Staff Picks: Creek Boyz, Mechanical Chickens, and Trash Heaps
Jorja Smith’s debut full-length, Lost and Found, has taken up residence in my mind since its release last week. Between tracks, the twenty-one-year-old R & B singer wrestles with her self-worth (on “Tomorrow”: “The hardest thing I have learned is I can’t help myself / If I can’t trust my worth / Then I can’t trust my words”) and with the gaze of the UK police state (on “Blue Lights”: “I wanna turn those blue lights into strobe lights / Not blue flashing lights, maybe fairy lights”). Being young in the summer is difficult, but it’s easier when you have someone else living through it alongside you. Last year, there was SZA’s gentle Ctrl; this year, Jorja Smith takes on her demons with a jazzier vibe, more melancholy than anxious, and very, very matter-of-fact—almost like a diary entry. —Eleanor Pritchett
On October 25, 1977, Roland Barthes lost his mother, Henriette Barthes. The next day, he began ais “not a book completed by its author, but a hypothesis of a book desired by him.” This is borne out in the tangled reading of observations that range from the philosophically speculative to the quotidian. His suffering repeats, swells, and subsides, seemingly without design or reason: “What I find utterly terrifying is mourning’s character.” At times, our participation in that mourning feels like an invasion—these notes were not intended for publication in their current form—and if anyone were to tell me they read this book for purely high-minded reasons, I would distrust them. But past the rubbernecking is something more significant, for here is grief at work on a brilliant mind. The result is disordered, clumsy, and at times prosaic. It also has the virtue of being true.
