Every year, I look forward to Spotify Wrapped.
Let’s get it out of the way: yeah, Spotify is a terrible company and they are terrible for artists. We all know this at this point. I have a lot of friends who have moved over to using other music apps like Tidal. I respect that.
I’ve been using Spotify for over a decade, and there is a huge nostalgic collection of playlists attached to my account that has consistently prevented me from moving to a different app. There has also been Wrapped.
They started doing Wrapped in 2016, when I was 19 years old, meaning I’ve had seven years of it. It’s become something of a ritual, something I look forward to around the end of November or beginning of December.
Now let’s get this other part out of the way: yeah, they’re just spitting a scary amount of data they’ve collected about me back at me in fun graphics. They found a way to get me excited about my surveillance. Yes, yes, we live in a dystopia, etc.
But I do look forward to it. In part because music has been, for most of my life, a major way I process emotions and my mental state. I like it because it begins the process of me reflecting on the year as it comes to a close. I could laugh at myself the year after I was officially divorced, 2019, having Our Song by Radiator Hospital or No Children by The Mountain Goats as top tracks. I could see IDLES as a top artist in 2020, and think about the clear connection between the political anger and joy behind that artists and the events unfolding that year.
You can probably tell from this newsletter that I’m not as invested emotionally in music as I used to be. You can see it in the hours of music I’ve listened to each year, decreasing slowly in 2021 onward. I’ve been trying to fix that, and making conscious efforts to force myself to choose music over podcasts sometimes. It’s easy for me to be passively devouring information constantly, and not allowing myself to emotionally reflect a bit. You can also probably tell from some of the last few months’ newsletters that I have been reflecting on music more.
This is Josiah’s media round-up, a newsletter where I tell you about all the media I’ve been watching, reading, listening to, and producing.
Spotify Wrapped
This year’s Spotify Wrapped made me laugh. Around the beginning of the year, I had the exhiliration of getting obsessed with a band that I don’t have as often as I used to. The band wasn’t new to me, it was more of a rediscovery: Los Campesinos!
In some sense, this is a band from a different era. Yes, that era was only about a decade ago, but things feel very different now. Something about that twee indie sound of the late Aughts and early 2010s feels somewhat quaint now, and I’m not sure why. Around the beginning of the year, I decided to revisit Los Campesinos! on a whim, solely because a Twitter mutual had shared a few songs and got me thinking about them again.
In the past, I could take or leave them. They just didn’t click with me. The only song I had playing repeatedly was The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future. Weirdly, this was the first song of theirs I’d heard, and I think the darkness of the song was attractive to me in high school, and so when I found their usual stuff, often in major keys and a bit ironically chirpy, it just didn’t hit me the same. But my taste in music has changed a lot since high school, and while I like The Sea is a Good Place and I still default to sad music frequently, it feels like a song that’s despairing in a really obvious way.
What has resonated with me more, now, is a song like My Year in Lists, which is chirpy and jokey in it’s lyrical delivery, but has more emotions I connect with.
“On your request, I compiled a list of my top 5 resolutions for this year,” the second verse begins, and as the secondary vocals chant “one!” for the first resolution, the verse derails: “I declined, because I (two!) do not believe in the new year anymore.” The secondary vocals keep chanting numbers as if there are resolutions being listed, despite the verse changing course. This makes me laugh everytime I listen to it.
“(Three!) And you must confess that at times like these hopefulness is tantamount to hopelessness (four!), and I accept that it’s time for a change but not in (five!) places like this with people like these.”
This year, my top five tracks on Wrapped were almost entirely Los Campesinos!
There are Listed Buildings - Los Campesinos!
Salt, Pepa, and Spinderella - Johnny Foreigner
My Year in Lists - Los Campesinos!
Death to Los Campesinos! - Los Campesinos!
Romance is Boring - Los Campesinos!
While I do really like them as an artist, I do think the best explanation for them being so high up is that I was listening to them on a road trip I took toward the beginning of the year. I think my top artists is a little more reflective of my year.
