#NEGATIVES

[zegalba]

Tina Rowe: "Oyster Shell Ghosts" (2019)

Photographer Tina Rowe printed a series of found negatives on discarded oyster shells, breathing new meaning into forgotten items. Each shell is first subbed, to help the emulsion adhere to the surface. They are then coated with multiple layers of customised photographic emulsion.

[archivedotorgfan]

The photographs in this collection are of the women at the Los Angeles Gay Community Service Center's (GCSC) "Lesbian House," as well as friends and allies, between 1972 and 1973.

by bee ottinger for her thesis project, 1970s.

[virtualboypsd]

some of my film rolls (Kodak Gold 200, Kodak Ultramax 400, Kodak Colorplus 200 & Kentmere 100)

[chemnections]

https://twitter.com/sbeangreen/status/1715492445008310394?s=61&t=-FAQ0Hbbr4pzBYaZof040A

man, bleak but i really like it, it’s probably the most accurate perception i’ve heard about what it’s like to live through a successful mainstream album.

the black parade was a rough time for the band from it’s creation to it’s finish - i like his point of mcr being a very different band within a span of a year.

will definitely need to chew on this more, it’s a lot to take in. so much stands out like the point of people’s different realities. and the getting help for mental health but getting the wrong help which was just as greatly detrimental. feels relevant for today. but i also love that he wrote this on the way either to or from the europe tour, he is all about the music and it emphasizes the difficulties of the music industry not necessarily the music itself.

[aswrm]

My Chemical Romance in ‘Negatives’ by Amy Fleisher Madden

transcript/ID below the cut

My Chemical Romance

Est. 2001

Belleville, NJ / Kearney, NJ

You can't discuss emo now without mentioning My Chemical Romance, but the early days of the band were fraught with unintentional mystery.

There were rumors that it was a side project of the already established band Thursday, that they were vampires, that they were a death metal band. Only some of those rumors were true or. maybe partly true. What was definitely true, however, was that after releasing an ambitious first album that felt like an emotional hybrid of Ink & Dagger and the Murder City Devils, as well as signing to a major label, the band was on the tip of every scenester's tongue. At the time, it was noted that there was this palpable feeling that something big was going to happen. What no one knew was just how big, and that this band would break out globally and achieve rock star status around the world.

In 2004, when the video for "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)" was released, there were so many emotions and even more opinions. Some took the stance that this was emo exploitation; others celebrated that the music that had been bubbling up for years had finally broken into the mainstream. At first the band rejected the emo label, but after years of their fans waving the emo banner all over the place (and in their faces), they accepted it and gave into the title of reigning champs of third wave emo.

Regardless of which side you were on, My Chemical Romance's success was big. Big, like your parents who had never understood the kind of music you listened to (or why your hair or pants looked the way they did) could now see it front and center on the cover of Rolling Stone, kind of big. And to say

that the band and their music changed the scene forever would be accurate. Some of the polarizing attributes of third wave emo that tend to agitate die-hard first and second wave fans were made abundantly popular by this band and their fans-and often the outright popularity of the band infuriated other emo fans who tend to gate-keep.

You can't have it both ways, though. You can't only want certain friends within the scene to be successful, but be upset when others experience that success instead. That's a rough double standard and I can't get down with it.

My Chemical Romance risked everything to be successful and "make it" -and I fucking love and respect them for it. And listen, it is impossible for me to decide whether I love Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge or The Black Parade more, so please don't make me choose a favorite. Numerically speaking, My Chemical Romance is not the biggest emo band of all time.

That honor is currently reserved for Fall Out Boy.

But in my opinion, they are the most influential third wave emo band. It's no surprise to see Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas, citing them as one of their greatest influences. No other band has had such an indelible impact on pop culture, the scene, and the future waves of emo.

[photo id: black and white photo of gerard. they’re bending forwards and singing into a microphone. they’re wearing a leather jacket, black tshirt and jeans]

[photo id: the whole band. L-R: frank, ray, otter, mikey, gerard.]

