u/Extension_Yak3898

This is only me thinking out loud, please take it all with hefty grains of salt, though I never understood that saying.... If you dont even think their best album is Sunbather or LPWP, feel free to share your own rant about it! 🙃 Personally I could give a damn what's better than what, but shh ahh damn spoiled the ending of my post

/startrant

LPWP was a return to their usual sound after Infinite Granite; released anticipation can have a lot of staying power, and can add a lot positivity to experiences, colouring them. For longtime fans, this may have been such an overwhelmingly positive experience with a new album that it can't seem to compare to memories of discovering Sunbather or what have you for the first time, knowing absolutely nothing about the band or their success

LPWP is also more accessible than Sunbather. Shorter songs means a LOT for how most people listen to music, it's easy to zone out when there's long sections of blast beats, and instrumental interludes to boot. So I can see how a) preLPWP fans might be extra suckered into believing it's better than Sunbather, just because it slips on like a glove just that much more easily than Sunbather, and b) how newer fans might see Sunbather as daunting and/or maybe kinda boring.

The thing is, I'm returning to their older stuff - started with New Bermuda yesterday, then this morning the demo & Roads to Judah, now trying to get back to Sunbather after the first side. And MAN it's honestly just much more straightforward lyrically, and concise too. I mean there's maybe 50 words in Sunbather, and the whole album takes up much less space on the record sleeve than with LPWP. That's a feat and a half! Plus I would gamble to say that somehow, in fewer tracks to boot, they cover more ground thematically than they did throughout LPWP, even if the thematic combination is a bit less cohesive.

Indeed, the step up in both playing skills & production qualities from the two preceding releases to this is, honestly, kinda wild. Though Sunbather does not quite have that effortless sounding quality to it that the band has now as a well oiled machine going 15+ years now, it has a balance between a) the kind of raw youth angst thats been the heart and soul of rock n roll since it began, b) the maturity of people who are actually quite mature for their age despite maybe engaging in habits that don't reflect it (drugs & alcohol esp).

Both albums will always have a special place in my heart, and I've barely stopped listening to LPWP since it came out. I've actually favoured listening to it over all the other records all year, pretty much. But something felt off. And it's because Sunbather is amazing. So don't discount Sunbather just because LPWP is amazing too! It's ok for great things to be great in different ways - in fact, I'd say it's pretty great itself compared to the alternative of 1 opinion to rule them all mentality

/endrant

/startrant

I think the song, and much of the first side of the album, is about how authoritarian populism (Reagan) was taking over the country at the time. But I won't get into that room much here, the song is really more about loneliness & how people deal with it. He's also kinda breaking the fourth wall IMO.

The first two verses of this song are a lot like other verses on the A side - characters, settings, an aphorism or two. He starts by just detailing where he is, setting the scene, but also bringing up that laws are being broken by 'shadow boys' and how self obsessed 'Napolean at the carnival' is giving up on 'down here's ie the streets where 'the smoke is on the horse' (smoke from a gutter on a cold day?) and also the moon is there, apparently. It also sounds like he may be detailing that he (or at least the character singing the song) is high, with 'the wind is making speeches and the rain sounds like a round applause'.

[The Reagan stuff - smoke and horse are drug terms for marijuana & heroin respectively, 'shadow boys' could be CIA outing those drugs on the streets, the moon is there because everyone knows it, and hence why Napoleon has given up on the streets and is *engaged* with his reflection]

I think the second verse is referring to the Napoleon in the first as a type of person or phenomenon. 'Pretend they're orphans', 'memory that gets smaller as they pull away' - these strike me as things you could say about slimy politicians, that they pretend they're innocent and often lie about their memories, distorting them. The part after that points to how regular people fall for the lies when they themselves lose their memories of what's real, and fall for the lies, and see the slimy politician as a saint. Honestly I don't see any way this verse can be about anything else. Then you've got Matilda, likely a tattoo artist, sticking around with the sailors 'till the bandages came off' but clearly they don't ever come off, those boys 'dont know how to quit' even though it hurts. This refers to the supports of slimey politicians and the people who take care of them, even to the point of enabling them.

