#i was gonna tune a floating bridge guitar i have since itd be great to play this but...

[coridallasmultipass]

Fuck yeahhhh! Pulled out my mom's tapes.

It's a little stretched from where it was resting, but the rest of it sounds beautiful. A lot better than on my MP3 player speakers. (The boombox is rough, but has legit bass boosting and equalizers easily accessible.)

Vulgar Display is the album for the tour when my mom saw them live, since my dad was a bouncer at the venue and snuck her in, and she got to hangout backstage with them - a year before I was even born, so I missed out lol.

Fucking wild that big metal bands used to tour in our rural area. Not any more, this area has FULLY cemented itself as a sleepy rich people wine country tourist destination. Heaven forbid someone say "fuck" out loud or turn up the distortion. Might cause a serious disturbance in the neighborhood. Don't you know that children exist??

By the time I was a teen, I was making my adults drive me over an hour to go see my fave band (once when I was lucky), or even multiple hours to LA to see them, but only for my fave. Metal bands completely overlooked our area, and rightfully so, because it sucks, but. Obviously, that sucked for me as well.

[More off-topic ranting below the cut/long post:]

Honestly, culture in general is feeling really cemented and sterile to me right now. Maybe because of what happened last year (personally, but also nationally). Maybe it's because I live in my own little counter-culture bubble of me and whatever filters its way through the internet to me, and I feel a duty to remain weird. But like, shit like metal, and using language the way it was meant to be used (not censoring words for the algorithm), participating in the adult side of fandom; it all feels like a nice, safe blanket of non-marketability. ((I know, metal is very marketable for the right audience, but certainly not in my area.)) Like, if I see something niche, it feels more genuine than anything manufactured for a mainstream viewer (or inherently manufactured to comply with content restrictions, not just censored). ((There's a case to be made for fun, of course, but that can also be a downfall because fun is profitable.)) But seriously, I hear a metal riff and it's like, oh, this is comfortable. Not even just metal, not even just music. It's the same with finding niche explicit fan art. Like, it was made for the fuck of it, not to generate social points in a system designed to suppress non-conformity.

It just feels like, in a world where a lot of content is just straight up online-only now - that venue Pantera played in my area has not been a thing since the 90s, despite seeing many other big names play there - why are people in the digital world no longer able to cuss and be loud and be individual? Surely advertisers are not pearl-clutching in 2025 (I'm half-serious, half-knowing that they are). I can grab any one of my old metal magazines from the mid 2000s-early 2010s and point to ads that were okay with being shown next to parental advisory lyrics. ((To be fair, I do remember my fave band at the time posting about how they weren't allowed to say "fuck" at one venue and told everyone to shout "firetruck" on the opening line instead. It was hilarious.))

[ Okay, tangent, because it was a church, but still, LMAO: (Shaky cam)

Lol. That was hilarious to watch unfold over Twitter back then. I don't remember what the other contenders were for the opening line, but damn, I mean, firetruck, patience of the saints in that church to let a band play their song called 'Immaculate Misconception' - glad those kids got their fun. MiW were so little still. ]

But anyway, I'm not about to start some conspiracy theory about censorship here, so I'll stop while I'm ahead, and you can have some other words instead:

How are people expected to let off steam when they're restrained by Terms and Conditions and ever increasing property values? The walls of society are Landlord White, no expression, no personality allowed here. Monetized life doesn't come with an ad-free subscription, so let their model define you. The illusion of trend, already dead before deletion, a diet of headlines - your only news.

...Anyway, quirky social ranting aside. This tape fucks. I REALLY needed to hear it on a different, older device. On a different medium than digital. I love tapes, man. I get they're not a preservable-friendly medium, but if you ask me, for metal in particular, the mild artifacts of age and an old hand-me-down boombox add character (I sound like Red Hood now lmao). It's nice and dirty and no one else is hearing it with the exact same qualities.

I love having physical media. I love not hearing ads in between songs. I love that I don't have to pay, to not hear an ad. I love that I'm not wasting rural-speed, metered internet on hearing an ad. Yeah, I have CDs and my MP3 player-dock/phone files too, but again, I wanted to hear it as it should be experienced - through bigger speakers from a well-loved cassette.