What I Listened To This Week 2025-02-07

I cooked my brain writing this and can't think of a good subheading

Feb 07, 2025

Why you trolling like a bitch? Ain’t you tired?

In the first week of the second month of this calamitous year, the Supervillains in the Capital, both of the elected and unelected variety, carried out a strategy of overwhelm to stunningly great effect. Even more than in the weeks before. A litany of flagrant fouls—too many to list—stirred out of a batched cocktail of grievance, impunity, hubris and pettiness. It’s a lot to bear witness to while remaining focused on everyday tasks. Even for an old head like me, who has seen dictators rise and fall in my lifetime, prefers reading news in long form, abhors social media hysteria, and still goes around saying things like “we were built for this.”

That cloud of anxiety, plus not having any radio shows or DJ gigs scheduled this week1, trying to duck being summonsed2 for jury duty, and getting distracted by a hundred hot Grammy takes all contributed to me barely doing the thing. The thing: being a DJ when not actually DJing. Preparing playlists, researching, listening to new releases, digging for obscure cuts, diving into music history, tapping in to music nerd communities, maybe even some crate digging, and, most of all, actually enjoying it.

This wasn’t a joyful week. So today’s edition of What I Listened To This Week is less about new music and old gems, more about what entered my orbit through happenstance and habit while I sidequested and doomscrolled. I returned to familiar, comforting records like Stevie Wonder’s Songs In the Key of Life. I organized my record collection and read liner notes. I listened to songs that friends sent in DMs and group chats, most of which were released before 2024. I even played Lo-fi Beats in the background while I worked, like a streaming-only normie.

The most current music-related thing on my radar isn’t a song or album, but the intrigue surrounding What Will Kendrick Do At The Super Bowl Halftime Show? with Supervillain Prime watching in person. Will he use this platform to make a political statement? Will he play it subversive but safe, like others have done previously? Or will he just do his songs, grab the bag, and move on? Watching yesterday’s Apple Music-sponsored interview with K.Dot, it seems like the third option is the most likely.

As we fast approach kickoff and the looming end of democracy, The Feed is filling with desperate pleas not unlike Princess Leia’s hologram-gram to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Someone posted in a group chat an appeal to bring YG onstage to rock “FDT,” followed by a shout that the letters also stand for “Fuck Drake, Too.” While this would make for great television, far more exciting than everything that’s ever happened in NFL history, one can’t help but wonder: how much pettiness can a single stadium hold? And what changes if this happens? If this is truly our only hope, we’re cooked.

A shoutout to the music community On This Platform

Salute to those writing about music from and for the under-represented and marginalized. Especially in this moment, where being from these communities means your being—your livelihood, your humanity, your existence—is under attack. And especially on this platform, which needs more of us. I’m especially thankful for the music writers on this platform who ensured my feed wasn’t entirely apocalyptic, making me feel like I was doing the thing without doing the thing.

Here’s a few I follow and enjoy:

The New and New-ish

Q Lazzarus - Heaven

This one is actually a carry-over from a couple weeks ago, which I’ve kept in rotation in anticipation for the documentary Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q. Lazzarus, dropping on February 22nd. This song is a previously unreleased, complete version of the Talking Heads cover sung in the film Philadelphia, directed by Jonathan Demme, who featured the late singer in his other films. It’s on the film’s soundtrack, along with many unreleased songs, which you can pre-order on Bandcamp.

(Also, today is a special Bandcamp Friday, where 100% of Bandcamp’s proceeds go towards Musicare to support those affected by last month’s greater Los Angeles wildfires).

Wiz Khalifa - Roll It Up Freestyle (JON REYES ZSHARE EDIT)

This also showed up in a group chat. Bro had me at “ZSHARE EDIT.” If you know, you know it’s an appropriately named remix because young Wiz Khalifa is definitely on the Mount Rushmore of Blog Rap. It was in that pre-streaming, mp3-link era when I initially crossed paths with Jon Reyes, founder of aforementioned group chat, producer of this remix, and one-half of a duo, DLRN, who had me guest rap on one of their songs, which got a little blog love back in the day.

Great to hear Wiz back in his primal mixtape form, when he was doing out in Pittsburgh what we were doing over here in Seattle (we did it first, he did it better). Ah, the days when rapping over contemporary Indie Rock and Electronic music samples was a New Thing, making the old heads mad and the mp3-loving kids dance.

Divide and Dissolve - Live on KEXP

This isn’t a shill. I’m sharing this recently-dropped Live on KEXP performance not because I work there, or because I’m a fan of Sounds of Survivance, co-hosted by Tory J., who hosts this live performance. I’m sharing it because playing it loud in surround sound while prepping dinner after a long day felt like a catharsis, a healing, a sonic snapshot of the present, and a reaction to it.

Not gon front, I wasn’t familiar with Divide and Dissolve, or much contemporary doom metal, before watching this. This might be my entry point. It’s foreboding, slow and heavy, alternating between soft, soothing and loud, abrasive. Imagine a collab between Andre 3000 (the flute playing version) and Alice in Chains (without vocals), and it somehow not being wack. Reading up on the band, they make it clear that one of the driving themes of their music is dismantling colonialism, genocide and white supremacy. Apropos af.

RIP Irv Gotti, who passed away this week at the age of 54. He wasn’t as well known for producing music as much as he was known for selling it, but the intro to Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s final album that he co-produced is classic. Interesting seeing a whole wave of internet rap heads only find out now that, in addition to being of Black American and Trinidadian descent, that he was part-Filipino.

A note on streaming platform playlists, plus a streaming platform playlist of last month’s songs

In the early days of this newsletter, I’ve shared songs and playlists from big streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal). Then I stopped, partly out of protest, partly to promote more artist-friendly alternatives such as Bandcamp (it’s Bandcamp Friday today, go), partly because I work in FM radio and these apps are the opps.

So what about all these YouTube links? YouTube videos get love here because 1. they pay more than other streaming services, 2. it’s the most widely used platform for listening to music worldwide, especially in so-called developing countries, and 3. there’s more music available there that isn’t available anywhere else.

All said, I’ve compiled a playlist of all the songs3 mentioned in this newsletter in January 2025, available begrudgingly on major streaming platforms 😢: