#queue up liability by lorde

[etherealhoneypie]

i notice things TOO much like so much it hurts

[achingly-shy]

genuinely fuck high school i need to get out of here

[spindrifters]

mm he contains multitudes actually. he has depths he's complex he's babygirl. he's spiritually if not physically covered in blood he's an adhd king. he's got a hairy chest he's wearing a skirt. he's holding hands through the horrors sometimes he is the horrors. alexa play bitch by meredith brooks. queue up liability by lorde after that.

[faraway-wanderer]

Opening show of 'Europe Dance' OR the best night of my life

Last night was the best night of my life so far.

I know that writing this will never ever do it justice because this show can't be pinned down with words. It was like being in another dimension or a portal through we which we crossed into Ella's world for a couple of hours.

I got to the venue super early and met my friend Jess!! and I think there were only five of us there at that point, so we had over twelve hours to spend together but it was great because everyone who got in the queue that early formed this sort of fellowship with each other. Everyone i met and spent time with yesterday were all so kind hearted and full of love and stories and incredible energy. I'm so sad we has to say goodbye.

One of my fave moments of that queue was when we were screaming the lyrics to all her songs right before doors opened.

And when they did,oh boy, that was insane. It sloped down to the stage and we were all just running down to it.

Khalid's set was fun and filled with energy and some of his dance moves were off the charts!!!!!

The scream that went up when Ella came on stage was incredible.She was dressed literally like a witch, complete with hat and crescent moons.

The first half has sort of merged together because I think I was just in total awe but I remember her smiling SO MUCH. Proper full toothed grins; of course she was enjoying it as much as we were.

To be there in the crowd of the opening show to a world tour is utter crazy.

I still can't actually believe she was right there in the same room singing to us,with us, it's the best feeling.

We all just kept giving each other wide eyed glances and squeals.

In the second bit Ella came on in this angelic white jumpsuit sort of thing and there was neon arch of flowers above her (tattoo worthy).

During Ribs when she sang 'and I've never felt more alone/feels so scary getting old' I just started crying and I was thinking this is why I'm here, for moments like these- sharing the same feeling with other people around you.

And then! Literally straight after Ribs the guy next to me,-Thomas I think he was called- pulled me up onto the ramp in front of him so I could see better and I can't thank him enough for it ( although I already have multiple times).

Ella was sat on this cardboard box and just started to talk to us (I managed to get all this on video). At one point she was talking about Oreos, and she paid tribute to the Manchester attack and then said :

' I spend all my life in the studio and these little outings remind me what I'm doing matters'. Everyone cheered and yelled and cried.

Then she talked a lil bit about Liability. (I was sobbing by this point) she said:

'when you're a multicoloured person,when you make stuff, when you have vivid dreams asleep and awake it's easy to feel like you're too much. And to that, I say fuck it. Because I can see your faces and I know you're perfect.'

At that people were shouting 'we love you'd and she replied, looking at us 'love you too'

I love her more with everything she does- she comes out here and says things to lift us all up because she knows it's important (and now I'm crying in the café I'm writing this in). What Ella said, made me believe in myself again.

And it just got better and better she sand Liability, the liability reprise (!!!!) Then my favourite song in the WHOLE WORLD 'A world alone'. Whilst she was singing a world alone she was so determined and full of something I hadn't heard in the song before- she's alone and people are talking, but let them talk because she's following her heart and that's what matters.

I think my favourite moment was during Green Light (the last song, sob) when Ella and all of us were screaming and singing and dancing our hearts out together, and then confetti stars just exploded out of nowhere. I stopped for just a moment, and caught a falling star in the sky of green, whilst the others were landing on our arms, faces, hair, and Ella was filling the stage with joy and that-

That is the brilliance of sharing a party with Lorde.

[them-pomegranate-seeds]

Let’s talk about some writers 3

Louise Glück -

Against Sincerity

Maybe that’s the thing hate most about writing. That I am, as the author, dead. What people assume about my writing and the relationship it has with me is frankly frustrating and invasive.

Queue Lorde after releasing Liability ‘I’m not that sad all the time, I’m fine.’

