So I have this friend. The important things to know about this friend are that:

1. He is cooler than he thinks he is,
2. He is easily one of the smartest people I know, and,
3. He has some pop cultural gaps for some similar reasons as me,
4. He is cooler than he thinks he is WHICH I WILL CONTINUE TO REMIND YOU TALEN.

He is also a blogger who is much better about actually maintaining a blog than I am, and I offered a list of albums for him to Do Postes about, because music is cool and good. Belatedly (like months later, after we talked about some of said posts), it occurred to me that I might also want to Do Postes about the same albums, because they are cool and good.

So here I am, Posteing about things that are something other than navel-gazing, shitposting or screaming into the void about labor rights.

Anyway, my main rules are going to be that I don't want to stomp on me mate's posts so I'm not going to run ahead of him, and I'm not going to write reviews, because reviews are terrible.

The first album is Portishead's Dummy.

I never listened to Portishead during their heyday. I missed trip-hop's height almost entirely, due to living in a shack without power or running water for years with people I hated who hated me right back, so my first encounter with Portishead was the first time I watched Tank Girl with Neon.

Tank Girl whips ass, by the way, don't listen to what terrible people with bad taste say.

There's a scene in Tank Girl where Tank Girl (Tank Girl, played by Lori "Tank Girl" Petty, best known for her starring role as Tank Girl in Tank Girl and some other movies that are not Tank Girl but are very good as well in which she did not play Tank Girl, and also Point Break), who has just been sent to a fascist labor camp, takes a sand shower - there's no water, because of the aforementioned fascists - and then introduces herself to Jet Girl (Naomi Watts), saving Jet from a creep through the magic of lesbianism. This whole scene, maybe a minute long, is set to Roads, the eighth track off Dummy, and so Roads became very important to me and an assortment of other young queers starting in 1994 and most likely to this very day because it's...

You just gotta watch it.

Anyway, all of Dummy is like that. There are songs, yes, but you can't understand Dummy that way. You can't understand trip-hop that way. The songs are about things, yes, and they have their identity and purpose. There's hard edged songs, there's softer, more melancholic trippy stuff like Roads. As an album, though, it's just an experience, a continuous ride with, if you need them, a few stops to check your head. It's about finding the song, or part of a song, or something else going on in the space in which the music resides that grabs your brainstem and yanks, and then following through the rest of the album like that. If you don't find that part, you'll never get it, but if you do it will rewrite your DNA. Something will embed itself inside you.

Dummy wants to pull you inside out and you want to let it.