#like the 'hear me out... you must know...' part was absolutely revolutionary musically speaking for 5 year old me

[halfalgorithm]

Get Another Boyfriend by the Backstreet Boys came out 24 years ago and it still goes hard tbqh

[shitpostingfromthebarricade]

Deleted Scene: The Heart of the Matter

Opening scene: les Amis have just had their first meeting since Grantaire was cursed.

“That could have gone better,” Éponine says as she shuts the door to the door to the second floor behind her.

“But it also could have gone worse,” Cosette reminds her.  

Already settled grumpily on the sofa in front of the fire, Grantaire remains silent.

Cosette seems to survey the room.  “Cupcakes?  I’m thinking cupcakes.”

“There should be some dough in the fridge for fresh bread,” Grantaire grunts.

“Cupcakes and bread, then.”  With that, Cosette is off.  

Éponine thinks that if she brewed potions and stewed drinks all day the way her wife does, she’d probably be sick of the kitchen, but Cosette seems to thrive on her ability to put people at ease with her culinary skills; in any case, Éponine isn’t about to argue.

Turning back to the lump on their sofa, she sighs.  “It really wasn’t that bad.”

“Just the beginning of forever.”

She rolls her eyes.  “Drama-queen.”

“You’re not the one who has to live it.”

“I’m not the one who got my ass cursed.  And anyway, you haven’t even tried to break it.”

“Because it’s pointless.”

“Because you’re a pessimistic asshole.”

A knock comes at the door, and the crispness of each rap makes it immediately clear exactly who it is.

“Am I now?”  He rolls onto his side.  “One guess as to who that’s for.”

Failing to fully suppress her sigh, Éponine turns and opens the door to a startled-looking blond revolutionary.  “Enjolras,” she says, her voice a tired imitation of enthusiasm.  “What a surprise.”

“Éponine,” Enjolras nods.  “Is Grantaire in?”

She opens the door wider in wordless response.

“Grantaire?”  The blond takes a tentative step past Éponine.  Shutting the door behind him, she crosses her arms and leans back against it.

A long hiss of air sounds from the sofa before a mess of inky curls appears over its back, glowing with the light from the fire.  “Present and accounted for.”  

The gap that an over-the-top title would usually fill is painfully evident, and Éponine tries not to flinch at it.  A quick glance at Enjolras’s face tells her little: his expression is stoney, mouth pinched and nostrils flaring.

“You were very quiet tonight.”  A silence follows, as if Enjolras expects Grantaire to volunteer a response or an explanation; to Enjolras’s credit, under different circumstances Éponine thinks Grantaire would absolutely jump at the opportunity to offer an empty comment or criticism.  “Is everything all right?”

She can practically hear the diatribe of empty questions and answers Grantaire would normally pose, the verbal waltz he might perform to fill up the quiet.  Instead, the silence continues, and Enjolras turns back to Éponine with a crease between his brows.  

“Éponine,” he asks in a furtive tone, “what’s happening?”

Her gaze flickers between the blond and the couch several times before she sighs, uncrossing her arms and pushing herself off the door.  “How do you take your tea?”

Past Enjolras she can see Grantaire’s head pop up over the sofa, eyes narrowing at her.  She shrugs in response, moving toward the kitchen and pressing a kiss to her wife’s cheek between filling up and starting the kettle.  

“Have a seat, Ép’ll be right out,” her doting, brilliant, over-accommodating wife calls suddenly without looking up from her batter.

Éponine looks through the window into the living room to see Enjolras still frozen by the front door.  He looks up at Éponine now, who sighs.  “Sit down, I’ll be just a minute.”

When she does return, she sees that he’s settled into her usual armchair, leaving her to choose between taking Cosette’s rocking chair or squeezing next to the lump that is her best friend on the sofa.  She opts for the latter, placing the tray of tea and accessories on the coffee table and settling onto the side of the sofa adjacent to Enjolras.

She makes her chamomile in silence and blatantly ignores whatever ritual Enjolras goes through to prepare his.  Behind him, Éponine can see Cosette raising a pointed eyebrow at her, a warning and a reminder that the blond has no malicious part in any of this.

