Run the Jewels lash out on incendiary sequel

Hipster drivel: With Taylor Swift, it's complicated

Before Vampire Weekend proved it was more than an Ivy League novelty, before Frank Ocean crooned his way into our bedsheets, before LCD Soundsystem bade farewell to a generation of dance-punk converts, before Nicki Minaj silenced the haters with her spitfire feature on “Monster,” and before Mark Kozelek told the War on Drugs to suck his cock, I listened to Taylor Swift.
Once, an age ago, I was a romantic. You may not know this about me. There might be a positive correlation between acne and sentimentality, or pubescence and feelings, or maybe this teenager was just born to pine.
My stoic demeanor and baggy shirt hid an exploding heart (the metaphor, not the band). I once delivered roses to a girl at the ballet. When I couldn't bear the weight of the heartbreak that my adolescence invited, I'd close the door to my self-hate-nest, cozy up to a teddy bear, and break out my Tay Sway. I loved “Fearless.”
I think Swift is very good at what she does. Even as a moody male teen I identified with her love-lorn characters. Her transition from bright-eyed, tug-at-your-heart-strings acoustic classics to four-on-the-floor pop hits felt inevitable, but she has done it with elegance.
That is why I would not call her a guilty pleasure—why should we be ashamed of enjoying good craft? But sadly, the magic has run out. If Taylor Swift's new album “1989,” is guilty of something, it's of never even entering the orbit of guilty pleasure.
I stopped listening to Taylor Swift after making my blood pact with hipsterdom. In fact, I stopped listening to female artists at all. In switching off the car stereo, I not only turned away from the trite lyrics and predictable chord progressions of the Top 40, but also fled from a land where queens reigned supreme. The Best New Music section of Pitchfork was filled with edgy acts—though most were all-male outfits.
Convincing myself that I only liked to listen to lead singers who were male, I flirted with, and fell for, the homoeroticism of Franz Ferdinand.
I bought my first pair of skinny jeans, donning a sultry look that put the “sexual” in “metrosexual” (no high-end accoutrement could afford me the prefix) and channeled my teenage heartbreak into the aesthetic of a wounded but snobbish hunk.
I found romance not in Taylor Swift's high school dramas, but in Arcade Fire's tragic tales of love and woe and in the Civil War shanties of the Decemberists.
At the turn of the decade, the phallocentricity of the Great Albums canon makes it read like the Great Books canon. I mean this almost literally, with Sufjan Steven's biblical history lessons and the romantic erudition of Bon Iver.
Where are the women in the “Best Of” lists? The collapse of punk in the early 1990s gave birth to an aggressive female style, as bands like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney upended essentialist notions of femininity. Of the top thirty albums of the 1990s, according to Pitchfork, only one can claim the appellation “feminist”: Liz Phair's “Exile in Guyville.” (The only other female artist in the top thirty is Bjork, though a handful of the bands listed have female members.)
The riot grrrl movement of the 1990s was at the margins of marginalized music. Compare the riot grrrl to the trope of the sensitive male singer-songwriter of today. With his aching falsetto, skin-tight denim, and wistful coo, he approaches the classical feminine with more commercial success and cultural caché than the riot grrrls. At what point does masculine sensitivity edge out female versatility?
This is just to say that there are women who compose fearless pop music who should not be eclipsed by the bland pop affect Taylor Swift adopts on “1989.”
Mary Timony, best known for her work in Helium in the mid-90s, comes to mind. The snotty power-pop of the debut of her new band, Ex Hex, is memorable without resorting to the generic yawns rampant in “1989.”
Ex Hex may contribute nothing new to a long tradition of garage rock, but to hear a trio of women perfecting the art of rocking the fuck out with insta-classic riffs is a sonic windfall.Speaking of rocking the fuck out, Sleater-Kinney announced its return in style with its first new song in nearly a decade. “Bury Our Friends” is a three-minute whirlwind of slashing guitars during which Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein exchange yelps as sharp as the cuts of a rapier. Their advice: “Exhume our idols, bury our friends!” Maybe it's time we put down the Taylor Swift and dusted off our Bikini Kill. Let's dig up a better sort of feminist. Resurrect the riot grrrl.

