Raise the Knowledge

“Revolution is internal, help yourself at any time”

If you haven’t heard, Gogol Bordello are releasing a new album. Obviously, they couldn’t be more relevant than at this moment, and I can’t wait to hear what they have to say. A lot of us right now are thinking to ourselves “I didn’t leave the fucking motherland to keep on dealing with this shit, I left it so I wouldn’t have to!” I didn’t come to America to be surrounded by mindless violent nationalism, that’s what people come to America to get away from. Unfortunately, America is basically that suspiciously hot girl on Tinder who turns out to have meth mouth and both kinds of hepatitis. So at a time when America’s international diaspora is collectively quaking with fear and rage, we really need an uplifting voice. We need to be reminded of how strong and brave and vital our immigrant communities always have been and always will be. Yes, we’re deeply disappointed right now; we thought we wouldn’t have to be dissidents anymore. But if there’s one thing Joe Make-America-Great-Again doesn’t understand, it’s that people don’t come to America because they think it’s going to be a fun daisy carnival; they come because they’re desperate to survive. Everyone who comes here does so because they’ve seen and lived through things so intolerable there’s nothing left to do but leave. In that regard, we’re way better equipped than any white-bread Americans are to deal with whatever spiteful baby-fascist bullshit comes next. It’s hard to bring people down who’ve already been down. We can be dissidents again. We can drink and party our way through whatever troubled times may come. We pass free thought around with the vodka bottle.

Raining Men

Well, this is about the polar opposite of my own life, but I’m glad that Rihanna and Nicki are both getting some. Obviously, the level of bad-bitch-ness that Rih and Nicki Minaj are at is an unattainable ideal, especially for those of us who spend most of our time indoors with our cats. But there’s a little bit of a bad bitch inside of all of us, and we need to remember that when we’re feeling like useless blobs of angst. The musical stylings of Rihanna don’t get a lot of credit for having deep cultural or spiritual impact, and hey, they’re not really there for that. But Bad Gal RiRi is there to remind us that we should be having fun and being fabulous and there’s billions of fish in the sea, just in case anyone cares about fish. Don’t ever misunderestimate how fucking empowering it feels to be fabulous and get in front of the lights and cut loose.

Pumped Up Kicks

I wager you’re well familiar with ubiquitous hit, and I bet that sometime after the ten thousandth time you heard it, what it’s about may have finally dawned on you. You may have even felt a tiny little bit bad for whistling along. But then you whistled along anyway. It is, to refresh you, an inescapably catchy ode to that peculiarly modern social evil of our time, the school shooting. Making delightful art out of the shittiest things in life isn’t by any means a new phenomenon; people have been making whistle tunes in the face carnage for as long as people have known how to whistle. It’s an interesting thing to think about. We’re reached a point in our society where we just numbly accept the very real likelihood of getting shot by a disgruntled acquaintance or blown up by a terrorist as just a residual risk of living. While the specifics of the threats we face are uniquely ours, the mindset is nothing new. We wearily accept our timely dangers, just as people before us wearily accepted that most of their children would never live to adulthood or that a certain number of people in their communities would inevitably be eaten by lions. It’s not callous, it’s just how we’ve always survived.

Pretty Face

Another song from Here Lies Love, featuring the French vocalist Camille. She is best known for recording with Nouvelle Vague, and is also a solo artist. Apparently she has recorded half a dozen albums, some of which were certified platinum in France. After years of knowing her only for her Here Lies Love contribution and as part of the Nouvelle Vague ensemble, I’m curious to discover Camille as an artist in her own right. More on that at a later date.

Pretty Babies

It may be under the radar for some of you, but for me and a small group of fans, the music event of the year is Karen Elson’s new album. We have been waiting seven years for this! Numerology may be bunk, but seven is a significant number. It’s long time in the life of an artist, and of course, I’m excited to know where Karen Elson is in hers. I was expecting her to start recording heartbreak songs after her 2013 divorce, as many artists do. But she proved that she’s classier than that. It seems that Elson is not the kind of artist who creates compulsively, but one who does so slowly and deliberately. So, I will shortly be coming back with my impressions of the newly released Double Roses. In the meantime, enjoy a throwback from The Ghost Who Walks.

Pow Pow

Welcome to the musical sensation of the year, circa 2010. You can stop and say “wow, it’s been a long time!” LCD Soundsystem made three albums in five years and then did that whole ‘quit while you’re ahead’ thing. I think James Murphy is doing something with microbreweries in Brooklyn now, which is so hipster it’s, like, meta-hipster. Of course, very few people actually do quit while they’re ahead, and they usually get sucked right back into it when they try. So, seven years later, the time is ripe for an LCD comeback. Seven years is an eternity in our sped-up world of instant returns, and seven years of silence is like 40 years in the wilderness. The good news is there’s a new LCD album promised, with all details still TBA. But it’s definitely coming this year, so leave a slot preemptively open on your record of the year list.

Please Don’t

Are you sick of hearing about this record yet? I suspect that you are, but I listen to this record a lot, so it comes up a lot. Also, it’s a really long album, it’s 22 songs and maybe it kind of runs together if you’re  not following the storyline, and a lot of the singers sound the same. But let me just say that this is one of the standout songs from Here Lies Love, and the only one that was released as a single. The singer is Santigold. The video is an official one and matches the lyrics of the song, featuring footage of protagonist Imelda Marcos mixing it up with various heads of state. Marcos was a glamorous woman with a taste for princess dresses with huge sleeves; it appears that she was charming, popular and well liked on the political circuit. Unfortunately, her husband was a corrupt tyrant who put his poverty-wracked country under martial law and embezzled state funds to support his family’s love of luxury. David Byrne suggests here that Imelda’s aggressively fashionable image was an attempt to put forward a pretty face so world wouldn’t look down on the Philippines as a backwards third world country.