Author: Edward Clark

By Edward Clark

T. S. Eliot and Earl Sweatshirt (real name Thebe Neruda Kgositsile) are both visionaries. This claim is contentious – many find Eliot’s writing frustrating or pretentious and Kgositsile’s abstract delivery and style of hip-hop alienating. Nevertheless, both artists redefined what their craft could be, pioneering a new lens for poetry in interwar and modern eras alike. This essay considers how Eliot’s The Waste Land and Kgositsile’s “solace” both use abstract form, language and structure to express feelings of aimlessness after loss: Eliot representing the ‘lost generation’ of young people following the First World War, and Kgositsile dealing with depression and addiction following the death of his grandmother. Today marks a decade since Kgositsile released the ten-minute “solace” on YouTube channel dar Qness, accompanied only by the caption ‘music from when i hit the bottom and found something’. No rollout, no marketing. Split into five distinct sections like The Waste Land, the song delves into Kgositsile’s struggles with addiction, depression and grief. “solace” seemingly has little in common with Eliot’s masterpiece, a poem which encapsulated the aimlessness of modern twentieth-century society and cemented Eliot as a seminal modernist writer. Although it may appear fruitless to draw comparison between a groundbreaking century-old epic poem and a relatively unknown song released solely on YouTube, analysis of Eliot’s The Waste Land and Kgositsile’s “solace” suggests the unique role that forward-thinking art plays in conveying perspectives from ‘the bottom’.

As Eliot uses disorienting form to display a frustration with post-war aimlessness as a member of the ‘lost generation’, Kgositsile breaks down traditional hip-hop structure in “solace” to depict his difficulty in dealing with the grief of his grandmother. “solace” is split into five distinct sections, each providing a snapshot of different experiences of depression in loss. Kgositsile’s five-act structure is not only reminiscent of Eliot, but of Aristotle’s Poetics and a dramatic framework which Aristotle influenced – a form which both Eliot and Kgositsile themselves distort. “solace” and The Waste Land thrive on this type of disruption. If Aristotle’s dénouement of the fourth act intended to build towards a climactic conclusion, Kgositsile’s fizzles into depressive ambiance and Eliot’s five acts laugh in the face of structure altogether. Attempting to draw a single narrative between the fragmented voices of the poem does a disservice to the deliberate disorientation of Eliot’s writing. Beyond form, inversion of tradition and the familiar is the foundation of The Waste Land. The poem’s opening line ‘April is the cruellest month’ twists the opening to the General Prologue of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which describes how ‘Aprille with his shoures soote’ … ‘engend[er] the flour’ (April with his showers sweet … grow flowers). What represented new life in the Middle Ages is twisted by the 1920s to be lifeless and ‘cruel’. Kgositsile similarly distorts the optimism of April. A sample of Ahmed Jamal’s “April in Paris” is skewed and repeated to sound eerie and unsettling. A celebration of the beauty of spring through jazz is inverted to soundtrack Kgositsile’s lament that he has ‘been alone for the longest’. The rebirth of spring hurts more when stuck in a cyclical pattern of depression.

Where Eliot is constrained to the page, Kgositsile is provided with more opportunities for expression. His slurred, depressed tone leaves the listener with a pit in their stomach; a feeling only accentuated by uses of repetition throughout. The mantra of ‘it’s me and my nibbling conscience … I’m fixin’ to give up’ structurally emphasises Kgositsile’s repeated failure to climb out of the pit of depression which he raps about. Cyclical despondency is at the core of “solace”, the song beginning with a warped voice repeating ‘I’ve been here before’. Depression is not foreign to Kgositsile. A wide emotional range is expressed through instruments alone. The third section of the song lacks vocals altogether, sounding almost optimistic, yet then quickly descends into the darkest section of the track after a brief moment of reprieve. The decision to leave the most up-tempo, brightest moment of the song without vocals is itself reflective of Kgositsile’s low self-esteem – the song’s auditory moment of optimism is saved for when his vocals are absent. 

