Typically, the character of a particular calendar year is best explained by a very specific, recently released musical recording (or recording artist’s outfit, see: 2020 Bridgers skeleton pjs). Something with a sound, lyrics, and theme that unquestionably match what everyone was universally going thru for those 365.25 days. And typically it’s not too hard for me to identify this and then write about it. But this year was different. Every attempt to connect a song to the essence of 2024 seemed to, much like a French Olympic pole vaulter’s protruding groin, inevitably hit a barrier.
My two favorite new songs this year both involved MJ Lenderman, Asheville NC indie musician, who released the album Manning Fireworks, described by a SiriusXM DJ as ’slacker rock.’
My first reaction was, “Ooh, slackers are back in?!” Cuz I’ve loved ambitiousless, no-worries, who-needs-the-rat-race types ever since the culture was inundated with them when I was a teenager in the 90s, inspiring me to dream of perhaps one day becoming one myself.
(Speaking of 90s slackers, I recently checked in with the movie Reality Bites just to see where I currently stood on the Wynona Ryder/Ethan Hawke/Ben Stiller love triangle, and discovered I still choose Ethan Hawke’s character for her, but not for the reasons I used to. It is not Hawke’s slackerism, coolness, and performance of Gregory Corso poems that are as appealing to me now, but rather that he has enough self respect to set clear personal boundaries – philosophically, artistically, and romantically – whereas Ben Stiller’s character, despite his higher professional status, does not.)
And actually this is part of the reason why Lenderman’s cannot be the year-in-review songs. Because this was not actually A Year of Slacking but of Determining to Build Confidence In Spite Of Self-Limiting Patterns And Mindsets Of The Past. And while his song, “She’s Leaving You,” has an appealing whatever-man vocal style, chord structure, chorus (“It falls apart, we’ve all got work to do”) and guitarwork* (*Geisen would probably insist it’s really basic unimpressive crap, but I’m just happy that any young person is still attempting to play guitar solos at all these days), it just doesn’t match the year enough stylistically or thematically.
The song is about a guy who’s fucked up his relationship during some midlife crisis bender in Vegas, but we all know the words “she’s leaving you” haven’t actually applied to anyone in years. Which is cuz in order for someone to leave you you have to actually be with someone in the first place, and everyone has stopped even trying to be with anyone else, now accepting loneliness and low global birthrate as the preferred way of being.
Which is also why “Right Back to It,” Lenderman’s collaboration with Waxahatchee, can also not be the year-in-review centerpiece. Even tho there’s something time-stopping about Katie Crutchfield’s bamatwangy vocals, especially when adding in the harmonies with Lenderman, the song is about the mundane ebbs and flows of a longterm relationship, and the only thing less 2024 than splitting up with someone was being with them for the long-haul.
The year simply had nothing to do with beginnings, middles, or endings of love. It had to do with transforming yourself to be self-sufficient enough to live without love, which was perhaps the only way that love could even be a theoretical possibility again.
And then it occurred to me that perhaps the work of creative media which best captured the spirit of the year was not a song at all, but a film…
Hit Man, written/directed by Richard Linklater and co-written/starring Glen Powell, who’d previously collaborated in the 2016 80’s-college-baseball-players-getting-laid movie Everybody Wants Some (currently # 5 on my all time list of baseball movies), is based on the true story of a guy, Gary Johnson, who back in the day went undercover for the police to catch people trying to hire contract killers.
Powell (who amazingly starred in every single new movie that came out this year) plays a fictional version of Johnson, starting out as a nerdy college professor who enjoys birding and lives alone with his pets. But he stumbles upon a natural talent for improvising and pretending to be various fake hit men characters, and actually starts to transform into one – Ron – the confident, cool, sexy guy, who doesn’t take shit from anyone and gets the hot main chick to fall in love with him.
But more important than the plot or romance or whatever is the question the film poses as to how much we can really transform our personalities. How much of a ‘true self’ do we really have? Is it simply a matter of changing our self-narratives and perception of our own identity? In other words, can you really fake it until you make it?
Professor, birding, alone… Hmm, that sounds an awful lot like all of us in 2024, doesn’t it?…
Not that all these things necessarily needed to be transformed tho, and actually it was the best birding year yet. 328 species, a new personal record. The trick is to travel to kinduv random places you don’t usually go. Like Kansas City the day before the Chiefs won another Super Bowl (Pileated Woodpecker) or the Gulf Coast of Texas in the heart of mosquito season (10 thousand bites, 11 lifers including Painted Bunting).
