#i do have beef with the lighting in some scenes though but whatever i digress

[metagalacticx]

i’m watching beef is anyone else watching beef

[seenashwrite]

Notes From Nash: Season 15 Episode 2

We're back! And by that, I don't mean back for episode #2, I mean we're back in the little town, same little town we were in for the majority of episode #1. And as far as how ep #2 compares with ep #1.... um.....  

The writers ain't in no damn rush to advance the plot or further character development, are they? So this is basically ep #1 all over again with some guest star overload as a substitute for those two very important aspects of storytelling I just mentioned.

[stares at date]

They've got *how* many eps to wrap up the show? 

Hoo-boy.

Spoilers below the cut.

Changing it up from last time (see link at bottom), I thought I'd go in order of the ep this post. All right. Let's roll.

From the mom who gets 86'd in the opening------

And, PS: That's not disemboweled. Don't use the word if you (a) don't know what it means and/or (b) won't let make-up/effects do their job.

-----to the rest of the people, I care nothing. There was no point giving all these extras lines and whatever little backstories, I give no fucks. Mainly because, gee, I don't know, I signed up for a show about two brothers goin' out there and gettin' after it, and thus far we've gone about two inches and gotten nothing.

Are we still in this little town?

More questions, borrowing from the dialogue some here:

"Remember when we did the thing with Amara?"

"God's sister?"

"And the soul bomb? And here's how it worked? Remember? Because you participated? REMEMBER?! I'm not just saying this for the benefit of, oh wait, no one, because the chances of brand new viewers coming into the game this late is virtually nil, so everyone - including us, here, in this scene, our characters - already know this backstory, ergo the only reason for exposition anvils is to benefit those viewers, who - as we've already established - likely don't exist. So let's run through this for the benefit of, I have to assume, the writers who don’t actually, you know, watch the show as evidenced by--- well, we’d be here all day."

Nope. No, no. Those aren't questions I had. Because I've been watching the show for a good while now. This exchange should’ve been something to the effect of - “I was thinking - remember how we did the soul bomb, with Amara? Do you think you could pull off something like that? To trap them?” and then Rowena responds with uncertainty but will give it a try, etc. I mean, the writing in this ep is thus far pedestrian.

There's still no explanation for why these ghosts - especially these super notorious ghosts like Ripper and Lizzie and who-fuck-ever - were lingering so close together that they were able to be trapped by the stupidest ex machina spell in the writing world. And what of the others? The entirety of hell escaped. We've seen, what, maybe 20? Could there maybe have been a throw-a-way line to Belphagor something like “Did you corral the worst douchebags together”, or “Is there a bar in hell where the worst douchebags hang out or something”, or “this is just our luck that the worst douchebags landed here” or WHATEVER, just SOMETHING to acknowledge they (the writers) recognize that Convenient Super Bad Ghosts Are Convenient.

IT'S KETCH, BITCHES!

I love this character. What a breath of fresh air that snarky piece of ass has been. I hope he doesn't get killed. He will. Because we can't have anything good. But there is some good, which is the Ketch-Rowena flirting. Honestly, I'm fine with Rowena getting action from anyone. She's awesome and she's earned it. Ketch is primo catch, though. (I'm not sorry for that sentence. I am, but I'm not.)

The repeated use of Belphagor's name pleases myself and my podcast co-host. Should you wish to know more about that demon, please do check out our podcast. Don't look him up first, trust us. That they have chosen this particular demon's name is just *chef's kiss*, though I do hope it's not a foreshadowing for how the rest of the season is going to go. Okay fine, I'll spoil it: he's a shit demon. He deals in poo. Literally. I'm not lying. Go forth to the podcast @youtotallymadethatup​ - just about every post links you to where you can listen. /shameless self-promo

IT'S AMARA, BITCHES!

Let's hope that wardrobe does her better than that ill-fitting black dress this go 'round, she deserves better.

"You're the darkness, I'm the light."

STOP IT. STOP. FUCK. STOP.

Are we still in this little town?

Blah blah blah Castiel Dean angst repeating essentially what's already been said at the end of 14 and last week blah. "You know what's real? We are." Not if it's an alternate timeline, my love. 

I keep forgetting just how many spaced-out chains you need to have strewn about your standard meat packing plant and/or factory, well played, set dec and props. That.... that was sarcasm.. (Look, I got no beef with the crew, they're just playing the cards they've been dealt, and their hands are garbage, just a pile of same ol' same ol' stereotypical, unimaginative stuff, so bless them. I hope every single one of them has a job lined up next year, truly. They have more than paid their dues and earned it. Lord knows especially since certain parties took the reins, good night nurse. I've digressed. )

IT’S KEVIN BI----

This is dumb. This is actually dumb. In case you didn't see my half-time post, and I quote:

That is *three* in under twenty minutes. Like, it’s episode 2. You’re blowing your wad. Pace yourselves. AND MAYBE SOME STORY ADVANCING, THAT WOULD BE AWESOME

This bullet thing could be hella interesting. It *could* be. I wonder if it will be. 

These ghosts are painfully uninteresting. The guy playing the Ripper is horribly miscast. This needed to be someone who... who.... I dunno, is a good actor. He's not. Sorry, Pops. I mean, even Osric (who is an excellent actor) couldn't elevate that scene.

This episode is painful.

Are we still in this little town?

Ketch got knocked out, left alone with ghost, deffo gonna get possessed. 

Are we still talking to these ghosts? Why? Why is Kevin thinking he can go up against them alone? I'm not exactly sure what threat they are to him, can't he just disappear and whoosh somewhere else? I missed something, I must've missed something. It doesn't matter, none of this matters.

Okay, Belphagor says there's at least a hundred. Still, what would that be, like 1/2500000000th of hell? Why are the Winchesters, of all people, and now Rowena concentrating on this stupid little town----

Are. We. Still. In. This. Little. Town.

---why in the fuck aren't the most renowned hunters of modern time and their angel friend and the powerful witch friend and the friend with immense tactical knowledge regarding weaponry for supernatural shit not at the bunker strategizing and planning and... and... and.... I just.... 

Lookit, I've said this before: especially in fantasy/sci-fi stuff, if you are logical in every possible place you can be, if you nail the simple shit, then the audience is exponentially more likely to buy into the fantastical stuff, and also to be more forgiving (or not notice altogether) when you inevitably whiff, because nobody's perfect, of course. But this show in later years has notoriously screwed the pooch on the easy stuff, and here we are, in some needlessly convoluted mess right out of the gate in the last season ever.