[onemillennia]

[fragrantblossoms]

Paul Haviland.  Mlle Aliki Biplaracares, c.1928.

[a-glitching-disaster]

The Astral Man by Sascha Schneider / 1903 🕺🏿

Society6 // Instagram

[zegalba]

Isabella Anderson by Pegah Farahmand (2020)

[childish-gambeard0]

Hey y’all so I kind of went into the negatives this time around. The first time in a long time, and I may need a tad bit of help, until I get Friday. If you can help in anyway that would be fantastic.

$Childishgambeardo is my cashapp. Or if you can help with Zelle as well, just message me for that. Thank you in advance if you can help.

[life-without-meaning]

1996/97/98/99.

[prismatic-skies]

This one I worked on right before bed adding sooooooo many effn layers

I’m teaching myself audio and sound effects, so I’m more practicing. I want to get better at it!

I’ll probably edit this audio

[chemnections]

i am excited to read what he wrote for it! negatives . . .

also appreciating that the reason gerard isn’t tagged because he turn his tags off after frank tagged him as the unibomber in toronto.

[aswrm]

Geoff Rickly in ‘Negatives’ by Amy Fleisher Madden

Transcript below

An Introduction to the Third Wave

Geoff Rickly

Thursday / No Devotion / United Nations

Everything is hardcore. Snapcase is hardcore.

Obviously. Strife and Chain of Strength and Bad Brains are hardcore. Sick of It All is hardcore, and they're from New York, so they spell it NYHC.

Shelter is hardcore and 108 is hardcore, and they're both Krishna, which means people call them Krishnacore. Earth Crisis and SSD are hardcore, but they don't do drugs; straight-edge hardcore.

There are so many little signifiers in place to help people know what's up, but each one of these bands does actually have something in common: They are all hard as nails. They're hardcore.

It was the mid-'90s. I'd moved out of the dorms at Rutgers and into a house on Somerset Street with my old roommate, Clay, and my new housemate, Louis. We were a good twenty-minute walk from campus, but the house was weirdly small on the inside; it got bad light. But it had a big basement.

Big enough to have shows in. Hardcore shows.

Luckily, by the mid-'90s, hardcore was everything, and everything was hardcore.

Converge was hardcore-full of guitars and drums that sounded like broken glass in a blender. But so was Rainer Maria, with twinkling clean guitars and dual vocals whispering and shouting in a joyous conversation. So were Ink & Dagger, in their corpse paint, smashing Aphex Twin electronics into Black Flag riffs. Fugazi was hardcore with a rhythm section that sounded like James Brown and a no-slam-dancing policy. Texas Is the Reason had twangy vocals and the most beautiful guitar parts that anyone had ever heard, and they were fucking hardcore-with the pedigree to prove it. They were one of the groups that inspired the latest wave of bands who were all playing shows in our basement, and in other basements like ours all over America: The Get Up Kids, The Promise Ring. Jimmy Eat World. They were all catchy and sweet, and full of youthful innocence. And they were all hardcore, too. Everything was. The basement show was like an Olive Garden:

If you were there, you were family-you were hardcore.

But holy shit, did we love to tease those bands— "You guys are so emotional, you're so fucking emo." Stick a tap in them and let the tears flow. That's all emo was to us: a taunt, a ribbing, a genre label that had never really stuck. I remember seeing Fugazi in the early '90s and someone yelled at lan MacKaye, "You are so emo!" His reply was simple and seemed to shut down the label forever. He said, "Emo Philips?" —forcing the crowd to think of the awkward comedian, with his strange bob haircut.

So, years later, when we had a great young hardcore band from Princeton play in our basement, we shouted at them, "Oh my god, Saves the Day are so emo." Their singer, Chris, acknowledged it dryly: "Boo hoo." Or that time when At the Drive-In destroyed the Melody Bar in front of a crowd of five people. I told them, "That was so good, I could have cried. but I didn't want anyone to thinkI was emo."

