“We’d set up and basically play instrumental versions of the Grateful Dead,” Bryan told me. Aaron, Bryce, and Bryan began making music together as teen-agers. (In 2013, Tom released a poignant feature, “Mistaken for Strangers,” about his time on tour with the band it opened the Tribeca Film Festival that year, with an introduction by Robert De Niro.) The group coalesced in a large, unheated industrial space on the oily banks of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, but its members were brought up around Cincinnati, and have known one another since they were young. The National is made up of two sets of brothers-the multi-instrumentalists Aaron and Bryce Dessner, who are twins, and Scott and Bryan Devendorf, on bass and drums, respectively-along with Berninger, whose own brother, the filmmaker Tom Berninger, has become the group’s default documentarian. This month, the National will release its ninth album, “First Two Pages of Frankenstein.” Like each of the band’s previous records, it contains pathos and beauty. Berninger steels himself to confront the next loss: “Memorize the bathwater, memorize the air / There’ll come a time I’ll wanna know I was here.” “The grief it gets me, the weird goodbyes,” Matt Berninger, the band’s vocalist, sings on “Weird Goodbyes,” a recent song featuring Justin Vernon, of Bon Iver. We are always losing, or leaving, or being left, in ways both minor and vast. An apple tree that stood outside your bedroom window, levelled to make way for broadband cable. Maybe there’s a person you once loved but lost touch with. Part of it is surely existential-our lives are temporary and inscrutable death is compulsory and forever-but another part feels more quotidian and incremental, the slow accumulation of ordinary losses. No amount of Transcendental Meditation, Pilates, turmeric, rose quartz, direct sunlight, jogging, oat milk, sleep hygiene, or psychoanalysis can fully alleviate that ambient sadness. For more than two decades, this has been the National’s grist: not the major devastations but the strange little ache that feels like a precondition to being human. The band-which formed in 1999, in Brooklyn-was lampooning its reputation as a font of midlife ennui, the sort of rudderless melancholy that takes hold when a person realizes that the dusty hallmarks of American happiness (marriage, children, a job in an office) aren’t a guarantee against despair. Lil Baby closes out his performance standing on a police cruiser, his fist raised as fireworks erupted behind him, taking viewers back to the summer of 2020, reminding us of all the ways it never really ended.Last fall, the National débuted a new piece of merchandise: a black zippered sweatshirt featuring the words “ SAD DADS” in block letters.
“To accomplish this, we don’t need allies. “President Biden, we demand justice, equity, policy, and everything else that freedom encompasses,” she intoned, in front of bleachers filled with background protestors. The pair were also joined by activist Tamika Mallory, who issued a direct address to the White House during her poem. “All of us serve the same masters / All of us, nothing but slaves / And never forget: In the story of Jesus, the hero was killed by the state.” I didn’t have much choice.”ĭuring the song, the rapper was joined by Killer Mike, who brought along a surprise verse off Run the Jewels’ “Walking in the Snow.” “The most you’ll get is a Twitter rant, calling it a tragedy / But truly the travesty: You’ve been robbed of your empathy, replaced with apathy,” Killer Mike raps, to a press conference’s worth of unmanned microphones. I was a savage about whom the least said the better, who had been saved by Europe, and who had been brought to America. On Sunday, Lil Baby brought the 63rd Grammy Awards outside the Los Angeles Convention Center and back to this summer’s Black Lives Matter marches against police brutality for a sprawling performance of his protest song, “The Bigger Picture,” which opened with a quote from James Baldwin: “When I was brought up, I was taught in American history books that Africa had no history, and than neither had I.
0 kommentar(er)