::sighs::

Oh, look. Because of course he's possessed. You left him alone with a ghost. I'm neither a professional writer nor a psychic, I'm just thinking "What is predictable as possible?" and saying that. You try it. It's worked for me so far.

"I tried to heal him it didn't work" - well maybe he's still residually possessed. Or maybe you suck. Sorry Cas, you don't deserve that. It's not you. It's not me, either. It's them. It's the writers. I don't know what this line is about unless they're teeing up Cas to be even more neutered than he already is. I legit don't know, I can't think, I'm so irritated right now. 

"Nothing to hold you anywhere" - what? Really? Seriously? So what are you and Dean? Y'all ain't his family? Let that little badass haunt the bunker. He'd be the most awesome research assistant ever. Now THAT is a good plot point, have ol' Kev be home base, helping coordinate whatever's coming. Oh here we go, swishy swishy hand, magic hole, nobody knows why this demon can do all this shit, and Kevin's gone. Why? WHY. My idea is better. No way Osric would blow your guest star budget, it appears to be shaping up to be immense, especially with all the money you've saved so far on location(s). 

Shoulda kept him rest of season, let him assist, then his final reward is getting into heaven for reals when Cas (they'll probs kill him, tho) or Amara (maybe, seems too obvi a choice tho, and she doesn't give a shit about beng a ruler, we knew that back in whatever season that was) or Jack (because why not, it's the most ridiculous idea, since he's got the mind of a toddler, meaning it's something the writers would think is a great idea) or Billie (wild card guess) is the new God. Or have him brought back to life, fuck, I don't care.

So is the bullet trapping Chuckster on earth, is the question, and if so what kind of all-knowing deity puts a weapon in the hand of a potential enemy that could render him even a *touch* weaker? Where's the long game, there? What could any possible reasoning be? 

Okay, well, the scenes between Emily and Rob have been the best part of the episode, as well as the interaction with Ruthie and DHJ. Everything else fell flat. J2M seemed to be bored and phoning it in, and it's not often that can be said about any of those three.

I swear, if the preview shows that we're still in this little town for episode #3.... wait, is that the crypt from ep #1?.... are.... are we..... 

ARE WE STILL IN THIS LITTLE TOWN

What have we learned? Other than Chuck, no character development. The plot remains that some ghosts-interchangeably-used-with-souls from hell are trapped in a confined area, and it was via a tenuous spell provided by a demon whose motivations are unknown, and there's something up with that bullet wound. We knew those already.

(There's possibly something wrong with either Cas or Ketch -- or else that's something that will be completely forgotten was ever mentioned -- but we don't know either way and we don't know what it is, therefore we didn't learn anything; if this does ultimately turn out to be something, then we'll count it as a learned item for that episode.) 

So, minus learning that Chuck is weakened somehow and that at least for right now Amara’s not exactly in his corner, we're in the exact same place story-wise that we were in last week. 

And looks like we'll be back there again next week. 

See you next week, I guess.

=================================

Past posts, from newest to oldest (and I sometimes do addendums if a response warrants)

Episode 1

.

[fromdirectorlanawachowski]

honest and unmerciful endgame thoughts

a sequel to this post

this is deadass one of the worst movies i’ve ever seen.

a few brief thoughts before i get into the more or less play by play.

- making jokes about how time travel in movies isn’t really how time travel works doesn’t work if you’re a fucking movie dude

- fat thor was a fucking disgrace

- professor hulk has to have been 80% ad-libbed because there’s no way someone actually wrote that garbage dialogue

- using a past thanos was a mistake because we don’t actually give a shit about him

OKAY LETS GO

actually fuck it i was gonna do plot point by plot point but i’m just so exhausted i don’t have the strength to do it. i’m gonna go in broad strokes and if you want me to elaborate on WHY something was bad feel free to yell at me in the DMs

okay lets go

right away the whole thing with clint fucking turning on the spot as his family disappears was goofy as all hell. i know exactly what they were going for but having him literally turn on the spot instead of go into the house or go into the shed just draws attention to the absolute hilarity of how fast they vanished compared to others.

why the fuck was tony skin and bones when he got back to earth. i know he was in space for three weeks but they clearly show him eating during the montage of him and nebula doing.... things?

also everyone just kind of trusts nebula? okay? i’d be wary of purple aliens in light of what just happens but inclusivity i guess

also you mean to tell me that in three weeks they scanned the entire universe for gamma radiation? also enough gamma radiation that would show up on a scan from light years away but not fry everyone nearby when thanos snapped?

as soon as they killed thanos i knew the climax of this movie was gonna suck ass.

the writers have no idea how fast human hair grows if five years later natasha still has that godawful blonde dye on her tips

a fucking rat got scott lang out of the quantum realm. i don’t have any commentary for this because this scene speaks for itself. a rat.

moreover how did they even get the van down from the rooftop it was on at the end of ant man 2

fat thor. i don’t have any commentary about this either. the whole thing reeks of the russos looking at taika and going “you wanna be a funny man? you want thor to be fucking funny? you think he’s hilarious? fuck you”

oh i guess i did have commentary on that after all

i’m glossing right over the gay scene because again, taika fought tooth and nail to get bisexual valkyrie and now the russo shitters get to say they had the first canon lgbt character and it’s a couple of throwaway lines that can be redubbed for china. seriously. i don’t think there’s ever a scene where he says “he” or “him” while his lips are on screen.

apparently i am doing this relatively plot point by plot point but i digress

if i was keeping points like cinemasins (ew) i’d take a few off for morgan stark. i’m an bitch but not that much of one.

oh yeah pepper potts’ first of, i believe, four lines in this movie is “yeah i’m reading about compost”. i have no commentary for this either. it speaks for itself.

tony hits upon time travel in a day

i’m so glad we couldn’t get any real character development for anyone but we had time for the four minute “ant man becomes various aged forms of himself and then makes a peeing your pants joke in 2019″ scene.

