#featuring my goober lords in black

[aaaaaaafrogs]

the one and only grace

[caltropspress]

DISPATCHES FROM 2ND ST. STUDIOS: Fatboi Sharif & DRIVEBY in session

I went to DRIVEBY’s apartment in Jersey City because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of documenting musical exxxprrrimentation, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I knew witnessing Fatboi Sharif in the studio would be morbidly rewarding—I felt it in my critik’s skull-and-crossbones (memento mori, pirate flag, poison pictogram). It was New Year’s Day in the year of our Lord Have Mercy 2024, and I had to pull myself away from a tree documentary that had, sadly, begun to disappoint. I had opened a stocking-stuffed box of Goobers and was reluctant when Sharif sent the invitational text. I had settled in for the night. But it was my idea to watch the man work his black magikal esoterika hammer-don’t-hurt-them-witches recording session, so I’d be a real punk to rebuff the offer. I got into the Toyota and headed down Route 3 toward Jersey City. I was on the 1&9 in no time—the truest highway to hell, if one ever existed. Ate de Jong could never scout such a location. AC/DC roadside appliance wasteland. Potholes pave the way, but in a De Nah Soul manner. I finished eating the Goobers in the car, by the palmful, and lost one to an erratic lane merge. I motherfucked and shitted at the thought of a chocolate stain on my upholstered driver’s seat, or worse, the seat of my pants. My dad delivered Blimpie’s for thirty-plus years in Jersey City, long before it became Brooklyn-of-the-West, so I know parking spots there are at a never-dream-of-’em premium. I parked several blocks away from DRIVEBY’s studio and cloven-hoofed it while huffing brick air. Texted from outside, but Sharif was already ushering me through a wrought-iron gate (suitable for guttings and impalements) and into the basement apartment: DRIVEBY’s 2nd St. Studios. That gate was like an entrance into a secret garden—overblown and overflowin’ with a riot of root rot, weeds, and (of course) crumbling-but-still-grumbling gargoyles, most with the medieval motif of mooning jutting out from the church buttresses. DRIVEBY’s had a William Shatner’s TekWorld comic next to his speaker. Dusty keyboards lined the floor. Sega Genesis cartridges, a Sharp boombox, and the requisite vinyl collection on bowing crates completed the scene. The space stored antiquated and dead media—ghost machines humming and haunting.

⤧

Sharif told me he’d be recording some tracks for his upcoming album with Blockhead, something for Bigg Jus, and several features. When I arrived, he was in the middle of recording one of the Blockhead tracks. The mic and the iso shield were directly inside the door of the apartment, and I sat on the couch to the left of that. Sharif would be spitting at me, beyond me, as he did his thing—an intimate setting, to say the very least. Beans of Antipop Consortium sat on this same cushion months earlier, I thought. They recorded “Sex With the Leopard Print Lady” here. While I pondered the legacy of stylist berzerkers of past and present, Key & Peele played on the television in front of me. I wanted to make myself scarce, invisible as possible, Brundlefly-on-the-wall, non-participatory, so I watched the “Laron Can’t Laugh” sketch on mute and registered how Laron’s noiseless convulsions and eventual shriek expertly pantomimed Sharif’s vocals. These layers of silence allowed me to hear some of what Sharif was spewing forth and commit it to memory. He spoke of avenging the death of Candyman. The words loom like Tony Todd—tall as a ponderosa pine in a Cabrini-Green courtyard. Caroline crossed eyelids…90 degree pressure… Closing in on 400 degreez, but we’re talking below zero. The winter of our disconnected selves. Sharif tells DRIVEBY he wants his voice to sound “fucked up.” He’s snorting, super sinusy. He wants to cultivate a specific sound—it coats the inner concavities of his skull. He just needs to externalize it into a self-portrait in a convex DAW interface. “The soul establishes itself,” John Ashbery writes. Sharif is shoeless, I should add. He’s black socked as he cuts the song’s first of three adlib tracks. The first is completely muddled, barely audible—a grumbly grumble grumb. The second is a helium-huffed high pitch mania. The third, a yell—“the banshee,” as DRIVEBY calls it. Sharif slackens the headphone wires and walks across the room. He does “the banshee” from as great a distance as possible. You’ve no doubt heard the banshee adlib track before (B.A.T. for short, as in, the hematophagic vampire bat). If you’ve heard a Fatboi Sharif recording, you’ve likely heard a hotly desperate and deranged voice coming from the depths of a hellmouth—sinners swallowed and still writhing, quasi-alive, anticipating rigor mortis. DRIVEBY captures the natural reverb. Sharif asks him to put distortion and echo on the last word of the verse. 

