Rare is a debut so fully formed and overflowing with music and emotion. Tidal grapples eloquently with loneliness, retribution, and the oceanic ups and downs of being young and being a woman.

Tidal

The second track on Fiona Apple’s debut album, released in 1996 when she was 18 years old, is a ballad about trauma. She describes the paralysis of depression: how the hurt stalks below the surface; how emotions rage and contort out of view. “And there’s too much going on/But it’s calm under the waves/In the blue of my oblivion,” she sings, as if facing a brewing wind, her voice a beacon of dignity, soul, and resolve. And then she digs deeper.

Is that why they call me a sullen girl?
They don't know how I used to sail the deep and tranquil sea
But he washed me ashore
And he took my pearl
And left an empty shell of me

Each word, like rocks tumbling into jewels, falls into the next. The internal rhymes hang onto one another and lift you up. No surprise, then, that spirals of poetry and jazz formed Fiona. She began on piano as an 8-year-old in Manhattan with a collection of standards called The Real Book (Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday were favorites). She was sent to psychiatrists, which she resented; once, staring at ink-blots, she made out the shape of a beetle and so proclaimed that she saw John Lennon’s face. Fiona has referred to Lennon as “God” and Maya Angelou as her “mother.” She slept with a compilation of Angelou’s writings under her pillow. “She had brought me through some tough times and shown me a light,” Fiona once said of Angelou, who she thanks in the liner notes of Tidal’s vinyl reissue “for everything you’ve ever written.”
In Angelou’s memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, first published in 1969, she describes her experience, at 8 years old, of being raped in her mother’s St. Louis home. After, she grows quiet; she is no longer interested in games. “When I refused to be the child they knew and accepted me to be, I was called impudent and my muteness sullenness,” Angelou writes. She is sent to Arkansas to live with her grandma, never knowing if her St. Louis family “just got fed up with my grim presence… There is nothing more appalling than a constantly morose child.” Angelou only warms up to the idea of talking again when a woman tells her that “it takes the human voice to infuse [words] with the shades of deeper meaning.” You can see why Fiona—having also been raped outside her home at age 12, retreating inward and taking solace in the act of writing—would find strength in this. Her music, too, is all words, all messages to decode, a potent mix of literary ambition and raw truth; scaling the depths of her vocal register, she swings and punches and finesses phrases with smoke.
It’s called Tidal, after all, to honor monumental extremes—the highs and lows of a force so awesome it forms waves that can wipe you away. When Fiona was 17, her three-song self-made demo tape famously found its way from her friend Anna, who was babysitting for a music publicist, to Andy Slater—who became Fiona’s manager and swiftly produced Tidal. Slater devised a sound based on Fiona’s interests in hip-hop, classical composers, and “old-school singers,” and with that Tidal contains some of the plushest and most atmospheric music in Fiona’s catalog. Its moodiness unspools slowly, from its wonky trip-hop beats and banged keys to its featherlight trills, marimba, and harp. But more often than not, it is a death stare in the face of a world that doesn’t deserve Fiona’s smile. “Life is tidal, love is tidal,” Fiona said on MTV’s “120 Minutes.” “It’s like the only adjective you could use to describe anything.”
Hers are rigorous pop songs because writing was survival. “I didn’t think of it as a fun thing to do,” she told The New York Times in January of 1997. “I thought it was the only thing I could do.” The songs collectively unpack the pain that hardens young women to the world—revealing Fiona’s thick skin and what she endured to build it; fight songs, and why she fights. It is often merciless. “Carrion” has an unusual tinge of optimism for a song that hangs on a hook of “My feel for you boy is decaying right in front of me like the carrion of a murdered prey.”
“Sleep to Dream” and “Shadowboxer” are the bones of the persona Fiona would come to project: skeptical, sensitive, and very smart; a lone young person betrayed by the ways of the world, summoning a colossal rage to match them. On these songs, she is a woman of herculean strength with her fists out, gloves on, building muscle to chip back at whoever has played her. “Once my lover/Now my friend/What a cruel thing to pretend,” Fiona sings on the latter. “What a cunning way to condescend.” One of the great wonders of pop music: that something so common could inspire a song so spectacular. She once said “Shadowboxer” is about “angry desperation”—“when your mind is fighting with your heart, when you know something isn’t good for you but you want it anyway, you’re trying really hard to do the right thing for yourself, but then finally you’re like, ‘I’m gonna do what I wanna do, I gotta do what my heart wants me to do, otherwise I won’t learn anything.’”
If “Shadowboxer” is her training ground, then “Sleep to Dream” is pure flexing. She rips the truth out of this idiot, she drags this guy who wronged her, all the while sounding self-possessed, feet on the ground, eyes wide, head clear, voice loud. It rumbles open, each word a drum: “I tell you how I feel, but you don’t care/I say tell me the truth, but you don’t dare/You say love is a hell you cannot bear/And I say ‘gimme mine back and then go there for all I care.’” Kanye said he was inspired by Fiona (and “Sleep to Dream” especially) because he wanted to rap like he was “at the top of a mountain.” On “Sleep to Dream,” Fiona sounds eight-feet tall. It’s full of classic Fiona missives, complete sentences of self-respect: “Don’t even show me your face ‘cause it’s a crying shame,” “I have never been so insulted in all my life,” “I got my own hell to raise.”
“Slow Like Honey” actualizes Tidal’s more glacial notes, its reveries that hang thick in the air with the accompaniment of Jon Brion’s vibraphone: “When I’m high like heaven/When I’m strong like music/’Cause I’m slow like honey/And heavy with mood.” In its florid verses, “Pale September” is her most classically romantic Tidal track, as she sings of “autumn days swung soft around me like cotton on my skin.” You might not include these on a mixtape of Fiona’s defining songs, but they turn Tidal into its own suspended universe nonetheless. You get why Solange, with her defiance and intellect and grace, deemed herself the president of the Fiona fan club—and why Perfume Genius once proclaimed that he should like to cover his body in tattoos of Fiona’s lyrics.
Tidal has some piano ballads of deceiving serenity, gentle but weighted by experience, heavy as cement. “Never Is a Promise” is the only Tidal track taken from her demo. In this severe six-minute confessional, you understand that of course Fiona comes from a lineage of stage actors and big band singers; its drama is operatic, with weeping strings arranged by Van Dyke Parks. It sounds so apart from the rest of the album—a song about absolute edge-of-the-earth isolation, about not expecting the world to catch you. “You’ll never feel the heat of this soul,” Fiona sings at its blazing peak, “My fever burns me deeper than I’ve ever shown/To you.” Throughout, she is calling out a person who says they will “never” give up on her. But she sees that “never” is hollow. How telling that this bracingly sad song is, at its core, a linguistic accusation. The last verse goes:

You’ll say you understand
You’ll never understand
I’ll say I’ll never wake up knowing how or why
I don’t know what to believe in
You don’t know who I am
You’ll say I need appeasing when
I start to cry
But never is a promise
And I’ll never need a lie.

Bluntly, which is probably the only way one should talk about Fiona Apple, “Never Is a Promise” reminds me of a dulled, sunken feeling I could rarely shake in high school. It was then a soundtrack to falling on the ground, picking myself up, and seeing the world through blurry eyes. (“Of course I have an eating disorder,” Fiona told Rolling Stone in 1998. “Every girl in fucking America has an eating disorder.”) “Never Is a Promise” was an unlikely life-saver, something to float with and hide in. I had never heard a song this honest, and yet it felt like it was coming from inside of me: A song about the foundations we set for our lives, a snapshot of beginning to see this (bullshit) world a bit more clearly. Listening to it now, I am astonished not by the fact that a teenager wrote it but that the world might make her harbor all of this pain instead of releasing it.
There is an unmistakable, almost comic dissonance between Tidal’s biggest song—the thrillingly misandrist radio hit “Criminal”—and the rest of Fiona’s early catalog. She wrote it in just 45 minutes when her label asked for a clearer single. (“I can write a hit,” she said in 2012. “I know how that shit works.”) On “Criminal” she is the immortal “bad, bad girl” being “careless with a delicate man,” delivering it all with a not-unsubtle wink: “What would an angel say? The devil wants to know.” But “Criminal” is a power play. She is reclaiming hers for all to see.
People would constantly prod Fiona on how an 18-year-old could write songs as mature as these—as if the most horrifying shit does not happen to people when they are teenagers, as if Fiona does not make metaphors of a spider, the clouds, and a lily pad in reference to men. Why did they not ask instead how she became a genius? She sounds preternaturally wise on “The Child Is Gone,” with its cool sway, its knowing ease, evoking the cutting assuredness of Nina Simone. As “the darkness turns into the dawn,” she sounds self-aware, forthright, welcoming a grand revelation. “I suddenly feel like a different person,” Fiona sings, “From the roots of my soul come a gentle coercion.”
Tidal went platinum within one year and yet, Fiona’s best work was still to come. The pleasure and poetry and purpose of Tidal, though, only calcifies with time. So much of it seems to say: You could never feel the pain I feel because only I have felt it. There are things about me that you can’t see at all, because I have buried them so well. You don’t know who I am. But of course, in Tidal, we saw ourselves.


Somewhere between a sorta-pop stab and pointedly hook-free, SY’s eighth album is ambivalent and shaggy by design.

