When I went to the SFMOMA retrospective with R (in May), there was one piece that really stood out to me– a city map doctored with text that seemed sometimes facetious (a contact address is listed as “2470 Purgatoire”) and sometimes outside cartography’s normal discursive bounds entirely (the legend “Main Gate - Security is a child against a building.”) It was titled “Different Drugs”, by Simon Evans, and when I finally remembered to look him up yesterday, I was thrilled to learn that all of his work is kind of like that:

Simon Evans (small images of selected works)

I’m a sucker for this sort of thing; eerie, abrasive, verbal. “ORIGINAL LOCATION OF ANGRY MUSIC FOR COWARDS”, “TOUGH VOICE MAKES MY HEAD LOOK SMALLER”, “IF YOU CAN’T KEEP YOUR SHIT TOGETHER ON TV WE WILL EAT YOU”. I was not surprised to read that he’s a big fan of The Fall. I was more surprised, though it makes sense, to see that he’d exhibited with Brendan Fowler of BARR, whose spoken-word pieces keep threatening to be generically confessional in the same way Evans threatens to be generically political; both of them seem to love wriggling out of their own traps.

Hear it on Youtube

I’m temporarily fascinated by this song. As Uffie says early on, “There’s two kinds of MCs out there / The ones who rap and the ones who don’t care / And frankly I don’t give a fuck”. In other words, she’s too tough to bother being good at music, and that toughness is (unspokenly) exactly what she thinks makes her qualified to be a rapper. That and record sales, anyway.

I feel like that’s the aesthetic argument implicit in a lot of Ol’ Dirty Bastard too. I mean, plenty of performers are more endearing for lacking technical skills, but most genres don’t have a convention of totally identifying some non-musical characteristic with being good at that genre. Maybe if Madonna or Britney wrote a clumsy song about how lazy she was, in a way that made laziness seem sexy?

There must be some other example involving slackerhood and mid-90s indie rock. It’s tough, though; I never felt like the looseness of “Slack Motherfucker” would have been self-described as incompetence by the band at the time. Maybe!