No it’s not.
This is not vengeful straight-girl punk rock. This is not what you hear on the radio before Maroon 5.
This is complicated, rich, textured, jazzy, funky, and relevant as fuck.
This is a concept album telling the story of our lives. The Great-American-Novel, except it’s the Great-American-Album.
A few hours ago, I was sipping ice water after an indulgent taco dinner with brand new friends. We were doing a polite amount of political commiseration…which has been happening a lot since 2016, whatever happened then. The increasing violence in Israel hit my new friend hard.
“What gives you hope?” she asked in the kind of bold honesty that made us instant friends.
I’m not a parent, and teaching is not the reason I wake up in the morning (though it is the reason I wake up at 6:15…hissss). There’s one reason I don’t run my car over a cliff every day, and that’s the act of creation. Feeling my leaves bloom in places where I was told not to, where others laugh due to an inability to see the layers and shades. Seeing other leaves bloom. Contributing to the ever-expanding mosaic that oblivion stretches to hold.
“Music is so good now,” I said. “Funk isn’t just funk. It’s jazz. It’s pain. It’s a goddamn ecosystem of sound.” I was never even into funk. But then Tame Impala happened, and I started paying attention to the texture and movement of funk.
And then DOMi & JD BECK took me on a waterslide through ethereal modulations so seamlessly, I closed my eyes and believed in gardens again.
It isn’t just funk either. When I think of Sleep Token’s Take Me Back to Eden, Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter, BoyGenius’s The Record, DOMi & JD Beck’s Not Tight, Caroline Polachek’s Desire, I Want to Turn into You, Knower’s Knower Forever, and the face-brick juggernaut that is Paramore’s This is Why, I’m reminded of how adversity tends to evoke the greatest music of all time.
Russian symphonies from the WWII era are the best symphonies. Shostakovich’s Leningrad is unmatched. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances.
And then there’s Mozart, composer of over 800 musical pieces, while Austria was going through The Seven Year’s War, The Third Silesian War, War of Bavarian Succession, and the reign of “Enlightened Despotism.”
Do you know any symphonies from contexts of prosperity and stability? No, you don’t. Because there’s no reason to write them.
One actual thing I agree with boomers on is America’s golden years of music. It is scientific fact that American music from the 60s and 70s is peak. My Gen Z students know Jimmy Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane. They don’t know Hansen, and they never will.
So when I think about the fact that so much global power lies in the hands of lazy assholes who haven’t evolved beyond “shit, fuck, and murder,” I plug into sound. I feel the deep wounds of the earth and its children sing to me, and I feel a collective pulse.
Yeah, we’re not gonna make it as a species, I think that’s pretty clear. But the end isn’t here yet. There are still many waves ahead. If the economy and human rights violations ever calm down again (it’d be nice to stop killing the planet too, but one can only dream), I hope we experience a musical cool-down reminiscent of the 80s. There was a brash audacity to that synth. There was an ease with the euphoric frivolity of “Billy Jean” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”
Obviously, the 80s weren’t “chill” either, if you talk to any gay person who lived through the period. But that’s the decade I entered the world. And I’d love to leave it during a similar wave of music, going into that good night with neon veins and big hair.
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