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naruhearts · 5 years

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14x10: Dean Free Will Winchester, Destiel, TFW, and the Only Win

Originally posted by michaeldean

*trips over feet*

I still have no proper words re: the seamless interconnections of TFW/Dean/Emotional Arc-centric meta that most of the meta community has already yelled and written extensively about since S12. 14x10 was a META EXPLOSION, my friends. I had complete chills!! Yockey’s magnificent soup lent us years of Dean/TFW-characteristic meta narratively realized like some colourful picnic basket of psychology.

I’m sure I missed some awesome stuff considering I haven’t rewatched it yet, but for now, here’s my semi-coherent first-impression thoughts (some of which I copy-pasted from twitter) under the cut!!

On the other hand, if you don’t want to read this massive post, it can be succinctly summarized in one phrase:

Originally posted by @intelligentshipper

Dean is the cage. Man, yes I know, the NARRATIVE WEIGHT AND SYMBOLISM OF DEAN LOCKING HIMSELF UP; Dean’s possibly in “physically rough shape” (translation: emotionally rough shape) inside the cage he built for himself. As the Master of Repression and Locking Up Emotions, this unhealthy psychological mechanism in this case becomes his controlled strength against the core of his trauma and everything Michael represents *points at Dean meta* therein lies the beautiful paradox of the human condition. Dean Humanity Winchester is the poster boy for it. It’s all led to this! Don’t you love when our characters undergo self-translation from unwanted/coerced destiny to chosen role (after Michael manipulated Dean’s freely given “Yes”. And recall the same key theme with Sam occupying the position of Gatekeeper to Hell re: Lucifer trauma in 14x01)?

14x10 in itself offsets the rest of what we’re gonna see characteristically as per TFW’s individual narrative journeys (and Destiel arc; we’ve observed the continuation of Dean and Cas role reversals as per usual, with Mind!Pamela and Father Figure Michael serving as heavy-hitter Casifer-reminiscent exposition). “Nihilism” and “Damaged Goods” paired through subversion, where Dean going on a ‘suicide’ mission via imprisoning himself with Michael isn’t done out of SOLE low self-worth (don’t get me wrong, he still hasn’t fully emancipated himself yet) but mostly 50% low self-worth and 50% martyrdom for his loved ones. Toxic codependency is no longer the basis of Dean’s self-sacrificial choices, but LOVE AND…LOVE. However, Dean still assumes he deserves to imprison himself. Michael capitalizes on Dean’s depressive trauma and low self-worth in that his conditioning since childhood to internalize self-blame for Sam and Cas’ problems - the world’s problems - works in the Archangel’s favour. He both projects Dean’s fears onto Sam and Cas then breeds their self-doubt by framing them as lacking genuine altruistic value to Dean and hitting TFW where it hurts altogether. A double-double coffee of anguish.

Here we come back to Michael’s overarching role this season as the Harbinger of Truth (as I wrote about when the season first began x x)

Michael!Dean assumes he knows what people want, and yes, maybe in some respects he does in fact know, but I mentioned that he distorts a person’s sense of “worthiness to be saved” (oh, I wonder where I heard that previously) by exploiting their self-hate/respective mental uncertainty of their wants vs needs.

That’s the GOLD about Michael’s role: he’ll be uncovering an entire interpersonal discourse on the characters figuring out (and using their damn communicative skills to accentuate) what they WANT vs. NEED. Again, clarification of truths.

In 14x10, we were largely reminded of Michael and his intrinsic link to S14′s themes and TFW (copy-pasted from my 14x01 review meta; meta builds and builds on itself!):

WHAT DO YOU WANT, A New Beginning (a New World Order, a Better World in Michael’s case reminiscent of S6/7 like I expected. Michael is the absolute antithetical figure to Dean Humanity Winchester, who is blinded by authoritarianism), Love Is Weakness (Love is also STRENGTH, and different kinds of love exist, where we see more singular vs plural dialogue e.g. Cas’ “You have me. You have all of us”) and Family Is Unity.The fact that Michael is the one asking people what they want, specifically directing it to Anael the Destiel/Cas mirror (which she was in 13x13), bodes VERY well for me. He’s going to hold a key overarching position in the clarification of truths and Want Vs Need for TFW with significant flavours of past Eldritch Expositional Big Bads like Amara. Anael is feeling a lack of kinship. She desires belonging. A home. And it’s all very human of her. Because of this emotionality, Anael has FALLEN.

What is your truth? Confront your truth. Accept what you see in the mirror (like I was saying the other day) and glue that broken reflection back together into something empowering. Honest. Genuine. Self-actualizing. And considering Dean is imprisoned within his own body (confinement/imprisonment was again tangible across the episode both plot, visual, and characteristic-wise where TFW, impacted by Dean the Heart Hero’s absence, left a gloomy sense of detachment, helplessness, expendability, and failure internalization) and considering Dean is no doubt hearing Michael reiterate this main thematic question has me buzzing with the joys of self-introspection!!

What do you want, Dean Winchester? What do you want, Cas? What does everyone want?

**Michael additionally gauges the purity of potential recruits for his Supermonster army via hunger. What are you hungry for? What do you crave? Seemingly calls back to S5 Famine and the emptiness derived from losing something alongside experiencing trauma. And when Michael offers you the misleading opportunity, will you take it? Are you worthy? Michael distorts worthiness (Dean’s worthiness; indeed, Dean fills the episode’s negative spaces) by exploiting self-hate. Cas enhances (Dean’s) worthiness by providing freedom.

The “turning point” between Dean and Cas in 12 may actually be Dean saying goodbye (then perhaps finding out about Cas’ deal; we shall see). This could call back to 11x23, where Dean was also surrounded by his family pre-sacrifice. Dean thinking he needs to “die” - to lock himself up - in order for them to win may segue into TFW “wishing” things were different, thus somehow inducing John’s return (and possibly Chuck’s re: Daddy Issues) in 14x13.

Dean wasn’t left alone at the end of the episode. His family - Sam and Cas - were there with him as the wonderful antithesis re: Michael isolating Dean. Separating family ends up unifying family, BUT like I said above, he was still able to hit them where it hurt. Michael the Manipulator used words to twist their thoughts into self-doubt - sow self-discord, yet TFW worked as a unit to strike back. Lessons learned: stronger together, weaker apart.

Sam and Cas occupying the dark Empty-parallel space in Dean’s mind. His MIND was an EXPOSÉ. ALL THE TRAUMA, and it’s incredibly significant that we observed Cas scanning Dean’s traumatic memories (obviously he’s an angel, but the meta undercurrents of this killed me). Cas has now actually seen/felt/heard Dean’s trauma, anguish, and long-running depression instead of Dean using his words to tell him about such trauma; it’s ingenious storytelling, not to mention Sam introspecting over Dean’s own trauma in order to find him was SUPER uplifting and META ironic --> Finding Dean involves happiness. Most importantly, Cas was witness to Dean’s low self-worth, negative self-process, failure internalization, and fear of the future without blinking, yet he also displayed total worry, compassion, and barely concealed panic - as if he couldn’t bear to think about the multilayered traumatic prison that Michael trapped Dean within. Sam said “Dean is strong.” Cas replies that Dean is “more than strong.” To Cas, Dean’s strength of mind, body, and soul shines, and this is why he’s in love with this man - his charge. He loves him in the face of his trauma and past mistakes. Once I have time, I should discuss the memories we heard, but of course they involve his time in Hell (and his S3 mirror telling him he will become a demon. Moc/Demon!Dean callbacks).

CAS: So much. So much trauma in Dean’s mind. There’s so many scars.

SAM: Well yeah. Dean’s been through a lot, but he’s strong.

CAS: Sam...you’ve both been through a lot, and Dean is more than strong [...] Because Michael has Dean trapped away - drowning - I have to wade through Dean’s most terrible memories.

SAM: Would Michael bury Dean in trauma? Michael said it himself. The reason he left Dean in the first place was because Dean was fighting back so hard.

CAS: So if Michael wanted to keep Dean placated--

SAM: Dean thrives on trauma. He’s had to his whole life. It keeps him alert -- keeps him ready. But if I wanted to distract Dean, I’d give him something he’s never had before.

CAS: Contentment.

(**Sam’s right, but he’s also wrong. Dean “thrived” on trauma because he had to as the consequence of a misguided John-imbued childhood, where he mostly skipped over the innocent era of being a healthily developing child and became an adult overnight: father, mother, and brother rolled into one. A good little soldier, and he created various masks of performativity in response to trauma. Multiple tiny seeds of self-doubt grew into worthless that then bred emotional misarticulation, repression, and psychological instability. x)

14x10 majorly ties into SPN’s season-long storytelling commentary on TFW’s perception of Happiness and the overarching themes of Happiness vs Sadness. Cas stated to Jack how The Life™ rarely gives oneself happiness last episode. Ultimately, can you believe Dean’s accrued trauma has been textualized like this?!

Michael knows that Dean has never been happy.

Dean never lets himself have what he wants to have nor be who he wants to be. He is entrapped by fearing real happiness, and his trauma holds him back from achieving what he wants - continues to make him believe that he doesn’t deserve to be content.

And Dean certainly wants Cas. He is fully cognizant and self-aware of this fact. Narratively reconsolidated in musical exposition by the Marshall Tucker Band’s “Searchin’ for a Rainbow”, Dean searches for the rainbow endlessly, but he’s uncertain…afraid of the wind’s flow (and his internalization of low self-worth remains –> he believes “all good things come to an end”. Temporary contentment, where he’s undeserving of such good things as epitomized by real estate woman who wants to infringe on Dean’s property/dream; ‘sell it out’ literally and figuratively).

Either Dean will find his pot of gold waiting for him, or he won’t, and this is the underlying star-crossed literary beauty of the D/C narrative.

Dean’s sick of pretending. He WANTS the wind to show him the way, but we must remember that, in an episode rich with the concept of authorial authority - writing your own fate and ever-glaring Free Will - he NEEDS to blow the wind himself. If he just allows himself to believe that he can have true happiness, then he will.

*I SCREAM, YOU SCREAM, WE ALL SCREAM FOR META-INTROSPECTION!*

Michael’s “I Am You” —> Dean knows he is Michael - the reflection who embodies all the dark parts of himself, just like Dark!Kaia underlined - but he also knows he isn’t Michael, and Dean will use it to his advantage. Dean has what Michael lacks: FAMILY. x

“EVEN GOD CAN DIE.” This cracks open so many parental absenteeism eggs. Cas’ conversation with Michael over Chuck, the ultimate deadbeat absent father figure, was simply an outlet for Michael to attribute his self-righteously immoral actions to his fatherly abandonment. Bitterness. And Cas, more humanized than ever, is aware of Michael’s shortcoming: “confusing loyalty and compassion with weakness”, thus these perceived “weaknesses” are foils to Michael’s preference for isolation, solitude, mercilessness, betrayal, and hatred.

MICHAEL: Playing nursemaid to a nephilim. Nothing like the Castiel I knew. He would’ve never been so...anemic.

Loyalty and compassion are human traits - despised by most angels such as Naomi and Ishim; belittled by Michael - that Cas recognizes and practices. *human!Cas feelings* He has evolved, and as I said in my 14x01 Cas meta:

Earth [is] the true home of Cas the Fish, which bridges his intrinsically human emotionality/disposition as an ex-Angel of The Lord to his sense of belonging. Growing legs to replace fins. Evolution of character. And Dean Winchester, right from their point of contact in Perdition, was the driving spark for his evolution.

