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Javiera Mena, »Otra Era«

by Juana Giaimo

A couple of days ago, I entered this site to see what songs had been covered. When I saw “Un audífono tú, un audífono yo” by Javiera Mena, I knew it had to be Ryo who wrote about it. I don’t think it is a coincidence that we are both part of The Singles Jukebox and that we both chose her. Seeing that “Luz de piedra de luna” had the highest score of 2012 was shocking. I remember I couldn’t believe these writers were obsessed with her, just like me, and that they weren’t from Latin America. I wanted to be part of that too.

Lately I’ve been thinking that music journalism would be different if The Singles Jukebox didn’t set on its own in 2009. The Singles Jukebox was always about diversity not only in the music we’ve covered but also for including writers from all around the world. When music sites were ignoring Paramore, J. Balvin and Taylor Swift, The Singles Jukebox proudly raised the flag of poptimism and massive hits have been always considered as important as the new indie hyped band.

But most importantly, The Singles Jukebox made me discover a new way of listening. It taught me that writing and scoring music isn’t about being a judge, but about telling what happens to yourself when you listen to a song: the memories that appear in your mind, the physical changes in your body and the emotions that suddenly emerge. Every day I’m more convinced that writing about music isn’t maybe about music itself, but it’s about language and being able to put into words what those sounds cause in you.

If you read the blurbs on “Otra era”, you’ll find a kid looking at outer space and a walk through the tunnel under the Thames. Linking music to intimate experiences is hard because it can feel that you're exposing too much of yourself. I sometimes read my blurbs again and realize that you can guess what was happening to me at the time I wrote them - if I was feeling hopeless, if I was falling in love and even if it was summer or winter where I was. I couldn’t have written like that for any other site except The Singles Jukebox, because I knew I was surrounded by voices who respected me and who also believed writing about music is much more than just describing the instruments or the lyrics.

My friends and I like to think that Javiera Mena’s music has a dose of pathos. She is always revealing too much of herself, singing the corniest lines and letting the yearning in her voice be noticeable in a needy kind of way. She doesn’t try to look cool in front of her crush, she just spills her heart out. Writing for The Singles Jukebox sometimes felt like that. However, the day we covered “Otra era”, I didn’t find many personal words. Instead, I thought about how the song fit in her discography. But it’s alright, because one of the many positive things about collective reviews is the fact that you can find personal approaches next to generic ones or next to a negative review. Every voice is important.

When “Otra era” was released in 2014, I used to think of it as ethereal, futuristic and even a little bit robotic. Although I loved it, I couldn’t connect much with it as I did with other songs by Javiera Mena. She seemed to have embraced the cool girl this time. But lately I’ve been listening again to this song and I’m surprised by how different I feel it now. While I previously heard distance in her voice, I can now listen to all the physical closeness in her deep and reflective tone, in the way phrases finish with sighs and in how one line follows impatiently the other with desire. It is the voice of day-dreaming. It makes me think that whenever I meet someone new, I find myself the next day lying in bed for a long time, with my eyes open but not really looking at anything, with my mind going from one place to the other but truly not being anywhere. When I come back to reality, I don’t even know what I was thinking about. As Javiera sings, it feels like time travelling to the Middle Ages, to the Roman Empire or to the future.

When I was a teenager at the beginning of the decade, I never spoke about myself to no one. I just didn't know how or didn't think it was important. I now realize I was being too rational: self-expression doesn't have a hierarchical order or one way of saying things directly. "Piensa en mí como soy, piensa lejos de mí, piensa en mí como soy, pienso lejos de ti", Javiera sings in "Otra era", but what does that even mean? The odd combination of words in the lyrics reflect the inability to completely reflect the feelings for other person in words, that is, the fact that language is never enough - and still, humanity keeps trying, I keep trying to find words that capture all that a song is for me because today I know that is my favorite imperfect way to write about music and that imperfection is exactly what makes it my favorite.

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Kacey Musgraves, »Happy & Sad«

by Jamieson Cox

I don’t know if “Happy & Sad” is my favourite song of the decade, but it represents some hard-earned wisdom.

I look back at the person I was ten years ago and see a kid who’d led a charmed life; I hadn’t experienced any meaningful pain, nothing serious enough to leave a mark or change my behavior. I guess I’d been bullied as a kid, but it only reinforced my belief that I was someone special; I was still in the closet, but deep down I didn’t have much doubt that I’d come out to acceptance and approval. (The tides were already shifting, even if I wasn’t quite ready.) I was 17, and it still felt like every door in existence remained open to me. I wanted to be great, even if I didn’t know exactly what form that would take. More than that, I had no doubt I could achieve whatever sort of greatness presented itself most readily. I was young and smart and privileged enough to believe I could do anything, save maybe professional sports. (There was no way to delude myself into thinking the NBA might call my name.)

When I jump back to the present, it’s remarkable how greatly my ambitions have shifted; someone less charitable might say they’ve shrivelled, but I don’t feel any angst about it. “Greatness” no longer holds any real appeal, and I’m not out to leave any sort of traditional legacy: no awards at work, no legions of fans, not even children. I want to immerse myself in art and nature in the time I have here, feel good in my own skin, treat my partner and my friends with kindness, live a moral life, help make the world a better place in small ways. Those feel like the only things that really matter.

I’ve also felt real pain and real loss in those ten years. People I love have passed away, friendships have faded, my family has splintered. I’ve felt the burn of guilt, the dizzying punch and unbearable numbness of infidelity and betrayal. There have been months at a time where I’ve walked by mirrors and tried to avoid looking at the person in the glass. I didn’t want to see that body, those slumped shoulders, that sense of resignation; I didn’t want to have to justify it to myself, that place I’d ended up.

Maybe none of it was exceptional, but it changed me all the same. I’ll never be that golden boy again, the one without a scratch who felt like anything was possible. I’m less judgmental and more guarded, sure, but I’m also more open to fleeting moments of beauty: a sense of community riding the train to work, crows cawing overhead as I take my dog for a walk, a quiet Saturday morning with a cup of coffee while everyone else is sleeping. In other words, I’ve hurt badly enough to savour the moments where things are running on all cylinders. Those moments of joy are now tempered by the realization that they’re rare. I’m not always going to feel that good, and that’s alright. It’s just being alive, no more, no less.

That’s what I take away from “Happy & Sad.” It celebrates that quiet, healthy melancholy you carry with you when you’ve weathered a few storms. Kacey comes at it from a slightly more somber angle than I do: she’s smiling with tears in her eyes because she can’t stop thinking about the descent from this magical moment she’s enjoying. The light is perfect, the music is just right, the person she loves is saying exactly what she wants to hear, and all that’s on her mind is that it’s not going to last forever. It’s a heavy sentiment, but the song isn’t depressing. There’s a thick, amber glow around the arrangement — it sounds like a good dream — and the final note is one of balance and acceptance. She may not want to come down, but she knows it’s going to happen anyway.

"Happy & Sad” is also, in a small way, a song about writing. How do you express yourself when you can’t find the exact word for the way you’re feeling? I can’t help but think back to those lofty ambitions I held a decade ago, especially because I spent a few years thinking my greatness might come as a writer. That’s where people would recognize my genius, that’s where I’d make the mark everyone believed I was worthy of making. And because I wanted to be great, I wanted to write like people who were great. It came in phases: forced pretentiousness, prose that was overly referential and internet-poisoned, reviews and blurbs that stretched for this sort of enduring grandeur. There was a minute there where I didn’t write at all, laid low by a bad gig that crippled my confidence and interest.

All of those ships have finally sailed, or at least I like to think so. At the dawn of a new decade, I’m writing to access some real feeling, even if it’s not elegant or concise — just to tap into some truth. That’s another thing I love about “Happy & Sad.” Kacey never finds the word she’s looking for; she wanders through the chorus, circling around images and sensations until she finds the time-worn cliché that does the job. “Happy and sad at the same time.” “Everything that goes up must come down.” They’re phrases that are time-worn because they speak to something real. I probably would’ve considered them corny a decade ago; now they feel like old sweaters or photos of my parents when they were my age. They fit more neatly into a life that’s simple and, for the most part, deeply satisfying.

