Bartees Strange & How To Live Forever

The Way to Live Forever is to Keep Moving, the Music of Bartees Strange

“Genres keep us in our boxes
Keep us from our commas
Keep us * hopeless
Keep us from our options
Let a * springboard, let a god’s wings burn”
Is how the hypnotic Mossblerd begins, a diatribe from the Southern-born and church raised Strange about genre’s rope and how it seeks to limit Black art the way other systems seek to limit Black bodies. And genre, the ‘god’s wings’ in question do burn on this album, or maybe, take flight for the first time, zig-zagging through rock, rap, indie, folk, and others with the ease of shifting gears in a Mustang. 

The first song on the album, Jealousy, sets the stage for the anti-genre while providing the context of the artist. From Oklahoma to Brooklyn, Strange takes us on a journey in this album by showing us who he is. A person who has synthesized, willingly or not, the many influences of places and cultures not traditionally inclusive or meant for him. The album jumps so often through genres and does them so well, it’s almost easy to miss that it is a heartbreaking depiction of placelessness and the dream of synthesis. The song is dreamy and electronically distorted to recall the way only nostalgia can distort memory and he ends the song with a gentler foreshadowing of his Mossblerd diatribe: the desire to ‘come to a place where everything’s everything.’ 
Mustang is the name of the second song, an obvious callback to Strange’s upbringing in Oklahoma. The catchiness of the song belies darkness in the lyrics that are hard to swallow. ‘A man bled out this morning and I’m the antecedent.’ It’s more than likely that Strange, an army brat knows the story of Walter Manning, one of the Tuskegee Airmen likely flying a P51 Mustang. He flew 50 missions, was awarded the Air Medal for heroism six times, and was the only known black man to have been lynched in Austria during World War II. 
The song ends chillingly with 
‘Don’t ask, why don't I want to give you solace
Tie me up’
Boomer is a classic rock banger. 
‘We on track
I’ve relapsed
I told my girl that I was working that’s a lie I’m in the trap
Told my momma I was savin’ fuck I spent that shit on wax
Told my friends I couldn’t make it they don’t know I got the bag’
When the above verse lyrics are juxtaposed with the chorus lyrics:
‘And I, I can’t even lift my hands up
That’s what we dance for lord, I’m going in
And right when I get all of my hopes up, something explodes lord
I never win’
The hopelessness, the lack of incentive to do anything good or honestly, or to even try becomes all too clear. Towards the end, Strange brags:
‘You can’t hurt me, I been buried alive by the devil that’s in them hills
You can’t touch me, I been buried alive by the devil that’s in them hills
No chance.’
The swagger of the words is undermined by the rest of the song which posits that the best way to be protected from pain is to remain hopeless. 
You can’t hurt me, you can’t touch me, because my hope has been buried.
Strange’s singing often undermines his words, like the end of In a Cab, when he repeats ‘I’ll be safe’ a few times and the word last safe dissolves, falling into an abyss. Or in Stone Meadows which starts with Strange pleading for an equal footing of vulnerability and empathy.
‘Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone had problems
If everyone turned tail when you’re around’
His voice towards the end of the song takes on a keening edge as he repeatedly sings
“The last shot in a moment
And I see you on the run, and I see you on the run, I see you on the run
Now I see you on the run, and I see you on the run, I see you on the run’
It’s impossible, in the context of recent events to see this song as anything besides a response or a dialogue, maybe even a voice for Ahmaud Arbery. 
‘Lord where have you gone? A world can be so clear, but where have you all gone?’
In the last ‘run’, strength gathers and holds until it runs out in Strange’s voice. The song ends with a tambourine shake, a last bodily twitch. After the heaviness of this song, we are thankfully transported, this time to the club with Flagey God. The music disrupts itself in the opening intro, introducing a siren of ugliness in the form of a half-step rub after a loop of more straightforward arpeggiation. When the vocals come in, it’s hard to say what key or pitch center Strange is in, the music harmonically re-enacting the aimless walking in the song. Mossblerd is next and after its closeness, its very direct message, we are lifted into the distance with Far which starts with gentle guitar and vulnerable vocals.
‘I wish I could run anywhere but home’ he sings, and this song reflects that as a departure from anything before on the album (except for the next song Fallen For You) though even this song disrupts itself, turns in on itself, and our preconceptions of how it might progress based on the beginning. Ghostly, with its mention of Rosebud in the first lyric, brings us back to the beginning of the album and Strange’s beginnings. In the second part of the song, Strange sings ‘I don’t want nothing that I can’t trust’ and maybe what he means is that he no longer wants completion or believes in the idea of synthesis or wholeness as it is offered. Nothing Strange speaks or sings is overtly political or overtly any one genre and with that, he shows us how terrifying, how easy, and how necessary it is to be genreless. How terrifying it is to slip into something or someone else, how terrifyingly easy to become someone else, and how necessary it is to be malleable in a world that is always trying to break you or box you in. The long sought-after dream of synthesis has been achieved, and it is within the mind, person, and sound of Bartees Strange.