“that’s how time travel works in movies this is real life” that’s great except that joke falls flat cause you’re a fuckin movie bro

i’m skipping over the entirety of the battle of new york thing because that was just fucking.... *benny hill music*

oh no i’m addressing the ancient one thing. love to have characters retconned into previous movies so they can try and explain the time travel in a way that actually makes it more confusing and also isn’t the way the movie follows

steve leering at peggy through the blinds was creepy, i’m sorry. actually the way he was suddenly obsessed with her this whole movie was really creepy.

howard potts

tony meeting his dad was so awkward and uncomfortable and they really meant for it to be heartwarming but i’m sorry it was fucking hilarious and i was howling with laughter in the theater

likewise thor with frigga. a really nice, emotional moment where thor gets closure with his mom and she overtly says she knows she’s going to die soon but she loves him and she’s so proud of him....

..... and then tops it off with a fat joke. the russos can’t let any kind of emotion hang without making a joke.

when they killed natasha a guy three rows down said “if they were killing her here why the fuck did they greenlight her movie then”

why did thanos get a scene confronting the cost of the stone but clint just wakes up in a puddle? are you gonna tell me thanos cared more about gamora than clint did about natasha? ok.

okay i’ll admit seeing quill dancing on morag without the background music was funny as fuck. rhodey explaining the punchline was not funny as fuck though

three cheers for nebula inexplicably having new abilities

as soon as they brought in past thanos i knew the climax of this movie was gonna suck a big ass

hulk snaps the iron infinity gauntlet because he’s the only one that can withstand the gamma radiation that it allegedly emits and has been mentioned only once before in this movie

the fact that it works is demonstrated by not anyone coming back, but ant man looking out the window at some birds. yeah. gee.

okay i have a question here that may take a little bit to explain.

earlier in the movie it’s explicitly stated they only have enough pym particles for one round trip each. that’s why steve and tony had to go back to 197X to get the tesseract and more particles. 

so.

past-nebula takes current-nebula’s place and uses her particles to travel back to the present, leaving current-nebula with no particles

so how did past-thanos bring his ship to the present with no pym particles

anyway past-gamora and current-nebula kill past-nebula to get the iron infinity gauntlet back

the final battle was whatever. i couldn’t for the life of me tell you what happened or where anyone was in relation to anyone else because it was cut so poorly

everyone comes back. remember at the end of my infinity war thoughts when i said the end had no stakes because obviously everyone snapped came back and you all got mad at me? everyone comes back.

the ladies all running the gauntlet would be cool if it wasn’t encompassed by shots of all the men running the gauntlet, drawing attention to the fact there’s literally only like seven ladies and one of them isn’t even a hero

joss whedon was the cinematographer the day they shot wanda fighting thanos, judging from all the gratuitous shots down her shirt. i know elizabeth olsen has nice boobs. believe me, i do. i’m envious. but for the love of christ stop being creepy voyeurs about it

also “you took everything from me” “i don’t even know who you are???” that was a great setup for her to use her mind powers and make thanos experience some suffering but they just didn’t do that so those lines are hilarious

tony gets the stones and snaps, killing thanos and all his army. thanos fades away into dust while a woman vocalizes in the background in a manner that’s less satisfying than when voldemort did the exact same thing in deathly hallows part 2

tony dies because i guess?

at the funeral everyone is there and there’s shots lingering on everyone including this weird kid who looks like he’d microwave a gerbil? i had to google him and it’s supposed to be the kid from iron man 3. i feel like seven years later you should probably put in a line like “thanks for coming <whatever that kid’s name was>

okay we’ve reached the part i have the absolute most beef with.

steve’s ending

from the start of this movie he’s been inexplicably obsessed with peggy. the ending is telegraphed from a mile away and i was still shocked and stunned that they actually did this.

so steve just gives up everything, all his friends and family, to go back in time to be with a woman he knew for max a year, in the heat of war, where emotions run high and they may very well have latched onto each other in case they died.

steve rogers, the man who wielded mjolnir, the man who broke his friend’s mental conditioning just be refusing to fight him, just sits back through the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s. the cuban missile crisis, the LA riots, the assassination of JFK, the death of howard and maria stark, the infiltration of shield, the berlin wall, 9/11, the war on terror, and he just.... did nothing?

what the fuck was that

sam is captain america now though so i’m down with that

but i’m still so angry

this is beyond character assassination for steve. it’s... outright brutal murder and mutilation. anywhere i can, i give endgame a half star review FOR THIS ALONE. setting aside fat thor and how they treat Ragnarok, the fact they think steve rogers would, after everything he’s done and learned, go back into the past where there was still a chance he could help his friends in his own way, and do NOTHING, is the most infuriating thing about this barely-polished turd of a movie.

IN CONCLUSION i said infinity war was the worst movie marvel had ever put out and marvel went “haha we can do you one better”

endgame is just three hours of setpiece, gag, setpiece, gag, setpiece, gag, occasionally punctuated with emotional moments that aren’t allowed to hang long enough for the emotion to sink in before a joke is made, usually at thor’s expense.

[saotome-michi]

Hi! Well I think they might have changed the regulations since even a BL that was broadcasted this year (the one about the blond guy and his teacher) couldn't show kisses (though i think they could show one in last episode?) anyway regarding not mentioning the kiss perhaps it was due to the fact they didn't choose the BL tag, the scan of the fanbook and translation you can find it in the tumblr account "gogoeeg" under the tag "sayo-yamamoto"

About the event in Philippines, I got friends from there who went and talked to me about it but I couldn’t find a post until now, to read it go to the account zuzusexytiems and search the tag “yoi-news” also not long ago mappa’s ceo talked about how Sayo always had the intention to depict a romance which i think was the most direct statement but of course not choosing a BL tag arrises problems, but even so as I told you about that other bl series, they couldn’t show kisses until last eps

Still same anon, but messages sent later on with links and more clarification: 

Hi! Don’t rush if you need to study, I hope things go well with your finals, i found a twitter thread about the director’s statements on the fanbook (they also put tumblr links with the scans in the thread) i hope this link can be sent well twitter.com/hanleia/status/877682683429609472

Also this is a report of the event my friends in ph talked about, i met them because the persona fandom but they were into yoi too so it caught my attention, there might be more reports but is difficult to find them zuzusexytiems.tumblr.com/post/165924693224/met-sayo-yamamoto-fuuko-noda-of-yuri-on-ice-at-a?is_related_post=1

A second anon, I presume: 

Regarding what the other anon said, is true, that other anime hitorijime my hero had a lot of censorship despite being a BL and even the staff of series “explicit visually” like no6 have explicitly stated the relationship is “probably one sided” or “up for interpretation”. The thing is that even co creator Kubo has already labelled Victor and Yuuri as a couple as well as mappa’s ceo Otsuka and even Sayo said in yuri on life that their love encompasses love like lovers, family, etc so (½)

As someone who participates a lot in japanese fandom I can tell you almost no one denies the kiss and they took that statement as “confirmation” (for westerns it would be when Otsuka said their relationship was 恋愛) I dont consider yoi the best representation but i can assure is not bait, you just have to check official material, あの二人の愛多くの意味を包含するから…友だちだけじゃない、恋人だけじゃない even JCM and Johnny Weir have spoken with the staff and assure is romance (2/2)

First of all, I would like to apologize to both of you for this late response. Although I said I would address this after finals, I got sidetracked by family obligations, and couldn’t really get together enough energy to look through these sources and do research until now. Hopefully you two still see this answer. I am compiling your messages and answering both of you at the same time due to the similarity in topic.

