Daily Archives: December 19, 2020

The News Tribune asked local brewers and bakers and others in the biz to talk about their best bites from the past year. Here is what they said.

Lobster roll at Scenic 61 (Christa Lawler / clawler@duluthnews.com)

"My best food was the lobster roll from the airstream trailer at The Scenic Cafe. My best drink was cedar and cider from Vikre and Duluth Cider."

DAVE HOOPS is the veteran brewer behind Hoops Brewing and whose Hoops on Hops column runs in the News Tribune. The New Scenic opened an airstream trailer, Scenic 61, and has been serving customers in the parking lot and at a few pop-up locations.

Laura Kirwin liked New Scenic Cafe's meal kits. (Photo courtesy of Kirwin)

As someone who works in the restaurant business, it was so refreshing to have a nice meal cooked for me from New Scenic Cafe. My husband and I were sick of cooking at home so for our 13-year wedding anniversary, we got a meal kit from New Scenic Cafe. Missing travel and reminiscing about our worldly travels, we ordered the cassoulet (a hearty bean dish with housemade sausages and duck confit) paired with a cherry frangipan tart. I can't tell you how much it lifted our spirits and (temporarily) made us forget about the stressful times we are living in. I'll never forget it.

LAURA KIRWIN goes by the name Bayou Baker when she adds the dessert red velvet cupcakes, pralines, coconut snowballs to the Cajun dinners from Gumbo Boi. New Scenic Cafe, in addition to opening the Scenic 61 food truck, has added meal kits in its Mise en Place Marketplace.

The Buffalo Chikn Tacos at Mama Roots Vegan Food Truck (2020 file / News tribune)

Mama Roots is a huge standout this year. The vegan food truck sold out during their debut, and the peoples taste buds dont lie.

During my visit, the Buffalo Chikn Tacos and Moroccan Carrot Slaw were to die for with organic soy curls that really tasted like chicken! Also, greens, tomato, green onion, buffalo sauce and bus-made ranch (made of aquafaba, lemon, fresh dill and parsley, among other delicious things).

The slaw was sweet, bright, orange in taste and color and well-covered in their ACV-maple syrup-lime aioli. Their food is 100% plant-based, impressive on the taste buds, easy on the wallet and on Mama Earth what more could you ask?

MELINDA LAVINE is a features reporter at the News Tribune and frequently contributor to the Things We Like column. Mama Roots opened as the weather warmed in 2020.

A menu card showing the Real Tacos served by Oasis Del Norte in Duluth. (Clint Austin/caustin@duluthnews.com)

I've loved the innovation of 2020 and the way food became a source of entertainment: The buzz around Doc Witherspoon's Soul Food Kitchen, the radically honest social media presence of Tony O'Neil from JamRock Cultural Restaurant, Gumbo Boi's muffuletta sandwich, served out of a borrowed kitchen, with the coziest homemade bread, Scenic 61 offering New Scenic levels of food with the decidedly concession stand of regular old bag of chips or a bottle of wine. When I interviewed Eduardo Sandoval Luna about taking Oasis Del Norte to a pop-up spot at the mall, he recommended his super torta. I keep going back for it, this handful of taco flavors like beans and cheese and avocado; we add carnitas, but there are other meat options, on a soft tela roll. Every once in a while you come across a glop of mayo and audibly groan with pure food joy. Do not skip the tres leches cake, which is a moist crumble of dessert, and tack on horchata.

CHRISTA LAWLER is a News Tribune features reporter. Oasis Del Norte spent the summer popping up in areas often untouched by food trucks, including an insurance company's parking lot in West Duluth.

Vikre Distillery is offering cocktail kits. (file / News Tribune)

I think the one thing that I enjoyed and was impressed with the most was Vikre and their quick offering of cocktail kits. Each one was hand mixed, creatively packaged and (duh) delicious. It really helped take the edge off those early months of the lock downs and helped keep me feeling classy. And let's not forget to mention the sanitizer program, I didn't drink it, but Vikre deserves a lot of praise for things they did this year. Also, I really enjoy Bent Paddle's Snow Maker brew.

ROBERT LEE went from cooking hobbyist to a full-fledged pop-up shop with Gumbo Boi, which serves cajun dishes on weekends out of the kitchen at Zeitgeist. Vikre Distillery began making hand sanitizer early on in the pandemic, but also has kits filled with ingredients for the home bartender.

The enchiladas at Bucktales are worth the drive, according to Taco Stand writer Jon Nowacki. (Jon Nowacki / jnowacki@duluthnews.com)

Growing up in a small town, I was used to taking road trips as the nearest town was eight miles away, and the nearest restaurant chain, 30 miles away. I did even more driving than normal this spring, with everything shut down, sightseeing out of boredom. I liked hitting Wisconsin Point until they posted a sign saying it was only open to people who lived in Douglas County (not sure how a guy walking outside by himself checking out a lighthouse contributes to the spread of coronavirus, but I digress).So I went the other direction and ended up south of town at a place called Pickled Petes, shortly after Wisconsin opened back up. I was hungry, and the bartender recommended a place just down the road that served great Mexican cuisine.A Mexican restaurant in the middle of nowhere? I had to investigate.Turns out, Bucktales Cantina and Grill was just as advertised.Ive been to Bucktales about a dozen times since, and Ive never been disappointed. Owner and chef Dee Morales never mails it in its always good. He clearly takes pride in his work, whether its traditional Mexican dishes like enchiladas and chimichangas or gyros and Philly sandwiches, and theres always a good Mexican beverage to pair with it.I was there just the other day and while it was listed as an appetizer, the chorizo tacos were a meal in and of themselves, and man, they were good.In this year of COVID-19, and with Minnesota back on lockdown, this holiday season Bucktales has been the gift that keeps on giving. Its definitely worth the drive.

JON NOWACKI is the News Tribune sports reporter who writes the Taco Stand food column. Bucktales is a Mexican restaurant in a bar on South State Rd. in Superior.

The Boat Club's Lake Superior Breakfast comes with whitefish, eggs, arugula, mushrooms and pickled red onion. (Melinda Lavine / mlavine@duluthnews.com)

I was a big fan of The Boat Club. From set up to service to plated meals loved everything about them and went to my own JamRock page to rave about them publicly.

TONY ONEIL took JamRock Cultural Restaurant from a mobile grill to a brick-and-mortar spot at Average Joes and now has plans to move to the former Paks Green Corner, 1901 Tower Ave. The Boat Club, located in the lower level of the Fitgers Complex, specializes in seafood and views.

The Toasty's Burger in Paradise features cream cheese spread, Colby jack cheese, pineapple, cilantro, organic BBQ sauce, lime zest, jalapeos and bacon. (Clint Austin / caustin@duluthnews.com)

We're so blessed with so many amazing local options. But, if I've gotta choose just one I'm going with the Burger in Paradise from Toasty's. It's mortal magic in a bun. Two cheeses, jalapeos, bacon, bbq sauce, lime, two perfectly juicy patties *chef's kiss* superb. I once let someone try a bite of my burger (pre-covid) and cried because they took a bigger bite than I was expecting. Also, I haven't confirmed this, but their fries taste like they blanche them. The BIP and fry combo could get me through, like, five more 2020s. Although Universe if you're reading this pleeeaaassee understand that it's just hyperbole. Less pandemics, more burgers in paradise.

RACHELLE RAHN of Duluth Kombucha recently reopened in a new space, 12 S. 15th Ave. E. Toastys, located in downtown Duluth, is a sandwich shop that offers variations on the classic grilled cheese sandwich in addition to burgers.

There are two things I have eaten the most in 2020.

One would be a cheese burger from Lake Ave. This is definitely my favorite restaurant in Duluth. They always have a creative, well thought out delicious menu but I always come back to this perfect patty. I have to get my burger fix from them a few times a month. Hands down best in the D!

Two would be fettuccine alfredo from Gannuccis Italian Market! Bill puts a lot of love into all his dishes but that one in particular is, in my opinion, the best in town. The noodles are handmade, perfectly cooked, and the sauce is creamy perfection.

JONATHAN REZNICK owns The Rambler food truck and MidCoast Catering and was part of the movement to deliver food to frontline workers during the pandemic. Lake Ave. is based in the Dewitt-Seitz Building and Gannuccis Italian Market is a West Duluth mainstay.

Love Creamery's salted caramel ice cream. (2016 file / News Tribune)

We honestly eat our food all the time, but we also love love love to visit Love Creamery. The completely made-from-scratch taste is never missed and included in every flavor. My wife especially loves the gluten/dairy free options like Smores. My favorite flavor is the Honey Chamomile because it reminds me of home, a flavor I had growing up as a kid.

EDUARDO SANDOVAL LUNA opened a pop-up Oasis Del Norte at the Miller Hill Mall with plans to stay through March. Love Creamery, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, seemed to have a steady stream of masked and distanced customers throughout the pandemic.

Lulu's Pizza Banh Mi-Za features pork or mock duck, a pickle medley, cilantro, banh mi sauce, roasted garlic, olive oil and shredded mozzarella cheese. (Clint Austin / caustin@duluthnews.com)

The affogato at Love Creamery. This isn't news, but does it need to be? It's sooooo good. I like to get mine with the salted caramel ice cream and top it with whipped cream because it reminds me of the ones we had on our honeymoon in Italy!

The banh mi pizza at Lulu's pizza. Lulu's opened right before the pandemic began, which seems like unlucky timing, but maybe it wasn't since their pizza is pretty much the perfect take out food. We have been picking up pizza for dinner almost every Friday since the pandemic began, and the banh mi is my steady favorite.

EMILY VIKRE of Vikre Distillery published Camp Cocktails this past year and the distillery also made a quick move to create hand sanitizer when there was a sanitizer drought and also has created cocktail kits. Love Creamery is a craft ice cream shop that quickly adapted to the pandemic. Lulus Pizza has clever pizza options and is at 420 W. Superior St.

It's been a super odd year for eating out, but there were still some good experiences. I have so many favorite spots like Lake Ave Cafe, Phoholic, OMC / Duluth Grill. It's really hard to pick something. I really miss the Scenic Cafe. The Earthwood Inn in Two Harbors sometimes has fresh herring and fresh lake trout fish cakes. It's bar food connected to a little motel, but if they have fresh fish they do a really great job served with hush puppies and fries. Yikes, it's a greasy dinner, but a little juxtapose to fine dining and super foodie fun that I'm usually after. For a favorite drink option, the new Jade Fountain has some really top-notch cocktails with really interesting ingredients and house made ginger beer and other concoctions.

JASON WUSSOW made a quick shift to add a drive-thru window at Wussows Concert Cafe in West Duluth, in addition to hosting parking lot concerts this past summer. Jade Lounge is a tiki bar located across the street from Wussows and The Earthwood Inn will often update its Facebook page with its fresh fish options.

Read more here:

Duluth's best bites of 2020 ranged from fresh herring to ice cream - Duluth News Tribune

The early months of the pandemic took away sports and big-ticket movie releases. At first, it seemed as though major albums would go the same way. Shortly after large swaths of the U.S. went into lockdown, artists like the Chicks (ne Dixie), Lady Gaga, Haim, and Kehlani punted their album release dates. Suddenly, we were left with no major culture releases on the calendareven ones that could be enjoyed within the comforts of our home.

This, of course, would change. Those albums would all come outas would projects by Drake, BTS, and other mega-selling artists. Taylor Swift was particularly productive during her quarantine: She released two chart-toppers, Folklore and this past Fridays Evermore. Musicians may be unable to tour, but the album is alive and well.

You wont find most of those major albums mentioned above on The Ringers best-of list, which is presented below alongside some honorable mentions. Most of them were fine. Some were even great. But in a year when movie theaters all but disappeared and we fretted over whether wed run out of TV, there was a bounty of great new music to wade through. We believe the albums presented below are a true indication of the music that mattered this year. Some speak to isolation, others to the racial reckoning America faced following the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. There are independent releases we identify with on a personal level and a few big projects that we believe well look back on as pivotal moments for their genre.

