#ME WHEN THE LYRICS MEAN SO MUCH MORE AFTER A PIVOTAL MOMENT IN THE NARRATIVE 💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖

[spineless-lobster]

So obviously listening to luck runs out after listening to mutiny has the same effect as seeing a picture of new york that has the twin towers in it, but like the line where odysseus says

“I need you to always be devout and comply with this, or we'll all die in this”

and eurylochus was like “okay”

But eurylochus CONSISTENTLY does not do that 😭 he disobeys odysseus and opens the bag, then after blowing them off course you’d assume he’d learned his lesson but NO he’s also gotta kill the sun cows

Like eurylochus I love you and they could never make me hate you but come on man you kinda brought all of this upon yourself man

[passionate-reply]

This week on Great Albums, I finally do a video on one of my very favourite artists: Gary Numan! And I’ve started with a not-so-obvious choice, his second solo album, Telekon. What makes Telekon so great? Click and find out! Or read the full transcript, which is below the break.

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! Today, we’ll be talking about Gary Numan for the first time in this series, and most definitely not the last. Telekon, Numan’s second LP under his own name, is not a particularly obvious place to start tackling his enormous legacy, but I chose it partly for sentimental reasons: while I can no longer remember exactly what my first vinyl record purchase as a teenager was, there’s a solid chance it might have been this copy of Telekon. But, that aside, Telekon holds a pivotal spot in Numan’s discography, in that it’s basically the last entry in his very brief “imperial phase.” 

Numan’s first major hit was, of course, the unforgettable “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”, the main single off of his second album with Tubeway Army, 1979’s Replicas. Replicas was a bit patchy and stylistically diverse, a snapshot of the artist emerging from punk rock, and just starting to meld that with electronics and forge something new. Later in ‘79, Numan followed it up with something more cohesive: his arguable masterpiece, The Pleasure Principle. This album would pull no punches in its attempts to blast you onto your back with its synthesised screeches.

Music: “Films”

But, where to next? While all of Numan’s music is distinctively “him,” he’s also never been one to get too comfortable in any particular style. If The Pleasure Principle was Numan leaning into the punk side of Replicas, and tracks like “When the Machines Rock,” then Telekon represented a return to the dark and ominous atmosphere of tracks like “Down in the Park.”

Music: “The Aircrash Bureau”

While The Pleasure Principle had been defined by its buzzing, gritty walls of texture, Telekon tracks like “The Aircrash Bureau” emphasize eerie, whining synth lines, and create a sense of delicate frailty with traditional instruments like viola and piano. Where The Pleasure Principle strove for a busy and full sound, bordering on overwhelming, Telekon is bleak, hollow, and haunting. But aside from its sound, “The Aircrash Bureau” doesn’t necessarily push new conceptual and thematic ground for Numan, being narrated by the titular entity, a hopelessly mysterious force of death and chaos that seems to threaten us listeners. Equally gothic themes pervade the rest of Telekon, including its lone single and opening track, “This Wreckage.”

Music: “This Wreckage”

In 1980, Numan also released two other singles, “We Are Glass” and “I Die: You Die.” These standalone A-sides were clearly intended to be part of the “Telekon era,” as their sleeves prominently feature Numan in his iconic black-and-red leather jumpsuit, like the album does. They were initially absent from Telekon, though--at least, before some releases added them to the tracklisting. I like a big hook as much as anybody else, but I can still appreciate the commitment to ambiance and crawling, slow-burning song structures on Telekon proper. Thanks to the dominance of slower-paced material, the more strident moments feel well-earned--as on “Sleep By Windows,” the track usually cut for “I Die: You Die.”

Music: “Sleep By Windows”

While it’s easy to praise the artistic integrity of Numan’s aversion to including those singles, it was certainly a somewhat bold career move. But Numan was more or less on top of the world at this point--and he’d been hitting the top of the pop charts, with both Replicas and The Pleasure Principle becoming number one albums. If he was a bit cocky, that was understandable...and it ended up paying off for him in the end, at least this time, with Telekon also achieving that number one spot. But Telekon would prove to be Numan’s last LP to do so. While there’s never one clear reason why an artist falls out of the spotlight, it’s hard to listen to Telekon without coming away with the impression that Numan was a bit tired of his sudden and unexpected fame, which had swallowed him up when he was hardly a legal adult. “Remind Me to Smile” stands out as a track whose lyrics seem to embody Numan’s desire for relief from so much public scrutiny.

Music: “Remind Me to Smile”

“Remind Me to Smile”’s strikingly upbeat melody seems to embody the titular request, putting on a stilted facade of emotion despite the misery expressed in its lyrics. Numan’s diffident demeanour and social awkwardness, which he later learned to attribute to autism, undoubtedly made his life difficult. His personality also contributed to his perception by the masses as robotic or alien, almost as much as the futuristic themes of his art, grounded in his lifelong interest in science fiction. The much-beloved track “I Dream of Wires” is one of his most famous dystopian narratives, spinning the tale of an elderly electrician who’s lived to see himself become obsolete, in a high-tech world with no more use for his skills. With its chorus ambiguously referencing “new waves,” it’s tempting to interpret it as an expression of Numan’s own fears of the world of music continuing without him someday.

Music: “I Dream of Wires”

The cover of Telekon is dominated by this bold black and red colour scheme, its criss-crossed stripes evoking the straps of Numan’s aforementioned jumpsuit without actually portraying him wearing it. The artist’s disembodied head appears to be floating, with a sort of ghostly halo behind it, adding to the album’s spooky feel. Equally mysterious is the expression on Numan’s face: his head is slightly tilted, and his eyes seem to drift away from meeting our gaze as viewers, which might be read as a symptom of his characteristic shyness.

While the title “Telekon” doesn’t particularly mean anything on its own, it seems to be derived from the word “telecommunication,” and could be interpreted as an outgrowth of Numan’s established association with things technological. Telekon is often concerned with ways of communicating with others, as on “Remind Me to Smile.” Phone calls are prominently mentioned on several Telekon tracks, as well as the aforementioned single "I Die: You Die." “Please Push No More,” perhaps the album’s most desolate moment, is anchored by what seems to be a call from a telephone booth.

Music: “Please Push No More”

After Telekon, Numan made yet another bold move: embarking on a “Farewell Tour,” and declaring his intent to retire from giving his much-lauded live performances. However, he quickly reneged. His next two albums, 1981’s Dance and 1982’s I, Assassin, saw him vary his sound even more drastically, adopting influences from jazz and funk. They also saw him decline ever further in relevance and commercial viability. To this day, Telekon is usually considered the last truly great album Numan made for a long time. I’m not a huge fan of his early 80s followups myself, but I do think that they’re at least a bit unfairly maligned. I’d challenge the notion that their stylistic shakeups came “out of nowhere,” and point to Telekon’s increasing emphasis on groovy basslines as a hint of where Numan would decide to go next. 

Music: “Music For Chameleons”

My favourite song from Telekon is its closer, “The Joy Circuit.” While Telekon has a lot of pretty dejected-sounding tracks, “The Joy Circuit” seems to send us off on a more cheerful note, with a dramatic finish bursting with violin and viola. It’s tempting to see it as a sunbeam, parting the gloomy, grey clouds of the rest of the album...but Numan doesn’t let us off the hook that easy. The final line of the song, and hence the entire album, is “all I find is a reason to die,” which is a hell of a way to close the book. With that, I have to end my video--thanks for watching!

Music: “The Joy Circuit”

[beatriceeagle]

I think my TV meta ask reported an error so I'm going to repeat my questions, feel free to ignore any of them! 1) I love Looking for Alaska the book, and whilst I'm not worried about the TV show as an adaptation, I am worried about it being good... should I watch it? 2) Are you excited for Bojack Season 6? 3) How do you feel about Agents of Shield as a TV show that's constantly changing? I'll never forget their pivot in season 1! 4) SPORTS NIGHT! Why do I love Dan Rydell so much?

I don’t think I could love a meta ask more unless it included Farscape. This is phenomenal.

1

The highlight is that the Looking for Alaska adaptation is good and you should watch it. To get deeper, without getting spoilery, I’ve heard a lot of people say that it improves upon the book, which I don’t exactly agree with. What Looking for Alaska is is a very smart adaptation.

Basically, Looking for Alaska, the book, pulls off a thematic trick using its limited point of view. Miles spends the first two-thirds of the book wildly idealizing Alaska, and often very much in the dark about the exact specifics of her relationship with Jake, but also with Takumi and even the Colonel. Then when the turn comes, that becomes the point: Miles might have loved Alaska, but the Alaska in his head was never the real Alaska, and that means that he can never really understand what happened.

We spend a lot of time hearing Miles’ very precocious, pretentious narration, and also Alaska’s precocious, pretentious dialogue, and a lot of that has seeped into the culture as being the book, as if there’s no deconstruction happening. But there is! Miles is a little bit self-deluding, and Alaska is almost always putting on a front, and neither of their words can ever be fully trusted. This is a book about a guy who never really knew a girl.

The writers of the series, I think, wisely realized that that dynamic was going to be incredibly difficult to replicate on-screen. No matter what they did, viewers were going to get an objective look at Alaska, and the time constraints of television (ironically, the fact that they had to fill out more time) meant that they would have to go outside of Miles’ perspective. So they ditched that idea entirely, and instead dedicated themselves to expanding wherever they possibly could. We get so much more Alaska than the book gives us. She is more real than she possibly could have been in the pages, because we get to see her, not Miles’ view of her. But we also get much, much more of the Colonel, more of Sara, more of Takumi and Lara, more of the Eagle and the Old Man. And it’s wonderful! Some of the show���s most incredible scenes are between characters who are neither Miles nor Alaska.

But it does undercut the theme, somewhat. (Especially when combined with some other adaptation decisions that I won’t get into, because they are spoilery.) Looking for Alaska, the series, gives up some thematic impact in favor of a great deal of character richness, and it’s absolutely the right call for the series, given its format, and given the context in which it was released. But it was a trade, and I think it should be acknowledged.

(The other thing the show does that I think is necessary from an adaptation standpoint, but makes for a kind of weird viewing experience, is that it adds a whole plotline to the middle of the series that doesn’t exist in the book. I do think that this was necessary, because there’s not a lot of structure to the middle of Looking for Alaska, and while that’s fine for a book, a series needs a plot with some kind of forward momentum to hang itself on. But the problem is that the inevitable arc of the book means that this new plotline has nowhere to go, and it ends up just sort of fizzling out, once the book plot takes over.)

Anyway: Looking for Alaska. Very good show, very good music, exceptional performance from Denny Love. Definitely check it out if you loved the book.

2

I am very excited for BoJack season 6! I’m just waiting to watch it with my sister. I have hope that, since this is a planned final season, it’ll give the writers space to move the characters forward, and actually give people like Diane some measure of peace, and people like BoJack some measure of atonement.

3

I think that being the kind of show that was a different show every season was the smartest choice that Agents of SHIELD ever made. (The least smartest choice that Agents of SHIELD ever made was “Fitz and Simmons can never be together for more than six episodes at a time,” even if it has led to several individually successful story arcs.) It makes the show infinitely adaptable, so for instance, if they kill off their lead character thinking that the show is ending, and then suddenly get renewed for two (!!!) more seasons, it’s very easy for them to bring the actor back without walking back the story they’ve told; the show is capable of going to almost any place or time, and pulling on almost any trope of sci-fi or fantasy.

It also makes the show really interesting. One of the problems with season one of Agents of SHIELD was that the MCU is this giant world, full of lots of different settings and genres, and in comparison, AoS felt bland. The genre it was taking on (sci-fi procedural) isn’t inherently boring, but it wasn’t a particularly fresh take on the idea, and the visual trappings of the setting were incredibly sterile. But post-Hydra reveal—and especially post-season four—AoS is like the MCU in a microcosm. It can be anything! It can do a season in the future, a season in space, a season in a computer simulation. It can do pulpy action and messy comedy and gorgeous, lyrical sci-fi.

And also, it manages to do something that’s incredibly difficult (even The Good Place didn’t quite manage to get the hang of it until literally just this last episode) which is to rewrite the characters’ realities over and over without losing track of their character progressions. So, for instance, Fitz has been regular Fitz, and then he’s had his entire reality rewritten by the Framework and become the Doctor, and then he married Jemma and died, and then we reset to cryo!Fitz. And throughout all of that, the show has always been very clear about where the current Fitz is emotionally, and how all of the past and alternate versions of him affect his mental state—but also how he is distinct from any past or alternate versions of himself. And they do this while carrying on actual physical trauma from season 2; if you pay attention, Fitz still briefly loses words when he gets stressed. (As someone who takes a medication that makes me forget words easily, this is my ACTUAL FAVORITE THING on television.) The end result is that you actually know more about Fitz from seeing his reality rewritten so many times—and he still has a coherent character arc.

Of course the downside of this constant shifting is that sometimes AoS will find something that really works for it, and then leave it behind. Like, over the course of seasons three to six, they built up a lot of texture and a deep bench of characters to the space setting, and I would probably say, at this point, that Space AoS is my favorite version of AoS. But the latter half of season six ditched that setting almost entirely, and it’s not clear to what extent we’ll be going back there at all for season seven. Similarly, Fitz’s character arc remains coherent, but I’m not sure the current version of it is my favorite version of it.

But at the end of the day, I think that’s a fair trade for a show that’ll change Daisy’s name halfway through and stick with it, you know?

4

Well, I don’t know why you love Dan Rydell, but after putting a great deal of thought into this over many years, I can tell you why I love Dan Rydell: He is, setting aside some baseline Sorkin patronization, a legitimately great guy, going through a legitimately tough time.

Like, in the grand scheme of things, there are a lot of people who have it a lot worse than Dan Rydell, but one of the cool things about Sports Night is that the narrative is genuinely engaged with that fact: It’s aware of Dan’s privilege, and it makes Dan aware of his privilege, in a way that future Sorkin properties never really manage to do. Think of “The Apology”: “No rich white guy ever got anywhere with me comparing himself to Rosa Parks.” Think of Bobbi Bernstein, a woman who Dan calls crazy until she proves that she was right. Think of “The Quality of Mercy at 29K,” an episode that’s basically all about turning Dan’s privilege inside out.

What makes Dan likeable is that the show is aware of his privilege, it points his privilege out to him, and he learns. When Isaac calls him out, he’s immediately contrite. When he sees someone in need in his office, he overcomes his immediate reaction and tries to help. And when he realizes his error with Bobbi, he grants her an immediate, complete, and sincere apology.

The thing is, Dan wants so desperately to be a good guy, and it’s just really hard not to like someone who is trying so hard. He’s incredibly good to his friends, and honestly, I think the turning point is “Mary Pat Shelby.” You give Dan and Natalie’s scene in “Mary Pat Shelby” to a halfway decent actor, and how do you not come out of that scene loving Dan? This incredibly unselfish, incredibly well-pitched moment where, while everyone else is freaking out and trying to get something out of Natalie, Dan just says, “No, I’m not going to tell you what to do, I’m just going to tell you that I am behind you a million percent.” How do you not love that person?

But the other thing is that Josh Charles is not a halfway decent actor, Josh Charles is a phenomenal actor, so actually the turning point isn’t “Mary Pat Shelby.” It’s the speech in “The Apology.” The speech in “The Apology” isn’t  Sorkin’s best writing—“high as a paper kite” is a choice—and honestly, that scene is a lot to ask any actor to take on. Performed competently, it would be kind of embarrassing.

Charles fucking impales himself on that monologue. He leaves blood and guts on the anchor desk. And he somehow does it without overacting? It is a very subtle, precisely-balanced act of self-dismemberment.

What I’m saying is that right from the very beginning, Dan opens himself up to the viewer, and we see all his vulnerabilities, all the ugly, painful pieces of him that make him. And because Charles is a really, really good actor, it’s all very believable, and it’s all very magnetic—you’re drawn to it. And he does it all while being so likeable, and so good.

So of course people love Dan Rydell. He’s generous, he learns and apologizes, he tries incredibly hard, he’s got level 25 charisma, and he’s an open book of emotion—not to the people in his life, but to the viewer.

(Hey, while you’re here, have a link to an amazing Dan Rydell vid!)

Send me meta prompts to distract me from my migraine! (Yes, I still have a migraine.)

[thesinglesjukebox]

IDINA MENZEL & AURORA - INTO THE UNKNOWN

[5.83]

[Knock, knock, knock-knock, knock] Do you want to build a sequel?

