Rosie Tucker's UTOPIA NOW!

I listened to "UTOPIA NOW!" at the end of 2024. It was in NPR's best of list. NPR's music reviews tend to be ... what frivolous political label should I use? champagne socialist, in that they opt for the outward appearance of promoting diversity without really discussing how the philosophical and cultural origin of that diversity contributes to the album's ideas. I'm not saying what they do is right or wrong - every publication has their bent, and it's nice they're consistent about it - I'm merely recounting the swirl of thoughts going on when first listening to "UTOPIA NOW!"

So, a little more on NPR: they'll feature a lot of music in languages other than English and the musicians will be from all over the world and from all spectrums of sexuality and gender identity. Again, nothing wrong with that.

They favor danceability and catchiness over any other attribute of the music. I do have a quibble with this aspect because, at the end of the year, I listen to a battery of music and I quickly get exhausted by how same-y they sound after a while. I don't think dance and pop music have to be headless. The Pet Shop Boys, indisputably, made some of the best dance music ever; they made a chorus out of normally not doing this kind of thing; they made a lot of money off of singing about making a lot of money; the Boys were never being boring. Generally speaking NPR features disco or electronic music or pop music, paired with some interesting-but-generally bland classical and jazz, i.e. genres that have been extremely trope-ified. Not that music is new and musical taste is entirely original; again, I'm simply observing.

Rosie Tucker, the singer-songwriter, is queer and goes by they/them. They're from California. The title: UTOPIA NOW! This is what NPR wrote for the end of the year list:

"What you give to me no one can frack / What you give to me cannot owe bail / What you give to me no app can track," Los Angeles indie-rocker Rosie Tucker sings on UTOPIA NOW! The lyric demonstrates something at which Tucker is especially talented: moving deftly between big-picture societal critiques and dialed-in personal intimacies, often from one line to the next. The album, which Tucker wrote in the aftermath of being dropped from their label, chronicles (among many things; Tucker created a Wiki compiling all the references on the album) the perils of the music industry and the failures of technology. But Tucker's erudition doesn't come at the cost of the music's playfulness; it's a guitar record after all, and the production is experimental, with literal bells and whistles (and car horns and dog barks) layered throughout. And Tucker is truly funny as a lyricist, slipping one-liner zingers into songs that are existential and anti-capitalist, making listeners sit with our complicit consumerism.

written by Elle Mannion.

I'm a cynical man, and so I had an ultra-cynical response. I heard myself screaming internally, Next!

This is all to say, I did not expect "UTOPIA NOW!" to be so introspective and thoughtful, so funny, and so willing to provoke and challenge, as good art should. It's probably one of the best albums I have heard in this decade so far.

Let's begin with "Lightbulb", whose first 30 seconds reveal all of Tucker's idiosyncrasies:

The lightbulb is updating and I sit in the dark, picking at my nose with the invisible hand

My favorite style of verse-making - which happens to be my style, so I'm extremely biased - is when the singer detaches and observes themselves as a character within their own life, sorta like Dylan's "When I Paint My Masterpiece". A way of distinguishing is, this is singer-as-character, whereas most songs are singer-as-main-character. I love it when an artist clarifies their thoughts and produces a singular image, as metaphor for their state of mind, as Tucker does with "The lightbulb is updating / and I sit in the dark", rather than them telling me what they're thinking. I also love metaphors playing with light and darkness, as Joni Mitchell often did.

They then immediately - it seriously seems like something I myself would actually write - take their metaphor and make it real, give it flesh-and-blood, via their "picking at [their] nose", which is very funny and self-deprecating. They continue "with the invisible hand", which reveals you one of the themes of the album: Tucker is both in and out of the world; they are both present and not present; and this goes onward with the world, which is both real and not real, and treats them as a real and not real person.

Rosie is consistently funny throughout the album. The following lines:

And how many songwriters does it take to screw a tune?

which I have thought in my most cynical mood. And then their self-deprecation then turns to the world:

To get the record done on time? To maximize demand? While Palantir sells us to LAPD.

