The future is hard to talk about. This is what one of my col­leagues (hint: Ben) con­fided to me the other day. Orig­i­nally I took it as an excuse for missing the mix­post dead­line, but now I read it as a peremp­tory con­fes­sion, one that I’m afraid I have to make to you right now: you’ll find little of a future in this mix. What you will find are present anx­i­eties, dystopic murder-worlds, preva­lent sad­nesses, and some nice britpop.

The future here rep­re­sented is a project of the present to present itself, or at the very least, five adults trying to make sense of the thing; you’ll find common bina­risms of imag­ined reality and real­ized imag­i­na­tion, of utter anni­hi­la­tion and cir­cum­spect peace, pre­cau­tion and willful abandon. Most of these songs evoke feel­ings about the future, and the majority of them describe crappy futures no one wants to live in (Jason has a knack for iden­ti­fying these nar­ra­tives). A select few cap­ture what it would feel like to live in a time beyond com­pre­hen­sion (these are my songs). Niina took every­thing to heart and went into the future to figure out what we’d be lis­tening to 246,342 years from now. Mike con­tem­plated a quick shower.

All in all, it’s a clumsy, pes­simistic, and ulti­mately typ­ical gpants mix. Enjoy.

01. Laura Nyro, LaBelle — “O-o-h Child (Live)”

This was the most uni­ver­sally res­o­nant song about “the future” that I could think of. Sure enough, orig­i­nally recorded by the Five Stairsteps in the 1970s, it’s been cov­ered dozens of times. What does everyone hear in it? Song­writer Laura Nyro’s stripped down take gets at its essence well, I think, espe­cially those first three arresting, ele­giac notes. Yea the chorus takes flight, and why not? We all want the future to be some­thing better. But it’s the opening, tit­ular sigh which gives that sen­ti­ment such a rich shading. It hints that maybe the future never comes, that it’s just an idea to make the present bear­able. (Mike)

02. Blur — “End of a Century”

Ok, so this one was obv. one of the defining achieve­ments of britpop, dis­tilling Blur’s per­va­sive 90s ennui into a lament for the non-event of moving into a new cen­tury. They were, of course, looking for­ward to the incon­ceiv­ably futur­istic 21^st Cen­tury, in which we spacemen are now deeply ensconced. Were they right to sigh boredly at the changeover? Well, aside from polit­i­cally, I’d say that the new cen­tury has indeed been “nothing spe­cial.” I con­sider this one to be a cau­tionary trea­tise on investing too much in a promising future. (Ben)

03. Arcade Fire — “Neigh­bor­hood #1 (Tunnels)”

This song is cheesy as hell, but I really do love its mood and imagery. If one were to take this song lit­er­ally, I guess you’d assume that some nuclear winter filled the streets with ice and snow, and some dis­ease or radi­a­tion poi­soning somehow wiped out the mem­o­ries and lan­guage of the sur­vivors. Romantic, huh? Now there is just the purity of love to bring color to the world, or some crap like that. But of course the imagery is a metaphor for the all-consuming bliss of a newly dis­cov­ered love, and the ten­dency of a new couple to want nothing from the world but each other. It sounds a little too sen­ti­mental, but you know, it really does feel like that some­times. (Jason)

04. School of Seven Bells — “Wired for Light”

I’ve been reading this comic lately called King City. It’s a seri­al­ized ver­sion of a hip book that came out some time last decade. Why am I bringing this up? Well, King City takes place in a weird future place in which cats can be injected with chem­i­cals to make them do stuff like pick locks, turn into periscopes, and look I’ve got no words to really set down here this is largely a song that makes me think of polyspa­tial laser fortresses and the Flash Gordon movie theme. (Joel)

05. Owen Pal­lett — “Flare Gun”

Heart­land is Pallett’s first album after resigning the Final Fan­tasy moniker; how­ever, the ges­ture of using his actual name is false, because this is actu­ally more a nar­ra­tive album than ever before. Where some future ter­rors are tiny future ter­rors, this is an bom­bastic, vast jingle for emi­nent domain; backed up by flutey bits that remind me of a Sufjan Stevens level of wack­i­ness, the nar­rator incites the “good men of val­orous heart” to “con­sider a new start and sail today for the Heart­land.” Indeed, the future of the Heart­land is a sparkling one, if the speaker is to be believed. But is he? (Niina)

