Earl Sweatshirt - I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside

Earl Sweatshirt's Previous album, Doris, from 2013, was a breakthrough for the artist, critically if not commercially. Sweatshirt is part of the rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, a group in which most of their 15 members have remained faceless outside of the collective. Odd Future, and their appointed leader, Tyler, The Creator, have made a career out of aggressive music - sounding like they're testing how ugly and depraved they can go without losing listeners. And Sweatshirt sounded like this for a while, too: Doris was the sound of dead end suburbia, with Sweatshirt's timid voice reveling in a life of marijuana and broken childhood. Of course critics ate it up: Sweatshirt has the skinny underdog look down tight. I couldn't tell you why I disliked Doris so much; like other critically acclaimed albums, I played it on repeat hoping to catch glimpse of the spark others had seen, but to no avail. I liked Sweatshirt, he wore his vulnerability on his sleeve, but Doris was steeped in Odd Future's loopy vibes, and covered in guest stars that sometimes had no reason to be there.

Sweatshirt's second studio album, I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside, is nothing but Earl Sweatshirt, which, if you're familiar with the rapper's style, should be enough to tell you if you'll like this one. He raps "I've been alone in my shit for the longest": Earl is stuck in his own head. After the last album, he found fame; now all he can write about is getting high and getting pussy. The production is so dour and downbeat that even Sweatshirt's voice sounds like it's cutting through the speakers. His flow has always been aggressive without being fast or angry, and the music too is built on slow beats - on "Faucet", the beat sounds like a ringing church bell, the chimes of death hanging over his every word. This is production so focused and purposeful it'll suck the air out of any room you play it in. There is few guest stars and fewer places where Earl's influences are clear, the music is too bare bones in places to have any influences. He raps "I spent the day drinking and missing my grandmother" - a lot of the album involves just sitting with Sweatshirt's thoughts, or listening to him wallowing in them.

The tone is dark, sometimes to the point of suicidal, and painfully self-conscious; usually, with albums like this, I'd say the music was for a mood piece or best listened to alone, and likely as a whole set, but I've had "Faucet" on continual repeat since I first heard it. There's nothing bouncy or fun to this music, but the words have meaning. Sweatshirt doesn't see the exotic nature of going on tour - to him it's nothing but dealing with "truck stop racists". While Sweatshirt's complaining about his own golden chains it's hard not to think about Drake, and the goldmine of emotional, self questioning rap that Drake opened up. This little sub-genre can be fantastic: the dramatic woes of the rich and famous played out with hauntingly articulate rap. And its popularity is at a high right now - vulnerability as a sort of game. Even Drake, with his endless self-criticism has turned his problems into a game. Sweatshirt doesn't feel like that (not yet, anyway), when he raps "Fame is the culprit who give me drugs without owing cash, Sipping 'til I melt, Never trying me, I'm diving, falling victim to myself, Middle finger to the help" the words resound in your ears, and it's the emotion you're there for, not the beat, not anything else. One might guess that's the reason Sweatshirt's felt the need to make the most minimalistic rap album possible: to know that his words have meaning, and that he is worth all the fuss, not his band or his producers, just him.

The music is inherently ugly. On the best track, "AM", guest star Wiki raps "Nineteen, still gettin' kicked out the crib, Ripped off my bib, spit out my food, hiccup and piss". It's an ugly image, but not malicious or mean, like, say Tyler, The Creator. It's all directed inwards, as is the whole album. I doubt there's big appeal for these tracks: if you do go outside, or you've forgotten you don't like shit, then you won't find much here. But there's gems to be found. At points on the album it can sound like we are hearing Sweatshirt's conscience talking to him; a similar thing is done on Kendrick Lamar's latest album, To Pimp A Butterfly, an album just as weird and violent, but also much wider in its sound so surely headed for greater success. Sweatshirt's album is all about personal demons - it deals frequently with Sweatshirt's breakup with Mallory Llewellyn and his troubled relationship with his mother - while Kendrick's album is a political album (admittedly driven by a personal anger). It sounds like a fight through black history. As well as his conscience, Lamar had an army of guest stars, he'd brought the boys, even 2Pac showed up from beyond the grave on the final track to aid Lamar's cause; Sweatshirt, by comparison, is fighting his fight alone.

