SEVEN #4: a Super Bowl time capsule
that is only tangentially related to football.
This Sunday, the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League will meet in the Super Bowl. In just about any other year, America’s biggest, most unavoidable, most shamelessly American sporting event would be the talk of the town. Since 2026 began, however, more important news hasn’t exactly been in short supply: matters that will lay the course for global economic conditions, the sanctity of international sovereignty, and the application of civil rights for years to come have dominated our uniformly unpleasant headlines instead. Any televised spectacle where two teams of buff, sweaty hunks pass around a leather ball for the nation’s entertainment would be hard-pressed to inspire much fanfare in comparison.
In times of crisis, distractions can be welcome, though: I’m sure some disingenuous outcry will surface from the usual suspects about Bad Bunny’s selection as Halftime Show performer, and there will inevitably be some moaning and groaning from less bigoted camps about the militarism omnipresent in our advertising, pageantry, and public consciousness, but both these gripes are likely to take the backseat as the majority of football fans lament the fact that “my” (sorry, not sorry) New England Patriots—the most dominant NFL team since the turn of the century—are back in the show again. They’ll be hunting their potentially record-breaking seventh Super Bowl victory (wouldn’t that be a nice tie-in?), though most bettors are predicting they’ll come up short this year. If you’d rather root for the underdog-turned-favorite, Seattle has only one prior Super Bowl win to their name: 2014’s installment against the Denver Broncos.
In 2015, the ‘Hawks returned, eager to go back-to-back. This did not occur, and it did not occur precisely because of the New England Patriots, who eliminated a deficit late in the game to re-apply pressure to Seattle. The strategy proved effective: in the closing minute, with a golden opportunity to snatch back the lead resting just a few yards away, Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson bewilderingly attempted a pass instead of running the ball into the endzone for the game-clinching touchdown. The ball was intercepted by Patriots cornerback Malcolm Butler, and the Patriots won with a final score of 28-24. Seattle’s decision to pass instantly and unanimously went down as one of the dumbest play calls in the history of professional sports.
Come what may in the two teams’ rematch this weekend, that infamous blunder and the era that produced it feel staggeringly distant to me now. At a glance, the world of winter 2015 was a simpler, happier time, but in all fairness, The Super Bowl tends to devour all other competing headlines once the beginning of February approaches, and I was also only 18 years old at the time. Was yester-decade really as rosy as I recall? To test my hypothesis, I’ve unearthed seven noteworthy headlines—and paired with them, seven songs—that dropped within seven days (on either side) of February 1st, 2015’s Super Bowl XLIX.
Spoiler alert: things were actually pretty shit then, too. At least this trip down memory lane comes with Gatekept bangers!
WINTER STORM JUNO
On January 24th and 25th, 2015, a blizzard blew down from the Arctic across central Canada, over the Great Lakes region, and into the Mid-Atlantic. The following two days, it essentially parked itself above Long Island and southern New England, dumping approximately three feet of snow in peak locations and buffeting the coasts with hurricane-force winds. While the Patriots themselves didn’t experience any travel disruptions en route to the site of that week’s Super Bowl (it was held in a neutral state, Arizona), the snow notably complicated last-minute ticket sales and kept many fans in the Northeast bound to their homes. The trouble didn’t stop on this continent, either—remnants of that same system re-intensified after traversing the Atlantic, producing another snowstorm in the British Isles later that week. Jumping to the present, my locale in Connecticut is still waiting for a thaw after a two-footer hit us a few weeks back. Shoveling out sucked. I haven’t seen grass in nearly a month.
If your heart also desires the radiance of sunnier seasons, take a peep of Doomtree’s “Beastface,” the indie hip-hop septet’s “we’re overdue for a vacation” bop. Half-stream of consciousness verbal porridge, half-electro-infused outsider trap, this representative taste of the Minnesotan collective’s unfazed individuality dropped on January 27th, 2015 along with the rest of their final record, All Hands. Even for their standards, it’s a track as brash as it is dorky—that won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I can attest to its utility as a trusty getaway pick-me-up. Leave it to folks from the Great White Relatively-North to know how to daydream cabin fever away.
MALAYSIA DECLARES “IT’S SO OVER”
On January 29th, 2015, nearly eleven months after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished over the Indian Ocean without a trace, Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation ruled the plane’s disappearance an “accident,” finally giving the victims’ families legal clearance to seek sizable compensation. While theories run rampant to this day about the cause of the aircraft’s course-drifting and subsequent crash, aftershocks of bureaucratic mismanagement kept this story in the headlines for years. Nothing stirs the pot like hazy answers, bitter tempers, and an abundance of red tape.
