jay

@kuppermann.xyz

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online ecosystem keystone species (uc davis ecology phd), they/them

25-6, the n0ughtie5 (descriptions in next slide)
2:04 PM] Dave: Chappell Roan is already budots, it could work [2:04 PM] jacob: expectations, as the most midwest princess thing on the album, is thus budots by induction
A flyer: Modjeska Live! A Full-band reimagining of the 2021 Nightjars Album June 20, 2026 4 PM The Lost Church SF All Ages, $25 tinyurl.com/NightjarsModjeskaLive
THE UNCTION!!! (superimposed over a bunch of old guys)
a table of contents: Star Pit Dog in a Fisherman's Net Corona Aye, and Gomorrah Driftglass We, In Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line Cage of Brass High Weir Time Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones Night and the Loves of Joe Dicostanzo
the ro khanna cycle
two tweets from helena horton, a journalist at the guardian: The real Joe isn’t on X and this account is based in the US and connected via the Brazil App Store. Jonathan the tortoise is apparently alive and well. The governor of St Helena just told me he went outside to check on the tortoise, who was sleeping as it is past his bedtime, but he is very much alive.
the dril dial tweet
a wikipedia article: Worm charming From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Worm charming, worm grunting, worm fiddling, or rooping
a journal article: SPECIES by Philip Kitcher
get a job stay away from her
The single cover of Frank Ocean's Thinkin Bout You
the rental interface for Lav Diaz's NORTE, which is 251 minutes long
my position in the cluster map, closer to American Leftwing media and comedy than infie music critics and journalists
The cover art for BIPP by Sophie. What a beautiful image.
The single cover for Dua Lipa's "Don't Start Now"; in retrospect, kind of outside of the aesthetic of the broader Future Nostalgia era
a tweet from @kscottz: The "Pro Billionaire March" in San Francisco looks like a bunch of Libertarian dweebs who stepped out of their Discord server for some fresh air. Boos and heckling from the parents at the playground with their kids. [an image of a pro-billionaire march with... sparse attendance. it's beautiful out in SF, though!]
a file named "pitchfork.csv" (contents left as an exercise to the reader). size 89.9 mb, download date 5/12/2023
a calico cat
jay 10/28/22, 2:11 PM i love it ogg vorbis is my cellar door
a description of England midfielder Jude Bellingham, describing him as a "tornado of desire"
my singles jukebox blurb for million dollar baby, unfortunately a [10]
the cover art for spots 25-10 on my #thetwen2ie5 list
Updated November 12 at 8:15 p.m. KST: The other three members of NewJeans have also announced their decision to return to ADOR. Following the official statement from ADOR, Minji, Hanni, and Danielle released this statement: Hello. This is Minji, Hanni, and Danielle. Recently, we decided on our return to ADOR after careful discussion. This was relayed late as one member is currently in Antarctica, but as ADOR is not responding at the moment, we are inevitably announcing this through a separate statement.
the single/album art for my first 25 picks in #thetwen2ie5s
From Darmok, Star Trek TNG
from Soulé, Michael E. “What Is Conservation Biology?” BioScience 35, no. 11 (1985): 727–34. https://doi.org/10.2307/1310054. a diagram of cancer biology and conservation biology as "crisis disciplines," each represented at the heart of a circle with other disciplines embedded like spikes in the perimeter
medal meme (please imagine that it has been edited to have 33 spots in between)
sickos yes
the wiki infobox for “finest worksong”, which includes a reference to the song as “funk metal”
my acceptance letter to UC Davis!
The pre-chorus to "Mystical Magical": Once you know what my love's gonna feel like Nothing else will feel right, you can feel like Moonbeam ice cream, taking off your blue jeans Dancing at the movies, 'cause it feels so
Kernel Magazine Issue 5: Rules Launch Party July 17 6:30-9pm SF Gray Area The illustration behind this text is a mix of gold chess pieces and purple snakes on a chessboard pattern lu.ma/k5-sf
Embattled San Francisco Zoo CEO refuses to step down
singles for control
the magazines at the bottom of my stairs
Cam'ron's singles from 2000 to 2002: "What Means The World To You," "Oh Boy," and "Hey Ma"
sickos yes
A chart of streams on spotify for "Iris," increasing overtime to peaks in the past week.
