#i need more los campesinos fans

[sages-music]

ok its not funny anymore

i NEED someone to talk about los campesinos! with. none of my friends irl like them so i feel like i have no way to talk about them and it makes me so !!!!!!! im fucking obsessed with them man. i got my hello sadness vinyl yesterday (shes gorgeous) and im so excited about it, it sounds fantastic.

i just want someone to talk about their lyrics with because !!!! fucking just in hello sadness right

"a wishbone hangs between your breasts, i hope you havent pulled it yet" first of all. im getting a wishbone tattood between my chest at some point because amazing. beautiul.

" i wear a ring of your lipstick around the knuckle of my fourth digit, it reminds me of what our bodies sowed, it will do until we are betrothed" BITCH when i tell you i actually gasped once i comprehended that line because. !!!!!! the imagery? the metaphor? the literary terms that i dont even know bc i dont remember anymore? theyre all fantastic and i want that line tattoo'd on my brain

or oh my god "the space between your navel and your waistband was the ice, where two fingers pirouette but now these hang nails, they just slice" like......... oh my god....... i can SEE it and i can FEEL it and its just. its so good man. i want to take a full class on their lyrics.

i have a book i do lyrical analysis in and its about to only be los camp

[monsterswithimagines]

Undisclosed Desires - Part 12

Joe Goldberg x female!Reader

Summary: Twenty minutes before he would have met Guinevere Beck, Joe meets you instead. You intruige him, but it will soon become clear that there is something off about you.

Words: 763

Masterlist

I think shit might just hit the fan soon.

Billy Corgan is a poet.

And I'll pull your crooked teeth

You'll be perfect just like me

You'll be a lover in my bed

And a gun to my head

We must never be apart

We must never be apart

I've never heard a truer song. Especially those last two lines. We must never be apart, (Y/n), I see that very clearly.

You are rearranging the books on a bookshelf you wouldn't let me help you move. You're singing along to Ava Adore softly, nearly whispering. You're wearing the same top you wore the first time I saw you, and shorts that are almost slutty. You know what you're doing to me and you wiggle your little butt and you sing: “we must never be apart.”

I take a bite of the pizza I brought. It's cold now. You've only had one slice, because you're too busy to eat, but that's okay. I'll make sure you eat later.

The next song on the CD is Perfect. You don't sing along to this one, because it's not a love song. You turn to me and put your hands on your hips and say: “I'm exhausted.”

There is a cobweb in your hair. You need a shower.

“Come sit down and eat something.”

You drop down on the bed and cross your legs. Then, you grab a slice of pizza and take a large bite. You don't care that it's cold, and you don't care that it's way too spicy. You laughed when I asked if you had any milk (even though I know you do, on the top shelf of your mini fridge. It's pure cruelty that you refused to give me any).

“Thanks for this,” you say.

“No problem. You done for the day?”

It's ten pm and if you keep making noise, your neighbors might complain. You don't think about that, though. You look around and shrug, like maybe you'll go lug some more stuff around in a minute. You've already rearranged your entire apartment, which comes down to switching what side of the room your bed is on, but it also means you had to move all your bookcases around.

“Let me rephrase that,” I say. “You're done for the day.”

You giggle.

“Yessir.”

I like that too much, so I don't react to it.

You eat three more slices of pizza before you decide you've had enough. I want to pull you to me and kiss your greasy mouth, but you get up and go to your CD player and turn the music off, then replace the CD with another one.

Most people don't listen to CDs anymore, (Y/n). But you like to own things. It's why you don't have a Kindle and you don't go to the library, and it's why you listen to CDs instead of making a Spotify playlist like everyone else would. It's also, I think, why you only let me kiss you on the cheek when I came in. You were on the phone with your mom, talking loudly in Dutch, and you knew not getting to kiss you would just make me want you more.

“When I was a kid,” you tell me, “my mom and I would have these girls’ nights. We'd play Guitar Hero for hours, sometimes until the sun came up.”

“So that's where your music taste went wrong.”

“So,” you say.

You stick out your tongue at me. I don't recognize the music you're playing now, but it's a little sad and a little daring and a lot fuck me.

When you sit down again you're way closer to me than before.

“So,” I answer.

I lean back against your headboard and pretend this is normal. Because it is, or at least it will be.

“What's this band called?” I ask.

“Los Campesinos. They're pretty neat.”

And then we're finally kissing. Except kissing is not the right word: we are necking. I am sticking my tongue down your throat. And I can tell you haven't dated before, because you're not immediately great at kissing, but you catch on pretty quickly. You are eager to learn, to please me.

If I was a less patient man, I would press you into your mattress and have my way with you right now. But of course, I can't do that. Because I respect your boundaries. Because I don't want to push you. Because you've never had a boyfriend before.

I nudge you away, just slightly, and smile.

“So,” I say.

“So,” you answer. “You wanna watch a movie, or something?”

[pigeonxp]

helloooooo!!!!! my name is paige, or pigeon! this is my intro post which will be edited as i gain new interests!

they/she/he pronouns

my current main interests rn are dimension 20/dropout, 9-1-1, and loona!!! if we share any fandoms (or if u like all 3 😳😳) id love to be mutuals !!! u can read more abt my interests below 😁😁

DIMENSION 20

☆ my fav campaign is fantasy high, but i also love neverafter and acoc, basically any intrepid heroes (i also love all the others too, burrows end my beloved)

9-1-1

☆ if u havent gotten it from my bio, i am an eddie diaz fan!!

☆ buddie shipper

☆ i am openly anti tommy and anti bucktommy, and i will be tagging as such. if u dont like that, please block me or those tags bc i dont want to clog ur TL with shit u dont like

☆ im a very big jokester, barely anything i say is genuine or serious unless i say it in the post or tags. most of my posts are just for laughs.

☆ BUDDIE PLAYLIST LINK:

LOONA

☆ STAN LOONA

☆ i am an ot12 forever and always but my bias always changes, but my usual underlying biases are always yves and haseul

☆ i dont post much abt loona, but i do every now and then so!!! keep on the lookout lol

MISC

☆ i am a HUGE los campesinos! fan and other indie bands

☆ i like nintendo games, specifically pikmin

☆ i am an ocean lover and a space enthusiast

☆ i love reading and listening to music

☆ i am a wwe fan also i will prob be posting abt that a lil bit too!! please talk to me abt it 😁

☆ if you scroll down far enough i was an mcyt blog for a while and i dont really post abt it, but recently ive been really into lifesteal and unstable universe (specifically been watching wemmbu and princezam)

☆ as a side note, half of my posts are in tags. u need to read my tags to get my whole opinion its chronic im sorry lol

btw my twitter is https://x.com/pigeonxp ! i dont rly post there much but when i do its most likely going to be 911 or loona related, and probably mostly reblogs

it is LOVELY TO MEET YOU ALL !!!! 😁😁😁

[dustedmagazine]

Los Campesinos! — All Hell (Heart Swells)

In a way, 2013’s NO BLUES was the end of a particular version of Los Campesinos! and for reasons that had little to do with their personnel changes over the years since 2006. The septet is far from the first (or last) band to experience the music industry leaving them for dead in a ditch for a lack of profit, and sadly also not the only ones to get one of their best albums caught up in that moment. So, everyone returned to (or got) day jobs and although they never exactly split up, it took some time to determine that, yes, Los Campesinos! was still really going to keep going. But if 2017’s excellent Sick Scenes was proof of concept of Los Campesinos!’s vitality and potential, the new, even more self-motivated ethos has led to both the longest break between albums yet and (recency bias be damned) their strongest LP.

Readers of Dusted don’t need to be reminded that financial success does not necessarily correlate with any particular merit, but that the entirely in house All Hell (self-financed, self-produced, on their own label) wound up as their first UK top 40 record (14 with a bullet!) is at the very least a testament to how many people were waiting for this record and how satisfying they found it. In Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s classic music-as-magic comic book Phonogram, one of the main characters describes Los Campesinos! (before they’d even put out a record) to another as “They’re never going to be big big. But they’re going to be big to some people.” Increasingly, it seems that those people have found them. If you go to an LC! show in 2024 fully half or more of the crowd are kids who were not listening to records when Hold on Now, Youngster… came out in 2008, a delightful product of the band just resolutely doing what they do for close to 20 years now.

All Hell is a stirring reminder of what that is, exactly. Their Bandcamp page still describes them as “The UK’s first and only emo band,” and that fine blend of sarcasm, sincerity, standoffishness, insight, and a certain love of starting an argument still sums up some of frontman Gareth David’s authorial voice (although it doesn’t include his incredibly vivid and compelling way with both political and romantic heartache and longing). Guitarist and (here) producer Tom Bromley continues to write incredible songs for David to drop punchlines and emotional haymakers over, and has also burnished this into easily the best sounding Los Campesinos record to date. At this point these seven members have been playing together since 2014 and can turn on a dime and nail pretty much any melodic/emotional register they need to, harsh or comforting, anthemic or plangent.

Fans are likely to draw comparisons to 2010’s Romance Is Boring, often considered a high-water mark. The last three records followed the same straightforward format: 10-11 songs, 40-42 minutes. Romance Is Boring was their most complex, lengthy, and interconnected record, and there’s an ambition here that makes them feel like siblings (possibly partly the result of having more time to build up material). The 15 songs here in just under 50 minutes, with three numbered tracks splitting the record into rough sections, feels sprawling and expansive after the tighter organization of the last few.

You can really feel that extra decade-plus in the structures, songwriting, and sonics of All Hell, but the polish and compositional sophistication here don’t belie a lack of fire. “The Coin-Op Guillotine” is easily the gentlest opener they’ve ever done; there’s bleakness there (“I think I’m right, I don’t think it matters”) but the refrain still centers on the kind of community and solidarity that they’ve been trying to practice from business/concert practices on down: “if you’ve got a cross to bear/call my name, I’ll see you there.” And even there it’s still about our current dystopia, and the title clearly refers to more than just the arcade game.

And sure enough, the following “Holy Smoke (2005)” immediately snarks that “nowadays it’s Live Laugh Love and Listen to Death From Above” over a headlong sprint (one of many places here where drummer Jason Adelinia is a crucial force). Even the magnificent “Feast of Tongues” (which arguably boasts a couple of the band’s best choruses to date), which swells from pensive backing “ooh”s and strings to one of the biggest, hardest hitting climaxes here, specifies that the title refers to when “we will feast on the tongues of the last bootlickers.”

As always, one of the challenges of writing about Los Campesinos! (as well as one of the joys of listening to them) is there are simply too many quotable lines, especially if you’re interested in the ways they refer back to their own history (dropping the “please” from the Romance Is Boring-era “can we all please just calm the fuck down?” as a teeth-gritted acknowledgment of how much less reasonable those they’re addressing have gotten since then) or just a good joke (if, say, “do you still have that one tattoo?/that’s how they work, of course you do” doesn’t work for you, another one will be along soon). And as much as All Hell is rich in the band’s traditional strengths, there are still moments of expansion. The crunching switchbacks of “Clown Blood/Orpheus’ Bobbing Head” are maybe the most aggro they’ve ever been, and the sweetly gloomy “kms” features Kim Paisey taking lead vocals for the first time.

Given the way the last two records have ended with some of their heaviest, weightiest songs, as they kick into the room-levelling angst of “0898 HEARTACHE” it feels like just that sort of crescendo. Instead, All Hell actually ends with the humbler melancholy of “Adult Acne Stigmata.” It’s the closest Los Campesinos! have come to an acoustic ballad, with multi-tracked Gareths sighing “it’s all hell, we know too well/it’s all hell” in the background. From another band, it might risk pathos or bathos; from Los Campesinos, it’s practically comforting. In the midst of inferno, we can all sing, and thrash, along.

Ian Mathers

[cobble-stone]

i need to loscamp post more i think. i remember the days that i converted like at least 20 people who followed me for mcyt stuff into los camp fans and i need to get back to doing that. i need to rub my dirty little los campesinos-fueled hands over everything

[musicismymoirail]

Per tradition, Los Campesinos! \m/! My dehydrated self forgot to get a snap of the sign at night when I left, but alas~ It was another wonderful show, just perfection! And an extremely sweet fan gave me a homemade ticket! 😭❤️ It is so cute!!!! It’s going right into my phone case for safe keeping.