As always, these are just opinions. You are free to yell in the Twitter replies. That doesnt mean well change ours, however. Justin Sayles

Most remix albums are utter garbage. Their existence seems engineered to give artists, their labels, and numerous hang-ons a buffer between the big-ticket items, while keeping the lights on in an increasingly empty house. 1000 gecs and the Tree of Clues subverts those expectations by employing a litany of talented and off-kilter hosts to take the jagged and abrasive sounds of 2019s 1000 Gecs and either sand, sharpen, or distort them further. A.G. Cooks Money Machine rework turns the chipmunk banger into a soft, electronic lullaby. Fall Out Boys Patrick Stump gives one of the great vocal performances of the year on Hand Crushed by a Mallet (Remix), and it lasts for less than 30 seconds. Umru explodes Ringtone from its sweet and tender origins into a rapid form of ecstasy that endlessly pivots, builds, breaks, and ups the ante. 1000 gecs and the Tree of Clues is a testament to what happens when a solid foundation meets a bunch of talented architects looking to cause some chaos. Charles Holmes

A small, insignificant tragedy of 2020: There were many great dance records released, but few places to dance in public. With apologies to Dua Lipa and Roisin Murphy, Jessie Ware had the best of the bunch. Whats Your Pleasure? is one part disco (Oh La La), one part Prince-lite funk (Soul Control), and one part propulsive house (Save a Kiss). But its all movement. If only we had a place to move. Sayles

Pop had a rough 2020. The major-label music we were supposed to care about was either boring, sexless, or pandering (often all at the same time). We knew too much about these starstheir marriages, breakups, quarantine horniness levels, and bids for chart dominance that mostly eluded themand still their music felt hollow. Rina Sawayamas SAWAYAMA was anything but. The 13-song project is the rare album I had the blessing of going into completely cold. I knew nothing about Rinas background, reason for being, or the where, why, and how for why this album existed. Instead, I hit play and the camp and the winking grandeur of the hooks made me pine for a bygone era of the top-40 charts. XS is sleek and biting. Akasa Sad is so off-kilter, months later Im no closer to understanding why it works. Bad Friend, with beautiful processed vocals that help kick off the songs first hook, is hauntingly catchy. In a year when her musical peers went muted, Sawayama decided to go bigger, and shes better for it. Holmes

There are concept albums and then there is Ajai, the idiosyncratic LP by Chicago rapper Serengeti and L.A. producer Kenny Segal that tells the tale of the Jordans-rocking, Supreme-obsessed titular character whose Off-White 1s get delivered to the wrong address. That may sound too insignificant to carry an entire album, but thats just the beginning of the story: Along the way, there are domestic disputes, an embarrassing incident at a company softball game, a fistfight involving a firefighter who loses his wife, and a bizarre therapy session. The plot also ensnares Kenny Dennis, the alter ego that Serengeti has developed over the past decade. Its a lot to track, but its laid out in gripping detail. And with Segals excellent production providing the road map, its worth sticking around to see how the story plays out. Sayles

Every Bad is a breathtaking display of songwriting and self-reflection, loaded with lyrics that double as mantras. (Thank you for leaving me / Thank you for making me happy, You will like me when you meet me, Youre wasting my time.) It also contains some of the most infectious melodies found on any indie record this year. (Give/Take may be the cheeriest song ever centered on a narrator learning how to say no.) Frontwoman Dana Margolin told Apple Music earlier this year that much of Every Bad is focused on working through frustrations and figuring things out. The album certainly has a nervous edge to itPJ Harvey is an obvious reference point for some of its heaviest momentsbut Margolin and her bandmates have already figured out how to make a great record. Sayles

Nostalgia is an infectious disease. In 2020, the IP is endless, the reboots get reboots, and the most talented artists of a generation are forced to recycle metaphorical plastic to appease faceless shareholders. But heres the thing about nostalgiaits always a little less dumb when the thing you adore is whats getting a second life. I am not too proud to admit, Man on the Moon III: The Chosen was the sentimental salve my lizard brain needed.

Show me a person impervious to a Kid Cudi hum or one of his sweet, sweet melodies and Ill show you someone devoid of a heart. Every year, the critical masses heap praise upon albums and songs that were forgettable the moment they arrived or try to plant flags upon scenes and trends that are even less interesting. Despiteor maybe because ofhis divisiveness, Kid Cudi has survived among a small but vocal contingent. And Man on the Moon III marks the moment his current deification became undeniable. Instead of remaking the hits that enraptured a generation (Day n Nite, Pursuit of Happiness), MOTM III sees Cudi updating his sound to compete with his various sons (with Travis Scott the obvious leader). Alongside Dot da Genius and Take a Daytrip, Cudi ad-libs, Auto-Tunes, and hums his way through the pressure. Tequila Shots is among the best album openers of the year, and the run Cudi goes on after it (from Another Day through his collab with Skepta and Pop Smoke, Show Out) is impressive for an artist not known for his cohesive albums.

Its rare that any sequel, let alone the last installment of a trilogy, lives up to the hype. For once the nostalgia was on my side. Holmes

Society if El-P and Killer Mike were in charge:

Sayles

You may have heard that 2020 was the year of the female MC. Arguably no oneman or womanhad a stronger introduction to the genre this year than Flo Milli. Shes undeniably charismaticher flow is nimble but ferocious playful, but nasty when she needs it to be. Clocking in at a brisk 30 minutes, Ho, Why Is You Here? is likely just an appetizer to whatever main course Flo Milli eventually serves up, but it feels like an opening shot fired by one of raps next great stars. Sayles

There are some albums that by virtue of merely existing come to define an artist. The collective effort, emotions, and struggle that go into ushering a body of work into the world become inextricable from the project. In February, Pop Smoke was murdered in the Hollywood Hills before he could ever see his major label debut through. Released five months after his death, Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon was cobbled together by Pops key collaborators. It is in no way a perfect album or even his best, but its undoubtedly the most interesting for what it tries and ultimately achieves.

Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon is meant to convey where Pop was going, which in his estimation was chart dominance. The features list is a cavalcade of Rap Caviar mainstays (Future, Swae Lee, DaBaby). There are bizarre clunkers (West Coast Shit featuring Tyga and Quavo) and daring risks (Enjoy Yourself featuring Karol G). Pop contorts the bass of his gargoyle voice to fit within the strictures of hits that are supposed to dominate Hot 97 as much as the Hot 100. Got It on Me, Pop Smokes flip of 50 Cents Many Men should sound sacrilegious, but instead arrives like a gothic banger. Yea Yea is peak 106 & Parkcore with Pop humorously trying to make the sandpaper quality of his vocals sound seductive. The Brooklyn rappers debut album went no. 1 upon its release, and three months later returned to its perch. Pop Smoke and Co. knew where he was headed, and the world was happy to invest in the ride. Holmes

When considering the message of Jeff Rosenstocks music, its worth considering the messenger: Rosenstock is a 38-year-old industry veteran whos been putting out albums since before some of his punk contemporaries were born. So when he sings Looking down the barrel of a shitty future, hes not doing so as an anxious teen with a full life ahead of him. Hes a nearly middle-aged man who has seen some shitty futures become the shitty past. But hes also been around long enough to know how to make a great record.

No Dream arrived in May 2020 without warning, seemingly like it was written specifically for this specific time. (It wasnt exactly; the album was completed in February, before we knew how shitty things would get.) Across 13 tracks, Rosenstock documents our terrible political discourse (On Scram!: Ive been told for most my life, Try to see the other side / By people who have never tried to see the other side) and the weird artifacts of late-stage capitalism (***BNB will make you reconsider ever renting a room in a strangers home again). The album builds to the explosive finale, Ohio Tpke, a perfect piece of heartland mall-punk and the best driving song of 2020. (Seriously, get on an open freeway, crank Ohio Tpke to 11, and thank me later.) The future may have never seemed shittier, but in Rosenstocks hands, that shitty future has never sounded better, either. Sayles

Theres an entire major-label graveyard for white rappers who abandoned hip-hop to hawk their wares in Caucasian-friendly genres (Kid Rock, Yelawolf) or fused the two from the outset (Limp Bizkit, Korn). So when Machine Gun Kelly finally took his bad-boy rock aesthetic to its logical conclusion on Tickets to My Downfall, it was predictable and eye-roll inducing. Theres one complicating factor, however: His pop-punk pivot was better than it had any right to be. In fact, the 15-song project was among the best rock records of the year.

Earnest, glossy, and absurd, Tickets to My Downfall finds Kelly trying way too hard in a multitude of aspects. But its because Kelly commits to the bit that the grand experiment succeeds. The hooks on Kiss Kiss and My Exs Best Friend sound like they were manufactured to go up in a Hot Topic or get loving write-ups between the pages of Alternative Press. Forget Me Too fashions Halsey and Kelly as Bonnie-and-Clyde lovers in the style of the Fueled by Ramen stars of yore. On the deluxe version of the album, Kelly even releases a cover of Paramores Misery Business despite possessing none of the vocal chops of Hayley Williams, and while the gamble doesnt pay off, its one of the most interesting gambles of the year to hear unfold. In a year where most artists played it safe, Kelly was the rare musician willing to truly act like a rock star. Holmes

You have to feel for Open Mike Eagle, who centered his excellent new album on the most traumatic year of his life: In every appearance he made or interview he gave to promote the projectincluding at this very websitehe had to recount his divorce, the dissolution of his Hellfyre Club rap crew, and the cancellation of his Comedy Central show. And that was before the pandemic, which brought a new kind of anxiety for independent musicians. But Mikes affableyou never get the sense he enjoys talking about these things, but hes introspective, willing to mine his emotions to explore how it relates to his art specifically and the human condition overall. That approach extends to his music, and its what makes Anime, Trauma and Divorce one of the best albums of the yearand the finest of his career.

Mike grapples with the cyclical nature of trauma openly on the albums first cut, Death Parade, which becomes something of a thesis for the project. Throughout ATDs 12 tracks, he revisits the thememost poetically on songs like Im a Joestar (Black Power Fantasy) and Bucciarati, which use anime to tell stories of pain and triumph. But even as he goes deeper into this psyche than he ever has before on record, Mike never loses his trademark humor. Sweatpants Spiderman is a manifesto for any freshly single 40-year-old man, while the darkly comedic The Black Mirror Episode may be scarier than any episode of the sci-fi anthology series. The heart of the album comes one track before Black Mirror, however: On Everything Ends Last Year, Mike drops the humor and metaphors to plainly discuss his recent experiences. Its October, and Im tired, goes the songs refrain. After a rough few years, one can only hope Mike feels better by the time next fall rolls around. Sayles

Lets begin with a fact so obvious it barely requires stating: The Grammys are an out-of-touch institution. You need look no further than the list of this years nominations for Best Rap Album for proof. The Recording Academy shunned major releases by the likes of Pop Smoke, Juice WRLD, and Lil Baby for backpack-friendly (and admittedly pretty decent) fare from Royce Da 59 and Jay Electronica, plus an absolute stinker from Nas. One album that snuck in, however, truly deserved its place: Freddie Gibbs & Alchemists Alfredo, a 35-minute salvo that distilled everything great the two artists had done separately over the past decade into 10 excellent songs.

The 38-year-old Gibbswho has a reasonable claim as the best rapper of his generation still working todayhas never been better than he is here. He melds with the beats, firing off rapid flows and dropping some of the years most memorable lines. (Michael Jordan, 1985, bitch, I travel with a cocaine circus is nearly as great as any scene in The Last Dance.) For Alchemist, the album is another bullet point alongside Boldy Jamess The Price of Tea in China and his work with Griselda in his Rap Producer of the Year rsum. Alfredo is the culmination of many things: the postmodern boom-bap sound Alchemist helped create, the renewed attention paid recently to cerebral street rap, the work Gibbs has put into redefining his career the past half-decade. Now it may culminate in a Grammy. The awards ceremony may be beyond fixing, but if it allows projects like Alfredo to collect hardware, there are some parts that arent fully broken. Sayles

My Turn is a culmination and coronation. Rap moves faster than any other musical genrerelevance is never promised, and hundreds of upstarts are willing to take their predecessors spots at the first sign of weakness. Atlanta artists thrive within this framework, as the city has launched more rap stars into the stratosphere than any other region over the past 15 years. As the title of Lil Babys latest album suggests, he is well aware his time on the throne is now. Between 2017 and 2018, the Quality Control rapper dropped six solo projects and one collaborative album with Gunna. With each successive collection, his talents grew past his peers. At 20 songs, My Turn was the last salvo of this barrage, and it turned Baby into a commercial behemoth.

