6A — Tuesday, Septemberw 3, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
MAKE THE GRADE
THE RUNWELL BACKPACK
BROCKHAMPTON has been
in turmoil since former vocalist
Ameer Vann’s departure from
the group in May 2018. Kevin
Abstract has been the most
public in wrangling his emotions:
From
melancholic
voicemails
cryptically
released
on
his
website to running on a treadmill
for 10 hours on livestream in
front of his childhood home, his
feelings have been palpable.
All the turmoil, public
and private, has coalesced in
BROCKHAMPTON’s most
off-your-chest album. In an
interview with GQ, Abstract
explained, “Something we’re
doing is putting those type of
lyrics — like this shit is trash,
anxiety, depression, all that
stuff — taking those type of
lyrics and putting it on a song
that a bunch of people could dance
to or something.” That speaks
to the album’s sound as a whole:
The lyrics are rarely anything
but burnt-out or bittersweet. The
concept comes to life very clearly
on tracks like the single “BOY
BYE,” where the boys speak on
depression and trauma with the
slickest flows over a vibrant beat.
Interestingly,
the
band
explained during an interview
with Beats 1 Radio that they
recorded over 100 songs for
the album and just picked their
favorites. But that’s not what it
sounds like in the music — in fact,
GINGER is more thematically
coherent
than
any
previous
BROCKHAMPTON
project.
The band’s simultaneous distress
and
confidence
is
perfectly
encapsulated over the course of
the album.
The boy band known for
starting their albums with intense
bangers subverted expectations
with opening track “NO HALO,”
a beautiful but subdued track
filled with depression, despair
and hopelessness. The second
track, “SUGAR,” is as sweet-
sounding as its title suggests. It’s
similarly subdued but packed
with smooth verses and vocal
harmonies for a feeling of warm
nostalgia. Ryan Beatty, a frequent
BROCKHAMPTON collaborator,
makes the track with his soulful
contributions on the hook. It’s
an Usher-like mid-2000s R&B
revival, and may be one of the
band’s best songs yet.
Faith as a way to cope with
struggle is an overt theme
throughout
the
album.
The
whole band has upped their
writing game with in-your-face
downtrodden lyrics like, “And
we all out lookin’ for, lookin’ for
God so we never see it in ourself”
from Dom on “SUGAR.” Pent-up
frustration from the band peaks
on
“DEARLY
DEPARTED,”
filled with lyrical mourning,
prayer and cries for help. It’s the
most emotionally charged track
on the record in which the boys
speak openly about ex-member
Ameer Vann. After following the
situation and seeing the public
fallout, I felt my own heart sink
when Kevin sang, “What’s the
point of havin’ a best friend if
you end up losin’ him?” Dom
McLennon, most infamous for his
anger towards Ameer, ends the
track with fury screaming “You
could talk to God / I don’t wanna
hear,
motherfucker”
before
dropping the mic.
While BROCKHAMPTON has
a track record for hardcore hits,
their slappers in GINGER don’t
land nearly as well as their softer-
sounding songs. The synths in
the beginning of “ST. PERCY”
is reminiscent of the iconic
opening track to SATURATION,
“HEAT,” and makes me want to
listen to that instead. “I BEEN
BORN AGAIN” is a fun track
— it’s exciting in the context of
the band’s “rebirth” and new
direction, uniting all six vocalists
— it’s just a little all over the place,
like many tracks on their previous
album iridescence.
There are also a few
stumbles at the end of
GINGER. Joba, who has
upped his game all across the
record, delivers one of his
strongest performances ever
on the eerie and ghostly “BIG
BOY,” but the rest of the song
doesn’t hold up. The mellow,
repetitive deliveries from
Kevin and Joba get stale very
quickly on “LOVE ME FOR
LIFE” despite the interesting and
unique instrumental. The album
still manages to finish strong with
“VICTOR ROBERTS,” on which
BROCKHAMPTON-affiliate and
first-time vocalist Victor Roberts
tells a heart-wrenching story of
his troubled family upbringing.
The song is a perfect closer for
an album in which emotionally
driven lyricism is at the forefront.
GINGER, like the album’s
namesake, is a palate cleanser for
BROCKHAMPTON. It’s a step
forward for the band as they’ve
struggled to find the footing they
had with their music in 2017.
This is the album they needed to
make: A controlled expression of
depression, a fresh encapsulation
of distress. Some tracks don’t land
as well as others, but even within
those, the impeccable and dark
songwriting still shines. They’re
overcoming the trials they’ve
faced as a band and making it clear
that the BROCKHAMPTON boys
are here to stay.
Cleansing with GINGER
ALBUM REVIEW
DYLAN YONO
Daily Arts Writer
The
often-repeated
injunction
“write what you know” always
seemed tautological to me — can it
be otherwise? Everything comes
from somewhere. It’s unsurprising,
though, that there are a lot of novels
about writers and their social circles,
and often about the process of writing
a novel. As a professional writer, a
certain kind of intellectual sociality
is probably easier to render in detail
than nearly anything else. So-called
“metafiction” is only at the extreme
end of this.
