise of the object of their fandom, and the band gets to tell the final act of its story on its own terms, creating a finality that a more tumultuous end fails to reach.

This final act of narrative craftsmanship is what Chairlift set out to do earlier this month in San Francisco. The Brooklyn-based dance music duo played a two-night engagement at Bimbo’s 365 Club on April 7 and 8 as the opening of their farewell tour— at the end of last year, they announced that it was time for lead singer/keyboardist/songwriter Caroline Polachek and bassist/drummer/producer Patrick Wimberly to “take the next step to where [their] passion was pulling” them.

It was a move that made a certain degree of sense. The group, which formed in 2006, was fresh off releasing its third album, “Moth.” That album was the most fully realized expression of its signature sound, a fusion of early ’80s new wave, disco-funk and 2000s R&B. Songs like “Polymorphing” and “Romeo” succeeded on the strength of the combination of Polachek’s deft songwriting and impossibly agile voice and Wimberly’s production: meticulous, but never overly fussy or rigid.

 

While bands that play music as well-constructed as Chairlift’s sometimes falter when moved out of the hermetically sealed atmosphere of the studio and into live performance, on Friday night, the duo made the transition almost perfectly. The opening act, Miya Folick, set the genre-bending mood of the night well, playing a set that spanned a wide range of styles, from Florence + the Machine-esque torch songs like “God Is A Woman” to punkier tracks like the ’60s-influenced “Pet Body.” Though she acquitted herself nicely, Folick admitted in her stage banter that she was awed by the night’s headliners.

As soon as Chairlift walked on stage, everyone in the audience knew what Folick meant. There’s a certain raw energy in the way Chairlift performs live, especially in a stripped down format. On Friday, the duo was only backed by two additional musicians, who switched between drums, saxophone, guitar and keyboards as necessary as they moved through the band’s three albums.

Nevertheless, their sound felt full, driven by Wimberly’s precise, funky rhythm playing but elevated by Polachek’s effortlessly charismatic performance as frontwoman. On songs like “Show U Off,” which features some of the most astonishingly deft vocal performances I’ve heard in pop music in recent years, she sang as well live as on record. On less strenuous songs, she had more fun with it, lending a playfulness to tracks like “Ch-Ching” and “Moth To A Flame.”

Despite the sheer fun that its more uptempo dance numbers provided, Chairlift made its biggest impact on slower, more contemplative songs. On “No Such Thing As Illusion,” the closing song to “Moth,” a sparse arrangement and more deliberate pace gave Polachek’s breathy, angelic vocals a bit more musical space, allowing it to fill the room.

The highlight of the night, though, was a stripped-down performance of “Met Before,” a single from the pair’s second album, “Something.” At the start of the encore, Polachek and Wimberly walked onto stage again alone, and proceeded to play the song as a duet of just bass and vocals, isolating the song’s beautiful melody and harmonic structure. They asked the crowd to clap along to the beat for percussion, and for a moment, it seemed like we were all part of some community.

Despite the immensely talented performance of the band, and the generally celebratory mood that pervaded the crowd, many of whom had likely been fans since Chairlift’s first album in 2006, there was something somber in the air befitting a farewell tour. Chairlift has never been a particularly popular band — its most popular song, “Bruises,” was a fluke hit that was featured in an iPod Touch commercial — but for just the two hours that it played in that club in San Francisco, it felt as if I was watching the last hurrah of the greatest rock band on earth.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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The Chainsmokers are the boring sort of bad https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/13/the-chainsmokers-are-bad/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/13/the-chainsmokers-are-bad/#respond Thu, 13 Apr 2017 07:27:36 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1125802 The worst thing about the new Chainsmokers album, “Memories…Do Not Open,” is that it’s not even a particularly interesting sort of bad. While I’ve never been a fan of the EDM duo’s prior work, I’ve had a sort of horrified fascination with its ability to make compelling pop music, most notably on last year’s inescapable juggernaut […]

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The worst thing about the new Chainsmokers album, “Memories…Do Not Open,” is that it’s not even a particularly interesting sort of bad. While I’ve never been a fan of the EDM duo’s prior work, I’ve had a sort of horrified fascination with its ability to make compelling pop music, most notably on last year’s inescapable juggernaut “Closer,” which was not the best song of 2016 but will be the song that 2016 is remembered by.

That song will always be the duo’s magnum opus, a masterpiece of pandering schlock that seemed to be engineered to get a reaction — any reaction — out of you. It referenced brands and specific locations with all the subtlety of a 40-something marketer trying to advertise to millennials, and the jackhammer synth line that drove its hook was maddening in its simplicity, but it was the sort of song that demanded your attention, the same way a fire alarm or a crying child does.

With “Closer,” The Chainsmokers perfected their art of throwing every possible hook or annoyance at you until something sticks, the approach they’ve developed since they burst, fully formed, onto the scene with 2014’s “#SELFIE.” Since that misbegotten mess of a novelty song, they’ve streamlined and beautified their approach, remaining all the while annoyingly compelling. I’d turn “Roses” or “Closer” off when I heard them on the radio, but they’d stay with me, unshakeable mental parasites. And their approach worked— “Closer” was the No. 1 song in the country for basically the entire fall quarter, and still sits at No. 17 on the singles chart.

The great shame about “Memories…Do Not Open,” (other than its title), then, is not that it is bad. It’s a Chainsmokers album, which is to say that I was not expecting anything good to begin with. Instead, the album is a failure because it is boring. The crassly compelling songcraft of “Closer” is gone, replaced by equally repellent yet far less interesting work. There’s more diversity in the collaborators that the Chainsmokers work with here, with the features ranging from R&B singer Jhene Aiko to country group Florida-Georgia Line, but nearly everything sounds and feels flattened out, as if they were tasked to make generic-brand alternatives to real pop music.

A key part of the problem with these songs is who’s singing them. Unlike their earlier songs, which primarily used female guest vocalists, a full half of the songs on “Memories” are sung by Andrew Taggart. Taggart, who makes up half of The Chainsmokers, sang lead on “Closer,” which is perhaps why he gets so much of the spotlight here. But even on that song, he was outshined by Halsey, who differed from Taggart in that she could actually sing.

He doesn’t really improve on his own here, gracing each of the six songs he sings lead on with a smug, listless affectation. He’s a thoroughly uncharismatic presence, aiming for a preppy take on the superstar ennui of Drake or The Weeknd but mostly sounding like a frat guy drunkenly stumbling through a karaoke session of his favorite tracks from “House of Balloons.”

The lyrics here are generally terrible, falling into the same boring traps every time. It’s basically all lukewarm, vaguely misogynistic callouts of exes (from “Break Up Every Night”: “She’s got seven personalities, every one’s a tragedy”), jabs at millennial relevance (from “Paris”: “Standing there with a frown and a cigarette/Posting pictures of yourself on the Internet”), and woe-is-me whining about the perils of fame (from “Bloodstream”: “I’ve been drunk three times this week/Spent all my money on a fleeting moment”).

