Daily Archives: December 27, 2021

bell hooks, undoubtedly the most influential mind in contemporary times, is a name not so familiar in India, but in the feminist world of struggle and academia, she is considered as one who gave path-breaking trope to feminist discourse. She passed away on Dec. 15, 2021, at the age of 69, leaving behind her oeuvres that certainly would enrich and clarify the political nuances present within the feminist theory and practice. She forcefully spoke publicly, that which was hitherto spoken in private, the conditions of black women and their visible inequalities sort of enmeshing race and class categories and envisioned a good society with dignity for all.

She resisted the title public intellectual, though she became one, and used to follow jargon-free-flowing writing style.

READ: bell hooks: A Radical, Black Feminist Whose Ideology Created Far-Reaching Impact

hooks began her education in the segregated schools in Christian county, completed her Masters at the University of Wisconsin and her doctorate in literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She worked as a professor at Yale, Oberlin, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. She published almost 40 books encompassing a wide range of subjects such as literary criticisms, childrens fiction, memoirs, poetry, education, capitalism, American history, and, in between, wrote passionately on love and friendship. She established bell hooks institute at Berea College to focus on, what she described as, the imperialist-white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy power structures. The multi-hyphenated term, for her, represented the intersectionality that one needs to understand while explaining the much more complex category called interlocking oppressions. She remained, nevertheless, essentially focused on the sliding of race identity into class identity. The slippage of the signifier and the signified between black woman and poor-black woman endures the zeitgeist of her opuses. Aint I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, written as her first major work in 1981, raised several questions on marginalisation and subjugation of black women and intervened, to include the experiences of black and working-class women, in the civil rights and womens liberation movements. She pitched into the feminist debate as an insider, from within, and sharpened the existing faultlines for contemporary feminists to take political positions.

Debates within and about feminism.

The second wave of feminism, unlike the first that dealt largely with what is feminism and feminist theory?, gave attention to internal debates in feminism, so to say, on debates within and about feminism. The feminists, in the 1980s and 1990s, explored deeper into the assertions that all women are victims of oppression and should be equal to men to gather the crucial differences within race/caste/ethnicity/class and to contest the straightforward stereotypical notion of a shared set of ideas and values. hooks wasnt comfortable with the slipshod account of feminists content the shared meaning for feminism as a collectivist generalised agenda rather, building her thesis on difference and equality, she asked to reject anything goes approach and focus on particular set of ideas. For hooks, feminism is not for any and every woman who regardless of her political position wants equal rights as men. In fact, she is choosy about the term feminism as it involves political commitment.

READ: Casteing Gender At The Ballot Box

In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre, she says I say the minute you begin to oppose patriarchy, youre progressive. If our real agenda is altering patriarchy and sexist oppression, we are talking about a revolutionary movement. For hooks, therefore, feminism is a distinct political perspective, with distinct shared political agenda than a mere ecumenical politics. She was deeply antagonistic to the capitalist economy and toyed much with the idea of sexual oppression predating or postdating class power that gets predicated on to the capitalist patriarchy subversions.

White-Feminism: A Reassessment

hooks stoutly raised the issue of invisibilisation of the marginalised black woman, particularly black working women. Her efforts led to the recognition of the differences related with marginalised racial/ethnic communities and the rejection of the presumption that women share a common identity based in a shared experience of oppression. White, western-middle class women as the custodian of feminism and as the norm for what constitutes woman, got a severe drubbing when hooks alarmed about the white-feminists complicity in exacerbating racism and ethnocentricism. In Black Looks: Race and Representation hooks disparages white-feminism for their perception of the pop-icon Madonna as subversive and suggests that Madonnas projection of sexual agency is scarcely of use to black woman of United States who may wish to refuse their representation as being sexually available. However, hooks was among those writers who envisioned the conception of feminism as a coalition that which is based on the principle of solidarity, on the ideas of political community, and usually on specific problems in some long term sense. In an essay Sisterhood: political solidarity between women, she writes:

..abandoning the idea of sisterhood as an expression of political solidarity weakens and diminishes the feminist movement..There can be no mass-based feminist movement to end sexist oppression without a united front.Women are enriched when we bond with one another .We can bond on the basis of our political commitment to a feminist movement.

