I'm Not Okay But I'm Gonna Be Alright

Is this moving me? Y/N?

Mark Beyer

In this newsletter:

• Stoner shoegaze I heard in a weird brutalist structure in like 2004.

• An album that might help you rediscover yourself in a dentist’s office.

• Expansive guitar drift from the ever-reliable Tarotplane.

• A new song with an Earl Sweatshirt verse that is making some waves on the internet.

• Random thoughts about Limp Bizkit, for no reason at all.

• An appreciation of an article about Superman and Mike Kelley and comics.

MEMORIES OF VARIOUS DUDES FOLLOWING THEIR DREAMS

In college, I got moved into family housing on the outskirts of campus even though I didn’t have a family. My house was near a brutalist structure that was ostensibly for playing, I guess, street hockey, but no one ever did that so it was repurposed for no sports at all and instead became a place to smoke weed. I rarely went in there, but when the wind was just right on certain evenings I could hear a guy playing guitar. Mainly, he’d create these cavernous drones using the natural echo of the space, occasionally letting a twinkle of a bent note rise above the hum. Once I went over there to see what was happening. He was standing alone with his guitar and pedal board, coaxing an endless drone in the crisp autumn air. His friend was there too, recording with his Minidisc player. I never told them I was watching, or that I opened my window to listen every day. We were an audience of two.

In 2008, my girlfriend and I took the train to Cold Spring, NY to walk around. We ate ice cream, got in a fight, and I bought a used copy of Terrapin Station at an antique store for like six bucks. Classic 2008! The town of Cold Spring ends abruptly at the water, where residents and tourists lounge around on nice days. On this particular day, a guy with a shitty amp and even shittier guitar was posted up on the grass, his skin leathery and grooved, like he’d been baking there for decades. He played over a chintzy drum machine loop, his guitar weaving into zonked out crescendos and then looping back to the simple pattern he began with. It wasn’t mindblowing, but it did point to a sort of zen way of living that I imagined was largely unencumbered from the stresses of modern life, possibly at the expense of personal relationships or “interacting” with “society”. All that aside, it pointed to a refreshingly simple way to engage with music? Maybe we should always be asking the question: “is this moving me? Y/N?”

MUSIC FOR WAITING ROOMS

In a recent installment of his newsletter, Sasha Frere-Jones reminded me of the existence of White Poppy, who has been making gauzy electronic music for awhile now, but with this year’s Ataraxia, has landed on a sound that captures a sort of effortless drift while still being compelling enough to offer up a deep listen. Frere-Jones says that listening to it makes him feel like he is “sitting in a room filled with plastic orange flowers.” I listened to it this morning while walking through Elysian Park, surrounded by real flowers—the effect of the music, the way it walks an uneasy line between digital and organic, between cheesy and genuine—was powerful, like having a personal epiphany in your dentist’s waiting room.

MEDITATIVE REPETITION

You can’t really go wrong with any Tarotplane release (there are so many). They all do a similar thing emotionally: make you feel like you’re having a transcendent moment of personal growth. I’ve been spending a lot of time with Improvisations for Echo Guitar, which is exactly what the title says it is. Tarotplane plays a Thai guitar on side A, and a Stratocaster on the B side. You can hear some differences, and probably get really nerdy about said differences, but both of these pieces play well as a singular experience, with the “echo” in the title acting as a sort of dub effect, allowing the guitar to move from beautiful desolation to humid, hypnotic repetition.

RAP MUSIC MADE BY RAP FANS (RARE)

Earl Sweatshirt has a new verse on the El Cousteau song “Words2LiveBy.” Even without the presence of Earl, though, the song would still be great—the beat sounds like it’s going in two directions at once/like it’s about to topple over and fall apart (it sounds like both but you can pick one if you choose). Earl, always the best rapper in the room, but not necessarily the most quotable (his style of writing has always been for me about the full song, not the individual line), comes through with some all timers here:

“I’m not okay but I’m gonna be alright”

and

“Free Gaza/We on the corner like some Israelites”

both deserve to be enshrined in whatever the modern version of the Ego Trip Big Book of Rap Lists is (the internet? Your high school yearbook?) Earl Sweatshirt, meanwhile, continues to sound great on any beat he raps on, because he’s an actual fan of rap music and is therefore enthusiastic to hop between subgenres the same way real rap fans will sift through thousands of mixtape tracks from virtually any artist out there in order to find pure gold.

TOXIC TEENAGE BOY SYNDROME

I’ve been thinking a lot about Limp Bizkit lately. If you know me, you know this is not exactly uncommon. That band, and the nu-metal genre they were associated with, were making some of the most popular music during the last gasps of the music industry as we used to understand it. Lack of critical acclaim be damned, we can’t just pretend that a huge, huge swath of the country wasn’t listening to this music all the time, and probably still is.

It’s interesting to examine why this music worked so well when it worked so well, and there’s lots to dive into culturally: the hypersexualized turn of the century, MTV’s stranglehold on music videos just before music videos became mostly irrelevant, etc. I, on the other hand, want to focus on just one moment from Limp Bizkit’s seminal “Nookie,” which ranks right up there with “Break Stuff” as a massive hit song that also happens to be massively toxic. For much of its runtime, “Nookie” is all Fred Durst hating on a girl for hooking up with his friends and lying to him, so he turns around and tells her that actually he just hung out with her so he could have sex with her and he never really cared about her at all. Cool, healthy lesson, bro! Then, midway through the song, Durst’s voice drops to a mumble verging on incantation. Structurally, it’s there to make the return to the chorus more explosive, but in the moment, it feels like the only true part of the whole song. Durst sings: “Ain't nothin' gonna change/ You can go away / I'm just gonna stay here and always be the same.” It’s petulant, but it’s also a pitch-perfect lyrical capture of what it means to be a teenage boy: all that bitterness and simmering rage and frustration and light nihilism is real, and that he was able to capture it in a way that goes so unnoticed that it feels subconscious (and probably subconsciously resonated with a lot of teenage boys at the time), is an achievement. Maybe next time I write one of these I’ll talk about how Korn’s “Got the Life” is a takedown of the popular music machine so scathing that I think it inspired an entire generation to distrust record labels. Or maybe not. Whatever.

OK ONE LAST THING

The writer Leah Mandel’s piece for Poetry.org about Superman comics, said comics’ many lost city of Kandor storylines (most of the time, the entire city of Kandor is trapped inside a bottle), Mike Kelley’s sculptural Kandors, Sylvia Plath, and much more. It’s a brilliant piece of writing for the way it weaves together sculptural art crit, personal reminiscence, the politics and themes of silver age Superman comics and more. Like Mandel, I also had a memorable experience at PS1’s 2013 Mike Kelley retrospective, and like Mandel, comic books of all types are an indelible part of my life, both as a human and as a writer. In writing this piece, she did achieved something unfortunately rare: comics criticism and analysis that manages to place the work alongside more “considered” or “established” works of art. It happens sometimes, but not as much as it should. Please read this piece.

Uncovered: My own communion with Kelley’s Kandors in 2013. I don’t remember this photo being taken, but it’s in my phone. I think I was 29 at the time.

See you next time?