“It’s all you,” Dean says to his reflection in the mirror, a repeated mantra, as Michael tries to break out of Dean’s mind, bringing my pre-14x01 meta of MIRRORS to light!! Dean confronted the reflection of himself that he has always hated, where the deep-seated worthlessness that he must eliminate is buried with Michael -- the narrative embodiment of Dean’s toxic shackles: predeterminism, Brodependency, parental absenteeism, repression, toxic misemotionality, and blunt tool expendability as his father’s hammer and society’s hammer. I adore Dean’s consistent self-awareness over the seasons as he learns to differentiate what he can and cannot control. And Michael is jailed inside a FRIDGE *light bulb explodes* It’s time to achieve self-actualization. Sure progress.

DEAN’S “ROCKY’S BAR” EASTER EGGS, MIND!PAMELA BARNES AND DESTIEL

Rocky’s Bar (Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends!!) was an EASTER EGG meta dream set by Wanek, with thematic colours of blue (depression, loneliness, and isolation -- blue is immediately evoked as soon as Dean starts gaining self-awareness of his past trauma-laden life and remembers the real Pamela), dim reds and somber yellows. GOOD STUFF!!

@intelligentshipper wrote/gathered superb colour meta on this consistent palette of Self + Depression this season - RED || BLUE & YELLOW || I’ve also briefly touched upon the recurring hues that we saw in another hardcore meta episode: Scoobynatural 13x16.

Hello bisexual colours (pink, purple, blue in this setting; observe the metaphor of this very moment - Repressive Toxic Past/Paternal Figure Michael wrestling for dominance over Dean. We live in a meta world.)

Without sounding redundant, here’s the list of Easter Eggs by sasquatchandleatherjackets/mittensmorgul. 14x10 bursts with so much symbolism that it warrants >2 rewatches!

SEARCHIN’ FOR A RAINBOW by the Marshall Tucker Band playing in Dean’s bar (see above):

I rode into town today In my mind, I said 'Lord I'd like to stay' Something in me said boy, move on Don't know what it is the good lord bred it in my bones

And I'm searchin for a rainbow, and if the wind ever shows me where to go, you'd be waiting at the end and I know, I'd see the hill with that pot of gold.

This old mount I'm ridin', she's gettin' kinda' tired But in my heart she knows there's this one desire She's gonna' take me to the end of our road

One of my favourites: the Daphne Loves Fred carved on the bar counter!! Fred, who represented Dean’s healthy masculinity -- was loved by Daphne, the dual counterpart of Dean’s non-repression: the side of him that adores wearing pink nightgown dresses, pink satin panties, vegetable water, romcoms and romance novels...the side of him that adores and embodies everything defined as “feminine” within a heternormative patriarchy. Reiterating past meta, Daphne also symbolized the traditional poster woman he should be attracted to, but never truly obtains for himself. Why? Because his true desires break tradition, and Dean’s subconscious knows this. They break his harrowing past of repression and psychological toxicity. They throw away what John Winchester wanted for him. x

And in this--

FB = Winchester “Family Business” = Jensen’s Family Business Beer Co, with FOX RYE and (phallic-shaped) COSMIC COWBOY as FBBC drinks (and the latter evoking 13x06 Space Cowboy and Cowboy!Cas. This episode, guys. WOW.)

Moving onto Michael’s subtextually telling construct of Pamela Barnes --

Mind!Pamela, well, she blew MY mind! @thetwistedwillow already describes amazing crucial points here. And let me provide commentary on the riveting and pertinent subtextual D/C double whammy of their office scene together:

DEAN: How come you always have a boyfriend?

PAMELA: How come you only want what you can’t have? You don’t want me -- you just like to flirt. Besides, I’m a psychic, so I kinda know.

DEAN: All right.

Mind!Pamela asking Dean why he only wants what he can’t have, linked to Pamela having a boyfriend, establishes romantic connotations. Pamela was D/C exposition.

There’s truth in jokes. Pamela's lines to Dean could be construed as genuine interest, but Yockey actually shot that down via Pamela confirming that the flirting is just for fun, with Dean not actually wanting her, and it nudges at the Destiel context. To me, if you move this outside the D/C context, it would make no sense, because the real Pamela did kiss Dean. They had a passing attraction to each other. Why not have them kiss again, then? Well, Pamela encapsulated both Dean’s subconscious psyche and Michael’s mouthpiece. And by Freudian design, both Dean and Michael know who he truly wants.

Cas is once again ensconced in the negative spaces.

Keeping in mind that Michael has seen Dean’s memories and feelings via possessing him, Michael’s construct of Pamela in the bar setting was, in certain respects, his unsaid Empty-parallel statement: “I know who you love - what you fear.”

Dean wants what he can’t have. He still thinks he doesn’t deserve Cas, and indeed, in his heart of hearts - in the deepest crevices of his being - Michael knows (like most Expositional Eldritch Villains do e.g. S11 Amara) who he loves and what he fears (manipulating Dean’s fears into snake-tongued attacks on Sam and Cas; those statements aren’t true, but human beings are contradictory, and Dean thinking such things about them long ago can still plant self-doubt today, but TFW are strong, and it’s all about conquering negative self-process to come out on the other side unscathed. I mean oh boy, we thought Lucifer was the prime expert on manipulation. Michael’s just as bad as his brother, if not worse.)

Dean is in love with the angel “who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition” (spot-on impersonation by Jensen) and Michael knowing the exact words then punches me in the feels because it’s a profound line...the iconic line verbalized by Cas to Dean in 4x10 Lazarus Rising that offset their love story later on. It’s the prime beginning.

To me, Michael hereby implies that he saw Dean’s memory of the first time he set his eyes upon Cas, and that it’s a highly valued memory which caused Michael to taunt it in the first place.

Like others have already pointed out as well, Dean’s memory of Pamela shows True!Form Cas blinding her in 4x01, and that certain memory, on an intriguing note, successfully breaks Dean out of the dream construct.

Since I don’t want to subject my readers to longer rambling, more of my meta on Pamela Barnes, Destiel, and the 13x06 Tombstone M/F Destiel-coded cowboy cutouts in Dean’s Mind Bar can be found here (with some repeated points that you’ve read throughout this post): http://naruhearts.tumblr.com/post/182144879031/14x10-destiel-cowboys-and-pamela-barnes

- - - -

TL;DR sign me up for the necessary pain!! All the TFW storytelling threads of the last few seasons consistently pushing SPN’s primary themes of Family, Unity, Love and…Love, New Beginnings, Self-Actualization and, of course, mental/emotional CATHARSIS from the old toxic past, will come together.

On another Destiel-adjacent note: Dean and Cas, their narratives running parallel to each other like they always have (especially since S12), are making the toughest, selfless, and sacrificial choices to save their loved ones (via Michael and Empty) and achieve the greatest win of all: living, hoping, and trusting interdependently.

And then Sam -- additionally making an impossible non-toxic codependent decision that I definitely believe is him giving Dean the go-ahead for self-imprisonment -- will encounter John in Endverse-adjacent AU!AU. *rubs hands together* CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT AHEAD.

DEAN’S CAGE/SARCOPHAGUS, 14x11 PROMO, AND FREE WILL

(Screenshot by me from my TV lol)

Obviously we saw very little of 14x11. But I saw enough to flail over it!!

Dean built a coffin - a sarcophagus for himself. A Pandora’s Box, as coined by @thetwistedwillow who also screamed with me in terms of the heartbreaking circular narrative of Dean’s S14 ‘burial’: simultaneously punishing himself and protecting the world from his failures --> the dual subtext of Dean’s return to ashes that naturally leads to resurrection. Lazarus Rising to Lazarus Dying.

Aka Dean imprisoning himself via isolation on his own free will and ultimately subverting Michael’s efforts to imprison Dean via coercion and possession.

I can’t even believe the sheer metaphorical symbolism of this!! CLOSET!BOX. Seriously. Again, years of Dean meta (and queer Dean meta) roped together in an angsty paradoxical basket by Yockey and co.

For Dean to emancipate himself—and save his loved ones + the world—he’s gotta imprison himself with the current source of his trauma (Michael) as well as deconstruct and deal with all the other remaining trauma he bottled up. Lazarus will rise again.

As Billie says, every single one of Dean’s endgame deaths were rewritten (this textualized TFW as the harbingers of their own destiny, where Dean himself “broke enough rules” to get his endgames rewritten!! I can’t tell you enough how gorgeous that is.), and they all end the same way, with Michael breaking free and using Dean to burn the world to the ground...EXCEPT FOR ONE.

(I had to) x

Guys, I’m burning with curiosity!! What endgame did Dean see? Utter shock was written across his face -- an intense disbelief and surprised demeanor, topped off with what seemed like tears in his eyes -- that gave me pause.

DEAN: What am I supposed to do with this?

BILLIE: That’s up to you.

That’s up to you --> Anubis said: Death, the reapers, and even God have no say. All the rules? All the cosmic constraints? They’re just useless in itself. They pass away. There are no rules. TFW “broke the rules” over and over and over again because they can.

A person’s choices in life dictate their fate.

“It’s about the journey, not the destination.”

In 4x03 In The Beginning (this title, y’all - authors and stories!!), no matter what Dean did to try and kill Azazel so that the subsequent murders of Mary’s parents, John, and the penultimate deal to resurrect John at poor Sammy’s expense are avoided, Dean realized that he could not alter Mary’s choices. Azazel still ended up poisoning Sam with demon blood. He couldn't influence her endgame because she wrote it herself in conjunction with external parties Cupid and Heaven (huh, forced free will paradox). At the same time, Mary’s journey invokes the key subverted difference of the Dean/Cas vs Mary/John parallel narrative which is fundamentally important to remember -- Free Will vs Destiny. Chosen Love vs Fated Love. Mary freely operated on fate’s influence, while Dean and Cas’ first meeting proliferated into a love story no one has ever foreseen, where they both defied subservient expectations and destiny fulfillment.

From the first point of contact, Dean and Cas seared their influence upon the other in the form of a profound brand.

Dean and Cas can make their own choices -- and have done so -- outside of predetermined plans for them. Dean and Cas’ love in itself blossomed out of free choice. Through rough seas, high tides, bright beaches, and hellfire, their love proved impervious. It was impervious to Heaven, Hell, reapers, and any supernatural force we’ve observed that tried to split them apart over the course of the show.

Attempting to constrain (Love and...) love, the greatest and most powerful force in the universe, is impossible.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics: chaos in the universe, which is the ultimate isolated system, only increases and never decreases.

Cosmic constraints all boil down to, well, nothing. We write our own fates. Michael failed to understand this concept. Destiel/TFW weren’t “defying” rules but acting as human beings with inherent agency the whole time. They are the authors and actors of their lives. Heaven/Hell despised humanity’s free will, when God’s miracle was truly his “mistake”: his draft worlds and giving humans free will. The flawed drafts = the universe becoming increasingly more chaotic.

It’s futile to enforce constraints, labels, and norms. Dean is absolutely narratively framed as the prime Death. The death one encounters depends on one’s choices.

In sum, Dean must LET IT GO. Do what you want to do, not what you need to do, though they go hand-in-hand. Drawing upon the last few seasons pertaining to baptism of the Self and interpersonal relationships, this includes communication, transparency, and quality time together.