a screenshot of the wikipedia page for markdown (invented by mark down)
another table Year Count Sum of Changes Average Change 1976 18 849 47.17 1984 9 475 52.78 1988 13 432 33.23 2000 12 336 28.00 1927 6 296 49.33 1943 5 292 58.40 1993 6 275 45.83 1971 14 263 18.79 1950 11 249 22.64 2001 19 243 12.79 1986 9 193 21.44
a table of songs and rank changes: 1976 Song Delta Police and Thieves 198 Cherry Bomb 160 Roadrunner 118 The Boys Are Back In Town 108 Love And Affection 106 (Don't Fear) The Reaper 95 Go Your Own Way 95 Love Really Hurts Without You 79 Gloria 28 Love Hangover 19 Radioactivity 8 You Should Be Dancing 1 The Rubberband Man -14 Anarchy In The UK -15 Young Hearts Run Free -26 Blitzkrieg Bop -32 I Want More -39 Car Wash -40 The average change is 47.167
If you’d like to talk about how AI is going to destroy the world, you can go to parties with people who might answer “how are you” with, earnestly, statements like “the fight against Moloch continues.” If you’d like to talk about how AI is going to cure every disease and be our machine God, you can go to those parties too. Want to be someone in the middle, someone with layered interests that extend to art and culture? Those parties are in every other city, not here.
A CNBC headline from 2018: Japan's minister of cybersecurity admits he's never used a computer
1. Chaka Khan & Rufus - Ain’t Nobody [!14 Points!] I stand by every world I wrote about this back in November. The world has changed. My life has changed. Yet after all of this the truth remains: “Ain’t Nobody” is a special song — a song at the midpoint of the era of modern pop music, exemplifying everything great and powerful about what this music can be. I don’t know if this was my favorite song of all time before I started enmeshing myself within this particular section of the pop-obsessed internet; it’s too hard to tell, too easy to fool oneself into thinking that one’s tastes have maintained some degree of continuity over time. I know that it is my favorite song of all time now — a song undeniably tied in my mind to the particular moment of now, a beacon through decades and centuries, a symbol of all that collaborative pop-making and sense-making can be. If I have nothing left to say, it’s because the song says it all.
2. Azealia Banks - 2[12 Points!] Where were you when you first heard this? I, of course, was on Tumblr. This is, in theory, a dance record — an genius fusion of European electro-house and New York club rap — and I have danced to this at an unknowably large number of parties in my time. But for me, and for many, many others, “212” has always been an online phenomenon first, an out-of-nowhere wave of greatness. It is the ultimate internet record, a frenetic display of boasts, threats, and jokes told with a disarming charm. It overwhelms you, much like many of the records I love the most, but it does so with a distinctly jocular sensibility; Azealia isn’t a high priestess, a mystic, or even a scientist, but instead embodies the form of the trickster, bobbing-and-weaving through Lazy Jay’s beat to find the ripest angles of attack. People like to frame Azealia Banks’ career as a sort of story of wasted potential — think of all the music she could have made if she wasn’t so devoted to self-destruction via posting! — but this sounds to me like posting by other means, one of the few records made during the peak decade of millennial social media that captures the delirious, queasy feeling of extremely online skirmishes. It’s bad for you, of course. No one said it had to be good for you; while music-as-transcendence has dominated this particular countdown, music is always just amplification of feeling, and what “212” amplifies is the meanest part of each of us, turning it out into a rallying cry — something almost joyful, a unifier built out of discord. What a song. What an experience. What a way to be.
A show flyer with the following text: the fixin’ to | may 18, 2025 @ 8 PM | $12 Nightjars Waterboy Kitchen Congregation
3. Les Paul & Mary Ford - How High The Moon [11 Points] “How High The Moon” existed for a decade before this version came to life, performed by countless jazz combos across the United States (Les Paul’s own band included) before this version sprang into existence. I am aware of these versions, of course — Ella Fitzgerald sings it perfectly — but they feel distinctly like preludes, like the song was waiting to be performed like this, a dozen guitars and a dozen voices springing out of nowhere. This is the most space-age of all recordings, an encounter made only possible by human cleverness and a techno-industrial society aligned just so. Mary sings that “somewhere there’s music” and she is, of course, right; this song is neither here nor there, one of the first pop recordings to not sound like you’re being transported to the particular physical location that it was made in. It’s missing something, then, compared to many recordings and performances of the first half of that century. But in those absences we can find the genius of “How High The Moon,” the strange and glorious things that Les Paul achieves in a laboratory environment. This is not a pure tech demo, but it captures, both textually and metatextually, the thrill and shock of the new; even when I heard this for the first time, more than a half century after it first conjured itself, I understood that there was sufficiently advanced magic at work here.
