#all american rejects was the first band to introduce my to alternative culture

[kholb2010]

I love tjis album so much i need it as a cd to listen to on the bus

[manifestopaulo]

A History through Vinyl

Back in the day, in my earliest recollections of music, there is one vivid memory that stands out. As I sat in front of the television, a mesmerising figure appeared before my eyes. It was Afrika Bambaata, a man who seemed to have descended from another galaxy and exuded an aura of a space age prophet. It was in that moment, watching Bambaata on the full technicolour TV during the 80s, that my young mind began to grasp that we was living in a remarkable future.

Then a peculiar anachronism unfolded before my very eyes, and it was somewhat linked to my brother's unexpected shift in music preference, taking a step back in time.

During the early years of the 1980s, my brother and his group of friends found themselves deeply immersed in the captivating allure of the American street culture, indulging in the realms of hip hop, break dancing, and graffiti art. 

However, at some juncture, my brother's musical taste took a surprising turn as he began to amass a collection of vinyl records featuring classic rock and older music, appearing to defy the contemporary norms of the era.

I vividly recall the first sign of this peculiar transformation when he made the decision to revamp our shared bedroom. One by one, he adorned the walls with meticulously placed postcards displaying revered album covers and legendary artists, turning our room into a gallery of icons like Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and films like Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange."

It was as if a mesmerising time warp had taken hold of my brother's taste, leading him towards older rock and genres. Among his favorites were Pink Floyd, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix and The Who. 

In London the emergence of a new growing hip taste marked a significant departure from mainstream trends. It was an era where I personally witnessed the transformative power of music in shaping one's identity and taste. This phenomenon introduced me to the concept of the 'teenage thing', where an individual's music preferences underwent a dramatic shift.

The rise of this phenomenon signified not only a desire to be part of a particular sub-culture, but also a yearning to explore styles that deviated from the mainstream. Previously, there had been a noticeable shift towards a glamorous and materialistic society which had its attendant hoi-polloi with their conformist tendencies. However, this emerging movement manifested as a distinct alternative scene, fiercely rejected this.

Simultaneously, this movement was regarded as more upwardly mobile, emphasising the importance of intellectual astuteness, exclusivity, cultured and literary aspirations like Jack Kerouac becoming significant again. This lofty stance was epitomised by influential figures such as Morrissey from The Smiths, who endorsed a similar worldview.

A new fashion movement evolved and a reciprocal relationship developed between the developments on the streets of London and the trends showcased in influential fashion magazines like The Face and I.D. Magazine, which predominantly focused on the London scene. It is undeniable that my brother wholeheartedly embraced this change. These publications provided an alternative response to the dominant mainstream preferences, such as the 80s soul scene.

Furthermore, the emergence of prominent bands such as The Smiths, U2, and Simple Minds had a significant impact. It is worth noting that punk retained its influence, alongside independent record labels like Rough Trade and the nascent Creation Records, which eventually birthed influential bands such as Primal Scream and Oasis. Alongside these musical influences, the movement was further propelled by its association with iconic fashion styles, all of which played a crucial role in this growing movement. 

This movement eventually paved the way (or gave way to) the explosion of acid house and the indie scene, characterised by a deliberate homage to hippie culture and psychedelic rock, while propelling us forward into the future once again.

During this time, people rebelled against mainstream tastes and this allowed the young people to dictate the trends. Small businesses, subcultures, and independent venues thrived, creating a sense of belonging and community within the movement.

Capitalism and corporations eventually adapted and absorbed these outliers, but for a time, it was a true alternative, made by the people themselves. The impact of this movement would go on to inform the hipster culture of London in recent years, showing the everlasting influence of this unique moment in time.

In conclusion, the peculiar anachronism that unfolded before my eyes, intertwined with my brother's unexpected shift in music preference, was a manifestation of a larger movement that defied contemporary norms. A similar movement happened in the U.S with Heavy Metal & Grunge but with a different emphasis on aspirations. It challenged mainstream tastes, embraced individuality, and paved the way for alternative expressions. This transformative period in music showed that things could move back as well as forward. It shaped and formed the identities not just of individuals but of the city of London for years to come.