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Marina and the Diamonds, »Teen Idle«

by Katie Kirk

There’s a cultural idea of teenagers that lives within culture at large—teens are the last vestige of cool before the inevitable capitalist drive of the workforce crushes their spirits. Teenagers, at least within media, are idealized. Teen life exists as somehow the first and final explosion of emotion and authenticity society can offer; if television and most songs are to be believed, supposedly you can find any teen anywhere darkening their clothes/striking a violent pose/et cetera at a moment’s notice.

Enter MARINA. 

Marina Diamandis styles herself as just Marina now, but for most of the decade went by the moniker Marina and the Diamonds (the Diamonds were sloughed off in early 2019 as part of a minor rebranding). Her first album, 2010’s The Family Jewels, was an inspired take on commercialism, sexuality, and modern culture in general; in retrospect it’s good, but I wasn’t familiar with it at the time.

Then came 2012’s Electra Heart. 

During my first two high school years, I was... very bad at being a teenager, at least in the mythical sense. In 2012 I was fifteen, a sophomore. Most of my time was spent: a. writing online blog posts about Shakespeare’s Hamlet (no, I will not be linking them here, thank you very much), b. having social anxiety, and c. carrying David Foster Wallace’s thousand-page novel Infinite Jest around for three months as some bizarre way of mentally asserting dominance over my classmates, most of whom I didn’t really talk to anyway (see b. above). Teenage dream? Not particularly. As someone who was experiencing the beginning of a non-mythical teenage-hood, Electra Heart was simultaneously alienating and inviting, but no song stuck out more to me than “Teen Idle”. 

Most media about and for teenagers is about partying, first love, and occasionally making mistakes. Marina’s early albums, by contrast, are about working hard, shutting yourself off, and—as is the case with “Teen Idle”—occasionally letting yourself feel a pang of regret for what you’re missing. 

Yeah I wish I’d been a, wish I’d been a, teen, teen idle / Wish I’d been a prom queen fighting for the title / ‘Stead of being sixteen and burning up a Bible / Feeling super, super, super suicidal

“Teen Idle” struck a chord with me, and it struck a chord with a lot of other teenagers (mostly girls) who were melancholic, who perhaps had aggressively pursued “success” at the expense of a social life, who felt they’d somehow wasted their adolescence. The song’s first words are “I wanna be an idle teen / I wish I hadn’t been so clean,” after all. There’s a lot of internet discourse out there about the rampant depression in ex-“gifted kids”. Much of it is irritatingly self-pitying, but there’s a grain of truth there nonetheless. When you’re in high school and don’t quite understand your peers, it can be far too easy to equate achievement with love. They’re not the same. They never were.

I wanna drink until I ache / I wanna make a big mistake

The song itself is exceptionally singable, even where it maybe shouldn’t be (the amount of parties I’ve been to where “super, super, super suicidal” is loudly sung as a group!), but it speaks to a common thread. Real teenage life often isn’t like the media-portrayed version of teenage life, not by a long shot. Marina’s song acknowledges that while simultaneously speaking to so many isolated teenagers’ desperate yearning to be relevant, to be cool, to be a person. 

It’s 2020 now. Most of us who were teens in the early 2010s aren’t anymore. I grew up, I stopped taking myself so damn seriously all the time, I loosened up, I made far more friends. I know logically that most teens in the media don’t exist, not really, and yet, and yet—if I’m being perfectly honest, there’s still a weird pang of yearning there for the carefree teenage experience I didn’t have. The wasted years, the wasted youth. “Teen Idle” captures that longing in a way I’ve never seen before or since. For that, I adore it.

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Julien Baker, »Good News«

by Austin Nguyen

I’ve always been a person who would scrape their knees falling in love so hard, crouching on the floor to hide teary eyes at school dances when Coldplay’s “Yellow” came on and writing romantic poetry each year for my school’s literary magazine with my crush as a muse. I’ve spent the better half of this decade scared to know who I am without clinging onto love, scared to discover what life is like when starry-eyed romances don’t color the lens I see the world in. 

The years have always seemed to cycle between the gushing ink of hope and the torn-up pages of loss, taped back together trying to remember love’s weathered beauty. The past is never that easy though. It’s never just silver linings you can forgive and forget or epigrammatic platitudes that you can shrug and laugh off; it’s gnarled with should’ve known better’s and red flags, and it’s hard-to-swallow pills you feed yourself in realizing that you’re just as responsible for your own pain as the next person, that you gave your own heart to shatter when you chose to fantasize about all those firsts — the kisses, dates, and holidays spent together — at 11:32PM while tracing the stucco ceiling (that “you” really just being “I/me” in this case).

But the unrequited doesn’t mean you’re any less worthy of the hand-holding, slow-dancing, FaceTime-calling romance you dreamt of. You aren’t a lesser person for giving a piece of yourself in loving somebody, but who you can be is someone who recognizes how much harder love is to come by without that person as a possibility, someone who reflects the light of the world in even brighter incandescence because of its rarity.

Melancholia always seemed to be the easiest remedy to heartbreak, and “Good News” was there for me every single time. Julien Baker’s lyrics have always had this way of exhuming the most repressed feelings from within and splaying them across the hardwood floor, leaving a cavernous body for her voice — with all its softened grit and breathy vulnerability — to echo through. “Always scared/ That every situation ends the same/ With a blank stare/ Me and the tap water/ Circling the sink drain,” she sings, stretching the vowels as if in an ache to fill the void between the melodies, anything to distract her from the numbing dissonance of the guitar chords that cycle in her mind.

But “Good News” is about more than mourning what was, even if those are the opening words (“Your long hair/ A short walk”); her words are about the struggle now, trying to come to terms every day with how fucked up we can be as people — these emotional wrecks that are left constantly devastated, spaces that we expect other people to color in for us. And that’s exactly why she starts the climax of the song with a line that seems to sculpt anyone’s broken heart:

…when what you think of me is important

Because the most difficult part about the aftermath, in trying to piece back together the shards of who you were before you fell in love, isn’t “moving on”; that’s a job for time as unrelenting seconds keep pressing the forward button. No, the real punch-in-the-face is telling yourself, “That’s okay,” and meaning it. You cry, and you vent, and you feel bitter and petty, and that’s okay. You want to smash a TV screen in with a baseball bat and scream until your throat hurts in an empty parking garage, and that’s okay. And you weren’t the person someone else needed to feel in love, and that — most importantly — is okay.

We spend too much time on pinning the blame on someone, on ourselves (“And more about how I ruin/ Everything I think could be good news”) and on others, that we forget the world is random, filled with so many different definitions of compatibility and soulmates and love. Perhaps both parties in a couple deserve some blame for believing it could be so easy to find love and find a fault in it, but once you let it go, maybe the past and present can finally shine with light.

I’ve never really understood the process of kintsugi (repairing broken items with gold) until now, writing the words above, but at least I’ll remember one thing: scraped knees, no matter how much blood spills and how big the scab is, will always heal.

– Austin Nguyen

PS: If you want to fanboy over Julien Baker with me or just talk about music in general, email me at nguyenaustin3@gmail.com or head over to my Instagram (because I don’t really use Tumblr that much).

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Florence + The Machine, »Queen of Peace«

by DS

In the last decade, I have spent an inordinate amount of time contemplating my own existence, as a woman, as a person of color, as someone who doesn’t neatly fit into the boxes I was supposed to fit into by virtue of my birth and upbringing and appearance. I have conceptualized myself in a million ways, embodied a thousand cliches, but as one of the Gossip Girl fanfictions I tore through during the nights I couldn’t sleep during my sophomore year of college said, all the cliches make a real girl. I don’t believe in astrology any more than I believe in religion (my relationship with God is rather more ambiguous) but I have always overidentified as a Libra since, like my birthday twin Oscar Wilde before me, I am fixated on balance to the point of running almost solely on anxious death drive. And the most Libra song of them all is my favorite song released in the last decade, Florence + the Machine’s “Queen of Peace” from How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (2015).

