Tag / Donald Trump

by sweensryche

The Song of the Election: “Grandma’s Hands”

On October 8, a week after being hospitalized with COVID-19, Donald Trump released a two-minute video on Twitter directed to his “favorite people in the world,” the senior citizens of America. And while the obvious goal of the piece was to shore up his poll numbers – on the same day, Politico ran a piece with the headline “Why Senior Citizens Are Flipping On Trump” – even that purely selfish motivation could not compel our president to express any remorse whatsoever for the nearly 170,000 Americans over 65 who have been killed by this virus.

But as we’ve learned over the last four years, abject cruelty and the refusal to admit fault are the default state of this administration. The reason this video stands out to me is the moment at the beginning, where Trump tells his favorite people that he’s ashamed to be one of them:

“I’m a senior. I know you don’t know that. Nobody knows that. Maybe you don’t have to tell ’em, but I’m a senior.”

Presidents are supposed to at least pretend to care about their most vulnerable populations, because to do otherwise would offend a loyal voting bloc and make you look like a deranged asshole. Why on earth couldn’t this 74-year-old lie factory express pride in being a senior citizen, even if he doesn’t mean it? The answer to that question cuts to the core of why Donald Trump is extremely unfit to lead our country, and absolutely cannot be re-elected on Tuesday.

He hates vulnerable people.

In 1971, the R&B singer/songwriter Bill Withers released a hauntingly beautiful acoustic-blues ballad about how much he loved a vulnerable person – his maternal grandmother, Lula Galloway, who died when Withers was 15. Like Trump’s video, “Grandma’s Hands” clocks in at just over two minutes. It’s the loving, heartbreaking, empathetic antidote to his obscene narcissism.

Over a mournful, minor-key riff, Withers starts the song with a reassuring, now-iconic hum. The sweetness of his voice is an immediate comfort, a signal that we’re about to be smiling through our tears. Then the artist starts singing about how his grandma looked out for him. His lyrics, which often quote Galloway, are direct, honest, and effective – perhaps a stylistic homage to the way she treated others:

Grandma’s hands
Used to issue out a warning
She’d say, ‘Billy don’t you run so fast
Might fall on a piece of glass
Might be snakes there in that grass‘

In the second verse, Withers points out his grandmother’s physical vulnerability, but as a way to provide further evidence of her strength – her painful arthritis can’t stop her from offering solace to a woman who was likely being shunned by others:

Grandma’s hands
Soothed a local unwed mother
Grandma’s hands
Used to ache sometimes and swell

The song’s simple blues arrangement continues, steady and slow, for the entire track – three verses, no chorus, no bridge. Even the studio ringers brought in by producer Booker T. Jones cede the spotlight. Stephen Stills’s lead guitar runs are quiet and gentle. Drummer Jim Keltner plays a basic 4/4 beat. All so we can truly feel the warmth and gratitude in Withers’s voice, as he passes down memories like the elder he’s memorializing.

On the final verse, we understand just how much Galloway protected her grandson – and not just from hypothetical snakes:

She’d say, ‘Mattie don’t you whip that boy
What you want to spank him for?
He didn’t drop no apple core,’
But I don’t have Grandma anymore

On March 30 of this year, Withers passed away at 81, from non-COVID-related heart complications. Weeks into the pandemic’s terrifying, disorienting first wave, everyone was listening to him again, finding solace in his lyrical sensitivity and deep, burnished tenor. So many of his hit songs were about love and compassion and the beauty of being together, from the blissful “Lovely Day” to the gut-wrenching “Ain’t No Sunshine” and the profoundly supportive “Lean On Me.” He wrote “Grandma’s Hands” before all of those classics, showing the world how he learned to love before teaching us.

What if Lula Galloway had contracted a horrible virus and died before her time? What impact would that have had on her grandson who loved and needed her? Would he have been inspired to write these songs that, even today, make me feel like everything’s going to be okay? Or would that legacy of love have been ripped from us?

Every time a senior dies unnecessarily from this unchecked pandemic, we are losing so much more than their physical presence. We’re losing the knowledge they have to impart, the love they have to give, the lessons they have to teach. These are precious natural resources that help our younger generations grow into well-rounded, kind-hearted adults who know what true strength really looks like – someone who uses their hands not to grab whatever they want, but to protect the people they love.

