#40 - 'Year of the Tiger' (Enjoy Your Rabbit, 2001)
-and the battle begins. You tussle wildly in the clearing as the boarlets scamper into the forest, terrified. The boar is outmuscled here, but it is determined, and its agility is greater than you had accounted for, developed through a lifetime of hunting game of its own. Its teeth dig into your neck and you yelp in pain. You wrangle it onto its back and kick it with your hind legs, returning the favour. For several minutes you and it dance a primal ballet: kick and claw, wrestle, retreat a few steps, pounce. It’s a battle you would have won a long time ago were you not an emaciated, bony thing, starved of hearty game in these drier forest highlands. For months you have watched yourself waste away, subsisting only on mice and insects, and you wonder, What sort of life is this? You salivate at the very thought of catching a creature of this size; you’ve dreamt of it lustfully, knowing that just one could extend your lease on life by months. Today that dream is inches from reality, but the fight is longer, and more taxing, than you had hoped for.
The boar finds its footing and, finally realising its untenable situation, runs. You give chase. You trail it closely, hoping it will tire well before you do. Some thirty minutes of this pass, and then the two of you, as one, collapse of exhaustion, nestled against one another like quarrelling lovers. You sleep there all day. When you wake up, you look at the boar’s slumbering body and ready yourself to feast, but for some reason you don’t have the will to go through with it. The boar feels your warm breath on its face and jolts into consciousness. It, too, is docile now, and in the light of day it sees you as you really are – a hungry, tortured cat. It nuzzles its snout into your coat.
A year later, you and the boar are the best of friends. You have a litter of your own, and your kittens wrestle with the boar’s now-grown young and prowl the forest with them. The boar gives you belly rubs; in return, you hunt, in this denser jungle, and bring back all sorts of delightful spoils for your newfound family. At night you and the boar take turns scanning the undergrowth for threats while the other sleeps. It’s no easy task – this neck of the woods is Edenic for you, and, more concerningly, for creatures like you. But you don’t mind. You have a complement now, wearing coarse dirty fur and a sour face, and he will kill for you, and he will die for you. And that, in this inky, thrumming night, is all you could ever desire.
In 2014, Asthmatic Kitty Records finally pressed Enjoy Your Rabbit on vinyl following years of petitioning from fans. As part of the reissue’s promotional cycle, AKR commissioned filmmaker Geoffrey Hoskinson to produce a music video for a song of his choice from the album. Shirking the more lauded Enjoy Your Rabbit songs – ‘Rat’, ‘Ox’, ‘Dragon’, ‘Horse’ – Hoskinson instead animated a video for ‘Year of the Tiger’.
On paper this choice makes sense. If you’re not going to tackle one of the album’s overtly cinematic epics, tackling a song about a tiger feels like a logical alternative: the animal is kinetic, visually striking and personality-filled. It’s intimately associated with the Zodiac calendar, too, and is more broadly a cornerstone of Orientalist aesthetics - the tiger exclusively roams the forests of India and southeast Asia, whereas the other creatures of the Zodiac have a broad global dispersion, thereby accruing new, geographically-dependent associations. It’s the only (non-mythical) animal in the calendar to be a true apex predator. Everyone loves, or fears, the tiger. Sufjan’s Zodiac calendar has addressed the sickly kitten, monkey, rat, ox and boar so far, and his efforts to make secular gods out of the underloved underbelly of the earth have been largely successful, but the time for small fry is over. There’s no underdog narrative to work with here: the tiger is king, its status uncontested.
You’d think the formula for a music video dedicated to a tiger would be straightforward. Depict it as a hunter; show it stalking its prey; have it bolt through the forest; let it feast on its spoils; or some variation thereof. The fierceness of the tiger is widely recognised; nearly everyone understands what it is capable of, what seeing one in the wild most likely means for your chances of being alive in an hour. Entire societies worship it, for heaven’s sake! No added context is necessary when an animal holds this much cultural capital. Slam dunk, case closed, there’s your video.
Case open. This might have been the approach taken by ninety-nine percent of filmmakers for ninety-nine percent of songs about tigers, but not Hoskinson, and not for ‘Year of the Tiger’. Go ahead and search up the video yourself – it’s readily available on YouTube. The art direction is… a trip. Disembodied tiger heads bedecked by whirling patterns float serenely across a Day-Glo backdrop; elsewhere, striped sperm swim towards, and then fertilise, a bright yellow ovum, which begins to pulse wildly, finally mutating into a jagged-glass fetus. (That sentence alone would kill a Victorian child.) It’s perhaps a little harder to take seriously than the creator intended – the primitive flexing animation on the tigers’ eyes and noses isn’t quite Hollywood-grade – though the overall tone of the video is very far from dour anyway. The most fearsome animal in the jungle, attached to this goofy, psychedelic technicolour fever dream of a film.
