#357

Factually Musical 2023 is slated to end today. This has been excellent, for me anyway. It's what I wanted and didn't get from Album Week 2019, and it's what I was pursuing with all subsequent installments of Album Week, but could only grasp fleetingly.

Maybe it didn't make a ton of difference to you, dear reader, and maybe it did, but writing, though ostensibly much more about symbols and ideas than music is reckoned to be, is really identically all about feelings, because feelings are after all the only really real thing in this embodied existence we are consigned to. Factually Musical 2023 has felt incredible to generate. I hope that comes through. Tempted, and sorely, to kick off the nascent year with Factually Musical 2024, because I have a ton more ideas I didn't get to discuss and maybe I don't want them to have to wait very long.

It's Christmas Eve. Didn't plan this at the outset because I have been extremely unstuck in time, extremely chronoaberrant, but I realized what had happened and of course today's post will center on Christmas music.

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A subject with some trauma around it! How many people do you think made it as far as this sentence? Let's acknowledge this: way more people spent their larval stages listening to Christmas music than are willing to tolerate even the concept of it as fully developed insects.

You can blame the fall of man, the decay of any given church/society, the gay agendas and the wars on Christmas if you want, but I blame retail environments. I also blame the Coca-Cola company and Sears and Roebuck back in the day ands a whole other slew of commercial shit plus ecosocioreligious and legal shit, none of which is the point: let's stay with retail environments and the pathetic disgusting fucking crack of an asshole Christmas music they dump into our ears like sun-warmed chumcum*.

Oh! And the Santa Lie. I'm not going to be gentle: you gotta be a fucking moron to continue to propagate that shit. The Santa lie is responisble for everything the tellers of the lie find abhorrent in the post-reveal behavior of their progeny and of the direction this nation of liars has taken (the logical consequence of fucking telling yourself and your children lies upon lies upon lies, all the fucking god damn time. Merry Fucking Christmas).

The so-called cooperative I used to work at didn't play any holiday music at all. Same shit all year. No offense to anyone, ever, no matter what. Customers would complain aggressively if a neophyte put Chrismas music on the system. It was that kind of place, in that kind of town.

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Sinatra and Crosby are bearable, also that guy that inspired Dino Spumoni in Hey Arnold!. I don't love their Christmas music any more than I love when a contemporary music star puts out something forgettable and mercenary for the post-holiday paycheck, but the old crooners don't get played as much in your average store or market, is why when my mom wants to put those CD's on, I don't pitch a fit or anything. Honestly though the arrangements are not very inspiring and it's not exactly like the dudes are being their most authentic selves out here with these empty-minded, watered-down little covers and children's songs. A whole generation disagrees, you say? They ate and breathed a lot of fucking lead coming up, I reply. I may have plastic all throughout my body and even my cells, but at least I'm not medically brain-damaged and only treated as normal because my entire cohort is too.

Just kidding! Every living thing has trace lead too. Mercury, other heavy metals. Down beneath the plastic, holding hands with PFAS in the bloodstream and the folds of the brain. Party down, fuckers! We're the poisoned billions! We might be beyond help! Woooooooo!

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Ok, time to skew positive. Well, my highly subjective version of positive. At any rate that's quite enough vitriol, thank you. 

John Denver and The Muppets made a Christmas record which is the first CD I remember putting in myself and which is the first music I remember dancing all-out to and crying a little about. It's a big deal to me, maybe I've mentioned it before. The Christmas music Sufjan Stevens puts out has been much more important and vital to me than any of his other music. From actual arrangements of  Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" to all kinds of arrangements for all kinds of versions of The Nutcracker and The Mouse King, those are definitely some kind of Christmas music. Music made for adaptations off Dr. Seuss's How The Grinch Stole Christmas, including the--to my mind--critically underrated and misunderstood Ron Howard version, definitely Christmas. The jazz continuum offers a lot of great options besides that, including--I'll allow it, I have to admit I've gotten down to it--Harry Conick Jr.  

On that note, deserving its own paragraph, The Peanuts Christmas Special may be the most genius Christmas music ever made, one of the best Christmas things ever as a whole.

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Something that seems like quite the opposite of that but, you know, music is music and it's all kind of the same no matter how different it seems. 

M. Loer is a name and a place and it is definitely not Christmas music, but it's something else, somethings ranging from two-hour sound collages exhibiting the vastness of an empty atmosphere being filled slowly with the birth shrieks of an unthinkable pandemonium or short experiments largely consisting of overloading circuitry just enough to destroy the reality of the sound recording and substitute a new and substantially less predictable one. 

Len and I did indeed get together and record more sounds, very different than anything on the channel but we will see how it sounds once he's done tinkering with it and if he decides to post any of it. On some of the slightly older videos, I am featured as Ahrimanic Cathedral. It's the best name I could come up with in the middle of thinking about a bunch of other stuff. 