06. Pulp — “Help the Aged”

One of the best tracks on This Is Hard­core, an album pos­i­tively rid­dled with them, this song gently reminds “the youth” that “the aged” were once just like them. I’m not gonna lie. Despite its crooning, anthemic façade, this song scares the shit out of me. I try not to think much about death, or about turning into a decrepit husk of my former self before dying, but it’s coming for me. It’s coming for you. It’s coming for all of us. Fuck. (Ben)

07. The Moun­tain Goats — “Quet­zal­coatl Is Born”

This is the most per­son­ally res­o­nant song about “the future” that I could think of. What my iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the birth of a Mesoamer­ican feathered-serpent deity sug­gests I’m not really sure–maybe ask Joel, who con­ducts unac­cred­ited psy­cho­analysis ses­sions in our extra office on the week­ends. But yea, there was a pretty dif­fi­cult period in my life where I was waiting, as John D. says in another song, for the future to arrive. And there wasn’t all that much to do but wait, really. It was truly and deeply pur­ga­to­rial; I’d listen to this song over and over again, trying to detect any signs of life in me, any crack­ling or snap­ping corn. I wanted the uni­verse to toss me into a fire so I’d come out puri­fied and reborn. And that’s what I love about this song: its oddly inscrutable por­trait of trans­for­ma­tion. No one around, just some rustling fields, a strange gath­ering, and without a lot of fan­fare you’re ready to start again. (Mike)

08. Jimmy Eat World — “Big Cars”

It’s an unre­leased track! It’s rare! They’re not that bad! Look, I never thought I’d be in this posi­tion, putting Jimmy Eat World on a mix past the age of eleven, but we’re here now and we need to dis­cuss this. “Big Cars” comes from the fabled Mark Trom­bino (think Clarity, pre-Dreamworks) ses­sions of Futures, their hotly-anticipated and (for many) largely dis­ap­pointing follow-up to Bleed Amer­ican. For me, Futures was a pretty good album: it’s the last “lis­ten­able” Jimmy, and in many ways the cul­mi­na­tion of a lot of emo­tive themes they’d been riding on since Teenage Fan­club gave them a woody. When I got my hands on these demos (essen­tially a whole new album of mate­rial), well, I got a woody too. If we’re to treat the Trom­bino cuts as an alterna–Futures, then this track is its big opener: crunchy gui­tars, call-and-answer vocals, buildup to explo­sive chorus. It also plays real nice with our “futures” theme: “If there’s some­thing wrong / you just press delete,” Adkins laments after dis­cov­ering the back­space button in this elegantly-composed analogy of tech­nol­o­giza­tion to imper­ma­nence. Then comes the part where the song title becomes obvious: “Family can sleep well tonight, / we’re a long, long way / ‘til all the good names / for your big cars / will be used” See? Mazda Cosmo Sport? Any­body? (Joel) [editor’s note: HAHA THIS IS WHAT YOU GET FOR PUTTIN ME IN CHARGE OF A MIX YOU CRANKY FOOLS]

09. New Order — “Dream Attack”

I like to figure out what songs are about. I’m pretty good at it. Here is what this song is about. In the grim future, global war rages. A mono­lithic dystopian gov­ern­ment dis­covers that our pro­tag­o­nist, an ordi­nary family man, has a weak latent psy­chic ability that can be ampli­fied into a weaponized form. He is now the key to a dev­as­tating sur­prise attack that will destroy the enemy for­ever. His loving wife begs him not to unleash this holo­caust. But he must do his duty to his country. On the morning of the attack, he wakes up and looks out the window. It’s just like any other day. He goes down to break­fast. His wife’s eyes silently beg him not to go through with it. He has no choice. Rather than face her and his own uncer­tainty, he leaves, aban­doning his untouched break­fast. He knows she will not be able to live with him after this, but there is nothing else he can do. He can save his country. He travels to the gov­ern­ment facility. The machinery is set­tled into place over him, con­nected to his brain. There is no turning back. He would do any­thing for her, but he can’t change who he is and what he must do now. He closes his eyes and con­cen­trates. The machinery hums to life, and sud­denly the entire hemi­sphere is illu­mi­nated with rhythmic pulses of an unholy light. Some­where, unseen, ene­mies are being struck down as though by the hammer of Thor. The attack is a suc­cess, but at what cost? It is the begin­ning of a new, fright­ening age. I’m serious. That is exactly what this song is about. (Jason)