[superchartisland]

Super Mario All Stars (Nintendo, SNES, 1993)

Any overall roadmap for this project (and my brother’s related predecessor) is very lightly sketched, but this is a useful point to reflect on it. We grew up playing Dizzy games; part of what we’re doing is trying to reclaim video game history as we and many other Brits lived it, to demonstrate how the American-led received wisdom is a rewriting of the record. All of my research suggests that we were in the majority there -- in the UK the NES didn’t get a look in, and we’re not going to properly encounter the Game Boy until it’s a decade old.

Even this first Nintendo direct encounter is somewhat of a guess. Super Mario All Stars was a documented best-seller for the SNES, but in an absence of evidence I don’t know for sure that it was big enough to be an overall UK #1. I remember hearing about it a lot at the time, and by then the SNES had had a chance to build an audience, but remember that this blog covers games which were a #1 but not necessarily always the #1. Yet at the same time as I refute the story that Nintendo swept in to replace a dying industry -- neither happened like that in the UK -- we’re pretty keen on many things Nintendo. I have a NES Classic Mini, SNES Classic Mini and a Famicom Classic Mini sitting under my TV: loving recreations of consoles which I never owned.

In the internet era, this kind of adoption of history is probably more common. When I wrote the first version of this post I had recently watched the period piece music video for Satellite Young’s “Don’t Graduate, Senpai!” and was overwhelmed with contented nostalgic feelings, left with the power of a glimpse into a familiar and loved past. All that despite the fact I’ve hardly ever listened to the Japanese genre that it takes after, City Pop, or watched shoujo anime, and never when I was growing up. The person who it is precision targeting isn’t me. But it needn't be. There can be a feeling that is just as real, but second hand, a gravity exerted on adjacent culture that was invisible until something made me look over and notice its force.

There are lots of ways that the influences on the song and video reached me. My partner did grow up with a lot of Japanese pop culture in Hong Kong, and talking with her about that and having watched a couple of episodes of Creamy Mami means having a feel for her fond memories. I have years of happily browsing tumblr gifsets of Sailor Moon, absorbing love for it and its place in culture. I can still get good use from a “but you didn’t do anything!” meme even if I’ve never actually watched the show. I’ve listened to 80s referencing music elsewhere, and modern Japanese music taking cues from City Pop, and that has added up to giving the sounds of the song a similar personal gravity.

And all of that has been made easier by the world getting smaller, by the internet giving providing an easy route to interests you share with people elsewhere in the world and from there to interests they share that you don’t. Look at it negatively, and it means a winning narrative can travel faster and become more comprehensive than ever, reaching into places where it doesn’t belong. But at the same time, it gives us a Japanese band and some Swedish animators uniting in their shared nostalgia, and it reaching out to me through next door culture which I’ve taken in via friends from all round the world, and me having feelings shared with those friends. That’s an amazing thing.

In common with most people I knew, we didn’t have the internet when Super Mario All Stars came out, and the world was still huge. Nintendo had other tools to work with, though. Their games were successful enough to reach out and have an outsized cultural impact beyond the limits of people actually playing them. 

When I started primary school, before football stickers, there was a craze for Nintendo sticker books, and friends and I collected images of all of their games. People tried to negotiate enhanced swaps for stickers of Game Boy screenshots by maintaining that they were gold stickers, even more valuable than the special silver ones. I knew more about the characters and background for Mario through Saturday morning cartoons, and I remember watching American TV programmes where people competed through playing Super Mario Bros. levels. I assume it made it to the UK’s own Gamesmaster at some point too. And of course, many of the European games we were playing took their own influence from Nintendo. I may have been unaware of Metroid until years later, but hours spent playing Turrican still gave my first impressions of it that nostalgic gravity.