Jessica Doyle: Given Disney's current reputation for nostalgic repetition, I was pleasantly surprised to find Frozen II full of ideas -- in fact so full of ideas that almost none of them actually get developed with any coherence. (Whose voice was it again? And why is Olaf suddenly obsessed with aging? And how was a troop of Arendellian soldiers going missing without a trace for three decades not an issue? Et cetera.) "Into the Unknown" is as good a preview of the incoherence as any, as the song makes no sense narratively, psychologically (having spent all but the last six months of her life being taught decorum and self-distrust to the point of pathology, Elsa is ready to flee Arendelle because she... hears a voice?), or musically: the build-up to the chorus is repeatedly off-puttingly paced, most clearly in the "How... do I... follow... YOUUUUU" climactic line. But then again, I can say all this with authority because my older daughter, who was well finished with the first movie, is insisting on playing the soundtrack on the way to school. Maybe stuffing your sequels full of ideas and not worrying too much about the implications is more profitable than Bob Iger is willing to admit. [4]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: It's impossible to discuss "Into the Unknown" without discussing the massive success of "Let It Go." "Let it Go" was the rare type of cultural touchstone whose power was almost universal: it sold 11 million copies the year after the movie came out, won an Academy Award and Grammy, reached top five on the Billboard Hot 100, was translated into 44 different languages, and arguably paved the way for Disney to release a second movie and Broadway musical. Winter 2013-2014 when the movie came out, I remember singing this song in French during French class; in 2020, I'm putting on a musical production of Frozen with my students in China and every one of them -- inexplicably, even the ones who really don't speak English -- knows the words to the chorus. This is all to say: expectations for the second Frozen soundtrack were sky-high, and thus, "Into the Unknown" has been sold as the new "Let It Go" almost since before the movie was even released. (I'd argue that "Show Yourself" is a better thematic follow-up, but never mind me.) So does "Into the Unknown" live up to the hype? Not exactly; but to no fault of its own. The song works perfectly well as a way to advance the character development of Elsa and is gorgeously sung. Idina Menzel sells trepidation, fear, and excitement convincingly, and harmonizes with Aurora beautifully. It pays tribute to its listeners too; if "Let it Go" is a child's anthem about becoming the person you have always been despite what others think, "Into the Unknown" is the adult version of that, a song about escaping the comfortable life you've built in hopes of finding something new about the world and yourself. The song is doomed to live in the shadow of its predecessor, but is still excellent in its own right. [8]

Jonathan Bradley: "Let It Go" was, for all its power, an introspective ballad that turned on the first Frozen's theme of the liberating wonder of self-discovery. Its successor, "Into the Unknown," is tasked with maneuvering great wedges of plot into position, meaning it has to be the film's showstopper as well as taking on narrative weight that "Love is an Open Door" and "Do You Want to Build a Snowman" bore first time around. (The piano flurries that form the intro deliberately invoke the latter.) Aurora's four-note motif, the sinuous call that leads Idina Menzel's Elsa out of a resolved story and the security of her home of Arendelle, is appropriately otherworldly, but the song needs far too much to be overwhelming to allow that delicate melody the space it needs to be as entrancing as it is supposed to be. But "Into the Unknown" does eventually manage to be more than stage-setting; "Are you someone out there who's a little bit like me/Who knows deep down I'm not where I'm meant to be" is a couplet that speaks to that deep-seated sense of strangeness Elsa sees within herself and which has made her movies more than a toddler-sized-blue-dress dissemination mechanism. Something else helps: Menzel's horizon-shattering wail when she hits "unknown." The voice that defied gravity on "Defying Gravity" has the heft to move these big wedges of plot to where they need to go. [7]

Katie Gill: Whereas "Let it Go" was "Defying Gravity" reskinned, "Into the Unknown" is every musical theater "I want" song reskinned. Elsa wants to see how far she'll go, she's gotta find her corner of the sky, and for once it might be grand to have someone understand. As such, it's something we've heard before. A decent re-interpretation of something we've heard before with downright beautiful harmonies near the end, but something we've heard before nonetheless. "Into the Unknown" also fails in the job it's supposed to do: be inoffensive and singable enough that five year olds or my drunk ass can sing it through all the way without disaster happening. That last "into the unKNOOO-OOOOO-OOO-OOOOOWN" is very nice and very powerful and is comprised of notes that six-year-old girls and my exceedingly alto range cannot hit. But, like "Let it Go" before it, this is a song that Disney has carefully crafted and reverse-engineered and is putting so much pressure to be an actual hit. Of course it's going to be decent. Not as amazing as "Let it Go," which is easily a [9] on a good day and a [10] when I'm drunk, but a solid song nonetheless and one that I won't mind hearing when Idina inevitably performs it at the Oscars or when my five-year-old second cousin starts happily talking to me about Frozen at the next family reunion. [7]

Jackie Powell: Although Elsa doesn't build an ice castle at the conclusion of this power ballad, "Into The Unknown" doesn't need to be accompanied by gigantic visuals for it to be a much more complex and fascinating song than its predecessor. This track soars and it uses a potent string section, predictable but equally fun percussive cymbal crashes and Aurora's eerie dies irae gregorian chant as a counter melody. There's a certainty in "Let It Go" and that must be one of the reasons why it caught on as much as it did. But the difference in "Into the Unknown" is its obvious ambiguity in subject matter and tone. It's not sure of itself, but I don't think that detracts from its quality. That's why I don't think it's really all that comparable to "Let It Go." Its goals and motives are different. It's more mature in lyrical plot and composition. "Into the Unknown" takes leaps and breaths just as Elsa does when she's contemplating her next move. That's the beauty of the track, which composers Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez have addressed. Each line in each chorus is symbolic. In every "Into the Unknown" within the refrain, Idina Menzel takes a leap sonically. First, she travels an octave higher, which is a relatively safe interval, but then that is followed by the much more difficult intervals as the chorus ends. Menzel's voice goes up a ninth followed by an eleventh. Vocally she's out of her comfort zone, which pushes Elsa to do the same. The melody is clearly a bit choppier. It also bounces especially on the couplet of alliterations: " I'm sorry, secret siren, but I'm blocking out your calls." Its dynamics are much more defined and that's credit to Menzel, who wanted to sell the track as more than a "Let It Go" B-side. The extended queer metaphor that Elsa represents is able to flourish under "Unknown." Although it really shows itself much more later in the soundtrack. [7]

Edward Okulicz: Yeah, look, Frozen II: Heterosexuality Reclaims the Throne of Arendelle gave me plenty of feels too, but I always preferred "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" to "Let It Go," so this wasn't one of the Primary Feels Sources. The use of Aurora's four note call as a leitmotif is pretty clever melodically, but forcing this song and its narrative pivot kicking and screaming into being an "I Want" song (subclassification: "I Must," which if it doesn't already exist, it, well... should) is unbecoming. The asides ("which I don't") feel unnatural away from the cinema, and while Menzel surely blasts with those notes I don't feel moved when I replay. [6]

Brad Shoup: It's quenching when, in the second half of the second verse, Menzel dips into some jump-blues phrasing. There was no way this thing was going to stay an Arctic tone poem, so I'm grateful for moments like that. Toss out the movie and have Menzel reel in the asides, and you'd have a fantastically mysterious piece of piano-pop. [7]

Thomas Inskeep: I've never seen either of the Frozen films, but I recall how annoying I found "Let It Go," from the first film. This is better (though still, of course, a big Broadway-style ballad); I appreciate how this song will likely speak to theatre kids who feel like the weirdos in their schools -- songwriters Kristin Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, obviously, have a knack for this kind of thing. Having Broadway queen Idina Menzel sing it helps, as does the clever move of having Norwegian singer Aurora sing the part of the siren. Judged for what it is, rather than as a basic pop record, this is solid. [6]

Ashley Bardhan: As a recuperating former theater kid, I hoped this strange collaboration would be everything I wanted but couldn't admit. Unfortunately, it turned out to be nothing I wanted, which I feel comfortable admitting. I'm not sure what Aurora is meant to do on this track other than supply wordless, ghostly ooo-ing, which opens you to a sense of mysterious possibility that goes absolutely nowhere. Idina Menzel is a powerhouse and typically good at convincing us that we are in her character's world, but even she sounds bored at the incongruously triumphant swelling of orchestra during the chorus. She calls out from the overblown composition, "Into the unknown! Isn't it cool that I'm hitting this E-flat in chest voice?!" Yes, it is very cool, but less so that the last 40 seconds of this song is essentially musical theatre sacrilege. A money-maker high-note chorus into a painfully loud bridge that conveys absolutely no mood other than "me and Aurora are both singing right now," only to end with a very embarrassing, ham-fisted belted note? And they had the audacity to let Idina put a slide in there? No, no. No, no, no. No. [3]

Alfred Soto: No, no, I mean -- let me go. [3]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Even more than the first installment, Frozen II was lacking in songs that were memorable in and of themselves. "Lost in the Woods," for example, is really only notable for the animation that accompanied it: a montage riffing on '80s music videos that proved unexpectedly entertaining. "Into the Unknown" is the film's best song, but the music doesn't quite match what the lyrics are trying to convey: Why is the first chorus so bombastic when Elsa's not yet convinced to follow this siren's song? At least "Let It Go" knew how to accomplish a sensible narrative arc with its use of dynamic range. "Unknown" doesn't come together as neatly as "Let It Go" either, which found a lot of meaning in the evolving delivery of "the cold never bothered me anyway." The complaints could go on but at the end of the day, I can't really hate something that finds Aurora using kulning -- Scandinavian herding calls -- as a narrative tool. [5]

Tobi Tella: I was 13 when the first Frozen came out, and despite the fact that I probably should've been too old for Disney princess movies by the unspoken middle school social construct standards, I dragged my dad to see it in theaters. That probably should've been his first inkling that I was gay, and as clear as Disney's attempts to play on my emotions were as a shy insecure gay kid, the introverted, uncomfortable princess Elsa was the most accurate representation I had really found of myself in a kids movie. "Let It Go" was not only a cultural moment but a formative one and even though looking back as an adult I know that Frozen has flaws, I can't help but be empowered by it now. This song was set up to fail by its positioning it as "Let It Go II," and the seams of this one are far more clear; the chorus is literally just one phrase repeated and the lyrics are prime "leave nothing to the imagination or subtext and explain all your feelings." But I still feel an intense connection to this; maybe it's Menzel's strong and evocative vocal performance, maybe it's nostalgia, and maybe it's the feeling that even as a 19 year old my experience with my identity is not even close to over, the fact that there will always be unknowns which are horrifying yet intriguing (hello adult gay dating!). I'm not sure if this is a great song, or even a good one, but for a sequel with impossibly huge expectations it managed to evoke the same intense reaction that "Let It Go" did, so I guess Disney and their manipulations win this round. [7]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[afro-elf]

How to Listen to Hozier: A Guide in Escapism with The Troubadour Hero

@farrahda5hy wrote this days ago and it’s every thought i’ve ever had about this fucking album and i really feel understood

The narrative I am proposing is personal to me, and I do not claim that it is proper or correct way to listen to this album. However, I will be providing commentary on how I compose this specific narrative. These steps are really boiling down how I perceive things so see them as the end all be all. The instructions are comprised on two main factors: one’s beloved and the constructed world that exists in one’s mind.

1. First, identify your beloved. I don’t have a significant other which is why I probably am going to choose Sweet Andy Hozier himself. Also, he’s a neat guy and quite a charmer and activist…etc. This step should be easier for those are in relationships. As reductive as this may sound, it is important that one chose a few words that summarize the relationship with one’s significant other. 2. The self-construction is really only important to listen experience. It’s really where your mind goes to when you’re listening to the album. For those who are taking the beloved to the narrator (Andy as Narrator maybe) approach, I assume this step would be harder or potentially easier as one’s mind is free to run wild as you are not tied down to reality. As a creative writer, I live and thrive in this space.

I am choosing the words: Fluid, Bold, Chaotic, Sarcastic, Overwhelming, and Passionate.

As for this world construction, I usually go back to my hometown within the Appalachian mountains, specifically the Smokey mountains. For me, this place represents a mysticism that I have created for myself. Honestly, it is quite the opposite of the Bog People villas described in the album, but there’s a large number Irish descendants in this area. But like I said, it’s more personal and obviously idealistic. I don’t care for my hometown, but I’m in love with how it made me feel and the bastardized version of it that exists in my head now that somehow blurred into my new city.

Taking these basic elements, I’m forming this new track list organization. Hold on to your hats, it’s going to get fucking wild and possibly a bit fanfic, so as Griffin McElroy says “just fucking play in this space with me.”

Track one: Take Me to Church.

Yes, don’t at me. This song is in fact the first song on the album, but I think it sets the tone for the narrative. Two lines that stick out are “She’s the giggle at a funeral” and “My church offers no absolutes.” Honestly, these lines really stick out to me. Immediately, it identifies the woman in the relationship as other to what is excepted in society. Quite frankly as black woman, I’m kind always in that category, you know. Not to mention the hella gospel tones and such. The second line mentioned out of context is very much a declaration of acceptance which is bomb, but also naive in a way in a new love sense. Because of course within relationships, there are aspects that are fine in the beginning or on some levels but cause problems in the long-run. For me, I identify as the woman who the subject of the song. Honestly, I’m that gal who’s going to say wise shit to you, but will also doubt herself. But I’m a “fuck what the world thinks” person and overcompensate by existing in this “let’s take down the world” ideology.

Track two: Jackie and Wilson

This song is so damn playful, and it’s this feeling of hopefulness and disappointment in a way. Really the entire breakdown of the song throws your head into a loop. There’s this one-sided commitment, and I guess when I get to that part of the song I’m always thinking “yeah, bud, I like you, but shit, this thing can’t last forever right? Don’t tie yourself down to me because woof…buddy, I’m a roadtrip you do not want to go on.” The song is trying to come to terms with a partner who isn’t giving their 150%. Also, for my mental music video, Hozier has his hair down the entire car ride and sunglasses on, and I’m sticking my whole body out the car with an lit cigarette in my left hand while we do donuts in Kroger parking lot.

Track Three: Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene

This song is another one where the breakdown of the song is the most powerful. Really the song speaks for its self. The relationship just is toxic and overwhelming and in need of escape. Every time I listen to this song, I imagine myself in a basement at a drum set. It didn’t really occur to me that it’s the chaotic feeling and the need to escape that I have latch on to.

Track four: Someone New

Forget everything you know about this song, okay. Because this song is literally the “Take Me or Leave Me” moment. Literally until the breakdown of the song, I imagine the beloved singing the verses rather than Sweet Andy. It’s very much a “we’re not working. We’re trying other people.”

Two things I want to highlight: the lyrics of the breakdown. This first part will not make as much sense until I talk about the next song. But Jealous!Hozier is a fucking thing. I find this interesting, but until then, there’s this “I’m level headed and open about my emotions” air about him. But this delightful pang of jealousy adds dimension to what I call the Hozier Troubadour Hero. The female character (or the one I have constructed in my own head) as main vocalist is just as level-headed and falsely self-aware. Then there’s this arrow of “oh yeah we’re doing this thing and seeing other people, but I’m not happy about seeing you with other people.”

The line “Love with every stranger. The stranger the better.” I love this wordplay. But against the line “how pure how sweet in love Aretha that you would pray for him,” it’s fucking taunting and bitter as hell. Really, starting the album of with Take Me to Church reflects this disregard for organized religion, which is no stranger to Hozier, but the beloved seems to still exists in that sphere. But I also want to read in another way that it’s bittersweet to the Hozier!character that this beloved still prays for him although she’s involved with another person. I don’t know. It’s interesting.

Quickly, I want to highlight the other vocal overlay that actually comes between the two lines mentioned. I get this air of confrontation and then the “NO ITS COOL IM HAPPY THAT YOUR HAPPY WITH SOMEONE NEW”. Once again, I imagine this argument taking place in an apartment living room.

Here, I would like to introduce a distinction between the characters. The Hozier character is very much fluid that is very self contained chaos whereas the female character is very much open chaos. As a fire signs, I totally get that. Hozier being a water sign is very fluid in what we stereotypically thing as fluid, but we also don’t always see water as destructive in comparison to fire.

Track Five: From Eden

To this day, I still wonder if this is a love song. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be. But I find this song to be one of my favorites.

I want to flip the imagery of Jackie and Wilson and delve more into the Chaotic!Hozier characterization. Obviously, this song is very upfront with the Garden of Eden serpent allusion. This song exists in the uncertainty of relationship. The “are we or aren’t we” spheres. To sum it up, this is a conversation happening in a car. Oddly, person in the passenger seat (Hozier) is leading the conversation and the beloved as the driver really doesn’t want to have this conversation.

The ending of first verse give us little snippets, and it appears that the beloved flaws are being pointed out or Hozier is anticipating the responses from the driver. But also let’s return back to this serpent imagery. Hozier aligns himself with the serpent in Eden, so the idea of corruption is very highly in this imagined car ride.

When I first heard this song, I got the “bad boy who doesn’t let everyone know he’s a bad boy” vibe.” I really gripped on to this concept; along with other religious allusions, I really don’t know how to objectively look at them. For me, it’s a little “Walk to Remember-ish” where the preachers daughter is in love with the bad boy. I don’t know, but really at the heart of it, the narrative boils down to “I’m going to corrupt this persons core, and I don’t have remorse at all.” Understanding what this concept means on personal level will determine whether it’s a love song or whether it’s an act of selfishness disguised as love.

Track Six: Foreigners God

I’ll admit. I didn’t really get this song after my initial listen to the album. I think for me it’s just too personal. I grew up in a Christian household, going to a very charismatic church. So the line that really sticks out it’s very simple “It’s Foreign to me”. I’ll just leave that there.

It’s really an outsider looking in and not understanding and forming their own opinions. While “Take Me to Church” is very much a “sex in an abandoned church (or whatever) type of jam that highlights the oppressive aspects of organized religion, “Foreigners God” really displays the frustration of separating the comforting parts from all the oppressive aspects.

This scene takes place in the abandoned church, and I want to react in this way of “God is here” in this desolation that some people don’t understand. Going back to that fire fluidity, I just imagine myself dancing in this church with like a song under my breath and releasing all this anger I’ve shared with no one. Then Sweet Andy Hozier is just watching in the door frame in the background. Not even sitting in the pew.

Track Seven: Cherry Wine

I think I’m just punching a window out. Car window. A church window. A bedroom window.

This pivotal point of realization that “hey maybe you’re the one that’s holding you back and lashing out at people isn’t the best.” But the tragedy is there’s still a lack of self awareness. Like you’re angry but you still put blame on other people. Yeah…

Track Eight: Sedated

This song is another one of those songs that I interpret as the point of view of the beloved based on the breakdown of the song, but I still want to look at the Hozier character POV

“Darling, don’t stand there watching won’t you come save me from this. Darling, don’t you join in you’re supposed to drag me away from this.”

That’s desperation. That’s a little toxic in a way. Expecting a person to save you, but yet, forgetting that person may need saving themselves is selfish. What makes Jackie and Wilson so tragic is this naivety. “She’s going to save me call me ‘baby’ run her hands to my hair.” Yeah, that’s sweet and cute, but what are you doing in return. Falling in love with this idealized strong woman, but then denying her the opportunity to be vulnerable is very much the corruption I spoke about in From Eden.

Honestly, the worst part about hiding vulnerability is when it rushes out like a dam breaking or when a fire is no longer contained.

Track Nine: Arsonist’s Lullaby

I call it the pagan ritual version of Foreigners God or when Chaotic!Hozier is at his most powerful and vulnerable. Why? Is it the relinquishing of this vulnerability for his beloved to use as her discretion or is it his acknowledgment of hers and offering to aid her in channeling it? Yes, but it’s also the fire within him, the passion, the chaos, and the darkness that fuels him. He is both talking to the beloved and himself.

