The Gardener: November 2, 2024

I started this newsletter as a joke. In 2018, I bought a Never-Ending Pasta Pass from the Olive Garden, and my friend Graham challenged me to write about every meal that I ate with it. Never one to back down from a challenge, I accepted, and thus this newsletter was born. I called it The Gardener because, well, Olive Garden.

I’m not much of the other kind of gardener. I’ve tried, over the years, to tend to and grow vegetables, but I haven’t got the attention span or consistent focus to keep up with it, and I live on a creek that attracts all sorts of critters who happily devour my tomatoes or whatever else I’ve tried to grow. But I like the idea of a garden as a metaphor, and I haven’t found a better name for this lil’ newsletter, so The Gardener it shall remain.

I’ve been in Austin for less than a week as I’m writing this. Before that, I was on the other side of the International Date Line for several weeks, mostly in Sydney, Australia, but also with a brief stopover on the north island of New Zealand. The return flight from Sydney took off at 10am on Saturday morning, and landed at LAX at 6am on… Saturday morning, or four hours before it took off, which is very confusing. This weekend, we’ll shift the clocks for daylight savings time. Time, I’ve come to understand, is made up.

But still, it goes by, and your body is aware of it. In three days, the election will be upon us, and my anxiety—like yours, probably, but who knows, I don’t know your life—is high and will only get higher. On the last night in Sydney, Kat and I were at dinner and we saw a man in a Harris/Walz t-shirt sitting at the table next to us. When his friends arrived and I eavesdropped on their conversation, I was surprised to learn that he spoke with an Aussie accent, and eventually I asked him what was up with the shirt. “I don’t get to vote,” he explained, “But this election is important for everyone in the world. I wanted to do something.” A day earlier, driving from Rotorua, New Zealand to Auckland, we passed a car with a sticker on the window that read “Trump Posse.” Pretty much everyone I met wanted me to tell them who was going to win the election when they heard my accent. Buddy, I wish I knew.

Anyway, as we head into Election Day 2024, I’ve made you a playlist of songs that remind me of elections from the past, that reflect my experience of living through 2024, and/or just sound good. You can listen to it on Apple Music here, or on Spotify here.

1. “God, Allow Me to (Please) Play Music,” Voice of Baceprot (2023)

   As I mentioned, I was in Australia the past couple weeks. The first week was a work trip, to report on SXSW Sydney, which was in its second year as the first international edition of the Austin festival I’ve covered the past fifteen years. Part of that involved seeing how it functioned as a music festival, which means I got to see a good amount of live music that week. My favorite band I saw was called Voice of Baceprot.

   Voice of Baceprot are three young women from West Java, Indonesia. I’m not certain how young, but the bass player had braces. It’s hard to tell for sure, because the band, who are all Muslim, perform their intense heavy metal jams while wearing the hijab. It makes them a striking visual presence on stage, but also, they fucking shred—you could drop that bassist in, I dunno, the Mars Volta or some band that requires exceptional musicianship, and she could easily hold her own.

   “God, Allow Me to (Please) Play Music” is a great example of what this band does well—it’s got rapid-fire drums, doom-y guitars, show-offy bass parts—and also a killer pop hook (and an unexpected reggae breakdown that comes out of nowhere!). The song is plaintive but also stalwart. It’s a response to folks in their community who take a dim view of the band choosing metal as their medium of expression, which is a tale as old as heavy metal itself, and, I think, part of why what they do translates so well across cultures. And the song’s plea seems to have worked—at the very least, it won them an Indonesian Music Award, and they made it to Sydney for the festival.

   I don’t like to make predictions, but I am confident that at some point in the next year or so, some legacy rock band—the Foo Fighters or Mastodon or Metallica or somebody—is going to bring them on tour as an opener, and then they will ascend to global stardom. Expect to hear me drop the anecdote that I saw them play in a basement venue in Australia in 2024 in many conversations that follow.

