Frankie Cosmos' "affirms glinting"

I'll begin with what I think is a popular opinion and what I think may be an unpopular opinion. Popular: I think writing is a craft. You can reason to yourself why a verse is great. Yes, lyrics can be emotional and they will resonate with different experiences, and they can be rejected by different experiences, but you can always observe where the lyrics are going to and you can always observe why the emotions you have are related or not related to the verses you are hearing. I understand that white kids barking Public Enemy songs may not understand precisely what Chuck D. is rapping about and why he is rapping about it, but you can also understand what they don't understand. They just see the music as anti-someone. And, you know what, Public Enemy allows for that interpretation. To a listener, some lines are more important than others.

Unpopular: I think truly great writing requires a medium. There has to be an impetus for writing, and the writing navigates through and around that core. Some writers write the same way they breathe; they are prolific; as excellent as that artist is, I do not think all of their music is great or even good. I think the safest name I can put out is Dylan; he has clout, he's not going to be affected by me saying this, and I think he's at the age where he doesn't care, which is good. I'm going to bet most music critics wouldn't be even to name a tenth of Dylan's discography, which I know doesn't prove much because many critics specialize in a genre, but ... Dylan, like, won a Nobel Prize, he's one of the most substantive figures in music. Like, it's easier to remember The Beatles' discography somehow.

I think an artist needs a Big Problem, even though I don't think it's ethical to give artists Big Problems. A Big Problem can also be a question of aesthetics, as in, the artist is smart enough to see the ways an artform can expand, and goes to that. But for everyone else, the Big Problem is personal. Gertrude Stein was depressed. Rothko, we know. Wallace Stevens seemed to have his own domestic issues and psychological shortcomings. "Blood on the Tracks" (1975) came after Dylan's separation. Also Costello's "Imperial Bedroom" (1982). As for "I'm Your Man" (1988), Leonard Cohen was getting old. He was also, always, grumpy. (I think maybe the only person in my pantheon who didn't have their own demon is Marianne Moore, but I actually don't know much about her life.)

Again I don't want artists to have problems in their lives, and yet my own analysis shows that an artist needs a bee-in-their-bonnet before they make really coherent material. Or, the artist is just weird: Charles Mingus in my eyes is hands-down one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, and he was Weird, as can be seen in his autobiography. And yeah, Miles Davis: weird, to say the least.

Every album I have talked about this year has had some Big Problem, except maybe "GLOW ON" (2021) AFAIK. Taylor Swift said throughout 2016 - 2017 she felt she was worth absolutely nothing. Rosie Tucker was dropped by Epitaph Records before "UTOPIA NOW!" (2024) was released, an album which seethes at being a profit-making machine. Young Thug's "Barter 6" (2015) accompanied his meteoric rise, and his losing his mind, and Hotline TNT's "Cartwheel" (2023) was, in Will's words, his last break at music before moving onto whatever else life had going for him. Et cetera, et cetera.

And now we arrive at the very uncomfortable topic.

I love Frankie Cosmos. She's the one artist I really want to win. I don't know what "win" means; I guess for me it would be an artifact where I yell, "This is it, this is the one, GOAT, everyone shut up." This is a woman who loves songwriting, her verses cut and polished to perfection; she's very funny; and there's something about her music that connotes emotional depth but is as impenetrable as the ocean.

And yet, going by her releases, she has never had a "Big Problem". Which, again, I don't want her to have one.

Except for "affirms glinting" (2014), her Bandcamp release that isn't a part of her Wikipedia discography.

I wrote about "affirms glinting" in 2024, specifically "too dark". I don't really know what happened during the creation of "affirms glinting". My guess, given the preceding "Zentropy" (also 2014), is that she was going through a discovery phase of her sexuality, which conclusion we do not know and we have no right to know and why I am even speculating on this.

But that tension is palpable throughout "affirms glinting"; it's very noticeable. Well, even going back to "Zentropy", she has a very low opinion of her body, as seen in "Leonie":

I stand beside Ali in the mirror hulking, that's why you like me and I don't.

Later, in "affirms glinting", we have "i look at me i am happy":

When you don't want me I look at my body It's awkward and dirty I feel unsturdy

The very heart of sexuality is sharing your body with another person, whether through sight or touch or whatever; it can be the catalyst for developing feelings on your body and your specific presence in the world. Given this whole Manosphere thing and what I understand to be a genuine thought from "looksmaxxer" Clavicular, this can cause people to go insane, to the point they're developing their chins with hammers. I guess Frankie Cosmos was ahead of the curve by a billion years.