Refilling her tea, Éponine ventures into the abyss.  “You might have noticed that R’s a bit…”

“Quiet?”

“Selectively nonverbal.”  She’s extremely aware that they’re talking about someone who is right next to them, but given his apparent disinterest in speaking up she has no choice but to address the revolutionary in the room.  “He recently encountered some difficulties.”

“Difficulties,” Enjolras repeats.

“In his travels.”  In his bar crawls.  And to be honest, he deserves it—though relating the particulars to Enjolras doesn’t seem conducive to productive discussion.

His attention remains on her, discerning and wary.  “What kinds of difficulties?”

Again, she waits for Grantaire to volunteer an answer.  When none comes, she’s forced to provide her own.  “He crossed paths with an unlike mind, and this unlike mind decided that a curse might change Grantaire’s tune.”

Enjolras’s eyes widen, brows raising.  Grantaire has waxed poetic about how expressive his ‘golden god’s’ eyes are, and though Éponine will always and forevermore roll her own eyes at any and all of the praise her drunken friend reaps on the leader, she will privately begrudgingly admit that this one quality holds true.

“He was cursed?”  

Grantaire shifts beside her and snorts almost unnoticeably.  She narrowly resists the urge to smack his legs—it was his dumb ass that got himself into this situation in the first place.  And anyway, he can talk, she shouldn’t have to answer for him anyway.

“Yeah.”

“Does he know how to break it?” Enjolras asks, jaw set determinedly.  “Cosette’s shop has a cursebreaker, has he conferred with them?”

Something metal hits the kitchen floor, and Grantaire jerks beside Éponine as she stares blankly at the man in front of her.  “Do you—” she begins.  “What is it, exactly, that you think Grantaire does for a living?”

Enjolras blinks several times.  “Is...is he an artist?”

Grantaire snorts derisively into the couch cushions, and this time Éponine has no qualms swatting at the man.

“No.”  Perhaps she should expand on the answer—it’d certainly be the polite thing to do.  

It’d also be polite to know the first thing about the business partner of the person who lets them use her shop’s backroom for their political club meetings.

“Grantaire does know how to break the curse, to answer your original question.”

Enjolras’s countenance shifts from pure discomfort to only moderate.  “That’s excellent.  What does he need?”

The answer is on the tip of her tongue, but Cosette is still busy with whatever she’s making, and Grantaire is still busy being a stubborn bastard.

“He needs a boyfriend.”  

Enjolras looks startled.  “A what?”  

“A what?” Grantaire repeats, glaring from where he’s finally jerked upright.

“Or girlfriend.  Partner.”  Éponine smiles sweetly.  “The warlock told Grantaire that no one could stand his sharp tongue for even a week, and that if he could keep a partner for seven days the spell would be broken.”  

She catches Grantaire looking past her at Cosette, but whatever he finds there must not be sympathetic because his expression only sours.  

“What a pointless spell,” Enjolras sniffs.  “How long ago was this?”

It’s been four days since Grantaire spilled into the apartment surprisingly early for an evening out spewing a stream of oddly specific profanity.  “Today’s Sunday, I guess he got cursed...Thursday?”

“Wednesday,” Grantaire corrects, cross.  

That’ll teach him to play complacent in his own life.

“So you should be better by next week.”

Éponine’s head jerks back to the blond, eyebrows raised.  “What makes you say that?”

“That was Wednesday, and he only needs to date someone for a week.”  It’s stated like his conclusion is obvious.

Whatever Grantaire might have been planning to say is abruptly cut off.  

“He’s single.”

Enjolras looks back and forth between the two warily.  “Why?”

Grantaire is magnanimously allowed the opportunity to answer this one for himself.  “Haven’t found anyone who quite fits the criteria,” he explains through a tight smile.

Pointedly looking at Enjolras, Éponine waits for the blond to offer his services; he’s always the first to volunteer when his friends need help with anything within his realm of capabilities (and more than a few that fall outside), and the man’s continued silence is becoming rather puzzling.  It briefly crosses her mind that, for all of Grantaire’s dramatics, he could be right about Enjolras’s disdain for him…

But no, that’s definitely a blush rising to the leader’s cheeks.  Grantaire’s just an idiot.

