30 Days in 60 Minutes: June 2020

Featuring DJ Python, The 1975 feat. Cutty Ranks, Metro Area and "Resident Advisor" as a discovery tool for electronic tourists

Upon the fifth anniversary of Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher, our pal Larry Fitzmaurice asked whether it might actually be underrated at this point. It’s a bold claim, especially coming from someone who’s taken up the task of being the foremost expert on 2020 music. And it’s a question that immediately begs another question, i.e., what would it take for one of the most successful and immediately influential star-making indie records of the 2020s to be properly rated?

I’m not picking on Larry, this happens literally all the time; for the life of me, I cannot find it, but I’d say the epitome of this phenomenon was a piece from 2017 or so in Vulture or something that called Rihanna “underappreciated.” Besides, I can see where he’s coming from. Maybe it’s the curiously low placement on Pitchfork’s mid-decade list (#44) suggesting that there’s already been a generational shift on this era of indie rock; I’m not so sure of that, given that Yves Tumor and Perfume Genius’ 2020 albums are right ahead of it. This isn’t like the immediate (and inevitable) backlash that met Funeral; as I found out while writing its 20th anniversary piece, about six months after it was Pitchfork’s album of the year, it slid to #45 on the mid-decade list, right behind Mclusky and Deerhoof. When we made the 2000s list, it was back to #2, right behind Kid A. Maybe that happens here?

It’s possible he’s sensing more of a fatigue setting in around the whole boygenius camp, a release of an opinion held by a repressed whisper network that the record was nowhere near as good as it was popular. Way too many people I knew in real life (most often, queer women over the age of 35) expressed feeling guilty that they thought the album was kinda boring because they understood it was a public good and they liked the people who made it. Then again, is the fairly blah reception of the new Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker projects a sign of boygenius fatigue or just an honest assessment of both of them releasing some of their least essential work?

I think the best (or even only) argument you can make for Punisher being underrated is that it’s underrated in the same way that, like, Ten or Is This It is underrated - try to revisit it divorced from the thousands upon thousands of shitty copycat artists that popped up immediately afterwards and your reflexive disgust at that sound now and recognize how the past five years should be seen as a confirmation of its singular genius.

Punisher was an album I enjoyed quite a bit in 2020, though I know deep down that I wasn’t really capable of loving it the way I would have if I was between the ages of 18-24; it’s clearly functioning as the Transatlanticism or The Execution of All Things or Lifted or Funeral of its generation (it’s too emo to be The Reminder). But my definitive Punisher experience had nothing at all to do with actually listening to the record. As I prepared for a federally mandated day off from work that I hadn’t gotten until four years ago, the announcements of Punisher’s five-year anniversary reminded me of the outcry for Phoebe Bridgers to delay its release date out of respect for Juneteenth.

It is, in its own way, a definitive 2020 moment, a combination of vast swaths of Americans finding out that [checks] racism still existed, the social pressure to acknowledge said fact and said swaths of people having no experience knowing what to do in these situations. Lest you think this request was solely aimed at the biggest available target, the same demands were made of an Owen album.

The entire point of this project is to revisit songs and trends that help me get a better sense of what was actually happening in my life at the time - especially at a stage where I’m happily married, extremely unlikely to change jobs and even less likely to move cities. The big stuff is in the past, for the most part, it’s all just incremental changes. But that gets difficult looking into the summer of 2020, which even with the gift of hindsight, still feels every bit as much of an undefined blob of time interrupted only by short bursts of protest in streets and, more often, weird internet stuff that came from everyone spending 99% of their waking hours on the internet.

I was fortunate enough to not only have a job, but a job that required me to leave the house every day to break up the monotony. But I also remember trying to combat the ambient dread of the present the way I typically do, i.e., by going a layer deeper into various forms of electronic music, past the canon of MVPs into the perennial All-Stars. Hopefully, I get to the Remember Some Guys of the Honest Jon’s realm some day.

(playlist below)