One recent, and very good,
example of a novel about novelists
is “Early Work” by Andrew Martin.
The story follows the would-be
writer Peter Cunningham, who is
working on a vaguely-defined book
after dropping out of Yale’s graduate
program, and lives with with his
medical-school-student
girlfriend
Julia near the University of Virginia.
Peter teaches writing at a women’s
prison, a job which leaves him with
incredible amounts of free time that
he seems to use mostly for visiting
friends and occasionally writing,
seemingly without success: “As
anyone who’s ever pretended to be a
writer knows, ‘the book’ was really a
handy metaphor for tinkering with
hundreds of Word documents that
bore a vague thematic resemblance
to each other, but would never cohere
into the, what, saga of ice and fire that
they were imagining.” His charmed,
stagnant life is interrupted by his
sudden attraction to another young,
somewhat
directionless
writer
named Leslie, and the two soon
embark on an affair.
It’s a novel that could only
be written by someone firmly
entrenched within the milieu of
its
characters
—
overeducated,
self-conscious
creative
types
—
and probably is only readable by
members of the same set. The then
two-couple dynamic of the plot
is a shameless cliche, something
Martin freely acknowledges. The
book’s interest lies in its incredibly
engaging voice. Its humor is mostly
subtle, communicated on the level of
language. Martin always finds the
exact right word to nudge a line of
dialogue into absurdity, always finds
a way to communicate trepidation,
desire or quiet anger with the
balance of a sentence. For example,
here’s Leslie describing seeing a
film with a boyfriend: “She usually
loved boring movies, loved to sit and
stare at people’s faces as they stared
at other things, even when there
was a second-tier jam band making
supposedly joyful noise through the
wall.” Like many of the novel’s scraps
of inner monologue, this sentence
holds many competing thoughts and
feelings together in a precipitous
balance — the film is simultaneously
boring and enjoyable, the jam band
is simultaneously annoying, but
could be heard as joyful. The book
is saturated with references, nearly
always with attendant ambivalence.
One gets the sense that there are
multiple layers of cultural scripts
operating in most of the conversations
in the book. Leslie again, on Future’s
Dirty Sprite 2: “‘Yeah, I’m pretty into
monotonous drug rap right now,’ she
said. ‘I mean, like everybody. I guess
it’s the usual racist thing, where white
people like it because it takes their
worst suspicions about minorities
and confirms them in lurid and
entertaining ways?” To which Peter
responds, “Yeah, that’s why I like it.
Racist reasons mostly. I’m not thrilled
about the misogyny, though.”
This frequently-quoted segment
of dialogue is only one example of
a curious discursive form Martin
plays with in a million different
ways. Everyone in the book has
been educated into a sense of what
constitutes good art, a necessarily
exclusionary concept: this makes
their
interactions
with
most
everything else slightly tortuous at
best. Leslie listening to DS2 isn’t the
same thing as an ironic appropriation
— it’s a genuine sense of shame,
tempered by an equally-weighted
awareness of how absurd this shame
is. The characters renounce and love
in the same breath, arriving back at a
wordier version of where they started.
Martin
exercises
a
similar
ambivalence about the affair that
structures the book. Peter does not
try to rationalize his split affection
for Julia and Leslie, and thankfully
doesn’t make a caricature out of
Julia. In fact, she comes across as
quite personable in addition to her
talents (she’s also a published poet,
implicitly a more productive writer
than Peter). There is very little actual
parody in the book. Peter knows that
he’s making a stupid decision that will
hurt someone he loves, and he does it
anyway. In a similar anecdote, Leslie,
living in New York City, has a stable
relationship with Katie, a dramaturge
who “showers as much as once a day,”
and feels irrationally stifled by Katie’s
clipped togetherness — not because
of anything Katie does, necessarily,
but because Leslie doesn’t feel like
she has space to be irresponsible in
it. Right before Leslie abandons her
relationship with Katie, she thinks
to herself: “Why was there nothing
goddamn mysterious about (Katie),
like there was about everyone else?
Why were even her adventures so
cramped and circumscribed?”
This is to say that Peter and Leslie
are both seeking their freedom, every
relationship a provisional step on
the way to self-realization. Martin is
compassionate toward this impulse,
even while showing how ugly the
fallout from it can be. The novel
ultimately suggests that people can
create their own fates, even as it also
documents lucidly the vagueness of
the disaffections that compel us to
act, and the unforeseen consequences
of these actions. The book is forgiving
and optimistic about human nature,
and this might be why it’s overall very
pleasant to read despite the literal
events in the plot often being rather
ugly. For Martin, self-creation is what
ties together romantic relationships
and art-making — two noble pursuits
that we can’t help but fail at.
Writers writing on writers
LITERATURE COLUMN
EMILY YANG
Daily Literature Columnist
GINGER
BROCKHAMPTON
RCA (Question Everything)