October 22: Your patterns are still in place.

CW: death

Today’s recommendations come somewhat late and a little brief. I hope you’ll understand the delay. Yesterday I attended a memorial service that had me reflecting yet again on how some of the most indelible marks we leave on our friends and acquaintances is our taste. The man whose life we celebrated yesterday was a childhood friend. Together between the ages of seven and seventeen we forged our mutual affection for science fiction, reading, the woods of upstate New York, video and tabletop games, and long, winding conversations with no end in sight. The stories people shared of his life yesterday were mostly from the time in his life where I had already exited stage left, but in those stories I recognized a grown-up version of the 12-year-olds we had been together. I remember reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time with him, and the way he confused Saruman and Sauron for the duration of the book, mistaking two villains for one, and I remember laughing about that confusion with him and solidifying our affection for Tolkien together as we realized that, even in the confusion, we were connecting deeply to each other through it.

As I left the memorial service yesterday I thought about how my memories of people are so entangled with the things they recommended I try out. The first time a friend convinced me to try an oyster, the first time someone showed me how much fun acceleration in a car could be, the first encounter I had with literary analysis and the ways it could open texts up to me in a brand new way. Those experiences are names and faces to me, moments of connection and gratitude that spilled over from someone else’s enthusiasm and thoughtfulness. We live in the era of recommendation-by-algorithm.. My Spotify discovery playlist has served up a whole host of new stuff I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. The almighty TikTok algorithm has introduced me to more unique creators than any platform or person ever has - and I’m grateful.

But at the same time, I hope this newsletter disrupts the algorithmic monopoly on recommendations for you, just a little bit. I hope it’s a reminder that the recommendation can still be a powerful avenue for companionship and community, and no carefully honed social feed can replace that moment of contact.

On their track “Top Picks for You”, Injury Reserve raps about the ghostly remainder of a late friend left behind in the recommendation engine of his still-logged-in Netflix account.

“Your pattern's still in place, algorithm's still in action
As I scroll through I see a piеce of you is still reacting”

The algorithm’s still in action because, to the algorithm, there’s no loss to account for. Just a momentary pause of inputs. The recommendations left behind are an artifact of memory, an index of a friend’s life in taste. When you take a recommendation from someone else, you take a little bit of them into your own index and when you recognize your own tastes in the preferences that someone else has left behind, well, it’s a powerful gift.

Watch: “What Happened to Linkin Park” by Middle 8

Content warning: suicide

One day I’m going to write something at length about Linkin Park and the weird, influential space they occupied at the intersection of taste, mental health, pop culture, and heavy music. But until I get around to that, you should check out this video by Middle 8.

I’m 33 years old, which means I was just hitting the throes of adolescence when Linkin Park dropped their nu-metal magnum opus, Hybrid Theory. Between that record and its follow up, Meteora, Linkin Park was probably the single most important, most formational band of my angst little life at that point. But unlike a lot of my peers who shared my enthusiasm for those first two records, I stuck around with Linkin Park, listening to every record they released, even their critically (and fairly) reviled last album, One More Light.

During the years after Meteora, as nu-metal became a punchline and as the world came to understand this kind of angsty, earnest radio rock as an embarrassing phase, Linkin Park actually wrote some of their most interesting music, most of which is worth revisiting - or visiting for the first time if you’ve never gave it a shot. Middle 8 does a great job of highlighting the highs and lows of the Linkin Park discography. He spotlights 2010’s A Thousand Suns especially, an album that probably deserves critical re-evaluation in 2021, showcasing as it does a surprisingly mature political outlook and some trend-anticipating production choices.

It may be that you have no interest in reliving your teen years with Linkin Park’s early days, and you may lack my faith in the artistic merit of their later work, but if there’s even a shred of nostalgia for this band’s biggest hits, I think you’ll appreciate this mini-doc all the same.

Listen: By the Time We Get to Phoenix by Injury Reserve

If you Bing reviews of this album you’ll find that a large ratio of the words written about it are backstory - and for good reason. The three men who comprise Injury Reserve, Parker Corey, Nathaniel Ritchie, and the late Jordan Groggs, have a compelling story to tell. Their inventive and chaotic approach to underground hip hop emerged seemingly out of nothing, ex nihilo in Tempe, Arizona, and their lyrics are a mix of esoteric evocations and personal confession.

So I won’t waste more of your time recapping what others have written more clearly and sensitively than I could. Instead, I’ll simply say that if you don’t at least give this record a shot, you will be missing out on one of the year’s greatest musical offerings. When the opening track, “Outside” kicks off with its spoken word samples, filtered synths, and sludgy vocals tell you “there must be something wrong in your noggin,” you may find yourself wondering if this kind of thing is really for you. And I’ll acknowledge, aspects of By the Time We Get to Phoenix are pretty challenging. The flow of the record coheres around dramatic shifts in both tempo and texture, and the writing deals with deeply bleak material, including Groggs tragic death earlier this year. But along with the weird abstractions there is also a strong pop sensibility. The bass line on “SS San Francisco” walks up and down like a bluesy rock number from the mid 2000s, and the storytelling on “Top Picks for You” is intimate, clear as a bell, and immediately arresting.

It may take a few listens if you’re relatively new to the underground hip hop scene or music with avant garde leanings in general, but I promise. Injury Reserve has delivered something special here that only gets more rewarding with each spin.

Follow: @mr.mosebys_lefttit (on TikTok), The Musings of a Crouton (on Youtube)

How to describe the chaotic, hypnotic energy of this TikTok account. It’s like you opened your eyes to find, suddenly, you’re in a dream about being a first grader again, but your teacher has been swapped out with a crazed Ms. Frizzle who obsesses over her own eldritch legacy rather than why clouds exist. It’s like showing up to a motivational speaker event but the keynote has been swapped out with a CIA psy-ops project still in its testing phase and, frankly, it’s unclear if the new speaker is in on it or not. It’s like getting lost in the woods and you think you might be going in circles, but each time you see the same tree it gets funnier.

The brand of comedy that @mr.moseby is deploying here (as well as in longer form on her Youtube channel and podcast) might not immediately be to everyone’s taste, but I defy you not to swipe through her whole catalog after seeing a single one of these weirdo monologues. Whether she’s ranting about the conspiracies of feral adolescents or her role in the burning of Alexandria, everything this account posts is an hallucinogenic escape. Follow her, as well as her backup account, the musings of a crouton, to plug into a daily shot of surreal narrative energy.

Read: “Sable: To glide, or perchance, to vibe by The Crossover Appeal

Ok I know this one is cheating, but I really think this longer form exploration of one of the year’s most interesting games is worth your time. Sable has stuck with me in these weeks since closing the door on its final moments, and I think i has some really special things to say about exploration, meditation, and growth. Plus, it’s the first piece we’ve published here at The Crossover Appeal outside this weekly newsletter, so it’d be pretty cool and exclusive of you to check it out now.

That's all for now. As always, thanks for reading. And please reach out if any of these recs makes your week just a tiny bit richer. I'd love to hear about it.

Jordan Cassidy