As I’ve said here regarding 14x07 and Jack’s mirror role:

We had these wonderfully poignant moments pushing back Dean’s performance: exposing the core of his heart wrapped up in the walls of trauma, guilt, and crippled self-process. Dean sees his Free Self, who is waiting…encouraging him to let go and live life to the fullest.

His Free Self is starting to break the water’s surface — has been doing so this entire cathartic S14 narrative of looking in the mirror (actively hammered down in 14x04/5/6).

Dean’s realizing that yes, life may not be all these big, amazing moments. There’s numerous valleys of pain, horror and death. But there’s also numerous rivers of optimism and joy (hello to the river they visited in this episode. It pretty much re-consolidated SPN’s Rebirth/New Beginning themes carrying over from S12: a baptism of the self and interpersonal relations). Family and friendship. Faith and love. He simply needs to cast his line, catch the fish Cas, and pull it out of water for good aka make the dreams, wants, and desires reality.

As @thetwistedwillow pointed out, Dean’s initial offer to head out to a potential hookup bar was a foil for Jack the Non-Performative mirror of Dean: the wingman move winking at the old (DYING) remnants of his John-polished performativity and calling back to Dean bringing newly minted Cas to the brothel in Free to Be You and Me, in that the night took an unexpectedly not-salacious but sentimental turn. That night, Dean hasn’t laughed so hard in years, even with his own brother.

8 years later, Jack knew what Dean’s heart truly wanted. He felt it. Jack rejected the hookup offer precisely because — just last episode — he perceived Dean’s natural tune. It was casual sex, shacking up, and adios (yes postmodernmulticolouredcloak) no longer. It was romance and courting before dating, which involved emotional exploration and ding ding ding, spending time together (also both on the familial and romantic levels -> BEING THERE with Dean: the key gesture conveying that he deeply matters to you, and you matter to him). Jack wanted the same thing, too.

It all comes full circle. Free to be you and me indeed, since Dean’s almost free of John’s ghost, as a father, brother, and husband. We’ll be here to witness his complete emancipation.

14x10 textualized Free Will and the neverending stories of neverending stories of neverending stories: we can do what we want by formulating our own rules, and each individual has a moral compass influenced by their differing experiences.

Whatever Dean’s seen -- we don’t know what he saw, and we may not EVER know, and it’s literally pure conjecture at this point, but for the sake of meta speculation...legitimate HAPPINESS? His dream bar epitomized in real life but even better, where the realism of it involves not having to sell out ANYTHING nor sell out HIMSELF? Retirement? Dying from old age? Marrying Cas? The ACTUAL beach, toes in the sand, umbrella drinks, with matching Hawaiian shirts? General BAD things leading to good things? Yes, this is Supernatural, and as Cas put it in 14x09: no one can experience permanent happiness in The Life™ , but recall subversion. Death preceding Life - the natural cycle - persists. Dabb & Co have created an SPN narrative plethora of New Beginning cyclism for a while now, so of course I have no doubt that a positive endgame is in the cards -- whatever Dean’s read has stimulated Dean’s motives to build his sarcophagus. He thinks he has an idea of what to do to get to this endgame or (what I expect/hope is) Happy Death?

Heck, in the 14x10 context of Author God, writing drafts, and reaper books -- what if his ending is:

TA-DA!

It’s up to Dean to write his own ending. He has a blank slate as Author of his life.

The possibility of this blank slate ending as a win at first glance seems to entail the worst kind of choice -- since we all know repressing your trauma and emotions aka locking yourself up breeds maladaptive unhealthiness in the long run -- but it’s an absolutely necessary choice. The final countdown before self-actualization.

I kept saying it last season and I’ll say it again --

Dean Depressed Winchester must “die” so that Dean Self-Actualized Winchester can live. Dean building Pandora’s Box - CLOSET!BOX - for himself is LITERALLY an amalgamation of ‘Deal with your Trauma & Self’.

He should open the closet of happiness, embody self-acceptance, and go after what makes him happy -- what makes him psychologically wholesome, for Cas himself, Dean’s narrative half, tells the truth of his root fears:

Dean does deserve to be saved. He deserves happiness in all of its variant forms -- the eclectic rainbow of beach vacations, retirement, Rocky’s Bar, finding romantic love -- and he must try to believe it himself. His closet!box is the catalytic literal/metaphorical object for this chief realization.

And to emphasize how important the burial is regarding Dean’s psychological progression, ta-da, my 13x20 Dean meta still applies today, primary themes carried over into S14 by Dabb & Co:

And what are Dean’s WINS (plural) by dying? Saving people instead of losing people–saving Mary, Jack, Sam, and Cas. Saving the world. Reuniting his family unit. Interacting instead of performing. OUTING INSTEAD OF HIDING. HIGH DEPRESSIONLESS SELF-WORTH INSTEAD OF LOW DEPRESSIVE SELF-WORTH.

Better yet, Dean will undergo character development in relation to his loved ones (and Cas). With high self-worth, Dean’s capable of learning how to value HIMSELF independently. In turn, without personal obstacles he’ll learn how to sustain HEALTHY interdependent relationships and COMMUNICATION as well as learn how to WHOLLY GIVE HIMSELF to others (Cas).

Tell Cas he’s not expendable, Dean. Disclose the real reason YOU “needed him back”. Expose your feelings, choose Want over Need, and push away your rejection fears! Cas loves you dearly—let him know that his love for you is reciprocated. Nothing but good things ahead!!

And that’s the mystery of life: to live is to die. To die is to live. By “dying”, Dean saves his loved ones. He saves the world. He saves Cas, his romance-coded (sub)textual lover, Jack his son, and Sam his brother -- his family.

He saves himself.

His mind, his rules.

And Dean doesn’t know FOR SURE if this burial choice will lead to a win -- neither do we know if he’ll go through with it until 14x11 airs -- but that’s AGENCY, my friends. It’s the meat of particular Time Travel Is Bad tropes: if we know our ending, life loses meaning. The choices we make to get there loses value. Humanity loses unpredictability. Ergo the journey through life - the POINT of living - is about executing choices and taking chances.

"If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do." - Camus, Absurdism

The biggest reminder governing my SPN viewing as it had last season:

125 notes · View notes

xsoldier · 5 years

Text

Neural Repository: Consciousness Stream on Self Pain

You always see the faves of the depressed people who've killed themselves, and they're smiling and happy. That's likely because tendencies of hyperaltruistic behaviour get exacerbated when there's an extreme lack of dopamine. People become disproportionately more likely to take more harm upon themselves than inflict it upon others. But they're not always that way. Some people are just genuinely cheerful and love putting out happiness into the world.

I know I was.

What most of you don't know is that it's the one year anniversary of the first time in my life that I can remember deeply and wholly wanting with my entire being to not exist. To be done & gone. To will myself into nothingness. To disconnect my conscious self, and just let my body be a stand-in until I could return. To freeze myself in stasis and come back to life later. Or just die since none of those other things are actually options. It wasn't for months still that I'd actually experience the helplessness that lead me to knowing exactly how I'd terminate my life, or experience the emotional roulette rollercoaster of not doing so (about 6 separate times now) purely through the luck of circumstance of brain chemistry in the moment.

Suicide is very much a crime of passion against self. Opting out, and unsubscribing from the flow of the every day that you just can't handle anymore. It's harder when you've very carefully thought through everything and still come to the same answer. I wasn't surprised when Dana killed herself. She was about the only human whose absolute desperation and inability to escape the moments of self were like a reflection of my every day. She dealt with depression and I didn't, and I learned a lot from her. I was so annoyed when she died, because it filled me with an imperative purpose that I had to fill, and it meant that that option wasn't available for me. I talked everyone through it that I could, I spoke about her death, and I never even received a farewell or details about why. The reason that I always spoke so definitively despite that is that just about my only skillset is recognizing patterns of human emotion, and it was like staring in a mirror.

I've probably aged a decade in the last year. You can be around people all the time, but that doesn't overcome the pervasive sense of exclusion and loneliness that becomes all-consuming from where we need it most. We work long hours, because taking time off makes things worse, as the only sense of belonging and purpose is the small refreshing breath of being useful when you're drowning in an ocean of complete despair. Drowning people don't LOOK like they're drowning. They don't yell, or splash, or cry out for help. They just struggle a little differently, and then sink.

I don't remember what happiness is. That's not to say that I haven't BEEN happy and had wonderful experiences over the last year, it's just that every moment sense, instead of experiencing bad moments, life has become a series of the good moments merely being momentary distractions from the deep and inextricable sensation of the endless chasm of the complete and utter abyssal void that is what remains of me. The deepest, most delicate, sensitive, and vulnerable part of myself was utterly disintegrated and my happiest and most confident self is obliterated as being less than worthless. The start of my descent was the limb-shattering drop to rock bottom, followed my months of clawing through bedrock with shattered fingernails splitting to the bone. The only constant sensation of being buried in the scalding frozen blackness, slowly suffocating within the claustrophobic emptiness of being absolutely abandoned.

I know people cared about me. I know people care about me. None of that even scratched the surface of this place. They were a glowing distraction that faded, just making every moment more and more desperate. It's like sleep paralysis, where even as soon as you know what's happening, and every moment just gets worse. It doesn't matter that you understand it, or that you know what it is and how it works. It gets worse. Loneliness is the health equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes A DAY. Our brain experiences the social pain of abandonment the same way that we process the physical pain of being HIT. You want to escape it and what's worse — you don't want help. You don't want pity. That hyperaltruistic trigger means that even causing someone a fraction of the inconvenience that the every day pain causes you actually makes you feel WORSE not better. You are a constant net negative on literally every. single. interaction. for yourself, but it's smaller when you just let it happen. Once you start talking about it, it ends up echoing like a scream that shreds your vocal chords to pieces in seconds and adrenaline and desperation are literally the only things you have in your veins.

Each day, you recognize yourself less. You end up yearning for the worst days you can remember, because it feels like a comforting familiarity. You don't yearn for good times, because you literally can't remember what they feel like. They're a distraction, not root cause analysis. Anything that isn't digging at the core of the issue is extraneous and worthless, and nothing else consumes your thoughts. It latches on to your basic survival instincts for food & shelter, it encompasses the entirety of your need for social inclusion. The idea of self-growth and healthy focus without meeting those other two things first literally doesn't exist, because your brain is CERTAIN that you are moments from death during every agonizingly hour-long second that you experience that state.

As serotonin drops your general harm aversion for others and self drops at the same rate. It doesn't make a dent in the hyperaltruistic behaviour meant to secure you a tribal in-group to help ensure your survival. Eventually you're a net negative on ANY given scenario, and you don't want to try with another group. You enter a state of apathy and learned helplessness. Every response to attempts at improving elicits a dysfunctional response, so there's no telling what actions or behaviours net a known outcome. The momentary improvements are eclipsed by the shattering insecurities and inability to do anything positive. I'd been sleeping with a weighted blanket for months to prevent the crippling anxiety, and my medication hyper expresses my need to take action on things met with an insurmountable apathy as a roadblock to all basic needs. I start to experience panic attacks to positive stimuli because I'm so used to dysfunctional response that I'm ACTUALLY afraid of feeling good, because the drop I experience afterwards is so far down. Every one of the brightest and most positive moments I've felt has been suffocated, and the darkest moments I've felt were the brightest. My friend murdering herself kept me alive, because it gave me a purpose. My friend who I saw 5 days a week for the last 5 years being DEAD was the moment that made me feel the most hopeful about myself in the last year. Knowing that I feel that makes me feel even worse. I've almost murdered myself 6 times this year — I didn't though. That's just circumstantial luck and brain chemistry because I'm existentially horrified of injury, hospitalization, or being in a mental ward. Deep down, I can't do it without a guarantee that I won't be certain that I'm gone and experience as little pain as possible in doing so… and that just hasn't happened yet.

