Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
Featuring collaborators from across the Drag City universe and a repertoire of gospel, country, pop, and rock covers, Bill Callahan and Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s lockdown double-album is playful and spirited.
In October of 2020, Bill Callahan and Bonnie “Prince” Billy posted a cover of the Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens’ 1967 protest anthem “Blackness of the Night.” “For this bad bad world, I’m beginning to doubt/I’m alone and there is no one by my side,” the Bills harmonize, Callahan low and steady, Will Oldham lilting above, over a gentle shuffle of acoustic guitar and synth courtesy of their labelmate Azita Youssefi. Though it’s a song centered on solitude and loneliness, sung from the point of view of an outcast, the recording exudes a spirit of camaraderie, longtime compatriots reaching across the digital expanse to connect, “Determined to make a new friend out of an old favorite.”
It would have been lovely enough on its own, but the covers kept coming, through the fall and into winter, each pairing Callahan and Oldham with a new collaborator from the diverse Drag City roster. All 19 are collected on the newly issued Blind Date Party, which functions less like a singles collection and more like an overstuffed double album: discursive, playful, and full of imagination. While a few selections hew close to the country, hushed-folk balladry deep cuts one might expect—songwriters include Leonard Cohen, John Prine, Lowell George, and Robert Wyatt—they often veer into new territory, bouncing from hard rock to fluttering electronic pop, from meditative groovers to gospel, from the avant-garde to raucous sing-a-longs.
The album’s concept was simple: Oldham and Callahan selected songs they wanted to hear each other sing and sent them off to a wide-ranging cast of collaborators—including Meg Baird, David Pajo, David Grubbs, and Sir Richard Bishop—who arranged and recorded contributions, returning them to the duo to finesse and eventually sequence into a full-length. Quarantine necessitated plenty of records assembled in a similar manner, but the “sight unseen” aspect—Oldham and Callahan gave no specific directions or input to their collaborators—injects a sense of spontaneity into the remote sessions. “If you give someone the freedom to make their own interpretation, then there’s a good chance that what they’re going to do is going to come from their heart, you know?” Callahan says in the album’s liner notes, noting Cooper Crain of Bitchin Bajas’ desire to give Iggy Pop’s “I Want To Go To the Beach” a reggae makeover.
Liberties are taken, from Bill MacKay’s almost samba-like approach to Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues” to the psychedelic mantras of Wyatt’s “Sea Song” with Dirty Three guitarist Mick Turner. Though there were eventually some notes traded between collaborators, there are countless moments of creative verve, especially when the two take on each other’s songs. Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny resurrects one of Oldham’s Palace numbers with crunchy drums and gnarly guitars. Meanwhile, Dead Rider transforms Smog’s “Our Anniversary” into a genuine ripper, boosted by Oldham’s soaring vocals. “Everything that can sing/Is singing its mating song,” he yelps triumphantly over Todd Rittman’s overdriven riffs.
The best songs here similarly evoke the most unmoored days of the pandemic, and perhaps that’s what informs the joyful whoop Callahan lets out at the start of Lou Reed’s ode to domesticity, “Rooftop Garden,” in which the Greek lutist Xylouris White stirs up John Cale-style drones. Those moments of levity are found throughout. Paired with his Superwolf bud Matt Sweeney, Oldham employs a clipped pronunciation of the word “cocaine” on Hank William’s Jr.’s “O.D.’d In Denver,” evoking the way Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland might say it. On Billie Eilish’s “Wish You Were Gay” with Sean O’Hagan of the High Llamas, the two relish in the chance to go full-on synth-pop.
At an hour and a half, Blind Date Party could be trimmed into a slimmer volume, but it plays wonderfully as a longform epic. The best mixtapes are bound together by a hard-to-pinpoint but somehow felt logic, and these songs about faith, horniness, devotion, bottoming out, and rising up bear the mark of their assemblers. “Human beings, they do miracles,” Callahan sings, backed by Ty Segall doing his best Sly Stone on a cover of Johnnie Frierson’s moving lo-fi gospel “Miracles.” In Callahan and Oldham’s hands, the song speaks in concert with the bruised hope of David Berman’s “The Wild Kindness,” performed here with Cassie Berman (David’s former wife and bandmate) and dozens of voices. As the song crescendos and Pajo’s distorted guitar snakes frantically, Callahan and Oldham’s own vocals are nearly swallowed up by the big choir. And yet, you still feel them.
