Rainbow Connecting: 12 Musical Numbers We Want To See The Muppets Perform, And Why

[Note: I wrote this piece in, I think, about 2014; a different age. For a while I was trying to sell it to a Respectable Outlet, but it wasn't fated to be. It's sat in my drafts folder since, but for no particular reason I've opted to finally share it aloud with you, The World. You'll sense a lot of naivette, and some opinions have curdled, but I think it remains a pretty good representation of what I love most about the Muppets. Hope you dig.]

They say it, right up front.

“It's time to play the music.”

Never accuse the Muppets of subtlety. From the very first line of their original theme song, Kermit and the gang promise that when they stage a production, music is to be involved. This Fall, ABC  has brought the merry, furry misfits back to prime-time with a series they've creatively entitled “The Muppets.”

“The show's gonna be all about our personal lives – behind the scenes, our relationships – sort of an adult Muppet Show,” Kermit explained in the debut trailer.

“How about we film the series in that crazy, handheld documentary style, and have cutaways to one-on-one interviews?” suggested Electric Mayhem guitarist Floyd Pepper. This fall, fans will go backstage with the Muppets as they parody the TV format popularized by “The Office (UK),” and the like -- but will they hear them sing?

This new series' very existence is proof that Disney's recent investment in the Muppets – a pair of feature films, countless promotional appearances where the puppets are allowed pass as real life celebrities everywhere from the venerable talk show circuit all the way up to the reality TV one – has paid off. But franchises assert their value through their potential to continually grow, delivering more and more. The campaign to revive the handheld celebrities has mostly been received positively, but a nagging sense that something is either missing or fleeting has occasionally made loyalists wince. It's almost like Disney takes its custodial responsibilities so seriously, and is so invested in protecting the brand, that it has hampered some ability to take certain creative risks. There are moments, though, that capture a bit of the original spirit. The barbershop quartet version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or the chickens clucking “(Forget) You,” in 2011's “The Muppets” film worked for the same reasons so so many Muppets acts had before; the juxtaposition of songs and singers were as clever as they were well-executed. Ours is a modern age of made-to-order, commodified nostalgia and passionate niche demographics, so perhaps if they producers can modestly recreate “Muppets Tonight,” ABC's last foray into an ongoing series, the project will be deemed a success. But considering a television landscape where soundtracks to “Empire,” “Glee,” and “Nashville,” have all scorched their way up to the top of sales charts, ABC/ Disney should take a hard look at what placing a premium on the music could bring to their new Muppet show.

Like The Monkees, Spinal Tap, or the Spice Girls, manufactured beginnings never stopped the Muppets from being standout performers. Their celebrity was cemented when Kermit the Frog charted a genuine Top-25 Billboard single with 1979's “The Rainbow Connection.” Anyone that cares to dispute whether mere puppets should be considered real artists is welcome ask a working musician for thoughts regarding the Grammy's.

The Muppets' music and musical performances played a huge role in securing their lasting purchase in our cultural imagination. It always had heart, even if, sure, it needed to be given a hand. Who in show biz doesn't, amirite? (Wocka wocka...) The campaign to restore Kermit, Piggy, and the gang to the B-list is great, but the characters' faux-fame is only a satisfying punchline when the actual art – funny puppets joyfully making creativity and originality onscreen – delivers on substance. It's not enough to be rooting for the Muppets, they have to also make you believe in their talent. In order to do that, they need to put on a show.

The last decade has seen a few non-sanctioned, Muppets-inspired projects hit the bigtime online. The Sad Kermit versions of “Hurt,” “Creep,” and “Needle in the Hay,” mercilessly thrust its fist into the chest cavities of Gen Xers in the mid-2000s, tearing out their innocence and leaving them to curse their own internalized cynicism. A transcendent one-man musical recording of “Muppet Christ Superstar” made the rounds around last Easter, demanding praise if only for its outlandish conceptual precision, which showed such a perfect amount of irreverence that you could nearly imagine the characters themselves having made the ill-advised decision to stage it. A recent run of throwback hip-hop lip-sync YouTube mashups by Mylo the Cat – in which Gonzo freaks to “The Humpty Dance,” Animal fronts a Beastie Boys tribute on “So What’cha Want,” Rowlf does his Biz Markie impression on “Just A Friend,” and the whole gang gets together to throw a “Hip-Hop Hooray,” – has children of the '80s like myself tipping to Peak Nostalgia Ratings. Because it's not fair we were robbed of more Muppets during hip-hop's ascendance. 

The viral sensations all capture some authentically original essence of “The Muppet Show,” where nothing was allowed to be sacred, least of all its stars. Each juxtaposed songs and imagery to bring something inspired out of both. 

To really get with the times, the Muppets need music. In the '70s, they could play a mix of the standards and contemporary hits, furnished by guests or otherwise. Today, as the creations of Jim Henson, Jerry Juhl, Frank Oz, Richard Hunt, Dave Goelz, and company return to the medium for which they were designed, they should turn to the pop charts for tunes to tackle. For a moment, let's pretend that the fates of these songs do not lie with tyrannical multinational recorded music corporations or artists that might not co-sign a Muppet version of their song. Let's just let our imagination run wild.

The goodwill surrounding the revival is born of an audience eager for the chance to love new things Muppets, and the viral success of the unlicensed web-fodder (including the classic Kermit-sipping-tea meme) proves that if it's funny, eyes will come. Until the show premieres, fans are in that sweet spot where they know something they love is coming back, and can become intoxicated at the unlimited prospective potential of their wildest dreams to be made manifest. Until we know otherwise for sure, the new Muppets show could be the greatest success since the original.

Let’s believe it will be as great as it could be,  that it will work so well its only hecklers will be Statler and Waldorf. After all, irrational optimism is a big part of the world of the Muppets.

Here are 12 songs the Muppets should perform on their new Muppet show. It is our professional opinion that you should sing them all in your head, where the voices of the Muppets' original performers remain perfectly preserved for all time.

Daft Punk's GET LUCKY

Janice fronting The Electric Mayhem

She may not fit into Pharrell's hat, but Janice's sunny, California-soaked vocals nicely match his falsetto register on Daft Punk's smash “Get Lucky,” and her Valley girl inflections and ad-libs promise to take that song you've heard a jillion times and turn it into something special and new.