It's part of why I left America and all of the resources I had behind. It's infinitely harder for me to kill myself here. I knew that the moment that suicidal thoughts were replaced with panic about my extant plans for self termination being derailed in my new surroundings. Again — it's a crime of passion against self. It has a lot to override to put you there, but I felt it was necessary to call out that I've spent a year with this as my constant daily "normal" and being very used to overwhelming thoughts of suicide and being well-beyond the most utter insignificance as my day-to-day, and it was necessary to time-stamp those thoughts.

Don't ever feel bad if you did or didn't reach out to a friend you lost to suicide. It's a very weird beast, and there's no telling how it's going to manifest. If we all had an "off" button on our arms, every person would have used it at some point, and the things that hold us back or let us make one vary greatly from person to person. I don't want to be remembered as someone who was happy to combat and offset all this pain and sadness. I just want people to know that I was that kind of person when I WAS actually full of joy and happiness, too. I used to be really great, and I'm still trying my damnedest to make the world a brighter place inspire of myself, and inspire of the fact that you're not in it anymore either. I miss you @acrid Every fuckin' day. Even when I hate myself. I really try to remember the best of both of us, and put it up on display for everyone to see, because maybe somehow I'll find myself again some day, too.

#personal

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incarnateirony · 6 years

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Color Study: Blue & Yellow in 14.06

Some have already seen my red color study meta for 14.06, and it was definitely the most jarring of our themes due to the natural “stop” effect and hazard warning that comes with red to the human brain, much less how saturated it was. It started as trims, highlights, and small props before evolving into wardrobe and then overbearing lighting on one of our story effects.

Again, I emphasize. I very, very rarely get into color metas because I honestly feel they are vastly abused and set people up for misreadings and disappointments, finding addiction in finding the specific wall color or coffee mug of their choice to evoke a sentiment from a series of skewed fandom-saturated talking points and in the end, everybody bickers.

However, Richard Speight Jr executed phenomenal awareness of human psychology in what he was addressing in this episode. Red is not the only color he used to the point over over-saturation. The other cardinal colors, yellow and blue, were in thick application all around, from props, wardrobe, to lighting just the same, sometimes going so far as to directly lens flare for a color only to offset it with another impacting light later on.

I’m not calling on any-old fandom pillar of meta on this. I’m talking the pure psychology by which Richard Speight Jr decided to communicate and impact the general audience. No specific character assignments, none of that. Just pure color psychology for cinematography.

So let’s go. Blue & Yellow in 14.06

Just like in the red meta, the other themes slowly saturated us. Blue is the boldest, but instead I’m going to set up another premise that laces in both themes.

It isn’t news -- I don’t think it is, at least -- that the bunker is often yellow coded. The brick and general construct itself is beige in nature, but often the lighting is designed to give us a yellow lens of differing type. Hell, the flashback sequence and our lead in are quick to remind us of that.

So first, let’s address the base concept of yellow.

Yellow is the most luminous of all the colors of the spectrum. It’s the color that captures our attention more than any other color. It’s the color of happiness, and optimism, of enlightenment and creativity, sunshine and spring.

Lurking in the background is the dark side of yellow: cowardice, betrayal, egoism, and madness. Furthermore, yellow is the color of caution and physical illness (jaundice, malaria, and pestilence). Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the sources of yellow pigments are toxic metals - cadmium, lead, and chrome - and urine.

Although there are strong mustard yellows and deep yellow ochres, there are no dark yellows. When you add black to yellow you get gunky dirty green. Yellow is the only color that reacts badly to black: Add a little black and it becomes a sickly yellow-green.

Dull (dingy) yellow represents caution, decay, sickness, and jealousy. Light yellow is associated with intellect, freshness, and joy.

Which kind of shows even there. Lucifer reaving out grace while everything goes to hell? Dingy, dull, green tinted. Jack having success? Fairly warm. Mood.gif in a family discussion? Half warm and lensing towards green, but not as entirely dingy. Ding ding, we have ourselves a psychological winner.

So where do we go from here?

(I do admit to tapping lightly at the contrast balance in that last frame but the saturation/color balance I left the same; the painting was there, but the shading was so subtle in the lighting I felt the point would be missed before we got through the rest of this analysis)

You may remember from my general notes and red meta that while Dean turned aside the Red Cock during the awkward flirtation, he’s mostly haunted by golden ones after that. That is, however, until there’s a very awkward timing with Jack inquiring about birds and bees, which leads Dean to promise to explain later. Here we have Red Roo but with a bold, sunny yellow right over his shoulder.

Or maybe during Jensen’s amazing Face Journey while playing good cop bad cop and teaching Jack the ropes, being called Old Man, and both the painting and lighting hugging him in that moment of maturing “discovery.”

Jack, on the other hand, sits in the backdrop of the portrait we see earlier, and hugging yellow lighting that stays warm, without turning dingy. But the thing is, this follows Jack (and often Dean) the entire episode, as below.

From walking into the warm farmy backdrop, to Jack’s communicative message in yellow reaching out against the fierce red light of their aggressor (which his presence stands against the ominous glow of all around, and even his red is the gentle scale that evokes love and kindness rather than fervor), to heading back home to the bunker, we have a variety of stronger yellows following us around by-and-through Jack.

Which is certainly fair. Jack is a good deal of warmth in their life. While we’ve talked Family Don’t End With Blood to death, Jack’s the vessel of that in our show. The communal son, everyone’s attempt at redemption in their own way, trying to pass on their better traits and raise a child as a community. Jack brings a certain warmth to their life and a rare happiness and hope. His color is yellow for far more than their eyes.

Even our preview for next week licks in yellow themes for these two.

I’m going to seem to break away abruptly now, because I have a few other things to address. Chiefly, this.

This particular cap doesn’t capture one part of it, but this is Sam sitting in a light blue truck playing with a light blue fidget spinner in front of a blue store awning.

Blue, on this branch of our story, slowly creeps forward from other elements around us just like red, and yellow, though the yellow is less abrupt. And, in the end, these paths will fuse.

So let’s briefly discuss the psychology of blue.

Blue is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven. However not all blues are serene and sedate. Electric or brilliant blues become dynamic and dramatic, an engaging color that expresses exhilaration. Also, some shades of blue or the use of too much blue may come across as cold or uncaring, and can dampen spirits.

It slows human metabolism and produces a calming effect.

As opposed to emotionally warm colors like red, orange, and yellow; blue is linked to consciousness and intellect. Dark blue is associated with depth, expertise, and stability.

Light blue is associated with health, healing, tranquility, understanding, and softness. Dark blue represents knowledge, power, integrity, seriousness, intelligence and lack of emotion.

Too much blue can create feelings of melancholy, negativity, sadness, self-righteousness, and self-centeredness. Too little blue brings about qualities of suspicion, depression, stubbornness, timidity, and unreliability.

So here we are, sitting in a truck. Light blues of serenity, understanding and softness, but light while we hang in feelings of the unreliability of unhumans, and everything Charlie admits early on while the two seem to idle endlessly in this truck. Hopefully if you’re reading this, you’ve already watched the episode to understand how this lines with the color scheme you’re about to see bloom and go “wait what the fuck how did I miss this.”

So anyway the bus rolls by, one small strip of near-warning yellow and some pall glow in an otherwise blue cut=through, then heading to a blue door. I’m not even kidding. Like we leave the blue fidget spinner and awning and truck when the blue bus rolls by to head to the blue door.

We can talk to death the metaphors of this blue door for now, while knowing -- by now -- that this is all a giant metaphor both for Charlie and for everything else going on in their lives at large, which Yockey literally clobbered everyone to reflect on textually. But for now, let’s truck on.

If for some reason you thought this was pure coinkidink, not only do their lights glare blue but the entire scene is filled with consistent blue lens flares, startling electric shocks of blue tension through overbearing melancholy, negativity, and sadness in the story of the lone Musca, who abandoned his people to live alone, because he already felt alone.

It glows vividly enough we might even call it indigo at certain junctions.

The color indigo is the color of intuition and perception and is helpful in opening the third eye. It promotes deep concentration during times of introspection and meditation, helping you achieve deeper levels of consciousness.

Indigo stimulates right brain or creative activity and helps with spatial skills. It is a dramatic color relating to the world of the theater, which, during times of stress becomes the drama queen, making a mountain out of a molehill!

The negative color meaning of indigo relates to fanaticism and addiction. Its addiction encompasses everything from a need for recognized qualifications to a need for illegal drugs, from the workaholic to the religious fanatic.

Oh, so we went through the blue door and graduated towards an exploration of deeper consciousness, laced in, when not glowing damn near indigo, pure melancholy and loneliness.

I do find particular interest in the red light shining down like a bold cut out through the shocking blue with electric offsets, as if there was some sort of want, or fervor that laid unanswered right there in the pit. To read more about the use of red in this episode, just visit the red meta .

But let’s go on about Charlie and Sam’s talk, but absolutely not forget the Jack-Family-Coloring above with healthy, warm displays of yellow.

Between Sam and Charlie, as they roll along -- frankly, this would require a set of gifs I don’t have the skills to maintain -- all three colors accompany them. Melancholy and introspection sits heavily in thick blues rolling past the windows, but waves of red pass through in softer displays and lens twinkles in the distance of all three primary colors spark as she realizes the moral of this all and reconsiders taking the path of loneliness -- to not become the lone bugman, saturated in his blue melancholy and entombed in his loneliness, who abandoned his people. She considers returning, and that’s... you know, good.

Through the course of it, we see the Muscas come to reclaim their fallen. The Musca, that abandoned his people due to “self esteem issues,” has not been abandoned or forgotten by his people despite his attempt of forgetting them.

The blue rooms are carver not by blue lens flares like Charlie and Sam’s journey but a warm, soft, yellow glow as his family returns, carving through the melancholy if not entirely warding it away, centering over his body as they prepare to honor him and carry him out.

Huddled here, against grief and sadness, there is a warm, yellow, familial light in as much as a memory they still hold to honor, while Dean details the changes they can make to the world to help people and to change things. To make a difference.

Family wards away the sorrow and carries their fallen away.

Back at the bunker, Dean and Jack have their own heart to heart. And, as per the above last primary-yellow display, at first there is still warmth in the mutedness of it, but I’m going to briefly call back to this,

Yellow is the only color that reacts badly to black: Add a little black and it becomes a sickly yellow-green.

With a quickness, sickness, darkness and despair settles over the moment of warmth, and family as Dean himself blends into a motif of sickly despair and tragedy, sealing off our moment with a final collapse onto a greyed out floor.

Honestly the wardrobe piece is fantastic; his shirt is scaled so as to fuse well into the warmer yellows, dillute into the greens and still bond to the late near-greys with Jack on the floor, washing out our episode in a final moment.