I got really close so decided to just enjoy the show, but I got one neat picture (I had a great view so had to!) and a probably terrible video of the end of ‘I Just Sighed. I Just Sighed, Just So You Know’ because one of my favorites and ‘please just let me be the one to keep track of the freckles and the moles on your back’ is an absolutely murderous line. I love it. I need to make more art around it!! >:3!!

[rainbluealoekitten]

For the mlm asks;

1. Do you like resting your head on a boy's lap, or on his shoulder?

6. How do you like your tea?

16. What's your favourite cologne smell?

17. What's your ideal date?

19. What's your favourite mlm movie?

29. What's a compliment you'd love to receive?

33. Coffee shop or dog park date?

39. Confident or shy boys?

40. What is your favourite love song?

41. You're amazing. (<= not an ask, just a fact I learned.)

Also, no pressure to answer <3

SO MANY!!!! :D yayayay

i only have experience with putting my head on someone's shoulder, which i have to say i'm a very big fan of!!! i think lap would also be really nice BUT i would feel a lot more stressed about it, so it would only work with specific people (whereas idm who it is as much for shoulder) and i'd need to get used to it first

6. i love tea with my entire heart and i am VERY peculiar about it so! black tea, seeped for 3 minutes MINIMUM, and then be very generous with the (skimmed) milk. i also ALWAYS reboil the water before pouring even if someone just boiled it a few minutes ago

16. quite frankly, i am fairly unfamiliar with colognes BUT i tend to love most of them as long as they are not overpowering

17. suuuuuch a good question but i genuinely do not know the answer. i will say, however, that the favourite "dates" i've been on have been where we listened to full albums and gave our in depth thoughts. BUT in the future, i would also love any kind of late-night dates where we're both sleepy and not making any sense. this could be star gazing, walking around, or just cuddling at home. personally i prefer stuff where it's just us and not public places like restaurants

19. i actually very rarely watch movies so cannot answer this ;-;

29. first i have to say the bestest compliment i ever received was being told i'm the "most fascinating person [they've] ever met" and all variations of this mean the world to me ("i like how you think," "you're so interesting," "you're such a weirdo (<—said with all the love in the world)") but also all compliments on my gender from trans people are incredible

33. doggy park :3

39. BOTH. big fan AS LONG AS it doesn't become awkward/i have to do most of the talking bc then i feel on the spot and haaaaate that but i have to say i both love being teased and being the teaser. plus i love having someone there be emotional support but i also feel so cool when i get to do that

40. omgggg as if i could ever choose one :0 recently i've been a big fan of:

jackie and wilson - hozier

no. 1 party anthem - arctic monkeys

the idea of growing old - the features

reach - matt kerekes

romance is boring - los campesinos!

the world is ugly - my chemical romance

glass in the park - alex turner

the way i spoke - beabadoobee

and soooooooooo many more but i can't think anymore

41. that's insane man!!! what are the odds that we'd both be??? incredible i love that 10/10

42. what about you for ALL of those please <3

[ajoytobeheld]

Philadelphia 29/3

March 30th, 2009

Day One off tour…jesus christ, i wrote “off” instead of “of”…things have got this bad already? Anyway, we woke in New Jersey. I don’t understand why we stayed in NJ, the day before and of the Philly show. It meant two pretty long journeys, desperate to pee, but WHO AM I to question the judgement of a tour manager. Especially one so fine as Joe Puleo. Actually, come to think of it, I think he insinuated we’d get robbed if we stayed nearer to the gig, or something like that.

Some Notes:

Previous Philadelphia experiences of ours had been quite lame. One show at an awful club where we got our spare tyre stolen (fair enough Joe), and another at Johnny Brendas, which was an okay, if uneventful, show, but sadly in an area where there was not a lot to do. Fishtown?

South Street was really cool.

Great falafel from some place called ‘Chickpeas’. Turned on the old English charm and got some free fries given to us. Never seems to fail (even if it’s never intended).

HAIL STORM!

Repo records was really cool. First time I went in they were playing Swans, and then the Fever Ray album. I got the Mi Ami record, which I have yet to listen to, but the stuff I’ve heard on their myspace is rad. They’re touring the UK soon, and OBVIOUSLY we’re away on tour ourselves so have to miss it. Sob.

Best of all in this store…I found an illegal Los Campesinos! bootleg DVD. I think this means we’ve made it. It was a (n actually very good recording) of our show in the little room at Amsterdam Paradiso last year, ingeniously entitled “Knee Deep In Amsterdam”. I need to get a camera so I can capture these incredible moments.

We finally got to play with Ponytail. We’ve been trying to do a show with them for a long time, and it often seems the best way to see a band you want to see is to work out playing a show with them. They were really lovely, friendly guys and their show was awesome. So tight, and intricate and fun.

Also, we met up with Sky Larkin for what Katie informs me is our 4th tour together. Two UK, one mainland Europe, and now the US of A. We played, like, our 8th ever show with Sky Larkin. In Bradford. It’s so great that we’ve journeyed through this so-called Music Biz together, BFFs.

Speaking of which, Patrick and Ian G of Titus Andronicus made the trip to see us. They say they’re touring the UK again soon, and I THINK we’re even gonna be home to see it, so they’re totally coming to stay with me at my Mum’s house. Party times.

Two beautiful people brought us food. Young Griffin brought us oatmeal cookies and a blueberry cake that I’ve not allowed anybody to eat yet, because it’s too pretty to spoil (and I want it to myself) and a really cute girl who brought us animal-free Pumpkin cookies. I think we have the nicest fans in the world.

FINALLY…I think I’m gonna try to not get drunk for a week. I feel pretttttty rough today and if I was less wasted I might have more interesting things to talk about. We’ll see…

[clustxr]

disclaimer: i'm not a spotify user and besides i'm an album listener so my "on repeat" equivalent is like. two albums. so i'm gonna cherry pick ten songs that i KNOW i've been listening to a lot recently :>

"Naked in Manhattan" - Chappell Roan

just love this song honestly. been hooked on chappell roan recently and especially needing a pick-me-up right now this song is so fucking good. literally me.

"We are Beautiful, We are Doomed" - Los Campesinos!

breakup song. also just really good on its own tbh like augh such a banger. see also: romance is boring by LC!

"Lake Effect Kid" - Fall Out Boy

this one's really catchy. idk why but when i first listened to it in like... 2018? 2019? whenever it was first released, i wasn't really a fan, but i listened again a few weeks ago and wow it's a banger.

"This Year" - The Mountain Goats

i am gonna make it through this year if it kills me i am gonna make it through this year if it kills me i am gonna make it through this year if it k-- you get the point

"Maya the Psychic" - Gerard Way

hesitant alien is so scrumptious i swear this shit is on top. love this album so much and this closer is such a good song to end it on. top tier vibes.

"Canary in a Coal Mine" - The Crane Wives

addicted to the canary in a coal mine imagery. inevitable tragedy. the whole point, in fact, yet still holding out hope to make it through. augh.

"Rebecca" - Against Me!

me and who. this was my #1 song last year

"Clusterhug" - iDKHOW

this is literally my whole online brand. idk how much more Me a song can get.

"Say My Name" - Beetlejuice: The Musical

beetlejuice is my favorite musical of all time and this song is so fun to sing along to. catchy and fun and relatively easy vocals = a good time had by all

"I Don't Love You" - My Chemical Romance

okay i was trying to not have the same artist on here twice so i guess this is a little bit of a cop-out because of gerard way but. yeah. breakup song.

no pressure tags: @poppies-and-lupine @silliesthangyodonfan @clusterhug-mp3 @monachopsissssss @wearerofsocks @bioluminescentfrog @supertinytins @ghostyspoofs @needlesandnilbogs @riceicles

okay I don't normally do these things but was tagged by @unsavorie and already in a music music mood so here we go!!

"Shuffle your ‘on repeat’ playlist and list the first 10 songs that play, then tag 10 people."

"Don't Go Insane" - DPR IAN

I was obsessed with with one recently

"Loverboy" - young friend

and this one last year

"cough drops" - almost monday

and this one, recently again

"Something Super Sweet" - Rory Webley

and this one, again last year, and also a lot. i made up a dance to it

"*Equip Sunglasses*" - Hot Mulligan

I have been, am, and will probably continue to be obsessed with this one for a long time. I love it so much.

"ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?" - Negative 25

I also liked this one quite a lot but less than every single one so far lol

"Edge of the Earth" - The Beaches

this one i only very recently discovered, like within the last week, I cannot believe it made the list because I did not think I listened to it THAT MUCH 😅

"Sleeping on the Ceiling" - Friday Pilots Club

I wasn't obsessed with this one but I like how he says one of the lyrics so I always let it play, also this band has been making their way into my playlists more and more lately

"bl00dbath" - rosecoloredworld

this band got advertised to me on instagram not that long ago and I heavily fuck with at least three of their songs

"Addiction/Prescription" - poptropicaslutz!

this one has been my listen-again when it comes on shuffle lately, it's a mid yet fun song and I fuck with it. also I could have swore I'd heard of this band before but I went through their other songs and didn't recognize or like any lmfao

I was doing this and thinking "wow these are all such good songs that I love listening to" then it occurred to me that this is my on repeat and not my general playlist. on repeat means something 🤦

and I tag:

@vanguard @striders @letsrevince @hungry-hobbits @fluffy-flock @starssystem @langleyavenue @tenttle @adhdalistair @walnutsupreme @toadcroaky @babyprime

and anyone else who wants to do it!

[chaiclouds-writes]

𝓨𝓸𝓾 𝓢𝓶𝓮𝓵𝓵 𝓛𝓲𝓴𝓮 𝓑𝓾𝓫𝓫𝓵𝓮𝓰𝓾𝓶

Hello everyone! This is my first writing for someone, so I hope you all enjoy!

This idea came to me when I figured out that Wilbur's ears turn red whenever he's sleepy due to a stream he had did, and I was listening to Bubble Gum by Clairo. So I began writing and finished it in about 40 minutes. This entire piece was written due to yearning. You're welcome.

CC!Wilbur Soot x GN!Reader (they/them pronouns are used)

The tall man let out a yawn as he rubbed his eyes that were threatening to spill tears of exhaustion. He had just finished streaming and said his final goodbyes, the early hours of the morning getting to him as he slowly rolled out his chair from his wooden desk and carefully got up. He stumbled onto his feet, glasses slipping off the bridge of his nose. It wasn’t unusual for Wilbur to stay up this late entertaining late night audiences who were restless or just needed a more calm setting than what the harsh world had to offer, but tonight had crept onto him, leeching off his energy that left him like a dim headlight on a freeway.

He noticed a soft tune coming from a shared bedroom, a mixture of soft strumming of strings and an even softer voice emitting from it, which immediately warmed his heart as a soft red painted his cheeks to accompany his ears that had already turned to the same shade while he had been streaming. Wilbur gingerly placed his hands on the frame of the door, creaking it open so as to not disturb his partner too much, who had been singing the night away with the hopes of finding some exhaustion to cling onto and dip into unconsciousness.

Being immersed in the strum patterns and faced away from the doorway, (Y/N) didn’t notice the brunette man cautiously wandering in, admiring the voice. It made his heart beat against his ribcage and his stomach flutter. As he sat on the bed, (Y/N) stopped, turning back slowly and smiling once they noticed him. His eyes had already looked heavy and his glasses were just on the tip of his nose. But they also noticed his ears, which were a dead giveaway to his state of mind.

“Hello, love. Couldn’t sleep?” Wilbur mumbled, pulling his partner close and pressing them up against his chest. It was easy for (Y/N) to follow his rhythmic heartbeat, grinning as the man hummed contently.

“No... I was just here hoping that it would come to me, but一” (Y/N) started. “It just went woosh.”

Wilbur giggled. He took in a whiff of your scent, his face only growing warmer. (Y/N) had carefully placed their instrument down on the side of the bed, wrapping their arms around his torso. He had just noticed you wearing his Los Campesinos jumper. The scent of him and yours becoming a concoction in the air brought him a sense of relief and joy.

