Periodic Pretentious Pills, #1
12/19
About halfway through a Danny Brown record and another conversation involving music recommendations, longform links, and book recommendations, I decided that it would be more efficient and better for my ego to conglomerate all the recommendations I have (due to having way too much free time) to one place. Ideally, this will be just all bits of culture I think are noteworthy with some comments, once a week, on Thursdays. Why Thursday? Because my only competition is Thursday Night Football, and who cares about that?
MUSIC
Ogre You Asshole - 浮かれている人
As an American, it is my duty to only understand and speak English fluently. That being said, I particularly enjoy foreign language music due to the ability to ignore lyrics, and treat voice as an instrument. When you understand lyrics in music, it's very hard to pay attention to both the lyrics and the instrumentation, due to it involving different parts of your brain. Ogre You Asshole has it all in a foreign band to enjoy - a funny backstory for their odd name, active and joyful instrumentation, and a lead singer with a unique tonality. Also, they're basically Japanese Modest Mouse, and Modest Mouse is awesome.
Wild Nothing - Nocturne
I feel like everyone has a phase where they get really in to Indie music, before they realize it's the same nonsense of passive, unassuming instrumentation with a catchy bridge and chorus over and over again. It's like a switch flips - all of a sudden, what was once Indie rock is now Reggae. Wild Nothing is unique in this world, in the sense that his music isn't flat out boring. The dreamy vocals are counteracted by up-tempo drumming and an airy guitar constantly riffing. It shares the common thread of this week's music selections, in that the lyrics solely exist because something has to be said - they're never the focal point, and the content is easily ignored, which makes each track that much better.
READING
I hope to avoid making this section New Yorker heavy, but I couldn't resist recommending the profile of my intellectual inspiration a couple years before his death. Christopher Hitchens was fiercely opinionated without an ideology, which naturally leads to being contrarian and highly volatile in one's views. The one thing that remained constant was the intellectualism he lived by and the witticism he constantly displayed. There has never been a person who has disagreed with everyone so forcefully, yet remained well liked by all (well, most) to this degree. A fascinating journalist and person, he's worth knowing about, if one isn't reading his work directly.
One does not become as prescient as George Orwell without having the ability to relentlessly critique in real time. As India trends more and more towards dissenting thought being blasphemous, I always return to Orwell's attempts to counterbalance Gandhi's obviously massive role in history versus his thoughts and beliefs, which were seen as antithetical to the causes he eventually found success in. Given that Orwell himself was deeply political, he naturally has some interesting insights that are well worth reading about one of history's iconic figures.
An excerpt from my favorite book I read in 2019 (Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart), and wholly self sufficient as a preview. The entire novel is a satire, though not as laugh out loud funny as one would expect, unless you've spent time in the New York finance world. The chapter explains the context, but there's two essential points that are constantly skewered throughout the book: If you're right once, people will give you money for the next decade & people who are massively wealthy can't possibly be dumb, right? The delusion and self importance of that world (and America, in general) are captured remarkably well, and it's almost cathartic to see that someone gets how ridiculous that industry is.
Easily the weirdest book I read in 2019, at one of the weirdest times of my life. The book is a profound experience, and it is well worth reading it all at once (it isn't that long). Combining an allegory for South Korean society with a surreal, erotic plot, Kang's work sticks in your head and doesn't leave due to the dark bizarreness evoked. I've found that it remains a constant point of conversation months after reading it, which is quite rare given the volume and variety of what I usually go through.