It’s all so lifeless, so dull, that when a guest vocalist comes in and elevates the material from dreck to mediocrity, it’s almost a welcome surprise. Here, singer-songwriter Emily Warren fulfills that role — she sings lead on the album’s two best tracks and acquits herself nicely. She’s not great, but she at least sings with more feeling than Taggart.

Aside from those few bright spots, though, this is a thoroughly joyless affair. (I haven’t even mentioned the Coldplay collaboration, which is perhaps the least interesting song in music history — which raises the question of why this exists.)

The Chainsmokers were doing just fine without having released a full album — they’re a singles group, with no seeming ambition towards long-form statements. This is an album that seems to have been made so that The Chainsmokers can say that they have made an album, and it suffers for it. Every track on this 12-song slog of an album feels like it would have been better served with a little more room to breathe. All placed in a row, they lose any novelty they might have once had.

From “#SELFIE” on, The Chainsmokers have always been wasting our time. The least they could do is make it interesting.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Future, Young Thug and Lil B: In praise of prolific artists https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/14/future-youngthug-lilb/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/14/future-youngthug-lilb/#respond Wed, 15 Mar 2017 06:28:08 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1124831 Earlier this month, Future made history. The Atlanta rapper and R&B singer became the first artist in the history of the Billboard Top 200 to have two different albums hit number one on that chart in successive weeks. The two albums, “FUTURE” and “HNDRXX,” were both staggering individual monuments to Future’s skill as a hitmaker, […]

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Future, Young Thug and Lil B: In praise of prolific artists
Future live in Toronto during the Summer Sixteen Tour. (Charito Yap, Flickr)

Earlier this month, Future made history. The Atlanta rapper and R&B singer became the first artist in the history of the Billboard Top 200 to have two different albums hit number one on that chart in successive weeks. The two albums, “FUTURE” and “HNDRXX,” were both staggering individual monuments to Future’s skill as a hitmaker, with the self-titled album showcasing his rap bona fides and “HNDRXX” doing the same for his more sensitive, R&B-oriented side. Yet the most revealing thing about this two-album run was the sheer amount of music that Future was able to put out – each album is 17 tracks long, running slightly over an hour – and the nonchalance with which he did so. He announced both albums with little fanfare, and his fans didn’t really seem to think that there was anything particularly exceptional about his release strategy – when rumors started to pop up that he was going to release a third album the week after he dropped “HNDRXX,” many believed them without question.

Of course, that’s because the most distinctive element of Future’s career as a musician is not really anything about his music per se. It’s not his codeine-garbled voice or the stark trap beats he alternatively raps and croons over, nor his grim, hedonistic lyrics or his ability to write a genius love song when the occasion calls for it. The most distinctive thing about Future’s music is that there’s just a ridiculous amount of it.

Over the three years since the release of his sophomore album “Honest,” Future has released 12 albums or mixtapes, amounting to eight hours and 42 minutes worth of music. Counting the songs on which he’s featured in that time span, including singles like Ty Dolla $ign’s “Blasé” or DJ Khaled’s “I Got The Keys,” adds on a few hours more. And the strangest thing about Future’s prolificacy is his sheer consistency. Within those 12 releases, there are certainly differences in quality — 2015’s “56 Nights” and “Dirty Sprite 2” are certainly highlights, and 2016’s “Evol” is, frankly, kind of a boring slog – but nothing that really would really count as a misstep. And of the six albums he released since 2014, only one, 2014’s “Honest,” didn’t debut at number one on the billboard chart, instead landing just a spot below. Future, it seems, has figured out how to release as much music as he wants without wearing out his welcome.

Yet if we look throughout the world of music today, we see that Future isn’t the only hyper-prolific artist who’s managed to achieve success. His Atlanta-trap peer, Young Thug, has also released more than 10 mixtapes since 2013, with less commercial success but equal – if not greater – critical acclaim. Consistent production serves Young Thug well – his style of autotune rap is nothing if not experimental, and dropping music at the rate he does means that his fanbase gets to witness his artistic exploration in real time.

Perhaps the kings of rap prolificacy, though, are Oakland rappers Kool AD and Lil B. Both artists have released mixtapes that are more than 100 tracks long, with Lil B releasing an 855 track, five gigabyte mixtape of freestyles in 2012. Kool AD, in addition to the six hours of music making up 2015’s “O.K.,” released 10 separate mixtapes or EPs in 2016, in addition to writing a novel, a children’s book and a parenting column for Vice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cX_RuUkWzA

Even in genres outside of rap, there have been plenty of musicians who put out music at an astonishing clip. Robert Pollard, lead singer and songwriter for classic indie rock group Guided By Voices, has around 2,000 songs registered under his name in the BMI songwriting license database, and he has released 40 albums and EPs with his band. In more recent years, Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo released 10 albums on the indie music service Bandcamp, including the first four in as many months in 2010, before signing with Matador Records in 2015 and releasing two more albums, including the critically acclaimed, 70-minute long “Teens of Denial” last year.

This ethos of mass production that animates artists as disparate as Future and Car Seat Headrest runs contrary to the contemporary music industry’s conventional wisdom, where an artist releases an album and then coasts on its success for a year or two after, releasing singles and touring around their main release for that entire period. That cycle is best seen with mega pop stars like Katy Perry, who released nine singles between May 2010 and September 2012 from her 2010 album “Teenage Dream” and its deluxe edition. Artists following these conventional album cycles can be prolific – Rihanna released seven albums in the eight years between 2005 and 2012 – but musicians who work within major labels are still constrained by what resources their labels provide for them.

What’s allowed these hyper-prolific artists to prosper in contemporary music, then, is the decay of traditional label systems. The mixtapes released by Young Thug or the Bandcamp albums of Car Seat Headrest aren’t tied to a traditional record label, and they don’t have the same sort of expensive marketing push a “real” album would have. Even when these artists do sign to labels, they typically sign to indie labels like Matador Records, where Guided By Voices and Car Seat Headrest are signed, or create their own imprints, like Young Thug’s YSL or Future’s FreeBandz.

The Internet has also made it easier for artists to share whatever music they have at whatever rate they want. Mixtape sharing sites like DatPiff and Livemixtapes have allowed the distribution of mixtapes, previously limited to localized fanbases, to the greater listening public. Bandcamp has been a godsend for indie artists that want to release as much music as possible. Take the case of Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Elaiza Santos, who records lo-fi folk music under the names Whatever, Dad? and 100%. Santos’ music is frequently beautiful and funny, but her style, almost whisper-quiet, doesn’t really lend itself to mainstream label-dom. By releasing on Bandcamp, Santos gets to release music on her own terms, including releasing four different albums in 2015.