So hi, yes. While it’s attractive to addict ourselves to the use of red in this episode, all cardinal colors were used with exceptional power. Red and blue sat opposite on our story ends, but yellow as a premise of family and warmth followed through, as if to bring the spirit of the bunker with it, even if by the end, the spirit of the bunker itself is falling into a pall hue.

And that’s your mindfuck for the day.

#supernatural #meta #steve yockey #richard speight jr #14.06 #color study #mine #my meta

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tarotresearchresidency · 4 years

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tarot reading 30-10-20

The Magician (reversed), Six of Pentacles, King of Cups (reversed)

Quick read: An inability to make things happen means you’re having to think about giving and receiving. Are you giving too much to others? Are you taking too much from others? Either way, it’ll breed resentment and moodiness.

Long read: The Magician makes things happen. He manifests things. The blossoming foliage around him echoes his spirit of growth. As you can see on the table or altar before him, he has a Wand, a Sword, a Cup and a Pentacle. He uses all of these elements–drive, intellect, emotions and the material world–in his conjuring. When upright, the Magician says you’ve got the power (James Brown-style). When reversed, this power is awry.

Most often I think of frustration when the Magician is reversed. It feels like you’re trying but nothing seems to be working. The Magician is burning a candle at both ends, literally and figuratively. This is unsustainable. You’ll burn out quickly this way. With one hand, he points upwards, but the other points downwards. This sense of equal and opposite suggests the necessity of balance: his hands suggest ‘as above, so below’. The idea of ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ selves is a paradox, they are ultimately inseparable. The Magician reversed says maybe your external efforts aren’t working, because your heart’s not in it. ‘As above, so below’ speaks to systemic replication, on every level. A bad relationship with work speaks to a bad relationship with your life speaks to a bad relationship with yourself. It’s similar to the fractal patterns that physicists describe. The deeper you go, the more you zoom in, the more you see the same patterns repeated again and again.

The Magician’s posture suggests a lightning rod: he channels the power of the four Suit elements (Swords/Air, Wands/Fire, Pentacles/Earth and Cups/Water) to manifest the things he wants to see. He is not the magic, himself. He is simply the conduit for it. The message of the Magician reversed is to remove the ego, remove the sense of self-importance that is getting in the way. It’s also to remember the resources you have around you and make the most of them. They’re what make the magic happen.

Sometimes when you can’t seem to get what you want, giving things to other people can be really agonising. Giving when you feel you’re not getting your fair dues in return breeds resentment. You might end up looking down on the other people you’re giving to, or seeing them as a burden. You might end up thinking you’re superior to them, because you’re their benefactor. Equally, if you’re receiving things from other people, you might feel guilty for taking it. You might be humiliated at having to accept others’ charity. You might be taking it because you need to, but you can’t wait to get back to making it on your own. Like the Magician reversed who has forgotten what tricks he has up his sleeve, so the Six of Pentacles calls you to look at your resources. Simply put, work out what you’re giving and receiving. Are you happy with that? If not, stop doing it. Cycles of giving and reciprocity bind us together as humans, as Marcel Mauss explained in his seminal anthropology book, The Gift. Giving something to another person creates a bond, a debt that must be repaid. Look at where your bonds are being made, and to whom you are indebted. Perhaps you need to balance your sums, literally and figuratively. Know where your boundaries are; make an emotional budget. If that friend always wears you out with their whining, don’t spend so much time and energy on them. Live within your emotional means: don’t spend other people’s energy on your troubles because you don’t want to spend your own.

Recalling the ‘as above, so below’ fractal patterns of the Magician reversed, we can think about what this might mean with the Six of Pentacles - how do cycles of giving and receiving repeat themselves? Relying on billionaires to offset the negative externalities of their vast fortunes through philanthropy seems like a system that benefits primarily billionaires. It’s a little bit like a school bully taking everyone’s lunch money, and then giving some small change back out again. It legitimises exploitation, by offsetting the bully’s ‘guilt’. It seems to go against the needs of the collective. Slavoj Zizek has memorably critiqued the idea of feel-good capitalism, where if you buy a product, proceeds go to a charitable organisation. For Zizek, buying consumer goods to give money to those in need simply replicates the system that made those people needy in the first place.

Looking at what you’re giving and receiving might help clear some of the bad feelings out here, and the King of Cups reversed is suffering from them, big time. We met him before as an upright emotional leader; now he’s mired in moodiness and perhaps even using emotions to manipulate others, playing on their sense of decency, conscience and kindness to get his way. When people abuse their emotional power like that, it’s hard to get that trust back. It’s disrespectful to your friendship to play people like that, and it’s disrespectful to your own emotions, to use them in this way. If you don’t look at your own frustrations and your own boundaries first, then you’ll be susceptible to this behaviour, whether your own or someone else’s. Working out where your happy point is may seem like shutting people out or becoming selfish. But really the exercise is about returning to the joy of giving and receiving. When you are not giving or accepting things resentfully, you can enjoy them.

#tarot reading #tarot #daily tarot #tarot cards #king of cups #six of pentacles #the magician #slavoj žižek #philanthropy #capitalism #ethical consumerism #ethical consumption #billionaire #marcel mauss #reciprocity #manipulation #as above so below

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dustedmagazine · 6 years

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Joseph Burnett 2017 Review: Nostalgia for the Light

Back in days of yore (well, the 19th century), nostalgia was believed to be an illness so debilitating it could compromise the fate of an army were too many soldiers “infected.” One Russian general even threatened to bury his troops alive if they came down with nostalgia. It’s hard to imagine what the clearly charming general would make of our current times, so steeped are we in waves of competing nostalgia.

I’m one to talk, of course. The below list of albums shows that retrenchment into the past has at times been a great escape for me, musically, as 2017 quickly resolved itself into a right shitter of a year both personally and in the grander scheme of things. I’ve found myself actually nostalgic for the tiny, damp and claustrophobic apartment my ex and I used to rent because we were at least — in my mind — happy then. But that’s the thing about nostalgia: it doesn’t allow for a very nuanced image of what reality was. We certainly did have some good times in said bolthole, but surely the problems that swam into heartbreaking focus only a year or so later (and in a much nicer flat) were already there?

In politics — and this doesn’t get mentioned enough — nostalgia seems to have become a driving force. Trump vows to make America great again, without really elaborating on when it was that America was great in the first place. If one is to believe Roy Moore, it was that glorious period when slavery was a reality and you could still kill gays. But at least there was cholera and high levels of infant mortality to offset the troublesome fact that people were owned as goods and chattel. A similar vein of nostalgia has animated the Brexit debate on this side of the pond, as right-wing Brexiters hit out at “political correctness” and the European Court of Justice’s human rights laws along the road to the UK leaving the EU. Again, one can’t help but feel that the glorious past they pine for mainly revolved around being able to use ethnic slurs and homophobic insults on their way to a packed church on the edge of the village green armed with a blue passport. As with my domestic situation and Trump’s supporters, this nostalgia conveniently ignores unpalatable truths: the fifties right-wing nostalgics dream of actually included polio, rationing and the threat of nuclear annihilation. So it’s not really that different to today, except the polio bit. In that context, I’d say a bit of opprobrium directed towards racism, homophobia, transphobia and antisemitism represents progress.

So once again, as a wave of distorted nostalgia in part propels us towards an uncertain, even scary future, music has felt like a refuge. It’s becoming a tiresome leitmotiv, really. But the past is threaded through the below list, either as a nostalgic signpost or as a fictionalized unreality. Richard Dawson, on his superlative Peasant, reimagines medieval life in a series of epic, unfathomable and beautiful songs. The folk resurgence remains steady, despite the best attempts of lacklustre Mumford & Sons-like mainstream acts to dilute its potency. June Tabor’s Quercus released Nightfall, the most authentically “folk” album to have emerged in 2017, despite its jazz flourishes, with classic traditional songs echoing through the ages like ghosts. Similar phantasms crop up on Sarah Angliss’s Ealing Feeder to tell the hidden, murky story of London. Like the camera movements in John Sayles’ Lone Star, the past swirls around us listeners on these records, as well as on the crystalline chamber jazz of Tarkovsky Quartet’s Nuit Blanche whilst Elodie’s pair of superb instrumental albums are suffused with the nostalgic atmosphere of Proust. And there have been few more haunted albums of late than Áine O’Dwyer’s Gallarais.

Over on the dance floor, experimentation remains a vibrant way to concoct new sounds, with some of the most exciting producers around taking their already impressive music to new levels. Lee Gamble, Jlin, Actress, Laurel Halo, Shackleton, Arca: all released superb albums in 2017 that dragged the field of electronic music forwards, even those that looked into the past (the Ghost Box label continues to fascinate as it mines old TV music, computer game imagery and found sounds, with ToiToiToi’s Im Hag successfully reinventing the label’s perpetual motion wheel).

But in a world of Trump and rising right-wing populism, defiance has resonated most powerfully for me as an emotion. Irreversible Entanglements channeled the spirit of Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite and Jeanne Lee’s majestic invective on Conspiracy to deliver a monumental invective against white privilege and the mistreatment of African Americans throughout time. Jlin’s Black Origami maintained the politically-charged, hyperactive energy of her debut Dark Energy and Mhysa contorted notions of gender and sexuality with an inventive form of r’n’b.

Even in such illustrious company, one voice seemed to soar out of the abyss most forcefully. A strain of disillusionment has always run through Gary Mundy’s work in Ramleh or other projects, but on his latest solo outing as Kleistwahr he has hit new heights of despondency and despair. Determined to champion his own outsider status, Mundy baptized his album —a wondrous swarm of haunted guitar and seething electronics — Music for Zeitgeist Fighters. It’s a beautiful cry of rejection as the zeitgeist becomes the plaything Trump and Spencer, Farage and Murdoch, a call to arms for all who abhor the views seeping into the mainstream to scream “not in my name!.”

The great Chilean documentary director Patricio Guzmán’s most celebrated film is called Nostalgia for the Light and it traces that country’s traumatic history through the prism of the Atacama desert being one of the best places on earth to observe the stars. In that context, nostalgia becomes a way to reconcile oneself with the past and, perhaps, start looking for new light in the future. Maybe all who oppose the rise of right-wing demagoguery, be they musicians, activists, politicians and even lowly journalists, can find ways to look backwards to build a better tomorrow. If the world is going to be swallowed by pernicious nostalgia, it must be fought with a hopeful variety of that Russian general’s bugbear in turn.

