#the simplicity of the whole bit with chuck and the impala

[boywifesammy]

i just reached swan song in my rewatch.

if spn ended here… i’d be happy. more than. it’s a beautiful and bittersweet closure to a heart ache of a show. it wraps everything up beautifully. it takes sam, who viewed himself as a monster all his life, who was constantly labelled by everyone around him as a powerless junkie, and it lets him take over. hell, even SAM said himself that he views himself as less than everyone else. he knows his weaknesses and his failures yet he still said yes. he still fought. and in the end, it was his HUMANITY that brought him back. it was dean and the small memories of happiness that he holds so tight. sam just learnt that his entire LIFE was a lie orchestrated by azazel— but who he is? his family? dean? that’s all his. so in that last moment, by having sam regain control, it’s really the ultimate statement of humanity. he is not a monster. he is so very human that he fought the devil and won. isn’t that amazing??

also… dean in the aftermath. even though he lived through the apocalypse and lost his whole fucking world in one fell swoop, he kept his promise. he did what sam asked of him. he shed the cyclic revenge-fury-anger fate that his father instilled in him and he broke free. he let go, despite how much it broke him inside. every time i think about it, it makes my entire body ache. the sheer amount of grief and emotion that dean must harbour is unfathomable. the pressure he is under is impossibly crushing. but he keeps going on. he lives. he does it one day at a time, and he does it in his brother’s memory.

there is just something so fucking heartbreaking about that, about dean who will never fill the hole in his chest, who will never stop missing sam and seeing him in his dreams and wondering what if but who CHOSES to live. who choses to build up from ground fucking zero and make something of the life that sam fought for. to honour his last dying wish even if it killed him inside because he can finally acknowledge that he is more than sam’s keeper. he is his brother. he respects and trusts him, and he treats him like his own person. that speaks VOLUMES to dean’s character development, because never in my wildest dreams could i imagine a dean winchester who lets sam go BUT THIS DEAN DOES. this dean not only lets sam go but does so with pride and dignity and honour for who he was. that’s just mindblowing to me. s5 did such a PHENOMENAL job at wrapping up spn.

this isn’t to say that the latter seasons are all bad. it’s just that spn has traded so many hands throughout its life that the show that it ended as is virtually unrecognizable from the show it started as. that’s just a true fact. supernatural changed after seasons 1-5. it grew out into something new. i have a shit ton of love and respect for that in its own right— but og supernatural? kripke supernatural? the blood, grit, gore and gothic americana supernatural that i grew up on? in my mind, that ends with swan song. that supernatural is it’s own little story. everything after is an addendum, a sequel. the original story of sam and dean ends with that shot of dean with lisa and ben having dinner. the story ends with sam sacrificing himself for the world and proving without a doubt that he is good and human along the way. it ends on a note of bittersweet hope and raw grief that bleeds all the way down to your core but soothes the wounds in the aftermath, because no matter how much it hurts, it’s closure. for sam, and for dean.

#oc #supernatural #spn #spn meta #sam winchester #dean winchester #spn 2x22 #swan song #AND ALSO?? that reel of their moments overlaid with the howling wind #the simplicity of the whole bit with chuck and the impala #chuck dissolving into a mist at the end #i HATE this show i HATE it i want to eat it i need to be put down like a rabid dog #i’m not a crier but holy FUCK this episode had me dangerously close #anyway #i’m gonna go scream at the wall now

[boredkids]

A Tribute to Chuck Person’s Eccojams

By E. Schoop

The age of pop detritus has been upon us for quite some time. Not so embedded in the virtual age, but rather, the analog era of which preceded this revolution was full of bargain-bin pop. And so, the cultural zeitgeist overflowed with works briefly shining and flaming out like the proverbial comet, falling into obscurity. For the critical eye, it has been trained and tested to disfavor kitschy novelties, “corniness” being an operative phrase to describe this phenomenon. Beneath the sewers of disregarded music lay a dormant beast of melody and sensation. Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, set a path that has become a full-blown movement. If one is to take influence as the sole arbiter of taste, then Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 is surely the most important avant-garde album of the decade.

Simplicity is key, but simple does not mean easy. Slowing down music and warping it to great effect had been a concept since the days of DJ Screw had Houston mesmerized with chopped and screwed and Lopatin realized the possibilities of a genre that was reductive ad infinitum, curation by rearrangement and a keen ear for the rhythmic structure of a song. Previously, he’d flirted with these ideas through his sunsetcorp Youtube channel, allowing for a less structured aesthetic to appear, floating bits and pieces of his new ideas into the public. The earliest snapshot on the Internet Wayback Machine has “nobody here” at 51,000+ views, which, while numerous, show the lack of virality Lopatin was yet to cultivate. Even so, comments like “The sole reason Youtube should exist” and “They should play this at Chris De Burgh’s funeral” were indicative of the allure that “eccojams” held in the populace’s imagination.