Sonic Youth: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star

Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star

Sonic Youth’s eighth full-length album represents a blind spot in a career with otherwise pretty clear markers. In 1992, they released Dirty, which contained “100%”—a breathtakingly catchy sorta-hit that managed to distill everything great and weird about the band in two-and-a-half minutes, even if it didn’t quite reach the heights of the contemporaries they nurtured. It was their “Cannonball,” in other words, or it could have been, if MTV played it more. By 1995, they’d release an album best remembered for containing a song nearly as long as a sitcom without commercial breaks.
In between was Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, which resisted the relative concision of 1990’s Goo and 1992’s Dirty but still bore the whiff of commercial expectations. Released a month after Kurt Cobain’s suicide and in the middle of a messy alternative-rock culture explosion that Sonic Youth helped usher in but never particularly wanted for themselves, the album was shaggy by design—a concerted effort to loosen up after the rigor of previous studio efforts. You can’t judge an album by its cover and yet: Daydream Nation, Goo and Dirty boasted artwork by Gerhard Richter, Raymond Pettibon, and Mike Kelley, respectively—textbook examples of the band’s essential role as conduit between the underground and the mainstream. Experimental’s packaging, meanwhile, was hastily assembled by an in-house designer at Geffen. Everything about the album reeked of ambivalence.
“We wanted it to be less rock,” Kim Gordon said in David Browne’s Sonic Youth biography Goodbye 20th Century. “Dirty was pretty much the pinnacle of that. I guess we were really disappointed in the label that they didn’t get MTV to play the record. Or we just felt, ‘Well, we’re just not that sort of band anyway.’” Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star is about the limbo between begrudging aspiration for pop success and the relief in discovering it was never meant to be.  This isn’t just subtext: “Screaming Skull” shouts out the Lemonheads, Hüsker Dü, and Superchunk, dazed that their albums could be purchased at an SST Superstore on the Sunset Strip.
It is hard to hear, in hindsight, how the album is “less rock”—there are all manner of guitars doing things that seemingly only Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo knew how to make them do. “Starfield Road” is a burst of controlled mayhem that gets in and out in barely more than two minutes. Buzz Bin-worthy single “Bull in the Heather” and “Skink” are Kim Gordon at her Kim Gordon-est, the former enlisting both Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and one of Steve Shelley’s most infectious beats.
Sonic Youth’s lyrics are generally afterthoughts compared to their acrobatic dissonance, but one album after “Youth Against Fascism,” Moore’s “Androgynous Mind” and “Self-Obsessed and Sexxee” nailed the current social and political moment with 25 years of foresight. The album sold nearly as well as Dirty, which was enough to keep the band in Geffen largesse for years to come, but not quite enough to give the cultural cachet of its three predecessors or even some of the band’s later-career gems. The album is a half-step between the relative restraint and catchiness of the trifecta of Daydream Nation, Goo, and Dirty and the fuck-it experimentalism of A Thousand Leaves and NYC Ghosts and Flowers, and doesn’t feel like it ever quite plowed a lane of its own.
Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star was also the first Sonic Youth album the band didn’t tour behind, which could not have helped its slippery legacy; Gordon gave birth to her and Moore’s daughter Coco soon after the record’s release. By the time 1995’s Washing Machine came out, the band was headlining Lollapalooza and openly grappling with its place as elder statesmen of a scene they both indelibly influenced and wanted to distance themselves from. In that sense, an album marked by ambivalence may have been a definitive statement after all.


Gospel, punk, and noise fuse together for Algiers’ ambitious and chaotic second album. The songs burn with anger and grief, but lack cohesion to get the message across.

The Underside of Power

Algiers seem like a vision from a more progressive future: a mixed-race band from the American South fusing gospel and punk while challenging the capitalist state with righteous indignation. They’re a ragtag group of dissidents confronting the established order with industrial hymnals, raging against the machine through experimental rock epics; a band whose very name refers to the anti-colonial struggle. After releasing their self-titled debut in 2015, the trio of Franklin James Fisher, Ryan Mahan, and Lee Tesche were joined by former Bloc Party drummer Matt Tong. The newly-minted foursome made a pact never to be defined by their roles, and hoped to create an even more ambitious and outspoken work. Their sophomore album, The Underside of Power, strives to be the rallying cry for a tumultuous time.
Sessions for the record began in the UK during Brexit with Adrian Utley of Portishead. Utley was added to bring even greater urgency to the band’s aggressively political recordings. The flint for this powder keg was not only the rapidly degenerating political situation in both the UK and U.S. last year, but Fisher’s more personal experiences with race and privilege. As a 35-year-old black man, Fisher wrote many of the songs while working coat check at a Manhattan nightclub, inspired by observing young white people shout the n-word during rap songs. Much of the album, as the title suggests, spirals outward from these encounters, examining those disenfranchised by the system and eyeing a reckoning.
The reference points and influences for the album are vast and varied. The Black Panthers and Fred Hampton, Che Guevara, Camus’ The Plague, T.S. Eliot, Italian zombie exploitation flicks and horror film disco, PiL, Michael Stipe, Walter Benjamin, Jamaican soul, Dominick Fernow’s Vatican Shadow. The opener “Walk Like a Panther” alone tries to evoke Geto Boys, Afrika Bambaataa, grime, and footwork all at once, while maintaining the industrial gospel core. Mahan described “Mme Rieux” as capturing “the essence of early Portishead, if played with Wendy Carlos.” Then he said the same song was “a Donny Hathaway soul song mixed with the Shangri-Las and Delia Derbyshire.”
These are accurate comparisons as far as they go, but they also point to the album’s central problem: It’s overwrought and wildly overstuffed. In theory, The Underside of Power is the type of politically-charged work that would seem indispensable in times of crisis like the one we face today. It’s an eclectic mix of styles and sounds using protest to sustain its punk thrashers. The blueprint for such an album is out there—in bands that have inspired Algiers, like Bad Brains and the Clash, or groups like Public Enemy, Rage Against the Machine, Fishbone, and Dicks, all of which cross-pollinated genres to create explosive political music. But in practice, very few songs actually hit with the intended force. They’re bombastic to the point of kitsch, even though the issues at hand are a matter of life and death.
Algiers’ self-titled debut managed to weave many styles and sounds and say something powerful. A song like that record’s “Black Eunuch,” which subtly explored the relationship between sex and power, was super-charged with big, harmonic church-choir vocals and smashing guitar riffs. That equilibrium between opposing sonic forces isn’t found here. The songs rarely sound finished, or even like they have complete thoughts (as on “A Murmur. A Sign,” a previously-shelved song where Fisher’s hammy croon and the synth part undermine each other, as if each is only half-written). “Hymn for an Average Man” was inspired by Brexit and written for Trump supporters, imagining how working class complicity in the rise of fascism might square with their choices. An otherwise haunting portrayal powered by solo piano is disrupted by off-pitch synth and choir accents that, in this context, are a needless distraction.
While the production meanders, the songs also struggle with focus. “The Cycle/The Spiral: Time to Go Down Slowly,” which was originally based on a letter written to Fisher’s wife after an argument, somehow becomes a song about cyclical violence with an ending written about his parents’ divorce. Then there’s “Cleveland,” which samples Rev. James Cleveland’s gospel staple “Peace Be Still” and is supposed to invoke the memory of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was gunned down by Cleveland police in 2014, though he's never mentioned by name. Fisher names other victims of racially motivated violence—Sandra Bland, Andre Jones, Kindra Chapman, Keith Warren, Alfred Wright—and sings of karmic justice (“innocence is alive and it’s coming back one day”), but the effect is weirdly impersonal. This contrasts to moving tributes like Blood Orange’s “Sandra’s Smile” or Miguel’s “How Many,” songs that humanize their subjects. Weighty topics and individual stories on The Underside of Power feel more like abstractions, despite the ragged intensity of the delivery.
Cohesion can be overrated. A full-length album can certainly be concerned with building good songs first, and figuring out how they fit together as a whole later. Disorder can serve a record well; sprawl can help build suspense, create powerful dynamics, allow an artist to explore or magnify tensions, or cover varied terrain. But there’s something to be said for focus, particularly when delivering a specific message to an audience is the goal. Algiers have produced a record that is timely and necessary but also scatterbrained and messy, one that is so over the top it becomes a political melodrama, undercutting the issues it seeks to amplify.


The third album by Oakland, CA's Date Palms rides a foundation of doom metal, psych rock, and mournful country. What separates them from their drifting contemporaries is a distinct sense of composition; these are painstakingly considered, beguiling pieces partially inspired by California's Yuba River.

The Dusted Sessions

The vast desert of the southwestern U.S. has been an inspiration for musicians in all sorts of traditions. Increasingly it creeps into metal and psych, with late period Earth being a particularly strong example of rock that incorporates Western-style melodies and languid strokes meant to evoke the expanse. There’s something exotic but familiar about it, a beguiling quality that Oakland, CA's Date Palms nail to a tee. Riding a foundation of doom metal, psych rock, and mournful country, the group (now a quintet) led by Gregg Kowalsky and Marielle Jakobsons builds soundscapes with keyboards, mournful slide guitar, sitar, flute and a powerful electric bass. Their second album, The Dusted Sessions, ties together modern explorations of the Wild West with more traditional forms, infused with Americana but not giving into its clichés.
What separates Date Palms from troves of drifting psych rock bands is their distinct sense of composition. These aren’t lengthy jams but painstakingly considered pieces that ebb and flow. The Dusted Sessions centers around a suite inspired by the Yuba River in California, once central to the Gold Rush and home to a vast Native American tribe that was all but wiped out. There’s a careful reverence to the three-part “Yuba Source”, with its central melody that winds wide like the broad curves of the river itself. As the quintet work their way through the track, they’re propped up by monstrous basslines that provide important momentum without ruffling feathers, and a constant sitar that shimmers like a pool of clear fresh water.
The teasing melody of “Yuba Source”-- a simple three note blues phrase-- appears throughout the record, on “Yuba”'s second part and reprise. The group repeat these ideas like mantras, gently echoing so that an idea passes through each instrument as if it were being purified. Jakobsons’ violin, which emerges as the star of the record, takes these melodies and unwinds them out into long, soft strokes while the slide guitar dovetails gracefully beneath.
Each track is defined by a different instrument, however. As tight of a unit as they are, Date Palms are also pretty versatile. On “Dusted Down”, a searing electric guitar rises above the dusty tumult, and on “Exodus Due West” Jakobsons’ reverbed flute haunts the landscape. Kowalsky’s keyboards play an almost equally important role, especially in creating a wall-of-sound effect, as on centerpiece “Night Riding the Skyland”. Especially breathtaking on the latter, the viola merges with the synth before it’s all broken up by the thrust of Noah Philips’ electric guitar, diving head-first into a blues jam that recalls early-70s Pink Floyd and other psychedelic cornerstones.
That they can do all this on a single album is a testament to Date Palms’ ability and control as an ensemble. Even with 11-minute tracks, there’s not a moment that feels wasted; with so many different sounds and ideas invoked over The Dusted Sessions’ 44 minutes, there’s a clear idea at work even if it’s hard to quantify exactly what it is, which is where their brilliance lies. If the idea of Wild West-style slabs of desert rock doesn’t appeal to you, Kowalsky and Jakobsons will pull you in with their teasing melodies and weeping instruments anyway, their sound rough and immense like a sandpaper sky. On The Dusted Sessions they both deconstruct and reinforce the tenets of Americana and make something transcendent in the process.


By 1991, Prince's unsurpassed run of brilliance had ended, but he still had a lot of great music in him. Diamonds and Pearls had a clutch of future classics along with some odd experiments.