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The full library of Christmas songs, if such a thing were realized, would contain, I think, among the most beautiful compositions and performances of music through the course of history. Sacred music of any description contains within in a mote of the sublime, no matter how bastardized or mangled. You know, even that shit I hate so badly that they pump over the radio like with a grown woman singing like a five-year old some lyrics about putting Santa's cock in her chimney or whatever, if they bring people the feelings of Christmas that they need, then I accept them. I let it go. Is Frozen Christmas music? If you need it to be. 

Sanctity is just like that. May you have, despite all these bastards and all this mangling, a Merry Christmas, and may the new year see our feasting and bring itself around.

The long night is behind us, and new life ahead. 

--JL

*chumcum is chum, which is basically whatever solid waste you are able to dump into a bucket once you've finished swabbing the deck of fishing boat plus raiding the kitchen trash cans for anything compostable, with human seminal emissions mixed in. It's a lot more appetizing than the Christmas songs you're likely to hear in the average shopping environment from the first of november to about sometime in February.

#352

The final installment, as it were, of the current generation of the main Pokémon games has dropped and it has hit me like a bullet that shatters into a hundred perfect rainbow love letters. Each time I have loaded up and played each iteration--the initial drop, the first additional chapter, and now this closer which I am hours and hours into exploring and revealed thereby that it will take hundreds more, that they could stop here and I could play with what we have on the switch for the rest of my life. They won't, and I'll keep going with them into the unlimited potential futures of the Pokémon World--in which we all live, praise be and God bless. 

Surely internet seethes with hatred for everything I love and appreciate about it, but culture war internet is a pimple, where our most putrid selves go to coalesce and collapse together into an ocean of stinking pus. Once you're done with internet thinking--with cultural hatred--you are back in the bloodstream, baby, and can love what you please waging peace like a gangster.

If only I could aid the world, and make that process faster. All one can say is no snobs no masters.

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Look, I'll say it. I'm not gonna push around some false humility like an extra dick. I am fucking inordinately proud about that rhyme and scansion. Again, I'll say it myself: that was a mic drop. 

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But I wouldn't drop a microphone really because that is not good for the equipment. Maybe if it was already crapping out pretty bad I could drop it as like a farewell. That would take some planning, and could never be as cool playing out as in my head, where it's already not very cool.

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2023 is almost over. The year ran at speed, it seems to me. This probably due to the true aging process taking hold of my system, my brain changing tempo, as it were, as my body undergoes its first "weakening" puberty. None of that is the point--do I even mean it? What the fuck. Never mind, speed on--Album Week this year will undergo what might be called a restructuring, in company terms, or reboot, in continuity terms. That's maybe what is called "inside baseball"? I like basketball, and Plato, if we're playing with spheres. There's no company. Not the kind with meetings and tiers and hierarchies would confabulate to create what is compressed into the term "inside baseball". 

Digression over. Welcome to Factually Musical, brought to you by Factually Pointless. This year, the next week's posts--today being Monday, running through Sunday--will appear, if they appear, in the form of paragraphs, perhaps making use of lists or figures, concerning various musical concepts, ragging and raging and even ranging from whatever the fuck I feel like to whatever the fuck ends up happening, period. How do you like that, motherfucker? Do you fucking...do you love it? Good. That is a huge relief. I didn't prepare very well and I was a little nervous. 

Onwards.

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Because I am talking to more people a bit more regularly than since 2017, music is sometimes discussed. I guess music is like a part of life or something. Replete with emotional connections? Ringing any fucking bells? This is going to be about music. Music is about feelings.

Thing about feelings is that they arise, and exist well before any reasoning process can be applied, even if the arousal is rooted in layers and layers of reasoning process and lived experience. Indeed, this deeper rooting may even intensify and further remove the feeling from reason or the ability to interact with reason, because by the time our brains are even partially developed, most of us think in language so quickly that arousal and the resultant idea/reaction are perceived as simultaneous. This is something we need to try to remember when we think we've personally evolved beyond our emotions and have achieved command control. Please be convinced, without my further elaboration, that this is the mindset which leads to the most fabulously irrational behaviors that humans perpetrate. 

All this is by way of saying that one is never exempt from dealing with one's feelings, and one's feelings simply are what they are and not something to blame oneself for. Processes are processes. You may as well be angry with bedrock for having the percentage of silicates that it does, rather than some optimal figure you pulled out of your ass. Therefore, looking at what a computer program tells you is your most listened-to music and sharing it because someone shared their own computer-program-generated tallies for hours dedicated to particular music will generate feelings, before during, and after, and feelings lead to thoughts. As previously discussed. 

Let me, now that all is preambled to my satisfaction, tell you about some of those thoughts and feelings.

