Welcome to my first monthly wrap-up!
This will be a regular series where, at the end of the month, I cast my memories across vast distances and attempt to recollect what the heck I watched, listened to, read, and otherwise absorbed into my mind this past month.
Let’s get started with my largest category, music.
Music for me this month was both a return and an expansion. I started really getting into music by listening to hip-hop, and while I love a lot of rap, it’s been underrepresented in my listening this year as I learn to appreciate other genres. But this month, in tandem with a lot of instrumental hip-hop creation, I dove back into rap. Specifically, I listened to a LOT of Experimental, Industrial, and Abstract Hip-Hop.
What got me started back on this journey was the release of JPEGMAFIA’s latest album, I Lay Down My Life For You.
Mini-Review: One of Peggy’s most consistent albums, has less songs that amaze me, but still a good release. 75/100
This was a point of inspiration for me that got me back into making beats on my computer, after which all I wanted to do was seek out more inspiration. So I took a dive into Peggy’s back catalogue, listening to albums like Veteran, Offline!, All My Heroes Are Cornballs, and SCARING THE HOES (my personal favorite, and the only one I had listened to all the way through before this).
JPEGMAFIA is a great artist, and remains consistently creative, even if I don’t love all his albums. Personally, I’m a fan of the more abrasive, absurd, and energetic cuts, so albums like All My Heroes Are Cornballs (and the back half of Veteran) fell kind of flat for me. Despite that, I return to certain songs all the time, and Peggy’s abilities as a producer and rapper and nearly unmatched at times.
Speaking of re-listening to favorites, Kanye West.
I really can’t bring myself to enjoy most of Kanye’s music anymore. If I’m with friends, or if someone else plays his songs, I’ll have a good time and be able to hold on to the good parts. But listening to his music on my own? Not for me, thanks, it doesn’t feel good to support him in any way right now, especially given that he’s dropped two of the worst albums I’ve heard this year.
However… Yeezus.
Also Kids See Ghosts, I like that album a lot. But Yeezus remains the only solo Kanye album I still love and want to listen to. And for a while, I really couldn’t figure out why that was. But I think I’ve got it now. Yeezus is the first time Kanye made something that didn’t immediately change the game and spawn a host of imitators (some of whom would go on to make better versions of albums like The College Dropout and Graduation). In fact, Yeezus never spawned any copies, at least not any that had mainstream success. And that’s not to say its incredibly experimental or anything. In fact, in terms of Industrial Hip-Hop music and Post-Industrial music generally, this is very accessible. And that’s the most unique thing about it. Kanye managed to take Industrial music, a famously experimental and hard-to-get-into genre, and give it pop appeal. The only artists that are even close to the same lane are Nine Inch Nails, clipping., and Death Grips (more about those last two later) and they are all taking very different approaches while reaching comparable levels of appeal.
So yeah, Yeezus is probably a 98 or 99/100 for me, I really do love it. It’s got to be one of the craziest rap albums from a mainstream artist, especially in terms of lyrical content. The stuff Kanye talks about here, and the way he talks about it especially, is filthy, dark, and disturbing at times. Yet it manages to never be too much (at least for me, I can understand why a lot of people don’t like this album though), because it’s just so damn well-produced. He oscillates between intense electronic beats that blare through your speakers like an alarm, and beautiful soul sample flips that feel transcendent at times. The beat switches in “On Sight” and “New Slaves”? The Nina Simone sample on “Blood On The Leaves”? And the contrast between “Bound 2” and the rest of the album? Amazing stuff. I really hate Kanye’s views and what he represents right now as an artist and celebrity figure, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to dislike this album.
That being said, if you’re going to listen to this one, pirate it. Ye doesn’t need any more of his fan’s money.