Music writers tend to mythologize reclusive artists, those that suddenly release an album every few years from a secluded retreat and then just as suddenly retreat into hiding. Just look at the cycles of hype surrounding Frank Ocean and Lorde, who seemed to pop, fully realized, onto the global stage in 2012 and 2013 and then disappeared into the shadows, only to return in the past year. It makes sense for these artists to be subjects of fascination – they have a masterful control of their images, releasing only meticulously orchestrated opuses. Yet there’s also something equally astonishing about watching Future or Young Thug purposefully release a messy, at times beautiful, barrage of music. When they truly succeed, like on “HNDRXX” or Young Thug’s “JEFFERY,” it makes the whole enterprise, hyper-prolificacy and all, worth our time.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Radical optimism: PWR BTTM at Kairos https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/03/radical-optimism-pwr-bttm-at-kairos/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/03/radical-optimism-pwr-bttm-at-kairos/#respond Fri, 03 Mar 2017 18:19:59 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1124252 Friday night at Kairos ended with PWR BTTM’s lead guitarist, Ben Hopkins, leading the audience in a poem/musical incantation designed to kill fascists. The goal, according to Hopkins, was to chant it so loud that “Donald Trump fucking dies.” They did not quite achieve their goal, but not for lack of trying. Roughly two and […]

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Radical optimism: PWR BTTM at Kairos
(Courtesy of Talia Flores)

Friday night at Kairos ended with PWR BTTM’s lead guitarist, Ben Hopkins, leading the audience in a poem/musical incantation designed to kill fascists. The goal, according to Hopkins, was to chant it so loud that “Donald Trump fucking dies.” They did not quite achieve their goal, but not for lack of trying.

Roughly two and half hours earlier, the evening began as a far more conventional — but no less tuneful — affair, with an opening set from Stanford regulars Camp Youth. The group, whom you probably heard last while otherwise occupied at Full Moon on the Quad, played a rambling, friendly set in their omnivorous style of dance rock, indebted to not just modern guitar groups like Sleater-Kinney and Foals but also vast swathes of musical history, from ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll balladry to ‘70s funk and soul. While all four members present contributed their fair share to the band’s overall sound, the dazzling lead lines played by guitarist Jenna Swartz ‘17 and the fluid grooves of bassist Dan Ruprecht ‘17 interlocked to form the core of their sound. Swartz, who also sang lead vocals, provided some light stage banter in between Camp Youth’s expansive medleys, mainly asking the audience to dance. We generally accepted her invitation.

But if the 100-odd people packed into Kairos appreciated Camp Youth, they were enraptured by PWR BTTM, the headliners for the evening. The queer punk duo from New York City (founded at Bard College in 2013) have been something of a sensation in the worlds of indie rock and queer-friendly music since the release of their 2015 debut “Ugly Cherries,” which received critical acclaim for its mix of punk energy and witty, earnest lyrics that split the difference between the deeply personal and the anthemic with their devotion to portraying the queer experiences of Hopkins and drummer Liv Bruce.

Yet PWR BTTM is an even more magnetic force live than on record, as their Friday set quickly demonstrated. PWR BTTM was loud, and not just in the way that shows in small rooms with large speakers tend to be. Their sound is based on loudness, on openness, on shamelessness. From the blast of feedback that heralded the beginning of their set onwards, Hopkins and Bruce seemed possessed with an unflagging energy and positivity. That energy was infectious – on songs like “Ugly Cherries,” “Dairy Queen” and especially “I Wanna Boi,” it felt as if the whole room was singing along.

Even in those impromptu communities, though, Ben and Liv had a masterful control over their performance and the crowd. Despite their intentionally unpolished sound, both members are skilled musicians, with Ben playing dazzling, tapping-based guitar riffs indebted to metal and hard rock and Liv holding the group down with their steady punk beats. This stylistic divide held true even in their songwriting and vocal techniques, with Ben leaning into more bombastic lyrics and Liv using a wry, irreverent tone. In between songs, they bantered casually between themselves and with the audience, going on tangents about tarot readings, whiskey, Family Weekend and the nature of punk rock.

It was on that last detour that PWR BTTM gave a mission statement of sorts. To the band, punk rock is fundamentally about radical kindness and optimism, aiming to create spontaneous connections and families of people who feel alienated from mainstream society in whatever way. A PWR BTTM show is an inclusive space because of its punk-ness, and is punk because of its inclusivity. Part of PWR BTTM’s project — beyond just making music — is tearing down the power structures that exist within alternative music scenes. At the start of the show, Ben told the crowd that this was not a show to mosh at, disdaining the practice as an excuse for “people to hurt other people,” and throughout the evening, both members checked in with the audience to make sure that no one was in an unsafe situation.

In the wake of the election, much has been said (including in my own prior columns) about the place of protest music in this political climate. PWR BTTM, more than any other band, seems to have risen to the occasion, both in their music and their mission. Where their first album was deeply personal in its lyricism, PWR BTTM’s upcoming sophomore album, “Pageant,” out May 12 on Polyvinyl records, appears to be aiming for grander political statements. While they only played a few tracks from that release on Friday, two of the four they did play (“Big Beautiful Day” and “New Trick”) were directly political and anthemic in a way that the songs on “Ugly Cherries” rarely were. Yet it was a less explicitly political new song that ended up encapsulating the ethos of PWR BTTM. “Silly,” the opening song of “Pageant,” sounds like the glorious bastard child of Van Halen and Joni Mitchell, with a propulsive tapping riff that runs through nearly the entire song like wildfire and lyrics about embracing your “silliness” and loving in full, committing fully to yourself without caring about what anyone else thinks. It’s a rallying cry for people in an age of repression.

So anyways, about that musical incantation. It doesn’t look as if it worked — as of Thursday morning, the president has not died due to punk-related (or any other) causes. Yet as that room came together to declare that “One man won’t ever love me like I need him to,” the collective spirit that manifested, even for just a few minutes, felt more powerful than anything else in the world.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Opinion: What’s wrong with the Grammys? https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/13/the-grammys-2017/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/13/the-grammys-2017/#respond Tue, 14 Feb 2017 05:41:01 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1122909 The Grammys are, in theory, the most important awards in music. So why don’t they actually feel important? Even in a world where musicians like Beyoncé, Drake and Kanye West drive an outsize portion of the pop culture conversation, more so than any movie star, the awards show that claims to be the “Biggest Night […]

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The Grammys are, in theory, the most important awards in music. So why don’t they actually feel important? Even in a world where musicians like Beyoncé, Drake and Kanye West drive an outsize portion of the pop culture conversation, more so than any movie star, the awards show that claims to be the “Biggest Night in Music” feels oddly minor, an afterthought compared to the Academy Awards, which eclipse the Grammys both in raw viewership and cultural capital. The most notable news story surrounding this year’s Grammys, which aired on Sunday, was that Justin Bieber, Drake and Kanye didn’t feel like showing up — not out of any #OscarsSoWhite-esque critique but simply because they had better things to do. The problem, simply put, is that the Grammys feel irrelevant, both as a way of rewarding the best and most important music of the year, and as a spectacle of flashy performances and unexpected moments.

The Recording Academy combines traditionalist musical views and a truly overwhelming list of categories to create an awards ceremony that’s hard to get excited about. The Grammys consist of 83 awards over 30 discrete categories, and even a studied observer can find it difficult to distinguish between them — what’s the difference between “Best Rock Album” and “Best Alternative Album” when Cage the Elephant got nominated in 2017 in the former and 2015 in the latter, on albums that sound basically the same? Of course, things used to be far worse — before 2011 there were 20 additional awards, including separate ones for Best Pop Gospel Album, Best Rock Gospel Album, Best Traditional Gospel Album, and Best Contemporary R&B Gospel Album, as well as the award for Best Polka Album, which was won by Jimmy Sturr for 18 years of its 24-year existence.