The sleepiness continued to creep onto him.

“Wil? Are you okay...?” (Y/N) whispered out, feeling a shift of weight on them. There was a small jolt from Wilbur.

He only groaned out, pulling you into his lap and snuggling (Y/N) closer to him. They could only laugh as they realized what it is he was probably asking for without saying it outright. And by god, was it endearing.

“Alright, alright, c’mere,” (Y/N) requested, getting off of Wilbur’s lap to uncover the bed and tuck themselves into the weighted blankets. The brunette man slipped off his jacket, leaving him in his white graphic shirt and dark sweatpants. He happily obliged, tucking himself behind (Y/N) and pulling them close into his body, creating a cage of limbs around them.

His legs had intertwined with theirs, arms wrapped around (Y/N)’s stomach. Wilbur took off his glasses with one hand and lazily placed them on the nightstand in front of you. Satisfied, the tall man pulled you close to his body and buried his face into your neck, his hair tickling your face. He was filled with immense comfort.

A long late night stream, trying to stay awake for his fans and those who decided to stick around, ears turning red out of sleepiness. Telling stories, playing guitar and singing, the artificial glow of the monitors bouncing off his pale skin and glasses, eyes slightly going cross-eyed with every hour as he grew more and more lethargic.

And in the end, he would get to curl up on his mattress under heavy blankets with the other human being which he grew to love and deeply care for. And he couldn’t ask for anything better.

“Mmm... you smell like bubblegum...” he said, speech muffled with the jumper (Y/N) was wearing. They giggled, finally feeling the clutches of sleep grasping onto their eyes and threatening for them to shut. (Y/N) raised a hand, playing around with Wilbur’s hair and running fingers onto his scalp.

“I love you...” he muttered out before you could feel his grip loosening due to falling asleep.

(Y/N) softly turned over so his face was no longer buried in their neck and was rather staring at the man. Overbearing and soft emotions, (Y/N) brushed their lips over Wilbur’s leaving a kiss before nuzzling their cheek into his chest. Despite eyes being closed, there was a small twinkle in the man’s eyes and a smile crept onto his lips.

They felt thumbs rubbing into your back, easing tensions and muscles and causing both people to then fall asleep. Even if this man would sing wishing not to be anyone’s “soft boy,” the lyrics would make (Y/N) chuckle, knowing how soft Wilbur can become, especially when he grows tired.

[curious-minx]

Zippity Zoomer: Mining the Minecraft Generation

One picture is usually all it  takes to transport the viewer, one picture can create many stories.

“Where Y’All Sitting” is an image meme template ripped from good ol’ Vectortoons, a ubiquitous nobody. This meme represents a leftover relic of the days of true Beliebers.  This particular variant of the meme offers up a collage of usernames turned public personas of Minecraft content creators, and is not in fact secret gibberish code that Gen-Z uses for telepathic communication. For the record, and for the sake of offering my own  POV, dear Reader  I’m a rapidly decaying millennial screeching into my late twenties. The following is an investigation into a NEW BREED(Z) of Celebrity, The Minecraft Streamer.

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Millennials are more obsessed with generational categories because we have never felt an ounce of control in our own destinies.” - Me, a too wordy Millennial 

My first impression when I started Googling these names one by one is that Google generously auto generates the word “merch” next to nearly every name on this list. In the Age of the Hustle, our children’s children are hawking off not just plain ol t-shirts; but also offer a wide array of: hoodies, cell phone cases, coffee mugs, pillows, stickers (oh god, the  endless flood of stickers), clocks, shower curtains, coasters, jigsaw puzzles, magnets, tapestries, bedding (no, bedframes?), hats, fannypacks, flags, stationary, facemasks, baby onesies, coins, drinkware, pet clothing, and fake presidential campaign merch are just a smattering of the wares hawked by the people listed in this picture. This list of Minecraft enthusiasts turned digital entrepreneurs are all mostly various stripes of the same  floppy haired young men variant. An unyielding crop of snarky cocky content creators. Most of them are banking off of the success of a digital experiment that asked, “What if Lego, but as a video game?” No! There’s more to Minecraft than that! So much more and a decrypted boomer like me could  never hope to decipher.

Buy my Merch because I’m born to be on Merch. 

The cockiness permeating from these content creators is understandable. Most of these current Professional Gamers were raised devoid of a functioning plausible civilization. These Gaming Content Creators can have faith in the digital system  because it is through the stage of Minecraft they are  accumulating millions of youtube and twitch subscribers. All of these content providers are part of millions of young people’s media diet, websites churn out articles tracking down their love lives. People want to know if badboyhalo is dating Skeppy ? People want to know if Addison Rae is joining a Minecraft based content farm collective Dream SMP? Why has Tommy Innit been banned from Tik Tok? Why did georgenotfound boycott Wendy’s? Were Minx and Wilbur Soot really dating?  Does technoblade have ADD? Okay, mainly the website Distractify is asking these questions  the Google algorithm certainly encourages them too). This onslaught of articles proves that not only are these largely Minecraft based Twitch streamers profitable from a merchandising stand point but they can also be mined for tabloid fodder.  

Wilbur Soot - who is not an Incel. He’s just cheeky. 

The connective tissue that brings all of these names together is not just Minecraft and Game streaming, but the common cause of a collective, the Dream SMP collective. Apparently, young people need a collective to believe in. I know I would be lost without an Animal Collective or an Odd Future to help illustrate what a collaborative effort should look like.  Young people gravitate towards collectives and communities at large, because it is no longer available in the real world (and this was the case well before Covid). Take another name from the meme lunch room, Wilbur Soot, who is not only another Twitch based video game streamer, but he is also a musician with equally viral music videos . Soot’s general sound/vibe could be described as if Los Campesinos were extremely online and played less instruments (and just generally were worse, okay maybe that’s a thin, mean comparison). His music is not offensive, one song in particular “E-girl” finds Soot’s flipping expectations and criticizes the Internet for aiding an unhealthy romantic  fixation. Surprisingly thoughtful material that is trying to articulate the raw feeling of people plugged in since birth. Seeing  as most of these Minecraft based guys are known for being on the mic for hours at a time it does make Soot’s four minute song feel way longer than it should be. Soot’s got an impressive music production style down that makes his schtick go down easier. My verdict, Wilbur Soot is certainly a step above Hobo Johnson.

One of these e-boys were reported on for  making an off colored jokes on a Jackbox stream, and is about a complete non-story as you would expect. I am sure most of the young men listed in this collage are walking Ninja/pewdiepie hate speech bombs waiting to happen, but I am sure that kind of controversy is saved for later down the road to get over that 10 million subscriber hump.For the most part, this is bunch of dorky tech savvy teenagers who indulge in wholesome trolling and have a fixation on serving the Sponsors.  

These Minecraft based content creators’ main business pitch is a Maximalist Parasocial Bonding that specifically taps into the fan’s Good Friends based cortex. In no way am I adverse to freebasing on parasocial adult (mostly male) friendships. Being a human being, especially young and naive, is a lonely and miserable experience. People need all the faint grasp of human  connection he/she/they can get. None of these kids invented this dehumanizing that rewards people who strip themselves down to the basic elementals, strip themselves down into a celebrity sized square.

A still from the upcoming DREAM SMP movie trailer that is currently nestled at 11,100,784 views

Writing this article has been a personal exercise in fighting against validating every one of my knee-jerk reactions against these Simple Minecraft Dreamers. I saw a sea of probable goons rolling around in their sponsored donated money pits where donors’ flex control over the content provider. Give badboy Skeppy 10,000 big ones and he’ll shave his head for you and put on a show. Digging deeper, and I assure you what is lurking behind every seemingly bizarre and incomprehensible faction on the Internet is a longing for community. An all too real human ache and urge to spin stories and craft personal mythos. Minecraft is not the Marvel Industrial Complex but the Dreamers, muffins and potatoes could change all of that. I keep thinking that Minecraft is just a video game version of Legos and that it will one day fade away, but I am dead wrong. It is I that will be doing the fading away. The stories and servers of Minecraft myth makers will outlive me. My body will decompose but a Minecraft streamer’s plastic phone case will endure.

[iambenjiijackson]

The Groove Guide - Reviews 2008

The Prodigy - Experience Expanded/More Music For The Jilted Generation With the advent of British big beat/hard dance merchant's The Prodigy's fifth studio album, released by their new record label Take Me to the Hospital, it was inevitable that XL Recordings and Maverick undertook the same treatment EMI gave Radiohead and Capitol gave The Vines in releasing previous albums to capitalize off their success. However, rather than a traditional "Best Of" compilation which, well, has already been done, the shrewd move was to re-master two albums which helped both shape the big beat scene and redefine techno and rave with added b-side and live track bonuses. Experience and Music For The Jilted Generation both became important albums for the dance music scene; where Experience expanded upon early rave culture and fused jungle and techno with tracks such as "Out Of Space" and "Everybody Into The Place", both remixed and contained on the "Expanded" section of this re-release, it's ...Jilted Generation which provided a crossover between the underground to their critically and commercially acclaimed Fat Of The Land; the edgier, almost industrialized sounds emanating from "Break & Enter", "Their Law" and the Nirvana-sampling "Voodoo People" bridging ravers and rockers into the Big Beat sound that sculpted the likes of The Chemical Brothers, The Crystal Method and Fatboy Slim and gave birth to what we now know as 'electronica.' B-Sides from their single releases, live tracks from their most recent stints at Pukkelpop and remixes from Dust Brothers, the real reward is the re-mastering of the songs and highlighting that despite today's standards highlighting fluro, glamour and fashionista sensibilities, it never needs to be that way.

Los Campesinos  - Hold On Now, Youngster

If you're not really a fan of twee, this may change your mind. Welsh sextuplet Los Campesinos have been making an impression within the 'indie' scene, but rather that come across sophisticated and potentially haughty, the group have a power-pop element which comes across as fun. Catchy, with the ability to muster a smile upon the face of anyone (case point - "You! Me! Dancing!), Hold On Now, Youngster... is nigh on flawless and is once again more proof Wales, who have provided a number of influential acts in the past two decades, are doing something right nurturing their countries music scene.

Akaname - Filthlicker

The internet seems to heavily favour bands of Akaname's variety for good reason - while mainstream outlets omit such "radio unfriendly" one might be inclined to state as being on "Filthlicker", the internet and it's at times quite staunch view on bands place emphasis on talent rather than aesthetics. What we have with Filthlicker is a band who are mixing one part The Dillinger Escape Plan with five parts The Black Dahlia Murder to a great accord. New Zealand's music scene has just been hit with another metal(core) slug to its chest – one that'll be fired on April 11th at Oblivion in Auckland.

Goodnight Nurse - Keep Me On Your Side Goodnight Nurse seem to have turned a trick used by Blink 182; from that bubblegum-esque pop they once honed during their "Always and Never" era, there seems to be a more serious straight-ahead approach to the band. Almost breaking away from the quasi boy-meets-girl, girl-breaks-boys heart formula their new album makes them sound a little less New Found Glory and, strangely, a lot more like Homegrown and their 'darker' punk rock. An apt analogy would be to compare their work used in a Judd Apatow movie rather than a high school comedy akin to American Pie. "Drift Away" perhaps the standout track on the album, with "Lay With Me" there for older fans as not to alienate them. Definitely a goodnight rather than a goodbye from the boys.

Otep - The Ascension

Otep were one of the bands that during the golden age of nu-metal at the start of the 00's passed through with both relative success and, more importantly, a deal of anonymity - though they had their fans and were very much "Kittie for the thinking man", they escaped the scathing retrospective views because, sadly, people couldn't have cared less. Their latest effort retains those nu-metal sensibilities while the vocals pulling away from relentless screaming, and where the oft compared Jack Off Jill or, for some reason, Arch Enemy, found their transitional period turbulent, Otep manages such a thing near graceful. It helps, also, they pull off a Nirvana cover with justice.