⤧

Fatboi Sharif was reading lyrics off his phone, but by then he was Loosifa loose—engaging me, inviting me to dialogue, reveling in the job.  His feet are light and nimble, like McCarthy’s Judge. He says that he will never die. And, you bet, he dances in light and in shadow. He’s a craftsman and possesses an engineer’s ear, an ant-infested and severed one he probably plucked from a manicured lawn in Scotch Plains, NJ, Jeffrey Beaumont style. For the second verse of the song, he makes an alteration and decides to end the verse earlier than he had written it, stopping at the phrase “role model” because he likes the “swing of it.” Okay, Nuke Hellington. I see you, Benny Badman. A natural performer, the recording session reflects both technical know-how and impassioned delivery. He doesn’t quite lose himself as he does on the stage (or the audience floor where he so often ends up), but he’s unequivocally locked in, as he kids say. Locked in a room with padded walls, more apropos. On the next, he requires a seemingly endless run of retakes. I begin to wonder if my presence is a burden, a distraction. But the session keeps its devil-may-care air intact. Still, Sharif has a sonic vision he yearns to achieve. He won’t settle for less. He eventually gets the take he desires and tells DRIVEBY he’s gonna do three adlibs. These two men work in harmony to develop their songs of disharmony. They’ve been boys, and so that keeps the chemistry alchemical for the duration. Open and honest, DRIVEBY tells Sharif that three tracks of adlibs is “too many.” FUCK THAT! Sharif shouts at him. Sharif wants the adlibs to sound beneath everything—six-feet deep, or “buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways” (unexpressed emotions, that is), as Freud or a Freud-fraud once wrote. Sharif wants echoes. He wants to sound like he’s a signal coming in and out of the radio as you drive through the night. These are the requests he makes, delicately selected from his mental doom board as DRIVEBY adjusts the mix, adds effects. “Do you do a lot of vocal mixing on the spot?” I ask. Sharif shakes his head, points to DRIVEBY slumped over his computer monitor, clicking and dragging, random access memory maybe lagging: “He’s on his Bob Power shit.” Listening to the playback, Sharif tells me he wants to be like Joker in the children’s hospital scene. What kinda clown carries a fuckin’ gun?! I’m waiting for the next Sharif release, crossing my fingers into an arthritic mass of flesh and bone in hopes of his cover of “If You’re Happy and You Know It” appearing on the tracklist. 

⤧

DRIVEBY puts Joker on the TV. It’s the bus scene; he can’t stop laughing. He hands a fellow passenger his card: Forgive my Laughter: I have a Condition. Sharif still sleeps to beats. He’s told this story numerous times to various media outlets, and so it’s beginning to take on the tone of lore. But it’s not. Even wilder, he’s not listening on headphones as he sleeps; he blasts the beats on speakers. Sharif prefers to record late, well into the wee hours of morning. DRIVEBY’s couch often becomes Sharif’s bed. “He’ll have the same beat on for five hours,” DRIVEBY explains. He’ll be in his bedroom, unable to sleep. Sharif grins and tells me, “That’s when I’m in the mindfuck.” Sharif reapproaches the mic. Another Blockhead track. “He told me he made this one especially for me,” Sharif says. The beat sounds like a Gregorian chant in a cavern. Beware of the Shroom Monster. Sharif has managed to amass an intimidating number of releases over the past several years while not indulging us to excess. He’s conservative with his run-times. Clocks ain’t shit to him. Many of his projects are EP-length, but categorizing them in any terms would seem to discredit his ingenuity. As the session unofficially ends and we settle into more casual conversation, Sharif implores DRIVEBY to play selections from their unreleased album, currently on ice like a corpse. I listen and hear of an exorcism of Antoinette, of Elvira and death resurrections, of Basquiat painting in Transylvania, crossroads, and plosive sonic samples from The Pagemaster—a film I have absolutely no recollection of but DRIVEBY speaks almost as highly of as his Fantastic Damage instrumental CD-R. OneShotOnce shows up, presumably for a session, but not before he and Sharif pillage DRIVEBY’s fridge. They feast on cold chicken while I gather myself to leave. 

Images: Astronomical table detail from the Almanach Purpetuum of Abraham Zacuto (c. 1500)

[owl-elementary]

I just request some super gay christmas decorating fluff for Trimberly, including lots of grumpy Trini being cheered up by Kim kissing her lmao

All done! Merry Christmas! I didn’t make Trini as grumpy as she could’ve been - she’s too smitten with Kim’s antics.

Read “Don We Now Our Gay Apparel” below or on Ao3.

Trini woke up on Christmas Eve to the scent of peppermint and coffee wafting through the house. She had just pulled her hoodie on when the door was gently pushed open, and Kimberly walked in with two mugs.