So if you haven’t voted already, please vote for Joe Biden on Tuesday. He’s an (admitted) senior citizen who understands grief. Who will tell our nation every day that wearing a mask is an act of strength. Who will work to protect the vulnerable populations of this country, and teach our children to respect them.

Until I read the headline that announces his victory, I know what I’ll be listening to.

R.I.P. Bill and Lula.

by sweensryche

The Top 20 Albums of 2016

You don’t need to read another rundown of all the things that made 2016 the absolute worst. We know what happened. So let’s seal ourselves off in a pop culture vacuum and focus on what an incredible year this was for music. I think it’s the best since 2000 – the year of Stankonia, Kid A and a Democrat somehow not becoming president even though more people voted for him. Oh shit. Sorry about that. Calm blue ocean, people. Just read on.

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20. Black Mountain – IV

If you thought rock bands were done generating fresh sounds from old ingredients, here’s some cause for optimism. This Vancouver quintet is certainly a student of 1970s and ’80s rock tropes, but the elements they fuse together on IV felt distinct in 2016. Sabbathy pentatonics make way for undulating synth patches cribbed from Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” The melodies are imbued with the downcast posture and shattered beauty of Pornography-era Cure, but sung with the lithe dual-vocalist force of peak Fleetwood Mac. When these considerable influences melt together in the telling of an epic alien invasion or a graveside love affair, you have something that can only be described as Black Mountain.

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19. Leonard Cohen – You Want It Darker

“It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there,” sang Bob Dylan in the late 1990s, while in the midst of a heart-related health scare. Gone was the artist’s typical literary remove, leaving behind an authentic beauty that he’s rarely matched. A similar sense of clear-eyed acceptance is present on what we now know as Leonard Cohen’s final LP. Released a few weeks before his death, You Want It Darker is a spare, haunting treatise on the pitfalls of faith, with the artist staring eternity in the eye and giving it a knowing wink over soft beds of synths and the occasional choir. It’s familiar territory for the writer of “Story of Isaac” and “Waiting for the Miracle” and “Hallelujah” – one last crack at the god that never wrote him back. He may not have won the war, but this final battle is all his.

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18. Angel Olsen – My Woman

Angel Olsen’s third album is a plugged-in collection of rough-hewn folk songs that are resigned to love’s failure. “Heartache ends, and begins again,” she sings. But in this resignation, she finds freedom. My Woman is an ecosystem of love and pain, the evaporation of the former resulting in the thunderstorms of the latter. After the crackling chemistry of “Shut Up Kiss Me,” “Not Gonna Kill Me” captures that frightening moment when you realize loving someone gives them the power to hurt you. Then, in a torrential catharsis, “Woman” unleashes that hurt, clearing the way for the cycle to begin again. Like Roger Sterling once said, “The day you sign a client is the day you start losing them.” By admitting defeat from the beginning, you’re free to just enjoy the ride.

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17. Danny Brown – Atrocity Exhibition

With a guest verse on one of the year’s most irresistible dance songs and a weekly slot performing the theme song to ABC’s family sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, Danny Brown seemed on a path to being one of the cuddlier MCs of 2016. Then Atrocity Exhibition came out, and we were reminded he was fire incarnate. Inspired by a Joy Division song that was inspired by a J.G. Ballard novel set in an insane asylum, Brown’s fourth album is unrelentingly bleak, a musty hotel room with blankets on the windows and powder residue on the cable guide laminate. Fans of his club-friendly fare won’t find any refuge in the lyric sheet. But they don’t have to. Brown’s acrobatic flow is so effortless, his lung capacity seemingly bottomless, it’s impossible to avoid getting swept up in its energy.

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16. Case/Lang/Veirs – Case/Lang/Veirs

When k.d. lang wanted to realize a decades-long dream of creating her version of the roots rock supergroup The Traveling Wilburys, she shot an email to two of her favorite songwriters, Neko Case and Laura Veirs. Within a half-hour, it was a done deal. But Case/Lang/Veirs feels like anything but a one-off experiment. Whether it’s one of Case’s sweeping country gallops, some pitch-perfect vocal jazz from lang or a plaintive folk singalong from Veirs, the production has the same, perfectly lived-in feel. Plus, the shifting spotlight feels natural, because these artists share an uncanny ability to depict the joys and jealousies of long-term relationships. “The hungry fools who rule the world can’t catch us / Surely they can’t ruin everything,” sings Veirs on one of her several standout contributions. When I looked at my wife sleeping next to me on Election Night, I knew for a fact that she was right.