Satyricon - The Age of Nero Satyricon is an interesting little quandary - though superficially resembling all the aesthetics of a black metal act, they've caused quite the controversy after the release of Now, Diabolical was cited as being "radio-friendly" amongst hardened fans of the genre. Funny how Norway's equivalent of a Grammy can do that to you... However, The Age of Nero retains the hallmarks you would commonly expect from a band of their kind; the high pitched death growl, the bleak outlook within Satyr's lyrics. Unlike other black metal acts, there is a groove involved within their sound, rather than blunt force trauma - 'The Wolfpack' melodically could seat well at home with Dirt era Alice In Chains while 'Last Man Standing' could be a Down b-side, all the funnier Phil Anselmo is rumoured to be working with the band. The black metal fan in me is reluctant to give it a high rating because it's not essentially an album of that kind. But the general metal fan in me concedes it's a brilliant piece of work and, as taboo as it could be amongst the community, is actually very accessible and at the end of the day, isn't that more important to a movement?

Emigrate - Emigrate

Touted as being "industrial metal" and including remixes from Mr. Digital Hardcore himself Alec Empire, the side project of Rammstein's Richard Z. Kruspe sounds like a delectable and, dare I say it, heavy affair. Instead, Emigrate treats us to generic, radio-friendly tracks which you would hardly expect given Krupse's CV. In fact, it seems offensive to even believe this would come from such a person – almost as if the creativity from the German group has finally diminished (let's be honest though, Rosensot wasn't exactly their edgiest, was it). Bland, devoid of anything challenging, it would seem that the aesthetics were more important than the music and by far this is little more than a vanity project for Krupse.

The CHASE - Paranoia

When it rains, it pours. 2008 definitely seems to be the year in which New Zealand's hardcore scene emerges out of the woodwork finally to the acclaim it deserves - none more so than The CHASE, who channel the spirit of good post-hardcore that emanated out of the US underground scene circa. 2002-2004. In fact, with songs such as "The Seconds" and "Boomers", you could have easily mistaken them for a band on early Drive-Thru or Victory Records. Short (the album runs little over half an hour) but both melodic and aggressive, The CHASE are like a double happy; though they make not look it, they can induce a large amount of unexpected splendour. How's NZ DIY hardcore scene going to lay siege once more throughout 2008? With bands The Chase leading the charge. Corporate punk rock stops here.

Franz Ferdinand - Tonight Doth my ears deceive me, or have Franz Ferdinand taken a page out of KISS' playbook and decided to craft a disco song or two? Though where the old aged outlaws alienated the KISS Army with their experiment, Franz Ferdinand has not - there's always been that dance party element within their previous releases and Tonight is no exception. It, however, seems like the band have been caught in a zeitgeist of electro-new-wave eighties - songs like 'Turn It On' and 'Send Him Way' almost seem homages to Synth godparents The Human League, Alex Kapranos and company even seem determined to summon the spirit of Saturday Night Fever with 'Live Alone'. Though it might seem like committing commercial suicide, the thing is Franz Ferdinand have always been eccentric, and their idiosyncrasies are their strengths. Tonight is a record you might be ashamed to admit you'd like, but you will like it... embrace your fear.

Cavalera Conspiracy - Inflikted

There's been a wait in the metal community for the mighty return of influential metal act Sepultura. While that prophecy may not come to pass, Cavalera Conspiracy reunites brothers Max and Iggor Cavalera after too long of an absence. What you'd expect is something loud, noisy and aggressive, and truth be told, that's one extent of the album. The other is the groove that made Sepultura so popular, with well crafted if deceptively simple riffs that command the ability for even a casual rock fan to nod their head. Another bullet fired from the metal scene in 2008 – Inflikted is part Nailbomb at times and at others Arise-era Sepultura, but a huge return for the brothers Cavalera.

The Naked and Famous - No Light Was it rushed? That's the sceptical question posed as The Naked And Famous release the follow up to This Machine in what does feel like a very short space of time. Though many who may not have listened to the group cite that they are simply another electro band flooding Auckland's musical landscape, they couldn't be more wrong. Dirty basslines, distorted guitars, the tracks play out more industrial than electro - leadoff single "Birds" almost a nod to With Teeth era Nine Inch Nails and the sultriness of early Garbage. Second record syndrome? Powers and company taunt it... and leads us into eager anticipation for their debut long-player

Soulfly - Conquer

Max Cavalera has had quite a busy 2008 - earlier this year we saw the long-awaited reunion with his brother Igor conjuring a zeitgeist of prime Sepultura days with his side project Cavalera Conspiracy and now the sixth instalment of Soulfly, the group he formed shortly after leaving the thrash/groove metal outfit he made his name with. With that in mind, was it ever going to be an easy feat juggling his main band with a project many of us metal fans have waited years to see? The answer isn't an easy one and leaves many sitting on the fence. 

Conquer rather than becoming a continuation of the heavier hitting sounds the group gave us with their previous release, Dark Ages, with it's throwback to albums reminiscent of Arise, combines those elements with the groove metal which brought them to such acclaim with their sophomore album Primitive. Though it's an eclectic prospect on paper, sadly in practice it comes across a little disjointed and does beg the question if now Igor is in the song-writing midsts that Soulfly becomes now a second thought to the newer Cavalera project.

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[heartcravings]

50 Questions Tag!

@jongin-be-my-jagi​ tagged me for this a while ago, but I took my sweet time to answer. Here is my secret intel if you want to know me a little bit more!! Check hers as well, she’s an amazing writer and friend. 1. What takes up too much of your time? Tumblr, my stupid procrastination prone brain and my thesis. 

2. What makes your day better? Friends and loved ones, music and these absolute dorks (Channie especially) 

3. What’s the best thing that happened to you today? I hopped on the mat today in the early hours of the morning, rain on my window and the neighbours cat peeking at me from his window across the street.

4. What fictional place would you like to go to? Wonderland, bacause it’s “curiouser and curiouser!”

'Who are you?' said the Caterpillar.  Alice replied, rather shyly, 'I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'

5. Are you good at giving advice? I think so. Not so good at following my own advice though.  I do always consider where the other is standing and if I don’t know how to proceed then I’ll just be honest and say I can’t help. But i’ll always listen with my heart. 

 6. Do you have any mental illnesses? Not diagnosed. I do think i might be going through something now. 

7. Have you ever experienced sleep paralysis? No, but i have a recurring nightmare: the world is made of black and white paper thin layers. I am a paper thin person walking along a street surrounded by paper thin buildings. I walk for a long time, looking up at the white sky. Until the street ends, there is no more building and i fall into the abyss of a blank page.  I have had this dream since the age of 8 or 9 years old. Fear of not being good enough, you say?! Ding, ding, ding!! We got a winner in the back!  8. What musician inspired you the most? I get inspired by music all the time!! One of my all time favourite songs is Spanish Sahara by Foals. Its sublime!

So I’d say I’m mainly inspired by these artists: Queen, Arctic Monkeys, Foals, Radiohead, Bowie, Daughter, Bob Dylan, Beirut, Yeah yeah yeahs, Arcade Fire, The National, Joy Division, Blur, Warpaint, Gorillaz, Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver, Chet Baker, The Cure, Courtney Barnett, The Maccabees, Car Seat Headrest, Florence + The Machine, Editors, Kasabian, Crystal Fighters, Death Cab for a cutie, The Doors, Efterklang, Explosions in the Sky, Franz Ferdinand, The Horrors, James Blake, José Gonzalez, Los Campesinos!,  Metronomy, Nick Cave, Nina Simone, Patrick Watson,  Phoenix, Sharon Van Etten, The Shins, Simon & Garfunkel, The Smiths, St.Vincent, The Strokes, Toro y Moi, tricot, Tune-Yards, TV on the radio, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, The Vaccines, Vampire Weekend, The Velvet Underground, The War on Drugs, Wild Beasts and Yo La Tengo.

And the electro, pop and hip-hop groves of my heart: EXO, 2NE1, Janelle Monáe, Big Bang, Kris Wu,LCD soundsystem, SBTRKT, Childish Gambino, Frank Ocean, Kendrick Lamar and Daft Punk. 

And special mentions to the portuguese ones (learning from yixing and promoting when i can :P): Capicua, Joana Espadinha, The Legendary Tigerman, Linda Martini, Mayra Andrade, Noiserv, Ornatos Violeta, Paus, Samuel Uria, You Can’t Win Charlie Brown and The Silence 4. I know, tldr right? Sorry folks! 9. Have you ever fallen in love? Yes I have. I have mistaken a crush for love too. But i have definitely been very deeply in love. A wrecked kintsugi heart over here people! 10. What’s your dream date? I don’t think I have one. I’d love to do something unique with that someone special, something special for the two of us. It could be as simple as riding the subway while sharing earphones & listening to our playlist or walking the dogs out! Idk, I’m easy to please. But right now it would have to be with this handsome man :D pretty please?!

11. What do others notice about you? I am very kind and warm hearted, so I think that’s what people first notice when meeting me. Although I maintain good eye contact, I am also timid and will be quieter if there are very energetic people in the group. When alone, I usually take the first step and try to meet people, but only if i really must.  12. What’s an annoying habit you have? It’s really hard for me to ask for help. I also like to tell detailed descriptions of everything... Couldn’t you tell? 13. Do you still talk to your first love? I’ll text him on his birthday and he does the same to me. We met when we were 10 years old and that childhood friendship remains. But regarding my one and truly deep relationship, no we do not talk, unless we randomly meet.

14. How many exes do you have? I have three exes. The first love who was just an idealized crush on my childhood friend: we dated for 2 weeks during summer break xD Then my first real boyfriend, we met in my first year at university, dated for quite some time, he really loved me and made me love myself a little more. Finally the one i loved too much. I mended his wounds and made him love himself as much as I did. I always say all the love we feel makes our hearts grow bigger. I do not regret loving any of them, I am me now due to them and I would not change it if I could. 15. How many songs are in your playlist? I have way too many playlists for each and every mood... But my favourite songs list on spotify has about 1500 songs! uwu!  16. What instruments can you play? Triangles and flute?! I had mandatory music classes in school... so in reality I can’t really play a instrument...

17. Who do you have the most pictures of? Probably my cat, Sushi. With a second close of my doodles and sketches. 

18. Where would you like to go before you die? EVERY WHERE!!! But I really want to go to Japan and Scotland and Iceland and South Korea and New Zealand and i’ll shut up. 19. What’s your zodiac? Capricorn. 20. Do you relate to it? Sort of.

21. What is happiness to you? You know when it’s really cold outside in the winter and you manage to find a sheltered place where no wind can hit you and you still get to feel the warm rays of the winter suns on your skin? You hear the birds outside and you are contempt in that moment, at peace. That is happiness to me.   22. Are you going through anything right now? Yes, I am a bit lost. Trying to finish my thesis and trying to find what I want to do after. It’s liberating but also pretty scary. 23. What’s the worst decision you ever made? It’s a series of small decisions really. It started with going for a phd with the same people i worked in my msc. Should have gone to a different place. Then deciding to come home after a traumatic loss in the family. Should have kept my life going but I stalled it then. (I don’t regret helping my loved ones though).

24. What’s your favourite store? Probably Wishtrend for beauty stuff. Other than that I don’t have any favourite brands/stores. 25. (HALFWAY!) What’s your opinion on abortion? I think everyone is free to decide what they want or need to do. I couldn’t possible judge. If I would it? Probably not.

27. Do you have a favourite album? I don’t think so, I have favourite tunes for different moods and moments in my life. But if threatened with my life, I’d maybe say Total Life Forever from Foals.

28. What do you want for your birthday? It’s such a long time until my birthday comes! But maybe a real EXO ot9 reunion as a goodbye to Minseok?

29. What is most people’s first impression of you? Friendly and easy to open up to, i think.

30. What age do you seem according to most people? In real life, people usually think I am way younger than I am.  31. Where do you keep your phone when you’re sleeping? In the crook of my bed, between the mattress and the bed frame.

32. What word do you say the most? No idea really! 33. What’s the oldest age you’d date? 40s? I don’t think too much about age actually. 