“Random Access Memories” was an exercise in analog for traditionally techno Daft Punk, who drilled down their sound to a core that ended up calling to mind classic disco funk. To fer'sher, rilly do this summer jam justice, Janice and her Electric Mayhem bandmates should play the song relatively straight, set with a casino backdrop, perhaps – because, jokes – with few frills. The world famous Roots crew aside, they don't make house bands better than The Electric Mayhem, who have always had the chops to handle the classics, and can be psychedelic enough to experiment. They take hits and deliver the goods.

Daft Punk wears their helmets, y'know, always, so they're more likely than most to be sympathetic to the whole performance-as-construct thing. And “RAM” does nothing so well as it hearkens to a strong nostalgia for the '70s. Admit it, you can already hear Janice's voice singing “Like the legend of the phoenix...”

Katy Perry's HOT N COLD

Statler and Waldorf

There will never be a more sublimely Muppetational version of “Hot N Cold” than that of Ukranian polka band Los Colorados. Their viral smash had a perfect ratio of earnestness, cheesiness, quirkiness and catchiness, just like the best Muppets' material. This is the arrangement that doddering haterade addicts Statler and Waldorf should ape, taking the accordion accompaniment and adding a little Vaudeville to smugly celebrate their inability to ever be pleased by anyone but themselves.

Statler and Waldorf take all their satisfaction from the simplicity of their favorite, evergreen prank – moving the goal posts on approval-seeking performers at every opportunity for the purpose of utterly crushing their spirits. Mean is the joke that never gets old, that is, provided you have the malicious, unyielding hearts of these guys. Their core is one of antagonism, which is the central frustration of “Hot N Cold.”

But where Perry is suffering from someone's fickleness, the Muppets' resident hecklers revel in it, so the staging of this performance would require some creative inversion of the song's perspective and lyrics. Flip to “I'm hot when it's cold,” and other contrarian jibes, and punctuate it with a lot of one-liners and Ho-Ho-Ho's. Being mercurial can be a power move, which is what Perry is really railing against on this song, and the Muppets' resident hecklers embody that certain kind of control. The bit would have to end with Fozzie jeering the pair's performance, seeking justice for his years of torment. He'd fail, though, and end up the butt of the joke. Those that entertain themselves always get the last laugh.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah's MAPS

Gonzo the Great

Gonzo is a guy that could never quite catch a break, but for his nose. His outlying weirdness, even among a pack of weirdos, and subsequent self-awareness, always gave the character a lonely sort of depth. He seemed driven by his fascinations and fixations, from chicken-girlfriends to explosions to heights, and he committed to them all wholly, brashly, and to glorious catastrophe. The best quality of his music was a delicate soulfulness, never better evidenced than on his original “Muppet Movie” solo ballad, “I'm Going To Go Back There Someday,” although his version of Sinatra's “My Way,” was similarly fantastic. Gonzo puts himself out there, which is what makes him the Muppets' resident expert on the pangs of heartbreak.

He's not a sad character, exactly, he just seems to need things to love. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' mid-aughts anthem for romantic despair is an ideal platform for Gonzo to bare his weirdly unique soul once again. Merely summoning his scratchy voice pleading “Wait... They don't love you like I love you,” serves as a reminder that not every Muppet moment is born of slapstick or catastrophe. Their ability to move audiences and connect better than many human celebrities is what historically made them so worthy of celebration.

Gonzo loves his Things, whichever ones happen to have captured his imagination at a given moment. He's never too proud to be vulnerable, which is the key to unlocking “Maps'” beauty.

Fiona Apple's EVERY SINGLE NIGHT

Rowlf the Dog

When the Muppets want honor the best composers, Rowlf gets the call, and Fiona Apple is among the standout pop composers of her musical generation. The piano jazziness of her work is right in Rowlf's doghou-, er, wheelhouse. Both started their careers early – Rowlf was actually the first Muppet with a regular TV gig, going from Purina Dog Chow pitch-dog to sidekick on "The Jimmy Dean Show" in the early '60s before Henson finally sold his prime-time variety show, and Apple was only a teenager when her smash debut album, “Tidal,” went gold. While Rowlf moved beyond Purina, he remained a musical purist, which is why, given a field of modern singer-songwriters to choose from, he would probably pick Apple. And let's not pretend any red-blooded American dog can resist a “FiFi.”

Fiona Apple is the kind of artist that's always had a home with the Muppets. A distinct and original talent, she's been beating to the sound of her own drum ever since the time she hijacked the MTV Video Music Awards and turned an acceptance speech into a rejection of conformity and a testimonial to individuality. “Every Single Night,” the lead single on Apple's 2012 “The Idler Wheel...” album, has terrific pace for a Muppets sketch, its swells and releases afford built-in dramatic pressure and relief. The perfect sketch for this song would involve the gravely-voiced Rowlf simply trying to play this beautiful song on his piano while repeatedly being interrupted by chaotic distractions courtesy the rest of the gang. The concluding resignation would make for vintage Muppets morality. “Every single night, I endure the fight.” There's no quality the Muppets value more than resolute endurance, except perhaps the desire to “feel everything.”

Justin Timberlake's MIRRORS

Johnny Fiama and Sal Menila

“Kermit! Fozzie! Piggy! And some incredibly obscure Muppets that no one remembers!” This was the promise made in the premiere trailer for ABC's "the muppets." series. Well, meet the vaguely obscure Johnny Fiama and Sal Menila. Conceived during the Muppets' last foray into regular primetime, for "Muppets Tonight," Fiama is a sendup of mid-20th century hearthrob crooners (who are past their prime but whose bloated egos remain) and his monkey-mook bodyguard Sal, who is unnaturally attached to his boss and always hunting for a fight to prove it. They're a fun little send-up of the bubble of celebrity. Plus, I mean, one is a monkey.

No pop tune provides a better opportunity to poke at the preposterousness of celebrity and ego than Justin Timberlake's ode to the girl so beautiful she makes him think of himself. JT fancies himself a Rat Pack-type anyway, and Johnny Fiama probably remembers himself as a member, because he has hung with a pack of rats before and he's delusional.

This scene pretty much plays itself, with Sal and Johnny doing the old mimic-the-guy-opposite-you routine, hands making circles in synchronicity, and Sal persistently screwing up the duet by singing out of time. At “I don't wanna lose you now,” someone gets flung through a window. Cut to JT and Jimmy Fallon sitting next to Statler and Waldorf, jeering wildly. The joke's reflection bounces off itself for eternity.

