#ruffianbandwidth

1. Joey Bada$$ - “BABYLON (Feat. Chronixx)

We’re here. We’ve finally made it. The song that, in my humble opinion, was the best song of 2017. I’ve already written my praise for this album as a whole earlier on this list, but even amongst all of that greatness this song finds a way to transcend the rest. It’s on a whole other level, possessing that sort of polished rawness that all of my favorite songs seems to have, where emotion is not erased, but rather enhanced, through the lens of pristine production.

Similar to the rest of the album, this song tackles the structural and systematic racism and racial inequalities that continue to pervade and exist within America. However, any swagger and braggadocio that may have existed earlier on in the record has been stripped bare. It’s almost as if, after all of the effort and hope, Joey is exhausted. The entire album he’s been trying to do something positive, to name and face the problem – to help and lead his people, and yet now, in a moment of crushing clarity, he’s confronted by the full scope of what he’s up against and momentarily shaken by its overwhelming weight. It’s akin to the realization that your ramming your head against a brick wall, and once that realization hits, you can either take into account your own finite existence and stop, or you can ram all the harder, hoping that even if you can’t bring down the wall, then at least your effort will inspire others or maybe even weaken that wall for future generations.

Joey chooses to keep ramming. You can sense the desperation within his voice. It’s dripping from every line, blurring and tearing at his spirit, trying to inundate and break it, and yet through it all he perseveres, he presses on, turning the pain into passion and the hopelessness into resilience. Nowhere is this more clear than in the first verse, when he goes all in against police brutality and injustice.

“Turn on to CNN, look at what I see again It's another black man died at the white hand of justice To tell the truth, man, I'm fucking disgusted I fear for the lives for my sisters, my brothers Less fortunate than I, let's formulate a plan I'm sick of holding grudges, I'm loading in all my slugs and Aiming it at you judges, fuck the cops Fuck the system and the government, you fuckers not Protecting and serving You more like damaging and hurting And letting off shots 'till you motherfuckers certain He ain't breathing, you made it clear Fuck your breath, nigga, don't even deserve air Don't even deserve shit, don't even deserve nothing If black lives really mattered you niggas would do something Instead we mean nothing, in fact we being hunted They don't want us in abundance They know there's strength in the numbers That's why they gave you off The time is coming, no discussion If you ain't got a gun then you better start runnin'“

His voice becomes emotion incarnate. The rawness and the passion is undeniable. It’s not just a song. Its a plea and a battle cry. You can sense the overwhelming frustration of being surrounded by a dominant culture that not only shows indifference to your claims, but actual hostility. It’s a culture that praises and protects the killers, that would rather deny any wrongdoing in an attempt to avoid the deep and difficult soul searching that it would take to address and amend it. A culture that would rather preserve the status quo and some abstract notion of honor and sacrifice instead of attempting to achieve actual justice and equality. A culture that is so frightened, hateful, stubborn, and ignorant that it chooses to create slogans that obfuscate (all lives matter) and counter (blue lives matter) your own simple claim that “black lives matter”. Joey’s voice carries all of that. It’s laced with all of the pain, tragedy, frustration, resilience, and anger of a people continuously denied full personhood.

43. Father John Misty - “Things That Would Have Been Helpful To Know Before The Revolution”

If the previous jam dealt with the almost certain oblivion of the pre-apocolyptic present, then this jam explores the potential shortcomings of an imagined solution, or rather the inevitability of the human predilection for self-destruction. We as a society and a species stand at a crossroads – a crux within which we must make a decision (just in case the prior post wasn't explicit enough). We have the unique position of apocalyptic sentience, something that all of the volcanoes, floods, and meteors of the past lacked. We can control our destruction – and yet here we are, doing nothing, ignoring all of the signs as we carry on the same as we have for the past three centuries or so, continuously digging the grave within which we will all eventually asphyxiate and rest within.

21. Girlpool - “123″

There are certain emotions that balance on the cusp of contradictory meaning. They’re intrinsically connected and yet seemingly unrelated, alternating back and forth as your mind blows with the wind of the ever-changing present. One moment you’re leaning towards the negative, passing through the rippling shadows, and then the next you’re pushed back into the warm sunlight of the positive.

33. Father John Misty - “Leaving LA”

Father John Misty has always been slowly slipping into an ever-growing abyss of self-deprecation. Only we all knew he was never going to go down alone – he’s too jaded, witty, and smug for that. If he’s going down, then he’s taking everything he despises with him. The gravity of his persona is going to swallow all of it into his orbit as he careens out of control and burns up in an incisive and smoldering conflagration of self-loathsome honesty.

This thirteen-minute epic is that long-awaited crescendo given life. It’s the final slow-motion scene where everything we’ve been anticipating is at last realized. Father John Misty lays bare his soul, stripping away the veneer of pretension and the facade of affectation, to leave us with Josh Tillman. The man removed from any sense of myth or legend – a human being, life-sized and aching, longing for something other than his self-mythology to keep him warm.

It’s a beautiful thing to witness. To gain a glimpse of a soul that’s been through the gauntlet of fame and still maintains its humanity. If anything he’s made it out with a sharpened sense of humanity and he finally possesses the courage (or maybe just finally lacks the strength to keep denying himself the urge) to reverse the lens of his insight and focus it fully upon himself.

Now I understand that some might interpret this otherwise, and rather than seeing it as an attempt to strip away the pretension, they might see it as his most pretentious song yet. We all have our own lenses of subjectivity through which we make sense of life. Meaning that where I see honesty and catharsis, there are those who will inevitably see a sparse and repetitive thirteen minute bout of autobiographical narcissism. However, art is about subjectivity. It’s about trying to honestly depict an experience that transcends understanding, and in doing so, helping others notice their own unvocalized (or perhaps even unrealized) experiences.