What is some music you like?

[Nilsi]

20 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

I think Fred Again is one of the most misunderstood contemporary musicians - perhaps even misunderstood by himself. The dominant reading frames him as an emissary of post-ironic sincerity, of emotional transparency in the age of fragmentation. He is taken to be a kind of benevolent spiritual force - splicing fragments of the real into collective rhythm, giving voice to ordinary affect and digital intimacy. But the way I hear him, his music mourns precisely the impossibility of such sincerity in the contemporary moment. And in this mourning, it becomes far more profound than the redemptive ethos often projected onto it.

There is something undeniably spectral and surreal in his treatment of the human voice - his own, his friends’, strangers’ - always embedded in intimate recordings, private voicemails, or overheard confessions. But these voices are never present. They are soaked in reverb, blurred by delay, panned into the margins, stuttered and chopped beyond recognition. This is not simply a stylistic choice - it’s a metaphysical operation. The human voice becomes a trace: a ghost of immediacy that can never be retrieved.

In this sense, Fred’s music enacts what Derrida calls hauntology: the persistence of a future that never came, of a past that never actualized. These are not songs of presence or authenticity, but of melancholic virtuality - of lightness that once shimmered on the horizon of becoming, now returned only as a digital relic. What we hear is not emotion itself, but the echo of emotion - looped, delayed, and dissolved into atmosphere.

It is no accident that his work emerged alongside global lockdowns, collective mourning, and the virtualization of social life. The euphoric drops and expansive builds feel less like affirmations of joy than attempts to resurrect something irretrievably lost: the naïve possibility of connection, love, spontaneity - without irony or self-consciousness. In this, his music is not "hopeful" in the cheap sense - it is about desiring hope while knowing it can never arrive.

And perhaps Fred himself doesn’t fully grasp this. In his more recent work, he seems increasingly bent on actualizing this affect - pushing toward more polished, festival-ready affirmations, as if trying to close the circuit between digital fragment and communal resonance. But in doing so, he risks flattening the very distance that gave the music its poignancy. What was once spectral becomes literal; what was once virtual becomes kitsch.

This is the Žižekian moment: like the lover who tells his partner she would be perfect if only she lost a few pounds - yet when she does, she becomes not perfect, but ordinary. The ideal can only exist in its non-realization; its pursuit annihilates its very essence.

So for me, Fred Again’s music revolves around this fundamental paradox:

That reconciliation, closure, and sincerity can only exist as spectral potentials, not as realizable states. And when we try to touch them - to manifest them - they dissolve.

It is the music of the not-yet, the almost, the might-have-been.
It is not about optimism.
It is about the tragic beauty of optimism’s impossibility.

This is still peak Fred Again for me.

It’s as if, in this moment, he finally grasped the subterranean meaning of his own music - not just as collage, catharsis, or collective ritual, but as a kind of liturgical mourning for love itself: its passing, its repetition, its unbearable lightness. This set does not resolve in closure - it doesn’t land in triumph - but instead opens into something more fragile, more unspeakable.

Notice how it doesn’t end with “Baby, put your loving arms around me,”
but with “Oh my Lord, your love, it envelops me.”

It’s a subtle shift, but the implications are profound.

In the first, love is begged for, clutched toward, a plea for human intimacy in the flesh. It is the classic image of post-rave longing - sweaty bodies in need of touch.

But in the second, love is no longer grasped.
It descends. It envelops.
It is no longer directed at a human other, but toward an Other - a divine void, a metaphysical embrace.

This is no longer romantic love, but the memory of what love once was, elevated to a form of surrender.
A concession to its ephemerality.

And this, perhaps, is what makes this Fred’s most honest moment: not when he sings about connection, but when he finally lets go of it, and lets the music become a prayer for what cannot return.

[Waves]

@Nilsi Brilliant read.

I was living in London when I first encountered Fred's music - Kyle (I found you) was the first track. He released Actual Life 3 at that time. I find they encapsulated so well the Zeitgeist of the city post-lockdown, at least for people in their 20s to mid 30s.

What deeply resonated with me in the head- and heart-space I was in (and what the city amplified in me) is exactly the longing, the relishing in the mourning of the "not-yet, the almost, the might-have-been" while being lured by hope and a relief that we unconsciously or willingly push away, maybe because, as you say, we know it can never arrive.

[Schizophonia]

 

[Nilsi]

 

[Sugarcoat]

Video Games - Lana Del Rey 

It’s magical

 

[Beans]

 

[daydrinking]

 

[Princess Arabia]

 

Edited yesterday at 01:33 AM by Princess Arabia

[daydrinking]

 

[Nilsi]

 

[Nilsi]

Goated Kanye production.

Edited yesterday at 01:35 PM by Nilsi

[Nilsi]

“No More Parties in LA” isn’t just one of Kanye West’s greatest songs - it’s a look inside the manic engine room of his genius, and a document of his tragedy.

He’s not performing here. He’s being possessed - by his gift, his demons, his contradictions - and he knows it. That awareness, that inability to stop while watching himself unravel in real time, is exactly what gives the track its power. The brilliance isn’t in mastering the chaos, but in channeling it.

Madlib sets the scene with a beat that feels like ancestral time travel. Johnny “Guitar” Watson opens the track with a stoned, surreal aside - “Ladidada…” - before Junie Morrison’s “Suzie Thundertussy” kicks in: a deep P-Funk dive into swirling synths, absurd horn stabs, and erotic, theatrical chaos. It’s not just retro funk - it’s Afrofuturist delirium, the sound of a cosmos bending under its own groove. Morrison doesn’t ground the track - he unmoors it. The past is alive, and it’s messy.