Throughout the album, Baby does a little of everything. He gave high schoolers a reprieve from 2018s couples song of the year, Close Friends, with the equally emo Emotionally Scarred. We Paid was the clunkiest hit of the spring and took on such a life of its own that Baby threw it on My Turns deluxe edition. Across the album, Lil Baby raps with a speed and dexterity that almost threatens to topple at any minute. After years of watching his friends and mentorsFuture, Young Thug, Migosreign supreme, My Turn is a needed changing of the guard. Holmes

By virtue of, well, all of this, 2020 has been the year of the self-isolation album. Ever the visionary, Fiona Apple had planned an album centered on her time in her Venice Beach home long before the phrase social distancing entered the zeitgeist. Fetch the Bolt Cutters, the singer-songwriters fifth album released this past April, makes use of her surroundingsshe bangs on pans, uses space to create echoes, and mics up her own dog plus a few pals. (Shouts to Mercy, Maddie, Leo, Little, and Alfie, all of whom are credited on Fetch and probably got really excited when they heard the first word of the title.) Some of the albums more indelible moments were created by Fiona and her collaborators marching through her home, chanting. Months into quarantine, Im sure many of us can relate to that feeling, even if no one wants to hear our stomps and shouts.

The result of that domestic calamity is Apples best album in 20 years. Fetch the Bolt Cutters songs are immediate, but intimate as she explores bullying, manipulation, and trauma. On some songs, she speaks in raw, direct language. On others, she uses brilliant wordplay. (Take For Her, for example: Look at how feathered his cocks are / See how seamless his frocks are / Look at his paper-beatingoverthat rockstar / Look athow long she walks and howfar.) Theres a small but not insignificant chance that Fetch the Bolt Cutters will be mostly remembered as the first album Pitchfork awarded a 10.0 to in a decade, which would be a shame for such a revelatory album. Either way, I suspect Fiona and Mercy will be comfortable within the confines of their home. Sayles

Little is known about Sault, a British music collective who has avoided press, social media, or even listing most of its members. That secrecy, however, hasnt stopped the group from releasing two of the most fully formed, richest albums of 2020: Junes Untitled (Black Is) and Septembers Untitled (Rise). The former arrived seemingly out of nowhere at the peak of the civil unrest stemming from the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. It felt like a radical act of defiance. Mining musical ground indebted to Parliament, Sly Stone, and Earth, Wind & Fire, Untitled (Black Is) spoke to the rage of the momentDont Shoot Guns Down and X play like direct responses to the protestswhile also trying to soothe (the coda of Hard Life, when a chorus sings Everything is going to be all right / Because God is on your side is the most cathartic musical breakdown of the year).

Released a scant three months later, Untitled (Rise) may be even more stunning than its predecessor. Saults second LP of the year leans heavily on dance and African rhythms in its first act before moving to quieter pieces on its back end, as pianos and orchestral arrangements come to the forefront. The albums closerLittle Boy, in which an older narrator promises to tell the subject that shell one day share the truths about the boys in blue and those that look like youis a staggeringly beautiful song; its both heartbreaking and relentlessly optimistic at once. Sault may not want you to know the finer details of whos making the songs, but the group never loses sight of its identity. And as a result, Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise) are among the most human pieces of art this year. Sayles

Some artists are so singular in their performance they can transcend any number of borderslanguage, culture, geography. Bad Bunnywith his froggy singing voice and rapid-fire rappingis one such artist. The Puerto Rican musician and I do not speak the same language. There are levels of Februarys YHLQMDLG I will never understand, because of that inherent gap, and yet none of that detracts from the feeling that youre listening to a generational talent performing at the height of their powers. Pero Ya No is among the most hypnotic songs of 2020 as Bunnys voice swirls into a falsetto that soon turns into a merciless rap in which he says something about Pokmon. This cursed year was robbed of a dancefloor-demolishing song in Yo Perreo Sola. There are so many sonic turns on Safaera featuring Jowell & Randy and engo Flow that there should be a map specifically created for it. At a time when so many other artists took their foot off the gas, Bad Bunny never did. YHLQMDLG was the first of three records hes released during this pandemic year, and without a doubt his best. Holmes

Lil Uzi Vert was left for dead. A long and intense fight with his label bosses, DJ Drama and Don Cannon, contractually hobbled him. The generation of anarchic, prolific, melodically inclined rappers he birthed were moving past him commercially. His inability to drop new music after 2017s Luv Is Rage 2 left the world clamoring for an artist whose sonic footprint was fading day by day. Eventually, Roc Nation intervened, the Instagram squabbles diminished, and on an unassuming Friday morning in March the long-awaited Eternal Atake was finally delivered to the masses.

Eternal Atake operates like a divine purge. For 18 tracks, the Philadelphia native releases a creative torrent that feels like a rebuke of the music-industry cogs that almost denied his birthright. Uzis rapping is craggy and borderless, with the tempo of each beat feeling like mere suggestions. Baby Pluto is a cacophonous assault of ad-libs crashing against the blinks and beeps of a kaleidoscopic beat. Deep album cuts like Venetia sound like they were honed in deep and dank rave basements. Uzis tender singing voice on the trifecta of Im Sorry, Bigger Than Life, and Urgency belies an insanely horny rapper who needs to take a cold shower. Eternal Atake has enough ideas, genres, melodies, and bars for an entire career. (The loose space narratively is roughly the eighth most interesting part of the album.)

Across 2020, Uzi has ran a quarter-mile past being prolific. He released two solo albums within a week of each other and followed that up with his recent collaboration with Future. Over the past three years, the major critical establishments have gawked and praised pop stars like Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift for adopting release schedules indebted to decades of Black artists bucking a major-label system and feeding a ravenous audience. Uzi is of this lineage, and while none of his follow-ups were as intensely brilliant as Eternal Atake, they did speak to an artist who was momentarily deferred. The myriad forces that held Uzi back only made him more powerful. Holmes

Original post:

The Best Albums of 2020 - The Ringer

In her recent paintings exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, on view through 23 December 2020, the artist has continued to develop what she refers to as insistent gestures and neologisms. They are marks that have progressed over time, becoming larger in size, decisive in stroke, and referential to forms before them. This newly invented language emerges from her desire to further develop the space she creates, where she reimagines the potential of the liminal expanse born in the in-between or transitional place.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

Always circling back to biblical references, Mehretu's exhibition is enveloped in its drama. Like the clouds over The Raft of the Medusa (18181819) by Thodore Gricault, the exhibition recalls the Book of Revelation and the narrative of the Seven Seals of God that eventually lead to the beginning of the apocalypse.

It is in that moment before the apocalypse, and in that impossible frame of theological time, that Mehretu finds the space for another possibility. In these paintings Mehretu works dynamically, starting her process with a news image, which she first digitally alters and blurs. She distils the essence of that image, its spirit and substance, and builds layers of a gradient and saturated palette consumed by blacks and resonating colours, airbrushed and sanded impressions of varying opacity and pointed deconstruction.

Julie Mehretu, Maahes (Mihos) torch (20182019). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

The series of seven paintings, 'about the space of half an hour (R. 8:1)' (20182020) depict this hovering between realms. There is a sense of anticipation among streamers of saturated colour, movement, and form, their gestures evoking a post-event in an uncanny space. They are suspended among particles of airbrush, indicating that the dust hasn't settled yet.

Mehretu's paintings collapse space and time, breaking linear progressions of human histories and narratives through repurposing and transformation.

In the series of aquatint photogravures, 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' (2020), Mehretu references both Joan Didion's collection of essays and W.B Yeats' poem, 'The Second Coming'. Her paintings in this series begin with blurred images of worldwide protests and movements transformed into abstractions of light, shadow, and colour on the large surfaces inhabited by her gestural marks.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

The vertigo-induced image both manifests and destabilises the catastrophic logic of those contemporary moments that are alluded to in the works' titles. This is a unique quality in the paintings, which maintain their indeterminacy as delineated in the spaces of near illumination and penumbras manifested by the hovering patterns, computer glitches, painterly streaks, and forms and glimmers of light that push through the shadows. Mehretu's paintings collapse space and time, breaking linear progressions of human histories and narratives through repurposing and transformation. The paintings consequently evoke the possibilities to be discovered within the blur, altering the images into disembodied experience.

'There's an access to this other condition that is insistent,' she explains to me in our conversation. Black lines and shapes hover over masses of shadow and light in another series of seven paintings also in the exhibition. In Loop (B. Lozano, Bolsonaro eve) (20192020), the title suggests a realm between contemporary Brazilian political corruption and a dedication to novelist Brenda Lozano whose love story ruminates on marking and erasure.

Julie Mehretu, Loop (B. Lozano, Bolsonaro eve) (20192020). Ink and acrylic on canvas 243.8 x 304.8 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

Here, Mehretu looks to her surroundings. Synthesising her immediate environment and the social and political zeitgeist raging in the United States and the world, she reciprocates with abstraction that resists a single idea, and instead, draws a perspective where a once fortified patriarchal world shows its cracks.

Mehretu's paintings are immersive in this way. Works like Rise (Charlottesville) (20182019) allow us to step into these histories of brutal colonialism, orthodox doctrines, and natural exploitation, their demise revealed in a collective punishment of flames devouring parched forests, and revolts and protests fuelled by racial oppression and killings.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

The paintings on view demonstrate Mehretu's tremendous creative output during this year of global pandemic. She began some of the painting at the early stages of the pandemic reality in New York, and continued throughout the curfews and lockdowns.

Within this space of anticipation, she constructed a visual language in abstraction, which leaves an afterimage imprinted in the mind's eye, like the fleeting flash-blindness of dark spots that appear after a bright flash of light. This corporeal and time-based experience of Mehretu's paintings feels like an emergence in that instance of anticipation as your vision begins to return, and the swirly lines and dots dissolve. It is the calm before the storm, as the image comes back into focus.

Julie Mehretu, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Second Seal (R 6:3) (2020). Photogravure, aquatint. 170 x 208 cm. Edition of 18. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist, BORCH Gallery & Editions and Marian Goodman Gallery.

JMOpacity and abstraction are at the core of my practice and have been since graduate school. One should never feel the need to translate, or explain who and how one is for anyone else. This has never been asked of white male artists in terms of their identity. Black artists are too often expected to explain who they are in their work, which is based on racist ideas of authenticity.

Radical liberatory practices come from breaking away from the constraints of those ideas of authenticity, language, identity, culture, or any form of determinism. So much of the Black Radical tradition has been based in abstraction, precisely for this reason.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

In my work, the language of abstraction has evolved. Painting evolves slowly. But through years of working and mark-making, how I think about space, surface, the marks, and what can happen in a painting has transformed.

I think it really started with the 'Mogamma' paintings (2012)the scale of them and what takes place in terms of how one optically experiences the paintings. They take timea different kind of space opens up in them. It is a visceral experience, not just of space, but maybe also in relation to the memory of space and how one experiences that, while the marks become something else in their interaction with the architecture.

When I started to understand this whole time-based physical experience in the paintings, the architectural drawing became redundant to me. It was not necessary as a signifier anymore. At that point, I became interested in the blur.

Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 457.2 x 365.76 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

The blur grew out of projecting a photograph that had an architectural image in it. I was projecting a photograph of a bombed-out street that was out of focus on the projector, and it felt more haunting than tracing the ruins.

Everything that the blurred photo contained felt more palpable. One could not only feel the history of it, but the possible future of that ruin as wellall from this weird blurred photograph. It became more potent, in a way, so I took that as a starting point. I experimented in Photoshop using spray paint and airbrush, trying to create this ephemeral, blurry, hazy spacethe blur became the uncertainty of the image.

We live in a super mediated environment, especially considering social media, and every person's reality is differently informed by that. It's like a house of mirrors where we can't locate ourselves, and I don't think anyone really understands our sense of space, time, place, or history within it.

Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 457.2 x 365.76 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

The whole idea of 20th-century progress and ideas of futurity and modernity have been shattered, in a way. All of this is what is informing how I am trying to think about space.

Paul Pfeiffer and Lawrence Chua and I have a collaborative, collective project called Denniston Hill, which has been an artist residency but is also a collaborative creative space to mine and invent forms of liberatory practices and pedagogies.

The whole idea of 20th-century progress and ideas of futurity and modernity have been shattered, in a way. All of this is what is informing how I am trying to think about space.

For the past few years and the foreseeable future, the theme of our interrogation and projects revolve around the idea of exodus and aesthetics of uncertainty. Not the promised land, but rather of the post-emancipatory moment of those 40 years at a complete and utter loss in the desert: the cognitive confusion of that moment and that uncertaintythe haze and blur of the murmurings.

Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 457.2 x 365.76 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

That is the conceptual space that I have also been exploring in my paintings. These blurred photos are of a moment that we collectively experience. You don't need to know which California fire Hineni (E. 3:4) (2018) isit could be Beirut, Brazil, or Myanmar.