Los Campesinos!
Cloud Nothings
Talking Heads
Home is Where
The Mountain Goats
I haven’t written anything about Cloud Nothings on this newsletter, but this year I’ve been really enjoying them, particularly the songs Rock and I’m Not Part of Me.
I’ve written about Talking Heads and Home is Where a good amount in the past few months, and The Mountain Goats have been a consistent influence on me, both in my taste in music but also in my own writing. John Darnielle’s novels were really important for me, and heavily influenced the draft of a novel that I have sitting on my laptop and really need to edit and do something with.
Some deaths
Burn in hell, Kissinger.
That’s about all I have to say about Kissinger dying.
There were two notable deaths in the news the last few days. The first being Kissinger of course—a cause for celebration. The other made me genuinely pretty sad: Shane MacGowan.
There are a few musical artists that I feel like I “inherited” from my Dad. His reverence and love for an artist, and him perpetually listening to them while I’m growing up, gives me a strong connection to the music that I end up sharing. Talking Heads is one. Tom Waits is another. And, of course, The Pogues is one.
I’ve joked for a while that a part of me unconsciously thinks Christmas is an Irish holiday because my Dad listened to a lot of celtic music around the holiday. The Bells of Dublin by The Chieftans would always play as we decorated the tree, and Fairytales of New York by The Pogues was a frequent appearance around the holidays.
Of course, it wasn’t just relegated to that one Christmas hit, but because of it, I always tend to revisit The Pogues around this time of year. So it hit me especially hard that, at this time of year, I learned of Shane MacGowan’s passing.
It would be something of an understatement to say that MacGowan shaped my taste in music. His punk approach to traditional folk influenced my own music and most of the folk-punk artists that I love, even if they didn’t include the particularly celtic sound.
I was thinking of this influence especially when reading Alexis Petridis’ eulogy for MacGowan in The Guardian. He pushes back against a cliché about MacGowan as the poet of the working class, one that’s always easily debunked by pointing out MacGowan’s education at a prep school. Petridis astutly gets to the heart of his music,
He never set himself up as a poet of the working class: what he wrote about, again and again, was a kind of underclass of outcasts (“the junkies, the drunks, the pimps, the whores”, as The Boys from the County Hell put it), a subsection of society in which people from all walks of life can end up. He wrote about its inhabitants with a startling empathy and tenderness, drawing the listener into their stories.
If you were to be Marxist about it, you might call MacGowan a poet of the lumpenproletariat, the criminals and addicts. His music isn’t about the working class, although sometimes it is (listen to Dirty Old Town), it’s about precarity. It’s about the potential to fall through the cracks. The potential, even as a good upper middle class kid, to spiral downward from your addictions and vices. And he approaches this with empathy.
This is also a theme that floats around in a lot of other folk-punk, and there is an interesting resonance between another favorite artist of mine, AJJ, and The Pogues, despite the lyrical styles varying drastically. In People II 2: Still Peoplin’ (the title is part of an ongoing joke in AJJ’s discography), Sean Bonnette sings, “We're all two or three bad decisions away from becoming the ones that we fear and pity.”
Returning to the big Christmas hit, there’s something about Fairytales of New York that I find incredibly moving. Many portray the song as deeply cynical and something of a mockery of the notion of romance or dreams, and while that is somewhat true, I also think it ends on a more hopeful note than that.
Yes, the couple in the song resent each other. They had dreams that never came true. “You promised me broadway was waiting for me,” Kirsty MacColl sings at MacGowan. And now they’re poor, they struggle with addictions, and they are just another bickering, miserable couple in New York.
But the final verse still suggests to me the continuation of a love in the midst of unfilled dreams.
MacGowan: “I could have been someone.”
MacColl: “Well, so could anyone. You took my dreams from me when I first found you.”
MacGowan: “I kept them with me, babe. I put them with my own. Can’t make it all alone. I’ve built my dreams around you.”
