Category: Music

I have never seen a shooting star. I have never been to the Grand Canyon, nor the Great Wall of China. I have never heard a lick of Swahili spoken, nor have I eaten shark. I have, however, seen Nick Cave run across an audience held up by their hands. I’ve seen Jonny Greenwood tear up a violin bow on a guitar Jimmy Page-style, and Kanye abduct an entire audience like a UFO atop of a floating pillar. These are all monolithic markers for which we attribute our universality to. You may not have seen them, but maybe your best friend has, or your teacher, or your parents. They are landmarks and sights we recognize, a single universal point we all focus on in awe.

There’s a plethora of artists forging a following through social media, but only a few have become ­­­true subjects of fascination by just staying silent.

Last month, a topic began trending on Twitter that seemed just a little out of the ordinary. It wasn’t a celebrity’s name, or the name of a place, or a natural disaster, or “Happy National Whatever-the-fuck” day. No one was sure exactly what it was, the specifics being so vague and the tweets just as confusing. It wasn’t until Phoebe Bridgers tweeted “five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred gecs” when I discovered the phrase for the first time.

Upon the announcement of their NTS Radio take over this past weekend, Warp Records scheduled certain hours of exclusive remixes, live performances, and unreleased material from just about every artist on their roster. Some artists curated mixes, others played exclusively new material. However, one name on that schedule did catch the attention of every Warp Records enthusiast.

The term listening party has always thrown me off. It’s almost a tease in the name itself – sometimes they’re cool experiences, other times they’re not as cool as they’re made out to be, maybe due to the host wanting a large turnout just so they can guarantee they’ll have a line that stretches around the block.

An anomaly occurred just a little less than a month ago, when Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” charted on the Country Billboard chart. It was, at that time, maybe taken as a joke. But then you started listening to it… and you couldn’t really tell what the song was. Was it a country song, but made with hip-hop instruments? Or vice-versa? Regardless if it feels like a glazed-donut dipped into an orange 7/11 Big-Gulp, the song itself represents perhaps a new age in contemporary music.