For the sake of the conversation, this scene also takes place in the same abandoned church, and Hozier gets up to where he stage used to be; barefoot and hair pulled back. At first, he’s swaying gently, fluid like as flame is first lit with back facing the congregation. He’s like this for a few moments and then he’s twirling around the abandoned stage until he’s almost stomping his feet. Thump. Thump. Thump. Suddenly, everything changes and his hair falls out the ponytail and turns around and the stumps are more violent, yet the dance is just as fluid until he steps down from stage…the intense eye contact is fucking overwhelming. He just walks out the abandoned church leaving his shoes like some awoken wild child.

Track Ten: My Love will Never Die

Do you like blues? Welp. This song speaks for its fucking self. Do you want Sad!Hozier crooning in a room by himself? Because that’s what he’s doing, babe.

Track Eleven: In the Woods Somewhere I get a lot of fever dream vibes from this song, so I can only imagine it as something just not real. So I present you with an actual dream I had about Hozier I had once.

Pretty much, I dreamt Hozier was this shapeshifter who turned into a fox that was terrorizing the town in his fox state. It was more a vigilante like thing, but it was tragic because I had to kill the fox out of mercy.

The song also talks about a similar scene. So mercy killing when you’re in love is very much something that hard to describe, but you have to do it to the other person when you love them. I don’t know. So just imagine Hozier shooting up out of dead sleep fever dream.

Track Twelve: Run

Also a ritual dance, but also possibly a fever dream? This song introduces the field/nature imagery to relationship narrative. The metronome in the background mirrors the jerky dancing of the beloved from the Foreigners God portion but the tempo of the drums gives rhythm to the fluidity of the Hozier!Character. Both of these two sounds represent being grounded, and they work in unison. This unison is a first really. Playing that fever dream, the song seems to end abruptly and I think that’s the true awakening of the Hozier!Character physically and emotionally.

The dream itself is the couple dancing in a field together in the afternoon. I could go further with this dream, but I’m going explain it as actual event later.

Track Thirteen: It Will Come Back 

The best song on the album, not to mention a song of seduction. It’s an unintentional sexy song. I wish it were a duet or at least have more prominent female background vocals. While seduction isn’t the best term for the overall narrative, what I am trying to say is a song of pleading for so many things: to be let go, to be let in, or to be cast aside to make it easier to move on. Wild Eye, Sleep-Deprived Hozier is walking around barefoot at three am across town to reconcile his feelings, and then he’s just singing and howling outside my house? Of course, I’m going to let him in. “Don’t you hear me howling, babe?” The faded of the last line is so interesting, and it brings me back to Sedated’s line “I keep catching little words, but the meanings thin.” I just occurred to me is that the expression of vulnerability is very metaphorically, but on the literal manifestations are different. The Hozier!Character is very much a “tell me with your words”; the beloved is very much “tell me with your actions. “Don’t you hear me howling, babe” takes on another meaning in which the question is literally “you’ve seen me vulnerable, but did you hear what I actually said. I love you so much that it’s animalistic and consuming the humanity in me.” That’s oddly beautiful. 

Track Fourteen: To Be Alone 

So I bet you were wondering when I was going to talk more about the location part. Well, here is it. I grew up in the middle of the Bible Belt. Sometimes when you’re not conforming you feel like everyone is looking at you whether they are or not. At on a more concrete level, my hometown used to have a festival called the Fall Festival, and they would have a series of out door concerts of various artists. This event was usually held downtown. Honestly, I’m not to big on crowds, but at the same time, I adore being alone in a crowd or with one person while out in public. To Be Alone captured that vibe very well. Returning the relationship, at this point, the air of ambiguity of relationship still exists; however, the relationship is heading toward stability in my opinion. I just love the image of Chaotic!Hozier dancing in a crowd simultaneously ignoring everyone else while be fully away of the contained space he’s got to be close with his lover. Then just going the fuck home for sex just because the mood allowed it to feel sacred in some way. Maybe it was the dream of the two lovers dancing in the field. 

Track Fifteen: In A Week 

The only duet on this album! UGH SO DAMN GOOD! A lovely balances of vocals; they are playing off each other. It’s very much stereotypical “we finish each other’s sentences” concept but actualized very well. So maybe the sex didn’t happen after the festival, but that closeness and intimate is still present. Despite being allergic to grass, I like lying in the grass. I also like the macabre. So nothing is out of place, and it’s all intimate joke to describe a seemingly tragic love that is no longer tragic. 

Track Sixteen: Like Real People Do 

Something tragic about that this song (it’s probably the true story behind it) but also romantic. As the penultimate song in the album, it’s very much the final acceptance of all the flaws, frustrations, and the opposition within. Not to be sexy, this song is the foreplay to the final song. This is the outside conversation on the porch before you invite your lover into the house to stay the night and lead your lover upstairs or to the couch or the floor Whatever floats your passionate boat. 

Track Seventeen: Work Song 

It’s the only song on the album that doesn’t seem to have baggage behind it. It’s purely romantic. I put this song in opposition to Take Me to Church really. I imagine that’s why I put it at the the end. This song is true acceptance not the fake acceptance in Take Me to Church. The line “Heaven and Hell were words to me” signifies this point. Everything I’ve described throughout this narrative as been about duality and finding where the lines blur for this relationship to be functional. “Work Song” finally rejects that ideology and allows the relationship to heal and flourish. So in this moment, let’s return back to this abandoned church that this couple has made their own sanctuary (face it they are fucking weird) but it’s not broken down or stuffy. It’s homely as they camp out for the night making their bed at the abandoned altar. The couple makes love in the moonlight that peeks in through the shattered window. The whole damn cosmos witness the rebellion that manifests in their love. So yeah, I’m curious to what the narrative of the reverse of this track list. I didn’t have this narrative planned out in my head. It just came organically as I was writing. Honestly if i had written my original idea it would have been more fantasy driven and a lot more Chaotic!Hozier. If you’re curious about that let me know. Also, I will try to do one of the original track list because it’s more of a challenge.

[onestowatch]

Clubhouse Is Making Their Way Through Life, Curveballs and All [Q&A]

Photo: Dillon Matthew

Feel-good indie-pop outfit Clubhouse continue to entrance listeners with their happy-go-lucky arrangements and introspective lyrics with their latest single, “No Way.” Following the success of their previous release, “Flipside,” the track, which frontman Max Reichert expressed was about a toxic relationship, is yet another example of the band's ability to sonically and visually create emotional and provocative storytelling that makes listeners want to dance.

The band is comprised of five best friends forged from a middle school garage band in Columbus, Ohio, made up of Max Reichert, twin brothers Ari and Zak Blumer, and Michael Berthold and Forrest Taylor, who they met in college. The five-piece have gone through the ups and downs of life together, especially while their frontman dealt with cancer. Now, with an EP and a national tour on the way, the band is eager to tell their story with the hope that they'll be able to help someone else who is dealing with a similar bump in the road.

We had the chance to talk with the band about "No Way," their upcoming tour, and the curveballs of life.

Ones to Watch: Can you walk me through the creative process behind "No Way?”

Max: We wrote it with this producer named Cooper, and this songwriter/pop star named Claire, who goes by spill tab. We wrote it with them at their house. It was our first session writing with them, our first time meeting them, and we wrote pretty much the whole song with them in a few hours. So it just came together really, really quickly. In terms of juxtaposing the lyrical content, which talks about a toxic relationship and how two people just don't fit for each other, I think we just love juxtaposing more profound lyrics or lyrics that are not necessarily crazy deep but aren't about having a good time with dancy beats. I think it kind of goes along with our mantra for what this EP is about.

Zak: Which is about not taking ourselves too seriously.

Max: Yeah, like rolling with the punches and going through hard things in life but not getting too bogged down on matters and still being able to have fun even when you're going through hard things. I think that's kind of a common theme throughout the EP. We talk about heavy things but try not to put too much weight on them.

How has your songwriting process evolved?

Max: I think it's certainly changed. I went through cancer a few years ago in 2018. I had bone cancer in my left leg, which was honestly a turning point for us as a band. We took a step back when I was going through all that, and we refined our craft from a songwriting standpoint and just our general outlook. We've always taken music really seriously, but when we went into writing, I think we took the pressure off ourselves. I think we used to be like, “okay, this next song has to sound like this and has to sound like our favorite band, and we have to be like the next biggest band ever.” I think for years, we did that, and it would confine us in this box. As soon as we just went to the session and were like, “Hey, let's just enjoy each other's company and let's just have fun together and be friends and write music that feels good to us and not think anything more about it,” I think that was when we had this significant turning point. The songs started sounding better, and the storytelling got better because it was just more honest. We weren't trying to emulate. We were just writing from our gut.

What are some of your inspirations on a larger scale outside of music?

Zak: I think one we can sort of all agree on is, we all sort of shared partially in Max's struggle while he went through this crazy shit. People our age, or at least us, and we think our friends as well, have been going through a quarter-life crisis. So you start to ask yourself, “Am I achieving my goals? What are my goals? Am I getting there fast enough?” So skipping ahead to the title of our EP, these are questions we have and still always ask ourselves. But through partially having gone through what Max went through and being there alongside him, I feel we can now see the question as what it is and accept that we may not always know the answer, but we can try to remind ourselves to enjoy every day. I think many people relate to that over the past couple of years, and I think the meaning of life has shifted for a lot of people and we just kind of wanted to share our two cents.

The music video for this single is overall lowkey and seemed super fun to shoot. How did you come up with this concept and execute it? Did y'all originally have other ideas?

Zak: We had tossed around a couple of other ideas. Some were more narrative-driven and focused more on the actual lyrical content. We could have taken it more of an expected route, like maybe following an argument between two people and becoming more intense that way. But we were thinking about this sort of single frame, elevator-style, elevator shot video kind of thing where the frame doesn't really change much, but everything inside of it's changing all the time. So we were pulling references from the opening credit scene of That ‘70s Show where they're all singing in the car and the Wayne's World scene where they're singing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and the guy in the middle is hammered drunk. Once we kind of were thinking along those lines, it came together really fast. I think we shot everything for this video in like one afternoon evening.

That's super-efficient.

Zak: I mean the team that we had, our manager Cole together with Justin [Kaminuma], the director, and Carlos [Ramos], the DP. Those guys killed it. Kind of like creating the song; once we got that idea, there wasn't much like back and forth. It was kind of like, “Okay, what if we just kind of have a good time with this track?” The track is fun and energetic, so we thought to just give them that in the video. So we just goofed off and had a good time and jammed, and I think it turned out pretty well.

Max: Yeah, and it kind of matches with the lyrical content because, as I said before, the song is really about a toxic, chaotic relationship, and I think in chaotic relationships, there's good and bad. There's craziness, and there are good times, so I think we kind of wanted to lay that out and in front of the video where there are shots where we're all just like sitting around, and there are shots of us going crazy in the car having fun. So I think we wanted to match those moods together with the visuals.

Michael: From start to finish, everything happened so easily and quickly. After the first writing session, I remember we played the track in the car, and we were bumping it, and it was pretty much like the video. We were all just like damn.

Max: I think we actually drove that car to the session too. I remember after the session, all five of us drove back in that car, and we were all like bumping the demo. It was hard. It's my dad's car. He got it back in 2008, but he had it in Ohio forever. The thing is, in Ohio, with how the seasons are, you can't really drive that car that much because it just won't run in the winter. So when I moved out here, it had just been sitting in his garage forever, so eventually, he said I should take it out there.

Michael: I just want one thing to be known about the whole video. All of that hype and headbanging and everything is the most authentic thing in the world because we were doing it for so long. At one point, we had been just head bopping for like two hours straight we had to sit back.

Forrest: Yeah, it was as much fun to do it as it looks. We were having a blast.

What makes for an excellent creative collaborator when it comes to crossing over mediums?

Zak: One of the biggest things I noticed was that there was a moment when the plans we originally made weren't working out. So a lot of us were just not really seeing them and just trying to keep pushing forward and try to make it work. So one night, basically, Cole, our manager, Justin, and Carlos, the three of them had a meeting, and they were like, “Look, we got to make a hard pivot, and we need you guys to trust us right now.” So we were just like, alright, you know you guys are the bosses here. We trust you. Let's make this work, and it ended up turning out beautifully, so I think one of the one things that we really, or I really admired from this team, was how quickly they were just able to just shift.

Yeah, you for sure got to have that trust there.

Zak: I'll add one thing to that, which is that both Justin and Carlos are really young guys in the scene, and part of that is—we also view ourselves as up-and-coming, young people in the scene, and we kind of want to bring in people that sort of are not necessarily—I mean obviously sometimes when you work with like more established people, it comes with an ego, but it's not so much that we wanted to avoid that as much as it was to bring in the eagerness and the excitement. I mean, they were so stoked as soon as they landed to just get working on things and to start brainstorming ideas and that kind of energy we just feed off of. So for “No Way,” it was literally all of us just feeding off of each other's energy. I remember in the scene where we were in the car, parked, Carlos and Justin were outside filming and just jumping up and down with us. So, yeah, they were as excited as we were. It was fun.

So now walk me through the day you found out that you were going on tour with The Wombats? How are you feeling about the upcoming tour?

Max: It felt very surreal. We've been fans of them for so long. I grew up listening to them and still listen to them. I guess it was just this crazy full-circle moment of, I don't know, I think I might have teared up. Growing up and being such a massive fan of them and wanting to do music, not really knowing how to play an instrument in high school, learning how to play an instrument in high school, going through college, into the cancer thing, and then to come out on the other side of it and to get to tour with a band that I'm a genuine giant fan of. I mean, it's just like a real-life childhood dream coming true. So it's like, it's... I don't know. I can't really describe it other than that. Our dream realization moment, and we're so excited.

Zak: Yeah, we're grateful to them for giving us the opportunity, and we're gonna work our asses off to make it the best shows we've ever played.

Be sure to catch Clubhouse on tour with The Wombats, starting January 2022.

[christimesteele]

Transcript - Time Talks Ep 37 - Felicia Rose Chavez on Poetry, Dismantling Patriarchy, Anti-Racist Writing Workshops, Mutualism, Building Power, and Grief

chris time steele  00:06

Welcome to Episode 37 of the Time Talks podcast part of the channel zero network. This month I had the opportunity to speak to Felicia Rose Chavez, along with being an educator and professor, Chavez is an activist, writer and author of the book The Anti Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative C lassroom. In this episode, Felicia Rose Chavez spoke about poetry, dismantling patriarchy, anti racist writing workshops, mutualism, building power and grief. Thank you to awareness for the music. And here's a brief jingle by fellow channel zero network member.

 Silverthreads 00:41

still walking, still waking is co hosted by me carla bergman, and me Eleanor Goldfield. This is where we interview long term organizers and radicals about their watershed moments, what they've learned along the way and how they maintain their hope on this path, dreaming and building emergent worlds for a present and future anchored in justice and freedom for all because there are forks in the road. But they all lead us home to the fight to the build

 chris time steele  01:38

You wrote about the influence of June Jordan's Poetry for the People. I wanted to read an excerpt from it because I feel your book does this just so much as well and your writing. I read all of your, most of your short stories and essays that I could find online as well which were just so powerful. She writes, "poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair and build revolution in which speaking, and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter." And building on top of this, I was wondering if you could speak on a transformational moment. I don't know if this goes back to when you went to Albuquerque Academy, or after it or before or maybe it's a process, a moment that radicalized you to interrogate the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy further, but to also fight against it, but also building outside of it?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  02:48

That's a powerful question. I don't believe that it's any one moment. I mean, I think there are shocking moments that we lived through, that we can point to and remember, by the narrative that I've had the opportunity to reflect on is one of consistent lived experiences that I like to think of as splinters right, they just kind of splinter under the skin where you're like, something's not right about that. That's not, is it just me, am I being crazy? Am I being overly sensitive, or why being too critical? And it happens again, and again, and again, until something's just like so much in your face that you can't, you can't deny it anymore. And you have a choice to make, you know, do I, you know, shake my head walk away, talk about it later, rant privately with my friends, my parents, my partner, or do I take action against it. And I think it took me many, many years to finally commit to that action. First through proper channels. You know, like in graduate school, I was petitioning for change and working on academic committees, working with faculty to create my own class. And nothing happened as a result of that. I mean, it was a lot of extra labor with no real fruit. So it took me writing down my own experience on the page and being vulnerable, and saying, hey, you know, I'm going to I'm going to count these splinters, I'm going to take them out one by one. And that started as early as, you know, elementary school where you're like, ah, why am I being treated differently as a student of color, you know, and then throughout middle school in high school, as you said, I went to a private predominantly white school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And by that senior year, I was furious. The context of college changed everything. You know, when I when I saw how easily my peers kind of transitioned into higher education, as though it were all laid out for them. And it was, you know, it was it was predestined. And for me it was real work, something I had to kind of claw for, and hang on to. So, you know, I guess the ability to articulate what it is that was wrong, presented itself in my teenage years. But it wasn't until later in life in my in my 30s, really where I was able to put it down on the page in a way that felt like I was doing it justice.

 chris time steele  05:36

Your thoughts about that moment were really, blossoming. When you were in Iceland, going back to when you said, when you were in elementary school, I remember you mentioning, in the book or a talk when you handed your husband, something from the third grade, where you were really,

 Felicia Rose Chavez  05:54

He was like, really, we're going all the way back? And I'm like, yeah, we're going all the way back. But that experience of reading, the very earliest rendition of the book was a 10 minute speech, where I just spoke to what I experienced at the University of Iowa as an MFA graduate student in creative nonfiction writing. And then a list of practical strategies that I do now kind of pivoting, from the way I was taught and embracing a new way to teach creative writing in the classroom. And I cried during that speech I stood up and just cried and cried. Because I was saying it. I was, it was my testimony, I was testifying to the people I went to school with and the people who taught me they were in the room. And I was, I was really summoning the courage to say what I experienced out loud, I think so many of us don't, we don't have that opportunity to go back and say, listen, this is what happened to me here. And we need to change so that this doesn't happen again, to your current students and your future students, it was a powerful, powerful moment that I think emboldened me to move forward to write the book.

 chris time steele  07:12

And I really thought the Iceland story was so powerful, because you said in, in one moment, you were so emotional, and cried, because you felt like you were betraying some of these people. But at the same time, when you when you did that, you found that you had so many people on your side, you know, when people were passing around the paper and trying to dismantle the systems that you spoke about was so violent.

