monks in a mosh pit

Making a bracket informally ranking Kanye songs is how I am spending my time waiting for the DONDA drop, now rumored to be August 26th/27th. This Kanye bracket was made from the rankings of Kanye songs on rateyourmusic.com, replacing some interludes with Kanye's unreleased music. In the end, my decisions came down to which Kanye songs are the most Kanye— i.e. represent the musician and person he is the best.

          Frank Ocean has been my favorite artist for over half my life. I grew up on channel ORANGE playing in the car on trips to H Mart or filling basement air with ambience when I played Legos while my mom worked, inspired by the album’s twists and turns over organic chords. I endured my first rejection as a moody teen to Blonde’s gentle atmosphere of affection. I cried on sleepless nights to the oasis of warmth in an abyss that is the album Endless, painstakingly downloaded onto Spotify from YouTube rips the night I heard “Wither” for the first time.  My hero Frank, who is notorious for staying off the radar despite his fame and hasn’t released new music in two years, suddenly came out with a statement this week to announce his new luxury jewelry brand, Homer—a collection “no less expensive than Cartier” with pieces ranging from $395 to $1.9 million. In an interview with the Financial Times, he talked about the origins behind the brand: his wish...

Sometimes, I like to listen to music with lyrics when I read. My brain naturally tries to comprehend written and spoken word together, which can cause confusion, but when records are familiar or mumbly enough, lyrical music enhances my experience of reading. Cadences can change the way I hear sentences in my head, and sometimes I literally read words in the artist's voice—different filters to the same picture. Similarly, the ideas of books bleed into the meaning of the music—and that’s what happened this week, when I accidentally juxtaposed a book I was reading on the political application of psychoanalysis, Enjoying What We Don’t Have by Todd McGowan, with the mixtape I have had on repeat: Future’s Beast Mode.  The book discusses Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas and how they can be applied to society as a whole. Freud’s main argument is that members of society satisfy psychological needs and obtain enjoyment through an unconscious impulse called the death drive: a tendency ...

         For Playboi Carti fans, 2020 can probably be summed up in two words: down bad. In the past year and a half following Carti’s promise of a new album coming “soon,” fans listened to snippets of Carti repeating “Homicide” for thirty seconds, simped over Iggy Azalea, and asked such existential questions like “Do you think Carti touches himself?” while impatiently waiting for a man who acted more like a legendary Pokémon to drop another album. False hope and crazed theories trying to crack the code of Carti’s tweets defined a wait that felt much longer than it was, thanks to Carti’s cryptic messaging and Kanye-esque refusal to be clear. But finally, Carti’s Instagram post of “Album.TuRneD iN.” in November felt like a breath of fresh air, some relief especially after such an objectively terrible year. And when the album finally dropped on a rainy Christmas day, I dropped my xbox controller and screamed in joy and relief, prompting my confused mother to ask if...