“Enjolras, you’re single, aren’t you?”  Cosette’s musical voice rings from the kitchen as she removes something from the oven, and Éponine falls in love with her wife all over again.

“I am, but—”

Éponine nearly has them where she wants them.  “Grantaire, do you think you could make it through a week of dating Enjolras?”

Taking on a determined set, the man’s expression looks poised and ready to make Éponine regret this entire encounter.

“Let me rephrase that: is there a possibility that Enjolras could help you break your curse?”

Foiled, Grantaire’s eyes dart toward the fireplace as his mouth puckers.  “Perhaps.”

Éponine pushes an unexpected wave of delight back for later.  “Great, then it’s settled.  Your first date’s tomorrow.  Enjolras, Grantaire will text you the details.”  She rises, a cue for the blond to get the hell out of her home.

Sparing a backward glance for the lump on the sofa as he’s crowded out of the room, Enjolras quickly takes his somewhat baffled leave.  As soon as he’s out the door, Éponine locks it, sinking against it in relief.

“What the fuck was that?” Grantaire accuses.

“You’re welcome.”

“That’s not even my curse!”

Éponine rolls her eyes, making her way across the room to her now-abandoned seat.  “Of course it’s not, but now he has a week to realize that he’s totally in love with you before he puckers up.”

Sinking into the couch and digging the heels of his hands into his eyes, Grantaire groans.  “The man doesn’t even realize I’m the house cursebreaker here.”

Éponine’s expression falls flat.  “Yes, well, that is a minor setback.”

“An oversight, really,” Cosette offers as she finally makes her way into the living room.  “Cupcakes are cooling.”

“I’d call you a saint, but you denied me three times before the sun rose in the sky.”

The woman shrugs.  “Peter’s a saint all the same.  And Éponine’s only trying to help.”

That might be giving her a little too much credit (it definitely is), but Éponine’s not about to correct Cosette when she’s already won this round.  “Look, either it works or it doesn’t.”

“And if it doesn’t, Enjolras will hate us forever and never talk to me again for lying to him.”

Éponine huffs.  “That’s kind of your deal, though: you didn’t lie to him.  You physically can’t until you get ‘true love’s kiss’ or whatever.”

Still, her guts twists in sympathy at Grantaire’s words: extensive trial and error proved that it doesn’t matter if it’s true if Grantaire thinks it is, and apparently he truly believes that Enjolras will despise him for this dishonesty.

“‘Until someone loves your true self,’” he quotes, shaking his head.  “What a load of absolute over-literal horseshit.”

Éponine nods in agreement, but Cosette hums thoughtfully into her tea.  “But you think he can break the curse.”

Grantaire’s head jerks up.  “What?”

“I heard it too,” Éponine grins.  “You think there’s a possibility that he could break it.”

Her friend reddens.  “I said that it could perhaps happen.”

“Which is to say, you’re amenable.”  Rocking back in her chair, Cosette takes a long sip of tea.  “Fairytale curses require two-way love, and I know you know that because you’re the one who taught me it.”

The cynic makes a disgruntled mumble.

“If you’re saying ‘perhaps,” the potion master continues, “that means that, supposing our Fearless Leader does fall for you, you already trust yourself to play your part.”

Grantaire grumbles again before flipping back onto his side.

“You know what I love the most about honest Grantaire?” Éponine asks Cosette broadly.  “He can keep his truths to himself if he wants, but it’s been at least four days since he’s told us he hates us.”

Gasping dramatically, Cosette conspiratorially leans her chair in toward the sofa.  “Could it be?  Grantaire,  is it possible that you love and adore us?”  

More unintelligible sounds.

“I’m sorry, what was that?” Éponine goads.

“You two are—”  The words seem to catch in his throat, the effort to catch them before they’re released into the world visible on Grantaire’s face.  “—relentless,” he seems to finally decide.