The verse is a series of deflection, taking the subject of their impotency to the topic of their deadline, then the sale of their album, and then questioning what is even the point of selling anything, an effortless movement into the matter of the album: What is the point? What are we even doing here? And when they realize that maybe no one wants to hear their shit, they admit:

I get jealous when someone I know's on TV.

Since I heard this in 2024, I don't know if I share Rosie's reference of mind, or I have slowly adopted more and more of Rosie's thinking as the years have passed by. There's something about their vulnerability and confusion about the modern world that appeals to me. But one of the reasons why I like the detached voice in writing is that, particularly now, it's very easy for a musician to get on a soapbox and try to pander to their audience for sympathy. Rosie's approach is a two-way window: they're looking at themself and they're looking at the world, and at times they're filling out the details of the world and then the details of themself, until finally these two things wind together and enter a harmony - or so they hope.

But I'm getting ahead of myself: I said the first thirty seconds reveal everything about Tucker, and now I'm already past those thirty seconds. The other attribute of "UTOPIA NOW!" is that Rosie is not a pitch-perfect singer.

You can almost hear the mushiness in their mouth as they sing the "light" of "lightbulb"; there's a mealiness to their b's, u's and s's; their "updating" sounds like "ahp-dah-ting", like they're British. When they sing the subsequent "dark", they sing it suddenly as if they're just tossing it on the ground. Most singers would emphasize that "dark", linger and draw it out. When they later sing "songwriters", they crack at "song" - or maybe not "crack" (I'm not a professional vocalist, clearly), but they're not in the same tune as they were for the previous words.

By no means is this a weakness. It's a positive attribute of theirs.

I mean, Bob Dylan sounds like shit and Leonard Cohen had to tell people "I was born with the gift of a golden voice" because no one ever thought his gravelly grumbly voice sounded good. In fact, Tucker sounds better than both of them, it's just that, if you listen to music non-stop and forever, you will notice they do not have a perfect climb, and they don't even enunciate words consistently. But ... that's them. That's who they are. And that's what the album is ultimately about: I know it, I suck, everything sucks, I hate it here, but I'm here, all the same.

Later, they achieve the perfect scene transition with:

The lightbulb is updating, we both look through my phone,
You know that lightbulbs only die to maximize demand, so if you're burning out you better keep that shit in mind 'cause if you're
writing the record you must want it heard and return on investment is all but assured, guess success is a steal where the price is obscured.

Rosie changes the scene such that "we" are looking through the phone; the verse is no longer a self-reflection, it's their trying to grasp at a common humanity, some empathy, a real "do you see this shit right here?" What follows is their trying to get you to understand their existential crisis, of being in a world where art doesn't matter, where art only matters if it makes money, where only money matters, and where nothing matters, because money is a bunch of bullshit anyway.

It, uh... And I feel a little guilty saying this... It makes me think of PUP's "The Unraveling of PUPTheBand". I know I talk about PUP all the time, and in these write-ups I hate taking the spotlight away from the featured artist. Let's just say: in this continuously self-unaware and careless and hapless and frankly stupid digital culture we live in, these artists are the only ones who I think have actually tackled the question of personhood well.

And then, the best singing on the track:

I'm a brain in a jar, I'm a face on a screen...
Liberated, good-looking and good at relating,
Now everyone's clapping for me.

And now, the track that opened my eyes to the power of Rosie's music, "All My Exes Live in Vortexes":

I hope no one had to piss in a bottle at work to get me the thing I ordered on the internet

which is a hell of a verse. It is so annoying, so insecure, everyone knows someone in their life who has thought something as random as this, but you don't get annoyed because it's so fucking funny. I believe I played "UTOPIA NOW!" on shuffle and I, by serendipity, by wonderful chance, landed on this track first, and I remember actually double-taking and thinking, "Wait, this is awesome."

