When it comes to art, at least in the broad definition of the word, there’s often this unspoken rule about staying in one’s lane. Painters should paint. Musicians should play music. Actors should act. I mean, how many times have we heard something like, “They should just stick to [insert artistic medium here]”?
If the name Johnny Tran already sounds familiar, it’s because he’s been largely immersed in the fine art world for over a decade. The co-owner and co-curator of the pop-surrealism-focused Thumbprint Gallery in La Jolla, he’s probably more than familiar with the concept of becoming pigeonholed into one particular field.
So when I heard that Tran was releasing an album of music, I didn’t know what to expect, but Meditation on Death is a surprising listen nonetheless. It’s a mostly electronic album that seems largely influenced by late ’90s and early ’00s genres like glitch, trip-hop and drum and bass.
The album starts off with a beat cribbed straight from Eminem’s “Without Me,” but with samples of a lecture about the chemical element Neptunium. A song like “Executive Order 9066,” with its samples of Trump and his racist minions overlaying a foreboding drum and bass track, is genuinely hard to listen to, but fans of The Avalanches, Massive Attack and Unkle (or anything DJ Shadow was involved in), will find their heads bobbing to tracks such as “Devolution” and “Fibonacci.”
Taken together, Meditation on Death isn’t groundbreaking by any means, but the overall style and messages contained therein could be indicative of how little we’ve evolved over time. Just as is the nature of pop-surrealism and lowbrow art, Tran’s music is a statement on the zeitgeist, as well as a tribute to it of sorts. At the end of the day, what is art if not an exercise in egotism that results from humanity’s inherent fear of death? Tran has spent enough time dealing with art to understand that to limit one’s self artistically, is just another day closer to death.