“‘Relentless,’” Cosette repeats, looking up at Éponine.

“I can do ‘relentless.’”

“‘Relentless’ sounds idyllic.”

“Adding it to the resume next time I’m at my laptop.”

A blanket is pulled back over Grantaire’s face, and the rest of the evening is met by incoherent grumbling from the mound on the sofa until Cosette and Éponine go to bed for the night.

The rest of the fic is featured here.

[keyofjetwolf]

Elisabeth: The Cheerful Apocalypse

With a name like that, you know it’s got to be good. Indeed, it’s pleasantly upbeat, a slightly less rowdy bar song. There’s a push to it, as well, like a driving, consistent march that gives the whole thing a feeling of inevitability that serves it extremely well, even as that’s part of the song’s dark humour: for a song about and urging movement, nobody ever leaves the fucking cafe.

But for all that it works in the Essen version, it really doesn’t in the Takarazuka. It’s been dramatically shifted, to the point where the only real consistencies are gossiping and coffee shops. AND THOSE ARE GREAT CONSISTENCIES. It’s a fantastic method of moving time and setting up significant plot points happening in the interim.

Only, interestingly, the Takarazuka version wants this to be more. Alongside the general gossiping and proto-TMZ coverage, we have a budding group of revolutionaries, led by the unfortunately named “Zeps”.

Now I’ve seen me some Les Miserables, and I tell you friends, I am here for a group of cafe-dwelling idealistic doomed young students. Unfortunately, I think the Takarazuka was just as enamoured of the idea, and had about as much success wedging them in. I expected big things from this storyline (HOW COULD YOU EXPECT ANYTHING LESS FROM SOMEONE NAMED ZEPS), to the point where I’m spinning this web of interconnected possibilities with Lucheni, and the inherent class bias in the students that they’re unable to overcome, and possibilities lost and recaptured, I WAS FULL ON MY SHIT FRIENDS. All to find out that these guys (INCLUDING SIR ZEPS THE HAMFISTED) only appear one more time, briefly, somewhere in Act 2, trying to persuade the adult son whose birth is announced in this very scene to join their revolution.

We won’t dwell much on how it’s like twenty-five years later and this revolution consists of the same four dudes in the same fucking coffee shop, like, I admire your devotion, but maybe expand your hobbies to include hiking or dominoes. The crux is that the Takarazuka version changed this song to include these guys to set up a straightforward plot point that won’t happen for over forty minutes (musical time)/two decades (storyline time).

It’s such a bizarre choice that I’ve spent nearly an hour now trying to puzzle it out, and the best answer I can come up with is this:

MORE DEATH WE NEED MORE DEATH

Sincerely, though. This version of “The Cheerful Apocalypse” places the focus on the revolutionaries to give an “in” to Death. It continues with the idea that all this is -- if not caused then facilitated -- by Death, to the point where he demonstrably joins the movement.

They even devote multiple rewritten lines to suggesting that Death has met with and talked to the students before, furthering the implication that this is all happening according to keikaku. A plot point, I must again note, doesn’t ever actually GO anywhere.

The end result for this song in the Takarazuka version is strange mishmash. We have the apathy of the easily distracted patrons as the backing vocals for the voice of change that even the story itself never hears. It winds up giving way more credit to the people than the Essen version and, in a weird twist, that’s to the song’s detriment.

Once again, the tone difference in the Essen version is immediately apparent. I SHOULD NOTE BY THE WAY, “The Cheerful Apocalypse” comes immediately after the scene where Elisabeth and Franz Joseph are mourning the death of their first child. This is missing entirely from the Takarazuka version, I’m guessing after someone decided infant death and grieving parents was a giant fucking downer. GIANT FUCKING DOWNERS IS NOT TAKARAZUKA

So while here’s Lucheni at the start of this number being beautiful and amazing in Takarazuka

And here he is at the start of Essen

“Ma che cazzo vuoi!”, for those of you who don’t speak Italian (LIKE ME) translates into “What the fuck do you want!” and is spat out after Lucheni’s dramatic bout of fake crying. The royals lost a child, yes yes, very sad, happens every fucking day for the poor, who’s crying for them? Essen Lucheni has such a delightful rage that he carries with him throughout the musical, so that even when we’re moved to feel particularly charitable, or the story has wrapped us in the glamour and tragedy of the Hapsburgs, Lucheni yanks us back down. That grounding is, I think, one of the things that makes the musical so so good, and RELEVANT, even as it’s about events over 150  years ago.