My interest is more in the visceral, collective source of that experience. For me, it becomes this activated, fertile space I can work in and respond to. I think the opacity of abstraction, that space to play with language, is where one can invent other images or possibilities. It's not about delineating or defining some concrete political perspective, or some directive on how to understand things, or even a historical narrative. It's about the collision of all those thingsthe uncertainty and murmurings of all that.

For a lot of people, this way of working can be problematic, especially so for Black artists or artists of colour, who are expected to explain who they are and to tell the world their perspectives. It goes back to the idea of the right to abstractionthe right to opacity.

Julie Mehretu, Hineni (E. 3:4) (2018). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 304.8 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMYes. In the Book of Revelations, it's the moment after the four horsemen of the apocalypse are released; after the seventh seal is opened and 'there would be silence in heaven for about the space of half an hour.' It is the moment that's considered the threshold, the calm before the storm, or the space before the apocalypse; before the second coming.

During this whole pandemic, it felt like time was suspended. Many failures of our social systems have been exposed by the pandemic. But, at the same time, especially the first few months, it was this massive pause.

I was working upstate on these paintings, reading Moby-Dick and listening to it when I had insomnia. This story is about foreboding and mayhem, as well as the calm before the storm. We have been completely captured in this suspended, vertiginous, foreboding moment, with our own Captain Ahab catapulting us further into clear disaster. The show also opened the day before the election, so that was another threshold in my conscious.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

JMYes, I was more interested in that blur and that hazeto find the emergent light and forms within, as well as the absence and emergence of figures and what happens to them within these haunted spaces of imprisonment.

There is a charged DNA in the blur, for me; it affects my interaction with the painting, and it enables me to play with the spectre inside the image.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

JMFred Moten discusses the continual release of the fugitive and the possibility that emerges therehow Black joy can be advanced through negotiating against the constant effort to negate and extinguish that.

There are incredible inventions across American culture that are rooted in the effort to find possibility and joy, in the context of Black creativity and experimentation, despite all efforts against this and through pain.

Julie Mehretu, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Third Seal (R 6:5) (2020). Photogravure and aquatint. 169.9 x 208 cm. Edition of 18. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist, BORCH Gallery & Editions and Marian Goodman Gallery.

So even though many of the previous 20th-century concepts of futurity feel shattered and impossible as tropes, there's still a determined persistence on something else that is possible. That is core to my investigation in painting. There is intentionality and intensity in this pleasure and excitementthe fervent effort to make and createand I think part of that comes from this place.

I'm reading this book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, where she follows the ecology, economy, and history of the matsutake mushrooma rare delicacy in Japan. Basically, it's this mushroom that thrives in damaged landscapes. She argues that by tracking the mushroom, the people who have travelled the world to pick itmostly refugees from Southeast Asiapresent a case for creative, imaginative ways to reinvent ourselves in the midst of precarity.

Julie Mehretu, A Mercy (after T. Morrison) (20192020). Julie Mehretu. Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 304.8 cm. Courtesy the artist.

To me that is super profound when considering the creative work and creative thinking required of this time. It is our role to mine those possibilities, and to figure out how to continue to exist, insist, and to persist. It's not pessimistic.

I think that the elements of wanting to create, think through mediated images and painting, participate in the history of painting, learn how to make another picture and what that time-based experience is like, and to insist on a visceral, transformative experience that can happen in front of a work, can allow one to participate in those imaginative possibilities.

Julie Mehretu, Orient (after D. Cherry, post Irma and summer) (20172020). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 274.3 x 304.8 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMYes, I was writing a piece on John Coltrane recently, and I was thinking about how, 50 years ago, coming out of Jim Crow and the denial of any type of humanity, there was still a revered creative force. His work, I think, was to mine and invent another space where he could be free, through concepts of universality and various forms of religion and spirituality.

So how do you do that when you don't have a language for that? You can't use the language of the oppressor in the same way. But it's not just the language of the oppressorit's the way you understand the world.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

I think that's where the neologism comes inwhere we invent new words. In music, there's the invention of sound and the constant effort to mine structure and sound. There's the effort in trying to create some kind of texture, space, and experience that goes beyond what can be defined or described or articulated with the language of pain, because experience is visceral and known.

I think the opacity of abstraction, that space to play with language, is where one can invent other images or possibilities.

I'm not trying to speak opaquely, it's just all of this stuff is complicated, contradictory, undefined, and intangible. Is intuition a sense that is mined from the ontological congregation of resistance, an ontological congregation of ancestry; of a collective? How does one have understanding or access to different points of history, of time and of space in their knowing?

Marilynne Robinson said these beautiful words about writing fiction: 'It sounds as if it's some jag of mysticism or something but in fact it's true and I think it's important to me for people to realize that there are much larger, more complex, more consequential entities than most culture allows them to believe . . . when I'm writing fiction the hope is that I will have found my way to something that speaks for itself that is not interpreted but is adequate to interpretation when it comes.'

Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour (R. 8:1) 1 (20192020). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMAbsolutely, especially in the architectural drawingsthe marks were always trying to be like clogs in the machine. They were trying to devour that system, if you willwork against it, devour it, participate in it, but ultimately, there's this kind of emergent entropy.

I think you see that energy in the paintings in the gallery. There's a kind of fury coming out of what the marks and blurs participate in creating, but there's also this dynamic happening with all of the other elements in colour. I feel like they participate in the construction of a systemic thing, but they also fall apart in that.

Julie Mehretu, Rise (Charlottesville) (20182019). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

It reminds me of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, who wrote, 'I find myself surrounded by patchiness, that is, a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs . . . only an appreciation of the current precarity as an earth-wide condition allows us to notice thisthe situation of our world.'

I think all of that is a part of the disruption and the kind of breaking of a particular linear narrative. One of the paintings is titled Loop, after Brenda Lozano's book, where the protagonist goes through these cycles that weave from ancient mythology to today, through these repetitive, sometimes creepy patterns. That's the kind of magnitude of time that we connect with that's also broken and disrupted, so I think there's a participation in that, not only in a disruptive way, but also in a generative way.

Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour (R. 8:1) 3 (20192020). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMOf course, part of the intention with the work is to participate in this grand history of painting, which has been dominated by the white male painters for the most part. And institutionally and structurally, whether it's colonialism or patriarchy, or heteronormativity, it all contributes to the history of abstraction.

Julie Mehretu, Being Higher I (2013). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 213.36 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and White Cube. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

What I'm trying to do with the making of these pictures is to try to resist, invent, and push against all of that. So, part of it is the scale of the work, and part of it is the desire to work in this language that has been denied to many people, though numerous artists have been working this way for decades. How does one articulate fragmentary breakdown, of a decentred way of looking? A multi-perspectival way of approaching paintings and an openness to their reading? It is all a part of the refusal of autocratic and patriarchal systems.

I think about those things because they are core to not just the way that I make, but also the way that I amthe way I live and participate in the world. This also goes back to what you asked earlier about opacity alongside negation in abstraction.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

JMI think part of the effort in trying to find a space for oneself is to constantly be inventing, finding, and mining your own spaceinsisting that you have that rightas we have to do as marginalised people.

The constant effort of trying to find a space for oneself is to work against and participate in that language: to use that language, to participate in that language, to shift it and morph it, and to create something else out of that, but also to insist on a state of possibility. I keep using that word 'possibility,' without it being too directed.

Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour (R. 8:1) 4 (20192020). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMIt is the most potent thing I feel I can do. Morton Subotnick said, in a conversation with Paul Holdengraber, 'The meaning of life, for me, and it never changed, is you find out who you are. Your duty is to find out who you are, what you are, and do the very best you can with that, and share what you do with other people. That's what I've done my whole life.'

Read more:

Julie Mehretu on the Right to Abstraction - Ocula Magazine

Narrowing down any kind of list of music videos usually means separating the meaningful expressions of musical ideas from the flashy gimmicks. The best ones that youll see below manage to work in tandem with the songs, each elevating the other. Sometimes, this might mean that a great song has a leg up its hard not to be wowed by something paired with a song that means a lot to you or has been stuck in your head for months.

But it works the other way, too. Its easily as possible for a track that may not have clicked the first few listens to suddenly come alive with the right visual pairing.

Some of these will be easier to match to this calendar year than others, but each of them take a distinct stylistic approach to the songs they complement. Whether simple, elaborate, or in that area in between, these are all reminders that at least when it comes to music 2020 still had plenty to offer:

According to Real Estate frontman Martin Courtney, Paper Cup is a song about questioning your chosen path in life and searching for meaning in what you do. In the video that message is carried out by a washed-up audio-animatronic squirrel named Chipper whose spent his entire career performing a hair metal version of Country Bear Jamboree at a Chuck E. Cheese-style childrens arcade. Directed by Nick Roney and shot by Christopher Ripley, theres both a subtle sadness to watching Chipper sluggishly go through the motions, cybernetically recalling the glory days of yore, and a tongue-in-cheek takedown of woe is me navel-gazing from the rich and famous. The ending is perfect combination of those two idea, a seemingly sweet swan song, followed by a disturbing, disgusting, and violent coda, wrapping back around to a sweet moment shared between artist and audience. Party time is all the time, indeed. LAG

[Authors note: To put the mindfuck that was 2020 in some context, when Steve put this on our nomination list, I was certain he was mistaken and that it had been released in 2019 because January feels like it was several years ago.]

Anything less than the ideal balance of self-awareness could doom a premise like this one. Yet, this fake VHS how-to setup finds each member of this New Zealand rock quartet perfectly arranged in a four panel pan as each of them dispenses their own bits of wisdom. Right in the sweet spot between overstuffed or underdone, this gets to draw on jokes about songwriting, instrument technique, and concert attire and hold on them just long enough for them to register. At the very least: its always welcome to see a video that gives everyone in the band their own distinct arc and looks like it was genuinely fun to film. The back-and-forth motion is timed down to the frame (barely squeezing in the singalong ball on the word Trying is a wonderful little touch in a video filled with them) and it all culminates in a structure-busting finale right in line with the songs overflowing energy. Hooray for teamwork! SG

2020 certainly doesnt have a monopoly on music videos built around one person dancing. But pointing a camera at someone and getting them to move is far from a guarantee of a compelling final product. So our hat goes off to Shelpuk and dancer Eric Schloesser for taking full advantage of this bowling alley escapade, halfway between a fantasy and a daydream. Just as Schloesser moves across different planes, sashaying and cartwheeling along with the songs orchestral groove, the camera bends across its own axes in unexpected ways. Rest assured well be sampling a bit of those arm and hip moves whenever our next trip back to the lanes happens. SG

Theres absolutely no pretense to the video for Harry Styles Watermelon Sugar. From the title card stating This video is dedicated to touching to watermelon serving as the most overt of metaphors, theres little this video leaves to the imagination and frankly, thats the point. Filmed in January on a Malibu beach, the video is exactly what it purports to be: a musician and a bunch of good-looking models having a blast on a beautiful day. The pseudo-homage to Elton Johns Im Still Standing video and the analog video aesthetic is nice, but the hero of the piece is Mr. Styles, knowingly chewing the scenery (and watermelon) with a sly grin and constant wink. LAG

A choreographed group dance, a montage of performers, and a day-in-the-life chronicle of social media ennui: describing these three videos to anyone in 2019, it wouldnt necessarily be obvious what they all shared. But viewed through the unavoidable lens of the year that they come from, they form a kind of unofficial trio. They represent some of the best of the lockdown-inspired offerings from artists and bands trying to find a way to channel the uneasiness of months spent alone into something that felt artistically relevant to an unfolding era.

In hindsight, its incredible how quickly Thao Nguyen and her team of collaborators not only saw how Zoom windows would come to be the dominant visual mode of the year, but also put together this impressive ode to distanced creativity. Crowdsourced contributions like those in Lay Your Head on Me became a way for some artists to connect with fans while also giving voice to the idea that no one was shielded from the events of this year. And with isolation becoming an even more universal theme than before, it made sense that someone would look to harness a view at life through screen time.

