#ruffianbandwidth

[ruffianbandwidth]

an earworm, if there ever was one.

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Milly · Marcy

Babe, get in, we're going back to the future - and by "the future" I mean Sunny Day Real Estate.

[ruffianbandwidth]

a lil’ dose of those summah time vibess

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1. Joey Bada$$ - “BABYLON (Feat. Chronixx)

We’re here. We’ve finally made it. The song that, in my humble opinion, was the best song of 2017. I’ve already written my praise for this album as a whole earlier on this list, but even amongst all of that greatness this song finds a way to transcend the rest. It’s on a whole other level, possessing that sort of polished rawness that all of my favorite songs seems to have, where emotion is not erased, but rather enhanced, through the lens of pristine production.

Similar to the rest of the album, this song tackles the structural and systematic racism and racial inequalities that continue to pervade and exist within America. However, any swagger and braggadocio that may have existed earlier on in the record has been stripped bare. It’s almost as if, after all of the effort and hope, Joey is exhausted. The entire album he’s been trying to do something positive, to name and face the problem – to help and lead his people, and yet now, in a moment of crushing clarity, he’s confronted by the full scope of what he’s up against and momentarily shaken by its overwhelming weight. It’s akin to the realization that your ramming your head against a brick wall, and once that realization hits, you can either take into account your own finite existence and stop, or you can ram all the harder, hoping that even if you can’t bring down the wall, then at least your effort will inspire others or maybe even weaken that wall for future generations.

Joey chooses to keep ramming. You can sense the desperation within his voice. It’s dripping from every line, blurring and tearing at his spirit, trying to inundate and break it, and yet through it all he perseveres, he presses on, turning the pain into passion and the hopelessness into resilience. Nowhere is this more clear than in the first verse, when he goes all in against police brutality and injustice.

“Turn on to CNN, look at what I see again It's another black man died at the white hand of justice To tell the truth, man, I'm fucking disgusted I fear for the lives for my sisters, my brothers Less fortunate than I, let's formulate a plan I'm sick of holding grudges, I'm loading in all my slugs and Aiming it at you judges, fuck the cops Fuck the system and the government, you fuckers not Protecting and serving You more like damaging and hurting And letting off shots 'till you motherfuckers certain He ain't breathing, you made it clear Fuck your breath, nigga, don't even deserve air Don't even deserve shit, don't even deserve nothing If black lives really mattered you niggas would do something Instead we mean nothing, in fact we being hunted They don't want us in abundance They know there's strength in the numbers That's why they gave you off The time is coming, no discussion If you ain't got a gun then you better start runnin'“

His voice becomes emotion incarnate. The rawness and the passion is undeniable. It’s not just a song. Its a plea and a battle cry. You can sense the overwhelming frustration of being surrounded by a dominant culture that not only shows indifference to your claims, but actual hostility. It’s a culture that praises and protects the killers, that would rather deny any wrongdoing in an attempt to avoid the deep and difficult soul searching that it would take to address and amend it. A culture that would rather preserve the status quo and some abstract notion of honor and sacrifice instead of attempting to achieve actual justice and equality. A culture that is so frightened, hateful, stubborn, and ignorant that it chooses to create slogans that obfuscate (all lives matter) and counter (blue lives matter) your own simple claim that “black lives matter”. Joey’s voice carries all of that. It’s laced with all of the pain, tragedy, frustration, resilience, and anger of a people continuously denied full personhood.

It’s a moment that hits all the harder in the wake of Eric Garner’s killer escaping without punishment. America has a problem, and only once all of us realize and acknowledge its existence, and begin to collectively bang our heads against the brick wall, will we be able to fracture and dismantle the hold it has over us.

[ruffianbandwidth]

like robots learning to dance

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43. Father John Misty - “Things That Would Have Been Helpful To Know Before The Revolution”

If the previous jam dealt with the almost certain oblivion of the pre-apocolyptic present, then this jam explores the potential shortcomings of an imagined solution, or rather the inevitability of the human predilection for self-destruction. We as a society and a species stand at a crossroads – a crux within which we must make a decision (just in case the prior post wasn't explicit enough). We have the unique position of apocalyptic sentience, something that all of the volcanoes, floods, and meteors of the past lacked. We can control our destruction – and yet here we are, doing nothing, ignoring all of the signs as we carry on the same as we have for the past three centuries or so, continuously digging the grave within which we will all eventually asphyxiate and rest within.