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15. Kanye West – The Life of Pablo

Kanye West’s seventh album is by far his messiest. It’s also his most forthcoming. For months leading up to its release, West was wracked by indecision and completely transparent about it, asking for our opinion on the title, tweeting out pics of yet another altered track list. This clear lack of direction had an obvious impact on The Life of Pablo, muddying its themes and splintering all its potential narratives. What’s amazing is that West uses the disarray to his advantage. Listening to this album is like pinballing through the maze of his mind – absurd ego and existential malaise, blue sky gospel and hamfisted sex rap, concerned fathers and bad friends. “Name one genius that ain’t crazy,” he challenges. I certainly can’t name one that could make an album as magnificently conflicted as this.

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14. Ka – Honor Killed the Samurai

Few things convey strength better then staying calm as a samurai in the face of adversity. Like Charles Bronson, vengeful yet stone-faced, in Once Upon A Time In The West. Or Barack Obama, never losing his cool in the face of obstructionist hate. Or the Brooklyn firefighter and underground rapper Ka, who dives deep into the warring psychologies of street life while never once raising his voice. Over candlelit soul samples that would make any Wu-Tang member salivate, Ka delivers every line in a steady, conspiratorial whisper – even the ones about the tragically paradoxical advice of his loving parents. “Mommy told me be a good boy / Need you alive, please survive, you my hood joy / Pops told me stay strapped son / You need the shotty, be a body or catch one.”

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13. Beyoncé – Lemonade

Thirteen years ago, Beyoncé released her debut solo single – an exhilarating song about how love made you feel crazy. This year, on her stunning emotional arc of a concept album, the artist wrestles with the consequences of that overwhelming emotion, how it can be taken for granted and betrayed. “What’s worse, looking jealous or crazy? … I’d rather be crazy,” she sings over the airy island rhythm of “Hold Up,” refusing to suffer in silence about her cheating husband. Gorgeously curated and thoughtfully sequenced, Lemonade is more nuanced than your typical breakup album. The artist doesn’t limit herself to syrupy ballads to convey her pain. She burns with righteous anger, eulogizes her sense of security, then blazes a path to forgiveness and, ultimately, empowerment. By the end, Beyoncé has transcended being crazy in love. She’s never sounded more powerful.

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12. Masta Ace – The Falling Season

A great storyteller finds humanity in the mundane. Like a math class, or a bus ride, or a conversation with your mother about what high school you should go to. These are moments that Masta Ace writes about on The Falling Season, an utterly absorbing, 23-track hip-hopera about the rapper’s years at Sheepshead Bay High School in Brooklyn. The 48-year-old MC is on top of his game throughout, his couplets shading in characters and pushing the plot forward with ease. The skits are skillfully written and performed, especially a monologue by self-described “Italian tough guy” Fats that gets interrupted in a sweetly humorous way. Ace has been polishing his skills as an underground rap raconteur since 1990, and you hear all of those years on this record, his words infused with hard-won wisdom, his flow steady and reassuring. In 2016, he was my favorite teacher.

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11. The Monkees – Good Times!

On Good Times!, the surviving members of The Monkees celebrate their 50th anniversary by doing what they do best – exuberantly harmonizing over impeccably produced sunshine pop. Along with producer Adam Schlesinger and an impressive array of guest songwriters, Mickey Dolenz, Peter Tork and Mike Nesmith lovingly recreate that warm, jangly 1966 pop sound that proved they were more than a bunch of boob-tube Beatles. Schlesinger does an excellent job mixing his authentically retro-sounding sessions with unreleased vintage recordings of Davy Jones (who died of a heart attack in 2012) and old Dolenz pal Harry Nilsson. And while Dolenz handles most of the singing with admirable verve, it’s a joy to hear Nesmith, who sings with grace and transparency on two excellent ballads. At 73 years old, the green-hatted one remains a woefully underrated craftsman.

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10. Jamila Woods – HEAVN

Chance the Rapper had a massive 2016, his relentlessly positive Coloring Book mixtape resonating big time with a traumatized American populace. But to me, Chance’s frequent collaborator Jamila Woods was the one doing the lord’s work this year, radiating strength and self-worth in a society that is hell-bent on destroying it. HEAVN is one beautifully constructed ode after another – to resilience in the face of police brutality, to Lake Michigan, to her name – over gentle, rolling grooves that feel like they were warmed up on a windowsill. The Chicago native is a meditative singer along the lines of Erykah Badu, her voice a balm, exuding serene confidence without ever pretending there isn’t a reason to be afraid.