Beyonce's XO

Beaker

Some songs are so powerfully sung that the vocal performance eclipses the importance of the lyrics. “XO” is Beyonce at her most iconic, a stirring showcase of her precision and command that encapsulates her diva persona at its best. It might be the most Beyonce song of all-time, and would remain recognizable even were it boiled down to a series of “mi mi”s.

Beaker is the put-upon Muppet, his gift is suffering through anything, so his attempts to sing Queen Bey's soaring ballad would have to be met with disaster. I'm thinking that Beaker is attempting to perform the song in a dark area, lit only by a single hanging bulb. And every time he Mi-Mi's his way through “Love me, lights out,” someone pulls the bulb's chain, and out they go. Combine the visual pun with the classic case of mounting frustration, ratchet things all the way up until they reach a vintage Muppets explosion, and this bit would deliver exactly the kind of payoff a Beyonce song demands.

Jay Z and Kanye West's OTIS

Rizzo the Rat and Pepe the “King” Prawn (feat. Rowlf the Dog as “Otis”)

“I invented swag, hokay?”

One is a streetwise, back-talking New Yorker, and the other is a boisterous and magnetic self-proclaimed king with some strained connections to the sea. Unlike Kermit, Piggy, and Fozzie, Rizzo and Pepe are Muppets still played by their original performers. Steve Whittmire and Bill Barretta are not living in anyone's shadows in these roles, just like Jay and Kanye proved they were in no one's shadow when they delivered the classic “Watch the Throne.” And nothing could more befit a Muppet show than having their two smallest take on two of rap's biggest.

Rowlf is best qualified to handle the Otis Redding accompaniment for this song, which would require some punchy lyrical rewrites.

“Dang Pepe and Riz, where the heck you been? Rats are getting so reckless -- stuntmen.”

[In full daredevil regalia, Gonzo wanders onstage]

“(Not now, you.)”

No one ever had more fun in a video than Jay and Kanye did tearing up that Maybach and stunting in front of that American flag in “Otis,” and that joyful extravagance is worth a Muppets revisit. Rizzo has Jay’s Brooklyn cool, and Pepe might be as self-congratulatory as West.  Say it with me; R-to-the-izzo, P-to-the-Pepe-hokay?

Britney Spears' TOXIC

Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Beaker, Dr. Julius Strangepork and Dr. Phil van Neuter

Put all of the Muppets' mad scientists in a room and something dangerous is bound to come out of it. Suddenly Britney's intoxication transforms into a nightmare where a monstrous creation of the doctors reigns down destruction on its makers in the confines of their laboratory. The creature would fly, of course, so when they sang “Too high, can't come down,” it would carry only innocuous, family-friendly, literal meaning.

“Toxic” is peak Britney, and is already pretty haunting as is. Its screechy strings feed an overall claustrophobia that's the perfect pitch for panic. Beaker and Honeydew are already favorites, but in 2015 it's all about the team-up, so get “Pigs in Space” vet(eran) Dr. Julius Strangepork involved and bring in “Muppets Tonight” vet(erinarian) Dr. Phil van Neuter to round out the doomed mad science-team. Maybe Britney Spears songs weren't written to be performed by guys in lab coats languishing in terror at what sins they have wrought against nature, but that doesn't make the concoction any less radioactive.

Kanye West's ONLY ONE

Robin the Frog

Robin is a sensitive little frog. He's soft-spoken, which puts him at odds with the guy that wrote this song in a session with Paul McCartney, but he's reflective, and perfect match for Kanye West's dreamy prayer of self-affirmation.

“You're not perfect, but you're not your mistakes,” is a sentiment in exact lockstep and philosophical alignment with the Muppets, who are never quite so good as they mean to be yet are all the more lovable for it. On the original show, Robin's greatest hit was “Halfway Down The Stairs,” a musical interpretation of an A.A. Milne poem that found profundity in the simplest of childhood discoveries. That juvenile serenity is exactly what Kanye's lullaby aspires to. Kanye's talked a lot about his admiration for the unchastened way five-year-olds engage the world around them, with wonder and innocence, and how he strives for that kind of creative freedom in his work.

The purity to those first experiences feeling small, devalued, isolated, and even invisible make them universal, which is the kind of acceptance Kanye strives for and what feeds his Michael Jackson fixation. It would be all too appropriate if it took a Muppet playing a Kanye West song for some people to take his artistry seriously.

Taylor Swift's OUT OF THE WOODS

Whatnots

If you're doing a Muppet show covering new pop songs and leave Taylor Swift out, you're doing it all wrong. There's nobody more original, playful and multi-talented in pop. The Muppets are one of the last refuges for unadulterated, puntastic literalism, and Swift's walking meme nature makes her ripe for spoofing. “Whatnots” are the made-to-order Muppets cast extras and role players, and for “Out Of The Woods,” it would be from their ranks that we find our Wolf and Red Riding Hood, negotiating their way through the forest in the scene.

To flip paradigms a bit, Red could be chasing a laid-low Wolf out of the woods, causing him to sing the Taylor banger in a panicked frenzy. Swift's best music has a timelessness to it, befitting the timeless fairy-tale imagery of the not-so-grim sketch. Besides, “Out of the Woods,” has the quality most essential to any Muppets musical performance – it makes for a terrific singalong.

Sia's CHANDELIER

Kermit the Frog

Occasionally, the burden of leadership gets to Kermit. Being responsible for the creative dreams of his every loved one, not to mention his own, is a job that's big, like a mountain, and important, like a river. His most memorable musical moments all involve him tipping his hand, and sharing some of his pressures and sorrows. In fact, it seems that sharing and acknowledging his anxieties with an audience is actually how the frog sheds them. “Rainbow Connection” and “Bein’ Green” are the most beloved examples of this, but I find “This Frog,” and “A Song From Kermit,” 1977 Sesame Street numbers, to pack equal emotional thrust. Making songs about the complexities of loneliness and interpersonal dynamics that are elemental enough that children can digest them is laudable for its creative ambition, a degree of ambition it shares with Sia's summons for the strength required to break self-destructive habits.

The reclusive Sia doesn't seem to want people to see the person behind the curtains any more than the Muppets do, and although we've already seen a performance of “Chandelier” by Possible Muppet Relative Kristin Wiig, giving Kermit a crack at it could recontextualize it for audiences. Sia and Kermit don't nurse the same wounds, but they are both largely shaped by social pressures. Neither wants to be a disappointment. Tailor the song for a Kermit-is-overwhelmed episode plotline, adapt the lyrics some so that the problem-solving frog could incant to himself “One, two, three/ One, two three- Think!” instead of slipping into Sad Kermit-ish dark recasting, and you could have a new iconic Kermit the Frog song.