Opinion: What's wrong with the Grammys?
Polka guru Jimmy Sturr. Courtesy of Paul McCord, Wikimedia Commons.

Yet despite this deep collection of niche genre awards, the Grammys’ fundamentally conservative cultural attitude has caused an embarrassingly long list of snubs and completely overlooked artists. In every decade, the Grammys have missed the boat on many of the key sounds of the time, from ignoring the Supremes and the Rolling Stones in the ‘60s and skipping out on Curtis Mayfield and the Clash in the ‘70s to forgetting about everyone from Björk and Biggie to Sufjan Stevens and Nicki Minaj in recent years. In many cases, these snubs aren’t even because of more deserving or prominent nominees — in 1967, the New Vaudeville Band beat out The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Mamas and The Papas, and The Monkees for the Best Rock Recording Grammy with their hit single “Winchester Cathedral.” Frankly, “Winchester Cathedral” is kind of terrible. Even if you’re into its novelty charms, though, it’s hard to argue that it deserves its award over “Good Vibrations,” “Eleanor Rigby” or even “Last Train to Clarksville.”

Even when the Grammys do award deserving figures, they tend to do so years, or even decades, after they should have. For every Stevie Wonder, who won three Album of the Year Grammys at the peak of his career, you have countless more cases like Bob Dylan, who won his first Grammy in 1980, years after he went from daring lyrical genius and cultural critic to vaguely-gospel Americana peddler, or Steely Dan, Herbie Hancock and Carlos Santana, who all won Album of the Year not for their electric, compelling jazz fusion work of the ’70s but for tepid late-career legacy albums in the 2000s.

Honoring these latter-day works simply compounds the problem, though. When you give Steely Dan a Grammy in 2001, it means Radiohead and Eminem lose their chance to get Album of the Year trophies for “Kid A” and “The Marshal Mathers LP,” both career high points. Herbie Hancock certainly deserves praise for his contributions to music history, but I’m skeptical that anyone really thought “River: The Joni Letters” captured the pulse of music in 2008 better than Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black” or Kanye’s “Graduation.”

Beyond specific artists, though, the Grammys are also late to adapt to general cultural trends in music. They didn’t recognize rap or metal as worthy of praise until 1989, didn’t recognize alternative or dance music until the ’90s, and still confusingly split R&B into traditional and “Urban Contemporary” (which typically translates to the R&B that people actually listen to). They first gave an independent artist Album of the Year in 2011, and only allowed streaming-exclusive releases to be considered for any nomination last year. The Recording Academy just doesn’t have their finger on the pulse of modern music.

The root of the Grammys’ problem with cultural relevance isn’t really their slow reaction time, though— it’s a factor out of their control. The problem with the Grammys, of any awards show designed to recognize all of music, really— is that there’s just too much of it. While there are roughly 225 movies that make at least one million dollars each year, that figure is dwarfed by the number of albums released annually — not to mention the number of songs. Pitchfork, the preeminent reviewer of indie music, reviews roughly four albums every weekday, and even their relentless pace leaves off a number of “significant” releases, especially in genres like country, metal or EDM.

Because of this sheer volume, the top line Grammy nominations, like Album or Song of the Year tend to consist of pop hits, which is a bit of an unsatisfactory state of affairs. This is not a knock on the quality of modern pop — I was as big of an fan of “Lemonade” or “Work” as anyone — but seeing a field where just one Album of the Year nominee failed to sell over a million copies is like seeing four out of five Best Picture nominees be Marvel movies. Many truly great releases end up relegated to genre awards, while pablum like Lukas Graham’s “7 Years” ends up with nominations for both Song and Record of the Year despite being widely considered mediocre at absolute best.

So if the Grammys aren’t any good at recognizing what’s good, is it at least a fun show? Well, not really. The Recording Academy’s idea of a good time, at least in recent years, seems to be mashing up two genres in ill-advised and manifold forms. The fruits of this concept have been underwhelming, from Paul McCartney playing with Linkin Park and Jay-Z in 2006 to 2010’s mix of Jamie Foxx, Doug E. Fresh and Slash and 2012’s haphazard mix of David Guetta, Chris Brown, Lil Wayne, Foo Fighters and DeadMau5. Yet the Grammys persist in promoting these bad ideas, with Imagine Dragons and Kendrick Lamar doing a version of the former’s “Radioactive” in 2016 and this year’s ceremony featuring a collaboration between Lady Gaga and Metallica. These collaborations feel less like daring artistic forays into the unknown and more like desperate stabs for relevancy made by the deeply out-of-touch — Lady Gaga and Metallica were last really hip and relevant 5 and 25 years ago, if we’re going to be honest.

One of the few bright spots of Sunday’s telecast was Chance the Rapper, everyone’s favorite Chicago wunderkind. Chancellor Bennett walked into the awards ceremony, which he also performed at, with 7 nominations and ended up with 3 wins, including a (well-deserved) Best New Artist trophy. Chance is clearly at the cutting edge of rap music, and the Recording Academy would have been blind to not recognize his 2016 accomplishments in some way. That they did is a happy surprise. Yet even when the Grammys are being relatively timely they’re still late — Chance may be the Best New Artist, but he had already released two incredibly acclaimed mixtapes in 2013 and 2015 before breaking into superstardom this year.

Opinion: What's wrong with the Grammys?But for every Grammy success like Chance, you get far more artists that see the Grammys as increasingly irrelevant. Frank Ocean is the standard-bearer of this movement. After a polarizing performing at the 2013 Grammys and winning two awards, he has become increasingly hostile to the Academy, neglecting to submit his 2016 albums for consideration at all, and publicly critiqued the awards show’s organizers, saying “your show puts me to sleep” and inviting them to “a discussion about the cultural bias and general nerve damage the show you produce suffers.” Ocean represents the increasing consensus about the Grammys — a boring, irrelevant spectacle stuck in the music industry of the past.

And on Sunday night, they did little to allay that reputation. While Chance won big, and Beyoncé had the clear standout performance of the night, the Recording Academy largely spent the evening reinforcing their reputation as a force for musical conservatism. While Chance and Beyoncé won genre awards, all three of the highest awards went to Adele, a figure emblematic of the sort of music the Grammys prefer. Yet even she noted the incongruity, shouting out to Beyoncé’s work during her acceptance speech and saying afterwards that “The Grammys are very traditional, but I thought this year would be the year that they would go with the tide. I’m very grateful to have won it, but I felt the need [to acknowledge Beyoncé] because I love her and I felt she is more worthy.”