Prince / The New Power Generation: Diamonds and Pearls

Diamonds and Pearls

Do you know how confident you have to be to wear ass-less pants? Kanye might have the swagger to swaddle himself in rabbit fur coats and bejeweled luchador masks, but cut the ass out of his leather jogging pants and Yeezus suddenly becomes meek. Offer Young Thug the outfit that Prince wore to the 1991 VMA’s and he’d ask for something slightly more modest. It would’ve made Oscar Wilde stammer, and Humphrey Bogart re-consider his right to have a name that starts with “Hump.”
If you’ve never seen the seven-minutes of Marquis de Sade-soul that comprises Prince’s “Gett Off” performance, watch it right now. I’ll still be here when if you return. It’s the lead single from his 13th studio album, Diamonds and Pearls, and the only proper context for Prince’s state of grind.
Can you imagine the conversation between Prince and the awards show producers?
“Okay, I’m going a need a flaming stage that looks like the ruin of an ancient Roman brothel exclusively occupied by senators and their horses. 30 erotic back-up dancers in thongs, sheer negligees, and leotards, and no, I can’t share with C&C Music Factory.
Think the Minneapolis sound meets New Jack Swing meets a Caligulan orgy. I’ll be wearing a ventilated yellow jumpsuit with a plunging neckline and matching guitar. My collar will be silk. My pants will be assless. Tell Amy Grant to leave the room when I come on.”
A quarter-century later, it’s still unbelievable that it happened on cable television in a country with George H.W. Bush as President. These are the things you can’t explain, but can only witness. For every Prince performance, there’s someone who will claim that it was his best, but I’m reasonably certain that the '91 VMAs are superior to all—even that Coachella performance that made Daft Punk look like poseurs. There’s a brief moment of human fallibility as he takes the stage, a split-second fumble of the microphone, then he offers communion via mass orgasm.
Time and place shade the perspective. This wasn’t the first time I ever encountered that Purple: there was the “Batdance” video, where he dressed in full Joker regalia, turned the Batman theme into acid-faced funk, and rivaled Ray Parker Jr. for best song ever written for an '80s film. But Ray Parker Jr. never seduced Vicki Vale, nor recorded them fucking in the studio for a song called “Scandalous Sex Suite.”
The '91 VMAs was the first time I witnessed the real Prince, the original Mr. Steal Your Girl, the one who wrote his first song at age 7 and called it “Funk Machine.” For a 9-year old, it was baffling and awesome—like walking into the second act of a movie, frantically trying to piece together a plot line, but developmentally unprepared to do so. Who was this man? How could he do the splits so easily? How did his vocals effortlessly levitate from sordid lothario to brilliant eunuch? What did 23 positions in a one-night stand mean? (I’m willing to give Prince full credit as a sexual wunderkind, but let’s be real: some of those positions had to be minor variations. Sort of like how he claimed to play 27 instruments but included nine types of keyboards and organs—yet somehow no “woodwinds.”)
Prince’s eccentric genius ensured that he’d never fit into a particular genre or corner of pop music. But it seemed particularly incongruous in September 1991, a world where James Brown and MC Hammer presented the VMA Viewer’s Choice Award to Queensryche. Less than one week later, Nirvana released “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” triggering grunge and teaching a generation how to seem affected and disaffected at the same time. Two weeks later, A Tribe Called Quest dropped Low End Theory.  The VMAs heralded the last dry heave of the '80s, where Chris Isaak triumphed over Jon Bon Jovi, George Michael, and Gerardo for “Best Male Video.”
Diamonds and Pearls came on the satin heels of a three-year run where critics gleefully scrawled Prince’s eulogy. A bad ecstasy trip allegedly led him to shelve The Black Album in favor of the uneven Lovesexy. The Batman soundtrack reached No. 1, but felt campy and far removed from his late-’80s apex*, Sign “O” the Times*. While the sequel to Purple Rain, 1990’s Graffiti Bridge completely bombed, receiving five Golden Raspberry Nominations and yielding a soundtrack that failed to go platinum.
The solution was assless pants and obscene funk. The latter arrived via the New Power Generation, the first band Prince used since dissolving the Revolution a half-decade earlier. Until Diamonds and Pearls, Paisley Park’s director had a notoriously contentious relationship with hip-hop. He welcomed sampling but scorned “tone deaf” rappers who talked “silly shit.” Big Daddy Kane contributed a “Batdance” remix, but it never saw official release. Not even Prince could ignore that rap had dethroned R&B and funk as the most vital urban sound.
In response, Prince converted a former backup dancer named Anthony Mosley into the lead rapper of the New Power Generation. That’s Tony M on “Gett Off,” wearing the rattail and purple racing jacket, doing his best Chuck D boom but bringing noise more like the guy who rapped on Snap!’s “The Power.”
Prince famously called Tony M. “the wittiest pen the Twin Cities had ever seen,” but there are currently fourth-string rappers on the Rhymesayers bench with more bars. His “Jughead” attempted to start a new dance craze, but includes the dated slang you’d expect from a Christopher Guest parody biopic of Father MC: (“Get stupid,” “Mack Daddy in the House,” "turn the mutha out,” “clocking a freak in a low pro.”)
As for Tony, he admitted in a 1991 Details profile that the people back in North Minneapolis no longer liked Prince because they saw him as a pop thing. But he quickly added, “They didn’t like Van Gogh, did they?” Then again, Prince didn’t need to cut off an ear and give it to Apollonia. His popular decline mirrored the natural gravity of the music business. Until Prince, almost no solo artist had spent a decade at the top of the charts.
It’s not quite accurate to call Diamonds and Pearls a comeback. If anything, it inaugurated the brief New Power Generation phase of his career, the last in which he was a commercial force. For the first time, Prince found himself chasing trends rather than setting them. On “Daddy Pop,” he urges people to stop “living in the past” when they should be “living the new,” over Teddy Riley drums and wheeling sacral organs.
The juxtaposition of old-world spirituals and contemporary bounce might as well have doubled as a mission statement. Prince reveled in contradiction: demonizing illegal downloading and YouTube while simultaneously being one of the first to leverage the internet to sell directly to fans. He chastised rappers who didn’t say anything, but partially ceded the spotlight to a man who attempted to turn an Archie character into a dance craze. Diamonds and Pearls reflects the minor crises of a man in his early 30s, too agile to be outmoded, but no longer able to depend on the effortless violations of youth. He could still do the splits, but he wasn’t sure for how much longer.
“Thunder” stitches evangelic lyrics to sub-continental sitars, slashing guitars, and chord progressions that Max Martin has swiped for the last two decades. It’s basically a proto-Backstreet Boys anthem for born-agains. There are the classic Prince deep cuts usually only cited by the apostles (“Willing and Able”) and sunny day guitar benedictions to individualism (“Walk Don’t Walk”). “Strollin” pairs George Benson jazz guitars to New Edition adolescent pop, and a story about two teens roller skating, eating ice cream, and buying porn. It’s weird. It’s Prince.
If you’ve heard OutKast’s “2 Dope Boyz (In a Cadillac),” you’ll recognize the extraterrestrial intro of “Live 4 Love (Last Words From the Cockpit”—an anti-gang space-rap exploration about what happened after he got kicked out of his house at 17. Even the afterthoughts betray a brilliant guitar riff, organ lick, or drum coda.
But it’s pointless to pretend that we remember this album for much more than its four Top 40 hits. “Gett Off” led to more unplanned pregnancies than anything Prince had recorded since “Kiss.” His final #1 hit, “Cream” triangulated T. Rex and Robert Palmer into something that rivals only Wu-Tang for the greatest song named after a dairy product. The late night neon jazz grooves of “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night” remind me of Steely Dan if they played it straight. It’s an indictment of greed, self-destruction, and the war machine—ending with the stark image of a child shrouded in a cloud of poison gas.
There is, of course, the title song—the twinkling locket-pop ballad that both Cam’ron and Lil Wayne eventually rapped over. One of those songs they’ll play at weddings until we stop using diamond engagement rings and the ocean runs out of pearls. It’s Prince at his best, blending dizzying romance with an undercurrent of danger. He opens up: “This will be the day/That you will hear me say/That I will never run away.” It’s a utopian promise he knows he can’t keep, an incantation he hopes will become true if he utters it out loud. “Love must be the master plan,” he says, echoing a clichéd sentiment that so many before him have uttered. But Prince had the gift of making you believe whatever he said.
As with all the greatest pop stars, Prince was a master at simplifying life’s most complicated emotions into catchphrases. He encompassed lust, jealousy, fear, spirituality, avarice, the impulse to run away, and the need to strip everything to its core—sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively.  The man who believed in everlasting love died alone and childless, adored by almost the entire world. A song like “Diamonds and Pearls” illustrates why. For all the flamboyance and idiosyncrasy, Prince just wanted the same things as everyone else.


Light in the Attic’s latest foray into Japanese easy-listening pop has plenty of summery charm, but it offers few discoveries for those already familiar with the genre.