The last rap artist I’m going to shoutout here before moving on to other genres is the inimitable billy woods (yes that’s how his name is spelled, no capitals here). I listened to a lot of hip-hop that experiments in the production department this month, groups like Injury Reserve, clipping. and Death Grips. And those are all great, really experimental and inspirational to me as someone wanting to create a similar sound. But beyond being a music lover, I’m a lover of words. And there’s more than one way to push the boundaries when it comes to rap music.
billy woods might just be the best writer in hip-hop. That’s hard for me to say as someone who, for whatever reason, doesn’t actually listen that hard to lyrics. But let me tell you, billy woods makes me wish that wasn’t my default, because when I actually sit down and listen to what he’s saying, it’s some unbelievable stuff.
I’ll shout out one album here if you’re looking to get into his music, Aethiopes.
Mini-Review: A masterpiece of both political commentary and personal storytelling, incredibly well-written. 90/100
billy woods has the remarkable ability to mix the politically conscious, philosophical, and personal, all without making it obvious he’s doing any of these things. He’s a legitimately great poet, and he has the talent that few writers do, which is to present his readers/listeners with a whole suite of complex and often dark ideas, while never appearing to be favoring one message or conclusion. He lets his audience sift through his words and take what they will from them. This isn’t necessarily better than an artist like Kendrick Lamar presenting and arguing for a clear directive and path of action for the world, it’s just different and a bit rarer in my opinion.
Here are a few of my favorite billy woods lyrics, in no particular order.
Black car on a backstreet, little me asleep in the back seat
Lulled by streetlights and the blackness in-between
My parent’s argument picking up speed
In and out of bad dreams
- “Christine” by billy woods
Avocado tree hang over the property line
And I watch from as high as I can climb
The dog looks up and whines
The hills are alive with land mines
I live in my mind
Not sure what I’m looking for but I’ll know when I find
My mother sent the gardener to look for me
But the sky is a great place to hide
- “Asylum” by billy woods
Birds of paradise in the menagerie
A single death is a tragedy but eggs make omelets
Statistics, how he look at war casualties
Killing is one thing, what sticks is how casually
- “Soft Landing” by billy woods & Kenny Segal
Yeah, I like billy woods’ writing quite a bit.
And he’s definitely not for everyone, some of his production choices (looking at that LOUD saxophone during Asylum’s chorus) and his flows especially can be weird or off-putting. But when it all comes together, on songs like the aforementioned “Soft Landing” or the misleadingly named “Spongebob”, it really works. Maybe the fact that I love those songs so much is down to his collaboration with producer Kenny Segal on both of them? Who knows, those are definitely easier albums to get into (“Soft Landing” is off Maps, and “Spongebob” is off Hiding Places), but I think lyrically, Aethiopes is probably his best.
I’d say that’s probably enough hip-hop for now, so I’ll briefly touch on my other music pursuits this month, and then move on to books and movies.
The other most obvious direction I went with my music listening this month was pretty similar to Experimental and Industrial Hip-Hop. Just remove the hip-hop part!
I enjoy experimental music. I rarely love it or want to re-listen to it, but I often come away from a particularly weird or avant-garde album experience with at least an appreciation that someone took the time and effort to create something that strange. I think it’s interesting, and many of these albums open my eyes to the possibilities of what can be considered music and what art in general can sound like.
This month I listened to several Experimental and Industrial albums. While I didn’t finish 20 Jazz Funk Greats or any of the other few pure Industrial albums I started, I listened to several songs from each while I was looking for inspiration for Industrial Hip-Hop beat-making. I’ll probably do a deep dive on Throbbing Gristle soon, 20 Jazz Funk Greats was surprisingly approachable, but one band I’ll actually be coming back to a lot (and already have been), is Ground-Zero.
Ground-Zero falls more on the side of Noise Rock and Plunderphonics music, rather than Industrial-influenced Experimental. Their music incorporates a mix of free jazz and noise rock played by the band and samples brought in in production (that’s what Plunderphonics means, if you haven’t heard that particularly dumb and obscure genre name before, music that’s primarily made up of samples from other records). I listened to three Ground-Zero albums this month, each with varying levels of experimentation and varying degrees of replayability for me.
Revolutionary Pekinese Opera Ver. 1.28, the first of their records I listened to, is almost entirely samples, with a few songs including live jazz and rock playing alongside the samples of Chinese opera performances and… random yells and screams? Told you this was weird music. The whole album was definitely an interesting experience, and I really loved the incorporation of opera and classical aesthetics into the music and packaging. But I’m probably not coming back to this one that often.