To enrich feminist movement anywhere, including India, there is much to learn from hooks monumental works.

(Tanvir Aeijaz The author teaches public policy and politics at the University of Delhi and is an honorary Professor Extraordinary at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Views in this article are personal to the author and may not necessarily reflect the views of Outlook Magazine)

View post:

Remembering bell hooks: Political Commitment And The Feminist Movement - Outlook India

2020 was predicted to be the big year the year that sustainable went mainstream.

After all, it had a nice ring to it: the start of a new decade; an era of change. Even the symmetrical structure of the year itself two twenties, striding forth side-by-side into the future seemed to signal the winds of change, that a forward-looking epoch was upon us.

It followed a year of peak Greta Thunberg, widespread Extinction Rebellion protests, David Attenboroughs heart breaking more visibly with each of his series that aired, and the flygskam (flight shame) movement gaining traction. It looked like sustainability was about to go from zeitgeist to ubiquitous, including across the travel sector.

Well, our old friend corona put paid to a lot of the real change we thought wed see two years ago. But now, as we enter 2022 not quite as aesthetically pleasing as 2020, granted, but beggars cant be choosers it looks like this could be the year. Anecdotally, the number of emails in my inbox mentioning sustainable, slow and responsible travel has reached a fever pitch. And, while much of this may indeed be more green-wash than true commitment, theres definitely been a shift in the importance that global travel brands including airlines are putting on emphasising their eco-credentials.

Theres definitely been a shift in the importance that global travel brands including airlines are putting on emphasising their eco-credentials

It reflects the way in which sustainability has crept up the agenda for us civilians, with events like COP26, held in Glasgow in November, and the release of the latest damning IPCC report over the summer, infiltrating the national psyche. A survey by Kantar of residents of 10 countries, including the US, UK, France and Germany, published in November, found that 62 per cent of people saw the climate crisis as the main environmental challenge the world was now facing, ahead of air pollution (39 per cent), the impact of waste (38 per cent) and new diseases (36 per cent). Some 76 per cent said they would accept stricter environmental rules and regulations in response.

Elsewhere, research from Booking.coms 2021 Sustainable Travel Report found that 43 per cent of nearly 30,000 people surveyed said the pandemic had made them want to travel more sustainably in the future.

So, does Neo from The Matrix need to watch his back could 2022 be The One? Lets take a look at the elements that could help holidaymakers get their green on in the year to come.

Slow and flight-free travel

The popularity of eschewing air travel in favour of slow travel has gone from strength to strength. So far, 3,590 people have signed up to the Flight Free UK pledge for 2022 committing to take no flights, or only essential flights (no leisure trips allowed) for the next 12 months. This compares to 5,000 in 2021; founder Anna Hughes is aiming to convince 10,000 people to sign up in the year ahead.

Even though Covid is still very much with us, and travel of all kinds is difficult, people are keen to show that they are staying grounded for the climate, she tells The Independent. There has been a growing awareness in the past few years of the environmental impact of our travel choices, and we have seen more and more people signing our pledge because of their concerns for the planet.

Slow travel is gaining popularity

(Getty Images)

And there are all kinds of interesting companies popping up to offer flight-free itineraries in response to demand. Two new enterprises were created during the pandemic arguably not the easiest time to set up shop, but if they can survive that, they can probably survive anything to cater to this burgeoning market of travellers. Byway, a pioneering slow travel planner for flight-free trips, launched in 2020. Each multi-stop trip is personalised for the holidaymaker, and optimised for quality of experience instead of speed. No Fly Travel Club launched the following year, offering sustainable rail trips for adventurous souls. The main tenet of each is the idea that stopping flying doesnt have to mean stopping travelling and that, in fact, swapping plane for train can add a massive injection of adventure into any trip.

In addition, Europe seems to be taking the slow travel theme and running with it numerous sleeper train routes are launching on the Continent over the next year or so, offering travellers the opportunity to cover vast distances while they kip.

After 20 months in which many of us were forced to stay grounded and slacken our pace, the idea of embracing slow travel might not be so out there in 2022.

Carbon labels for holidays

Picture this: youre scrolling through holiday options, trying to decide where to book for your next big trip. But instead of comparing the facilities, the number of infinity pools or the size of the breakfast buffet, youre weighing up the carbon emissions of each possibility because the numbers are right there, in black and white, for all to see.

Carbon labels arent just a flight of fancy, nor a nice-to-have extra to be added on at some unspecified point in time: its a trend that has already taken off, and looks set to only get bigger.

Do I think it will be everywhere? I do, Sam Bruce, co-founder of Much Better Adventures, says of carbon labelling. It was the first international travel company to introduce the concept at the beginning of 2021. It should go beyond travel and they should be on all products that we buy; carbon labels should be the new calorie.

Forget designer labels in 2022, carbon labels are going to be the ultimate sustainable accessory

Pura Aventura, another travel company with sustainability at its heart that released carbon labelling this year, has taken a different approach. The UK tour operator introduced labels for itineraries as part of its preparation to become a certified B Corporation the premier sustainability certification only awarded to brands that are legally committed to balancing purpose and profit but it wasnt as straightforward as giving each trip a number.

The complexity we have is that all our trips are tailor-made so we cant say weve got 50 trips and lets measure the carbon of each one, says co-founder and CEO Thomas Power. Every trip is different. You need a live tool so we built it into our database.

Meanwhile, even Google is getting in on the action: the search engine launched a range of new product features to give people greener options when they travel in the autumn of 2021. These included putting carbon emissions information on Google Flights, with travellers able to see associated carbon emissions per seat for every flight and find lower-carbon options.

Hopefully more travel companies will follow suit. Forget designer labels in 2022, carbon labels are going to be the ultimate sustainable accessory.

Nature positive travel

The concept of offering trips that are net neutral or that do no harm take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints, keep nothing but memories and all that jazz has been around for a while. But some forward-thinking companies believe that no longer really cuts it.

Ethical tour operator Responsible Travel has been offering green and conservation-driven breaks and holidays for two decades, but in 2021 year its 20th anniversary founder Justin Francis decided that he wanted to go further, offering trips that actively make destinations better. The brands new goal is to make every trip nature positive by 2030. Just as being climate positive goes a step further than being carbon neutral not just cancelling out carbon production, but actively removing carbon from the atmosphere this travel ethos aims to leave the environments we visit not just in the same state that we found them, but better off.

In this decade, humans have become ever more aware of climate change. Calls for leaders to act echo around the globe as the signs of a changing climate become ever more difficult to ignore

Getty

Fierce wildfires have flared up in numerous countries. The damage being caused is unprecedented: 103 people were killed in wildfires last year in California, one of the places best prepared, best equipped to fight such blazes in the world

AFP/Getty

Entire towns have been razed. The towns of Redding and Paradise in California were all but eliminated in the 2018 season

AP

While wildfires in Greece (pictured), Australia, Indonesia and many other countries have wrought chaos to infrastructure, economies and cost lives

AFP/Getty

In Britain, flooding has become commonplace. Extreme downpours in Carlisle in the winter of 2015 saw the previous record flood level being eclipsed by two feet

AFP/Getty

Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire has flooded repeatedly in the past decade, with the worst coming on Christmas Day 2015. Toby Smith of Climate Visuals, an organisation focused on improving how climate change is depicted in the media, says: "Extreme weather and flooding, has and will become more frequent due to climate change. An increase in the severity and distribution of press images, reports and media coverage across the nation has localised the issue. It has raised our emotions, perception and personalised the effects and hazards of climate change."

Getty

Out west in Somerset, floods in 2013 led to entire villages being cut off and isolated for weeks

Getty

"In summer 2012, intense rain flooded over 8000 properties. In 2013, storms and coastal surges combined catastrophically with elevated sea levels whilst December 2015, was the wettest month ever recorded. Major flooding events continued through the decade with the UK government declaring flooding as one of the nation's major threats in 2017," says Mr Smith of Climate Visuals

Getty

Weather has been more extreme in Britain in recent years. The 'Beast from the East' which arrived in February 2018 brought extraordinarily cold temperatures and high snowfall. Central London (pictured), where the city bustle tends to mean that snow doesn't even settle, was covered in inches of snow for day

