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)

