Depletion Garden

Weekly Music Writeup #3: Earl Sweatshirt, MIKE, SURF GANG - POMPEII // UTILITY

2026-04-05T00:00:00Z

Welcome back to the Warrens! (Not that anyone was waiting...) Some things have changed since last time: for one, we have a new banner and homepage image, featuring a metal-style logo made by yours truly. Despite how amateurish it is, I have to say I'm sort of proud of it; I might make a future post on metal-style aesthetics and fonts. My pronouns are also sort of in the air right now; I'm going by any/all until further notice, and it may be a while until things change/solidify. Please be patient with me as I navigate what is turning out to be a weird and somewhat disheartening time in my life. Nonetheless, I hope to blog more consistently than I have been (not hard, considering the previous state of the blog), so consider this the first volley! And if I don't make another post for another year, uh, consider it a misfire I guess.

In a recent interview with Pigeons and Planes, Earl Sweatshirt trained his aim on 'real hip-hop' purists. "What is this, like, thing where culture has become solely nostalgic or regurgitative?" he asked. "As if it's not supposed to keep finding itself in different places. Like that 'spirit of hip-hop' or whatever. And we have that!"

I'll admit: I was one of those people who, for many years, lost track of Earl's music. I was a big fan of Earl back in high school: in both Doris and I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside I found a sound and sensibility—nihilistic but whip-smart, deceptively active, an exhausted predator slink—that, at its best, spoke to me more than pretty much any other hip-hop artist, even my beloved El-P. It certainly helped that Earl was an almost peerless stylist in the classical sense as well, lacing his cynicism with, to use El-P's elegant formulation, "holy-fuck-what-did-he-just-utter?" bars that were like little puzzle boxes to be picked apart and examined and debated over in Rap Genius comment sections. Reviewers compared him to MF Doom and Eminem, which is a much more succinct way of making the above point. He was, in other words, a 'real hip-hop' artist, which is especially notable considering he first gained notoriety as a member of OFWGKTA, among the most iconoclastic rap groups (to say the least) to ever have laid sixteens down over drums.

Given all of the above, I eagerly awaited the release of his 2018 album Some Rap Songs, even ignoring the lead single "nowhere2go", which was the first bit of evidence that we weren't going to be getting a 'traditional' Earl album (whatever that meant). When it came out, I thought it was okay—I could appreciate what Earl was doing, and, if it had come from a different artist, I could even see myself liking it quite a bit. Yet something about the album, with its lo-fi, abstracted beatwork and pithy bars, failed to click with me in the same way that his earlier work did. Whence the bleary-eyed nihilism? Whence the punchlines? I felt like Vince Staples on "Burgundy": "I don't care about what you going through or what you gotta do. I need bars, sixteen of 'em." Speaking of Vince, Earl's tantalizing twenty-second turn on Vince's FM! briefly gave me hope for a return-to-form, but when instead he followed Some Rap Songs up with Feet of Clay, an even gnarlier and gnomic and apocalyptic album laden with Seventh Seal portents, I sort of checked out.

Looking back on my younger and dumber self, I can say that they would have done well to stick around a bit longer—Earl would bring some of the energy back on SICK!, which contains classic Earl bangers like "2010", albeit ones that reflect the growth he had undergone, both as a person and a rapper—but also that they were wrong not to have paid attention. I think my thing back then was that I enjoyed "lyrical" hip-hop, but only when they were talking about typical hip-hop things—flexing, 'sonning' others, the like. The moment things got a little too artsy for me I checked out. Which is weird. I liked artsy, experimental bands like Current 93 and Death Grips, but when an artist brought a similar sensibility to (traditional) hip-hop I recoiled from it. The problem, perhaps, is that I had a caricatured view of the "true hip-hop artist," or what earlier hip-hop heads would have called 'backpackers,' one that maintained that they were all pretentious fart-sniffers smothering their overwrought lyrics in a haze of Hawaiian pot and scorning A$AP Rocky and Schoolboy Q for talking about guns and money. I mean: who could possibly hate A$AP Rocky and Schoolboy Q? Who did these assholes think they were?

