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Liam Scott

1 May 2020

A Reflection on Music in a Moment of Mishap

Hunched over in the new living room on Hoffman street in the Bronx this January, having just returned from a semester abroad in Ireland, I was vehemently trying to register for

Spring semester courses. I spent my days in Ireland meeting friends from around the world, wandering cobblestone streets, exploring towns and wistfully filling notebooks with lyrics and idle thoughts. I had made the decision to change what was then a major in Computer Science to a minor, and add a second minor in American Studies – a summer in Harlem, the presidential primary, and the months in Europe had left me with pages of questions about what constituted the United States of America, and I wanted answers. Little did I know as I sat in that living room on Hoffman that it was about to be my lucky day, a spot in a class about hip hop and rock music had opened up, and I was about to launch myself on a journey of becoming familiar with the last seventy years of American music and a quest to understand why I like what I like today.

In this paper I will be talking about some artists that inspire me, make me think, make me question, and foster hope in me of someday being able to construct meaningful music. In addition to this being my cumulative submission to this class, I also want this paper to be a time capsule of how exactly music is striking me right now, as a twenty-one-year-old during as misfortunate a time as coronavirus. Some of the artists I will focus on in this memoir I have, many times, listened to in the darkness and quiet of my thoughts; their stories I have gawked over on long subway rides from ‘Bx’ to ‘Bk’ and back. Pensively, I have made note of their lyric substance, their song structure, and have spent hours learning to recite them on guitar, then drums, and vocals all throughout. I have filled my head with doubts many times about how I Scott 2 could never amount to writing a song like that, could never pen lyrics like hers, could never construct progressions like his. Eventually, and many times with the help and inspiration of this class, those walls of doubt can be knocked down.

The first time I heard of the band Car Seat Headrest was the spring of my freshman year.

My new college friends were adamant about buying tickets to see them at Brooklyn Steel in

September. Unfortunately, come that September I had to give my ticket to a friend for some other engagement, something I regret to this day. Luckily, I still had my chance to see Car Sear

Headrest that winter at Madison Square Garden, opening for the venerable indie rock group

Interpol. I was greatly looking forward to seeing them in the coming months, but their June performance in Brooklyn has been canceled due to the pandemic.1 This band has become incredibly important to my view of music, specifically their album Teens of Denial.2 The first song I fell in love with on that record was “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” for its belting, heart- pouring vocals and windows-down, max volume guitar mix.

But now, backstory. A big influence on my relationship with music and where I attribute my soft spot for modern folk is Vermont. For almost a decade, I have been going to and later working at a small rinky-dink summer camp in central Vermont called Camp Downer. That place has watched me grow up in a way no other place has, and it has given me a network of some of my absolute closest friends. Being on staff at camp is wildly fun, what with the weeks on end of dealing with hilarious fun-loving kids, and the mischievous nights where our spirits turned into ghosts and trampled through the trees by firelight. It was these nights wherein I

1 Car Seat Headrest – Canceled, The Bowery Presents. https://www.bowerypresents.com/shows/detail/393923-car- seat-headrest-cancelled 2 Jeremy Gordan, “Teens of Denial Review”, Pitchfork. 20 May 2016. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21673- teens-of-denial/

Scott 3 learned to play guitar, self-teaching and learning through peers. There were some bands that were sacrosanct to that space: The Avett Brothers, The Lumineers (in their early days), The Head and the Heart, Wild Child, Neutral Milk Hotel, Dispatch, and many other various tracks that no one knows the real origin of, but were passed down by generations through scratched CDs and etchings on the wall. This subgenre of mountainous alt-folk can trace its origins back recently to albums like In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,3 the bombastic record from Neutral Milk Hotel that reverberated far into the 2000s, and more distantly back to acts of the 1960s counterculture like

Peter, Paul & Mary. While on the subject, I would be remised to not mention earlier names like

Woodie Guthrie who laid the groundwork from this and, with songs like “This Land is Your

Land,” carried over culture form the American Transcendentalist movement.4 This is the tradition of music that is seeped into the culture of the wooded summer camp, each new generation bringing with it new music.