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm@stanford.edu

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Review: Japandroids return with ‘Near to the Wild Heart of Life’ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/08/japandroids-near-to-the-wild-heart-of-life/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/08/japandroids-near-to-the-wild-heart-of-life/#respond Thu, 09 Feb 2017 07:42:43 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1122663 In 2013, Japandroids were on top of the world. The Vancouver-based rock duo had released their second album, “Celebration Rock,” to widespread critical acclaim the prior year and wrapped up a 200-show world tour in November. Their two albums, both eight-track affairs that clocked in at 35 minutes each, captivated the world of indie music […]

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Review: Japandroids return with 'Near to the Wild Heart of Life'
Brian King of Japandroids. (Piotr Drabik, Wikimedia Commons)

In 2013, Japandroids were on top of the world. The Vancouver-based rock duo had released their second album, “Celebration Rock,” to widespread critical acclaim the prior year and wrapped up a 200-show world tour in November. Their two albums, both eight-track affairs that clocked in at 35 minutes each, captivated the world of indie music – and it’s easy to see why. Their brand of hard rock – melded together the lyrical bombast and guitar heroics of classic rock and the raw, nervous energy of punk – grabs you with an immediacy not often seen in modern rock; they struck a balance between the mumbling insecurities of indie folksters and the bloated pretension of the U2’s and Coldplays of the world. In short, Japandroids were poised to be the next big thing, if they weren’t there already.

And then: nothing.

From their November 2013 announcement that it was “time for us to disappear into the ether for a while” to the announcement of a limited, six-venue tour in August 2016, Japandroids were silent. No Facebook posts, no Tweets, no secret shows or guest appearances – not even any interviews to explain the disappearance itself. In a hyper-exposed cultural world where even recluses like Frank Ocean can’t escape the all-seeing eye of social media in the long interims between albums, Japandroids pulled off a rare vanishing act.

On their third album, “Near To The Wild Heart Of Life,” Japandroids sound like a band that’s had some time to think. Things aren’t radically different – the album’s only two minutes longer than the first two and boasts the same number of tracks, and guitarist Brian King and drummer David Prowse haven’t let any outside musicians into their duo – yet “Near To The Wild Heart Of Life” stands apart from Japandroids’ earlier work as feeling far more expansive, for better or for worse.

The first two Japandroids albums never slowed down. Even on their ballads, like “Celebration Rock” closer “Continuous Thunder,” the guitars and drums kept up a constant barrage of sound, never letting up on the listener. Their energy – the sort of energy that lets you play 200 shows in five continents over two years, but also the sort of energy that leaves you exhausted afterwards – was their greatest weapon. Yet on their third, Japandroids seem to intentionally tame that breakneck energy, finding more varied artistic territory as a result.

The album’s titular opening track is the closest to a standard Japandroids song, an ode to finding your dreams on the road and escaping the confines of home that’s fueled by King’s driving power chords and Prowse’s galloping drums. Yet the remaining seven tracks of the album seem to take the first’s admonitions about getting “fired up to go far away” as a stylistic command, rather than a geographical one. Over the remaining half hour of the album, King and Prowse play songs that break out of that traditional Japandroids in small but significant ways, from the acoustic balladry of “North South East West” and “Midnight to Morning” to the prog-rock pomp and circumstance of the album’s seven-minute-long centerpiece “Arc of Bar,” based around a glitched-out synthesizer loop. Not all of these experiments work – “I’m Sorry (For Not Finding You Sooner),” feels like it never really finds a rhythm over its short, two-minute run time – but when they stick, it’s something revelatory.

Take “True Love and A Life of Free Will,” the album’s third track. Its sound harkens back to “Continuous Thunder,” with its majestic, rolling drums and guitars, but where that track simply seemed to build to cacophony, repeating the same riff and the same lines over and over again like desperate mantras, “True Love” has more to say, weaving a tale of “cigarettes, sorcery and Biblical sins” that builds to a simple, effective climax. It’s the most fully realized of all of the band’s ballads, richer in storytelling, emotion and sonic depth than anything they’ve done before.

In short, “Near To The Wild Heart Of Life” is Japandroids’ least consistent album, in both quality and form. It never reaches the sustained sort of peak that “Celebration Rock” found in its final four songs, but on tracks like “True Love and A Life of Free Will” and “Arc of Bar,” Prowse and King reach fitful moments of glory that outshine, or at least equal, the highest points of that record. And even when their ideas don’t quite work, Japandroids are a band of enough spirit to keep you wanting more.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

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Punk under Trump? https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/01/punk-under-trump/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/01/punk-under-trump/#respond Thu, 02 Feb 2017 07:04:49 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1122295 We live in interesting times. With the election of Donald Trump, the advent of Brexit and the normalization of right-wing populists and demagogues across Europe, the world we live in seems to many to be far more uncertain, dangerous and oppressive than it has been in the past few decades. While groups throughout the country […]

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Punk under Trump?
The Sex Pistols. (Koen Suyk, Wikimedia Commons)

We live in interesting times. With the election of Donald Trump, the advent of Brexit and the normalization of right-wing populists and demagogues across Europe, the world we live in seems to many to be far more uncertain, dangerous and oppressive than it has been in the past few decades. While groups throughout the country have been organizing to resist this rising tide and protect those most at risk, others have taken a more optimistic tact. They look into the abyss of reactionary politics and far-right governance and see opportunity — more specifically, the opportunity for a creative renaissance.

The most notable figure to make this claim is singer and performance artist Amanda Palmer, who claimed recently that “Donald Trump is going to make punk rock great again,” and that “if the political climate keeps getting uglier, the art will have to answer.” Her comments were echoed by Conor Oberst, lead singer of Bright Eyes, who claimed that “art does thrive in adversarial times.”

On a surface level, these claims seem to make obvious sense. There’s a long and storied history of music as protest, from “We Shall Overcome” and the civil rights movement to the anti-Bush and anti-Iraq War battle-cries of the 2000s (including, notably, Oberst’s own “When The President Talks To God”). Yet upon closer observation, there’s more nuance to musical history than a model of simple reaction to political oppression and strife. Musicians have made great art under totalitarian regimes and permissive liberal democracies — and all societies between and beyond them — with intensely political and equally apolitical motivations. Even looking at the birth of punk rock, perhaps the most political of major musical genres, we see a great diversity of political viewpoints — from the gleeful lawless iconoclasm of the Sex Pistols and the studied leftist poise of The Clash to the apolitical scruffiness of the Ramones. As punk expanded in the 80s, so did the political viewpoints of its practitioners. Two of the most notable punk groups of the 80s were the anarcho-socialist Dead Kennedys, whose frontman Jello Biafra once ran for the mayorship of San Francisco on a platform of making businessmen wear clown suits, and the neo-nazi Skrewdriver, a group that fundraised for the British National Party and the National Front. Punk rock, just like any musical genre, is a tool, and can be used by musicians of any stripe.