Kermit's best songs share an aspiration for a certain kind of catharsis. He's always holding on for dear life, clinging to the hope that someday, he'll find it. They resolve exasperation and doubt with surrender and acceptance. As lessons go, like this song suggests, it's not an easy one.

Rihanna's BITCH BETTER HAVE MY MONEY

Miss Piggy

Kicking down a helicopter door, decked out in electric green boas, performing in front of A-listers and demanding what she's owed – Rihanna had to have considered the original boss (hog) bitch for a moment before she strutted out to debut “Bitch Better Have My Money” at the iHeartRadio Music Awards. Disney won't allow for the PG-13 cursing, but “pigs” substitutes for “bitch” well enough, and this matching promises to sizzle. Miss Piggy and Rihanna literally have everything in common. They are both iconic divas, share a love for a good song-and-dance man, both live by no laws other than their own, and they both own, generally.

Ri-Ri has never been more strident than on “BBHMM,” making it the perfect vehicle for Piggy, who embodied female forcefulness for a generation. Maybe Miss Piggy didn't karate-kick down doors so women could run in real life, but doesn't it feel like it happened? And even though Rihanna is an actual human being, doesn't she kind of feels like a fiction, a casual goddess of hedonism we collectively dreamed up? Their characters are strong enough, independent enough, that they can self-sustain. Neither woman would ever let someone else's truth get in the way of the story they have decided to tell.

A great performance is about the proper motivation. On “BBHMM,” Ri's motivated to get all she deserves. All Miss Piggy has ever wanted was to be considered a peer to divas like Rihanna, so here's her shot. Besides, those boas are in her favorite color.

Don't act like you forgot. Hi-yah-yah-yah.  

The Readmix: Hoth x Jotunheim and the January 2014 playlist

Today's curriculum

I'm a big advocate of the playlist-as-living-mixtape lifestyle. We are in an era where radio has long since been declared deceased, and where the tastemakers have all basically fundamentally been compromised. The protective walls of commercial music have come down, and active listeners can just as easily access a tine that was produced in someone's bedroom as they can something born of a major studio. While it isn't quite an even playing field, it is closer to it than ever been before. In this limitless musical landscape, we are completely empowered to chart our own musical constellation, cater it to our specific personal tastes, and form entire relationships with songs and musicians in a way that, historically, was mandatorily negotiated through a major corporation.

It's a great time to love music. You can envelop yourself in a personally-tailored soundtrack. But it's also completely overwhelming. We've got culture and media saturating our lives at all times. The only way to cultivate your sonic garden might be to spend entirely too much time on it.

Which is certainly what I do.

Given the over-attentiveness paid to my iTunes arrangement, it's only right to share this newest playlist, foist some opinions your way, and try and let you know how and why each track came to me and sounded like the earliest days of 2014. It is the Ice Age phase of the new year, with the entire country only thawing out once a week in order to watch titans do battle on frozen and foreign tundras, so read on to tune into Hoth x Jotunheim. Because I am a huge nerd.

"All you hear is tires,
click-clack, boom of the gats."

1) Phantom
Chester Watson



This kid, a teenager from the South I guess?, came across my path via the Shots Fired podcast. A hip hop radio show I'd never heard until I came across it via Stitcher, they had steered me the right way with dude Anderson Paak (who does what's basically a life-changing cover of Yeah Yeah Yeahs' MAPS on his Cover Art album), they played this song and shouted him out, it sounded like my kind of mellow vibeyness, so I hit it up on Youtube and whatever whatever I'm a fan.

This song is just super melodic and haunting, and really tonally on point. His rhyming is really unassuming and comfortable, and his voice really contrasts to the more accosting, put-on styles of guys like Chance the Rapper and Earl Sweatshirt, who, age-wise, are probably the dudes in what we might call this guy's draft class. He's not quite singing, it's like he's focused on cooperating with the sound.

What's most impressive is how he curates the sound of his ghostly phantom with his timbre, the loop, and the imagery. It's a hyper-focused grab bag that's extremely rad, like a corkboard in the world's most cultured coffee shop. That skill makes me confident that following up on him will prove worthwhile.

"Telling songs in the key of life,
you was on your Stevie."

2) Martyrs
Mick Jenkins



After the way Kanye used it on Blood on the Leaves, someone was going to have to sample Nina Simone's Strange Fruit in a way that could more readily be seen as contextually-appropriate to the song's storied legacy. Dude Mick Jenkins steps up, his rejoinder “I'm just with my n****s hangin'” plainly equivocating impoverished urban decay and social surrender with Strange Fruit's lynching imagery. Again, it's super haunting- terrifying really- but in such a way that it really honors its ambition.

Jenkins is really clever, and he illustrates his music with real quickness and dexterity while making something very specific. He's making Martyrs a composite of all this cultural shorthand we associate with, basically, hood shit. He's got Django on a horse, he's got a weird composite of James Franco and Gucci Mane's Spring Breakers characters, along with weaves and basketball dreams. It's all building this case for nihilism and fatalism. It's almost like it's a response to Lorde's Royals, a commentary that isn't quite a rebuttal but, since it's not quite in agreement, isn't quite complimentary, either. There's no substitute for friends in different areas with great, eclectic tastes, and it is to my old roommate in NYC that I owe credit on this particular cutting observational find.

Martyrs definitely gets richer with each listen. Which, considering the portrait of impoverished surrender it articulates, is probably ironic.

"I just need a reaction to keep it alive, baby"

3) Fertilizer
James Fauntleroy



You have no idea how much it thrilled me to unearth this gem from the dusty corners of the Internets. I came upon it while researching (although can we really call snooping around the Web “research?”) James Fauntleroy had blown me away with his contribution to Drake's phenomenal Girls Love Beyonce track, a Nothing Was The Same leftover that uses Destiny's Child fragments as well as James Blake ever could. Fauntleroy has a voice that is vulnerable and precise, and that delicate precision gives his rendition of the typically-female Destiny's Child Say My Name verse an unexpected authority. Fauntleroy had cropped up doing hooks here and there since, notably on J.Cole and Big Sean's most recent albums. You got the sense that he had a pretty big musical reach, due to the prestige of the his collaborations, but he definitely didn't seem high-profile.