 Felicia Rose Chavez  07:39

That was the great surprise of this book. And it happened twice. So once in Iceland, where I'm sobbing, because I think, what are they going to say, you know, and then I get this glorious response as you said from, from both the people of color in the room and the white educators in the room who said, we don't want to, we don't want to replicate this sort of harm. So what can we do to help? You know, like, can we have a copy of your speech? Send it to us, you know, and I thought, well, I could do more than a speech, i'll write on this, I'll really give it everything I have. But in the process of writing, I can't tell you. I mean, it was two years of constant paranoia, I mean, really awful, agonizing moments, day and night, where not only am I dredging up, hard to confront moments from my past and trying to make art out of it, trying to make a message out of it. But at the same time, I'm thinking, this person from graduate school is going to call me a liar. This person who taught me is going to is going to, you know, say that I got it all wrong. This person, I mean, I just was constantly thinking of strategies of defensiveness and dismissiveness and denial that has been the signature moves of white supremacy throughout all of our lives, right throughout history, and so I thought how many people are going to shut this down before he even has a chance to speak to anyone? Luckily, before it was published, as we were in the editing phase, a group at the University of Iowa called Black at Iowa Writers came forward and started calling out faculty members by name, specifically one faculty member John Degotta(?) and spoke out against their unfair treatment in the nonfiction writing program. I wasn't hip to it, a friend kind of nudged me to check out this social media account and I cried and cried. Then too, I mean, just out of pure relief, that it was real, that this experience was shared, and that someone was bold enough to come out before me and do this work. And then in an, in a sense, hold my hand and walk me through the process so that I could be brave enough to do it next.

 chris time steele  10:08

Thank you for sharing that story. That's, that's really powerful. And it really shows you that when you have the courage to stand up, that others are going to stand with you, even though they feel so alone. And that vulnerable moment,

 Felicia Rose Chavez  10:20

Absolutely, they didn't know, no one knew that I was working on this manuscript, it wasn't like I kept in touch with the alumni committee. You know, like, you never know, you never know how your work is going to impact someone, how your story, just sharing it aloud, it's gonna impact someone to, to go on and share their own story. And that's the power in in storytelling, right. And so, that was such a relief for me to feel supported in that way and less isolated.

 chris time steele  10:55

I think, another part of your, your writing that has such a liberatory and powerful effect is that you call out these systems as they are by using bell hooks, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. It's, it's right out in the open is, it's not something that some writers try to hide it by talking about systems and things like this and something so refreshing about your work. And you explicitly tell your story, which I feel calls out patriarchy as well. You mentioned how a colleague had to leave, and someone said we don't want to mother, these students and I loved how you reformatted the language. And you made it so powerful of talking about how we are multitudes mothered again and again in rhythm and time. And you talk about in the piece Color Lines about the coop living situation and the racism and patriarchy you had to endure there. From your story, the Brown Line, which just, which would be a simple walk for a man is this horrifying event for you. And for a woman that shows that inside your house, you have sanctuary but you should have that outside as well. It should be your sanctuary, your stories make these be so apparent. And was just wondering if if these tools to dismantle these systems like patriarchy? Is it just in the writing? Or what are some strategies you use to help dismantle or show these systems with students or more in your own writing?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  12:30

Well, first of all, thank you, I feel so heard and seen by that quick analysis. That was really that was wonderful for me. Thank you for, for that quick overview of different works that I've put out in the world. That was really special. Yeah, I think that it takes this reorienting, we're so accustomed to, especially within our educational journeys to say the right thing, to be what ever the person in front of us teaching us needs us to be in order to move forward, move on, get the grade, whatever it may be, right tune out. My practice, at heart, it's about tuning in, it's about doing the opposite, right? It's not about the authority in the room. It's about becoming our own authority. And the more that we can tune in and quiet everything around us, and listen. And the first step is to listen to our fears, and to listen to our insecurities, because that's just another iteration of white supremacy in our brain. So it's just another form of manipulation and control to say, you can't do this, you're not any good at this. Who do you think you are? Right? And sometimes these are the voices within our own families from internalized racism, right? This is who you know, who do you owe your fancy? Who do you think you are? Right? So, so these are, these are the voices that haunt us, but they live there and they're not going away? We just got to acknowledge that that's what that is. And then we move forward and we say, Okay, if I can move past fear, right, what do I want to try? What do I want to risk and failure's okay. So if we just accept the failures, okay, what do I want to try? And when we attempt something, whatever classroom it may be, it doesn't have to be a creative writing classroom. My goal was the anti racist writing workshop, is to couch it in creative writing, but like, please extend it. Right? I'm working with science teachers, I'm working with math teachers and working with history teachers, like extend it beyond, let's activate our imaginations to see how much we can empower students across the academic curriculum. And so we we embolden our students to try something that they're afraid to try and, and then as they're doing it, we ask them to listen. How's it going? check in with yourself? What are you proud of? What, what's really hard for you? What do you want this to be? But it's not yet, right? And we ask questions, encourage students to ask questions of themselves to be their own assessors. And then finally, how did it go? Right? What do you think about what you produced? What do you want to change, if you had an opportunity to change it, go on and try it, right? until they're able to tune in and say, I trust my own voice, I trust who I am, my gut, whatever we want to call it right to be able to go inward and say, I'm going to tune you out right now and listen to me. And I think that is so powerful for all of our students, but especially our students of color, and especially our young women of color, who can say, okay, now I can trust me, I'm going to listen to that voice that tells me this is an unsafe situation. I'm going to listen to that voice that says leave now. Right? I'm going to listen to that voice that says you cannot talk to me. No, thank you. Don't talk to me that way. And I'm going to trust that voice. And I'm going to act on it. So it is, as I said, it's couched in creative writing. But the whole gist of it is, how can we truly embrace our own voices and exercise those voices to create change in our culture?

 chris time steele  16:28

Yeah, I love that answer. And you really talk about boundaries in your in your book as well. And how were you when you were turning 30. And you talked about the trust in yourself and the power of No, and how this helped you fight back against educational and academic trauma that you were experiencing?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  16:46

Yeah, that that was the turn for me, was becoming a mother. And it was a really hard time period in my life. My husband, I was a new mother. And I don't consider myself maternal. And there are some women who are like that I've since learned, you know, are we like, you know, I changed the diaper for the first time when I changed my son's diaper. It was on on the job learning. And, and I had I experienced postpartum depression, probably as a situational and hormonal kind of situation, we had just moved to a new town, my husband took on a new job, he was traveling a lot, I didn't know anybody. And I just remember being in the house a lot. There was this huge wildfire. And so we weren't allowed to go outside for weeks because of the smoke. And so it was just like, contained. And and this, not a good recipe for mental health, for a new mother especially. And it was then that I start I knew I had to speak up. Like I knew I had to start saying what I wanted, what I needed. And so that was a that was a big turn for me. Again, intricately linked with with being a woman.

 chris time steele  18:05

I was wondering on my next question, Is this the kind of two questions they may relate I notice a lot of mutualism in your writing in your pedagogy? How you talk about deep listening, it also reminds me of some of those Zapatista teachings of asking, we walk kind of that we, we learn as we go, and we reflect as we go. But we don't get paralyzed by that fear. I was wondering if if there's a relation with mutualism, with your inspiration for your writing. And it also sees this ties in with Audre Lorde on quote you used, the way we can do is by creating another whole structure that touches every aspect of our existence at the same time as we are resisting it.

 Felicia Rose Chavez  18:51

I mean, that's, that's the difficulty that presents itself, right is that we're on a learning journey together as educators, those of us who are invested in doing the work, and I'm doing facilitations now all over the country, with elementary, middle, high school, undergraduate and graduate teachers, who are eager to learn that the question comes up again and again, is this the right place to do this work? Can we do this work within the institution? How do we, how do we flourish when the structure is set up so that we fail? And it's a tough question? It's a question that's keeping me up at night. Especially when it comes to our younger students like they're so they're held to a particular learning standard, right? Very strict learning standard. And there's no collapsing that system yet. As one brilliant educator just shared with me the other day on a meeting. He said let's do it anyway. With our with our kiddos with our little ones, let's just do it. Let's Let's lead them through an anti racist writing workshop curriculum. And then they'll become the next generation to overturn the standardized tests and the learning standards that they've been held prisoner to, for so, so long. And I thought that was really exciting, exciting way to think about it, right? How do we, how do we learn along the journey to change the restrictions that we face on a daily basis? Right. And it's, it's reminiscent of that last letter that I include in the book, which is addressed to the reader? And it's something like how do we live racism and mourn racism and fight racism all at the same time, it feels impossible, sometimes it's just, I'm just gonna lie in the bed, be useless, because I'm so overwhelmed by all of this. And then there are other days where you can take on the fight and try to change the system within so

 chris time steele  21:03

are you referring to the Letter to Close? When the police officer was blocking your driveway? This, this may lead to my my next question. And you may have already answered it with I really liked that answer. We're planting the seeds, and the students in the next generations to fight the threat to blossoming that is in academia or just education systems. And this question is of the do you worry about your book being co opted by liberal institutions? As an example, after George Floyd was murdered, we saw many businesses and colleges make statements about white supremacy and racial justice. But at the same time, there's been so many murders since then, of people of color Black, Indigenous communities and Black trans communities. And also with the recent killings of Daunte Wright and now Adam Toledo. My academic institution has been silent as well. Do you worry, the term anti racist writing workshop will be branded but still reproduce the violent and toxic problems that you wrote about?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  22:11

I mean, likely? Likely, I mean, look at, you know, these schools that I'm working with now, quite a few of them preempted, you know, before the book preemptively took on this anti racist initiative. Right, Colorado College, whom I work for, has taken on an anti racist initiative college wide. They're attempting to do the work. I feel, perhaps more so than some of the colleges that I kind of, you know, step foot in, and then and then exit. When I do these facilitations. They're at the very beginning of this initiative, whatever they label it is true anti racist work. I wouldn't call it that. Right. I think that's the term that's popular at the moment. But hey, that's a lot further than what we were three years ago, right? No one was throwing around that term at the college and university level, to the extent that they are now, again, co opting is the right term. I think that they're putting out fires. Because students are demanding again and again and again, that there's change. So I think it's a gesture to address those concerns. The real work happens daily, and college wide. And that's where we get into trouble. Because I think the attitude of many faculty members is, oh, well, we'll just have to wait on so and so's retirement in order to stop implementing harm. Because we all know so and so is, you know, horribly terrible, right? There's this 10 year old system where we have folks who are irresponsibly educating their students, it's hard for me to enter into the Zoom space and do these facilitations when I can see the dismissiveness at play sometimes with faculty. This isn't to say that it's always this way. Sometimes they're very sincere groups who are asking a lot of questions that are very engaged. Sometimes people turn their turn their bodies away from me, they'll roll their eyes, they'll sigh they're clearly doing something else, right. they're required to be there to hear me out or tune me out, whatever it is that they're doing. The University of Iowa just brought me in to do a panel and a public reading, which was a surprise for me, and it was one of the worst couple of weeks I've had since the book came out. I was not eating well, I couldn't sleep. It was reliving a trauma that I hadn't anticipated would be so difficult. For me, and it truly was, and I think that was also damage control. Right? I think it was putting public facing events out to the world to say, Yes, she, you know, she writes about her experience. So look, we're listening to her, will there be change that comes as a result of that I'm not facilitating workshops with those faculty members. And I'm curious if that does happen, right? I don't know. It's disappointing a lot of the time, and I get a lot of hate mail. And you've talked about the gendered politics of this all I mean, there's horribly sexist, as well as racist. And it's discouraging. It's disappointing to hear echoes of these hate messages out of the mouths of professors who are responsible for generations of students, you know, quick to dismiss and deny that racism even exists. It's scary sometimes.

 chris time steele  25:58

I think you made a great point of many awesome points, that just having an anti racist workshop, even if it's not being lived up to it lays this great foundation for it to be called out and put back into place, when it's not being used correctly. By as you said, these students who seeds were planted in optimism of this?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  26:20

Absolutely, I do a facilitation called self advocacy for students. And that's my favorite one to do. Because it's, it's how to hold one another as peers accountable and how to hold our educators accountable. Every time I talk to educators, I say you need to explicitly say it. I teach an anti racist writing workshop, I teach an anti racist econ class, I teach an anti racist history class, like, How can you be so explicit, so as to empower your students to hold you accountable, right, because if you just come out and say it, now you've got to follow through. And, and I want all of our young people to be able to exercise their voices in that way, where they were their reminders, constant reminders to one another, and to their, to their teachers, that they deserve better.

 chris time steele  27:17

I also loved throughout this book that you call out gatekeeping even with, not just within academia, but within these writing groups that these workshops, there's often a lot of gatekeeping that goes on, and I like the you talk about gaslighting, and also the importance of language, all these different things that really cause so much violence, and how you call out words like literary and classical, which are another synonyms for gatekeeper. And I just really love that you I just wanted to highlight that this is so important what you bring out. And when I was teaching political science and history, this was something I was trying to change in my department to stop using words like slave and using enslaved, I had a big fight with my department when I tried to get rid of a Pearson textbook, and try to add Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, The People's Indigenous History of the US.

 Felicia Rose Chavez  28:14

Wow, that was a fight?

 chris time steele  28:16

Yeah, then they told me because I didn't have a PhD. I didn't know about scholarship, that the book was against America and all kinds of things is so horribly racist things and it really reminded me of your story on Shakespeare, but not being a play that was highlighted for just not one time, which became an outrage.

 Felicia Rose Chavez  28:37

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just just earlier today I, a board member at the creative writing studies organization, I just joined, and they put out a call for proposals for conference panels. And I just read the call and noted language in there, like, you know, you must have, you must cite other sources, scholarly sources that support this work, you know, this, this is the same old rhetoric that that we offer one another to maintain this, this domination over who gets the control of the narrative, right. And to me, that's no different from our officers saying, you know, there was a meme that I posted, you know, it's a package of Skittles, it's a gunm a cell phone, it's a gun, a sandwich, it's a gun and then a taser? Oh, no. Right. I got confused. I didn't have you know, a gun is a taser like it's, it's control of the narrative. So, so it extends across our culture. It's not just within academia, but it is shameful, how we use that as as a standard to enforce white supremacy without having to use those words.

 chris time steele  29:56

Definitely. Thank you. This is probably my last question, I want to be mindful of your time, along with your amazing book which I have already recommended it to so many people, the Anti Racist Writing Workshop, I'd like to talk about your other writings as well. And I love Femme Fatal. the great frat boy in the sky, your other writings, how they deal with a field to deal with a lot of grief, Anatomy of a Life is one, the Mindful Birthing. I love that one. I was wondering if you could talk about the piece Memory Loop, which I found extremely personal and powerful and vulnerable. Wondering if you could talk about the process for this piece of was it therapeutic to write? Did it reopen wounds? Or did it help to heal wounds? Or was it a combination?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  30:49

That's That's the one. I feel like all the other writing was just practice, right. I mean, it was just fun. Well, not always fun. But but more experiments. You know, I wanted to try different things with my writing. But that was the very first piece I ever wrote. I taught writing for many years as a way of supporting myself. And I taught writing because I was such an avid reader. And so I think the two go hand in hand and in that I was able to share strategies that appealed to me, as a reader, and relay that but not necessarily coming from a place of a writer speaking to another writer, I thought of myself as a teacher for so many years. And it took needing to relocate to Albuquerque, from Chicago, to go back home and serve as a caretaker, to my parents, my dad specifically, that motivated me to say, well, I'll try. I'll try graduate school, I'll try a writing program, let me dedicate some time to writing. So I showed up for a two week period, I showed up every day, a little bit early to work. And I wrote, you know, maybe 20-30 minutes per day in my little cubicle. And I would write and cry and write and cry. And what I created, I didn't edit I just sent out. And that was the very early version of memory loop. It took me between 10 and 12 years to return to that piece over and over and over again, I did so many different versions of that piece. I mean, the bones are still the same, but I tried reordering it, retitling it, like I mean, I just just adding a ton of research, taking it out. It was the, it never felt right. And once I achieved the draft the current draft, I thought I just knew it. It's like the body knows. It just I just knew it was almost like a sigh of relief. Like I finally did it. And it was, I think, transitioning from this is what happened to me, right, which I think is what we all come to the page as an act of like, release, right, this is what happened to me, I was witness to this, then, you know, this is, let me try to get inside the head of my mother who had experienced great depression. And it's kind of a stunning, shocking depression, which felt out of nowhere, when in truth was years long in the making, once I stepped out of her experience and into my own and really owned my own my own actions, like I'm complicit in this story, I'm not just there watching it happen. I'm involved, and I need to point the finger at myself as well, it needs to be, you know, like, it needed to be way more complicated than I was initially prepared to make it because I had to, I had to process it first. So to make something of it took many, many years. And it taught me something I learned about myself in writing that and coming to terms with my own guilt, as a you know, a participant in in the story. And in that in that few years, you know, 10, 5 years of my mom's life. And I'm really grateful that I didn't settle for that first draft. I'm really grateful that I did that work and went back again and again. Because I think that I needed to teach myself something in that writing.

 chris time steele  34:22

Wow, thanks for sharing that process it's such a powerful piece, you switch from narrative so smoothly. You know, some writers have to use the three stars to show we can do the scene as a new narrative. And then your piece went to so many different avenues that was just so powerful. Thank you for explaining that process.  Thank you for listening to this episode of the time talks podcast. Please check out some other shows on the Channel Zero Network. Thanks to Awareness for the music, please support his music on Bandcamp and please pick up Felicia Rose Chavez's his book out on Haymarket, the Anti Racist Writing Workshop, and check out her other writings. I'll link them in the show notes. See you all next time and free Palestine.

[cloudydamage3]

Erin Hoover's Playlist for Her Poetry Collection "Barnburner"

« older | Main Largehearted Boy Page

Erin Hoover's Playlist for Her Poetry Collection "Barnburner"

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.

