Links For August 23, 2015
Notes on 21st-Century Mystic Carly Rae Jepsen
And so Carly Rae’s music is tied up with an adolescent but ageless question: What’s more compelling—the falling or the love? Infatuation is an unrealized glimpse of future possible, and how you are as a person depends greatly on whether this vision supersedes, creates, or gets eclipsed by the actual possible. Carly Rae, anyway, is not interested in actual possible. She sidesteps the conundrum, and in a very particular way. The nameless, sparkling tension in her music comes from two parallel but opposite forces: Her substance regresses back to an impossible purity of emotional intention, while her form progresses towards an emotional climax that, necessarily imaginary, can never come. Carly Rae wants love; she wants nothing more than to want it—as in, she literally will not move past that point.
'Compton: A Soundtrack,' and Dr. Dre's L.A. legacy
But on “Compton,” which could easily be 12 variations of “I told you so” while Dre danced on a burning cop car, his foundational role in a pop version of black militancy is reduced to one line about a moment when he ended up “face down on the pavement with the billy clubs” and saying “.... the police” once. This is not a post-Ferguson album. This is an album curated by an executive at the world’s largest company. What did we expect?
The Crudman is based around a Walkman which has been elaborately hacked so that a tape of a looped or droning sound (or any other sound) can be precisely sped up or slowed down via Midi or 1v/octave CV to accurately hit notes over a range of 3 octaves.