PA

Months after the cold snap, a heatwave struck Britain, rendering the normally plush green of England's parks in Summer a parched brown for weeks

AFP/Getty

Worsening droughts in many countries have been disastrous for crop yields and have threatened livestock. In Australia, where a brutal drought persisted for months last year, farmers have suffered from mental health problems because of the threat to their livelihood

Reuters

Even dedicated climate skeptic Jeremy Clarkson has come to recognise the threat of climate change after visiting the Tonle Sap lake system in Cambodia. Over a million people rely on the water of Tonle Sap for work and sustinence but, as Mr Clarkson witnessed, a drought has severley depleted the water level

Carlo Frem/Amazon

In reaction to these harbingers of climate obliteration, some humans have taken measures to counter the impending disaster. Ethiopia recently planted a reported 350 million trees in a single day

AFP/Getty

Morocco has undertaken the most ambitious solar power scheme in the world, recently completing a solar plant the size of San Francisco

AFP/Getty

Electric cars are taking off as a viable alternative to fossil fuel burning vehicles and major cities across the world are adding charging points to accomodate

AFP/Getty

Cities around the world are embracing cycling too, as a clean (and healthy) mode of transport. The Netherlands continues to lead the way with bikes far outnumbering people

Jeroen Much/Andras Schuh

Cycling infrastructure is taking over cities the world over, in the hope of reducing society's dependency on polluting vehicles

Ma Weiwei

Despite positive steps being taken, humans continue to have a wildly adverse effect on the climate. There have been numerous major oil spills this decade, the most notable being the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010

AFP/Getty

More recently, large swathes of the Amazon rainforest were set alight by people to clear land for agriculture

AFP/Getty

This decade may have seen horrors but it has led to an understanding that the next decade must see change if human life is to continue

Getty

Adventure tour operator Exodus also has nature positive travel at the top of its agenda; the company has pledged to become what its calling nature net positive by 2024.

Theres an expanding band of travel firms actively looking to make the world a better place through the holidays they run and their growth is testament to the fact that more and more tourists are placing a higher value on booking with a clear conscience.

Sustainable stays

In Booking.coms 2021 Sustainable Travel Report, 64 per cent of travellers said they wanted to stay in sustainable accommodation in the year ahead. While its not always easy to know exactly what that means after all, if a hotel has composting toilets but barely pays its workers a living wage, is it really the better choice? this research highlights that the issue is becoming a bigger factor in holidaymakers decision-making when it comes to where they stay.

As part of its greener travel options launch, Google has included information on sustainability efforts when searching for hotels, from waste reduction and water conservation measures to whether theyre Green Key or EarthCheck certified.

And a new platform catering specifically to travellers looking for more eco digs has also been created: Staze claims to be the planet's first carbon negative hotel platform. Users can filter more than 450,000 hotels by carbon footprint in any city and double carbon offsetting is offered for free on every booking.

Thats it, Im calling it: greener getaways look ready to hit the mainstream in 2022.

Follow this link:

Will 2022 be the year sustainable travel goes mainstream? - The Independent

2021 was a weirdly liminal year for music. Most of the best pop projects this year were retro-skewing triumphs of craft (30, An Evening With Silk Sonic, Solar Power, Lana Del Reys two albums) rather than anything that felt like the future. The left-field New York scene thats producing much of the best hip hop is plateauing. Mainstream rock is still in the slow process of being rehabilitated by former rappers digging around in their middle-school pop-punk CD collections. With Bandcamp Fridays becoming less of a big deal, we arent seeing quite so many of the delightful low-stakes Bandcamp releases we got so many in 2020. There werent even that many consensus albums, which made year-end season a lot less predictable than last years RTJ4/Fetch the Bolt Cutters doldrums. [See Daniels 2020 picks here.]

The most exciting rustlings this year in American music came from the young, queer, experimental underground, and theres a good chance next years prestige indie albums will come from names like Claire Rousay, More Eaze, Lucy Liyou, and Nick Zanca. Its hard to shake the feeling that the 2020s has yet to really start from a cultural standpoint, but until the other shoe drops, here are 20 of the years best albums.