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9. Kvelertak – Nattesferd

A bearded warrior broods on a mountainside, his loyal space owl by his side, the moon a lingering witness in the early morning sky. One of the highest compliments you can give Kvelertak’s third album is it that its songs perfectly suit its objectively awesome album art. Nattesferd is extreme metal party music that grabs you by your filthy black t-shirt and demands you pay attention. It’s a group of focused Norwegian musicians worshipping the art of the riff as if Odin decreed it to be so. Chugging, triumphant arena rock, exhilarating 1000 mph thrash, reflective minor-chord balladry, sinister doom – it’s all here, and it’s all unbelievably catchy. Vocalist Erlend Hjelvik screeches like a possessed space owl all over everything, which could be a sticking point for some. To me, it’s downright painterly.

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8. Anderson Paak – Malibu

Throughout his sprawling second album, Anderson Paak intersperses interview clips of professional surfers, who discuss the dangers and sensory thrills of their sport. It’s an appropriate motif for the artist, who treats Malibu like one 62-minute wave, created when the current of 2016 hip hop meets the undertow of 1976 soul. And I’ll be damned if he ever loses his balance. Paak is an R&B singer first, but his masterful syncopation and raspy tone are more reminiscent of Kendrick Lamar than any crooner. He’s just as comfortable on an Isley Brothers jones as he is trading verses with Schoolboy Q. One of the surfers says it best: “I enjoy some of the old, and I enjoy the new, and if I can find a balance between it, that’s where I find my satisfaction.”

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7. Solange – A Seat at the Table

In a year that tried its hardest to crush our spirits, Solange Knowles made an album of crisply focused R&B that felt like the eye of a hurricane. A Seat at the Table had been gestating for years, but it doesn’t sound remotely fussed over. The artist favors a less-is-more production aesthetic, putting kick, snare and keyboards together in ways that evaporate tension. She sprinkles in a series of compelling conversational interludes to accentuate the informal vibe, while deepening the record’s theme of irrepressible black pride. Whether she’s admitting to weariness, bristling at cultural appropriation, or explaining all the reasons she has to be mad, Solange does so with preternatural calm and emotional insight, like the moment of clarity that comes after a long, productive cry.

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6. David Bowie – Blackstar

David Bowie wasn’t one to sugarcoat. His most universally accessible work was about alienation and mortality. So it’s hard to imagine a more perfect coda to his career than Blackstar, released two days before his passing in January. Bowie sings of his impending demise with wit and honesty, over sumptuous, adventurous production. He casts a cadre of New York jazz musicians as his Titanic orchestra. And they wail furiously, until the pair of stunning ballads that close the record. The last song is called “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” its sweetly bending harmonica a direct callback to the Low track “A New Career in a New Town.” It’s one more glance over the shoulder before he ends his transmission to us all, leaving no doubt he gave us everything he could.

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5. Rihanna – Anti

Rihanna didn’t call her eighth album Anti as some sort of faux-punk Avril Lavigne pose. This is a truly remarkable example of a massive pop star pushing back hard against weighty commercial expectations. Her favored production style is a shadowy electronic murk – faint bass lines rumble under jittery drum machines and the whispered rumor of a keyboard. “Woo” is straight-up label-head-baiting, dissonant art rock, all squealing guitars and Auto-Tune howls. And it works, as does everything here, because of Rihanna’s voice, the beating heart of these compellingly cold environments. She’s always been an underrated vocalist, but on Anti, she’s living the notes, inhabiting the melodies. And it’s 100% why a risky late-album shift to straightforward R&B feels like a spine-tingling coup instead of a money grab. “Higher” is the best of the four excellent ballads that end the album – a raw, drunken plea with a great lyric about being too heartbroken to write great lyrics. When her voice frays on the chorus, I’ve been known to cry.

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4. William Tyler – Modern Country

There’s something about the way William Tyler plays guitar that makes you feel like everything’s gonna be OK. So this year, Modern Country was an absolute blessing. It’s an album of transportive, richly reverberating instrumentals, the kind of music that gets played in the background but refuses to stay there. Tyler is a Nashville native, and his bluegrass chops shine through in the gorgeous way he clusters notes together. His production instincts are open, warm, and never rushed, like a stroll in the country with someone you love. And his tone is pure honeysuckle. Lyrics would ruin this.