You would be right to shout "Who do you think you are??", and don't worry, I'm doing the same. There are a lot of unexamined prejudices here across both gender and race lines (always a risk for non-Black hip-hop fans), and in a moment when I'm revising the very grounds of my gender identity, the idea that my enjoyment of hip-hop came, and to a certain extent still comes, from the fantasy of inflicting emasculation on others is, uh, ripe for examination. Still, I do think that past me identified, albeit accidentally, a real distinction. Despite the overwrought caricature, 'backpack' rap was very much a category with actual practitioners, like, say, Childish Gambino, or (less recently) Jeru the Damaja, who was unforgivingly parodied by the great Abe Beame: "Jeru was emblematic of a genre of hip-hop guy that was prevalent on the east coast in the 90s. This symbolic dude (always a dude) made distinctions between rap and hip-hop, Biggie and Jay-Z were too mainstream due to the materialism in their frivolous bars, he was probably a five percenter, and nothing on this Earth was more important to him than the sanctity of his own very narrow definition of hip-hop. This imagined guy's favorite rapper was Jeru the Damaja."

Importantly, this was a category that a good portion of the underground did not belong to. MF Doom was as comfortable with Ghostface Killah as he was with Madlib, and Company Flow's (and later El-P's) music was indebted to pulpy sci-fi and comic books as much as William Burroughs and was studded with vulgar flexes. ("I'll ignore you selling crack, killing people, and keeping it real/But disrespect me and my adopted fam and die young like veal.") All proof, if proof was needed, that you could keep hold of what was fun in hip-hop without succumbing either to frivolity or consumption on one hand and pretentiousness on the other; to use the language of architecture, this style worked via an operation of "double coding," making art that provided both intellectual and visceral pleasures. El-P and Killer Mike would later go on to take this double-coded style and make it big and accessible enough to soundtrack Marvel movies (something we greet with mixed feelings, for sure, but it proved that the style had legs outside of the narrow purview of indie rap).

Unbeknownst to me, a loose conglomeration of rappers were creating just this type of hip-hop beneath the mainstream. Earl, Boldy James, MIKE, ELUCID, Billy Woods, bbymutha, Medhane: all artists who could rattle trunks as well as they could deliver introspective, thoughtful bars. Some of these artists have been around for a long time, even longer than Earl (Woods and Boldy come to mind), but I wasn't tapped into the right channels to hear them, and many of these artists would find their greatest success starting in the late 2010s, during the first (cries) Donald Trump administration. It was Armand Hammer—the rap group consisting of ELUCID and Woods—who really brought me back into the fold: they could expound on history and theory and put belt to ass, often at the same time: "Your crew fragile as the Caucasus, as the Balkans is/It's one n**** who nice, the rest sausages." ("Chicharrones") But it's Earl and MIKE who, with their collaboration with SURF GANG POMPEII // UTILITY, delivers the coup de grace.

This album cover more or less gets across what this album is all about: savage art-rap.

What is there to say about this album? Earl and MIKE are both in top form here, but they're also loose, obviously having fun with things, taking joy in their language and delivery (which on both sides of the album varies quite a bit from song to song) even at their darkest. At times it almost feels like a challenge they've issued to themselves: how nimble can we continue to be while utilizing the same (or very similar) flow over much of the album's runtime? Very, as it turns out! MIKE: "I'mma free my brothers from them shackles, the Django/Any system out here get dismantled, the bankroll." Earl: "That shit made us giggle, I'll give you that/I usually pay to watch n***** act." These are classic bars, snappy and literate, but smeared like jam over flows that wouldn't sound out of place on a SoundCloud release, and over beats whose mix of dreamy synthesized soundscapes and concussive drumwork, courtesy of SURF GANG (whose other stuff I definitely have to check out) marks this as being a distinctly contemporary affar, hooked up into the same vast electrical system as rappers like LAZER DIM 700 or even Playboi Carti—rappers, in other words, who are often used as examples of the declining state of hip-hop by disgruntled elder statesmen. This album is an unbelievable joy to listen to, and honestly feels half as long as its hour-long runtime: that's more than enough on its own, and in a year with releases from folks like Miserere Luminis and Nondi_ and Xylitol and Namitape, this is more than enough to make it my album of the year (so far). But for me at least it's also remarkable as an album-length rebuke to those very people who see trap and rage as hip-hop's antichrists, who cringe when they hear a Pi'erre Bourne producer tag, who ensconce themselves in an inpenetrable wall of Wu-Tang records and incense. Look at Earl in the video for El Cousteau's "Words2LiveBy"—y'know, the song where he drops the immortal lines "Free Gaza/We in the corner like Israelites." Does this look like a man who's worried about the state of the genre? Who obsesses over some imagined "spirit of hip hop?" Calm the fuck down, dude. Have a beer. Dance a little bit; throw some ass; pour some glitter on yourself.¹ You can have your cake and eat it, too.

Other recs:

Next time on Warrens of Honk: Adventures in Gender!! (Maybe? Possibly? I don't know I'm just writing this so that I have something to hold me accountable. Not that that's ever stopped me in the past.)