1. Lana Del Rey, Chemtrails Over the Country Club This was the only album I heard this year where I choke up just thinking about it. This isnt because of what happens to any of the characters (though the telepathic exchange between Nikki Lane and Tammy Wynette is gobstopping) but because of how brilliant it is, how much is going on, how well its executed, how boldly it takes risksand the possibility Lana Del Rey will never again make an album I love so much. She has some great songs, but I find her classic-rock references cloying and her attempts at importance unnecessary, and she had no albums in my regular rotation until now. Here, she splits her Statue of Liberty-sized alter ego into a handful of smaller protagonists lost in the transient vastness of the worlds third-largest country, looking for the right vantage point to watch the world end. Down at the Men in Music Business Conference/down in Orlando/I was only 19 says more about how much it can suck to be a pop star than the entirety of the Billie Eilish album from this year. The song whose chorus goes not all those who wander are lost transcends clich by being exactly the kind of sentiment one of the characters in her songs would find apt to print on a wall ornament. Producer Jack Antonoff, who Im starting to like, uses softly brushed cymbals and the muted moan of a steel guitar to make the whole album sound like a nuclear wind blowing over a field. This isnt the most consistent album of the year, but because its the one Ive had the most fun picking apart in my mind, itll probably be the one Ill still listen to the most by the time the world does end.

2. Bitchin Bajas, Switched On Ra Synth-drone band does Sun Ra could be a recipe for freak worship or aimless meandering, but Chicago trio Bitchin Bajas uses the almighty jazz pianists music as a springboard for some of their brightest, most accessible, and most rigorous music yet. Daniel Quinlivans vocoder sounds just as insouciant as Ras favorite singer June Tyson, who instead of acting as a surrogate for the listeners awe sounded like shed been traveling the stars for years. And by interpreting this music on an array of vintage synths (shouting out another forebear in the process, Wendy Carlos), Bajas connect to Ras interest in keyboards both as instruments and objects, specifically the 50s and 60s recordings that included some the earliest-ever use of electric pianos in jazz. Though this pulsing, blacklit synthpop is generally unrecognizable as Ra until the melodies come in, Bitchin Bajas are honest and thoughtful about interpreting the music of an artist whos more widely known than widely heard. This should be treated less like a cover album than as a jazz album that uses source material from a single composer as a platform for a fierce new sound and vision.Anne Guthrie, Gyropedie The most important trend in experimental music this year was the folding of everyday objects and field recordings into diaristic, Internet-savvy, faintly emo music intended to document its creators lives. Most participants are in their twenties or early thirties: an age where time starts to slip through your hands at an alarmingly fast rate and when people, especially young artists, tend to live transiently. Making this music is a way of wresting control over time, and I felt this most poignantly on Anne Guthries Gyropedie, an album made on a journey from the East Coast to the West Coast. No idling cars, no hotel chatter or clatter of plates in roadside diners: just cold mornings, frost on breath, the resolve of getting into a car every day for a long, lonely trek. Whether Guthries move had anything to do with COVID is unknown to me, but I thought of my COVID-spurred move from Portland to my native San Francisco, the deep exhale before entering the unknown for months or possibly years. So why do I find this album so comforting? Maybe because Im happier than I was in March 2020, maybe because I know now that you can bottle the past and take it with you into the future.Grouper, Shade I realized all of the songs on Shade were love songs six hours after I got the edits back on my Pitchfork review, which I regret making all about how ooooh, inscrutable! the record is when what it was really about was under my nose the whole time. But Liz Harriss latest ultimately resonates most strongly for its sense of place. Its acoustic tracks sound like they were recorded in a hotel room, and I Followed the Ocean sounds like it was recorded as she was actually following the ocean. I was lucky enough to get the advance before going to a rave in rural Washington and spending the night awake in a tent in the middle of the woods freaking out. When youre half-awake in a tent on drugs, anything sounds inscrutable, but when I had it on my stereo over morning coffee, it filled the room like a great folk album. Looking back at my original piece, I was right that the album takes her knifes edge balance between intimacy and inscrutability to the extreme, but I was wrong that what shes saying is just out of reach.