Kleistwahr — Music for Zeitgeist Fighters (Nashazphone)

Jlin — Black Origami (Planet Mu)

Nadah El Shazly — Ahwar (Nawa Recordings)

Richard Dawson — Peasant (Weird World)

Áine O’Dwyer — Gallarais (MIE Music)

Elodie — Vieux Silence (Ideologic Organ)

Actress — AZD (Ninja Tune)

Tarkovsky Quartet — Nuit Blanche (ECM)

Irreversible Entanglements — Irreversible Entanglements (International Anthem)

Laurel Halo — Dust (Hyperdub)

Shackleton & Vengeance Tenfold — Sferic Ghost Transmits (Honest Jon’s)

ToiToiToi — Im Hag (Ghost Box)

Forest Swords — Compassion (Ninja Tune)

Félicia Atkinson — Hand in Hand (Shelter Press)

Saz’iso — At Least Wave Your Handkerchief at Me: The Joys and Sorrows of Southern Albanian Song (Glitterbeat)

Colin Vallon — Danse (ECM)

Lee Gamble — Mnestic Pressure (Hyperdub)

Elodie — La Porte Ouverte (Faraway Press)

Skullflower — The Black Iron that Fell from the Sky, to Dwell Within (Bear It or Be It) (Nashazphone)

Pan Daijing — Lack (PAN)

Arca — Arca (XL)

Quercus — Nightfall (ECM)

Dopplereffekt — Cellular Automata (Leisure System)

Aaron Dilloway — The Gag File (Dais)

Yair Elazar Glotman & Mats Erlandson — Negative Chambers (Miasmah)

Maleem Mahmoud Ghania — Colours of the Night (Hive Mind Records)

The Necks — Unfold (Ideologic Organ)

The Belbury Circle — Outward Journeys (Ghost Box)

Sarah Angliss — Ealing Feeder (self released)

Mhysa — fantasii (Halcyon Veil)

Reissues

Tony Conrad — Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain (Superior Viaduct)

Anne Briggs — The Time Has Come (Earth

Lal & Mike Waterson — Bright Phoebus (Domino)

Henry Flynt — You Are My Everlovin’ (Superior Viaduct)

The Belbury Poly — The Owl’s Map (Ghost Box)

Battiato — Fetus (Superior Viaduct)

Akira Rabelais — Spellewauerynsherde (Boomkat Editions)

Luc Ferrari — Hétérozygote / Petite symphonie… (Recollections GRM)

Zos Kia/Coil — Transparent (Cold Spring)

Jon Gibson — Two Solo Pieces (Superior Viaduct)

#joseph burnett #yearend 2017 #dusted magazine #richard dawson #june tabor #sarah angliss #tarkovsky quartet #elodie #aine o'dwyer #kleistwahr #nadah el shazly #actress #irreversible entanglements #laurel halo

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tgaoe · 6 years

Text

Andy’s 2017 Music Report

Favorite Albums, Favorite Songs, and other assorted temporally-specific ramblings.

Preamble

I. Dearth I listened to less music this year than I did last year, partly due to the immense amount of time required to finish my Master’s Degree, and also because I slept better. You may recall from last year’s treatise that I experienced something of a listening renaissance late in the year, turning to music during nights spent sleepless for work-related anxiety. 2017 marked my fourth year in my current job, and the first during which I began to feel confident in my own professional competence. Hence, less anxiety, fewer sleepless nights, less music. So it goes.

II. Duplicity, Disaffection Another reason. Prior to November 21st, I spent an inordinate amount of time listening to a single band, the band that made my #1 record from 2016. They were also my most-listened to band of 2017. I went deep into their back catalogue, full immersion, and I found such joy and pleasure in doing so. The band helped me through a fraught, life-altering personal ordeal. I traveled to see them play and it was cathartic. However, on 11/21 it was revealed that the leader of that band may have betrayed much of what he/they claimed to have stood for as steadfast advocates for kindness, equity, and empathy. The woman or women he hurt are the primary victims, but secondarily his hypocrisy destroyed a community of people who connected strongly with his music. I believe in rehabilitation. But I also doubt I’ll ever be able to listen to this band the same way again, if at all. I share this troubling information because it undoubtedly colors this list. For weeks after the revelation I only listened to songs sung by women, maybe to offset the damage somehow, maybe to avoid connecting with another secretly awful man.

III. Disappointment Last year I wrote extensively about how the absence of releases from legacy acts resulted in my exposure to an unusually large number of new/emerging artists. That trend of exposure continued this year, for unfortunate reasons. Most new releases by old favorites proved little more than pleasant. Though something like 20 albums from 2017 fall into that category, only five or six made my list of favorites, and even some of those did so despite caveats. I suspect this may have to do with the current circumstances of my life more than with the music itself, at least in some cases. For instance, Sleep Well Beast will not appear below, but I am the only National devotee I know who doesn’t love it as much as their previous records. Time will tell, I suppose.

IV. Derelict I devoted significantly less time to this project this year than I did to its previous iterations, probably 20 hours vs. the usual 40-60. I usually track favorites all year and begin writing in October. This year I was much less diligent, not commencing writing until mid-December. It shows, I’m afraid. I did not keep an actual Favorite Songs list, nor did I keep a running record of micro-moments.

Blame the Master’s. Over five months of work my research project ballooned to 18,415 words spanning 118 pages—characteristically about twice as long as it needed to be. It’s a mystery how I mustered the energy to eke out another 6000 words for this thing after all that.

V. Dingus As always, forgive my assumption that readers of this monstrosity possess a certain level of familiarity with prevailing music culture. The writing reads better that way. Also as always, please forgive the preposterous pretense that anyone would want to read this, the bloviations of yet another obsessive 30-something white man desperate for your attention.

My 19 Favorite Albums of 2017

19 favorites because 19 was how many favorites I had.

19 The World’s Best American Band White Reaper Big, stupid, shameless riff rock; a record as fun as its title is ridiculous. The band almost has the chops to live up to it too, blazing through ten hook-dense, hedonistic rockers with fatalistic abandon. No introspection here, folks. The only lesson White Reaper has to impart is, “If you make the girls dance, the boys will dance with ‘em.” Noted, dudes.

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18 Cigarettes After Sex Cigarettes After Sex How to Make the Sexiest Music Ever, Apparently

1) Start with early Interpol. 2) Slow it down. 3) Tighten it up. 4) Strip away the fuzz. 5) Replace Paul Banks with Greg Gonzalez, a man whose smoky, sultry voice I mistook for a woman's until just now. 6) Drop the nonsense lyrics in favor of straightforward stories, proclamations, and invitations, all specific and intimate like the first xx record.

The result: a collection of variations on "Fade Into You" sans twang. Almost unfathomably sexy. The sexiest.

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17 The Nashville Sound Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit I don’t love this album, but I do love all its songs. The Nashville Sound should have been a solo record with an accompanying full-band live release a few months later. The 400 Unit is so talented, so utterly professional that they can’t help but sound canned, over-produced, in a modern studio. Any old band off the street can be made to sound that way. What makes the Unit special is that this is how they sound live. They sound perfect. Perfection on record isn’t much fun.

Jason Isbell is the best songwriter of his generation. Case in point: Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” his best song and a contender for best song by anyone, famously concludes with the couplet,

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel That's all, I don't think of you that often

Isbell manages to casually convey the same sentiment through implication on Sound’s “Molotov”:

Another life but I still remember A county fair in steamy September In the Year of the Tiger, nineteen-something

He remembers, but not that well, not the year. He doesn’t think of her that often.

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16 Need Your Love Sheer Mag The opening salvo of “Meet Me in the Street” and the sort-of title track tells you everything you need to know about Need Your Love, the surprising segue of anthemic nails-hard rebel rock into heartfelt, slinky soul-funk. Sheer Mag is everything 70s rock, all facets, plain and simple, in timbre, tone, and demeanor, fitted to modern pop structure and sensibility. Massive riffs, throaty hollers, cavernous sonics, never not danceable. The last 40 years never happened.

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15 Something to Tell You Haim Four years ago I passionately engaged in a pointless internet debate on the false premise of the superiority of Haim vs. Lorde. Of course this was less about the actual artists than it was the debaters’ desperation for validation of our own tastes and preferences at the expense of others’, which is a stupid thing insecure young white men do for some reason. However, looking back now and comparing the two entities’ work and public personas does reveal fascinating differences in their approaches and cultural placements, especially considering the rollouts and receptions of both artists’ follow-up records. I’ll write more about Lorde later (spoiler), but she crafts songs that achieve timelessness and universality seemingly unintentionally, through trope subversion and highly specific and personal writing. Haim achieves the same through something like the opposite approach.

Every Haim song feels like a glossy new product behind a high-end shop window, displayed uniformly, calculated and designed for maximum value and mass appeal. I’ve said this before, but Haim recordings sound like money, sound expensive. Because they are. Haim recordings are light, airy, sleek, tight, and huge. The lyrics strive for universality by exploring standard romantic emotional states in the most vague, impersonal, situationally unspecific possible manner. We do not know the identity of the “you” in these songs. Hell, we don’t really who the “I” is. We can project whoever we want. These songs are perfect manufactured products. That may read as negative criticism, but it is not. The total orderliness of Haim songs forces order on anarchy. Haim songs make the world simple, make it make sense. Every question has an answer, every problem a solution.

There is an exception that proves the rule here, a more experimental Haim song that towers above the others by subverting those established expectations of order, transcends them to depict in actuality the true messiness of love. That song is “Right Now,” and it is a monster jam, likely the best song Haim has ever written. The structure is confounding, the melodies don’t time out naturally, nothing musically makes sense, is rational, in the same way feelings don’t and aren’t. There is a call-and-response with which it is almost impossible to sing along because the response comes in like half a beat later than every other pop song has trained us to expect. Feedback blares, clicks click, hums hum. “Right Now” is imperfect, and in that it is the most perfect Haim song. It came not from an assembly line, it came from a soul. Or souls. “Right Now” even allows a single reference to an actual specific event, a quiet conversation overheard through a window, which, even though still somewhat vague, gives the song a level of personal meaning to the narrator missing from, you know, every other Haim song. More like this please.

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By the way, this short PTA-directed performance film is incredible, and suggests that everything I wrote in that second paragraph may be negated when the band plays live.

14 Graveyard of Good Times Brandon Can’t Dance Brandon Ayers's collection of mom's basement DIY songs plays as much like a friend's great mix cd as it does a solo artist's album, intuitively-sequenced and formally experimental in the sense that the dude seemingly tries any musical idea that occurs to him, and there are so many here: stoned weirdo neo disco, 80s soft rock, wall-of-sound shoegaze, earnest folk, synthy dance rock, 90s industrial and more, all effortless, catchy and united aesthetically by competent use of limited production resources. Ayers's lyrics are always either smart or hilariously, knowingly dumb as he explores a kind of mundanity inherent to a life of low-budget hedonism, as well as how much he loves his dogs, mom, sister, and grandma. Can't go wrong with that.

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13 Villains Queens of the Stone Age Josh Homme and Britt Daniel have much in common culturally, both mid-40s men who have spent nearly two decades each as highly unlikely sex symbols, sustaining multi-decade rock careers, stalking stages with maniacal, borderline-predatory confidence. But musically they’ve shared few qualities until now. Villians has airless, precise grooves similar to some Spoon records, but, you know, with that Queens menace and evil. The QoTSA has always been a band about perfect playing, but this time Homme brought in preeminent funk racketeer Mark Ronson to help shape Villains. The result is the shortest, most accessible record the band has ever made. Actually, it is not the shortest—it just feels that way. Villians cooks, showcasing the same old Queens, aggressively showy and prone to extended digressions, but with arrangements more focused, lightweight, and compressed than ever before.

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Make sure you stick around for the entire song. Trust me.

12 I Love You Like a Brother Alex Lahey What is happening in Australian that the country keeps producing these witty, confident female punk singer/songwriters? Alex Lahey’s style certainly mines a similar humorous vain to Courtney Barnett, but her approach is more energetic and less erudite. I always feel held at a distance by Barnett’s music; listening to it is almost a purely intellectual exercise. Lahey’s, however, has a casual immediacy that makes me want to smile and laugh and dance.

