Mustang, Oklahoma is about 85 percent white and was only slightly less so a couple of decades ago, when, as a young child, Bartees Cox Jr. traveled around the state with his family, singing in operas and churches. On his debut album, Live Forever, Bartees Strange pays slight homage to his past with “Mustang,” with that feeling of needing to flee your hometown—cosmic synths, a hook yelped with scrunched eyelids, an outro that drives like a Charger on a clear highway. It’s a paradox that Bartees can’t escape whiteness in the music he creates as a Black man. It’s already part of whatever artistic turn Bartees makes, whether it’s the erasure of Black artists’ contributions to indie rock, or the existential crisis Black rappers face when they must entertain largely white crowds. It’s a lot to work through on a 35-minute album, which is just a part of what makes this one of the most fascinating and affecting debuts of the year.
Most of Live Forever’s magic, however, is in how it doesn’t seek to explicitly subvert whiteness. Bartees is not necessarily a boundary-breaker: He presents every bit of sound he collects as a natural part of his experience. From a childhood spent bouncing from base to base as an Army brat or shying away from becoming the frontman in the bands he shuffled through as an adult, the struggle to root his voice is a running theme. Yet every influence he pulls from—TV on the Radio’s world-weary poetry, Hot 100 hip-hop cadence, industrial punk—is marked by his personable, intimate presence. “Mustang” flexes its biceps, but doesn’t lose its humanity (“Last night I got so fucked up, near lost my job/It’s nice to think that folks are near, waking up was hard this year”). For all its arena-sized gesturing, the song is really a heart-to-heart.
Bartees’ introduction to the wider public was directly informed by his otherness. His breakthrough—March’s Say Goodbye to Pretty Boy, an EP of National covers—was inspired by being the only person of color at one of the band’s concerts in Washington D.C. Bartees’ interpretation of “Lemonworld”—which flips singer Matt Berninger’s sullen brokenness to a world-beating howl—speaks to the cathartic mode he sticks to for much of the album’s first half. The run is a pristine technicolor whir, where the seasick horns of “In a Cab” swing briskly into “Stone Meadows,” whose harmonic guitar interplay and bleak melodrama (“If I died in a meadow/If I died I don’t think they’d ever find me at all”) recall Silent Alarm-era Bloc Party. But the thrills mainly sprout from Bartees’ powerfully layered vocal performances.
“Boomer,” centered on Bartees’ formative years after he moved from Oklahoma to Brooklyn, has your basic ’00s pop-punk formula, let-’em-say-what-they-wanna-say-because-we’re-gonna-do-us-and-it’s-time-to-dance hook included. Bartees serves us Young Thug-meets-Fall Out Boy, rapping with vocal tics that accent his small joys (“We on track, woo!/I’ve relapsed, woo!/I told my girl that I was working, that’s a lie I’m in the trap”) and express the bliss of self-actualization. The cerebral drum patterns of highlight “Flagey God” create a dewy club sweat on the hook, and Bartees rides it with a bounce that carries the ghosts of gospel and house music. He’s spoken about struggling to find cohorts who knew what to do with his Black voice. But alongside mixing engineer/bassist Brian DiMeglio and mastering engineer/emo-whisperer Will Yip, Bartees places himself at the center of nearly every element in Live Forever. Regardless of how disparate its shifts may seem, his voice is the connective force.
Bartees reserves his lone screed against the compartmentalization of Black voices for “Mossblerd.” There are plenty of musicians who resist the industry gatekeepers who pigeonhole them into being a certain “type” of artist. But Bartees is specific in how this is not just an artistic frustration but something that jails you inside your own body. In a sharp piece of songwriting, he describes the way it spoils his Brooklyn paradise: “Pull up on these white folks, Park Slope abandoned/Used to hate my body, they tried to kill my spirit.” It lays bare what drives the album’s urgency: a generations-old form of strife.
The idea of Black mobility—from Oklahoma to Brooklyn, from punk to folk—that threads through Live Forever never feels like it’s about escaping yourself, but about staking out an identity in unfamiliar places. The album’s final minutes begin with “Far” and “Fallen for You,” sparser, campfire-ready love songs that lean on Bartees’ falsetto at its most quavering. Then, in the final moments, Bartees feigns transcendence. Amid the ascending synths of “Ghostly,” our protagonist finds himself yearning and alone. Instead of pointing outward, the narrative circles in on itself, calling back to the existential frustration of “Mustang:” “Most folks would say that I seem fine/But each morning I don’t feel worth it/Pull up to my job almost on time.” Live Forever argues that life is not some march toward a peak, but a closed loop—one that’s tighter if you’re Black. The brilliance of Bartees’ debut is in how it carves out an expansive space within that loop. Why escape when you can create a new place entirely?
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