we are living in the era of the rabbithole, with brains boiling like rats in the soup of conspiracy and peers and parents alike wading into reedy everglades never to be retrieved from the muck. but its good to remind ourselves that there is also striking beauty beyond those bubbling tarpits, a vast network of different nooks and crannies and spindly pathways chewed through by like-minded termites who came before you. allowing myself to be sucked down the soundcloud golf-hole into a technicolor cartoon wonderland was the greatest thing to happen to me this year and i wanted to document that somehow. so here are some thoughts on some of my fave songs 2022.

some of my fave songs 2022

BEAR1BOSS ft. T3 - Drunk in Love (Remix)

a hundred bath bombs in the washing machine swirling, colors mixing, an occasional flash of green jumping out like the northern lights. we watch our scientific experiment unfold while dancing in drunken loops as COPS runs on the tv behind us; an endless chase montage. Bear1boss’ ramblings like late-nite sleeping bag gossip— he always finds the most brain-scratching pockets (other artists seriously need to study him& step it up); T3 the friend who’s too loud too boisterous disrupting the still of night but you’re laughing too hard to properly shush him. here we are sneaking out, here we are winding the glowing streets in a fever of giggles while the balmy heat drops on us like slabs of bologna: pure anticipation. but the pre-game is always better than the party, we know that now, looking back. always sillier. and so much more free. cuz I’m drunk in loveeeeeee

CASH COBAIN & CHOW LEE - JHOLIDAY

remember those videos of that bloke who would take one bite of a sandwich and then dance like his godforsaken life depended on it— and by dance i mean uh fuck the living shit out of the entire atmosphere surrounding him? okay but now imagine there's two of him doing that shit side by side. heinous. that’s what this song is, right down to the final minute which is full of this awkward meandering post-nut tension which i’m sure is exactly how that dancer ambles out of the room after his unconscionable cameraman stops recording. but yeah this song bangs and cracks me up simultaneously just like that dance (which is in all honesty my favorite and most-mimicked move of the year)

GUNNA - SOUTH TO WEST

gunna at his best feels inevitable, like his verses were carved out centuries ahead of time— ancient riverbeds resuscitated by the icy flow of fresh spring water smoothing craggy pock-marked rocks into perfect skipping stones. he charges ahead automatically, an unstoppable force with no immovable counterpart, greg jennings with a broken leg, nothing can prevent this from happening. words are less important here than feeling, than detail— i can imagine the alan clarke movie christine playing on the tv in gunna’s studio when south to west was being recorded; the dullest aspects of upper-class drug addiction morphing into hypnotic poetry with perfectly paced tracking shots and an unexpected unicorn on the wall. both gunna and clarke achieve that rare and sacred sense of inevitability. they don’t try, they just are.

LOUKEMAN - NICE TO HEAR YOUR VOICE AGAIN

a long-distance facetime, staggering, glitchy, conjuring fragmented images of the person you miss most. like that age-old riddle about the perfect murder weapon: the exact wording worn threadbare, an urban legend hand-me-down, all i remember is it pierces the heart and leaves a puddle in its wake.

BRENT FAIYAZ - ALL MINE

in nyc i always felt hottest in my apartment, fitted to precision, full-length mirror admiration— that perfect airtight moment just before your feet hit the stoop and the mirage comes crashing down. outside you realize EVERYONE is fitted to precision, more precise than you in fact, and everyone is hotter than you also, richer than you too, cooler than you as well, and, most importantly, more self-conscious than you therefore not registering your perfectly calculated fit in the slightest. but every now and then a moment strikes— a shock of light from behind the clouds, shimmering and holy— in which you know definitively that you are the SINGLE hottest, best-dressed person in the city, and most importantly you know that everyone else knows it too. usually this is achieved through copious amounts of mojito but faiyaz provides a shortcut to the experience. it’s pure soho music: all cobblestones and posturing, peacoats and main character syndrome. you’ll come around if I don’t do too much… sometimes there’s nothing more fun than being a total douche.

D0LLYWOOD1 - A SONG ABOUT OUR FEELINGS, FEATURING BLACKWINTERWELLS

one of the strongest defenses the lame ass case against mumble rap has ever been confronted with. blackwinterwells bursts out sharply enunciated and stinging with precision, the cruel laughter of a bully who won in the end, a perfectly airtight verse, you think you know what you’re in for. then another voice bubbles to the surface. and your entire spine realigns. and your knees buckle. and bumpy claymation birdies flutter laps around your dome. it’s dollywood. it’s perfection. and you can barely understand a word of it.

ZEPHYR - CLOVER

by far my most listened to artist this year was otis redding. the timbre of his voice splits you like lightning down to the trunk, pure exasperated sorrow— when he sings “got pain in my heart” it feels redundant. we know you do, we can hear it. otis’ vocal quality is to agony what zephyr’s is to longing and horniness. this bloke needs his girl so bad his shit is trembling like he’s soaked to the bone, posted beneath her window in the throes of a tsunami with a now unrecognizable soup of flowers and a short-circuiting boombox in his clutches. the most frequent phrase tumbling out of zephyr’s unfocused 2am i-aint-readin-all-that text block is “i need”— his desperation is operatic, but also his shit is so sexy that it saves him from the dreaded Cornologist label. a rare feat in an increasingly corny world.

