pop culture picks from ‘one of the most transformative years in pop music history’
hello,
what a year, eh? so many things happened. again! and yet, here we are, still facing impending collapse amidst ever greater chaos and conflict. lol.
indeed, this year’s turmoil has made me less inclined than usual to seek new pleasures. hence this year’s list will be relatively short. but i did still try, because i must for my sanity’s sake, or something close to that.
watching
my favourite live show this year was Tife Kusoro’s new play, G, which debuted at the royal court theatre.
The Arts Desk review billed it as ‘everyday realism blitzed by urban myth’. perhaps it wasn’t quite gritty enough for their liking, but i’ve had my fill of grit, so found the surrealist scenes that presented the mythical aspect of the play rather mesmerising. i’m not usually given to the ‘dancing’ expressions of the characters in non-musical theatre, but it worked supremely well in G, thanks to superbly directed choreography, which gave the characters’ movements a haunting quality consistent with the general mood.
and the story itself? i won’t describe it fully - there were a lot of ambiguities for a relatively slim plot - but the play centres on the characters’ obsession with a pair of pristine white trainers left abandoned over a telephone wire, allegedly the property of a dead Black teenager called ‘Baitface’, according to urban legend.
i’m glad i managed to see G. it was the sort of play that deserves to be described as spellbinding on a poster somewhere.
looking back at my previous years’ choices, i am reminded that i am partial to a hate watch (i’m thinking Succession in 2021). so it follows that the improvised conditions of sporting events can generate a drama as compelling as any tv show, and in the world of football i have indulged in a hate watch for a while now, which this year has continued to produce hilarious outcomes.
allow me to explain. i am a millennial aged Arsenal fan, and those who share this demographic know all too well about the traumatising years of losses to various Manchester United teams of yesteryear, especially the Arsène Wenger vs Alex Ferguson days. well, if you’d told me after the infamous 8-2 drubbing in the 2011–12 season that a time would come when Man United sides would get thrashed silly by all sorts, i would have had you sectioned.
and yet, a symbolic yuletide defeat for the second year in succession has proven this crazy notion correct. in december last year, AFC Bournemouth routed them by three goals to nil at old trafford. Man U they were in the top six of the premier league at that point, but the manner of such a defeat felt like a tragic moment for the club. it’s the mighty Man United! who are they anymore, when they get walloped by a plucky little south coast club whose full stadium capacity’s of fans wouldn’t fill more than a quarter of old trafford at best?
the then manager, Erik Ten Haag, tried to initiate a fresh start this calendar year, and even led the team to glory, winning the fa cup by the end of season. but while i lamented an average Man U side still managing to win a trophy, it was far from a vintage season by their lofty standards, and it was pointed out to me by a Crystal Palace FC fan that this was in fact the funniest possible timeline, because the illusion that they’d have improved as a football club would get shattered on contact with the 2024/25 season. perhaps they caught something of that truth in the end-of-season drubbing the Eagles gave the Red Devils, because Ten Haag did so badly he got sacked in november. replacement Ruben Amorim was hired to instill his philosophy, methods, values, principles, and all of that guff new hotshot football coaches are meant to bring to the premier league these days.
and yet, only a few matches into Ruben Interim Amorim’s reign - and twelve months on from that defeat to AFC Bournemouth - history decided to repeat itself as farce. another three nil loss has left Man U worse off than last season (bottom half of the table, lol) and many of the same players somehow look worse now under the new regime. i mean, Amorim talks about suffering a lot.
and suffer they do. even Arsenal scumbagged a victory against them recently, in much the same way that they used to be on the receiving end of. so for all these reasons, it’s been fantastically entertaining to watch Man U lose football matches repeatedly. theatre of dreams? stuff of nightmares, more like! it couldn’t happen to a nicer club. don’t come for me reader, i never said i was good person.
usually the most controversial live tv performances of the year make for the best ones. so no amount of Netflix advertising will make me watch any half-time super bowl special until that happens. whatever Beyoncé did, she failed the assignment because it generated no controversy.
whereas metalcore act Knocked Loose performing their GRAMMY-nominated song Suffocate on Jimmy Kimmel Live did so by accident. they weren’t the first act of their ilk to appear on the show, so the fact that some of the social media reactions to their performance went viral came as a surprise. perhaps it was a publicity stunt, but it got me interested enough to want to watch it, and… it’s a solid tv performance by a regular modern hardcore band simply going about their business. the band’s playing is tight, and the song itself is well crafted according to the conventions of its genre, resulting in something typically unpalatable to those used to pleasant harmonies and melodies. i thought these metal tropes would be familiar to mainstream audiences by now, but i guess these types of acts can still have a strong visceral impact. it’s just that the negative publicity from this performance has turned it into an iconic moment for modern hardcore / metalcore.