Danish prog chuggers VOLA released their debut record, Inmazes, on February 2nd, 2015, just a few days after the Malaysian government’s concession. They, too, didn’t disappear from the spotlight so quickly, as the album would later get a fall 2016 re-release. Melodic rager “Stray The Skies” benefitted most from the renewed attention, receiving an animated music video and eventually becoming the band’s most-played live number. Just as I can’t conclude from a distance whether or not Flight 370 was intentionally diverted to its certain doom, I can’t definitively peg “Stray The Skies’” as an allusion to being mentally unwell and in charge of piloting a passenger jet. The shoe fits, though—vocalist/guitarist Asger Mygind seemed to have dissociation on the mind while composing Inmazes’ lyrics, and the song’s focal metaphor sure makes for an uncanny parallel regardless of the intent.
DUTCH TEEN STAGES UTTERLY POINTLESS STICKUP
Here’s a doozy: on January 29th, 2015, a 19-year-old claiming to be a hacker stormed the studios of Dutch broadcasting company NOS armed with a fake gun, demanding ten minutes of airtime. Before he got any, local police showed up and apprehended him without struggle. The perpetrator, later identified as “Tariq Z.,” acted alone and ultimately had no connections to terror cells or extremist groups. Threats involving explosives and a cyber-attack turned out to be bluffs. Former classmates described him as “normal” and “into conspiracy theories,” a pair of descriptors that I, for one, find contradictory, albeit entirely befitting the type of person who would try holding up a news studio with no coherent motive and, somehow, even less foresight.
On February 3rd, 2015, Modest Mouse released “The Best Room,” the third promotional track from their then-upcoming LP, Strangers to Ourselves. It was a divisive release for fans and critics alike, but those gravitating to the band for their frazzled rants about [gestures broadly] got what they yearned for thanks to primary songwriter Isaac Brock’s “old man shakes fist at cloud”-isms. In my eyes, “The Best Room” is one of the band’s widely-overlooked, late-career strokes of genius, jabbing into the vapidity of modernity while still acknowledging the privilege of a life where your biggest nuisances are loud neighbors and soulless streets. “Don’t you know it’s hard feeling tired all the time?” Brock whimpers in the song’s quieter cutaways, mocking the sentiment as much as he means it. In those reprieves from the noise, I picture Tariq barreling into trouble at a dumb, reckless age, staring past the rolling, unattended camera seconds before surrender, embarrassed, cornered, and responsible for nothing but an hour’s worth of technical difficulties and the founding of his own criminal record.
HEALTH INSURANCE GIANT INCURS DATA BREACH
Tariq chose a momentarily credible bluff, at least. On February 4th, 2015, Anthem Inc. (now known as Elevance Health) reported a data breach affecting 80 million Americans whose names, Social Security numbers, home addresses, and medical IDs were potentially floating around on the black market thanks to their neglect, allowing identity fraud artists to charge complete strangers the cost of their unrelated prescriptions and clinical visits. If the preceding sentence didn’t quite make sense to you, just nod and move on—I don’t have anywhere near enough space in a week’s SEVEN to exhaustively rant about the self-fellating ouroboros that is the American health care industry, but I do remember this headline, because guess which Gatekeeper received their health insurance through Anthem back in 2015?
hahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH i hate it here :)
Know what I don’t hate? The unmistakable sound of tricot. “E,” a single from the Japanese math rockers’ second album, A N D, premiered via music video on February 6th, 2015. According to vocalist/guitarist Ikkyu Nakajima, the track was inspired by someone who hacked her Twitter account. Impersonation directly ties into the clip’s logistics, too: after original drummer Kazutaka Komaki left the band in 2014, the three remaining members relied on session musicians to track drums on A N D, a footnote they allude to by performing (or at least mimicking) the drum parts themselves in the video shoot. 9/8 riffs, staccato jolts, and one of Nakajima’s most dynamic vocal performances to date made the track a heavy-hitter for me upon discovery: it was my formal introduction to tricot, and I haven’t soured on the band since. If any of you haven’t taken the plunge with them yet, this is as good a place as any to start. Can’t say the same about the wild world of American health care.
9-YEAR-OLD LITERALLY PLAYS WITH FIRE, KILLS 17
On February 5th, 2015, some brat in a Huizhou, China shopping center messed around with a lighter too much and set the building ablaze, killing 17 people in the process. As you’d expect, the PRC kept a tight lid on follow-up details. If you’ve got rascals of your own, just take this as a reminder to keep a reasonable eye on them: they could turn into inadvertent arsonists, or worse, Periphery fans.
I say it with red hands, of course. I’ve been an unbearable apologist for the djent titans through thick and thin, and while Juggernaut: Alpha and Juggernaut: Omega, co-released on January 27th, 2015, rank among my least favorite offerings in Periphery’s discography, the double album arguably snapshots the band at the zenith of their crossover appeal to \m/etal purists, indulging traditional theatrics (blood! sacrifices! cults! guilt! revenge!) to an unprecedented degree. To this point in their career, “Hell Below,” an incendiary, sluggish deluge of RIFF, sounds superlatively like its namesake, the crux of Juggernaut’s looming divine torment until its climax of “LIIIVE. DIIIIE. BUUUURN.” segues into the following track via the piano melody of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Even at their most committed, you can’t extricate mischief from a Periphery production the same way you can’t separate shoddy safety regulations from developing world architecture.