DUWAP KAINE - RICK ROSS

this one always seems to end the second it begins (a sure sign of a classic), never long enough— always leaves me grasping, clinging to its soft fuzzy edges before it slips out of reach. the synth here is warm as stevie wonder on the vocoder; without a doubt my favorite beat of the year and kaine knows as much, letting me bathe in it for the last ten seconds— and it’s gone again. I can’t get enough. so many songs from rap’s most prolific outsider/insider could’ve made this list (BEU, My Girlfriend, Smelly II) but this one rlly cracks an egg on my head and trickles down my spine like middle-school games of yore. Now let’s run it back again.

PRETTY V - BEVERLY (SPED UP)

parsing the rubble with a flashlight fading fast splintered floorboards jut out like cracked teeth powder-fine debris coats the room like morning breath a whimper dribbles out of a dark corner the weakened beam hasn’t yet reached. tentative steps towards the source the tinny cries leaking from beneath a pile of dalmatian paintings once realist now crushed into picassos. gingerly lifting sifting the halo of light bounces off something then burns out. slapping against palm flickering light returns reflections dance across the ceiling. paintings parsed quickly as voice continues to moan faintly finally at the bottom of the pile canvas torn to shreds cracked frames cleared the dust settles and there it sits. completely rusted over. the dense metallic two wheeled contraption crying out for its sole companion.

FUTURE - RED LEATHER

i always think about the cover art for monster, how it renders future half-man-half-zombie— a raging mutant whose grounded, human form is being slowly consumed by the gnarled fangs of numb debauchery. the tidal-wave clash between those two poles, between the desire to hold onto the cliff’s edge and the desire to let go, provided the electric tension that elevated that mixtape run into something mythical. but post-hndrxx future has often tipped the scales in favor of the zombie, fully automated numbness, loping through his verses with a predictable dead-eyed gaze & outstretched arms— understandable of course! when your face has long ago been hand-chiseled into that fabled four-headed mountaintop the incentive must bottom out at some point. luckily every now and then something sparks in him, a wavering flame that melts away the green-tinged flesh scabbed over his heart, and we remember why his face is up there in the first place. times got hard and i fucked off your lashes / everything real i got my gold veneers added / model fucking addict but i wear and rock a patek / if your love was a drug maybe it would be acid / i know i lost your trust but i made you relapse / i gotta be on a pill to tell you how im feeling... ok maybe to some that sounds like the epitome of numb debauchery, but real futureheads can tell the difference. to me this is a sign that the petty poet laureate is in his prime again, displaying polychromatic multitudes.

@CLOTHES29A - REALLY NICE SONG MHM

I read an erowid post recently where a guy mainlined so much mdma his entire field of vision got cooked and he saw everything in ultra-saturated black and white for what felt like hours. this is precisely what happened to me when i heard this songs opening drop for the first time, hitting with the thunk and crack of a watermelon on my head dropped ten stories down my eyes turning inward black and white spreading concussion immediately present but all i know is that sweet sweet summertime taste. my favorite drop of the year, my favorite producer maybe ever (shoutout to them for letting me re-upload on my personal soundcloud after they took this masterpiece down for reasons ill never fathom— part of a larger soundcloud epidemic that must be halted. the delete button should be eradicated from the app)

SCAN - SHAKE IT

as the strings flutter and cascade, our leading man appears at the top of the plush velvet staircase adjusting his satin gloves— yearning in his eyes. or maybe he’s wandering the town square, dressed all frilly with a feather in his cap, searching the assorted marketplace for the key to his heart. no matter the time, no matter the place, the same sentiment echoes through his mind— one that rang as true then as it does now: “I wanna see what it looks like”. the love song of the year despite that stupid ass  “ZERO FUCKS GIVEN” tag bookending his soliloquy— a tag made especially dumb given how specifically untrue it is in context: our protagonist here does give a fuck, he cares so much, can’t you see? desperately chucking abandon to the wind like a half court shot and confessing he really, really wants to see what it looks like. Who among us can’t relate?

454 - SKITTLES

vast metallic creatures twist up out of the earth and rupture the uninspired Ohio landscape in a welcome act of ecoterrorism. our nostrils paint chemtrails along the dull tinted windows of my friend’s dad’s minivan-turned-tour-bus-turned-back-into-minivan, all of us leering for a glimpse of these monsters eating the sky. this shared sense of urgency is led not by the novelty of the sight, we’ve all been to cedar point before, but rather the gnawing knowledge that this anticipatory glee is usually the best part of the whole experience. waiting in lines, shoveling down uninspired treats (dippin dots) with uninspired flavors (Funky Monkey(?)), trying not to get cheesenecked (slapped by a “friend” across the typically sunburnt titular body part), and trying not to shit your brains out (dippin dots), usually composes most of the day. but here we are regardless, so flip-flops clip and stagger across molten concrete weave between torso’s bearing shirts shouting “Hey Michigan, Hold DEEZ Nuts” hips press the metal bar of admission primed for our days worth of mediocrity but then… the friend’s dad thrusts something towards us that cracks our world wide open.