So, having dug the limited stuff I'd heard, I go down the rabbit hole a little on him, come to find out he'd done a bunch of stuff I'd heard from another mid-level favorite of mine, Jhene Aiko, and worked on a good amount of Kanye's Cruel Summer album, mostly performing and being credited under the guise of Cocaine 80s. And that was all cool cool and whatever whatever.

Then I found Fertilizer.

I should note at this point that last year, in the lead-up to the release of channel ORANGE, I became pretty thoroughly obsessed with Frank Ocean. I heard Pyramids, which sent me backwards to Nostalgia, Ultra., which I devoured and is probably my favorite mixtape ever and a top-15 all time album. I was privileged to see Frank in a small venue just weeks after ORANGE's release, and at that point I already knew every word to every song in his catalog. When I go in, I go in hard. (#pause)

channel ORANGE was an interesting (and acclaimed) project, but one of my favorite layers to it was the way that Ocean really orchestrated it to feel like you he was tuning you into all these different stations along the way. He used sketches and interstitial tracks to compose this thematic collage that alluded to everything and made nothing explicit. One of these interstitial tracks was a 0:40 ditty called Fertilizer. “Fertilizer, I'll take bullshit if that's all you got.” That's all we get, then the tuner shifts and we move on from Thinking Bout You to Sierra Leone. It was a song you could appreciate without ever thinking too much of it, you assume it's just an unfinished fragment considered but cast aside as not worthy of inclusion in totality on the final album. It's a curiosity.

Well it turns out Fertilizer is a 2010 James Fauntleroy song, which Frank decided to cover for forty scant seconds on his 2012 major label debut.

And the full song turns out to be a bit of dimestore ear candy so sweet I think I gave myself an ear-cavity listening to it on repeat.

That I'd heard it, fragmented, as the third song on channel ORANGE, tucked right between the lovesick Thinkin Bout You and the spacey responsibility dream Sierra Leone, made this song super-fascinating to me. I'm dying to know why it was included in Ocean's major-label debut project, why it's the only song on the album without an Ocean writing credit, why for only 0:40. But more than anything, I was thrilled to find a throughline from Ocean to Fauntleroy, both of whose mastery of what the Academy confusingly calls “Urban Contemporary," has been among the most rewarding part of following pop music of the last couple years.

Fauntleroy has a needy garden in his heart that can only be filled by the bullshit of one negligent gardener. It's a sentiment that bore right through me. The desperate urgency and resignation to the anatomy of one-way relationships and crushes and power dynamics is familiar and universal, unless you've always been the one crushed on, I guess, in which case, go screw. Still, for a song about the absence of affections, it's incredibly upbeat and optimistic. It's pleading, but not victimized, as if the singer knows he's just as responsible for the problem as anyone. It lives in that moment before resentment sets in, when a lovestruck crusher still sees the two's union as an inevitability, despite all evidence to the contrary. Which, let's be honest, can be the most thrilling part.

"Though both can't be broken, I'm not
your heart, I'm your habit"

4) Beautifully Bad
Idle Warship AKA Talib Kweli and RES



Lyrical bar-setter Talib Kweli and syrupy golden vocalist RES have been collaborating for over a decade, first cropping up on my radar on my single favorite track of my collegiate era with Where Do We Go, off Kweli's 2002 Quality album. This song stood out even in those wild-west days of rampant music piracy and the infancy of internet-induced information overload, moodily challenging its listeners to take ownership of things as thematically broad as their own isolation, creativity and ambition, and the taught dynamic tension underlying all three. It was Kweli at his strongest, the “backpack rapper,” playing professor to his impressionable audience, with RES providing insulating  harmonies, keeping things in frame. I could never explain why it was my favorite out of the tens of thousands of songs I panned through in that exploratory era, but the fact was it certainly was the song most likely to be heard from outside my dorm room at any given time.

Fast forward a million years, and my man Kweli tweets that we need to check out this great Fleetwood Mac cover by his girl RES. It's phenomenal (and I will surely feel compelled to explore it another time), and sent me down another musical spelunking journey to see where she'd been since working on that song I loved a million years ago. Come to find out the two had worked on a few entire projects together as Idle Warship.

Beautifully Bad succeeds everywhere Where Do We Go did, in terms of demanding introspection, focusing on a single failing relationship instead of the ambitions of an entire generation. The vocalists almost seem to negotiate a sweet spot between singing and rapping where they can both perform comfortably and authentically, as opposed to donning the traditionally gendered roles of “rapper” and “singer.” They make a wonderfully complimentary pair, and really share the space of the song. Beautifully Bad tells the story of two people walking opposite directions away from the wreckage of a failed Great Romance. It's not an argument, because it lives in a moment that exists after all those have passed. Instead, it's a eulogy for something that was nearly magical, right up until the point it wasn't.

If we learned anything from Pacific Rim, it is that together we can build beautiful things. Of course, this makes it all the more tragic when they come crashing down, but even in that tragedy there's beauty (again, as illustrated so beautifully in Pacific Rim). Idle Warship proves both with their existence, collaboration and creative ambition.

You know how to drive in rain
and you decided not to make a change"

5) Honeymoon Avenue
Ariana Grande



It was never going to take very long for my pop-proclivity to reveal itself. I'm probably too old to be listening to Ariana Grande, but as long as her rangy vocals continue to evoke mid-90s, totally-in-her-prime Mariah Carey, I'm going to be giving her fair listens. As an avid comicbook guy, I'm used to enjoying it when one artist ably apes the style of another successful one. And while I know I'm SUPPOSED to hold that lack of originality against the imitator, I'm usually too distracted by all the enjoying I'm doing. Make no mistake, Grande sounds EXACTLY like Mariah, especially given the way her voice climbs. At a certain point, though, it's like, who cares who you're dunking LIKE? You're still throwing down WINDMILL REVERSE JAMS!

So again, I have no issue with someone lifting something that works. Which is convenient, since Honeymoon Avenue (the first song off Grande's Yours Truly album), begins with nearly the exact same orchestral string overture as the first song on Justin Timberlake's 20/20 Experience Pt. 1. It's a harmless little flourish that definitively demarcates the pop era it is participating in. The strings give way to very Glee-meets-RENT choir doo-wops as Grande, again channeling Carey, sprinkles coy little vocal exclamation marks about. The project is very glossily produced, but it can't diminish from how impressive it is to hear someone hit her marks the way that she does. Grande's age and career makes me think of modern collegiate NBA prospects, who are younger, more talented, more refined and more specialized than their predecessors. It's impossible to think of how prepared these kids seem without thinking about how that preparation must have shaped their entire youths. It's really remarkable. These kids these days, I tells ya. This is why one of my favorite hobbies is flippantly dismissing any and all 90s babies.