^{1. Metaphorically speaking. I actually have a weird irrational fear of glitter in real life: just the sight of it is enough to make me squirm in my seat, and seeing it tossed around actually gets me to cry out. Don't ask me why; that's a question for a psychoanalyst.↩}

Why Is My Prose So Annoying?

2024-12-21T00:00:00Z

Sometime in the past couple of years, my writing began to look sort of weird. Mostly my nonfiction writing. I don't know exactly when it crossed this line; all I know is that I've been writing various emails to professors, personal essays, school papers, the two music posts you see on this site, and so on, and the more I look over what I wrote one question forms in my mind:

"Jesus, why is my prose style so annoying?"

I mean you've noticed it, right reader? It's okay, you can tell me. (I know nobody's actually reading this, but anyways...) It's long winded, there's a ton of subordination and modifiers and such weighing each sentence down (not to mention semicolons, which I guess I have a fetish for), there's a virulent strain of what I'll call "stock theory" where five cent words and concepts cribbed from theoretical texts are thrown around haphazardly...it's just a mess.

To be fair, my prose has always been sort of sloppy. Back in high school I was one of those kids who really, really loved David Foster Wallace and took every opportunity to imitate his writing style. Now that was probably annoying in its own way, but for all the hoopla about how long-winded and pedantic and irritating DFW's writing can be, especially in his fiction, I think by-and-large his prose had a verve and energy to it that carried you through to the end of his very long sentences. He was, after all, a self-proclaimed Grammar Nazi, one who wrote a really long philosophical essay on semantics and syntax and the ethics of grammatical correctness; the choice to write in that style was always a calculated one, and he had the uncanny ability to appear glib and informal even when he was employing words like "prolegomenous." If my prose had any of those merits back then, you can thank him for that, not me. But my prose now is different, and not in a good way: it's leaden, clumsy, pretentious, and overall just a real slog to get through.

Anyways, I could talk for hours about all this, including where my new prose style came from (read: it's theory and Fredric Jameson in particular—FJ is, for the record, a great prose stylist despite what haters will tell you, but he's also really hard to imitate unless you think the same way he does—and that is doubly true if you're imitating him unconsciously, as I think I am). But the reason why it bothers me so much is that I think it cuts against the grain of what the alt internet is supposed to be. I mean, obviously everybody including me should do and write what they want, however they want; if I or anybody else wants to write their blog in a facsimile of academic prose, then they should be free to do so. And a lot of the bloggers I read most voraciously—K-Punk obviously but also The Pinocchio Theory and An und für sich and McMansion Hell—are academics, or academic-adjacent folks whose prose retains traces of that milieu. But it's hard to shake the feeling that this writing style is just me writing the way I think I should—as an educated and somewhat politically-aware person—rather than being truly loose and free and informal. For chrissakes, this is a site whose name is a riff on a Planescape: Torment location and who has as its mascot a side character from an erotic visual novel; why write like I'm trying to get published in the London Review of Books?

I knew that making this blog would be a source of writing practice, but I think I misunderstood the nature of the practice a blog gives you. It's not so much writing quality—though it can offer that too—as it is writing as a habit: learning to create prose that feels natural and unfussy and relaxed and clear, writing just to write. Which means, obviously, that the actual quality of writing is more or less besides the point.

So here is my pledge to you, dear-and-likely-nonexistent-reader: all posts from here on out will be at least 50% less annoying to read. You have my word.

If you don't trust me, trust Konata.

Weekly Music Writeup #2: Krallice - Years Past Matter

2024-12-20T00:00:00Z

Due to various recent events (the one you're probably thinking of if you're an American, sure, but also personal ones) I've been thinking a lot about apocalypse, or about the promise of another world breaking through the shell of this one. I'm still fairly new to all this, but one theme I see in a lot of contemporary theory is anti-transcendence: the idea that this is the only world there is, and whatever happens must happen, to use the words of a recent figure, "in the context of all that came before it." "No outside," cry the accelerationists; and along these same lines Antonio Negri (RIP) and Michael Hardt open their really fucking good Commonwealth by saying: "Along with nihilists, we have to recognize that, regardless of how brilliantly and trenchantly we critique it, we are destined to live in this world, not only subject to its powers of domination but also contaminated by its corruptions. Abandon all dreams of political purity and 'higher values' that would allow us to remain outside!"

This seems self-evidently true to me, but at the same time there's something to be said about the seemingly omnipresent sense of yearning for a better world. I'm being sort of academic about all of this, but to be clear this is a powerful feeling, more of a need than a desire. To put things in a personal register, I can't keep being a depressed shut-in forever: eventually, if I don't want to die (and there are worse deaths than the physical) I have to go out and talk to people and make friends and overall just start being a part of society. Yet I'm stuck in such a morass of hopelessness and self-loathing that it's difficult to imagine how I can bring such a thing about.