You're Next (2011)

You're Next opens with a scene that Scream (and to a further extent, Scary Movie) parodied over a decade ago. We're first introduced to a couple while they're having sex, before the man, clearly having enjoyed himself, leaves to go in the shower, and the women, looking deeply unsatisfied, looks solemnly out of the window into the isolated countryside setting we'll spend the rest of the film in. These two are quickly killed; the filmmakers' choice to instill brief moments of emotion in either character appearing bafflingly pointless. This whole sequence is only to introduce the setting, the tone, and the killers - here wearing bunny masks (going by the old horror maxim that cute things make for extra scary things when they're trying to kill you). Although an opening like this is telling us something else, whether it knows it or not: that this is one of those horror movies, playing into the traditional formula with only slight aesthetic changes from the last one of these you watched, similar to a new map pack for a video game you've already invested hours in.

If you've watched enough of these movies then you should recognize the formula: the isolated setting relies on inconveniences like no one having a phone signal; the core cast of characters - made up of four siblings, their significant others, and their mum and dad - all seeing each other for the first time in a while, have some underlying conflicts which are swept under the rug once the killing starts (creating a strangely inspirational 'lets band together in the face of evil' message that feels out of place); one of the characters having some exceptional survivalist skills, providing an unexpected challenge for the killers as the house is transformed into a booby-trapped lair, resembling an adult version of Home Alone. Even the plot twist in the film's finale feels done out of obligation to the genre. It's not that You're Next gets anything wrong, it has some squelchy killings and tense moments, it just never goes out of its way to get anything extremely right. The filmmakers were clearly never aiming for 'the most squelchy killings' or 'the most tense moment' - You're Next is the horror movie equivalent of that school kid who's only aim is to not fail his exams, nothing more. Which is at least a way to say You're Next doesn't fail.

There's some obvious situations when a film following the formula has its positives, i.e. when looking for a movie to watch while snuggling up with a significant other that promises some scares, or when choosing a movie to watch late at night that comes with the guarantee you won't have to use much brain power. These compliments might sound a little backhanded, and they are: I won't defend You're Next because it is guilty of everything a whole subcategory of film is guilty for. Genre movies are funny things though, no one ever watches one because it has threw out the rule book: people want to see the usual conventions, just done in new or interesting ways. You're Next doesn't do this, it only upkeeps the usual stuff to a decent quality.

Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly

At some unknown point people decided that the sign of a quality rock album is how concise and snappy it is. No filler allowed. Ambition is welcomed but overstepping the mark isn't. In almost complete opposition, hip-hop and rap albums are rated on their messiness. From the start they had filler tracks built into their DNA, with intros and outros and comedy skits; being ambitious and showing it off were part of the game. Which, rating on this scale, makes Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly, Lamar's third studio album, a grand success. Butterfly is Lamar at his most pissed off, and spilling it all onto tape; it's a kaleidoscope of ideas - some work, some don't - that's so wide in its area of attack I can't imagine anyone liking or disliking everything on it.

It was a lot easier to say what Lamar's previous album, good kid, m.A.A.d city, was about: however authentic he was being, Lamar was playing gangster (or playing with gangsters) on the mean streets. It's harder to say what Butterfly is about. It's an album about race, which is an understatement: it's easily the most angry fight against racism I've ever heard put onto tape. It's steeped in references to black history - such as Lamar's recycling of lines by James Brown and Michael Jackson, and referencing Richard Pryor infamously setting himself on fire - and Lamar sounds like he is using it all just to fuel himself up for another fight with the microphone. There's been other recent albums that dealt with race in a big way, an obvious example being Jay-Z and Kanye West's Watch The Throne, although that celebrated black culture from two people who had already risen to the top. As Jay-Z rapped, it was a celebration of "Black tie, black Maybachs, black excellence, opulence, decadence". Lamar approaches race from the opposite angle: it's all in the title of King Kunta, which matches Lamar's hostile rage with a militant backing track, by updating the title of the real life 18th century slave to that of king. Lamar might be the current king of the rap game, a level of fame a black man would never have dreamed about not long ago, but Lamar isn't forgetting all the blood spilled on the journey to get to his crown.

