#but yeah this is a somewhat chronological history of the band :)

[rat-boots]

Hi I'm brand new to bob hund could u please infodump information to me about them bc I'm loving the music but know nothing about them

ohhohoho let's freaking go!

all right, so bob hund was formed in 1991 in stockholm by Thomas Öberg (vocals), Jonas Jonasson (synth) and Mats Hellquist (bass). A bit after that Conny Nimmersjö (guitar) joined the band because he had a rehearsal space (they even made him audition in that rehearsal space). Their other guitarist Johnny Essing joined the band because he owed Mats Hellquist 100 kr (which is like $10). They had a bit of difficulty finding a drummer at first but eventually found a guy named Mats Andersson

Thomas and Jonas went to school toghether in helsingborg before they moved to stockholm

They got the name bob hund from an animated short film called get a job (1985)

Their logo was drawn by Martin Kann, who is also the guy who designs all of their album covers

Blur's guitarist Graham Coxon is (or at least was) a huge fan of bob hund and he did a cover of the song min trampolin

In 2003 they released a self titled album in english under the name bergman rock. That album took several years to make and flopped commercially. In 2005 they released a second album as bergman rock called Bonjour Baberia pt II (both albums are very good i highly recommend them)

In 2009 bob hund gets a new drummer, Christian Gabel, to replace Mats Andersson who is now a passive member of the band

in 2013 they sold their instruments and played shows by borrowing instruments from their fans which somehow resultet in them performing at the malmö opera with the opera orchestra in 2014 (the recording of that performance can be found on their youtube channel under the name 'och bob hund dör i slutet')

in 2021 they did a musical where they are ghosts trying to stop a band called bob katt from breaking up (it's really good but there's unfortunately no recordings of it online) and from late 2022 to about mid 2023 they did some more theater with the show Den overkliga sanningen om bob hund, which is kind of an on stage argument about the band's history (no full recording of this either but there are a few short clips of it on youtube)

[fuckyeahvanhalen86-95]

Van Halen had more than their share of contradictions.

They began life as a party band but were also home to one of rock's most inventive musicians in guitarist Eddie Van Halen, who spent countless hours toiling in isolation perfecting both his craft and instruments. Their fun-loving music, videos, fashion sense and personalities served as the template for a generation of bands, yet they were also at the center of two of the nastiest breakups in rock history.

So, yeah, things could get weird around Van Halen sometimes. They had an unparalleled gift for blending hard-rock chops and pop smarts and a knack for staying creatively ahead of their peers. Bold and sometimes strange musical experimentation played a role in that success, as you'll note in the below chronological look at the 10 Weirdest Van Halen Songs.

"IN A SIMPLE RHYME/GROWTH" (1980 - WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST)

Van Halen's first two albums were comprised of songs written during their club-performance days. On 1980's Women and Children First, they took advantage of their chance to write new material, expanding their palette and exploring more complex arrangements. One of the clearest and most distinctive examples is the LP's closing track, "In a Simple Rhyme." It's a poppy, progressive and somewhat weird rock song that sounds like Rush attempting to write a romantic ballad. After the song's gentle fade-out comes another surprise: a 30-second instrumental featuring a brontosaurus-sized guitar riff. According to The Van Halen Encyclopedia, the plan was for "Growth" to be expanded into a full song that would kick off the band's next album. That didn't happen, but they would occasionally play the song at their concerts, including a 1986 version featuring both Eddie Van Halen and Sammy Hagar on guitar.

"SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN THE PARK/ONE FOOT OUT THE DOOR" (1981 - FAIR WARNING)

After sneakily replacing his guitar with an electric piano on Women and Children First's "And the Cradle Will Rock...," Eddie Van Halen dove deeper into synthesizers with the following year's Fair Warning, using an inexpensive Electro-Harmonix micro-synthesizer to come up with "Sunday Afternoon in the Park." It's a funky and creepy two-minute instrumental that sounds like George Clinton's idea of a John Carpenter film score. The tempo switches to a hyperactive electro-boogie for the conjoined "One Foot Out the Door," as David Lee Roth tries not to get caught with somebody else's wife. It's all topped with one of Van Halen's fiercest guitar solos, which fades out too quickly.