However, this song tries to imagine an alternative future within which a revolution successfully takes place. Somehow something is done, and the people rise and react, halting the manmade powers that sought to become nothing more than unremitting forces of nature. The people have won, and yet victory still eludes them. It’s the classic dilemma faced by all opposition and revolutionaries – destruction is easier than creating, in the same way that criticism and resistance is easier than leadership and governance. Any sense of purpose is lost and obscured. Its shrouded in the actualization of reality. Resistance gives way to realization and leaves all the zealots aimlessly drifting without a goal or a target to assail. The people now have the reigns, however, amidst the glory of the revolution there begins to rise an unmistakable sense of restlessness and uncertainty. Society starts to return to the shadows of the past, to seek out the old and established footprints of those who came before, and instead cling to the known. History begins to repeat itself – maybe with a slightly different tinge or flavor to it, but the result is more or less the same. Order begins to re-emerge, right alongside inequality and capital. Humanity is unable to shake its past and truly change, proving that maybe intelligence is always destined for destruction, or maybe, and perhaps even worse, humanity is forever destined to stubbornly carry on with a doomed and irreconcilable existence.

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New Angel Olsen – a.k.a. 80′s synth goth ice queen

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21. Girlpool - “123″

There are certain emotions that balance on the cusp of contradictory meaning. They’re intrinsically connected and yet seemingly unrelated, alternating back and forth as your mind blows with the wind of the ever-changing present. One moment you’re leaning towards the negative, passing through the rippling shadows, and then the next you’re pushed back into the warm sunlight of the positive.

This song seems to split its time between adulation and remonstration, and in doing so perfectly captures the chaotic nature of young love. Bolstered by passion and lubricated by hormones it’s as if such love is caught within a perpetual gale, unpredictable by nature, and yet undeniably forceful. The love cannot help but be felt deeply. However, what it feels remains unknown. It’s almost as if the passion is empty or void of substance, or perhaps its stuffed too full to be clearly understood. It’s simply feeling to feel something, without caring to define or even be certain of what is being felt. The feeling, in and of itself, is enough, because the feeling is what staves away the haunting maw of nothingness.

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33. Father John Misty - “Leaving LA”

Father John Misty has always been slowly slipping into an ever-growing abyss of self-deprecation. Only we all knew he was never going to go down alone – he’s too jaded, witty, and smug for that. If he’s going down, then he’s taking everything he despises with him. The gravity of his persona is going to swallow all of it into his orbit as he careens out of control and burns up in an incisive and smoldering conflagration of self-loathsome honesty.

This thirteen-minute epic is that long-awaited crescendo given life. It’s the final slow-motion scene where everything we’ve been anticipating is at last realized. Father John Misty lays bare his soul, stripping away the veneer of pretension and the facade of affectation, to leave us with Josh Tillman. The man removed from any sense of myth or legend – a human being, life-sized and aching, longing for something other than his self-mythology to keep him warm.

It’s a beautiful thing to witness. To gain a glimpse of a soul that���s been through the gauntlet of fame and still maintains its humanity. If anything he’s made it out with a sharpened sense of humanity and he finally possesses the courage (or maybe just finally lacks the strength to keep denying himself the urge) to reverse the lens of his insight and focus it fully upon himself.

Now I understand that some might interpret this otherwise, and rather than seeing it as an attempt to strip away the pretension, they might see it as his most pretentious song yet. We all have our own lenses of subjectivity through which we make sense of life. Meaning that where I see honesty and catharsis, there are those who will inevitably see a sparse and repetitive thirteen minute bout of autobiographical narcissism. However, art is about subjectivity. It’s about trying to honestly depict an experience that transcends understanding, and in doing so, helping others notice their own unvocalized (or perhaps even unrealized) experiences.

Father John Misty may be speaking about himself, but I believe he touches upon something universal. Not only does he bare his soul in a way that will inevitably be unpopular and unmarketable (which is honorable and inspirational in and of itself), but he shows that despite our positionality we all share something in common (albeit to different degrees). We’re all caught within something beyond our control. Whether that something is personal, such as our memories and decisions, or something unfathomable, like the power and force of a society that surrounds and contorts us, in the end there is no escaping determinism. We can run away. We can plan. We can hope. We can dream. However, in the end its all the same. Even in honesty were trapped. We’re cogs kept spinning in a machine that's ultimately outside of our control, indifferent to our will, and beyond our volition.

[ruffianbandwidth]

the goddess of 21st century ennui

also, if you have happened to sleep on this album up until now, sleep no more.

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52. Big Thief - “Pretty Things”

This jam is reminiscent of a horror movie. It has a fragile suspense to it, one that carries both a sultry and lascivious haze as well as a violent suppression, like a bound coil ready to snap or explode at any moment. You can imagine it playing as two bodies tangle in between the sheets, sweat glistening, rain falling outside, slight moans and heavy breathing filling the air. Only there’s no intimacy to it. It’s desperately trying to create the appearance of intimacy, but the harder it tries, the larger the fissure seems to grow between the two. Tenderness turns violent, and pleasure unravels into a painful awkwardness.

