Why I changed my mind about Angelic 2 the Core
“Ascension millennium, ascension millennium,” opens the 2016 album Angelic 2 the Core, the magnum opus of former child actor, current activist and timeless musician Corey Feldman. While the rhythmic consonance of the retro dance beat evokes the theme of a millennium on the rise, the dissonance of the synthesizers and autotune imply a musical experience of declining enjoyment. When the verse arrives and all sense of rhythm is lost, even the most trained musical ears will struggle to find the art in the noise.
Over the next hour and a half, Feldman pursues countless themes, disappearing motifs and the widest array of musical stylings presented on a single project in the history of modern music. Music review site Sputnik Music described the experience as “a very, very tough album to stomach, not just for the length of the record outright, but for the absolutely baffling execution of the ideas on show.” Washington Post published music reviewer Anthony Fantano characterized the album as “sure to get those suicidal juices flowing.”
Needless to say, there is a consensus among those who have listened to Angelic 2 the Core that the album is an unpleasant experience. When I first heard the outro of Feldman’s cover of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero,” the finale of the album, the silence was a relief from the tapestry of dissonance I had just endured. Nevertheless, over the next weeks and months, I found myself returning again and again to this train wreck of a project. Was it from disbelief? Awe? Self-injurious impulses? As I learned more about Corey’s story, an answer emerged.
Most people who listen to music seek out consumable compositions that express the nuances of human experience. In the history of the music industry’s charting of hits, one would struggle to find a week where the top 100 singles did not include a love song. After romance, despair is the second theme that permeates musical subcultures. These themes, love and sadness, are so ubiquitous because they speak to near-universal experiences. Most people can relate to an ode to a romantic interest or to the catharsis of a weepy ballad.
Corey Feldman’s Angelic 2 the Core includes both motifs, but the experiences expressed in the project are far more complex. For example, the song “We Wanted Change” is a straightforward love song in its words, but in its music a broken pastiche of lounge and jazz whose tonality and rhythmic ambiguity contradict the nominally happy theme. What could be a simple song becomes much more intriguing—the contradictions provoke questions in the minds of the listener.
These questions are what first prove Angelic 2 the Core as a bona fide work of art, and it is the depth of these questions that make it a great work. There are countless portraits of smiling women in museums around the world, but the one that comes up first in the cultural mind is the Mona Lisa—not for its simplicity, but for the complexity communicated in the face of the subject. Centuries of viewers have puzzled at what that enigmatic smile means, and it is this puzzlement that embeds the painting in the thoughts of millions of people.
When I finished Angelic 2 the Core for the first time, the silence was not quiet. My mind was filled with questions about what possible aspect of the human experience was being expressed in this project. It was these questions that kept me coming back to the album, and as I learned more about the composition and the composer, the full picture came into focus.
The life of an artist informs their art, and the life of Corey Feldman is a life of absurdism, trauma and optimism. It is a story that brings the very nature of the human experience into question. Simple expressions of love are tainted by a history of abuse, and the sadness of loss is mitigated by a lifetime of living with grief. Angelic 2 the Core expresses a deeply complex philosophical interpretation of life that reveals deep truths about the subjectivity of our experiences. Feldman refuses to simply characterize trauma as pain or love as bliss—instead, he acknowledges that all things can be good or bad, but that first and foremost, things are the way they are.
Sources:
https://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/71779/Corey-Feldman-Angelic-2-The-Core/