6. Joshua Chuquimia Crampton,4 This LA guitarist-martial artist-comic-book creator topped my list last year with an ambitious double-album of solo guitar music called The Hearts Wash, and heres his new mini-album, clocking in at well over an hour across four pieces. If you were to visualize this music, you might envision a film-strip, or a geological timeline, or maybe a strip of colored beads; he meanders from one landscape to another, some lush and welcoming, others rugged and volcanic, each movement of his hands over the strings taking us a little further away from home. 4 is evocative enough that were not necessarily thinking about the fact that this is just one man with a guitar, but we never really forget it either. He puts his whole body into the instrument, the tap of his feet on the pedals audible, strumming with such force that our hands hurt in sympathy, until mind and body are one and were witnessing a crude form of telepathy.7. Parannoul,To See The Next Part Of The Dream What a delight to hear a rock album that goes so out of its way to be gorgeous. The second album from this anonymous Korean project is about how beautiful the world is (its first track is called Beautiful World) and about how its narrator is too despondent and depressed to enjoy it. This theme climaxes in a stunning moment in Beautiful World where the guitar shifts into a percussive five-beat pattern and that frustration becomes physical, as if theyre punching the wall. Though the songwriting is in an emo idiom, Dream is also one of the best-sounding shoegaze albums Ive heard, hyper-distorted yet hyper-compressed, so that its rough edges are shaved off into a square and the songs seem just as boxed-in as their hero. Lots of music has been made about teenage despondency, but Dream may be the rock album that best visualizes the realization that time is slipping out of your hands.

8. Pendant, To All Sides They Will Stretch Out Their Hands Brian Leeds Pendant project brings us some of the best horizontal ambient this year, its 10-plus-minute cloud-drifts curiously blank at first before their creepy little textural details emerge on subsequent listens. It might be the years best comedown soundtrack, keeping interest at chill-out intensity until the middle of the album crashes open on The Story Of My Ancestor The River. Most ambient albums are content to be ominous without a payoff, but the possibility that something scary actually will happen heightens the listeners interest, and we scan the surroundings looking for something that might jump out and attack. My colleague Ted Davis and I both noticed a paranoid undertone in Leeds work, as if leering pairs of eyes are squinting out of the chords and synth pads. To All Sides zeroes in on that feeling at the expense of almost everything else. Its a little too quiet.

9. Claire Rousay, A Softer Focus If Guthries Gyropedie got to the heart of the field-recording-soft-collage-documentary-emo ambient thing, A Softer Focus is its imperial statement and one of the best recent examples of an experimental musician moving to well, a softer focus without compromising their art. Rousay was a San Antonio punk drummer who got into the avant-garde at a young age, and now in her mid-20s she stands astride the scene with this glorious fusion of ambient music, diaristic recordings from her life, found objects, and the Auto-Tuned lilt of the emo-rappers shes long carried a torch for (centerpiece Peak Chroma in particular sounds at once like an anthem and a gentle survey of day-to-day life). A Softer Focus is loving and sentimental with a streak of stoner mischief, and it captures the loneliness of the Internet age without resorting to name-dropping or the awkward shoehorning of contemporary cues. It remains to be seen how it will age, but it might be the album from this year that sounds most like now.

10. Hoavi, Music For Six Rooms I quail to think of the alternate universe in which I took one look at the title, assumed it was a ripoff of Hiroshi Yoshimuras Music For Nine Postcards, and missed this dub-techno gem. But Music For Six Rooms is the best new album in the genre Ive heard since Space Afrikas Somewhere Decent to Live back in 2016. Dub techno is a head-expanding genre with a conservative streak, and its always a thrill to see someone get creative and cross-genre while staying true to the formalism thats arguably a prerequisite. The Topdown Dialectic album from this year might have more sounds that no one has ever heard before, but its more impressive to me when someone takes those mile-wide chords Basic Channel invented and finds new contexts for them. A whole documentary of dub techno history flashed through my head as I floated through its 70 minutes, but Id never heard an album using those sounds that felt quite like it. Instead of rusted and dank, instead of spacious and stoned, it felt soft, warm, diurnal, domestic: Now that I think about it, a little like Music For Nine Postcards.