For a period of several months back in 2016, I had this recurring dream. My husband and I were married and everything seemed perfect; we were beautiful and successful and madly in love and after a saga of not being okay in so many ways, I was finally okay. But the image that kept on playing in my mind, over and over like a broken videotape, was of me kneeling at my oldest son’s hospital bed; he was dying, sometimes from a car accident, sometimes from a premature heart attack, sometimes from a drug overdose, but at the end of the story, he always died. In some versions of the dream, he had a baby sister, other times, he was a golden only child but always, he didn’t deserve to die even if his parents deserved to be punished for hurt they wrought upon others and themselves in the years before they were his parents. My husband would be watching my vigil; he would be looking at me not as if he blamed me for our son’s condition but as if I should have warned him in the first place that I bring about death in this manner. I remember being fixated on the vividness of the scene that sometimes still rewinds and replays in my head, the colors of it, the light blue crispness of the hospital room, the red of the shirt I was wearing (it was always red), the dark in my husband’s eyes. Don’t get me wrong, my husband never stops loving me even if he believes I ought to have warned him about who I truly am but nonetheless, nothing would ever be the same again. And while I didn’t know it at the time, I have come to realize that this dream was at least partially caused by my several hundred listens of “Queen of Peace” that year I was 21 to the point the song metaphorically embedded itself in my bones the way no other song has before or since then. 

In the first verse of “Queen of Peace,” Florence Welch sings, “Oh, what is it worth/ When all that's left is hurt?” And you could say that I related. I’ve come to terms with most of the things I did and said when I was hurt but despite being healthier and happier than I’ve ever been, I’m sometimes still completely terrified that I’m going to bring about impenetrable darkness to those I love wherever I go because of the nature of my past, because of my history of violence against myself. I’m afraid that because of my long-standing existential despair, because of not wanting to be alive for a large portion of my life, there is nothing more to me than the pain that I felt, the pain that was often self-inflicted in more ways than one and that is all I can bring to the table. But I have come to realize, there is life after survival and the fear and anger and abject sadness that I have felt for longer than I can remember cannot take that away from me. 

The thing about expressly not wanting to be alive for an entire decade is that you stop planning for a future that you don’t believe you’ll be around for. When I was 17, I was flying home from Boston and on that cross country flight, I distinctly remember thinking, who cares what college I get into because I’m not going to be alive to graduate anyway. I planned out what outfit I wanted to wear at my funeral and contemplated what color I would write my death notes to my loved ones and the weird thing is, I never called them suicide notes even to myself because that seemed far too intentional to me and some part of me was convinced that I was born to die young so I didn’t need to put in the effort to kill myself. But I’m 25 now and that time still hasn’t come and I’ve stopped expecting it. Somewhere along the line, something changed within me, like a candle being snuffed out, and I just simply ceased believing in my long prophesied death and began desperately wanting to do and say and simply be as much I can in my time on this Earth. 

However, and this is embarrassing to write, some part of me hardcore judges myself for wanting to live so badly and doing so much to ensure my own survival, fighting until my knuckles are bleeding and burning what bridges have rotted and crying so much the salt dries out the skin on my cheeks. It feels gauche and pathetic and downright childish to be so doggedly determined to live but I’ve grown to accept that aspect of myself, the silliness of living as Voltaire once called it. The fragments of good, no matter how small, will always endure and I really believe that.

In any case, despite the sorrow inherent in the blood flows through my veins and all the sometimes inarticulable damage that has been done to and by me, I made a decision some years back to defend life complete with all its accumulated anguish, fury, confusion and most of all, its complete mundaneness. In “No Choir” from High As Hope (2019), Florence Welch sang, “And it's hard to write about being happy/ Cause the older I get/ I find that happiness is an extremely uneventful subject” so I’d like to think she understands, and I hope that you all reading this do as well.

– DS

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Javiera Mena, »Un Audífono Tú, Un Audífono Yo«

by Ryo Miyauchi

About five years ago, Tumblr deleted my original account that I set up in summer 2009. Basically, it got flagged from its links to Taylor Swift mp3s. So my early writings on music no longer exist all because I wanted to share a Fearless single as a song of the day. Not that I miss the blog exactly, but it would have been nice to show you what I was up to back then.

A thing I miss working on from those days was something I called Record Club, where I chose an album to discuss as the Album of the Week. It didn’t fulfill its entire premise because, well, I didn’t have an audience on Tumblr, so any attempts for engagement would get radio silence. Except, I got a few recommendations when I asked which album to tackle next as the Album of the Week. One of them was Javiera Mena’s Mena.

How else would I have stumbled upon an album made by a pop artist from Chile? Pitchfork surely wasn’t covering any Spanish-language pop in 2013. I would also later discover the site Club Fonograma from that friend, and from what I know, they seemed to be the only one championing Mena’s music or really any other Spanish-language pop online. I grew into liking other artists like Natalia Lafourcade, Julieta Venegas and Ximena Sarinana by just keeping in touch with this other scene of music that opened up to me from a simple recommendation — and with more help from that friend, of course.

I have no idea how people found me during that time except through pure luck of them clicking on, like, the Owen Pallett music tag when I attempted to discuss Heartlands for a week. It’s surprising I even got responses for that project. It’s a bigger miracle that my posts inspired one of those readers, the same friend who suggested I write about Mena, to ask if I wanted to join her and her friends to write about music.

The more I wrote, the more people I got to meet. One of those friends in our collective of music writers invited me to another site that he edited for. I got to know mutuals of mutuals, and even got to write with some of them, by just broadcasting about an album I was obsessing over on Twitter. That collective and that website unfortunately took their natural courses, but I do have them to thank for helping me become a contributor for the Singles Jukebox, which houses so many brilliant writers.

There are so many artists that I only know because of those people I met along the way. And really, I’m mainly enthusiastic about those artists because I know someone else who’s talking about them too. I started writing at the beginning of the decade just to have a conversation with myself about the music I liked. I really didn’t think I’d get to actually talk about it with other people.

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Wye Oak, »Civilian«

by Lin VanderVliet

It was during my sophomore year of college that I first heard “Civilian” in my dorm one night. My memory has softened in eight years, the way edges in a dream bleed pastel, but I would venture to guess that I was watching Last Call with Carson Daly when I heard it. In those days I would stay up late with my assignments, leaving the TV on to emit presence. I remember hearing the titular track to Wye Oak’s 2011 album and discovering something in “Civilian” that I hadn’t yet felt or known.

If you’ve never experienced fall in Florida, it’s a bit like faux fall, where occasionally the temperature dips just enough to warrant a jacket or long sleeved shirt, even a scarf. If it’s ever cold, it’s more memorable than it is lasting. Compared to more seasonal climates, there’s a pretend-ness to it, a subsequent coziness which everyone seems to quietly acknowledge. It’s authenticating somehow, like being given permission to insulate. There is an inherent secrecy to autumn—a need for storage, for warmth, for memory. My memories of “Civilian” are steeped in the evocations of Florida’s “pretend” autumn. “Civilian” is about heartbreak, but more specifically, the inevitable mingling of intangible memories with the tangible relics of childhood—the result of embedding one’s memories in a location of intimate secrecy. 

“I still keep my baby teeth/ in the bedside table/ with my jewelry/ you still sleep in the bed with me/ my jewelry and my baby teeth,” Jenn Wasner confesses, revealing how memories often take uncomfortable, even inexplicable residence within our tangible lives. If you’ve ever collected souvenirs from your childhood and later combined them with the in-dissolvable lozenge of adult disappointment, you’ll know that it’s strange. It’s messy, perverted, even. Of that baby teeth lyric, Jenn Wasner shared the following in an interview with HuffPost in 2017:

“It’s based in reality; I mean I actually do have some relics like that from my childhood…I definitely took some artistic license with it, and they are not necessarily where I claim them to be in the song.  But I think that line in particular is more about my tendency to be a little bit of a pack rat physically with objects, and… ‘Civilian’ is about that same impulse, but emotionally — hanging on to things past the point of reason and being dependent on others, and unnecessarily and unrealistically hinged to your past and being afraid of change.”