34. What’s the youngest age you’d date? 20s? Again not very important to me. Love is love, whomever, whenever and wherever <3

35. What job / career do most people say would suit you? I don’t know! People always say i don’t totally fit in anything... so there’s that. If you have an idea please let me know! 36. What’s your favourite music genre? Go back to question 8. I listen to everything! :D 37. If you could live in any country in the world where would it be? I’d like to live around the world, every few months a different place and get to know different cultures.

38. What is your current favourite song? I’ve been obsessed with RM’s intro/teaser song, Map of the Soul: Persona. (I’m not even a bts fan, but this music and lyrics just touched me a lot.)

39. How long have you had this blog for? I think for about 6 years? It’s my personal space, where I dump all my obsessions.  

40. What are you excited for? I’m visiting some friends in Granada in a couple of weeks. Yay, tapas!

41. Are you a better talker or listener? Normally I am a better listener. But there are a few people to whom i open like a book. Either words flow right out of me without even thinking or they see throw me. Those truly are my people.

42. What is the last productive thing you did? Prepped meals and cleaned the kitchen. Open the folder and file of my thesis. Read the latest chapter I wrote.  43. What do you want for Christmas? Well, just like for my birthday, there is still such a long time to it! But let’s say i want to have already finish this part of my life and want to find my next adventure.

44. What class do you get the best grades in? No more exams! Ehehe! But I used to have good grades at everything. Physical Education was my lowest mark i think.

45. On a scale of 1-10 how do you feel right now? Right now, a 4? I have a headache.

46. What can you see yourself doing in 10 years? Smiling? :D I want to be happy in my own skin. To feel contempt in my life, doing something that gives me a sense of purpose and having time to share and enjoy with my friends and family. 47. When did you get your first heartbreak? Oh my kintsugi heart has been broken quiet a lot. By friends and lovers and even by myself. I keep patching it up with gold dreams though.  48. At what age do you wanna be married? I will only want to be married if i find the one. So until then I guess. 

49. What career did you want to have as a child? I wanted to be an astronaut and a ballerina. Preferably both!

50. What do you crave right now? Just sitting somewhere and listening to Yeol play the guitar.

Well i finished it! :D I’ll tag @thedeviousdo @ohsenhun @hongseok and @paepsi. I’d love to read yours! Feel free to dismiss it though, it is quite a lot.  Lots of love everyone!! <3 <3 <3

[aili]

Valentine’s Day Music Newlsetter 2019!

Welcome to the 13th Music Newsletter! Short intro for the newbies - I love music. I love sharing music with other people. In college I started a "music newsletter" email with some playlists (aka mixtapes) I've made and some song/band recommendations. Why Valentine's Day? Because I think this day should be about love in many ways - including love for music!

That brings us to today. The first Valentine's Day mixtape I put together was actually a physical mix CD that I mailed to my home friends while I was away at college. That was in 2008 (11 years ago!). A lot has changed since then, but my love of music has not. While I feel sometimes too busy or too old or too out of touch to know what I'm even talking about, I hope you'll get some enjoyment out of this - as much as I've been enjoying listening to these songs and picking them for you! 

*Click here to download Valentine's Day 2019 mixtape!

Click here to play Valentine's Day 2019 on Spotify!

*Note that the file downloads as a zip file, double clicking on it to open it up should give you the individual songs. Then move the songs to iTunes into a playlist!

1.) "Happy Unhappy" - The Beths New Zealand indie rockers The Beths debut album, Future Me Hates Me, is full of catchy, energetic sad-twinged songs. This song feels like it could have come out back in the 00s when we had to find new music by reading blogs and actually downloading MP3s - it feels closer to the Garden State soundtrack era of indie than the recent moody electronic vibe. It's a lot of fun! Sounds like Courtney Barnett by way of The Wombats, with a splash of Los Campesinos.

2.) “City Looks Pretty” - Courtney Barnett Courtney’s 2018 album “Tell Me How You Really Feel” is only her second studio album, but somehow it feels like she’s been around forever. The album features a “fuller” sound and more production, which may appear dulled next to 2015’s “Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.” However, I feel excited by Courtney exploring a more mature sound and think it accurately reflects the albums depressive theme. “Sometimes I get mad / it’s not all that bad” is sung with a definite apathy compared to her shout-singing past record. As the bridge settles in, Courtney captures the depression symptom of lack of interest in things you used to enjoy. The city looks pretty when you’ve been stuck inside isolated for two weeks. 3.) “Screwed” - Janelle Monáe feat. Zoë Kravitz Janelle’s 2018 album “Dirty Computer” is an anthology of songs (and truly, poetry) that tell of reckoning with being a queer woman of color in an oppressive, violent society. It’s an incredibly personal album with her fans in mind - “I want young girls, young boys, nonbinary, gay, straight, queer people who are having a hard time dealing with their sexuality, dealing with feeling ostracized or bullied for just being their unique selves, to know that I see you. This album is for you. Be proud.” (Rolling Stone, 2018). My favorite part of this song is “See, everything is sex / except sex / which is power / you know power is just sex / now ask yourself who’s screwing you.”

4.) "BAGDAD - Cap.7: Liturgia" - Rosalía 25-year-old Rosalía Vila Tobella from Catalonia has an excellent 2018 album El Mal Querer. The album combines traditional flamenco with modern R&B. The album is a story of love and heartbreak over the course of 11 chapters/songs. This particular one might sound familiar due to the sampling of Justin Timberlake's "Cry Me A River."

5.) "Gun" - St. Lucia St. Lucia's first release off of their 2018 album Hyperion caught my attention with its connection to a more traditional rock sound and the heavy-hitting, one-word title. The production and sound almost reminds me of Oasis or U2. Turns out that the album is indeed produced by someone who worked on records with PJ Harvey, Depeche Mode, and U2. In interviews, Jean-Philip Grobler talks about how this song is generally about both gun control and power. "You said you wanted to feel a gun in your hands" in Verse 1 transforms to "You said you wanted to feel the blood in your hands" in Verse 2, highlighting the fact that guns are designed to kill. 

6.) “Apathy” - Frankie Cosmos With a catchy bass line, gorgeous lyrics, and endearing vocals, this song and entire album are not to be missed. As you may notice on this year’s playlist, this year I was super into what I would describe as punk-influenced, low-fi indie female vocalists. Pretentious enough for you? Haha. I just mean that there are a ton of young women blowing up in the indie music scene with a huge crossover in sound. As demonstrated in “Apathy,” many of these songs are short, lack a traditional pop music format, use low-fi production, and have a storytelling aspect of almost speak-singing. These elements are all found in traditional punk music, so it’s interesting and exciting to see these artists shaking things up and challenging the punk genre. Frankie Cosmos has a long history of creating music, under various projects using Bandcamp as a teenager. Her 2018 album “Vessel” is nothing short of delightful and another one of my favorites of the year. 7.) “Your Dog” - Soccer Mommy Soccer Mommy is Sophie Allison, singer-songwriter based out of Nashville. She opened for Paramore on their recent tour and she has launched into the indie music scene with a lot of attention in the past couple years. I love how her voice clearly carries so much anger as she sings about an emotionally abusive relationship. Her lyrics describe the agony of small, sweet gestures pushing her back to her ex, despite her wanting desperately to end it. Using the metaphor of being a loyal, sub-servient dog, she describes the way her SO treats her like she’s his property. Because the song lacks a traditional “pop” format (verse 1 / chorus / verse 2 / chorus / bridge / chorus), there is a sense of the story ending unresolved. Fortunately, she has an excellent album (one of my favorites) from 2018 called “Clean” where you can learn more of her story. 8.) “Pristine” by Snail Mail A stunning debut from 19-year-old Lindsey Jordan, “Lush” is a 2018 release not to miss. “Pristine” perfectly encapsulates teenage life and love - “it just feels like the same party every weekend. Doesn’t it?” There is such a sense of genuine hormonal angst that she is almost joyfully celebrating. Her album reads more like a diary - and how lucky she is to have these future memories and be able to approach them with such wisdom.

9.) "Uncomfortably Numb" - American Football feat. Hayley Williams Paying homage to Pink Floyd, legendary emo band American Football joins with Paramore's lead singer Hayley Williams for a devastating track about losing emotional sensation. "I blame my father in my youth / Now as a father, I blame the booze." I couldn't find too much information on the exact inspiration behind the track, but it's the second track released off their upcoming album out March 22nd. Hayley is usually front and center as a singer, and it's interested to hear her take more of a backing role, as well as explore a bit of a lower vocal range than she usually does.

10.) “Geyser” - Mitski Mitski absolutely killed it last year with “Be The Cowboy,” which was consistently rated not only in the top 5 best albums, not only top 3, but making MULTIPLE end of year lists as the number one album of 2018. It’s easy to see why, given the incredible breadth of music she wrote for her album. I see Mitski's influence reflected in the rise of fame in other punk-inspired female vocalists in the indie scene, building off her ability to capture the attention of a wide audience. Which is also very interesting because she incorporated elements of many other genres on this album (spot any disco on “Nobody”?) While it was difficult to pick one song for my playlist, “Geyser” stands out to me as not only an excellent album opener, but a fascinating look into Mitski’s own relationship with the art she creates. In an interview, she explains that this song is about her feeling like she has to create music because she would never be satisfied in life without it, but feeling sometimes stifled, stuck, and resentful when she puts music above basic needs such as her health and self-care. She needs her art to survive but it simultaneously kills her.

11.) “Me & My Dog” - boygenius It’s impossible to pick just one song of this album. Boygenius is the supergroup of Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker - who each could also have one of their incredible solo songs on my playlist. Partially because they enjoyed each other’s creative energies and partially as a response to constantly being compared to each other as “women in indie,” the trio came together to create an EP of emo-influenced, folk-inspired gorgeous tracks about grief, loneliness, identity, and heartbreak. This particular song features Phoebe Bridgers in the verses and is a beautiful representation of the embarrassing and frustrating feeling of being in love with an ex. Please check out the individual work of these artists too!

12.) "bless ur heart" - serpentwithfeet Serpentwithfeet, aka Josiah Wise, has a gorgeous, intimate voice throughout his 2018 debut album, soil. This song starts off with a question of how his art will be received by the world. The rest of the song is a tender message of gratitude to his first love. It seems like Josiah questioned the choice to speak about his experiences with his ex in such a public fashion - with complexities of privacy, being open about sexuality, and possible painful memories on the table. Josiah's writing is very much like poetry, and his raw, unfiltered, un-autotuned vocals match the beauty of his words.

13.) "Bury A Friend" - Billie Eilish 17-year-old Billie Eilish is set to release her debut album, When We Sleep, Where Do We Go? next month. This song matches her goth aesthetic with a creepy story from the perspective of the monster under the bed. We learn that the monster is part of Billie herself, who is struggling with her own demons. 14.) "Loading Zones" - Kurt Vile A gorgeous guitar track, Kurt Vile paints a picture of his hometown Philadelphia and feeling on top of the world exploring his city's streets. He included a hilarious marketing strategy of sending fake parking tickets to fans in the mail to promote the song. Kurt Vile talks about the metaphor of "I park for free," which is how he sometimes lives his life - breaking the dumb rules because it's his life, his streets, his town. 15.) "Dylan Thomas" - Better Oblivion Community Center Is it possible to already be nostalgic for the late 2000's? Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers released this surprise collaboration last month and this is the standout track for me. Conor Oberst's incredibly recognizable voice is hard to match in terms of strength, timbre, and uniqueness. While Bridgers is young enough to be from a different generation than him (she also grew up listening to Oberst's music), he saw something in her that resonated with him. I love how they sing in unison on this track (and much of the album) and think their voices sound really good together.

16.) "Butterflies" - Kacey Musgraves Kacey Musgraves is bringing a breath of fresh air to country. After self-releasing three albums, she tried her hand at reality TV through Nashville Star over a decade ago. Golden Hour is her fourth album using a record label, and she just won Album of the Year at the Grammys! Her voice is beautiful and has an earnest, authentic approach in joining elements of country pop. 