In a short interview Hoskinson gave to Pitchfork, he explained the reasoning behind his choices:
‘What mainly drove the visuals for the video was the concept of birth… The vocal parts in “Year of the Tiger” sounded to me like a wordless lullaby for a baby. So in the video, I saw the tigers as spiritual beings who were calling a new soul into existence with their song.’
It was the correct approach. ‘Year of the Tiger’ is nothing like you’d expect it would be. It is, to put it mildly, a total delight.
In keeping with the grand tradition of Enjoy Your Rabbit songs that offer convention-defying takes on the animals of the Zodiac, ‘Year of the Tiger’ largely refuses to portray the tiger’s most superficial traits: ferociousness, fearlessness, agility, obdurate hunger. You’d perhaps expect this song to take on an aggressive, abrasive sound, similar to what ‘Year of the Monkey’ does four tracks prior, but ‘Year of the Tiger’ declines that opportunity, and does something far more interesting instead. If Sufjan’s tiger is to be one of the kings of the jungle, it is going to accept every last responsibility that accompanies that role. This is not a song about unilateral dominance over nature – it is a song of service, of duty, and of gentility, its relative softness imbuing the tiger with a dignity that feels, yes, very regal (and holy, too, if you’re that way inclined.) Its eponymous animal employs the massive strength at its disposal to care for those who don’t share those same privileges. What a shame that this sentiment feels so surprising to us.
In marked contrast to ‘Year of the Boar’, ‘Year of the Tiger’ does not sound as if its narrative is transpiring in an environment where death or disease might strike at any moment. The forest over which this tiger reigns is almost implausibly peaceful, an ideal place for the ‘wordless lullaby’ of Hoskinson’s video to be intoned – under the watchful eye of nature’s strongest soldier every creature can sleep in total serenity. You’ll encounter this serenity from the very moment the song begins: whereas some Enjoy Your Rabbit compositions announce themselves with brutal force in their very first seconds, ‘Year of the Tiger’ tumbles in on a bed of twinkling vibraphones ported from the end of ‘Boar’, and then proceeds to explore quietly textural organ lines for the better part of thirty seconds. It’s a smart choice to begin the song this way, especially given that it must follow up ‘Boar’, a production many times more jarring and animated than this one. All that tension melts away, like water trickling off a mountain.
The notion of the tiger as maternal or paternal figure enters full bloom once the main theme kicks in. This motif, which makes up the bulk of ‘Tiger’s runtime, is gorgeous and, impressively, not at all treacly – the trademark Enjoy Your Rabbit playfulness is never too obscured by sentimentality on this song. Soft, soothing human voices make their return for the first time since ‘Rat’, and in keeping with their presentation on the antecedent track, they are entirely wordless, folded into the mix like any other instrument. They are highly melodic here, though, much more so than on ‘Rat’: a female voice (Liz Janes, a long-time Asthmatic Kitty Records signee) provides a quivering soprano line that moves, unhurried, through a major scale and finally resolves to the root on its last note. Sufjan, loath to hog the spotlight on this one, quietly underscores Janes in a lower register. The coiling of their voices around this long-form, almost operatic motif represents something new for Enjoy Your Rabbit, an album that consistently employs chopped-up snippets of melody in keeping with its minimalist influences (and intended to lend its compositions more surface energy, I’m assuming.) ‘Year of the Tiger’ – at least until its last minute or so – is in absolutely no rush to get anywhere, making it a welcome reprieve from the white-knuckle urgency of the songs up til this point.
The melody of ‘Year of the Tiger’, probably the most consistent – and consistently foregrounded – melody on the album, feels east Asian in character to me. I don’t have anything concrete to back that up; perhaps there are some modal movements at play here that I lack the music theory smarts to identify. Perhaps it’s the delicate manner in which the vocals are enunciated, or the graceful, bell-like chimes that move around underneath them, or the tin whistles and flutes that poke through occasionally. Regardless of how that aesthetic is conveyed, its presence is undeniable for me – ‘Year of the Tiger’ feels like a song more of the temple or monastery and less of the church, an ambience far more common in Sufjan’s early career than it would be from Michigan onwards (albeit still exceedingly rare even at its peak.)