Same goes for Consume Red, the second and definitely most experiment Ground-Zero release I experienced this month. And experienced is definitely the right word here, because this is really pushing the limits. This album is an hour long, and for about 80% of that runtime it is playing the exact same horn line. It is repetitive beyond the point of boredom and passing into the point of “wow, they really played this live and recorded it?” And it is interesting to be sure. There are a lot of other elements that build upon that bombastic, apocalyptic horn melody, and they’re all introduced slowly over the course of those first 40 or so minutes. But at a certain point, the endless horns start to fade, replaced by a wall of static and harsh noise. This is one of those albums that I am definitely glad I listened to, but I will probably never do so again.
The same cannot be said for the final Ground-Zero album I listened to this month, Plays Standards.
This album is something else entirely. It retains a lot of the elements of the other two, notably the all-consuming noise rock of Consume Red and the spastic sampling of Revolutionary Pekinese Opera. But instead of being a complicated, prog-like, multi-suite performance, this feels like one crazy band’s take on a bunch of songs. These are all technically covers of standards from around the world, but the places they are taken to make them completely unique. Ground-Zero combines wild samples with energetic jazz-rock jamming, drones, and orchestral atmospheres in more varied and unique ways than any other single album I’ve heard does. I’ve already listened to this multiple times since my first one, and every time my love for it only grows.
I’m listening to the album as I’m writing this, and I just had to delete the section where I gave it a 91/100 rating, run to update my RYM to five stars, and change my rating to 98/100. This is officially my newest five star record, and only the second one I’ve found this year. I can’t believe it, but it’s just undeniably awesome. The horns and guitar solo on “Die Pappel Vom Karlsplatz” put it over the edge.
Well, I think that’s as good an end to the music section as I could hope for. I honestly didn’t think I’d find a five star work this month, but I couldn’t be happier that I did.
Up next, movies and books!
Books were fairly lackluster for the most part this month, so I’ll start there.
I read five books in August:
House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J. Maas
The Dragon Republic by R.F. Kuang
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
The Burning God by R.F. Kuang
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
I also started a few books that I have yet to finish this month, but hopefully will by next month. Check in at the end of September to read my thoughts on:
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
Most of these are R.F. Kuang books, and I read them for my Mid-Week series. If you missed those, my thoughts on every R.F. Kuang book relased up until now (except for Babel, which I’ve already read and will probably be talking about in my year-end posts) are on this very same blog. Check them out! If you have read those, you’ll know that out of the four I read, Yellowface ended up being my favorite, very close to overtaking Babel as my favorite R.F. Kuang book. And overall, it was probably my favorite of the month.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is very close though, and interestingly similar. Both this book and Yellowface start from the core Thriller genre and expand upon it in very interesting and different ways. Piranesi, which I gave an 87/100, is a Thriller that starts out with you, the reader, knowing very little about what is going on (which is the perfect way to read the book, I highly recommend just reading it without knowing much going in, trust me it’s worth it). Yellowface on the other hand tells you basically everything that’s going to happen on the back, or if you don’t read plot summaries, you’ll pick up basically everything within the first few chapters. From that point on both these books are basically experimental character studies. I ended up liking Yellowface more (91/100 if we’re putting it to numbers) mostly because it has more to say about the world and I’ll definitely be thinking about it more. Than being said, Piranesi was a more emotionally interesting experience, so who’s to say? My opinions may change, but for now I’ll have to put down Yellowface as the best book I read this month.
As always, if you want to check my ratings for all of the books, movies, and music I consume, the links to my various rating sites are in my Substack bio.
Speaking of movies, let’s talk cinema for a bit.
This section will be similarly brief. I also watched five movies this month, although two of them were rewatches.
