Essays
The World is a Beautiful Place…’s Whenever, If Ever Turns 10
The cover of TWIABP’s Whenever, If Ever depicts a gangly, pubescent kid taking a plunge into a green, murky swimming hole. The sprawling band, then comprising eight members onstage and 10 on-record, was audibly restless, unsatisfied, and desperate, straining at their tethers to escape their hometowns. The artwork screams: Fuck it, let’s jump.
Without Wayne Shorter’s Weather Report, Jazz Rap Wouldn’t Be What It Is
Weather Report, the jazz fusion group co-founded by the brilliant Wayne Shorter, is integral to the rap subgenre known as jazz rap. In honor of his passing, we look back on his group’s impact on hip hop.
Young Thug’s 1017 Thug Turns 20
Once upon a time, one faction was convinced Young Thug was a threat to rap’s traditional values, while the other treated him like a divine being with no stylistic precedent. The degree to which he’s since pulled the rest of the genre into his orbit makes those days feel like the Old Testament. We all stuttered our way to wildly oppositional conclusions, but the initial reaction was the same: what the actual fuck.
Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf Turns 20
Queens Of The Stone Age’s third album is loosely set on the drive from LA to Joshua Tree National Park, near the band’s home base of Palm Desert. Don’t call it a concept album, but these 60 minutes of tightly coiled hard rock do a hell of a job depicting a cranked-up odyssey between teeth-grinding Inland Empire traffic and the highway hypnosis-inducing landscapes of the Mojave desert.
El-P’s Fantastic Damage Turns 20
Everyone ascribed a “post-9/11” sentiment to Fantastic Damage because they were finally catching up to the corroded worldview that El-P had been espousing for years. Left to his own devices, El burrowed deeper into his psyche, communing with his memories of growing up in New York but also capturing his city’s hellish modernity in ways no other pen or MPC has, before or since.
A$AP Rocky’s LIVE.LOVE.A$AP Turns 10
By the time LIVE.LOVE.A$AP was released 10 years ago this Halloween, Rocky had graduated from internet hype. He and the rest of A$AP Mob were tapped as the Next Big Thing that New York had been unsuccessfully searching for since the mid 2000s. But there was one facet of Rocky’s whole package that people couldn’t wrap their heads around at the time: His music didn’t sound like New York hip-hop.
Unwound’s Leaves Turn Inside You Turns 20
Unwound’s early output is very much classic-era post-hardcore — the guitars were loud, the vocals and rhythms idiosyncratic, the lyrics intelligently impenetrable. Considering their DIY cred, insistence on playing all-ages shows, and history of touring with artists like Fugazi and Sonic Youth, Unwound may have seemed like the genre’s new torch-bearers going into the mid-’90s. It’s harder to connect those dots to Leaves Turn Inside You.
The Weeknd’s House of Balloons Turns 10
The early 2010s were a boom time for drooling over performative anonymity, as well as making a big fuss about hybridizing indie music and R&B, two things the Weeknd did expertly from day one. The skeevy American Apparel/Terry Richardson aesthetics of his single and mixtape art, the Beach House samples, the idea of taking The-Dream’s darkest, weirdest impulses even further down the rabbit hole, the Drake cosign — there’s no way to overstate how en vogue it all was.
Indie Music’s Not Immune to Fascism
Fascism has infiltrated indie music the same way that we’ve seen it infiltrate seemingly every other institution or scene in the past five years. A VICE founder supports Trump; Lil Wayne supports Trump; hell, the actress who played Anna on The OC supports Trump — why would we expect this vast genre of music to be immune?
Waka Flocka Flame’s Flockaveli Turns 10
“Hard in the Paint”’s individual elements — menacing synth-brass, triplet-heavy percussion, top-of-the-lungs yelling, an ad-lib track just as active as the lead vocals — all existed, in some form or another, in pre-2010 street rap, namely Gangsta Grillz tapes like Jeezy’s 2006 monster Streetz Is Watchin. But when combined into a no-holds-barred Royal Rumble, the result is absolutely jarring, a maxed-stats video game character running over everything in its path.
The Microphones’ It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water Turns 20
It Was Hot further solidified Elverum’s sound, sacrificing none of its predecessor’s roughshod charm while corralling its wilder impulses into more purposeful statements. As is abundantly clear on “the Pull,” there are still neck-snapping transitions between light and dark, soft and heavy, but each part’s more well-defined in relation to the other.
Three 6 Mafia’s Mystic Stylez Turns 25
Mystic Stylez laid the groundwork for Three 6’s path to domination. Combining pulpy horror, gangsta rap, and murky sounds from the Memphis underground, Three 6 landed on a formula that would fuel one of the late ‘90s and early 2000s’ most dominant Southern rap dynasties like Cash Money or No Limit.
Neil Peart Believed in the Freedom of Music
All the negative stereotypes of rock drummers — that they exist only to keep time, that they don’t contribute to composition, that they don’t write lyrics, that they get by on brute force rather than elegance — wither and die in the shadow of Neil Peart. The longtime Rush drummer, who died at 67 this week following a three-year battle with brain cancer, smashed all previous perceptions of rock drummers and redefined the capabilities of two sticks rhythmically hitting flat surfaces.
Kid Cudi’s Man on the Moon Turns 10
As pedestrian as his lyrics can be, as ambitiously overdriven as his musical goals often are, Cudi is important to his fans in a way that transcends artistic merit. And just as Cudi makes artists who are hugely popular in their own right look like fanboys, he often inspires criticism that resembles a fanblog.