17.) “Prior Things” - Hop Along “Bark Your Head Off, Dog” is Hop Along’s third album, released in 2018. Singer/songwriter Frances Quinlan has the ability to transform the themes of her songs. Layered with a multitude of different sounds and instruments, it could easily sound scattered and busy, but instead feels like we are huddled around a campfire with an enthusiastic, stream-of-consciousnesses storyteller. “Prior Thing” is the last song on the album and crosses time, space, and memories with the start of a hallucinogenic drug trip. She has the ability to take a phrase and transform the expected - pausing or elongating notes at unexpected places. This method keeps you invested in figuring out what the song is really about or what the conclusion is. 18.) "Kids" - Pup Emo/pop punkers Pup have a new album Morbid Stuff coming out on April 5th. Their songs are made for live shows - shouting/singing alternates, sing-a-long catchy lyrics reminiscent of the Hold Steady, and unison whole-band lines. Pup frontman Stefan Babcock said this song is about finding someone who agrees with your view of the world being a fucked up place, and enjoying small moments of solace in spending time with them. 

SPOTIFY

Don't forget to subscribe to my playlists on Spotify! Here is the link to listen to this year's mixtape on Spotify.

I try to add new songs at least once a week to this playlist: What I'm currently lovin' (updated freq)

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I hope you guys enjoy the new music and feel free to send me recommendations of anything you like!<3 aili

Previous Mixtapes:

Autumn Love mix | Autumn Love Spotify

Copenhagen mix | Copenhagen Spotify

Valentine's Day downbeat 2010

Valentine's Day upbeat 2010

Valentine's Day 2011

Philadelphia mix | Philadephia Spotify

New Crime mix | New Crime Spotify

The City mix | The City Spotify

Drive mix | Drive Spotify

Valentine's Day 2012 | VDay 2012 Spotify

King's Myth mix | King's Myth Spotify

Hold On mix | Hold On Spotify

Valentine's Day 2013 | Vday 2013 Spotify

Valentine's Day 2014 | Vday 2014 Spotify

Valentine's Day 2015 | Vday 2015 Spotify

Valentine's Day 2016 | Vday 2016 Spotify

Valentine's Day 2017| Vday 2017 Spotify

Valentine's Day 2018 | Vday 2018 Spotify

[thenewlittleprincess]

Little Guerrilla

"OK everybody!  Es'era 'Ay Bendito!' y su cancion 'Bembe!' , Numero Tres en las listas aqui en WSNY, 'S' por 'Espanol' en Nueva York, en el corazon de Brooklyn. Soy Marty Martinez aqui y bienvenido a ustedes que acaban de unirse a nosotros.  Ahora son las siete cuarenta y cinco dela manana del lunes, primero de diciembre, dos mil vientecinco. Y ahora alguien que acaba de unirse a nosotros aqui es La Princesita. Bienvenidos, nenita."

"Muchas gracias, Marty. Hola, Nueva Yorka! Vos quiero muchá!"  says the Princess.

"Has estando viajando por las estaciones de radio, hablando con gente y cantando nuevas canciones. Que clase de reaccion tu viste?" says Marty.

"First, can I speak in English?" the Princess asks.

"Yeah, sure. But I t‘ought you was fluent in Spanish," Marty says.

"Yeah, but our Spanish is not exactly the same as yours and I get confused and confuse everybody. Also, we decided I would sing in English and speak English so everyone can understand. ‘cos me Guatemalan people need all the help they can get!" the Princess says.

"OK, sure. I understand," Marty says.

"Bu' I'll answer your question now," the Princess says. "Yes, the reaction's been great. Talkin' directly to fans and other people. I never dreamed it! Sometimes you get the odd one out but me Uncle, the Barrister in London, told me to be in the business you have to get a rhino's hide. You cannot let anything hurt you."

"OK and do you have a new song for us today?" Marty says.

"Ciertamente!"  the Princess says.

"Ciertamente y cual es el nombre?" Marty says.

"It's name is 'Little Guerrilla' o en espanol 'Guerrillita','" says the Princess.

"OK, adelante!"  says Marty.

"Gracias!"  the Princess says.

The band strikes up a reggae beat, the Princess playing the electric piano in chords. The video below is one of the best examples of the genre.

Then the Princess sings, in Jamaican style.

She sittin' in de back

O' de cantina

Hidin' from gran de guerra maquina

Guerrillas gettin' useless on de quetzalteca

"Vamos! Vamos!"

Little Guerrilla sippin' quiet on de limonada

Not any money for a drop o' soda

When she hear de tanks de planes

And de guns she run

"Vamos! Vamos!"

Hey, hey little guerrilla

Maybe just 10

Your whole family gone to Heaven

And you're just waitin' to see dem again

Little guerrilla

Fight for what's left

It's fight or flight

You know what's right

'Cos in dis revolution

You de cuttin' edge

[Musical interlude - electric piano melodies around the bands' chords]

She doesn't like no gun

De knife is good enough

Just push and turn and turn and turn

But you gotta be tough

Don't be no powderpuff!

Dey never believe it

'Til after dey gone

De cute little one

Wid de knife in her pocket

Can kill you faster

Than any gun

Hey, hey little guerrilla

Maybe just 10

Your whole family gone to Heaven

And you're just waitin' to see dem again

Little guerrilla

Fight for what's left

It's fight or flight

You know what's right

'Cos in dis revolution

You de cuttin' edge

[Musical Interlude - electric piano solos with the band keeping the reggae beat]

Hey, little one

Don't you have no fun?

She say

Fun is for de rich kids

Not for dis one

Fun is wakin' up

And still seein' de sun

Dere be time for fun

When de battle's won!

We can celebrate when de war is done

[Spoken by Princess in low tone] Gotta take care of business

Little guerrilla

Fight for what's left

It's fight or flight

You know what's right

'Cos in dis revolution

You de cuttin' edge

Woh, woh!

And de struggle goes on

And de struggle goes on

No holidays, no weekends

Every day de same

Yeah, yeah, yeah de struggle goes on!

For we not givin' it up

We gettin' justice or death

If one happen we quit

If de other we gone

Yeah! Keep movin' on

Band: Keep movin' on, keep movin' on, keep movin' on

Little guerrilla

You are tomorrow

Ready to die to make our future bright

A prayer, a thought, a hope for you tonight

For you tonight ... (3 times)

Sleepin' in de jungle

In de shinin' moonlight

Oh, oh, oh  

Oh, oh, o de ho Oh oh, oh oh (3 times)

[Applause in the studio]

"Magnifico, Princesita, magnifico!" Marty says.

"Cheers, Marty! Muchas gracias," says the Princess.

"Y quien es la guerrillita? Tu?" Marty says.

"No! I thank Jesus, Mother Mary and all the saints that I can fight for Guatemala in air- conditioned studios!" the Princess says. "I doubt I could 'sleep in the jungle in the shinin' moonlight' for fear of the snakes!"

"Hay ninas asi en Guatemala, peleando en la selva?" Marty asks.

"Not many, I think," the Princess says. "But there are some. People from Guatemala come to Crummer Canyon and tell us what’s goin' on there. One bloke showed me a photo of a li'l girl in a red cap and really common clothes carryin' an armalite. He told me she was one. He called her "un' otra princesita".

The Princess giggles.

"Pero la nenita en la cancion, no le gustan las armas,"  says Marty.

"Yeah, that were my idea," says the Princess. "Li'l kids carryin' guns, that picture's off. People wouldn't like it and couldn't believe it. But this li'l one who can kill a man by surprise with a knife, just because he'd never dream that was what she would do. That's believable and sort o' more interesting, innit?"

"Eso es cierta. Y los hombres que te dicen lo que está pasando en Guatemala. Qué dicen ahora? " Marty asks.

"All the news out o' home is bad," the Princess says. "First, they showed us videos: airplanes droppin' firebombs on villages and burnin' up the houses and the kiddies. People marchin' in the city and soldiers mowin' 'em down rapid fire with machine guns and even planes. Then they tell us the shelves are empty in the shops. People were down to eatin' tortillas and frijoles but now the frijoles are too expensive and too hard to find. The Presidenta gave the campesinos land and the Army chased them away, killed half of 'em and gave the land back to the ladinos. It goes on and on. Then they attacked Belize and lost a whole lot of soldiers there. They were our neighbours now they're our enemies. On and on. But . . ."

"Qué ?" Marty says.

"I've go' a scoop . . . special for you lot," the Princess says. "Me bessie Antony always loves when I do this."

"Quién es Antony?" Marty asks.

"He's the top entertainment reporter for Topzine," the Princess says. "He loves when I give him a scoop!"

"Quieres decir una primicia?  Algunas noticias que nadie más conoce? " Marty says.

"Sí,"  the Princess says. " You're the first in America to know this I think. Well, I was, but you're next. You and all your listeners."

"Qué ?" Marty says.

"We've got a leader now," says the Princess. "It's what we've needed. He's the Presidenta's cousin. He was a General  but he's been hiding in the jungle with his bessies since the Presidenta was murdered. They've been trainin' and gettin' ready. Now they're ready and we're gonna use the Freedom Fund ta fill 'em full o' food, clothes, medicines, guns, bullets, rockets: anything they need. The leader is named Xihualtepec, like the Presidenta was: so they call him 'Comandante X'. I have a video of him saying that the junta are all traitors and he's going to put them against the wall for fusilamiento. And may God speed that day! First, they're goin' up to Belize to help the people there win their freedom and then the Belize people will help us win ours."

"Ahora te gustaría recivir algunas llamadas de los oyentes?"  Marty says.

"I'd love it!" says the Princess. "Let's hear from them."

"Primo de Bronx. Teodoro?"  Marty says.

"Sí,"  Teodoro says. "Princesita. Solo quiero decir que admiro tu coraje. A tu edad, lo que estas haciendo. Haciendo frente a una dictadura brutal. Rezo por ti y por los guatemaltecos."

"Muchas gracias, señor," the Princess replies. "Pisto es importante pero oraciones igalmente. No m'admira. Ayuda a los chapinos. Puedo hago tan poco. Vosotros, la fuerza, hagan todo. For the English people listening, I said money is important but we need prayers equally. Don't admire me, help the Guatemalan people. I can do so little. You, the power of the mobilised youth, do everything."

"Siguiente, Marcelina?"  Marty says.  

"Little Princess, aren't you scared?" Marcelina asks. "Wouldn't those soldiers try to do something to you?"

"No,"  the Princess says. "I thank God and Mother Mary that I am safe in America to do this work. If I had to do this in Guatemala, I'd last all of five minutes. I know nothing they can do to me is worse than what they're doin' to all people of all ages in Guatemala. So why do I deserve any better? If they cry, I can cry too."

"Y siguiente, Paul?" Marty says.

"Bue-nas di-as, prin-cessa. Co-mo es-tas?"  says Paul.

"Oh, there's a Spanish language student!" the Princess says. "We can see one comin' for kilos! It's OK. You can ask in English. It's me first language."

"What do you really want in Guatemala?" Paul asks. "What's the solution there?"

"Easy Manchester caviar that one!" the Princess says. "But yet someone needs to say it out clear like that, 'cos it's so obvious people can miss it. First, there's Comandante X's solution: stand the junta in front of a wall and shoot them down. They dunno' deserve to live. That will make the people free. Then we canno’ get the Presidenta back from Heaven, where I'm sure she is, but have another election. Maybe Comandante X can stand in place of his cousin. He - or somebody - can help the poor, the black people, the Mayans, the campesinos and the trabajadores like the Presidenta did. Give them land, food, enough money, medicine, schools, water, toilets, everything they really need. So they can live like we do. That would be a beautiful thing. Everyone would come back to Guatemala and live happily like we used to."

"Que hermoso sueño, princesita!" Marty says. What a beautiful dream!

“No esta un sueño, Marty. Esta un plan d’accion!” says the Princess. “Why dream it if ya can do it?”

[spamzineglasgow]

(HOT TAKE) Notes on a Conditional Form by The 1975, part 1

In the first instalment of a two part dialogic HOT TAKE of The 1975′s latest album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit, 2020), Maria Sledmere writes to musician and critic Scott Morrison with meditations on the controversial motormouth and prince of sincerity that is Matty Healy, the poetics of wrongness, millennial digression and what it means to play and compose from the middle.