The three that were new to me were
Scream (1996), dir. by Wes Craven
Chunking Express (1994) dir. by Wong Kar Wei
The Tender Bar (2021) dir. by George Clooney
And the two I had the pleasure of rewatching were
Collateral (2004) dir. by Michael Mann
The Departed (2006) dir. by Martin Scorsese
I’ll start with the rewatches, which I’m including because I haven’t seen them in several years, long before I started rating and reviewing movies, and I’d like to get my opinions out there now that my experience with them is fresh.
Also, they’re both some of my all-time favorites.
Mini-Review: Pure action bliss, with some excellent performances from Cruise and Foxx. Comfort watch. 97/100
Collateral is in contention for my favorite pure action movie of all time. I know it’s not perfect, but damn if I don’t love it every time I see it. Plus it came out the year I was born, I really have just decided to love this movie and won’t be swayed from that opinion.
Fortunately, there’s a lot to love in my opinion, and this latest viewing, I believe my second or third ever, confirmed that. First of all, one of Tom Cruise’s few roles as a villain, and man does he knock it out of the park. Cruise seems like a weird guy in real life, but it’s hard to deny that he’s one of the best modern action stars, and a legitimately great dramatic actor beyond that. This is probably his best role, out of the movies I’ve seen at least, and that’s equally down to his performance and the writing. The character of Vincent is evil in such a banal, office-worker way. He has the philosophy, the collected grit, the physical skills, and the smooth cadence of a true sociopath. I absolutely love watching him, he makes the movie for sure.
That’s not to say the rest is lacking. Jamie Foxx’s performance is great in a different way, and while his character arc is a bit prototypical action hero, because he’s Jamie Foxx he sells it in a way that makes even the most cynical viewer root for him just a bit. This really is a story about a guy who’s stuck in one place learning to move on and take charge of his life, and that’ll never be a negative for me. The movie is also great from a technical perspective, Mann’s directing, James Newton Howard’s score, and the cinematography by Paul Cameron and Dion Beebe are all fantastic. This is just a perfect little action movie, my ideal comfort watch. I don’t think this will ever drop out of my top films, and even if it won’t be my absolute favorite it’ll always have a special place in my heart.
The same goes for The Departed, although for very different reasons. I won’t say as much here, this film is rightfully praised all the time and there’s plenty of full reviews out there for those interested. I’ll just say, in terms of acting, writing, and plot structure, there are few crime dramas out there that hit as hard as this one did. The buildup to the end of this movie is unlike anything else, and it’s in contention for the best film of one of the greatest directors of all time. As overdone of a take as it may be, I can’t help but give The Departed a score of 100/100.
Moving on to my new watches, I’d definitely have to recommend Chunking Express.
This is an odd little romance movie that isn’t really about much. It follows two police officers, both of whom have recently been broken up with, finding new love in Hong Kong. The only connection between the two stories is a single diner, and the entire movie is told in a pretty abstract way. It can be hard to tell if what is on the screen is supposed to be real or something like a dream, and honestly, I love that. It probably won’t work for everyone, but this movie has such a nice vibe that I think everyone should at least try watching it. Some great perfomances, and the directing and cinematography are good all around, but the best part is the writing and the way scenes are structured, as well as the odd dialogue and the overall surreal vibes. Definitely a good one, 92/100 for me.
Scream is all time classic horror movie, glad I watched it but it didn’t do a whole lot for me. Very well-made and influential though. 80/100
Finally, The Tender Bar. This was also pretty well made from a technical perspective, but the story fell a bit flat for me once it ended and I realized that was all that was going to happen. I honestly like that it was such a strange, abrupt ending, but I get the feeling that that happened because the source material was just a relatively tame and uninteresting memoir, and not because the creative team behind the movie were trying to do something interesting. Overall not that bad, but not one that I’m going back to. An even 50/100 for me, purely average.
Okay! That’s it for me for this month! I’ll be back next Wednesday with the first entry in my September Mid-Week Series! I’ll give you a hint: one part will heavily involve one of the music genres I mentioned earlier in this post.
Okay, as always, thanks so much for reading! If you enjoyed, consider sharing this, subscribing, or even pledging your support! Everything helps, and I appreciate anything you can do to help make my dream of writing for a career a reality! Until next time, take care of yourself and read/watch/listen to/do a backflip over something interesting!