Many videos filmed in the months before March or with less obvious constraints may take on a retroactive significance (Jack Garratt twirling around to the chorus of Better, Moses Sumney in old-age makeup looking over the remains of a haunted bedroom in Me in 20 Years) and some filmed during it may end up being indicators of this time in their own way (HAIM strolling through the parking lot of The Forum, Jeff Tweedy lending the lower half of his face to a parade of famous guest lip-syncers). Regardless of the timing, no list of the years best would be complete without including the videos that were able to respond to an uncertain world in as close to real time as you can get. SG

On-location video shoots became something of an unintended balm in recent months, especially when showcasing large, joyous gatherings. Few of them had a place take centerstage as much as Palenque, Colombia does in this video, co-directed by Pimienta. Eso Que Tu Haces has a rainbow of color that feels as natural as the sunlight bathing the intersecting lines of dancers. Theres not much in the way of visual trickery, just clear and intricate dance steps from choreographer Matilde Herrerra. With Pimienta walking through the street with a smile on her face, theres a feeling of just being grateful to be alive. And those who arent singing convey just as much as when theyre standing still as they do when theyre in motion. SG

Playing characters on the verge of tears, haunted by something they cant shake, isnt the exclusive territory of Paul Mescal. But if his big TV breakout hadnt already proved he was up for the task, this video would have proven hes one of the best men for the job. In a year where plot-sparse, star-driven videos popped up in other places (see also: Aiden Gillen as a TV presenter with a sinister secret in Fontaines D.C.s A Heros Death or Michael Sheens fascinating work as a man transfixed by a kitchen appliance in Kelly Lee Owens Corner of My Sky), this is the one that best tapped into its protagonists charms and made best use of its own ambiguities. Its the tiny details that really make this that picture frame! all capped off by the frequent appearance of a dog that were pretty sure could carry a Hulu show all its own if it really wanted to. SG

The video for Open Mike Eagles Bucciarati is a testament to the creatives at its center: the rapper, of course, but additionally his co-star Paul F. Tompkins, his director Demi Adejuyigbe, and his producer Liz Maupin. Filming anything mid-pandemic (as evidenced by the dearth of content not shot on an iPhone or via Zoom) was not an easy task, especially when music videos dont tend to garner massive budgets. Which is why Adejuyigbe smartly pared back on the bells and whistles youd likely see any other year (crowded jury box, cutaways to the gallery) and simply focused on the performances from Eagle and Tompkins as two lawyers vociferously pleading their lip-synced cases to a judge (played by trumpeter Jordan Katz). Its a simple concept, used with comedic precision on Drunk History, with the twist here being that Eagle gifts all of his verses to Tompkins, taking Kari Fauxs lines for himself. The result is a video that mixes concept and performance, comedy and drama, real-life issues and Hollywood make-believe, all while likely having a crew of four in N95s behind the cameras. LAG

Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, or so the saying goes. The level of care poured into SiRs video for John Redcorn by SiR and directors Daniel Russell and Dominic Polcino clearly shows they hold Mike Judges King of the Hill in high esteem. Copying the characters wardrobe, domicile, and vehicle (although now it levitates) to essentially lovingly re-staging Jon Redcorns relationship with Nancy Gribble (replacing Jon with SiR and Nancy with a woman named Neicy), the video is a glowing homage to the former Fox sitcom. Of course, no parody of King of the Hill would be complete without a shot of Hank and the boys drinking by the fence, and the videos version does not disappoint, casting Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, Schoolboy Q and Jay Rock in the roles of Hank, Dale, Bill, and Boomhauer, respectively. LAG

Every point where it seems like this video locks into what its going to be for the remainder, theres a shift. A barfly oner gives way to a two-person bender, which morphs into an out-and-out fistfight with a small audience unsure of what to do as it unfolds. This all pairs really well with one of the thematic takeaways from Sawayamas song, that things can either change or get lost the wider that the scope of life gets. Between the shadowy grayscale, the beat-drop-synced punches, and the slow-motion objections of bystanders, its the kind of controlled chaos that best represents inner turmoil in its outward form. Even if you see that final shot coming, its still a striking place to leave people. SG

Filmed a few weeks before the pandemic hit, the video for Run The Jewels Ooh LA LA had an alternate dimension feel to it when it was released in April, a month into most states self-imposed shelter-in-place guidelines. Which is somewhat fitting as the video is the visual manifestation of waking up on a day that there is no monetary system, no dividing line, no false construct to tell our fellow man that they are less or more than anyone else. The world that Run The Jewels and directors Brian and Vanessa Beletic created in Ooh LA LA was already one that most viewers would want to step directly into, but in the wake of the presidential administrations bungling COVID response, Mitch McConnell and the GOPs downright evil stance on financial assistance, and the rich getting even richer via the invisible hand of the stock market, a world where the whole meaning of money has vanished seems less like a quaint dream and more like a necessity. And on that day, finally free of the shackles of our capitalistic caste system, Run The Jewels will throw a motherfucking party. In the words of Killer Mike, I need a bottle of Moet, garon! (P.S. My favorite Easter Egg is Zack de la Rocha showing up in the video despite not being featured, because of course that dude wouldnt miss dancing on capitalisms grave.) LAG

Cutting between four isolated performances (beautifully realized by Samantha Figgans, Raymond Pinto, Walter Russell III, and Celeste Mason) and in various combinations, Hurwitz and choreographer Kyle Abraham paint a portrait of a family dealing with a crumbling world around them. Whether the force causing fissures in every room is a trauma from within the walls or from outside them, the resulting ballet tries to put a movement to the turmoil. Adding in sweet food and drinks as a nod to the title and whatever connotations/associations come with it, the pressure borne by these four in their own private rooms builds until everything around them literally falls away. The final moment pointedly doesnt feel like an easy triumphant finish, mainly because of all the swirling emotion that everyone involved is able to imbue into the tiny glimpses that come before. SG

It was so important to me that we represented all different shades of brown, and I wanted every character to be shined on in a regal light, Beyonc said in an interview shortly after Brown Skin Girl was released on YouTube. The video, an excerpt from the Disney+ visual album Black Is King features cameos from Kelly Rowland, Lupita Nyongo, Naomi Campbell and even Beyoncs daughter, Blue Ivy Carter. Variety referred to the Jenn Nkiru-directed video as almost more like a series of paintings than a conventional video, but that implies a passivity to the proceedings. Its not just about locations and wardrobe, but rather, the kinetic motion of the camera in relation to its subjects, subtly panning up, zooming out, or spinning overhead. It really is a marvel. In the words of IndieWires Libby Hill, if the world of film and television awards were fair Beyonc would win an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Grammy every year she released an album. LAG

CANADA perfectly harnesses the rainbow-colored Busby Berkeley energy that Edgar Wright was going for in his video for Becks Colors. Here, its coupled with an omnibus of color-wheel panache, piling in digital snippets from animation/VFX house Mathematic, some shadowplay-esque choreography from Charm LaDonna, and the implied danger of falling down an endless maintenance shaft. In lesser hands, all of the visual trickery executed on a soundstage that seems like the size of a small airplane hangar would feel like a simple proving ground for rotating platform and mirror matching shot technology. Instead, it all coalesces into a kinetic display that works whether its just the singer and another dancer (a pas de Dua?) or an entire platoon of monochromatic performers. SG

No music video quite captured the zeitgeist the way Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallions WAP did. From Carol Baskin (of Tiger King fame) bemoaning the lurid video for its glamorizing the use of tigers as pets to a Change.org petition to remove Kylie Jenner from the video to conservative blunderkind Ben Shapiro reading the lyrics on his show to prove something, Im sure, WAP was a lightning rod for very dumb controversy. Which is kind of a shame, because the video itself deserves praise. Filmed during the pandemic (the shoot spent $100k on testing alone), the Colin Tilley-helmed video is a mix of Hype Williams and Tim Burton by way of the strip club. Its a video that demands ones attention, which perhaps is what made it so uniquely ubiquitous in 2020. LAG

Sure, its a bit of a cheat to include Christine and the Queens La vita nuova, a 12-minute video that includes every track off an EP with the same name on this list, but its our list! [Plus, no one got mad when we included Girl Talk Girl Walk // All Day on our Best of the Decade list.] The short film for La vita nuova was filmed pre-pandemic at the famed Palais Garnier opera house, and features gorgeous choreography by Ryan Heffington. Each song in the suite gets its own distinct setting and style, though the story roughly follows Hlose Adlade Letissiers Black Swan-esque relationship with a hellish faun figure, portrayed by Flix Maritaud. The video, ably directed by Colin Solal Cardo, is sprawling masterpiece featuring allusions to other Parisian works such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, as well as more modern references, (the works of Bob Fosse and Baz Luhrmanns Romeo + Juliet). As Vogue put it, think the Thriller music video meets Paris is Burning.' LAG

Theres something to be said for Hiro Murais ability to so convincingly blend lived-in spaces with the surreal. Nothing seems out of the ordinary, until everything is. The video for FKA twigs sad day is the latest in a long line of Murai-helmed videos that ostensibly begin as snapshots of everyday life in public eateries (Childish Gambinos Sober and Sweatpants immediately come to mind) before morphing based on the emotions of the song. In the case of sad day, a track that sees twigs trying to salvage a fading relationship, that means a sword fight breaking out in the middle of a diner, spilling out into the street in a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon manner, before coming to a visually arresting halt. The swordplay is to be commended as twigs and her antagonist Teake, a dancer she cast via social media, swap blows (a press release stated that FKA twigs swordsmanship is the result of three years training in the art of Wushu). LAG

It would be difficult to proclaim 2020 to be anybodys year, both as an intellectual exercise and for the linked ignominy that might bring, but there was no artist who connected more viscerally to the isolation-drenched existential dread of watching the world eat itself whilst doomscrolling than Phoebe Bridgers. In the words of Voxs Emily VanDerWerff, Bridgers Punisher sounds like driving up the coast when the world is on fire.

The video for the albums closer I Know the End begins suspiciously quaint, a long dolly in on Bridgers singing in a tub of water, but the minute we exit is when things start to stutter and glitch, theres magic, theres apples, theres the future meeting the present, to dissect it too fully robs it of something. Then the song shifts, and the video mimics it. Movement, floating, driving forward to something. Bridgers official uniform of a skeleton onesie has never looked more ominous than in the shots where shes running in pitch black toward the camera / interspersed with her struggling to stay above water in the aforementioned tub which seemed so serene earlier. Then the video climaxes in an empty L.A. Memorial Coliseum in an explosion of fear and passion, as if fight and flight had become irrevocably intermingled. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this video, expertly directed by Alissa Torvinen and beautifully shot by Casey Stolberg, is the perfect marriage of time and place, image and song.

Its the reason Steve and I broke our own self-imposed rule to never have more than one music video from one artist or director for fear that wed end up with a list that was 50 percent DANIELS and 50 percent Beyonc. But I Know the End superseded that limitation. Hell, I even thought about including this live version from Late Night with Seth Meyers (directed by Jason Lester and shot by Powell Robinson). And thats why its IndieWires Best Music Video of The Year. Phoebe, the Chilis gift card is in the mail. LAG

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The Best Music Videos of 2020 Year in Review - IndieWire

The year 2020 marks 26 years of Soul Citys existence, in a period where the world is experiencing a pandemic that has forced all of us to do business unusual. Like everyone, the Soul City Institute found itself having to adapt to change in an effort to survive, grow, transform and maintain our competitive advantage in an environment filled with uncertainty because of Covid-19.

As we prepare to say goodbye to 2020, I want to reflect on the year that has been and how as an organisation we positioned ourselves to ensure that our work was not hindered by the Covid-19 pandemic.

We coined 2020 Soul Citys year of transformation. We went through a significant leadership transition: we welcomed the new CEO (myself) and two new board members phenomenal young women with diverse skills and who are living with disabilities.

These appointments are in line with Soul City Institutes strategic vision of inclusivity. True to our feminist principles, the organisation made a commitment to centre the care and wellbeing of our staff by appointing a black female-led EAP company, JDD Psyche Consulting, to provide the necessary support to our staff due to the impact that the Covid-19 lockdown has had on different people.

As an intersectional feminist organisation, Soul City Institute kept tabs on everything that was happening in our country with regards to gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF). We issued media statements calling for government to be responsive to GVBF cases such as Tshegofatso Pules, which continued to be reported.

The Soul City Institutes advocacy team participated in a webinar hosted by the Democracy Development Program in partnership with Afesis-Corplan. The webinar focused on civil societys response to the Auditor-Generals 2018/19 report on local government expenditure. The objective is for civil society to put together a submission to demand accountability and action on the Auditor-Generals findings. The submission has been finalised and Soul City has endorsed it.

The advocacy team also participated in the Department of Womens launch of the 16 days of Activism campaign. The Soul City Institute also endorsed the GBV collectives position to oppose the establishment of the interim trust on GBV.