As I mentioned, this song in the Essen version doesn’t have any particular focus. We have students, professors, and journalists among the patrons, all talking about the royal family and soup and politics and war and card games with the same degree of intense interest and detached resignation. The guy who wants someone to play skat with him calls out as passionately as the teacher reflecting on Austria’s political isolation after the Crimean War who is equally matched by the bohemian who just wants another beer for the love of god. Through it all, the stage rotates, the tables and patrons spinning on this carousel that goes nowhere and never ends. And the chorus of the whole thing is just *kisses fingers*

Unlike the Takarazuka version, with its knot of revolutionaries, the cafe in the Essen version is filled with informed people. SMART people, who could any one of them stand up and do something to try to change all this, if they could just maybe give a damn. But they don’t. They DON’T, and that’s the point. Even at the end, as Lucheni starts firing them up with foreshadowing visions of Rudolf-led revolution, even as they seem to be getting into it

in the end, everyone just sits back down at a table and goes back to reading the newspaper.

I just adore the way the Essen version handles this, from music to lyrics to set and presentation. It’s a beautiful melding of so many ways to communicate something that isn’t what Elisabeth is about, BUT ALSO IS, in a way that I think is masterfully understated.

Between the two, it might be a harder call if the Takarazuka were more tightly plotted and followed through better on some of what it brought to the song, but alas. Full points to Essen on this one, absolutely loved it.

[doomedandstoned]

Doomed & Stoned Turns Five!

Coinciding with Doomed & Stoned's fifth anniversary, Todd Severin of The Ripple Effect talks to Editor in Chief Billy Goate about this bitchin' lil blog, from its inauspicious beginning in the summer of 2013 as a simple social media platform to bring together lovers of the doom-stoner sound to dabbling in its own music festival, a massive compilation series, podcasting, and of course album reviews and interviews. Touching on both the joys and challenges of coordinating a multinational team of contributors, Billy discusses battles with burnout, the excitement of new discoveries, and the struggle to stay on top of an exponentially mushrooming music scene.

Photo by Chris Schanz

Let's start with the obvious: why Doomed & Stoned?

The name Doomed & Stoned isn't really meant to be edgy, though it does have a nice ring to it. It came to me as a simple way to sum up the heavy vibe that is the heart and soul of our writing: doom metal and stoner rock. I consider those to be the enduring styles of true metal and classic rock 'n' roll, best encapsulated by the music of Black Sabbath. Sabbath played music that was famously downtuned, slow, plodding, and somber, documented so incredibly by those first four albums. Then they had their up-tempo swings that tapped into the feel-good era of the 1970s, "Hole In The Sky" and "The Wizard" comes immediately to mind, as does "Sabbra Cadabra" and a number of songs on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973) -- such a forward-looking album. Black Sabbath is the quintessential doomed and stoned band and it has been, broadly speaking, the stylistic portfolio of music we've decided to hone in on for this venture.

Photos by Alyssa Herrman

As soon as I was turned on to the doom-stoner vibe, I began to notice things happening into my own backyard of Portland, Oregon. At the time, Oregon’s proudest exports were bands like Witch Mountain, Yob, Lord Dying, Danava, and a handful of others that were being signed left and right to labels like Relapse and Profound Lore. Well, I just started documenting everything, because I felt there was something really special happening here, much as there'd been a magical vibe about our sister city Seattle in the '90s when my family had moved up here from East Texas.

It all began with me showing up randomly at shows and shooting live footage, I believe the first was the Portland Metal Winter Olympics in 2014, then Hoverfest. Initially, no one knew who the hell this guy was showing up with his camera, but gradually I became more accepted by the community, which opened up opportunities for doing interviews, album reviews, and a big 75-band compilation of the Portland scene, which kicked off this massive series of scene comps that many know Doomed & Stoned best for.

