your favorite of the mark kozelek canon

May have said this before but have a plan to compile myself a post-Perils Kozelek/Sun Kil Moon best of/CD-R. Its a bit of an odd one because I can find the same tracks a bit tedious and utterly moving dependent on mood/alcohol use. Won't include him reading fan letters.

I think I really like the new one (although I’m only halfway through - it’s sooo long). Not the best music he has made by far, but the stories are better and the tone is a bit different from he’s schtick for the last five-six years. He might be in a better place.

Too long and needs a better title but something like this:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2fwAhfBSBvpanTpLXuOq1a

His John Denver cover is probably the best thing he's done.

i always end up coming back to april, though ghosts and perils are strong runners up. i still haven't untangled admiral fell promises after all this time but i'm getting there

(The playlist is a Post-Perils one ... It's less of a compilation and more of an argument that he's still doing something interesting though listening to his albums involves the skip button these days).

oh yeah that was a response to the thread title, not your posts

i haven't really dug into the post-benji stuff but "i watched the film the song remains the same" is the main example of the bathos of his newer style working for me rather than whiffing and i'm guessing there's probably a few others like that

That Desertshore album feels transitional, halfway between carefully constructed songs and stream-of-consciousness. I've been listening to it recently, and really enjoy 'Mariette', 'Livingstone Bramble', and 'Tavoris Cloud' as well as 'Brothers'. I haven't heard anything past Benji - feel like I have enough Kozelek albums in my life, and it's pretty universally agreed that returns are way down. Kudos for having the patience to check them all out.

"Hey You Bastard I'm Still Here" from that Desertshore album was the first thing I've heard from him, after ten years of casual listening, to cause me to look up what he actually looks like. He does not look like what I imagined Mark Kozelek looks like. No, I cannot describe right now what I imagined Mark Kozelek looking like. The real Mark Kozelek looks like he works at Panera Bread.

Like a pixar character where mere words take life

I thought he was in his sixties, fifties at least! Old! Maybe had that retired gameshow host, houseboat resident lifestyle "alcoholic topography" sunk into his face (to use a David Berman phrase), an older withered slendered greyed and weakened academic poet retiree, the type of white man who haunts Western Massachusetts with a sweater-rich cowbwebby wardrobe, much more decrepit and sad to the eye than the actual dude himself who looks like his joie-de-vivre is recording emo bands from the affluent northern Chicagoland suburbs when he's not working at that Evanston Panera right before 9/11.

My man has always looked kind of assy

Had a friend of a friend who had dealings with red house painters and he said they were the worst people in a band he ever encountered so I guess you get the face you deserve

painting houses is thankless work and never did nothing for anyone's countenance

https://pitchfork.com/news/mark-kozelek-of-sun-kil-moon-accused-of-sexual-misconduct-by-three-women/

not much of a shocker

Fuck this abusive asshole

He has a denial up on the SKM website which also indicates he's hired a particularly litigious and awful lawfirm in LA called Lavely and Singer so I imagine this might get ugly (uglier)

tbf that's completely on brand for him.

Fucking fuck, this guy

checking in on mark kozelek pic.twitter.com/V36fNDthmw

— dylan (@spiritnght2) March 7, 2021

wow uh that's something even for him

Are those real lyrics?? Jesus.

you gotta be kidding me

https://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/resources/img/blogs/pinocchio.png
Gets one Pinnochio because Portland has 77,000+ Black people (2.2%), and evidence that Vietnamese people "taste sweeter" than white people is not backed up by any scientific data.

Squint a little and those are Hank Williams Jr. lyrics

Reading the lyrics didn't prepare me for hearing his 'rap' delivery of them

hank jr is a better lyricist

this song is 13.5 minutes long

have you all already forgotten his michael jackson song

The song is a mess. The album is a mess.

I still like a lot of and Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon material so I tried, albeit briefly, to understand his point about Black Lives Matter but it’s ultimately (and unsurprisingly) pointless. If you can somehow get past the “I’m not racist because I have a Vietnamese girlfriend and a fetish for black chicks,” its basically Black Lives Matter is hypocritical because they don’t care about black crime. That’s so obviously wrong and so explicitly racist that it nullifies the few (possibly) resonate points like caring more about Portland protests than protests anywhere else and good lyrical moments like the verses about kids having graveyard sex.

I also love the moment where he says he was brought up right despite writing songs for decades that clearly demonstrate he wasn’t brought up right.

Remember the beautiful poetry circa 2010 and earlier? He was an incredibly tasteful artist then on all fronts. He’s gone off the deep end. You know he is convinced he is pushing boundaries with this approach.

he's just reciting run of the mill daily newspaper online article commenter bullshit

"I thought he was in his sixties, fifties at least!" He is in his 50's, so not sure which picture you saw.

also good timing for me as I listened to Admiral Fells and April last night then listened to Among the Leaves (which I still kind of like) and its pretty clear something shifted in his interest in writing songs right there, because everything after that is an explosion of all the shit that didn't work on that album taken to the nth level. Really, let's pretend he died after Admiral Fells Promises and left a really good catalog behind.

I basically agree with that other than the pleasant blip that was Perils From the Sea. but he's entered Moz territory where I have a hard time listening even to the old good stuff now.

Benji was the last album of his I've heard and it's been a long time. I know that was the one where he went all in with this boringly diaristic approach to songwriting, but I don't remember him being completely off his rocker quite yet. Increasingly glad that was where I gave up on him though.

his weirdness about fetishizing asian women is like... totally a part of his pre-among the leaves catalog y'all. this is just saying the quiet part loud

he is also a rapist

sorry to enter the convo like this but this dude ruined a lot of my favorite music of all time

Yeah, Brad makes the point clearly. I will still, always, have a space in my heart for "Michael" from the very first release. It's a beautiful song about a lost friendship with (ironically?) a total fuckup, but done in a way that allows for empathy even despite it all, and it's so gorgeously sung and performed. It's the one song I'll keep from everything he's done, and I have to think about it as the work of a young man before any hint of even subcultural fame thanks to 4AD picking up that demo. Like a 'what if' that hangs in space.

