So Much For Forever

The 1969 Armenian film The Colour of Pomegranates is perhaps the most beautiful movie I’ve ever seen. Is it my favorite movie of all time? No. It would definitely be on my top 100 list though. Thing is, I’ve only ever watched it once or twice. I hope to watch it again some day but there’s a chance I won’t.

Have you seen it? Playing the odds, I’m guessing you haven’t. Check out the trailer:

Beautiful, right? Did you watch the whole thing? Again, I’m going to guess you didn’t. If you did, do you think you will now seek out the movie and watch it? Even if you agree that it looks beautiful, you probably won’t. That’s my guess. I hope you do though.

Based on what you just saw in the trailer, it may not surprise you to learn that the movie is based on the works of a poet. Sayat-Nova was his name. He died in 1795. I like poetry. I have a bunch of favorite poets. But I don’t sit down to read their works every day. I have to be in the right mood, I suppose, so it’s a once-in-a-while sort of thing.

I think the thing I’m describing is (at best) kinda how people might view the Bike For Three! album So Much Forever (not to compare it to work of art as great as The Colour of Pomegranates). If you’re aware of the album at all, you probably feel like you have to be in a particular mood for it. Maybe it’s something you only need to listen to once. Maybe spending time with it feels a bit like work.

Here’s what I can tell you from my end (and having just listened to the album before writing this): I think it’s easily the most beautiful work I’ve ever been associated with. I can’t take much of the credit. All the music was made by my Bike For Three! partner Joëlle (Joëlle Phuong Minh Lê). It’s masterful work. It’s some of the most sophisticated electronic music I’ve ever heard. It always put me in the mind of a Blade Runner movie that never was. I always felt quite unworthy to accept such generous gifts from Joëlle and in my writing, I just did my best to stay out of the way of her incredible production.

So Much Forever is also - easily - the best sounding album in my catalog. Most of my stuff is lo-fi as hell. SMF is ultra-high fidelity. There should be an audiophile vinyl pressing. Quadraphonic, or whatever.

I’m pretty sure the songs on the album were the last I wrote before going on my hiatus that started in 2014, not long after the album’s release. I spent a little over ten years (between 2002 and 2014) trying to write pOeTrY. I aspired to make a contribution to the hip hop art form by bringing fine poetry to the table (I think I just threw up in my own mouth a little). It’s an embarrassing thing to admit but I can tell you now that that’s a big part of where my head was at. I wanted to make fine art (sigh!). I was probably corrupted by the time I spent living in Paris. And I got just enough encouragement from people to keep writing all this flowery shit. So, for whatever that pursuit was worth, So Much Forever is the peak of those efforts. Looking back now, I don’t think I was much of a poet. But I sure-as-shit was trying.

It can’t be easy listening for anyone. It’s a bunch of love letters. I don’t know about you, but I feel awkward or uncomfortable when I find myself privy to the intimacy of others. I fast forward through the hanky-panky scenes in movies. No thanks. That said, as I was listening to SMF today, I heard a few lines where I thought to myself, ‘not bad’. But what surprised me was that - looking past the “pretty” business - the rapping is pretty good from a technical standpoint. I can tell I worked really hard at crafting those verses. The rhymes are dense and pretty complex and fall in some surprising spots at times. That made listening to my insanity almost tolerable.

It’s a hard sell: listen to this crazy man rap his ass off about love and lightning storms and shit like that. In the year 3000.

When I was living in Paris and going to museums all the time, I just wanted to see some art that made me feel something. It didn’t matter if the feeling it gave me was gross or uncomfortable. If I felt something, then it did its job. That was my take. With the distance of 12 years, SMF makes me feel something. It’s pretty immersive. It’s the sort of feeling that kinda derails the day a little bit. It takes some time to shake it off. So I can understand anyone feeling like they can’t commit to it when they have to put in eight hours at the job and there’s groceries to buy and bills to pay and when House Hunters International is on TV and rockets are being launched in the Middle East. But if you ever do wake up one morning with a craving for pomegranates (if you know what I’m saying), you can find the album on Bandcamp.