The listener no longer knows what is going on. Whether were listening to the thoughts of consensual brokenness or something else, something much darker. The hair on the back of your neck starts to rise and you’re caught between the whisper of something both beautiful and evil, like watching a tossed coin flicker and rotate as it passes through the air of a poorly-lit room, shadow and light intertwining in each moment.

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nostalgia infuses time

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Florist is back and I couldn’t be more stoked. The music carries the same frail beauty as before, meandering through the philosophical and the day-to-day ennui, only this time around its somehow managed to gain even more depth, wrapping itself in an added layer of emotion and meaning. Having myself experienced the overwhelming loss of losing a parent a too soon, this song and the accompanying video have even more meaning and immediately found a special place within my heart. Within this track Emily is able to translate the elusive heaviness of loss into something tangible. However, she makes it poetic rather than explicit, and then rounds out the edges with a soundscape that both cocoons and haunts. It’s an intimate beauty, like stumbling into your own headspace through someone else’s door. So go ahead and stumble away.

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Philadelphia artist (Sandy) Alex G graces the world with another brittle plea for a long-lost innocence.

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27. CyHi The Prynce - “No Dope on Sundays (Feat. Pusha T)”

This album was probably one of the biggest and most pleasant surprises I encountered in 2017. It was on a whole other level, like climbing into a time machine and returning to the roots of Hip-Hop, back to when there was a tangible and striving spirit guiding the lyrics and contorting the emotions of every artist involved. It’s an album that gladly takes on the legacy of its forebears to create a collection of incisive, intelligent, and authentic works of art. It’s street poetry in its purest sense. Every line has direction, whether its painting a picture or dropping a clever witticism, there’s an underlying purpose guiding every decision. CyHi is simultaneously laying his heart bare, preaching from the pulpit, and expounding from the lectern – and the combination of all three creates a gravity that’s hard to ignore.

This track in particular is a cinematic experience, almost like an old time radio show that tells a story through nothing but sound and asks the imagination to fill in the rest. It’s this sort of experience that speaks to listeners. Whether you’re a POC who has shared the lived experiences of CyHi and can meet him halfway, interweaving your own stories, memories, and hardships with his own, or a middle class white person like myself, who instead sees Hip-Hop as a primary source, as a window into a silenced or demonized and misunderstood state of reality that I have little to no experience with and probably never will.

Either way its a valuable experience and part of why Hip-Hop is such an indispensable form of art. It gives voice to the voiceless and takes control of a narrative that for far too long was repeatedly filtered and contorted through the pervasive apparatus of a white-dominated media, politics, and academia. It was this apparatus that depicted black culture in such a negative light, highlighting its faults and wrongfully ascribing blame, taking victims and portraying them as the perpetrators, and in doing so further causing and perpetuating the very aspects it criticized. This is why the latest bastardization of Hip-Hop by capitalistic interests (the majority of which are white-dominated) is so devastating and heartbreaking. Not only is it eliminating meaningful and powerful content, but its appealing to the lowest common denominator and praising addiction, materialism, and misogyny for their own sake, without any of the context or depth and duality that used to always coexist alongside it. It’s new age colonialism, a more subtle form of racism and a holdover of America’s slave-holding past, where contracts are signed, ownership is given, and negative, frivolous, and damaging lifestyles are glorified and promoted while the real struggles and resilience of lived experiences are either ignored or minimized.

Luckily CyHi is able to transcend this and create a transformational work of art. Here’s to hoping we’ll see a resurgence of more albums like this, because as we should all know, the struggle is far from over.

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11. WHY? - “One Mississippi”

As someone who has experienced profound tragedy and loss this song bears special significance. Losing a loved one is something that never really goes away. One continuously carries it with them, but like any weight, you grow used to it, adapting to the experience, becoming either desensitized to its presence or strengthened by its existence. I know that I’m not alone or unique in this experience. However, I also know that each experience is unique, much in the same way that each life and relationship are unique.

Nevertheless, I feel like this song does a great job at capturing the aforementioned weight and the ensuing confusion that so often accompany the aftermath of loss. For many of us, we know what should be done, or rather what is expected of us, and yet despite this knowledge the mind and the heart remain fickle things to control, often hovering just outside of our reach as if responding to some unknown gravity. Yoni’s lyrics function as a mantra of sorts, somewhat like an anchor in the midst of an interminable storm. He knows that there is nothing he can do. Life, god, fate, the universe – whatever one chooses to call it, has spoken, and the meaning (if any) is far beyond his ability to comprehend. All he can do now is accept what has already happened. He has to submit to the forces around him, and the existence he can’t even begin to understand or lay claim to. It’s by no means an easy task, and it defintiely takes time (hence one mississippi), but it is the only way to carry onward and begin to focus on life, rather than death, once again.