Mario was Nintendo’s most successful reach out to the wider culture, and that wider culture drove people back to Mario’s original form. That could work better for Nintendo if Mario games were easier to access, and so we get Super Mario All Stars. What to do when moving on from the NES to the SNES? Reissue, repackage, re-evaluate the games! Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, and Super Mario Bros. 3, now brought together in one place. With an extra track, no less, in the form of Japan’s very different Super Mario Bros. 2, new to the rest of the world and hence called The Lost Levels. From 2019 the very idea of levels being lost feels faintly absurd – someone will dig it out in a mod, or you can just log onto your alternate Japanese online console account, surely? I guess a handful of British people probably did own imported Famicoms even in 1993, but everyone else got their cross-fertilisation of culture mediated by Nintendo’s eccentric international release schedule. 

Super Mario All Stars presents each game in its entirety, complete with newly upgraded graphics. Yet, in some way, the games seem to shrink in the transition. The act of selecting a game to play from a menu, turning them into pinned specimens labelled by year, emphasises the overall history and starts you off with a reminder that each world is only a part of a newly defined whole. Maybe that's why there is no Super Mario All Stars on the SNES Classic Mini, an assessment that the bird-inside-a-bird effect of featuring a retro collection on a retro collection would be that bit too spookily recursive. 

And that idea of recursion is where the realisation struck me as I played Super Mario All Stars. It wasn't the first version of Mario I played, (it was the first Super Mario Bros. 3 that I ever played, though, the briefest of enchanting glimpses). But it feels absolutely right as my version of these games, even for Super Mario Bros. 2 where I'm pretty sure I'd never played this version before. The very sense of diminished scale, the way that All Stars exists as a Mario game aware that not only each individual game, but the games as a whole, are but a small part of the Mario out there in the world, feels totally fitting. The feeling runs through everything. The upscaled renditions of the music which expand on it but nonetheless can't escape how iconic the basic originals were. The decision to put Super Mario Bros.’ underwater waltz on the title screen with the new confidence that duh, it rules. The little portraits of what to expect that have been added to the start of each level, not spoilers but cute reminders. This is a Mario for the late to the party, an artefact of the games' immense second hand cultural gravity, reflected back into the games themselves. It's a sign of so much to come.

In reflection of it being the first time these games have come up on my route through history, here are miniature entries for each of the four games on Super Mario All Stars, pinned to one place:

Super Mario Bros.

It’s all about the movement. Specifically, the jump, the balletic means of progression which sits at the tempting boundary of predictability and control. It is not the only game jump, it was not the first game jump, but it is somehow still the Jump. When you press the jump button the moment stretches in time, a repeated joy that resounds slightly differently from Jump to Jump. Sometimes the Jump is relaxed, sometimes the Jump is tense, sometimes the Jump is a celebration of achievement. Gravity and momentum make their claim on you, and you must not reject them or bow to them, but turn towards them, take their hands, and dance. Only when you are the lead in the dance can it proceed in its full majesty. All of the subtle design, killer music and cleverly revealed secrets play their part too, of course. The richness of the world, day and night, water and dungeon, clouds and green groundclouds, isn’t to be underestimated. The dance wouldn’t be as kaleidoscopically beautiful without all of that. Fireworks might not always be necessary, but they are still fireworks. And yet it is the dance of the Jump that gives meaning to it all.

The Lost Levels

It’s common in games for many a character or object to be accompanied by its inverse, its mirror, its shadow. Maybe it’s a product of how games are made, were made, of the commonality of repetition and the short distance from repetition to repetition with a twist. Super Mario Bros. 2 (“The Lost Levels”) introduces one such shadow as almost its first move with the poison mushroom, power-up turned to power-down. It takes that to a whole new level with the negative warp zones: welcome to warp zone, now a trick on you. The whole game, in fact, is a cruel mirror held up to Super Mario Bros., a reflection that looks right but doesn’t wave back. Much of its cruelty comes from luring players into familiar actions and then turning them back against them. This game is a dance too, but it’s one where the floor is trying to throw you off, where the steps and flow that you have learned are not only impossible to use but will quicken your downfall. But for some people who already know the dance back to front, perhaps trying to freestyle your way through some spiky math-rock is an enjoyable next step.

Super Mario Bros. 2

It’s common in games for many a character or object to be accompanied by its inverse, its mirror, its shadow. Maybe it’s a product of how games are made, were made, of the commonality of repetition and the short distance from repetition to repetition with a twist. Super Mario Bros. 2 (“Super Mario Bros. USA”) is the Waluigi of early Mario games, a mirror of a mirror. It doesn’t focus on the shadows of objects and characters, though, but whole shadow worlds. Pick up a magical potion and you can open a door anywhere, take a subtle knife to the fabric of the universe, walk through the doorway and find yourself literally in shadow. Even outside of that mechanic, there are doors everywhere, and each one could go anywhere. This is the world of the subconsciousness, where possibilities extend to such things as a playable princess and gliding across the world on a gravity-resistant egg. Super Mario Bros. 2 is barely even a Mario game, and handles more awkwardly than one. Yet among all of its doors, it opens one to one of the series’s futures, platforming which is first and foremost a series of puzzles and doors to unlock.

Super Mario Bros. 3

This is the game where Mario learns to fly, tail flapping, on unseen wires in front of platforms casting shadows on a sky painted on sheets. The game is a show, and it’s some production. It has a cast of thousands and is the introduction point for almost as many iconic series images as the original. Its brilliance as sequel and as theatre is in taking the solid and dependable gameplay and mechanics of the original and using those as building blocks, the platforms of its stageset, then rearranging them. Each world rejigs and relights them and makes them interact with new props and characters for a set of dramatically different scenes. Water levels go from brief distractions to an entire world; the desert and an idyllic grassland emerge; World 7 turns off all of the lights to interact with the bare mechanics of pipes. The transitions between levels feel like curtains down and a chance to move things round. And then occasionally it breaks all the underlying rules and throws you into giant world or climbs up through the clouds, and there is nothing to do but laugh in delight. This is the game where Mario learns to fly. 

SNES chart, Edge 004, January 1994

[dylanreviewsthings]

Take A Trip Back To 2005 With The All-American Rejects' "Move Along"

There are few years that have such a definitive sound like 2005 does. Pop punk collided with alternative rock in all the right ways, giving way to a new culture of emo and high school memories. Anyone in school during this era will know how important the music was to that culture. Perhaps one of the defining bands of the era was The All-American Rejects, a band whose singles truly cemented themselves in the hearts of every teenager from the era. We're taking a trip back to 2005 with The All-American Rejects' Move Along, the album that really brought all of that alt. rock goodness.

The first songs everyone will remember are the singles. Introduced by the big guitar of 'Dirty Little Secret,' which means instant nostalgia. The intro is huge and anthemic, and even if you haven't heard the song in years. It just has that quality to it that is unforgettable and takes you back to a specific place in time. The same is true for the absolute anthem 'Move Along,' its giant chorus never failing to pick you up. The layered vocals in that final chorus are just epic, too. Then there's the slower ballad 'It Ends Tonight' which has a similar effect as 'Dirty Little Secret,' taking you back to a specific time in your life. These songs are part of each of our histories.

The non-singles from the album hold their ground, too. Though admittedly a bit samey, it keeps sight of the sound of the album. 'Stab My Back' just screams 2005, and really captures that alternative sound. Much of the rest of the record follows the same sort of sound and formula, but its a sound that you just can't get sick of. The album ends on a more dramatic note with the orchestrated 'Can't Take It,' a cool, chill, and even emotional ending to the record.

The mid-2000s was a period defined by its music, and The All-American Rejects stood at the center of it. Press play and take a trip back to 2005 with The All-American Rejects' Move Along and prepare for both nostalgia and for the memories to come flooding back.

Favorite Tracks: Move Along, Dirty Little Secret, It Ends Tonight

Least Favorite Track: Change Your Mind

Rating: 75 / 100

Stream or buy Move Along on Apple Music, and follow our 2018 Playlist:

[sanguinarysanguinity]

rabbit & like a bat family, for the ask meme, whichever questions you feel comfortable answering

(Questions)

Like a Bat-Family

(Elementary; Martha & Kitty & Joan & Sherlock; part of Rolling Remix)

1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?