Through the aptly-named Curatorial Club, Lopatin released a mixtape under his Games alias, further creating a world only distinguished by 80s R&B samples and remnants of an HBO afterlife. Spend The Night With might be a supplement to the ethos Lopatin was defining himself by in this era, but it stood as a little beside to the plunderphonics he would come to create in both Eccojams and his next Oneohtrix release, Replica. There seemed to be an effortlessness insofar as grafting samples for songs, with the likes of Janet Jackson, Toto, and Fleetwood Mac all being used as maestros with which Lopatin could craft his singular vision.

“A1” is a sublime way to begin the album. Before all the “Africa” memes, before the Toto-Weezer bizarro crossover, Lopatin predicted the future with this slice of heaven, a cosmic entity that forces the listener into bliss, whether consciously or unconsciously. It’s a perfect primer for the Chuck Person galaxy, assaulting the senses in a barrage of track splitting and cutting that would make John Oswald blush. The signature technique of pulling a single phrase from a song is unveiled here, wherein Toto frontman Joseph Williams sings “Hurry boy, she’s waiting there for you”, it’s chopped into a beautiful repetition that buoys the entire song to euphoria. Chuck Person draws an incredible conclusion from the pop tradition of ephemera -- only a few seconds matter.

sunsetcorp again rears its prescient head with “A2”, adapted from “angel” off of Memory Vague. Hauntological pop was nothing new at the time, with Ariel Pink and Leyland Kirby dabbling in the genre, but Lopatin took it to a whole new level with the track. “Angel please don’t go” provides a goosebumps-inducing refrain, Christine McVie’s vocals warped and looped like a psilocybin  nightmare. The use of vocals is incredible, affecting mind and body and transporting the listener into different worlds and states of being. Lopatin’s re-appropriation tactics came to define the concept of vaporwave itself, as choral focus of pop magnified at-large. Never before was the human voice so acutely presented, its power in the abstract realized by the curious power of Ableton.

The three-piece of “A1”, “A2”, and “A3” may be one of the most potent 3-track sequences on any album. “A3” is the most widely-known song off Eccojams, and for good reason. It’s a massive piece, a song that could fill stadiums given its euphoric propensity. Fantastical images abound, bringing JoJo’s “Be real, it doesn’t matter anyway / You know it’s a little too late” from pristine into dazed iconography, a collusion of sounds and senses. What’s even more fascinating is that Lopatin then turns around and samples “Castles in the Sky” by Belgian trance project Ian Van Dahl, finding an ornate balance between the polished pop of JoJo and the kineticism of Eurodance in an ambient interlude.

There are more sunsetcorp deep cuts on here repurposed as a cohesive unit, such as “demerol” as “A4” and “nobody here” as “B4”, but the true stars are the previously unreleased jams that Lopatin cooked up in his laboratory. In his Reddit AMA he alluded to “cryogenically unfreezing” them, and it’s an apt metaphor for such otherworldly music. “A6” features Janet Jackson trapped in the A&R purgatory of pop, glamorizing the dissonance until Lopatin cranks up the chopping, until Janet is no more. “A8” is absolutely fascinating, and listening back to Marvin Gaye’s “My Love Is Waiting”, it’s wondrous that the sensual elegance of Gaye could become such a deformed product, a tangled mess of misshapen R&B that is utterly majestic at the same time.

The second half is much more akin to noise, finding a home in cacophony rather than keep relying on the scrambling of hits. While there are straightforward samples like “Me Against The World” by Tupac on “B5” or “These Dreams” by Heart on “B6”, Lopatin opts to go for a manic approach in his quest boil pop down to its essence. In an interview with Simon Reynolds, he explains this process saying “Noise can be sculpted down to become pop; pop can be sculpted down into noise.” Eccojams plays with these assertions constantly, erasing any sort of dichotomy present beforehand. “B1” is a sensory overload, with all the energy of a panicked anxiety attack, until its outro calms the mind and body. After, “B2” packs radio static together and unravels it, syncopation drowning out any coherent thoughts. It’s as if Lopatin cut and pastes memory until nothing familiar is left.

Vaporwave’s influence has been abundant through modern culture, from the hyperreal facets of music videos by Drake and Tame Impala to our endless obsession with 80s and 90s culture being rebranded and sold to us, there isn’t an online soul who can say they haven’t stumbled across some form of this phenomenon. Yet beneath all the memes and bastardization lies a cultural statement of hybridity and ephemera, and Chuck Person stands in-between all of this. It’s more philosophically meaningful and spiritually fulfilling than any other release in the microgenre, artistically brilliant and packed to the brim with matchless ideas undeterred by the limits of audio software and the human brain. Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol.1 is the emotions we’ve never felt and memories we don’t have, sealed deep into the shared consciousness of us all. And to think, Lopatin intended all this as a joke.

#chuck person #eccojams #vaporwave #daniel lopatin #oneohtrix point never