2. “Nancy Reagan’s Head,” Mission of Burma (2006)

   Mission of Burma were a legendary post-punk band, despite only making one album before breaking up in 1983 because their singer had tinnitus, which is no joke (I have a mild case of it and when it’s bad, it’s really bad). As their legend grew and the band learned they could turn their amps down, they reunited twenty years later.

   Often, when that happens, it’s a cash-in, but their reunion produced four really interesting albums, the second of which concluded with the song “Nancy Reagan’s Head.” There are a few songs about politics on this playlist, but only one of which has a hook that includes the line “I’m haunted by the freakish size of Nancy Reagan’s head” and then the rest of the band responding “no way that thing came with the body.” I wish there were more.

3. “The Hollows,” Why? (2008)

   Sometimes there are artists you hear that you immediately incorporate into your personal canon, whose work you know you’ll be seeking out for years to come. Others are more brief affairs, a fleeting connection that fades as quickly as it came on. Why? is one of the latter bands for me. I’m not sure I’ve listened to a full record since the one “The Hollows” came from, which is now more than fifteen years old. But as we approach this election, I’ve been thinking about the songs that capture the way I felt in previous election cycles, and “The Hollows” captures something essential about late Bush-era paranoia.

   I spent that election season out of the country, too; Kat and I were living in London while she was in grad school, and I watched America from afar for the first time. It felt like this—uncertain and tense and a little bit funny, too. By the time the election came around, we were back in the U.S. and the economy had crashed and the uncertainty about who would win had mostly vanished, though there was plenty else to be anxious about.

4. “Fuck the World,” Insane Clown Posse (1999)

   I’m not a juggalo—I’ve never felt comfortable enough joining a group identity, and I’d never have the patience for the makeup—but I listened to ICP a lot when I was in my late teens, because their songs were funny and stupid and catchy, and Chuck D said it was okay.

   “Fuck the World” is vintage ICP, an incredibly dumb song that knows how dumb it is (“fuck all fifty-two states, oooh yeah!”) and has a lot of fun with it.

   Continuing our theme, it roughly captures how I felt around the first election I voted in, or even paid much attention to, which was Bush/Gore in 2000. I did not like either of them, and was convinced that if Ralph Nader got five percent of the vote, perhaps we would have more options in the future, so I voted for him. He didn’t get five percent, obviously, and the options got much worse long before they got better. I learned that you can’t take a shortcut toward building the world you want, and it takes years of seeding things in small ways for anything to change. “Fuck the World” isn’t about any of that, obviously, except in the broadest sense that I understand the impulse to say “fuck you” to all of your options, and ICP did, too, sometimes in extremely specific ways. (“You know the guy that operates the Rouge River drawbridge in Del Ray on Jefferson? Fuck him!”)

   Anyway, Violent J endorsed Kamala Harris last week. Whoop whoop, indeed.

5. “House Parties,” Dawes (2024)

   This band has apparently released nine albums! I had no idea because I was only dimly aware they existed until the song “House Parties” popped up on a playlist the algorithm made a few months ago. It’s a delight, though, catchy and funny, with a chorus that changes most of the words each time it plays through, but preserves the rhyme and meter, which is extremely satisfying.

   This is just a good song about realizing who you are and what you value, and what you don’t, and Kat said it reminded her a little bit of Jimmy Buffett, and I think that’s a good insight. I like Jimmy Buffett, and house parties and local bands, and Dawes, too, it turns out.

6. “Waterloo Sunset,” The Kinks (1967)

   Okay, here is a confession: When I was making the 150 Favorite Songs list, I just kinda… forgot “Waterloo Sunset,” which probably would have fallen somewhere in the top twenty or so. It’s maybe the best pure pop melody anybody ever wrote, yearning and plaintive and wistful and also catchy and joyful, all at once. Every songwriter I’ve ever talked with about it wishes they had written “Waterloo Sunset,” and it’s easy to tell why after you press play.

