November 21, 2022

My Year in the Swedish House Mafia

Welcome to Nature's Corrupted, Magen Cubed's newsletter. This is a place to share writing, thoughts, observations, and personal stories at the intersection of art, fiction, and life.

Give Me a Taste of Spotify Pie

I don't usually put a lot of stock in Spotify related…things. Yet if I see some new trendy app or widget or doodad that will read my Spotify listening habits and pass judgment on me, I will immediately plug my information into it for the thrill of a shiny new chart. That's probably not my most security-conscious instinct, but I'm assuming my information is already stolen and my devices are all compromised, anyway. I'm not saying I'm happy about it, just that I've surrendered myself to the mundane horrors of the digital age.

So when Spotify Pie turned up on my Twitter feed, I stopped whatever I was doing for that new hit of condescension. Tell me I have no taste, Spotify Pie. Lay bare my musical crimes for the world to see. I am, in fact, a basic bitch. This is my debt.

And the results were…basically what I thought they would be. Swedish House Mafia is my most listened to artist of the current moment. Joji right after. While Prince is in the right place, I'm not sure how recently they're pulling this data. Some of these rankings are a bit off at best or hilarious at worst. I also have to contend with the fact that I listen to music on the Bandcamp app or on YouTube, which further skews the results.

But those top two? Swedish House Mafia and Joji? I think I need to talk about that for a minute.

I Hope This is the Hardest Part

To start, I have to explain that 2021 was what I have been calling my Despair Year. Last year, I made a concentrated effort to listen to music about, or that put me into, a state of despair. I get that this sounds like an odd undertaking, but 2021 was a very strange and difficult time. Amid survivor's guilt over COVID, multiple upheavals in my personal life and routines due to COVID, and what I can only describe as a forcible realignment of my own interior world, I was not altogether…here. You know? I was not fully present and of sound mind and body. And I was very much trying to feel my way through it all, while maintaining a full-time job and pursuing my creative goals.

I wrote more about this time in agonizing detail here:

So, I figured that I had a few choices to make:

1. I could talk to a therapist about finding better ways to cope with what I was going through.

2. I could try to throw myself into my personal projects to distract myself.

3. I could try to numb myself with entertainment and escapism.

4. I could just sit with all of these feelings and attempt to process them as they came rather than hide from them or will them away.

In the end, I went to a therapist from April through June to try and figure out ways to deal with what I was feeling. It was useful until it wasn't, because I felt like my therapist wanted more from me than I was able to give during most of our sessions. A clarity surrounding my experiences when I had difficulty making sense of those experiences, let alone articulating them during a Zoom therapy session. I also wrote nonstop, working on a half-dozen short stories, two novellas, and a novel, until I burned out and crashed in the fall right before the holidays. That probably wasn't my best choice, but it was the choice that I made. Finally, and maybe most importantly to me, I made the effort to accept that I was in a deeply despairing state and let myself feel that way.

So, I listened to Joji all year.

I won't bore you with a lengthy introduction to the work of George Miller, better known as Joji. It's an interesting and frequently sad story. It's also a very Online one, following the intensely private singer-songwriter, rapper, and producer from the height of 2010s internet fame under the YouTube personas Filthy Frank and Pink Guy to his third studio album. Yes, the guy we can credit for the Harlem Shake and pioneering the weird, nasty days of pre-corporate YouTube is now charting on Billboard, playing Coachella, and going viral on TikTok. 

I say all this because, at a glance, Joji sounds like he was grown in a laboratory specifically to annoy me. As it stands, I can't really speak to the YouTube stuff or the many related controversies because I wasn't watching YouTube at the time. I can't really give you a decisive opinion on things I came to understand far after the fact and primarily from clip reels. This is why I don't really want to engage with the Filthy Frank era, honestly. It's something that he has made great strides to distance himself from as an artist, and I don't find it particularly interesting even as trivia. It's also been talked about, critiqued, and dissected from every possible angle in any number of articles and YouTube video essays. Those are out there right now if you Google 'Joji.'

It's okay. I'll wait.

But I do want to talk about the fact that I spent all of 2021 lying on the floor, listening to his 2017 debut EP In Tongues and two studio albums, 2018's BALLADS 1 and 2020's NECTAR. When not lying prone, appreciating how deeply disconnected I felt to my own fingertips and toes , I drove home after work in the evenings, accepting how close I was to crying at any moment throughout the day. I listened to his albums on repeat at work during those days, too, periodically leaving my desk to take a walk in the parking lot and sit with the sensation of being both empty and full.