4. Minnie Riperton - Les Fleurs [11 Points] There is no attested evidence that Minnie Riperton drove up the west coast in springtime before she sang this song — though she moved to Los Angeles later in her unfortunately short life, the Minnie Riperton of “Les Fleur” was a Chicagoan through-and-through. Yet as I drove up the coast yesterday, routing from Oakland to Portland in just under 12 hours, I understood this song more than I ever had, the hallucinatory richness of the natural world singing to me in the same dazzling range that Riperton’s own vocals possess. “Les Fleur” is the defining statement of Riperton’s career, the proof-positive for her particular brand of lush 70s vocal soul. I’ve included a lot of records from this style in this list — if I had to pick a particular genre and epoch to listen to for the rest of my life, this would be it — but there’s something special about Riperton’s take on it; she’s at once grounded in the specificity of her vision and completely given away to the gestalt of feeling. In the space of this song, she is the flower, the lady pinning it in her hair, the child, the stream, the entire world of experience. Her voice rises out of the glories of Charles Stepney’s production like the very concept of spring itself; when she hits those whistle tones I am transported, every time.
5. Stevie Wonder - Living for the City [11 Points] The greatest to ever do it. If this were a ranking of artists, of albums, of multi-album runs, of songs, of careers, Stevie Wonder would take the top spot for the modern pop era. Here, he still gets close — with a song that feels almost too massive to be a single; not the longest track on my list, but the deepest, the richest. What Stevie conjures here over the course of seven-and-a-half minutes is special, sui generis in the history of pop. Some may say that this doesn't really count as a great single — the 3 minute edit that somehow glanced at the top ten in 1973 is so much lesser than the full version. I just checked, and two things are true: (a) the single edit is incomparably worse than the original (b) it's still one of the ten-or-so greatest recordings of all time. Even within those bounds we've got all the aspects that make "Living for the City" perfect — that ambiguous, murky array of synths; the joyous hand-claps; Stevie's vocal performance; those drums. I'm not the first (nor the first in this listing) to talk about how great a drummer Stevie is, but "Living for the City" erases all doubt — in each snap of the hi-hat, each roaring fill, his greatness is revealed again. He plays the drums like it's telling the story of the song, just as much as the lyrics are. There's a desperation to his play, each hit worn-down and lived in. When I first heard this song as a small child, I did not grasp the nuances of the sociological analysis of America that Stevie brings here, but I understood something more fundamental: the rage, pain, and horror of the story he tells. Perhaps the best work of literature of the 70s; he captures decades of struggle in single lines. A true one-of-one song.
6. Diana Ross - Upside Down [11 Points] The rest of the songs in this top 8 are grand epics, songs that take the contemporary forms of pop in their time and stretch them out in avant garde ways. They’re statements of purpose, attempts by some of the great artists of our time to make their marks in pop history. “Upside Down” is not one of those. By the time Diana Ross got to “Upside Down,” she had nothing to prove. For the better part of two decades, Diana Ross had been the definitive pop star, a force across eras and modes of production. Diana was her final moment of glory, but on the record she doesn’t sound at all ill at ease with her crown. Instead, “Upside Down” is a delightfully relaxed record, an artfully struck set of poses from an all-timer who knows her skillset perfectly. She weaves in between Chic’s backing like she’s got collisions turned off, hitting her lines with a poise unmatched in her time or since. The whole song plays with negative space — rare has a pop hit sounded this spare, this open and inviting; everything can breathe, letting you into its groove with grace. It’s the kind of song that’s inherently hard to write about; its perfection coming from the ineffable aura of excellence binding it all together more than any particular moment.