How can we separate it out?

here’s how I see it (sorry Louise, I’m not quite onboard with how you define things):

Honesty/sincerity - an illumination

This is what you make of the world

But here’s the thing; sometimes this can be a rambling, can be a relief, rather than substance

we have to take care of our words, like a rose bush that requires pruning

be careful to wear gloves so as not to prick yourself on the thorns while you do your necessary work

Truth/actuality - the world of events

this is the more universally defined idea of truth

the witness statement at the police station

the last time I saw Dave was at the party

no I didn't see him on the pier

I didn’t see him jump

I didn’t feel the splash echoing in my ear drums

Elspeth Probyn -  Writing Shame

‘Shame makes us better writers’ do you agree or disagree?

Here’s the thing, yes and no. 

That may sound like a cop out answer but I have reason I swear -

Yeigh 🎉

The argument given by Probyn, is pretty valid. 

‘Shame forces us to continually reflect on the implications of our writing.’

On the ethics of 

representing other people

representing gender, race, sexuality, disability etc.

representing ourselves

Neigh 🐎

My own practice, especially this semester, has been an exercise of putting shame in a box and closing the lid. No holds barred intimacy with my inner self. This kind of writing where I can’t hide behind science and let it do the talking for me.

But I can’t this time, so shame becomes my enemy. 

Phillip Lopate - 

On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character

I thought I understood everything I needed to about turning myself into a character. I have my own style or snarky self-possessed writing which illustrates both pride and vulnerability. I thought that the snapshots at my childhood in ‘How you likin’ the rain girl?’ said enough. Quirky details and revelatory moments.

After reading Lopate’s work, I’m not sure I have filled in all the things that I could to sketch out my ‘character’.

‘Fledgling personal essayists may think they've said or conveyed more than they actually have with that one syllable. In their minds, that "I" is swarming with background and a lush, sticky past.’

Me as illustrated by ‘how you liking’ the rain girl?’

likes red wine and TimTams

Mum is a librarian at a school (lower middle class?)

read a lot as a kid

hooks up with people?

likes twilight 

is ‘questioning’

Is that enough?

[mynazrulansari]

By Rowan Bosworth-Davies

This man has long proved himself unsuited for any position of trust, but apparently, we still need to remind ourselves of his manifest lack of suitability to be Prime Minister.

Of course, BoJo has wanted this job for many years, and he has long set out his stall to capture the honour.

When David Cameron called for a referendum to decide the future of our relationship with the EU, he little realised that he would be opening a Pandora’s box from which someone as unsuitable and dysfunctional as Boris Johnson would ultimately emerge, purporting to represent himself as some latter-day, Tory Messiah.

Very soon, an unrepresentative gang of approximately 130,000-odd, old, embittered, anti-Europe Tories are going to vote for the next Prime Minister of this country. This tiny rump of antediluvian fossils are almost certain to vote for this buffoon, this unmitigated chancer and consummate con artist to lead their increasingly cretinous party, because they are frightened of change, and of losing their status of entrenched privilege.

Unrepentant liar, serial adulterer and former public school buffoon

The entire Brexit episode has turned this country into a morass of gibbering idiots. It is a measure of how far down the scale of reality the Tories have sunk that so many MPs are willing to give their vote to this unrepentant liar, serial adulterer and former public school buffoon who now struts and frets his hour upon the stage.

I mean, it’s not as if these clowns have not seen the evidence of how BoJo behaves or conducts himself. Yet in the case of BoJo, all logic and common sense has deserted those who will be voting for him. Let us examine the facts.

Boris’ former boss, Sir Max Hastings, says BoJo is unfit to hold the office of Prime Minister.

The words of Max Hastings, who once employed BoJo as a columnist, give a good clue.

“Boris is a gold medal egomaniac. I would not trust him with my wife nor – from painful experience – my wallet. His chaotic public persona is not an act – he is indeed manically disorganised about everything except his own image management. He is also a far more ruthless and frankly, nastier, figure than the public appreciates. I would not take Boris’s word about whether it is Monday or Tuesday. He is not a man to believe in, to trust or respect, save as a superlative exhibitionist. He is bereft of judgement, loyalty or discretion. Only in the star-crazed, frivolous Britain of the 21stCentury, could such a man have risen so high, and he is utterly unfit to go higher still.”

One would think that with a reputation like that, the person concerned would be relegated to the dustbin of history, but not BoJo.