10. Janelle Monae — “Sin­cerely, Jane”

Janelle Monae, Afro-Futurism’s heir pre­sump­tive. Like my dreamy crush Joanna Newsom, she’s an outré female artist with her own dis­tinct aes­thetic. And like my other dreamy, gay space­ship of a crush Sam Delany, she refracts social expe­ri­ence through the lens of sci­ence fic­tion, looking crazy cool in the process. Sin­cerely Jane comes from her EP Metrop­olis Suite I of IV, a song cycle about dystopian android enslave­ment and a more-human-than-human pro­tag­o­nist (the remaining install­ments will be packed into her forth­coming LP, the Arch-Android, to be released in May). Monae is unusu­ally lit­eral here, calling out the gun, drug and sex trades that suf­fo­cate com­mu­ni­ties around the world. But it’s impos­sible to sound boring or preachy on a track like this. The horns carry the song, they sound nothing so much like par­tic­u­larly jazzy ele­phants swaying back and forth–outsized, a little goofy, but unde­ni­ably pow­erful, like Monae her­self. (Mike)

11. Class Actress — “Careful What You Say”

This is a warning song, a right-now-future kind of song. It’s dance­able enough to seem blithe, but it’s actu­ally rather severe – “how many times do I have to say it?” Trans­la­tion: don’t fuck up, or there will be some answers required. Her beau­tiful voice just makes it all the more ter­ri­fying, because you know beauty is always cruel (god, I did just quote Cradle of Filth). When she gets to the repeating singsongy end part (“careful what you say / it hurts me when you talk that way”) I think she’s just taunting us. Guys, lately, when I think of a song about the terror of the imme­diate future, I think of this one. (Niina)

12. Talking Heads — “(Nothing But) Flowers”

Here’s one we can take lit­er­ally. Some apoc­a­lypse has cleanly wiped away human civ­i­liza­tion. Noise and pol­lu­tion are no more. The world is fields and flowers, bird­song and beauty. But this guy is right, most of us would hate every second of it. And with that admis­sion, we can acknowl­edge that the things we do to harm the planet are pretty much inevitable. The scene described in this song prob­ably really is in our planet’s future, with the dif­fer­ence that none of us will be there. Also, I’m ashamed to admit that I uniron­i­cally love the Talking Heads. (Jason)

13. Okay — “Hug­gable Dust”

Close your eyes and pic­ture a wobbly widdle plushie bear singing this song to you. Now open your eyes and gaze into the twin flick­ering iPhone screens worn on this sen­tient mound of stereo­scopic wires and microfi­bred debris gath­ered by a kid robot and shaped into a familiar ursid that’s trying to start a thing with you. This tragic Furby is still speaking human gib­berish after mil­lennia of iso­la­tion. He lives in an android’s septic tank, and prob­ably knows the Oracle from The Matrix. Don’t cry for him, he does not com­pute. He does, how­ever, respond to hugs. (Joel)

14. Neil Young — “After the Goldrush”

So look, it’s pretty obvious to everyone that Neil Young smoked a great deal of weed in his day. “After the Gold Rush” is a key example of the sort of lyrical output such indul­gence pro­duced: it’s got “mother nature,” “knights in armor,” “silver space­ships flying,” and of course the line where he just flat out states, “I felt like get­ting high.” Broken up into three verses—past, present and future—the song charts the devel­op­ment of, and destruc­tion caused by, the rise of human civ­i­liza­tion. Then it posits a some­what fan­tas­tical sci-fi con­ceit for how the human race might carry on after we’ve irre­triev­ably fucked every­thing up here. Fun stuff! (Ben)

15. Mirror Mirror — “New Horizons”

Mirror Mirror’s entire album actu­ally presents a future impres­sion con­trary to Pallett’s glim­mering vistas; it’s some­thing darkish and Pink Floy­dish, com­bined with the awe­somely stressful car­nival antics of Sleep­y­time Gorilla Museum (my favorites). This song is a bit happier-sounding than some of their others, but it still gets me a little nervy when someone asks me about any society what­so­ever, much less the “society for the advance­ment of inflam­ma­tory con­scious­ness”. The future is right there, and as anyone can see, you’re such a sen­sible girl, and everyone agrees we’re going to be friends for a long long time. (Niina)

Down­load the mix with all those proper tags and stuff that everyone appre­ci­ates: [Multi­u­pload]