But for an album that bites into huge chunks of black history it's also (somewhat disturbingly) personal. On u Lamar raps "I place blame on you still/Place shame on you still/Feel like you ain't shit/Feel like you don't feel/Confidence in yourself", before turning his words on himself into a harsh self criticism, calling himself a "fucking failure". The song feels like it could be the manuscript of a weepy church confessional. The album's production - part freestyle jazz, part sorrowful piano score - matches Lamar's weirder tendencies. Almost all tracks have prologues and epilogues, with Lamar and other character speaking and playing part of a wider story; it's not all fun listening, the same way a lot of the tracks are tough listens too, but Lamar never runs out of things to say.

The best moments on Butterfly are when Lamar's outspoken side is matched by some fun beats. These Walls opens with the sound of a woman groaning, whether this is out of pleasure or pain - possibly giving birth? - isn't made clear. (By the end of Butterfly everything is mixed up: the personal, the political, the pleasurable). The music is catchy and seductive, and way sexier than anything Lamar's ever done. The walls of the title at first refer to the vaginal walls of a woman Lamar is pleasuring, but in the final verse are flipped to refer to the walls keeping said woman's baby daddy stuck in a prison cell. And when Lamar ponders "If these walls could talk" it opens things up to a lot more than prison cells and vaginas. It's songs like this that have the thoughtful groove that was heard in D'Angelo's Black Messiah from last year, only with a lot more aggression to it. As the title of Butterfly warns you, there's beauty in difficult things, but you can't ignore the ugly, messy, violent side while you're finding it. And isn't that what hip-hop is all about?

The Prodigy - The Day Is My Enemy

The Prodigy is a band I have a hard time writing about due to the personal affinity I hold for them. As a child the shelf next to my TV held all the secrets of video games, movies and albums my parents had bought before I was even born. I got acquainted with a lot of this music - my mam's love for Boyzone; my dad's interest in cheesy 90s rubbish like No Doubt - but The Prodigy I was always a little too scared of to listen to. They just sounded so... wrong. They weren't among the first wave of electronic music artists but they were there before the whole thing blew up. For a band still grappling with early 90s soundboards and pre-internet technology, their music perfectly captures some of the ugliest things about being human. The Prodigy's violent punk-techno was perfect for the claustrophobic setting of most acid house raves. The change in culture, and broadening of the meaning of electronic music, is maybe why The Prodigy's post 90s output hasn't managed to garner the same love as their older work, although as I say, I've always been inclined to overlook this.

Like everyone who spends too long in the corners of dark rooms taking lethal substances, The Prodigy believed they were the most important band in the world (and hell, maybe for a very brief moment they were). It wasn't long before they had an album titled Music For The Jilted Generation, coming in a case filled with typical us-against-them artwork. This self imposed importance made sense in the 90s; since then, like on Invaders Must Die, the epic feeling of conquering the whole world has felt misplaced: the music was fun and playful now, not epic and trendsetting. The best compliment that can be leveled at The Day Is My Enemy is that for the first time in a long while it sounds like a band who knows exactly who they are. Firstly, they've dropped the illusions of grandeur: the album is far more angry and psycho sounding to, I imagine, ever get play on the radio. Secondly, this is closer to The Prodigy's 90s output than anything they've done since. The argument could be made for them going backwards, although I'd make the bigger argument about needing to know when to turn back.

The sound is unrelenting. It mimics what I imagine a good time at one of The Prodigy's concerts would be like, aka an all out assault on the ears. A track like Roadblox feels like layer after layer of oncoming attack (hence the title, I guess) with the bass never letting up. TDiME sounds like it's telling you to do no good. In interview, Howlett has said the aim for TDiME was to oppose the current trend of formulaic dance music, and on that objective the album is a success: the songs so thrashing that even after a few listens no structure is immediately clear.