7. “We the People…,” A Tribe Called Quest (2016)

   There was a running joke in 2016 that it was the worst year any of us had ever experienced. It’s kind of a stale joke at this point, because 2016 was so bad that it even ruined waiting for the next year to be better, but generally, people were aware that there was something rancid in the air.

   One bright spot, though, was that those horrible vibes led to a new A Tribe Called Quest album, the first (and last, RIP Phife Dawg) in nearly twenty years. Somehow, they didn’t miss a beat along the way, and We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service was a fitting coda to the legacy of one of the most important groups of its era.

   “We the People…” was the most explicitly 2016 song on the album, by which I mean it captured, reflected, and responded to the vibes. (It also has an inexplicable reference to Tony Romo and former Cowboys tight end Jason Witten for some reason.) It came out at the end of the year—after the election, which was one of the stranger and most vivid nights in my life, and maybe yours, too—and was about as political as Tribe ever got, a reaction to the 2016 version of Trumpism that sounds almost quaint now, except they’re all just too good at rapping to come off as trite even nearly a decade later.

8. “"Euphoria,” Kendrick Lamar (2024)

   Speaking of being good at rapping! I don’t know what song I will think about when reflecting on 2024, but there’s a really good chance it’ll be “Euphoria,” which I like even more than “Not Like Us,” despite that one being the superior pop song. There’s just something in the sheer weight of the six-and-a-half minute, chorus-free invective of “Euphoria” that I find thrilling.

   Kendrick spends the whole song playing with different voices, finding new ways each time to insult Drake with something you’ve never heard before; sometimes he calls him out using humility as his weapon, sometimes pure lyrical skill, sometimes sheer aggression, sometimes devastating humor. (I still laugh when he follows up “I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress” with a line about something else he hates that he qualifies with “but that’s just me, I guess,” like everything else was just a self-evident fact that no one could disagree with.)

   I love diss songs, and “Euphoria” is, I think, one of the greats—it’s full of swagger and fury and humor, just the perfect combination for this kind of song, and there’s more to appreciate every time you listen to it. I’m hopeful that 2024 will conclude in a way that makes me feel the same confidence and dismissiveness Kendrick deploys here, but who knows.

9. “Government Cheese,” Vince Staples (2024)

   Vince Staples quietly made one of the best records I’ve heard this year, a collection of mostly downtempo, low-key, introspective rap songs that sound best late at night.

   “Government Cheese” is thick with melancholy, from the minor-key piano riff that runs through the song to the mumbled raps Vince drops about the contrast between the places his life has taken him compared to where he came from, and how becoming who he is—a rap star and actor, living a successful creative life—hasn’t brought him the happiness you’d expect. He raps about this in a devastating way, telling the story of getting a call from a friend in prison who saw him in his part on Abbott Elementary while locked up and who wanted to tell him how proud he was, and how he pretended that he felt like he deserved it because saying otherwise would have been too cruel to someone living under rather more desperate circumstances. If things turn out poorly next week, maybe 2024 is the year of “Government Cheese,” instead.

10. “I Never Cared for You,” Willie Nelson (1998)

    Okay, enough politics, at least for now. Willie hasn’t recorded a lot of songs like “I Never Cared for You,” the version of which appears here is from his 1998 album Teatro, although he first recorded it in the sixties.

    The song opens with one of the most intense lines he ever wrote: “The sun is filled with ice and brings no warmth at all,” which would be a perfectly fine way for, say, Neurosis to start a thumping, slow-burn of a metal song. From there, he lays out a set of similarly brutal lyrics: “The sky was never blue,” he sings, “the stars are raindrops searching for a place to fall, and I never cared for you.”

    There are two ways to interpret this—the first is the way that I think he probably intended, which is that he’s saying all of these obviously untrue things in order to set up “I never cared for you” as sort of a punchline. If he’s lying about the sun and the sky and the stars, then he’s also lying when he says he never cared. But there’s another read on it, too, which is that the way Willie is feeling in that moment, all of those things are true, or at least true enough. The sun is filled with ice and brings no warmth at all, because that’s just where he is in that moment, and he never cared for you.