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3. A Tribe Called Quest – We Got It From Here … Thank You For Your Service

The day after Donald Trump got elected on a wave of fake nostalgia, A Tribe Called Quest returned after 18 years to give us the real shit. On We Got It From Here, the group accomplishes the difficult task of appeasing nostalgic fans, and mourning one of its members, while never pandering to anyone. It’s full of the warm Rhodes chords, spacious jazz-fusion loops and glorious vocal syncopation of classic Tribe. But rapper/producer/visionary Q-Tip leads his crew down some fruitful new avenues as well, including an embrace of guitar sounds that encompasses distorted Jack White atmospherics and Can’s cold funk. Even more amazing is how great these MCs sound, with Tip and the late Phife Dawg effortlessly trading couplets like old times, and former hype man Jarobi delivering some of the year’s most purely enjoyable bars from out of nowhere. “It’s time to go left and not right / Gotta get it together forever,” rap Tip and Phife together on the instant-classic opener. Even on November 9, it made me feel hopeful.

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2. Kamaiyah – A Good Night in the Ghetto

In 1992, Ice Cube illustrated how rough most days were in Compton by painting a vivid picture of a good one. Kamaiyah’s debut mixtape extends Cube’s party into the evening, with a collection of pristine, lowrider gangsta shit about how much better champagne tastes when you’ve been broke all your life. The Oakland MC is the definition of charisma on the mic, her flow easygoing, her rhymes both celebratory and reflective. “I shine so hard that you can’t ignore it,” she raps over the rubbery synth bass and vintage high-register keyboard runs of “Out the Bottle,” and it’s a goddamn fact. No album in 2016 was stacked with more hooks than A Good Night in the Ghetto, and Kamaiyah fills them with laid-back swagger that comes naturally to her, like a sigh of relief on payday. She’s like the protagonist on the cover – arms raised with a bag of chips in one hand and a bottle of Hennessy in the other, triumphant in her newfound belief that life is good.

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1. Frank Ocean – Blonde

Frank Ocean took a long time recording his follow up to 2012’s magnificent channelORANGE. And it seems like most of those four years were spent deconstructing. More often than not, Blonde is as stripped down as a folk song. Keyboards are abandoned. Guitars are stranded. His peerless voice goes unsupported as it seeks salvation through loneliness, attempting to transcend the temptations and limitations of fame. It’s passionate, therapeutic and heartbreaking all at once. On some level, Ocean must feel a connection with the haunted geniuses he references on Blonde – Elliott Smith, Karen Carpenter, Nirvana. That must be scary for him. But instead of burying that feeling and trying to recreate the work that made him famous, he has channeled it into something new, and complicated, and compelling in its flaws. Anything means more when he’s singing it. And here, he’s singing for his soul.

Honorable Mentions: 2 Chainz – Daniel Son Necklace Don; Aesop Rock – The Impossible Kid; Against Me! – Shape Shift With Me; ANOHNI – Hopelessness; The Avalanches – Wildflower; James Blake – The Colour In Anything; Bloodiest – Bloodiest; Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Skeleton Tree; De La Soul – And the Anonymous Nobody; Drake – Views; Iggy Pop – Post Pop Depression; Inter Arma – Paradise Gallows; Kendrick Lamar – Untitled. Unmastered.; M.I.A. – AIM; Noname – Telefone; Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool; Isaiah Rashad – The Sun’s Tirade; Sturgill Simpson – A Sailor’s Guide to Earth; Survive – RR7349; Swet Shop Boys – Cashmere; Vektor – Terminal Redux; Young Thug – No, My Name Is Jeffery; Young Thug – Slime Season 3

by sweensryche

The Song of the Election (revised): “Give the People What They Want”

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Around 1 a.m. on election night, NBC News cut to the Javits Center, the glass-ceilinged site of the Clinton campaign’s planned celebration. And there amongst the throng of stunned supporters was Stevie Wonder, leaning against a railing, looking tired and perplexed. After so many hours wiping tears and swallowing bile, it was the appropriate capstone to my evening.

Four days earlier, I had written about how Wonder’s classic 1976 song “Pastime Paradise” was the only thing keeping my election stress at bay. An all-too-relevant warning about the dangers of nostalgia, delivered in the artist’s clarion call of a voice, it was the perfect delineation of America’s crisis. Would we be driven by fear, or by hope?