Our key achievement for 2020 is the launch of our TV talk show Its a Feminist Thing, an unapologetically feminist talk show that started airing on SABC 2 at the beginning of November. The show is uniquely South African, and captures the zeitgeist of the contemporary South African womens movement, which has patriarchy squarely in its sights. The show explores relationships between women, gives real expression to the ways that women love, support and empower each other, and reveals patriarchys divisive and destructive power.

During each episode, a Public Service Announcement (PSA) deals with the issues in that episode in a hard-hitting and provocative manner, which gets broadcast as part of the talk-show.

If youve missed the show, or just want to see it again, you can watch it on our website (visit: https://www.soulcity.org.za/media/its-a-feminist-thing-talkshow).

Major events that happened during this year for Soul City Institute highlight the importance of being agile in the space we work in. The context within which Soul City has been operating has significantly changed at the strategic level, mainly due to the Covid-19 restrictions. In order to remain relevant, the organisation redirected the social mobilisation work from face-to-face to radio and social media. We engaged local radio stations. We partnered with district-based radio stations in all nine provinces to reach as many young women and girls as possible.

Through these collaborations Soul City has potentially reached close to 800 000 listeners; we promoted messages about Covid-19, GBV, adherence to medication, prevention of teenage pregnancy, condom use and mental health, in line with our strategic communication content and our funders, the National Department of Health and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Our two PSAs that have recently aired on national and local radio stations may reach over 32 million listeners on national radio stations and close to 1.5 million listeners on community radio stations.

All of our interventions including many which have not been highlighted here are aimed at cementing Soul City as a change maker. We are changing the world today, creating the reality of tomorrow. We use the different platforms to give ordinary South Africans a chance to speak up, challenge norms, collaborate and build networks to create an environment that is non-tolerant of violence, especially violence perpetrated against women and girls, in all their diversities.

Soul City stands in solidarity with all women and girls, recognising that unity is a vital weapon in the fight against our common enemy: patriarchy. United we stand.

Stay safe over the holidays and try to always check in with your loved ones. Soul City has resources that can help: Safetipin is an app that you can download to check the safety scores for areas in your city, or you can provide safety scores so that other women and girls can benefit from your information. There is also a friendly bot called rAInbow that can help you with information on intimate partner violence and domestic violence.

As 2020 ends, let us not forget to always remain inclusive of people living with disabilities especially women who are unable to access healthcare. Im proud to be part of Soul City, which hosted the first-of-its-kind webinar with a sign language interpreter. These are the many ways Soul City wants to go into being more inclusive in the future.

May you have a very restful festive season, and Aluta Continua. It is Not Yet Uhuru. Remember to drink responsibly and stay safe on the roads. Dont drink and drive.

The figures and incidences of gender-based violence in South Africa are staggering. Its not unusual for the news cycle to be inundated with headlines of yet another woman who has been raped, assaulted or even killed by a man in most cases by a man they know and one theyve had an intimate relationship with. While the odds are stacked against most women in the country, women and girls living with disabilities face a double sword of discrimination and violence: one, for the simple fact that theyre women and the other often ignored for living with disabilities.

Lumka Sizani is one of those women. The 37-year-old mother from Green Village in Soweto has experienced discrimination from nurses to police officers as she navigates the world as a deaf person in South Africa. In a webinar hosted by the Soul City Institute, Sizani shared how she has struggled to access healthcare particularly sexual and reproductive health services in public health facilities and was failed by the justice system when shes tried to report abuse at the police station.

Where am I going to report my abuse? Who am I going to report it to? The police station is not accessible to me, there are no sign language interpreters there, she explained. Even if I were to be successful, what would happen in court? Would I easily access an interpreter?

According to a 2018 global study by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), girls and boys with disabilities are mostly excluded from education and health services, discriminated against in their communities and trapped in a cycle of poverty and violence. Girls and women living with disabilities bear the brunt of these violations, as they face up to 10 times more gender-based violence than those without disabilities. Those with intellectual disabilities are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence.

The report, titled Young Persons with Disabilities: Global Study on Ending Gender-based Violence and Realizing Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, investigates and analyses the state and quality of life of young people with disabilities, with a particular focus on discrimination and gender-based violence, including the impact on their sexual and reproductive health and rights.

The report found that children with disabilities are almost four times more likely to become victims of violence than children without disabilities, and nearly three times more likely to be subjected to sexual violence, with girls at the greatest risk.

In another study, conducted by the African Child Policy Forum of violence against children with disabilities, nearly every young person interviewed had been sexually abused at least once and most more than once.

Additionally, research has shown that children who are deaf, blind, autistic or living with psychosocial or intellectual disabilities are exceedingly vulnerable to violence.

Sizani has struggled with reporting being sexually violated her whole life. When I wanted to report for the first time what happened to me, even my own mother told me to wait, because this would bring shame to my family.

She had to rely on a close friend to take her to the police station, but it was hard for the police to help her. I dont have access in this country. My language sign language is not accessible in South Africa. Its difficult to find interpreters to help me.

Its not just accessing the police that has been difficult and sometimes impossible for Sizani going to the clinic for health services can also be an experience filled with discrimination. Two years ago, Sizani went to her local clinic for a check-up after she missed her period. While she was waiting in line, one of the nurses called her name and she had to communicate through writing down because there was no interpreter in the clinic. I told the nurse what I was at the clinic for and she examined me. Indeed, I was pregnant, Sizani said. She asked me if I had any other children, and I told her I had three, and this pregnancy would be my fourth. She shouted at me for being deaf and pregnant with my fourth child.

Shocked at the treatment she was receiving, Sizani said she felt that she was being judged, mostly based on the fact that she was deaf.

Its my body. I should be able to do anything I want [with it]. But the nurse didnt think so, and she called other nurses to come and see that me, a deaf woman, is pregnant for the fourth time.

Accessing sexual and reproductive health services is particularly challenging for young people with disabilities because of the attitudes of healthcare providers have towards them, particularly toward young women. Often healthcare workers are biased and discriminatory towards young people with disabilities such as Sizani and this results in stigma and prejudice toward their disability.

A 2015 study about South African women with disabilities who sought reproductive health services in Durban, for example, reported that healthcare providers asked inappropriate questions as to how and why they engaged in sexual activity and were not prepared to accept persons with disabilities as sexually active human beings. Much like in the case of Sizani, healthcare workers make assumptions about women with disabilities sexuality and ridicule them.

The participants also mentioned that healthcare providers are often surprised that they will need family planning services, and they are not given choices about suitable birth control methods. Additionally, health facilities are often inaccessible to persons with disabilities, making it difficult for them to obtain reproductive health services or forcing them to rely on the mercy of the providers and other healthcare users.

I was judged for being a deaf woman with three children. The nurses did not respect that I was a sexually active and that I can have as many children as I see fit, said Sizani.

Women and girls with disabilities continue to be excluded from mainstream sexual and reproductive health services. Communication barriers, the physical inaccessibility of health facilities and the attitudes of healthcare providers all represent significant barriers to young women with disabilities. We cant talk about accessibility without sign language being more accessible in public spaces especially in health facilities and police stations. Women living with disabilities deserve better treatment than what were currently subjected to.

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Soul Citys Year of Transformation - Mail and Guardian

DECEMBER 14, 2020

COFFEE-TABLE BOOKS about swimming pools are a surprisingly well-established genre. Lavish, glossy, and tempting, theyre almost like pop-up books their images practically lunge at the reader, a medley of splashes and bodies. They dont look particularly serious and seem to make the perfect winter gift, if you can withstand the tease of aquatic pleasure while its freezing, raining, or snowing outside.

The latest entry in this increasingly crowded field is Lou Stoppards Pools from the house of lavish itself, Rizzoli. Like the editor of most such books, Stoppard is light of touch and low of word count, including just a few choice paragraphs to accompany photographs that are intended to speak for themselves. But what are they saying? To distinguish this book from several similar ones, Rizzoli has wrapped the cover in a latex-like transparent blue sleeve. This slightly kinky touch makes the book appear to be submerged in water, beckoning the reader to dive in. Several of the pictures Stoppard includes have been reproduced before in recent books like Hatje Cantzs stunning album of classic 20th-century images, The Swimming Pool in Photography (2018). Stoppard, however, juxtaposes canonical shots with pool photography from the present, allowing the reader to see how the cultural imagination of the swimming pool has evolved.

These utilitarian exercise machines, these mere accessories to boutique vacations, possess a very varied cultural backstory. Enjoy your workout! my friendly neighborhood pool attendant yells at me just before I enter the water. I always bristle at this aggressively cheerful exhortation, because swimming is much more than exercise. Its a form of ritual that involves a highly deliberate process of transformation: the careful, even fetishistic shedding of a quotidian skin. One doesnt have to accept the Freudian notion that swimming enacts a return to the womb and some form of prelapsarian amniotic nirvana to appreciate that bathing originated in the ancient world as a component of religious ritual, and that the act has by no means entirely lost the aura of a baptismal rite. The Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro in Sindh, Pakistan, which dates as far back as the third millennium BCE, appears to have encouraged bathing for just this sort of reason, and remains an archaeological site of considerable historical value. The ancient Greeks and Romans constructed pools for athletic purposes, it is true, but employed them for many other purposes besides, including ritualized social bathing and the keeping of fish, resulting in the term piscine.

Our modern image of the swimming pool as exercise machine and Olympic arena thus possesses a richly complicating global history. In the early modern era, Europeans shunned bathing as an activity for savages Africans and Asians were brilliant divers whose skills they could barely comprehend, let alone emulate. When Westerners finally embraced swimming again as a mass pursuit by the turn of the 20th century, it was with a dramatic sense of rediscovery and rapture. The avatar of the Surrealist movement Andr Breton rhapsodized about what he called the voluptuousness of swimming, declaring himself born under the sign of Pisces. Swimming not only changed ones body, he insisted, but transformed ones mind, freeing it from the shackles of rationalistic thought to a more authentic dimension of imaginative consciousness.

Lou Stoppards juxtapositions of classic and contemporary photos suggest how the swimming pools cultural meaning has shifted during the century since Breton. Consider, for instance, the following carefully curated double-page spread. On one side, the reader is greeted by Jacques-Henri Lartigues adoring portrait of Marie Helvin at the French Rivieras Eden Roc Hotel pool in 1977. On the one hand, its just another glamour shot: big-name photographer, top model, high-end digs. But the picture is exquisitely realized, a vision of ecstasy. Helvins head thrown back, eyes closed, her expression is beatific. Her jet-black locks dance mesmerizingly in the water around her. The portrait dazzlingly records the play of light on her chest, tracing wild light-lines across her skin, which looks as though it is swathed in sunlit Jell-O. In Helvins profoundly private sense of repose and pleasure, Lartigue captures the paradox of erotic desire as innocent bliss.

Opposite this blast from the 1970s, Stoppard reproduces two bright and striking images by Karine Laval shot in 2010. Laval calls these images Poolscapes. Four-plus decades on from Helvins hedonistic headshot at Eden Roc, Lavals pictures offer few anatomical, social, or geographical coordinates. No details of place or person are deemed worthy of inclusion even in the titles of these shots. Lavals are not pictures of a swimming pool as such, more an exercise in the production of disorientating chromatic-aquatic effects. A submerged human figure, clad in red, can be seen in some sort of agitated pose, like a cubist minotaur strutting against the currents. The viewers gaze is dashed by shards of light and color that come flying out of the image. Brittle and crystalline, they cut up the humanoid form: all that is soft shatters into lines. If this is the picture of a swimming pool, youd never know it, since Laval has abstracted it into a set of tones, lines, and ripples. We have left Bretons voluptuousness of swimming and Helvins fleshy ecstasies far behind. The question is how and why?

Its crucial here to go back to the early part of the 20th century, when Breton and many others dreamt of swimming as a revelatory and paradisiacal form of experience, to understand how the archetypal pool photo was invented. A better description than ecstasy for Helvins portrait is reverie: closing ones eyes while in the water, escaping into a personal and private realm not merely of physical pleasure but intimate emotional and psychological experience, enabled by the act of immersion. This is the classic photographic conceit of the swimming pool as an entity that transports its subject to a dream-like world beyond the quotidian and beyond the limitations of gravity. Invented in the 1920s and 30s during the zeitgeist of Surrealism and psychoanalysis, this kind of photo features the swimming pool not as an arena of competition or consumerism, but as the trigger of subconscious desires for personal transformation.