Before I get started on talking about TV regulations, I wish to clarify (especially for those who are not aware of what I’ve already written on yoi) that I do not consider yoi bait, due to queerbaiting being a US/UK concept. In my opinion, the term simply does not make sense in Japan–MAPPA was never trying to attract LGBT viewers to yoi, their material was always well in line with the light BL/shoujo demographic. My past criticism about yoi was focused on its overblown reception among international anime viewers; people were acting like yoi was going to revolutionize all Japanese media in regards to depictions of lgbt people, as if yoi was the first show to have men in love, as if Japanese lgbt people and organizations have not already been fighting this fight for years… and frankly it just annoyed me on how much people misunderstood and oversimplified the situation in Japan. Whatever your views on yoi are, I think most can agree that there’s a real disconnect happening when the only articles talking about how revolutionary yoi is were from western/international websites, and Japanese sites, including lgbt sites, had nothing.  

Hence, despite having voiced my dissatisfactions towards Kubo and the yoi staff before on my blog, my main beef with yoi has always been more about its reception, the international fandom and their activity. 

But I digress– the discussion regarding TV regulations goes back to my post “Yuri on Ice, anime ratings, and censorship”. I wrote this post on Nov 20, 2016–so not long after episode 7 had been released–and in this post I put forward arguments refuting the idea that “the YOI staff censored the kiss either because they didn’t want to change their rating or their genre, or to avoid government censorship laws.” While I still stand by this idea (because ratings and genres really don’t work the same way in Japan as they do in the US, and there are no government censorship laws that apply here) I also see that, after doing some more research, there were other factors that I failed to take into consideration, namely: 

While there are no government laws or agencies that censor depictions of homosexuality in media (as there are in China), that doesn’t mean people/companies in Japan don’t exercise other forms of censorship, such as:

Corporate censorship: the sanctioning of speech by spokespersons, employees, and business associates by threat of monetary loss, loss of employment, or loss of access to the marketplace. 

Self-censorship: the act of censoring or classifying one’s own work of media. Usually done out of fear of, or deference to, the sensibilities or preferences of others (Wikipedia).

What I’m hinting towards is that, basically, either: 

Broadcasting Stations, while not having legal regulations, may pressure Anime Studios to change their content and/or

Studios themselves might be inclined to change their content in order to not conflict with Broadcasters’ perceived preferences or to better market their anime to certain Broadcasters. 

This is actually an idea that I brought up in “Yuri on Ice, anime ratings, and censorship”, but did not fully develop– it would make sense if different broadcasting stations had different “preferences” in place regarding what content they prefer in the anime they broadcast, depending on their reach, image, and perceived audience. For example, stations such as AT-X and BS11, which are known for broadcasting a good deal of “shinya anime” (if you do not know what this term means please refer back to my post linked above), are much more likely to screen niche anime with explicit content than say, stations like TBS, whose anime content consists of those targeted to either children or shounen manga readers, a much wider demographic. 

There is a possibility that these “preferences” are formalized in the shape of outlined standards. The JBA (The Japan Commercial Broadcasters Association), a non-profit incorporated association whose membership consists of 206 commercial broadcasters in Japan, focuses on upholding fundamental standards for commercial broadcasters, as well as on improving broadcasting ethics throughout the industry. Their standards, which are detailed in this document, “ JBA Broadcasting Standards”, are then used as a guideline for individual broadcasting stations to outline their own standards. However, since I am unable to find any individual broadcaster’s standards on the internet, this is mostly speculation, although the document itself is an interesting read and gives an idea of the various social pressures more mainstream broadcasters might face. For example, a couple of the outlined standards include: 

26. Public morals shall be respected. Any possibility of arousing favorable feelings toward speech or action that is against common social practice, or desire to imitate such speech or action, shall be avoided.

77. When presenting sexual minorities, full consideration shall be given to the human rights of people who belong to said minorities.

A bit conflicting, given that a portion of Japanese people still think same-sex relationships go against public morals... 

So, with all this being said, do I think it’s possible that the yoi staff was pressured into making the kiss scene what it was, not by any laws, but by social pressures translated into Broadcasters’ standards, a combination of corporate and self censorship? Yes, I do. Although TV Asahi did broadcast Shin Sekai Yori, an anime with same-sex relationships and kiss scenes, Shin Sekai Yori is an outlier among TV Asahi’s anime content. The majority of their programs (and BS Asahi’s, another station that broadcast yoi) are targeted towards a wider demographic, so I can see them having stricter standards. 

Having come to this conclusion, I wish to apologize for my old post; although the information included there is accurate, I failed to consider the factors and possibilities outlined above, thus not giving readers the full picture. 

Does this change my opinion about yoi? It changes my opinion that Kubo and Yamamoto could’ve included the kiss if they wanted to, but it doesn’t change the rest of my criticisms about yoi and its reception. 

Oh and before I forget–

Regarding Hitorijime~My Hero: I am not familiar with this anime, but whichever way the kiss scenes were handled does not prove anything in regards to TV Asahi’s regulations, because the anime was not broadcast by TV Asahi in the first place. A quick look at the anime’s main website (http://hitorijime-myhero.com/onair/) shows that it was broadcast by AT-X, Tokyo MX, and BS日テレ–not by TV Asahi.

Furthermore, while Hitorijime may have only had one kiss scene, BL/GL anime such as Super Lovers 2 and NTR~Netsuzou Trap showed multiple kiss scenes, and non-BL/GL anime like Kuzu no Honkai and Koi to Uso each had one as well. (All mentioned anime were broadcast in 2017.)