My earliest memories of listening to “Civilian” are mundane. I would walk across campus to one of the art classrooms and spend the weekend on a still life drawing assignment which involved replicating the perspective and packaging designs of various boxed snacks in pencil. I was nineteen, with a newly developed understanding of myself and of my potential. And while I had yet to experience grown-up disappointment of my own, I discovered something recognizable within “Civilian,” and the instrumental solo that concludes the last minute of the song. Overtaking the final echo of the lyric “civilian,” guitars pierce, twist and screech with anxiety, as if enacting a forced separation, like removing the ugliest most stubborn adhesive from one’s skin. That this could be inexplicably so familiar to me felt secret at the time, and it’s is something I still loosely associate with my impersonal drawing assignment. I didn’t realize it then but that task was foreshadowing, in the sense that it’s possible to hide one’s secrets in the destinations of receding lines. 

But it’s “Civilian’s most audacious lyric that is arguably my favorite—a belief I seem to test each year since first discovering the song years ago. “I don't need another friend/ When most of them I can barely keep up with/ I'm perfectly able to hold my own hand/ But I still can't kiss my own neck,” Jenn Wasner sings. This is the song’s climax, and Wasner’s delivery here is assured and unapologetic. Rejecting the lastingness of friendship in favor of the more immediate gratification of a kiss, it’s a sharp reply to one of the most exhausted platitudes on “just” being friends (ie. that nothing is sacrificed after a breakup, and that friendship in and of itself isn’t a compromise.) Sometimes it’s more effective to hold your own hand because the alternative feels patronizing. This sentiment is akin to lyrics such as Mitski’s eponymous cry in “Nobody” where she declares “And I don’t want your pity/ I just want somebody near me…I just need someone to kiss/ Give me one good honest kiss.” “Civilian” suggests the same, that you won’t get what you need by naming it, but it’s nothing if not cathartic just to say it.

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Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, »Hope the High Road«

by Melanie Killingsworth

The colloquial definition of ‘crazy’ should include ‘puts song on repeat for twelve hours while lying maybe this time it’ll cure the insomnia.’

I spent much of 2017 in what I then called ‘a tough time’ and I now realise was a depressive episode futilely fighting off a breakdown years in the making. (Apparently, ‘breakdown’ isn’t the medically-accepted terminology anymore, but that’s what the opening of “Hope The High Road” calls it and that’s sure as hell what it feels like, so the line stays.) June 2018, after fighting had turned flailing turned catastrophic nothing, at the exact time I needed it, I heard The Nashville Sound. It played through again and again, giving language to heart palpitations and pain, admonishing me to relate to others with compassion, reminding me to forgive others and myself.

We always found things at ‘the right time’ in retrospect, of course, as we search for a lens through which to make arbitrary timings and events make sense. But had I listened when it debuted, the dark fog would have given me familiarity without understanding. When I finally heard it a year after its release, I was ready for The Nashville Sound’s epistolary, country-meets-rock-and-roll, brutally honest insistently hopeful theology. The lyrics explore inherited struggles, anxiety, alcohol and drugs and subsequent sobriety, aftermaths of breakups and paralysing self-doubt, bittersweet nostalgia and painful growth. The album as a whole examines changing ideas and values, how bad events and good people challenge you, and privilege with a nod to intersectionality.

I swear this isn’t my roundabout way of talking about my favourite album of the decade (a four-way tie between Janelle Monáe’s Metropolis entries and By The Way I Forgive You), but because of its structure, you need the album to fully understand the song. Usually a big, anthemic track is spot two or three for commercial reasons, but “Hope The High Road” is at the end, where it works better thematically and dramaturgically. The Nashville Sound funnels the listener into “Hope” to tie off preceding anguish, anger, success, political turmoil and personal admissions before the soft closer “Something to Love.” Itself a retrospective, “Hope” encompasses all things small and personal, global and political, from the songs before it:

Opener “Last of My Kind” sets up “Hope’s” refrain with Daddy said the river would always lead me home amongst lines of loss and loneliness

I’ve heard enough of the white man’s blues reminds us it’s still a “White Man’s World”

I just want you in my arms again echoes the need to hold your hand from “If We Were Vampires” 

I know you’re tired and you ain’t sleeping well confirms “Anxiety” doesn’t magically disappear; even with my lover sleeping close to me / I'm wide awake and I'm in pain 

“Hope The High Road” could easily accomplish this recap with furore and pessimism, but instead follows a grand tradition of bands from all genres urging listeners to go on. Isbell acknowledges pain and injustice, affirms those of us breaking down (whether from personal, chemical, political, or all-of-the-above causes), but insists despite it all there’s love, forgiveness, even happiness.

We'll ride the ship down Dumping buckets overboard There can't be more of them than us There cannot be more

Isbell repeating the line is telling; he believes it, but must continually convince himself and us. There can’t be more of them . . . it would be not only unjust, but too overwhelming to consider. Crucially, the answer is not empty assurance “it’ll be ok” but assertion fighting is worthwhile. 

Though the song opens in first-person, the narrator avoids naming addressees. “I ain’t fighting with you down in the ditch” is cutting but broadly aimed, generous enough to open the listener up to taking it onboard. The person he won’t stoop to the level of could be someone specific he won’t publicly identify, someone generic in the political audience, multiple people he won’t stoop to the level of. It is, of course, all of the above. 

How much in the last decade have we been simultaneously uninspired and mad as hell, blindly furious while feeling nothing creative or positive, with no idea where to put our righteous anger and no energy to carry out a plan even if we could conceptualise one? “Hope” acknowledges these seemingly insurmountable dichotomies. We’re complicated creatures in a fucked-up world, but we can still find our way, hoping even when that’s all we can do.

If I’m making the song seem platitudinal, go listen; reading about song lyrics is empty without hearing the musical wrappings. Isbell puts grit in his vocal instrument – especially noticeable as the tracks immediately before and after are soft ballads – to convey both anger at systemic injustice and the strength needed to face it. He isn’t afraid to work clichés into his art as mantras, a lifeline thrown repeatedly until we can believe. 

Never be embarrassed of things which are true and beautiful simply because they’re earnest and straightforward. 

On “If It Takes A Lifetime” Isbell sings “a man is the product of / all the people that he ever loved / and it don’t make a difference how it ended up.” Whoever you are, however this decade has been for you, whatever we are or were or will be to each other: I hope the world gets better and we’re part of the fight to make it so. I hope we sleep better next decade than we did this. I hope we sharpen our weapons to fight injustice and 3AM anxiety. I hope we find someone who understands us when we don’t know how to covey what we need, and that we accept they’ll never be able to solve all our problems but we can face them, anyways. I hope we become inspired, take the high road, and find, if not peace, solace. Whatever happens, in making it through this decade, we’ve won.

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LMFAO, »Party Rock Anthem«

by Jake Cleland

‘Party Rock Anthem’ isn’t the best song of the decade, it is the song of this decade. The rotten nucleotides that comprise its DNA and its video’s captured everything that would define the 2010s even before the decade had properly started. JJ Abrams’ franchise dominance, cinema’s sequelitis, Malcolm Goodwin’s role in iZombie — seen in retrospect, ‘Party Rock Anthem’ makes LMFAO seem downright prescient. But as an early decade phenomenon, it’s also an epitaph to a brutally missed 2000s. The Cobrasnake-via-Dim Mak-via-Ed Banger-via-Mad Decent street party fashion makes the post-#mensfashionadvice 2010s look hopelessly conservative. 