If any song on Enjoy Your Rabbit should sound that way, a song dedicated to a tiger is a pretty good choice, considering how prominent the fearsome animal is in some Asian mythologies and iconographies. Perhaps it ought to have committed even more intently to those ideas. Enjoy Your Rabbit’s most significant shortcoming, I would contend, lies in how it co-opts ideas from Chinese culture while failing to pay anything beyond the most token of lip service to them in the music proper. That’s likely, in part, the point: the album seems far more interested in the animals themselves than it does in the scheme that collects them, striving as it does to make non-denominational gods out of creatures whose reputations transcend cultural borders. I suspect there was an (admirable) attempt to avoid exoticisation here, on both conceptual and ethical grounds.
But this music is far from trans-cultural. Its main influences are mid-century minimalism, gonzo noise pioneers like Stockhausen and Xenakis, and contemporary-to-2001 European IDM artists; this is, undeniably, a very WASPy lineup. Sufjan, by the turn of the millennium, was a talented and highly connected composer living in a multicultural New York neighborhood – it’s hard to imagine that he did not have the resources to create an inclusive sound that could bridge the gaps otherwise antagonised by Enjoy Your Rabbit’s dialectic. The occasional inclusion of Chinese speech on some tracks here feels, quite literally, like little more than lip service, an ex post facto attempt at a corroboration not achieved in the music proper. Whether or not you wish to delve into the murky ethical waters of appropriation and cultural property, it’s hard to deny that most of Enjoy Your Rabbit inhabits an awkward sort of ontological middle ground: too anxious to have an erhu or guqin, too assured in how it shallowly mines the Chinese language for passing aesthetic value. Few are made happy this way.
The sound displayed in ‘Year of the Tiger’ at least goes some of the distance that Enjoy Your Rabbit theoretically could in that regard, even if no explicit reference is made. This is much appreciated. The soft power of the music here – the unmistakable feeling that all will be well, even if danger might still lurk at a distance (note the unpredictable glitches that gather steam as this section bears on) – is in keeping with the spiritual bent of the project, but in a manner that dares to connote ways of seeing outside the Occident. A utopian animal is this tiger, and a collectivist one, too; both immensely powerful and compelled to protect those below it; Mother Earth herself, maybe. Does this feel like a Western conception of power to you? Would it have felt like one for Sufjan in 2001 (Enjoy Your Rabbit was recorded around the circus of the 2000 presidential election, and released September 17, 2001, a mere six days after the world irrevocably changed course)?
No region, whether geographical, cultural or political, is a monolith. Eastern cultures can be ruled by demagogues, Western countries can prize family and tribe. Given the recent (as of 2026) stratospheric rise of totalitarianism in those Western countries, though, it’s tempting to seek out alternatives. What if the tiger used its fearsomeness for the good of its community? Even if we cannot see it around us, through songs like ‘Year of the Tiger’, we might at least feel it a little.
‘Year of the Tiger’s final minute sees the song briefly and dramatically pivoting toward a faster, more aggressive sound. Pounding four-on-the-floor drums are emphasised by organ charges that never stray from the downbeat, while rapid-fire woodwind lines further amp up the urgency. I understand why Sufjan would wish to include a section like this, even if it feels at odds with the rest of the song – it would be wilfully obtuse to act like the tiger isn’tone of the jungle’s most capable hunters, and in any case, peace is only as resolute as its enforcers are. Said passage, importantly, does not cross a line into outright abrasiveness. The tiger can be fierce if it so chooses, and sometimes it must be, for the good of itself and its children, but it isn’t a monkey; it will never confuse its objective with the methods used to achieve it. Thus we return to the main theme at the very end, a sentiment with which ‘Year of the Tiger’ finally leaves its listener.
Though not quite as musically profound or as painstakingly arranged as certain songs preceding it on Enjoy Your Rabbit, ‘Year of the Tiger’ accesses niches otherwise untouched on this album, a considered, mostly restrained lullaby for an animal who could have easily warranted a song as grandiose as ‘Rat’ or as aggressive as ‘Monkey’. Such a subversive approach, of course, is precedented on an album that shirks boilerplate observations about the Zodiac – one eventually learns to expect the unexpected on this one – though perhaps Enjoy Your Rabbit would have better stood the test of time if the rest of its songs were as reliably thoughtful as this. It’s no surprise that Hoskinson singled out ‘Tiger’ to be represented visually, nor is it a surprise that his reading of the song is so deliciously quirky. Something about ‘Year of the Tiger’ sticks with you long after your first listen: its comforts, its worldliness, the strength of its hand, holding you firmly, quietly. The sort of creature you’d very much like to be.
tangentwithtanner
stormborns