WAR. WAR EVERYWHERE.
Russian insurgents in the Donbas. Boko Haram in Nigeria. Israel in Palestine. ISIL, wherever they could sink their teeth in. Every day in the two-week retrospective to which this SEVEN applies, gruesome headlines from at least one (and often multiple) of these warzones littered my search results, proving once and for all that the notion of “peaceful times” is purely subjective and not something to take for granted. Even now, as an emboldened, nakedly partisan, paramilitary goon squad rounds up and abducts anyone they please off the streets without due process, the average American keeps on truckin’ with their daily lives. I’m not sure whether the general disregard has been reassuring or harrowing. Time will tell. All I know is we’re not really at war—not yet.
Tension between its message and medium in tow, hardcore act Xibalba were ahead of the country’s nosediving political curve, if not any particular musical one. “Guerrilla,” from their January 27th, 2015 LP, Tierra y libertad, epitomizes all of the band’s consistent attributes: downtuned, murky riffing, gruff, Spanglish rally cries, and a self-evident distaste for trying to impress through matters of fashion or wankery. It’s well-intentioned anger exorcised straight from the soul. Warmongers everywhere crave to not give a fuck what you think as loudly and proudly as these guys do, and that’s precisely why they’ll never be able to.
JUMPING THE (LEFT) SHARK
As promised, this week’s SEVEN returns to football courtesy of Super Bowl XLIX’s Halftime Show, headlined by Katy Perry. Missy Elliott and Lenny Kravitz were there, too (what is this parade without a few obligatory, washed pop stars the 40-year-olds in attendance will recognize?), but by the end of the night, it was an unannounced, anonymous guest that stole our hearts and minds: Left Shark. Left Shark was the one paradoxically human, imperfect, unpolished element of the whole performance. Left Shark thought to themselves, “what if I flop my fins around without regard for the metronome?” Left Shark didn’t want to sync their moves to “Teenage Dream.” Left Shark had their own dream, and then Left Shark made that dream a reality. Left Shark is my hero, or at least, they were my hero, if only for the amount of time it took to glowingly post about them on Facebook.
If you don’t remember Left Shark, I don’t blame you—less than a month later, The Dress took the world by storm. A week and change before that, Ward Sutton (under his Onion pseudonym Stan Kelly) published the now-evergreen “SICKOS” comic on February 16th. That makes Left Shark, at best, the third-best memetic phenomenon born in February 2015. We saw Left Shark, chuckled at them, and moved on with our lives. They were a distraction within a distraction within a distraction. Their fate was sealed from the get-go. We are not hardwired for this. The world—good, bad, and ugly—moves too fast, and it will not slow down on our behalf. Acclimating to a healthier speed takes effort—active, consistent re-framing. Some folks find that discipline easier than others. Maybe the rest of us can learn a thing or two from the hardiest of them.
Mount Eerie’s SAUNA was released on February 3rd, 2015. It was Phil Elverum’s final release before the death of his wife Genevieve in 2016, and the release of his 2017 album A Crow Looked At Me, which chronicled his grief in the wake of that loss. Temporarily pigeonholed as indie music’s chief mourner (a position which he served with unique eloquence, though hardly unique experience), any fans attracted to Mount Eerie at this juncture did themselves a disservice if they didn’t also wade into the waters of his prior catalogue, a discography just as poetic and fragile as that of the albums-cum-obituaries that re-popularized him.
SAUNA is an especially temperamental beast to grasp: some songs span over ten minutes, some less than two. Some are sparsely led by organ and plaintive vocals, others by discordant walls of fuzz. Melody, like the rest of Elverum’s work, is an afterthought. But closer “YOUTH” exemplifies all these traits and ties a bow on the album’s intertwined ruminations on growth, emptiness, and permanence with particular potency—throwing back to Clear Moon’s title track, Phil turns an established metaphor on its head; “‘There is no moon,’ my young mind thinks, ‘in a totally black night sky.’ / But there is a moon.” There is also a Super Bowl.
Phil doesn’t strike me as the type to celebrate anything related to football, and perhaps, dear reader, you aren’t one for such antics, either. This SEVEN didn’t set out to change your mind (what right do I have? I’m a bandwagoning curmudgeon who’s only watched one game all season), but hopefully I’ve contextualized the necessity of frivolous nonsense, especially when the walls feel like they’re closing in. Wherever you find your comfort, whether it’s watching beefcakes clash over a pigskin, perusing for recommendations on budding music blogs, or in some mental steam bath of your own design, cling tight to whatever gives you joy. It’s a rough world out there.
OH WHAT A RETURN BY RASHID SHAHEED