We would practice our own contributions to share around the fire. The songs that people loved best were the ones with emotional swells where singing became yelling, swaying became stomping, and tears were drawn. Of the discography of Car Seat Headrest, “Drunk Drivers/Killer

Whales” was that song.

But it is far from my favorite on that record, I would place tracks like “Fill in the Blank.”

“Not What I Needed,” “Cosmic Hero,” and “Destroyed by Hippie Powers” as some of my favorite songs of the past few years. Their new record, which was just released this week, is pleasing so far as well. The third track, “Deadlines (Hostile),” is the first song to come out in

3 Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Aeroplane_Over_the_Sea 4 Richard Kahn, Environmental Activism in Music. See attached, also: https://www.academia.edu/1395159/Environmental_Activism_in_Music Scott 4

2020 that I could conceive of Kurt Cobain genuinely listening to. Ok… maybe at least Brandon

Flowers5.

These songs all deal in vocals that are relaxed at times and feel like distant cries at others, their heavy, reliable chords met with vocals landing so delicately in resonance. This soft vocal resolution is something that I really appreciate in music. Take the section of “Not What I

Needed” that begins at 0:30:

E A F#m C#m Hello my friend, we’ve been waiting for you for a long time A B F#m We have reason to believe that your soul is just like ours E A F#m C#m Did you ever get the feeling you were just a little different? A B F#m Well, here’s our web page, you’ve finally found a home 6

These finely constructed lyrics speak for a generation battered with desolate feelings and mental health struggles – a generation that are effectively guinea pigs for a life cemented online. But the musicality of these lines is what really strikes me. In a simple yet emotionally packed chord progression, the vocals rise above and fall below midrange bellowing of the electric guitar, landing gracefully at the end. Will Toledo, the vocalist, places his vocals delicately on a bed of raging guitar, and it works so well. The chord transition from A to B here is especially idyllic, with the vocal melody remaining on the same note during the transition and resolving at the end.

It is these kinds of musical moments in rock that can singlehandedly bring goosebumps, the subtlest of movements with vocals just relaxing enough to ignite fireworks. Soft, delicate resolutions like these are consistently something that I am drawn to in music, no matter the time

5 Sami Rahman, “Car Seat Headerest – Teens of Style” Review, 29 October 2015. https://www.earbuddy.net/60872/car-seat-headrest-teens-of-style.html/reviews 6 Teens of Denial Album Chords by Car Seat Headrest https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/car-seat-headrest/teens- of-denial-chords-1847841 Scott 5 period or genre – and they can happen in really any genre. Young Thug’s ‘Just How It Is’ 7 is as good an example of this as any, pulling it off with melodic raps and a strong, simple 808 bass.

Car Seat Headrest is simply one of the bands that I will associate this part of my life with, being young and trying to figure out New York City, navigating Europe and sinking into my headphones when I needed comfort. Their lyrics are simple, funny, pithy, just specific enough to tell a story and just ambiguous enough to relate on an underlying emotional level. Their music pays homage to historic rock and hardcore; it seethes with a cool, calm, measured devotion to norm-rejecting and there is a distinct ease to its musical excellence. They sound so good because they don’t overcomplicate trying to.

My rock predilections were originally passed down from my mother. Even when I could barely talk, I would ask her constantly in the car and at home to play me some of her music.

Throughout my early childhood, she and my father would play through their expansive CD collection. We would listen to The Beatles, The Stones, Coldplay, Sting/The Police, James

Taylor, Paul Simon/Simon and Garfunkel, The Cure, Elvis Costello, Joan Armatrading, Bob

Marley, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Cat Stevens, Peter Gabriel, Indigo Girls, Sarah

McLaughlin, Carole King, and eventually The Killers and Franz Ferdinand with mid-2000s suggestions from my older cousins. Irish household names like Sinéad O’Connor, Cristy Moore, the Clancy Brothers, Van Morrison, and The Chieftains were also on heavy rotation. However, far and above the rest, the music acts that informed by understanding of music from the earliest age were U2, Bruce Springsteen, and R.E.M. These bands laid some sort of groundwork in me before I was even aware of it, and I still enjoy their music to this day. I loved the cool, collected sound of U2, the homey energy Bruce brought to singing about Jersey, Philly, and New York,

7 Young Thug, “Just How It Is” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gip5bo9Qh8 Scott 6 the alternative indie sound of R.E.M that was in many ways ahead of its time. I still love these bands today, having essentially grown up with them. These bands were my picture of what music was as a child, and relationship with music was begun here.