11. “Capitol Air,” Allen Ginsberg and The Clash (1981)

    My personal politics are sort of complicated these days, but I think this piece by Allen Ginsberg, which he recorded one night in 1981 with The Clash at a concert in Times Square, probably does as good of a job of capturing them as anything. It opens with the words, “I don’t like the government where I live,” which is such a funny and childlike way to say something that is true for many of us.

    It’s weird; part of growing up is killing your youthful heroes, and Ginsberg was certainly that for me, but the older I get, the more insightful and impressive I find his work. I think it’s probably because he never really stopped going, which is rare for poets—he was in his mid-fifties when he wrote “Capitol Air,” and he wrote it after a lifetime of political disappointment. Accordingly, he rejects pretty much everything in the poem: “I don’t like dictatorship of the rich,” he declares, but also, “I don’t like the KGB gulag concentration camps.” Is he an anarchist, then? Nope. “I don’t like anarchists screaming ‘love is free,’” a line he follows up, hilariously, with, “I don’t like the CIA, they killed John Kennedy.” Throughout it all, the Clash play a simple martial beat, and on the recording, you can hear Ginsberg get pumped up by it, finding the rhythm of his lines in ways that aren’t there when he performs the poem without music, building to something more cathartic then he can deliver on his own. Ultimately, he refuses to accept the whole frame of the competing worldviews that defined the era. “The bloody iron curtain of American military power / is a mad mirror image of Russia’s red Babel-tower,” he declares in the poem’s climax, a line he repeats twice. It could easily play as bitter and checked-out, except that’s not okay, either, and so he sticks with what he knows works in its final lines: “Armed with humor, feed and help enlighten, woe-mankind,” he concludes, which I think is good advice.

    There’s a sentiment, at least in the online discourse, that if you’re not a Committed Leftist, then you’re a shill for the establishment; if you’re not willing to compromise on certain values, you’re a nihilistic tankie; if you don’t preempt your statements by acknowledging that you believe in the greatness of the free market, you’re a communist who would have been happier in Stalinist Russia; etc, etc, etc. I think it’s all more complicated than that, and when I looked for something that articulated why I think committing to an ideology that puts theory above the actual lives of people is a fundamentally broken way to exist in the world, I found that Allen Ginsberg wrote it all down and recorded it with The Clash, of all bands, forty-some years ago.

    (Note that this recording of “Capitol Air” isn’t on Apple Music, and the one that is on there is kind of… silly sounding, so I left it off that version of the playlist. You can listen to it here, and I think you should!)

12. “Sammy’s Bat,” Dan Bern (2004)

    The 2004 election was the first one that really broke my heart. I spent that fall on tour, an eleven-week marathon across America, performing in community spaces and living rooms and rock clubs and sketchy bars all over the country. To fill up eleven weeks of tour dates, you can’t just stick to the big cities—there aren’t enough of them. So while I got a look at the United States as it appeared in New York and Chicago and San Francisco, I also saw it in Monroe, Louisiana and Aberdeen, South Dakota and Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, too. And I came away from the experience very confident that George Bush would lose, which I wanted to happen very much. And, welp.

    “Sammy’s Bat” is a song about how unfair elections can feel, and about the impulse to fight back by being unfair yourself. (The title is a reference to Sammy Sosa, an MLB all-time great home run hitter who achieved his remarkable results at the plate through dubious means.) It still sounds mostly like the way 2004 feels to me, when I think back on it.

