sentiment

"Sometimes I am just grateful that I can still cry. Because being numb is an even worse reality, and very few people seem to return from that."

I did not cry the first time I heard those words spoken by Theodore Cale Schafer on "4pm," the opening track of claire rousay's sentiment. Embarrassingly, I also did not recognize the voice as Theodore's. I had probably heard it a dozen times before I read his name in the liner notes. Theodore is a friend, kind of. He's the kind of person I'd refer to as "a friend" if I was talking to someone else and they mentioned his name. I'm not sure if he would do the same for me, though it's difficult to imagine anyone talking about me when I'm not there. We've met in person a few times, we played one or two shows together, and he let me release some music he made on a netlabel I used to run. We might have been in the same group chat for a while. He will always be, for the purpose of casual conversations with certain peers, the kind that I have in my imagination far more often than in real life, "a friend." These days, most of my friends are like that.

For a long time, I didn't understand why some people struggle with solitude. I still don't really empathize when people talk about being alone like it's something to be endured or overcome. I'm good at being alone. I've been doing it constantly for several years. I used to think it made me stronger: a better artist, a better thinker. Maybe it did at one point. But I've come kicking and screaming to the realization that I need connection in order to live well; that solitude has made my world small, stale, and disenchanted. I feel an immediate kinship with claire rousay's music, becauase it expresses both this smallness and the magical intuition of something bigger, something realer.

sentiment's cover art is a photo of rousay in her bedroom. She's lying in bed with a guitar, hand resting on her pillow, looking over it at the camera; on the side table in front of her are two discarded Dale's Pale Ale beer cans, a pack of cigarettes, some notebooks and electronics. rousay recreated "the sentiment bedroom" as a stage design for her 2024 tour dates, and as an interactive installation in Toronto commissioned by Porsche. It reminded me of my first and only artwork shown in an institutional setting: a recreation of my childhood bedroom that I made for Miami Art Basel in 2011, when I was briefly an art world microcelebrity. At fourteen I wasn't very reflective about what it "meant" to do this. Like most teenagers, I treasured my private space and possessions. At the time, a reviewer of the show compared my installation to "My Bed" by Tracey Emin. But unlike Emin and rousay, I didn't show my unmade bed, my clutter, my trash. I carefully staged a scene with objects I liked, trinkets I thought would tell an interesting story about me. There was some youthful pride involved. But there's some adolescence to sentiment too.

I never really got into emo music. I was a member of the Polyvinyl Record Club as a preteen and got a couple Owen CDs in the mail, and my first girlfriend in high school was into American Football and Joyce Manor. I think what I found repellent about it was the directness, the diaristic honesty and lack of self-conscious abstraction. I've always been too thoughtful, too eager to reinterpret and represent things to be properly in touch with my emotions. I'm easily embarrassed. By the time you're reading this I've edited every intuition into something less intuitive, every clarity into something more obscure.

I was familiar with rousay's music, mainly through her collaborations with More Eaze (who released two great albums this year). I loved their 2022 album Never Stop Texting Me, probably the most obvious precursor to sentiment. Formally it leans more pop punk or hyperpop, but with a kind of bedroom sensibility that reminded me of the blog era. It doesn't use autotune as an ironic or referential thing, but in the old fashioned way, as an aid to expression. Still, I wasn't quite prepared for the gentle directness with which rousay uses the tool across sentiment, beginning with "head". It's kind of startling, and I wouldn't really blame someone for being turned off by it. But I am moved by it over and over again.

rousay has been very modestly open about being in recovery: she posted in September that she was 100 days sober, and I'm pretty sure a recent post about a "little list of resentments" refers to the fourth step of Alcoholics Anonymous. It was immensely gratifying to learn this after I had become so close to her music in the early stages of my own recovery. (I've been in rehab three times this year; sentiment came out in between stays one and two.) Even without knowing anything about rousay's life, I felt that sentiment very plainly spoke to what I was feeling in the blurred transition from addiction to recovery, a haze from which I've yet to fully emerge.

