The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
4 — Wednesday, February 17, 2021 

Kota the Friend moves toward 
closure on ‘Lyrics to GO, Vol. 2’

The title is accurate — Lyrics to 

GO, Vol. 2 is all about the message 
indie rapper Kota the Friend wants 
to leave you with. The flow of words 
— words of gratefulness, sadness and 
love — seems to tumble out of Kota 
on this mixtape. Lyrics to GO, Vol. 
2 is not as carefully thought out as 
his previous album Everything, but 
it was released anyway because Kota 
has words he needs the world to hear 
right now, without delay. His lyrics 
stand on their own; there are so many 
things to say that there’s almost no 
time to form a perfect, catchy beat to 
match.

True to Kota’s earlier work, the 

rapper’s mental health challenges are 
carefully ruminated on as gratefulness 
fights to exist alongside them. This 
mixtape is a cathartic processing 
of these conflicting emotions. Over 
pared-back, sunny beats that let the 
ease of his flow shine through, Kota’s 
direct lyrics provide self-reflection. 
His words hold up a mirror to each 
listener — we can connect to this 
mixtape only if we choose to actively 
listen to it. The beats are designed to 
give the words the space they need but 
don’t do enough to draw the listener 
in without a bit of effort. Through his 
openness about his struggles, Kota 
seems to find closure as the mixtape 
progresses.

The starting tracks set the tone for 

the mixtape, with their beats made 
up of guitar or wistful piano, and 
full of grainy fry. In “Luke Cage,” 
Kota speaks in the second person, 
asking the listener to remember 
with him as he welcomes them 
into the album. The memories are 
a mixed bag. In “Clinton Hill,” he 
acknowledges hunger pains of the 
past in the same breath he speaks of 
his thankfulness. On “200 Dollars,” 
his nostalgia takes on a bite as he 
considers the gentrification of his 
hometown, New York City. He longs 
for the metaphorical green grass and 
pound cake he describes that are just 
beyond his grasp at the same time he 
reviles them.

His sadness begins to infiltrate 

the mixtape about halfway through. 
“Created 
everything 
from 
the 

darkness, I still wrote it / I still wear 
my heart on my shoulder / I’m still 
hopin’ for the best, I’m still awake 

when I rest,” he admits in “Broken.” 
Kota’s laid-back vocalization of these 
difficult words keeps the lyrics honest, 
instead of portraying a fabricated 
tortured artist. He acknowledges 
that life has suffering, but it isn’t 
all suffering. Pain fosters growth; 
Kota uses it to develop himself and 
his music. “Thunderstorm coming, 
I sit on the porch and sing through 
it,” he tells us on this same track, 
acknowledging all the little bits of life 
that make it whole. In “Emotionally 
Dumb,” he drives home this point by 
emphasizing that you can be grateful 
even when everything isn’t perfect.

In this same song, Kota drops 

lyrics that just about sum up the 
mixtape: “But I’m workin’ on it, no 
more escapin’ when I’m hurtin’ / 
No more self-sabotage, livin’ against 
my purpose / More appreciation for 
myself when I ain’t perfect / Every 
day I get up and grow, that’s what I 
chose.” 

It is a statement of self-affirmation 

that we are all learning to make for 
ourselves, and hearing it from others 
allows us to share that experience. 
He accepts that growth does not 
mean everything is instantly better 
— it means you want to make things 
improve. 

The profundity of these statements 

makes it seem a shame for them to be 
rushed out with not much thought 
given to their production. Although 
the minimalistic beats give the 
listener space to think about what 
Kota is saying, they don’t add much. 
The lyrics would have a similar effect 
being rhythmically read aloud at a 
poetry slam — there’s musicality in 
Kota’s flow, but not in much else. 

And yet, for now, the words are 

enough. This probably isn’t a mixtape 
that will stand the test of time, but 
it emerges right after the close of a 
year that knocked us all off our feet 
again and again. On “Flowers,” the 
closing track, Kota acknowledges 
that everybody always wants more 
out of life — but right now, this is 
what he can give us. He released this 
mixtape, even though it is not his best 
work, even though it is bare bones 
and sounds like a lot of mediocre 
SoundCloud rap, because it was one of 
those moments when he couldn’t hold 
back what he was thinking. There 
are times where you finally find the 
answer you’ve been searching for for a 
while — Kota can’t keep himself from 
sharing his.

ROSA SOFIA KAMINSKI

Daily Arts Writer

‘Waiting For The Night Song’ is a flimsy nature fiction debut

Albeit flawed, 2020 was a wonderful year 

for debut novels. Some of my favorites — “A 
Burning” by Megha Majumdar, “The Best 
Part of Us” by Sally Cole-Misch and “Burnt 
Sugar” by Avni Doshi, to name a few — kept 
me company during endless hours indoors. 
Other debuts, however, were less thrilling. 
“Waiting For The Night Song,” a nature 
fiction debut by Julie Carrick Dalton, falls 
into this category. 