"BIG BAD BILL (IS SWEET WILLIAM NOW)" (1982 - DIVER DOWN)

One of the main sources of friction between David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen was over the latter's use of keyboards. Roth feared it would upset the band's fans, who wanted only to see Van Halen in "guitar god" mode. (As "Jump" and the band's string of keyboard-based '80s hits proved, Roth was wrong.) But it was Roth who suggested that Van Halen's father, Jan, play jazz clarinet on the band's cover of the 1924 Milton Anger and Jack Yellen song "Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)" on 1982's covers-heavy Diver Down. "He was nervous as shit," said Van Halen, recalling his dad at the recording session. "We're just telling him, 'Jan, just fuckin' have a good time. We make mistakes! That's what makes it real.' I love what he did."

"HOT FOR TEACHER" (1984 - 1984)

The final single of David Lee Roth's first tenure with Van Halen was the sorta weird "Hot for Teacher." How many hit songs can you think of that start with a 30-second drum solo, followed by an extended guitar solo? Roth doesn't appear until more than a minute into the song, speaking to his "classmates," rather than singing, as Eddie Van Halen suddenly shifts to chicken-pickin' rhythms. A traditional verse-and-chorus structure finally appears, but the band never stays in one place for long, blending speed-metal riffs with high school humor and a big Broadway-worthy chorus. It was all too perfect to last: Soon after the song's release, everything went to hell.

"INSIDE" (1986 - 5150)

"Man, what kind of crap is this?" That's the opening question Sammy Hagar asks on the closing track of his first album as Van Halen's new singer. After using the first eight songs on 5150 to establish the new lineup as a commercial and artistic force, Van Halen cracks open the fourth wall and directly if obliquely addresses the controversy that ensued after Hagar was hired to replace Roth. Over a thumping synth-rock groove, Hagar gets meta about what he's learned from his new bandmates: "Now me, look, I got this job not just being myself," he says. "I went out I brought some brand new shoes, now I walk like something else." He gets more serious as the song goes on, hitting some wild vocal heights while singing about feeling the need for "something special, someone new, some brand new group to sink my teeth into."

"MINE ALL MINE" (1988 - OU812)

After proving they could use keyboards to craft hit pop singles and ballads, Van Halen took a more serious step with the opening track of 1988's OU812. Clocking in at over five minutes, the complex "Mine All Mine" treads near jazz-fusion territory and showcases a new lyrical depth that almost drove Hagar past the breaking point. "It was the first time in my life I ever beat myself up, hurt myself, punished myself, practically threw things through windows, trying to write the lyrics," he told writer Martin Popoff in 2010.

"PLEASURE DOME" (1991 - FOR UNLAWFUL CARNAL KNOWLEDGE)

For the most part, 1991's For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge marked a return to straightforward guitar rock for Van Halen. The hit single "Right Now" was the only song to feature keyboards; almost everything else follows a Standing Hampton-on-steroids formula. But the seven-minute "Pleasure Dome" takes a weird turn into progressive rock, with the Van Halen brothers and Michael Anthony daring each other to go deeper into King Crimson-style madness. Hagar's cosmically themed vocals are fine but seem almost beside the point. When the band performed the song live, it was usually instrumental.

"STRUNG OUT" (1995 - BALANCE)

Ever wanted to hear Eddie Van Halen destroy a piano? According to the Van Halen Encyclopedia, while renting composer Marvin Hamlisch's beach home in 1983, Van Halen "threw everything he could find into the piano and raked various items across the strings, including ping-pong balls, D-cell batteries and even silverware." Supposedly, there are hours of tapes documenting this, but Eddie Van Halen mercifully selected the best 90 seconds for inclusion on the band's final album with Hagar.

