bachXtats

Racked let me talk about L-boog, BDP, Arsenal, Walt Frazier, Tommie Smith, Jil Sander and Lil Wayne, among more obvious things. 

new open-ish format recommendations tinyletter by me for the 1-6

Last piece of mine for the year, at Racked. I talk about California, Suicidal Tendencies, social media and a bunch of other stuff.

This came on in the headphones while looking at the water from a log the day after one of the bigger earthquakes I’ve felt and a couple weeks after I relocated back to the west coast. It was good. I should mimic what singers do in music videos more often maybe.

So much happens in this video. There are key moments where the mood changes suddenly, and also long stretches of increasing intensity. I know this show was written about a bunch but I’d never watched this whole thing (I guess the full set isn’t up though?). Stage “invasion” and “storming” are really weird terms for this since it looks like fairly safe and entirely jubilant dancing / participation / communion. Like a lot of the best shows, there’s a moment where you’re unsure if things are going to get darker or bloody but then things ease up again. It’s also fascinating to see how huge the band is at home, having seen them in a cramped, extremely unglamorous Toronto bar in which obviously there was far less heroism happening.  

There’s a Richard Allen BBC doc?? (Oh, of course there is, there’s one on every possible British subject ever)

On ‘The Program’, for Vice Sports.

(Vibe always reminds me of Inner City Theme by Inner City)

Well I’ve gotten re-obsessed quickly. The first episode of This is England ‘90 is just like a big fuck you to ‘prestige’ TV, everything about it is just better than anything else. The scenes between Woody and his parents (the ‘surprise’ and the phone call) are so lingeringly funny. In another interview clip I watched, Vicky McClure admitted that things will again get way darker so maybe that’s why I can’t stop thinking about how (relatively) nice that episode was. (The four minute official “the story so far” video on youtube is as intense as you would expect.) Anyway, above is Shane Meadows talking about how the funeral of Thomas Turgoose’s mother, after the film, brought the cast closer together and may have led to its TV continuation (Jesus!) and his childhood winter olympics gang tryouts.

At Racked, I tried to parse the expanding apparel wing of Drake’s empire 

- ridiculously boring major key 3 chord progression (see also Verve Lucky Man and Third Eye Blind Jumper)

Popsongs is still such a great reference tool. This comment has blown my mind. I’m terrible with knowing lyrics to begin with but it seems like with songs I’ve known and liked forever, my brain just stops working. The fact that all those words are crammed in right at the end of the verse and the tiny pause after sleep ascending with “but to dream” makes it even better.

Nice to have super on point visuals by Terrell Davis for this Hopes&Fears story.

E•MO•TIONs are running high these days

We were always of the Left, but having said that, we didn’t have any solutions to the world’s problems. I mean, we were trying to grope in a Socialist way towards some future where the world might be less of a miserable place than it is, but... if Karl Marx was unable to do it, there’s no way that four guitarists from London could do it. So... we were, like, groping in the dark. You have to think to yourself, what would you do if you did rule the world? It’s a tough question and I don’t think we had an answer to it, not that we should have done. But we did try to put our minds... pose those sort of questions, whatever good that was, we did try.