“Hi babe,” she said, kicking the door closed behind her. “I wanted to let you sleep.”

“Thanks,” Trini said, accepting a mug. She was about to take a sip when she spotted the wrapped box on the desk. “What’s that, Princess?”

“Our first Christmas together calls for a present we can share. NOT that kind of present,” she said, quickly, seeing Trini’s look. “Go on, open it.”

Trini let Kim take her coffee for a moment while she peeled open the penguin wrapping paper. The box inside had no description, so she couldn’t take a guess at what it was. From the way Kim was trying not to grin, she assumed the worst. She opened the box, peeked inside, and let out a groan.

“Don’t be grumpy!” Kim said. “They’re cute.”

Trini grumbled, but pulled both ugly Christmas sweaters out of the box and pulled hers on over her tank top. Hers said, “Make the yuletide gay,” in rainbow stitching, while Kim’s said, “It’s the most wonderful time for the queers.”

Trini couldn’t help it - she smiled brightly as they sat on her bed and sipped coffee. It had been two years since the defeat of Goldar, one year since they’d imprisoned Lord Zed, six months since the pair of them had moved out and started at UC Angel Grove, and about six weeks since a putty kick broke all of Trini’s ribs, from which she’d now fully recovered. So all in all, she was happy. And if wearing a goofy sweater all day made Kim happy, then Trini was all in.

“So,” she asked, sipping her coffee. “What’s the plan for to today?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Kim said, avoiding eye contact.

“Mmmhmm…you don’t have a whole list of festive holiday fun written out for us?” Trini asked, grinning. “Time stamped so that we stay on schedule?” Trini laughed as Kim quickly folded a sheet of paper and stuck it in her pocket.

“Nope. I’m totally chill. We can spend the day in wonderful, Christmasy chaos - no schedule whatsoever.”

Trini put her mug down, and pulled Kim down on top of her. “I love your lists. I love that you try to counteract your everyday recklessness with obsessive scheduling. So,” she said, pulling the folded paper out of Kim’s pocket, “tell me about our day.”

Kim smiled and kissed Trini’s nose. “Well, first and foremost, you’re making me breakfast.”

*

After the two of them had snarfed down roughly ten pancakes each, they settled down in the living room to finally decorate their tree. The tree, as Kim claimed, was Trini-sized but completely bare. This was because a month-long battle had taken place as to the type of decorations their Christmas would feature. Trini wanted a color-coded Power Rangers tree, while Kim wanted…well…

“What the hell, Kim?” Trini laughed.

“You specifically said that the ornaments just had to match our colors. Everything is pink and yellow,” Kim responded smugly.

Trini looked down at the ornaments. She’d been expecting pink and yellow baubles and lights. Instead, there were teddy bears, school buses, snowflakes, guitars, notebooks, tacos, chickens, and more. “Let’s get decorating, then!”

It was all going well, until words were exchanged about a bright ornament shaped like a pair of sunglasses. Then…the tinsel started flying, Kim tried to tie Trini up in pink lights, a tickle fight broke out, and the madness only stopped when Trini complained that she was hungry. They ordered a pizza and finished the tree in peace.

“You got some tinsel in your hair, Princess,” Trini sniggered.

Kim shot her a playful glare. “Your fault.”

“It is,” Trini agreed proudly. “But…maybe I can make it up to you?”

“Oh really?”

“Not like that!” Trini laughed. “Well…like that too. But later! Open your present.”

“It’s not Christmas yet!”

“You get one on Christmas Eve, you goober.” Trini took the smallest package from under the tree, and passed it to Kim.

“Okay, then…you get this one tonight.”

They’d imposed a 5 gift limit on each other, since both knew that the other would go crazy with gifts otherwise, so they���d still have some to open Christmas morning. The two of them opened their presents at the same time. Trini screamed, staring down at the special edition Black Panther hardback collection. She looked up at Kim, who was staring down at the open box with what Trini could only call heart eyes.

“You like them?” Trini asked.

Kim held up the pink and yellow glass fountain pens. “They’re gorgeous! Where did you get these?”

“It’s a secret,” Trini said, winking. “And I’m sorry, but you’re not getting any tonight - I’m going to be up all night reading this.”

“We’ll see about that,” Kim said, trying to grab the book back.

Trini wrapped herself around Kim and gave her a tiny kiss on the cheek. “They guys are coming over tomorrow for dinner, right?”

“Yep! Got the ornaments for the exchange?”

“I did - got them last week. And seeing the ones you got, I’m glad I picked the out.”

“Psssh! My ornaments are great.”

Trini looked over at the twinkling pink and yellow tree and smiled fondly. “You’re right. They are. Merry Christmas, Princess.”

“Merry Christmas, babe!”