7. Lady Gaga - Bad Romance [11 Points] By the circumstance of my birth, my life as a listener of pop music has been defined by Lady Gaga. As a suburban pre-teen in the late 2000s, I was indifferent at best to pop — it’s not that I thought that the pop landscape of 2007 was bad so much as it did not register at all. Then came Gaga. Even now, after the blueprint provided by The Fame-era Lady Gaga has become one of the foundational texts of contemporary pop song-craft, it’s easy to see why she’s so special. The first seven songs off of that debut are glorious assemblages of hooks, a precocious pop genius cramming in all of her good and bad ideas as if she’s not sure if she’s going to have another chance. Sometimes the results are perfect (“Just Dance,” “Paparazzi”); other times they’re “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich.” Regardless, they woke me from a slumber. Yet even these songs now feel like prelude in the light of “Bad Romance.” And, for whatever it’s worth, the rest of Gaga’s career, with all of its highs, sometimes feels like the denouement of “Bad Romance.” This is a song that defines a career. “Bad Romance” is one of those songs that splits pop history in two. Everything before it anticipates it, everything after has clear marks of its influence. In its grandeur I can hear everyone from Édith Piaf and Peggy Lee to Rick James and Janet Jackson; in its wake I can hear it shaping everything. A decade and a half of imitators has not dimmed the shine of “Bad Romance” by one lumen; it’s still the Death Star hanging above 21st century pop, a massive object looming, capable of extreme acts of power. Listen to the way she chews up those syllables — I fully feel like I understand French when Lady Gaga speaks it. Listen to those bleeps and bloops and buzzing sounds, all mustered into action by Gaga like Napoleon rousing the troops for the Hundred Days. It’s almost too much. But it isn’t.
Claire: I thought we had left this kind of song in the 2010s, but no, it appears there is an endless market for music that attempts to approximate bombast through the use of thunderous percussion and overwrought choral vocals. Worse still, in the case of Alex Warren’s “Ordinary,” that approach is in service of lyrics that, despite evoking a love that’s supposedly transcendent, employ the most basic religious metaphors possible and still manage to garble that throughline. (I’d hazard a guess that the line “You got me kissin’ the ground of your sanctuary” is meant to refer to oral sex, but that would be far too erotic for a song this neutered.) That iconography is appropriate in a slanted way, because the grayscale grandeur of “Ordinary” would sound more at home on a Christian rock station than anything resembling a Top 40 playlist. I can hardly think of a more damning criticism. 4 Scott: Inactive; drags on. (And if that seems dismissive, this could have just said Dozier)5 Jel: No fair, you can’t wear a kick-me sign like this. “Ordinary,” indeed. Is this a powerful voice? It’s the kind of singing I just can’t stand, a sort of theatre school, boo-hoo but I am strong, I’m marching up that hill in the rain! I’m fixing your car! I’ve done the dishes! I’ve trodden on a Lego brick, but I won’t let it show! 4 Taylor: Alex Warren is the sin-eater who was ritually assigned to take on the worst qualities of Imagine Dragons in order that they might finally have a 6/10 album. 1 Nortey: To be frank, if you told me this dude was black, I would’ve have believed you. I hear it. Then I’d hear him sing “breathe and take my breath away,” and I’d immediately peg him as a Hozier wannabe (whom I’d have also thought was black if I’d ever seen him). (The song is fine.) [5]
Alex Warren – Ordinary There’s probably no outage we could have had that would have outlived this thing’s chart run… [Video] [3.21] Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A musical anti-meme; despite this being, at worst, the second-biggest song in the world right now, I’ve not been able to retain a single fact about the experience of listening to it. There are guitars, unless there are ukeleles or pianos. There is a man singing — I am almost certain he does not rap. He sounds like Hozier but is likely not to be Hozier. You could get married to it, possibly. It is 186 seconds long. It is recorded sound. What are we talking about, anyways? [3]
a spotify playlist with title "what's 1c000ler than being cool?"
8. Outkast - B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad) [11 Points] I turned 10,000 days old today. This song came out when I was 1,000 days old. In the 9,000 days that have passed, there has never been a moment where “B.O.B” hasn’t sounded like the future. It’s one of the most overwhelming recordings of all time — a wave of sound overtaking you, a D.I.Y amalgamation of everything exciting inside and outside of pop music in 2000 recombined into a completely unstoppable force. It shouldn’t work; the song proceeds like a runaway train, Big Boi and Andre 3000 frantically twisting their flows just to fit inside the confines of those drums while guitars and turntable scratches and an entire choir elbow for position. And yet with every overstuffed second of the song it wears you down, entraining you into its maximalist logic. It helps, of course, that no men were more charismatic than these two in the 1997-2003 window (very few men have been as charismatic before or since, to be fair.) But perhaps “B.O.B.” was also a perfect song for its moment in time, an instant of intense acceleration that has left the century that has followed in a sort of inertial hangover. What happens when the future comes and doesn’t sound like the song?