I received my copy of “Like Family” for remixing and groused and whined and cursed its author, because like hell did I see a way into it. The obvious thing would have been to flip the pov to Kitty, but “Like Family” might already have been a pov-flip from whatever came before it and I didn’t want to risk just flipping it back again.

I finally decided on a slumber-party-like variation of the mutual nail-painting, probably featuring Martha. Then once I had Martha and Kitty in the same mental premise, I realized they had probably built some kind of relationship during their mutual time in the brownstone, and thus that Martha should be added to the list of people cheated of a proper good-bye with her. (And not just cheated of a good-bye, but of the entire history of their relationship!) So this became a reunion/closure story for not only Joan-and-Kitty, but also Martha-and-Kitty.

I set it during New Year’s at the brownstone mostly out of cussedness. I’d already remixed a story for the exchange, which meant I knew there was a cluster of NYE stories at the beginning of the chain. I thought it’d be hilarious to re-introduce the New Year’s theme at the tail end of the chain, too, in the hopes that it would mess up some of the guessers.

2: What scene did you first put down?

A scene that no longer exists: Joan on the roof New Year’s morning, ostensibly cleaning up after the party but mostly staring at the river, and being surprised by Kitty’s entrance. The energy was never quite right, somehow, and the whole story stalled there until I switched povs and began over with Martha. However, the scene still indirectly exists in the current version of the story, and the original image of Kitty appearing from nowhere like Batman was the genesis of the Bat-Family motif.

The only part of that now-deleted scene that I was really sad to lose was the color scheme:

[Joan stood at the roof edge, looking out at] the desaturated, wintry grays of the city, contemplating the rough slate of the East River and how it reflected back the platinum sky above.

Happily, I was able to salvage the bones of that description for Nostoi:

Beyond that streak of white, there was nothing but grey all around us: sky and rain and sea-water; iron and silver and slate.

3: What’s your favorite line of narration?

Joan and Sherlock argued silently with each other, a flurry of mulish mouths, jutted jaws, and raised eyebrows.

4: What’s your favorite line of dialogue?

“Alfred,” she whispered, and all three of them cracked up into giggles.

5: What part was hardest to write?

Ugh, gah, cramming in the backstory and off-screen bits. Backstory and flashbacks are always a struggle to incorporate smoothly without overexplaining or messing up the narrative flow, and this story was written so quickly, with so little opportunity for editing… Meh.

6: What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?

My first and only story from the pov of a trans character? More unusually, I didn’t have the time to ask someone who is trans to look it over – that’s usually something that I take care to do when writing a marginalized identity outside of my own experience. But once again, the turn around time was so fast… I hope I did no harm, and I own it if I did.

9: Were there any alternate versions of this fic?

I was going to bring back Joan’s accordion from the first two stories, which – when joined with Kitty’s clarinet and Sherlock’s violin – would be the foundations of a Klezmer band. (Martha would be on drums, because.) When I later saw that someone in the exchange had written a Band AU I kicked myself so hard that I hadn’t done it.

Rabbit

(TSCC; Jesse Flores; 5+1)

1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?

The Terminator franchise centers itself so strongly on Southern California and the Connors, I craved to know what that franchise looks like if you don’t presuppose John Connor as the center of the universe. Further, I am fascinated with the way the timelines fold back on themselves in that franchise, the way Judgement Day is forever shifting, the way futures keep reaching back to rewrite the past-to-be based on whatever has been going on in the current timeline.

A 5+1 seemed a convenient way to explore what successive futures might look like when one is half a world away from the causes, experiencing only the after-effects; it also allowed me to build an argument that John Connor may not always be the single most important person in the future. That is, that there might be futures where other people become more strategically significant.

I also had the very misguided idea that a 5+1 would be a short, simple, and easy structure, and would get me out of having to build and plot a full-blown story. Ha fucking hah.

3: What’s your favorite line of narration?