11. Leather Rats,No Live Til Leather 98 This is apparently an American psychobilly band that was huge in Japan in the 90s, and on this purported live EP you can hear swells of crowd noise comparable to the ones that greeted Cheap Trick at Budokan. Of course, Leather Rats was no such band, and this is clearly a latter-day producer with a taste for misdirection, exploiting the old joke about weird music being huge in Japan against all odds. Whats funny is that this music isnt even psychobilly but a fusion of heavy dub with Suicide/Danzig-style dark-Elvis vocals, which works so spectacularly that Im surprised this is the first example Ive heard of it (if anyone can put us onto more psychodubilly well start a dedicated outlet, says label Bokeh Versions). In this context, the applause becomes a production affectation just like an airhorn or a loon sample, and the hoary old big-in-Japan joke is forgiven because it exists in the service of the music.

12. Jeff Parker, Forfolks Its a treat to see one of the most imaginative guitarists of the last 25 years do so much with just a guitar and a looping pedal. Here, the real-time link between the Tortoise guitarists brain and fingers is complicated by the question: What do I loop? Little vamps, sure, but also long lunar tones made from single notesand moments where hes either not looping at all or is so fantastic at looping we dont notice.

13. Arooj Aftab, Vulture Prince An illuminated manuscript: Urdu poetry dressed up with enough harps and strings to rub the cultural specificity of stripped-down authenticity in your eye like a finger full of gasoline. You dont need to know shes mourning the death of her brother to catch the albums central tension: As the arrangements bloom outward, her voice seems to be digging inward, like a fountain pen jabbing deeper into the paper.

14. Playboi Carti, Whole Lotta Red The preening boy-king of SoundCloud rap speaks in little grunts and squeaks and micro-tics and humphs of superiority over military-grade beats that put so many trebly, trendy dalliances in experimental rap to shame. His character is an insufferable dipshit, but the music is so exploratory and his princely schtick so cartoonish that enduring this orgy of contempt actually becomes kind of fun.

15. Lost Girls, Menneskekollektivet Jenny Hval and her awesomely named collaborator Hvard Volden expand on the philoso-trance of 2019s Practice of Love, taking the track lengths and the potential pretentiousness to extremes. Its Hval going full Hval, tying metatextual knots as sweet chords yield to creepy industrial shrieks, and its so easy to enjoy as ASMR that you might find yourself understanding it (!) before you even know it.

16. Soshi Takeda, Floating Mountains Have ever played a video game and known in your heart that its world doesnt stop at the edge of the map, that beyond those impassable trees and rocks and oceans there must be more to explore? You already understand this album, which rejects vaporwaves ironic treatment of turn-of-the-millennium virtual aesthetics and focuses on how pretty it all looks, how cool it all feels.

17. SUSS, Night Suite The expansive ambient-country visions of New York quartet SUSS have slowly soured and turned apocalyptic over time, and their new EP Night Suite is their most despairing and desolate vision yet. These five tracks, all named for American cities, are suggestive of decaying machinery, abandonment, sparsely populated expanses harboring old secrets. Is this the Dust Bowl or the fall of the American empire?

18. _____, The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid Seth Graham and More Eazes collab album is a tear-jerker. Listen to that monologueabout rock bottom, listen to those bells come in, and tell me they dont know exactly which buttons to push. Such sentimentalism is a relief in an experimental zeitgeist that often prefers to leave us guessing, and though guessing is fun, sometimes I want a punch in the gut to prove my heart pumps blood.

19. Jana Rush, Painful Enlightenment Opener Moanin has us thinking Jana Rushs new album might be a five-finger exercise before throwing us into the tank with confrontational male voices, pained yelps, and what sounds like a girl being repeatedly slashed with a knife. This is such frightening stuff that I can only imagine what Rush mustve put herself through tomakethese tracks, let alone to listen back and mix them.

20. Daniel Lichtenberg, Swan Island Tapes My gig at Willamette Week requires me to dig through the depths of the Portland Bandcamp tag, and this is the most rewarding thing Ive found therein. This ambient EP from a classically trained pianist shows off some of the most plaintive sounds Ive heard from a keyboard, woven into pieces that remind me of the organ in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds wandering off on its own trip.