The best track on the album is Wild Frontier, which uses loopy sound effects to indulge in The Prodigy's still present interest in extra terrestrial life. All the familiar Prodigy indulgences are here: Howlett's repetitions of the title on Nasty bring to mind the late night scary man on the British streets that Howlett once perfectly encapsulated. TDiME is the band's weakest lyrical effort, although everything adds to the weird mood the band puts in place. TDiME isn't the best album by The Prodigy, and only a handful of tracks stick in the mind, but there's a confidence to this album in feeling like The Prodigy are happy making the sound of music they for a while sounded bored in making - like a respectable gentleman now through a mid life crisis and happily accepting of life. Only The Prodigy are neither respectable or gentlemanly and are all the better for it.

A Hard Day's Night (1964)

A big music act doing a movie meant a very different thing in 1964 than it does today. The first movies that come to most people's minds are those associated with The Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, The Spice Girls. I think we're all expecting at least one movie out of Justin Beiber, less so out of Arcade Fire. Which might just be a comment on the divide that now exists between fun, mainstream entertainment and critically acclaimed, "important" works of art that has grown since the days of The Beatles, when they could practically be the same thing. What I'm trying to say is: A Hard Day's Night wouldn't have seemed like a cheap cash in or something just for screaming fan girls. Movies had obviously been around a long time, but there was still a mystique to them - the glitz and glamour and the big American stars. No one was shooting hour long drunken videos on their phones on a Saturday night and using it as proof they were the next Scorsese. There is something really playful about The Beatles doing a film. It doesn't feel like people capitalizing on The Beatles success, it feels like people simply enjoying it. These four Liverpool lads had blown up: they were playing in night clubs, now they're making a movie!

The film opens with the four Beatles running through the streets while a crowd of fans chases them. They're trying to make it on a train in time, touring the country at the height of Beatlemania. There's no goal or journey that drives the film forward, instead we're allowed to see a brief snippet of life from the biggest band in the world. This could have easily been a concert film, or a documentary that just recorded what The Beatles were up to, but instead the story is part fiction. I don't imagine the details of backstage shows were hugely different from this, but all of the characters are exaggerated. Again, if a modern band like One Direction filmed a movie playing exaggerated versions of themselves I imagine they'd be accused of tricking people, of their performances only adding to the 'PR machine', but nothing about what The Beatles are doing seems malicious. I imagine the fab four found fantasy more appealing than reality. John fancied himself the mischievous joker, George reckoned himself the cool, smirking ladies man. Even Ringo gets to play out a 'being yourself' narrative straight out of a Hollywood fantasy. The Beatles music, especially the music they were playing when A Hard Day's Night was released, is all a fantasy: I've never seen the point in criticizing The Beatles' love songs as unrealistic, or too picturesque, when surely everyone wants things so perfect and serene. The film only adds to the warm aura that surrounds The Beatles.

This film really 'gets' The Beatles. They had an interest in women, surely enjoyed the interest their fame gave them, undeniably objectified women too, but there was a romance there that this film gets. The Beatles might have been sexy but they weren't dirty sexy like The Rolling Stones were. If you hooked up with a Beatle they might have taken you back to their hotel room, but after that they might have taken you on a romantic trip to take slow walks in the moonlight and written catchy songs about you too. This film gets that. It gets that they were very 'us against the world', they didn't want to play by the rules or listen to their managers, but that they were too playful to cause any real trouble. They had a comforting glow that surrounded them, like the best comedians, and A Hard Day's Night is such a care free film - in one scene the boys run around a wide open field together, they don't look like they know what they're doing, they are just doing it for the hell of it.

There was a few Beatles films, although none remembered as fondly as A Hard Day's Night. By the time of the other films, starting with Help, and especially with Yellow Submarine and The Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles weren't the same: they'd packed in touring and moved into the studio, and joined the psychedelic movement which dictated much of their image. These other films were more about what The Beatles were trying to share with everyone else: the drugs, the culture, the freedom and the success. A Hard Day's Night works because The Beatles aren't sharing anything but themselves.