"CROSSING OVER" (1995 - BALANCE [JAPAN IMPORT])

Van Halen released only one non-album B-side, and it was a pretty strange one. In 1983 Eddie Van Halen composed "David's Tune," a tribute to a friend who died by suicide, handling all the instruments and vocals. After joining Van Halen in 1985, Sammy Hagar was eager to flesh out the track, but Van Halen kept "Crossing Over" in the vaults for nearly a decade, until the death of the band's manager, Ed Leffler. A full-band take was recorded and then blended with the guitarist's original version, which can be heard in the left channel of the released recording. The sonic effect is otherworldly, a perfect match for the song's subject matter.

"HOW MANY SAY I" (1998 - Van Halen III)

Van Halen III is the most criticized album of Van Halen's career, and much of the scorn is directed at the closing "How Many Say I," which features Eddie Van Halen on his only lead-vocal performance. The piano-based track is reminiscent of a late-era Roger Waters ballad and is an odd creative choice for the band, which was in the process of introducing its third singer, Gary Cherone. "They forced me," Van Halen told Billboard at the time. "Don't be shocked when you hear the vocal." "Maybe we were being too artsy-fartsy," Cherone later admitted to Rolling Stone. "But I thought it was great."

[bubblesandgutz]

Every Record I Own - Day 287: Daughters Hell Songs

Very few “heavy” bands truly live up to the misanthropy they project through their music. But Daughters were different. Over the course of a U.S. tour together, I got to know the guys in the band pretty well, and they were a rare instance where their personalities were as fucked up as their music. Don’t get me wrong---they were all great people. But there was something inherently damaged in their chemistry. They were barely functional as a unit, but that made their music seem all the more dangerous.

A year or two after that tour, Continuum Books announced open submissions for their 33 1/3 book series, wherein authors analyze classic albums and assess their cultural impact. I knew I didn’t stand a chance, but I pitched a book on Hell Songs. My thesis was pretty basic: heavy music is typically just theater, but Daughters was real life drama, and that made their music that much more intense. As per their submission guidelines, I wrote an opening chapter. The pitch was rejected, but I wound up posting the chapter online, where it caught the attention of Robotic Empire, the label that put out Daughters’ debut LP. They offered to print the book. And so for the next year-and-a-half I dedicated all my spare time to questioning the individual band members, chasing down old tour mates, stitching together the chronology of their history, reading old interviews, and writing the damn thing. I submitted a first draft to the band and waited two weeks to hear back from them.

They eventually asked to cancel the project. There were disagreements within their camp as to how shit actually went down. And, understandably, there were a lot of grimy details that they weren’t too excited to share publicly. It was disappointing, but understandable. I figured a certain amount of rejection is inevitable as a writer, and this one at least had a valid excuse, so there wasn’t much of a sting.

Anyhow, I’ve posted the first chapter after the jump. The writing seems a little corny now, so maybe I ultimately dodged a bullet.

“Yeah, I’ve been called a sinner...”

And so begins Daughter’s 2006 sophomore album Hell Songs--with a declaration of degradation. Vocalist Alexis S.F. Marshall, or Lex for short, wears the insult proudly, announcing it with the kind of defiant pride of Hester Prynne and her scarlet letter. And then a cascade of noise descends upon the final syllable. The song, “Daughters Spelled Wrong”, is one minute and 42 seconds of Lex’s self-flagellations delivered in a slurred Southern Baptist preacher’s drawl. In that short parcel of time, Lex lists off every slanderous label he’s endured.

“…wrong-doer, evil-doer…”