But the other end of "affirms glinting" - and Frankie's albums seemingly have a journalistic quality to them, so we have some idea of what's happening to her as she makes them - is that Frankie was touring, and touring fucks. People. Up. The Breeders got their addiction to drugs on tour (because there was nothing better to do), I recall Michael Gira of Swans tried to choke someone on Sonic Youth during a tour, the Butthole Surfers went insane, and members of Hole died from, again, drug abuse. And then Weezer made "Pinkerton" (1996) based on the loneliness of touring; I feel like I don't even need to elaborate further. It's being isolated from people you love, not having a stable home you can rely on, whose objects you know and own, and every person you meet being a stranger and you have no fucking clue what they're thinking of you. Oh, the last example: Thom Yorke wrote "How to Disappear Completely" after Michael Stipe gave him advice on how to deal with tours. Touring. Is. Hard. It is a fact of having a musical career.

These two turmoils in Frankie's life, her touring and her insecurities concerning her relationships, form "affirms glinting", what I still think is her best album yet.

So, full disclosure: sometimes when I look at art, I am at a loss for words for what to say because I just think of a million things to say. And so it goes with the opening, "schmuck in the room", which has the most memorable opening lines for an album ... I can think of.

Life is long as fuck and I just want to stay sharp.
How many ways can you call whatever I do small?

The music, uhh, kinda breaks my brain. The couplets depict two completely disparate situations, and yet combined together they form a portrait of a life in complete chaos. No drugs and heartaches are involved here; it's just a woman struggling to keep up.

But the other things I wanted to talk about contribute to the other feeling or atmosphere or "aura" of the album, as the kids like to say. One is Frankie's style of writing, the other is her music of choice, the other is her recording environment, and the last is her album art. Taken together, they add onto the unintentionally-haunted mood of the album.

First up is Frankie's "micro" style of writing, where she strings up differing ideas and scenes into a song creating an artwork uneven and somehow unified in a central theme. It's a poetic style; she cites Frank O'Hara's poetry as an inspiration, and it's no different from Fiona Apple's style or Bob Dylan's style. The difference between them is that central theme: Fiona is operatic, confessional; Bob is nomadic, bardic; Frankie is diaristic, not confessional, in the sense she has nothing to confess, she is an observer. I would say her albums from "Next Thing" (2016) on has tried to incorporate this style into what is essentially pop music, with echoes of ... The Beach Boys. That claim, uhh, seems ridiculous, but I'm not talking "Pet Sounds" (1996) Boys but "Heroes and Villains" (1967) and "Friends" (1968), which are the best Beach Boys and you know I'm right. Because there is no story to tell, the listener is buoyed on the flotsam of impressions, creating an overall "vibe" to the music. "Next Thing" on, Frankie evokes the sunny vibes of the Boys; here in "affirms glinting", the pieces she tries to fit into a song are crude and ill-fitting, leading to an album ultimately about awkwardness.

To continue on with the lyrics of "schmuck in the room", there's one of my favorite verses ever that is so funny and describes me:

I'd rather be in the bathroom with a National Geographic than talk to anyone

This is me. I am on your toilet trying to avoid your party.

She follows:

Haven't you heard? If you can't pinpoint the schmuck in the room it's you, it's you, it's youuuuuu, it's all for you.

Isolation and self-isolation and diminishment and self-diminishment - Frankie describes a cycle where she shrinks because people reduce her, and because she is being shrunk she decides it's better to shrink herself as that's what everyone wants with her. Perfectly written.

The next up is her music of choice: unlike "Next Thing" on and even at odds with "Zentropy", the music is minimal and involves only an acoustic guitar. This is not the case for "healthy", I think, and there are moments when she overlays a separate vocal track over her own, which makes the music pretty creepy. I think every track is arranged with only one instrument, which further lends the music the feeling of complete loneliness. You hear this immediately with "schmuck in the room", where Greta's playing on the guitar is also mindless, just keeping in tune with her voice, not building to any particular effect.

In contrast, "being alive" pretty much has a riff, and you can tell there's more preparation for this song as the lyrics are more song-like:

Being alive I see you in everything My vocabulary's limited But I wanna tell it all to you If I could would you want me to?
Being alive If I become a piece of dirt for a dollar can I enter your brain?

Most singers put a narrative in their music; this is natural and normal, because human beings think in a sequential, logical order. Frankie essentially cuts up the first verse in atomic sentences, with each sentence having no clear narrative relation to one another; this is unnatural and shows a conscious organizing of the lyrics. There's also the repetition of "being alive", the song's title, meaning she intends for it to be a kind of motif.

But...what is the effect of this organization, of her mustering the energy to summarize itself? You see what it is in the next verse:

Being alive matters quite a bit even when you feel like shit,
being alive.

The point of the song is to tell you, the audience, that being alive is like feeling like shit.

You build a tower only to tell the world "I don't know why I built this fucking tower."

The repetition of "being alive", too, is a little like Frankie walking in a circle, her eyes pointed to her feet: she's engaging in a completely pointless routine and all she wants to do is finish it, all else be damned.

