It’s time to talk about more music! Albums! And, like last year, I’m not, y’know, the ~hippest person when it comes to music, so this is just what I really loved and listened to. Truthiness before coolness.
Bangerz is a great pop album and hasn’t even started to wear out its welcome yet. It is straight-up loaded with danceable, singable, jammable jamz and I will 100% go to the mat defending it and Miley. I can’t excuse her appropriative behavior or the implied racism of it — no one should — but she’s young and learning and I will straight-up murder you if you talk about her “fall from grace” or whatever people are claiming this week. This album is so, so great and I can’t wait to see what she does next.
Bad Blood is so, so good. It’s big and sweeping and tender and, like, magical. I listened to it on repeat for like, a month and a half straight and never got tired or bored. It’s an album that had great standalone tracks, but is most pleasurable when you hear the whole thing in order. I can’t remember the last time I felt that way about an album. It’s also got this great sort of orchestral, storytelling thing going on that I love, where I can imagine a whole bunch of people with large, important instruments backing up the band? I don’t know, the drumming just screams timpani.
We’ve all been jamming to Major Lazer for like, four years now, right? The first time my BFF heard Major Lazer, she was in my car and I had put it on a playlist specifically for her and she stopped dead in the middle of dancing and was like, “Who is this?” and for the first time ever in my life, I was cool. For about thirty seconds.
Anyway, Free the Universe is super solid. It doesn’t have quite as many standalone killers as Guns Don’t Kill People…Lazers Do but it is still totally loaded with jamz. Let’s be real, any year that Major Lazer puts an album out is probably a year that it’s going to end up on my best of list.
Notable Jamz: “Jessica”, “Bubble Butt”, & “Jet Blue Jet”
Ora is g-l-o-r-i-o-u-s. There isn’t a single song on the album I don’t love, it works as a whole and as individual jamz. There are so many great danceable hits that I wish I was 13 and had a full-length mirror to perform in front of. I cannot even begin to count the number of times I’ve broken down crying to “Hello, Hi, Goodbye”. It’s just a phenomenally fun album. I only wish it were 100 songs longer.
I can’t talk about The Electric Lady or Janelle Monáe without just flipping out and losing my shit because I love her so much. I don’t think I’ve ever loved a musician with the veracity and respect awe with which I love and adore and worship Janelle Monáe. One of the most well-spoken, articulate, and smartest women I’ve ever heard speak and so, so incredibly talented I can’t process it. Goddess.
Uh, anyway, The Electric Lady is phenomenal. I l-o-v-e concept albums universally and I love music that tells a story and this album just does it all so well and looks and sounds cool as hell while it’s doing it. And as part of her larger concept? Killer. There are songs both aching and danceable and her voice just floors me. I can’t even explain the torrent of emotions I feel during “Primetime” or how many times I’ve turned into a sobbing mess listening to it. Basically every time I’ve heard it. This album is a gift
The end of 2013 is upon us and just like last year I’ve decided to round-up some of my favorite pop culture experiences into Totally Top 5 lists for your perusal. Again, like last year, I’ve let my iTunes play counts do the talking and started with my top five jamz for the year. Here we go!
This song is a jam. It’s all energetic yelling and Patrick Stump’s wailing and it’s so, so good for screaming out your car windows when it’s, y’know, warm enough to have them rolled down. I always really like Fall Out Boy’s wordplay and this one’s got a couple of great bits. So good.
4. M.I.A., “Bad Girls”
The ultimate song for a car full of girls who are excited to be alive. I can’t even count the number of times someone pulled up next to me at a stop light and rolled up their window because I was blaring this so loud and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m not a badass, but this lets me fake it pretty god damn well.
Like everyone else on Earth this year, I could not avoid this song and, like the large majority of those same people, I embraced the hell out of it. This song is fun, it’s feel-good, and even if it’s overstayed its welcome a little, it was still one hell of a jam.
Katy Perry’s done and said some dumb stuff — though I think that is just part of the territory of being successful, mistakes are made — but it hasn’t slowed down the juggernaut that is her pop reign. This song is glorious and if you haven’t cried like at least twice while listening to it then I just don’t understand what you’re doing. I love this song so much that I’ve had dream arguments where I went to the mat defending it. That’s a jam.
When this came out in spring, I was utterly powerless against it and just left it on repeat for days at a time. I really kind of love her — appropriation issues aside, sigh — and this is just such a jam. Great beat, great chorus, and the perfect length for a pop hit. Jam and a half.
since today is the solstice and the first official day of summer and the sun is set to drop at 9:58 pm in my middle-of-nowhere corner of the world, i thought i’d finally throw together my playlist for the summer. i typed this twice on a manual typewriter. a. manual. typewriter. TWICE. my index fingers are furious.
totally top five jamz for summer 2k13:
5. ace hood feat. future & rick ross, “bugatti” – if you don’t wake up thinking “i woke up in a new bugatti” every morning after you hear this, i don’t understand you.
4. austin mahone, “what about love” – this CHILD. i can’t watch or look at him because i get the motts (secondhand embarrassment) so bad that my teeth feel like they’re going to fall out of my mouth, but this is a good-ass song.
3. fake shark real zombie, “paint it gold” – put me on a raft in the middle of a pool and leave me there to die. this is filling the void for pool jamz in my heart, since i don’t have new lana del rey to do it.
