Man Alive! - King Krule (2020)
A week of kings: I spun up my randomizer and randomly got 3 different artists with “King” in their names. So I’ve expanded it to a whole week
I have this idea that there’s a new genre of music that’s hidden entirely from view, because it’s divided into little bits and pieces across multiple scenes and market categories and pigeonholes.
It’s not a blending of disparate musical styles and genres, so much as a hand grenade thrown at the very idea of genre. If you like it–whether you heard it from a Youtube video about Japanese surf rock or your parents’ Nirvana CD or that Miles Davis album you read about or a random thrift shop purchase of an Aldo Nova record–you consume it and adapt it and implement some of it in your music.
I call it metamodernism, a philosophical concept I’ve come across that I think explains a lot of the limbo our society finds itself in. Film Youtuber Thomas Flight’s explanation of metamodernism as it applies to film is one of my favorite YT videos, and explains the concepts extremely well even if he doesn’t talk about music.
The reason there aren’t a ton of self-important Youtube music critics writing about this new thing is that it’s not immediately visible. The people doing it, while they all belong in this same group, are spread arbitrarily across the many subdivisions the music industry already recognizes for marketing and self-important blather purposes.
- The wildly creative chaos of Tyler The Creator and JPEGMAFIA, constrained by convention to be hip hop but really so much more
- What passes for more or less mainstream pop or rock, but veers into wildly different territory: Young Fathers, Idles, Perfume Genius, and even Billie Eilish
- Sleep Token, by turns a metal band, a shoegaze band, or a pop band
- out-there jazz from the likes of Rich Ruth, Nala Sinephro, and Alabaster De Plume
- Alt-R&B like Mk.gee and Blood Orange
- the modern prog sound of Black MIDI and Squid
- the cleverer and less nostalgia- and irony-obsessed corners of vaporwave / chillwave / weirdcore / barber beats
And, if you hadn’t seen it coming, there’s this pocket of grimy, stoned, washed-out music for the chill-out room of the “Got chewed up by reality and spit out” club. Mount Kimbie, Mura Masa, Wu Lu, and of course King Krule.
Krule’s music is more jazzy than a lot of the others I mentioned, but it’s also moody, bombed-out, and angry in a very subtle way.
Maybe I’m hearing things. Of course I’m hearing things, or what’s even the point?
