See Eeyore Rave

During a recent guest appearance on Theo Von’s podcast, James Blake yell laughed when Theo described his music as feeling like Eeyore at a rave and I sat in my car in the H.E.B. parking lot a bit stunned that someone hadn’t thought of that before. It’s true in, like, fifty different ways. Blake is a bit of a conundrum. Much of his work sits on a spectrum that extends from an alternate universe version of Take Care written by someone with emotional depth on one end, and Massive Attack on the other. Which is to say, much of the time he makes UK Garage-ish music for people who don’t leave their garage.

In the build up to the release of his 2020 EP Before, Blake went back on Boiler Room for the first time in 7 years to turn an abandoned Regent Theater into a camera obscura of his current musical landscape. For obvious reasons, his new (at the time) shit was included and was very good, but the tour of their surrounding countryside gave me some of the best moments as I remembered for the umpteenth time the musical multitudes he contains. As an example, I can’t think of another person on planet Earth who would think to play “Father’s Day” by Gucci Mane and then tuck that track like a snus packet into the lower lip of “Bring” by Randomer. It’s totally OK if that sentence means nothing to you, but it’s like the club version of Joan Didion dropping Slouching Towards Bethlehem in the late 60’s. Which is to say, not many people can swish journalism and fiction together in a glass quite like that.

That doesn’t mean I think this set is an historic event, but more that it’s a worthy portrait of what makes James Blake so singular in modern music for me. And the setting here only serves to underline my point. I can’t think of anyone better suited for making an empty club go all the way up than him, or channeling the mood of that particular city during that particular time. LA is a famously lonely place in many less-literal ways, but Covid externalized those to such an extent that there were weeks when it felt vaguely apocalyptic. Part of the beauty of the place is the way bitchiness and vanity became normcore to some extent, because to me those are forgivable symptoms of a city stuffed to the rafters with people trying desperately to become who they think they really are, or really should be. That may lead to often-predictable and sometimes dark outcomes, but there’s nothing I love more than spending time around people who are trying.

Anyway, context aside, I think this a beautiful musical moment that cropped up during a season of deep suffering. I’ve watched it 7 or 8 times since it first released, and I wanted to pass it along to you in hopes it helps the next time you need something like this.