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The relationship between data and the interpretation of what music is and how it behaves is ancient and fraught. Now we live in the time of Big Data, so we have a lot of grist to chew up in our little mills when it comes to, say, which rapper has the highest word count vs. vocabulary vs. repetition vs. various matrices of the preceding categories and as many as we can think of in addition. Ah, but who has done more with less? And who has turned less into significantly more than even that? And who defied convention in such a way as to skewer this math a third way? What escaped through the holes in the net? What lies deeper than these questions, these numbers, these ciphers?

It doesn't really matter and I don't really care, unless I care more that anything--depends on the question--but the actual thing about the questions is that they change how I feel about things and how I feel as I hunt for the answers and decide how I feel about what I'm able to find--a modifier on my lived experience, on my interpretative and emotional journey through existence. As importantly, I notice things, and that leads me to make connections with the data I have happened to access (which must be taken with a grain of salt in any case), and connections we make ourselves are key emotional warp, weft, and weave. 

That so much quantitative data and mathematical backbone be available, be elemental to something that every organism does and must experience in their own completely unique way--breathtaking! Terrifying? A hilarious joke? I always favor the latter, as you know, but we've only been crawling around the tip of this iceberg, and depths alway carry their risks, may contain subliminal horrors, always more tenebrous and unfamiliar than our beloved surfaces.

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Yet to attain heights, we must suffer depths. Indeed, we must command both, if we are to advance. 

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Basically, I felt ruffled that an industrial focus on what we most consume by volume must by its nature undermine the value--at last as perceived and reflected in the sense of the general antechamber of shared culture--because it obscures range. Because ape brain says numbers go higher are better, people with highest numbers are best. Oh, to be the Swiftie with the most hours of Taylor Swift listened to on this planet! POWER SO GREAT THE SIDEWALK SHATTERS IN A LINE TEN FEET BENEATH WHERE THEY FLOAT, WREATHED IN LUMINOUS ENERGIES THAT BLIND THE UNWORTHY!

In reality such a thing is only meaningful if you know the story and depending on how it makes you feel. In reality, an untold fuckton of bots and scripts and sockpuppets listened to 8760 hours of each of Taylor Swift's songs, maybe a few hardcases did something more linear manually, maybe one in a billion needed her in the ear all year no surcease no pause and is the one authentic claim to the figure and then the hundreds of millions of stories beyond, but none of it matters. I mean it's a fucking footnote to a blip, and matters the same amount--to me, precious, en masse and in total, precious, even if I hate the particular details I've chosen to discuss. To others, not. To some, also precious, but their feelings and their emotions will lead them in the direction of different performances, emotions, expressions, ideas, states of mind, further explorations and calculations. Concepts, interpretations, moments, communions, transcendences, all molecules on a great, trackless, unsoundable ocean on which we pass like ships in the night, and we signal one another, oh, we play music, we send up signal flares, we declare, we care, we share.

And so on.

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Once again, back in reality, probably no one in ten million thinks about that list and its implications for more than a few minutes and certainly most would wish to tell me that I am overthinking, overcarrying, overstretching, and overinterpreting the affair to a degree which strains credulity. 

That is because I have a lot of feelings on the subject, which get away from me as I write although I am so aware of them that I spent all this effort telling you about it, dear reader, in the preamble, as an effort to remind myself, which has been a resounding failure--unless it was my plan all along to demonstrate what I believe is truly beautiful and meaningful about music, about love, about art, about life; which is to be carried away, which is to get ahead of oneself and fall into the sublime.

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FACTUALLY MUSICAL

2023

HAS BEGUN

--JL

#195

It occurs to me that I have never imagined a dragon when the band Imagine Dragons comes up in my life. I'm not imagining a dragon now, either. Their whole deal does not work on me, which is interesting, as I am prone to imagining dragons without any impetus at all. From the ages of seven to fourteen, I drew dragons practically all the time. I had entire art pads filled with dragons. 

Can't draw a dragon very well, no. They were all bad, but I did at least imagine them.

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Maybe I'll draw a crappy dragon when I finish this post. Use that fancy brush pen I bought on a feverishly desirous whim and have only set to paper a single time.

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Some days your body feels fine and your head checks out okay but your spirit's a little off the center, your heart maybe not quite right. It's not bad, not a sickness, not an affliction like despair or thirst for punishment, but a fragility. The sensitivities are heightened, your feelings glassier, easier for you to see through but prone to cracking. Ever run a finger over cracked glass the wrong way? One learns what it is to bleed freely, if one didn't already.

Usually there are little solaces throughout the day. This is lucky. 

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Taking in and working out poison takes a certain toll on the system. This is as true for the spirit as it is for the flesh.

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Alright. Gonna go sit outside for June's last sunset. It's been quite a month. Really one for the books in a lot of ways. A month of extremes; frustrations and blessings, blaze and deluge, halcyon days and severe tests, compassing failure and success, loving and longing, and exertion and release. Also I saw a lot of birds. Even saw an oriole, not super common to peep round here. 

Hope your June was also worth comment. Let's see what July has for us.


--JL