Dear Scott,

> So we have agreed to write something on The 1975’s fourth studio album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit/Polydor). I have been traipsing around the various necropoli of Glasgow on my state-sanctioned walks this week, listening to the long meandering 80-minute world of it, disentangling my headphones from the overgrown ferns, caught between the living and dead. Can you have a long world, a sprawling fantasia, when ‘the world’ feels increasingly shortened, small, boiled down to its ‘essentials’? Let’s go around the world in 80 minutes, the band seem to say, take this short-circuit to the infinite with me. I like that; I don’t even need a boat, just a half-arsed WiFi connection and a will to download. I’m really excited to be talking with you, writing you both about this; it’s an honour to connect our thoughts. I want writing right now to feel a bit like listening, so I write this listening. When my friend Katy slid into my DMs on a Monday morning with ‘omg the 1975 album starts with greta?????????’ and then ‘what on earth is the genre of this album ?!’ I just knew it had to happen, this writing-listening, because I was equally alarmed and charmed by the cognitive dissonance of that fall from Greta’s soft, yet urgent call to rebel (‘The 1975’), into ‘People’ with its parodic refrain of post-punk hedonism that would eat Fat White Family on a Dadaesque meal-deal platter ‘WELL, GIRLS, FOOD, GEAR [...] Yeah, woo, yeah, that’s right’. Scott, you and I went to see The 1975 play at the Hydro on the 1st of March, my last gig before lockdown. I’d been up all night drinking straight gin and doing cartwheels and crying on my friend’s carpet, and the sleeplessness made everything all the more lush and intense. Those slogans, the theatrical backdrops, the dancers, the lights, the travellator! Everything so EXTRA, what a JOURNEY. And well, it would be rude of me not to invite you to contribute to this conversation, as a thank you for the ticket but also because of your fortunate (and probably unusual) positioning as both a classically trained musician (with a fine-tuned listening ear) and fervent fan of the band (readers, Scott messaged me with pictures of pre-ordered vinyl to prove it).

> It seems impossible to begin this dialogue without first addressing the FRAUGHT and oft~problematic question of Matty Healy, the band’s frontman, variously described as ‘the enfant terrible of pop-rock’ and ‘outspoken avatar’ (Sam Sodomsky, Pitchfork), ‘enigmatic deity’ (Douglas Greenwood for i-D), ‘a charismatic thirty-one-year-old’ and ‘scrawny’, rock star ‘archetype’, not to mention ‘avatar of modern authenticity, wit, and flamboyance’ (Carrie Battan, The New Yorker). ‘Divisive motormouth or voice of a generation?’ asks Dorian Lynskey with (fair enough) somewhat tired provocation in The Guardian, as if you could have one without the other, these days. ‘There are’, writes Dan Stubbs for The NME, ‘as many Matty Healys here as there are musical styles’. So far, so postmodern, so elliptical, so everything/yeah/woo/whatever/that’s right. Come to think of it, it makes sense for The 1975 to draft in Greta Thunberg to read her climate speech over the opening eponymous track. Both Matty and Greta, for divergent yet somehow intersecting reasons, suffer the troublesome, universalising label of voice of a generation. Why not join forces to exploit this label, to put out a message? I’ve always thought of pop music as a kind of potential broadcast, a hypnotic, smooth space for desire’s traversal and recalibration. More on that later, maybe. What do you think?

> You can imagine Matty leaping out of a cryptic, post-internet Cocteau novelette (if not then straight onto James Cordon’s studio desk), emoji streaming from his fingertips like the lightning that Justine wields in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011); but the terrifying candour of the enfant terrible is also his propensity to wax lyrical on another (bear with my clickhole) YouTube interview about his thoughts on Situationism and the Snapchat generation. It feels relevant to mention cinema right now, if only in passing, because this album is full of cinematic moments: strings and swells worthy of Weyes Blood’s latest paean to the movies, but also a Disneyfication of sentiment clotted and packed between house tracks, ballads and rarefied indie hits. Nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975. Maybe more on that later, also.

> Where do I start though, how to really write about this, how to attain something like necessary distance in the space of a writing-listening? Matty Healy, I suppose, like SPAM’s celebrated authorial mascot, Tom McCarthy, poses the same problem of response: how to write about an artist whose own critical commentary is like an eloquent, overzealous and self-devouring, carnivorous vine of opinion?  

> Now, let’s not turn this into a discussion about who wears pinstripes better (we can leave that to readers - these are total Notes from the Watercooler levels of quiche). There seems to be this obsession with pinning (excuse the pun) Matty down to a flat surface of multiples: a moodboard, avatar, placeholder for automatic cancellation. He’s the soft cork you wanna prod your anxieties through and call it identity, you wanna provoke into saying something bizarrely, painfully true about life ‘as it is now’. Healy himself quips self-referentially, ‘a millennial that babyboomers like’. I don’t really know where to start really, not even on Matty; my brain is all over the place and I can’t find a critical place to settle. I’m lost in the fog and the stripes, some stars also; I haven’t even washed my hair for a week. Funnily enough, in 2018 for SPAM’s #7 Prom Date issue I wrote a poem called ‘Just Messing Around’ where the speaker mentions ‘pinning my eye to the right side / of matt healy’s hair all shaved / & serene’ and you don’t really know if it’s the eye that’s shaved or the hair, but both I guess offer different kinds of vision. Every time I google the man, IRL Matty I mean, I am offered a candied proliferation of alluring headlines: ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy opens up on his beef with Imagine Dragons’, ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy savagely destroys Maroon 5 over plagiarism claims’. Perhaps the whole point is to define (or slay?) by negation. Hey, I’ll write another poem. The opening sentence comes from Matty’s recent Guardian interview.

Superstar

I’m not an avocado, not everyone thinks I’m amazing. That’s why they call me the avocado, baby was a song released by Los Campesinos! in 2013, same year as the 1975’s debut. In the am I have been wanting to listen and Andy puts up a meme like ‘The 1975 names their albums stuff like “A Treatise on Epistemological Suffering” and then spends 2 hours singing about how hard it is to be 26’ and I reply being 26 IS epistemological suffering (isn’t that the affirmative dismissal contained in the title, ‘Yeah I Know’) I mean only yesterday I had to ask myself if it’s true you can wish on 11:11 or take zinc to improve your immune system or use an expired provisional license to buy alcohol like why are they even still asking I thought indie had died after that excruciating Hadouken! song called ‘Superstar’ which was all like You don’t like my scene / You don’t like my song / Well, if you Somewhere I’ve done something wrong it seems a delirious, 3-minute scold of the retro infinitude of scarf-wearing cunts with haircuts, and yeah sure kids dressed as emos rapping to rave is not the end of the world, per se, similarly I had to ask myself is there a life in academia is there a wage here or there, like the Talking Heads song And you may ask yourself, well How did I get here? Good thing I turn 27 next month Timothy Morton often uses the refrain, this is not my beautiful house this is not my beautiful wife to refer to those moments you find yourself caught in the irony loop and that’s dark ecology the closer you are the stranger it feels like slice me in half I’ll fall out with more questions you can plant in the soil like a stone or stoner, just one more drag of does it offend you, yeah? will I live and die in a band Matty sings the sweet green meat of my much-too-old -and-such-youthful experience of adding healthy fat to conference dialogue, like ‘Avocado, Baby’ was released on a record called No Blues I believe a large automobile is hurtling towards me now in negative space and the driver is crooning Elvis and reciting my funding conditions and everything feels like there aren’t not still people who believe the new culture of content is a space ‘over there’ and you can still have earnest power ballads about love if you want them =/ to cancel (too many tabs don’t make a tableau but in the future facebook has a paywall) and fame is a drag the pressure we put on the atmosphere, like somewhere you’re alive and still amazing asking wtf I’m reading this novel by Roberto Bolaño set partly in 1975 before we had internet it seems poets got laid a lot that year in Mexico City before I was born to pick up video calls with a spliff in one hand in the splendid, essential heat like a difficult knife in my side you can put me on toast, grind the pepper over me gently and say fucking hell this has taken forever.

> I guess I want or wanted to begin with this question of difficulty that rises when responding to Notes on a Conditional Form. How do you approach an album whose delayed release places it in a position of considerable hype, an album whose world tour and promotion is again delayed by global pandemic, an album shrouded in the ever-shifting controversy of Matty’s persona, an album whose length and sonic variety risks collapse into litanies of zany superlative and necrophilic attempts to revive musical category as vaguely relevant here? As beautiful as it is to catalogue the offbeat Pinegrove vibes of ‘Roadkill’, the shoegaze croons of ‘Then Because She Goes’ and the pop-punk, chord-bright euphoria of ‘Me & You Together Song’, I could keep going and going with this. I could just list and just list this. The album is a generous offering: a tribute to the album as form in an age where attention tapers away on high-streaming playlists set to conditioned, circadian moods curated by the likes of Spotify or Apple Music. The album is a Borgesian plenitude of multiple pathways, multiple timelines, infinite feed, choose your own adventure; a hypertext of cultural reference almost worthy of Manic Street Preachers at their Richey Edwards era of paranoid, intellectual peak; a metamodernist feat of oscillation between irony and sincerity, an extended tract, a drunk millennial ramble, a journey that loops from house party to club basement to the streams of sexuality repressed and expressed encounter...and yet. It is both more and less than these things. In trying to capture Notes on a Conditional Form with some pithy, journalist’s statement, I’m doing it all wrong.

> Sidenote: I recently listened to Rachel Zucker give a 2016 lecture on ‘The Poetics of Wrongness’ as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She makes a case for wrongness in poetry and critique, rejects the poem of pithy essence, the short, pretty and to the point lyric whose meaning is easily digested in a greetings card, or A Level exam paper, say. ‘Instead of the Fabergé egg of the short lyric, I prefer the aesthetics of intractability and exhausted exhaustedness’, the mistakes, lags or aporia made along the way in one of these long and winding poems. Notes on a Conditional Form is full of what some might deem mistakes, digression, exhaustion; but it is also peppered with the gloss of almost perfect pop ‘hits’ such as ‘Me & You Together Song’ and ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’. A wrong poem should be, ‘ashamed and irreverent’, which feels like a decent description of The 1975’s general orientation towards artistic conception. There is cringe and incongruity, there is by all intents and purposes ‘too much of it’, whatever we mean by ‘it’. And yet, that is its beautiful poetics of wrongness, the sound of wrongness, which ‘prefers the stairs’ to the easy elevator pitch (as Zucker puts it), that ‘prefers a half-finishing crumbling stairwell to nowhere’. I like to think about this 1975 album as a kind of exhausting Escherian scene of shifting, crumbling stairwells, shuffling and reassembling against the glistering backdrop of the internet’s inverse void, where everything, literally everything is translated to a starry excess of 1s and 0s, our collective binary data, the white hot, unreadable howl of our noise. What do you think Scott, would Matty find this image agreeable? Does that matter?

> Pushing dear Matty aside, say what you like, let’s start (again) with the title: Notes on a Conditional Form. Following 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, it’s fair to position these records as gestures towards philosophical statements ‘of the times’. Important to recognise the resistance to total or dominating knowledge built into the titles: these are not complete tracts or theses, but rather ‘a brief inquiry’ and ‘notes’. It’s obviously the ancient yet *hip* thing to do in capital-P Philosophy, to put out your statement on aesthetics and ethics, and I think The 1975 are playing with that tradition and its failure. You can imagine if his attention span were different, Matty Healy would’ve already written a PhD thesis on this stuff and published it as drunken bulletins on LiveJournal in 2007. As it stands, we have the smorgasbord sprawl of this eclectic record to get through in this cursèd year of 2020 — it’s not like we have much of anything better to do right now, when everything feels so futile, beyond reason and even the greatest human endeavour. Haha, woo, Yeah :’(((.