Not going to deny any of the above but "Duk Koo Kim" has been swirling around my head for the past few days after I got some really terrible news about a friend of mine. It's just shitty that the same guy who wrote those lyrics lost the thread so abusively/idiotically/defensively etc

also good timing for me as I listened to Admiral Fells and April last night then listened to Among the Leaves (which I still kind of like) and its pretty clear something shifted in his interest in writing songs right there, because everything after that is an explosion of all the shit that didn't work on that album taken to the nth level. Really, let's pretend he died after Admiral Fells Promises and left a really good catalog behind.

― akm, Monday, 8 March 2021 14:47 (one hour ago) link

I've more or less written your exact post in a hundred different ways, but yes- there were interviews near when AFP came out where he mentioned being obsessed with Segovia and some other classical players and deciding that with AFP he was going to set out to make the must beautiful album he possibly could. And he did! The reception was sort of lukewarm. Regardless, it is obvious that he poured his entire self into it and likely burned himself out. Understandably, Among the Leaves was him shifting gears and being looser. Probably felt nice to do something like that in contrast to AFP. Then with some traumatic losses of acquaintances and probably some midlife crisis feelings, he leaned in on an even rawer, cathartic, even more unfussy songwriting style with the last Desertshore collab and it must have felt so right that he went even further for the Benji material. Then all of the excessive accolades around that record- all the attention, the contrast with the reception of THAT vs all the hard work he put into AFP... I think the personal life stuff, the discrepancy in those album receptions, the spike in fans and attention- I think he just unraveled. He got it in his head that he was onto something new and daring and brave and punk rock. He got himself into trouble with other public figures and did all sorts of provoking. Probably feeling like he was creating this iconic interesting eccentric artist persona though it. But he is SO many albums deep into it. Little hints of musical beauty pop up here and there but this whole catalog of late period SKM is him going against his better instincts. Because his natural instincts made the straightforward singer songwriter stuff of his early career and he thinks that's all BORING now.

Conclusion: he is completely delusional, and I agree, just pretend he quit after AFP perhaps. HOWEVER, also pretend that the song Young Love was the actual final track of AFP because it would and should have been his swan song. If you read this whole comment and don't know that song and also hate him, please listen to that song and get back to me I'm legitimately curious what you think.

I got into RHP in the early 00s when they were about as obscure a band as you could find - I only learned about them by trawling through AllMusic reviews whilst working long night shifts at a hotel, and had to go to the one specialty CD store in my home city to buy their albums as imports.

They had this sombre, tortured singer who I only knew the look of because of his small part in Almost Famous. Their haunting, mournful music spoke to me in a way few other artists have before or since - the lyrics and vocals seemed to come from this impossibly deep well of suffering and sensitivity.

The fact that no one else I knew had even heard of them, let alone ever heard their stuff played on the radio, made it all the more special, like it was this secret only I knew about. I listened to those first few RHP albums constantly and loved Ghosts of the Great Highway and his AC/DC covers album too (though it was different to the older stuff).

Fair to say pretty that much everything that's happened with Mark in the 20 years since then (and particularly the last 10) is one massive, deeply depressing WTF.

You weren't a fan of the first 10 years of SKM?

I enjoyed those records (although they were a bit of a departure), but I meant more Koz's gradually increasing public presence/'fame' and the slowly dawning realisation that he was this creepy, disturbed guy.

I saw him do a live solo gig circa 2005 in a pub and he was completely sullen and disengaged, despite the crowd consisting almost entirely of ultra-hardcore fans like myself who were thrilled to see him. He just seemed to resent us for being there or something, it was weird. He finished his set abruptly and just shrugged off stage and out of the pub like a moody adolescent busker - it was the furthest thing possible from '15 year music vet and beloved cult icon'.

I guess I'd just assumed his persona was at least some sort of 'act' and that he actually had a functioning personality underneath (kinda like Robert Smith who's had a stable relationship his entire adult life despite perpetually singing about doomed love).

To find out that he really didn't, and then the unravelling that's happened since Pitchfork anointed him has been pretty brutal to watch.

Right. I am relieved that I don't have to feel conflicted about supporting him anymore because he refuses to make anything listenable, so there's nothing for me to support. Sometimes I research the "current SKM fan" as an anthropologist because I'm amazed that there are loads of people that gobble all these recent albums up. At this point it seems he wouldn't be able to disappoint them if he tried, and he really seems like he's trying doesn't it.

I saw him do a live solo gig circa 2005 in a pub and he was completely sullen and disengaged,

Hah, I saw him do the same in the fall of 1998 - just bitching about the mix, then his life, so he was pulling this shit for years.

Still adore the first Sun Kil Moon and recently got into "Perils".

ultimately the revelations about him and the way they align with his current music to the point where there's no distance between the shitty personality and the shitty music at all have made me sort of believe that all of the rhp and early skm stuff is a mask that he put on to make people like him or make people think he was profound, and even that stuff contains lyrics like

Won't you whisper in my ear?
You look so good against my mirror
And you're my baby full of joy
You're my erotic brown eyed toy
You're my exotic black haired toy

so fuck him

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEf_Wfqou3I

He just seemed to resent us for being there or something

hasn't he written songs about how he resents that his hardcore fans who have been most of his audience for the past two decades are nearly all men instead of the attractive young women who used to make up some of the audience for rhp in the early days