There are many versions of this archetype, and Stoppard lovingly reproduces several of the best. Perhaps the first great psychological pool picture is George Hoyningen-Huenes masterpiece from 1930 featuring two bathers sitting together on a diving board. Their backs are turned to us and we cannot see their faces. They are modeling elegant designer beachwear, but this mundane act of salesmanship is completely transcended by the existential quality of their pose. They look away to the horizon, following the trajectory of the diving board, perhaps with excitement, perhaps trepidation. We cannot know. But we have been fooled. The viewers mind has responded to the diving board and imagined the presence of water below it. There was no pool: Hoyningen-Huene took the picture on a rooftop high above the Champs Elyses in Paris.

The conceit of the swimming pool as a portal to other mental, historical, and even mythological dimensions is also superbly suggested by Louise Dahl-Wolfe in Night Bathing, shot in 1939. A woman in a delicately striped one-piece bathing suit stands at the edge of a pool by night, mirrored in her pose by a statue of Aphrodite, goddess of love. Both figures look shyly away from the camera, as the darkness presses in. This pool is a scene of metamorphosis; indeed, it is reminiscent of the tales of Ovids Metamorphoses, such as Narcissus falling in loving with his own reflection. The juxtaposition of the two female figures implies the pools hidden power to transform the living woman into a goddess.

Pools, bathing, swimming, swimwear: in the post-Freudian imagination, the superficial accessories of luxurious living become tools of psychological emancipation and emotional self-expression. Yet they also became instruments of fascist conformism, racialist theorizing, and eugenic ideology. Between Hoyningen-Huenes divers and Wolfes Aphrodite, Leni Riefenstahl filmed Olympia, her unsettlingly brilliant documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Riefenstahls Aryanist dogmas led her to combine bravura images of swimmers and divers competing in front of cheering stadiums in Nazi Germany with a fantastical sequence featuring Greek statues coming to life as German athletes. The modernist swimming pools dream of transformation was as politically dangerous as it was personally alluring.

The psychological pool photo enjoyed a long afterlife, flourishing well into the 1970s. Martine Francks image of a boy in a hammock gazing at sunbathers round the curves of Alain Capeilleress pool near Marseilles suggests those curves as the very contours of his mind. Horst P. Horst who posed as one of Hoyningen-Huenes divers in 1930 shot Janice Dickinson cocking her head to one side, eyes closed, in that eternal yet fleeting instant before exiting a sun-drenched pool. Its 1979, and like Helvin, Dickinson is a nude supermodel. But Horsts portrait is still an image of innocence and experience still the picture of swimming as flight to a private mental paradise.

Such images of bathing as reverie coexisted, however, with two main rivals in the late 20th century: social shots of public pools as riotous lower-class playgrounds; and luxury shots of private pools as pure consumer glamour. Exceptionally, all three visions might converge in the same image, like Helmut Newtons virtuosically overloaded panorama of Pariss Piscine Deligny in 1978. Newton fused sexuality, surrealism, and glamour with dark humor. Worlds collide with magnificently absurd results. In the foreground, two models in black evening gowns pose with incongruous campy melodrama, as male bathers stripped down to their briefs look on with a mix of desire and exasperation under a hot sun. Yet the humorous center of the photograph is a wonderfully oblivious topless female bather who entirely ignores the absurdity around her, hunched with Rodin-like concentration over the book she is reading. Newtons photo captures the invasion of the swimming pool as a public institution and its denaturing by money, glamour, and fantasy, presaging the shift in pool photos since the 1980s from a public resource for ordinary people to a moneyed private oasis. Newton played a leading role in this transformation, especially in all the celebrity shoots he did in the 80s; perhaps the Deligny panorama is a confessional premonition, a mea culpa before the fact. Anyone who has floated idly in the Standard Hotels enticing rooftop pool in downtown Los Angeles, to name just one of todays most photogenic boutique destinations, might well conclude that glamour won, the spirit of the bains publics is dead, and Newton helped kill it.

It would likewise be tempting to read pictures of bathers taken in momentous political years, like Olaf Martenss portraits of swimmers in the German Democratic Republic in 1989 (which Stoppard also includes), in a similar light. 1989, after all, is famously taken to mark the end of the Cold War, the end of history, the end of the public, and the dominance of capital. In the vanished world of the GDR, now a distant mirage of social unity and fodder for Ostalgie, a regimented body is about to spring into a pool like a wind-up toy programmed to win an Olympic medal for the communist bloc. Meanwhile, Martenss portraits of the naked yet submerged Simone evince the distinctive German Freikrperkultur (free body culture) that encouraged public nudism as a form of salubrious self-expression in the absence of political or economic freedoms.

If 1989 does mark the caesura between 20th and 21st centuries, what does recent photography reveal about the cultural meaning of the swimming pool of the present? One answer lies in the utterly banal celebrity culture that Newtons Piscine Deligny image foreshadowed. We have ended up with images like supermodel Gisele Bndchen striding past a pool, staring straight to camera, being ogled by some starry-eyed dude in sunglasses. And with shots of former James Bond star Pierce Brosnans teenage sons Dylan and Paris lounging in jeans, backs turned to their Bel Air pool, occupied instead by two inflatable swans. The pool as designer accessory is wholly evacuated, a reference point you dont even have to look at. Its just a checklist luxury. In the absence of any social realism or public context, glamour, wealth, and privilege have bored themselves, and the viewer, to death, making the pool itself invisible.

A second answer is to be found in Stoppards canny juxtapositions. Opposite Janice Dickinsons glamour shot, for example, Stoppard places a double-portrait taken from 2018 by the fashion photographer Joyce Sze Ng. This picture features two women of color, elaborately clothed in gowns, staring from distance straight at the camera. They stand on the other side of a motionless, mirror-like pool that reflects their dignified yet expressionless faces. The photograph is neither one of pleasure nor psychological depth; indeed, it seems to disavow any invitation to depth. The picture is a hybrid: a fashion photographer evidently making a political statement, but what is the statement? Sze Ngs subjects appear to demand that the viewer acknowledge their presence but without any promise of revelation or intimacy, since they parry the viewers gaze. The inward gaze of reverie has turned outward to repel the viewer. Sze Ng seems to want to make a point about identity but, perhaps wanting to disavow the history of female nudity in pool art, feels it necessary to disavow the pool itself, converting it instead into a conceptual abstraction.

Sze Ngs double-portrait has a self-consciously pristine quality that is even more evident in the photography of Slve Sundsb, although Sundsbs pristineness is of a different character. It is technological, and showcases a third trend in recent pool imagery: the abstraction of pools and bodies into technical virtuosity. Sundsb does still take photos of people in water. One portrait of a young woman in a dark asymmetrical bathing suit shows her gazing wide-eyed under sanitized steel-blue water, like a doll in suspended animation or an amniotic spa. She enjoys no state of reverie, however; her open eyes appear lifeless. But the viewer is distracted by Sundsbs bubbles, which the speed of his camera recasts as beads of blown glass. Sundsb loves his bubbles; other shots engulf human forms in vast bubble clouds that fan out like Rorschach patterns. Sundsb says he strives for purity in such images, but the result is really pure mechanism: one cant help look at these pictures without thinking of the lens rather than the artist. What is absent from this kind of work is not merely the psychological charisma of classic pool photography, but the social reality of the swimming pool and its storied cultural identity. Instead of accumulating and drawing on this history, it is all but erased.

Why has pool art taken these turns? Several predictable answers naturally suggest themselves. We now possess more powerful cameras than ever before, with much faster lenses, and greater capacity for manipulating images. At the same time, our culture has tired of meaning and come to mistrust the promise of depth. We have rejected not only Freud but, seemingly, the whole nave project of self-discovery, settling instead for anti-depressants, cheaper consumer goods, harder bodies, and endless Instagram posts. Most importantly of all, we have retreated from public life to private islands. If photography provides any sort of guide to our collective imagination and it may not we no longer marvel at the grand architectural designs of public baths but dream of the hotel spa and the exclusive infinity pool. Twentieth-century photographers loved social realism and the hedonistic playfulness of the madding crowd; their 21st-century heirs are private clinicians who shun the mixing of different social classes in public waters.

But lets go easy on the jeremiad. Stoppards selections undeniably show that the dream of the swimming pool in all its different forms is far from over. There are a number of contemporary photographers who resist the current vogue for the clinical and the impersonal, the luxurious and the technical. For these artists, the pool is not an abstraction but an enduringly meaningful dream-machine that continues to inspire compelling, humorous, and imaginative visions.

Stoppard includes many extraordinary images of public pools as social panoramas that continue to be shot around the world, showcasing multitudes of bathers clambering en masse for the physical pleasure and psychic relief of water from the multiracial swimmers of the French banlieues to the vast crowds happily hugging the shores of indoor beaches complete with artificial wave machines in Japan. The reverie shot is not dead either, but lives on, poignantly renewed in Diana Markosians portraits of Afghani refugees floating in pools in Germany. They lie on their backs, gazing heavenward, dreaming of a better life. Even America boasts trusty throwbacks to bygone pool pleasures. Alice Hawkins is an expert in the popular sublime: she knows how to take sparkling shots evoking dreams of glamour that are far from faded for her subjects. These include gangs of girls lounging on dusty pool decks, wedding parties thrilling to kitsch joys of liquor and love, and close-ups of a cheeky blondes Lucky Bum, poolside in Vegas. Hawkinss bathers have no doubt that the swimming pool can still sprinkle magic dust on ordinary life.

Finally, Stoppard includes one of the most striking pool photos of recent years, and quite possibly of all time a remarkable untitled image made by the British photographer Polly Brown, taken in France in 2015. Like much recent pool art, the picture admittedly has a clinical quality, lacks an explicit psychological appeal, and offers no portrait of society. Unlike almost all recent work, however, it possesses a genuinely exhilarating grandeur of conception. Browns camera tracks a lone female swimmer in mid-stroke from high above a large multi-laned pool. All geared up, she wears a dark blue one-piece, cap, goggles, and even fins. The aerial distance between camera and subject makes the picture impersonal. Bright but sunless, its steely blue colors cool the viewers eyes. We are too far to sense the swimmers emotions.

There is, however, no flight to abstraction here: this is a swimmer in a pool. Yet we cannot see the pools edges. This is crucial. We cannot see where the pool begins or ends, that it begins or ends. Through her cropping, Brown has given us a subtly yet profoundly suggestive portrait of the pool as an infinite expanse, and of the swim as a limitless odyssey. The notion is reinforced by two telling details. Painted dots mark distance in each lane like repeating metronomic beats; and the swimmer swims through an opening or gate, the width of a single lane, leading her from one section of the pool to another. She is going somewhere. This is not the 20th-century dream of the inner life; indeed, in the pandemic year of 2020, it could be read merely as an image of persistence or survival in an evacuated world. But it is undoubtedly the image of an existential quest. The majesty of Browns photograph lies in its liberation of the viewers mind from the narrowness of much recent pool art, returning the swimming pool at last to the free rein of the imagination.

James Delbourgo is professor of history at Rutgers University, where he teaches the history of science, collecting and museums, and the history of the Atlantic World. His most recent book is Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (Harvard University Press, 2017).

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The Dream of the Swimming Pool - Los Angeles Review of Books - lareviewofbooks

The Lounge Society by Piran Aston

Well, that was a laugh wasnt it?

Officially The Worst Year Ever (at least we could drown our sorrows and sing aloud in 2016), 2020 has turned everyones lives upside down and still has the capacity to do so, but we know all this.

It wasnt just COVID-19 that caused such a year of great upheaval. In Sean Connery and Diego Maradona, the silver screen and the beautiful game lost legendary figures, so much so that we should perhaps start checking up on soon-to-be octogenarian Bob Dylan (although, given hes now $300m richer, hell probably be alright). Meanwhile, in the UK the agonising, incessant stench of Brexit lingered on.

Yet while the music scene lost some legendary figures too (Little Richard, Florian Schneider, Tony Allan and Andrew Weatherall to name but four) and was hugely curtailed by the lack of live music as it frequently it does, it adapted and found creative solutions.

Musicians have also brought the disparities of royalty payments via streaming to the public eye; Tom Gray of Gomezs #BrokenRecord campaign, now being discussed in Parliament Committees with Nile Rodgers and Nadine Shah arguing the case. Gigs are becoming a worryingly distant thing of the past, but the confidence of Live Nation, Michael Eavis and Melvin Benn, as they dangle the carrot of old-school live music in a few months, is a salivating prospect.