Dalton’s novel reads like a subdued version 

of Delia Owens’s “Where the Crawdads 
Sing.” Dalton, a journalist, tells the story of 
Cadie, an entomologist who grows up in a 
small town in rural New Hampshire. Young 
Cadie holds the local woods close to her 
heart until a deadly shooting turns her world 
upside down. The novel alternates between 
the present and the past, following Cadie 
and her best friend Daniela as they navigate 
the trauma they’ve inherited. The plot deftly 
intertwines themes of climate change, 
immigration and political polarization to 
create a layered and current story.

Fans of nature fiction will love Dalton’s 

lingering and thoughtful descriptions of our 
planet. “Wind stretched the clouds below her 
like raw cotton on a comb, allowing rusty tips 
of dead pine trees to peek through,” Dalton 
writes when Cadie stands at the peak of a 
mountain. And Cadie is just the type of lovable 
science geek that fellow environmental 
enthusiasts will love. Yet even with these 
luxurious descriptions, Dalton’s writing lacks 
depth and fails to pack a punch. 

Ironic for a thriller, this novel’s greatest 

downfall is its inability to effectively build up 
suspense. However, Dalton does a sufficient 
job of depicting trauma in a realistic and 
understandable way. “All of her experiences 
and memories were either before or after the 
gunshot,” Dalton writes of Cadie. Readers 
see how trauma lingers, appearing during 
otherwise ordinary moments with an intensity 
that transports you back to the incident itself. 
Yet, the events of the plot happen suddenly and 
without warning. Without suspense, readers 
don’t understand the gravity of situations that 
are meant to be transformative or traumatic for 
the characters. 

Similar to the plot, the romance in 

“Waiting For The Night Song” happens 
quickly and without any significant buildup. 
The relationship between Cadie and Garrett, 
a child across the lake that Cadie met during 
the fateful summer of the shooting, feels 
forced. Cadie and Garrett have had a handful 
of conversations together, yet when Cadie 
returns to her childhood woods nearly thirty 
years later, Garrett is suddenly all she can 
think about. “I think I’ve been waiting for you 
my whole life,” Cadie says, a phrase that was 
quite literally hard to read. How absurd this 
relationship feels isn’t a consequence of the 
character building, but because the plot lacks 
a sense of urgency and depth. It’s difficult 
to understand the strength of Cadie and 
Garrett’s bond when they only met for one 
summer at the ripe age of eleven years old. 

Despite its flaws, “Waiting For The Night 

Song” does have a bright side. Climate 
change-themed fiction is a hard genre 
to master while retaining an interested 
audience, and Dalton does a wonderful 

job weaving the acute threat of climatic 
warming into the plot. Cadie’s forest is 
both depicted as a comforting refuge and 
a landscape threatened with fire. “Silence 
lived at the top of mountains and deep in 
the woods, where the nuances of worms 
under soil, insects in the air, trees exhaling, 
and animals wooing gave dimension to the 
quiet,” Dalton eloquently writes, reminding 
us all of the serenity found outdoors. But 
when those same woods are on fire, the 
landscape is unrecognizable, the flames 
depicted as “harmony and melody thrashing 
with unrestrained grace” as they hungrily 
devour the forest trees. 

The dual depiction of the environment 

— as both a safe haven and something 
under constant threat of destruction — is 
a poignant reminder that we don’t have 
much time left before many of our local 
landscapes begin to resemble California, 
Australia or the Amazon. Dalton allows us 
to take comfort in our surroundings while 
also reminding us how much it would hurt 
to lose them. I think of this in nearly every 
encounter I have with the natural world — a 
peaceful moment walking through a grove 
of pine trees suddenly seems more sinister 
when I realize this same stand likely won’t 
be here in 50 years, when the climate of 
Michigan is projected to resemble present-
day Arkansas. 

Even with these highlights on climate 

change, this novel still unforgivably lacks 
in plot and substance. It’s easy to turn the 
pages, but the story’s lack of urgency makes 
it ultimately unfulfilling. “Waiting For The 
Night Song” is a light, easy read, but don’t 
expect it to rock your world.

TRINA PAL

Daily Arts Writer

Design by Elizabeth Yoon

Samantha Power in conversation with Laura Dern

Last 
week, 
publishing 

company HarperCollins hosted 
an event to help raise money 
for local bookstores. In their 
timely exploration of the human 
experience 
extrapolated 
to 

the universality of the human 
condition, actress Laura Dern 
and writer Samantha Power 
mingled in a conversation that 
was not simply an overview of 
Power’s life story, but instead a 
discussion of the driving forces 
at play in her new memoir, “The 
Education of an Idealist.”