There are bright spots of positivity in the song, as when she sings: "I'm collapsing inwardly, / your name strikes a match in me." The album is not nihilistic or pessimistic; it's just gloomy.

The third choice of Frankie's is recording environment. I don't have a citation for where she recorded this album, so I can't say it was in her bedroom. It sounds like she recorded it in the same environment The Breeders achieved that "a-oooooo, a-ooooo" effect in "Cannonball". Her vocals are fine; her guitar is submerged and completely dulled of any harsh sounds, with no sharp peaks nor rumbling lows. This is not Frankie using digital technology to smooth the music out to be faceless, nor would I call the effect a blunting of the music. Her music just feels "numbed", like it's on novocaine. It seriously sounds like an Arthur Russell song, even though Russell chose instruments with the sharpest attacks possible, almost as if testing what can be blunted. Frankie, instead, just goes with the flow.

You see this very well with "too dark", where Frankie sings:

I wish I had some control, you embarrass in folds
I feel all alone, I don't wanna hear how flustered you were.

The song begins with Frankie clacking something on something; it should produce a bright, sharp sound, but it sounds like she's striking something with a hard head against porcelain, the sound isn't as grating as it should be. Her guitar proceeds, and it's covered in so much haze and gunk you don't hear the beautiful reverberation of the guitar and the shimmering of the sound as it fills the air. It's not a matter of the chords she plays, it's the texture of the music itself. Guitars are strings, they have impact against the air and the wind; she sounds like she's playing underwater, which enhances incredibly that "I wish I had some control." This adds onto the ideas of the music, that Frankie is in this submerged state that she doesn't want to leave and that she can't leave lest she has to confront the fact of how uncomfortable people make her.

Which interpretation is enhanced by:

If your love was as strong as my shame I'd marry you and take your name, but it's not, you'll never get it, so I guess, I'll just forget it,
too dark.

And Frankie, no stranger to pop structures, enters a walking lyric whose progression is worthy of ABBA (and note how sharp the guitar sounds here, how plangent and melancholy):

I stand alone lucky and unknown Do I belong? Do I belong, do I belong, noooo
when I know I'm not the best girl in the room I tell myself I'm the best you can do, do I belong, do I belong, do I belong, noooo.

In my wacky brain there is a concept in pop music that can be called an "adventure", when the singer engages the listener in a rapid sequence of scenes meant to depict emotions of passion. This is Frankie's adventure, and it leads her to apathy and disinterest and self-loathing and isolation. But no matter how you look at it, it's a fascinating journey in the mental gymnastics one can play, to discourage oneself. And so Frankie's adventure ends, "when I'm bored / I crash up on the shore."

What's the final ingredient? The album art. Let's look at "healthy":

I am privileged enough to go to the doctor but I don't need to go because I feel so good
everyone is healthy nothing is wrong with me

which, if you're saying everyone is healthy and that nothing is wrong with you, you are totally thinking something is wrong with you: you make a category of people and then linguistically you separate yourself from that category, c'mon, you're unconsciously separating yourself.

This is one of the big themes of the album: of Frankie believing she is normal, believing she is not normal, of Frankie believing everything is alright, then thinking everything is not right at all, of Frankie believing she fits in, of Frankie not fitting in at all. The cover art depicts it all: purples and violets and blues painted in violent arcs, with a tiny Greta at the bottom of the image not happy, not sad, not angry, and a green tinge on her skin. In the upper right corner is (I think) a picture of her deceased dog. No, everything is not alright, but uhh, the worst thing about this is that I'm green, and that's not that bad if that's the worst thing that could happen to me? That's the vibe I get from the album.

Speaking of Greta's dog, Joejoe, he's on the cover of "Zentropy" and I recall she cited her closeness to Joejoe to some of her songs, which we can perceive in "i look at me i am happy":

and when you don't love me I look above me and I talk to my god even though he's a dog

(banger of a lyric, by the way)

and I ask him if I'll be ok and he says that he was once a stray and that was when we took him home and loved him and made him our own and you have done the same to me which doesn't mean that I'm not free

which sounds a lot like the bargaining stage of grief.

It's kind of an amazing album, and what specifically makes it amazing is that there's a tension in an album that is entirely organic to Frankie Cosmos. I'm not fan of fabricated drama; I think everyone is interesting; I think everyone is finding the means to express themselves; I think everyone has their own valid set of problems and their own worldview, and the challenge is to make their emotions come to life in another person's eyes. There is no death in Frankie Cosmos; there's jealousy, yes, but not of the sexy kind, as in "Othello". As Frankie puts it beautifully in "embody":

Sarah is a lightbeam from the picture Jonah sent me It makes me so happy she embodies all the grace and lightness

wherein she is staring at something that she feels she can't approach.