Hipster drivel: What is love? Sticky, messy and complicated—just ask Van Etten

I first fell in love when I was 16 and immediately regretted it. Love was sticky and smelled slightly off. It consisted of long, oozing tendrils wrapping themselves around my heart and yanking at inopportune moments. I felt both weightless and claustrophobic in it, buoyed and breathless in love's thick embrace. To fall in love, I discovered, is to be suspended in something resembling my aunt's endearing attempts at bread pudding (a dish, no less, savored by my then girlfriend). By the time I was 17, I realized how thoroughly I had fallen in when I tried to extricate myself from love's mess. Evidently, love, again like my aunt's bread pudding, goes bad. It's even stickier and holds on ever tighter, when it does.
Sharon Van Etten knows this. She has lived this, and she has sung about it. Nowhere are her thoughts more refined, nor her feelings more concentrated, than on her masterful fourth album “Are We There.” It is a sonic tour de force of the daily triumphs and trials of love, a testament to the endurance and occasional idiocy of the human spirit, as well as to the healing powers of the heart. The record does not ask love's burning questions so much as slam them—as stark and question mark-less as its title—on the altar for sacrifice: is there an elegant way for a heart to break, a graceful falling out of love?
Van Etten has no answers, but in crafting the record she makes the case for something which I have suspected since I was 16 and accidentally belonged to another person. Our turns of phrase are in need of updating—we don't fall in love, so much as stumble into it.
Perhaps it's because our emotional wiring dangles like stubborn shoe laces, perhaps it's because because we're rarely as honest with ourselves as we'd like to think, but love is what happens when we're busy making other plans. Van Etten sings with all the intensity this cruel irony—that our most intimate feelings might only be intelligible in retrospect—inspires. With “Afraid of Nothing,” the album opens with the swirling haze of an arpeggiated guitar grounded by a gentle, melancholic piano line. The effect is the passage of time, as if soundtracking the car on the cover forever whisking by suburban neighborhoods. Van Etten stares out the window, searching for something unseen ahead. She knows she won't find it: “I can't wait 'til we're afraid of nothing.” Waiting for love's confirmation is the wait of a lifetime. Love requires risk and leaps of faith. It is urgent, and will not abide by “a lame 'wait shit out,'” as she chides the song's second person. Love is fickle. It does not come with a eureka.
“Are We There” is not a break up record, though it could function as one. It is more an album about thresholds, the spaces in between lovers, getting mired in the mess. On the show-stopping “Your Love is Killing Me,” Van Etten, in one of the finest vocal performances of the decade, captures the vulnerability of hearts that live outside our chests. She needs the language of violence in order to describe the inner turmoil of a long-distance relationship: “break my legs so I won't run to you” and “stab my eyes so I can't see,” but “steal my soul so I am one with you.” It's easy to forget that the person in charge of your heart is a real human being. The physical force of Van Etten's performance—and the message to “taste blood, everybody needs to feel”—helps to remind us that we are just flesh, even our ex-lovers.
The confusion comes to a fore on “I Love You But I'm Lost.” Even the assuredness of a feeling in the present doesn't guarantee it's longevity. We're all changing (or do we call it growing?) and disappointment is inevitable: “to know somebody in and out, it's a real challenge.”
How accurate are our representations of each other, and can love endure the transitions from one picture of a person to the next? “You know me well,” she half commands on the next song, but it isn't enough to fill the brick house of a relationship, built without the sides. We might never actually know each other fully, but going through hell together at least offers familiarity. Whether that's enough, to conceive of the significant other with emphasis on the “significant” and downplaying the “other,” is debatable, but it's a start. Relationships work through willing partners, and Van Etten displays such determined compassion as she sings “I will reach you.”
“Are We There” is a difficult album to listen to because it grabs your attention by punching you in the gut. It's hard to relegate it to the background, because it makes whatever you are doing—cooking, doing homework, lounging around on the internet—seem insignificant to the torment of heartbreak. Raw and rich, “Are We There” rewards multiple listens, as it unfolds to the haunting, gravelly quavers of Van Etten's voice. Listening to it is a little bit like falling in love for the first time, stickiness and all.