We didn't know we were already part of it. A joke or not, we were already emo. When we started Thursday, we thought we were just another hardcore band in the wave of hardcore bands that we looked up to: Saetia, You and I, Usurp Synapse, Orchid, Reversal of Man, The Locust, Charles Bronson.

Our friends. Our heroes. We were playing the same basements and VFW halls. We were buying the same vans and using the same dialers to get free calls on pay phones. We didn't know that, even as our own band took off, we were already emo, and we were about to be part of something new.

After Full Collapse came out on Victory Records-a very hardcore label —we spent a lot of time tracing the footsteps of all those who d come before. We played to five or ten people a night, occasionally landing a festival where we'd do anything to get people to stick around. "Yeah, we have a three-way split with Joy Division and Swing Kids, but we're sold out of them right now... Still, we're playing after Dragbody if you've got the time to watch us."

Then Saves the Day offered us a spot opening for them on a national tour. Our friend Dan from the band Joshua explained to us that Saves the Day was the biggest band in hardcore. They'd hit the indie glass ceiling-they'd sold 100,000 records without being on a major label. We took the tour - first of four in front of 1,000 people every night-and something clicked. The very next tour we went out on, we were the headliner, and it was entirely sold out before we even left home. Something was happening. We broke through the 100,000 record glass ceiling, shooting to 400,000 records. All our friends were right behind us, in the next couple years, hitting a million records sold and more.

The press has always been a little tone deaf, and they'd already been using the term emo for years, so they tried to find something new and catchy for this rapidly developing phenomenon. They tried screamo, except not everyone was screaming- and the bands hated it. Emocore, except that term somehow sounded even wimpier than just emo-and the bands hated it. They even tried the term xtremo, and tried to line us up to play X Games-type events, with cans of Mountain Dew stacked on our amps, but the sponsors weren't sure about the crossover appeal-and the bands hated it.

[photo id: geoff leaning back into the crowd. he is shouting, with one arm raised above/behind his head and crowd members’ arms round his torso]

In the middle of all this, I had the chance to produce the first album from a scrappy bunch of hard. core kids who loved Placebo and Queen and comic books. They were called My Chemical Romance, and by their second record, they would solidify something that had been becoming apparent for the last couple of years: The 2000s were the decade of emo. It was everywhere. It was fashion and TV and billboards. It was celebrity. It was gossip.

And when money gets involved, things can quickly go to shit. Emo got increasingly commercial. It was codified. It was slick. It had songwriters and mega producers. It had A-listers directing music videos.

The only thing it lacked was sincere emotion. The feeling was gone. A pretty tough break for a genre called emo.

By the 2010s, being emo was about the uncoolest thing in the world. The heavy hitters started breaking up. Not just the early torchbearers like us or our West Coast buds, Thrice, but the big guns, too.

My Chemical Romance called it quits, and suddenly bands started dropping likeflies. Pop singers dropped the emo haircuts. Things cooled off.

But then, half a decade later, something strange started to happen. The young kids began to go back to the roots of the genre, appreciating the earnest sincerity and adventurous musicality that made emo break out in the first place. The Hotelier, Teen Suicide, The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, Joyce Manor, Hop Along-these bands brought emo out of the boardroom and back into the basement, bashing away at a glorious noise until the world started to notice. This

"emo revival" was actually the birth of something new. It inspired Thursday to start playing again, and it inspired so many of our peers to do the same.

We've gotten the opportunity to see this thing that we gave our hearts to through newer, purer eyes.

Watching Pianos Become the Teeth and Title Fight and Touché Amoré burn with passionate intensity has reignited our fire. Seeing these photos, through Amy's eyes- seeing the vitality that has always been there-is much the same. It's changed everything, allowing us to restore a true relationship to our past work.

Recently, I had the opportunity to stand on stage with Thursday and watch a sea of kids scream along to these words from "War All The Time":

All those nights in the basement,

The kids are still screaming

On and on and on and on and ...

And it was pretty hardcore-emotionally speaking.

[spockvarietyhour]

Ghostbusters negatives and stills (1984)

Went ahead and inverted the negatives below: