Glitter, Darkrooms, and Kanye
Whoever said that dancing means winning was right. Life squeezes you from every direction—the taxes, the lawyers, the dishes that develop their own personality—and the correct response is to put on something loud and move around the kitchen. I’ve been watching Glee lately, which has rewired my brain to see every minor inconvenience as the setup for a musical number. I’m not fighting it. Here are the albums making it possible.
Blue Songs by Hercules & Love Affair is nostalgia and glitter and a very specific kind of sweat: flamingo shirts, Miami Vice color grades, confetti cannons, a house explosion that leaves no room for anyone without a pulse. The hedonism has no ceiling and doesn’t apologize for it. If you don’t move to this record you’re already dead and just don’t know it yet.
And then there’s Azari & III, which is somehow even more committed to the bit. The 80s trash aesthetic runs through the whole thing—this isn’t confetti anymore, this is darkrooms and substances and music that sounds best when you’ve lost track of what time it is. Auditory MDMA. Play it loud and don’t explain yourself.
On the other end of the room entirely: Kanye’s The College Dropout. Yes, he’s become an insufferable asshole with a self-regard so enormous it circles back around to being almost admirable. But on this record he was still just a kid with something to prove, rapping with a fundamental refusal to be small that I can actually borrow something from, even now. Not every song is cheerful. Most of the attitude is delusional. None of that matters.
The Jay-Z & Marvin Gaye mashup Brooklyn Soul isn’t new—someone is always layering Jay-Z over Marvin samples—but this one sits right. Headphones on, bus window, city passing. Berlin isn’t Brooklyn, but at least nobody’s getting shot on my commute, so I’ll count that as a win.
Weezer’s Raditude isn’t Pinkerton—nothing is—but it’s better than Hurley, which nearly finished off my remaining goodwill toward the band. The Underdogs and Put Me Back Together are two songs that anyone who doesn’t live entirely inside the electro bubble deserves to hear. That’s a fact and I’m not taking it back.