As the front man for Daughters, Lex was the human element to the band. And while his performance on Hell Songsis unnerving enough in its own right, his tirades became exponentially more menacing live. With his stringy waist-long hair, his tall and gangly frame, his wiry handle-bar mustache, his hopelessly tattered black pants (apparently his only pair), and his ill-fitting stained white dress shirt, he gave off an aura of someone who didn’t give a fuck about the pageantry of rock music. He wasn’t even fashionably unfashionable. Grooming, hygiene, and composure were neglected. He looked disheveled, poverty-stricken, strung out. Most Daughters sets found Lex in less attire, usually just a pair of briefs. Far from the display of muscle and machismo seen in chiseled frontmen like Henry Rollins, Anthony Kiedis, and Chris Cornell, there was nothing erotic about near-nude Lex. Sexual? Certainly, but only in the most degrading, animalistic sense of the word. Lex’s stage presence only served to make the audience as uncomfortable as possible. He would claw red lines into his belly, cram his entire fist into his mouth, fellate the microphone, and drool on himself while fondling his genitals. In moments where audience members chose to interact with him on stage, the results were equally filthy. People vied for his spit. Women pulled at his briefs. Fans fondled and licked his exposed cock. A confessed “sex addict”, Lex would swap spit with both men and women mid-set and fuck fans in venue bathrooms. His tally of sexual conquests was startling, given his disturbing stage behavior and lack of sociability. Claiming a bad acid trip as the root of his social anxiety, Lex was nearly bipolar in his daily interactions. He was relatively friendly and talkative one moment, withdrawn and angry the next. A ninth-grade drop out and former homeless teenager, his bleak world-view was legitimate.

“…worker of iniquities…”

There’s no verse. No chorus. No rhyming scheme. No melody. It’s just one musical phrase repeating for the entire duration of the song. The instrumental accompaniment sounds like a broken machine filtered through the ears of someone simultaneously shuddering through a panic attack and immersed in vertigo. The sound underneath Lex’s litany is a study in all things wrong and counter-intuitive. The band—comprised of entirely capable and talented players—sounds like they’re deliberately unlearning their instruments. Cymbals crash without a kick drum to punctuate them. The bass guitar dives and climbs with little regard for actual notes. One guitar avoids the lower octaves completely and opts instead for atonal high-end screeching and skronky discord. The other guitar remains stuck on one warbled, seasick riff through the whole song, sounding off-balance and broken even when the whole band locks in around it. It’s confounding, ugly music.

“…transgressor, bad example, scoundrel, villain, knave…”

The annals of rock music have no shortage of bands showcasing the darker side of human nature. Ever since Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil, ever since Jerry Lee Lewis set his piano on fire, ever since Iggy Pop rolled in broken glass, there has existed a certain sector of the rock community dedicated to exorcising its demons on stage. It’s the reason that concerned parents and church groups still argue that rock music is evil. This flagrant display of bad behavior, self-destruction, and reckless abandon is at the very root of rock music. And perpetuating rock’s legacy of danger requires raising the bar of rebellion. As rock music nears the age of retirement, its old tricks no longer impress young audiences. Chuck Berry and Little Richard carry none of the threat they did in their heyday. KISS terrified puritanical parents with the widespread rumors of their name serving as an acronym for Kids In Satan’s Service, but now they seem downright Christian in comparison to the blasphemous content of black metal bands like Gorgoroth. So prevalent is the anti-social contingent of music in today’s market that it’s hardly noteworthy for a band to parade its malice for an audience. The harder edged realms of rock music—metal and punk, for example—depend on that kind of antagonism. Daughters looked for one of those last few buttons to push, one of those last few taboos to break, one the last few ways to make people cringe. Perry Farrell noted well over two decades ago “nothing’s shocking.” Daughters challenged that statement.

“…miscreant, viper, wretch, the devil incarnate…”

It takes a certain brand of individuals to make nihilism translate into music, and it requires their contempt to be believable. Words like “genuine”, “sincerity”, and “honesty” get thrown around by critics and fans as signifiers of good music. How do those qualities apply to antagonistic musicians? Do the artists have to be genuinely miserable people to make convincingly ugly music? The artists who are typically the most successful at channeling this kind of dark art manage to convey that wrath and misery in both content and form. It’s not just a matter of singing about the pasty underbelly of the human psyche or throwing a few skulls on an album cover; it’s about the thoroughness of pessimism. It’s about creating a genuine sense of danger. And it requires a misanthropic honesty that carries itself both on and off-stage. It used to be that the entirety of the public’s perception of an artist stemmed from image they set forth on stage and on record. In the age of the internet, this is no longer the case. Even more so for a band of Daughter’s stature—a band that rarely had a backstage to slink off to, a band that still had to unload their own gear off stage, a band that still had to run back to the merch booth after their set to sling t-shirts for gas money, a band with no place to hide and sustain a fabricated mystique.

“…monster, demon, fallen angel, murderer, and thief…”

The Catch-22 is that being in a successful band—a band that can write music together, play shows, tour, record, maybe even make a little money—requires unity, solidarity, positivity, compromise, and sociability. In other words, a band that’s genuinely driven by angst and hostility is doomed for failure. Proof of the unsustainable nature of these kinds of acts is most evident in the dearth of popular nihilistic bands. Even the somewhat well-known misery peddlers tend to be tragically stunted. Notorious shock rock icon GG Allin made a career out of anti-social behavior and bilious lyrical themes. He was known to take the stage naked, ready to fight the audience and fling his feces at the crowd. He wrote songs with titles like “Last In Line For The Gang Bang” and “Fuckin’ The Dog”. He famously promised to kill himself on stage, which would have been the ultimate display of the self-destructive nature of negative music, but a heroin overdose beat him to it. Glen Benton, the vocalist and bassist for seminal death metal band Deicide similarly promised to off himself at the age of 33 as a mockery of Jesus Christ’s year of death. Benton failed to live up to his word. And while he will always be remembered for the controversy he created in his early career by branding an inverted cross into his forehead and advocating animal sacrifice, he tempered out in his later years when he became a family man with a wife and kids. Not surprisingly, the quality of Deicide’s albums declined, as did their album sales. Allin went too close to the edge and fell into the abyss. Benton mellowed out. Neither managed to sustain the malice of their classic records over a protracted career. Daughter’s brand of ugliness had none of Allin’s overt misogyny and violence, none of Deicide’s Christian-baiting Satanism. Instead, they specialized in a kind of implied depravity. Lex wouldn’t attack the venue patrons, but he’d do everything else in his power to make the audience take a squeamish step back. Even though their album title references Hell, there was no trumpeting of a contrarian religion in their lyrics, no acknowledgement of moral consequence. Instead, Lex sang about emotional voids. It somehow made Lex scarier than GG or Glen. He seemed smarter. Colder. Less confrontational, but also less vested in cheap stunts and outlandish behavior for the sake of winning over anyone’s approval. He wasn’t interested in violence. He was interested in degrading himself on stage, forcing the audience into an unnerving kind of voyeurism.

“…lost sheep, black sheep, black guard, loafer, and sneak…”

Even the millionaire “bad boys of rock”—artists like Alice Cooper, Guns N’ Roses, and Motley Crue—aren’t exempt from the imbalance of nihilism and authenticity. For one thing, these cultural giants never tread so far into the blackness that you feared them as people. Their worst crimes were their hedonistic appetites. They still came across as people that would be fun to party with. Marilyn Manson managed to up the ante of anti-social behavior in the ‘90s, but the controversy was calculated. Manson always knew how to articulate his more vitriolic statements in a calm, well-spoken, intellectual manner. It was obviously theater. Daughters didn’t come across as the life of the party. They didn’t come across as having any sort of deeper, thoughtful meaning to their art. They came across as genuinely bitter, crass, resentful individuals.

“…good-for-nothing ass-fucking son of a bitch.”

Daughters were a band that tried to find that balance between thorough, real ugliness and some kind of self-sustaining functionality. They wanted to be successful; they wanted to tour the world and make money. But they also wanted to make something truly hideous and uncomfortable. Their debut album, Canada Songs, was an 11-minute surge of hyper-paced noise-driven hardcore. Occupying the kind of punk/metal hybrid territory instigated by bands like The Locust and Dillinger Escape Plan, Daughters found an immediate audience among fans of frenzied, technical music. It was well-received, but not entirely unconventional for that particular style. But Hell Songs was different. The band ditched their lightning-speed tempos, metal-steeped instrumentation, and shrieking, indecipherable vocals for disjointed mid-tempo lurches and Lex’s drunken oratory. They weeded their old material out of their performances. The fans felt betrayed. They had gone from sounding like the arty descendents of the powerviolence and grindcore scenes into a tightly wound meth-fed version of The Birthday Party. There was a much stronger adversarial vibe to their new approach. Their sound was less tethered to any particular scene. It alienated a fan base that was already built on embracing disenfranchisement and being at odds with everything.