She sucked me in with her Big Sean and Mac Miller collaborations, and has won me over with her acrobatics on Honeymoon Avenue. 90s babies might not know ANYTHING, being that they missed the most important decade that I remember most of, but some maybe they learned some shit via osmosis or something. Because they certainly know some things about some good sounds.

"Then we mix it up, call it Pikachu"

6) Hands On The Wheel
ScHoolboy Q feat A$AP Rocky



Covers, right? Love 'em. I love the chart of music and influences they can map out. Love it when someone unexpected can own something unconventionally, in a manner that runs against type. Its gratification is something akin to karaoke, albeit at an at-least-passably professional level, which makes it, y'know, awesome. So a sample of a cover is something like a box within a box (within a box?), and while its anatomy is that much more insular, its appeal can be that much broader.

ScHoolboy Q's Hands On The Wheel samples this girl Lissie's cover of Kid Cudi's smash hit Pursuit of Happiness in an endeavor that would probably be best represented by some sort of Venn diagram visual aide. I mentioned karaoke and going against type, as that is one of my favorite parts of performance singing and which I think, when wielded properly, can be one of society's most subtly effective weapons against what we might call otherization. There is, of course, a fine line between participation and appropriation, and, contextually, as a straight white man I occupy pretty rarefied and risk-free territory when it comes to what the “type” is that I can go against. Big words and big ideas aside, all I mean is that doing Beyonce and Toni Braxton songs is really really fun, especially when the audience doesn't see it coming.

This type/code-switching was definitely part of the appeal and notoriety of Lissie's cover, a white folk singer covering a young black rapper's hit single (although it's worth noting that throughout Cudi's musical career he has gone to great lengths to distance himself from anything that might marginalize him as strictly a rapper, and that he's no stranger to the switching act himself, sampling pop-contemporary Lady Gaga's Poker Face on Make Her Say).

It's not fair to say whether Lissie was making some sort of statement with her cover, whether it was about her or Cudi or music or expectations, but who the performer is and what she is performing certainly informs its resonance. Top Dawg Entertainment's Q flipped it one more degree, co-opting the co-opt.

Kendrick Lamar has done the most to establish TDE as a thinking fan's rap label, but the entire crew has shown themselves to be deliberate and thoughtful in their creative approach, so while ScHoolboy is basically just making a getting-fucked-up banger anthem by plucking a good and familiar sound from wherever it crops up, its inclusive anatomy is no accident. It posits that, actually, here, at least, no one is appropriating anything; we're all just sharing the stuff that was made for all of us.

It is one of those quiet things that, again, to me, signifies an underlying racial and cultural progress that is taken as a given by the younger generation. They all just want weed and brews and to fuck once or twice. The arc of justice is long and bends towards beautiful interracial babies, just like The Matrix promised.

Oh, incidentally, Q and A$AP Rocky are really good at rapping, and this song goes hard. If you were wondering.

"A lotta brothers from the ghetto
got the gift of gab"

7) Ill Vibe
Busta Rhymes and Q-Tip



As I believe I've made clear, I remember the 90s. I don't know when the era became so mystified for me, being that most of what I remember about the decade is awkwardness and sexual frustration, but it is certainly a time that happened. I spent half the decade pretending that I was someone who didn't like rap music and then spent the subsequent decade doing everything in my power to catch up on everything I'd missed within the genre when I wasn't paying attention because I was too distracted by Metallica.

Busta Rhymes was the favorite rapper of my childhood best friend and hip-hop consigliere. He was cartoonish and broad and nimble and even if I didn't acclimate to him instantly, I could see his strengths. Q-Tip, I would later learn (again, didn't have it totally together in the 90s), was largely responsible for the kinds of mellow music I loved that came out of the era.

Me and my bestie would eventually get our chance to see Busta's cartoonishness up close, when he performed at our college during our underclassmen days. It was an absurd evening, complete with a woozily drunken and stoned crowd that wasn't entirely sure how to compose itself at a RAP SHOW, and an ornery Busta who, when dissatisfied with the audience participation during one of his hits, jeered the crowd and, unforgettably, told us all to put down the sandwich and get on a treadmill. This made it all the funnier when, years later, Bus' was alleged to be a part of a whole group of rappers vaguely implicated in a celebrity HGH sting. People in glass houses need to be careful where they scream at fisheye lenses, bruh.

In any case, Q and Busta came together and gave The Culture a stiff shot of nostalgia late last year with their The Abstract and The Dragon mixtape. Both have solo albums upcoming this year, and in today's all-important hype market, they crossed streams with a mix of old, new and forgotten stuff that reminds audiences of the power and consequence they wielded in the days when the power of celebrity and airplay was more concentrated. These guys are super talented, still, and if they have new things to say it'll bear listening. HGH or not, Busta still slams his verses with the power and precision of Barry Bonds, playing the part of ferocious dragon. Q-Tip sets the mood, giving Busta the boom-boom-bap flooring to build upon, and curating the (abstract, natch) sound that transports us to those halcyon, naïve Clinton years.

Some reunions are sad affairs where it is impossible to note anything but the powers that have been lost. Hip hop is advancing to middle age, though, so the fact that these dudes are doing it gracefully and crisis-free is, in and of itself, worth catching an ill vibe to. Word.

"Love ain't fun for me, it's a battlefield
and I got a big gun with me"

8) Love Is
Dutch Rebelle



I don't know a single reason why Dutch Rebelle shouldn't be a superstar. I'm just a guy with an iPod and some headphones and a slice of digital real estate and a lot of opinions, so whatinthefug do I know, but to me this Boston girl is, to borrow a local title that's currently going unused, The Truth. She popped up last year on a lot of year-end lists with her Married to the Music debut album. It was the aching and cinematic Runaway Bride that sold me, not only on her talents rhyming and singing, but her creative direction and well-tuned ear.

We haven't yet hit the time when female rappers are as respected and exposed as their male counterparts, and the ones that have begun to break through seem to share a hyper-ferocity they couple with a hyper-sexuality, as if there's some need to prove that they can “hang with the guys.” Rebelle is no pushover, she's as lyrical and canny as any contemporary, but she doesn't seem to need to be a swinging dick to represent herself. Her music is capable of dealing with her vulnerability as a strength, roundedly, making her work more approachable and relatable than someone like Azaelia Banks or Angel Haze. Which is totally unfair to everyone involved but oh well.