Yob at Hoverfest (Film by Billy Goate)

What gave you this crazy idea of promoting the scenes to the rest of the world?

Doomed & Stoned originated out of a frustration I had in sharing discoveries like Windhand, Saint Vitus, Sleep, and Goatsnake with my metal friends. Many wouldn’t give these bands a chance or listened for half-a-minute and gave up. Surely, I thought to myself, there must be others out there who were just as in love with the doom-stoner genre as I am. It wasn’t long until I met Melissa Marie in a metal forum. I told her what I was planning, she was down, and together we burrowed in the heavy underground and discovered a whole community there welcoming us. Melissa was my first contributor and along the way, we made acquaintances with aspiring writers and photographers who really caught the vision and volunteered to document their own scenes. She's since become my executive editor and the organizer of our flagship festival in Indianapolis.

Suzi Uzi and Melissa Marie at Doomed & Stoned Fest

Just like that, the Doomed & Stoned team was born. Roman Tamayo joined the team shortly afterwards, now the Editor of Doomed & Stoned Latinoamérica and I started meeting people from all over who wanted to contribute an album review here, a bit of concert footage there. It all happened very naturally and organically, fueled by simple passion, a mutual love of fuzzy, downtuned riffs, and a desire to document the energy and excitement of what we were all witnessing -- Demon Lung in Las Vegas, Orchid in San Francisco, Pale Divine in Pennsylvania, Pilgrim in Rhode Island. It didn't take us long to discover was going on in the rest of the world and it blew our ever-lovin' minds.

With the explosion in blogging and desktop publishing, we gradually discovered there was a loose network of folks covering the doom-stoner scene all over the world, too. Most of them have been very friendly and we’ve even had the opportunity to collaborate with folks like The Sludgelord, Outlaws of the Sun, The Ripple Effect, Invisible Oranges, Revolver, Blabbermouth, and so many more. There are others that wouldn’t acknowledge our existence -- still won't to this day -- I’m guessing because we were viewed as unwelcome competition in an already small market with a tight circle of friendships. The thing is, we never really wanted to compete with anyone; we just wanted an outlet to share our love of music. It’s hard not to be competitive sometimes, of course. Competition can be positive in that it inspires you to push yourself, try new things, and grow.

Stephanie Cantu, Frank Heredia, and Elizabeth Gore at Psycho Las Vegas

That said, since none of the 20+ contributors to Doomed & Stoned are doing this full-time, we want ultimately just want to have fun and you can’t enjoy the ride if you’re constantly trying to outdo this site or that. We found our niche in digging into local scenes and telling the stories of the bands who may very well be the next Sleep or Windhand a decade or two into the future.

We're now in the fifth year of our existence and I feel we’re becoming known as people willing to give bands and their local scenes the kind of in-depth coverage they deserve. That speaks to our motto: “Bringing you the music and the stories of the heavy underground, with an emphasis on the Sabbath Sound and local scene coverage -- by the underground, for the underground.”

Disenchanter at Doomed & Stoned Winter Showcase (Film by Billy Goate)

How has the scene grown and changed in the intervening years?

Well, since those bright-eyed early days, the doom-stoner scene has absolutely exploded. We were lucky enough to time our entry, purely by happenstance, to ride that wave just as it was nearing its crest. Right now, the scene is at least twice as big as it was five years ago and it’s becoming practically impossible to listen to all the new albums coming out, even if we limit the consideration to just doom metal, or even a subgenre of doom like blackened doom or death doom. It becomes a matter of practicality to prioritize those albums that are brought to your attention by PR firms and record labels, but I always remember that some of our greatest discoveries have been unsigned bands.

Over the years, we’ve been lucky enough to discover bands like Disenchanter, Holy Grove, Troll, Year of the Cobra, Toke, and dozens of others that have since risen to international prominence. Just to know you were there the moment their demo showed up on Bandcamp. You were among the first to listen to their self-produced CD on the commute to work. You were there to witness them opening for a touring headliner. You wrote their first review. You made that social media post that sparked a fire of interest. You recommended them to one of your overseas blogger pals. All of that is tremendously gratifying to be a part of.