Erin Hoover's Barnburner, awarded the 2017 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award, is a timely work of politics, feminism, and humanity.

PANK wrote of the collection:

"Erin Hoover’s debut poetry collection Barnburner is replete with powerful and timely character-studies. Each character, whether a bad boss, a junkie, a peer on a different path, a boyfriend, or a mugger is examined with the same mordant empathy Hoover is incredibly adept at employing."

In her own words, here is Erin Hoover's Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Barnburner:

I am not a musician. As a poet, I’m more in love with the syntax of the sentence complicated by line break than with the music of words. But for much of my life, I have been musician adjacent, hanging out with people in bands and going to shows and then to parties after shows. There was a time in my life where I was likely to be in a reasonably sized party with Interpol or living in the loft where Matt and Kim were setting up a show. And I have always been a “hard listener” to music. I will analyze a song like a text: what a song means, why it’s important, the context of its writing.

I created this playlist for Barnburner from the time period in which I had certain experiences that inspired the fictional narratives of the book. Barnburner is a group of poems organized around tone. The book’s epigraph describes the origin of the word ‘barnburner’: the farmer who burns down his barn to get rid of a rat infestation. I’m not sure if this comes out of America’s puritanical origins, but I think that in our country political and personal commitment is tied to risking annihilation. Not nihilism, where nothing holds meaning, but the opposite: whatever concerns the barnburner at a particular moment in time must mean everything. As my most rock-n-roll friend used to say, riffing on This Is Spinal Tap: “I go up to eleven.”

1. “Clampdown” – The Clash

I used to drive around central Pennsylvania listening to the Clash in high school. I was college bound, but I understood the energetic hopelessness behind “Clampdown,” certain that I was in some way entering into the service economy version of factory life. I don’t think I got the double meaning of working for in “Working for the clampdown” until later on. Now I also know firsthand how you can be both a victim of the clampdown but also one of its unwitting agents. The first poem in Barnburner, “The Lovely Voice of Samantha West,” is about global capitalism, and there are others about labor in general. As a bonus for me, the Clash shout out my hometown of Harrisburg at the end of “Clampdown” because international media attention around the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 made Harrisburg into an emblem of the American working-class city. I’m not sure that people now living in Harrisburg conceive of the place that way, but I did, growing up there.

2. “50ft Queenie” – P J Harvey

P J Harvey blew off the top of my head with this song, which I first saw as a video on MTV’s 120 Minutes. I loved all of Rid of Me. I, too, wanted to be a tough, unapologetic bitch and to turn the tables on people, mostly men, who had made me feel powerless. That’s how I read “50ft Queenie.” Although now I reject the idea that I have to appropriate masculine ideas of power to be powerful, I will love all of P J Harvey’s music until the end of time.

3. “Open Heart Surgery” – The Brian Jonestown Massacre

My affection for “Open Heart Surgery” is heavily influenced by the video for it, which pairs Survival Town Atom Test footage from 1955 with a sound characteristic of one of my favorite bands. The U.S. military built “Survival Town” in the middle of the Nevada desert—the video includes construction scenes too, mannequins being placed in domestic poses—to test the effects of detonating an atomic weapon. What results is something like the mental landscape that produced the poems in Barnburner, an impression helped along by Anton Newcombe wailing and a barebones guitar riff. Not that I’ve suffered more than anybody else—I’m absolutely sure that’s not true—but I’ve tried to interrogate what I know of anguish, in particular, belonging to a cultural system that fundamentally doesn’t respect the same things I do.

4. “Head Like a Hole” – Nine Inch Nails

As a pure expression of rage, “Head Like a Hole” fits the feeling some readers will find in Barnburner. The book has been called angry. I’m including this song for the addict friend of mine who inspired the M. character in several poems, for the endless hours we spent driving through Pennsylvania back roads listening to industrial music because somebody might have a pill to sell us. The lyric “I’d rather die than give you control” is ironic in this context, because like the characters in the song, we had no control outside of using twenty bucks we’d scared up to fulfill our own death wish. Americans prefer to see addiction as an individual moral failing rather than a natural response to late-stage capitalism, calibrated according to various social factors. I wish it were different.

5. “It’s So Hard to Fall in Love” – Sebadoh

I’m not a monster. There are tender poems in Barnburner, mostly about children and wanting to protect them, and poems about being naive myself. Even as a teenager, when I first heard this Sebadoh song, I was amused by the line, “It’s so hard to fall in love / Knowin’ all I know / Seeing all the things I see,” because how does any young lover know anything? And yet I knew that I loved Lou Barlow for writing those lyrics, for making a lo-fi song about falling in love built on the rhythm of a heart beating.

6. “Taste the Floor” – Jesus and Mary Chain

I’ve heard this band called pure dirt. The Jesus and Mary Chain are too much. Fuzzed-out melodies played loud as fuck. Lyrics tinged with bored masochism and sung without affect. I’d nominate the whole album Psychocandy for this playlist. “Taste the Floor” struts in a dark room and then kicks in the way a strong drink or a drug kicks in. And while I don’t understand the lyrics, I don’t have to. No, I will not turn the music down.

7. “New Year” – The Breeders

May I present the Breeders, loud women (and one man) writing powerful songs and playing kick-ass guitars and drums. You can blow out a car speaker with these songs. As for “New Year,” it’s a hard-driving race to the finish once you get past the line “It’s true,” which is a nice pivot if you think about it. I conceive of Barnburner as a race-to-the-finish book, with narratives that I hope propel the reader to go on. Additionally, the Breeders recorded one of two songs I’ve ever learned how to play on guitar (though not this one). See my poem “What Is the Sisterhood to Me?” for the other.

8. “I Wanna Be Your Dog” – The Stooges

Although the Stooges are an American band, “I Wanna Be Your Dog” was standard at early-2000s New York City Britpop nights at Don Hill’s or Bar 13, and it will always put me right back at last call with a mouth tasting like tonic water and ashtray. When Iggy Pop sings, “And now I'm ready to feel your hand / And lose my heart on the burning sands,” I’m ready to jump up and down with everybody else. Barnburner tries in places to capture a post-9/11 feeling as experienced by a certain group of people who were newly adult in 2001 or 2002, when we all thought we were going to die, not from terrorists, but from the stupid actions of our own government, and we danced like it.

9. “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” – Cat Power

Chan Marshall’s version of the Rolling Stones song is stripped down and contemplative. I don’t think that I could hear, really hear, Mick Jagger sing “Satisfaction” until I heard Cat Power. I also liked a woman singing this song, the woman as the protagonist who grapples with the emptiness of capitalism. I have wanted to be a woman who could do that. Also, that last line. And I’m tryin’.

10. “Resist Psychic Death” – Bikini Kill

I listened to many riot grrrl bands in high school and college because it felt incredible to hear shouted alternate ideas about sexuality and gender after absorbing so much toxic masculinity, especially in punk rock circles. Bikini Kill is the band I continue to listen to. For me, “Resist Psychic Death” is about pushing back against someone else’s narrative, and thus agenda, for your own life. Those false narratives are part of what I’m trying to pull apart and take down with Barnburner. I want to be the author of my own life, and to me that’s still revolutionary. These lyrics! Listen and learn: “There’s more than two ways of thinking / There’s more than one way of knowing / There’s more than two ways of being / There’s more than one way of going somewhere.”

11. “Prayer to God” – Shellac

Two girls from Washington, D.C. who were into hardcore taught me how to dance, and it was one of those girls who introduced me to Shellac back when 1000 Hurts was new. After listening to me go off about some injustice I’d experienced from a dude, she whispered, “You’ve got to hear this song” and played it for me. “Prayer to God” is more melodic than other Shellac songs, but true to the band’s usual driving rhythms and angular guitars. Like a prayer, the song begins with an address to God and ends with an Amen. The diction switches between holy and profane, between the poetry of a man asking God to strike his beloved “Where her necklaces close / Where her garments come together / Where I used to lay my face” and increasingly loud refrains to kill the lover who has replaced him: “Fuckin’ kill him already, kill him.” For me, there is an important distinction between making poetry that is crafted vs. poetry that is merely polished. Craft can evoke rawness, too. Shellac nails that distinction for me, musically speaking. Sometimes fuck is the word that you need.

Erin Hoover and Barnburner links:

the author's website

Glass review Grist review PANK review Publishers Weekly review

Connotation Press interview with the author The Pinch interview with the author Rob McLennnan interview with the author Tallahassee Democrat profile of the author

also at Largehearted Boy:

Support the Largehearted Boy website

Book Notes (2015 - ) (authors create music playlists for their book) Book Notes (2012 - 2014) (authors create music playlists for their book) Book Notes (2005 - 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book) my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays

Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists) Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights) guest book reviews Librairie Drawn & Quarterly Books of the Week (recommended new books, magazines, and comics) musician/author interviews Note Books (musicians discuss literature) Short Cuts (writers pair a song with their short story or essay) Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links) Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtracks) weekly music release lists

permalink

Source: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2018/10/erin_hoovers_pl.html

[filosofilagucom]

The Roots – undun Review

The Roots – undun Review -

The Roots undun Review

The Roots undun

undun is unlike any rap album I’ve ever heard before. It’s made up of 14 tracks with a running time amounting to only about 39 minutes, and of those 14 tracks, only nine actually feature any rapping. It’s also a hip-hop concept album, which is one of those things that you read about and wonder, “why don’t people make these more often?” until you realize it’s…

[filosofilagu]

The Roots – undun Review

The Roots – undun Review -

The Roots undun Review

The Roots undun

undun is unlike any rap album I’ve ever heard before. It’s made up of 14 tracks with a running time amounting to only about 39 minutes, and of those 14 tracks, only nine actually feature any rapping. It’s also a hip-hop concept album, which is one of those things that you read about and wonder, “why don’t people make these more often?” until you realize it’s…

[disappearingground]

No Nostalgia: Jenny Lewis on 'Rabbit Fur Coat' Ten Years Later

VICE February 2, 2016

When Lewis wrote this LP she was still figuring out what she believed in. Now she reflects on how far she's come and her all-female record label, Lovesway.

By Dianca London

The first songs I learned were hymns, stripped down and chock-full of harmonies, gospel became the soundtrack to my childhood. I sang “Precious Lord Take My Hand” to my dolls on countless afternoons and hummed “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” during games of hopscotch at recess. Whenever my family went to the community swimming pool or ventured to the Jersey Shore for a weekend trip, I whistled “Take Me To the Water” until my mouth grew tired. Or until I was asked to stop.

As the years passed, my appetite for “old-time religion”—ie. a sort of "back to the basics" core expression of Christian faith—became more nuanced. I developed a craving for something different. I started searching for similar chords and lyrical narratives in songs that I could call my own, songs that I hadn’t inherited from my grandmother or my parents. I wanted to lose myself in the melodies that existed outside the confines of leather bound hymnals. Jenny Lewis, in that sense was an answer to that prayer.

In addition to backbeats and catchy chords, it was Lewis’ ability to tell a story without hesitance that converted me to a diehard fan. At an instant, I was struck by the raw candor of the quasi-autobiographical narrator on Rilo Kiley’s 2002 song “A Better Son/Daughter,” drawn in by her refusal to downplay the anxieties of expectations, relationships, and the perpetual demand of a 9-5. Years later, I encountered what felt like a resurrected version of that same narrator in “Handle With Care.” Offering a litany of flaws, fears, and unabashed confessions, “Handle With Care,” much like the rest of Lewis’ debut solo album, Rabbit Fur Coat, seemed to add something more to the tradition that first introduced me to music. “Run, Devil Run” and “Happy” felt sacred. The album’s final minutes played out like an intimate benediction. The first time I heard Lewis sing with The Watson Twins, I felt like I was a little girl again, listening to my mom sing along to gospel LPs from the 70s. Reminiscent of Loretta Lynn, Nina Simone, Skeeter Davis, and Aretha, Lewis' songs became for me what “Amazing Grace” was for my mother. Her songs offered a different kind of salvation; it was Lewis’ sincerity that saved me.

Currently touring to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the album's release, Lewis, who is admittedly “not really one for nostalgia,” has returned to the stage yet again to perform an album that ultimately shaped the rest of her career, and inspired everyone from Best Coast to Waxahatchee to First Aid Kit. Unlike the rest of Lewis’ discography, Rabbit Fur Coat is the only album to date that was solely influenced by women. It’s release sparked a desire in Lewis to further explore lyrical narratives crafted outside of male-dominated spaces. While speaking with her over the phone on a chilly afternoon, it became clear that even after a decade, so much of her first solo album continues to ring true.

Noisey: It's been ten years since Rabbit Fur Coat's debut on Team Love Records. How has your connection to the album evolved? Jenny Lewis: The songs feel strangely relevant ten years later and I've been playing a handful of them during my solo sets. I played “Rise up With Fists” with Rilo Kiley on our last tour but the songs that I avoided in the last ten years, they feel like they really apply to my life right now. It's strange, when I write songs I don't always know exactly what I'm writing about and this particular period for me I had only written within my band and [Rabbit Fur Coat] was the first time that I was writing with a different intention. It wasn't being filtered through the other members of my band, it was very quiet, private songwriting process. I didn't share the songs with anyone really except for The Watson Twins before we recorded them, so they feel particularly personal and private.

In retrospect, which tracks resonate the most? We're performing the album in its entirety in order which I've never done before. They all serve a purpose within the whole, they all feel good and they fit together. They tell a story from beginning to end and there's an arc and the middle of that arc is the title track which I don't typically play. I mean, I played it a little bit in 2008 and I certainly played it in the first touring cycle for Rabbit Fur Coat, but that one I've avoided. Partially because it’s a four minute story song and I'm just up there alone, you know? I feel very exposed when it’s just me and the guitar and my song in front of an audience. It’s different if I'm in my living room playing songs for my friends who are also songwriters, but that song in particular is kind of a tough one to get through and not only because of the content, but just to be able to stand up there in front of so many people. It’s terrifying.

There's so much transparency and vulnerability in moments like that. It’s almost like those nightmare dreams you have when you're in front of a class and you're naked. It’s the part of my job when I'm up there when I'm like, “Goddamn why did I choose this job?”

In an interview from 2008 you referred to the title of the album as a metaphor for the “need to show your wealth” and “use a bunch of little dead things to make you more than what you are.” Looking back, has that metaphor changed for you in any way? I still identify with that metaphor but that song has taken on so much more for me. In my songwriting in my 20s I was pointing my finger a lot, I was looking outwards sort of examining my past, looking to my future, looking to the people around me, but what I've realized writing songs now is that I embody all of the characters that I'm criticizing. I've sort of become all of those people and I guess I was those characters all along I just didn't realize it.

The album is really rooted in the tradition of folk and gospel, two genres that have a legacy of bearing witness and responding to moments of personal and cultural significance. Songs like “The Big Guns,” “Rise Up with Fists,” and “Run Devil Run” come to mind. How did those genres and their traditions influence your identity as a songwriter? The record that influenced Rabbit Fur Coat the most is Laura Nyro's It's Gonna Take a Miracle and The Labelle Sisters are singing backup for her. That was something that I listened to growing up with my mother and my sister in the San Fernando Valley. I sing because I grew up singing with my mom and my sister. We were always listening to gospel songs because there were such distinctive harmony points. [Rabbit Fur Coat] for me, is a kind of spiritual record. It's not a religious record, but it's a spiritual record that in that moment in my life I was trying to figure out what I believed in. It turns out I believe in love and my friends and at that moment making music in Nebraska.

Omaha's music community, at that time and even now, was so influential. Saddle Creek and everything that they were doing was pivotal for so many bands. Conor [Oberst] was a great influence lyrically. He asked me to make the record and I never intended to be a solo artist, I never set out to do that. My identity was wrapped up in my band, that was my entire life, it was all I cared about and when he first approached me to make the record my first reaction was I can’t do that and he said, “No you can do it, you're going to do that and I'm going to put it out on my new record label, Team Love.” So he’s very much a part of the songs and the spirit of the record.

I've been really fortunate along the way to just have these guides and I've always been really afraid but when I get on stage I'm not afraid anymore, just getting there is terrifying. Conor, Ben Gibbard, Blake Sennett, and Ryan Adams... all of these guides, have just kind of pushed me out there, pushed me beyond what I thought I was capable of doing. Each era is defined by a guide in a way.

In regards to things that define you, what have some of your current influences been? I've been staying in New York in my friend's apartment, just trying to write my new record and there's no internet, there’s no TV and there's the record player and a handful of records. They're her records but the one that I keep listening to the most is the second Steely Dan record, that one has been on repeat. It's so great to get back to the basics of music where I've got like five records that I listen to. I don't feel inundated with too many choices. That and this Ted Lucas record...it’s amazing [and] EZ TV. They're from Brooklyn and they made my favorite record from last year. I've been listening to a lot of jazz and reggae, roots reggae.

It's really cool that you mentioned reggae. In a way a lot of the narratives in reggae are similar to the stories that folk and gospel tell, especially with the call and response pattern present between each genre. The message is love really, you know? Almost all of Bob Marley's songs are about God and the reason why it connects with people is because there's this mess of love and I've been listening to this music and trying to grasp on to it a little bit and it’s really inspiring.

Rabbit Fur Coat explores similar themes head on. Do you still feel the same way about religion? It's funny because you know, I was 28, 29 years old when I wrote these songs so for me it feels very 20, but then some of the themes continue to resonate. It’s not a totally serious record and I think there's a lot of questions on the record, but I think the through line is spirituality and however you choose to define that or identify within that but I'm still on the quest to figure it out but I always come back to one word which is ‘love’ and that, you know, dictates how I proceed.

You were on tour last year for Voyager. How was preparing for this tour different for you? I tend to compartmentalize eras. I'm not really one for nostalgia, I don't really look back but I do think [that] it's really important. The Watson Twins—they're such an important part of this record and although they're my songs, [the twins] help bring them into the world. Without them, I don't know if I would have even made the record.

There was just this moment where I had these very private songs and they lived a couple blocks from me and I went over to their place and we started singing together and it was like I was back in the kitchen with my mom and my sister. It felt immediately like I was a part of a family. I'm so grateful to them and I just think our vocal blend is really very, very special. I feel very safe around them. They're very loving and it's just a very special connection that we have. Touring with Voyager was amazing and I love my band but when I sing with the twins, it's like something from outer space.