Various Artists: Pacific Breeze 2: Japanese City Pop, AOR & Boogie 1972-1986

There’s no greater comeback story in recent reissue culture than Japanese city pop. About a decade ago, Blogspot blogs and Japanese reissues introduced music nerds to a strain of AOR, funk, disco, and yacht rock trafficked under the amorphous term, a vague descriptor for Japanese music that incorporated jazz and R&B, reflecting city life and consumerism amid the 1970s’ economic upswing until the bubble burst in 1992. The music had largely been neglected by Westerners and derided by many Japanese as cheesy, but as YouTube algorithms launched songs into the wider collective consciousness, city pop surged in popularity; nothing was as emblematic of its second wind as a music video popping up for Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love” 35 years after release.
Light in the Attic’s first volume of their Pacific Breeze series felt like a culmination of all the hubbub. At last, uninitiated listeners could dive into a compilation featuring songs from big-name artists like Taeko Ohnuki, Hiroshi Sato, and Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono. Pacific Breeze Volume 2: Japanese City Pop, AOR & Boogie 1972-1986 nobly continues documenting this time period, but it isn’t consistent in highlighting the finest from the era—or offering any real discoveries for those with a cursory familiarity with the music.
Pacific Breeze 2 opens with “Pink Shadow,” one of the most electrifying tunes from duo Bread & Butter’s middling discography. Its syncopated funk-lite grooves are at once tight and loose, thanks to the session crew known as Tin Pan Alley, whose other work—such as on Ayumi Ishida’s Our Connection—also feels like it’s bursting with joy. Also notable is Tomoko Aran’s “I’m in Love,” whose sly hi-hats and bass glide into a chorus in which Aran coos the titular line, her voice like a spray of rose-scented perfume. Best of all is “Rainy Saturday & Coffee Break,” which ambles along in effortless fashion as Junko Ohashi delivers a strikingly clear and crisp vocal performance.
Kyoko Furuya’s moody “Harumifuotou” is an addictive bare-bones pop-rock song, but its spacious production and distinct mixing feel out of place alongside the following track, the hyperslick jazz-fusion instrumental “Bay/Sky Provincetown 1977.” It’s a noticeable miscalculation, but more frustrating is the fact that “Harumifuotou” was previously reissued in 2017; it feels superfluous. Anri’s “Last Summer Whisper” is another standout; it was written by Toshiki Kadomatsu, who has a real penchant for sticky-sweet basslines that allow the rest of the song to breathe, granting Anri’s vocals a tender dreaminess. But it’s also one of her most famous songs, sampled in popular tracks from both Korea and America; hardly a rarity, it feels like low-hanging fruit.
The most disappointing aspect of both Pacific Breeze compilations is the absence of the best city pop artists. Some of these were mentioned in a feature for The FADER by Mark “Frosty” McNeill and Andy Cabic, two of Pacific Breeze 2’s three curators. While billed as a list of “hard-to-find” tracks, the more precise term would likely be “hard-to-license.” The aforementioned Kadomatsu, as well as Tatsuro Yamashita, are the most impressive songwriters and vocalists of their generation, and they’re not found on either compilation (nor Japanese ones released in 2003). These absences are glaring, leaving a gaping hole in any understanding of city pop as a whole; curious listeners would be better off cycling through city pop mixes on YouTube that don’t omit them.
The carefree bliss Pacific Breeze 2 certainly lives up to its title: Listening to these tracks, it’s easy to imagine yourself at the beach or driving around in the summer, windows down. It’s a good collection of songs that capture much of city pop’s charm. Still, it’s hard not to feel like the compilation does a disservice to the genre: It feels incomplete in scope and features lesser songs from many of its artists, such as those from Yumi Murata and Piper. It feels nice to soak in Pacific Breeze 2’s soft, innocuous pop music. Just don’t expect it to represent the luxury and excess that top-shelf city pop did.

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A gloomier companion to 2020’s Getting Into Knives, John Darnielle’s latest is patient, tense, and full of empathy.

Dark in Here

Near the end of his 2014 novel Wolf in White Van, John Darnielle wrote, “There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die.” Three decades into his career, it’s easy to see which one he prefers. Darnielle and the Mountain Goats, his one-time solo project which has now solidified into a quartet, have remained in constant motion. After a five-month tour at the end of 2019, the group settled at Sam Phillips Recording in Memphis to make 2020’s Getting Into Knives, with a plan of heading south to Muscle Shoals, Alabama shortly afterwards to record the immediate follow-up. After spending a week at FAME Studios, they emerged with Dark in Here, their third studio album in 15 months, sixth in as many years, and 20th overall. Where Getting Into Knives was something of a mixed bag and Songs for Pierre Chuvin, recorded around the same time, was Darnielle’s homemade lockdown opus, Dark in Here is a beacon of light, creeping out of Earth’s darkest trenches.
Like the acoustic dispatches on Songs for Pierre Chuvin, Dark in Here harkens back to Darnielle’s early work about misfortune wreaked on nobodies. He is at his strongest when he balances the soulful vamp of the session players—including Spooner Oldham, whose Wurlitzer was a vital ingredient on Aretha Franklin’s Lady Soul and I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You—with stories of forgotten people wedged in tight, messy crevices of rubble, combating the plagues of loneliness that live on well beyond the limits of calamity, urging even the unluckiest of us to find the beauty hiding in plain sight.
The only conceptual throughline on Dark in Here is the lingering desolation stalking each character, a common theme in the Mountain Goats’ discography. And whether he finds it lurking on the brink or actively upheaving his characters’ paths, Darnielle sounds right in his comfort zone, leaning on velvety piano and Jon Wurster’s tight rhythm to build the tension, allowing the record to feel progressively more on-edge as each track bleeds into the next. On opener “Parisian Enclave,” a throng of men lurk through the sewer system beneath a European city and break out onto the streets, and the darkness hiding on the record takes shape in familiar scenes: a bible verse catalyzing self-sabotage, a quiet train car full of unreadable strangers, or a shoreline blackened by empty midnight.
Dark in Here finds a balance between the catastrophes we face and the catastrophes we create. In the thrashing cautionary tale of “The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower,” a squadron of drillers dig their way into Hell and forget about their earthly possessions, embracing the beauty sprouting from the ashes. Darnielle has always understood how to make a romantic mess of these kinds of stories, focussing on people who have no say in their own afflictions. On “When a Powerful Animal Comes,” with his deadpan tenor atop Peter Hughes’ oil-slick bass lines, Darnielle gestures toward a grander sense of fallibility—“We’ve made mistakes/Everyone spots their own mess when the dawn breaks”—and extends a hand to his audience, ushering us into the light, assuring it will not burn us alive.
For a record so subtly violent and wretched with anxiety, with Darnielle’s overriding mood pitched between moshpit and battlefield, the music is just as approachable as the lighter fare on Getting Into Knives. The characters in these songs often feel like matured recasts of the ones we’ve crossed paths with throughout Darnielle’s past work. Dark in Here welcomes into the fold a new battalion of teenage metalheads, an embattled music critic, and one metropolitan prophet posing as Jonah. All of these characters are teetering on the edge of death and purgatory, drifting onward toward their “preordained place.”
Although Dark in Here was recorded in the same stretch of inspiration as Knives, and was meant to serve as its muted and gloomy companion, it outshines its predecessor. Instead of circling the drain in despair, these complex characters are steadfast in their resolve. “Swim right through the night/Break the surface and rise like a geyser/When my time is right,” Darnielle sings near the end of closer “Let Me Bathe in Demonic Light,” a patient, sympathetic nod towards the people awaiting the resolutions they deserve. Darnielle has long interrogated the complicated, often tragic journeys of his flawed heroes, cultivating a songbook of loud, exhausted reasons to keep on moving. On Dark in Here,  he sings proudly for the ones who dare to stick around.

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Uzi’s latest project comes very close to delivering on the chaotic, sublime promise of “XO Tour Llif3.” It’s the Philly rapper’s  most musically developed work to date.

Luv Is Rage 2

“XO Tour Llif3” is the sort of song artists spend years trying to write: pained and poised, tapping into a vein that had previously been found but never fully pierced. The “I don’t really care if you cry” taunt that shouldn’t be believed melting into “All my friends are dead/Push me to the edge” is a stretch of masterful songwriting, but withering in a way that few artists could mimic without tipping into self-parody. Its commercial benchmarks—No. 7 on Billboard, Platinum three times over—don’t come close to capturing the depth with which people feel the song. It will probably define Lil Uzi Vert for the rest of his career.
Which is fine, because artists have been plagued by hits with just a fraction of the pathos “XO Tour Llif3” has. But Uzi has been an ascendant star for at least a year and a half: from promising rookie to SoundCloud darling to rap’s A-list and beyond. He’s proven himself a popular force with solo cuts like “Money Longer” and guest turns on Migos’ “Bad and Boujee” and Playboi Carti’s “Woke Up Like This”; dozens, hundreds of imitators across digital mixtape platforms cite him as a major creative influence, or at least a welcome distillation of whatever’s happening in and around the Atlanta scene. And yet in some small way, Uzi’s long-awaited Luv Is Rage 2 is a referendum on whether he can live up to the standard “XO Tour Llif3” set. The goal isn’t a streaming figure or a chart position, but a feeling.
Lofty as that is, Luv Is Rage 2 comes very close to delivering. At its best, the album mines the psyches of exhausted and exhausting people, searching for the moment where enough drugs or heartbreak or iMessages or sleep deprivation can unlock a new part of the brain. It’s the Philadelphia native’s most musically developed work and features a bulk of his most interesting songs to date.
Take “The Way Life Goes,” which is produced by Don Cannon and Ike Beatz. Uzi opens with a brief introduction to the other half of his failed relationship, punctuated with, “I like that girl too much, I wish I never met her.” From there, he launches into a full interpolation of the first verse from Oh Wonder’s “Landslide”: “I know it hurts sometimes, but you’ll get over it/You’ll find another life to live.” Uzi’s less interested in the granular drama of the breakup than in the fallout, the moment three or four days later when reality starts to set in.
Over and over again, Uzi careens past the edge of convention or good social form. “Pretty Mami” is a desperate missive from a tour bus; the excellent song about his mother, “Dark Queen,” sounds less like an ode to a parent than a supernatural reckoning. The plunges into Uzi’s psyche are mirrored by his delivery. He’s chaotically animated, flitting between short staccato runs and heartfelt singing, punctuated by yelps and bug-eyed ad-libs. The perpetual churn of style and song structure can be a strength, or at the very least helps cover up songwriting that can tend toward formlessness. “444+222,” never finds its footing or has much to say, but at least keeps the listener on his or her toes long enough for Ike Beatz and Maaly Raw’s beat to make its imprint.
Rage 2’s production is almost uniformly excellent, poppy and full of air, but with sinister undercurrents when Uzi summons something darker. (For the brighter side, see WondaGurl’s “How to Talk” or Pharrell’s particularly breezy “Neon Guts,” where he also trades bars with Uzi.) If Lil Uzi Vert is innovating anything, it’s a macro approach to the emotion and perspective in his songwriting. The technical aspects—his flows, vocal patterns, and even his vocal registers—owe plenty to his contemporaries and immediate predecessors from Atlanta and Chicago. Metro Boomin and Pierre Bourne’s propulsive “X,” for example, could be lifted from one of the many batches of Young Thug leaks, down to its operative line: “Yeah, my life’s a mess/But I’m also blessed.”
What makes Uzi’s music his own is that instead of a one-off appraisal, he combs through his heart and Gmail to figure out just how the blessings and messiness interact. Luv Is Rage 2 is ultimately a record about keeping it together when your wits and resolve have been tested and depleted. (The Weeknd-assisted radio play “UnFazed” falls flat precisely because Abel’s practiced stoicism doesn’t gel with Uzi’s risk-it-all performance). Whether he’s full of joy or howling into the void, he pushes his songs to their edge, which helps to deliver on the promise shown in his earlier work. We knew Lil Uzi Vert would become one of rap’s biggest stars, but Rage 2 suggests that he may spend his time on top experimenting rather than retreating to a comfort zone.


The duo seamlessly merges their contrasting styles on their new EP, an assured slice of underground rap.

Tha God Fahim / Your Old Droog: Tha Wolf on Wall St

Tha Wolf on Wall St

New York rapper Your Old Droog and Atlanta rapper/producer Tha God Fahim have a professional relationship that stretches at least as far back as “Saga City,” a track on Fahim’s 2017 project IRON MONKEY. Over the last four years, they’ve developed a substantial rapport, both reveling in the art of storytelling. While Fahim trades in brass-tacks metaphors, Droog leans more toward punchlines and pop culture-laden double-entendre. Like any effective duo, their contrasting styles dovetail seamlessly on their new EP Tha Wolf on Wall St.
The entire project is an assured slice of underground rap, but the pair’s compatibility shines brightest on the title track. Over a soothing lounge jazz loop, Fahim’s bars land with a deceptively blunt force, considering his nasal tone (“Stepping over devils, they bite like anaconda/Tryna pull drama, you bleeding with mad trauma”). Meanwhile, Droog’s leisurely delivery masks weighty rhyme schemes (“Gordon Gekko in some Jordan retros/‘side the lobby of the five-star telly pouring Prosecco”). Fahim and Droog move back and forth like co-stars on a long-running cable drama, and the former’s production provides a more serene mirror reflection. Fahim laces each of the EP’s eight tracks with sedate loops, splitting the difference between his and Droog’s clashing styles. The horn refrain at the foreground of opener “All Bidness” creates unique pockets, which the duo uses to their advantage. “Meditation” and “Value” settle into soulful rhythms, allowing the raps to chew the scenery. Fahim’s ear behind the boards is as direct as his bars.
There are moments across the project where the duo is as invested in their respective communities as they are in their own wallets. Take “The Poverty Bothers Me,” where Fahim, Droog, and New Jersey rapper (and mentor) Mach-Hommy construct a panoramic view of impoverished communities ignored by the rich, dotted with children hooked on drugs and undercover cops in Yankee fitteds. All three of their perspectives add flavor and heart to a common issue without condescending.
Fiscal intelligence aside, Fahim and Droog just sound dope as hell rapping together. They’ve taken congruent paths to success, appealing to a consumer base eager to buy the brand of polished street rap they’re selling. On “Meditation,” Droog celebrates his wins while directly addressing the chip on his shoulder about entering the rap game on a Nas comparison nearly seven years ago: “Make them wish that they embraced me when they could/All they really had to do was just say ‘he was good’/Maybe then I would relax; now I’m permanently on attack.” Outside of more deeply personal projects like Jewelry or last year’s revelatory Dump YOD: Krutoy Edition—both of which Fahim played a key role in creating—Droog’s verse on “Meditation” stands as one of the most heartfelt of his career. Though, as a whole, the EP lacks the sweeping personal ethos of Dump YOD, it still works as proof that Fahim and Droog’s creative partnership isn’t a fluke.

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None of the wild imagination fueling David Ayers’ bloated orc cop epic carries over to its soundtrack, which feels test-marketed to a fault.

Bright: The Album

Of 2017’s many examples of how indiscriminate media companies have become in their race for streaming content, none was more conspicuous than Netflix’s Will Smith vehicle Bright, a $90 million eyesore with the budget of a blockbuster but the heart of a Syfy network original. Imagining a fantasy Los Angeles where humans coexist, uneasily, with mythological creatures, it’s the setup for some horrifically bungled social commentary, and a movie so unlovable that even Netflix’s own social media team couldn’t resist taking potshots. Yes, it is as bad as the critics say. And no, it isn’t worth a hate watch.
Thanks to Netflix’s closely guarded ratings metrics, there’s no real knowing how many subscribers actually streamed David Ayers’ orc cop epic, but all available evidence suggests the film wasn’t nearly the cultural event imagined by its soundtrack, which is every bit as gaudy and grandiose as the movie that spawned it. Built from the same mishmash of toothless pop rap, bloated EDM, and battle-montage alt-rock as the soundtrack to Ayers’ previous movie, Suicide Squad, it exists in an alternate universe where Bright became the box-office Goliath its creators conceived it as. For its imagined audience of Bright obsessives, a pair of heavy-handed opening tracks dutifully conjures the gritty, blighted world of the movie: Logic and Rag‘n’Bone Man’s brooding “Broken People” and the weepy Bastille anthem “World Gone Mad.” Like the film, the album takes itself very, very seriously.
Imagine Dragons aren’t actually on the soundtrack, but they loom so large over it that they deserve an honorary executive producer credit. The album’s rock tracks are steeped in the band’s tortured bombast, and their dalliances with other genres provide the model for its seemingly arbitrary crossover pairings. EDM producers Steve Aoki and Marshmello partner with Lil Uzi Vert and Migos, respectively, while Imagine Dragons imitators X Ambassadors share a track with Machine Gun Kelly and Bebe Rexha, one of the many industry bench players peppering an album devoted to the latest, glossiest Top 40 sounds.
The soundtrack’s one true standout is one of its most unassuming songs. Meek Mill, YG, and Snoop Dogg’s fiery East Coast/West Coast team-up “That’s My Nigga” may be less high concept than the deeply silly DRAM/Neil Young head-scratcher “Campfire,” but it has the advantage of performers who have not only chemistry but also genuine interest in each other’s worlds. The same can’t be said of the album’s other collaborations, including the turgid A$AP Rocky/Tom Morello coupling “FTW (Fuck the World),” which imagines how much more awkward the Prophets of Rage album could have been if it made any effort to reach out to a younger audience.
One of the few things the movie Bright has going for it, despite its grim execution, is conviction. There’s the seed of a genuine passion project buried beneath the movie’s hideous makeup, crude racial caricatures, and endless shootouts. None of that wild imagination carries over to its soundtrack. Save for one inexplicable Neil Young cameo, it’s test-marketed to a fault, coasting on popular sounds, top-dollar production, and proven star power. In that regard, though, these songs are just like the movie itself. They openly long to be hits, but they just aren’t any good.


Sasu Ripatti—aka Vladislav Delay and Luomo—returns to footwork with his first album-length attempt at the form, translating the genre’s fast-paced syncopations into a harsh, elemental blast.

Fun Is Not a Straight Line

The last time Sasu Ripatti was making footwork, so was everybody else. When Ripatti01 EP came out, in September 2013, Bangs & Works was still rearranging people’s heads: Producers like Addison Groove and Machinedrum were fusing the hyper-regional Chicago-house mutation with more internationally established electronic dance styles; young guns like Slava and Thug Entrancer were finding arty uses for its arrhythmic kicks and fearsome snares; and all the while, the genre’s founding fathers were on a roll. Ripatti’s early EPs under his last name weren’t bad, but they felt more like the Vladislav Delay/Luomo guy trying his hand at footwork than an expansion of the conversation. He was still trying things out.
Fun Is Not a Straight Line is Ripatti’s first full-length of footwork music, and it’s a canny time in his career to return to this project. After a short run of Ripatti EPs and a solid Vladislav Delay album, 2014’s Visa, the Finnish electronic musician more or less dipped out for six years, selling his hardware before returning with a new, more violent approach on last year’s Rakka and its sequel from this year. The individual elements of Ripatti’s music have always seemed suspended in midair—drums without a parent rhythm, errant flecks of dub bass, chords lost in space. But there was a heft to Rakka that defied physics; the sounds he used seemed too heavy to be so indifferent towards gravity. As luck would have it, that also describes a lot of the best footwork productions.
Listening to footwork as a non-dancer can feel like standing in a hurricane. On Fun Is Not a Straight Line, Ripatti is the hurricane, lifting errant sounds into his vortex with little regard for where they fall. The polyrhythms on tracks like “everyday” and “movathat” become so dense that the 160-bpm grounding of footwork becomes buried and the music approaches Meshuggah levels of rhythmic convolution. The snares are sharp enough to draw blood, but they adhere to no grid, and the kick drum is subsumed into a blur of toms and machine-gun rat-tat-tats. Pads blow coolly but offer little shelter from the sensory onslaught. One of Ripatti’s strengths is the way his music seems assembled by chance rather than produced, and that’s as true of Fun Is Not a Straight Line as it is of his more abstract work, like Entain or Whistleblower.
The one constant here is the rap samples that form the backbone of almost every track. He’s built up a whole library of them, some easy to spot (Rick Ross’s “Hustlin’,” Ty Dolla $ign’s “Drop That Kitty”), most clipped into unrecognizable bursts. Sometimes, like on “flowers” and “wants interlude,” these samples are melodic enough to allow a flash of color to enliven the album’s monochrome palette. But for the most part, Fun Is Not a Straight Line is a harsh, elemental blast, only marginally less relentless than the Rakka albums, its lean 39-minute length the only thing keeping it from overloading the listener. Both the name of the album and the lowercase, noncommittal-sounding track titles (“motherfuckyou,” “videophonekitty”) suggest this is an album he made for himself more than an auteurist statement. But what we get in turn is a little more challenging than “fun”: a cleansing trial, perhaps, something more like cryotherapy than a night at the club.
Ripatti has had a long career that includes high-water marks in both vocal house (Vocalcity, as Luomo) and ambient dub (Multila, as Vladislav Delay). Like Rakka, Fun Is Not a Straight Line comes across as a rebuke to fans who want sequels to those early achievements. A Bandcamp statement claims Ripatti found himself “frustrated by the inflexibility of the 4/4 house idiom,” which he hasn’t really worked in since Luomo’s Plus in 2011. He might also be frustrated by the albatross of Vocalcity, which he made more than 20 years ago and has largely disavowed. Vocalcity sounds as great now as it ever did, and the road to this new record is dotted with gems. But between Fun Is Not a Straight Line and the Rakka albums, it’s clear he’s in the middle of a white-hot burst of inspiration that’s not to be missed.

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The brilliant singer-songwriter's first 10 studio albums, cut during an 11-year span, have been gathered in this import box set. During this run, Mitchell charted one of the most solid career arcs in contemporary music that then detoured into one of the strangest.

