Another End of the World: Annivyrsary 2012
ISSUE #217
It was the year the world was supposed to end. For music, in a way, it did.
As the 2009 class of indie darlings delivered underwhelming follow ups (Shields, Centipede Hz, Swing Lo Magellan—many now, in ten years time, seen as unsung greats), critics were reckoning with the rise of poptimism. Those who’d typically be listening to rock revival were phasing into a hazier scene via DIIV, Mac DeMarco, and Tame Impala. If you weren’t listening to Kendrick and Schoolboy Q as a newly subscribed Spotify user, you were watching Tumblr feeds for Canadian nightwave from the likes of Grimes and Purity Ring.
That was the summer I had my first blue-collar, dug-out-of-dirt type job—luckier than most, to last that long before running headfirst into reality. My girlfriend lived across the state. It was six hours in the car to see her. If I was going to afford even one visit or two, I was going to have to work my ass off.
I found my way into a gig as an industrial painter. I had painted office walls before, for community service—I thought that this job would be more of the same. I quickly learned that our contract was with the Army Ammunition Plant, a large government enclosure that took up the many acres just west of town. I knew it well, as our house would occasionally shake from the foundation upwards. “Ammunition Plant must be testing,” folks would say. As with any phenomena you grow up witnessing, this was normal to me.
I spent my days painting bomb shells, forest green. “I make things pretty before they blow up,” I’d say.
The job started at 6 a.m. and ended at 3. I spent my nights bleary-eyed watching Late Night before sleep. This was peak early Fallon, who was actually a tastemaker before his Tonight Show years, the sum of a low profile and Questlove’s influence. I watched Tune-Yards, St. Vincent, and Odd Future on Fallon, believe it or not. One night, exhausted from work, I watched a handsome man in a red bandana make his television debut. He sang a ballad of unrequited love, a genre I was primed to adore—it was only when he sang “I can never make him love me” that I clocked his audacity. Here was a queer love song on network TV. The next day, I put down my first painter’s paycheck on a copy of Channel Orange.
The next few months were speckled with that album, which single-handedly got me through that dirt-cloud summer. I was still smoking back then—part of my wooing of that same girl, as there’s no better time to talk than when a smoker steps outside—and I would read my community college texts during my two-cigarette lunch break, playing “Super Rich Kids” on repeat. I’d collapse at home each day, nostrils caked with red dirt, headphones cycling through “Crack Rock, “Pyramids,” “Pink Matter,” “Lost”… To this day, the era is one of my fondest music memories.
Channel Orange gave way to other 2012 classics—perfect, personal records like Celebration Rock, The Idler Wheel…, Get Disowned, Visions, The Money Store, Shrines, and my beloved American Weekend—but there’s no replacing memory’s power to fuse certain seasons of hardship and joy to the sonic amber of a work of art. Frank’s two masterpieces have each served that important purpose to me, and there’d be no Earwyrms without him.
The world didn’t end, though sometimes it feels like it. As to why time continues, I can only guess—I like to think it’s the potential for Frank Album #3.
1984 has been called the greatest year in pop, and I think it might still be true. If 1974 was music’s fallow period, ten years later was its opposite. We danced in the dark beneath the killing moon and under purple rain—this was the year the critics and the people met in the Minneapolis streets.