Toke at Doomed & Stoned Festival I (photo by Johnny Hubbard)

We're all the product of our musical past. What's your musical history? First album you ever bought? First musical epiphany moment? First album that terrified the hell out of you?

I was raised by parents who came of age in the ‘50s and ‘60s, so I was exposed initially to a lot of late-‘60s rock, big band jazz, and later the ‘70s radio pop. Mom was fond of playing three classical music albums with a mix of music by Mozart, Beethoven, and Rossini, and that left a very powerful impression on me early on. She also was fond of Olivia Newton John, so I have “Jolene” permanently etched on my psyche and every so often vainly attempt singing it in the shower.

My first vinyl was the Ghostbusters soundtrack, which dad bought for me, and it unleashed a curiosity for the popular music of the ‘80s. Like a lot of my friends at school, I was nuts about Michael Jackson and I remember asking dad if I could have one of those swank red jackets that he wore so famously in “Thriller” (I was denied, though I did get quite good at grade school moonwalking). I distinctly remember the day my family got cable TV for the first time and with it MTV, which brought the music of Metallica, Boy George, Madonna, Aerosmith, and Run-DMC into our conservative Texas household.

It didn’t last long, because somewhere in the mid-‘80s, my family got caught up in the whole “Satanic Panic” movement. They started monitoring my listening habits vigilantly. One day, for instance, my mom was horrified to find her ten-year-old boy singing along to “Nobody’s Fool” by Cinderella during Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 show. From that point on, both rock and metal were banned from the house and my radio was confiscated. It was too late, though, because I was hooked – particularly by metal. Something about it has always moved me in a way that only classical music has matched. My first metal album, which I purchased in secret, was ‘Appetite for Destruction’ by Guns ‘n’ Roses – which at the time represented the pinnacle of late ‘80s heavy metal. People need to understand how revolutionary it was to hear something that “hard” on mainstream radio and MTV. I listened to it and ‘Lies’ incessantly on my Walkman and continued listening clandestinely to FM hard rock and heavy metal.

Since I couldn’t listen to it openly, I started developing an interest in the darker side of classical music, the moodier pieces by Beethoven, Liszt, and Scriabin, and took up playing the piano around 13. My family was supportive of that talent and I would spend hours and hours a day for years playing the piano in solitude. That was my first introduction, in kernel form, to “doom” – especially late Beethoven, when he started growing deaf and began expressing his frustration and despair more poignantly through dark tones. Franz Liszt, later in life, experienced so much tragedy that he begin to write very bleak, obscure music and was one of the first to experiment with atonality.

It wouldn’t be until my college days that I’d come face-to-face with doom at a Saint Vitus show in Portland. From that moment forward, I knew I’d discovered my soul food. Doom metal made an immediate connection, as it addressed the fucked up nature of life and society in a way that felt authentic to me. It wasn’t just anger. It was dark, slow despair and even a blithe kind of acceptance to it all. It was refreshing to have those feelings mapped out in song like that. That triggered a wave of discovery that led to Usnea, Cough, Pilgrim, Demon Lung, Serpentine Path, Undersmile, and others that are now staples of my musical diet.

Drumhead from Doomed & Stoned Festival II

What do you see happening in the music scene today, good and bad?

More people are digging to the doom-stoner sound and the scene is growing exponentially. The internet has democratized music in a way that has made it easier than ever for bands to form, record, and share their music. It’s also made it much, much harder for a band to get discovered. We’re simply oversaturated by it all. We’re reaching peak information and many listeners have just stopped exploring altogether. I think there was a study done some years back that said by the late-20’s/early-30’s the average metal listener typically hardens in their musical tastes. I don’t know how true that is still, but I know that I’ve been increasingly suffering from listening fatigue. 2014 was the last year I felt on top of it all. 2015 was explosive and every year since has found me woefully behind in my listening. I’m still digging through the rubble and discovering incredible records that I share now and then in a series of short reviews I call, “Doomed Discoveries.”