“solace’s” shifts between tones are reminiscent of Eliot’s poetic voice. In part one, The Burial of the Dead, Eliot uses enjambment to quickly change the meaning of his lines. The romantic image of ‘the hyacinth girl’ with ‘arms full’ and ‘hair wet’ turns sour as Eliot writes ‘I could not / Speak, and my ears failed’. Similarly, enjambment is employed at the beginning of part two, A Game of Chess, to create a flowing, confused and overwhelming body of text, reflective of the ‘synthetic perfumes’ Eliot describes. The abstract perspective of the poem disorientates the reader, placing them in Eliot’s aimless shoes. The words ‘troubled, confused’ are initially read as adjectives, leading on from the image of ‘perfumes’, yet as one follows onto the next line it becomes clear that they are intended as verbs. As optimism and pessimism are opposed in The Waste Land and “solace”, so are youth and death. Part one of The Waste Land questions a man, and by proxy the reader, as to whether the ‘corpse … in your garden’ will ‘bloom this year’. Rebirth is juxtaposed with the legacy of conflict and the First World War. How can new life flourish against a backdrop of violence? Kgositsile’s depression prevents him from disconnecting his physical body from his grief: ‘I got my grandmama hands, I start to cry when I see ‘em / ‘Cause they remind me of seein’ her’. At twenty-one, depression and grief lead him to despair, with seemingly no solace in sight. The final lines of the song are hopeless: ‘I’m the youngest old man that ya know’.

Years after The Waste Land’s publishing, Eliot described it as nothing but ‘a piece of rhythmical grumbling’. An untuned ear may describe Kgositsile’s solace in the same way. Both works represent the disgruntled voices of their generations a century apart. As The Waste Land instantly became a classic, its ominous tone connecting with those who connected themselves to a ‘lost generation’, “solace” has connected with thousands of fans around the world who relate to Kgositsile’s potent, free-flowing, faded depression. Yet it gets better. Eliot found happiness and connection in a second marriage later in his life, and Kgositsile is now a father and sober. Both artists pushed their art forms to convey their aimlessness and came out on the other side. Perhaps we can find solace in The Waste Land.

Image credit: genius

By Edward Clark

Via her Tumblr, ‘mothercain’, Hayden Anhedönia (releasing music under alias Ethel Cain) repeats the phrase ‘Perverts is for every-body’. Yet her ninety-minute EP Perverts, released in January, has divided her fanbase. For newer fans born from Anhedönia’s success on Tiktok, the drone and ambient-heavy EP lacks the catchy melodies and vocal expression found on 2022’s Preacher’s Daughter and 2021’s Inbred. For dedicated fans of Ethel Cain and Anhedönia’s worldbuilding, Perverts is a departure from the Ethel Cain character and mythology. Anhedönia stated on Tumblr that ‘this next little project has nothing to do with ethel cain lore’ and has no connection to the narrative developed in her previous work. Perverts instead functions as something closer to a thematic set of character studies of different ‘perverts’, initially inspired by Donald Ray Pollock’s book Knockemstiff. Anhedönia has acknowledged that the end product has shifted away from this case-study-like structure, but the initial form grounds it; the project is thus a total separation from her previous album.

Anhedönia’s most recent venture is seemingly a result of her changing mindset. In a May 2022 interview with the New York Times, she expressed how she was happy to embrace celebrity and ‘play Miss Alt-Pop Star and … parade [her]self around’ for the release of her ‘first record’, with the aim to earn a legacy where she can remove herself from the mainstream. Now that Anhedönia’s first album cycle is over, her ‘parad[ing]’ seems to be over. During an interview with the Guardian, Anhedönia stated that she ‘would really love to have a much smaller fanbase’ than she did post-Preacher’s Daughter. Frustrated with her audience ‘joking’ about her work, Anhedönia expressed a desire to be able to ‘turn off the memeable internet personality thing’ where she can move away from being ‘funny’ or ‘relatable’ and, instead, have an audience based on appreciation of her art. Six months later, Anhedönia appears to be somewhat succeeding. Fans of hers have expressed confusion about the direction of her new sound on social media, with comments such as ‘ETHEL WHAT IS THIS??’ and ‘this new Ethel Cain album is just machine noises … what even is this’. 

