Heartbreak // Music of the Week / WS 14-Feb

Context

This is the new look of Music of the Week. I’m just going to round up all the music I’ve been listening to all week and share it with you good folks, rather than talking about one album at a time. The effort here, if I’m totally honest, is to keep all the monolithic conversations about single albums or sets or playlists to the Music Box and inject this space with a little bit of my own personality. To give some personal context to the music I’m sharing. 

So in that spirit, personally, my theme for this week was heartbreak. Not everything I heard was related to heartbreak – in fact most of it wasn’t – but the crumbling of a long-term relationship in the week before Valentine’s Day would inform at least some of the music one listens to, and that happened. Here’s the Spotify playlist.

My stories

I discovered an EP by Schneider TM and KPT.Michigan called Binokular EP when their cover of the Smiths’ There is a Light That Never Goes Out from the EP was featured on Adam Curtis’s latest documentary, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. I also played that particular Kylie Minogue song quite frequently, needless to say. Another song that made it from the documentary to my listening list was a song that was pretty central to the courtship period of my lost relationship: Phosphorescent’s Song for Zula. It’s among the best songs ever written about romantic loss, and answers both the key questions of popular music perfectly: how to write a good hook, and how to write good lyrics.

The day I spent hanging out with a buddy exposed me to the happier and more carefree side of the music listening experience. He introduced me to one of this year’s inevitable Punjabi party hits – Bajre Da Sitta by Rashmeet Kaur, Deep Kalsi and Ikka. Despite its boom-boom party treatment in this incredible well-produced banger, the poetry of the folk song on which the track is based is quite layered too. I leaned on the interpretation I found in this blogpost by Shivpreet Singh to better understand it. Quite simply, the woman who sings this song compares the dexterity with which she lures her lover into her orbit to the dexterity with which she splits the cob of bajra (pearl millet) before cooking it. 

I then spent a day listening to Bush Tetras’ Boom In The Night and the New York Noise compilation tape that included You Can’t Be Funky from the album, and many other wonderful songs from that era of the New York post-punk scene. Among the bands featured in the compilation, my favourites are Bush Tetras (of course), Mars, and Liquid Liquid, whose Cavern is among my favourite songs of that era, and whose bassline is the basis of one of the earliest hip-hop classics: 1983’s White Lines (Don’t Do It) by Melle Mel. 

Finally, I deep-dove into the world of nineties punk while writing part 2 to my longform series, A Personal History of the World After Punk, titled 1994. In that I alluded to three punk albums released in 1994 that formed the basis of my initial love for punk music – Bad Religion’s Stranger Than Fiction (the key inspiration for the name of this magazine), Offspring’s Smash, and Green Day’s Dookie. I also alluded to another 1994 album – Weezer’s Blue Album – that would form the basis of my love for another offshoot of punk music: nineties power pop. This music of the week playlist, my first for the magazine, ends with that album’s closer, Only In Dreams, and in many ways, comes full circle on the theme of the week – heartbreak. I hope you find in this playlist what I found this week: that even in heartbreak there’s a lot of reasons to jump around and make happy sounds.