13. “Brooklyn,” Jesse Malin and Dinosaur Jr. (2024)

    Jesse Malin recorded “Brooklyn” for his 2002 album The Fine Art of Self-Destruction, which is a record that meant a lot to me at the time. This is, I think, the best song on it, and I haven’t been able to listen to it in years, because there’s a stupid, thoughtless slur for trans people in it for no reason at all. (It’s the one that begins with “T.”) Or, I guess, it’s there because the bigotry trans people faced at the early part of this century was just casually cruel, something that could be tossed off as a throwaway bit of wordplay in a song that had nothing to say about them at all. For years, I didn’t even realize that word was in the song, which is otherwise lovely and wistful. I thought he was singing “no more Chinese near work,” as in “we don’t stop for Chinese food at lunch anymore because we don’t talk anymore.” Instead, he’s referring to people he used to see on his walk home, and he uses a cruel, dehumanizing word to describe them.

    Anyway, it is 2024 now and Jesse Malin is recovering from a stroke. Musicians, famously, don’t have great health insurance, and so a bunch of Malin’s friends went into the studio with him to re-record a few dozen of his songs to raise money for his medical bills. Dinosaur Jr. took on "Brooklyn," and in the new version of the song, the slur was taken out, so I can finally listen to this song again without thinking about how incredibly mean the world has been to people I care about for no reason at all.

14. “Justin Bieber,” Kitty Pryde (2012)

    I think about 2012 as the year I learned to listen a little bit better. I think it’s probably mostly shedding some of the bullshit that young men grow up with, as I made my way into my thirties, but I’m grateful for it—my life has been richer and more interesting the better I’ve gotten at listening to other people.

    Weirdly, I think this song from Kitty Pryde, who was a Soundcloud rapper in the early part of the last decade, is sort of a symbol of that learning to listen. She was a teen rapper who wrote songs about things of concern to teenage girls. “Justin Bieber” is a song about Justin Bieber fandom, and the way a teenage crush on a pop star can really take over a kid’s life. I had heard lots of rap songs about lots of things by 2012, but I had never heard someone rap about being hopelessly obsessed with Justin Bieber before. As someone who appreciates the thrill of newness and novelty, Kitty’s music jumped out at me.

    The 2012 election was, I guess, the last normal one there was. All of the elections since have felt existential. I don’t think I’m alone in missing the days when the stakes seemed lower—when the outcomes still very much mattered, but not in the same way they do now. All of that is jumbled up with learning to listen better, and to seek out voices you’re unlikely to hear otherwise, and thinking of those as good things, rather than as threats. It seems like a lot of the country doesn’t see it the same way, which has made the years since a lot harder than they need to be.

15. “I Know the End,” Phoebe Bridgers (2020)

    Man, 2020 was a fucked up year, huh? That’s not deep insight or anything, but still—it’s hard to believe it was four years ago, because in so many ways, we’re still living in it. I’m writing this on March 1706th, 2024.

    The year ended with some catharsis, though, even if I only ever experienced it in isolation. And catharsis is also the thing that makes “I Know the End” special. The song starts out pleasantly enough, standard-issue Phoebe Bridgers where she sings sadly about sad things, until about halfway through, when the drums come in and she starts getting increasingly apocalyptic, seeing the end of the world from a bunch of different angles. The band gets frantic, too, strings and horns and crashing drums and a shout-along hook, and then it just becomes pure cacophony, no more words, just Phoebe Bridgers screaming over the end of everything, big noise erupting from the speakers, and every time it starts to get melodic again there’s a sound like a marching band walking directly into a brick wall layered underneath it in the mix, until she finally lets out more screams even as the music disappears and she’s left just shouting hoarsely into the microphone, and then somebody turns it off and the song’s over. Not at an ending, so much as a stopping point.

    I’d like for 2024 to feel a bit more definitive, but I’ve come to accept that that isn’t really how anything works. I’m not sure it ever did—maybe I only ever thought that was how it worked because I was younger, then, and I assumed somebody knew something I didn’t. Whether it’s age or the experience of living through the last four years that have disabused me of that notion, it all sounds like the last few minutes of “I Know the End” to me now.