Lines (Between the Age of Words)

a.
I got my drink, I got my music, I will share it, but today…
Where my mind is tomorrow, it don’t matter until the dawn. I can feel your energy from two planets away. Until my mind is made up I’ll be really, really gone.
Things I don’t understand. Could go to a million places, could sing a thousand songs.
My city found me then put me on stages. To me that’s amazing.
When I hear the radio play I don’t care that it’s not me. Remember the days I’d shout anything for you to see me.
My new year’s resolution is to stop all the pollution. Talk too motherfucking much, I got my drink, I got my music.
I could never sing, now my voice, it…

b.
Didn’t you know I was a boy before you came? I was my own, didn’t you know, before you came.
I don’t mean to make a drama. It’s against all I believe in.
Sometimes I need to be alone.
Nothing mattered.

Close enough for counting – in seven days you won’t remember this.
On the way towards your descent I could count every flower on the hill.
The roses on the lawn – don't know which side you're on.

c.
Learn how to be figurative, less literal. Beauty is for the books and I'm illiterate.
I know combat facts, yes, I read books. I’m addicted to literature.
I’m trying to put Wikipedia down on paper so I got something to read when the web turn into vapors.

d. (Bonus Heems)
Bad business, a hundred million. Wait, wait, Mike says this should be a song about women. But then he said he don’t know any women. I told him yo, I know like seven women.

(Earlier in the year, a majority of the music I liked most—and anticipated most—in 2012 had been made by women, so I was planning for a year-end narrative centered on strategies for loving women, something about how listening to music by women allows a degree of intimacy I’ve otherwise been denied by chance. As it turns out my musical preferences have ended up being pretty well gender balanced this year, so instead I’ll opt for a narrative in which I have the traits of an average human being.)

Sources:
Kendrick Lamar, “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe”
The Men, “Candy”
El Perro Del Mar, “I Was A Boy” (imaginative in a way the “if” of Beyoncé makes impossible)
Frida Hyvönen, “Saying Goodbye”
Frank Ocean, “Pink Matter”
Ken Stringfellow, “Jesus Was An Only Child”
Wild Nothing, “Counting Days”
Beach House, “Wishes”
Heems, “Bangles,” “Combat Jack Show Freestyle,” “Deepak Choppa,” “Womyn”
Killer Mike, “Willie Burke Sherwood”

Top five music moments of the year

(non-lyrical category)

1. Frankie Rose – “Gospel/Grace” 1:33-1:47 – Total peace.
2. Julia Holter – “Our Sorrows” 1:19-1:39 – The early morning lookout crowd.
3. Lotus Plaza – “Eveningness” 3:37 – Slight diminishment in energy but the rhythm continues. Another Pundt classic that could go on forever.
4. Lower Dens – “Brains” 1:47 – Similar moment (an energy creeps out from under another energy) but too much entropy to hold forever.
5. Orbital – “Never” 2:12 – One big moment.

Cream of the Crop*

*pop crap

1. One Direction, “One Thing”
2. One Direction, “What Makes You Beautiful”
3. Taylor Swift, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”

I especially love “One Thing,” its sounds so bursting and sharply defined, its melody so inherently emotional, from melancholy to joyful, that it requires nothing of its singers except smooth boyness. Speakers haven’t pulsed so healthily since Deerhunter’s “Helicopter.” The Swift song has that same level of clarity in its production, too, but what’s really touching with her, always, is her essential naïveté. When she sings about an “indie record that’s much cooler than mine,” you can believe for a second that the difference between corporations and people really is just a matter of perspective, and that an indie record by Swift wouldn’t net any extra sincerity.

Greatest thank yous

a. Nas, Life is Good: his ex-wife and his daughter’s mother, side by side.

Signs of a generous era, if the title wasn’t enough.

b. Perfume Genius, Put Your Back N 2 It: “[…] Gay People, The Walls, The Middle and the Base.”

I still believe my review of the latter album, and this, are my only notable contributions to listening this year (if only my own), even if they were partial pictures. I’ve since had a chance to look at the lyric sheet, where I found the revelatory thank you page (more strange, primal simplicity), and some lyric clarification. On “Take Me Home,” it’s not the parting eyes of a dead god, but the popping eyes of a dead dog. Gosh! I photographed the entire lyric sheet, one song at a time, which I also felt great about as a creative act and a means of talking to the album. Still lives #8, 9 & 11:

This concludes preliminary year-end stuff.