Bonnie Prince Billy & Matt Sweeney, Superwolves Will Oldhams career has been defined by continual improvement: not just as a musician but as a person, a lover, a provider. Superwolves is his greatest tribute yet to just being good. The production is punched up, the guitarwork from Matt Sweeney and hotshot guest Mdou Moctar proves they practice, and the songs for his kid are as pure and rustic as a handmade toy horse.

Visit link:

20 best albums of 2021: 'A weirdly liminal year for music' - 48 hills - 48 Hills

(Credit: Alamy / Far Out / Elektra Records)

In The Doors 1971 masterpiece L.A. Woman, Jim Morrison yells the words, Well, Ive been down to god damn long, that it looks like up to me, with the war cry rattle of a frustrated builder who has just found out his jackhammer has been stolen but is going to try and shake the wall down anyway. This wail of the beleaguered disenfranchised echoes in Bob Dylans music too, albeit in a wildly different style, but the connection between the icons is far less nebulous than that.

Jim Morrisons purring words in Been Down So Long were actually plucked straight from Richard Farinas novel,Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, published five years earlier. As if woven into place by fickle fingers of fate, this book almost serves as an allegorical paradigm of the tragic side of counterculture, weaving a few of its most prominent figures into the picture as it does so.

In the novel itself, Farinaevokes the Sixties as precisely, wittily, and poignantly as F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the Jazz Age, according to Penguin. The hero, Gnossus Pappadopoulis, weaves his way through the psychedelic landscape, encountering-among other things-mescaline, women, art, gluttony, falsehood, science, prayer, and, occasionally, truth. The proto-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegasmasterpiece provides a vignette of counterculture and almost prognosticates its demise, as he states therein: This is a nervous little decade were playing with.

Farina wasnt just observing the counterculture movement and rendering it in precisely wavering prose, he was very much a part of it. He was a singer who became good friends with Bob Dylan and even married Joan Baezs younger sister, performing with her as Richard & Mimi Baez. This inner world insight illuminates lines like, The conscience of my elusive race gives not a fig for me, baby. But I endure, if you know what I mean, a certain fateful weight especially given what was to come.

Two days after his seminal work was published, Farina was at a book signing promoting the novel. He chitchatted with fans, discussed the whys and wherefores of the novel and the way the art world was seemingly teetering on the brink of bringing the old William S. Burroughs quote to fruition: Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. When all was said and done, the novelist left the signing behind, jumped on his motorbike and was tragically killed in a collision.

Dylan was saddened by the loss and would later suffer a motorbike accident of his own, prompting him to turn away from the zeitgeist which, as Farina put it, [mistook] induction for generation and reclaimed a sense of spiritual youth, extolling that message that he was much older then, Im younger than that now. Meanwhile, Morrison was stirred by Farinas prose and sad loss in a different way, relishing in the ways of youthful revolt in a splurge of visceral creativity that nevertheless harked back to some notion of the mystic spirit of great old America. Morrison would also tragically die shortly after he uttered the fateful title.

As it happens, even the novel that tied the counterculture icons leapt back into the deep roots of pop cultures past. The phrase Been down so long, that it looks like up to me, actually originates in the old rock n roll precursor of the blues. In Furry Lewis 1928 track I Will Turn Your Money Green he lies his way through swooning a lady with lines like, I show you more money Rockefeller ever seen, before hinting at a darkness with, If the river was whiskey baby and I was a duck, Id dive to the bottom, Lord, and Id never come back up, before the truth is revealed that he is terribly lonely and he purrs out the now-iconic line.

In 1997, Dylan would then bring the loop full circle by lending a verse from Lewis track for his anthemic blues send-up Trying to Get to Heaven which is inspired by both the late bluesman and his old friend Farina. In the song, Dylan rattles with his earthly tones the Money Green line: When I was in Missouri, they wouldnt let me be, I had to leave in a hurry, I only saw what they let me see. And in doing so, he seemed to tie together some long-wavering paths of history that had led culture to a particular point in the ever-unfurling roads of the disenfranchised folksala we might be ugly but we have the music.This connected tale might be one riddled with tragedy but the art it spawned along the way will always endure, if you know what I mean.

Follow Far Out Magazine across our social channels, onFacebook,TwitterandInstagram.

Most popular

Excerpt from:

The tragic novel that links Bob Dylan and The Doors - Far Out Magazine