i sorta like the song, although i found lead vocalist Bryan Garris’s particular shouting tone a bit grating compared with contemporaries such as Soul Glo and Turnstile. just as well that guest vocalist Poppy complements Garris neatly then. the bit where she skips on stage just before the start of the second verse, looking all fly in white compared with the band in all black (great choice, btw… block colour says ‘i’m a team player’, but white says ‘i’m also a special guest’), just to start screaming diabolically, is wonderful to see. and then the song becomes a duet i never knew i wanted. Islands in the Stream this ain’t. honestly though, the final chorus they scream together is metalcore’s answer to Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe, i swear. and i will forever enjoy the fact that prime time american television had to endure the full-on pig squeal that came just before it. Graham Norton needs to book them next.
reading
as ever, i read little, and remembered even less. my usual interests are plagued with the question of whether artificial intelligence will ruin change everything. meanwhile life gets worse in many other ways.
only one book i read this year tried to explain the feeling i get when the present feels bad and the future even worse: philoshoper Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression.
frontcover image of Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression.png
Berardi engages with the possibility that what we call depression might actually be a perfectly sensible reaction among many young people in materially rich nations to ‘the chaos and collapse of a seemingly unchangeable and unliveable future’.
i won’t pretend that this book has the answers to this rut, but i appreciate that Berardi takes the issue of depression in this modern age (in this economy?) seriously where others simply write off the sensation of impotence in the present and lethargy towards the future as divorced from reality or out of touch with the stats. the sort of approach which dismisses young people’s anxieties about the less savoury aspects of modern life as feelings which facts don’t care about is coming unstuck against present-day social, economic, political, and ecological problems. so for someone like Berardi to legitimise these concerns by trying to understand the resigned spirit of the age and the actions young people take to divest themselves of their dwindling stake in societies across the world is relatively refreshing. i welcome more thinking like this.
listening
2024 was ‘one of the most transformative years in pop music history’, according to Musicboard. i think this translates as ‘loads of streams’ in the case of the Lamar vs Drake beef (a wild mismatch, what was Drake thinking?), plus Taylor Swift’s Eras tour becoming the highest-grossing ever (meh). even Charli XCX went mainstream. all good from an industry perspective, then.
outside the bubble, few music artists seemed best pleased at the accelerating rate of closure of smaller music venues, the inflated costs of performing, and the rising threats of so-called artificial intelligence making their chosen profession more precarious than ever. transformative might translate as ‘chaotic’ for them.
as a listener, i’d retreated to the comforting sounds of 20th century radio. but when i dared to sample the sounds of today, i was occasionally rewarded. thumbs up to Milkweed setting old folk tunes to hip hop beats, Natasha El-Sergany’s shoegaze sheen on the somesurprises album Perseids, and some of the neat tunes off young indie rock act Hello Mary’s second album (0%, for example).
rarely am i moved to purchase music almost immediately upon hearing it, though. Liberate made me do that with their debut EP, The Tide. they identify as a hardcore / metalcore act, but the riffage is so slick, it felt more like groove metal to me, like Pantera, minus Dimebag’s solos. in fact Liberate groove so well, they can hold a single chord with ease, as the last couple of minutes of the title track demonstrates. credit to the drummer for that.
i often say that one of my favourite types of albums involves the auteur inviting me into a world that runs by their logic, and i have to figure it out. Martha Skye Murphy hits that target on her album Um. her voice barely rises above a whisper for the best part of an hour, but the sonic world she inhabits suits it perfectly. you can tell she worked extremely hard on her craft, and i think it pays off if you are willing to be absorbed.
at some point this year, i slipped into another vaporwave coma, and got lost in a signalwave concept album (what is signalwave? this article explains things). Road to Nowhere features taped radio broadcasts accompanying a series of truck journeys. for me, CT57 achieves the feat of producing content as enjoyable as the form it takes: several of the tracks are longer than most albums, but i listened to them all, and would do so again.
another type of album i like is the sort where a band, armed with the same instruments as everyone else, somehow manages to develop a coherent sound quite apart from their peers. Still House Plants are an art school grad trio on their third album now, walking the tightrope between precision and looseness. the drummer refuses to play regular rhythms, and the guitarist appears to want to play in between accents (neither wish to keep time in the conventional way), and the vocalist sings set phrases triggered by the other two’s patterns with a technique that sounds sort of aleatoric. if you don’t like this description of their sound, then i urge you to skip the clip below… the Rolling Stones are still here for you. as for me, i’d love to make an album like If I don’t make it, I love u. actually, i think the right bassist would make them even better. so hmu haha
my favourite album this year was Being Poor is Expensive by Bashy. the grime legend has retained his storytelling ability in the 15 years between albums, while forging an acting career. the flawless production is a perfect match for the album’s central themes, namely the dilemmas young people growing up in poor urban areas have to face in britain, how poverty stunts your character growth, and how much the luck of choices made or not made can determine the course of your life. many words spoken during the course of the album, not one wasted.
how about you? what have you done lately?
*reads last year’s resolutions*
i quite liked the monologues i published… i may try to publish more stuff like this in 2024. the dream would be to complete a longer form piece, but that’ll be the promise i most likely break if i make it.
and break it i did! i let the professional side of me win out over the latter half of 2024. i will try to publish more creative outputs next year, but i make no promises because i doubt it will help. carving out time to better decide what to do with my many half-finished projects would be a start. plus, who knows what time we have to do anything creative for ourselves before events overtake us? save yourselves!
all the best