But deservedly, the record found an audience, albeit a small one. For as caustic and abrasive of an album as it is, there’s a surprising catchiness to the material. The low end groans; the high end piercingly buzzes like a swarm of insects; the drums flit from spasms of hyperkinetic pulverizations to deconstructed thuds and clatter; and Lex moans and howls over all of it. Yet somehow, Hell Songs is rife with hooks. There was a discipline to what they did. It could’ve easily devolved into white noise, but there was always a clarity and separation to the instruments. They were a tight band. And for the three years that followed the release of Hell Songs before the group imploded, Daughters came about as close as any band can get to being a total train wreck without rattling apart at the seams. There was fighting, a rotating cast of guitar players, drugs, infidelities, van accidents, hospital trips, lost money, rivalries with tourmates, promoters pulling guns on the band, and an never-ending list of lewd stage behavior. They were a fascinating, glorious mess, and they perfectly captured it over the course of ten songs.

“I’ve been called a sinner.”

[oneweekoneband]

“You ever heard of emo? Yeah...we started that.”

--Chris Conley (Saves the Day), “Where’s the Band?” Tour 2016

Why has “emo” become such a dirty word? There’s honestly quite a few explanations -- some valid, some less-than -- but as far as I’m concerned, the primary reason has to do with the disgust our culture-at-large has with emotions, especially when expressed by men. Men aren’t “supposed” to talk about their feelings, they’re supposed to bottle them up, so when a group of young men gets on stage (with or without tight jeans, long hair, and/or make-up) and start singing about heartbreak, it becomes a punchline. And that’s a crying shame, because acknowledging our emotions is such a vital part of life -- and not doing so only leads to more pain.

Saves the Day aren’t the first emo band, but they are one of the earliest bands to legitimize the genre and help bring it into the mainstream (for better for worse)*. If you like any bands associated with the modern emo, pop-punk, or alternative music scene, they’re almost definitely inspired by Saves the Day. Yellowcard name-drops them in one of their songs; The Wonder Years’ Dan Campbell tells stories of camping out to see them at the Electric Factory at his shows; Fall Out Boy famously began as a Saves the Day cover band; Say Anything’s Max Bemis started out as (and still is) the band’s biggest fan, and is now one of their closest friends and collaborators. Their influence looms large over the scene.

More importantly, though, Saves the Day are one of the greatest examples of everything the genre does best. Frontman Chris Conley (the only musician to stick with the band throughout the entirety of its nearly two decade career) imbues their music with honest, genuine, and emotionally urgent lyrics that manage to feel universal while also being intensely personal. Vivid metaphors, symbolism, and (often violent) hyperbole wring every last drop of emotion and meaning from their words. Vitally, Saves the Day’s songwriting has grown and evolved along with the members -- not just the music itself, which has become more confident and experimental over time, but the subjects of Conley’s laments. They’ve grown from exploring teenage heartbreak to trying to understand mankind’s suffering to appreciating the wonder of life, even as “boring” married adults. Saves the Day is the kind of band that grows up with the listener, that has something to offer no matter what stage of life you’re in.

One of the criticisms often lobbed at pop-punk or emo is that it’s ridiculous or played-out to listen to young white men whine about their problems. This is a somewhat simplistic description of the genre that mostly focuses on its lowest common denominator of bands, but there is some validity to it -- unfortunately, this scene is one that’s always struggled with inclusivity, although it should be noted that Saves has had multiple non-white members in recent line-ups. Still, I think that ignores how cathartic it can be for young people from all walks of life to hear their pain reflected back at them, to know that others have gone through what they’re going through, have felt what they feel. Moreover, there’s a lot to be gained from examining the different struggles others face as well. This builds empathy, and that may just be what the world needs now more than anything. Building communities via shared suffering has always been what emo is all about, and I don’t think there’s a band that exemplifies those qualities better than Saves the Day.