Joni Mitchell: The Studio Albums 1968-1979

The Studio Albums 1968-1979

Joni Mitchell once called fame "a glamorous misunderstanding." As America's finest living Canadian songwriter (tied with Neil Young), few musicians have understood its nature so well. In the 1960s and 70s, Mitchell was Mary Magdalene to Dylan's folk-rock messiah, making music that was bittersweet and relatable, carrying what Dylan begat even further. Her work helped birth a new idiom that was personal and poetic, creating a new space for songs that made artistic statements, unbound by cliché and tradition. Such was the strength of her music that Mitchell's lyrics didn't have to make sense. But they did, particularly to women.
Mitchell's first 10 studio albums, cut during an 11-year span, have been gathered in this import box set. During this run, Mitchell charted one of the most solid career arcs in contemporary music that then detoured into one of the strangest, following her muse into places that very nearly cost her career and exhausted her fanbase's patience. Throughout, she was confident and unrepentant in her vision, in an era where that kind of ego was unbefitting a woman, even if she did have the gold albums and Grammys™ to back it up.
This is a basic set-- no frills, just all the albums' original layouts reproduced in envelope sleeves, the fonts so tiny only mice could read them. There are no extras, outtakes or re-anythinged. But taking these 10 records in a row, chronologically, it is a striking reminder no single artist has had a run like Joni (even her acolyte Prince only got to seven albums before he started to fall off). Mitchell was pop's first female auteur, an innovator of singular talent, whose influence was vast, immediate (see: Led Zeppelin's "Going to California") and long lasting (Joanna Newsom, St. Vincent, Taylor Swift's kiss'n'tell cottage industry).
Mitchell was "discovered" c. 1968 when ex-Byrd David Crosby pulled up in a sailboat outside the Florida club she was playing and took her to L.A. At the time, folk was out of fashion yet Mitchell managed to pull down an unprecedented major label deal for a girl and her guitar: total and complete artistic freedom, with the caveat that Crosby would produce her first album. It was rare for a woman to be writing and recording her own material at the time, let alone to be an unaccompanied solo act. Though Mitchell's debut, Song to a Seagull, was a heavy precedent for the era it's a harder listen now, the fin de siècle earth-mama lyrics playing strange against the stilted, formal musical settings. The delicate album suffers under Crosby's intrusive production; Mitchell would self-produce from then on.
Clouds (1969) is the introduction to Mitchell's real deal, shaking folk tradition and giving off a little humor and spirit. The album sounds casual. Lyrically, she was transitioning from the era's de facto hippie sensualism (colors! the weather! vibes!) to the classically prosodic style (Keats! Cohen!) she'd become known for. The album's biggest signs of life are two of her most famous songs-- the kicky "Chelsea Morning", which is about as straightforward as Mitchell ever got, and "Both Sides Now". Though she'd known burden and heartache plenty by her still-tender age (she'd borne a child alone and in secret after dropping out of art school and married singer Chuck Mitchell in order to make a family; he changed his mind a month later and she put the baby up for adoption) she sounds a bit too young and chipper to be singing about disillusionment. Still, Clouds was a landmark, and she landed a Grammy for Best Folk Performance.
Ladies of the Canyon from 1970 is Mitchell's most accessible album and it introduces her earnest folk-pop style. Her voice is newly elastic and expressive, and it's the first record where she sounds like she might actually be fun to hang out with. Ladies also features her generation-defining "Woodstock", "The Circle Game" (Mitchell's answer back to Neil Young's nostalgic "Sugar Mountain"), and her blustery gentrification sing-along, "Big Yellow Taxi". All were hippie-era sing-along staples; it hardly bears remarking that these songs are some of Mitchell's corniest.
The genius of Ladies is often circumscribed by Mitchell's proximity to CSNY; the vocal arrangement and production invariably propped to Crosby's influence, "Woodstock" supposedly inspired by Nash's recounting of the event (she wrote it before he'd even returned from the festival). If Ladies does bear the mark of CSNY, it's to the album's detriment. The fruits of the Nash/Mitchell romance-- his gee-whiz domestic ode, "Our House" and Ladies' "Willy"-- are saccharine at best. Their subsequent break up would inspire much more potent work-- Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" and Mitchell's follow-up.
About that follow-up: 1971's Blue is possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made. After Mitchell's relationship with Nash dissolved, she headed to Europe to lose the tether of her fame, eventually taking exile in a cave on the Greek island Crete. The trip would inspire the how-Joni-got-her-groove-back ditties "Carey" and "California". The album is suffused with melancholy for all that is missing: her daughter ("Little Green"), innocence ("The Last Time I Saw Richard"), and connection ("All I Want"). Mitchell bleeds diffidence and highlights it with spare notes plucked out on her Appalachian dulcimer. While her pals Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Laura Nyro were also pushing the singer-songwriter genre forward, none of them managed to stride the distance that Mitchell did here in a single album.
"Will you take me as I am/ Strung out on another man?" Mitchell pleads on "California". She was (in)famously strung out on other talents that were as mercurial as hers, fueling constant speculation as to whether this song was about Leonard Cohen, or that one about James Taylor or Nash or that puerile heartbreaker Jackson Browne. The year Mitchell issued Blue, an album that would be a landmark in any artist's career, Rolling Stone named her "Old Lady of the Year," a dismissal effectively saying her import was as a girlfriend or muse to the men around her more than as an artist in her own right. Worse still, they called her "Queen of El Lay," and offered a diagram of her supposed affairs and conquests. She'd made the best album of her career and in exchange she got slut-shamed in the biggest music magazine in America.
Mitchell retired to her homestead in Canada and returned sounding confident for 1972's For the Roses. Up until Roses she'd kept things minimal, here she stacked multi-tracks of impossible vocals harmonies, mimicking a horn section ("Let the Wind Carry Me") or interpolating and dueling with jazzer sideman Tom Scott's riffing woodwinds. Mitchell's vocals, fluttering unpredictably and with stunning control between the bottom of her range and the top of her crystalline contralto, were given a new stop; her heavy smoking had given her a heretofore non-existent midrange. There's really no singing along with Roses--  which is a fabulous fuck-you for a pop artist.
Though part of the reason that she'd retired from performing in 1969 was to avoid the default of writing about the myopic rock'n'roll life, Roses' standout track, "Blonde in the Bleachers", shows that she may have understood it better than any of the boys; it is one of the best songs ever written about the rules and (gender) roles of the road. "It seems like you've got to give up/ Such a piece of your soul /When you give up the chase," she sings, about finding identity and meaning in who you fuck. Freedom is an evergreen subject for Mitchell, but "Blonde in the Bleachers" gets beyond the thrill in partaking of what-- or, rather, who-- is offered up, backstage. The quiet story here is the ebbing power of a woman once she's been conquered.
Though Mitchell was criticized for not making blatantly feminist or political (read: sloganeering) albums, her work was always tacitly so. Her songs spotlight the unspoken roles of women ("Barandgrill"), who they were unrelated to men; she gave them names and precise details. There is hardly a more feminist topic than striving for a freedom that life and love has never allowed you. On "Woman of Heart and Mind", it's hard to tell whether she is mocking herself or the man she is singing to (or both): "Push your papers/ Win your medals/ Fuck your strangers/ Don't it leave you on the empty side /I'm looking for affection and respect." On Roses, Mitchell sounds like a woman who's had enough of everyone else's shit, an attitude that certainly put her in line with the libbers.
Her 1974 commercial break-out, Court and Spark, found her backed by first-call jazz session cats L.A. Express. It was her official severance from folk music. Court is her most pop album and gave her three chart hits, going gold five weeks after its release. Mitchell's production features heavy and sudden multi-tracked swells of her voice that spike melodies like a choir of accusing angels and mimic strings and horns. Her arrangement on "Down to You" (aided by Express bandleader Tom Scott) is stunning in its complexity, yet it never shakes you; it is still utterly a pop song.
Now six albums deep on the topic of love and loss, Court has a marked cynicism. It's a grown up album about arriving at the intractable issues of adult love. "Help Me", which was Mitchell's only top 10 hit, is reluctant about romance; she's "hoping for the future/ And worrying about the past." The refrain is pocked by the dawnlight realizations of that post-free love era: "We love our lovin'/ But not like we love our freedom." For the largeness of her band (which included Joe Sample of the Crusaders, and Larry Carlton, soon to be of every memorable Steely Dan guitar solo) they are nimble throughout; their finesse suited her own.
To explain how and what happened next in Mitchell's career-- how much her The Hissing of Summer Lawns was viewed as not a stylistic departure but a betrayal-- we must first look at the run up. While promoting Court, what could easily be defined as the commercial and artistic high-water mark of her career, Mitchell went to go see Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour and wound up joining. At the time, she was a peer of Dylan, commercially and as a songwriter, she was also tight with tour member Robbie Robertson of the Band. She had a song in the Billboard Top 10-- and she was opening. When Mitchell recounts this in later interviews, she talks about how being on the tour was a matter of constantly having to subvert her ego to the men around her.
At this same time, many of her peers were headed further toward the mainstream, towards syncopation, towards rock, towards retro revivalism. Mitchell saw there was not much of a place for her amongst the new talents and the Peter Pan-ing crew she came up with, as a woman in her early 30s, and she saw jazz as a genre that would allow her to age gracefully and expand as an artist-- and so there she went. She was trying to find or develop a place to belong.
Through all of this she arrived at Hissing of Summer Lawns.
The 1975 album marks Mitchell's official departure from the mainstream, her embarking upon her jazzbo journey. It's the album of an artist absolutely assured of herself, and it's addressed to anyone who might not consider her a serious musician, who believed all she could do was confess her heartache. Though it doesn't have the rhapsodic rep as Blue, it's unquestionably one of Mitchell's finest albums, and it is certainly her most timeless.
It opens easy enough with "In France They Kiss on Main Street"-- a soft, linear move from Court. What follows is jarring if you were expecting more of the same: "The Jungle Line" runs over a distorting sample of the Royal Drummers of Burundi tribal pounding and chanting. Mitchell going from husky to her enunciation so precise about "the mathematic circuits of the modern nights," the long, low whirring of a Moog running the melody line under Mitchell's acoustic strumming. The rest of the record is dark, tense, and lilts unapologetically toward something softer and more ornate than jazz fusion (no more than the later Steely Dan records it predated) with Mitchell singing observationally, about the place of women in the world, about the trade-offs they make for power and freedom.
Mitchell and women of her generation had been brought up with the idea that marriage to a man who took care of them would fulfill them entirely and that ambitions beyond that were frivolous. The album is a reckoning reflective of culture at the time; Hissing is an album of women trying to find their real selves in a world that had groomed them for quiet obeisance to men. On "Harry's House" Mitchell sings of a curdling domestic scene, of wives who "paper the walls to keep their gut reactions hid." The song dovetails into the standard "Centerpiece", which she sings in a voice not her own, playacting with this ultra-feminine throwback voice, creating a critical distance when she sings the lines: "I'm building all my dreams around you/ Our happiness will never cease/ 'Cause nothing's any good without you/ Baby you're my centerpiece." And on the subtlety devastating "Sweet Bird", she sings of women wielding power through beauty and youth, and what is lost and gained in that bargaining: "Power ideals and beauty/ Fading in everyone's hand" and "Calendars of our lives/ Circled with compromise."
Mitchell had never made a record that wasn't bigger than the one before and was shocked that her fans and many critics saw her new sound as an abandonment and misguided move, respectively. Reviewers chastised her for her ego. While the album went gold and brought her a Grammy nod, as her 1974 live album Miles of Aisles attests (a wonky fiasco, skip it) there were still plenty of people shouting for "Big Yellow Taxi". But that Joni didn't live here anymore. Hissing was proof. The era of Mitchell doing no wrong was over and if her audience couldn't hang, she wasn't about to do anything to reel them back in.
The two albums that followed are where Mitchell went off the grid. Hejira, from 1976, was written while driving alone from Maine to L.A. and is a meditation on the value and melancholy of being alone, her guitar imitating the rhythms and expanse of the road. In spots it's as emotionally bare as Blue. It's a real grown woman album and may not make tremendous sense to anyone under 30.
Musically, Mitchell says she was trying to see how far she could get from traditional rhythm; the songs are long and lovely, burbling and unspooling. Whether or not you feel this era of Mitchell is unfairly maligned depends on how you feel about Jaco Pastorious and his fretless bass and its many, many notes fardling way up high in the mix. His playing lends a darkly cinematic feeling to the album, but in the decades since his trademark sound and style have been taken to such unpleasant extremes by jam and light jazz bands, it's understandable to experience a visceral revulsion.
Inspired by the rhythms of Brazilian music, Mitchell issued the experimental double-album Don Juan's Reckless Daughter in '77. Her experiments went further than just musical; she appears in brownface and an afro wig as a man on the cover. Less commented on is her in "injun" costume on the back, palm raised, a bubble above her head reads "How!" (Her cringe-inducing arguments about it later on included statements about how she has a "black man's soul"). The album is solidly jazz-fusion, indulgent in length with still plenty of Jaco-dominance. But! there is reward in the album's centerpiece, if you can make it that far: The 16-minute "Paprika Plains" is a freakout of a song suite, inspired in part by a conversation with prickly ol' Bob Dylan. Even if you cannot abide by the album, we must be grateful for it, as it is Bjork's #1 favorite album and source of inspiration. The last piece in the box, Mingus, her 1979 collaboration with Charles Mingus before his death makes her seem like the jazz dilettante that people accused her of being. The ultimate result doesn't serve either of their legacies particularly well.
Though Mitchell's weird escapade through pop doesn't end where the box set does, she never recaptured the thread of popular imagination. Her 80s albums, like many of her hippie-era peers', were overbearing and scolding and featured awkward embraces of technology. She retired for long stretches to focus on her painting. Her last good record was 2000's Both Sides Now, where, her range ravaged by decades of smoking, she sings the definitive version of the titular song that launched her career and finally sounds like she's seen enough to know.