“I’ve built my dreams around you” is the line that sits in my head.
Film
This week, I worked on completing Stephen Cone’s filmography. If you’re unfamiliar, Cone is an independent filmmaker in Chicago. His style reminds me somewhat of other Mumblecore filmmakers, but (in my opinion) his films have a lot more heart. Earlier this year, I watched The Wise Kids and Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party, both of which became instant favorites of mine. I have never seen a film that captures the subtleties of evangelical culture better than those two films. Princess Cyd is also fantastic.
This week, I watched In Memoriam and Black Box.
In Memoriam follows a man who is disturbed by a news story getting shared around about a couple that fell to their deaths from a roof while nude, likely having sex and slipping. Everyone is calling the story hilarious, and it’s being shared on lists of funniest deaths. The pointlessness of the death—two drunk college kids dying because of a stupid mistake—seems impossible to him, so he tries to investigate what actually happened. But nothing actually happened. It was as the story seemed.
But the story bothers him, so he begins to meet the families and friends of the couple. I won’t spoil the ending, but I found the whole thing pretty moving.
The film came out in 2011, and I recall as an internet user at the time, things like the Darwin awards getting shared around. I always found the “funny death” thing a bit unsettling. I understand laughing at the death of some monstrous person who deserves it (I mentioned Kissinger above), but someone dying in an embarrassing or unexpected way likely doesn’t deserve it. I would always image if I died like that or if my friend died like that, and suddenly my friend or I are famous as “guy who fell off a cliff while pissing” or whatever. This becomes the final way an entire person is remembered, and it likely haunts the people who knew them.
This film has a different tone than a lot of Cone’s films. It is a bit of a dark comedy, although the comedy isn’t about the death really, it’s about the strange protagonist getting way too involved with people he only knows because of a novelty news article. It’s primarily driven by cringe comedy.
Nevertheless, the film also captures what I love about Cone so much: his empathy. He is empathetic toward all of his characters. This is part of why his films addressing evangelicalism are so good. They don’t feel like caractures. The most obnoxiously condescending and self-righteously devout are still understandable. You rarely hate any of the characters in Cone’s films, even if you dislike aspects of them.
Black Box really hit me hard. The film follows a woman adapting an old, pulpy children’s horror novel she read as a kid into a play. She directs the play with undergraduate theater students as actors, who find the script and the dialogue incredibly corny. However, as the film goes on, as romances spring up between the actors and more individual pain is revealed, the play begins to mean a lot of different things to everyone involved. As with all of the Cone’s films, the real poetry is in the moments of vulnerability—sexual vulnerability, emotinal vulnerability, spiritual vulnerability, incredible moments of two individuals putting their guard down and trying to express something that they don’t have the words for.
There are so many aspects of this film that I appreciated. One is the way it engages with “bad” art. The director understands the script is corny, but she also believes it can be both corny and meaningful. She wants to go beyond that framing, despite no one else really getting it. Even toward the end, the audience doesn’t really get it, but the actors do. Even the original author of the book, despite claiming he barely remembers writing it, clearly has some emotional tie to it that is hinted at throughout the film. The director’s connection clearly comes from having read it as a child, and all the pain and anxieties of her childhood that she had projecting onto this corny horror novel.
The other is Cone’s adamant push to see the body and sexuality as a good thing. This is primarily his beef with evangelicalism, you can tell. It’s not the belief in God or any of the theology, really. He has no problem showing Christians in a positive light, and you can tell it’s not religion he’s objecting to. He’s objecting to the way many Christians, and other systems of thought as well, make adolescents hate their bodies and fear their sexuality. This gets put in explicit terms in Black Box, which illuminated some of his other films for me.
If you want to venture into Cone’s filmography, I would suggest starting with Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party and then The Wise Kids. At least for me, those are the ones that hit me the hardest. That being said, all of his films are worth seeking out.
And with that, I think that’s all I have for this week. I’ll see you next Friday.