The title track is both punk as hell and sticky-sweet, a genuine love song from a sister to a brother, insanely catchy and refreshingly sincere. I am no one’s sister, and my brother and I, though we love each other, have never had a connection quite like the one Lahey documents here. Still, I so feel this jam. It follows the album’s opener, “Every Day’s the Weekend,” an actual love song, albeit one about having fallen for a broke, emotionally elusive charmer. “Fuck work, you’re here, every day’s the weekend,” is lyric of such powerful brevity, so effectively conveying the feeling during those times when someone exciting has unexpectedly exploded into your life. The hilarious “Perth Traumatic Stress Disorder,” another gatestormer, follows, and then the album starts to mutate into something more complex and interesting.

I Love You Like a Brother begins as an aggressive punk record, but slowly warps into atmospheric, radio-ready stadium rock. On a couple occasions this may be to its detriment, but as a whole the album serves as a solid testament to Lahey’s versatility as a writer. The lyrics of “Awkward Exchange” are comparatively anonymous to the earlier tracks, but the open sound, dynamic structure, and wordless chants beg for massive festival singalongs. It might happen. It should happen. The two approaches combine on “Lotto in Reverse,” perhaps Lahey’s greatest triumph here, an inward-focused dirge grafted onto a massive, hooky rock song that more than earns its prominent placement on Spotify’s Badass Women playlist.

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11 Go Farther in Lightness Gang of Youths Christian music is terrible, almost all of it. Not just because it all still sounds like U2, but because none of it deigns to explore actual life as a flawed human who happens to be Christian. This is so intentionally. The Christian music industry is insidiously Randian; cynical and deplorable. Gang of Youths is fighting back, hard.

Singer/songwriter David Le'aupepe is a vulgar spiritualist, kind of a like an Australian David Bazan or Sufjan Stevens in the way he publicly struggles to reconcile his faith with his human proclivities. His studious lyrics often recall very early Bruce Springsteen, with their expansive vocabulary and wide-ranging cultural literacy. The band met in church (like U2!), yet the man swears with relish and documents his perceived failings as well as his issues with the spirtual institution to which he belongs. Get a load of this, from “Perservere,” which is actually my least favorite song on the album:

But God is full of grace and his faithfulness is vast There is safety in the moments when the shit has hit the fan Not some vindictive motherfucker, nor is he shitty at his job What words to hear, and I’m a mess by now 'Cause nothing tuned me in to my failure as fast As grieving for a friend with more belief than I possessed

Imagine that at Sunday service! If all Christian music was this nuanced and genuinely introspective then, well, Christian music wouldn’t be a ghetto. It would just be more music.

This album is long, almost feature-length, most of its 16 songs stretching beyond five minutes. Fortunately, the wealth of ideas and arrangements sustain the length, if only just barely. Gang of Youths are adventurously egalitarian in their consummate unoriginality, adamantly subscribing to the notion of Ecclesiastes 1:9, content to let Le’aupepe’s compelling narratives give the band identity as their arrangements freely pillage ideas from the most successful indie rock bands of the last decade, mostly those who can now fill arenas; the Killers, the National, Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, LCD Soundsystemm Bloc Party. My favorite songs here pound forward relentlessly like Titus Andronicus. On some songs Le’aupepe’s words tumble out uncontrollably like Gareth Campesinos, on others his voice could be mistaken for Matt Berninger’s low growl.

Also, I’d be remiss to not mention how appealing I find it that there are no white people in this band. It’s rare and refreshing to hear this kind of massive music from a cultural perspective so different then my own.

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10 Hot Thoughts Spoon Spoon is a band of consummate constants and variables. The band knows exactly what defines it, what listeners like, and they always deliver while also changing just enough to surprise. Every record, every song, reliably has three particular elements: an airtight hard rhythm groove, simple, catchy, repetitive; a masterful command of pop structure; and Britt Daniel’s enigmatic brand of ultracool, vaguely sexual vocal swagger. The other sounds around those elements, the atmospheres and tones, change with each record. Hot Thoughts delves deeper into the psychedelic G-funk timbres the band played with some on They Want My Soul, as Daniel continues to explore nonthreatening, acceptable ways to express desire. In short, it’s another Spoon record, and it rules.

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9 Strangers in the Alps Phoebe Bridgers I keep coming back to lyrics. Lyrics draw me in like nothing else, the more smart, personal, and specific the better. Lyrics don’t come more specific and personal and smart than Phoebe Bridgers’s. She tells vivd stories, recounts memories of events and emotions by conjuring indelible, detailed settings and images with devastating depths of feeling, mostly over quiet, close-miced acoustic guitars underlaid with noninvasive strings and other atmospherics. Prepare to be haunted.

Though she sometimes doesn’t bother and the songs don’t suffer for it, as on the incredible “Smoke Signals,” Bridgers can also write the hell out of a chorus. Try not to get “Motion Sickness” stuck in your mind.

Strangers in the Alps does take a production risk I would understand some finding off-putting. Sometimes sound effects supplement and/or match lyrical events; a plane flying overhead, a boot crunching leaves, the kind of thing. It’s strange at first, but ultimately sets the album apart from others by similarly earnest stool-seated strummers.

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8 Near to the Wild Heart of Life - year’s best title Japandroids I’ve seen this band play three times. The third was this year. Those previous had been with friends, and before the shows we drank and goofed around, celebrating our affection for each other and getting just the right level of lit up. This year I took a vacation day from my professional job, drove to St. Louis alone, and waited in line alone while reading a screenplay by one of the guys I used to go to shows with, eventually watching the show alone while nursing a single beer. It wasn’t the same. But it was still good.

Japandroids write what they know. Seven years ago what they knew resulted in a masterpiece, an album more relatable to me at the time than any other. Indeed, Celebration Rock remains my all-time favorite record, its ragged, propulsive riffage and emotional narratives of kinetic nights with close friends still have the power to take me back to that time, when I had more energy and a will to wildness. However, over the long interim between albums, the Japandroids’ lives and mine ceased to resemble each other. My closest friends moved. I have bills and a career and a generally pleasant, stable life—one distinctly not wild. Meanwhile, those dudes are evidently still globetrotting, every night out there swilling top-shelf tequila to nurse the heartache of intercontinental romance, living hard and loving harder. I no longer relate. As a listener I’m an observer now when I was once a participant. However, while I don’t connect with latter day Japandroids experientially, in a way the fact that Wild Heart still plays great for me despite that suggests that Japandroids is a legitimately great band on a musical level, rather than one just great for its ability to bash out messy, meaningful feelings..

These dudes are not shy about their laziness as songwriters, at least in terms of prolificacy. They release music as soon as they’ve reached the requisite minimum quantity of great songs, and it takes them forever to do so. Like the two previous Japandroids records, Wild Heart has only eight tracks, and they cheat even to amass that many. While Celebration Rock included a (totally awesome, raucous, thematically-appropriate) cover song, this time one Wild Heart track is an interlude, barely a song (“I’m Sorry [for Not Finding You Sooner]”), and another is just bad, sounding like a high school garage band trying hard to write a Japandroids song (“Midnight to Morning”). They really shouldn’t have let that one through. But man, the other six songs still kill with the same ferocity as before, some with an increased sense of melody and hook, and they all sound great live and feel great to shout along with, which, let’s be honest, is mainly what this band is for, and has always been for. The shouting just means a little less to me now.

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7 Don’t Be a Stranger Nervous Dater Rachel Lightner has the gift, my favorite gift. She expels what she considers her worst qualities, and she does it through great songs; extremely catchy, smart, driving, dynamic punk songs. She does it publicly, with casual confidence. She makes it look easy and, most importantly, normal. Feeling how she feels is not unique. Sharing those feelings legitimizes them, creates a community around them. I mean, look at these lines:

Cause when things get quiet I feel uneasy I need my friends or at least just the sound of the TV To keep these things in my head from screaming “You’re inadequate! You’re a piece of shit! You could run forever but you’d never get away with it! And if people really knew who you were, They’d probably cover up the ground that you walk on with spit!”

If you can’t relate, then I envy you. If you can, and if you like punk, you need this band.

The players behind Lightner are also great, building arrangements that match incidental turns in the lyrics. The lines above are from the title track. Listen for how the song bends and nearly breaks as the narrative does the same, then recovers before almost breaking again. The band follows a formula, each instrument doing a specific job. Drums, bass, and one guitar lock into rhythm, while a lead guitar incessantly plays highly-involved tasto solo hooks. The band rarely veers from its set aesthetic, and when it does, it does so with purpose.

Occasionally a male member of the band will cameo, supplementing Lightner’s self-excoriations with early-2000s emo-screaming in the background. It’s a signifier that, intentionally or not, effectively ties Lightner’s music back to that era, an era that very intentionally excluded and delegitimized women’s voices. As has been proven time and time again in recent years, that was stupid. Women do it better. The contemporary women making emotional, personal punk music are doing it so well that nobody’s come up with a term like “emo” to dismiss it. I love being alive right now.

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6 Big Fish Theory Vince Staples For when people ask what kind of music I like, that impossible question almost only asked by those who do not share the obsession, I have developed a stock answer of surprising accuracy. The smartest versions of punk, rap, and country. Country is a fudge, designed to open up a conversation about what “smart” country is. Dorks call it “alt-country.” Anyway. That’s a separate essay. You may have noticed that Big Fish Theory is the first rap record on this list. I am not tapped in to most contemporary rap. The slow, repetitive codeine scene doesn’t do it for me, and rap is more about single songs and premium playlist placement than it is about albums now. The album-focused rappers are dinosaurs. Four fossil-rap acts made solid records this year, and three made my list. Ranking them was difficult, and I am not at all confident in my final assessments. Vince Staples could have ranked highest another day.

Some days I like Big Fish Theory more than DAMN. Vince Staples’ world is less complicated, more concentrated and angry. Some days unnuanced anger is what I want. For fuel. Case in point, compare the two’s thoughts on the President and the country. First, Kendrick, hinting and contemplative:

Homicidal thoughts; Donald Trump's in office We lost Barack and promised to never doubt him again But is America honest, or do we bask in sin?

And Vince:

Tell the President to suck a dick, because we on now Tell the one percent to suck a dick, because we on now Tell the government to suck a dick, because we on now

And, of course, both men appear on “Yeah Right,” every bit as glorious a linguistic whirlwind as could be expected.

Also, I don’t know another rapper more musically experimental, forward-thinking, and adventurous than Vince Staples, including Kendrick. Vince is admirably without ego here (humble!); often letting the music overtake his voice, having faith in listeners to look up his words if they so desire. Much of Big Fish Theory is essentially modernized Chicago house with rapping, while also proudly West Coast. And it bangs, hard.

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5 Melodrama Lorde This one took time. It took reading younger people’s perspectives to appreciate, grow to love. The first listen felt cold, staid. Pure Herione had been an instant rush, a loud announcement of a new, exciting pop personality, fully steeped in enthusiastically appropriated pop tropes of the time and letting Ella Yelich-O'Connor’s novel personality shine atop it all. Melodrama is different. She doesn’t shine, she seethes and writhes. She’s growing up in front of us, with surprising, precocious wisdom and emotional maturity.

There is nothing particularly contemporary about the sound of Melodrama. It’s less jokey, more earnest than Pure Heroine. And ultimately, despite that it does not provide the same sugary pleasure rush of its predecessor, Melodrama is far superior. It doesn’t sound like a time period, it sounds like first love and first heartbreak, because it is the manifestation of those. It sounds timeless, orchestral without an orchestra, because it is those things.