Taken from a rousing 2023 reunion show, the UK stalwarts offer another souvenir double-live album filled with aged and elegant takes from the core of their songbook.

Live at Wembley Stadium

Blur’s latest resurgence came crashing down at Coachella 2024, where the reunited quartet encountered an audience indifferent and ignorant to the very notion of Britpop. It was a far cry from the crowds Blur found at Wembley Stadium a half year earlier. Early in July 2023, just weeks prior to the release of their comeback album, The Ballad of Darren, Blur played a pair of shows at the iconic London venue, greeted by punters primed to revisit the glory days of Cool Britannia.
The cavernous confines of Wembley may have been new territory for Blur but reunions are commonplace for the band. In the waning days of the 2000s, they mounted their first return, regrouping not much later to play a Hyde Park concert aligned with the closing ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics. Both of these events were commemorated with the release of a souvenir double-live album, as is the 2023 show in the form of Live at Wembley Stadium, which is also accompanied by Blur: To The End, a feature-length documentary chronicling the band’s comeback. Available in a plethora of formats, Live at Wembley Stadium is best heard in its double-CD/triple LP incarnation which contains the entirety of the Sunday show, the second and final concert Blur played during its Wembley stint, a performance that carries a tangible sense of triumph: This is a band eager to commune with its devoted followers.
Those listeners were ready to indulge in nostalgia, anxious to bellow “Parklife!” the moment Phil Daniels hit the stage to once again reprise his starring role from 1994. From a certain angle, that’s precisely what Blur delivered, devoting their set to the hits and album cuts that comprise their core songbook. No less than 16 of its 30 songs were also featured on Parklive, the album commemorating their 2012 performance, confirmation that the Blur canon is fairly entrenched. As commonplace as these tunes may be, the music feels considerably different than Parklive, a record that now plays like a jubilant relic of pre-Brexit Britain. Tempos are slower, particularly on such breakneck rockers as “Popscene” and “Advert,” there’s evident gravel in Damon Albarn’s voice, and Blur on the whole seems heavier, thanks in no small part to an added ballast in the rhythm section.
Such subtle differences are part of aging; individual bodies change, as does collective chemistry. Blur certainly sounds older on Live at Wembley Stadium than they did on their previous live albums, yet those scars lend poignance to these familiar songs. The erosion in Albarn’s voice diminishes his impishness, adding a sense of empathy to his cultural observations. This is especially true in “Tracy Jacks” and “End of a Century,” songs written by a twentysomething wondering about “getting past 40” and how “the mind gets dirty as you get closer to 30,” now delivered with a wistful air by a singer on the far side of 50. Instrumentally, Blur accomplishes something similar. They still can play “Song 2” with burly credibility yet they seem mightier summoning cascades of psychedelic noise on “Trimm Trabb,” “Oily Water” and “This Is a Low” in versions that feel earthy and elegant.
It helps that, unlike many modern live records, Live at Wembley Stadium actually feels alive. Albarn fumbles lyrics on “Beetlebum” and “Country House” and becomes overwhelmed with emotion singing “Under the Westway,” an elegy to London. Graham Coxon’s gnarly guitar runs ramshod over the vocals, while the bass of Alex James careens across the steady rhythms of Dave Rowntree. The quartet seems thrilled by the clamor they conjure and they’re able to channel that energy into the ballads, providing a nervy counterpoint to the middle-aged melancholia that underpins The Ballad of Darren. Where that studio affair offered a long meditation on maturation, the concert setting here prevents extended reflection; there’s a crowd to consider, after all. Blur nevertheless brings the bittersweet pulse to the forefront, particularly in the closing stretch that pairs recent single “The Narcissist” with “The Universal,” a song whose premonition of a numb, narcotized 21st Century has come to pass. That shift in the culture isn’t acknowledged outright but it’s felt, providing a wistful undercurrent on an album that’s a ripping entertainment.


After posting an online message about his financial troubles, and then receiving help from his fans, the Winnipeg producer Venetian Snares posted Thank You for Your Consideration on Bandcamp. The collection bursts with the explosive strangeness and mathematical focus that defines much of his best work. It's also an argument for a more human view of technology.

Venetian Snares: Thank You for Your Consideration

Thank You for Your Consideration

"I am suddenly in very serious financial trouble," Aaron Funk, better known as the producer Venetian Snares, posted on Twitter and Facebook at the end of August. "If you've ever enjoyed my music, I badly need your help asap." Two weeks later, his fans had delivered and, shortly thereafter, so did Funk. At face value, Thank You for Your Consideration could be seen as Funk's version of "pulling a Beyoncé"—which, as of 2015, is often shorthand for the way new music is released. But unlike Bey, or Drake, or Björk, the Winnipeg producer's new record was neither accompanied by a plea for remuneration (fans had already donated without any promise of a reward), nor was it part of a larger marketing scheme (the album was posted on Bandcamp, rather than released via Funk's longtime label, Planet Mu). Instead, like much of Funk's work that came before, Thank You for Your Consideration's release was enigmatic, raw, and, one must assume, sincere: "Thanks for having my back and caring about me and the music I make," he wrote.
For about a decade beginning in the late '90s, Funk was a restless creative force—dropping album after album of breakcore beats in a deluge that resulted in some of the decade’s most arresting electronic music. At his creative peak—arguably 2005's ambitious, classically-inspired Rossz Csillag Alatt Született—it wasn’t uncommon for Funk to issue several releases a year. But eventually, his output slowed to more human levels. Four years passed between 2010’s My So-Called Life and 2014’s My Love Is a Bulldozer and, in that time, Funk himself seemed to cede momentum to artists whose own sounds softened or refined parts of the one he helped create (Death Grips, Gobby, the Range, and the Vaporwave aesthetic all owe much to the road he paved).
One might guess, then, because of the nature of its release and Funk's prolific recording schedule, that Thank You for Your Consideration is cobbled together from different stages of his career, or simply a collection of tracks he never planned to release at all. As he told XLR8R last year: "I think I still make the same amount of music, I just barely show it to anyone anymore." While that may be the case, unlike other odds-and-ends albums, Consideration's 14 tracks come off as remarkably—and appropriately—considered when taken as a whole. While last year's My Love Is a Bulldozer saw Funk experimenting with his own vocals to beguiling results and this year's Your Face showed a more condensed side to Snares' sound, Thank You for Your Consideration bursts with the explosive strangeness and mathematical focus that defines much of his best work. The album's intricately programmed drums have the loose feel of much of his mid-2000s aesthetic and Funk's dynamic time signatures spin like rogue gyroscopes feeding off their own entropy.
The album opens with "Smersonality", a wobbly production whose groove is driven by spazzed-out synths and jazzed-up beats. For longtime fans, it's a return to form; for newcomers, it may recall Zach Hill by way of Aphex Twin. Venetian Snares' music is often purposefully difficult to swallow in large doses, but more often than not there's a cleverness and humor that rewards deeper listens. "Koopa Cookies", whose name portends the glitchy chiptune that erupts from the song's placid opening, plays like a boss battle where Mario's mushrooms aren't of the legal variety. Further down the road, "Thousand Mile Stare" is a jungle track with a vocal sample as sinister as its razor-blade synths. Funk has also always been capable of tempering high-octane drum and bass with less combustible fare. "Beside the Past by a Lake", for example, uses a retro-futuristic palette to paint a scene that's as soothing as it is unnerving without feeling disjointed.
While the unnamed circumstances that led to Thank You for Your Consideration are no doubt terrible for Funk's personal life, the fact that a plea can be answered, and that an artist can return that favor in kind just weeks later, is the sort of story that illustrates the adaptability of the Internet. While jaded listeners may view each new leak and mixtape as the next piece of a perpetual PR machine, Consideration is an argument for a more human view of technology. (As is clear from a recent FACT interview, there's perhaps nobody more jaded by the music industry, or music criticism, than Funk himself.) From the patient, apocalyptic drone of "09sept09" to the synapse-sizzling electro of "Ötvenöt 3", Thank You stands for itself. But it's difficult to ignore the context: "Still royally screwed, yet you've made me so feel supported and loved," he wrote when linking to the album. Like much of Funk's best music, it's a statement filled with tension and contradiction.