I appreciate a lot of things about Joji. As an artist, he's an intensely private person who seemingly leaves little trace of himself in the world outside interviews and public appearances. He also has a unique throughline connecting his work, videos, covers, and promotional materials. Images of death, machinery, false-faced celebrities, alien worlds, space explorers, lava flows, desert roads, and animal anatomy all coalesce in a disparate, emotionally distant kaleidoscope. Often, the subject and content of his lyrics drive these visuals in ways that require multiple listenings to clue in on. Some of it seems random, unpolished and unthinking, as if hastily assembled with low-fidelity camera photos or stock assets. This, too, is interesting in its presentation in jarring contrast to the careful space cultivated between him and his audience. Yet the thing I appreciate most about Joji is his aptitude for conveying despair in a way that just feels like he's sitting on my chest, speaking my own feelings into existence.

Joji's lyrical style is as delicate as his vocal delivery, threading scenes together with a kind of uncomfortable earnestness. It's a lived-in ugliness that meditates on feelings of rejection, estrangement, obsession, and shame that rarely attempt to save face. Joji’s work veers easily into self-pity and misanthropy in 2017 tracks like 'Will He' or 'Bitter Fuck,' which lack some of the deftness of his later writing. Even so, these songs convey just enough self-awareness to never feel completely like juvenile diary screeds. Bouncing 2018 tracks like 'CAN'T GET OVER YOU' and 'NO FUN' soak in a kind of chaotic nihilism that’s both funny and all-too relatable. They capture the roiling fallout of break-ups with both lovers and friends, and wounds we inflict on ourselves and others in those moments. 'SLOW DANCING IN THE DARK' is a dreamy waltz about walking into a destructive relationship, while 'YEAH RIGHT' commits to the meaninglessness of knowingly pursuing someone who doesn't care about you, embodied with a sense of terminality the way a relationship can feel like a death in its own right.

There's this…absence of light in his lyricism. A warm, enveloping sensation of darkness in his mournful vocals and low-tempo soundscapes. His worlds are sparse, claustrophobic to the point of discomfort. It all feels like falling forever into the depths of sea or space or some psychological nothingness. Joji, or rather his narrators and characters, lives in these beautiful little dioramas of abject misery but do so without any ego-saving pretense. The despair feels real because it feels raw and unfiltered. It is elegant suffering, wrapped up in beautiful simile and meticulous word choices, but it is still the most intimately familiar suffering that I can remember hearing in a very long time.

Yet 2020's NECTAR seems built around the potential for second chances through the miasma of it all. While still meditating on themes of heartache and self-loathing in personal favorite tracks like 'Daylight', there is some call to life underpinning it all. This rings most clearly in tracks like 'Sanctuary,'  'Run,' and 'Your Man.' Something else feels possible.

Recovery, or at least some temporary peace, is a light that flickers in the dark. Perhaps Joji will find some resolution, or he won't.

Perhaps I will. Or I won't.

I'm pretty sure 'Daylight' was on the top of my 2021 Spotify Wrapped playlist, next to 'One Last Kiss' by Hikaru Utada. 

But then 2021 became 2022, and I decided that it was time to pull myself off the floor.

A Struggle Made Magic 

So, I don't actually like dance music. Or, rather, I don't really know anything about it. Over the years, I've developed a kind of gun shyness toward things that are outside a certain acceptable boundary of liking. This comes from growing up in an abusive home, where the things that I did, said, or expressed interest in were subject to relentless scrutiny. Frequently, this involved outright derision and ridicule. It took me a long time to understand, let alone grapple with, the anxious concern that I was doing something wrong by liking something…incorrectly? Poorly? Without a complete mastery or understanding of it? 

Like many other fingerprints of trauma, it isn't an immediately or easily definable feeling. This extends to the music I listened to just as much as anything else I engaged with. 

Anyway. I'm working on it.

Dance music fell into that category of anxiety-inducing things for much of my life. I knew of dance music from advertisements for club anthem CD box sets that came on TV during the 1990s. I knew about it from Saturday Night Live skits. Movie soundtracks. I remember that our local alternative rock station would switch over to dance music on Saturday nights at midnight. As a teenager, I would sometimes stay up late and sit at my desk beside my tiny portable radio listening to 'Sandstorm' on the lowest volume so no one in the house would know. 