So much of art and politics was deastheticised by the project of fundamentally reorganising how art and politics meet and whether that casualty was necessary has yet to be reckoned, although it was probably inevitable. But ‘Party Rock Anthem’ came out when hipster irony (a phrase, kids, that folks used to use with a straight face) was only uncertainly dead, with poptimism still holding the gun cautiously to its chest. The ensuing cultural/political schism ultimately wasn’t drawn on the line between left and right, but overwrought exegeses on the meme of any given week (sup) vs. pleading to just like what you like (aka Like Everything). Two fronts battling basically for the same humiliated cause of pop supremacy made the previously delicious sport of music snobbery just not very fun. The only available rebellion was to [extremely Big Sean voice] go stupid.

(This also meant the only space left for sincere irony was, like, /mu/ and /r/indieheads and Fantano’s comments section. (Pass.))

If ‘Party Rock Anthem’ came out a few years later, it might’ve been wilfully embraced, although its pariah status also left the life in it, so we take small blessings with gratitude. After all, it’s a safe song to like: it is exclusively about the unifying force of The Party. Lyrically it even reifies the previous paragraph: “Stop: hatin’ is bad.” Where it missed a trick was not predicting the trickle down stanonomics of K-Pop’s influence, but it was a utopian vision. Superficially, it’s apocalypse-pop but if so, it’s the only example that doesn’t sound hopeless or lifeless (James Murphy arrived five years late to this, but succinctly, at least, with LCD Soundsystem’s ‘tonite’.) You watch Redfoo - convincingly scared while two-stepping through a sea of Air Jordans and lame - finally succumb to The Party and tell me that the alleged zombies aren’t the good guys. NB: the only other guy afraid of them is wearing a shirt and tie. 

He’s also the only one pushing a product in the whole clip. For all the zombies-as-consumerism metaphors, who’s really a conformist consumer here? Let’s not stretch this too far, but hand-on-heart finger-tapping-forehead: makes you think.

A month before ‘Party Rock Anthem’, Tom Ewing wrote a piece for The Guardian I still think about a lot. Riffing on Girl Talk’s pointillistic reference dropping, Ewing laments the deficiency of celebrating Moments in songs/albums/patchwork sample monster mixtapes which get lost in the holistic approach. In that spirit, the Beats product placement in the ‘Party Rock Anthem’ clip created a Moment which gummed up my brain creases all through this decade almost more than the song itself. The lone survivor tells LMFAO to use their earbuds. “You got ‘em in?” he says. And Skyblu says:

“What? Vitamins?” 

No matter which way you interrogate this moment, it is downright hilarious. To research for this piece, I watched over 100 music videos. I watch a lot of music videos, so the research for this piece consisted of a lot + 100 music videos. That’s more than a lot of music videos. I also watched the ‘Party Rock Anthem’ video more than 100 times, just to make sure I was awarding this Moment the appropriate gravity. So I can say with scientific credibility that not only is ‘Party Rock Anthem’ the song of this decade, but that this moment is the Moment of every decade. It is a non-sequitur nonpareil. Was this scripted or improvised? And either way, in that moment, why would someone say to them, “Vitamins”?

The story of LMFAO concluded in another particularly 2010s way. Another victim of the neverending Scam Season, Redfoo allegedly ripped Skyblu off of all LMFAO royalties. Karma rewarded Redfoo a couple years later when he was hit with a glass in Sydney. In this, we may see ourselves, inevitably disgraced by time.

There are ways ‘Party Rock Anthem’ predicted the zeitgeist and ways ‘Party Rock Anthem’ created the zeitgeist and I was present for plenty of the latter. At least in Melbourne, LMFAO’s recycling of the Melbourne Shuffle filtered back to nightclubs in a way Klein et al. warned was already happening generally. Happy to have our culture regifted if it was also represented, it was less impossible than you might imagine to find yourself inside your own LMFAO music video. But it’s what I came home to after those nights that makes ‘Party Rock Anthem’ the song of the decade, which was: inbox notifications, gchat alerts, dashboards full of posts and replies wringing meaning from meaninglessness in the most seriously unserious way. Epitaphed plenty elsewhere, Music Tumblr doesn’t need another bouquet laid here, but ‘Party Rock Anthem’ is prominent on the playlist of associations I have with the first definitive part of the decade (other triggers: ‘Video Games’, ‘Gucci Gucci’, ‘Bangarang’, ‘What Makes You Beautiful’, ‘Furisodeshon’, ‘Hey QT’, SSSSSSSSOME NIGHTS I STAYYYYYYYY UP...)  

Coming from the Gawker/Defamer/Idolator readership to find a group of mostly-communal-but-sometimes-adversarial-but-for-the-better (via “Iron sharpens iron” - Coach Wade) weirdoes eager to unwrap celebrity looms large, I have no doubt, in the definitions of this decade for the people involved. Most have since left music writing or been pushed out and found fulfilling lives elsewhere, but although the pop of the era trended towards the annhilistic, let’s not cave. When I first started writing about music on Tumblr, old heads were quick to say the jobs were gone. Defiant and determined to prove them wrong, I made a pretty good go of it, and others are still doing as much. All the pieces are there for anyone with a willingness to be wrong to pick up. 

That’s enough navel gazing for a time long ago. Put it to bed. The revelation of ‘Party Rock Anthem’ isn’t that you should never leave The Party, it’s that the whole world is The Party. “Dancing all night isn’t legendary, only dancing all night is.” The only thing to do in the decade ahead is to keep listening attentively. Let music fill you up. It’ll get in your bones.

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Merce Lemon, »For Sophia«

by Owen Stone

It’s funny for a Pittsburgh musician to sing so well about how loss feels when looking out at the expanse of the ocean. I lived in the city for four years and those rivers can be beautiful, especially at night when the stadium lights spread across the cold wet dark. But you can still see to the other side. Rivers are always ending, no matter which bank you’re on. Death is surprisingly less conclusive.

It’s been about 13 years since my sister died. This was supposed to be the decade that my family picked itself back up after the loss. And it has been. Partially. But it’s also been the decade where we’ve come to see that that task is never really complete. The grief will hang on. The love will continue to develop. Which is why the ocean has been such a fitting site for remembrance.

Every year on her birthday my family goes to the ocean to collect rocks. We scope the shore for hours, carefully curating the collection. In March, it tends to be overcast but it’s San Diego so it’s never actually dreadful. But the clouds are still greying and expanding in a way that’s intimidating for our city. So there’s the evolving ocean landscape, the clouds’ gloomy presence and hundreds of rocks, all colored with time. To be honest, I’ve seen my sister in all of these things over the years.

But this would be the decade I moved away from the ocean, to Pittsburgh no less. The first time March came around my family was sending me pictures of the sea and I knew I couldn’t just give up on this ritual. It was pouring outside and I still didn’t have a good coat so a friend lent me hers and I wandered out into the woods. I was stumbling around in the darkness while the rain was really starting to pile up and gain momentum in this abandoned trail I thought might have a good rock or two. As the rain only got worse it suddenly struck me as funny how different my life was now. I was soaked through, fumbling in the mud for rocks, laughing my ass off, and realizing how much I still had to learn about loss.

The first time I heard For Sophia was at a show. I didn’t know much about Merce Lemon beforehand but I felt an immediate kinship the second they started playing. It was the kind of music that fits perfectly in the venn diagram between my parents’ music taste and mine. Immediate and honest and funny and dark and vulgar and sweet and packed with harmonies and even featuring her dad in the band. I found out later that her family used to host artists like Kimya Dawson when she was stopping through Pittsburgh on tour. My parents used to host house concerts in our garage. It felt like some other vision of my family projected into another city. I loved it.

That night a friend of theirs had requested For Sophia. That friend’s mother had recently died and the song had come to mean much more to him since that moment. Hearing them dedicate this song to him at the show was one of those moments where DIY spaces transform into something truly communal.

The song was originally written by Merce Lemon for a friend of hers that died when she was fairly young. I think we must have been processing this loss at similar times in our lives. Both old enough to understand but too young to process.