One track is a notable exception to the timelessness, and that makes it almost impossibly special. I will elucidate later in the Favorite Songs section.

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4 DAMN. Kendrick Lamar Has there ever been an artist so deft at balancing/blending pure creative expression with commercialism? Until DAMN., Kendrick had achieved that balance through compartmentalization, by creating knotty, esoteric records, masterpieces, while also featuring on the most crass chart-bait singles imaginable. Another case in point: Kendrick made “For Free?” and appeared on the “Shake it Off” remix the same year. DAMN. inextricably fuses the two compartments without compromise. Almost every second of the album is both at once. Every song has earworm hooks and brain-breaking lyrical density. The record is jammed with potential singles, yet still works as a whole… even when listening to the tracks in reverse order. All hail. DAMN. is unquestionably the best album of the year, but even so, and even though I flew 1500 miles to see him play it live his hometown… it is not my favorite this year. DAMN. somehow isn’t even my favorite rap record, a late-breaking change-of-heart that took me by surprise.

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3 RTJ3 Run the Jewels It’s too long. Let’s get that out of the way. But it’s all essential. For months I said that cutting “Hey Kids” and “Thieves!” would have made a better record. I was wrong. “Hey Kids” is the weakest track, for sure, but Killer Mike’s verse is straight up canonical, despite the relative frivolity of El-P’s bars and the idiocy of Danny Brown’s feature. “Thieves!,” on the other hand, after some close-listening and Genius deep-diving, is one of RTJ3’s best tracks, a massively ambitious dystopian sci-fi narrative that subtly riffs on Hamlet. Part of that ambition is manifested in a structure quite different from the straightforward presentations we’re used to from these guys; listening without the proper context doesn’t provide the furious pleasure typically associated with Run the Jewels.

Killer Mike & El-P were in an unenviable position prior to releasing this album. RTJ1 surprised everyone, even its makers; a no-stakes lark that happened to be much better and more special than that due simply to the sheer volume of talent involved. Expectations for RTJ2 had been high as a result, and they were exceeded as the band chose to treat the project with seriousness and gravity, leveraging their newfound fame and cultural relevance/reverence for conscientious advocacy. The result, RTJ2, is an unimpeachable classic, one I will listen to for the rest of my life. How could they top it, or even match it, without repeating themselves? By ratcheting up the ambition even further, and with it the risk.

Run the Jewels had been many things on their first two records; angry, funny, aggressive, stoned. Introspective was rarely one of those things. On RTJ3, the duo turn their focus inward, exploring feelings, emotions, and motivations as they apply to the external world in a manner they had never done previously. They also continue to make hilarious dick jokes.

The first and last four tracks are the best work they’ve ever done, the bookends especially. I didn’t appreciate just how great “Down” is until seeing the group close a couple live sets with it. The friends with whom I saw those shows and I were confused by that choice, but it caused us, or me at least, to listen to the song differently, to consider it as the type of song to close a set. Turns out, the choice was a great one. This band has become a band about hope manifested as anger and action, and no track conveys that notion better than “Down,” no RTJ album does it better than their third.

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2 Turn Out the Lights Julien Baker Julien Baker creates stadium soundscapes using only a clean electric guitar and/or piano filtered through looping pedals. Many artists try this and fail. Especially in a live setting, it’s a cynical trick often deployed to impress perceived plebes, as I’ve seen Ed Sheerhan and, sadly, Elvis Costello, do in person. But for Julien Baker it is not a trick. It is seamless, unnoticeable; technical mastery not for its own sake, for impressing an audience, but for empowering expressions of deep feeling.

Turn Out the Lights is so much more than its production and arrangements, however. Baker is one of the most talented living writers, singers, and performers. Her percussion-less, entirely solo arrangements exist only to serve the themes of her songs. She’s one woman, onstage or on record, alone with the power of a full orchestra as she looses her interior on the world, her battles with addiction and depression, her fight to square an existence as a Christian and queer person, and her longing search for love and meaning through it all, the constant quest to hurt less.

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1 After the Party The Menzingers If this were a list of “best” rather than “favorite” albums of the year, After the Party would be much lower, possibly not even included. There’s nothing innovative or original happening here, nothing generation-defining, no new ideas or calls to revolution. But there is an endless well of energy, feeling, and hyper-competent rock musicianship. The Menzingers have one of the most able rhythm sections working, serving the songs of two extraordinary writers, who seem incapable of picking up guitars without creating stadium punk hooks as indelibly catchy as they are heavy. This is smart, pure, meat-and-potatoes rock music, the meatiest and starchiest.

Beyond the wholly satisfying drive and force of the band on a primal musical level, these dudes have a real working-class, post-religious Midwestern mentality, despite hailing a little too far east to fully qualify. Many of these songs deal with how to gracefully age and settle while maintaining an uncommon resistance to traditional values. It should come as no surprise how strongly I relate. Earlier I mentioned Japandroids, how their initial records depicted the romance of early-20s debauchery and intense friendship. The true triumph of After the Party is how the The Menzingers manage to write about moving forward, building lives with partners, embracing careers and domesticity while also looking back fondly at bygone wild days without romanticizing them, fully owning that a calmer life is a better one, but allowing that the past was pretty damn fun.

After the Party may not become a timeless classic like other records on this list might, but this year it was the album to which I connected most. It was, and is, mine.

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A Few of My Favorite Songs of 2017

8/7 “Truth Hurts”/“Water Me” Lizzo Lizzo should be a huge star. She’s like André 3000 good. She’s my Beyoncé.

Including these songs here is like an honorary Favorite Album spot. I listened to the two singles back-to-back more times than I did most albums this year. Lizzo has talent in excess of her excess of confidence and swagger.

Music journalists could not shut up about the two times Rihanna rapped on record this year, a little on the Kendrick album and on the only good 45 seconds of the N.E.R.D. album. Both instances earned effusive and universal praise. It bothers me that Lizzo doesn’t get that type of attention. She raps, sings, and writes far better than Rihanna, better than most pop stars working, really, and she often does it all in the same song, the same line.

“Truth Hurts” is a total kiss-off rap banger, insidiously catchy as it deconstructs and rebuilds the chorus of “Black Beatles” into something much better and exponentially more driving than its lugubrious origin. “Water Me” is an aggressive funk jam that Lizzo goes nuts over, showing off the full range of her voice, trying about a hundred different modulations and weird ideas. They all work, and together form some truly transcendent pop.

Check out her older stuff too, including a couple unlikely collaborations with Sadie Dupois from Speedy Ortiz (!) for my punk friends.

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7 “What Can I Do If the Fire Goes Out?” Gang of Youths This isn’t another “Younger Us,” a song that so fully represents a period of my life that the opening chords still sometimes have the power to make me tear up. But it does take me be back to another time, and moves me in a similar way to the Japandroids classic. I haven’t told many people about this, but though I didn’t openly quit the church until a few months after graduating high school, I had struggled to maintain faith for a few years, even while playing in a devoutly evangelical Christian rock band.

“What Can I Do If the Fire Goes Out?” takes me back to a specific morning, a bone-cold, see-your-breath morning, driving to school my sophomore or junior year, listening to the first song from the second Spoken album and weeping at the lyrics’ longing prayer for help and guidance. In hindsight, Spoken made objectively bad music; comically derivative and poorly-structured. Throughout the Gang of Youths album, and especially on “Fire,” similar sentiments are explored and depicted more articulately, with far superior musical acumen. I’ll never believe again, but it’s nice to be made to have those feelings again, to experience unforced sympathy for another’s spiritual struggle.

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6 “Right Now” Haim See the last paragraph of the Haim album entry above.

5 “Even” Julien Baker Julien at her most simple, most distilled, uncharacteristically just 4/4 quarter-note strumming an acoustic guitar, showing us that her layered productions would be nothing without the powerful songs beneath them. And what a song, karmic allusions and memories of conflicts.

It's not that I think I'm good I know that I'm evil I guess I was trying to even it out

Yeesh.

4 “Supercut” Lorde That word, and its power. Until recently no expression or single word existed to describe that wistful wash of isolated, curated romantic memories, warm-tinted flashes of the loveliest tiny moments of a lost relationship, ignoring fights and infidelities, only seeing sunshine. The good parts. And knowing its nature, indulging it with caution, recalling fondly and reliving without desire to return or recreate. “Supercut” could not have existed at any other time, on any other album, by any other artist. Lorde took the most modern of language and forged a work of art of crushing emotional truth; timeless, indelible, perfect.

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3 “HUMBLE.” Kendrick Lamar I saw Kendrick play his first ever solo headlining arena show in his hometown. When it came time for “HUMBLE.”, the music dropped out after the initial “Hyeuh, hyeuh!,” and Kendrick let the crowd rap the entire song acapella while he just gazed around, observing in awe. The moment was magic.

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2 “If We Were Vampires” Jason Isbell I’ll be honest. I don’t know how to write about this one without getting inappropriately personal. It’s been a hard year for me in certain relevant ways, and this incredible song has not helped matters.

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1 “God in Chicago” Craig Finn The adjective “cinematic” doesn’t do justice to “God in Chicago,” which, despite lasting a mere four minutes and forty-five seconds, and not being cinema, is one of the best films of the year, a devastating, seedy road trip romance with a tight plot, loveable flawed characters, and an ambiguous ending. Craig Finn fronts my favorite band of over a decade, and yet this is the best thing he’s ever done. Every detail matters, every word and phrase considered and intentional. It’s Craig’s “Chelsea Hotel No 2,” a quiet meditation towering over an oeuvre of louder, more sensational and populist work. I love this man.

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Appendices

I. Albums I enjoyed and/or listened to often but did not become favorites for whatever reasons Allison Crutchfield, Tourist in this Town Arcade Fire, Everything Now Big Thief, Capacity Broken Social Scene, Hug of Thunder Bully, Losing Charly Bliss, Guppy Cloud Nothings, Life Without Sound The Dirty Nil, Minimum R&B Drake, More Life Fat Joe/Remy Ma, Plata O Plomo Father John Misty, Pure Comedy Feist, Pleasure Craig Finn, We All Want the Same Things Japanese Breakfast, Soft Sounds from Another Planet Jay-Z, 4:44 Jens Lenkman, Life Will See You Now LCD Soundsystem, American Dream Migos, Culture The National, Sleep Well Beast Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, The French Press Ryan Adams, Prisoner Sampha, Process Sylvan Esso, What Now Tigers Jaw, spin The War on Drugs, A Deeper Understanding Waxahatchee, Out of the Storm Wolf Parade, Cry Cry Cry Worriers, Survival Pop Yaeji, EP2 Yr Poetry, One Night Alive

II. Albums with which I was simply unable to spend enough time So many. Basically any album on any list covered on this site—the ultimate resource for end-of-year music dorkery--that I didn’t mention in my document I would have at least given a cursory try. That’s my normal process. There just wasn’t time.

III. A vain attempt to string together some final thoughts I’m exhausted, too exhausted to force a cute unified narrative onto my experiences with music this year beyond what I already have. As for the future… I’m excited, in a different way than normal. I don’t know what’s coming out next year. I haven’t done the requisite research. I’m into the idea of just letting it happen, letting New Music Fridays reveal themselves week-to-week.

Haha, just kidding. As soon as I post this I’m jumping in headfirst, making a 2018 Most Anticipated List. Sayonara suckers.

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