In any case, the world as we know it isn't really a world at all but a collective hallucination of sorts, an inpenetrable weave of ideology and habit. Ideology tells us that this is all there is and all it can ever be, even though obviously everything is contingent. So, how can we see past all this to the "baroque sunbursts" that Fredric Jameson uses to describe other, possible worlds?

Krallice's album covers are unbelievably raw, by the way.

Recently, in car rides where I'm forced into proximity with my conservative family members and their friends, I've started listening to black metal: particularly Krallice. For one, they're loud, and maintain their volume throughout the entire length of their very long songs, and thus their music works really well at blocking out all the transphobic/misogynistic/racist/reactionary talk.¹ But also, listening to them while watching the sun rise over California's mountains, soaking them in blue—in moments like the one four minutes into "IIIIIIIII" where the dueling guitars break into mournful harmony—I feel as though I'm really seeing those baroque sunbursts, like a different world is right there behind the rocks and chaparral trying to yawn into being.

Apocalypse is, of course, a really contentious topic, not least because it usually manifests as a whole lot of people dying. Nor are glimpses of other worlds wholly benign; I mean, just look at Lovecraft for a preview of how such things usually turn out. Krallice's music is loud and terrifying and on first listen can seem as wild and endless and homogenous as a churning ocean, everything mashed into one roiling element. But it's also beautiful. When those guitars achieve liftoff—and Krallice, especially on this album, are extremely good at meting out these moments—I catch a glimpse of what might remain when everything is erased; something horrifying, sure, but also gorgeous and, in its own weird way, human. Yes, there is no outside. But art like Krallice's can allow us a peek at what lies beyond the door.

Also, it rips.

Other recs:

^{1. As a writer I acknowledge that I should probably be paying attention to them, no matter how painful it is, but...well let me just say that I tried, but it proved too difficult. I'm a pretty thin-skinned person already, but entering those vehicles is something else—like stepping into the irradiated chamber at the end of Fallout 3 or something.↩}

Weekly Music Writeup #1: Storefront Church - Ink & Oil

2024-07-17T00:00:00Z

Hello again! The post on the internet that I suggested was forthcoming is...well...still forthcoming, and could take a while to get finished considering I'll be at Evo until Monday. In the meantime, though, I thought this was a good time to start doing something I've been wanting to do for a while: a weekly music recommendation column! Often, when listening to music, I get the irresistible urge to write about it, so this should give me the opportunity to whet that urge a little bit, in a spontaneous way¹, while also hopefully introducing folks to music I think is cool. This won't always be full albums, hence why this is called Weekly Music Writeup instead of, say, Album of the Week—instead, I'll use these posts to talk about whatever's on my mind musically, whether it be songs, albums, trends, weird patterns, album art, and so on. I'm hoping to maintain a pace of one of these every week, at least for now. We'll see what happens if/when I get accepted to grad school. In any case, on the off chance that you're interested in reading far too many words on music, read on!

The album cover feels a bit generic to me, but the music rules.

Ink & Oil starts off relatively auspiciously, with every track from opener "The High Room" to the eight-minute centerpiece "Words in the Rind" featuring lead singer Lukas Frank's gorgeous, slightly listless voice floating over ornate orchestral arrangements. You sit back, relax, and let the music—which, as heavy as it is, goes down quite easy due to the familiarity of the sounds involved—wash over you.

But then, to your surprise, near the end of "Words in the Rind," a wave of noise crashes over the track, jolting you awake—the strings, formerly weepy, begin to wail, ushering in a minute of pure cacophony that after the last few tracks of gorgeous melancholy feels almost endless. What the fuck just happened?

The album never quite recovers from the shock, and from this point on dissonance becomes one of the album's main ingredients, as well as its secret weapon. My eternal fave Ian Cohen introduced this record on Twitter² as Father John Misty's ironic opus Pure Comedy but with a truly apocalyptic sound rather than just lyrics, and I think the shoe fits. As mentioned the production is incredibly thick; I've seen this band's music described as "cinematic," but I think most directors, if handed a soundtrack like this, would send it straight back—it's too dense, and it would overpower any scene to which it's applied. And anyways, this is the sort of record that is a movie in and of itself: each track, from the crazed street-preacher squall of "Coal" to the understated groove of "King Of The Lobby"³, is rendered in lavish, 3D detail, enhancing the late-American millenarianism of Frank's lyrics ("All the walls are grated/With tiny office spaces," "In front of the concentration camps/We've got drive-in movies/Displays of American heroism/Rigid brawn is death's best friend").

