Clairo and Suicide Boys

Ready to go way out on a limb with me? Great! Clairo and Suicide Boys (i'm too tired to use dollar signs), a match made in THOSE TWO THINGS DONT BELONG ANYWHERE NEAR EACH OTHER!!

Sure they do, they're both "independent" artists with secret major label distribution and "Target bought 7,000 copies" money. Ain't nobody I know distributed by The Orchard, because they are now a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony. I'm not saying they don't deserve it, I'm just on one of those honesty kicks I enjoy so much, because Project 2025 makes the year 2020 look like a minor inconvenience we barely remember. You've all seen the solidarity maxi-pads taped over people's ears, and if that doesn't smell like swastikas you might have a malfunctioning olfactory system from covid brain damage. That's not hyperbole, real research by qualified researchers correlates long covid with up to 20 years of brain aging/loss of gray matter due to the shockingly severe immune response.

Regardless, Google demands I know that Clairo has rheumatoid arthritis, but i'm more impressed that THIR D T IMES TH E... CH A R M (granular gravy do I detest unnecessary typography) is correspondingly her 3rd album. I'm also not even close to convinced this album will merit the Punk-style cartoons and ergodic titles on the back, but I am always happy to be wrong in my presumptions. No choice, we'll have to spin it to find out.

Credit where credit's due, I will accept a full band studio photo as gatefold material when the inner sleeve has printed lyrics and no static. K, couple tracks in and I do not dislike this in any way. It's the kind of Indie-Rock you can't separate the Shoegaze from, quirky almost-folk, and so twee I feel like a dirty old man by proxy, but my ears refuse to lie. I can't musically compare it to Billie Eilish, but it has a similar affect. Verbally forward but timberally distanced, very Bird and the Bee at times, Second Nature and Slow Dance especially.

What a jerk I am, I'm looking at the track details and you can't credit "mouth trumpet" without some terrible voice down the hall chiming in "as opposed to ass trumpet." Honesty kicks not doing me any favors today, apparently.

But seriously, this is actually a phenomenal album, if very dark and amateur in its production. I think that's on purpose though, it's clearly supposed to sound like a soft lofi Jazz album. Not Smooth Jazz, just soft and romantic. Not capital R Romantic with ghosts and death by self-poisoning, lowercase r as in Sexy To Someone. Side B is definitely close to Moonchild in the Neo-whitegirl-R&B department. Still feels uncomfortable to call it sexy since I graduated high school a couple months before Claire was born, and I am an unashamed older than me guy, but it's 1000% more subtle than Janelle Monàe's last album, so i'm not gonna stress too much.

Final verdict, I can't uncompare it to Bird and the Bee, but it has absolutely none of the irony, so if you like Mod-sounding light Jazz recorded with cheap-sounding microphones and only the faintest whiff of PTSD, definitely check out Clairo. She named it right, it's charming.

Which begs the question, how are the white rappers with mullets and face tattoos going to absolutely ruin the pool party for everyone?

Wu Tang Clan gonna let you get away with saying G*59 is for the children? Obviously ODB is dead, but c'mon. Princess Peach? It's 2024 and you're referencing Super Mario Brothers? Yeah, I know you don't have rabies, but "coke and dope" is called a speedball and you inject it not smoke it like the previous song implies. I don't want my readers to actually go look up Viper's biography, but it feels like y'all cowards don't even smoke crack.

I'm being judgy, I'll just let it play and comment later.

Yeah, no, you're snorting oxycontin off of your handgun? What part of your Smith & Wesson is flat enough to crush and chop up pills on? Yeah, here's the line that just kills it: "selling my soul to my dreams and my goals but I won't ever stop until I'm on the stretcher." You can't Million Little Pieces this. Hyperbole is one thing, and yes you guys are recovering opioid addicts who made a pact to kill yourselves if you weren't successful by 30, but this right now is the sober recontextualization of who you were 5+ years ago before rehab and it sounds like then you would have beaten the shit out of now you. What you're really saying is "you can't help people like me, I don't even know why I'm not dead by now, because that was definitely my goal."

Sure, we'll chalk it up to me never wanting to not be conscious or having severe depression or an addictive, borderline personality.... Yeah, no, what's bugging me here is the hidden intellectual inversion of your personal perspective. Now you calls it bipolar depression and suicidal ideation as a bottle in which you keep back then you who fully believed the drugs and violence were being alive, but now you is the one who is actually inside the bottle. You haven't traded the crack for the methadone, you've traded the methadone for the crack of self-righteousness. That's why addicts relapse, it's impossible to lie to yourself forever. The world, for you, is garbage and severe depression is the appropriate response. Actual recovery is finding the brain cells that can choose to not snort coke and heroin then follow it up with percoset and ecstacy and letting them call the shots. You can't confront and beat up the steam roller of addiction until it leaves out of frustration, you have to calm down and gently step out of its way. Remember, high you is the personality you think you should be, but nobody else agrees and you're instinctively wrong. Crazy as it sounds, I do know what i'm talking about. Happy Bottle is not at all a nice person, wheras tired, angry, frustrated Bottle is a caring, friendly, likable person, and it took him 22 years to figure that out. Addicts, at least in my observation, feel guilty about how much they love being addicts, and tend to favor the control they feel at rock bottom over the lack of control they feel in rising above it, but brainwashing them into hating themselves does not have a high success rate.

Then again I could totally be wrong, I'm not from Louisiana. At the end of the day though, neither of them are in prison or currently dead, so this is all over the top hyperbole used as a coping mechanism. Ruby da Cherry says it's all therapy in rap form, Scrim credits a label intervention and 12-step (particularly the finding God part) for his sobriety. It's a way of saying look at how foolish I was to believe my pathetic life was this lavishly exciting, and i don't have any argue if that actually works for you.

All that being said, as a Hip Hop album this thing is phenomenal. Lots of people have sued them for copyright infringement over the years, but i've talked at great length about how dubious that whole situation really is. Hip Hop is literally defined by sampling, nobody is claiming they aren't sampling, nobody is using someone else's music to commercially convince people to buy their unrelated products the way the copyright act actually intends to protect intellectual property. Lawsuits as standard business practice for generating revenue is extremely unethical.

I don't have to be specifically convinced these guy are OG gangsters to call it a good album, and I don't need to find fault with what they consider to be the source of their mental struggles. Sure, I personally hear it all as bad/misapplied inversion of Marxist inversion (which in my Klein Bottle theory means we reach the starting point facing the other direction), but who's to say we weren't facing opposite directions to begin with? They certainly aren't bad rappers, and they aren't calling me the bad guy.

I don't know about you, but I don't think the pool party got ruined at all. Nobody served us worm cake like in the iwrestledabearonce video for You know that ain't them dogs' real voices. I totally TLDRed, but I always do that, and at least I didn't make you listen to the new Eminem album (mostly 'cause even I don't want to listen to it).