Through this class I’ve also garnered a much greater appreciation for other early artists,

Sam Cooke, Leonard Cohen, and Peter, Paul & Mary to name a few. I have grown to learn how

Sam Cooke ignited the genre and is in many ways to thank for the direction that rock music took from the very beginning. With songs like ‘Twistin’ the Night Away’ and ‘A Change Is Gonna

Come,’ he cemented these meaningful, jazzy vibrations into the rock zeitgeist. Sam Cooke’s music is fun, reliable, and serves as a common ancestor to the array of rock music that you can find today.

Our class on Peter, Paul & Mary and the origins of the environmentalism movement and the counterculture also left a big impression on me. It gave me context as it relates to older people in my life who I know sympathized with the “Back-to-the-Land” movement and hurt from the wounds left by Vietnam. The song ‘If I Had a Hammer’ paints a distinct picture about how counterculture in the 60s is resemblant of that today. It made me think of my aunts, uncles, and my old boss at camp, a man named Harold Mitchell who spent his career as a school principle and retired by building an environmental-focused, equal opportunity summer camp in

Vermont. I’m positive that they were was touched by “If I Had a Hammer” in 1963, just as I am by similar progressive rallying cries today.8

A broad theme that I also spent lots of time exploring is the intersection of music and

New York City, both in the past and the present. After our discussion of Lana Del Rey’s

8 Kate Daloz, “How the Back-to-the-Land Movement Paved the Way for Bernie Sanders”, Rolling Stone. 19 April 2016. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/how-the-back-to-the-land-movement-paved-the-way-for- bernie-sanders-65188/ Scott 7

“Chelsea Hotel No. 2,”9 I remember hopping on the train and going downtown for some reason but ending up just to walking around Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen listening to Leonard Cohen’s discography. (Damn, do I miss those pre-pandemic days…) Listening to Lana Del Rey’s rendition sparked in me a vast appreciation for Leonard Cohen that carried me for the rest of the semester. His music shed light on what it meant to walk around this city, these streets that have been passed down through generations and millions of New Yorkers, and hear music in the humming. Cohen’s music I will cherish going forward as a moment in my long love for New

York. I haven’t listened to him since coronavirus began.

Walking around the city and thinking about music is about the best escape I can imagine.

It has been since I was young, being in New York only for quick day trips and then a train ride back to Philly with a little iPod as companion. But now, at any time of night or day, choosing to enter that network of sidewalks and become anonymous has become a mechanism for refocusing and becoming calm. It is a surreal and assuring thought to consider that so many artists have felt similarly over the years. So many artists have sped through those sidewalks, navigated those trains, been in that mindset. There’s a reason why Jay Z’s term ‘Empire State of Mind’ resonates so well with reality. I imagine the Ramones growing up in Queens, the Strokes charging around

Lower Manhattan, Joey Badass hanging out in Brooklyn, Lana Del Rey going to Fordham, there are literally hundreds of examples of righteous artists leading lives just like anyone else, trying to catch a grip in this pinball machine of a city.

One example that was on my mind for much of this past year was recent NYU graduate

Maggie Rogers.10 As of recently, she has crested into the ruling class of pop music and her fan

9 “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” Lana Del Rey cover https://youtu.be/Jj_myXdOLV0 10 Amanda Petrusich, “Maggie Rogers, An Artist of Her Time” The New Yorker. 6 March 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/maggie-rogers-an-artist-of-her-time Scott 8 base has grown immensely, but her debut album squarely encapsulates my most recent summer in Harlem and my travels in Europe. Each song on it packed such a punch of inspiration to me in my early listening, and it contextualized a growing passion for music production and sound design. When I was living in Galway earlier this year there were multiple occasions when I would join in the town tradition of busking and play “The Knife” by Maggie Rogers in the street.