Hipster drivel

Run the Jewels lash out on incendiary sequel

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

November 14, 2014

Killer Mike and El-P are angry. I mean pissed. I mean off-the-chain furious, goddammit, and no one escapes their wrath—pimpin’ politicians, fuckboys and hucksters, coke-addled hustlers, corporate personhood, brutalized neighborhoods, for-profit prisons and profitless sit-ins. And when they take aim, you better run them jewels fast.

Last year, these two titans of underground rap joined up for the explosive, self-titled mixtape “Run the Jewels,” and now they’ve returned for the sizzling, scintillating, take-no-prisoners “Run the Jewels 2.”

It’s more than a sequel, it’s a statement: Mike and El are hustling, and we’re buying. They flow through nearly 40 minutes of sheer dragon-spew, igniting everything in their path, and in the wake of the flames they dance the Charleston.

Maybe the person most on the duo’s radar is Kanye West, whose big mouth and Daft Punk production overshadowed the industrial edge of the duo’s debut. But even the genius of “Yeezus” looks like derivative drivel, which El acknowledges on “Jeopardy.”

“I’ve never been much of shit, by most measurements don’t exist,” he raps, nodding to his underground status. “On the radar a little blip in the shadow of motherships, been smothered and brashly muffled by hucksters of global spin.”

Whether he’s referring to Yeezy, Walmart or the military-industrial complex, El knows his secret weapon for taking down the system is his anonymity. His beats influenced Kanye circa “808s & Heartbreak” and could probably neutralize an army, but he prefers to remain unknown: “I been here making raw shit and never asked to be applauded.”

Mike is not so conciliatory. He steals the thorny crown right off “Yeezus,” toppling idols in the process. “You know your favorite rapper ain’t shit, and me, I might be,” he bellows. “The closest representation of God you might see...prevail through Hell, so Satan get thee behind me.”

Slinging dope and poaching on the street, Mike knows he’s no role model (“the villains is here, no Jesuses here”), but if he’s bound to burn, might as well make the Devil pay: “The gates of hell are pugnaciously pacing, waiting, I give a fuck if I’m late, tell Satan be patient.” We’re all sinners in the hands of an angry Mike, and the tithe never looked so affordable.

Mission statement loud and clear, Run the Jewels bulldoze the rest of their competition. The brain-bashing thump of “Blockbuster Night Part 1” makes it the most likely to soundtrack some debauched warehouse orgy, while “Lie, Cheat, Steal” gives us a gym-tan-laundry routine for the next session of Congress.

Run the Jewels are at their best when they razor their way through the tragedy of life on the street and find humor in its absurdity. Forget, for a moment, that they raised $40,000 to remix “Run the Jewels 2” solely using cat noises. They send up rap’s casual misogyny in “Love Again (Akinyele Back)” when Mike and Gangsta Boo of Three 6 Mafia exchange boasts about fellatio and cunnilingus.

The track, however, that shows Run the Jewels at their angriest—and their funniest—is the masterfully titled “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck).” Over the constant refrain of“run them jewels fast,” Mike conjures a storm of black power imagery, calling on mandatory minimum inmates to start a prison riot.

His agony is palpable in lines like “We killin’ ’em for freedom ’cuz they tortured us for boredom, and even if the good ones die, fuck it, the Lord’ll sort ’em.”

El proceeds to gross us out with his “vagina whispering” and “conjugal visiting” before Mike brings it back to solitary confinement and fathers ripped from their families only to vow vengeance on the system that put them there. The song even pulls Zack de la Rocha out of rap-metal obscurity so he can rat-tat-tat the triple entendre “Philip AK Dickin’ you.”

“Run the Jewels 2” is what happens when two rappers at the top of their game get angry and make a record. It’s both brutal and hilarious, offering release from, and access to, the overwhelming reality of systemic racism in the U.S. Mike and El aren’t ones to pass up a chance to fight, and they’ve made an album that never backs down.

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