What I Listened To This Week 2025-01-31
Is music helping right now?
No, seriously, is it? The good news is that we're already 8.33% done with this year. The bad news is that there’s 91.66% left to go, and 99.99% if you're on the lunar calendar. I want to believe the answer to the question in the subheading is yes. Is it yes? I think it’s yes. No, fuck that, the answer is always yes. We’re in the darkest timeline. Panic and anxiety feels like the desired result of a designed strategy. Turn the shit up.
The Newest and New-ish Joints
FKA twigs - Sticky
The liminal space between underground and mainstream, pop and avant-garde, terminally online and defiantly offline, is where most artists dream of being (even if they wont’ admit it). But also extremely difficult to remain there once one finds themself in it, the world wanting you to neatly fall somewhere, anywhere, instead of floating in ambiguity. There’s probably a political analogy there too but I’ll save that dive for another day.
FKA twigs has existed in that space, seemingly everywhere-adjacent, for longer than most who have ever made it there. Eusexua—her third studio album and first in five years—dropped last week and somehow still captured our attention in spite of totalitarianism-induced panic and ongoing out-migration from big social media. Or, perhaps because of it.
Ok, now I’m sounding like a music critic. I could draw connections between the textures and tempo and lyrics and glitchiness of the music with the current social climate but fuck all that. Just listen to it and see what I mean. This album sounds like right now.
MIKE - Pieces of a Dream
MIKE’s whole Showbiz! album just dropped today but I’ve had this song, released a couple months ago, in rotation throughout the fall-to-winter transition. It’s dope that he named this song after the song that his song sampled, which was named after the group that made the original song, which was produced by Grover Washington, Jr.
Ezale - Hang Wit Them
Ezale is Mac Dre’s spiritual successor.
I remember hearing this take around the time the DJ Mustard-produced “Too High” went sorta viral around 2016-2017. The song was dope and you couldn’t unsee/hear the obvious parallels (the flow, the beats, the MDMA). It felt too early to make such a declaration, though. Plus, Today’s Equivalent of (Insert Legend Here) debates are wack. I’m not from the Bay Area, though, so I sat out the conversation.
The more obvious uncontroversial take is that an entire generation of Bay Area rap collectively carried Mac Dre’s torch, and in many different directions. A spectrum that spans from P-Lo to Qing Qi to Seiji Oda to Larry June to G-Eazy and probably every other 21st century Bay Area rapper. But as Ezale has continued to add to his catalog, it’s become apparent that he, more than anyone over the last decade, pushes Dre’s trickster spirit in the direction it felt like it was going before his untimely death. “Hang Wit Them” off his latest album Town Taxes, which also includes last year’s “Do It All Night” makes it official for me.
KOOL A.D. - PROMETHEAN RHAPSODY
As soon as I saw the song title, I thought “why didn’t I think of that?” Then I listened to all 24 minutes and let it go. Felt like I was half hearing my own thoughts about 2024, half hearing an old friend give updates on what they been up to, half hearing a wise, weathered unc drop game on how to survive 2025. Yes, I realize that’s three halves but that’s the point. The math hasn’t been mathing for awhile, and this guy been knowing before all y’all.