Streaming, Buffering

I have the habit of working through The New Yorker website by opening each article I'd like to read in a new tab, until the tabs at the top of my screen don't have enough space to include any words - which I realized a long time ago I like doing a lot more than reading the actual articles. I guess you could blame this on The New Yorker, the over-expensive-fancy-restaurant-that-if-you'd-only-stop-being-such-a-snob-you'd-realize-tasted-like-piss-compared-to-McDonalds of the writing world, although this rule applies to nearly everything I do on the internet. My "bookmarks bar" works as a procrastination bar that now has over 300 pages saved. I'll be on a page I like, tell myself I need to focus on something else or that my brain is too tired right now for something new and add it to the list to view tomorrow. Which is bullshit, since whenever I do decide to make my way through my bookmarks I start from the top, which means the oldest links. By the time I get to most pages I'm confused why past me thought future (now present) me would be interested in this. How did I even get onto this? I even do this with porn - I probably spend more time masturbating to the main pages of porn sites as I line up tab after tab than I do jerking it to the actual videos. It's because there's just too much - a landfall of blogger posts and news articles and new links to look at, and god forbid I miss any of it. Which I do every second. Reading one article means ignoring the hundreds being posted during your reading, some of them probably better than the one you're reading, and more useful too, but you'll never know most of these pages exist. The internet is everything you don't know expanding second by second; standing in the middle of a rushing stream made out of gold coins and only able to catch what you can carry while the infinite wealth of the world passes you by, and still you don't swim to freedom.

Frank (2014)

We've all been living under the guise that Gonzo died when Hunter S Thompson did, or likely well before that, when actually it just migrated over to film, where no one seems to care what's real and what's not anymore. Take Frank: the title character inspired by the real life papier mache headed alter ego of comedian and singer Chris Sievey, who from 1984 til his death wore the head more often than not. One of the film's writers, Jon Ronson, toured with the real Frank, although the real man seems to be only an influence on the movie - other real life stories like Captain Beefheart's infamous recording sessions of Trout Mask Replica are mixed in, the story is updated to modern day, and things end up more dramatic and romantic than I imagine anything life would allow.

Domhnall Gleeson plays Jon, an amateur keyboardist who lucks out on landing a job in Frank's band. He packs up and moves with the band to a remote lodge in the countryside of Ireland while the band record their album - a claustrophobic recording session that goes way over schedule.  Jon doesn't fit easily into the band: like any musician who's only ever imagined himself on stage, he finds reality an anti-climax. Another bandmate, Don, hangs over Jon as a a reminder of what he doesn't want to end up as: a backup musician, his music never good enough to take the spotlight, forced to the background of his own life. Frank, more than anything, is about an artist who can't accept he sucks; everyone who's ever wanted the creative lifestyle knows the itch to be truly great at something, and the pain of not being good enough, of not being Frank. In one scene Jon says how he wishes he had had a troubled childhood - I know many won't understand this line, although anyone who's ever put up posters of Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix on their walls and knew what those walls now said about them will. It's easier to chalk other people's talent up to their tortured lives and troubles. Thing is, it's all a myth. Even with the head off, Frank has real talent, the talent that Jon longs for. Frank is as much a story of Jon accepting this as about the curiosity of watching a man who refuses to take his head off.

Michael Fassbender is great as Frank. It's one of the "in things" in acting right now to praise performances that impair the actor in some way. Like Tom Hardy's emotion hiding mask all through The Dark Knight Rises, or single person films like Locke and Buried. It's becoming a cliche to see people going crazy over performances because they were a challenge for the actor, regardless of whether they were good or not. Fassbender's Frank still doesn't feel like a gimmick though; his natural charisma comes through even from behind the papier mache, and he manages to suppress it to show a much darker human being when the mask comes off.

The premise alone made me think the filmmakers had found a quirk mine of a character and Frank would end up a film about a lovable weirdo, but the film arrives at a much darker place than that. The characters travel to America for a big gig and the film changes to something else, it becomes a film about all the things artists think about but wish they didn't. The line between selling out and becoming more "likable" as Frank puts it. If all music is for an audience or if, sometimes, it's for no one more than the people it's made by. If the torture of every "tortured artist" is really where the magic springs from, or if they're the rare lucky ones who've made it despite their problems. The film talks about these things, as all films can talk, in such simple terms. I wouldn't imagine everyone would understand the appeal of this film, the same way many people would consider wishing you had a troubled childhood a weird thing to do, and not a bad thought pattern you have to work your way out of. Frank is a film more for people who, at least at their lowest moments, could see the benefits of living inside a papier mache head.

The real Frank