Mitski - "Your Best American Girl". People tell you, when you're young, that music moves in cycles. They say that your favourite new band sounds like their favourite old band; they say it's retro, re-heated, re-hashed. You say no. You say no this is a bit like that shitty dusty old band but mostly it's different; this is fresh and utterly, absolutely alive. Your favourite new band is the most important thing in the world and it is like a jewel hidden in the cabinet of your chest, something no one who is older can fully understand. You say this with absolute certainty, staring them straightly, darkly, in the eyes. Your gaze does not waver. It doesn't drop. You know it. This is young and whole and wholly mine.

But then of course you yourself get older. After ten years of listening, fifteen, twenty, you have the same straight, dark gaze. You have the same seriousness of listening, you hope you do. Yet there are more lines around your eyes. A skepticism has set in, or a weariness. You have heard so much music, so much whole and transformative music; so much music has meant so much to you; and now the cycles have come round and round and there are things that sound so much like the things you discovered at the beginning, and the feeling you have is that this music is redundant. That it is attempting something that others already attempted. (It's attempting something that others already attempted and, perhaps, others already solved.)

Perhaps you say so to the kids. You tell them their favourite new band sounds like your favourite old band. You say it's re-heated. And they stare at you with their dark young eyes.

Because you're wrong.

You're not mistaken but you're wrong. Because listening to music should not be a conversation about knowledge, a conversation about taste. It should not be a conversation about evaluating a song's antecedents. Those conversations run into dead-ends: stubbornness, defensiveness, distrust of elders, contempt for youth. Fundamentally they run into the dead-end of each of our accumulated sets of experiences, unique and incomprehensible. "Knowledge" starts with self-knowledge, "taste" is secret, incontestable.

Instead, we should come to these conversations the same way we come to weddings.

We sit and listen. With flowers and booze, manners, affection, our gladdest garments. Our friends tell us about their love and we try to let that love light and fill the space. We do not question it; we do not compare it; we do not challenge it against the other loves we have known or witnessed. While the wedding lasts, until the last toes leaves the dance floor, we do everything we can to feel each other's happiness.

Everything new is also old. In youth we should try harder to understand the way we are linked by our loves to all the songs and singers and listeners that came before, the string of dark straight looks that leads back through yesterday to long ago. In older years, with that flimsy experience, we should be humble enough to learn that the shadings of a new thing matter: that the smallest aspects of its reinvention can amount to transformation. It matters that a synthesizer is playing this part; or it matters that the line is about an email, not a letter; or it matters that a woman is singing these lines. It matters that a young person is singing these lines, a young person more like you.

Mitski's "Your Best American Girl" is a wondrous song. It sounds like music I have heard before and it is also a transformation. Loving and rending, wisely demanding, rock'n'roll with its furnace in the grass. Measured syllables, guitars as loud as bagpipes, the flash of a ring as it's thrown through the air.

[buy]

Vince Staples - "Loca"
Vince Staples - "Lemme Know"

Summertime '06 is called what it's called and it came out last June, but really it's an album for the sharpest corners of winter, the way it keeps lacing the spring's slow approach, even when the light starts to change over for real. Cold splintered in the wind like stray glass, all kinds of whisper and drift in the air. Staples raps with this clenched-teeth diamond-throated supernatural jittering leanness, a calm that's half a molecule away from total chaos in every syllable. An object lesson in how stillness and frenzy aren't anything as simple as opposites. His anxiety, all through these songs, all through this album, is so pervasive that every other impulse starts and ends inside of it. You can hear it in the background even when he's pausing, in the echoes that skitter across each song, you can hear it when you're walking home with your headphones in at night along an empty street in a cold that wants to claim you even as it's beginning to dissolve. Sexy in how bad it wants to teach you a lesson or grasps to be taught one, sexy in its stainless steel, its strobing. Staples can't rap over a beat if it doesn't sound like a stuttering heart. He can't ask if you wanna fuck without checking to see if you're down to die in the same steady, gasping breath.

[buy Summertime '06]

The Pathetic and Elegant - "And You're Still Here" [Buy]

So I updated my IOS on my iphone4 and my ipad.

Well, for my iphone 4, people told me not to update so it was an accident. So far seems fine. People also told me to walk like a penguin when sidewalks are icy because penguins got its center of balance right so I did walk like a penguin but I fell on ice like an penguin too. Never trust anyone.

Anyways, to update your IOS, Steve Jobs asks me to log into Apple ID or whatever iCloud or something. The problem is that I barely log into Apple ID or iCloud so I don't remember the password. I have two passwords I use mainly for things like email log in etc. Obviously, I won't tell you but they are band names from 90's.

Let's say, those band names I use often are collective soul and soul asylum.

Oh! and at least, one of the letter has to be upper case.

cOllective sOul ? or sOul asylum ?

And they ask to have numbers in my password to be strong!

cOllective sOul69 ? or sOul69asylum ?

All of these combined, the possibility is infinite to me.

3.14ColleCtivesoul ? or sOUL3.1495ASylum ?

Because every time, I try to log in to download app or something, I don't remember and I try so many times and the account log in gets locked out for security reason. Then, I have to click "forget password" with email address and it says "wrong email." Then, I click on "forget your email" and go through it. I felt like a hacker trying to get into pentagon or FBI but in this case, my own brain is the highly secured information.

Because, I reset passwords so many times, now they started to say, "you can't use same password used within an year."

fuck sakes! I just wanted to type eatshitasshole for my password.

anyways, I calmed down and realized it was just a first world problem. So I had a glass of milk and started to watch food documentary on Netflix eating melon ice cream

but then, wi-fi was glitchy like Aphex Twin song.

Fuck! I said it again but realized it was another first world problem so I went to bed dreamed about world with free wi-fi.

The end (sorry for bad language parental discretion wasn't advised but it's human nature.)

Alvvays - "Next of Kin"

Walking down the rocky beach is a good way to spend an afternoon, especially if the wind is up to keep the bugs off. Sometimes at the head of the beach a golden dog barks at us from a house in the distance, but he means no harm. Walking on rocks requires care and balance, looking down and putting a foot on one rock and the other foot on another and trying not to slip. At the pond a frightened duck always flies off in a perfectly straight line. Further down the beach I once saw an eagle up close, and another time an osprey dove into the harbour and flew off with a wriggling fish in its talons.

A ways past the old camp there are a few patches of salicornia growing along the shore of the marsh. Standing a few centimetres tall, they grow in clumps, and look like tiny trees from another planet. I crouch down and pick the stems, making sure not to tear out the root. They're salty, but also moist and incredibly fresh tasting. After a bit of snacking we continue on to the headland, or past it, and then turn around and go back home for supper.

[buy]

(photo by Spike)