There are a ton of narrative lines I love, mostly in the final section. But have this one out of the fifth section:

Jesse stared at the farmboy, her gaze flicking to where the dolphins should have been on his chest. Jesus Fucking Christ. A whole crew of nubs. They were running a deathtrap.

4: What’s your favorite line of dialogue?

“You are not a god, Derek. You made choices, I made choices, John Connor made choices. We all made choices. Hell, there’s a twelve-year-old Jesse out there somewhere, making choices. Whether to swim at the leisure centre or swim at the beach. For all you know, the war hinges on the choice she made today.”

Tied with:

“What do you want me to say, that it could have been anyone? That the only reason Skynet went after you—the only reason your family died—is because Goodnow tells a good story and Skynet fell for it?”

Because I have opinions about the Terminator franchise, and how everyone is running around making choices based on stories they were told. Skynet, the Connors, everyone from the future who gets their hands on a time machine, everyone they meet in the past: everyone has heard a story, and now they’re all making choices, and the entire future history of the world is gonna hinge on those choices. Talk about a universe that runs on fucking hearsay and gossip.

But mostly my favorite line is this:

“I’m Jesse!” she screamed at it, to make herself breathe. “I’m Jesse fucking Flores!”

Because Jesse fucking Flores. :-D

5: What part was hardest to write?

All the Australia bits. :-P

@lastwingedthing put in a good chunk of work on this story, correcting language and helping me with geographically appropriate choices for stuff. (That olive tree in the first section began life as a prickly pear, which is invasive in Australia – I wanted an invasive plant for thematic reasons – but it’s invasive in a different part of Australia.) However, the challenge with writing something that will later be Ozpicked (or Britpicked, or whatever) is that it’s not enough to eschew Americanisms in your draft, you have to put in geographically specific stuff, too, otherwise you’ll end up with a bland and non-specific story. And while a generous Ozpicker can and will help with that, you can’t expect them to do the bulk of that work for you.

For an example of what I’m talking about, consider my own The Case of the Six Marmalades against @scfrankles’ The Case of the Deceased Marmalade Thief: they’re nicely matched in terms of fandom, genre, and topic, and I consider Frankles a peer in terms of our respective skill. But notice that Frankles’ use of idiom in her dialog is much, much richer than my own (in part because she really is just that good with voices), but also in part because she’s English, and has a much larger mental catalog of appropriate idiom to select from. In contrast, I’m forever rejecting language as “too American” and then finding I have nothing interesting to replace it with. Consequently, my dialog has a linguistic blandness to it that hers doesn’t. This is the kind of thing I see a lot with American vs. British authors in British fandoms: the British authors have a vibrancy to them that American authors seldom manage to attain.

And this isn’t to run myself down, or to suggest that Six Marmalades is a failure of a story. (It’s not.) It’s simply an illustration of how it is with stories written by outsiders: even if they manage to eschew errors and stereotypes, they often end up with a generic, non-specific blandness that’s difficult to overcome. *shrug emoji* Either you never write outside your own specific cultural context, or you accept that you won’t manage the vibrancy that your story deserves. Choose your poison.

Anyway, back to Rabbit: I had to come up with Australia-specific stuff to put in, but I was starting from near zero. I watched all the Australian post-apoc films I could stomach; I played Australian talk and comedy shows in the background while I did chores; I listened to a series of Australian podcasts for English-language-learners during my commutes; I spent a fuckton of time browsing anAustralian slang dictionary (where I learned more usage via the crowdsourced definitions than in the nominal terms being defined)… Just, trying to pick up idioms and usage and rhythms and words, both to reduce the load on my very generous Ozpicker, but also trying to make sure that when she was done removing my Americanisms, my language didn’t end up blandly generic nowhere. (If nothing else, I could give her possibly-wrong Australian slang that she could correct to something more appropriate, yeah? And she did a bit of that: “yobbos” became “sad bastards,” for example.) So the language was a fair amount of up front work, even with her polishing and fine-tuning it for me.