The first reason I love this song is because I love when people are dead in songs. Death is complicated enough and does not need to be obscured with euphemisms. 

The second is because it recognizes loss as something that is energizing, at times. That it has to be. When she sings “Even though you’re dead your energy is keeping me alive” it has to be true. To be able to claw your way out of grief there has to be a way to turn it into forward momentum. For it to mean something. Especially without much of a religious framework to rely on. There has to be a way that we look at death so that it doesn’t just feel like an ending.

The third reason I love this song is how it traces a day. The first verse you wake up with the sun, then night starts to come in the second, and finally the day is over. It reminds me of the kind of victory that facing the day can feel like when you’re overcome with grief. Greeting the sun, watching it turn into night and letting that night become the end of another day you’ve successfully faced. Rinse. Repeat. Until the sun’s repetitions can start to feel like healing.

My family is lucky for the closeness we feel towards each other. For the trust and kindness and general enjoyment of each other’s company. It’s incredibly rare. And those trips to the beach made me recognize how much of that is due to my sister, Gavyn. She taught us a lot about how to hold each other close while we had the chance. That’s why remembering her is energizing.

And I’m lucky to have traveled so far away from that bond, that ritual, and to have found in Pittsburgh a song that spoke to me so much.

Owen Stone // Instagram: @2manybdays

If you like this I’m also doing my own countdown of my favorite albums of the decade over at mydecadeinmusic.blogspot.com.

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Soccer Mommy, »Your Dog«

by Sam Fishman

Soccer Mommy’s “Your Dog” begins with the best rock lyric of the decade; my jaw still hits the floor every time I hear it: “I don’t wanna be your fucking dog.” In one line, singer-songwriter Sophie Allison eviscerates 50 years of macho classic rock glorification and announces some things are going to change around here.

While the 2010s may be remembered as the decade when hip-hop, R&B and pop fully snatched the mantle of critical attention away from rock, may we never forget the coup that came from within. Soccer Mommy, Mitski, Brittany Howard and more not only changed what indie rock looked like, but also what it sounded like. The best rock music of this decade, especially the second half, was made by women.

But the women who pushed rock forward in the 2010s declined to totally repudiate all that macho classic rock bs. That would be too easy (and some of those macho records are actually pretty great). Instead, they studied it, learned it, and made it their own. In 1969 Iggy Pop said he wanted to be our dog, and in 2018, Soccer Mommy—respectfully— declined.

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Kurt Vile, »Wakin On A Pretty Day«

by Patrick Hosken

Kurt Vile is not exactly known for his incisive lyrics. Like his former collaborator and War On Drugs maestro Adam Granduciel, Vile concerns himself more with creating cosmic worlds, a different one in each song. He’s a purveyor of moods. He kicks off one of his best albums with a major one.

From its title on down, 2013’s “Wakin On A Pretty Day” is a journey, and Vile begins it with inherent tension: “Wakin’, the dawn of day / And I gotta think about what I wanna say.” He echoes this later in his patented lackadaisical warble, the first thought in his head once he awakes haunted by a slight twinge of social anxiety: “I gotta think about which wisecracks I wanna drop along the way today.” The air is thick with swirling psychedelic notes, the pace never rises past a saunter, and this nine-minute voyage is less a long, dark night of the soul than a cool morning toke (“To be frank, I'm fried,” he sings, “but I don't mind.”) Eventually, Vile delivers 60 repetitions of “yeah” as part of his morning ritual, affirmations akin to a collective Om.

Yet quite suddenly, a guy known more for tasty guitar freak-outs than poetic insights — and this song has plenty of both — becomes a philosopher king.

What he means, and what the song means to me as one of the defining reluctant statements of the 2010s, comes early on via a couplet so simple that it barely registers. “Phone ringin’ off the shelf / I guess he wanted to kill himself,” Vile croaks. He’s morning-throated as if pestered by a vibrating alarm and ready to let the damn thing buzz right off the end table and onto the floor. Even in the comparatively halcyon days of 2013 — before innocuous selfie apps were still that, and not nefarious Russian data plots — this image was (and remains) pure escapism. A trembling phone left alone, dying from lack of attention.

I hear it and think of Bill Murray smashing his radio alarm clock to bits in Groundhog Day. I see lazy weekends melting into dreaded workday mornings. I envision a call coming in that you’re simply too wiped to take — “I guess somebody has somethin' they really wanna prove to us today” — so you just don’t. But looking at the lyrics more literally, I drink in the notion of a suicidal smartphone, sentient and fed up with its own ubiquity, with macabre glee. The dystopian notion makes me smile, even as it deeply unsettles me. If that isn’t a succinct summation of the 2010s, I don’t know what is.

For nearly 10 minutes every time I listen to Vile pass through his own hazy morning fog on “Wakin’ On A Pretty Day,” even through the more languorous guitar passages that somehow evoke both desert air and city grime, I never feel like checking my phone. What a trip. What a blessing. What a mood.

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tUnE-yArDs, »Bizness«

by Garry McKenzie

My 2010s were an inverted bell-curve, musically speaking.

I started with a couple of years on radio, but it soon became apparent the imminent increasing of my brood would put pay to that. The middle years were spent vocalising songs to help rock bub to sleep (Joe Strummer’s X-Ray Style was a favourite), followed by the Wiggles, Georgie Parker, Sharky and Bones (aka Captain Bogg and Salty), and deliberately subverting the lyrics of nursery rhymes to howls of indignation from my discerning audience. (“He called for his pipe and he called for his bowl and he threw them out the window…” “Dad! Don’t!”)

Hobbies reverted to those whose enjoyment could not be ruined by crying, a strident demand or that stream-of-conscious monologuing only primary school-aged kids maintain enthusiastically and endlessly. For sanity I retreated to older favourites for my daily commute. So, short of the ubiquitous big, big hits and the odd Pop World Cup, I felt cut off from contemporary music for the first time, more or less, since I received Smash Hits ’87 for Christmas.

It was not until this year, with kids now too busy for Dad, that I could I deliberately listen to as much unheard music as I could. This was partly to help me recover my passion, and partly to finally vote in Freaky Trigger’s end of year poll with a vague sense of authority. Small steps and all.

So how to pick a track from this decade. Would it be from two years of engagement at the start of the decade? The theme-tune to Abney and Teal? A new passion from this year? The ubiquitous big, big songs don’t need my support.

In a decade where most of my favourite moments were non-musical, I’ve chosen a track which stayed with me throughout, surfacing when I was down to raise me back up. Something from the clutch of early decade tunes which made it onto that commuting playlist otherwise dominated by music from the previous 30 years.

Those two radio years were spent cruising MP3 blogs and websites like Negrophic and the dearly departed Dutty Artz, feeling hot and cold about Pitchfork and still buying the odd edition of Wire magazine, especially if there was a cover disk. I had a radio show to feed, but my CD buying days were now nappy buying days.

Somehow, in this milieu, I heard tUnE-yArDs’ Bizness. It hit all my musical sensibilities of the time. Clattery percussion loops? Great! Snappy brass solo? Brilliant! Idiosyncratic vocals? Loved them! Plus a great clip as a bonus. I became hooked. But my mind was too busy to wonder why I loved it.

Not that I really needed to. Such thinking doesn't always help.

Now I can see why loving Bizness made sense. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but the song linked in with the music I was thinking a lot about about at the time.

Adapting to parenthood and the accompanying loss of identity, I’d spend part of 2010 compiling a list of my favourite tracks of the Noughties. Those ten years had been time half spent on an earlier radio stint in rural climes, before relocation to the big city, where I ended up doing midnight to dawns with just me and the rats down the corridor for company. It was my first full decade of adulting, but the music was still there every day.

Number one on my Noughties list was Yo La Tengo’s version of Nuclear War, especially the jazz version. Despite being seven years old, it was still in my mind in 2010. Clattery percussion? Check. Snappy brass? Ah huh! Idiosyncratic vocals? Definitely, especially Georgia.