I cry a lot now. The first big one came in detox, when I read Virgina Woolf's The Waves while heavily sedated. Since then it has been all kinds of things: sad, joyful, both, often neither. It's been books, commercials, dreams, conversations, walks, intrusive thoughts, mild discomforts, silences. Last night it was a line Patricia Arquette says to Nicolas Cage in Bringing out the Dead: "No one asked you to suffer. That was your idea." Today, it was my friend Theodore's voice.

Fake city, real city

The protagonist of Megalopolis, an architect named Cesar Catilina, has some kind of superpower allowing him to stop and control time. He only uses it a few times, and its symbolic meaning is ambiguous. It seems to represent powers associated with both art and love. In an early scene, he stops time at the moment an apartment building is demolished in preparation for his utopian construction project; a character named Julia Cicero, apparently the only other person who can see his time manipulation, happens to be standing nearby. Later, after a prolonged, expositionally awkward courtship, the two stand on construction beams suspended above the city of New Rome while Catilina frets: his power has stopped working. He analogizes this to a state of creative ineptitude. Julia leans across the yellow chasm to embrace Cesar, and the digitally composited clouds in the background slow to a halt.

Megalopolis is a psychedelic film, in both the colloquial sense and the etymological sense of "mind-manifesting." It has no main argument, no total system of thought, and all of the attempts I've seen to describe or critique its "politics" have seemed to misunderstand it on a basic level. Its didactic monologues and literary citations wander back in intellectual history all the way to the origins of ethics and politics, repeating foundational ideas and playing with them in vague and sometimes contradictory ways. The past is stony language and the future is never-ending revelation, unfolding in a struggle that threatens all foundations.

So what does the future look like? Others have already pointed out that Catilina's "megalopolis" is basically just the "how society would look if..." meme, but yellow. His major architectural innovations, or at least the ones we see, are moving sidewalks, spherical cars on rails, and buildings that look like flowers. The movie is less concerned with the material specifics of Cesar's utopia than with the painful process of its realization: a strange political drama that seems to be happening far above the squalid conditions in which normal citizens of New Rome live, which we see only brief images of.

Catilina is in charge of something called the "Design Authority," which is presumably a branch of the municipal government but also seems to possess its own autonomy. Mayor Franklin Cicero, Julia's father, is a stubborn pragmatist who opposes Catilina's idealism. He's very unpopular for some unknown reason; he is booed whenever he appears in public, while Catilina is followed by paparazzi and questioned about his philosophy and personal life. This is weird, given that Cicero seems genuine in his belief that power should be used to address the everyday problems of the present, while Catilina utilizes his familial connection to the mega-wealthy banker Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight, in a truly insane performance) to dream a utopia that requires, in his view, sacrificing the "now," himself, everyone and everything else to the "forever."

Megalopolis self-consciously navigates timeliness and timelessness. The one point at which I think it legitimately gets in its own way is at the end of a long sequence set in the "Coliseum" (Madison Square Garden), when it veers into a brief subplot dealing with deepfakes and cancel culture. This and another digression near the end, which involves Shia Labeouf and conspicuous Nazi imagery, feel shoehorned in as signals of an awkward, but maybe obligatory, intention to make the film speak to our present. Like his protagonist, Coppola struggles to come up with anything vital to say about the now, instead limply indicating his disapproval. But my issue with the deepfake bit isn't that it's cringe — the whole film is epically, transcendentally cringe — it's just kind of boring and not funny, the only drag on a film that is otherwise consistently engaging and hilarious.

There's an understandable temptation to compare Megalopolis to other big-budget films with similarly uncanny postmodernist aesthetics, but to me its more interesting kinship is with the films of Neil Breen. In films like Fateful Findings and Pass Thru, Breen plays misunderstood geniuses and messiahs who wield supernatural powers in their struggle against the corrupt, short-sighted authorities of society. Breen has been praised and mocked for his lack of conventional inhibitions as a filmmaker. He takes wild creative liberties with narrative, editing, line delivery, and visual effects in order to convey an extremely urgent message, of profound importance for the future of humanity, that always seems to get partially lost or distorted on its way to us. Watching a Neil Breen film is sort of like a psychedelic experience: a series of strange images and language fragments that alternately provoke uncontrolled laughter and curious reflection. With Megalopolis, Coppola is working in that same register, but he's doing it with a hundred million dollars and forty years of rumination on the mainstream culture.

