Nanananananananana na-na-na, Taylor Swift, Tayor, Taylor Swift! Nanananananananana na-na-na, Taylor Swift, Tayor, Taylor Swift!
Fuck, man, It’s Taylor, you bunch of fucking cunts! Somehow, amongst all the brouhaha, amongst all the controversies and talking points, amongst all the will shes and the won’t she’s and the have shes and the would shes, Taylor fucking Swift has now snuck five consecutive albums onto the Necessary Evil list. For a bit of context, Young Fathers – one of my absolute favourite modern acts – have had three. Radiohead have had two. Her talents are seriously beyond serious debate now, aren’t they?
On her phenomenally intense and altogether astonishing latest album, Lingua Ignota/Kristen Haytor sticks her claws deeply and violently down the throat of Christian theology, pulling out bloodies entrails that even fellow damned theological researcher Nick Cave feel a little queasy. She highlights the duality and crazed hypocrisy of blind devotion, while also seeming to float the thought of requesting the all-powerful dominance (you could almost call it ‘biblical’) of that good old fashioned Old Testament God to help soother her own wounds by inflicting painful reckoning on the people that have hurt her. Well, I say ‘people’… Men. It’s not a nice story. It’s a grim and horrific story that seems to have been continued recently in her relationship with Daughters‘ frontman Alexis Marshall. I’m not going to cover any of this in detail in this piece, but I feel it is important to be aware of.
The anger and malicious retributory intent reaches such an apex on I WHO BEND THE TALL GRASS, when Hayter sems to collapse to her knees, shivering with rage as she references Corinthians 2:14 and begs God’s help to ‘Take hold of my gentle axe and split him open/Gather up my quiet hammer and nail him down/Use any of your heavenly means/Your golden scythe/Your holy sword/Your fiery arrows studded with stars’ before abandoning any pretence of deference and simply screaming ‘I don’t give a fuck/Just kill him/You have to/I’m not asking’. It’s an absolute fucking trip.
Ow! No, seriously, owowowowow! I can actually barely type right now, both my arms are seriously kejiggerd. Owwwwww! After the (I think we’ll all agree, era-defining) Magdalena Bay post, I went downstairs to get a new cup of tea. My dopy, disabled, Cauda fricking Equina infested body wasn’t paying enough attention to its much compromised balance, I slipped on the stairs and fell down the fucking lot of them!
So, although I planned to write about the wonderful CHVRCHES return to form tonight, I am in no physical shape to perform my usual duties, so I’ll be leaving it until tomorrow. I’m still going to leave this bit in though, because I am meta as fook, you hear?
Aaaaargh! Eeeesh! Oooof! Concerned faces! Furrowed brows! Isn’t the internet just awful?! Social media! SOCIAL FUCKING MEDIA! Facebook and Myspace and shit!! They’ve ruined the world! They’ve destroyed a whole generation!! That teenager who you follow on Instagram who keeps posting pictures of her pert young tiddies straining against a tight vest provided by Shein’s new line? Don’t you just hate her?? Her narcissism is destroying society! Havea look at the next photo. Eugh! I’ve never seen such a narcissistic bitch! Scroll down. My God! Look at those tight narcissistic abs and those horrendously self-absorbed nipples visible through that egotistical Pretty Little Things top! Let’s see how bad the next photo is…
Don’t think aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah know?? Y’only tryna sa-ha-haave, yourself! Fuck, yes! I motherfucking love this shit! And I’m not only referring to the original songs on Sharon van Etten’s original 2010 album, her second release and one that indisputably catapulted her into that vaunted selection of artists you should perhaps, maybe, kinda care about. A lot.
While we’re here, can more artists do this please? I have a deeply psychological issue where I will only listen to records released in the same calendar year as when I’m encountering them, with the odd annual exception if you’ve died or if you’re, erm, Yeasayer. Or Prince. If you’re an artist that I’ve discovered in the past five years or so -when this strange affliction really started to take hold and become near dictatorial – then I’m just never going to have the chance to go back and appreciate your earlier stuff unless you rerelease it. Ideally encased with as many bells and whistles as possible, making it an official reissue and eligible for that year’s list. Like, Lupe Fiasco, I’ve fallen in love with you, but only since 2014, so can you rerelease your older stuff that people say is, actually, much better? Kid Cudi, you too, I only started appreciating your majesty as recently as 2016. Could you rerelease that terrible rock album you did, I am beyond curious. But not, like, curious enough to disobey the list.
