The Music Box.
Entries about the music I like.
Slow & Steady // Music of the Week / WS 17-May-21
This week’s playlist has served as a soundtrack to my efforts to count my blessings, name them one by one, and stay the course, to just keep going: be it with Stranger Fiction, with work, or with life. It starts with the nightchill downtempo of A Forest Mighty Black’s Duo Trippin’ and ends with Kendrick Lamar telling you 'we’re going to be all right.'
Laybak // Music of the Week / WS 28-Mar-21
The word of this week is fursat: leisure time. My favourite spot in my new apartment is my fursat space: a bed surrounded by speakers and a screen. The music of the last week has been music experienced from atop a mattress that doubles up as a theatre-for-one, eking out every last second of fursat. I’ve been rediscovering fuzzy guitars and spare hip-hop beats.
Aesop Rock – The Impossible Kid
Every city is a city unwilling to acknowledge that its primary inhabitants are the lonely. It’s like Aesop Rock asks in Dorks, ‘if I died in my apartment like a rat in a cage, will the neighbours smell the corpse before the cat eats my face?’ Morbid. Maybe unnecessarily so? But is it really a far-off concern for the average inhabitant of the average post-industrial city?
Hope • Reset // Music of the Week / WS 21-Mar-21
It’s hard for me to talk about the last two weeks from a musical perspective because so much has happened in my life outside of music. I’ve alluded to the personal and professional changes in my life, so I won’t go into the tacticals here. I will, however, take this time to reflect on what those changes have meant for me emotionally and psychologically.
The Calm // Music of the Week / WS 28 Feb 2021
I’m about to take my next professional plunge, and am about to also take my next residential plunge, so this has been a week of planning, anticipation, and anxiety. As I sit down to write this week’s column, I’ve spent the last seven days running from house to house, furniture shop to furniture shop, and introduction to introduction. My mood is one of cautious excitement.
Aesop Rock — Spirit World Field Guide
Aesop Rock is the wordiest storyteller in hip-hop today. He has the most unique take on the art of storytelling in hip-hop today. His wordy hip-hop tome, the Impossible Kid was among the best albums of 2016. His latest offering, Spirit World Field Guide, is more of exactly what you'd expect from him. Check it out to see the master of how to write lyrics practice his art.
Nas — Illmatic
In many ways, Illmatic is peerless. In it, the then 20-year-old Nas is a storyteller without equal, showing you through a clear window pastiches of a world you would have never otherwise seen. He does this against the backdrop of the best work of hip-hop’s best producers: DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Large Professor, Q-Tip (from ATCQ), and L.E.S. It’s a veritable who’s who of the greatest beatmakers of the east coast punctuating Nas’s images of urban decay with spare jazz-influenced boom-bap beats.
REASON — New Beginnings
I’ve been struggling with hip-hop for a long time now. Like I haven’t had any ‘gang’ experience. And it’d be disingenuous to pretend much of hip-hop doesn’t harbour shitty attitudes towards fifty percent of the human population. That stuff is often explained away: playing a character, truthfully portraying a life led by a section of society over-represented in hip-hop — ‘gangbangers’. We’ve broadly accepted that hip-hop plays by a different set of rules from the rest of us. Well I’ve been struggling with that, and as a consequence, I’ve been speaking about hip-hop less frequently than I would’ve earlier in my life.
Prabh Deep — K I N G
I’ve been unable to indulge in hip-hop much anymore. A weird thing that has begun happening with me and hip-hop is something that happens whenever you hang out with your alco-weird friend. You’re always on the look out for a fight picked with a stranger, or inappropriate views about women or something else from a litany of embarrassments. Anyway, I don’t feel that way about Prabh Deep’s K I N G. In fact it’s one of my favourite records from 2019. It’s also my most listened to album from that year.
Run The Jewels — RTJ4
The murder of George Floyd isn’t just an American issue, but a global one. RTJ4, Run the Jewel’s fourth album, is a hip-hop album made for this particular moment in history.