The third verse is to say 'and maybe that's you too'. To sympathize with how hard the cycle of populism is to escape... The pidgeons falling to the street happen when the calendar girl 'is on a roll' but clearly she can't be 'on a roll' because 'things are pretty lousy'. So usually she'd be rounding em up 'the pidgeons' but 'the boys dive right off the cars and splash into the street's ie they're suicidal and don't want the aquaintance of a 'calendar girl' who can get em all hot and ready to roll with a simple flash of the 'razor from the boot'.

The last couplet in the last verse indicates that he, Tom, is with a 'calendar girl' right now. 'Pay the fiddler off till I come back again' - kinda like how we dismiss a lot of music until one day we find the way to dig deeper and it just HITS like a train? I think this last like indicates that he wants to be taken more seriously than 'a Fiddler', he wants you to know HIM, not some character he might be signing as in another song. The dish outside is filling with rain because we can't actually put a kiss upon his lips. As much as he wishes we could love him, he realizes that we're just more Matilda's tattooing more Napoleans, egging them on to dominate whatever small or large empire they happen to have control over

/endrant

The concept would be 'Nasty Nas raps offbeat about the prison system'

Whenever Soma comes on I'm like "whaaaat I thought Mayonnaise was later in the album"

Then I'm like "no, it's the other one" and take a minute to remember the name is Soma

So I woke up from this crazy dream last night (any really provide details without taking over the post) and immediately heard wood's line "we already fell from quite a height"

​

I didn't know which song it was from so I googled, assuming it was after Haram, or maybe even part of the Earl assisted track Falling Out the Sky... But no! It's from Houthi which came out 2 years earlier

​

The funny thing tho is, the verses to Houthi suggest that the song may have been written around the time of recording Haram. The evidence for this is that the line I woke up hearing is preceded by the word 'haram'.

​

But more to the point, woods seems to use the first verse to reminisce about how he used to rhyme, and the second to elucidate how he rhymes now... Almost as if he's anticipated that the song he's recording/just recorded with Earl will lead to better things. "Pride before fall but he felt sure/both hands wrapped in gauze/stole fire from God, my Lord".

​

I think he's talking about how he rhymes specifically due to the references to shadows in both verses. He starts off the whole song saying he 'cut my shadow off with a dull knife whispered in its ear, sent it off into the night'. I relate this to the psychological concept of the 'shadow', the dark parts of you that are largely out of your control. It comes back later with the candles in the second verse. Taken into account with the rest of the lyrics, it sets up a portrait of how woods' mind works with regard to inspiration & how disparate ideas connect through intuitive logic.

​

Although, when I first read these verses, it seemed he was talking about the evolution of hiphop in general - things that are off limits (Haram) to most fans & artists, things that happen time and time again in hiphop scenes, whether to artists or fans, and his relationship to the music. So take this all with some grains of sand 🙃 this is just an early morning writing exercise for me

​

And then there's the wives.

​

There are 3 wives in this song - the one that says Haram (yours) and his ex wife who knows where the stash is hide and he's just wondering what she's thinking when she paused - and also wood's mom, who told him where they keep the passports hidden.

​

The fact that woods used this chorus with this song indicates that he indeed sees things getting better in his career, but is also ready to leave it for Plan B if need be. Remember, this is off Hiding Places, which is what blew him up in the underground.

​

But the wives... One emphasises the Haram, the ways billy rhymes that are off limits for hiphop purists. Note that it's not clear whether she says 'but we fell from quite a height' or woods does - and either way there's an excuse, followed by reminiscing about how 'the bag was light' ie times were tough despite some success.

​

The second wife, the ex, doesnt say a word, yet sparks a long line of 'not the Haze' (something else?) induced rant refering books, the Shining (probably), candles at dinner, clowns, genocide with a 'loopy smile', and a line comparing his braids under his wave cap under his kufi to tea leaves. I see this verse as a picture of a PTSD laden mind, high on substances, pushing his creativity to the limits in order to contain the flashes of suspicion & memories that come to him over a visit to his ex wife. It seems times have improved, but they are also more complex, complete with a 'belt buckle' that 'whip you raw'.

​

The fact that he put this chorus in this song - it almost feels like magic trick he's playing, 'a sigil in the noise' as Elucid once said. Like he's taking these verses full of acknowledgement of his own pain and suffering, and putting them with a chorus which, despite being sourced from a dark chapter of his life (possibly his darkest), signals that hes scared to get famous, scared to take off - but that's he's escaped worse fears before, and can do so again with a 'couple passports'