For a very long time, I had no interest whatsoever in Sufjan Stevens. This would still be the case if (a) I had never discovered his series of Christmas albums (b) I had not come downstairs one day as one of my roommates (shouts out Kevin) was listening to the single most interesting moment on this entire album. I have surely described a dozen albums as [artist's] 808s & Heartbreak through the years, but the claim holds up better with The Age of Adz than most (even if it feels a bit useless as a label for anything already within the indie folk idiom).

I first read this in high school, which reflects very well on my high school's English department and did the book a great disservice. It was well worth revisiting not only because books are better when they aren't read begrudgingly, but because the one month of class time spent on this remains the high water mark of my exposure to Egyptian literature of any sort (there are no prominent ____ writers might be even more dangerous as illusion than reality).

This album's real good, and probably my favorite of the genre from last year. R'n'b builds upon itself, and where there are obvious stylistic antecedents it's really nice to see them referenced overtly (the interpolation of Akon's Don't Matter on Undercover, the sample of New Edition's If it Isn't Love on In My Feelings, the album title's update of TLC's CrazySexyCool) rather than by way of a pale, uncredited imitation of the source material. SweetSexySavage is the quintessential document of r'n'b in 2017, capturing the flavors of the year in terms of production and subject matter while highlighting the requisite doffs of the cap to the throwback hits on which its target audience grew up.

I didn’t even attempt to salvage the situation this go-round, and so naturally I ended up having a pretty alright time. Alas, I’m not sure that my experience is easily replicable and I’m unqualified to give the advice (speak even if not spoken to; approach interaction from a stance other than suspicion, etc) that would probably lead most directly to a similar outcome.

More than anything else, this is an incredibly stylish book. Perhaps surprisingly, I have a big thing for books (or stories in general) set in places which by their very existence render any discussion of the financial maneuvers underlying the endless shuttling between, say, a series of Alpine resort towns unnecessary. In assuming that this is indeed what life is like for the fabulously wealthy, the reader gives the author a great deal of both credence and, more importantly, attention; when the author is Daddy Vladdy Nabokov himself, the latter is richly rewarded.

A lot of this will sound familiar - an album that constructs its own world, a nice accompaniment for a night drive - but I think it bears repeating given that Anidea is the work that made me realize that those things were possible with music. It’s undeniably dated, sure, but the concept - the soundtrack to an imaginary RPG in the tradition of the Final Fantasy series - is to my knowledge completely unique. In most contemporaneous reviews, it was lumped in with dubstep (partially, I think, due to a sheer lack of terminology; for god’s sake, purple music was still in wide use as a genre name), but its video game origins are so embedded the music that squeezing the album into a non-soundtrack genre or context feels like a disservice.

This is apparently the more famous Cisneros work, although I was introduced to her via Woman Hollering Creek (recommended to me by Sandy at Daedalus; written about in the 6/29 Hip Replacement). Mango Street is similar, keeping up the form of vivid portrait by way of vignette but maintaining consistent narration and location throughout. I've written already about the ability of Sandra Cisneros to inhabit absolutely anybody, and that's still at play here; she's unbelievably adept at filling scenes with complete characters whose contribution may be as little as mere presence or a single line.

I was a teenager once, and more recently than I would like to admit. I was unsupervised after school, vaguely angry at… existence, and had more idle hours than I appreciated at the time. Inevitably, I found 4chan.