56. WHY? - “This Ole King”

As many of you might already know, WHY? is arguably my favorite band. I don’t usually like to use the term favorite – especially when it comes to bands/artists, because it carries with it a sense of finality and permanence, or rather a clear and unquestionable hierarchy, and I don’t like hierarchies. I feel like there can, and should, be a plurality to everything. Nothing should be set in stone or final, because then there are these self-imposed limitations, these arbitrary boxes that we breathe into existence and then find ourselves trapped within.

I didn’t sleep much last night. Is it obvious? I tend to ramble when I’m tired and trying to be coherently intellectual. Anyway, I digress.

What I mean to say by all of this is that WHY? is special. Yoni Wolf has a consistency to his craft (which is why he’s one of the three most influential artists to affect my life), and yet at the same time the music he creates is constantly changing, vacillating between the dual pull of Hip-Hop and Indie Rock. It lives within this nebulous realm that defies definition or convention, and because of that its beautiful. It stretches and leaps past the edges of expectation, sometimes falling in the process, but even when it falls its beautiful, somehow turning the kitsch and strange into something that upon repeated listens becomes just as infectious and undeniable as the rest of his work.

Now this jam is far from strange, but it remains unique. It’s firmly in the vein of WHY?, and yet at the same time it manages to evolve their sound. The rhythm is the backbone of the track, plodding along like the individual passing of each day. Its at once monotonous, trapped within the unraveling of time, and dynamic, like the adult that manages to hold onto their imagination and then use it to pierce through the confining veil of reality. There’s a perpetual hope throughout, one that rides the waves of life and carries on despite all of the ups and downs. Its resilient, accepting fate in order to direct it.