9. Glen Campbell - Wichita Lineman There is a video of Glen Campbell performing this song, 40 years after its release, on Jools Holland’s late night show. It’s perfect — every performance of “Wichita Lineman” is perfect by definition — but it ends on an odd note. Instead of the slow, meditative fadeout of the original, dissipating into just strings and the far-away beeps of organ, or the gliding climax of most live versions, Campbell instead goes rogue. He finishes the song by announcing, mostly in tune, that he, the Wichita Lineman, still on the line, is “doing fine.” To me, this is a fundamental misrepresentation of the song. “Wichita Lineman” is many things — the dreamiest thing ever composed, the highest aspiration of what “Americana” can mean, the Wrecking Crew’s great triumph — but it is not, really, a song about doing fine. It is about all of the highs and lows of the human experience that encircle but do not include fine: the solace of the road and the grinding nature of work, the overwhelming power of love, the vastness of the American West. It is a song that, I think, will outline the city of Wichita and the concept of telephone pole linemen and pop country as a musical formation. “Wichita Lineman” is eternal.
10. Blondie - Atomic Is Blondie my favorite band? The more I consider the question, the more ridiculous it sounds — of course Blondie is my favorite band. At the peak of their powers (which, given how short their original run was, is essentially their entire career before the breakup,) Blondie was a completely unstoppable pop force, a crack team of NYC weirdos that found the middle road between the various waves of the late 70s. For a moment, they could do anything — and they did. “Atomic” is the heart of that moment of extreme exuberance and ambition. It’s a song that sounds like nothing else, not quite new wave, krautrock, or post-disco but something incorporating elements from all of those styles without fully occupying their lanes. It’s the brightest object in the night sky, a pulsing force of pop; there’s no form here but the space between Clem Burke’s beat and Debbie Harry’s exaltation, the remaining members of the Blondie group filling the gaps with aplomb. It’s the best time you’ll have with a bass solo in pop history.
#53: PLAYBOY: You've often said that you believe very strongly in fascism. Yet you also claim you'll one day run for Prime Minister of England. More media manipulation? BOWIE: Christ, everything is a media manipulation. I'd love to enter politics. I will one day. I'd adore to be Prime Minister. And, yes, I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that's hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over as fast as possible. People have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership. A liberal wastes time saying, "Well, now, what ideas have you got?" Show them what to do, for God's sake. If you don't, nothing will get done. I can't stand people just hanging about. Television is the most successful fascist, needless to say. Rock stars are fascists, too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars. #54: PLAYBOY: How so? BOWIE: Think about it. Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It's astounding. And, boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience. Good God! He was no politician. He was a media artist himself. He used politics and theatrics and created this thing that governed and controlled the show for those 12 years. The world will never see his like. He staged a country. Really, I would like to be Prime Minister, but I think I'd have to set up my own country first. I don't want to be Prime Minister of the old country. I'd have to create the state that I wish to live in first. I dream of one day buying companies and television stations, owning and controlling them.
12. Prince & The Revolution - When Doves Cry & 11. Madonna - Like A Prayer I already said most of what I wanted to say about these songs from an analytic standpoint back in November; instead, let us treat them here as a dyad, linked not only because of the presence of Prince’s guitar-craft on the opening bars but on a deeper level. These are not my favorite songs by the two of them (that’d be “Live to Tell” and [song to be disclosed during the B-Sides challenge]), but they are each artist’s definitional piece — the song through which all interpretation of their works must pass. They’re two precocious pieces, taking on the trappings of baroque composition and cathedral-scale soundscapes in order to express foundational feelings — in Prince’s case, the fear of loss; in Madonna’s, a pure exaltation. So what’s perhaps most interesting about treating these two as a pair is in how they differ — a difference most clearly expressed in the means of their production. Here is Prince at his most singularly productive: an atomic figure, autonomous and tyrannical within the context of his own work. There is nothing on “When Doves Cry” that isn’t Prince; you can hear him becoming more and more paranoid and insular with every gorgeous layer he encases himself in. And then there is Madonna at her most gloriously imperial, taking in a small army of instrumentalists, vocalists, and engineers in order to build her myth out to its first finale. She lets herself be carried away on the palanquin she has constructed for herself, coasting on the glory of the choir.