But if anything, this lends more weight to my theory that different broadcasters simply have different standards, and anime studios self-censor their content in order to market to certain broadcasters. Hitorijime, Super Lovers 2, and NTR~Netsuzou Trap were all broadcast by AT-X (shinya anime) and Tokyo MX (shinya anime), but only Hitorijime was broadcast by BS日テレ (wider demographic), while Super Lovers 2 and NTR were broadcast by BS11 (shinya anime). So perhaps BS日テレ is stricter? Makes sense to me. 

[spamzineglasgow]

(HOT TAKE) Notes on a Conditional Form by The 1975, part 1

In the first instalment of a two part dialogic HOT TAKE of The 1975′s latest album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit, 2020), Maria Sledmere writes to musician and critic Scott Morrison with meditations on the controversial motormouth and prince of sincerity that is Matty Healy, the poetics of wrongness, millennial digression and what it means to play and compose from the middle.

Dear Scott,

> So we have agreed to write something on The 1975’s fourth studio album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit/Polydor). I have been traipsing around the various necropoli of Glasgow on my state-sanctioned walks this week, listening to the long meandering 80-minute world of it, disentangling my headphones from the overgrown ferns, caught between the living and dead. Can you have a long world, a sprawling fantasia, when ‘the world’ feels increasingly shortened, small, boiled down to its ‘essentials’? Let’s go around the world in 80 minutes, the band seem to say, take this short-circuit to the infinite with me. I like that; I don’t even need a boat, just a half-arsed WiFi connection and a will to download. I’m really excited to be talking with you, writing you both about this; it’s an honour to connect our thoughts. I want writing right now to feel a bit like listening, so I write this listening. When my friend Katy slid into my DMs on a Monday morning with ‘omg the 1975 album starts with greta?????????’ and then ‘what on earth is the genre of this album ?!’ I just knew it had to happen, this writing-listening, because I was equally alarmed and charmed by the cognitive dissonance of that fall from Greta’s soft, yet urgent call to rebel (‘The 1975’), into ‘People’ with its parodic refrain of post-punk hedonism that would eat Fat White Family on a Dadaesque meal-deal platter ‘WELL, GIRLS, FOOD, GEAR [...] Yeah, woo, yeah, that’s right’. Scott, you and I went to see The 1975 play at the Hydro on the 1st of March, my last gig before lockdown. I’d been up all night drinking straight gin and doing cartwheels and crying on my friend’s carpet, and the sleeplessness made everything all the more lush and intense. Those slogans, the theatrical backdrops, the dancers, the lights, the travellator! Everything so EXTRA, what a JOURNEY. And well, it would be rude of me not to invite you to contribute to this conversation, as a thank you for the ticket but also because of your fortunate (and probably unusual) positioning as both a classically trained musician (with a fine-tuned listening ear) and fervent fan of the band (readers, Scott messaged me with pictures of pre-ordered vinyl to prove it).

> It seems impossible to begin this dialogue without first addressing the FRAUGHT and oft~problematic question of Matty Healy, the band’s frontman, variously described as ‘the enfant terrible of pop-rock’ and ‘outspoken avatar’ (Sam Sodomsky, Pitchfork), ‘enigmatic deity’ (Douglas Greenwood for i-D), ‘a charismatic thirty-one-year-old’ and ‘scrawny’, rock star ‘archetype’, not to mention ‘avatar of modern authenticity, wit, and flamboyance’ (Carrie Battan, The New Yorker). ‘Divisive motormouth or voice of a generation?’ asks Dorian Lynskey with (fair enough) somewhat tired provocation in The Guardian, as if you could have one without the other, these days. ‘There are’, writes Dan Stubbs for The NME, ‘as many Matty Healys here as there are musical styles’. So far, so postmodern, so elliptical, so everything/yeah/woo/whatever/that’s right. Come to think of it, it makes sense for The 1975 to draft in Greta Thunberg to read her climate speech over the opening eponymous track. Both Matty and Greta, for divergent yet somehow intersecting reasons, suffer the troublesome, universalising label of voice of a generation. Why not join forces to exploit this label, to put out a message? I’ve always thought of pop music as a kind of potential broadcast, a hypnotic, smooth space for desire’s traversal and recalibration. More on that later, maybe. What do you think?

> You can imagine Matty leaping out of a cryptic, post-internet Cocteau novelette (if not then straight onto James Cordon’s studio desk), emoji streaming from his fingertips like the lightning that Justine wields in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011); but the terrifying candour of the enfant terrible is also his propensity to wax lyrical on another (bear with my clickhole) YouTube interview about his thoughts on Situationism and the Snapchat generation. It feels relevant to mention cinema right now, if only in passing, because this album is full of cinematic moments: strings and swells worthy of Weyes Blood’s latest paean to the movies, but also a Disneyfication of sentiment clotted and packed between house tracks, ballads and rarefied indie hits. Nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975. Maybe more on that later, also.

> Where do I start though, how to really write about this, how to attain something like necessary distance in the space of a writing-listening? Matty Healy, I suppose, like SPAM’s celebrated authorial mascot, Tom McCarthy, poses the same problem of response: how to write about an artist whose own critical commentary is like an eloquent, overzealous and self-devouring, carnivorous vine of opinion?  

> Now, let’s not turn this into a discussion about who wears pinstripes better (we can leave that to readers - these are total Notes from the Watercooler levels of quiche). There seems to be this obsession with pinning (excuse the pun) Matty down to a flat surface of multiples: a moodboard, avatar, placeholder for automatic cancellation. He’s the soft cork you wanna prod your anxieties through and call it identity, you wanna provoke into saying something bizarrely, painfully true about life ‘as it is now’. Healy himself quips self-referentially, ‘a millennial that babyboomers like’. I don’t really know where to start really, not even on Matty; my brain is all over the place and I can’t find a critical place to settle. I’m lost in the fog and the stripes, some stars also; I haven’t even washed my hair for a week. Funnily enough, in 2018 for SPAM’s #7 Prom Date issue I wrote a poem called ‘Just Messing Around’ where the speaker mentions ‘pinning my eye to the right side / of matt healy’s hair all shaved / & serene’ and you don’t really know if it’s the eye that’s shaved or the hair, but both I guess offer different kinds of vision. Every time I google the man, IRL Matty I mean, I am offered a candied proliferation of alluring headlines: ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy opens up on his beef with Imagine Dragons’, ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy savagely destroys Maroon 5 over plagiarism claims’. Perhaps the whole point is to define (or slay?) by negation. Hey, I’ll write another poem. The opening sentence comes from Matty’s recent Guardian interview.