And Rosie, blessed with great self-awareness, follows up their take on corporate America putting their hands in everything we own by moving the camera to themself:

But I am no responsible party, I'm just a middle-sized fish in a pile of plastic wider than Texas, a pile of plastic,
you wonder why I'm a poor sport,

that metaphor, "I'm just a middle-sized fish in a pile of plastic", is something I've been chewing on for these last years. It accomplishes several things: one, it's a continuation of the previous verse, which is Tucker's anxiety about their placement in the universe and the state of that universe as regards pollution and consumerism, and two, the "middle-sized fish" (great alliteration of the i's, by the way) gets at Tucker's general "What am I doing here?" theme throughout the album which leads to three, leading to the following verse where they go on about a shitty situation they were in that no one cares about, particularly the subject of that situation:

squeezing my pores in the bathroom, I'm not ready yet to go back to the people,
Fall short, every chance I give you say Speak for yourself.

It's great songwriting, the way they connect all of these anxiety-inducing scenarios, or how they paint all the layers of their shitty world that becomes more than the sum of its parts.

And then, one of my favorite verses of recent memory:

I know every time you sip from a bottle of piss and remember me the memory degrades.
I need no responsible parting, you can think me away in your mind made of plastic

I'm always bemused by repetition in poetry, as I can never quite understand what it accomplishes. Moving their gaze from that "no one" to "you" sipping from the bottle of piss has a cinematic feel to it; Rosie's motif here conveys the idea of someone degrading themself from a sense of self-respect, but it's interesting that they shift their concern for someone's self-respect for them. It's a weird bit of theory of mind she's engaged in, that is somewhat fleshed-out in the album and somewhat not, which is a missed opportunity I think.

I don't know if they intended it in this way, but because of the prior "piss" I always see "memory" as a sinking lake, which is an admirable effect I can't confirm, again, is intended. Regardless, there is such a violence in how they sing "the memory degrades" - there's anger, there's bitterness, and there's also regret in that voice. Tucker is not a violent person throughout their depiction in this album; death to them is not justice, it's just destruction.

Next up is "Gil Scott Albatross", whose opening verse I made fun of in 2024:

They're gonna turn the moon into a sweatshop

(which is a fantastic line on its own, by the way, funny and evocative and tight),

like none of these fuckers ever heard of Gil Scott Heron, more like Albatross

So corny, but it feels like the type of quip that you construct only when you're so mad words fail you. They save themself with this Kafkaesque imagery:

And if I turn my life into a treadmill, wrap me in a spreadsheet, lay me in a landfill with all the shit that I cast off

Rosie has a great power to paint scenes. Of course, "paint" is a metaphor; words do not paint, they're words, they refer to something else. Whenever I say an artist can "paint scenes" through lyrics, I am really talking about their ability to put the listener in the scene of their emotions.

But Tucker is surprising in that they don't paint emotional scenes, a la "Just a little lovin' / early in the mornin' / beats a cup of coffee / for starting off the day", which establishes, without telling you, a place and a time and a situation in the character's life, which is loving. Tucker just paints scenes. They can fit intellectual arguments in their music without being preachy or overbearing, because they're that good of a painter. They are more in the tradition of "All the vampires walking through the valley" or "You've gone to the finest school alright, Miss Lonely / but you know you only used to get juiced in it".

I remark on this because I am now noticing a verse I never noticed before and was about to skip over:

Where there's smoke there's a car on its back, there's a gap in the side of the overpass, you could call to the line but the signal's jammed

and I don't know what they're really describing, but the "smoke" makes the scene apocalyptic, and I know there's just a feeling of complete helplessness from the singer, and, as a result of that helplessness, a feeling of complete apathy. I don't know what this portrait of a car abandoned under an overpass is meant to depict, but I know how I feel staring at it.