Then Kendrick enters. His verse is brief, clean, Apollonian. He plays the observer, the technician, the wise cousin who hasn’t lost himself to the party. He critiques LA culture with a wink, but keeps his poise. It’s the calm before the storm - and maybe a warning.

Then Kanye explodes.

His verse isn’t just long - it’s sprawling, breathless, feral. Nearly 90 bars of uninterrupted stream-of-consciousness, where everything is on the table: LA groupies, bathroom sex, fatherhood, therapy, fashion gossip, his daughter, addiction, fear of irrelevance. It’s not linear - it’s spiral logic. One thought devours the next, one persona crashes into another. You don’t follow him - you hold on.

“I know some fans who thought I wouldn’t rap like this again…”

It’s a boast, a confession, a plea. He knows we’re listening. He knows he’s spiraling. And he can’t stop. That’s the tragedy: Kanye has always known he’s both a genius and a messiah-complex meltdown. He sees it, scripts it, and still has to live it - on display.

Even the title - “No More Parties in LA” - feels like an unresolved cry. When he says “Please, baby, no more parties in LA,” the desperation is real. But who is he pleading with? Kim? His daughter? Himself? God? The culture that made him? The voice trembles between irony and sincerity, control and collapse. It’s not a command - it’s a prayer. And the party rages on anyway.

All the while, Ghostface Killah’s looped chant - "Shake that body, party that body…” - plays like a curse. It’s not celebration; it’s echo. A voice from a party that never ended, never evolved - just looped. It mocks Kanye even as it drives him forward.

Then, just as it all becomes unbearable, Larry Graham enters like a deus ex machina: “I just keep on lovin’ you, baby…” A lush, gospel-soaked outro. It sounds like salvation. Or maybe denial. Is it closure - or delusion? That’s the unresolved ache at the heart of the track: Kanye wants love to save him, but knows it probably won’t. Still, he hands the mic over to that hope.

And yet, the party just keeps raging on. The beat doesn’t fade. Ghostface still chants. The loop doesn’t resolve. There’s no catharsis, no moral, no exit. Just the same spiraling momentum, haunted by the possibility of grace and the near certainty of repetition. Kanye steps away, but the system he’s caught in - the parties, the personas, the public confessions - keeps playing.

Madlib’s beat loops beneath it all like an ancient, dusty engine - crackling vinyl, warm bass, sampled ghosts. There’s no hook, no structure to lean on. Just a looped reality Kanye can’t escape. And that’s exactly the point.

“No More Parties in LA” isn’t about leaving the party. It’s about knowing you should - and not being able to. Kendrick offers balance, but it’s too late. The samples don’t comfort - they testify. They aren’t nostalgic - they’re prophetic. This isn’t a song about LA. It’s a song about Kanye. Trapped. Possessed. Spiraling. And still, somehow, making the best music of his life.

Edited yesterday at 02:49 PM by Nilsi

[Nilsi]

Kanye West’s Famous video is one of the most layered and underappreciated works of 21st-century pop art.

Twelve naked celebrity bodies lie motionless in a shared bed - some controversial, some idolized, all reduced to image. The scene is static, unnerving, and deliberately hard to read: not erotic, not quite satirical, more like a tableau of contemporary mythology.

The track itself opens with one of Kanye’s most infamous lines:

“I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous.”

A statement so volatile it fractured the very notion of authorship, agency, and consent in pop culture. Is it a boast? A provocation? A meta-commentary on the media? Who controls the narrative, and who gets to say what counts as “real”? That question becomes the architecture of the video itself.

The composition draws from Vincent Desiderio’s painting Sleep, which itself echoes Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. The reference isn’t incidental - Kanye is placing himself in a lineage of artists who use stillness, dream-logic, and ambiguity to stage the tensions of their time.

That lineage runs through Warhol, of course - but also through Debord and Baudrillard, whose critiques of spectacle and simulation are alive in every frame. The bodies are not people; they are signs, stripped of depth, suspended in the flat light of the screen. 

Kanye places himself at the center of the frame - not to dominate it, but to mark his complicity. He isn’t above the image economy - he’s both its producer and its product. He performs the trap he knows he’s in.

And he performs it with uncanny timing. Donald Trump appears in the bed - naked, inert, symbolic - months before his election. Kanye was already pointing to the blurring of power, celebrity, and fiction that would soon define the post-truth world. The irony is sharp: the man who would soon embody total media dominance lies here as an object, stripped of speech, of suit, of spin.

The question of who gets to frame the conversation - who speaks, who’s spoken for, who gets edited into the scene and who gets left out - continues to haunt Kanye’s work, most recently in the form of his increasingly erratic, controversial, and nihilistically self-aware public statements. Famous already pointed there: toward a world where everything is up for framing, and no frame is neutral.

And then there’s Jeffrey Epstein, years before anyone was supposed to be looking - whatever that means.

Edited yesterday at 03:47 PM by Nilsi

[Nilsi]

Such an iconic track.

Takes me right back to the after-school Teamspeak grind - jumping into League of Legends with the boys until our parents came home and told us to stop wasting our lives on video games.

[Yimpa]

"Waiting for little proofs to appear
That I drank some of grandaddy's beer"

[Jehovah increases]

 

Edited 12 hours ago by Jehovah increases

[Aaron p]

 

 

[Cireeric]