I'm not going to cover the whole album, as it doesn't have a narrative arc. I'll, instead, highlight some of my favorites, starting with "the suckers corner" which has one of my favorite verses that absolutely describes how I feel some days:

There's suckers and there's jerks and temptation never strikes the suckers
we all just get fucked over fuck it suckers should be proud we're the only good people around.

Then there's little anecdote snuck into "theory of mind":

You called me 4 in the morning talking about two abortions I had just turned 16 I didn't know what you meant

and then this incredible end:

Your girlfriend had just moved out of the apartment where
you said so much nothing the place that we were fucking, was probably sacred for something.

(At this point I'm just going through every song on the album.) There's the haunted opening of "am i wrong that you want me", where Frankie puts her voice through some echo effect:

Am I wrong that you want me? The questions that haunt me... affirms glinting the love I was hinting.

The opening couplet of "trigger/TOUR GOOD":

What is entailed in being human? Does anyone owe anyone anything?

And then, finally, the opening couplet of "pure poison":

Life is a road Every town is a home

Honestly, I did not think much of this album until this write-up. I always enjoyed it, but I never realized how many virtues it has sparkling in it. Which, to me, is Frankie's shtick: her micro-poetry tries to unveil the secrets of the world and the people around us in their plainest dress; they amuse us, they mystify us, and then we move on, not cursing the world for its mysteries but accepting it.

She's a poet. I admit it now. She's not merely a good lyricist, she's a poet, you can stare at these verses and feel every emotion and every deflection as the line starts and as it ends. In the same vein that the way Leonard turns and molds a sentence is artful, the way Frankie compresses an idea in a line is artful.

We're entering scary territory here. This album came out in ... May 12, 2014? What do I have for my album of 2014? Grouper's "Ruins"? Is, uh, "affirms glinting" better than "Ruins"?

How, umm, is this fair? Grouper sings:

I've a present to give you when we finally figure it out, and we still haven't figure it out, and we still turn in circles

Alright, that alone confirms it for Grouper. But I kinda actually shat my pants a little. It's an unfair matchup because both albums are so similar, so stripped down in sound, so as to bludgeon the listener in silence, so melancholic, so wrapped up in their own worlds, and so emotional and vulnerable.

Eugh, the following is such a difficult conversation for me to have.

The issue with Frankie's output "Next Thing" on is that the music and her subject matter are both ignorable. The only music that is designed to be ignorable, according to Brian Eno, is ambient music, and even then that's not true: Eno really meant, the music is equally as interesting as when you listen to it as when you ignore it. You can grasp a thread of music and be dazzled by it and want to follow its patterns.

Great music is not ignorable. It often does not have an influence or an impact on people, nor does it incite, but if you pay attention to it great music is able to transform a listener's world, by changing their perspective. The artist, at heart, is a revolutionary; the longhaired record shop cashier, the woman in the wooly sweater who loves knitting, the custodian who smokes and ignores people while listening to Steely Dan, these are all revolutionaries, because revolution in art is not counted in violence, it's counted in vision.

And vision isn't a function of "genius", whatever that means; vision is a function of vision, it comes from wanting and willing to see far ahead, of seeing beyond the world and finding things out. Vision is seeing how things harmonize and how things abrade. It is observing the world in all its glory and its nausea, and trying to unify these into a coherent whole.

The issue, generally, is not about picking a bad direction, it's not committing to a direction at all. If you make pop music, something has to stand out in the scene, a verse, a riff, something; I mentioned ABBA before, who were masters at perfecting the concept of the heart leaping at once. If you make folk music, you have to direct your listeners through some scene or some story. Rock music is very impressionistic and emphasizes a texture, an emotion, a feeling. And these principles aren't confined to music; in every Jackson Pollock painting, there is one line so exuberant, so aggressive, so dominant it demands the viewer to follow it; a Rothko painting can be divided into vortices of color and thickness, and your vision can be entranced following their spirals. You must get to something. Art is about sculpting. And even if the entire composition is dull, its dullness, too, is a salient point, but you must toil at making it uniformly and harmoniously dull. A great example is Anna Domino's "East and West", a slow-moving album where Anna's voice and arrangements are both languorous and hazy, producing an interesting artistic effect. We could also throw in The Blue Nile's "Hats" as well. Something must be emphasized, or, in another way of speaking, demonstrated.

She hasn't accomplished this in the last decade or so, but, to be fair to her, it's not an onus that can be arbitrarily put on her. It's her choice as to what she decides for her career. I dislike the impression that I'm poking at her or sermonizing her to do what I want her to do. But "affirms glinting" is a genuinely incredible album, man.

This makes me think of a Rosie Tucker song:

And the saddest part of all of this is that you have got the brightest gift, at least that's what you hope is true when you settle up and leave the venue.