It always seemed frivolous. Who just goes out and dances? Who makes music to make people dance? The lyrical content is scant to non-existent. But that's the thing about dancing -- it's often about other things. It happens in spaces both intimate and public. The action becomes a ritual tied to such spaces. A space to find people. To find yourself. To be alone with yourself with other people.

In 2022, through a strange confluence of events, I found myself driving around listening to a lot of 90s EDM. House. Drum and bass. The music that was popular when I was a kid seemed like the most natural place to start, driving home listening to mixes and albums at night on my way home from work. Listening to playlists while driving around South Florida on the weekends with my girlfriend Melissa. Taking rides is a habit leftover from the initial COVID lockdowns of 2020 when there was nothing else to do but get in the car and drive. Get in the car and follow A1A up and down the coast. Watch the narrow road turn into the sandy dunes of Jupiter, the Miami neon and grit easing into the suburban and psychological non-descriptiveness of Kendall. When concrete becomes ocean, green becomes sky.

2022 is the year that I got really into vaporwave, too. I had listened to vaporwave and its multitudinous offspring and offshoots casually since about 2018 or 2019. My interest in future funk became city cop which just became new music. The detachment of listening to endless American, European, and Latin American remixes of Mariya Takeuchi's  'Plastic Love' turned into looking for the artists behind the overworked, overused samples.

My surface-level understanding of Vaporwave as palm trees and Greek statues became an appreciation for the nuances of slushwave, deathdream, mallsoft, chillwave, late night lo-fi. I got a lot of mileage out of t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者's foundational releases. The immaculate soundscapes of Dan Mason. The droning, lonesome expanses of Desert Sand Feels Warm at Night. The sun-soaked synth magic of bl00dwave. The mirror polish of luxury elite's hypercapitalist dream world. The slick, funky slide of George Clanton. 

Yes. Of course, I've listened to The Caretaker.

We've all listened to The Caretaker.

Somehow, dreamy lo-fi and driving synth on blown-out speakers led me off Bandcamp and back on familiar roads. I ended up listening to Paradise Again, the debut studio album of Swedish House Mafia, until I drove even myself crazy with it. Released in April by the Swedish supergroup of Axwell, Steve Angello and Sebastian Ingrosso, Paradise Again covers an expansive range of stylings and emotions from the group's past and present. It boasts a strong list of guest appearances, including 070 Shake, A$AP Rocky, Connie Constance, Jacob Mühlrad, Mapei, Seinabo Sey, Sting, Ty Dolla Sign and The Weeknd.

And it's…it's okay.  It's ambitious in its scope but doesn't quite stick the landing for me. Paradise Again stretches itself thin thematically and conceptually, skipping around from the beautiful opening track 'Time' with Mapei to perfectly fine tracks like 'Moth to a Flame' with The Weeknd. The thoughtful piano interlude of 'Jacob's Note' with Jacob Mühlrad and stunning crown jewel of the album, 'Heaven Takes You Home' with Connie Constance, lies between. Afterward, the ridiculously sexy 'Mafia' drives headfirst into the charmingly devious horror show that is 'Frankenstein' with A$AP Rocky. 'Don't Go Mad' with Seinabo Sey brings you back from that detour with one of the most memorable tracks on the album for me.

Past the halfway mark, I kind of tune out. The title track is very solid in its monumental feeling,  a swelling emotional peak, like watching a city of glass emerge from the sea or the snow. It feels out of place where it falls in the track listing, like another oddly-paced transition. 'Lifetime' with Ty Dolla Sign and 070 Shake sounds like what people think Miami sounds like when they explain to me what they think Miami sounds like. (I don't like it, is what I'm saying. There are, like, pew-pew laser noises in there somewhere?) 'Calling On' is pretty solid and I like it. 'Home' works like the response to 'Heaven Takes You Home,' pulling at its threads and remixing Constance's "You're perfect, you're cool / You took the best parts of you" with a sexy vibe all its own. 

'It Gets Better,' 'Redlight' with Sting, 'Can U Feel It" and '19:30' just run together in a soup for me. 'Another Minute' picks up the opening track's theme of time and second chance relationships and is just a solid, pretty song. 'For You' closes us out on a sweet sentiment, as if all the disparate ideas of home, rest, love, and reunion sprinkled throughout the track list are finally coming together.