Hi, I’m Spencer, and there’s very little in this world I love more than Saves the Day. I’ll be your host this week as we more closely examine the ideas I outlined above and really dive into what makes this band so special. Because their music is so closely intertwined with Conley’s life and the band’s growth over the years, I’ll of course examine the band’s history as well, and will mostly be tackling things in chronological order. If you’ve got any questions or comments, I’d love to hear from you; feel free to send me an ask, or @ me on twitter (I’m @ThatSpenceGuy).

Meanwhile, if you’ll indulge me for just a moment, I’m going to use my next post to tell you all why Saves the Day means so much to me personally. I’m hoping I can provide you all with some insights into why this band has forged such deep connections with their fans and their rest of their scene, because Saves’ approachability and lack of pretension just may be their most important qualities of all.

*One of the more valid criticisms of the word “emo” is that it really isn’t a genre, but more of an aesthetic. The actual sound of bands considered emo varies greatly, both over time and even within a single generation of bands, with Saves the Day’s catalogue consisting of an especially eclectic and evolving mix of pop-punk, hardcore, indie, and other forms of alternative rock. Moreover, many of the bands most closely associated with emo reject the label entirely, either because of its weaknesses as a descriptor or simply because they don’t want to be associated with some of more mainstream (or “embarrassing”) emo bands. I use “emo” to describe Saves the Day partially because Conley seems to have embraced the term in recent years, and partially because it aptly sums up the band’s themes, lyrics, and community of fans, even as their actual sound defies easy definition.

[everythingtimeless]

Historical Hour With Hilary: 1x07

Since we skipped a week, as ever, you can refresh/catch up here. Otherwise, as we find the Time Team in quite a pickle in pre-Revolutionary America, during the French and Indian War of 1754, let’s get started.

The name “French and Indian War” itself is slightly misleading, as it sounds as if the French and the Indians were fighting each other, when in fact they were allied together against the British in colonial North America, in what was almost a non-stop string of conflicts among the European powers in the eighteenth century. Off the top of my head, in chronological order, I can think of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), the first Jacobite rising (1715), the Anglo-Spanish War (1727-1729 -- side note, there are literally seven different listings for that on ye olde Wikipedia), the War of the Polish Succession (1733-1735), the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-1748) which turned into the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), the second Jacobite rising (1745-1746), the French and Indian War (1754-1763), which was part of the larger Seven Years’ War (1756-1763); the American revolution (1776-1781), and the French revolution (1789-1799). I am almost surely missing some, but the point is clear: it was a literally never-ending theater of attempts for each colonial power and major empire (English, Spanish, French, Hapsburg, Prussian, Russian, Portuguese, etc) to carve out more worldwide influence for itself, and control of the North American continent, as well as the rich West Indies. (The Golden Age of Piracy is also in here, between 1716-1726.) To say the least, it was a busy century.

You can find a more detailed infographic on the war here, but the basic causes, aside from colonial rivalry, were the right to a vast stretch of the modern-day USA between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, contested between English-controlled America and French-controlled Canada. (Of course, technically none of them owned it in the first place, but we’ll get to that in a bit.) Unlike today, when we associate Canada with politeness, Tim Hortons, moose, and cold, this was a major rivalry and concern (especially with bigotry against the Roman Catholic French settlers, and fanned along by the infamous Schenectady massacre of 1690). The end of the war was a triumph for the British, as they claimed all the disputed territory as well as much of French Canada, and aside from the participation of a 21-year-old Virginia militiaman named George Washington, it fundamentally set the stage for the American revolution two decades later. But there was obviously also the need to reckon with the Indians, whom both French and British had approached and tried various tactics to deal with. Even aside from war, European-introduced diseases had already violently decimated native populations from over 2 million in 1600 to fewer than 250,000 by 1750 (see chapter one). There were fewer than 50,000 Indians in the contested areas by this point, and the most populous war band, the Iroquois Confederacy, had about 2,100 warriors; the Shawnees, led by Nonhelema and her brother Cornstalk, had about 350. 

