Jonny's Weekly/Monthly Musings - Jan 9 - 15
Everyone gather around the fireplace. Young and old alike. Let me tell you when people used to go outside. What a time it was. Hundreds of people huddled together to listen and watch people perform. What a time it was.
Sadly we are still probably a good year away before anyone is comfortable holding massive concerts and music festivals and whatnot in public. Until that time I have the inkling to start a new weekly (will probably end up being monthly) blog post about my very personal musing about music and such. While I know the list of people who genuinely care about my opinion is not long, I thought I could get some catharses and general serotonin from putting my thoughts down weekly. Like a diary for soy boys who listen to indie and pasty white girls all day long.
*Breaking news: Lana Del Rey continues to dig her own grave*
The biggest story of the music world in the past week (in my humble opinion) is miss cop loving Lana Del Rey releasing the lead single for her upcoming album, “Chemtrails Over the Country Club.” Quite a provocative name for a song but that isn’t even the main reason she is in the news. Lana has been slowly but surely descending into fake woke madness the past year or so. Her first mistake was was back in May of 2020, she called out a “double standard” in music which pretty much boiled down to her calling out predominantly black female singers for “dancing for money.” This was in response to a lot of people calling her about for glorifying abuse and making it a central tenant in her music. Since Lana’s aesthetic kind of builds off these tortured characters I can see why she got upset. Lashing out at your female peers though (who definitely get similar questions about their sexuality as expressed through their music) is just not it.
That story somewhat blew over and Lana was sort of quit for the rest of 2020. The most we got from her was Instagram pictures showing her going around in a mesh mask that is definitely not halal in any sense. This brings us to last Friday (01/08). After releasing her first single for this new album that is coming out, Lana went on a Trumpian twitter tirade just kind of said “I’m woke so stfu.” Lana has since deleted the tweets (rightfully so) but many of were about the album artwork being inclusive and she has so many “colored friends” and things along that line. A couple days later she tweeted more about a bunch of magazines taking what is saying out of context as right wing sentiments. I really don’t know what she was talking about but I’ll link the one tweet that hasn’t been deleted and you can make a judgement for yourself. The moral of the story is Lana really needs to listen to her PR person.
After that whiplash of social media frenzy, it is hard to listen to the song with a clear mind. It’s aight. I have really been a big fan of Lana Del Rey for a while and think her music has generally improved over the past few years. Instrumentally there is some interesting stuff bellowing in the background but it is hard to say it is lifechanging. Also the title an themes just kind of encapsulate all this drama that has been surrounding her the past year. She’s a rich “liberal” who is trying so hard to be woke by pointing out “wow chemtrails=bad.” There’s a song there that a more put together artists might be able to turn into some biting satire or something like that but in her current state, miss Del Rey is not it. Hopefully the full album will prove me wrong.
The next big thing that came across my desk this week was Olivia Rodrigo’s debut single “drivers license.” Never had I felt so old so fast. Rodrigo is the star of the Disney+ show High School Musical: The Musical: The Series and is only 17 years old. Actually blows my mind. Imagine being born in the 2000’s??? I mean imagine just being? Anyways the singer/actress set a Spotify record for the most streams in a single day when on January 11th the song was streamed 15.17 million times. The kids are taking over. Like this can only be compared to Lorde releasing “Royals” at 17 and really exploding. In that regards I get it. I listened to the song a couple of times. I thought it was kind of cheesy and every time Rodrigo says “suburbs” I couldn’t help but cringe. But after framing this in comparison to Lorde I gathered more respect and appreciation for the song. “Royals” must’ve really sounded loud and cringey to a 20-something in 2013 but that song definitely hit me. I am sure there are countless teenagers sitting and blasting this shit. The song has pretty cursory instrumentation and backing but Rodrigo’s voice is truly spectacular. The moral here is that the march of time will destroy us all or something like that.
Miscellaneous Musings
A couple of miscellaneous things before I sign off. The only big album release this week was Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red. It was pretty meh. Everything kind of congeals together in my mind and that is definitely a result of these trap/rap albums being insanely long and kinds repetitive. The only tracks I really liked was “Vamp Anthem” and “King Vamp” and that is just because they talked about vampires.
The last thing I wanted to mention about this week was the soundtrack to the new Pixar movie, Soul. This was scored by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross who are by far my favorite score composers (if you wanna call them that. Trent Reznor is also the lead singer in Nine Inch Nails). Their debut was scoring 2010’s The Social Network, which, if you know me, is some of my favorite music of the 2010’s periodt. I could write a whole thesis about that soundtrack but we gotta get back to Soul. The score is broken up into Jazz bits, performed by John Batiste (of Steven Colbert fame) and soft electronic pieces by Reznor and Ross. While obviously the duo couldn’t go balls to the wall like in The Social Network, the electronic bits are still awe inspiring. They are a little on the light side to probably match the visuals of the “soul world” that our main character finds himself in throughout a large portion of the movie. It is almost chip-tune-esque in a way and provides a solid foundation for the films heavy themes to rest upon.
This has been an experiment that I have wanted to do for a while and I hop you enjoyed dear listener :)
Happy Jamming <3