> Let’s stay in that conditional space between crying and laughter. Conditional form is interesting as a term, often used in grammar to refer to the ‘unreal past’ because it uses a past tense but does not actually refer to something that literally happened in the past: If I had texted him back, we would probably have gone to the gig that night. There’s something about the conditional as the ur-condition of the internet, the proliferating possibilities it offers and the hauntological strains of what could have been had we chosen x option over y, z, a, b, c, infinity...As millennials, we often make decisions by hedging, always caught in the conditional state of what it is to be. Hovering in the emotional shortcuts provided by dumb yellow icons, the poetics of abstraction. A verb form’s dalliance with uncertain reverb; and so we live our conditional lives.

> To push this further, we can say the internet is, as ever, Matty Healy’s natural habitat. In a recent podcast interview with Conor Oberst for The Face, Healy tells his favourite emo-country hero that ‘my natural environment by the time I started The 1975 was the fucking internet’. So how does that ecosystem play into the music? In a damning review for The Line of Best Fit, Claire Biddles concludes:

The 1975’s first three albums are ideal and distinct worlds to inhabit, each individually cohesive but situated in specific contexts — the anticipation of the small town, profundity in the face of vacuous fame, and the horror and isolation of late capitalism. Perhaps because of its broken genesis, Notes has no such common context, and ends up feeling flat, directionless and inessential, where its forebears felt vital, worthy of devoting a life to. For a band with proven dexterity in deftly capturing the nuances and quick changes of contemporary conversation, it is disheartening to witness them with nearly nothing of note to say.

That description — ‘flat, directionless and inessential’ — is kind of how I experience the internet right now, in the paradox of Web 2.0 becoming utterly essential, somehow, to how I live my life, how I love, how I am with friends. The internet as my ecosystem, my utility, my complete environment, my Imaginary — beyond the mere utility of a WiFi connection. Broken genesis might well describe the childhoods of those of us who grew up online, whose platforms collapsed around them, whose adolescent data was lost in the great ~accidental annihilation of the MySpace servers, whose identities were always already fractured, performed, anonymised or exquisitely personalised, deferred into only the (im)possible keystroke of utterance and trace, the fort-da play of MSN sign-ins. ‘My life is defined by a desire to be outward followed by a fear of being seen’, Matty says in a new short film for Apple Music, released in tandem with the album. The internet requires this chiaroscuro destiny: not to burn always with Baudelaire’s hard and gem-like flame (O to be an IRL flaneur beyond times of lockdown) but to endlessly flicker between the bright green light of presence and the shade of what once was called afk, away from keyboard. To live and burn in the gap between extroversion and introversion, to live in this conditional state of tendency. To express with emoji, send pics, is to both reveal and withhold something else, essential.

> I like albums to feel like worlds; I appreciate Biddles’ evocation of the cohesion experienced in the first three 1975 records. But perhaps it is a kind of violence to assume a world must have cohesion to exist. What is even meant by ‘common context’? What pressure are we putting on a singer, a band, a cultural moment to produce something familiar and harmonious, and to whom, at what scale? What does it mean to be the biggest band in the world...for a bit? How does that work when everything is dissonance, transience, noise, interference; both this and not-this; when life itself is lived as the flat traversal of a millioning existential terrains that seem to collapse into this nowness in which I feel myself sliding forever? Can anyone weigh-in on what it means to make music, art or writing that’s ‘worthy of devoting a life to’, because the gravity and force of that condition for good art, good pop, seduces me so.

> Maybe the point is to always be in the middle, to never quite start to write about The 1975, to find yourself always already writing about this album because this album was always already writing about your life. I have said nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975, but I was being coy, because the hottest twentieth-century philosophical double act, Deleuze and Guattari (haters gonna hate), do the interlude rather nicely. The point of a rhizome being ‘no beginning or end [...] always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ as they write in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). I see the musical interlude of a pop record, the instrumental moment without lyric, as a kind of middling gesture that places the listener in that conditional state of presence and absence, a hinge between songs, times and narrative moments. Maybe my favourite moment in A Thousand Plateaus is the statement: ‘RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or pseudoscien-tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous’. Painful or ponderous might be a fair critique levelled at the enfant terrible vibes of Matty’s lyrics and generic pick’n’mix, but isn’t this tactic a kind of swerving punch at the categorical violence that keeps people out of academia, that keeps academic discourse so often stale in the first place? Unlike most journal articles, let’s face it, pop reaches ‘“the people”’. Perhaps Notes on a Conditional Form is the rhizomatic sprawl of the myriad we need as an alternative to institutional hierarchy, ring-fencing and the language games of academia. Surely the title is a reference to the very ‘pseudoscient-tificity’ D&G mention? I’m gonna quote Richard Scott’s blurb to Colin Herd’s 2019 poetry collection, You Name It here (not least because the indie publishers, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, come straight out of Manchester, home to The 1975, and because Herd’s poetic spirit is pure pop generosity with a platter of theory on the side), because I want to say similar things of this album: ‘Colin Herd’s poems are masterpieces of variousness. They are talismans against Macho demons. They are snatches of theory operating under lavish spills of language’. The good thing about Herd’s poetry and Matty Healy’s lyrics is that the impulse towards romantic or florid expression is always tapered by an interest in the mundane and everyday. Healy is always singing about pissing or buying clothes online or, as on ‘The Birthday Party’, singing about ‘a place I’ve been going’ that seems to consist of the lonely, infinite regress of conversations about seeing friends and watching someone drink kombucha while buying, in the convenient life of rhyme, Ed Ruscha prints.

Ed Ruscher, Cold Beer, Beautiful Girls (2009)

> So what kind of listening does this rhizomatic sprawl demand — does it expand beyond the banal or find a holding space there, a heaven of affect chilled to late-modernity’s crisp perfection? ‘The End (Music For Cars)’ is a luxurious, Hollywood ‘soaring’ moment, all strings and swells, fucking woodwind, and comes as the third track on the album, where normally you’d place it as some kind of penultimate climax, the album’s landscape pan-out or big swelling screen kiss in three-dimensional rotation. The band’s ‘Music For Cars’ era comprises their two most recent records, and you have to take it as a nod to Brian Eno’s 1978 ambient classic Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Matty recently interviewed Eno again for The Face, cool). The thing about cars is you drive around in them, you follow rules but also whims and desires, convictions; you choose to join others or you pursue the selfish acceleration (‘People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles’ goes the laconic teenage refrain in Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero). You only listen to music half-attentively; you don’t listen close enough to trade in souls. Are we being invited to experience this album as an ambient disruption of figure and ground, presence and absence, here and there, space and place, intimacy and despondency? Driving feels increasingly ‘directionless and inessential’ when the scale effects and obscenities of the anthropocene, of covid and other late-capitalist crises loom in our vision, when the sign systems we used to navigate our lives by seem to shimmer out of focus, or pixelate and deteriorate through endless memetic replication... You can’t help feel like Biddles review kind of misses the point.

Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor (1959)

> What point would that be though, in a world of rhizomatic overlap and intersecting, middling lines, a direction without seeming end? I love the approximation at work when Biddles writes, ‘with nearly nothing of note to say’, because that seems to be a possibility condition for writing in the age of the internet. To write in a way that is almost less than zero and loop back upon some kind of infinity, yet keep it in 2-step. I think back to Rachel Zucker’s image of the half-finished crumbling stairwell, and feel an amiable sense of approval towards this band who always work between the registers of diary, confession, advertising, provocative sloganeering and faux-didactics, never quite settling in to specifically tell you this particular story. It’s all mess, and it’s awful and delicious, I’m sorry. ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’ is the title of track 13 on the album: that movement between nothing and everything feels like the absolutist, absurdist conditions of ‘truth’ possibility in the Trumpocene/age of so-called ‘post-truth’. ‘Life feels like a lie, I need something to be true’, Healy sings with strained conviction in the song’s opening. But what is at stake in this truth? ‘I never fucked in a car, I was lying’, goes the line, referring back to the dramatic in medias res opening to ‘Love It If We Made It’, notable banger from A Brief Inquiry…: ‘We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin / Saying controversial things just for the hell of it’. If lying is a pun on telling a mistruth or laying back, practically sexless in a passive state, there’s a deliberate play on apathy, agency and distortion here. It’s something Matty seems snagged on. On ‘I Like America & America Likes Me’ he collapses aesthetic superficiality, capital’s lyric abstraction (‘Oh, what’s a fiver?’) and generalised crisis into this (un)conscious desire for shutdown, expressed in fragmentary bullets of needing-to-know-and-not-know: ‘Is that designer? Is that on fire? Am I a liar? Oh, will this help me lay down?’ And then that impassioned refrain, processed through vocal distortion as if to enact the difficulty in clarity as overcome somehow by the sheer making of noise: ‘Belief and saying something / And saying something / And saying something’. It’s the endless, driving recursion of our lives online, online.

> Back to ‘The End (Music for Cars)’ which really is the middle of the beginning. It’s weird to listen to songs about driving and lying down in the middle of lockdown, drowning in the bloat of social media, on top of our ongoing climate emergency (yeah, remember that, it’s still happening), where high-carbon travel feels like an exhausted, almost impossible concept. A musician complaining about travelling is an age-old subject for a song, but this feels just as much about living in the in-between times of the internet (remember the sweet naivety of the information superhighway) as much as the great Road, for which Kerouac longed as much as Springsteen, Dylan, or Lana Del Rey. Is Matty Healy homesick though? ‘Get somewhere, change my mind, eh / Get somewhere but don’t find it / I don’t find what I’m looking for’. It’s all ‘(out there)’ as the parenthetical refrain goes, but maybe ‘out there’, outside, is the maddening supplement, as Derrida would say, to our lives online, thus revealing their mutual, entwined dependency. Imagine the M6 but tangled up crazily, zanily, like one of those Sylvano Bussoti scores. It’s not like you’re trying to get home, get back, exactly. It’s not like you can just click back on your browser and erase that trace of the touch that enacts it. That’s the weird-ass sensation of being an ecological being: ‘Wherever you go, there you are’, writes Tim Morton in Being Ecological (2018). We’re all pretty alien, even to ourselves.

> If life feels like a lie, as Matty sings, does it matter anymore whether it is or not? Or, to pose the question differently, how do we feel into, attune to something like ‘truth’, a shared reality or feeling? ‘Out there’ is only a state of ellipsis [...] a vine extended, something for the listener, user, consumer and/or human to cling to — or be strangled by. In the aforementioned Apple Music video, Matty takes away the canvas and presents the frame beneath, in a gesture that is comically overwrought with Duchampian pretention around the state and context of the artwork itself. ‘Sometimes I think what is the point of...it’s not my atheism coming out, it’s just my being human coming out’, he muses. The phrase ‘coming out’, with its connotations of closeting, shame and cocoon-like emergence is intriguing here. In a dehumanising, post-internet world of neoliberalism and its attendant microfascisms, its commodification of all kinds of art, its easythink translation of poetry-to-advertising, what would it mean to come out as human after, or better still, in the middle of all this? It’s significant that he trails off after ‘the point of…’, for surely the point itself (of the art?) would be to find yourself here, there, right in the middle of it all. And then in ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’, it’s like Matty is calling us back from that epistemological and ontological boiling point of knowing and being, like in singing we could go along, we could feel present and ‘true’ again, even with friction and difference. We gotta take hold, cool ourselves down from the rhetoric and into warm emotion, the smell of paint, erotic vibration of bass, in a manner of speaking.

> What if the mode of inquiry were not to investigate but rather to follow the lines of flight, to riff on this world where narrative arcs and chains are replaced by the multiple possibilities of hallucinatory experience, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’? To just desire and trace it. This, Scott, is where you come in (and I finally shut up to listen). There is so much more to write about this album, echo for echo, and I feel like I’ve only begun the tracing which was already beginning: I want to know your thoughts on The 1975 and America, on gender and genre, on bodies and football and friendship, on political engagement, those house beats, on the beautiful, sultry appearance of Phoebe (fucking) Bridgers, on sincerity, on the question of ‘What Should I Say’...It’s been playing on my mind that I will never say what I want to, or should, or would say of this album, but this perhaps is what I would otherwise have said. I give you my notes in conditional form.

Read part 2 of our review in Scott Morrison’s response here.

Notes on a Conditional Form is out now and available to order. 

~

Text: Maria Sledmere

Published: 23/6/20