Done By The Forces Of Nature is one of the really most wonderful hip hop albums and it a little puzzling that it isn't placed up there with the requisite greats. It depends perhaps on which magazine or whom you're reading but it has always seemed to me that the JB's are one of the most criminally under-appreciated 80's groups. There is almost a perfect balance of musicality with funk and spittin', agit-prop and verisimilitude, not to mention what has to be one of the best ever songs about getting a raise. Alot was made of how not hard they were, which now would just mean they fit snugly in the backpacker section, but it really is kind of crazy to think about how these came out in the same period of a few years as albums by not only PE and NWA but also Tribe and De La and so so many more. And that story's told pretty thoroughly by now though it's hard to imagine our rockist music press will ever give as many inches to this golden era as that hoary baby-boomers' CNN-sponsored zeitgeist in the 60s which feels ridiculous to even to have lament, still, in 2016. The most over-documented period in history in culture in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLqOIyq_OME

Notes Toward The Post-Electronic:

The electronic device, whether a playstation or proper synth, is the sensible device on which to make music. Millenials grew up with the internet, not to mention videogames, google avatars the make music on command. The synthesized sound is natural, a kind of environmental awareness. Chintzy-sounding electronic tones become almost like sentimental objects. Music like Ariel Pink is more the Proustian power of it's obscelesence, its distorted celebration of a failed way of life i.e. material wealth, real estate, property, sovereignty. All of these concepts problematized by constant surveillance in everyday life.

Sound itself, recorded sound, is necessarily synthesized sound: it requires shaping, presentation matters etc.