Love Is marks Rebelle's most precise and well-executed work to date. She's simultaneously strong and wounded in the a soulful ballad. Like Runaway Bride, it is a woman's song with a woman's perspective. It has R&B trappings, but plays to her strengths, storytelling the betrayal with vibrant detail.

Mainstream hip hop has evolved a lot the last few years, in terms of participation and pathos. There are feels rappers and there are punchliners and superficial plastics and living legends and everything in-between. But fifteen years after The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, it's still a boy's club, complete with all types of saloon doors in need of swinging open.

Dutch is that fly half of Lauryn Hill from the Doo-Wop (That Thing) video. Not because she has the look, though she does, or the bars, though she does, but because she's got the authenticity. Her songs reek of realness. If there's justice, she'll break all the way through. If she doesn't, well, somebody's gotta make Beantown Shit the official anthem of Boston's inevitable next sports championship, if only so the Dropkick Murphys guys can finally be put out to pasture.

"I'ma hit the dojo like Neo hit Morpheus
and see who got the plug like Dr. Kevorkian"

9) Daily
Michael Christmas



Rap is more differently inclusive than ever, which means there's more room than ever for the out-and-out weirdos. Michael Christmas, another Boston act on the come-up, is definitely one of those weirdos, whose distinctly clever and referential flow is in the same weight class as the latest by Joey Bada$$ or Mac Miller. Of the jams Christmas released in advance of his Is This Art? mixtape, farcical mission statement Michael Cera was catchier, but Daily, the Hot Pocket, pot-smoking and jerking off testimonial, is where he really embodies the well-intentioned burnout/underachiever-persona that Seth Rogan and all the other Judd Apotow-ites have made such a major part of our cultural lexicon over the last decade plus.

You're inclined to be like, “This dude is just normal,” again, like the players in an Apatow project, which, while true, takes the work's quality for granted and distracts from how talented and comfortable in their craft all the creatives really are. The end result is the same, too, where that ambient likeability translates to relatability which can, with the right breaks, subsequently translate to universality. To paraphrase (well, no, steal-a-phrase) another great millennial philosopher, Christmas may not end up as the voice of his generation, but he's certainly a voice of a generation. Which is probably more in keeping with his ambitions, anyway.

"If I was yours, and you were mine, would you do
me like you do him and have someone on the side?"

10) If U Were Mine
Nipsey Hu$$le feat. Sade & James Fauntleroy



The aforementioned James Fauntleroy-research-black hole I found myself sucked into also turned out this track, off Nipsey Hu$$le's Crenshaw mixtape. I just wanted to hear that dude's voice as many places as I could, even if it was merely him echoing the sped-up Sade sample looped throughout this song. Hussle had been somewhere around my radar since Crenshaw dropped, but I hadn't found that all-important point of access to his work until now. If U Were Mine is benign; in it Hussle is negotiating with someone that's crushing on him, trying to set honest realistic expectations for her while seeing if she's still down.

I couldn't help but be reminded of LL's Hey Lover, where Cool James Todd richly details this fantasy world built around and for the object of his affection. He offers the world, assuring her that their union would solve everything short of world peace. Of course, it's a fantasy; it won't come true. The gender roles are flipped on If U Were Mine, and Nipsey, playing the pragmatist, promises no more than he's willing to deliver while also picking apart the motivations of the girl making the proposition.

I dig that Hussle never out-and-out rejects her, he just teases out the scenario and lets the story speak for itself. There's a gap between Hey Lover and If You Were Mine, it involves the respect with which each rapper is explaining the situation to his respective prospective, that I can't help but think speaks well of gender equality's cultural evolution in the nearly twenty years between releases. Nobody's motivations are totally pure, but there's a baseline respect with the way Hussle holds this girl accountable to her proposal that LL's pleading but knowing mansplainin' lacks. Maybe it's just a triumph of laissez-faire hookup culture, I don't know, but it seems more honest and on more balanced footing.

It's a fun track, and Sade, Fauntleroy, and Nipsey Hussle's voices all blend well. I found Hussle's ideas on fan culture and artist ownership and the Internet and direct sales and involvement in the new and unstable economy of the recording industry to be, like, trenchant? And probably telling about the direction of all produced content in a world where content has been rendered free but for those who pay voluntarily. So the dude seems worth paying attention to, going forward.

"Rather be alone than unhappy"

11) It's Not Right But It's Okay
Chvrches


Everybody tells me I gotta listen to Chrvches, because they play like a brand of synth R&B with a delicate female lead vocalist and I love Metric so how could it not be a fit, but I had, to date, lacked that entry point to their catalog. Their Whitney Houston cover, given both the practice and the subject, seemed like the maximal opportunity for they and I to see how we all get along.

It's a take that is well-served by the huge stylistic gap between it and the original. It's upbeat, slick and sparse. The lead singer doesn't make the mistake of attempting to mimic Whitney's vocal gymnastics (as karaoke jockeys across the globe collectively shudder), and really succeeds in containing the intensity of the song within the range she dictates. It's not as complimentary to the original as a lot of the covers I gravitate towards, but it's a very confident and specific take. It'll be that confidence that makes me curious about Chvrches in their own, original work, which I now can at least begin to approach.

"Don't think I'm just his little wife"

12) ***Flawless
Beyonce



Beyonce is America's only real superhero. Think about it; she's got the origin story, the celebrity, the acumen, and the let's-just-say-it flawless reputation. No one has more fans, or bigger ones.

For those that might self-identify as part of the Destiny's Child generation of girls, Beyonce is a real-life Disney princess all grown up, complete with a coronation and a Hollywood happy-ending husband. It might be that she serves as a beacon of sisterhood from a bygone age of Girl Power that makes her so seemingly impossibly popular among women. Guys don't have an immediately apparent analogous hero. For men, the only unifying figure even nearly as universally idolized and beloved has got to be Batman.

Beyonce's most impressive feat is the way she wears the crown without ever seeming to break a sweat under the crushing weight its burden of perfection must carry. The culture is shocked when even the slightest cracks begin to show, but even then negativity fails to stick to her the way it does so many contemporaries. Those biggest stars are the ones most closely scrutinized, so when the biggest acts deliver in the biggest way, as Beyonce did with BEYONCE, its impressiveness is matched by its improbability.