Unrepentant Euro-haters

He knows, in his water, that the small group of Tory crumblies who will queue up to vote for him in the Party election, are unrepentant Euro-haters to a man and woman. He knows that as long as he captures their imprimatur, he will become Prime Minister in our outdated and dreadful electoral system. To be Prime Minister of the UK is to hold one of the most powerful political roles in the world, and that is what this bumbling buffoon is after, power!

All his supporters have to do is to keep the faithful in their state of blissful somnolence, ignoring the facts about this mendacious liar for as long as it takes to get their cross in the box against his name. This is why he has been ducking all press interviews and debates, because his backers know he will put his foot firmly in his mouth if he is allowed the wiggle room.

Childish and immature

The Tories have manifestly failed to get their business through the Commons, and they should now be seeking re-election in a General ballot. It is unconscionable that someone who is as big a political liability as BoJo should now be standing on the threshold of taking power by default.

His views on Europe are childish and immature, (he spent years writing column inches berating the EU), and the Euro-managers are unlikely to forget or forgive his insults and jibes. Whatever demands he makes in Brussels will be ignored, and he will then drag us out of the EU in a ‘No Deal’ outcome. Of course, when this all goes tits up, as it will surely do, BoJo will blame Brussels for not giving him what he wants.

The words of lady Caroline Lamb, when talking about Lord Byron are very apposite here, and could just as easily have been said about BoJo.

“He is mad, bad and dangerous to know.”

Sadly, very sadly, we will all soon be realising how mad, bad and dangerous this clown truly is!

[leonbastralle]

Reply Binge 2k17 (June 21st - 23rd)

Luckily, at least my activity filter is working again xD

A GOOD MUM

@treason-and-plot said: Breathe, baby. 

but I want everything to work perfectly pls

@treason-and-plot said: Ooh yes I have a newfound love for Lorde 

ajhmdvjasd me too!! Her new stuff is amazing ;_; Supercut and Liability are too accurate, and all throughout the day I find myself silently singing ‘broadcast the boom boom boom boom and make em all dance to it’ xD now I won’t have her music for a weekend and I’m still not sure how to survive.

POSTCARDS FROM RUSSIA (could be a book title, right?)

@zauglom said: Oh, sorry! I'm in love with them :D As for the posrcard, it won't be quick. Russian post will take its time, I'm more than sure :( 

I figured :/ I just hope it won’t get lost and you made an effort for no reason! Also, it’s fine, I’ll try to remember tagging reminders in those cases from now on.

MIRACLES

@vkthesims4 said: that daddy is really cute oml 

isn’t he ;_; when he had his first child I almost cried because it was so damn cute! I love him too much I tell you.

@fadepixels said: me 

lemme hug you bro smh

GO HOME TUMBLR YOU’RE DRUNK

@amixofpixels said: I'm keeping an eye on you, but I am over 18. I'm old. ;__________; 

Thankfully, huh?

@simlishprincess said: i've read that the safe mode blogs a lot of lgbt stuff 

that’s such a load of crap :/ I haven’t had any romantic scenes in a while so I didn’t see anything there, but really??? You can’t tell me straight smut is more suitable for kids than gay smut xD

@greenfooddog said: It's blocked a bunch of toddler birthdays on my blog. 

(great name btw) yeah, from what I’ve heard and seen on my blog, it really likes to block toddlers doing the most pure and innocent things. One day tumblr might actually do something right, but I’m quite sure I’ll be dead by then.

@zauglom said: I don't see those block indicators as normal people do, but if you go to your dashboard and click at your blog's name (above your post that is on your dashboard), you will have 'mobile' version of your blog opened in the right part of your screen, and there you can see NSFW indicators. But I don't see any on at you blog. 

Thanks! They actually all got removed as far as I can see, at least the ones on yesterday’s posts, and my blog isn’t even marked as explicit which is lovely xD

SENPAI!?

@inkwisteria said: Ven is well known for his powers of seduction. It is his curse and his burden to bear. :P 

I can only imagine xD so now when are you bringing him to life in this world? I could really use a grumpy old man to cuddle ;)

@inkwisteria said: ;;__;; I love 

REALLY ;_; it’s less than nothing but at least her video wall looks cool and I made up a reason for her not being active xD it was so nice tho! I had a lot of fun writing this even tho no plot actually happened, and I have more of them in the queue for a very special event ;)

[raleightatum]

Lorde Wrote the Perfect Party Album

On “Liability,” the standout piano ballad halfway through Melodrama, Lorde (the stage name of 20 year-old Ella Yelich-O'Connor) describes coming home from a breakup and falling into the arms of the only love she’s got left: herself. The interior design of Lorde’s possibly-autobiographical home in Auckland is up for debate, but as for me, I see her returning to an older Victorian number on a quiet street, old married couples and quiet loners up and down the aisle of row houses, with huge tall windows and open, creaky wood floors. I feel good about my vision of Lorde’s place, and go ahead and figure out yours while you can, because this is where the 20 year-old pop star keeps you for this dazzling forty-minute documentary of an album. A stranger walking by, looking up just long enough to catch a glimpse of a girl dancing alone, caressing her cheek, crying, screaming, partying, dancing -- the album produced as if we were hearing the music as sidewalk passersby, with Lorde playing the piano by herself, alone in the dark.

A quick runthrough of Lorde’s second studio album -- or a singles-heavy radio jaunt -- might lead you to believe that Lorde has a firm grasp on the age-old dilemma for twentysomething introverts: should I stay in or go out? The album’s first two singles (“Green Light” and “Liability”) offer decisive polarities: the former rages, the latter hunkers down. But on Melodrama, she does plenty of both, her possibly-Victorian home working as a hub for parties, Uber pickups, and morning cleanups, hallowed ground for the holy and the horror. Lorde seems not to have mastered this internal yanking and pulling of partying or not, but instead chases her whims to their full extents -- parties and painful piano ballads.

Home is ostensibly where we are the safest. We have, after all, the keys to our homes, the alarm code, blinds over the windows. The paintings and throw pillows and television and liquor cabinet are all arrayed just so to protect us -- we have, those of us without roommates, chosen this particular setup because it makes us feel some measure of safety. It is odd, then, to remember that home is where we encounter most starkly the terror, the horror, and the fucking melodrama that Lorde sings so earnestly about. When we’ve just been told that we’re too much, or perhaps not enough, and it all ends, we don’t go file into the queue at Blue Bottle, wander through the aisles at a bookstore, or fling ourselves onto a barstool at a pub (or at least we don’t at first): we collapse into our beds, or onto linoleum kitchen floors, or wilt into the carpet right in front of the stereo speakers. Home is, most precisely, where the horror is. Home is where we scream, where we cry; we slam the doors in our home, break glass in our home, where we kick people out and drag people in.

On Melodrama, Lorde lets us all into her home.

The album opens with Lorde hopping into a friend’s car, flying through a “Green Light,” doing her makeup on the way to a bar. The track is the first single, and it’s a racing, chanting thing that pulls us right back into the Lorde universe: jaunty choruses and tongue-only-slightly-in-cheek wishes for ill upon exes (“those great whites they have big teeth / hope they bite you”), but a kind of hopeful fist-pumping that’s a perfect way to start the night.

Whatever happens after Lorde sails through those green lights is documented on Melodrama, and ends, well, perfectly, with “Perfect Places,” as if the entirety of the album is a day in the life of Lorde.

“Sober” brings the party back to the house, and there’s dancing and drinks and an appropriately-in-her-head Lorde, wanting just to dance out the many questions (“can we keep up with the ruse?”; ���what will we do when we’re sober?”). Lorde knows “in the morning (she’ll) be dancing with the heartache,” and that her efforts to pretend she doesn’t care are false, but “Sober,” and Melodrama as a whole, and life on the earth as a human, has this inevitability, this beating presence, this insistence on taking life as it comes, this refusal to confuse self-deprecation for self-shame. Lorde knows it’s time to dance with the truth -- but sometimes the truth is the music's too loud and the conversation will have to wait until the morning.