2. robin thicke feat. pharrell, “blurred lines” – if i was putting cash money down on the song no one will be able to escape for the next three months, it’d be this one. S U C H A J A M.
1. ariana grande feat. mac miller, “the way” – i legit thought this was a mariah carey song the first time i heard it because it just felt like one. that’s a compliment. straight-up “honey”-esque vibes.
Live Through this was released on April 12, 1994. I was nine years old and just about to finish out third grade at a new school. I was tall for my age, fat, smart, and already just a little bit angry at the world around me. I’d started my school year at a brand new school and my big sister had just moved out of our house. I was just starting to become someone and music was the thing — the thing I loved first, the thing I loved before books or movies or television — that was helping to make that person.
Nineteen years later, I am twenty-eight years old and just about to finish up my first year in a new state. I’m no longer tall for my age, but I am still fat and smart(ish). Music is still the first thing I ever really loved, but I’m in a serious relationship with television at the moment. My idea of what “someone” is has changed dramatically and I’m okay with how I turned out most days.
Nine years old seems insanely young to me now, impossibly young — too young for Hole probably, too young for anything, honestly. But I grew up with wonderful, involved but permissive parents and KROQ and the Los Angeles alt-radio culture of the mid-90s, so young or not, I first found my footing as a human being in Green Day and Candlebox and Nirvana and Tori Amos and The Offspring and Alanis Morrissette and Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. And Hole.
I remember standing in my bedroom screaming into the handle of a sponge mop to every single song on Live Through This. I remember scrawling lyrics out on binder covers and backpacks. I remember listening to it in the dark with my best friend Marian. I remember burning candles and shadowing my eyes with black eyeshadow and slicking my mouth with red Wet & Wild lipstick and screaming those songs like the words were being exorcised from me, like I’d die if I left them in for too long. I remember staring at that album cover, at young and barefoot and probably-not-all-that-far-from-my-age-at-the-time and still kind of unbelievably cool Courtney Love on the back. I remember the cracks in the plastic CD case.
I remember being angry — so angry — at so much, at everything. Angry at nine and at twelve and at fifteen and at twenty. Angry at myself for being fat and weird. Angry at the kids who were mean to me and at myself for being impossibly meaner back. Angry at the people who didn’t listen when I was hurting, angry at myself for getting hurt, for letting other people hurt me. Angry at the world in the most uncomplicated ways, the most individual. I was angry because I was hurt.
I remember.
I couldn’t have told you in 1994 when I bought it on cassette at Tower Records at the West Covina Plaza or a couple years later when I bought it on CD at the same Tower Records or a year after that when I had to rebuy it because I’d worn my first copy out or when I rebought it digitally because I couldn’t take the skips from my ripped copy any longer — I’d have probably just said I liked it a lot because Green Day was my favorite band and I would’ve felt like a traitor — but Live Through This was the most important album of my youth. And nineteen years later it means more to me than ever.
I didn’t call myself a feminist in 1994, partially because I was nine years old and I didn’t really know what that meant and partially because I was raised by a father who called feminists “feminazis” and if there was one thing I wouldn’t have wanted to do in 1994, it was disappoint my father. I didn’t call myself a feminist in 2004 either because I was raised by a culture that taught me that feminism meant female superiority and that I should strive for something my conservative poli-sci professor called “equalism” but was actually code for the patriarchal bullshit status quo. I call myself a feminist now and I try very hard to be a good one, an intersectional one, an engaged one.
But I’m also angry. Still angry, so angry. And where my anger was indistinct and personal when I was young, anger built on hurt and sadness, it is anger directed at the system now, at patriarchy and rape culture and misogyny. At the incredible violence women face, institutional and political and personal.
Before I really knew why I was angry, Hole gave me a voice for it. Before I understood what it meant when a boy with a blond bowl cut chased me and my best friend around the playground at my first elementary school and flipped our skirts up, laughing, I was angry. Before I understood why a yard aid pulled me aside and told me not to play on the monkey bars because my shirt was “too short” and everyone was looking, I was angry. Before I saw the aggressive challenges from boys in high school because “girls don’t like metal” as acts of sexism, I was angry. And even though I didn’t really know it, Courtney Love was shaping that anger, asking questions that I wouldn’t understand for years, and planting the furious seeds of something that would shape me monumentally as an adult.
As an adult, that anger raged, rages through me every day. Every time I see another woman sliced open on a television or movie screen. Every time I’ve been groped or catcalled or hit on through the open windows of my vehicle. Every story I hear about street harrassment. Every time a politician thinks they have a right to make rules about what people can or cannot do with their uteruses. Every single time I’ve heard “Nice tits” or “That mouth would look great around my dick” or “You’re fat but I’d still fuck you.” Every story about assault or rape or abuse.
Every time I remember the world I live in as a woman, the world the women I love have to live in, the world every woman has to live in, I’m angry. So angry. And at nine, at twelve, at fifteen, and nineteen, and twenty-two, and twenty-eight, I was angry and, even when I didn’t understand the forces behind the objects of my fury, Hole was there to give that fury voice and shape and color and direction. Courtney Love was there. Nineteen years later, she is no longer the sole voice of my anger, but she’s still there, familiar, always and eternal, and for that I will be forever grateful.