Our constant consumption of content and messaging has fostered an environment where hype is like a cultural high-fructose corn syrup, insidiously rotting our insides and expectations. The impossible bar set by hype is very probably why this album was released without any advance warning. There was no time to envision this project being anything other than what it actually was, making it impossible to disappoint.

***Flawless is Beyonce's superhero testimonial. It's an ownership of her entire mythology, and the inclusion of Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche's feminist TED talk pushes its scope even further. A superhero, like a celebrity athlete, is measured by his or her opponent, and Beyonce has set her sights on misogyny and gender inequity, as well as a culture whose willingness to celebrate her life and career is contingent on her credentials in the historically subservient roles of wife and mother. She's taking on a big fight, but if she is going to be ladies' (FLAWLESS) biggest champion since Wonder Woman, it is really her only worthy adversary.

She wears an armor powered by the belief a generation of women has placed in her, and gives the world the visage of immaculate perfection it demands. But she doesn't surrender it, coyly, deferentially; she flaunts it, brusquely, authoritatively. She dictates the terms to let her acolytes know that it is what they should be doing, too, and that it is what the world should expect and accept of them.

Before there was BEYONCE the superhero, there was Ms Knowles, the secret identity. The Star Search scenes that bookend ***Flawless highlight the imperfection and failures that compose the messy reality of her own inward personal origin story. Girls' TYME, the precursor to Destiny's Child, loses its bid at fame. The devastation it must have meant to an 11-year-old Beyonce is obvious and self-evident. It's a tip of her hand, a reminder to the audience that, like magic, perfection isn't a reality but a well-orchestrated illusion.

Still, mastery of the illusion is a feat in and of itself. After all, I woke up like this.

"Wanted to spread them legs like you number 23"

13) Lay Down
Fabolous feat. Ryan Leslie



Fabolous had lit the New York streets on fire over the holidays with his Soul Tape 3 mixtape, as I understood it, and, being that I'm bitchmade, it was the Ryan Leslie track that I had to check into first. As you might expect from a Leslie collaboration, Lay Down is a tender ballad, free of aggressiveness. Fabo has his walls down, the cat-and-mouse game of courtship has already been resolved, so he can comfortably bask in the resulting intimate trust as it plays out in the boudoir.

Lay Down is a strikingly grown-folk song. The patience of its cadence and rhythm makes high-tempo urgency seem foolishly immature. Young bucks might work themselves into a frenzy, but on this song, no one has anything to prove. It displays the kind of confidence that only comes with experience and the kind of curiosity that romance fosters best. Leslie croons and Fabo narrates and the lights are lowered and grown-folks do grown-folk things without reservation.

Fabolous just seems so much more grateful for his partner than most rappers aspire to be in their attempts at love songs. The gratitude is the sort that could only exist between peers, which gives it a much more heartfelt resonance. Leslie is also totally welcoming and nonthreatening, which is, of course, no surprise.

Anyway the fact that I even care if a song about nothing but sleeping together aspires to some sort of equity probably just proves how and why I'm bitchmade. Always caring about people's feelings and shit...

"Cookie monster."

14) Cookie
R. Kelly


Will R. Kelly force every music consumer to also become some sort of ethicist?

I'm not sure what R. Kelly's legal history means to our standards for cultural participants. I don't know if listening to R. Kelly songs empowers him to abuse others, and, without being overly relativist, I'm not sure if or how my attentions empower any famous person to do despicable things.

This being the case, I am going to take advantage of and underdeveloped and under-supervised entity and steal R.Kelly's album from the Internet without his consent, and advocate you do the same. It's nice to find a backdoor ethical loophole and payout to occasional piracy.

Make no mistake, the Black Panties album is a nymphomaniacal masterpiece. It's sixty-nine (!) minutes of pure, prime-grade freakiness. Casual vulgarity doesn't come to anyone as naturally as it does to R.Kelly. It's so casual, in fact, that after immersing yourself in it for long enough, you might even get used to it, and before you know it, you're belting out “Oooo like an Oreo, I love to lick the middle like an Oreo,” as if that was even remotely acceptable behavior in any civilized society. But goddamn if it isn't catchy as shit. Although “pervasive,” might be the better word.

Still, when Kelly breaks into “Cookie, cookie, cookie, I'm your Cookie Monster,” you can't help but wonder whether he's willfully trolling us all or if his lack of self-awareness is so absolute that he could possibly fail to recognize how casting yourself as a Sesame Street character might be a questionable decision for a man that's been repeatedly and publicly accused of inappropriate behavior with children.

If his apparent failings as a human being can be compartmentalized, his musicianship can be duly celebrated. He clearly aspires to be a sexual revolutionary of some sort, fighting a war against repression; not only repression of desires but even of the conversations around sex and sexuality. Which has merit?

Sadly, the affirming, let's-all-be-freaks-together message of Kelly's music is pretty incongruous with the reputation of a man who's best known for (probably/basically/definitely) peeing on a fifteen-year-old child in order to get his rocks off. It kind of sucks that we don't get to choose who gets to be our geniuses.

I'm someone who has gone to extraordinary lengths in erecting mental barriers of plausible deniability around the life and times of Michael Jackson because the alternative would make loving his music too heartbreakingly difficult. Ultimately, we negotiate our relationships with the artists whose work we allow into our lives individually. Who they are and what goes on in their lives are things that only matter as much as we decide they do, and that decision is really the point where we begin to weave our own narrative into theirs. It's where we decide their context for ourselves.

And contextualizing art for yourself can probably be pretty cool or whatever.

---

Brought to you by-

So yeah, it's cold and the bedsheets are hip-hot and that brew of lyrcism, observation, affection and discovery is Hoth x Jotunheim. If this has all gone well, you've gotten the chance to hear a story while listening to some music in some sort of weird essay-meets-listening-session amalgamation. These 14 songs will be on steady repeat on my ipod for the next three weeks, running over and over, like Casey Kasum playing his top-40 to an audience of one, because I'm into repetition. Then I'll move on to a new set, probably made up of largely the same bones of this one, but with whatever comes into my life in the next few weeks added, and that will get the repeat-treatment, because I'm into repetition. Later still I'll be able to come back to Hoth x Jotenheim, hopefully from the warm of spring, and have that little flash of exactly enough tupperware-sealed nostalgia.

Hope the highlighting and sequencing pleases. Appreciate you appreciating the appreciation. Thanks for listening.