Here at Wacko Meenis, we all read, because we’re sexy. As a big believer that reading is an important part of writing, I want to put you on to something I read that changed my life. If you too are a reader (which you are! You’re doing it right now! Congratulations!), you’ve probably had the experience of reading something that made you go “wow,” expanded the parameters of what you thought was possible, maybe even made you step back and consider the entire medium of writing differently. That’s the intermittent reward that makes the pastime so fulfilling and keeps your mouse brain coming back for more. Rayne Fisher-Quann called reading “sort of a Russian-roulette style hobby where like one in every ~10 books you read to kill time before bed might end up dragging you nearly-unwilling into a new self, a new world, regardless of whether or not you’re ready for it.” This brings me to one of the most memorable pieces of writing I’ve come across in the last half-decade, which was not a novel or short story or essay, but a review on rateyourmusic.com.
I myself am not a Rate Your Music user. The world of media rating and ranking is odd to me for reasons I will expand on later. Collin is ratings-pilled and constantly reads me box office figures and Pitchfork decimals whose significance I don’t really understand (like, so what if The Super Mario Bros Movie is the highest grossing video game movie to date but A Minecraft Movie had a higher-grossing opening weekend?) But I do enjoy reading a really well-written review once in a while via Collin’s curation. They sent me the review in question, which they found combing RYM’s shores, after I listened to The Glow Pt. 2 by the Microphones for the first time in 2020. We laughed about it for weeks. We still laugh about it! Shoutout Collin for always putting me on new shit.
I quote this review constantly. I had it printed on a t-shirt. It makes a great t-shirt because any single sentence that you catch in passing will make you wonder what context could have the right context to contain such a ludicrous yet wise string of words, like “all sex looks and feels the same except that some of it is a little bit better or worse,” or “women usually smell pretty good when they’ve just showered.” Then the passerby says “what is that?” and I get to say “It’s Rate Your Music user Nodima’s review of The Glow Pt. 2 by the Microphones,” as if they ought to know what that is. Sometimes unexpected things inspire.
I haven’t read all of Nodima’s reviews (there are thousands) - only ones for albums I’ve heard. I’m taking a page from his book right now and giving you my thoughts off the cuff. It’s a review of a review. I’ve had drinks. Let’s get into it.
There’s not much to gather about Nodima biographically from his posts on RYM. He’s from Nebraska. He was a prolific poster with over two solid thousand entries, mostly hip hop (including Run That Shit: Nodima’s Hip Hop Handbook, a ranked list of over a thousand hip hop albums). They cover a variety of genres and decades. He had a rating system he applied to each track on an album (which explained on his profile) that he eventually gave up for non-hip hop albums, then gave up altogether. Then one day he disappeared.
His bio says “I now find just about all music to be ephemeral and unqualifiable, so I quit.”
I think this is fair and respectable. But the attempt at qualifying the “unqualifiable” (a word he made up… Shakespeare fr) is what made Nodima’s weirder reviews, like The Glow Pt. 2, so good. And maybe what makes good music-reviewing a worthwhile pursuit at all. Regarding music as phenomenological, dependent on individual experience, made the content of his reviews at times so abstract as to be almost esoteric. His notions are completely unique and therefore must contain an inalienable truth.
Nodima often speaks in ridiculous extended metaphors never before put to page, making synaptic connections so new and novel that I suspect psychedelics were involved; if they weren’t I’m worried for that Nodima. I think things turned out alright for him though.
Maybe his brain is more naturally lubed-up than your average from birth because both his parents played a lot of Brain Age. Maybe he’s microdosing that special oil from the movie to keep his myelin sheaths strong. Maybe his mom played Mozart while he slept. I clicked a link in the day’s crop in my inbox and found something beautiful and strange, a gem in mundanity, like a farmer unearthing an arrowhead or some other ancient artifact, expecting to eat only the day’s meager harvest of root vegetables, but instead is nourished by the wisdom and creativity of ancient civilizations, which dance before him like a vision and the sun glints on the arrowhead’s hand-chiseled details, imperfect but unique.
Take this one for a spin:
“You know, women usually smell pretty good when they’ve just showered, or even hours after. The Glow Pt. 2 is kind of like what it’s like when a man who’s comfortable enough with the fact that no one but the girls that spend the night with him and take note of his shower habits will know that he uses a loofah or a scrunchie or whatever the thing that makes soap all sudsy is called uses one and steps out of the shower smelling like a woman except for the fact he used a soap labeled for men so he could continue to call himself a guy. It’s really good, but in that subtle way that’s easier to appreciate when you understand that everyone who hears it except barbarians are going to understand what makes it so awesome, kind of like how barbarians don’t get into soap too much because they’re too busy taking heads off bodies and listening to Ratt. Not that Ratt sucks, I liked their song on Guitar Hero or Rock Band, whichever.”