And getting the Australian bits right was more than just language, of course; there was the usual ton of googling random shit. Who runs public swimming pools, the history and composition of the Australian submarine service, what plants are invasive, imports/exports from Perth… Again, she corrected and fine-tuned a bunch of stuff (and sometimes pointed out issues that I hadn’t thought to question), but there was still a chunk of work involved in giving her something that could be corrected and fine-tuned.

I wanted to set Rabbit in Australia, a place that is distinct from America, and that ultimately was the hardest part of writing the story.

6: What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?

At the time, it was my only fic set in Australia, my only go at action/suspense, my only 5+1, my only “heroine against the world, framedaround a strong central metaphor, ending when the showdown begins in earnest” kind of story structure. I’ve since repeated all of those things, because I wrote this a long time ago, and I’m as repetitive as fuck.

As to what makes it still unique among my stories…

Um…

It’s the only one with submarines in?

8: Did any real people or events inspire any part of it?

I grew up in a Navy town, outside a nuclear submarine base, and one of the members in my origfic writing group served on a submarine, back in the day. So all the submarine stuff is strongly influenced by my hometown, the kids whose parents were in the Navy, my own dad who worked for the Navy, my schoolmates who went into the Navy themselves, the submariner who I dated when I was faaaaar too young for him (and the shit my dad pulled to scare him off), the tours I’ve taken on out-of-service submarines, the time I’ve spent fucking around in boats while sharing the same waters as submarines, plus all the time I’ve spent editing my friend’s submarine novels based on his own service.

None of which is actually the same as actually serving on a submarine myself, of course, but there are a number of submarine details that were inspired by spending a chunk of my life submarine-adjacent.

(Navy showers! My father enforced Navy showers on us when we were kids. Although not the same way that they’re enforced in the actual Navy, because that would have been child abuse. But you know. You run across random shit in your life, and it eventually ends up in a fic.)

[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

[underachievers-please-try-harder]

Interview // Austra

I spoke to Katie Stelmanis of Austra for 7digital, the day after Donald Trump’s election victory.

How are you feeling after yesterday’s election result?

I’ve been pretty traumatised and pretty terrified. I think it’s the first time, in my millennial life, I’m feeling major uncertainty about the world. At least in Canada, I’ve had like a pretty secure life, for the most part. I was totally shocked.

The press release for the album states that Future Politics “asks each of us to remember that apocalypse is not an inevitability, but the product of human decision-making.” With that in mind, how inspired was it by the prospect of President Trump?

This really all came together before the presidential race. And, I mean, to be honest, the presidential race seems more like a reality TV show than something I would write a record about in this way. Originally, I started writing this record feeling a very deep and personal sadness about the environment, and then I was reading a lot around it and made all these connections between capitalism and the environment. I basically realised that there isn’t one government in the world that’s capable of dealing with the environmental catastrophe that is ahead of us.

As the record progressed, I was able to get a lot more optimistic about things by kind of reading all these books, including sci-fi and fiction about the future. There are a lot of people that have like quite complex ideas about what the future could look like and what the possibilities are and, to me, that was kind-of like a light at the end of a tunnel that sometimes feels like it’s completely marred with hopelessness.

What did you read that made you optimistic?

Well, the specific text that inspired the title Future Politics was the ‘Accelerationist Manifesto’. These two British guys [Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams] wrote that and a book called ‘Inventing the Future’, which also inspired the album. I guess the ‘Accelerationist Manifesto’ is this idea that technology will free us from capitalism. Eventually, in the future, all labour will be mechanised and there will be no scarcity in the world and therefore, there won’t really be a need for money. It’s just one idea, but they actually provided a lot of evidence of how it could work and how we’re already getting there.

Completely radical possibilities for the future are kind-of what I find inspiring. I mean, I definitely feel like people are starting to realise [that] the only way forward is radically. I think there needs to be radical change because the status quo – which was used quite often in this election – has obviously been completely rejected. Unfortunately, there’s been no mobilisation on the opposite side of someone like Trump to combat that with a more positive vision.

Are you feeling hopeful for the future?