Of course, this is not to ignore that punk rock and music in general have typically had a leftward tilt — just compare the lineups for the inaugurations of Presidents Trump and Obama and the upswell of protest music that followed Trump’s election. Yet, instead of expressing some excitement at the prospect of musicians having more material for protest songs, it’s perhaps more prudent to recognize that having a culture that values free speech and creativity is the most valuable thing to ensure a healthy environment for musicians. While it’s easy to cheer on protest punk when you’re living in Australia for the next five years as Amanda Palmer is, it’s certainly harder to actually write songs when you also have to worry about losing your health care, being put onto a watch list or being deported. Music is undeniably valuable in times of peace and times of strife, but it is fundamentally secondary to concerns of life and death — dead men sing no songs, no matter how many they inspire. There’s something romantic and heroic in the idea of the starving artistic visionary, bravely raging against the machine, but even speaking as a music critic, I’d rather have bland music made in peace than masterpieces born out of collective suffering. All the great punk in the world doesn’t make up for an oppressive government.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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The manufactured authenticity of ‘Closer’ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/16/closer/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/16/closer/#respond Tue, 17 Jan 2017 01:08:49 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1120477 As of Nov. 26, 2016, “Closer” by The Chainsmokers and Halsey has been on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 15 weeks. That’s not particularly impressive. Songs have stayed on the Hot 100 for as long as 87 weeks — in the semi-miraculous case of Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” — and it’s fairly common for songs to […]

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As of Nov. 26, 2016, “Closer” by The Chainsmokers and Halsey has been on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 15 weeks. That’s not particularly impressive. Songs have stayed on the Hot 100 for as long as 87 weeks — in the semi-miraculous case of Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” — and it’s fairly common for songs to limp their way to long tenures on the chart. (If you’re wondering, Drake’s “One Dance” and Desiigner’s “Panda,” two of the biggest hits of the early part of this year, are still hanging around in the middle region of the chart; they currently stand at 31 and 37 weeks, respectively.) What is impressive about “Closer”’s tenure on the pop charts is how dominant the song has been throughout late summer and fall — for all 15 of its weeks on the chart, it’s been in the top 10, and for the 12 weeks between Sept. 3 and Nov. 16, it’s been the No. 1 song. That longevity at No. 1 is where “Closer” becomes noteworthy — only 10 songs have ever lasted longer at the top spot of the charts, and only six others have matched that record. At 12 weeks, “Closer” is now rubbing shoulders with an assortment of instantly recognizable, world-dominating pop songs, from “Lose Yourself” to “Yeah!”

Yet there’s something odd about “Closer,” something about it that makes it sit uneasily in the pop pantheon. Unlike most of those other hits, “Closer” isn’t a particularly distinctive song. It’s not by hyper-famous, instantly recognizable stars. In interviews, The Chainsmokers frequently describe themselves as just being normal frat bros — and they largely look the part. It doesn’t have a particular novelty to it, either — it’s not a nostalgic throwback like “Uptown Funk,” or a heartfelt tribute like “See You Again” or “Candle in the Wind.” Instead, “Closer” is just a song, and a fairly nondescript one at that. You’ve probably heard it many times over without even recognizing it. It’s the sort of song that fits in equally well in the club or in the grocery store, not really offensive or provocative in any way.

To understand how such a thoroughly bland piece of music could so thoroughly capture the pop-listening public, we have to first understand “Closer”’s musical roots. Mostly, that means understanding EDM. While “Closer” is a child of many lineages, including the passive-aggressive dueting of the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” and the 20-something ennui of Blink-182 and other pop-punk bands, its chief forebear is electronic dance music, and more specifically the variety of pop-ready EDM that first staked its foothold on the American pop charts of the late 2000s.

While danceable electronic music has existed since the electro-disco pioneered by Giorgio Moroder in the late 1970s, EDM’s history as a force in American pop music begins around 2009, with the ascendancy of David Guetta. While Guetta, a French DJ, achieved moderate success throughout Europe in the early 2000s, it was not until 2009 that he broke through in the U.S., on the strengths of his production on the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling,” one of the few songs to top the charts for longer than “Closer.” “I Gotta Feeling” and the singles off of Guetta’s 2009 album “One Love” would provide the blueprint for all the EDM and EDM-influenced singles that followed. The songs combined electro-house and house-influenced beats with standard pop melodies and structures, creating compelling, relatively novel dance-pop. While the songs, aside from “I Gotta Feeling,” didn’t achieve overwhelming commercial success — the most successful of Guetta’s early solo singles, the charmingly titled “Sexy Bitch,” peaked at No. 5 on the charts — they were enough of a presence on mainstream pop radio to inspire imitators.

Guetta may have been the originator of pop-ready EDM, but he was certainly not the only artist peddling that genre to the Hot 100 around the turn of the decade. In the early 2010s, artists like Avicii, Zedd, Diplo, Swedish House Mafia and Calvin Harris all achieved major chart success in the U.S. by playing some EDM subgenre. While the EDM producers who found success in the U.S. don’t all play the exact same style — just compare the aggressive dubstep of a Skrillex record to the groovier, more restrained, garage-influenced style of Disclosure — the chart-topping EDM in America is pretty homogenous. The baseline electro-house style that is the face of modern EDM is a fairly simple formula: Start with a simple beat, often composed of just drums and a couple basic synth chords, layer a vocal melody over it, frequently sung by a fairly anonymous female vocalist, and build tension to a wordless musical climax. That climax, known as a drop, is perhaps EDM’s greatest selling point; in terms of musical storytelling, there are few things more dramatic than a good EDM drop, that release of sonic potential energy into pure action. The whole style is pristine, efficient and not particularly difficult. There are scores of tutorials on how to make an EDM song throughout the internet, and even famous DJs like Afrojack don’t necessarily know all that much about the formal aspects of their craft. (In a 2013 New Yorker article, he admitted to not knowing what a “bar” was — one of the most basic units of music theory.)

The formulaic nature of EDM and its all-consuming focus on the drop made it a ripe target for satire at the height of its popularity in 2014. That year, SNL parodied EDM with a sketch featuring Andy Samberg as a DJ who keeps the club in so much suspense for the drop that its sheer force upon arrival kills everyone in it. More importantly, The Chainsmokers entered the pop consciousness with “#Selfie.” The Chainsmokers’ breakthrough hit is a truly noxious thing, unloved even by its creators, who described it as “an annoying-ass record” in an interview with Billboard. The song, which is less a musical composition than an excuse to make bad jokes about its titular subject, is an unlovable, inept take on EDM, feeling like a house song made by someone whose education in the genre consisted of a single half-watched Youtube tutorial. Yet it was released at such a cultural moment for EDM, selfies and all the assorted accoutrements of the 20-something club and festival scene that “#Selfie” became an actual hit, reaching the top 20 in 2014.

The Chainsmokers’ next hit, “Kanye,” was also a bit of a novelty. This ode to the Westian ego, with lyrics like “I wanna be like Kanye / I’ll be the king of me always,” was a much less ugly-sounding sort of joke. It sounds like an actual attempt at the tropical house-tinged EDM that gained popularity at that late-2014 moment, never approaching the crummily obvious parody of “#Selfie.” “Kanye” isn’t good, but it is more listenable. It’s also a key part of understanding the road that leads from David Guetta to “#Selfie” to “Closer.” On an episode of The New York Times’ “Popcast,” Jia Tolentino, a writer for The New Yorker’s website, describes “Kanye” as “the necessary link between ‘#Selfie’ and the Kygo-wave of [‘Closer.’]” Somewhere between summer 2014 and June 2015, when “Roses,” the first single of their new sound came out, The Chainsmokers evolved from the calculated, contrived parody of “#Selfie” to a new style, no less calculating but aimed for a more serious success.