To riff on metaphor a bit - my sister told me about this Phoenix interview where songwriter Thomas Mars says he prefers to write in English because the French language is very literal. In American songwriting, coming up with a concise and/or funny metaphor is the name of the game. Blow my whistle. Take you on a magic carpet ride. Climb the stairway to heaven. If you can write an abstract phrase that people understand, it multiplies the meaning of your message. And if you can write one that people don’t understand, with mystique, that’s even better. Linguists and substackers alike agree metaphor is “a basic building block of human thought and speech” - we understand both ideas and the material world through metaphor. Coming up with new and effective metaphors to communicate ideas is a skill honed by storytellers and writers, here-comes-the-choo-choo-training complex reality into our tender, toothless mouths.
Nodima skates through a range of topics like a seasoned stand-up comedian. They compare The Glow Pt. 2 to gendered grooming habits, the invention of the computer, and sex with hookers. He pitches ideas for Spike TV reality shows. He speculates whether they put mind-altering chemicals in vending machine soda. He says that a good album or movie, even if it’s a sham, “makes you think about life a lot and how nice it is to be a part of the whole thing even if it’s a pretty inconsequential amount of time in the scheme of things” and how “life kind of sucks a lot sometimes but music is usually pretty good especially when it’s pretty good music.” So true, king, so true. A good music review can do this, too, I realized.
One of the best metaphors is this convoluted comparison of the album’s runtime to a sexual encounter:
I usually climax at the part where Phil sings about his blood flowing harshly and heart beating loudly, which sometimes is difficult for music that has a lot more to offer afterward. Like what if I climaxed with a girl and we hadn’t even done it doggystyle yet so I didn’t know what that ass looked like clapping against itself? And more importantly what if that girl I climaxed early with had no ass so I wasn’t missing anything? This album isn’t like that though, it’s like a thing where you kind of be able to keep going after the initial climax and have other climaxes afterward, like in this sort of succession thing. Women might have told you about it or if you’re a woman maybe you know about it.
The comparison is astute and funny. It’s also a complex metaphor where many parts of the first thing correspond to parts of the other thing! My sister (different sister than the Phoenix interview reader) said this part didn’t land with her because she couldn’t look past the sexism. She also didn’t think the college girls observation was very funny, so altogether I think Nodima’s brand of irreverent writerlyness is not for her. The careful reader will note that the moment when Nodima climaxes is only the first song on the album. And top of mind for the socially-conscious is that, in retrospect, Jerry Seinfeld is into seventeen year old territory, so maybe we ought to reconsider his stance on dry humping.
Reading through Nodima’s catalog, every once in a while he pulls out a string of sentences that is so diaristic and personal, so tied to a time and place. The subjectivity really pulls my heartstrings.
Take his review of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, which he listened to on repeat during a science class that he was failing. Selected Ambient Works 85-92 got him through it, and is forever associated with that lab. And now he’s a physicist! I feel the same about any number of albums I listened to during grueling three-hour studio courses in a converted hallway with faulty heat, music comforting and motivating me. Graduating was the hardest thing I ever did. When I listen now, it puts me back in that mindset, back in that room, and reminds me what I’m capable of (one thing I learned I’m capable of is three consecutive all-nighters).
Next, reader, we travel together to Omaha. I always remember where I was when I first heard really good music, especially if it was on a walk. A leisurely, lightly stimulating walk is a perfect way to experience an album for the first time. Jack Antonoff recommends listening to all his new records on a walk at night with headphones. Commuting and transiting is a holy space for music listening. You may experience something profound.The most touching thing about Nodima’s first listen of A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships by the 1975 is that he hit play while walking uphill to the gas station for coffee after he missed the bus to work.
He writes of the experience, “the entire episode is a stupid, absolutely simple affair, and yet it lingers with him for days. He can not let go of the empathy he felt in that moment for all the things that often brought him anything but contentment… still… he can afford the 16oz gas station coffee towards which he marches, and so a smile crosses his face. Life is pretty slow, sometimes.”
My biggest takeaway from this piece of writing is the idea of empathy for the things that bring us anything but contentment - the pop songs on mix radio, billboard advertisements, heat. Appreciation for their beauty, despite their gratingness, commonness, banality, ugliness. Whether the billboard on the hill is annoying or somehow poetic depends a lot on the kind of day you’re having. I think this high subjectivity is something “real” music journalists are taught to shy away from. Something that irks me about a lot of music and film criticism in this everyone-is-a-tastemaker age is the impetus for a hot take. Everyone is itching to be correct about the “vibe” or the “culture” so bad that they expand their scope too wide, and forget what it is they’re talking about in the first place. I’ve read many reviews that seem to talk about everything except the song. Sometimes the actual details of the art and what it was like to experience it are forgotten for some larger moral or prescriptive statement about society, and they lose the realness, the thing that connects writer to reader.