(I was too timid to make a few cents in the beginning, but I warmed up to it.) What I love about

Heard it in a Past Life11 and the EP that preceded it Now That the Light is Faded is hard to put into words. I love that her lyrics paint a picture of beautiful landscapes, like in ‘Alaska,’ and social life in the city in ‘Light On.’ Her track ‘Fallingwater’ was produced by producer/composer

Rostam Batmanglij,12 a childhood hero of mine and original member of the band Vampire

Weekend. Here, Maggie and Rostam construct a song with incredible techniques like ending the song with a resoundingly ceremonial cut-time outro. I coveted this album as I was traveling around through beautiful Irish countryside, hunkered down on the cheapest flights, or longingly thinking of the mountains of Vermont. Maggie’s vocal abilities are top notch, as exemplified in tracks like ‘Past Life’ and ‘Color Song.’ It cannot be understated how much of a quality singer she truly is.

But what strikes me most about Maggie Rogers is the simplicity in the layers of her music and her ability to construct a breakthrough album a few years after graduation. This both inspires me and gives me shutters. How do you even get from not having an album to having an album? What does it require? It certainly involves studio space. Do you need to convince

11 Laura Snapes, “Heard It in a Past Life Review”, Pitchfork. 22 January 2019. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maggie-rogers-heard-it-in-a-past-life/ 12 Hua Hsu, “Rostam Batmanglij Defines His Musical Identity”, The New Yorker, 11 September 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/rostam-batmanglij-defines-his-musical-identity

Scott 9 everyone that you’re worth it? Do you need to have gone to NYU? Questions like these can cloud visions and, in music-making, commitment and confidence are rewarded. Leaving these questions aside and moving forward are the only way to know if it can be done. This is a lesson I see in Maggie Rogers, and it is good wisdom to remember.

Similar to Maggie Rogers, but I would venture to say a solid amount deeper, is another artist on my mind a lot recently, Phoebe Bridgers. From Los Angeles, Phoebe is truer to the acoustic side of popular music, constructing oceans of sound that wash over with lyrics that whisper to the depressed vibrations inside. She takes herself less seriously, pokes fun at herself but speaks in such depth on her records. Her first album Stranger in the Alps13 is gorgeous from start to finish, produced with intricate attention to creating a solemn and sometimes somber vibe throughout. These two singers, Maggie Rogers and Phoebe Bridgers, have made a big impression on me recently, and they deserve mention.

Car Seat Headrest, 80s alternative rock from my parents, singer-songwriters, from this looks of this essay so far you would not have been able to detect my overarching love of hip hop.

After all, hip hop was the meat of this course, and it accounts for a solid portion of the music I listen to and consistently follow. Hip hop is the most active genre I see around me. When I wanted to begin to learn production this year, making beats was the only place I could even consider starting.14 After all, hip hop beats are the most obvious music constantly bumping around in my head. This course opened up my understanding of the roots of hip hop and gave me an appreciation for the historical context in which Dr. Dre, Dead Prez, Public Enemy, and

N.W.A rapped in. It gave me a sense of the New York City that raised prophetic children like

13 Sam Sodomsky, “Stranger in the Alps Review”, Pitchfork. 23 September 2017. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phoebe-bridgers-stranger-in-the-alps/ 14 Beats can be found at: https://eloquent-meninsky-64e6bf.netlify.app/ Scott 10

Biggie, Tupac, Nas and Jay Z. The legacies of these artists are being carried today and consider myself incredibly lucky to be able to witness it. While I have the platform, I would love to shout out my three favorite rap albums of the past year.