Well, more of us were driven by hope, but fear still won. More than 60 million Americans voted for a man whose entire platform fit on a hat. Donald Trump promised to bring back the steel industry, with no plan. He promised to fix the inner cities, with no plan. He claimed to love women more than anyone, even though we all heard his detailed plan for sexually assaulting them.

So forgive me if my new Song of the Election takes an especially bitter view of what we all value as humans. “Give the People What They Want” was written by Ray Davies as a commentary on “if it bleeds it leads” journalism. Over a huge arena rock riff, Davies posits that while our media gatekeepers are pretty scummy, it’s the audience that deserves most of the blame. Violence means ratings.

The more they get, the more they need 
And every time they get harder and harder to please

 

 

America loves a trainwreck. And after eight years of a president who valued calm, rational diplomacy in the face of rampant hate, we’re hungrier than ever. We haven’t gotten to rubberneck in forever.  So along comes Trump, promising to blow it all up, to drain the swamp, to grab our better angels by their pussies. His stanky middle finger of a campaign appealed to a nation that was tired of being governed. We wanted to be entertained, much like the Romans that Davies devotes his second verse to:

The Roman promoters really did things right
They needed a show that would clearly excite
The attendance was sparse so they put on a fight 
Threw the Christians to the lions, sold out every night

“Give the People What They Want” does not sound like a typical Kinks song – its rudimentary blues hook is produced to a sheen, combining the catchiness of The Ramones with the emptiness of Kiss. There’s a screaming bar band guitar solo right where you’d expect Van Halen to put one. In an inspired satirical move, Davies infused his cynicism into the music itself, giving mainstream audiences what it wanted in 1981.

There’s a level of pretentiousness to this approach. Not all arena rock is bad. Not all people who find violent stories entertaining are bad. But I can’t help but identify. The acidity of this song tastes a lot like the bile I was swallowing in those early hours on November 9. More than 60 million Americans would rather have Norman Rockwell come back from the dead and give every coal miner a hand job while yelling “All Lives Matter” than vote for a woman. Our country is still virulently sexist, and racist, and embarrassingly susceptible to con artists.

 

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I’m truly afraid that Trump will actually try to build the 1950s white nationalist theme park that he promised us. But my biggest fear is that most of us will cheer him on. That chaos truly is what the people want. As Davies points out in his final verse, this obsession is nothing new:

When Oswald shot Kennedy, he was insane 
But still we watch the re-runs again and again 
We all sit glued while the killer takes aim

There is an upside to this bleak picture. “Give the People What They Want,” and the 1981 album of the same name, is a hell of a lot of fun – irony be damned. Ray Davies translated his disdain for humanity into what was arguably the last truly excellent Kinks album. Four years of President Trump is guaranteed to inspire many such works of art. And we’re going to need them. The bond between songwriter and listener is about to get even stronger.

by sweensryche

The Song of the Election: “Pastime Paradise”

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In a recent poll by the American Psychological Association, more than half of Americans say the 2016 election “is a very or somewhat significant” source of stress in their lives. You can include me in that group. The prospect of a President Trump has terrified me to the point where I turn into Baby Jane Hudson when I read Politico – every time I think about something nice, they remind me of bad things.

The APA’s tips on how to deal with election stress? Consume less media. Avoid talking about it. Do volunteer work. Try to have a more “balanced perspective.” I know I’m not doing any of those things from now until Tuesday, so I’ve decided to find a song that makes me feel better, that I can play on a loop until the fate of the world is sealed.

This was hard. Election stress isn’t the kind of thing I want to minimize or push away. So I went on a search for clarity through song, looking for an easily digestible, non-partisan explanation of how in god’s name we got here. When I couldn’t find a song called “America Hates Women,” I turned to the album that tends to have the answers to most things – Stevie Wonder’s monumental 1976 double LP, Songs in the Key of Life.

“Pastime Paradise” has a spiritual quality that goes beyond mere political protest. Built almost entirely of synthesized strings and light percussion, it floats into your eardrums like a Ghost of Election Day Future, warning us of the dangers of nostalgia. The lyrics are full of foreboding, yet Wonder cuts through the mood with a voice so pure, you can see to the bottom.

They’ve been spending most their lives
Living in a pastime paradise
They’ve been wasting most their time
Glorifying days long gone behind

 

 

Wonder’s diagnosis of our country’s malady is 40 years old, but it rings true as ever: When we’re unhappy with the present, when the turmoil of our lives compounds with the turmoil on the news, it’s very tempting to retreat to our own private island of memory. A place where we can personally curate what to remember and what to ignore. A paradise where we are all-powerful. It’s when we see this paradise as truth that everything goes to hell.

