Apocalyptic prophesies

i'm not really... like a music journalist actually. not that anyone was saying i was. i think this is the child playing in their dads truck (like i used to do in my dads) version of music journalism. i am uninterested in a lot of ways in making a point here. having a point means you could have a wrong point. it means assuming a certain weight of moral vision. of having the right framework. i have been dubious of frame works lately. in part brought about by a certain quietism. and the feeling that so much is grasping at straws. i am probably just angry. anger has been the shadow force in me for a while. and i just never knew. angry at myself. angry at feeling useless and out of step and boiling in my own ignorance. so who am i to say anything about anyone. to make a point. but i still like to write. and i still love billy wood's music. so why not say just anything. no points. no trying in anything else other than to illuminate an artist whose work has changed my life. i have a laptop and a feeling.

woods is a rapper from new york by way of d.c and zimbabwe. he got his start in the new york underground with the likes of rap legends vordul mega and others (frankly that's my one example sorry, he's had a long career in underground rap). I came to him around the time of his 2018 album hiding places, produced by the equally amazing kenny segal. it helped propel me through a philosophy paper i was working on (an addendum to a previous paper on hegelian recognition theory and the relationship between cis and trans people). without that record i probably wouldn't have finished the danm thing, let alone had so much fun.

wait, lets talk about frameworks for a second. i like a particular kind of rap, and this isn't to be all 'well he's not like the other rappers' about it. that's racist bullshit that white geek rap fans have been pulling forever and just reasserts the exceptional negro troupe. so stop it. anyhow i digress and also say that woods is like other rappers, he raps. rap is a lineage, an artistic tradition. again, digressing. what i mean is my idea of what fun is my own distinct version of what fun is. woods is what i think of when i think of fun hip hop. i like dark and sad music truly and he is dark and sad hip hop. i get a genuine thrill when i hear him rap 'grew up around where dogs was racist/ fathers pulled firing pins out of guns gave 'em to us to play with'. that shit kills. like hot damn. he raps like a house fire, not just in image but in feeling. he raps like a burning police precinct. a flickering intensity that lets you know these are only the tips of some particularly nasty icebergs. settle in. get ready. cuz we ain't stopping just yet. we've got a lot of very corrupt and vile systems to get rid of. rodney carmichael, npr staff writer on hip hop, in 2019 said woods was the 'poet laureate of our afro-dystopia.' the most concise and effective explanation for what woods does and why its amazing.

the density and command with which woods rhyme is what i think earns him the laureate title. he orates these fragments and snippets he masterfully strings together into his own kind of punchline structure (his line "shorty can't eat no book, what i told ta-nehesi coats" is just one of the most fantastic things i've ever heard. take that award winning and generally beloved cultural critic mr coats)... like i said i don't have or want a point... i just have a lap top and a feeling and i could just start quoting lyrics and going 'see he's a genius' but that would get very very boring. so i'll say, he's a more abstract wu tang to me. he isn't rapping about trans people getting killed or abut how uncomfortable it is to live the fallacy of social gender all the goddamn time. but in the terror and the novelty of life which he raps about, i do find a sense of comfort and a sense of cinematic entertainer, much the way i do with wu-tang clan lyrics, hearing this man rap about the violent and apathetic characters which inhabit his songs. plus he wrote one of the greatest songs ever written; red dust.

shout out to my future neck tattoo.

and i got out without making a point.

Review: The new Chodus Album

recently my buddy Lauren put out a new album. It's no secret I love his music and his band Chodus. I've written about them before. I made a Facebook post about how much I loved the new album A Clown Who Lost the Circus. And boy did I love it. In that post I said that if I wished I could write a review for a publication of the new album. And then I remembered that I have this blog, so here it goes.
There's a magic to what Lauren does that I can't talk about enough. He's the hero in music we all wish we had growing up, or at least I do, and to the extent that I am still growing up, I am glad he's around. He does what he does. No apologies and no back steps. I always appreciate someone who wears their heart on their sleeve and isn't afraid to dress down and yell about it. The thing with Lauren, and the other players in Chodus (Jake and Jason), they aren't just raw and effective. they are good. the songs take dips and dives. His guitar playing is mesmerizing. He painted the tracks on this one with ambiance. reversed wooshings and synthy wiggles. He plays with electronics and drum machines like I haven't heard from him before. The first track, an album highlight for sure, "Salenthropus Tchadelehensis" opens with strange vacuous sounds and rolls into a woozy spread of modulated and reversed guitars. its a divine opening track. no lie, divine. these songs are heart openers. they split you open, let all this light come in. His songs are like old friends that know where you keep the spare key. they just come in. the guitar solos don't hurt either.
I have some deep associations with this music, with Lauren's music. Perhaps a journalist would call them biases. Me and Lauren both come from New Hampshire. Similar towns at that. His music always reminds me of New Hampshire, feels like almost it couldn't have been made outside of our state. I don't have a handle completely on this idea, though I have been contemplating what New Hampshire music could mean. If there's a starting point I am pretty sure it's Chodus. its weirdo woods music. the sound of hills and trees and not having journalists and A and R's lurking around and being extremely creative and young and having to build it all yourself. I am sure there's more too it, and that describes a lot of places without intense 'industry infrastructure'. This record reminds me of home. and it reminds me of my dad. 
Do I like every song on this record, probably not. though the more I listen, the more I find a value in all of them. "I Do Not", a song about a secret underwater Nazi base, indulges in a humor that isn't so much my cup of tea. Secret Shopper is a ragged garage freak-out follow up to the serene opener, a sequencing decision that was not my favorite. it's all still radical. for whatever detraction or critique I could levy here, the good songs are so good that nothing else really matters. the sonics, the song craft, the places he goes where he had not gone before. Too fucking good.
Now a lot of these projects are the brainchild of Lauren cooking these records up in his basement, recording and producing them himself. So it is hard to avoid putting him under the spotlight... to a certain extent I don't want to avoid that. Clown certainly didn't sound much like the proper Chodus studio album that came before it, or the Lauren centered basement album before that Happs B. 
In a lot of ways it sounds like a fusion of both. On Clown Lauren manages to get a robust and full sound out of his basement studio, much like Dark Web, so not only are the songs good, this is a beautiful sounding record, those ambient and experimental flourishes mixed in beautifully with the guitars and percussion. And hey if there are rough edges, its all part of the experience. Throughout the Chodus catalog they often rerecord older songs. It creates a wonderful fossil record of where the project is at creatively. If you've listened to a Chodus project before you'll be familiar with this one. You'll already know how great this is.