As 
the 
former 
U.S. 

Presidential Ambassador to the 
United Nations under Barack 
Obama and as someone who is 
in many ways legally bound by 
public opinion, Power’s memoir 
demonstrates 
her 
effort 
to 

expose the roots of her fierce 
commitment to empathy. She 
wants to make you, the audience 
and the reader, more aware of 
the parts of her life that manage 
to defy the myth-making of 
American success. She wants 
you to know all this because 
she’s aware that there’s a chance 
it might resonate with her 
readers’ lives.

During the conversation, which 

was hosted by Literati Bookstore 
in conjunction with a network of 
local bookstores nationwide as a 
fundraising effort, Power worked 
ardently to demystify the shadow 
life haunting the background 
of her success by discussing the 
transmission of her idealism 
from a patrilineal line down to 
her: a transmission mirroring 
the 
spiritual 
guidance 
she 

offers in the form of a dazzling, 
knocked-down 
romanticism 

for the endurance of the human 
condition that refuses to stay 
down. Through her resistance 
to power structures known to 
oppress and marginalize, Power 
refuses to rant or lay blame on 
individuals. 

Rather, 
both 
during 
the 

conversation with Dern and in 
her memoir, Power turns the 
magnifying glass of reporting 
on herself. In doing so, she 
resists the polarizing idea that 
politicians are only interested 
in the power encircling their 
roles in government. She also 
repeatedly 
emphasizes 
the 

importance 
of 
mapping 
the 

universal onto the particular, 
atomistic 
functions 
of 
the 

human in isolation, whether it 
be quarantine-induced or the 
belief that you are uniquely 
alone with your burdens.

In the process of doing so, 

she delved deeper into her 
personal background than most 
politicians and their staffers 
tend to disclose outright, even 
in the aftermath of publishing 
a memoir. Dern, a clear admirer 
of Power, magnified Power’s 
commitment to empathy and 
how it’s manifested in the form 
of 
a 
powerful, 
trail-blazing 

curiosity.

“That’s not normal (or) innate 

curiosity,” Dern observed.

Power 
expanded 
upon 

Dern’s observation — as she 
excelled at doing throughout 
— by explaining how, when 
she was growing up in Ireland, 
the constant exposure to her 
father’s catalog of narratives 
from customers at his pub played 
an oversized role in shaping her 
empathically-leaning interests. 
She further explained that, due 
to the vividness of her father’s 
storytelling, it felt as if a cast of 
characters sat beside the rest of 
her family at the dinner table as 
she came of age.

Power expressed an avid 

appreciation 
for 
the 
moral 

integrity 
displayed 
by 
her 

father while she was growing 
up. “When you’re at the pub, 
everyone’s equal,” she said, 
referencing her father’s views 
on the human condition. “What 
people (in the pub) care about is 
… Can you tell the story’s arc and 
hold an audience?”

Power continued on to say 

that, “what (she’s) inherited 
from (her father) is the ability 
to tell a story and bridge a 
distance.”

While 
this 
type 
of 

storytelling might be expected 
given the framing of a memoir, 
what I didn’t expect was the 
interpersonal validation shared 
between Power and Dern, across 
two 
disparate 
professions, 

politics and acting — that of 
finding themselves to be the 
only woman in a room. Where 
the 
promotional 
literature 

of both the memoir and the 
event may have streamlined 
their experiences as that of 
prototypical American success, 
Dern 
and 
Power 
seemed 

intimately entangled in a more 
significant way: Each woman 
spoke of the impacts of resisting 
repression and silence.

This 
segment 
of 
the 

conversation 
began 
with 

Dern asking Power about a 
scene in the book where she 
is summoned to a meeting 
with other women working in 
government. 
Power 
recalled 

being initially annoyed by the 
perceived disruption of this 
summoning but then described 
how she reconfigured it as 
“one of the most cathartic 
experiences of (her) life” while 
she was drafting it into the 
book.

Another, 
personal 

throughline Power emphasized 
during 
the 
conversation 

dealt 
with 
the 
damaging 

emotional ramifications of her 
father’s death from alcoholism. 
Specifically, Power disclosed 
that, despite becoming aware 
that it wasn’t her fault through 
therapy, she questioned her 
own possible role in it. Dern 
didn’t shy away from pointedly 
asking Power how she managed 
to endure the self-interrogation 
required for the narration of 
her life — the articulation of its 
nuances in the writing of her 
memoir — in the wake of her grief:

“What I want to understand 

is, how did you survive the 
guilt of responsibility … How 
did you feel such a deep sense 
of self and let go of old stories?” 
Dern asked, referring to Power’s 
mounting sense of guilt after 
her father’s death, as well as the 
coping mechanisms she utilized 
as a witness to atrocity.