Superstar

I’m not an avocado, not everyone thinks I’m amazing. That’s why they call me the avocado, baby was a song released by Los Campesinos! in 2013, same year as the 1975’s debut. In the am I have been wanting to listen and Andy puts up a meme like ‘The 1975 names their albums stuff like “A Treatise on Epistemological Suffering” and then spends 2 hours singing about how hard it is to be 26’ and I reply being 26 IS epistemological suffering (isn’t that the affirmative dismissal contained in the title, ‘Yeah I Know’) I mean only yesterday I had to ask myself if it’s true you can wish on 11:11 or take zinc to improve your immune system or use an expired provisional license to buy alcohol like why are they even still asking I thought indie had died after that excruciating Hadouken! song called ‘Superstar’ which was all like You don’t like my scene / You don’t like my song / Well, if you Somewhere I’ve done something wrong it seems a delirious, 3-minute scold of the retro infinitude of scarf-wearing cunts with haircuts, and yeah sure kids dressed as emos rapping to rave is not the end of the world, per se, similarly I had to ask myself is there a life in academia is there a wage here or there, like the Talking Heads song And you may ask yourself, well How did I get here? Good thing I turn 27 next month Timothy Morton often uses the refrain, this is not my beautiful house this is not my beautiful wife to refer to those moments you find yourself caught in the irony loop and that’s dark ecology the closer you are the stranger it feels like slice me in half I’ll fall out with more questions you can plant in the soil like a stone or stoner, just one more drag of does it offend you, yeah? will I live and die in a band Matty sings the sweet green meat of my much-too-old -and-such-youthful experience of adding healthy fat to conference dialogue, like ‘Avocado, Baby’ was released on a record called No Blues I believe a large automobile is hurtling towards me now in negative space and the driver is crooning Elvis and reciting my funding conditions and everything feels like there aren’t not still people who believe the new culture of content is a space ‘over there’ and you can still have earnest power ballads about love if you want them =/ to cancel (too many tabs don’t make a tableau but in the future facebook has a paywall) and fame is a drag the pressure we put on the atmosphere, like somewhere you’re alive and still amazing asking wtf I’m reading this novel by Roberto Bolaño set partly in 1975 before we had internet it seems poets got laid a lot that year in Mexico City before I was born to pick up video calls with a spliff in one hand in the splendid, essential heat like a difficult knife in my side you can put me on toast, grind the pepper over me gently and say fucking hell this has taken forever.

> I guess I want or wanted to begin with this question of difficulty that rises when responding to Notes on a Conditional Form. How do you approach an album whose delayed release places it in a position of considerable hype, an album whose world tour and promotion is again delayed by global pandemic, an album shrouded in the ever-shifting controversy of Matty’s persona, an album whose length and sonic variety risks collapse into litanies of zany superlative and necrophilic attempts to revive musical category as vaguely relevant here? As beautiful as it is to catalogue the offbeat Pinegrove vibes of ‘Roadkill’, the shoegaze croons of ‘Then Because She Goes’ and the pop-punk, chord-bright euphoria of ‘Me & You Together Song’, I could keep going and going with this. I could just list and just list this. The album is a generous offering: a tribute to the album as form in an age where attention tapers away on high-streaming playlists set to conditioned, circadian moods curated by the likes of Spotify or Apple Music. The album is a Borgesian plenitude of multiple pathways, multiple timelines, infinite feed, choose your own adventure; a hypertext of cultural reference almost worthy of Manic Street Preachers at their Richey Edwards era of paranoid, intellectual peak; a metamodernist feat of oscillation between irony and sincerity, an extended tract, a drunk millennial ramble, a journey that loops from house party to club basement to the streams of sexuality repressed and expressed encounter...and yet. It is both more and less than these things. In trying to capture Notes on a Conditional Form with some pithy, journalist’s statement, I’m doing it all wrong.

> Sidenote: I recently listened to Rachel Zucker give a 2016 lecture on ‘The Poetics of Wrongness’ as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She makes a case for wrongness in poetry and critique, rejects the poem of pithy essence, the short, pretty and to the point lyric whose meaning is easily digested in a greetings card, or A Level exam paper, say. ‘Instead of the Fabergé egg of the short lyric, I prefer the aesthetics of intractability and exhausted exhaustedness’, the mistakes, lags or aporia made along the way in one of these long and winding poems. Notes on a Conditional Form is full of what some might deem mistakes, digression, exhaustion; but it is also peppered with the gloss of almost perfect pop ‘hits’ such as ‘Me & You Together Song’ and ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’. A wrong poem should be, ‘ashamed and irreverent’, which feels like a decent description of The 1975’s general orientation towards artistic conception. There is cringe and incongruity, there is by all intents and purposes ‘too much of it’, whatever we mean by ‘it’. And yet, that is its beautiful poetics of wrongness, the sound of wrongness, which ‘prefers the stairs’ to the easy elevator pitch (as Zucker puts it), that ‘prefers a half-finishing crumbling stairwell to nowhere’. I like to think about this 1975 album as a kind of exhausting Escherian scene of shifting, crumbling stairwells, shuffling and reassembling against the glistering backdrop of the internet’s inverse void, where everything, literally everything is translated to a starry excess of 1s and 0s, our collective binary data, the white hot, unreadable howl of our noise. What do you think Scott, would Matty find this image agreeable? Does that matter?

> Pushing dear Matty aside, say what you like, let’s start (again) with the title: Notes on a Conditional Form. Following 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, it’s fair to position these records as gestures towards philosophical statements ‘of the times’. Important to recognise the resistance to total or dominating knowledge built into the titles: these are not complete tracts or theses, but rather ‘a brief inquiry’ and ‘notes’. It’s obviously the ancient yet *hip* thing to do in capital-P Philosophy, to put out your statement on aesthetics and ethics, and I think The 1975 are playing with that tradition and its failure. You can imagine if his attention span were different, Matty Healy would’ve already written a PhD thesis on this stuff and published it as drunken bulletins on LiveJournal in 2007. As it stands, we have the smorgasbord sprawl of this eclectic record to get through in this cursèd year of 2020 — it’s not like we have much of anything better to do right now, when everything feels so futile, beyond reason and even the greatest human endeavour. Haha, woo, Yeah :’(((.

