Diegetic Dreamcore

10/23/2021

1. Good Sign - Charlotte Dos Santos
   From the Norwegian-Brazilian Jazz artiste’s 2017 record Cleo. A sunset stroll of a track; aglow in the rosin gleam of a just-alighted streetlamp; the perfume of a flowerbed whisked on the evening breeze; your fingers laced with those of your beloved; chimes of dusky birdcall from the bowers; a moment of suspended time, past and future a dissipating mist, the present an amber jewel.

2. My Queen is Albertina Sisulu - Sons of Kemet
   Don’t be fooled into thinking this is a sax song. The horns are a grand craic, but their main function here is to embroider the absolutely titanic, riotous polyrhythm orgy of the tune’s percussion. As the kind of guy who’s shown himself to be susceptible to the semireligious inhibition collapse of live music, this is the kind of beat shamanism that would make me yelp with ecstasy with my arms extended to Allah and my eyes fully rolled back to the wrong side of my skull.

3. boy I’m on yo ass - Zack Fox
   Zack dropped a heater of a record that was only made the better by its eliciting of one of the most hilariously sanctimonious, splintered-broom-handle-up-the-ass Pitchfork reviews in recent memory.

4. Running Away - Cate Le Bon
   Le Bon’s songs are big purply nebulas blazing against their black vacuum backdrops, hurtling with imperceptible, always-gathering speed, propelled outward by the dark matter of her dreamcore genius.

5. 2night - Hook
   I don’t miss being single. Wasn’t for me. Not interested in having to make the compromise Hook talks about making on 2night. Having to look past your incompatibility with another person—a person who you do not and cannot trust, whose every action seems calibrated to arouse suspicion or impart some vague but hysterically important meaning—all in the name of getting your rocks off. This is some people’s sweet spot. They live for the thrill of interpersonal volatility. I’m too easily confused and demoralized to get my kicks that way.

6. Enchanté - Jitwam
   Descend with me now into the jazz club k-hole that is Jitwam’s Enchanté. Unmoor your conscious mind to the high-heat sizzle of the shaker, the feathery keyboard flutters. Rid yourself of those pesky motor functions to the chiffon drapery of Jitwam’s sighed vocals. Feel the tension dissipate from your ligaments and tendons with every syncopated rimshot. If you were any more relaxed, you’d be clinically dead. This is living.

7. Headstart for Happiness - The Style Council
   Headstart for happiness, speed boost for satisfaction, blue shell for bliss, powerslide for pleasure, trick off the ramp for tranquility: these are just a handful of the many cheat codes and hacks the Bear has deployed in order to prevent there ever being a fair, sportsmanlike circuit in our long history of intra-Tent competitive Mario Kart.

8. He’ll Wait on Me - Paulette and the Cupids
   Old girl group love tunes always carry the threat of being vehicles for weird and regressive visions of romantic love. This one doesn’t even disguise it. A straight up prison pen pal love story about a girl so fixed in her infatuation that she’s willfully tuning out the well-meaning advice of her loved ones for a dude who, if my between-the-lines reading of the lyrics aren’t completely misguided, is, like, barely even aware that he’s in a committed relationship. Song’s a jam though.

9. Passion - PinkPantheress
   The Pantheress is either Next Up, or she’s already taken the throne and I’m just too washed to have received the memo. She put out a perfect byte-sized (pun fully intended and actually pretty good if you think about it) record this year that is masterfully of the moment—artistically forward thinking and immediately memeable. The more I think about it, the more I’m realizing that she probably is already an all-conquering phenom and I’m a late-arriving lame flapping desperately in the cultural slipstream.

10. Evolución - DJ Jigüe, El Menor, Victor Benitez
    The THR University administrators were pushing hard to disband our anthropology department. “There’s no grant money in anthro research,” they argued, “no public interest in the discipline. No job prospects for our graduates.” Our Trustees are dead set.” But the program is the crown jewel of our institution, I rejoined, the top playlist blog university anthropology department in the world. Our distinguished faculty is the envy of the academy. Unparalleled contributions to our understanding of the catalyzing function of sick playlists in human development. My arguments were unassailable. In the end, the department was saved—with enhanced funding and a brand-new suite of offices to boot. Our monograph on DJ Jigüe’s Evolución is currently in peer review, but it looks likely to break some seriously exciting ground in in the exploration of the music curation habits of cave-dwelling Denisovans. Dr. Glizzie just gave the plenary keynote at the International Conference of Paleoplaylist Studies. Professor Sleeps led a field study in Iran that uncovered what appears to be the earliest recorded example of a 12-song compilation—its title translates roughly to “Cold One and a Slugger.” These are exhilarating times at THRU Anthro.

⛺