I don't know why this album has lived rent-free in my mind since its release, but it has. It is an uneven album that plays leapfrog with its themes and core ideas, going on detours into horror or regrettably short piano interstitials before snapping back into the dancy and sexy stuff. The threads that run through are interesting in their little calls and responses back and forth across the album. It is very cool to listen closely over time and stumble upon the use of repeated words or imagery that just wash over you on casual listening. Finding those little jewels hidden around the album is satisfying, rewarding you for that diligence. 

While the first half of the album links up really well, 'Frankenstein' creates such a drastic tonal break that it's a bit jarring. The subsequent tracks never quite recover from that break, nor do they achieve cohesion with each other or the previous tracks. It's weird, is what I'm saying. But it wormed its way into me because of that weirdness. Paradise Again tried something different and eclectic rather than giving you 'Don't You Worry Child' or 'Save the World' all over again.

And so I just…lived inside of it. Listening to it every day. At home. At work. In the car. Over and over.

And that's why it's my favorite album of the year.

Until fucking Joji came back on November 4th with his latest album, SMITHEREENS.

I Heard that You're Happy Without Me

I didn't know what to expect from Joji's new album. That's part of the appeal of listening to Joji, I think. His artistry is what draws me to him and I'm always interested in seeing how he builds on the foundations laid out so far. When the first single 'Glimpse of Us' dropped over the summer, I was on the fence. It was a lovely song but I never warmed up to it. I see now that I needed to hear it nestled inside the rest of the album for it to make sense. 

To say that SMITHEREENS is a bummer would be an understatement. The tracks explore stylings and tones in a way that feels cohesive in consideration of Joji's previous releases, experimenting with its musical contours through interesting uses of sampling and sound. It clocks in at nine tracks and a brisk 24 minutes. This album shows up, does its thing, and hits the bricks before you can get used to it.

For this reason, none of the tracks jump out to me immediately upon reflection. I can point to solid gold tracks on his previous releases because they are so memorably catchy or melodic. But I don't think that this works against SMITHEREENS. Its brevity and general chillness allow the songs to wash over you. The album feels like its grainy, low-fidelity cover art: a field of deep blue that drifts lazily into turquoise before settling on a sliver of bright green in the lower right hand corner. Is it the transition from night to day as the darkness wanes? It's hard to know. These are just feelings. Ideas. You're left to sit with them.

'Glimpse of Us' sets the stage with an aching piano ballad before shifting into the head-bobbing resignation of 'Feeling Like The End' and the positively otherworldly 'Die For You.' The portrayals of terminality, alienation, and obsession in these tracks are nebulous, which makes the nature of the relationship being pined for nebulous. As such, the album can read as relatably heartfelt or unsettling (or both!) depending on how you come down on it.

'Before the Day is Over' and 'Dissolve' play with instrumentation and Joji's vocal range for a few brief, bright sparks in the fog. 'NIGHTRIDER' is a cool and downbeat lo-fi hip-hop track. 'BLAHBLAHBLAH DEMO' climbs back out of the gloom with a chill, finger-snapping time. Next is the driving and danceable introspection of 'YUKON (INTERLUDE)' before we come home on the dreamy, droning '1AM FREESTYLE.' The final track has emerged as my favorite of the album, Joji's melancholia rising from its depths to produce some of his most beautiful vocal work on the album. Themes of healing close the album out on a high note and feel like a fitting complement to the opening track, as if we too are pulling ourselves from the dark toward that fleeting promise of light. 

SMITHEREENS is sad. It's catchy. It's forgettable when I shut it off but infinitely singable when it's on. I'll need some time to really sit with the album and feel it through, but it feels fitting to close the year out on a Joji album.

Perhaps I'll stay off the floor this time.

Other Notes

Before we finish for this month, I wanted to highlight a video essay on the life and career of Lauryn Hill by F.D Signifier. I’ve gotten back into a lot of 90s music as a result of my recent discoveries and rediscoveries, and The Score by Fugees is an album I’ve spent a lot of time with. As such, Hill’s work has been on my mind a lot. Signifier is a compassionate yet razor-sharp critic whose work I greatly enjoy and who’s produced a really enlightening video essay on Hill’s complicated history as an artist and a private person. I highly recommend it.