So yes, its been gruelling, but the food of love continues to provide nourishment and has mattered more in the dark times, as Live4evers Best Of 2020: The Tracks list can attest.

The dark times obviously included the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis; Run The Jewels captured the zeitgeist with almost mystic precision on RTJ4. Released in the immediate aftermath of Floyds murder, the line, First of all, fuck the fucking law, was among many that added prescience.

Other artists used their outlets to shine a light on the Black Lives Matter movement: so much has been written about Sault over the last few weeks (having achieved a near-clean sweep in the end of year accolades) that any further contributions are superfluous, except to say that Wildfires is angelic in delivery but heartbreaking in content. A beautiful call-to-arms and the centrepiece of the other most significant album of the year, Untitled (Black Is).

Solo artists continued to reign in the first year of this new decade. Alternative musics new lyrical dynamo, Sinead OBrien, inspired the imagination on Most Modern Painting through her spoken illuminations. No-one had a better turn of phrase this year. Meanwhile, on Hu Man, Greentea Peng captured a texture like laying atop cotton wool, a warm embrace put to music, and there were so many highlights to choose from on Waxahatchees rapturously received album Saint Cloud, but the sublime chorus of Lilacs ensured that track just about shaded it for us.

Im not your fucking friend must go down as best opening line of the year, but Im Not Your Dog by Baxter Dury sustained a hypnotic spell, while on Hamilton Leithausers Isabella the Walkman established himself as a singing-songwriting force to be reckoned with.

On the electronic side, Thalassophobia by Nicolas Bougaieff took us on a journey to the dark recesses of our minds, in lieu of a dark recess of an actual club (one day soon). The anthem of The Summer That Never Was was surely Take Back The Radio by Katy J Pearson, which fizzled and sparkled with joy and intent, while Might Bang, Might Not saw Little Simz achieve a level of direct communication that other MCs can only dream of, without losing any of her London grit. Maddeningly catchy.

Guitar groups still resonated with us though: Sludge by Squid was like prog played by punks, a maze of wah-wah guitars and ghostly backing vocals, while Ballad Of You & I (Hotel Lux) was jaunty and slovenly defiant. Peanuts by Yard Act was indie at surface-level, until surprising us with a northern monologue that John Cooper Clarke would be proud of, and elsewhere in the north west Psycho Comedys Pick Me Up was a galloping Lust For Life with added scouse swagger.

Arguably guitar musics biggest success story of the year, Porridge Radio may have already moved on from Every Bad, but posterity will be kind to Lilac, while All Along The Uxbridge Road by Chubby And The Gang was an explosion of relentless pace and power, with a few slaps round the chops added in for good measure. Lastly, and categorically proving that indie music isnt dead, Sports Team supplied the best takedown of everything young people (and society in general) are told as facts on the joyous Heres The Thing.

On the release of A Hymn, it became apparent that Idles Ultra Mono was going to be something special (Teletext now has a place in all of our hearts) and like their forebears, compadres Fontaines D.C. saved a lot of lives when they were needed most with A Heros Death. A lockdown anthem, the repeated meme of life aint always empty had powerful resonance as we faced the same four walls again and again, for hours upon end.

But there can only be one winner. Live4evers Track Of The Year had to go to Generation Game by The Lounge Society. Even when we were participating in Zoom quizzes or socially distanced drinks in the park, many were apprehensive about the U.S. elections in November, a persistent cloud on the horizon; what will the U.S. do?. On a broader scale, the song takes to task the behaviours of North America and how they inform the west, for better or for worse, and the five minutes still feel like an experience.

The answer to the question satisfies some but not all, meaning there are undoubtedly troubled times to come.

But as this year has proved, there will always be a brilliant soundtrack somewhere.

Richard Bowes

See more here:

Live4ever's Best Of 2020: A terrible year soundtracked by brilliant music - Live4ever

The New Yorker has released a preview of the magazines second-to-last cover of 2020. The cover features an original digital painting by David Hockney, titled Hearth. It depicts a fireplace and is decidedly juvenile in execution. The brushwork appears childish and has sparked a Twitter backlash and outcry.

This is very funny. Hockney is perfectly capable of using digital brushes properly, can only assume he hates someone in the TNY art dept, Jo Livingstone of the New Republic noted in now-deleted tweets, Either that or somebody at TNY doesnt care enough to protect his legacy. Livingstone pointed to a number of Hockneys recently exhibited digital paintings as evidence of his mastery, supporting the supposition that the New Yorker cover might be, in some way, a troll.

Along with the cover in question is a brief synopsis and Q&A with Hockney conducted by Franoise Mouly, the New Yorkers art director. In it we learn that Hockney, after doing 220 digital paintings in 2020, will be returning to oils for a large mural in 2021. While not a sweeping or in-depth discussion of his work, the interview touches on his now decade-long fascination with the iPad as an artistic device and his taking inspiration from tapestries. The piece also features a time-lapse of the digital painting being created.

If anything, the interview raises more questions than it answers. Why, if Hockney went to such great pains over the course of the year to produce this great and specific quantity of work, did Mouly not choose to elevate one of better quality? For these short, dark days, she writes, David Hockney offers the traditional comfort of a hearth.

Hockney is 83 years old and considered among the greatest living British artists for his contributions to the pop art movement in the 1960s. Over the course of his career, he has used a wide range of media and has not shied away from technology.

But Hearth simply does not justly represent Hockneys digital work. Just last month The Art Newspaper featured an item on his digital art in quarantine, highlighting the hope that his most recent work is capable of eliciting.

The Art Newspaper featured two digital paintings in particular, first The Big Tree in Autumn, has a remarkable skyblue in the center of the frame, breaking through the clouds behind the branches of the tree. There are layers of gray in the clouds. The details of the trees branches and leaves show deliberate use of different textures and opacities. These are advanced techniques regardless of medium.

The Pond in Autumn, made two days later, is even more impressive. Again the range of detail, color, texture, and gesture, while not entirely controlled or pristine, still shows the hand of a skilled and dedicated artist. The tranquility of the water Hockney is able to portray is masterful.

Given the well-honed skill and style evident in these works and others exhibited over the years, why the New Yorker chose or accepted upon commission such a seemingly anomalous painting is a valid question. Hockney is clearly in command of his faculties, making it seem all the more likely that the irreverence and slap-dash nature of Hearth are an intentional thumbing of the nose at the magazines grandiosity.

This is also not the first iPad sketch from Hockney that has graced the New Yorkers cover. The three previous digitally produced Hockney covers featured beneath the interviewstill lifes from 2010 and 2011 and a landscape from 2018are all vastly more complex and impressive. It is not just that the study of the fireplace is weak or a departure from the other iPad work he has done at largeit is a departure in quality from what he has submitted in the past to this same magazine and this same art director.

Responding to Livingstones critique, Sterling Crispin suggested that Hearth was in continuity with Hockneys previous digital work:

But thats part of the appeal, hard for people to understand its supposed to be sort of shitty, Crispin continued.

Given, again, Hockneys stated mission to complete 220 paintings in 2020, its safe to say we cant expect all of them to be bangers. So yes, some are going to have that intentional shitty crude quality to themthat is not the surprise. The surprise is that he chose to shoddily iPad it in for the cover of one of the most prestigious magazines in the world after a year of social uprisings calling for the cultural standard bearers to be more inclusive in who and what they chose to promote. At a moment when art, almost alone among human endeavors, can offer us beauty and inspiration, or solace and consolation, or distraction and humor, or any other variety of grace, Hockney and the New Yorker give us this?

Kyle Chaykausing a logical fallacy to bait the conversation away from why or why not the painting is shitty and why was it chosen to well actually, it is a virtue that the painting is shittychimed in with this bit of wisdom: making people mad is a great side-effect of art. It can be, yes. It is also the intended effect of trolling.

Chayka goes on to invoke a well-known anecdote of dubious origin:

It always reminds me of the story about the woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, That will be $10,000.

But you did that in thirty seconds, the astonished woman replied.

No, Picasso said. It has taken me forty years to do that.

This vignette does not contradict Livingstones point, though. Dashing off a scribble for someone seeking, and willing to pay for, the work of a master is inherently an act of trolling: an instance of behaving provocatively or antagonizing someone. The crux is the irreverence and the New Yorkers acceptance and elevation of it.

Suggesting that the iPads paint app is unforgiving is an insult to Hockney, who has demonstrated that he is perfectly capable of producing very fine work in the medium. It is not difficult to grasp that some media are cruder than others. That is not what is at issue here.

Chaykas and Crispins defenses of the cover are silly. To suggest that there is something shallow or misinformed in taking umbrage at the covers juvenile quality is simply pretentious. This is not a case of my kid could do that but a moment to reflect on editorial integrity (and the possible virtues of shitposting). Because ultimately an editor made the choice to feature that image in all its mediocritychoosing to capstone the year by having an old white man dash off an image severely lacking in technical qualities and at odds with his proven abilities and reputation.

Even so, there is something pleasurable about seeing something done so terribly appear on the cover of the New Yorker. The disjunction is genuinely hilarious. Some have gone so far as to call it iconic. By being elevated to the cover it is able to capture a bit of the 2020 zeitgeist. This is not enough to redeem the digital painting as a standalone work of art. A fittingly shitty end to a shitty year.

Abstraction is still difficult for people!!! Chakya exclaims. Indeed, it seems at least some of the meta aspects of trolling have gone over quite a few heads. But saying a work is purposefully bad doesnt make it good.

Read this article:

How David Hockney Trolled the New Yorker - The Bulwark

From being the biggest Korean outfit on the scene, the boy band BTS has now become the biggest band in the world. Its the impression youd get from their majestic presence as the Times Entertainer of the Year & theres no exaggeration in this. If pop stardom in 2020 had a mascot, BTS would be it.

Sure, Taylor Swift has given us some of the best music with a countryside aesthetic a much-needed comfort in the year 2020, but BTS has kept the spirits upbeat. They released multiple albums, broke so many records across the board including their own, had a busy life appearing on live streams & bonding with their fanbase, lovingly referred to as the BTS ARMY.

To be able to do that in a year when all the live, in-person concerts stood cancelled is no mean feat, and BTS has shown what theyre capable of, while simultaneously keeping their empathy & love front & center. Which is why when other celebrities seemed to leverage the lockdown, they seemed disingenuous, but when BTS brought new music, it indicated hope.

When Time says 2020 was the year of BTS, theyve evidence to back it up. They talk of the success of BTS, From propelling their label to a $7.5 billion IPO valuation to inspiring fans to match their $1 million donation to Black Lives Matter, BTS is a case study in music-industry dominance through human connection. This sums up the impact of the band very well, so lets expound this evidence.

When it comes to their sticky popularity, the band has its BTS ARMY to thank. The year began with the release of Map of the Soul: 7, the fourth Korean-language seventh overall studio album by the band. Among the many records that the band broke this year is the most views on the music video for their single Dynamite, where they surpassed 100 million views on its debut day itself.

Today, the video is nearing 700 million views. Even on streaming giant Spotify, BTS took away the metaphorical awards. Dynamite is the most-streamed K-pop song this year and Map of the Soul: 7 is the most streamed K-pop album on Spotify. Dynamite opened at the top spot on Spotifys daily Global Top 50 chart when it released in August this year.

While the boy band garnered money & accolades for their work, they were always empathetic & aware of the trials & tribulations plaguing the world. Their activism has an ethos of anti establishment & compassion. Multiple members of the band have been extremely vocal about their challenges with mental health, the quirks of fame, and have embraced non-toxic masculinity as exhibited in their performance.

Even though same-sex marriage is still not legal in their country, South Korea, theyve been vocal about their support for LGBTQ+ rights. This year, they donated $1 million to the Black Lives Matter movement, something Jin from the band claimed was not politics. It was related to racism. We believe everyone deserves to be respected. Thats why we made that decision.

This donation amount was matched by their fandom BTS ARMY in no time. Thats their impact.

Even though their initial plans for a world tour stood cancelled, they ended the year with a bang by releasing their latest album BE. It has been hailed as the music thats closest to BTS aesthetic. With that album, they debuted a song & album at No. 1 on Billboard charts in the same week. More recently, they got another feather in their cap they got nominated or a Grammy.

Even in their interview with Time, theyre candid, It was a year that we struggled a lot. We might look like were doing well on the outside with the numbers, but we do go through a hard time ourselves, Jimin said.

No one can deny the impact of the band on the current zeitgeist & how they made the tough year better for all of us.

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Was 2020 the year of BTS? Here's why 'Time' magazine thinks so - Film Daily