They then turn to one of the verses that has been stuck in my head for years:

I want to turn the argument around, turn my face toward the sun and find some common ground, because we don't punch sideways, don't punch down

Every time I think of the national discourse, I literally think of this. It's also just perfect imagery, with Tucker leading your gaze to the sun as they sigh or grit their teeth in frustration; they then imply violence with the "don't punch sideways, don't punch down" line, which refers to their ongoing anger with the world.

I'll pass over "Paperclip Maximizer", which I do think is a solid song, and move onto my two other favorite songs on the album, beginning with "Maylene", ultimately the most unusually-paced and written song on the album. It begins with what sounds like field recordings before entering a simple guitar riff and drum beat. Rosie sings,

My neighbor Maylene loves the cops, loves to yell at her grown son; if I think Maylene's in the wrong, I'm biased 'cause I also have a mom

leading into an interlude of recordings, more ghost voices and sounds. It's the sole track on the album where Rosie is least in it, except "Eternal Life".

Focusing on the verse, it's another example of Tucker's ability to paint a scene without expending so many words. You can almost see her character Maylene on the lawn, with their car on the driveway, maybe a Blue Lives Matter sticker on it, and her son on that lawn arguing with her in their garage or something. Or you are free to put in your own imagery here; it's all implied.

But what is an unresolved matter is Tucker's feelings concerning the scene. They're not angry, as was depicted in the pop-punk / post-punk of the previous tracks, and it's important that they say "If I think" as it conveys that they're not sure.

After the interlude, after allowing memories of her own past to fill in the gaps between the words, they sing:

The Christmas lights stay up all year agleam in stale significance; who taught Maylene to love severe, to give and give at such expense?

And for this verse, I don't have anything to say. It's a mystery to me, what Tucker means by this gloomy, melancholy, and yet somehow hopeful picture.

The last song I'll discuss is "Big Fish / No Fun", which continues off the melancholic feeling of "Maylene" with the verse:

I'm not saying that you shouldn't care but the biggest billboard in Times Square can't fix your dad, clear the air, bring you back to me

It's that "fix your dad" part that fucks me up. "UTOPIA NOW!" is at its best when it's a series of portraits of broken people; after "Maylene" Tucker develops a theme of continuing the mistakes of the people before you. They then develop more of this picture of people against impossible odds facing all of the evils of the world with:

And that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to have a staring contest with the evil eye

leading to the song's chorus:

When you're up, you're up all night and when you're down, you're DOWN! And when you're only halfway up, you're no fun to be around, you're no fun to be around

which is another favorite verse of the last few years. I'm sure everyone knows someone like this: someone who loves life only when they decide to love life, who hates life on every breath, and who doesn't even want to be around every other second. It's the perfect picture of what Tucker is trying to show you of someone who is completely drained by modern life.

One attribute of the music is that it, in comparison to the music I mentioned before, is varied. "Gil-Scott Albatross" has a tinge of pop-punk; "Paperclip Maximizer" stutters like a post-punk song; and "Maylene" is, like, post-rock. "Eternal Life" can be called jazz-rock (it's interesting how "Eternal Life" is credited to Shira Small). It's interesting, too, what other music "UTOPIA NOW!" evokes: "Big Fish / No Fun" makes me think of Avril Lavigne and "Obscura", a highlight on the album, for whatever reason makes me think of Vanessa Carlton. Musically, "UTOPIA NOW!" is a vehicle for Tucker's lyricism, but what's striking as that they chose all the shitty rock traditions. What I mean is, the aggressiveness of punk and its variants is the aggressiveness of losers. It's almost as if they were comprising the songbook of the underdog.

One of the mysteries of "UTOPIA NOW!" is that the second half is weaker than the first half, and I don't quite know why. "White Savior Myth" is really funny:

The white savior myth got a good night's rest, she is twenty minutes late and impeccably dressed, she is skinny like a teen and exactly as depressed as depressed and a genius.

Then, Tucker somehow sneaks this poetic verse into "Obscura":

You point the pinhole, and I strive for stillness, I chart your course with my aperture wide, our nameless moon carves a ditch in the darkness, you only see me inverted and upside down.

(This has been haunting me all freaking week: I remember what the music makes me think of! "Obscura" sounds like Duster! I love Duster, dude.)

"UTOPIA NOW!" doesn't pretend to be a coherent song cycle, and I can't pinpoint a single aesthetic choice they make that produces an uneven listen; so what's the issue? Do I have a contention with the muted nature of "Me Minus One Atom"? But I love "Maylene" so completely, and I love the musical bridge in "Me Minus ..."

Well, maybe it's just me. There's some music you only like because you vibe entirely with the artist's state of mind while they were making the album. But I'll put out this hypothesis: I think the first half of the album has an urgency to it, as if the artist has to express something. The second half of the album is the artist reflecting on something, but, to take myself as an example, I reflect on a lot of things and a lot of my reflections are not worth writing down, because I haven't arrived at the heart of just what exactly it is I want to say or express. The second half doesn't feel incomplete, nor half-worked-on, but it doesn't arrive at anything hard, at something the artist has either full confidence in or full indifference to, an indifference that the result doesn't matter as everything that should be said has been said.

I'm a little disappointed I put it as low as I did in 2024. My whole rambling preamble is my way of excusing my lapse of judgment by sheepishly saying I was too tired to recognize its virtues. But I think that quality is also in the music: "UTOPIA NOW!" is fundamentally about a person in flux, someone who is figuring out what they think and who they ultimarely are. I took Tucker's navel-gazing initally as precious; but they are precious, and that preciousness is just part of them and something they have to carry as they navigate through life. It would be nice to have a utopia (now!) but that same person recognizes, as time goes on, how impossible that is to have. Although it doesn't hurt to ask.

And that's why "UTOPIA NOW!" is my favorite album of 2024 - no that's a joke, it's still Ka's "The Thief Next To Jesus". "UTOPIA" is an excellent album that stands out in an excellent year, but "Thief" is once-in-a-lifetime special and an endpoint for NYC rap.

Alright. Let's stare at this. No, this is not above Jessica Pratt's "Here in the Pitch", which I think got robbed by Ka. Is this above Charli XCX's "Brat"? ...Oh, this conversation is made to kill me. ...No, it's not. I listen to neither album front-to-back often, but "Brat" is undeniably consistent aesthetically and in content throughout. It also has that finality that I said was lacking in the latter half of "UTOPIA NOW!": in my eyes, Charli is done, through "Brat" she has summarized everything she had done since her debut album, "True Romance" (2013), and flushed her musical style with life. It's time for her to move onto newer pastures, not because she has to, but because in Charli XCX world she's only in a race with herself.

Uhhh... Kim Gordon's "The Collective"? Well, first things first: it's above DORIS' "Ultimate Love Songs Collection". Great record, but I like "UTOPIA NOW" more.

"Shelf Warmer" is just so funny though; I generally admire the conceit of "The Collective" and, yes, "The Collective" is aesthetically coherent through. Here's the deal: I think about "The Collective" more. I think about Sonic Youth a lot, and I think about Kim Gordon's relationship with the band. Kim is not "Daydream Nation" (1988), but she is "Sister" (1987). "The Collective" is just great noise, and she has a fantastic understanding of the distance noise produces. But I probably listen to "UTOPIA NOW!" more, and that's the real criteria, as what you listen to demonstrates what you actually have emotional resonance with.

So yeah, I'd put "UTOPIA NOW!" above "The Collective", but boy is it a hard decision. I don't know if it's a curse or a blessing Rosie Tucker released a great record on probably one of the greatest years of music in the last twenty-five years or so; it's a curse as, obviously, hers is completely obscured, but it's a blessing in the sense that music is an affirmation of the beauty of life, and music is sometimes all we have in a world that sometimes is really the pits.