And so we get “Closer.” Unlike the EDM that it grew out of, “Closer” is not a pristine drop-delivery machine. The synth hook, borrowed from The Fray’s “Cable Car,” sounds especially amateurish in its guileless pounding. It’s a fairly conventional, lyrics-driven pop song, telling a story of two ex-lovers who reconnect for a night in a hotel bar and end up fucking in the backseat of a Range Rover. “Closer” is a calculated song, but it’s manufactured for a different purpose than most EDM hits.

For all of the commercial success in clubs and festivals, EDM’s success on the pop charts over the past five years has felt like a bit of an afterthought. EDM artists have never made up more than 10 percent of Billboard’s year-end chart, the best metric for understanding which songs made a significant impact on the pop world, and just one EDM single had reached the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 before “Closer.” The main reason why “Closer” succeeded where previous EDM hits didn’t is because it feels more human, more self-aware. The stereotypical EDM piece is something inhuman, a machine designed to drive you inexorably to the release of the drop, carried by sparkling synthesizers and anonymous vocals. “Closer” takes that formula and tweaks it — the synthesizers are more clunky-sounding than the ones typically used in EDM, and Halsey and Drew Taggart (the Chainsmoker who sings the male part on this) have more personality than your average house vocalist (even though Taggart’s personality comes through as a complete lack of singing ability). “Closer” represents an evolution in pop-EDM, a softening and humanizing.

Yet it would be wrong to think that “Closer”’s more human take is any more “authentic” or “genuine” than any other EDM song, including “#Selfie.” The artifice of “Closer” is clear when the song is put up to any close examination. The song’s narrative, as it were, is threadbare, an excuse plot that allows the Chainsmokers to graft on a series of references (Blink-182! UC Boulder! Range Rovers! Tucson!) recognizable and relatable to their target audience of 20-somethings, all culminating in an anthemic refusal of reality: “We ain’t ever getting older.” If it weren’t so obvious, I’d call it genius. But maybe obvious is what works. In all of the pieces I’ve read documenting the rise of “Closer,” there’s a shared observation: Beyond anything else, “Closer” is a hit because it feels like a hit. There’s something undeniable about it, something perfectly designed for pop appeal. I can’t say I like “Closer” — I may even hate it — but even so, there’s something to be admired in its crass artifice.

This article first appeared in the Stanford Daily Magazine on January 17, 2017.

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Jóhann Jóhannson’s score for ‘Arrival’ proves that film scores need not be background https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/30/arrival-johannjohannson-soundtrack-review/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/30/arrival-johannjohannson-soundtrack-review/#respond Wed, 30 Nov 2016 22:22:09 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1120483 In September, a 13-minute YouTube video about movie scores went viral. A bit more substantive than your average fare of whimsical cats or infants, the 4-million-view video, titled “The Marvel Symphonic Universe,” asked an important question: Why can’t you remember any orchestral theme from the Marvel movies? While the 14 movies of the Marvel Cinematic […]

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In September, a 13-minute YouTube video about movie scores went viral. A bit more substantive than your average fare of whimsical cats or infants, the 4-million-view video, titled “The Marvel Symphonic Universe,” asked an important question: Why can’t you remember any orchestral theme from the Marvel movies? While the 14 movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have made billions upon billions of dollars at the box office, and have spawned untold hordes of merchandise, they haven’t managed to have a single memorable tune attached to them. And the most damning thing about that is that you probably didn’t notice the dearth of recognizable Marvel music until someone pointed it out to you.

In fact, the distinctive blockbuster orchestral score is somewhat of a dying art. Nowadays, big movies tend to use pop songs, either written for the film or repurposed from the annals of pop history, to fill the roles orchestral themes would have filled in decades past. This is certainly a lucrative strategy — Pharrell’s “Happy” and Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again” are just two of the many pop hits originating from movies in recent years, and the soundtrack to “Guardians of the Galaxy”, consisting only of radio hits from the ’70s and ’80s, sold more than a million copies in the US — but these pop songs are more easily divorced from the films they’re linked to. Even when modern movies let the orchestra carry their musical burdens, the songs composed frequently sound very similar between different films. They take the easy route to emotional resonance, playing exactly the score we expect.

This is all to say that I was pleasantly surprised when I heard the score to “Arrival.” I was even more surprised when, three days later, I was still thinking about that same score more than anything else from the film. This isn’t a knock on the quality of the film itself — it’s perhaps my favorite movie that’s come out this year, and it’s the rare piece of sci-fi filmmaking that balances complex concepts and emotionally-affecting storytelling well. Yet there’s something about its score that stands out even in the context of a great film. While most scores act as mere window dressing to the greater work, “Arrival”’s score conveys the same general points about the work in parallel to the rest of the film, speaking the same sentences in a different language.

Jóhann Jóhannson’s score is a startling thing. Instead of the typical full orchestra used in most soundtracks, or even the more rock-influence ensembles used in some modern action scores, like Hans Zimmer’s work on “Batman v. Superman”, Jóhannson’s instrument of choice is the human voice. To help convey the film’s themes on language and communication, Jóhannson enlisted the help of international vocal ensemble Theatre of Voices. On tracks like “Heptapod B,” the sheer strangeness of the arrangement strikes you immediately — where other composers would build tension with violins and cellos, Jóhannson instead floods the track with wordless choruses and chants, creating a piece that sounds like some otherworldly ritual. Even when the score is more traditional in arrangement, it doesn’t ever feel conventional in sound. Like his work on the score for “Sicario,” Jóhannson’s score is tense, spare and, for lack of a better word, creepy. Neither “Sicario” nor “Arrival” is a horror movie per se, but both are nerve-wracking experiences. “Arrival” is able to wring tension out of a plot based around linguistics and neuroscience, and its score is a major reason why that works.

Of course, a movie’s score is inherently tied to the film it was written for, so this review isn’t a recommendation to go and listen to “Arrival”’s score on its own, without having experienced it in the context of the greater film. Instead, I write this in recognition of the rare feat “Arrival” and its score have accomplished. In a filmmaking landscape where scores grow ever-more homogenized, “Arrival” manages to stand out sonically.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Concert Review: Kanye West is a cult leader (in the best way possible) https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/09/kanye-west-saint-pablo-concert-review/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/09/kanye-west-saint-pablo-concert-review/#respond Wed, 09 Nov 2016 10:22:38 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1119504 Kanye West has always had a complicated relationship with religion. From early gospel-tinged songs like “Jesus Walks” and “Never Let Me Down” to 2013’s industrial ego trip “I Am A God (feat. God),” Kanye has struggled with the role of god in his music. Yet, his most recent album “The Life of Pablo” is his […]

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Kanye West has always had a complicated relationship with religion. From early gospel-tinged songs like “Jesus Walks” and “Never Let Me Down” to 2013’s industrial ego trip “I Am A God (feat. God),” Kanye has struggled with the role of god in his music. Yet, his most recent album “The Life of Pablo” is his fullest exploration of faith and divinity and reveals the most about Kanye’s theology. While other religiously influenced rappers like Chance the Rapper and Kendrick Lamar treat their gods as saviors, lifting them up to better places, Kanye’s god is a different sort of figure. Kanye’s god might just be Kanye.