When Bizness dropped, it pushed the same buttons (though not that button) Yo La Tengo did. But there was something else going on as well. Loops added and subtracted, building up to euphoria, then falling away to a pause before a final burst.

tUnE-yArDs’ Merrill Garbus is two years younger than me. We are from the electronic looping generation. I’ve only read a few interviews with Garbus, and none recently, so I am not well versed in her influences, but we were the generation when the synthesiser and sampler grew to prominence, and as children we heard them.

They were used in advertising jingles. They were in TV show and movie themes. Axel F. Jean-Michel Jarre. It was the sound of space music. Surely we’d be living on a neon-tinged moon soon.

We may have been too young for the earliest Detriot House and early hip-hop, but those infected the pop music and electronica of the late 80s and early 90s. I got to uni as the 90s electronic scene was still at a height, before (I felt) it disappeared up its own fundaments with microhouse and glitch. Drum n Bass and ambient and ‘90s house. Even Kraftwerk were redoing their back-catalogue. Loops layered, building to euphoria, then falling away to a pause, or a suspended drone, holding the tension.

In 2010 I also compiled a belated list of my favourite tracks of the ‘90s. Number one on that list was the ultimate in loopy addition and subtraction, the euphoria-building, mid-song pausing of LA Synthesis’ Agrophobia.

Multiplying Nuclear War and Acrophobia together sound-wise does not produce Bizness. But philosophically it does. Real instruments with an African-tinged rhythms layered using the same tension and release tricks of 90s electronica. In a post-everything musical world afforded by foot-controlled samplers, a brilliant artist produced Bizness. It was a child of the music of Garbus’ and my life-times but also fresh and vibrant thanks to a fine ear and vocal dexterity.

Bizness stuck with me though another child, a more cluttered life, an increasingly sludgier head, pirate shanties, Big Red Cars and the possessions of every nursery rhyme character being thrown out the windows, the window, the second storey windows… (“Dad! That’s not how it goes…”)

My decade, musically, might have been a muddle for the best of reasons, but Bizness cut a line straight through it all.

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Idina Menzel, »Let it Go« (Frozen OST)

by Katie Gill

It's nonsensical to list the ways that someone has changed going from age 17 to age 27. I went from a child to an adult, a high school student vaguely aware of the world outside her bedroom window to an actual adult with an actual career path and an actual impact. I grew. I matured. My tastes changed and shifted as my lifestyle changed and shifted. But one thing has stayed the same: you can take the theater kid out of the theater, but you can't take the theater out of the theater kid.

I performed through so many mediums. I wrote scripts and crafted soundscapes. I crafted characters through the written word and through so many goddamn sessions of D&D. And so, like most theater kids in the 2010s, I fell hard for a musical that took the world by storm, unifying people across all different mediums, serving as a gateway entry drug for the genre as a whole, and became a talking point and indelible part of American culture for years to come.

That musical was Frozen. Hamilton was okay, but it wasn't the saving grace that Frozen was. And so, like a good chunk of America, "Let it Go" claimed a death grip on my psyche.

There have already been so many articles written about the appeal of "Let it Go." It's an anthem of self-discovery. A song about accepting yourself. It's a Rorschach test, an inkblot that you look at and piece out your trauma from the lyrics. The song is downright amazing in it's way to convey so many different sentiments in downright precise ways. But it's that idea of shrugging off perceived responsibility to fully be your true self that's haunted me through the last decade.

My therapist and I have been piecing out my complex of being 'the responsible one.' I'm never the one to move to California on a whim or decide to dye my hair for the hell of it. I stay at home, hold down the fort, save up my PTO in case of an accident, watch my parents' dogs when emergencies happen, smile and agree to take on extra work because hey, somebody's got to do it and it might as well be me. Be the good girl you always have to be. Conceal, don't feel.

You will be the one in the hospital with your father as he recovers from surgery. Not your siblings. You.

I'm not yet at the stage of fucking off, letting my feelings out, and building a metaphorical ice castle in the middle of the metaphorical wilderness. But the idea is intensely appealing. Getting to a point where I can honestly think "I don't care what they're going to say" has been an ever-growing goal of mine. It's slowly started to happen. And who knows, maybe the 2020s are the decade it actually happens. I really hope the 2020s are the decade it actually happens.

Though like, with healthier coping mechanisms than driving everybody away, repressing my guilt, and almost killing a few dudes in the process. 

#GetElsaATherapist

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Passion Pit, »Take a Walk«

by Jessica Doyle

In the summer of 2010, when I took a leave of absence from my PhD program, my dissertation was a helpless non-thing without a subject. In December 2018, I officially got my PhD, because my dissertation was done: written, revised, defended, revised again, approved, copied, formatted, distributed, carefully archived, accepted as an actual work of scholarship. It is arguably my most important professional accomplishment of the decade, and also arguably entirely inconsequential. The claim that 90 percent of academic papers go uncited is mostly untrue, but it is true for my dissertation, and I have the gaping void of a Google Scholar search return to prove it.

Trust me: as bitter and self-deprecating post-graduate students might be about their research (see previous paragraph), none of us start out planning to write something inconsequential. Certainly the subject of my dissertation was not inconsequential at all. “Take a Walk” is not my favorite song of the past decade, but it is the song that kept reminding me that the topic was worth writing about.

My dissertation examined what makes starting and maintaining a business easier or harder for Latino entrepreneurs in different American cities. Take Miami as an example, where 47% of all businesses are Latino-owned. That’s much higher than the national average (12 percent) and higher than the percentage in other cities with large Latino populations: New York, Los Angeles, Houston. So what’s so special about Miami? Is it because the Cuban population that arrived in the 1960s were often landowners or merchants fleeing Castro, and made wealth-building a priority in their new city? Is it the geographic proximity to Latin America and the Caribbean? Is starting a business in Miami easier than elsewhere? Is it something about Miami’s economy in general, or Florida’s? Finally (and more to the point), if policy-makers in another city wanted to put in policies that would help local Latino entrepreneurs flourish, what would Miami’s example offer as guidance?

To make a 295-page story short: it is much easier to turn immigrants into successful business owners if they come to the country with business experience and/or capital already at hand; and if the local immigrant population doesn’t start with those advantages, then policy-makers should focus on providing business education and access to financing, especially the latter. Latino immigrants in the United States who want to start businesses are more likely than native-born white entrepreneurs to use their own cash (which takes a while to accumulate), credit cards (which charge higher interest rates than do bank loans), or loans from family or friends (which means that loved ones, rather than banks with larger cushions, bear the risks). I’d say read the whole dissertation, but in all frankness you’d be better off checking out the research being published by the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative, including this report. (It’s more concise and their data is more robust than mine was.)

This all assumes, of course, that you want to encourage Latinos, or other immigrants, or anyone at all, to start their own business. A lot of us--including me; including Michael Angelakos, the artist behind Passion Pit--have immigrant entrepreneurs in our family lineage. In interviews to promote the album Gossamer, Angelakos described “Take a Walk,” the lead single, as about different members of his family. The first verse’s portrait is a classic rags-to-riches, grateful-to-be-in-America immigrant story: I love this country dearly / I can feel the ladder clearly. But in the second verse, the story shifts to a new narrator, and so does the tone: I watch my little children / Play some board game in the kitchen / And I sit and pray they never feel my strife. The final narrator is eventually undone...

I think I borrowed just too much We had taxes, we had bills We had a lifestyle to front

...yet still insists on his participation in the American dream:

Tomorrow you'll cook dinner For the neighbors and their kids We can rip apart those socialists And all their damn taxes You see, I am no criminal I'm down on both bad knees I'm just too much a coward To admit when I'm in need

Apparently at one point a Fox News reporter failed to hear the irony, and asked Angelakos if the song was anti-socialist. But Angelakos told MTV News, “It's about very specific family members, the male hierarchy, and how the men in my family have always dealt with money.... All these men were very conservative; socially very liberal but for some reason, they all came here for capitalism, and they all ended up kind of being prey to capitalism.” He told a different interviewer, “These are all true stories; this is my grandfather and so on.”