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On June 7, 2023, the sky above New York turned an eerie orange. People across the city looked up to see the air thick with smoke, carrying the sharp scent of wildfires that had drifted down from Canada. It was a startling moment, more alarming than a strangely warm November day but less directly dangerous than an active blaze in your own neighborhood. For many living on the East Coast, it was simply surreal. The air felt heavy and golden, and yet, everyday routines continued without pause.
“Something in the Air,” the second single from the Antlers’ new record Blight, depicts this environmental event, or at least one that mirrors it closely. If the Antlers have been unfairly labeled a “sad” band, this song won’t do much to change that. Peter Silberman, the group’s longtime creative force, sings with a trembling voice, “Oh, keep your window closed today.” Rather than fully grasping the strange intensity of the moment or facing its unsettling implications, the song leans into ordinary habits: “Oh, be sure to charge your phone today/Oh, maybe work from home today,” he sings softly.
Since their rise to prominence, the Antlers have specialized in songs that linger in deep emotional pain. Titles like “Shiva,” “Wake,” and “Putting the Dog to Sleep” offer a glimpse of the grief they’ve often explored. Back in 2009, their breakthrough album Hospice used a cancer ward as a backdrop for songs about a crumbling relationship, becoming a defining blog-era classic. Silberman now widens that lens, shifting from personal sorrow to collective mourning—what’s often referred to as “eco-grief.” Blight, the band’s seventh album, is presented as a song cycle about the climate crisis. Its nine tracks dwell on pollution (“Pour,” “Calamity”), complacency (“Consider the Source”), and looming environmental collapse (“A Great Flood”). Yet despite the weight of its subject, the music often lacks the sense of urgency or emotional release that once defined Silberman’s most powerful work.
Silberman wrote much of the album while walking around the land near his home studio in upstate New York. During those walks, he noticed a neighbor clearing part of the forest to make space for vehicles. That observation sparked songs like “Carnage,” which starts with spare synth and voice before exploding into a stormy full-band climax, packed with striking imagery—a decapitated snake, a toad crushed under a tire. “Accidental damage,” Silberman sings as the music breaks open in a rugged guitar solo. The title track reaches for the same vividness, describing “chawed up trees with skeletal leaves.” It also hints at his growing interest in electronic sounds, as skittering drum loops by drummer Michael Lerner weave through the latter half of the track, twisting like something alive and mutating.
That raw, immediate energy doesn’t carry into the longer pieces like “Something in the Air” and “Deactivate.” Those songs drift along on delicate arpeggios and mournful vocals but never find their shape. The Antlers have always embraced slow, ethereal soundscapes, but on earlier records those sounds still carried high emotional stakes and bursts of intensity. Here, they look straight at the scale of environmental disaster and end up with little more than a quiet sigh.
Throughout the record, Silberman circles around the question of responsibility for the climate crisis. He often points the finger at himself—or at people like him—everyday consumers who toss out disposable items without a second thought. There’s sincerity in that guilt, but it doesn’t always translate into compelling lyrics. “Is it enough to add to cart with buyer’s remorse?/Well, if you don’t know where to start, consider the source,” he sings on “Consider the Source,” an opener that echoes the warm, glowing mood of 2021’s Green to Gold. A few tracks later, the opening verse of “Blight” takes a more pointed tone: “Quickly, I need it!/Shipped in a day/Oceans away.” The words are blunt, leaving little room for interpretation.
This kind of introspection has merit, but it’s hard to ignore what’s missing. The album shows little anger toward the corporations, fossil fuel magnates, and politicians who have driven the climate crisis for profit. Everyday consumers are not without fault, of course, but there are far greater powers at play. In contrast, Tamara Lindeman of The Weather Station painted a chilling portrait of those forces in “Robber” from 2021’s Ignorance. That kind of confrontation is largely absent in the Antlers’ view of the world.
Perhaps that’s why Blight feels oddly detached for a record about an inherently political subject. In 2025, when the Environmental Protection Agency has been gutted and national parks stripped of funding by a science-denying administration, the quiet ambivalence in Silberman’s writing stands out. The album contains flashes of anger and guilt but not a clear sense of resistance. On the final track, “A Great Flood,” Silberman sings gently, “Of this I’m uncertain/Will we be forgiven?” The question hangs heavy, like the smoke-filled sky it reflects. Another, more pressing question lingers behind it: Who exactly is “we”?
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