As soon as I decided to start this weekly music thing, I figured that I'd start off by talking about a metal record, since I've spent the week listening to Wolves in the Throne Room and Agrimonia and such. Obviously things didn't pan out that way, but I think it makes total sense why this record ended up making sense to me in the context of those bands. At first glance Ink & Oil could not be any further from those bands in terms of mood and sound; I mean Frank is channeling ballroom music and maudlin string-led film soundtracks, and Storefront Church are based in LA (curiously enough, because this scans as a very New York album to me; though I suppose apocalypse fits LA better), which on its face could not be any further from the Cascadian eco-paganism of a band like Wolves. But in its own way this record is just as extreme, both in sound and in lyrics, and I think it rewards your attention in a similar way⁴.

Anyways, if you really like the Artic Monkeys' and/or Mitski's last few records, or want to hear an audio representation of what it'll be like to see the world's most decadent capitals swallowed up by swarms of locusts while GY!BE's F♯ A♯ ∞ plays in some distant town square, then you'll definitely enjoy Ink & Oil.

^{1. Or at least as spontaneous as I'm capable of being. Ironically, though, I decided to start writing this on a whim; so we'll see how long this column lasts, because when I am spontaneous I tend to fizzle out quickly.↩}

^{2. Yeah, I know. The temptations are great...↩}

^{3. (whose lyrics almost remind me of a inverted version of Fontaine D.C.'s "Roy's Tune," with its portrayal of romantic longing frustrated by the endless vicissitudes of work under capitalism)↩}

^{4. This is especially true because these are long songs: the record is over an hour long, and it's twelve tracks deep. Incredibly, it's actually over twelve minutes longer than Wolves's Celestial Lineage, half of whose songs pass the ten-minute mark.↩}

The Warrens Are Open!

2024-07-15T00:00:00Z

It lives!!!

After a month of banging my head against VsCode and 11ty (the latter in particular was a pain to get working), The Warrens are now in a somewhat presentable state. They aren't perfect—I was too lazy to figure out how to arrange the category list over there on the side ¹ in alphabetical order, and unfortunately Sacchin on the left needs more time in the oven—but the general skeleton is done. Now, I basically have...a Wordpress site. Except it took a month to prepare, rather than an afternoon.

Yeah, admittedly I do feel a bit weird about ending up with such a vanilla-looking site, especially after snooping around other people's sites (and sometimes code) and seeing all sorts of wonderful shimmering digital creations. It feels almost like I'm not really participating in the spirit of this independent section of the net. Obviously it's not a competition, and insofar as sites are an expression of their creator's personality the Warrens do reflect my personality pretty well. But when I started making this site I had all sorts of ideas, and it's hard to escape the feeling that the sheer difficulty of realizing them² made me preemptively cut myself to size. The ideas are still there, though; and I hope I maintain enough motivation after this to continue working towards them.³

In any case, my aim in making this site was pretty much the same as everybody else's—to attempt to sever my ties with the eldritch machinations of social media. I have more thoughts on this, and I'll probably write a separate post on this subject⁴; which feels really good to be able to say/do, as opposed to having to write a twenty-post fragmentary thread whose contents will be mined to write someone's four-page paper on, like, Derrida.⁵ It's been really difficult recently to loosen up my writing—to write, not necessarily as though nobody were looking (which is probably impossible), but at least as though there isn't a neck and head draped over your shoulder at all times, checking your work, clicking its tongue, sneering at your word choices, asking if you've really done all the readings, and so on. My hope is that writing this blog will help me forget about this head's presence, if not make it disappear entirely. (What I would give for that to happen!)

Anyways, that's all I have to say for now. Hope to meet you back here soon!

POV: Sacchin and her vicious gang are about to fill your body full of lead.

^{1. (or, if you're reading this on mobile, below)↩}

^{2. (though I should note that the difficulty is mainly due to my own incompetence with code, rather than any difficulty inherent in the project as such)↩}

^{3. More specifically I had section on the navigation bar called "The Warrens," which would have led to a weird webcomic/hypertext thing featuring all my OCs. In fact this whole site was supposed to feature my OCs, but since I'm not an artist and want absolutely nothing to do with that whole AI business, Sacchin was forced to take their place for the time being. She's doing great, though. Everyone say: Thanks, Sacchin!!!↩}

^{4. That being said it's a bad bet to think that I'll follow through on anything I say I'm gonna complete, so take this with a grain of salt.↩}

^{5. For now, though, here's a great article by Kate Wagner over on The Baffler about the cannibalistic nature of the recent internet.↩}