Angelakos’s ambivalence is understandable. (Several of the pieces that greeted “Take a Walk” identified it as a direct reponse to the 2008 financial crisis, an interpretation he rejected.) The idea that anyone can come to the United States, start a business, and work their way to financial security and political freedom is an old one--the history of immigrants employing at higher rates than native-born Americans goes as far back as the Census Bureau has been keeping track of such things. But even for the successful it has its costs. The narrators of “Take a Walk” are estranged from their families, anxious about their ability to keep wealth. The theme of risk runs through the song. No one worries about getting fired; they have market investments, business partners, endless complaints about taxes (as one might if one has to pay both ends of the Social Security and Medicare taxes single-handedly.) The risk allows the narrators to make comfortable lives for themselves and their family, and yet Angelakos isn’t convinced, looking back, that they were better off.

Historically, if you were running for any sort of higher political office in the United States and were from a major party, you made sure to say nice things about small businesses and entrepreneurship, especially the immigrant kind. To some degree this is still true: Elizabeth Warren’s campaign platform includes a Small Business Equity Fund that would give grants to minority entrepreneurs. That said, I’m not sure the current dominant political energy on either the American left or right favors small businesses, who tend to hate tariffs. If you read the Green New Deal resolution, though it calls for a more equitable distribution of available financing to such smaller-scale lenders as community banks and credit unions, a lot of what it wants it can only get at a certain scale. It’s easier for a larger company to retool its supply chains to lower environmental costs than it is for ten small businesses to do the same. It’s easier for a firm with a thousand employees to absorb the cost of any one employee needing a higher wage to make rent, or a longer maternity leave, or extended absences due to illness, than it is for a firm with five.

And Music Tumblr in particular can be forgiven for not thinking highly of entrepreneurship. Most creative people--artists, musicians, writers--end up as entrepreneurs simply because decent-paying employment in those fields has never been easy to find. (In 2017, Angelakos spoke of dealing with venture capitalists and deciding to run his mental-health-focused initiative, Wishart, as a combination of for-profit and non-profit.) But no loan officer with a nickel’s worth of sense would approve a loan to enter a market so saturated that marginal revenue is typically zero or close enough, or where thousands if not millions of people seem thoroughly committed to proving themselves, in Samuel Johnson’s eyes, blockheads. Upon hearing, “You can do what you love, but the market won’t reward you,” a lot of people will reply, “To hell with markets, then.”

It all comes down to how you feel about risk. For a long time the dominant American thinking was that higher risk was the price entrepreneurs paid to have the chance to succeed on their own terms. (There’s an ongoing debate in the immigrant-entrepreneurship academic literature about whether any one particular group of entrepreneurs is “pushed” into entrepreneurship--as in, they only start businesses as the best of a bad set of money-making options--or “pulled,” starting businesses because they want to.) More recently has emerged the critique that not all experiences of risk are created equal, and that in championing immigrant or minority entrepreneurship we offload risk onto those people with smaller financial or even emotional cushions. The heightened experience of risk, and its attendant anxiety and feeling of constant scarcity, may be what Angelakos meant when he described his relatives as “kind of being prey to capitalism.”

I personally agree with that critique, and would throw in that the general perception of Latino immigrants as not-entrepreneurial denies them a road to acceptance (or bourgeois respectability, if you prefer) that their Swedish, German, Jewish, Italian, and more recently Korean predecessors have been able to walk. That was why I wanted to write about Latino entrepreneurship in the first place, and why I ended up writing about North Carolina’s Latino Community Credit Union and associated initiatives as a promising case study. But I would caution against crossing the line from wanting to reduce risk for vulnerable minorities to regarding asking them to bear any kind of risk as imperialist and offensive. Risk can’t be eliminated altogether, and there are costs to scaling risk to higher levels of human activity and trying to diffuse it. A small business committed to a bad idea does a lot less damage than a government policy committed to a bad idea, even if the latter is more equitable in the range and number of people it effects.

Writing a dissertation is a humbling process. I’ve never written and recorded a song, but I imagine that process humbles too. (When “Take a Walk” came out Angelakos was not shy about disliking it, though he seems to have grown fonder of it as time goes on: “I like that it’s so uncharacteristic of me,” he said in 2017.) You work and work and work, all the while knowing you have no control over how your audience will hear your message, or if there will even be an audience. You can never be sure that you read enough, or chose the right method of analysis, or treated your subjects with sufficient respect. You’ll never know if you’re actually on the side of the angels. If the “angels” are metaphorical--if you don’t actually believe in a god, or God, whose love is greater than your human tendency to error and self-deception and treachery--then the risk is even higher. And yet, without that risk, how would you ever be able to say anything worth saying?

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Swallow the Sun, »The Crimson Crown«

by Nikolaevna Pshyonnaya [reader submission]

It comes from a place of loss, grief, and acceptance. Which is where I am at in my life right now. Their newest album came out on the heels of my wife’s passing, right when I needed it the most. This song eclipses anything else from then to now in the 2010s. Lead guitarists Juha Raivio’s life partner Aleah Stanbridge suddenly died. He hermitted himself away for time on end in a mountain cabin and emerged with a new album. The entire album is about loss and grief and life *post* loss. So you, dear reader, regardless of this submission making it on any kind of list; if you’ve ever lost anyone close, or know anyone who has, point them to this album.

~ Niko

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The Knocks, »The One«

by David Cooper Moore

My decade was all about family -- making one, maintaining one -- and so I only have three options for the song that defined my decade. One is inextricable from its surroundings -- "On My Own" from Farrah Abraham's My Teenage Dream Ended, an album about death and motherhood that is as poignant and sad and weird as anything I've ever heard. Another is from the second-best mom album of the decade, Flesh Tone by Kelis, "Song for the Baby." But my song of the decade is the first song I heard after my first son was born, “The One,” by the Knocks featuring Sneaky Sound System. The thing about having kids is that it really wrecks you -- I didn't realize that my entire life, its daily rhythms and boundaries, was being broken down and remade in those first few weeks. I was consumed with a pointless mania, so while he and his mom slept I spent most of my time hacking wooden chunks out of his bedroom door with a boxcutter in a doomed effort to "level it" and putting together an enormous playlist of every song ever featured on the first 50 NOW! compilations -- something that I have almost no memory of doing, but which nonetheless currently has 38,000 followers and counting. This is all to say that maybe I wasn't my most stable or least sleep-deprived self when I first heard "The One," but whatever it was, I remember thinking, when the chorus hit, that this crass thing, this stupid thing, is right -- everything is going fast, and he is everything to me, it is true, he is the one, my number one, and I cried, a good, long, cleansing cry. And then a few weeks later, when I was settling into the new me and sleeping a little more and monkeying with that NOW! playlist for the minor omissions from my fugue state and nursing the wounds on my fingers from the boxcutters, I listened to "The One" again, and you can probably guess by now that I cried again, the very same cry, with snot and everything. And then three years later I had another son, so I listened to it again, just to see what would happen, and I thought, surely this time it won’t -- but it did! And I cried again, because he was my number one now, too, the song was still right, because with your kids they’re all number one, you just find more heart to hold it all. Why did this particular song have this effect on me, a song that to my knowledge no one has heard the way I hear it, possibly including the people who made it? Right time, right place, right me? A random twist of neurochemical fate? Maybe it doesn't really matter -- we all get our own private sessions with epiphany, but we don't control the schedule, something like that. Songs speak to us when we listen and sometimes even when we don't, and sometimes, if we're lucky, we can really hear them whether or not we were ready for them — there, I heard it, this was the one, and I didn't get to choose my vessel any more than I got to choose my kids, but there it is and I love it all the same. Now it's been five years and it still goes fast, and there is so much to lose, more to lose than you could have possibly imagined. But it's lovely while it lasts.