so yesterday i was using my laptop on the kitchen table and i was talking to my sublet roommate Charlie about whether or not anyone is still listening to Sleigh Bells, and he told me he couldn’t ever really get into Sleigh Bells and doesn’t know what people like about a guitar sound like that. i told him that Sleigh Bells might be better in theory than in execution/actual listening, but he should still give it another try because i think it might be an Important record and it’s a lot of fun too. also it’s interesting to listen to the record and consider that it might be about the guitar as caricature, as a tool of total aural domination, and like a feministic reappropriation of the guitar as phallus. like you know that famous T. Rex t-shirt design where Marc Bolan is standing in front of those amps stacked on top of each other slamming on a guitar with his hair covering his face and it’s so primordial and powerful and the whole thing is fucking glowing gold?

or Prince on stage at the super bowl making a shadow on the curtain like a phallus?

Sleigh Bells is like if there was a girl the size of Godzilla and she was doing the same thing as Bolan on that t-shirt or Prince on the curtain, but with a guitar as long as a bus and swinging the neck wildly and slamming buildings with giant soundwaves, tiny people on the streets below begging for mercy but she just makes it louder and LOUDER!! but then i thought i wasn’t sure if that was true, and i didn’t really know how to phrase this idea i had about the guitar in Sleigh Bells, so then i said “okay i know you don’t like Sleigh Bells but maybe you’ll like this because it’s along the same sonic lines as Sleigh Bells but maybe a little more conventionally tuneful?” and i put on Fang Island and told charlie something about the record like how listening to it feels like, “imagine if you’re climbing a really tough mountain with a really heavy pack and you climb and you climb and you struggle and you struggle and you finally reach the top! and there’s this ecstatic victory you feel when you reach the top. except it’s like a trick mountain and you keep reaching the top every ten seconds! and all the struggle has been left off the record so the whole thing is paroxysm of joy after paroxysm of joy, you’ll see what i mean when you hear it man”

(i know that all sounds corny but Fang Island is a record i’m pretty passionate about and really believe in and i don’t write or talk or think this way about every record i hear but i thought Treats and Fang Island were so exaggerated as to lend themselves to discussion in those terms, you know? some records are subtler and it’s even harder to accurately represent them — not that there’s always that correlation but you know what i mean)

so i left my apartment and felt kind of unsettled about maybe not selling Fang Island and Treats to charlie in a particularly appealing way and maybe even in an offputting way and felt sort of sad that maybe what i’d say would be the thing that would prevent him from getting into those records, both of which have provided me hours of enjoyment.

anyway so then a couple hours later i was standing on the L platform listening to the new Big Boi record and writing down some notes about it in blackberry memopad because i really wanted to write about it because it’s just fucking out of control, and honestly i’ve only ever been moderately into OutKast so this really came as a surprise. i wrote down something about how maybe there’s a Simon & Garfunkel thing going on with Andre and Big Boi (i think for Simon & Garfunkel it’s generally accepted that Paul Simon was the visionary and Art Garfunkel had a pretty voice and was along for the ride). like Big Boi realizes, perhaps through the constant talk that Andre 3000 is one of the greatest rappers of all time (like on Maybach Music Part 2 when Lil Wayne says, referring to himself, “you see the Biggie, see the Jada, Tupac in him / and Kurt Cobain / and Andre three stacks”) that maybe everyone thinks OutKast was a product of the genius of Andre and not him, and the ferociousness and lyrical/technical magic tricks of Sir Lucious Left Foot (and especially the beats, all of which he co-produced!!!) are driven by that, by Big Boi fighting to justify his place in the southern rap canon right next to Andre.

and then i wrote down some other stupid stuff about the bombastic drums and the nimble synth lines that snake through the record, and some other random observations, and then i realized that there’s pretty much no way i’m gonna be able to capture this record with words and how frustrating that was, so i put my phone away and got on the train and relaxed and listened. i’m glad that reviewing records isn’t my job because it seems like really hard work, right? i wish whoever gets assigned Sir Lucious Left Foot good luck with it, because if you write for pitchfork and you’re reviewing a record, a big part of that record’s destiny in the ears of the public lays in your hands. and that’s a lot of responsibility. your assessment and interpretation and ability to write a compelling recommendation plays a huge role in determining how many people will get the record and how many fans the artist will have, and if you hear a record that you love but write a review that doesn’t translate to readers, you’ve done a grave disservice to the band that might do palpable harm to their career you know?

which is what i suspect is gonna happen with Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty. i don’t mean to say that if i can’t do it than nobody can, because certainly there’s Professionals out there who are trained in reviewing records, but it just seems like the type of record that’s so huge and great and unconventional, and you could write an ten-page essay and still not fully have covered what’s so spectacular about it. obviously this all reminds me of the phrase “talking about music is like dancing about architecture” which is totally untrue and might as well be rephrased as “thinking critically about art is impossible” because great writing can capture a record, but maybe some records are just really resistant to that. which is a real shame for their futures and their public conversations. i guess we’ll see what happens with the conversation about Sir Lucious Left Foot right? okay i gotta go the computer lab i’m in is closing early today

p.s. nitsuh abebe, whose superb Why We Fight #5 column just dropped, wrote three things on his blog that read suspiciously like this blog…