Arlo Parks - Super Sad Generation (BeatnikCreative)
I don't know, have you heard this woman? I don't want to compare her to other female rappers, writers, singers, artists, but here I go anyways as I can be a bit lazy like that. If you're old and can remember the first time you heard that album with the banana on the cover, the first time you heard Nico and the Velvet Underground and Femme Fatale... And that was a life changing event, your probably went and formed a band with a girl as the singer and the you bought a guitar and you never heard how to play it. And you and the girl... Well I don't care whether you are actually as ancient as me but Arlo Parks' understated, musically minimal and anything but lyrically laconic Super Sad Generation is probably the epoch making song of the year that has me thinking I need not worry, that all will be well when the nation's youth takes over. Maybe they already have and us old folks are we are just whiling away our remaining days attaching importance to deeds of no importance at all.
Let's see, SZA Supermodel great, Junglepussy Trader Joe's great, Dirty Projectors' Cool Your heart great. Really, Tony the Tiger grrrreaaat. Have you listened yet?
Lyrically, Arlo is a superstar poet. Super Sad Generation is everything in two and a bit minutes Netflix's Sex Education took eight episodes to not be. It's a light and dense and lovingly distended look at... all at once. Arlo's is the authentic voice. This is how people live now. There's no high drama. Barely anything registers as dramatic at all. Yet there's still enough to inspire an external moral panic It's a critically acclaimed indie film in a song. It's so perfect I don't know how she's done it.
Of course there'll be lots of people like me trying to stop her, you know why. Not exactly like me, but I think you know what I am saying. When you listen to Arlo Parks, you'll know, those types have already lost everything.