This was made more possible cuz of year two of the Full Time gig at the college. Disposable income/conferences. And actually alotta Hitmanning was happening there cuz of our new role as Composition Lead, where you hadta pretend like you were a Lead-er so you could entrap adjuncts at your campus into feeling supported and motivated. And shit if it wasn’t kinda working just like the movie. Slacking? Ha, we were now PROfessionals, composing emails and newsletters round the clock. You need a new classroom? A sub? A compliment on your lesson plan? We were on it. And we were on it in our classes too. Going full (insert inspirational teaching movie here, like I dunno maybe Summer School or something), and imparting not just the particular subject matter for the course but also Greater Life Lessons – forget your essay, how do you properly use the Semicolon of Your Soul?! (Practically: if we could just get our post-pandemic socialshy students to attend a school sponsored open mic it would be considered a major victory, and we did!)
It made us ask ourselves – What else can we pretend to be? How about one of those Healthy People you always hear about? So we went to the Boulder Rec Center 3-4 times a week to exercise just like they would. And we saw The Nutritionist and started eating a high protein/low carb diet instead of just Raisin Bran Crunch all the time. And we finally parted ways with top diarrhea ally – dairy. And we started taking magnesium at night to sleep better. And took swimming lessons to confront childhood fears. And it all actually worked, just like some kinda natural handmade Ozempic. Before long our Levi’s dropped a waist size, and we had a mysterious recurring feeling, which, upon further investigation, turned out to be a ‘good mood.’ Man, we thought, at this rate maybe we won’t even need to mention any celebrity deaths in this essay. Is it okay to like this version of me way better than the old one?
Some things that changed in 2024 were a little harder to tell if it was good or bad tho. What the hell happened to Boulder Poetry Scene you might be asking? I dunno even know, man. We just didn’t feel like putting much into it this year. Maybe cuz it just seemed liked more trouble than it was worth, or we were just busy with other priorities, or maybe it was actually just more what’s-in-it-for-me ego bullshit. I mean, outside of maybe a random girl from Nevada (and others I may be discounting to fit a narrative), we did not seem to get very much positive external (nor internal) support for our own writing this year. And we certainly didn’t handle our rejections very well. Ambushing editors at their own open mics and forcing them to listen to our rejected pieces directly to their faces and demanding they tell us it was actually a masterpiece. Sure we claimed it was ironic performance art, but was it realllly?… smh…uhh, are there any other areas of clear positive improvement to talk about here instead?
Uhh uhh… Love life?… No, we’ve been over this. We did try a little bit, we at least admitted to ourselves we might kinda sorta be into the idea of being in love again, we did post a list on social media with all our potentially attractive dating qualities, and we did allow ourselves to get crushes on a cute art teacher or two. Mmm, art teachers… We wrote them secret love poems about beauty and natural disasters and throwing caution to the wind, which just maybe we’d even share with them one day (haha, no no they’ll never get to read them). But we certainly weren’t in any position to conspire post-coitally with anyone to off any exes or law enforcement who were on to us or anything.
And by the fall things started to get weird, man. Some parts of us started transforming unintentionally. Like our appendixes. Without any pretending or improvising, the tiny unnecessary organ suddenly inflamed itself and threatened to spew bacteria out all over our other innards. The only indication this was even happening was thru intense outta nowhere pain that forced us to roll the dice on the ER, where they said ‘yep, we’re gonna have to put a hit out on your guts,’ and then we hadta have a very discrete operative cut the thing outta there and pitch it in a medical waste bin somewhere, assuring us they’d barely leave a trace of evidence. It all went reasonably well, but it was also enough to feel like things were Thrown Off.
Next thing you knew MJ Lenderman’s own Asheville NC was fully submerged in water, Elections were turning out I-don’t-wanna-talk-about-it, the FBomb Flash Fiction Reading ended forever, depressed poetry scene kids were making unfortunate permanent decisions, and we lost many many famous people just like always (former NBA centers, tv talk show guests, and deliverers of epic Field of Dreams (#1 on baseball movies list) monologues (“People will come, Ray…”) seemed especially hard hit). And then INTENSE ANXIETY showed up, cuz I dunno man, inescapable built-in high neuroticism personality trait? And then we couldn’t help but obsessively ruminate on the limits of how much we really could HitMan ourselves in a year (or at all).
Just cuz he was able to transform himself in a shade-under-two-hour movie didn’t mean you could actually do that in only twelve months of reallife. This was especially clear during another Blahcember, holding on to holidays and bird counts like life rafts in a choppy sea of triggered cortisol surges, and by the 31st we could only scour local therapist websites and order books by neuroscientists who might potentially hold answers about whether it would ever be possible to jussrelax again.
The research does say your mind CAN be rewired. It just might take a little time and a little more than personal ruses and sting operations. I mean, the amygdala remembers everything that’s ever spooked you and activates accordingly before you even have a chance.
Breathe everybody.
If 2025 is gonna (hopefully) be The Year of Zen, and Song of the Year something mellowsynthy from the Spa Channel with bird calls and light rainshowers, then “we’ve all got work to do” indeed.
And then who knows what will transform from there. Maybe, at some point, it will actually be a year for a love song again, and those are so so so much easier to find…
Jonathan Bluebird Montgomery 