Imaginal Disk, Nate

Do I even like pop music? I like "Teenage Dream," and I like Teenage Dream. I like Short n' Sweet. I like "Womanizer" and "Toxic," I like "She Wolf" and "Bang Bang." I like "n.a.s.a." I like "HOT TO GO!" and "Pink Pony Club." I like "Crazy in Love" and "7/11."

This isn't productive. Pop music is fine but by nature it isn't meant to be reached for. Except that's not right either because it is meant to be reached for. It's meant to move the masses, physically first but emotionally as well because people consume with their hearts and not their feet. The West needs religion, I am sure of that now. This is the true sinister nature of getting old, you start to think that the greater good is in accepting the system's flaws and all, then you're too tired to meaningfully try to fix the system because look how big that thing is and most of it works anyway, so let's let someone else do it. There's a shallow core at the heart of American capitalism, is the point, but there's just as much bottomless darkness in the folds of evangelicalism or roman catholicism. What is the correct way to answer why we do this, why life is foisted on us? I know it's not in consumer culture.

But maybe it's in pop music. I don't know, man. This is a Joe K*** review where I'm just going to type a lot and whatever comes out the other side becomes the review. I wonder how he'd feel about that, about designating His Thing as "write as many words as you can and see if you find it somewhere in the process." I know he doesn't value economy as much as I do, but I've never read Infinite Jest and he's never listened to the same 1:35 second Titus Andronicus song for over an hour just to see how long it takes to make him sick. Whatever, I am secure in the truth that I can say more or less anything here and it will be forgiven because for all my cruelty and rudeness, my intentions are pure. This is the key trick that one must learn before they can effectively manipulate people. See what I mean?

Jeez, it's fine. It sounds like the last Daft Punk record. There's a bunch of disco and '70s piano pop in it. Song by song it plays fine, as a whole it plays fine. Listen to it enough and you'll pick something out to love, maybe even uncork the deeper meaning. I grow so weary of the extra-textual shit. You can't even play this album on Spotify without being force-played a bunch of art-pop visuals. You can't just approach a work without being first exposed to all the commentary and positioning of a given thing. You don't just get to walk in cold to anything, you must carry with you all the references and noise of experience and existence and marketing and branding.

It's bombastic. It exhausts me.

My blood sugar might just be low. I know I am tired (only 90 free throws to go on the year, 410/910 as of this morning). I know I am stressed about work (imagine being stressed about Internal Communications, can you even conceive of how empty a life must be to get one's dander up about what essentially boils down to emails? The phrase "email job" is a misnomer, you only think you have an email job, my job is email). I know I am somewhat nervous to be alone with my youngest this weekend while Meg and the big kids are in Baltimore! Imagine it! Being afraid of a two-year-old! As if I had anything better to do than spend time with my youngest child, growing older by the day. What else would I do with my time? Finish Detroiters? Finish The Feather Thief? What is the German phrase for wishing you had a different life at the expense of missing the one in front of you? Is that just called wasting it?

Well, fuck. The album is in conversation with hyper-pop, but it's more in conversation with the movement's precursor artists. I hear a lot Grimes in this shit, which maybe is a misjudgment on Grimes. I hear some Autre Ne Veut in the mix, too. This is also what getting old is, its the inability to hear anything new, the inability to hear anything outside of the context of other things. There's value in that as service journalism, but it also makes the world a flat one, no thicker than your belly button. It makes you not an explorer but a colonizer. And yet, how else to be somewhere new than as you are?

Fucking shit man, I really don't know on this one. I really don't know. I ask again, any time something like this pops, why this? Why this and why not something else? NME says the album is "a zeitgeisty time capsule of anxious post-internet existentialism and the online condition observed through a synthy flower-power lens" in its 10/10 review, but that could apply to goddamn almost everything released under the pop umbrella not swinging for the radio fences. Under the Radar says that "in the midst of all of Magdalena Bay's playful self-styled performance art, they also manage to deliver one of the year's most rewarding pop albums." I can get behind most of that. Maybe I just don't listen to enough pop to know how this sits differently from the other shit in its wheelhouse. It's not a bad hang, for sure. the Line of Best Fit says "it's the product of a band intensely honing what they want to sound like and ending up with a style so unique that it's barely possible to describe." Due respect, pretty easy to describe I think.

I had to step away to deal with work and I no longer feel like writing this. So much for pulling a Joe. He'd be hammering away for another couple thousand words to get himself back on track. I admire and respect it, but it ain't my way, it ain't the way that got me this far. What got me this far is quitting, baby. Final score: It's fine and I'm probably wrong.