Yeah, y’know, I’m actually an indigenous person meself, know warra mean? Indigenous fackin’ Englishman, me, yeah? Oi oi! You avin’ that? Noice, mate, noooooooooooooooooooooooooooice!
Let’s stop all that for a start. The term ‘indigenous people’ isn’t just some uncomfortable dog whistle to be used to threateningly outline the idea that some kinds of people are the ones meant to occupy a certain land. Y’know, before all the bloody Muslims moved in… The term ‘indigenous’ when referring to people is actually intentionally loaded, and designed to make great portions of the globe always shift every so uncomfortably in their seats as it reminds them of past imperialism, past genocides, and current mealy mouthed pretences of absolutions and reparations. The Aborigines, The Maasai, The Kurds, The Maori… Indigenous people are among the original inhabitants of a place which was later colonised by a larger ethnic group, mostly leading to them being left as tiny minorities on the land they once considered their own. That’s right, by its very nature the term ‘indigenous people’ is all political, continuing the broad trens that everything that’s isn’t a straight cishet white man is political. If you’re an English person, your country was largely the reason most indigenous communities became indigenous. So there’s always that.
Motherfucking yes! I always seem to need this album. I needed it at several points during a fraught and traumatic 2021, I need it now after the two previous entries today have taken me to dark observations of my own previous suicidal ideations and miserable conclusions of the state of transphobia in UK media. Every time I listen t it, it satisfies and calms needs that I didn’t even know I had. Musically, it’s just a transient example of everything that’s good in the world and a reminder of the inherent beauty of human creation.
Firstly, any aspiring rappers out there can take “Dark considerations of my/Previous suicidal ideations” as one of the bars on your debut SoundCloud mixtape. Thank me later, though of course I will be demanding the standard 45% cut of all proceeds.
Up one place since her last album! If the unbelievably talented Brighton-based pianist/multi-instrumentalist continues on at this rate, and with a similar schedule between albums, then she’s going to place #1 sometime around Necessary Evil 2081! Will we all be dead by then. No. You will, obviously, but I’m never going to die. And neither will my pet Pomsky, Zeus Bertha Pepper, I wuv hm sooo muuuuuuch! But, erm, yes, you’ll all be dead. Zeus Bertha Pepper will have likely killed you, he has quite the bloodlust. Have you read that 2018 review though? Yeah, I loved the album muchly – I even suggest she score the recently released movie Bumblebee, which is of course meant as a compliment, how could it not be? – but I seem like I was in a pretty bad place on that particular day, doesn’t it? Three years on, has my brain’s general countenance improved? Today, absolutely. These past few months, definitely. This past year… weeeeeeeeeeeeell, there was a bit of a struggle that I invited it into.
I’ve touched on how toxic and damaging my 2020/21 marriage was, and how it left my self-belief, my mental comfort and my dang desire for life in the absolute toilet. Well, this post is going to be the final reckoning, the complete and total exorcism, the slicing open of old wounds so that they can bleed completely out and not poison me again. Starting on the 14th December 2020 I started keeping a diary of how much the marriage was hurting me, it ran until abruptly stopping on the 29th January, likely because my illness became too much to leave time for such pathetically solipsistic concerns. There were thirty three entries.. I think this was in response to my wife showing disbelief that I could be feeling that way, or perhaps she had challenged me to name instances in which I was hurt and my decrepit old brain struggled to give precise details when called up on it. Whatever. I started writing them down and put them in a password and fingerprint secured OneNote file. I never showed or even mentioned them to my wife, and before recently I hadn’t looked at them myself in months. It was actually reminding myself what I said about Poppy last time around that convinced me to dig them up. I couldn’t remember the password and had to keep guessing until about three in the morning, but I got in! And here the entries are.
Now, I don’t want to make this feel like I’m piling on my ex-wife – she wasn’t right for me I wasn’t right for her, but she otherwise deserves all the love in the world. I don’t come out of these records looking great either, please just take this all as evidence of how incredibly awful the relationship was. Oh, and I’m sure there’s roughly a dozen trigger warnings I should be offering here, so maybe just don’t read any further if you’re having anything like a decent day that you don’t want ruining, or if dark depictions of mental states or terrible relationships are likely to set in motion grim and traumatic thoughts of your own, then get out now! Seriously, not many jokes on this one…
Necessary Evil 