Japanese Breakfast Blooms, Danny Brown Gets Shown Up, and More...
What I'm Listening To in March 2021
Every month, I keep an ongoing playlist of songs that I want to keep in my listening rotation. These could be singles, loosies, album standouts, or just songs I can’t get out of my head, but they often have some significance to my own life or the state of the world. March was a transition from the cold winter of our discontent to the lukewarm spring of our mild discontent. Things are getting better, though, at least weather-wise, and a tinge of hope is bleeding into some of the songs I’ve been listening to.
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Japanese Breakfast
Be Sweet
As of late, I’ve been watching the trees. I’m waiting for them to become green again. Every season I have the same fear: what if they don’t? What if they stay skinny and barren forever? Every year I know it can’t be true, that the small, flowering buds are a sign that leaves are going to be here soon, but every year I ask myself, what would we do if they don’t? If the trees abandon us? They never do, though. There’s always spring.
The frost is melting. The flowers are emerging. The vaccines are going into our arms. The longest winter of many of our lives is nearly over. Japanese Breakfast seems ready to usher in this new spring.
It feels like she’s emerging into a spring of her own as well. After the gentle melancholy of Soft Sounds from Another Planet, Michelle Zauner is breaking through ennui to slap some bass into our hearts. She seems to be embracing a poppier direction, one that amplifies the 80s synth sound she sometimes plays with.
The lyrics give us a new season as well: “Recognize your mistakes and I'll let you back in/ Realize not too late, loved you always/ Make it up to me, you know it's better.” There’s a genuine desire for forgiveness there, especially when you just read the lyrics. That’s refreshing enough. But Zauner’s winking delivery makes the song playful; I’d even go so far as to say that she’s giving a little Carly Rae Jepsen.
Japanese Breakfast is reminding us to have fun, even in the wake of something not so fun. We deserve something sweet!
The Weeknd
Wicked Games
We can be sweet, but sometimes we can be a little sour [insert smiling purple devil emoji]. This month, Abel Tesfaye rereleased the original version of his hit 2011 mixtape House of Balloons, apparently with mixes and samples that were altered when The Trilogy was first released on streaming. As someone who hasn’t returned to that collection much, I just have to take Abel’s word for it.
The mixing is nice and muddy, especially on the guitar-looping “Wicked Games.” That’s not the only thing on the song that’s a little banged-up; The Weeknd is bringing his A-game when it comes to druggy, demon-time toxicity. The common narrative is that Future is the king of two-timing, woman-playing dudes, but early-2010s Weeknd gives him a run for his money.
The song starts off strong: “I left my girl back home/ I don’t love her no more/ And she’ll never fuckin know that” feels like something an old, scratchy-voiced blues singer would say if he was also sitting on a key of coke. “Let me see that ass/ look at all this cash;” Abel knows the beats he needs to hit, a tortured man who isn’t really interested in actually confronting his demons. The juxtaposition of “Bring your love baby, I can bring my shame/ Bring the drugs baby, I can bring my pain” and “Bring the cups, baby, I can bring the drank/ Bring your body, baby, I can bring you fame” in the pre-chorus.
Ten years on, The Weeknd has evolved some; After Hours is both more pop-friendly and (slightly) more vulnerable. House of Balloons, though, despite its stylistic differences, still feels like an old glove Abel can slip on at any moment.
Lucy Dacus
Thumbs
Sometimes, Lucy Dacus writes a song that just pulls you in. “Night Shift,” her most popular song, offers a relationship dynamic that I haven’t specifically felt but feels so personal that it’s universal. “Thumbs” works partly in the same way–love for a friend, hate for one that has hurt her–but it shows off Dacus’s storytelling chops. It’s gross; in fact, Lucy Dacus told Pitchfork, “Like most songs I write, I wasn’t expecting it and it made me feel weird, almost sick.”
The framing device, holding someone’s head in her hands and looking into their eyes, is viscerally inverted between verses. First, it’s her friend’s father (slight trigger warning for violence):
I lovе your eyes
And he has thеm
I imagine my thumbs on the irises
Pressing in until they burst.
The image is tangible in a really unsettling way and is unexpected given Dacus’s soft delivery.
The next time she does this, on the outro, it transforms righteous violence into tender care:
I wanna take your face between my hands and say
‘You two are connected by a pure coincidence
Bound to him by blood, but baby, it's all relative
You've been in his fist ever since you were a kid
But you don't owe him shit even if he said you did.’
The evocation of blood, the imagery of a fist–Lucy Dacus masterfully folds violence into love. It’s reminiscent of how her friend’s father might have ‘loved’ her, we can assume, through abuse; there’s a fine line, an emotional and physical connection between them, an ugly passion.
Noname
Rainforest
I like when the communist lady raps about communism.
Noname is so good at wrapping joy and revolution. It’s so easy, when seeing the state of the world and thinking of the work needed to transform it, to feel despair or anger (not to say that there isn’t any of that in her music, too). But Noname folds wonderful images into her calls for galvanization. There’s dancing, smoking weed, and love, both of self and others.
Noname reminds us that this is all for something, that we’re doing this for the joy and comfort of the most vulnerable as much as we are to stop the people who are exploiting them–this is a patient watering of something, waiting for the blooms to emerge.
Hiatus Kaiyote
Get Sun (feat. Arthur Verocai)
If we’re waiting for something to bloom, playing this new Hiatus Kaiyote track might just bring the flowers out of their buds. Vocalist Nai Palm’s voice treads between soothing and envigorating in such a way that I would love to bask in it like a pink-dappled tree; “a way to get sun when your heart’s not open.”
Memphis Bleek & Jay-Z
Dear Summer
I’ll fully admit it: Jay-Z is one of my guilty pleasures. The guy is the definition of a sellout, he cheated on Beyoncé, and is the poster child of LLC twitter. This is exemplified by his extended, no-hook takeover of the Just Blaze-produced Memphis Bleek “Dear Summer.”
This track came out after he announced his retirement from rap in 2003. The whole song is about how he’s broken out from the yearly cycle of dropping music, instead becoming a mogul: “Listen here, Summer, baby/ I just believe it's the right thing to do/ I got a brand new bitch, Corporate America.” Memphis does not utter a single word on the track, it’s just Jay-Z expressing his grievances against the music industry and bragging about how much people rely on his albums to enjoy the dog days.
Despite how shitty Jay comes off on the track, it’s irresistible. This is mostly thanks to Just Blaze: the sample does more work than anyone else on the song, and Just Blaze chops it up masterfully. The beat feels like a warm day, driving slow with the windows down. It makes me long for summer the same way a donkey longs for a carrot on a stick. Frankly, it’s the only thing keeping me going right now.
Bruiser Wolf
I’m A Instrument (feat. Danny Brown)
This playlist’s last spot goes to a Bandcamp-exclusive artist from the Danny Brown-led Bruiser Brigade. You’ve never heard anyone like Bruiser Wolf–he sounds like E-40 if he was, like, a court jester. It grows on you, though, and “I’m A Instrument” is one of the more accessible cuts off of the album.
Wolf doesn’t bounce on the beat as much as he jaunts along it with a cane and a top hat like Michigan J. Frog. His coke wordplay walks a line between groan-worthy and genius:
Pianist, I touch keys
Lines of white, guitar strings
This base ain’t percussion
This thing on my hip ain’t a trumpet.
There’s something refreshing about Bruiser Wolf. His flow, his lyrics, the beats that he picks–they’re all unique. It has to say something that he has Danny Brown on the track and almost makes you forget about it. This is the energy we need going forward: new growth, budding out in a kind of freaky way.
You can listen to the entire playlist for March 2021 here:
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