Their presence on the album gives each song such an intimate, almost sacred feel to them. … and there's no dude in control! [With] Rilo Kiley, it was very collaborative, but there was a very prominent male presence. With Rabbit Fur Coat, M. Ward produced a few songs, but his approach is very different, it’s a very, you do your thing and then he does all this amazing stuff around it. This is really the only record that I've made where there isn't a very strong male influence—you know all the Rilo Kiley stuff and Voyager with Ryan [Adams] and Beck. This is really a very feminine record. It's very stripped back. Whenever I'm in a producer position, I like to create space for the words and the vocals, and I'm not always right, sometimes it can get boring, but that's my sensibility and I think that this record reflects this.

Dudes are great, but there's something really powerful about songs crafted solely by women. It's a continuation of a tradition of women telling stories, of women as makers of meaning. When I play with women it's a completely different thing, We just arrange songs differently. We're not afraid to lay [it] out. I've played with some amazing women over the years and when we're in a room arranging, it's just a different intention. It's really special.

[It] brings to mind my label, called Lovesway, which is named after my parents band from the 1970s and Lovesway is re-releasing Rabbit Fur Coat as the first release, but then I hope to put out female artists exclusively on Lovesway: I want to put out a series of 7-inches of some of my favorite female artists. It’ll to be a really safe place for women.

That sounds like the perfect antidote for counterbalancing the misogyny and sexism that's often synonymous with the music industry. Some of my guy friends are going to be super bummed. [Laughs.] I'm not excluding them because I don't love their songs but I'm really interested in a female lyrical perspective. It's strange when you find yourself as the slightly older gen and there's women who've come up to me like Bethany Consentino and Katie [Crutchfield] from Waxahatchee, they've come up to me and said, “You were the first girl that I saw playing guitar on the stage, watching you when I was in high school inspired me to start a band.” You never think you're going to get to that point, you're like, wow, am I really that old, but it’s really cool to give back in a way.

[reomanet]

Rock band Shinedown removes the stigma around mental health and addiction in “Attention Attention”

Rock band Shinedown removes the stigma around mental health and addiction in “Attention Attention”

Shinedown (Jimmy Fontaine) Rock band Shinedown removes the stigma around mental health and addiction in “Attention Attention” Brent Smith and Eric Bass discuss their new single “Get Up” with Salon and what it is like to write from experience Rachel Leah September 16, 2018 11:00am (UTC) For Shinedown’s most recent album, “Attention Attention,” the rock band decided to get really personal, and no song was more vulnerable than “Get Up.” Front man Brent Smith penned the anthem after watching his friend and bandmate, bassist Eric Bass, struggle with clinical depression. At its core, the song deals with empathy. Smith’s lyrics reflect a shared experience. While he may not have endured the same struggles as Bass with depression, pain can — unfortunately — be a universal human experience and that sense of unconditional support and solidarity for his friend is the driving factor behind the song. Remarkably, “Get Up” was not pre-planned. Bass created the music for it, and Smith did not share the lyrics or motivation for the song until they recorded it. Yet Bass knew instantly who the song was about once Smith laid down the vocals. On a short break from the band’s world tour, Smith and Bass spoke to Salon about “Get Up,” mental health, addiction and how showing vulnerability strengthened their relationship with their fans. Let’s start talking about “Get Up.” Tell me about the single, the song and the message. Brent: It was like lightening hit both of us with inspiration at that time, because I was so afraid of crossing the line with our friendship – because I had never done something this personal before in regard to me and him – that I didn’t want to offend him. And I didn’t want to upset him, because I love him. He’s my partner, and he’s my bandmate and we create together. This was a very personal thing that I just expressed to him. And he wasn’t upset at all. I was so afraid to cross the line with him, but Eric just removed the line. That song was such a sounding board for the rest of the songs that became “Attention Attention.” I mean, “Get Up” was a huge pivotal moment for not only us, but just in the making of the album. It was a very powerful moment. Eric: We feel like “Get Up” just basically unlocked this record. Brent and I had conversations prior to that song about some of the subjects that we had begun to write about – which was substance abuse problems – and some of the things we had been through with each other over the past couple of years, dealing with that and dealing with my depression. We’ve fallen apart, we put ourselves back together again. Let’s write about it, but it took a song like “Get Up” to make it OK to do that. Here’s something that’s been really personal for me. My wife, my close family and my bandmates were really the only people who knew anything about my severe depression issues. We took the shackles off at that point, and we said, “Let’s just write honestly. Let’s write the story of what has happened to us over the past few years and make the record out of it.” People are going to identify with that. People love honesty, especially our fans. They love the fact that we’ve written something that is so personal, yet they can find a piece of themselves in each one of this songs – especially a song like “Get Up.” Eric, were you ever scared to let Brent write this song or to publicly open up through music about your struggles? It’s a very vulnerable position to be in. Eric: It is a vulnerable place to be for sure. I wasn’t really scared of it. I didn’t know what I was going to say to other people. I think more than anything, more than being scared — I knew that, because it was going to come to light, that this is what I go through, and a lot of people go through the same things — that I was going to have to engage people in conversation. And they were going to engage me in conversation, asking questions about it. I’m always scared that I’m not going to have the right answer for them. You know, because I’m not a therapist. I’m dealing with this just like they are. And, so, really for me, the only apprehension I’ve had with it is: What happens if somebody is really reaching out to me, and they really need help? I was never worried about any sort of stigma or anything with it to be honest with you. It’s actually been quite a relief to be able to articulate some of these things and talk to people about the things that I was scared of talking to people about. I don’t always have all the answers for them, but just engaging them in conversation about it and having a dialogue, even if it’s for three minutes in a meet and greet, that’s actually been very therapeutic for me. I want to talk about some lyrics from the song. “I’m on the bright side of being hell bent / So, take it from me, you’re not the only one/ Who can’t see straight.” They’re pretty powerful. Eric: They’re actually some of the coolest lyrics in there, and they’re very personal to me actually. I love the fact that Brent – when he wrote the song – he wrote the first verse really just about the two of us. And I remember that being something that just kind of really grabbed me and was very emotional for me, actually, because from the first verse out of the gate, I know he’s writing about me when he’s talking about “clinging to the light of day” and “medication doesn’t do much, it just numbs your brain.” Then he turns it on himself and says, “guess you might say I’m a little intense/ I’m on the bright side of being hellbent/ So, take it from me, you’re not the only one/ Who can’t see straight.” He’s talking about himself. Brent is a super-intense guy, and he’s been down some really hard roads. He’s talking about struggling with his addiction issues and knowing that he has to respect that – just like I have to respect my depression. And that’s why he’s saying, “You’re not the only one/ Who can’t see straight.” I know I’m not alone when he says that. I always loved that line in the song. I’m interested if your relationship or your connection to your fans has strengthened or transformed because of the honesty of this song. Brent: The amazing thing is that, whether it’s someone that has been with the band since the very first album or they’re just kind of finding out who Shinedown is – especially with this album, and these songs – the important thing to do with the audience, really, is to let them talk. We’ve written the material, but we want them to be able to talk about it, because they may not have ever talked about it. We meet a lot of people on tour, and a lot of times they just want to tell you their story or what they’ve been through. And, really for us, it’s about listening to them and giving them our time. We sometimes don’t even have to say anything to them, because they do talk about the lyrics, and they talk about the music and they talk about the songs. They know that it’s extremely genuine from us, because we can’t pull songs out of thin air. It has to be real. So, a lot of times, it’s just allowing them to talk. That’s what we try to do as a band – and to give them a platform – just as much as they’ve given us an amazing platform. Eric: The success of Shinedown is exactly what Brent just said, is the fact that it’s honest. We don’t ever make anything up. That’s also been the success of rock ‘n’ roll music, and a lot of people will say rock ‘n’ roll music is dead. But Kurt Cobain was being brutally honest, as well – it got inside of people. People latched on to what he was saying. Shinedown is a completely different band then, that we have a completely different message. But we’re not writing songs for the club – we’re writing what we know. We’re writing our experiences down and performing them through music. If a kid can listen to our song and go, “He’s writing about something that he knows that he’s lived through, and I’ve lived through the same thing,” it gives them hope. What do you think is important for people to remember and acknowledge as we continue to try to remove the stigma around mental health? Eric: The important thing for people to remember, who never suffered with any sort of depression issues, PTSD, mental health, anything like that is: The people who have the problem don’t understand it any more than the people who don’t have an understanding. You feel sad. You don’t know why you feel sad. My wife, who thank God doesn’t suffer with any of this, who’s been with me for 24 years. And she to this day doesn’t understand anything I go through, but she understands that it’s real to me. When she sees that I’m down, she doesn’t go, “What’s wrong with you? You have no reason to be depressed!” and start listing the reasons why I shouldn’t feel the way I feel. It doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t matter what your age, race, social economic status is, it gets you. It will bring you down and when you’re having an episode or when you’re down and out, it doesn’t matter. None of that stuff matters. You can’t even give people a reason why, because you don’t know why you feel the way you feel. That’s kind of the saddest thing for the sufferer and the most frustrating thing for the person who is watching them suffer. It’s important to remember they can’t help this, and for God sakes, the worst thing you can do is start giving them reasons why they should be happy. They need to go seek help, they need to find people who can help them out of this situation they’re in. We just need to create a more sensitive society — create more of a narrative, more of an environment where people feel like they can go talk to someone about this. I’m living proof that talking about it — not even talking with someone in particular — just articulating what I’m going through has helped me a lot in the past few months. I can actually feel a difference. Salon Talks: Criminalizing mental health When the largest population of severely mentally ill people are being “treated” in the prison system, there’s no question that the system is fundamentally broken. Rachel Leah MORE FROM Rachel Leah You can now support Salon from as little as $2, and help shape the future of Salon that you’d prefer. Salon’s pioneering, award-winning journalism that is read by people in over 230 countries has been mostly supported by advertising revenue over its 20+ year history. To keep up with the costs of creating great content, we increasingly need to run more advertising to support the business. In an effort to reduce the amount of ads, we are offering our readers the opportunity to directly contribute to us. SUPPORT SALON.COM

Read More…

The post Rock band Shinedown removes the stigma around mental health and addiction in “Attention Attention” appeared first on TBNT Have The Solution.

from TBNT Have The Solution https://ift.tt/2xo1H1X via Article Source

[chevd-blog]

My Top 100 Favorite Albums of All Time (Part 4: 40 - 21)

40. Silent Shout – The Knife (2006)

The first of two entries on this list involving experimental Swedish electronica musician Karin Dreijer Andersson, Silent Shout is a fine example of her most recognizable project, The Knife, which was essentially a collaboration with her brother Olof. The album is marked by an unmistakably Nordic sensibility, with a bizarrely sparse and wintry feel, and primarily narrated by Andersson in eerily pitch-shifted vocals that sound frail and petite at some points, and possessed by ghouls at others. Basically, imagine Björk on sulfur hexafluoride, and singing about the bodily decay of getting older, and you have a decent idea what to expect. There is something oddly unsettling about a female vocalist artificially lowering her voice into a male register, particularly for a song like "One Hit", which tackles the subject matter of male chauvinism rather bluntly. But if you stick around through the creepy and humorous bits, there are more than enough genuine moments which shine as well.

Prime cuts: "Silent Shout", "Marble House"

  39. Animals – Pink Floyd (1977)

The shortest of Pink Floyd's masterpieces from the 1970s is also their angriest. With a narrative that borrows from George Orwell's Animal Farm, the album Animals is a forty-minute critique of the social stratification of capitalist society, with the band delivering surgically-precise attacks on businessmen, political authorities, and the unwitting masses who cede control of their ultimate fate to power-crazed crooks who couldn't care less. Some of my all-time favorite Pink Floyd lyrics come from this album, specifically because Roger Waters really did not pull any punches (including some particularly scathing lines directed at Margaret Thatcher and Christian morality advocate Mary Whitehouse).

Prime cuts: "Dogs", "Pigs (Three Different Ones)"

  38. Lunatic Soul II – Lunatic Soul (2010)

As you might guess from the Roman numeral II in the title, Lunatic Soul II is actually a narrative sequel to Lunatic Soul's first album. Picking up where the last one left off, the story follows the protagonist through his further adventures in the afterlife. The album sets itself apart from its previous installment, however, by being a bit more kinetic: where the first part was content to tap into a wellspring of bittersweetness and melancholy and linger there, the emotional arc of the second part is a bit more daring and diverse. There are also fewer instrumental tracks here, which (as beautiful as they are) does seem to make a difference in the album's sense of gravity. Between the two albums, "Escape from ParadIce" is by far the wildest moment in the entire tale. And the story is wrapped up beautifully with "Wanderings", an epilogue containing a gentle electronic piano melody and echoed vocals, which (to me, at least) is vaguely reminiscent of 80s Phil Collins.

Prime cuts: "Suspended in Whiteness", "Escape from ParadIce"

  37. In the Court of the Crimson King – King Crimson (1969)

An absolute bona fide progressive rock classic, King Crimson's debut album is likely their most iconic, as well as the only one featuring the vocals of future Emerson Lake and Palmer singer Greg Lake. Consisting of only five songs, each between six and twelve minutes long, the album is largely a blend of jazz and classical influences with unabashed British psychedelia. Lest you think it a poor man's Pink Floyd, though, there's also a distinctly darker undertone and harder edge than most contemporary releases, especially noticeable on the first track, "21st Century Schizoid Man" and the elegiac "Epitaph" (the climax of which is just otherworldly). Simply put, there's a compelling case to be made that all of the subsequent hard progressive rock bands which I love so much– Porcupine Tree, Tool, and Riverside in particular– owe their existence largely to this album.

Prime cuts: "21st Century Schizoid Man", "The Court of the Crimson King"

  36. Polaris – Tesseract (2015)

With vocalist Dan Tompkins rejoining the band in 2014 after his 2011 departure (just after the release of One), Polaris finds Tesseract on familiar ground. But it's also obvious that the band had grown so much in the three years that they were apart. Ironically, by losing Tompkins, they actually found their voice, such that when he returned, all the posturing about forcing themselves to fit perfectly into a preconceived djent formula had been abandoned, and they were able to pursue a much more organic (and ambitious) trajectory. Polaris is a concept album, built on a narrative set in an apparently dystopian future. Unlike Tompkins' first recording with the band, there is nary a harsh vocal track to be found, save for the very end of "Cages" (but even that is toned down compared to earlier material). Instead, Tompkins is given free rein to contribute more melodic and technically impressive performances. When those vocals are combined with their matured instrumentalism, the result is an album which serves as a fantastic example of the ineffable expressiveness which makes Tesseract a compelling listen.

Prime cuts: "Survival", "Seven Names"

  35. We're Here Because We're Here – Anathema (2010)

I mentioned this album by name in my self-published novel Even Stars Die, and for good reason. It was my first Anathema album (as well as the band's first album released with Kscope), and it succinctly evoked a sense of aesthetic appreciation and purpose at a time when I was going through an existential crisis (admittedly, a frequent occurrence in my life). Older Anathema fans may have been disappointed in the band's change in sound from doom metal to a friendlier sort of progressive rock, but the latter sound suits me just perfectly. From the first notes of "Thin Air", I was hooked. Then I heard "Summer Night Horizon", with its faster pace, haunting piano, and blazing guitars, and I was completely sold on the album after just two songs. The rest of the album continues in the same vein: "Everything" was the first Vincent Cavanagh and Lee Douglas duet which really struck a nerve with me, "Get Off Get Out" provides the back half of the album with a moment of raucous abandon, and the brief interlude "Presence" contains a vocal sample of a discussion about "com[ing] to terms with one's own mortality"– which, in my case, was actually extremely helpful and comforting in my own struggle with the subject. If being able to experience a beautiful album like this isn't a good reason to be alive, then what is?

Prime cuts: "Thin Air", "Summer Night Horizon"

  34. Metallica [Black Album] – Metallica (1991)

I find that the Black Album tends to be a polarizing album for Metallica fans. For some of us, it represented a band that was unwilling to continue rehashing the same formula over and over, and longed to grow and change as artists. For others, it was nothing less than a betrayal of the band's no-compromise 80s thrash metal roots, and the first signifier of a period in the band's history marked by shorter hair and the presence of some mellower songs. ("A ballad?! Metallica doesn't do fucking ballads, man!") But regardless of one's stance on the album, it's impossible to deny that it was a significant milestone in their discography, where they expanded from a niche audience of headbangers to a more mainstream acceptance. For me, this was among my earliest impressions of Metallica, during my era of adolescent rage, and it sounded suitably hard-edged to me. There's no contest: I'd much rather listen to "Sad But True" than listen to naysayers, any day of the week.

Prime cuts: "Enter Sandman", "Nothing Else Matters"

  33. Rapid Eye Movement – Riverside (2007)

My initial introduction to Riverside's music (after discovering them via Lunatic Soul) was their third album, Rapid Eye Movement, which forms the final piece of a conceptual trilogy (the other two pieces being the albums Out of Myself and Second Life Syndrome). The album starts with a strong opening track, "Beyond the Eyelids", and transitions into a single-heavy first half containing "02 Panic Room", a bass-heavy song with a sound owing much to Tool, and the hypnotic Middle Eastern-influenced "Schizophrenic Prayer". The second half of the album quiets down a little, containing the two softer acoustic compositions "Through the Other Side" and "Embryonic", before launching into the 13-minute epic finale, "Ultimate Trip". Despite being the end of the trilogy's narrative, this was a great album to acquaint me with Riverside, as it displayed Mariusz Duda's vocal style, as well as the dynamic range of the band's material.

Prime cuts: "Schizophrenic Prayer", "02 Panic Room"

  32. Nevermind – Nirvana (1991)

Admit it, you knew this album was going to show up on this list eventually. I mean, come on. I grew up in the 90s. Nevermind is an obligatory album for any 90s kid. It was only a matter of time. And really, what can I say about this recording that hasn't been said a million times before by music journalists and other list-makers? The only new thing I have to add is my personal experience, which can be summed up pretty succinctly in one word: revelatory. You want to know why I gravitate so strongly toward hard rock? Answer: Nevermind. This was the album that sealed the deal for me. Before Nevermind, I was a naïve kid struggling to figure out what sort of modern music he liked. I was 14 or 15 when I bought my copy, and I never looked back. I suddenly knew exactly what kind of music really spoke to me. In terms of the development of my musical tastes, I really can't think of many others that were quite as pivotal to me.