“Homemade Dynamite” feels like a beer run, a keep-the-party-going callback to “Royals,” but one that drops us off at “The Louvre” and “Liability,” back at the doorstep of the house, suddenly gone quiet, our singer sobered up and gone wistful alone in her living room scattered with plastic cups. These two tracks feel like Lorde at her wisest, her wittiest (“they’ll hang us in the Louvre / down the back, but who cares / still the Louvre,” which pulled me straight to Lonely Island’s “doesn’t matter had sex!” from, well, “I Just Had Sex”), her most willing to share. “The Louvre’s” muffled, spacy chorus is Lorde reminding herself to “broadcast the boom, boom” an earnest self-call to vulnerability, so that others might quietly dance too. This song, along with its partner, “Liability,” are the songs that you or I or Lorde might have been dancing to alone, a lamp and a couple candles lit, strangers looking in at these private moments of cracking, celebration, and devastating beauty. “The Louvre” ends with this gorgeous ninety second guitar plodding, and the raw “Liability” might as well be a live video of Lorde writing this song in her bedroom at four in the morning, spilling with all sorts of beautiful moments, the stuttering “e-na-na-na-everyone” from the chorus, the scooping “then they get bored of me” in the second verse, the v-sound at the end of the last “get you wild make you leave” that I’ve listened to on three different sets of headphones to figure out if the crackling is my speakers, her mic, or (my hope), a heaving, crying spit of saliva that they left in. The dead of night in a Lorde album is a vulnerable place to be.

In the dead of night, if Lorde can possibly fall asleep, maybe she dreams, and “Hard Feelings/Loveless” is that dream, a montage, a remembrance, a drifting through those nothing moments in relationships that turn out to be everything -- grocery shopping, sitting in a running car in front of your house. Lorde is having what they call hard feelings, and singing about it over and over in the chorus, and it does to the listener what it does when you, say, repeat the word “cow” over and over (cow, cow, COW, cow? It’s a funny word), repeating something enough times to question it, to reframe it, so that it starts to sound weird and thus can actually be listened to and heard for what it is: we say we’ve got hard feelings when we’re pissed off at someone, and so that becomes the definition (hard feelings, n: the act of being pissed off at someone). But Lorde’s insistence on speaking these hard feelings remind us that this is no compound word, no standalone term: hard modifies feelings. Feelings are difficult. The swooping, grating metallic strings of the bridge whoosh and crash through to dismantle the otherwise safe song, a twisting, beautiful interlude that is itself hard to listen to, hard to feel.

The semi-song “Loveless” that emerges after the industrial interlude of “Hard Feelings” is, at first, an unusual tack-on to the original song, a playful, childlike chant of “l-o-v-e-l-e-s-s” and a corner-of-the-mouth smile that says “we’re all fucking with our lover’s heads,” a mouth that you’re gonna wanna tape shut (“Writer In the Dark” echoes this warning to not fuck around with someone who’s got a microphone and a following) this playful grinning and fucking-with just one of the many ways Lorde is able to get through the night alone, but after the grins and games of this latenight memory, we find our impure heroine back at home, the house lights on, cleaning up the champagne glasses.

“Sober II (Melodrama)” is a harsh, startingly gorgeous track, as if Lorde, Max Richter, and The Weeknd threw an afterparty in the same top-floor motel suite where Frank Ocean sang about “Pyramids.” Part One of the song (“Sober”) wonders what we’ll do when we’re sober, and concludes we’ll be with heartache in the morning. But “Sober II (Melodrama)” doesn’t wait until then, jolting you from sickly sweet hungover sleep, hurling construction crew lights on the terror and trauma, the carnage of the night before. This song is bittersweet, and it goes.

Melodrama, unlike many of its contemporaries, resists the urge to indulge itself, and (if you just go ahead and count “Hard Feelings/Loveless” as two songs like I think you should) features none of the epic nine-minute tracks we’ve come to expect. Many of the songs (“Liability,” and “Sober II (Melodrama),” perhaps) stop even shorter of what you feel like you want it to be, as Lorde gets us wild and makes us leave to the next song. But then, there in the lazy long afternoon of the album, in a regathering of hope after the traumatic night before, Melodrama goes there, on two otherwise perfectly-fine songs, “Writer In the Dark” and “Supercut,” the latter pushing and pulling (Lorde’s raw vocal singing of the chorus from what sounds to be, like, the floor of her bathroom) into this Eluvium-style stargazy instrumental. It’s in those moments that the album feels tremendous -- the cutting, dazzling touches on songs you weren’t expecting.    

I've heard Andy Greenwald, host of The Ringer’s “The Watch” podcast, say that television show finales tell us what the show was about. And in this melodramatic mini-documentary, Lorde tells us, quite explicitly, what the album is about in the album’s penultimate and final songs.

Throughout our night together, Lorde clearly grapples with her impulses, to stay in or go out, to scream or to cry, to dance or to talk it out, where she experiences these lurching yanks between parties and the nights alone that are all too familiar to those of us who have survived life to this point. In the reprise to “Liability,” the singer posits a been-to-therapy bit of insight: “maybe all this is the party.” The part where you pace around with the curtains drawn, drinking a bottle of wine by yourself, the part where your best friend comes over to help you clean up the mess of the night before, the tears and the cries -- maybe all this is the party.