In response, Power explained 

her initial resistance to the idea 
of therapy, as both a woman 
working in American politics 
as well as a first-generation 
immigrant. While she credits 
it with her healing, the long 
answer, for her, is that the 
trauma dealt with in therapy 
never really leaves you or drains 
away through the cathartic 
conversations 
had 
between 

therapist and client. Even still, 
she added that if you are lucky 
enough to do so, you can conduct 
the 
energy 
constructively. 

Power informed Dern that the 
guilt of her father’s death was at 
the core of her decision to go to 
therapy.

The exchange was initially 

propelled by the pair’s personal 
experiences characterized by a 
mutual understanding of what 
it means to build careers in 
male-dominated 
workplaces. 

But it was the accumulation of 
those same experiences, by way 
of what Dern called a “massive 
journey” through the political 
realm, that ultimately secured 
Power’s firm place as a feminist 
icon. That is, as a voice that 
grapples openly on the page 
with the toxicity built into the 
work environment.

In the midst of the desperation 

to 
be 
right 
that 
so 
often 

defines the modern American 
body politic, the refreshing 
commiseration between Dern 
and Power seemed to channel 
their desires, as an actor and 
politician 
respectively, 
to 

embrace the microphone and 
to speak for the betterment of 
the collective through its sonic 
force.

SIERRA ÉLISE HANSEN

Daily Arts Writer

There’s 
nothing 
more 

satisfying than turning a key 
in the ignition of a well-oiled 
car. Well, maybe getting crisp 
bills from the ATM, breaking 
the 
smooth 
surface 
of 
a 

freshly-opened jar of peanut 
butter or stepping into a 
boiling shower after being out 
in the cold. There might not 
be a true leader of satisfaction 
to rule them all, but as I 
started my first car early last 
month in the parking lot of a 
Chelsea DMV, I had never felt 
anything like it. 

Driving home at 65 mph on 

the freeway, I bested myself 
yet again: the seat warmer 
toasting 
my 
butt, 
hands 

firmly on the wheel, I reached 
for my phone and turned on 
Pat Benatar. This was the 
life, man. It’s the small things 
after all, right?

Listening to Pat Benatar 

sing-yell “We’re running with 
the shadows of the night” as 
I sped down the highway, I 
thought about that unique 
feeling of satisfaction that 
seemingly 
random 
actions 

create in our daily lives. 
Beyond the one-second hit 
of dopamine that turning 
the radio up might have 
spurred, it was Benatar and 
her 80s contemporaries that 
truly brought me comfort on 
that first drive back to Ann 
Arbor. I could imagine my 
mother doing the same drive 
to visit her sisters here at 
the University of Michigan, 
listening to the same songs 
on 
the 
radio 
screaming 

down a potholed interstate. 
I smiled, losing myself in the 
fake drumbeats and earworm 
rhythms of the music.

The songs that followed by 

Heart, the Pretenders, the 
Go-Gos, Wilson Phillips and 
the like were cheesy, sure, 

but there is truly nothing like 
them. In a period dominated 
by men with teased hair and 
gyrating hips on pyrotechnic 
stages, women like Benatar 
and 
Chrissie 
Hynde 
were 

unabashed in their embrace 
of 
life 
and 
love 
without 

apologies. 

You can pretend to hate 

“Barracuda,” but there’s no 
way you don’t at least know 
the chorus to that song. I 
didn’t know the song Scarlett 
Johansson 
sings 
in 
“Lost 

in Translation” was called 
“Brass in Pocket,” but I’ve 
known the chorus since I was 
seven years old. 

This music might not be 

considered “good taste,” but 
it’s really good. It’s music 
made for real people, for true 
comfort, made to be a catalyst 
for joy. 

I’m not typically a huge 

pop fan either; when I was 
13 I would have let Julian 
Casablancas of The Strokes 
kill me and then said thank 
you as a ghost. I still love a 
good angsty indie track, and 
most of my time as a music 
journalist has been focused 
on people who have less 
than five pieces of colored 
clothing in their closets. But 
there’s just something so 
universal about these 80s 
ladies, whether it is their 
strength, the catchiness of 
every single chorus or their 
very tall hair. 

Their voices are impossibly 

loud, their belts smooth and 
the guitar in the background 
peppy. Listening to them is 
like putting lotion on freshly 
shaved legs, like flipping the 
perfect pancake. I’m running 
out of similes, but you get the 
picture. 

No matter how emo the rest 

of my playlist might get, there 
is always a little space for my 
anthemic friends. Perhaps I’ll 
wear a leotard tomorrow in 
their honor.

CLARA SCOTT
Daily Arts Writer

In praise of cheesy comfort anthems