The value of music

When I play chicken with Callahan & Witscher, refusing to crack a smile, am I playing a role in a comedy routine or in a Socratic dialogue about art? And, anticipating the obvious answer, what does it mean to do both at the same time? Allowing laughter to punctuate tortured reflection; welcoming the irruption of the highest sincerity into the everyday languor of self-deprecating irony.

"Think Differently" is a polemic (even if they don't think it is) in the form of musical comedy (even if it is, in fact, gravely serious). It's not a shitpost or an inside joke. It's not very good music (more on this below), but it has an aura of importance. It seems rather obviously addressed to the most tragically online, scene-entrenched experimental music people, despite the vaguely universal object of its pseudo-criticism. We feel compelled to reply, with some carefully measured mixture of snark and earnestness, to the question it asks: "How do you judge a music's worth?"

There are tired, but forever unresolved, questions about irony and pastiche that immediately rise to the surface. Callahan & Witscher are aware that they sound like "jesters in agony" ("Columbus"), jaded scenesters making a wry joke of their own abjection (winking here) as experimental music lifers. But they want you to know that their worldview is more expansive, actually; that their wholesome American palates, sharpened by life on the road and augmented by avant-garde bonafides, accommodate an uncommonly rich media diet; that they care too much, they know, about a bunch of weird old shit and weird old ideas, but that they also know a little bit about the younger generation, and (winking again here) maybe they know it better, in some way, than it knows itself. But the onslaught of samples and references is not an appeal to relevance or a gesture of identification. (Nor would sitting down and trying to list all of them reveal anything important; though the ones that amuse or irk you the most — for me it's AI Anna Khachiyan, the PornHub break, and the Metal Gear Solid alert sound — might help you identify your symptoms of the disorder for which "Think Differently" wants to serve as a diagnostic.) There's a purely quantitative excess to "Think Differently" that stands in front of and obscures a deeper meditation on value and music.

"Quantitative excess" — as a collector, music is worth the money I pay for it, or the space it takes up in my room. As a performer, it's worth the cash I make at the door, or the attention and esteem I receive, packaged into metrics by YouTube and Bandcamp. As a critic, it's worth, for example, 3/5. But I've never been any one of those things to the exclusion of everything else, had any one of those relationships to music without the others; and taken individually, these kinds of value seem obviously extraneous and beside the point. Looking back at my life, I've often had a vague feeling that music is worth more than anything, holds value beyond anything I could give or risk. But I have never done anything for music. Music has been a force, a function, or an organizing idea of the exchanges I've made with people, with the world. It's hard to say whether music has any value at all.

That ambiguity is central to the confused affect of "Think Differently" — a kind of longing for something that may have never existed. The choice of 2000s alternative rock as the nexus of stylistic reference isn't arbitrary; it points to an outmoded relationship between the mainstream and the underground, an anachronistic framework of cultural exchange. But "Think Differently" isn't a nostalgia trip — it pulls from its source material in a way that feels contemporary with broader tendencies in music. It has parallel sensibilities to something like 100 Gecs, for example, albeit without the crossover poptimism (and for that very reason some of you will wince at the comparison). They know how broadly unappealing this music is: "At this point, any peers of mine or anyone older just think that what we're doing is just a gimmick, or some sort of cynical joke. And anyone younger just thinks, oh, look at these old guys trying to do this aesthetic but doing a bad job at it" ("Won't Let You Go").

My balanced take, as someone born on the Millennial-Gen Z cusp: it's a gimmick, or some sort of cynical joke, and it's also old guys trying to do this aesthetic but doing a bad job at it. But as a jaded, burnt-out former experimental musician and critic, I can't help but be a little moved by it. And unlike most hyperpop, it doesn't viscerally offend my taste — "Who Knows Where The Time Goes" and "Columbus" are actually not bad songs, I think. But I don't think it's unfair to say that Callahan & Witscher aren't great songwriters. That this feels like a pretty whatever criticism suggests a more substantial one about why they chose to deal with these things in song form in the first place. But what is admirable about "Think Differently" is precisely its stubbornness, its zealotry. Callahan & Witscher are relentless partisans of music. To defend it, they're willing to risk coming off like a couple of cynical losers, which isn't much, but it's more than most of us have to give.