As we meet her in the episode, Nonhelema is actually somewhat smaller than life. She was known as the “Grenadier Squaw” because she stood six feet, six inches tall, and was renowned as a warrior. Frankly, if this woman wanted to eat my lunch, I would not only give her the lunch, I would ask her if she wanted it warmed up or room temperature, and then I would get her a drink and a cookie for good measure. However, her brother, Cornstalk, gets the shaft in Timeless’ portrayal, as apparently they needed at least one Bloodthirsty Indian (tm) for this to work. He was characterized as just as handsome, intelligent, and honorable as she was, and was treacherously murdered in 1777 by American militiamen at Fort Randolph, after he had come to warn them about a British attack, and after he had tried for a long time to pursue a policy of peace between the Shawnee tribe and the settlers. (And wouldn’t you know, having him flagrantly murdered made the Shawnees pretty damn upset?) Not to mention, Nonhelema herself made efforts to assist the Americans during the Revolution, and petitioned Congress in 1785 for 1,000 acres of land in Ohio in recognition of her service. She was given a daily ration and some blankets instead, and in 1786, she and her husband and family surrendered to the Kentucky militia led by Col. Benjamin Logan, who recognized the mistakes from earlier and let them go free...

Ha. No. Of course they didn’t. Despite having signed the Treaty of Fort Finney and literally holding out a copy of the treaty and a U.S. flag, her husband, Moluntha, was killed by the soldiers (and yet again, so surprisingly, this escalated the Northwest Indian War). Nonhelema was taken to Fort Pitt, in Pennsylvania, where she was held prisoner for some time (and helped compile the first dictionary of the Shawnee language while she was there), dying shortly after her release. Later, the famous Shawnee chieftain Tecumseh would cite Moluntha’s death in his speech of August 11, 1810, as an example of American treachery against the Indians. And in case it isn’t clear... yeah. Between the slavery of African Americans and the genocide of Native Americans, for as much pearl-clutching as everyone is doing today over how white supremacy “isn’t American,” this country was built on the back of the sustained and deliberate practice of white supremacy as government policy and personal ideal alike. We’ll get into more of the sheer ugliness of Christopher Columbus’ legacy in our examination of 1x11 and the World’s Fair held in 1893 to mark the quad-centennial of his voyage, but to say the least, White America’s treatment of the rightful owners of its land is one of the biggest black marks in history.

Nor has that damage been amended or wiped out today. The Indian reservations of South Dakota are the poorest places in the United States, the result of a long and protracted struggle with the white invaders (read that whole piece). Their life expectancy is 48 for men and 52 for women, and infant mortality is the highest in the nation, with families surviving on an average of $3,700 a year. Alcohol use and abuse and unemployment figures are astronomical, and because of a loophole that non-tribal members can’t be subject to the tribe’s laws, white men use Indian reservations to go and freely rape Native women without punishment. The amount of crime they suffer is by some metrics the highest of all ethnic or social groups in America, and as noted, nobody gets punished for it. The Navajo Nation in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico is doing “better” if by better you mean 7% have a college degree (only 56% have a high school education), unemployment is 42% instead of 80%, and “only” 43% live below the poverty line. Funny what centuries of genocide and cultural annihilation will do, huh?

So the next time you feel tempted to post about how white supremacy “isn’t American,” remember that the problem isn’t that it’s not, it’s that it is, and we sorely need to have some of these conversations and make an honest appraisal of our legacy. (The Department of Depressed Historians, who we encounter rather frequently in these pieces, laugh bitterly into their shot glasses.) The odds are low, but we have to start somewhere.

Next week: We return to the 20th century and the moon landing of 1969, and meet a no-longer-Hidden Figure, as well as other female heroes of the Space Race.