A friend who toured with the indie band mewithoutYou once witnessed two girls approach Aaron, mewithoutYou’s singer, after a show and ask him to pray. My friend said Aaron kind of looked around, bemused, his arms kind of stretching as if to encompass everything around him, and said, “What do you think we’re doing here?” I’d like to think mewithoutYou and Lorde might agree: maybe all this is the party.

    Lorde might humbly or courteously resist my label, but the album ends with a perfect song. “Perfect Places” is a last-night-in-town rebirth of the party, a kind of partying that has taken what it’s learned from the night before and is able to put things in context, to understand, because partying without a care in the world (or without an understanding of why we’re partying) is fun, but understanding the cocktail of reasons why you might want to spend your night off your face and throwing your head back and dancing anyway: there is some definite mewithoutYou, maybe-all-this-is-the-party wisdom and beauty to that.

    Lorde’s grand finale is a wistful creed for those who would seek out the rooftop parties, the magical 3-a.m.-on-the-porch-conversations, the perfectly blissed-out moments (“Can we pray with you, Aaron?”) above all else, the longing for parties and perfect places when, well, it’s all the party. Lorde herself hopped onto the Genius annotation of the song and said that this dance-through-the-ambiguity, “can’t stand to be alone” partying is what Melodrama is about: “I’m partying so much because I’m just dreading sitting at home by myself hearing my thoughts hit the walls.” And so Lorde brings us the good word that thoughts hitting the walls are a party just like headstands banging the walls are too (“Hooking up...is fun but sad sometimes too!”).

The song dances along, takes someone home, and takes off all their clothes, as if the song was a regathering of the album, a recap of the long night we’ve just spent with Lorde. If all this is a party, we’ve all been invited, all of us young and ashamed, hardly able to stand being alone, and so we all dance ahead, “trying to find these perfect places.”

    “What the fuck are perfect places, anyway?” Lorde asks, and we remember the dashed champagne glasses, the muted dancing alone, our view from the quiet sidewalk, the kitchen floor collapsing, the post-mortem ride home after a breakup, Lorde’s Melodrama, her Victorian house of horrors. This is where, she’ll tell us, we are anything but safe. But it might just be the perfect place for a party.

[theworstbob]

the thing journal, 6.11.2017 - 6.17.2017

capsule reviews of the pop culture i took in last week. this week: venice, witness, 1989, gilded, punch-drunk love, sucker, bloody bloody andrew jackson, gone now, boomiverse, melodrama, before sunrise, pinata, whiplash

1) Venice, by Anderson .Paak: Paak might be really close to Greatest Living Songwriter status. Like, Malibu and Yes Lawd! are both undeniable classics, but this is ALSO so solid, solid enough that I feel like, if we get someone in the room with Paak to say, "Hey, dude, maybe don't put a bad butt pun in this one?" Paak could be running the world. Every second of this album is wonderful. Like, .Paak makes songs that make an indoor kid like me wish he was at the beach, that's like the only thing I can say about this album. .Paak' great. I don't have enough words to describe what makes him great.

2) Witness, by Benjamin Booker: ...So, this is the last thing I'm writing? And this was a nice, bluesy rock album that made a Sunday morning slightly doper. I liked it, it was nice, listen to it if you like nice rock albums.

3) 1989, by Tay Tay: I sure do have a lot to say about this album that wasn't said two and a half years ago! I liked it. The first five songs are as good as any five songs on any album that's ever been, and then the rest of this album... Exists? Like there's no way I'm going to call an album with "Shake it Off" and "Bad Blood" on it a classic, and after hearing Lana del Rey songs I can't get behind the Lana del Rey impression that is "Wildest Dreams," like it was already an enh song but knowing it was ripping off an enh thing gives it a firm "no," but any album with "Style" and "Blank Space" and "Style" deserves plaudits, and the album does pick up with the last two tracks, which are up there with the first five tracks as the best stuff Tay Tay has ever done. End of the day, though, To Pimp a Butterfly still should have won Album of the Year, and if at the end of 2014 Catch-Up 1989 is still in the top ten for 2014 (#9 as I write this), I'd be stunned.