First is Young Thug’s most recent studio album So Much Fun.15 At this point in his illustrious career, Young Thug can snap his fingers and release album that covers all necessary bases, and that is just what this album does. It lets us hear the calm, measured raps and the bumping, insane lyrical tropes all in one. Second is the first studio album Escape From New

York16 from the Brooklyn-based supergroup Beast Coast, comprised of rap groups Pro Era, The

Underachievers, and Flatbush Zombies. This album has to join the ranks of cornerstone New

York City hip hop records because it is such a product of the 2019/2020 world we live in. It is funny, raucous, experimental, risk-taking, and quality from start to finish. When you build a team of seventeen Brooklyn rappers to all collaborate on one work, it’s just simply going to be so new and extreme that it’s historical. The third is The Allegory17 by Royce da 5’9” which takes a step back from the modern sound of rap for a more original classic sound that doesn’t shy away from political lyrics. Two albums I should also mention here are Jay Electronica’s A Written

Testimony,18 which collaborates with Jay Z to engineer a blend of rap and soundscape the likes of which I have never heard, and It Is What It Is19 by eccentric bassist Thundercat, which builds

15 Alphonse Pierre, “So Much Fun Review” Pitchfork. 21 August 2019. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-thug-so-much-fun/ 16 Sheldon Pearce, “Escape from New York Review” Pitchfork. 30 May 2019. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beast-coast-escape-from-new-york/ 17 Jay Balfour, “The Allegory Review” Pitchfork. 27 February 2020. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/royce-59- the-allegory/ 18 Allison Hussey and Evan Minskey, “Jay Electronica Drops New Album, JAY-Z Features Heavily: Listen” Pitchfork. 13 March 2020. https://pitchfork.com/news/jay-electronica-drops-new-album-a-written-testimony-listen/ 19 Reed Jackson, “It Is What It Is Review” Pitchfork. 7 April 2020. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thundercat- it-is-what-it-is/

Scott 11 records like Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters20 by using funky basslines and heavy synths to boisterously remind people of the relevance of jazz in any musical conversation, especially contemporary ones.

This semester took a sharp turn, and it did so right in the middle. One moment we were zooming down our respective paths, the next the city was closed and human turmoil was abound.

It has been a hard time, without a doubt, but it is just as tough look at it objectively as we sit here in the middle of it. As a person who usually tries to see ahead, this coronavirus stint has made me have to leave that that urge aside and accept that nobody knows what will happen next. Living at home has been stressful at times, especially in a quarantine situation with my mother working in the Emergency Room dealing with COVID-19 patients daily. It has been difficult at times to give school the attention it would have received had I been there, which is I think one thing that

Fordham needs to admit.

But I think that being home for quarantine has also been a positive for me. It has reminded me of how much I love Philadelphia, and has encouraged me to think of this place as home a little more. After all, there are some good music acts coming out of here, the band Mt.

Joy,21 who I was able to see in Brooklyn this winter, started just a few towns over from me.

Additionally, I have some friends who are embarking on music careers too, RFA22 is a band that formed out of my high school and is playing increasingly bigger circuits. And I know two kids from school who are rapping, LiMM and Lil Xay, with their own distinct styles.

20 Jeremy D. Larson, “Head Hunters Review” Pitchfork. 5 April 2020. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/herbie- hancock-head-hunters/ 21 Stephen Thompson, “Mt. Joy, ‘Mt. Joy’ Review” NPR. 15 February 2018. https://www.npr.org/2018/02/15/584578389/first-listen-mt-joy-mt-joy 22 Liam Scott, “RFA: Philly Band of Prep Albums Gears Up For First National Tour” The Hawkeye, Student Newspaper. 27 October 2016. https://issuu.com/thehawkeye6/docs/issue_4__1_ Lily Sanders, “XPN Fest Recap: RFA breezes through their early Sunday set at the River Stage” The Key, WXPN Philadelphia. 28 July 2019. https://thekey.xpn.org/2019/07/28/xpnfest-rfa/

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Music has always been something that I cherish, but this class has made me understand and define that reality. It has shown me the context I yearned for to understand what this worldwide, collaborative gift of humanity means and how it keeps on giving. For so many millions of people, music is the outlet, the escape, the headspace that makes utter sense.

Partaking in that, even just the slightest bit, is an experience that makes this bemusing roller coaster worth it.

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel You were famous, your heart was a legend You told me again you preferred handsome men But for me you would make an exception And clenching your fist for the ones like us Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty You fixed yourself, you said, "well, never mind We are ugly but we have the music" -Leonard Cohen