Prime cuts: "Smells Like Teen Spirit", "Come as You Are"

  31. White Pony – Deftones (2000)

I came for Maynard James Keenan's appearance on "Passenger", and stayed for the rest of the album. After all, Deftones has been one of the biggest success stories to emerge out of the initial wave of nu metal bands in the 90s– a band that was able to transcend the angst and adapt to changing tastes. Their third album White Pony was a watershed moment– simultaneously breaking new ground for them, and also becoming one of their most massive commercial hits ever. Singles "Change (In the House of Flies)" and "Digital Bath" (and on the reissue, "Back to School (Mini Maggit)") received heavy airplay on rock radio and MTV, while "Rx Queen" and "Knife Prty" contribute some of the album's more affecting and experimental moments. Nearly two decades later, it still holds up as an outlier in a genre that wasn't exactly known for being adventurous or introspective.

Prime cuts: "Digital Bath", "Change (In the House of Flies)"

  30. Frances the Mute – The Mars Volta (2005)

Frances the Mute was released in the summer between my first and second years of college, while I was living in Florida. I had seen the video for "The Widow" on TV, and decided to give the album a listen. Boy, was I surprised. This was an album that signified to me that progressive rock (as it had existed before Tool infused it with metal and alternative influences) was back en vogue. The introduction of Latin musical influences was an added bonus, as far as I was concerned; it gave the music a very distinct flavor which I could never mistake for any other band, and it seemed oddly appropriate for my surroundings, being in a state with such a strong Hispanic cultural presence. With the dynamite mix of Cedric Bixler-Zavala's high vocals and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez's guitar presence, the Mars Volta quickly became one of my favorite new bands of the 2000s, and remains inseparably bound to my memories of my time at Ringling like no other band does.

Prime cuts: "The Widow", "L'Via L'Viaquez"

  29. Close to the Edge – Yes (1972)

A few years ago, I acquired a copy of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, and read it cover to cover. It was a rare, transcendent and transformational experience; upon finishing the book, I felt instantly electrified with a keen understanding of the tapestry of joy and suffering which we call life. Close to the Edge is Siddhartha in musical form, more or less. The album's title track was inspired by the book, and through its nearly 19 minutes of jaunty prog grooves— including a truly divine and thunderous church organ interlude— it actually does manage somehow to replicate the vivified sensation I got from reading the book. There are only two other tracks on the album: the sweeping "And You and I", and the churning "Siberian Khatru", both of which are brilliant in their own right. Much ado has been made of the excesses and pretentiousness which cast the original wave of 60s and 70s prog rock into the realm of unintentional self-parody. True to its name, however, Close to the Edge gets right up on that line without ever crossing it, instead finding the perfect sweet spot between too much and not enough.

Prime cuts: "Close to the Edge", "Siberian Khatru"

  28. Pretty Hate Machine – Nine Inch Nails (1989)

And thus, a legend was born. Being the earliest of Trent Reznor's work under the nom de guerre of Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine is a recording that (it always seemed to me) still has the vitality of a new band to it. It's an exception to so many of the ground rules that govern Reznor's later work. It's sappily emotional in ways that The Downward Spiral wasn't. It's easily dated by its sound palette in a way that The Fragile isn't. And for all its discontent, it's still quite upbeat and danceable at times, in a way that Year Zero never could be. Pretty Hate Machine sounds exactly as one would imagine Reznor's work to have sounded in the 1980s, which is to say, a higher ratio of synthpop in its DNA. It may have been eclipsed by some subsequent releases, but it is still a solid album, and a true classic of early industrial music.

Prime cuts: "Head Like a Hole", "Terrible Lie"

  27. Intimacy – Bloc Party (2008)

Say what you will. I know some people listened to this album (particularly its leading single, "Mercury"), and weren't feeling it, especially compared to the band's earlier material. I get that. It was a bold change of pace for Bloc Party, and I'm not sure if it was completely successful in what it was trying to accomplish. But there were enough great moments on this album— the chaotic percussion warfare and guitar bombast of opener "Ares", the heartwrenchingly bittersweet "Biko", and of course, "Talons", which quickly became my second favorite Bloc Party after "Banquet"— that the missteps didn't matter to me. When I got my copy of this album, I played it ad nauseum, until I knew it intimately (ba dum tssh). I can't hate on it for experimenting, or for being too sentimental. Both of those things are things I actually sort of applaud in music, and wish I saw more. And I got a little extra bonus with my copy, since my version also included "Letter to My Son", "Your Visits Are Getting Shorter", and Bloc Party's first foray into house music, "Flux". Moreover, I have a real attachment to the album now, because it represents a time in my life that was actually pretty happy for me, which has been a bit of a rarity— I was a student at Emily Carr, completely in my element, I had a fulfilling social life, and I was just generally enjoying my surroundings in Canada. So maybe I'm biased a little, but there was just no way I could leave this album off the list.

Prime cuts: "Talons", "Biko"

  26. 10,000 Days – Tool (2006)

Here's how you know we're getting closer to #1: Tool albums start showing up. Aside from a single album by A Perfect Circle and a few guest appearances on other albums, Maynard James Keenan hasn't really made any appearances yet. That changes now. Ostensibly Maynard's tribute to his late mother, the title of 10,000 Days refers to the nearly three decades between her paralysis due to an accident and her passing. Coming from a band that found its niche in extremely cerebral music, the album was surprisingly personal and emotional. Of course, there is still some heady fare here, as in openers "Vicarious" and "Jambi". And their trademark offbeat humor is on display as well, as "Lost Keys (Blame Hofmann)" briefly sets up a scenario involving an LSD-induced hospital visit, and then segues into "Rosetta Stoned", with the stoner in question describing (in barely coherent terms) being visited by extraterrestrials and anointed 'the chosen one'. Sadly, at 11 years and counting, 10,000 Days is still the band's most recent release (and we're all hoping to see a new one sooner than 10,000 days)— but at least we have a solid album to listen to while waiting.

Prime cuts: "Vicarious", "Rosetta Stoned"

  25. Good News for People Who Love Bad News – Modest Mouse (2004)

This album has the unique distinction of being doubly nostalgic for me— that is, it simultaneously conjures up strong memories of two different periods in my life. The first is from my freshman year at Ringling College back in 2004, right after the album was released. I recall very distinctly that one of my roommates owned it, and played it in the car while we went on grocery runs. At that time, I wasn't sure what to think of it; Modest Mouse didn't really seem to have a place in my music collection, among my Tool and Metallica and Nine Inch Nails. By the time I heard it again, though, I was coming around. It didn't hurt that my second real experience with Good News… was around 2007, when I realized my friend Laurie was a fan of Modest Mouse. That instantly caused me to take another listen. And because I had both of those experiences soundtracked by the same album, I now strongly associate Good News... with my coming-of-age and independence; after all, both points in my life were times when I had gained a new level of self-reliance and freedom.

Prime cuts: "Float On", "Ocean Breathes Salty"

  24. Stupid Dream – Porcupine Tree (1999)

As mentioned earlier, Porcupine Tree spent the majority of the 90s in the realm of psychedelia and space rock, filling the void left behind by the decline of Pink Floyd. Following the release of 1997's Signify, however, the band went through a massive recalibration in terms of its sound, shifting toward a much more straightforward radio-friendly alternative rock sound. Stupid Dream is the first album where this change is apparent. It's also the first to demonstrate Steven Wilson's long love/hate relationship with the recording industry; the album's lead single (and the band's very first charting song), "Piano Lessons", is an anthem of disillusionment with the over-commercialized nature of modern music and the 'stupid dream' of being able to reach the masses with an intelligent, heartfelt message, which works well as the album's thesis statement. My personal highlight on the album, however, is "Don't Hate Me", which is set apart from other Porcupine Tree songs up to that point by its slow, steady bass groove, its prominent flute and saxophone sections, and its tone of longing desperation. It was at this point where Porcupine Tree really started to develop into a force with which to be reckoned.

Prime cuts: "Don't Hate Me", "Piano Lessons"

  23. OK Computer – Radiohead (1997)

How does one add anything new to a discussion about an album that is widely regarded as one of the greatest albums of the past 20 years? This is an album that has been constantly picked apart and analyzed by music journalists, favorably compared to Dark Side of the Moon, and placed on so many "Greatest Albums" lists that it is in serious danger of becoming as much a cliché as Nevermind or Sgt. Pepper's. Can it possibly live up to all of that hype? Well… yeah. At least, I think so. In retrospect, I think some of the hype is due to the fact that it was really the final album of Radiohead's alt-rock period, where they sounded like what people expected them to sound like— i.e., the second coming of the British Invasion, for a Gen X audience. In contrast, OK Computer's immediate successor was such a radical about-face that it scared off many fans who were looking for a logical progression along the same vector (and, it could be argued, launched Coldplay's career as a result). But underneath all of the hype, and behind the iconic songs about unborn chicken voices and detuned radios, there really is a substantive, smart, emotionally powerful piece of artwork here. This is the rare moment where the stars align, and there is a perfect confluence of mainstream appeal, critical acceptance, and genuinely thought-provoking artistry.

Prime cuts: "Paranoid Android", "Karma Police"

  22. Fever Ray – Fever Ray (2009)

Fever Ray was the name given to the solo project of Karin Dreijer Andersson of The Knife, already mentioned earlier in this list. The self-titled album begins with the relentless droning of "If I Had a Heart", a song which, by its bellicose, minimalistic melody, seems to portend an Apache raid. The majority of the album seems to have a pall of inky darkness over it— not so much a depressing darkness, as a black haze that obscures sight and shrouds everything in shadow. A few bright shafts of light occasionally break through, as in the childlike "When I Grow Up" and "Seven" and the quirkily upbeat "Triangle Walks", but duskier tracks like "Concrete Walls" and "Keep the Streets Empty for Me" are the norm.

Prime cuts: "Triangle Walks", "Keep the Streets Empty for Me"

  21. Darkest Days – Stabbing Westward (1998)

Sometimes, no matter how much you try to keep moving forward, it's inevitable that there will be vulnerable moments. I've had a lot of those. For me, the battle with depression has been a long and draining one. And when I feel myself spiraling downward, like I break everything I touch, often one of the best ways for me to work through it is to envelop myself in music that seems as bleak as me. On many occasions, Darkest Days has truly been a savior. With 16 tracks, it is by a wide margin Stabbing Westward's longest release; it is also their magnum opus, the true highlight of their catalog of industrial rock. Darkest Days is a concept album based on the experience of a break-up, as the relationship moves through unhealthy self-sabotaging and fixation, into a post-separation cycle of pain, regret, depression, anger, and finally, reluctant acceptance. While singles "Save Yourself" and "Sometimes It Hurts" may be among the band's most recognized material, and "How Can I Hold On" deserves an honorable mention for its wicked mixture of computer beats and Christopher Hall's unmistakable vocals, it is the heartrending final track, "Waking Up Beside You", which really is praiseworthy for being a stellar composition— possibly the greatest song the band ever produced. Darkest Days has served me well as an emotional counterbalance from my teen years into my thirties. For that reason, I see it as an indispensable part of my music library.

Prime cuts: "Save Yourself", "Waking Up Beside You"

We’re getting much closer now! Next time: we crack the Top 20, with Part 5 (#20-11)!

[how2to18]

IT’S 1989. You’re in the middle seat of a Chevrolet Astro minivan, flanked on either side by your screaming siblings. Dad is driving. Oh god, he’s air-drumming on the wheel to “Smoke on the Water.” Again. You look down and see your backpack and your heart swells just a little because a device in that bag is your ticket out of here. Janine K gave you a mixtape of songs by The Cure and said they would change your life. The cassette is already in the Walkman deck. You pop on headphones, press play, and crank up the volume. Hello, freedom.

It’s hard to remember a time before we had the option to curate the playlist of our own minds. We are simply accustomed now to experiencing music in this deeply personal, albeit solitary, way. We disappear into headphones, stream a song via smartphone from the intangible, infinite web, creating a sonic landscape that mirrors our mood. We walk around the grocery store in Beyoncé-land.

But that wasn’t always the case. In her new book Personal Stereo, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow analyzes two major shifts in perspective associated with the 1979 birth of the first solo listening device, the Walkman. First, music becomes a personal experience, and second, music becomes immersive, a means to override — or even negate — the sounds of one’s immediate environment. Listening to music in private was not a new concept, of course, nor was the ability to take music on the road (à la the boom box). However, the idea of making the private experience of music a public phenomenon was groundbreaking. In that sense, the Walkman redefined music: it was a revolutionary tool that offered listeners a new kind of freedom. Music technology today still riffs on the basic concept of the Walkman, only now we have digital access to nearly every recorded song.

To set the stage for the Walkman’s rise, Tuhus-Dubrow takes us to postwar Japan, in a ramshackle office with a leaking roof. Two men are working with umbrellas over their desks. Their names are Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita, the founders of Sony and eventual fathers of the Walkman. Personal Stereo is the wild story of the ingenious brotherhood of Ibuka and Morita, of Japan’s ascent from financial ruin to the second largest economy in the world, and of the subsequent pushback from the United States against Japanese-made products. It’s also the story of the “Me Generation” of the 1970s, as well as the exercise craze of the ’80s, and all the anxiety and nostalgia implicit in the beginning and end of an era.

Personal Stereo is the latest entry in Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” series, which focuses on the hidden lives of ordinary things. The short book is divided into three chapters — “Novelty,” “Norm,” and “Nostalgia” — which together trace a narrative arc that mirrors the lifespan of a zeitgeist technology turned obsolete. Sub-sections within each chapter have evocative titles like “Trapping sound,” “Remember Pearl Harbor,” and — my personal favorite — “Home taping is killing music.” (One can almost hear record label executives in the age of digital streaming laughing out loud at that last title.) Tuhus-Dubrow illuminates a web of stories connected to the Walkman, her references as ubiquitous as its users. She takes us to a mountain in wintry Switzerland where Andreas Pavel, who would later win a lawsuit against Sony, played music for his lover on his jerry-rigged personal stereo while the snow fell silently around them. She quotes Tom Wolfe and Allan Bloom, along with her own buddy who had his Walkman stolen. After finishing Personal Stereo, I found myself wondering about the secret lives of every object around me, as if each device were whispering, “Oh, I am much so more than meets the eye.”

The most haunting theme Tuhus-Dubrow treats is contemporary nostalgia for analog technology. In 2015, the National Audio Company reported the best year of cassette sales since 1969. Thurston Moore, formerly of Sonic Youth, claims he only listens to music on cassette, and many artists today elect to release music exclusively on tape. Questioning her own nostalgia, Tuhus-Dubrow tackles the murky issue of why consumers would hold on to this outdated technology. Why commemorate an obsolete device? Tuhus-Dubrow suggests we are nostalgic for the Walkman not because it reminds us of a particular time and place, or an early taste of freedom, nor because it was pivotal in defining the spirit of an age, but because we may secretly long for boundaries in a world of limitless access. Perhaps we crave the singular focus that the Walkman’s simplicity forced on us: listen to this one Pearl Jam tape all the way home, because that’s all you’ve got. Tuhus-Dubrow speculates that we miss the time when we could actually touch music — when we had to fumble with a wonky device through a maze of fast-forwarding, rewinding, fast-forwarding again until the click: that sweet spot somewhere mid-tape, the beginning of our favorite song.

As with most generation-defining forms of technology, consumers had conflicting opinions about the Walkman. Because of the newfound personal freedom it offered, the Walkman was considered a threat, antisocial and amoral. “Walkman’s Oblivion” was likened to the escape of taking drugs or dissociating into a film-like hyper-reality. People who chose to withdraw into the private world of their personal stereos, hips gyrating down the street to invisible music, were labeled selfish, hermetic, or just plain crazy. “The history of technology,” Tuhus-Dubrow writes, “is in part the story of normal people starting to do things that used to be considered signs of insanity.” The Walkman’s origin story is as curious as the slew of contradictions surrounding its reception. This little device was seen as simultaneously a quintessential symbol of the United States and everything that’s wrong with the country, a tool both of laziness and of hyper-productivity (think: exercise craze), as well as a ubiquitous symbol of style and status.

Tuhus-Dubrow is a master researcher and synthesizer. It would appear that she has left no Walkman-related stone unturned. That said, if I could request a hidden bonus track to Personal Stereo, I would wish for more of her insightful musings on the mixtape, a phenomenon responsible for more excited swooning, long-shot lyrical (mis)interpretations, and make-out sessions than any other music delivery mechanism. Surely there is a connection to be made between the Walkman’s redefinition of music as personal and the art of curating a music mix specifically for your crush. If the Walkman had never come into being, would it have occurred to us to select and organize songs with such uniquely personal intention? Tuhus-Dubrow does touch on a mix of her own creation, including a stellar lineup of R.E.M. and Beat Happening, but it would be fascinating to read more of her thoughts on the subject. Then again, maybe I’m just feeling nostalgic for Janine K’s mix of The Cure, the one that truly set me free.

In July 2012, for approximately 45 seconds, I erroneously believed that I owned New York City. This brief moment accompanied a runner’s high, as I jogged alone along the Hudson, earbuds blasting “Empire State of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys. Sure, the exercise-induced endorphin rush contributed to my delusion, but the truth is I couldn’t have approached that moment of ecstasy had it not been for the ability to disappear into my personal stereo. At the time, I never would have credited the Walkman for my elation, but thanks to Tuhus-Dubrow, an elegant, engaging storyteller who unpacks complex social and political concepts with clarity and panache, I know better now. Personal Stereo is a joy to read.

¤

Carissa Stolting is the founder of Left Bank Artists, an artist management company based in Nashville, Tennessee. She is a contributing poet to the podcast Versify, a publication of PRX, The Porch Writers’ Collective, and Nashville Public Radio.

