Bladee & Ecco2K's Desire is a Trap

I've given myself the task of writing about one song a week for 2024 because, well, I think it'd be fun.

Bladee & Ecco2K's Desire is a Trap

Happy birthday, Bladee. (Alright, this is the last of the birthdays for a while.)

(By the way, that top Youtube comment? "This album inspired me to go to the nearby woods and talk to trees, collect berries, and mushrooms"? Fucking hilarious.)

Here we are, my favorite album of 2022, maybe, still, after two years, the most forward-looking album of the last two years I have heard, and I'm still not sure why I love it so much, and I'm still not sure if it's a joke. But, as time has moved on from the debut of "Crest" and I've gotten older, I have found art is exactly that: strangeness for the sake of strangeness. There's nothing normal in the songs Taylor Swift sings, whether it's desiring love "stories" or shaking off ex-boyfriends. Her art causes us to share in her feeling, thus impacting our thinking (whether we agree, on the face of it, or not), thus influencing our view of the world, thus changing what we think of the world and what people are doing in it. Expression provides the reasons why we feel or do what we do, even when we are against it (for what is not is also a description of what it is), and great expression finds words we never knew were there, such that we come upon something looking like...empathy towards other people and their viewpoints.

Which is why assholes like me exist, to try, in some way, to parse the art into words, which may not possess the same meaning in another's heart. Critics are romantics in that way, attempting the hopeless excavation of meaning so that some guy or gal would not look over these works with a wary eye and possess meaning as well, even if only partially, even if occluded, for meaning is the only substance we can have (definitionally).

Which is why "Crest" has always been a tough topic for me to tackle, because, though I love it so much, I don't know if Bladee & Ecco2K took...any of it seriously. An artist's oeuvre acts a cipher, a kind of Rosetta Stone, for the meaning of their future work. I've always loved this Joycean thought: James noted that authors are always trying to rewrite the same book in different forms, whether it's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", "Ulysses", "Finnegans Wake". (Sadly... I can't find the precise citation. LOL.) In so saying, Bladee has never made anything like "Crest". The closest is his collaboration with Skrillex on his album, "Don't Get Too Close". Therefore, I still see Bladee as a rapper. I at least know now, if he, or Ecco, do not take it seriously, I do.

"Desire is a Trap" is probably the song that most looks like a joke. "White Meadow" is the closest thing to a single. "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" looks most like a car commercial. "5 Star Crest (4 Vattenrum)", as I mentioned before, like Burial. "Heaven Sings" will be the closest thing Bladee has to gospel. But the overuse of synthesizers and autotune in "Desire is a Trap", to the point they are stinging, will be crass to many listeners.

But such abrasiveness is Bladee's intent: in an odd way, in an avant-garde, but in a pathetic way, he wants to disarm you. Electronic artists often try to overwhelm the listener so as to force their ideals, whether to take political action or to party, onto their listeners, in the same sense John Cage called Glenn Branca's music fascist. There's nothing overwhelming in Ecco's music as far as volume or beatmaking go, but good lord is it pitchy, and therefore gaudy. By pointing to how gaudy the music is, Bladee in his weird way is lowering himself, smirking, "Aren't I corny, huh." There is a weird meaning in his trying to pretend to be someone else.

That describes Drain Gang rather nicely: people trying to pretend to be other people while retaining their own identity. As adequate as they are at rapping, they never devolve into rap tropes. As much as you want to label them as sad sacks, they navigate around emo tropes. I do think, historically, I've never found the lot of them to be good musicians, but, nowadays, I do think of them as being interesting artists if only because I can't name anyone else like them.

It's not rap and it's not dance music, so you can't compare it to either. I believe Bladee described it once as rave music. This is correct. Rave music has an extraordinary sense of humor with itself. Take Underworld's "Born Slippy", which is all nonsense phrases. Then there's Aphex Twins' "You've got so many machines, Richard". There's something about the anonymity and unity of the rave that permits everyone into the inside joke.

In so saying, there's nothing to emulate or parody, because rave is often a parody of itself, thus your only route is to take the music seriously. You either wince at its bad taste or you keep listening. If you make it past the barrage, you get to: "I'm the head of the arrow / and the head of the fountain, / come to think about it, I can't wrap my head around it," which, again, you can take as a big shitpost by Bladee to make something somewhat Zen-sounding, but the imagery is too specific to really believe that (and this imagery, of the arrow, is reiterated with "The Flag is Raised").

Bladee continues:

Pick petals from your flowers, oh you love me, oh you love me not,
Now there's only one way down a tower, even if your hair is long,
I claw my way towards the top and let it fall down to the bottom,
Every day I swallow pain, but I still taste it,

to which we reply... What is he talking about? In the high-school poetry, the line "even if your hair long", I think a reference to the fairy-tale of Rapunzel, stands out as being particularly bad.

But...we're not sure if Bladee himself thinks it's bad. Yes, this is a bit of a cop-out, but we're reminded Bladee's voice is going through substantial voice processing; this, combined with the rapping, combined again with the half-mumble presentation, makes the lyrics hard to piece. The "hair is long" line is almost drowned in the instrumentals and the warbles of the auto-tune. We come, well, I come to the conclusion that this demonstrates some level of embarrassment. Embarrassment is a bad emotion to have when unveiling a new product or hosting a party. Not for art; not for expression. His "embarrassment", which he has shown to everyone, becomes sincerity, which is a rare emotion for art.

The most heavily auto-tuned part (accompanied with Bladee's overdubbed voice going "waaaa-ah!" and "wa-wa-wa"):

Wash, wash, wash, wash the pain away,
Three, three, three, three stars on the shield, okay,
Walk, walk, walk, walk, walking with the faith,
Drip drop, rain won't stop on a sunny day,

which comes off as a Wiccan chant, whose summon is happiness and, going by the title of the song, self-sufficiency. This is where we pause, because, as much as we can roll our eyes at the entire affect, we find in this desire...some earnestness. Perhaps we can find in the idea something worthy.

The music then quietens down, for Bladee to sing:

Uphill, easy, the diamond top,
We draw the line and then we cross,
We hold the light, it opens up,
Prepare the way, the trust in us,

which he sings so convincingly we almost see the Messianic imagery he's evoking.

When I last spoke on "Crest", I mentioned it was a Pandemic album, because it approached the Pandemic not in actuality but aesthetically. Bladee took the pain of a world under crisis, of an uncertain future, of the isolation that came from it, and made...genuinely optimistic and pessimistic music from it. He related it to his own struggle as a human being to improve and be happy. "Crest" is not his attempt to have heaven on Earth, but it was his attempt to glimpse at it, which itself is so hard to do nowadays. We find the synthesizer is employed precisely for its aggressive attack, trying to bring us to the highest heights; we find the autotune is an attempt to transform himself and his entire persona; we find the whole aesthetic of "Crest" is to take our entire mind out of the current world, by annoying us, to find, at the end, light and water as if at the end of a long storm. The music becomes a comfort, because it is an escape. The nice thing about this escape is that we are always free to return back.

Fittingly for a rave, the song ends in a long outro where the synths and the overdubs interchange, the pivotal moment Bladee, for a second, purges himself of his temporary desires. It's the very opposite effect of an Underworld song, whose endings are ecstasy. But both end in joy, at the last.