For these fans, Perverts lacks the anthemic and catchy memories of American Teenager or Crush; the lead single Punish is a dark, brooding, nearly seven-minute piano ballad. Anhedönia’s vocals are accompanied by creaking noises, as she sings slowly, enunciating every syllable, providing the minimalist space for the repeated refrain ‘I am punished by love’ to slowly and effectively resonate with the listener. As Anhedönia lets her voice and the piano become swallowed by harsh guitar riffs and feedback, her chorus blends into itself, the melody repeated and repeated until the guitar cuts out as the song returns to sombre piano chords, accompanied by an eerie, panning drone. Despite its harshness, this is arguably the most accessible song on the album. It is followed by the thirteen-minute ambient track Housofpsychoticwomn, which pairs the repeated, artificially monotone call of ‘I love you’ with a building sample (or reconstruction) of a pregnancy scan. Behind the clear repeated vocal, Anhedönia quietly mutters a spoken-word extract about the magnitude yet un-explainability of love. Eventually this is overridden by the overbearing drone. ‘I love you’ is perverted from a plea to a threat.

Although Perverts’ dark ambience is at odds with any previous framing of Anhedönia as a pop artist and the ‘stan economy’ she found frustrating in interviews in 2023, her new style is not a complete diversion from Preacher’s Daughter. Repeated vocal melodies, brown noise and heavy guitar riffs are reminiscent of harsher moments on songs such as ‘Ptolomaea’ and ‘Family Tree’. Further, Anhedönia’s new material, like her previous work, has ample room for interpretation and analysis. The fifteen-minute Pulldrone details the ‘12 Pillars of Simulacrum’, Anhedönia’s own theory influenced by Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra, which concerns the difficulties of dividing reality from media representation in modern society. Anhedönia’s interpretation of Simulacra is grounded in spirituality and a connection to ‘hell’ and the ‘great dark’, which Anhedönia developed in a YouTube video titled ‘the ring, the great dark, and proximity to god’ released in anticipation of the departure of Preacher’s Daughter. Proximity to God is of consistent thematic importance throughout the entire album, and there is an implicit comparison between the perversion of love and perversion of reality. Through a perversion of reality, the listener finds themselves against God. Further, the title of Pulldrone itself refers abstractedly to the pull of humanity between spirituality and the apathy of the modern age, yet also functions as recognition of the ‘drone’ accompanying the poetry. The ambience is uncomfortable and distorted; strings develop and become more grating as the song progresses, stuttering and dying out in its final moments. Anhedönia stated that this ambience alongside the base texture for the album is entirely developed from field recordings of Niagara falls. A connection to nature and thus a spiritual connection to the physical world is embedded in Perverts; this natural connection is distorted beyond recognition throughout. Not all of the ambient cuts on Perverts are deliberately abrasive, however. Thatorchia is a standout example, with developing vocal riffs which expand to an atmosphere that is eerie rather than claustrophobic. Even this, however, is uncomfortable. 

Perhaps the decision to state that Perverts is an EP (Extended Play) whatsoever is Anhedönia’s recognition of the album’s stylistic departure from Preachers Daughter. An EP is usually considered a shorter album, with the length nearly never exceeding 30 minutes. Perverts is longer than Anhedönia’s debut album. The decision could reflect some acknowledgement that this is a side-project or not the direction of her future sound. In a Tumblr post, Anhedönia brushed off the question ‘is it true you’re trying to push away from the more mainstream sound to draw in a closer and intimate audience?’ by saying that she ‘just really like[s] drone music and wanted to make some’. Despite this, it is surely naïve to suggest that Anhedönia did not believe that her newest release would ostracise some fans – a reduction of her fanbase she has previously been all in favour for. 

I am not intending to argue that Anhedönia’s newest release is a deliberate attempt to ‘weed out’ fans who discovered her music through TikTok or other social media. But she is encouraging her audience to judge her music critically and engage with it, instead of rejecting it upon first listen. Anhedönia regularly posts and thanks critics for reviews of her music even when not entirely positive: when the listener properly considers the merits of her music, the feedback is appreciated. Ambient and drone are not genres which resonate with everybody; through the release of a challenging, incredibly detailed drone record, Anhedönia encourages her audience to properly judge the music they hear. 

Perverts is for every-body.