Fast Passes.

this is pre-fast-pass-bubble mind you, before over-saturation of the fast pass market rendered them completely useless; this is early bored ape yacht club but you sell high before the ponzi scheme is exposed (and also fast passes were actually sick as hell for a while whereas bored apes were dumb as dogshit from the jump); this is, in essence, the cedar point cheat code. bouncing, bursting through the gate we pin-ball from ride to ride with maniacal glee, actively gloating at and taunting the lowly 99% who wither away in their sun-baked snake formations. we ride the magnum 4 times before those peasants can even ride it once— the magnum isn’t even that cool, we do it just because we can. tasmanian devils, lawless, a lucid dream with sugar-caked teeth and the universe bending to our will; with intoxicating high-pitched whines skull-rattling kicks and a synthetic jimmy neutron texture giving it all a surreally weightless quality 454 has distilled the pure joy of this memory into under two minutes. clearly the breakout star of the year with countless standout tracks, but none provide quite the same unadulterated bliss as this one. kind of like if dippin dots were as fun as they looked and as tasty as they promised and they didn’t make you immediately shit your brains out.

DORIS - LISTEN!

my friend said this song, all of doris’ songs really, resonates like a half-forgotten dream, or the inky waters between wake and sleep when your thoughts clamor off the ticker into sludgy alphabet soup-- and it’s true— “listen!’ plays faintly as my cake-batter airplane dissolves into a saucer of milk and i swim in my natural-born glory for all the giant chefs to see. DORIS is to me a utopic glimpse at the potential future of music: hyper-condensed shreds of ideas splattered over lush loops through an apple headphone mic carrying us closer to truth and transcendence than any conventional song structure ever could. let’s boil it all down and see what remains.

B GOODIE - BEG FOR IT

euphoric headrush boundless energy americano injection creeping anxiety post-coffee shakes building, building, then gone— rug pulled just before the crash. the way this song maintains it’s heart-pounding high without ever teetering over the edge is a tightrope walk miracle man fuck the primal-icebath-bros just run this shit the second you wake up and eat a chandelier, we got livin’ to do.

JEREMY CRESCENDO - BHACK DWORE

put this song under a runthrough of the Rayman 2 ice-slide level, trust me, modern day dark side of the rainbow + wizard of oz but way less boring obvi; gliding through a liminal frost palace suspended in space with your body detached at every node but somehow still operating as one (i can teach you how to make a stack, let me show you shawtyy) leaping through the piercing dark air to shoot an orb at a phosphorescent floating ring which bungee jumps you tarzan-style to even greater heights (i left that hoe i feel ahhHHH left that hoe i feel new agaaaain…). Crescendo such a fitting name for an artist whose songs spin endlessly upwards (peep rayman 2 fairy glade wind currents for another overwrought metaphor) leaving you breathless, exhilarated, soaking in the world from above.

BABYXSOSA - LONELY%20NIGHTS%20IN%20NY

sometimes you find a song that stops you dead in your tracks and strips you down on the spot— tenderly probing your weakest points; i nearly double over every time i hear it.  i already know decades from now this one will send memories of the past year rushing back in kaleidoscopic shards, glittering and cutting at once: the stuffy uber wall-to-wall with luggage traversing from rapunzel-like heights where my whole world rests, a pearl in a clam, down to the ramshackle safehaven where new life begins in a daze. The slimy gauze of shock and false ego that embalmed me for so long is thawed out and husked away the instant i hit play. forever resonant, timeless, perfect, just like hurtin, yeah just like that.

DJ LEGO INDIANA JONES 2 - 'ROUND HERE FUNK

nostalgic for a lost future, a different path forward that you might’ve missed along the way. you think of these alternate lives as you’re cutting through the thorny brambles and blackberry bushes, ivy creeping up your legs and taking hold; you think of what could’ve been as the lush greenery starts to close in, squeezing you like a dog’s toy as you trudge along in vain. the sharp tang of mud in the air sends you whizzing back to simpler times, lightning mcqueen bandaids and pre-peeled clementines, and you bask in this till the spell is broken by the presence of a mangled claw. in your last few moments the intricate attic piping that keeps the memories separate from the media you’ve consumed cracks under pressure and it all flows together in one vigorous sensory sewage dump. there’s you sitting in a bathtub with bacon scotch-taped to the wall while your mom twirls the soapy mop on your head to soft-serve perfection; there’s you at cedar point waiting in line for Panda Express, too scared to ride the millennium force;  there you are punching a time clock every hour on the hour 24/7 without fail for a year straight; there’s you dodging a palm tree as you round a corner in your rickety go-kart, your back tires dragging slightly in the pixelated sand. You see George, you really had a wonderful life.

https://soundcloud.com/dj-cutie-pie/sets/fave22-2022