Hey. I know it’s been a month since the last Definitive Answers, largely because I am living through a depression (though not suicidal). Winters can be hard, but I vow to show up here as regularly as I can. I always appreciate your patience and support!
The wick is flickering on Year-End List Season, and I’m throwing my hat in the ring with something different than my usual music recap: a Top 1 List.
For this impossible exercise, forget “favorite.” Forget best. Let’s talk Platonic Ideal.
I wanted to identify THE artistic representation of my 2022. This opened up the field from just music to include TV, film, articles, images, podcasts, whatever. That felt exciting, plus the framing felt like a nice opportunity to reflect on my year.
Then, the question turned to methodology. Do I generalize my year, then search for a piece of art that matches that description? Or do I take a handful of things I loved, extrapolate what they say about my year, and pick a representative that feels most correct without deluding myself? I chose the latter.
Even though one purpose of a Top 1 is to do away with ranked lists, I want to honorably mention a handful of candidates and why I considered them. Call it cheating if you must.
Trombone Champ, the “coo-kee” bird, and every Minions feature film provided me legitimately endless joy. But my year was not defined by joy.
Oren Ambarchi’s Shebang is a repetitive snake of an album that captures the stuckness I’ve felt this year—do not search the Definitive Answers archives for the word “stuck”—while offering hope in the way the band snowballs around that initial guitar line to evolve it and create community in the process. But the fit isn’t perfect, and I don’t want to define my year by stuckness.
Alabaster DePlume’s “Don’t Forget You’re Precious,” because I do, constantly, and the reminder moved me. But I feel like I’d actually have to stop forgetting for this song to truly define my year.
“The Unknown Is Our Only Hope,” the 6th most popular episode of This Is Your Afterlife this year, contains many of my deepest feelings about the world right now. But it’s bleakness is too bleak and it’s brightness too bright, plus it feels more than a little arrogant to winnow down a Top 1 List just to place yourself in/atop it.
I played a live version of Arooj Aftab’s “Saans Lo” for the virtual attendees of the MUAVI Mother’s Day vigil outside Cook County Jail after an English translation of the lyrics showed me how much they speak to motherhood, loneliness, grief, and the brevity of life. But it didn’t stick with me the whole year.
Everything for Everyone might come the closest. It’s the best book I’ve read in so long, and I recommended it to practically everyone I’ve met since September. I talked to both authors for the podcast and really hit it off with one of them. It also led to my newfound love of horror movies, via The Purge franchise. But that feels too external. It’s about what I liked this year, not what I was like.
With the inferior candidates dispatched, I present to you, the readers of Definitive Answers…
My Top 1 List, 2022
Psalm One, the rapper.
Her whole existence.
Everything she put out this year—her album Bigg Perrm, her book Her Word Is Bond and the fact it came out on the abolitionist-communist publisher Haymarket Books, her performance at the Glenwood Avenue Arts Fest in Rogers Park this summer, her episode of This Is Your Afterlife, and most importantly, her appearance on Open Mike Eagle’s Secret Skin podcast—made me feel less alone.
She talks about being a dope artist who is not popular but not unknown either and the struggles, and triumphs, that come with all of that. She talks about the pleasures of being a hater but still trying to grow as a person. She shares the jealousy of watching her peers’ lanes and the rewards she’s found focusing on her own. She talks about not always making a living from her art! And she does it with pride, always connecting her other gigs back to her need to survive and create.
In the first calendar year since 2007 when I’ve not performed live, the third year of a pandemic that’s taught me my life is expendable to most Americans, a year largely defined by my struggle to sustain myself through non-creative work I can tolerate, a year I nonetheless published the 100th episode of a podcast that is among my best work, a year I appeared on one of the most critically acclaimed TV shows for 15 seconds, in an era of my creative life when I’m finally rejecting the Fame Dream and working to release comparison and jealousy from my grasp once and for all, Psalm One stood tall at its heart, a reminder of all I am and a testament to who I can be yet.
LET’S DO COMMUNITY
What’s your Top 1?
THIS IS MY PODCAST, THIS IS YOUR AFTERLIFE
It’s the second annual This Is Your Afterlife New Year’s Special, initially recorded as a Patreon bonus episode with Claire Favret. Call it the Solstice Special. I come hard out the gate with depression and we dive into darkness and its purposes, plus all of Claire’s family’s solstice traditions, which are many.
Content warning: ungrateful children, Eve Bunting’s Night Tree, winter solstice, resolution sprees, ongoing muffled scream.
Listen:
READ, WATCH, DO
I liked this Dean Spade piece from 2018, “‘Having a Cause’ versus Living in a Life Centered in Radical Transformation.” If you’ve felt guilty for not doing more, or wondered how to balance “being political” with living the rest of your life, or if you’ve dived into community organizing but want to resist the pull to professionalize your efforts, I think you’ll get something out of it.
No resolutions 2023,
DM