On the bridge, Wonder lists the side effects of electing leaders who think it’s possible to not only live in the past, but to recreate a twisted and distorted past that only exists in the minds of one demographic. It’s a cheat sheet for the true meaning of “Make America Great Again”:

Dissipation
Race Relations
Consolation
Segregation
Dispensation
Isolation
Exploitation
Mutilation
Mutations
Miscreation
Confirmation to the evils of the world

This razor-sharp sociology lesson alone would make “Pastime Paradise” a candidate for the Song of the Election. But Stevie Wonder is not a pessimist. After showing us the path to darkness, he turns his face to the sun, dreaming about the good things that can happen when we look toward the future instead. Acclamation. Salvation. Stimulation. Peace. As the song nears its climax, and Christian and Hare Krishna choirs add even more gravitas to the melody, Wonder makes a plea. And it’s here, in this moment, where my stress turns to confidence.

Let’s start living our lives
Living for the future paradise

On November 8, we can reject the lie that America was better when it was controlled by white men.  And when the day is done, our country will speak two words out loud for the first time. Two words that prove we’re closer to a future paradise for all: Madam President.

by sweensryche

Leonard Cohen – You Want It Darker

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In the election year of 1992, Leonard Cohen wrote a song with this brilliantly subtle dig: “Democracy is coming / To the U.S.A.” Outraged by an imperialist nation that ignores its poor, yet buoyed by a beautiful, irrational hope, “Democracy” was gorgeously personal political commentary. By the end of the seven-minute track, Cohen is striking a chord with all Americans who love their country in spite of it all:

I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
that time cannot decay,
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It’s probably just a coincidence, but 24 years later, Cohen has once again tapped into the mood of a nation that is on the cusp of sending a Clinton to the White House. You Want it Darker, the singer/songwriter’s 14th studio album, has dropped in our laps a few weeks before election day, and it’s a spare, haunting treatise on regret and betrayal that should act as a cautionary tale for anyone on the fence about voting. The 82-year-old continues to be uncannily good at comparing fraying love affairs to crises of faith. Inevitably, his narrators end up alone, muttering to themselves, and clutching a glass of wine – the only difference is whether it’s consecrated or not.

Musically, Darker is more meditative and mournful, closer to Cohen’s synth-goth classics of the 1980s then the wry, ramshackle folk and blues of albums like 2014’s Popular Problems. Producer Adam Cohen relies on muted beds of keyboards and ominous choral harmonies, lighting just enough candles to show his father the way to the altar. Lovely wrinkles pop up here and there – like the spirited, Kate Bush-esque violin on “Steer the Way” – but conceptually and tonally, this is the most consistent group of songs that Leonard Cohen has put out since he hit retirement age.

And good Christ, does he make the most of it. Cohen’s voice seems to get deeper by the decade; on Darker his deadpan croon sounds like a old bass clarinet – very deep and dependably cracked. He sounds like a man who has lived long enough to be played for a sucker 100 times, a worshipper who’s gotten used to being taken for granted by his deity. “You want it darker/We kill the flame,” he whispers over the gentle choral tides of the title track. Like he’s done so many times before, Cohen uncovers the seductive, dangerous pull of fundamentalist submission, being able to have your reality decided for you, to be told you’re right and good and that others are wrong and evil. With Donald Trump one step away from the White House, it should be mandatory listening.

Speaking of Trump, I’ve gotta believe he was somewhere in Cohen’s head when he wrote “It Seemed the Better Way,” a spine-tingling slow-build ballad that’s the record’s most harrowing moment. It could be written from the perspective of someone who’s saying “at least he’s not Hillary” on Facebook right now, standing in toxic rubble during year two of a Trump presidency:

Sounded like the truth
Seemed the better way
Sounded like the truth
But it’s not the truth today

You Want it Darker might only be a political album in context. But by taking one of the best artists to ever write about the pitfalls of faith and giving him one last crack at the god that never wrote him back, this record has the angry, weary energy of a nation that is sick and tired of being lied to. It’s easy to get depressed these days, but when I hear Leonard Cohen creating relevant, bewitching works of art in his ninth decade on Earth, I think about what humanity is capable of, and how incredibly resilient we can be. Fuck it. Democracy is coming.