July 20: It’s not a machine, after all

It’s been a little more than a year since I last passed along a recommendation. I hope you don’t mind me slipping back into your inboxes for a moment.

I’ve been hovering around a return for some time now - waiting on something or other to clear up, make the way for putting words back to back to back - and I couldn’t really say what exactly finally got this newsletter in front of you again. But now that it’s here, I do have to say it feels good to be back.

How are you? I imagine you’ve tasted, read, and seen a million wonderful things between now and last April. Maybe you missed those weekly recs, maybe you never gave it a second thought. Maybe you’ve been lost in the Feed for so long that you’ve gotten used to the idea of people fading in and out of your scroll that absences mean almost nothing to you anymore. I know some days, I’ll randomly remember a time when TikTok that made me laugh until tears came to my eyes and I cramped until I felt nauseated, and then I’ll realize I don’t remember the video itself. Actually, I think it’d be nice if you’ve been loving on an album I recommended back in ‘22 and until this very moment you couldn’t have said how it first came into your world. It’s a newsletter after all, just an impression of a thing, nothing to treasure, nothing to get too precious about.

So let’s not. Here are four great things you should check out this week.

How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell

I first saw this book on a friend’s shelf a couple days into a vacation in the Pacific Northwest. Most of my trips out that way are explicitly about the unwind, the catch-up, the unplug, so its direct, self-helppy title stuck with me. Years later I finally picked up my own copy and dove in, and there’s a lot more to this book than its pop psychology presentation hints at.

This is basically Jenny Odell’s meditation on all the ways our social media hellscape robs us of our agency, our creativity, our energy, and our politics. And while, yeah, nothing groundbreaking about the observation that Twitter is killing us all, Odell’s doing more with this premise than most. She expands the horizons of “SOCIAL MEDIA BAD” discourse to include analyses on the rise and fall of utopian communes in the sixties, reflections on what it means to preserve public space in the age of rapid gentrification, and restoring a daily relationship to the natural world might be the most important missing ingredient in maintaining a steady, lively connection to the communities we live in. How to do Nothing isn’t really about doing nothing at all - it’s about how to cultivate the sense of self that we’re all going to need to survive the relentless alienation of modern life.

Please Don’t Cry by Rapsody

Please Don’t Cry is North Carolina rapper Marlanna Evans’, aka, Rapsody’s, fourth full length album in more than twelve years. New LPs from Rapsody are always a reason to celebrate - pound for pound, she’s one of the greatest rappers alive right now. Like she says on “Asteroids”, if I had a dick, I’d be in the greatest debates.

With this release Rapsody returns to the deep well of her own introspection, reflecting on everything from her own creative process, to her relationship to fans and the gender politics of the broader rap game, to the question of what it means to heal. Everything is delivered with a confident, musical flow that has a way of sticking in the memory like cement. And the production, I mean, it’s immaculate. Old school influences combine with a theatrical sensibility that transforms beats into set design. Which isn’t to accuse Please Don’t Cry of being overly conceptual - this thing is thick with danceable grooves and hard hitting beat switches. And on top of all that, as an album, it’s sequenced with the confidence of a master storyteller. Look no further than the jab-uppercut combo of “DND (It’s Not Personal)” into “Black Popstar.”

Easy contender for album of the year by the time December rolls around.

This Ain’t the Way You Go Out by Lucy Rose

The opening bars of “Light As Grass”, the first track on this record, brought me back to somewhere between 2007 and 2011, when some of the best indie songwriters in the world were serving up huge, piano driven pop-rock songs on a platter every other week, it felt like. Lucy Rose has handed us a collection of tunes that take those beautiful pop sensibilities of Phoenix or Keane and rescues them from the trash bin of millennial sentimentality by infusing them with equal parts electronic production, rock, and jazz influences, and a heavy dose of carefully observed lyricism about motherhood, recovery, heartbreak, and resilience.

It’s the kind of record that wraps you up in its world, invites you into some difficult, troubling times, and holds your hand while you scan the wreckage for reflections of your own hurts. Rose is a special songwriter - I haven’t heard stories that hit as hard as the ones on this record in a long time.

And yet, for all the heavy notes Lucy Rose strikes, the end result is compulsively listenable. It’s not a party, but it’s also not a funeral. Instead it feels relatable and spacious, like a cousin’s photo album that you occasionally feature in.

“What Was Parts Unknown“ by Alicia Kennedy

Alicia Kennedy is new to me, but having read this piece about the complicated legacy of Anthony Bourdain, I’ll be adding her writing into regular rotation. If you've read anything I've written over the past several years you'll know that Bourdain is one of my favorite topics, and while few celebrity passings have triggered as many think pieces, hot takes, and long form eulogies as Anthony Bourdain’s, Kennedy’s take here proves there’s still ripples worth considering - maybe more than ever - in the year two thousand and twenty-four.

Bourdain’s conflicted, complex public persona features heavily in Kennedy’s analysis, but it isn’t her subject - instead she focuses on why it seems like no one can truly fill his shoes, despite the Cambrian explosion of food content throughout the 2010s and 20s. The answer, like Bourdain himself, straddles a series of messy lines that structure the thickety terrain of contemporary food politics, the privilege of travel and tourism, and, of course, the role of a cultural translator and what that even means in a social media saturated world. And while her concluding lines are a bit more optimistic about the consequences of Bourdain’s legacy than I might feel, I love the way Kennedy captures the chimerical magic of this writer, chef, documentarian who always came from at least two worlds.

Thanks for reading, and for welcoming my writing back into your life. Looking forward to getting to know this whole thing again, seeing where else it can take us, and whether or not we even need it to take us anywhere.

-- The Crossover Appeal