When Kanye came through the Bay Area this October for the Saint Pablo Tour, playing two shows at the Oracle Arena on Oct. 22 and 23, that theology was on full display. To the adoring fans in the arena — especially the ones directly below his stage, which floated above the venue’s floor — Kanye was nothing less than a cult leader, gathering his faithful in a beautiful worship of the self.

Throughout the evening, Kanye had complete control of the audience. He would start songs over repeatedly until the crowd sang along with the gusto he desired, mix parts of songs together in entirely new formulations and go on rambling, seemingly improvised speeches at will. At any other show, these would be reasons for discontent in the audience. Yet with Kanye, these “bugs” became features — you go to a Kanye show, at least in part, for the things you can’t predict.

Take, for example, Kanye’s performance of “Runaway.” “Runaway,” the climax of his 2010 album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” is already one of the more revelatory songs in his catalog, a nine-minute-long piece where Kanye lays bare many of his internal conflicts. On Saturday night, though, Kanye took the song even further, free-associating about the nature of genius and insanity for nearly 10 more minutes. He started his monologue on a defensive tone, attacking those who would call him crazy and instead calling himself a “Fucking Genius.” Yet he moved beyond himself as he went on, dealing with racism, the media and all the other forces holding down creative minds in America, casting himself as a Christ-like figure who would “take the pain, on behalf of all believers, all dreamers, all thinkers.”

Even beyond the rants, though, Kanye’s live show was something special. The stage set, consisting solely of a faux-industrial platform suspended above the arena floor, was brilliant in its simplicity. It solved the key economic problem of massive stadium shows — the need to maximize both stage space and floor seating — in an inventive way. Yet Kanye didn’t simply use the setup to increase his profit margin, though he did admit that that was a major concern during his monologue. To Kanye, the stage platform was a creative tool — one he could leverage to further his command of the audience. As the stage and its lights moved across the floor, it seemed to drive the people in the floor seats into a frenzy, each of them striving to dance under his beams of light.

I’ve mostly refrained from talking about the music because, well, there isn’t much to talk about. It’s Kanye West, perhaps the most critically acclaimed rapper of all time, performing the best of his 13-year repertoire. While the setlist was more heavily weighted towards “Yeezus” and especially “The Life of Pablo,” his two most recent albums, he played a mix of selections, ranging from “Jesus Walks” from his first album to his guest appearances from this summer on Drake’s “Pop Style” and Schoolboy Q’s “THat Part.” Overall, his performance was energetic, sometimes deviating from the studio recordings but never veering into incompetence or incoherence.

Ultimately, it was those points of deviation that made the most impact on the congregants of the Church of Kanye West. The songs affected most by his changes were “Famous, ”“Runaway,” “Only One” and “Waves.” Each song is already a standout track in Kanye’s catalog, but their power was only magnified by how he made them feel like living, fluid creations in his performances, and the audience felt that. As Kanye sang and talked through the 20-minute rendition of “Runaway,” the man standing next to me told me that he was definitely buying floor seats to the next show.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar talk experiential learning and art at McMurtry https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/26/david-byrne-mala-gaonkar-neurosociety/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/26/david-byrne-mala-gaonkar-neurosociety/#respond Wed, 26 Oct 2016 08:00:40 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1118600 David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar want you to learn without knowing that you’re learning. If there’s one thing that they made clear over the course of their 1.5-hour discussion on Wednesday at the McMurtry Building with Stanford professors Anthony Wagner (psychology and neuroscience) and Charles Kronengold (music), it was that principle of subtle teaching. The discussion […]

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David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar want you to learn without knowing that you’re learning. If there’s one thing that they made clear over the course of their 1.5-hour discussion on Wednesday at the McMurtry Building with Stanford professors Anthony Wagner (psychology and neuroscience) and Charles Kronengold (music), it was that principle of subtle teaching. The discussion of their new piece of experiential theater, “The Institute Presents: NEUROSOCIETY,” was animated by that inclination, made most overt by Byrne’s declaration that helping audiences learn about themselves through the show was a “strong desire, but a secret desire.”

Byrne, most widely known as the bandleader and lead singer for American New Wave group Talking Heads, and Gaonkar, a tech investor, are perhaps not the most conventional pair of artistic collaborators, especially for an alternative theater experience based on neuroscience experiments — they admitted during the discussion that they were “rank amateurs” at any sort of theater. Yet their conversation made clear that they share both a deep curiosity about the workings of the human mind and an attention to the details of the human experience.

At times Byrne and Gaonkar seemed inexperienced or unsure about the precise details of the show, but their fundamental principles remained consistent. The two showrunners demonstrated a clear focus on how audiences would react, understand and learn from the performance, even in its smallest details. At one point, they discussed the decor in the building lobby, which features photographs of more serious neuroscience experiments in order to build expectations for the performance. More importantly, they discussed changing a part of the performance about unconscious bias from a simulation of shooting possible assailant based on race to one less racially charged.

The original versions of the show apparently demonstrated the unconscious bias held by all people by putting the participants into a situation where they would have to quickly decide whether to shoot approaching figures of various races, both unarmed and armed. Yet in the final version, Byrne and Gaonkar have replaced it with an exercise in choosing presidential winners based on appearance. While such a move could be seen as milquetoast avoidance of controversy, Byrne explained it quite differently, saying that the change was made so that the exhibit won’t immediately  “lose the argument” about unconscious bias by directly attacking participants.

Byrne and Gaonkar’s talk about designing experiences to subtly guide audiences into learning about themselves was interesting on its own. Considering that design motivation in light of Byrne’s prior work with Talking Heads adds an even more fascinating dimension to his statements. Unlike many of their contemporaries in the new wave and punk scenes of the late ’70s and ’80s, Talking Heads was rarely overtly political or moralistic — its music was too disjointed, too rhythmic and twitchy to preach to you the way The Clash or Elvis Costello could. Yet Talking Heads could hardly be described as a band focused only on danceable rhythms and chart success. At its best, especially on the three albums that it released from 1979 to 1983, the band was able to use their music organically to spur on intellectual growth, without falling into the trap of simply telling you what to believe. On those three albums — “Fear of Music,” “Remain In Light” and “Speaking In Tongues” — Talking Heads achieved a fusion of inventive, eclectic compositions and Byrne’s ironic, free-associative lyrics, all creating some of the most thought-provoking music of any time period.

It’s always easier to teach directly, through music or through any form of performance. Experiential learning is inherently messier — when you don’t tell your audience how to feel about something, they’ll end up feeling every way possible. While that openness can lead to fascinating results, it can also be frustrating for creators. In recent years, a number of messy, sprawling concept albums, most notably Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly,” have ended with songs that attempt to sum up the album’s “point,” narrowing down an expansive work to a more digestible message. It’s an understandable urge, but including such an ending limits the possibilities for further intellectual exploration. In any art form, be it new wave music or experimental theater, sometimes the most interesting results come from leaving the work ambiguous.

 

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu

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