Yes, I do feel hopeful. I think that, yes, Donald Trump’s election rejected an old system that people think doesn’t work anymore. And while it sucks that, right now, the liberal or whatever system is just too fragmented to come up with a better alternative, I think that that can definitely change. I think what’s really important is figuring out how to shape that different future or that better alternative, and having discussions all the time about what it should look like and how radical it can be.

I see it being like a global youth movement: it’s going to have to be something that everybody connects with everywhere. I feel like it has to rise up from the bottom on a global scale, and I feel like culture and the creative world has a lot of power. Like, in the 60s and 70s with the whole free love, peace on earth, hippy movement, it was quite radical at the time but totally informed the mainstream and changed the way that countries are governed and the way that people think on a mainstream scale. I just think that needs to happen again. There needs to be some kind of movement that completely changes the way people perceive the world, like major paradigm shifts.

So how soon after finishing up touring your last album, Olympia, did you begin work on Future Politics?

I feel like I’ve only not been touring for a year, but I would say I stopped touring heavily at least two years ago. I moved to Montréal and was living there for the first part of the writing process. You know what Montréal is like in the winter: it’s very cold and dark and sad. I decided to live a little bit further out and I ended up just being totally isolated for a few months. That’s when I was going through all these feelings of sadness, loneliness and depression, and also contemplating the collective sadness of our generation. And then I decided that Montréal was too dark, so I just bought a one-way ticket to Mexico City.

Why Mexico City?

I don’t know. I had never been to Mexico, but I’ve always had this feeling that I’d really like it. I think I put something on the internet, like, “I’m thinking of going to Mexico City for a couple of months,” and all these people were like, “Oh, my God. It’s the best.” And it’s now, like, my favourite city in the world. It’s so good.

That total change of environment must have been inspiring.

Yes, absolutely. First of all, it was my first time living anywhere outside of the American empire, and just sort of feeling and seeing the effects of American policies, and how they view American culture in general. And the other that’s interesting is that I find in Canada there are still lots of indigenous people but they aren’t as present – at least in Toronto – as they are in like other places in Canada. But in Mexico City the dominant race is the indigenous race and so their colonialist past is still very, very apparent. They actually learn about it and discuss it, and it’s woven very deeply into Mexican history, whereas in Canada they just pretend it never happened or that it was totally fine.

While your last album channelled Chicago house, Future Politics feels more serene. What were your reference points?

The first thing that inspired the earlier songs was that I played a show in Belgium with Massive Attack. I had never seen or paid much attention to them, but I watched their show and it was the best show I had ever seen. And then I became obsessed with them, so I was listening to their first albums a lot.

Also, when I was in Mexico, I was introduced to this type of music I never knew existed, called electro cumbia. It’s something that a lot of producers are doing in Latin America, where they take indigenous folk music and mix it with electronic beats. I was just out at some like a dance party and I heard it and I literally turned to my friend and I was like, “What are we listening to?!” I hadn’t heard something that was new to me in a really long time music-wise, and so it was all I could listen to for a while. I think it influenced the record in that I got really into slow music. So, many of the songs on this record are around 90/100bpm, whereas I’m usually in the 124/130 range when I write.

For the first record you worked alone, and on the second it was collaborative. How did the creative process work this time round?

This one was pretty much me again. I don’t know, I felt a deep need to reclaim my independence after the collaborative album. I mean, other people contributed, but for the most part it was just like a solo project. I even did all the engineering myself just because I didn’t want to have to be in a studio, dealing with the stress of thinking about how much money it was going to be. I wanted the full flexibility to go really deep with myself and also to do, like, 500 vocal tracks if I wanted to.

But was it difficult not having someone else there to say, “Ok, enough”?

I just personally feel that I do way better on my own or, at least, I think that I needed to access a certain level of feeling comfortable on my own before I’d be able to collaborate again. I mean, I also mixed [the album] with Alice, our band’s live engineer, who also happens to be my girlfriend, so it was a very intimate process. I was involved in every single aspect of it the entire time, figuring out how to do it. It’s like I had to achieve something. Now, knowing all that, I feel like I would be able to collaborate again.