Nodima soars past this problem by getting insanely specific and personal. He’s not trying to make any prescriptions about culture at large in his reviews. He’s just telling you how he feels. Of course Making Plans for Nigel hits different when you hear a cover band play it at the bar one night, hitting that sweet little riff right when you clock out. Or 808s & Heartbreak might feel extra lame if the Rockets are bombing field goals before your eyes. And if CTRL doesn’t make you a little horny, then you probably just don’t get it. Maybe your parents should have let you on the computer more growing up. Nodima’s points depend on subjective claims, but he makes them incredibly well, so they can’t be denied. This makes a Nodima review of a twenty- or fifty-year-old album timeless and pleasant to read. Emotional evocativeness is more of a motivator for me to listen to an old, popular, or “classic” album than cultural relevance is.
The A Brief Inquiry review shows that Nodima is a thoughtful and talented writer with a breadth of music and industry knowledge. He clocks all of the album’s sonic references and nods in awareness of the album’s reception by fans and music publications without getting too into the weeds. This is a guy who is immersed in the review-sphere, but writes as though it’s not important to him - all that really matters is what happened between play and pause. He writes with the eyes (or ears) of a child, to which Picasso said every artist should strive to return. And he’s not afraid to get a little weird with it as he tries to put his more “unqualifiable” feelings into words - to be fair, a lot of it makes no sense. You might be like “what’s this guy saying?” half the time, but when you do get what he’s saying, you’re like “woah.” His riff about a loofah or a scrunchie or whatever the thing that makes soap all sudsy is called in The Glow Pt. 2 review (quoted before) illustrates the if-you-get-it-you-get-it aspect of music-and-art-describing pretty well. In the A Brief Inquiry review, he manages to tie almost all his music-thoughts back to his struggle to make it to work on time. Despite the hectic morning and, well, the album, the review is full of optimism. He describes the first listen as one of those movie moments where you feel like things might turn up, despite everything. “Fucking pop music, forever may it be a fool’s errand,” he says, and tears fill my eyes.
Nodima’s vast and varied oeuvre makes me think about how the guy making my Jimmy John’s sandwich or my bartender or anyone I meet on the street could be cloaking their secret identity as an obsessive forum poster. It’s also worth noting that since I don’t have a RYM account, I can’t see any indicators of how much engagement his posts get, so I have no idea what level of clout we’re dealing with here. One time I met somebody in the pit at a Phoebe Bridgers concert in Cleveland who kept bragging about being a mod on the Bon Iver Subreddit and it made me meditate on humility a bit. Nodima comes off as a humble guy, despite his proclivity for the philosophical. He seems to abide by the rule that if he’s going to open his mouth (I mean keyboard?) and say something, it better be something beautiful and true. In the best way, The Glow Pt. 2 review feels like what you might say sitting around stoned in a dorm room talking about music with your friends. It’s an honest, stream-of-consciousness ramble, the kind where your buddy says something so profound and genius off-the-dome that resonates with everybody there, not even trying to sound cool or smart for an audience, just trying to say his thought as purely and completely as possible, and it might stick with you forever verbatim, or you might struggle to paraphrase it in your notes app, or you might forget it forever after five minutes. The style is candid and off the cuff, but the speaker’s genuine intellectual curiosity is felt, and you can tell that guy listens to a lot of music and thinks about life a lot.
As an outsider to the rating-and-reviewing racket, I read this guy’s reviews because I enjoy his writing and I care about what he has to say. Nodima brings something fresh to the table by being an observant and thoughtful student of life and a little bit of a freak. He also stresses that he is just a regular person, with no stake in the music or criticism industries/spheres. Afterall, he missed Pitchfork Music Festival due to not being in Chicago because he wanted to give people Jimmy John’s sandwiches they’d ordered over the phone. He’s just a guy with an ipod, but he ended up having a profound experience with music anyway. Can his buddy who saw Animal Collective live at Pitchfork Music Festival say the same? Afterall, “unless you’re born in a family that used to run a plantation and/or steel mill you probably aren’t ever going to have enough money to make a difference unless you have some really good ideas that somebody buys from you,” and/or you make a lot of really good posts on an online music reviewing website that a lot of people read.
My sincerest shoutout to Nodima, fellow ANTI appreciator and beacon of light in the confusing, cutthroat world of online amateur media review posting. And major respect to him for giving up the game once it wasn’t fun anymore - a guy’s gotta live his life. Nodima, wherever you are, whether it’s NASA or Jimmy John’s, I hope you’re still a hawk for silver linings. All this is to say that your work touched me, and I’ve taken notes from your book for my own writing hobby, which is just starting and still very fun for me. Godspeed, and maybe someday I’ll get into Run That Shit - I’ve got nothing but time.