The post Zeitgeist to Obsolete: Rewinding the Walkman’s Inverted Cinderella Story appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2hv8tOr via IFTTT

[lorrainecparker]

AOTC with editor of the documentary “KEDI”

Mo Stoebe currently works as freelance editor of both documentaries and narrative films in Los Angeles. He got his start in the industry as motion designer and animator for commercials and music videos, but his love for film eventually brought him to editing long-form content. He’s completed five documentaries and a feature and loves learning something new about the art of editing every day.

Art of the Cut discusses one of his latest project, the documentary Kedi which has received praise form many fronts. It is currently available on Netflix.

HULLFISH: While there are English subtitles, the language spoken in this documentary is Turkish.

STOEBE: Yes, and my Turkish is very bad.

HULLFISH: I’ve edited in other languages myself, Spanish mostly, and I don’t speak much Spanish. But I feel that you can get a sense of the rhythm of the language. I don’t speak Turkish, but I always felt like the rhythm of the language as you edited it was good.

STOEBE: I am from Austria and grew up bilingual as my mother is originally from the Netherlands so I’ve always been interested in different language. In the case of Kedi, the producers had the forty or so interviews and many verité scenes they had captured fully translated and transcribed. That meant that I was able to see the words that were said transcribed as subtitles as well as their English translations in the frame. I tried to string out interview portions I thought were relevant in this way. Of course there was quite a bit of fine-tuning and adjustment required by Ceyda Torun, who is the director of the film and fluent in Turkish.

HULLFISH: So are you saying the actual video files had translations on them?

STOEBE: Yes we had a small army of people going through all of the interviews, and verité scenes, translating and transcribing them. So I would have a subtitle of the transcription of what was being said. And then underneath it a translation of that same text. So I could pinpoint which sentence means what and make selects that way.

HULLFISH: So, it wasn’t just on a text file.

STOEBE: We did have text files but we also had it was on screen which I thought was very useful to be able to get a sense of what was said and see the expression on the subjects face during the interview. There were also quite a few verite scenes that were translated and transcribed in the same way. It must have been about fifty or so hours total which was a considerable amount of work in the overall scope of the post production process.

HULLFISH: And was that something that your Assistant Editors handled?

STOEBE: Yes, that was one of the technical issues to figure out before we could get started with editing. The producers had decided to use a software called InqScribe. It lets you timecode the translation and transcription and turn the finished document into an XML which places the text back into the timeline at the correct positions.

HULLFISH: I’ve used Inqscribe in the past. It’s nice because it allows you to type and control the playback of the media without jumping between two programs, like QuickTime Player to control playback. It makes it very fast and there are shortcuts for jumping backwards 8 seconds, which is a perfect amount when transcribing. Now, for many of these interviews, I’m using a software called Speed Scriber. It actually does the transcription for you and then every word in transcription is linked to the audio so if you look at the reading and decide “That isn’t the right word.” you can click on the word and actually hear it to type the correct word.

STOEBE: Oh, that’s fantastic. I’ll have to look that up!

HULLFISH: So you were saying you cut in Final Cut Pro 7?

STOEBE: Yes.

HULLFISH: Was that your last project on FCP7 before switching to Premiere?

STOEBE: It was the last project in Final Cut 7. I was a big fan of FCP7 and had gotten so used to it that I could really just kind of forget about the software aspect and just focus on editing. When I moved to Premiere about two years ago it took a few months to adjust. I have to admit I still think FCP7 was a fantastic editing system and I miss how fast certain tasks were compared to Premiere. But at this stage I have gotten very comfortable with Premiere.

HULLFISH: Tell me a little bit about temp music. There are extended portions which I think are absolutely lovely where there’s no dialogue at all.

STOEBE: The temp music was split up into three different bins. The first was a bin of several temp music pieces from Kira Fontana, the composer on the project to get a sense what certain parts would feel like. The second was a bin of Jazz and World Music. I had come across a jazz musician called Lloyd Miller during the editing process and I fell in love with his work so it was mostly his tracks in that bin. He is a very interesting musician and scholar who plays Middle Eastern instruments in a jazz tradition, he can play about a hundred of them.  One of his tracks on the album titled ‘Oriental Jazz’ felt perfect for Kedi, especially as an introduction to the cat called Psycho which pivots from being poetic and observational into showing the badass nature of the cat.

The third bin contained mostly Turkish pop tracks from the 70s and 80s. The director Ceyda had very specific ideas on how and where to use those tracks as the lyrics complement the story at points.

HULLFISH: I want to talk about the structure of the movie and – I could be wrong about this but – it seemed like to me that the structure was kind of you followed one specific cat for a while and told that one cat’s story and then there was kind of a general cat section and then another specific cat’s story.

STOEBE: That’s exactly how we approached it. The producers had identified about 35 cats and stories they considered capturing. At the beginning of the shoot that number was cut to 19. Out of those we edited about ten stories at the rough cut stage and seven made it into the final film. After we completed rough cuts for individual cat stories we tried to figure out out how they would sequence best and what would be the material linking various stories. We thought of a graphic approach using a ‘red thread’ type of device to link various neighborhoods and creating a journey that way. We considered animation. In the end we decided on aerial photography to give a stronger sense of the city as a character. The edit itself was very much like a sculpting process – we kept reducing the footage further and further trying to identify the core of each story. It’s not the fastest route towards a final result but for a partially observational film like Kedi it is the only way to do the material justice. The emotional peaks and valleys of the film were not very extreme which meant that attention to detail was even more essential. The only way to find brief but fun or charming moments is to go through all the material several times.

HULLFISH: Were you cutting while they were shooting?

STOEBE: Yes and no. The production team returned from Istanbul with about 180 hours of footage shot on various cameras. It was then all organized and transcoded to Apple ProRes HQ which was the format we edited in. Ceyda, the director had to take a break from visiting the editing room as her and her husband Charlie were having a baby daughter. It meant that I would have a good amount of time with the material to get familiar with each story. I used that period to create selects reels for each feature cat which we kept screening to find the core of each story. After that I began assembling rough cuts for each featured feline as well as string-outs of all the interviews. This whole process took about three months from start to finish. Once we had all our elements in place we began thinking about a structure for the overall film. It was a lot of trial and error.  Over the following three months or so we worked on 33 different assemblies of these elements and built many, many versions of transitions between them. At this point we had also decided that we wanted to use aerials in addition to material from the random cats and Istanbul bins to connect the individual stories. So over a period of a few months we periodically received aerial footage and cut that into the film.

After the 33 assemblies resulted in a structure we liked, we spent another month or so until we locked picture. So it was a process that took about ten months in total.

HULLFISH: The thing I noticed was there was two cats in restaurant areas and those were very much separated and then there were two kind of artist stories and those were separated from each other and there were kind of let’s feed a million cats stories and those were separated.

  STOEBE: (Laughter) Yes that’s very well observed. We knew that certain cats linked really well together but others could be moved around more or less freely. We had a few test screenings with friends and colleagues which also helped us decide on a final order. It became clear as we went on that the transition sections were a lot trickier to get right than the cat stories themselves. In hindsight, I think we spent almost more time working on the transition sections as we did on the cat narratives.

HULLFISH: And what was some of the feedback just from your feel of it, or the director’s or from screening audiences? What were some of the notes that affected that sequence?

STOEBE: For example the first cat – which was called ‘Yellow Shit’ during the edit because that’s what some of the people around her called her, mostly because she was stealing food from them all the time – used to appear at a later point in the film. Eventually we moved her to the front because she was just such a strong introduction to the city and the film in general. We also tightened some sections considerably to keep the film moving along.

This is the cat known as Yellow Sh*t

HULLFISH: That’s a great example that a specific cat with a strong point of view leads off and that we need to pace our introduction of a lot of cats.

STOEBE: Please excuse my answers. English is not my first language. I always claim E.S.L. as my defense. (Laughter)

HULLFISH: Your English is excellent. You are Austrian?

STOEBE: I’m Austrian, yes.

HULLFISH: But you lived in London

STOEBE: Yes, I spent seven years in London, two years of those to follow a masters program in design and filmmaking. I love the city but eventually I think I wasn’t the right fit so moved back to Los Angeles where I had been living since I was a teenager.

HULLFISH: In your editing, you mixed it up quite a bit, but mostly you did not play the opening lines of a new speaker on the speaker in sync, on camera. You almost always wait sometimes 30 to 40 seconds before you actually see person speaking. Tell me a little bit about that.

STOEBE: The interviews were treated different than in other films, people were very much not the main characters and the interviews needed to feel like they were happening in the moment. Some of the people that speak are never shown on screen so the focus of the film is really on the city and the cats, and people are just on the sidelines. That is also we chose not to include lower thirds. This helps the audience to just kind of take in the atmosphere and stay in a more observational mode.

HULLFISH: One of the things I love is that you get a sense of the journey of these cats and a real story taking place. I’m guessing that the sense of journey or story had to be completely constructed. There is a cat in the restaurant that ends up kind of chasing a rat and I’m assuming the story had to be constructed from non-linear footage… out of sequence and non-chronological.

STOEBE: There is a bit of construction in that but not too much. It’s mostly compressing time and showing something that happened ten times only once. The scene in the sewer that you see in the film is pretty much how things actually happened. One thing I certainly learned about cats during the editing of this film is that they patiently sit around and wait a lot. And observe…or just relax. Then they act quickly… before you know it everything is over again. I’m sure this is quite obvious to anyone who has ever edited nature documentaries but it was new to me.

HULLFISH: There are also other really nice sequences of cats going some place where you get the impression that the cat has this idea to do something then sets off with the camera crew in tow.

STOEBE: That’s pretty much what they did. One of my favorite cat stories is that of Gamsiz, the black and white male cat hanging out at the bakery that fights the ginger cat. He did have this elaborate route which he would embark on multiple times every day. He would climb up on a tree, jump to a ledge and up to a balcony and try to get into an apartment where he would frequently be fed. It took the director and her crew quite a bit of time to figure out where he was going and how he was getting where he did. Once they knew the route they were able to capture events from multiple cameras.

I also think that some of the cats took a liking to the camera and literally performed for it.

HULLFISH:  Got it. Talk to me about organizing your footage and what were some of the ways you organized it. I was thinking it would be organized per cat…

STOEBE: That’s exactly right: per cat.

HULLFISH: Then random cats and then you also probably have all this atmospheric footage of the city and then the interviews?

STOEBE: Exactly you are pretty much saying the way I named the bins! We had one bin for the individual ‘star’ cats and then a bin for random cats. Additionally,  we had a folder for city shots and a folder for all the slow motion footage which was filmed on the Red Camera. The the organization was pretty much: City, random cats, and individual stories as well as interviews.

HULLFISH: Let’s talk about the decisions of when to have music come in and when to stop it and what to play “dry.”

STOEBE: Basically we were trying to have a signature piece of music to introduce the feature cats and selected a mix of jazz and Turkish hits from the 70s and 80s.

HULLFISH:  As a non-Turkish person I liked those, too. I called it “pop” music. I was going to ask you about the pop music.

STOEBE: Yes, it’s Turkish pop from the 70s (laughter) which I really fell in love with too. The lyrics relate to what is happening on screen as well, which is something you will only get if you’re a Turkish speaker unfortunately, because we decided not to translate the lyrics. But to answer your question, yes we very much tried consciously to let the sound of the city come to the foreground at times. For example during the section with the cat at the waterfront restaurant, we wanted create an interaction between the cat and the fishermen through sound. The cat was listening to the sound of fish being gutted which sparks her interest and kicks her into action.

HULLFISH: There is a section about a cat in one of the shopping bazaars and the cat, you almost think it’s dead for a while then you find out it’s just sick. Then you follow that with a sequence in a cemetery. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

STOEBE: They were interviewing this man who was caring for all the cats who live in a neighborhood market. While they were interviewing him, a friend of his came up with a kitten who had been attacked by an older feline and he stopped the interview and rushed this poor little fellow to the vet. We actually don’t know if it lived or died or what happened with it. That was one story. In addition to that, we had a couple of interviews which contained portions that deal with loss. First, a very interesting woman who was basically a kind of hoarder of all kinds of decorations and artifacts. She also hoarded mostly injured or sick cats and she talked about her difficulty dealing with death, not being able to let go of something and the pain and longing it caused. Her interview was very philosophical and kind of pensive. Second, we had an interview with a well known local comic artist who talked about growing up with cats and what it would teach him about death and about loss because the cats would get run over or just die and that was a way of for him to be able to come to terms with that. His energy on screen was very different from the other two, he was very funny and witty. So as we went about sculpting the footage down this sequence materialized: market drama to melancholic woman to quirky artist. This sequence allowed us to bring a balanced approach to a topic like death and loss. I think these sort of discoveries in the editing room are what I like most about working on documentary films. It’s like a puzzle finally coming together and when it falls into place it presents a new image, a new story that you couldn’t really have planned out at the start or thought up while shooting.

HULLFISH: There are also a couple of really nice moments where you really were able to develop some conflict. Especially cats that didn’t like each other or fought and then there was a cat that had a little box where it was keeping kittens. It was protecting its kittens and another cat came up and the momma cat was worried about it, so I liked some of those conflict moments. Talk about creating a conflict with cats.

STOEBE:  You probably have heard cats fight but I had never seen what actually happens. There is a lot of screaming and lengthy posturing involved with very short bursts of action. Here again we had to condense time drastically. Some of the conflicts you see played out over a number of days. We had a lot of really great material for the scene at the warehouse so it was possible to illustrate the POV of a cat entering a warehouse through a gap beneath the door and sneaking up to another cat with her kittens. Trying to capture the POV of cats roaming the city, cinematographers Charlie Wupperman and Alp Korfali developed what they called a “cat-cam” which was a rig that allowed them to move the camera close to the ground. They had also experimented with cameras mounted on RC cars, but it wasn’t as effective as the handheld rig because it scared the felines.

HULLFISH: With any documentary with animals you’ve gotta condense time and build a story from disjointed parts – especially with animals.

STOEBE: That’s absolutely true. There is a whole lot of scratching and cleaning and waiting. I think the challenge sometimes is to find key moments when the animal makes a decision to act a certain way. You kind of have to try to start thinking like the animal a bit.

HULLFISH: You ended up with seven “hero” cats in the movie that I saw. How many actual stories did you end up cutting together fairly completely? Just seven? Or more?

STOEBE: I edited ten full stories together and we ended up dropping three of them. There were also many short observational stories that are now part of the transitions.

HULLFISH: And how do you decide how to end it?

STOEBE: As with all documentaries I have worked on so far, editing an opening and an ending are by far the most difficult tasks and usually happen late in the process. It was the same with Kedi, we were struggling with the question for a while, how do we end this film. During one of our discussions about structure, the idea came up to re-visit each cat and take you back to each location and cat you have seen which is the approach we eventually took.

We also worked on various versions of an opening which was quite challenging. What did we want this film to be? Should it provide historical and scientific context about the relationship between people and felines in the region? Should we talk about politics, ruthless urban development and the Ghezi Park protests? We came to the conclusion to create an observational and visual poem interwoven with thoughts and stories about the evolving relationship between cats and humans in this ancient city. A tribute to these incredibly fascinating animals living in Istanbul and to leave politics and science largely out of it. I think once we had tackled the opening and especially the ending we really saw the full shape of the film and it began to make sense as a whole versus a collection of stories.

HULLFISH: I loved it. Was that wrap up with the boat and the final shot of the cat on the roof something that you found in what they had already shot, or something you requested that they go get?

STOEBE: The director and the cinematographer had done a couple of trips to Istanbul. The first was a scout to see what sort of stories they would be able to capture. The shot on the roof was captured during that first trip. I believe that they tried to find the cat again during the main production but that it had disappeared so it didn’t become a full story. As for the shot, it was perfect as it visually sums up the film: the cat overlooking its city at the end of a beautiful day.

HULLFISH: What’s your approach to putting these sections together from the raw footage?

STOEBE: I would have a bin of a specific part of town with random cats, and I would just lay out all the shots in the timeline in sequence and then make selects, pulling up the portions of shots that I like, keeping it in the timeline but just pulling up that little section one track higher. This would allow me to scroll through the entire timeline and the shots would stay in sync. I guess that could be considered somewhat old school but I always like that approach better than using markers. (laughter) After pulling up selects I could easily go back and see where I had chosen things and how long the shots were. I kind of created a star rating system by pulling better shots higher up. So for exmaple V1 would contain all the raw material, V2 one star material and V3 two star material which I considered best.

HULLFISH: That way stuff stays in chronological order no matter its rating.

STOEBE: Exactly. That’s especially important if the cat is moving somewhere, because you know what happened before or after, and also you can see where you chose the bit from and you can quickly go back to find things around there saving you from having to open multiple shots from the browser window.

HULLFISH: I also really loved the sound design.

STOEBE: Istanbul itself is full of amazing sound. We tried add in as many elements as possible during the edit to convey that. After we locked picture, sound designer Paul Hollman added more layers and details. Roaming through Istanbul one experiences this beautiful tapestry of sounds and I hope that we managed to transport some of that into the final film.

HULLFISH: Thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed finding out more about this documentary.

STOEBE: Thank you so much for including me in your series of interviews. It’s been a pleasure to share a bit more information about how Kedi came together in the editing room.

To read more interviews in the Art of the Cut series, check out THIS LINK and follow me on Twitter @stevehullfish

The first 50 Art of the Cut interviews have been curated into a book, “Art of the Cut: Conversations with Film and TV editors.” The book is not merely a collection of interviews, but was edited into topics that read like a massive, virtual roundtable discussion of some of the most important topics to editors everywhere: storytelling, pacing, rhythm, collaboration with directors, approach to a scene and more. Oscar nominee, Dody Dorn, ACE, said of the book: “Congratulations on putting together such a wonderful book.  I can see why so many editors enjoy talking with you.  The depth and insightfulness of your questions makes the answers so much more interesting than the garden variety interview.  It is truly a wonderful resource for anyone who is in love with or fascinated by the alchemy of editing.”

Thanks to Moviola’s Renard Beavers for transcribing this interview.

      The post AOTC with editor of the documentary “KEDI” appeared first on ProVideo Coalition.

First Found At: AOTC with editor of the documentary “KEDI”