> Let’s stay in that conditional space between crying and laughter. Conditional form is interesting as a term, often used in grammar to refer to the ‘unreal past’ because it uses a past tense but does not actually refer to something that literally happened in the past: If I had texted him back, we would probably have gone to the gig that night. There’s something about the conditional as the ur-condition of the internet, the proliferating possibilities it offers and the hauntological strains of what could have been had we chosen x option over y, z, a, b, c, infinity...As millennials, we often make decisions by hedging, always caught in the conditional state of what it is to be. Hovering in the emotional shortcuts provided by dumb yellow icons, the poetics of abstraction. A verb form’s dalliance with uncertain reverb; and so we live our conditional lives.

> To push this further, we can say the internet is, as ever, Matty Healy’s natural habitat. In a recent podcast interview with Conor Oberst for The Face, Healy tells his favourite emo-country hero that ‘my natural environment by the time I started The 1975 was the fucking internet’. So how does that ecosystem play into the music? In a damning review for The Line of Best Fit, Claire Biddles concludes:

The 1975’s first three albums are ideal and distinct worlds to inhabit, each individually cohesive but situated in specific contexts — the anticipation of the small town, profundity in the face of vacuous fame, and the horror and isolation of late capitalism. Perhaps because of its broken genesis, Notes has no such common context, and ends up feeling flat, directionless and inessential, where its forebears felt vital, worthy of devoting a life to. For a band with proven dexterity in deftly capturing the nuances and quick changes of contemporary conversation, it is disheartening to witness them with nearly nothing of note to say.

That description — ‘flat, directionless and inessential’ — is kind of how I experience the internet right now, in the paradox of Web 2.0 becoming utterly essential, somehow, to how I live my life, how I love, how I am with friends. The internet as my ecosystem, my utility, my complete environment, my Imaginary — beyond the mere utility of a WiFi connection. Broken genesis might well describe the childhoods of those of us who grew up online, whose platforms collapsed around them, whose adolescent data was lost in the great ~accidental annihilation of the MySpace servers, whose identities were always already fractured, performed, anonymised or exquisitely personalised, deferred into only the (im)possible keystroke of utterance and trace, the fort-da play of MSN sign-ins. ‘My life is defined by a desire to be outward followed by a fear of being seen’, Matty says in a new short film for Apple Music, released in tandem with the album. The internet requires this chiaroscuro destiny: not to burn always with Baudelaire’s hard and gem-like flame (O to be an IRL flaneur beyond times of lockdown) but to endlessly flicker between the bright green light of presence and the shade of what once was called afk, away from keyboard. To live and burn in the gap between extroversion and introversion, to live in this conditional state of tendency. To express with emoji, send pics, is to both reveal and withhold something else, essential.

> I like albums to feel like worlds; I appreciate Biddles’ evocation of the cohesion experienced in the first three 1975 records. But perhaps it is a kind of violence to assume a world must have cohesion to exist. What is even meant by ‘common context’? What pressure are we putting on a singer, a band, a cultural moment to produce something familiar and harmonious, and to whom, at what scale? What does it mean to be the biggest band in the world...for a bit? How does that work when everything is dissonance, transience, noise, interference; both this and not-this; when life itself is lived as the flat traversal of a millioning existential terrains that seem to collapse into this nowness in which I feel myself sliding forever? Can anyone weigh-in on what it means to make music, art or writing that’s ‘worthy of devoting a life to’, because the gravity and force of that condition for good art, good pop, seduces me so.

> Maybe the point is to always be in the middle, to never quite start to write about The 1975, to find yourself always already writing about this album because this album was always already writing about your life. I have said nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975, but I was being coy, because the hottest twentieth-century philosophical double act, Deleuze and Guattari (haters gonna hate), do the interlude rather nicely. The point of a rhizome being ‘no beginning or end [...] always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ as they write in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). I see the musical interlude of a pop record, the instrumental moment without lyric, as a kind of middling gesture that places the listener in that conditional state of presence and absence, a hinge between songs, times and narrative moments. Maybe my favourite moment in A Thousand Plateaus is the statement: ‘RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or pseudoscien-tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous’. Painful or ponderous might be a fair critique levelled at the enfant terrible vibes of Matty’s lyrics and generic pick’n’mix, but isn’t this tactic a kind of swerving punch at the categorical violence that keeps people out of academia, that keeps academic discourse so often stale in the first place? Unlike most journal articles, let’s face it, pop reaches ‘“the people”’. Perhaps Notes on a Conditional Form is the rhizomatic sprawl of the myriad we need as an alternative to institutional hierarchy, ring-fencing and the language games of academia. Surely the title is a reference to the very ‘pseudoscient-tificity’ D&G mention? I’m gonna quote Richard Scott’s blurb to Colin Herd’s 2019 poetry collection, You Name It here (not least because the indie publishers, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, come straight out of Manchester, home to The 1975, and because Herd’s poetic spirit is pure pop generosity with a platter of theory on the side), because I want to say similar things of this album: ‘Colin Herd’s poems are masterpieces of variousness. They are talismans against Macho demons. They are snatches of theory operating under lavish spills of language’. The good thing about Herd’s poetry and Matty Healy’s lyrics is that the impulse towards romantic or florid expression is always tapered by an interest in the mundane and everyday. Healy is always singing about pissing or buying clothes online or, as on ‘The Birthday Party’, singing about ‘a place I’ve been going’ that seems to consist of the lonely, infinite regress of conversations about seeing friends and watching someone drink kombucha while buying, in the convenient life of rhyme, Ed Ruscha prints.