Frank Ocean has quickly proven himself to be among the most gifted singer-songwriters of his generation. His major-label debut swings from Stevie-style keyboard breeziness to 90s R&B to mystic psych rock to crunching 8-bit funk without thinking twice. It already feels like a classic.

Channel Orange

Frank Ocean is airborne, looking around, taking it all in. "Up above the birds, I saw the sky like I never seen before," he whispers on his major-label debut, Channel Orange, as avian chirps surround him. "You thought I was above you." The 24-year-old has quickly proven himself to be among the most gifted singer-songwriters of his generation; he's got the type of voice, wit, charm, smarts, and ineffable humanity that's always hoped for, but never promised. And he's got every reason to think he's above the vividly realized lost souls that slouch, preen, and weep throughout his album. But that's not how Frank Ocean works. His lofty gaze is powerful, but not all-powerful. "What's a god to a non-believer who don't believe in anything?" he sang on Watch the Throne's "No Church in the Wild". He's so good at questioning that answers can't help but bubble up in the wake of his words.
Along with Ocean's empathy for his characters is a sense of repose-- he's been there, he's weathered it, and he's come away with his Zen-like calm intact. On Channel Orange, this serene deadpan is splashed with crackling emotion, as though he's alternately narrating and starring in his own Magnolia-style cross-wired-heartbreak epic. It's all there on proper opener "Thinkin Bout You", where he battles his own brain while reminiscing about a first love. He tells himself white lies in the verse before flipping to a falsetto that could make D'Angelo sweat for the endless wound of a chorus: "Do you not think so far ahead?/ Cause I've been thinkin bout forever."
When Ocean dropped an early take of "Thinkin Bout You" on his Tumblr last summer, it was quickly followed by a version from perfectly competent Roc Nation signee Bridget Kelly, who claimed Ocean originally wrote the song for her. The fact that Ocean's take dwarfs Kelly's both artistically as well as in terms of popularity is telling. After languishing as a behind-the-scenes writer for pop stars including Brandy, John Legend, and Justin Bieber, with "Thinkin Bout You" Ocean doubled down on the out-of-nowhere success of his unique and brilliant 2011 mixtape, Nostalgia, Ultra., marking his territory as a performer in his own right. And while he's now primarily writing songs for himself, his time toiling in L.A. studios gave him the experience to create a piece as accomplished and varied as Channel Orange, which swings from Stevie-style keyboard breeziness to 1990s bap&B to mystic psych rock to crunching 8-bit funk without thinking twice.
The "Thinkin Bout You" mix-up was telling for another reason, too. As written, it's by-and-large a unisex composition, and the line, "my eyes don't shed tears, but boy they pour when I'm thinkin bout you," didn't seem especially revealing since Ocean wrote the song for a woman. In light of the letter he published earlier this month, in which he stated that his first love, at age 19, was with a man, that line-- and others on the album-- gains some personal and historical context. For a culture that accurately prides itself on sonic progression, hip-hop and R&B can be woefully conservative when it comes to sexuality. This is changing, and Frank Ocean is helping it to change, and if his revelation inspires others to understand themselves or the world more fully, then that could be one of Channel Orange's finest legacies. But it will not be the album's only legacy.
Aside from its bravery, Ocean's letter was, in itself, stunningly written. Its beautiful ambiguities had people reacting with sensational headlines, and then amending those sensational headlines, and then thinking about how and why they personally reacted to such sensational headlines. More questions; more answers. After realizing he was in love with a man, Ocean "reminisced about the sentimental songs I enjoyed when I was a teenager. the ones I played when I experienced a girlfriend for the first time. I realized they were written in a language I did not yet speak." And, whether consciously or not, Channel Orange's language is admirably-- and skillfully-- inclusive. Rather than getting listeners to comb through the lyrics for certain words or references, Ocean mixes things up so well-- and coats the entire affair with heavy doses of disorienting surreality-- that petty pronoun policing is rendered completely useless as deeper meanings reveal themselves at the same time.
While pop is currently in the golden age of exacting self-reflection-- an often beguiling phenomenon spurred on by the internet's infinite mirror-- Ocean is interested in a more selfless pursuit. "As a lifestyle, you always being the focal point is innately unhealthy," Ocean recently told The New York Times. "I like the anonymity that directors can have about their films. Even though it's my voice, I'm a storyteller." Those tales are as wide-ranging as they are engrossing, always benefitting from Ocean's eye for detail and specificity. There are sly California class observations in the vein of Joan Didion or Randy Newman, where latchkey "Super Rich Kids" can't see past their own one-percent "Sweet Life". But once again, Ocean isn't just sniping easy targets; "why see the world when you got the beach?" he asks, a Rorschach test of a hook that leaves its levels of bliss or cynicism wholly up to the listener.
There are plenty of addicts on the back half of the album: the fiend at the center of "Crack Rock" whose family "stopped inviting you to things" and "won't let you hold their infant," or the poisoned relationship between a dealer and his mule on "Lost". On the record's most harrowing cut, "Bad Religion", Ocean is crippled by love and left searching for life's answers in the back of a cab-- the string-bleeding ballad finds the singer offering his most impassioned plea yet: "This unrequited love/ To me it's nothing but a one man cult and cyanide in my styrofoam cup/ I could never make him love me."
While Channel Orange is stuffed with one-of-a-kind details and characters, its overall scope is grand, as is Ocean's. Tape-hiss interludes bind these very hi-fi songs together with a musty analog quality, and a couple of tracks seem to end mid-sentence, leaving you no choice but to keep going. And there's a timeless philosophy involved here, one of hard-won acceptance and the acknowledgement that love and sex and loss will always draw legends to them. How else to explain "Pyramids", a 10-minute time warp that goes from ancient Egyptian wonders to modern strip clubs and essentially reincarnates one of the most storied female rulers in history as a six-inch-heeled woman of the night. But still, the song doesn't read as an indictment of the last 2,000 years as much as yet another attempt to cleverly level the playing field.
"holding my head. keeping it g [...] whatever 'keeping it g' means to me. i've sorta zoned in on my own definition." Frank wrote that on December 27, 2011-- the same day he wrote the "first love" letter he published last week. Both missives, along with Channel Orange itself, carry the same spirit of confident, open-minded redefinition; he's living in his own world, but also fascinated with what's around him. Currently, his Twitter bio reads: "i don't know anything. & neither do you." In Frank Ocean-speak, that's not a statement of ignorance but rather one of wisdom.


Stymied by formulaic collaborations and unmemorable beats, the rapper’s latest has the ingredients of a really good Future album but lacks the depth of one.

I Never Liked You

“Toxic” is both the best and worst thing to happen to Future. Over the course of his immortal four-project run in the mid-2010s—Monster, Beast Mode, 56 Nights, and Dirty Sprite 2—the word became the defining trait of his persona. As he emerged as one of rap’s biggest superstars, it was like his conscience was telling him one thing and his masculinity another. But “toxic” also flattened the emotional complexity and thoughtfulness of Future’s songwriting. He wrote brooding sagas about self-inflicted heartbreak; candid reflections on the drugs that he blamed for his pain and relied on to heal it, too; turn-up joints about a life of luxury layered with the sense that he was overcompensating for lost love. Often on these tapes, he could go through all those feelings in one verse, blurring reality and myth.
But since then, despite some great moments—specifically 2017’s HNDRXX—Future has increasingly become a caricature of himself. His writing started to feel one-dimensional, embellishing the Future persona with even more devious lines. His stories used to contain mistakes and melodrama, but lately it feels like the goal is to get one over on the women he sings about. His latest album I Never Liked You—the title sounds like a breakup note passed in the back of a middle-school classroom—has the ingredients of a really good Future album but lacks the depth of one. It plays it safe by continuing to lean too hard on the schtick.
Still, Future is such a slick rapper and vocalist that his songs are pretty fun even when the lyrics feel routine. “I’m Dat Nigga” introduces a bunch of subtle yet exciting change-ups to his flow: He accelerates for a couplet, slows down for the next, and by the end, he’s in full boastful monologue mode. The eeriness of “Puffin on Zootiez” might make you believe Future is saying more than he actually is, but it’s OK because his downbeat yet rapid delivery and the ornate instrumental carry the song. The repetitive but memorable “Chickens” is a highlight, as Future embraces the cartoonish side of his character and gets a fresh burst of energy from EST Gee’s menace.
But Gee is the only collaboration on the album that feels inspired; the others are so formulaic that they’re indistinguishable. Check “Wait For U” with Drake: Sampling Tems’ “Higher” is a cheat code to a catchy song, but Future and Drake are on such autopilot that I’d rather listen to the original. The other joint with Drake, “I’m on One,” wouldn’t have even made the cut for What a Time to Be Alive. “For a Nut,” with Young Thug and Gunna, is the bottom of the barrel. The song is supposed to be a sleazy, darkly funny good time, but the lyrics are so half-assed that they come off more like a parody.
Throughout, it’s also apparent that Future doesn’t have that producer anymore. Here, it’s supposed to be ATL Jacob, who has some hot ones—the operatic “Holy Ghost” might be the best beat on the whole album—but his instrumentals don’t have any signature flourishes: They sound like how a Future album is supposed to sound, rather than how the best ones actually do. Almost all the beats on a tape like 2012’s Pluto share the same Atlanta trap foundation, but depending on who is at the helm, the interpretation is distinct. I Never Liked You lacks that creativity and irreverence.
It might feel unfair to compare ATL Jacob’s work to a few of the best-produced records of the last decade—and possibly the problem lies in the beat selection process—but this is a Future album and the bar should be higher. It’s hard to be excited when you’ve already heard him make music that sounds just like this, except better. No song represents that quite like “Love You Better.” It’s the type of moody heartbreak ballad that formed the pulse of that classic four-project run: There’s the chopped-up vocal sample, the whimpering croons, the lyrics where he sounds like he’s apologizing to a girlfriend but is really trying to manipulate her into feeling sorry for him. It sounds nice, but I feel indifferent. The heartbreak doesn’t have to be real, but it has to feel genuine, and with Future it just doesn’t anymore.