4) Gilded, by Jade Jackson: This? was somehow recommended to me by Amazon because I enjoy the music of Paramore. I cannot claim to have heard the Paramore in this. I heard a pretty decent if slow-moving country album! That was a fun surprise! One of my favorite things about country music in 2017 is how, like, we typically associate rebellion with punk and rap, y'know? Loud music that moves fast and is always shouting. And rebellion in country is sitting with just an acoustic guitar and singing sad songs about small towns. Like, a lot of country music is about what a small town home town dirt road party it is to be in the sticks, so the outlaws have to slow it down and reflect on whether they're truly happy where they are. So like, this album has incredibly little in common with Paramore from a music standpoint, but they share an attitude which has to manifest itself differently because of their respective genres. Basically, I'm incredibly down with this album.

5) Punch-Drunk Love, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson: hey. hey guys. did you guys know about this paul thomas anderson dude. he's pretty great. like, everything about that scene where he asks the woman out, the warehouse collapsing, the calls from the phone sex scammer, his sister haranguing him, the woman not knowing how to respond to this, him clearly not knowing how to handle the situation, the pudding the so much pudding, the score building as everything falls apart, it's so fucking good. i remember, when i was 12, this movie had like two whole shelves at hollywood video, and when my dad and my family were looking at this movie, we were like "we love little nicky! but this might be more serious? and poor innocent caralin," and i just, i wonder what a younger me would have thought about this film. i wonder how i would have reacted to this, if we actually had pulled the trigger on punch-drunk love before i was anywhere near ready to handle it.

6) Sucker, by Charli XCX: hahaha i need to do theme weeks or something like i'm supposed to think about a paul thomas anderson joint and then try to come up with a decent opinion about a fine, just a tich below great pop album. i should've eased myself into this, it should've gone punch drunk love, the kimbra album i added to provide the bridge from film master class to pop, and THEN charli xcx. i mean, i enjoyed this a lot, i had a solid, solid bus ride, but like i just need to structure the sequencing of thing journal better. like, maybe don't put the slap-hitting second baseman after the cleanup hitter, but the jason kubel type in the fifth spot, the chunky dude who kinda sucks at baseball but hits dingers more often than not. gotta think about my lineup, guys!

7) Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, wr. Michael Friedman: Well, this was good stupid fun. I think "Ten Little Indians" is a standout track, so clear a standout that it honestly belongs in a better work. It's a distillation of Native American history that doesn't seem to have any place in a musical recasting one of the shittiest presidents as a vain, morose emokid rock star, but then again, I listen to soundtracks and don't watch the shows, so fuck do I know about context. So, yeah, I dug "Ten Little Indians," and then everything else was fine and silly and took itself just unseriously that it never felt like American Psycho. Theatre in general isn't a good home for irony, but at least here, the sarcasm wasn't subtle, it was waving a giant flag the whole time saying "THIS IS DEF JOKES."

8) Gone Now, by Bleachers 9) Melodrama, by Lorde See, if I were a decent listener, I might have tried following up Gone Now with Melodrama. These reviews aren't being indexed in chronological order; I listened to Boomiverse before I gave Melodrama a spin, and looking back, I should've saved Gone Now for Friday to do a Jack Antonoff Power Block. I wonder if my opinion on these albums is colored by the interview I read where Jack Antonoff says he originally imagines all his songs for female voices, he writes his songs for women, then pitches them an octace down should they become Bleachers songs. And I found both Strange Desire and Gone Now to not really resonate with me, neither album really hitting me in the way an entity such as Bleachers should hit me. Bleachers is fun, '80s-inspired pop music -- I love that! But there's this weird disconnect I feel between the voice and the music, and I can't tell if that's a conclusion I arrived at on my own or if it was informed by that article, because while I didn't like Gone Now, I really loved Melodrama. Lorde and Antonoff work perfectly together, her voice gives life to a lot of things I heard but wasn't enthralled by on Gone Now, and they had a vision for this album -- songs have part twos! There's a reprise! ("Liability" is DOPE in the context of this album, y'all) -- which they executed sublimely. It's a complete, cohesive album that feels so much bigger than 11 songs, so full of weird ideas, and while I'm not sure how the mainstream is gonna react, I thought this was dope as hell, "dope as hell" being the highest praise my limited vocabulary has to offer.