Ed Ruscher, Cold Beer, Beautiful Girls (2009)

> So what kind of listening does this rhizomatic sprawl demand — does it expand beyond the banal or find a holding space there, a heaven of affect chilled to late-modernity’s crisp perfection? ‘The End (Music For Cars)’ is a luxurious, Hollywood ‘soaring’ moment, all strings and swells, fucking woodwind, and comes as the third track on the album, where normally you’d place it as some kind of penultimate climax, the album’s landscape pan-out or big swelling screen kiss in three-dimensional rotation. The band’s ‘Music For Cars’ era comprises their two most recent records, and you have to take it as a nod to Brian Eno’s 1978 ambient classic Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Matty recently interviewed Eno again for The Face, cool). The thing about cars is you drive around in them, you follow rules but also whims and desires, convictions; you choose to join others or you pursue the selfish acceleration (‘People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles’ goes the laconic teenage refrain in Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero). You only listen to music half-attentively; you don’t listen close enough to trade in souls. Are we being invited to experience this album as an ambient disruption of figure and ground, presence and absence, here and there, space and place, intimacy and despondency? Driving feels increasingly ‘directionless and inessential’ when the scale effects and obscenities of the anthropocene, of covid and other late-capitalist crises loom in our vision, when the sign systems we used to navigate our lives by seem to shimmer out of focus, or pixelate and deteriorate through endless memetic replication... You can’t help feel like Biddles review kind of misses the point.

Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor (1959)

> What point would that be though, in a world of rhizomatic overlap and intersecting, middling lines, a direction without seeming end? I love the approximation at work when Biddles writes, ‘with nearly nothing of note to say’, because that seems to be a possibility condition for writing in the age of the internet. To write in a way that is almost less than zero and loop back upon some kind of infinity, yet keep it in 2-step. I think back to Rachel Zucker’s image of the half-finished crumbling stairwell, and feel an amiable sense of approval towards this band who always work between the registers of diary, confession, advertising, provocative sloganeering and faux-didactics, never quite settling in to specifically tell you this particular story. It’s all mess, and it’s awful and delicious, I’m sorry. ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’ is the title of track 13 on the album: that movement between nothing and everything feels like the absolutist, absurdist conditions of ‘truth’ possibility in the Trumpocene/age of so-called ‘post-truth’. ‘Life feels like a lie, I need something to be true’, Healy sings with strained conviction in the song’s opening. But what is at stake in this truth? ‘I never fucked in a car, I was lying’, goes the line, referring back to the dramatic in medias res opening to ‘Love It If We Made It’, notable banger from A Brief Inquiry…: ‘We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin / Saying controversial things just for the hell of it’. If lying is a pun on telling a mistruth or laying back, practically sexless in a passive state, there’s a deliberate play on apathy, agency and distortion here. It’s something Matty seems snagged on. On ‘I Like America & America Likes Me’ he collapses aesthetic superficiality, capital’s lyric abstraction (‘Oh, what’s a fiver?’) and generalised crisis into this (un)conscious desire for shutdown, expressed in fragmentary bullets of needing-to-know-and-not-know: ‘Is that designer? Is that on fire? Am I a liar? Oh, will this help me lay down?’ And then that impassioned refrain, processed through vocal distortion as if to enact the difficulty in clarity as overcome somehow by the sheer making of noise: ‘Belief and saying something / And saying something / And saying something’. It’s the endless, driving recursion of our lives online, online.

> Back to ‘The End (Music for Cars)’ which really is the middle of the beginning. It’s weird to listen to songs about driving and lying down in the middle of lockdown, drowning in the bloat of social media, on top of our ongoing climate emergency (yeah, remember that, it’s still happening), where high-carbon travel feels like an exhausted, almost impossible concept. A musician complaining about travelling is an age-old subject for a song, but this feels just as much about living in the in-between times of the internet (remember the sweet naivety of the information superhighway) as much as the great Road, for which Kerouac longed as much as Springsteen, Dylan, or Lana Del Rey. Is Matty Healy homesick though? ‘Get somewhere, change my mind, eh / Get somewhere but don’t find it / I don’t find what I’m looking for’. It’s all ‘(out there)’ as the parenthetical refrain goes, but maybe ‘out there’, outside, is the maddening supplement, as Derrida would say, to our lives online, thus revealing their mutual, entwined dependency. Imagine the M6 but tangled up crazily, zanily, like one of those Sylvano Bussoti scores. It’s not like you’re trying to get home, get back, exactly. It’s not like you can just click back on your browser and erase that trace of the touch that enacts it. That’s the weird-ass sensation of being an ecological being: ‘Wherever you go, there you are’, writes Tim Morton in Being Ecological (2018). We’re all pretty alien, even to ourselves.

> If life feels like a lie, as Matty sings, does it matter anymore whether it is or not? Or, to pose the question differently, how do we feel into, attune to something like ‘truth’, a shared reality or feeling? ‘Out there’ is only a state of ellipsis [...] a vine extended, something for the listener, user, consumer and/or human to cling to — or be strangled by. In the aforementioned Apple Music video, Matty takes away the canvas and presents the frame beneath, in a gesture that is comically overwrought with Duchampian pretention around the state and context of the artwork itself. ‘Sometimes I think what is the point of...it’s not my atheism coming out, it’s just my being human coming out’, he muses. The phrase ‘coming out’, with its connotations of closeting, shame and cocoon-like emergence is intriguing here. In a dehumanising, post-internet world of neoliberalism and its attendant microfascisms, its commodification of all kinds of art, its easythink translation of poetry-to-advertising, what would it mean to come out as human after, or better still, in the middle of all this? It’s significant that he trails off after ‘the point of…’, for surely the point itself (of the art?) would be to find yourself here, there, right in the middle of it all. And then in ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’, it’s like Matty is calling us back from that epistemological and ontological boiling point of knowing and being, like in singing we could go along, we could feel present and ‘true’ again, even with friction and difference. We gotta take hold, cool ourselves down from the rhetoric and into warm emotion, the smell of paint, erotic vibration of bass, in a manner of speaking.

> What if the mode of inquiry were not to investigate but rather to follow the lines of flight, to riff on this world where narrative arcs and chains are replaced by the multiple possibilities of hallucinatory experience, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’? To just desire and trace it. This, Scott, is where you come in (and I finally shut up to listen). There is so much more to write about this album, echo for echo, and I feel like I’ve only begun the tracing which was already beginning: I want to know your thoughts on The 1975 and America, on gender and genre, on bodies and football and friendship, on political engagement, those house beats, on the beautiful, sultry appearance of Phoebe (fucking) Bridgers, on sincerity, on the question of ‘What Should I Say’...It’s been playing on my mind that I will never say what I want to, or should, or would say of this album, but this perhaps is what I would otherwise have said. I give you my notes in conditional form.

Read part 2 of our review in Scott Morrison’s response here.

Notes on a Conditional Form is out now and available to order. 

~

Text: Maria Sledmere

Published: 23/6/20