I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: KELSEY LU-“Due West” (2019).

I hadn’t intended to listen to so much of the Kelsey Lu album, but the third track was the one produced by Skrillex and I was curious what it would sound like.

I was expecting something very dancey and poppy.  It is nowhere near as over the top as I would have imagined.  Rather, it has a wonderful subtle hook in the bridge just because she sings a few words faster than the other.  Nearly everything else she sings is soft and slow, this little uptick is really cool.

Of the three songs, this is certainly the peppiest. It has some catchy electronic drums and definitive dance quality.  It’s still remarkably understate.

But i can see that the whole album could have sounded very different had she picked different producers.

The song ends with a surprisingly long guitar passage.  It is gentle and sweet with what sounds like crickets playing in the background.

I really don;t know all that much about Skrillex, but I think he’s a wild dancey EDM kinda guy.  The little I know leaves me astonished that he could produce something so subtle and pretty.

[READ: May 1, 2019] “Addis Ababa, 1977”

This is an excerpt from the novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.

It is a horrifying example of what it was like to grow up in Ethiopia in 1977.

The bedroom is a wreck and letters are scattered all over.  He will forever be able to see the room, the house, like this.

Soldiers have arrived. The house guards had already left (begging forgiveness as they fled).  There are three soldiers in the house and at least four waiting in the truck,

The lead solider pushes his father in to the room, considering him weak and vulnerable.  The soldiers can’t be more than a year or two older than the narrator.

The father mentions names as a way of assuaging punishment but the men he stated are already dead or in jail and nothing will diminish the trouble ahead.

A solider spits on the carpet and then hits his father with the butt of his rifle.  Is this what they were taught: Spit then hit.

The soldiers run into the bedroom (that’s where people keep valuable things) and begin trashing the room.

The solider return with the narrator’s fliers.  The soldiers must know that thee fliers cannot belong to an older man, but they interrogate him nonetheless. Who gave you this?  What is your role with this organization?

He lies and says he found them and brought them home throw away.  But that just leads to kicks until his father is slumped on the floor.

His father, over what seems like ten minutes, struggles to his feet as the soldiers clap sarcastically.

The narrator prays for the soldiers’ deaths or for the whole house to collapse so that no one survives this ordeal.

The soldiers escorted his father away at gunpoint.  He looked back and the narrator hopes that he saw his family not as individuals but “as a world, one he could claim to have created.”

But the narrator knows he didn’t look back for his own benefit, “He always believed in making a lasting impression.”

I wonder what else happens in this story.

Well, that’s easily discovered:

Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian immigrant living in Washington, D.C. after fleeing his country’s revolution seventeen years earlier. Running a failing grocery store he ruminates on the past as he faces his own inward crisis of displacement and identity while simultaneously marveling at the gentrification of his neighborhood

I see also that it won several awards.  I may have to check this out.