10) Boomiverse, by Big Boi: One benefit of being just a dude on tumblr chronicling his experiences is that I didn't have to listen to and write a thinkpiece about a 70-minute Lil Yachty album. I only have to experience Lil Yachty through his features on other people's songs, do not have to contend with the totality of his vision. But, it is disappointing that professional music people DO have to write extended thinkpieces about Lil Yachty, when those words and thoughts and energies would have been far better spent on this album. This album is just good. There's no frills, minimal use of the obligatory Atlanta trap beat, clever rhymes, only occasional misogyny, and maybe the most jubilant rap track of 2017, "All Night." I honestly can't remember the last time I heard a hip-hop joint as joyous as "All Night." So much of my favorite hip-hop of the last few years hasn't been happy, and not even the justifiable "shit's fucked up" unhappy, the "sadness is the only valiid emotion" unhappy, and "All Night" is a statement that darkness is nothing without light.

11) Before Sunrise, dir. Richard Linklater: "Hey! I've been up since 1 AM, and it is presently 4:30! I'm going to put on this quet movie about a quiet night in Vienna so I can watch Before Sunrise before sunrise, LOL!" Yeah so I fell asleep during this one, team. Not long enough to feel like I missed a lot, not long enough for this film to lose its impact, but enough to feel like I failed this film. What I was able to see was great. It was like someone shot a podcast in Vienna, and that sounds like an insult, but I'm into movies that are just two people talking to each other, and I'd be into a podcast where two strangers try to fall in love in two hours, two people bullshitting about love and relationships and the future while wondering if they could be happy with the other person outside of the podcast. It didn't feel at all tempered knowing there's a sequel in the queue. Like, knowing these two people see each other again is disappointing, only in the sense that I don't get to live with the ending for 10 years before learning about the sequel, but at the same time, the characters don't know they're going to see each other again, and that last goodbye at the train is so heart-wrenching, the way she disappears behind the wall and the guy just follows her, trying to stay as close to her as possible.

12) Pinata, by Freddie Gibbs & Madlib: I will let nature review this album for me: I live in a garden level apartment, and outside my bedroom window, where I stationed my new computer, there's a bucket beneath the gutter in which water rests. Squirrels will occasionally come through, take a sip, and bounce. But as I was listening to this album, I saw that the squirrel was lingering outside my window. I assumed it was responding well to the vibrations created by Freddie Gibbs' pleasant, deep-voiced flow and the low-key production, and that it was enjoying the things it was feeling. This is music squirrels can enjoy, man, what more do you want. And then a Danny Brown feature came on, and that squirrel RAN, man. Like, I get it? I wouldn't expect a squirrel to respond well to Danny Brown, but I still feel that squirrel is missing out.

13) Whiplash, dir. Damien Chazelle: When I listen to music, I've found I connect to the drumming more than anything but the lyrics. Part of the reason I still listen to pop/punk is because literally every single pop/punk drummer is amazing, drumming so so fast every time. I also watch sports and speedrun streams, and one of the things that fascinates me is the maniacal drive to be great, this obsessive need to push yourself to some limit most would find unnecessary. So of COURSE I'm into a film which would marry the two, and which had the performance of a lifetime from JK Simmons, JK Simmons deserving all the plaudits he got for playing Malcom Tucker's long-lost American twin. I think Miles Teller was cat perfectly for the scenes where he's with JK Simmons, an arrogant nothing-boy who can convey talent and cluelessness, but Miles Teller is such a zero that the scenes with his family and girlfriend, where we're supposed to say "no nice boy don't isolate yourself from your loved ones to drum so good," just felt like "god shut the fuck up you whiny jerk." The film also didn't really address a couple of questions I thought might be relevant to the JK Simmons character. Does music still retain its meaning if you obsess over it to the extent that Fletcher does, do people still respond to his performances on an emotional level, or do they appreciate it on a purely technical level? There's that dinner scene, where someone in Miles Teller's family asks, "How can you have a music competition? Isn't it subjective?" and Miles Teller says, "No," but it never explores the idea of what chasing the parts of music which can be judged objective does to the music. The other question is, what right does Fletcher have to the next Charlie Parker? How does this white dude think he can own jazz? But I've spent more words finding what's problematic about the film than I did on what I liked, which is usually the sign of a great film, one I wanted to spend a lot of words thinking about.