Among the trends I’ve seen in our scene in particular is the increase in female-fronted bands (which we tried to document in our compilation, The Enchanter’s Ball) along with more experimentation with genre blending. It’s becoming harder to find bands who traffic in traditional doom, but that’s fine because I think we all needed more diversity in our playlist to keep us from becoming jaded. For a while, it seemed every other band was “witch” this and “black” that. I’m the last person to judge a band by its name, but it was leading to a ton of criticism from fans -- to the point I’d have a hard time getting doom-stoner listeners to take a chance with a newer band that had the word “wizard” in their name. One thing that seems to be a theme of the doom-stoner scene is a continual drive for excellence and evolution. On the negative side, we tend to expect more of our heroes, as a result -- which is why bands like The Sword and Electric Wizard have been criticized for producing music that would have otherwise excited us if they were a brand new band.

Holy Grove at Hoverfest (Film by Billy Goate)

What's been your all-time greatest "find"? That band you "discovered" before anyone else and started the word spreading?

It’s hard to pinpoint one band, but I’ve been instrumental in boosting the music of Holy Grove, Disenchanter, Troll, and Year of the Cobra -- all bands from out of the Pacific Northwest. Initially they were promoted through Doomed & Stoned and then found their way to small-to-medium sized record labels and festivals. Over half of the bands that played the Vinyl Stage at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in the inaugural year of Psycho Las Vegas were my direct recommendations. Though I was less involved in the following year, Psycho Las Vegas booked most of the bands that appeared at Doomed & Stoned Festival, such as Merlin, Toke, and Youngblood Supercult. It was a huge confidence booster in Doomed & Stoned’s ability to be a “taste tester.” This is not to say our taste in bands has always been picked up by festivals or record labels. The scene is getting bigger and out of necessity bands have to diversify their reach through a multiplicity of media outlets, because you never know who will read that one feature at the right time and dig your sound. Besides, there’s too much music in the doom-stoner subgenre for any one site to cover right now, so there are plenty of great recommendations coming from a number of amazing blogs and webzines.

What's the last album to grab you by the throat and insist you listen?

Definitely ‘Celestial Cemetery’ (2017) by Purple Hill Witch. I was only a nominal fan of their first album, but their second one was quite convincing, emotionally. There’s an underlying sadness to the record that appeals to me as a person who has long battled depression.

Celestial Cemetery by Purple Hill Witch

What's the hardest thing you encounter in promoting shows?

Convincing people that live music is worth leaving the comfort of our homes to experience, to say nothing of many benefits that come from connecting others in the underground music community. These days, we tend to value how conveniently something can be delivered to us. Audio books have replaced the need to sit and read (and collect printed media), our homes have become veritable theaters so no need to go out for movies anymore, and streaming high-definition music makes us feel like we’re in some sense getting the real deal.

Of course, those of us who go out to shows know there’s just no substitute for the excitement, energy, and sound of a well-produced live show, especially in a small venue. This is to say nothing of the community that comes with it. My best friendships in the scene have come about because I chose to breach my comfort zone and venture out to a show, sometimes merely on a whim. With that said, I admit I struggle with convincing myself to go out. It’s the introvert in me, I suppose. However, I have a saying that I try to live by: “Feel the fear and do it anyway.”

Witch Mountain -- first tour with Kayla Dixon (Film by Billy Goate)

If you could write a 1,000 word essay on one song, which one would it be, and why? What makes that song so important?

Funny, I actually did write a 1,000+ word essay on Cough’s “Possession” -- the only song I’ve been moved to write an entire piece about so far. I think it’s because it spoke to me during a time in my life where I was feeling such raw, charged emotion and witnessing a personal transformation from being a happy-go-lucky, easy-going dude, to someone emptied of hope and weighted down by a very nihilistic outlook and pessimistic thinking. This was, in turn, keeping me more closed off from other people, because my trust level was at an all-time low.

I’ve always valued music for its ability to commiserate with me in my circumstances. During Basic Training it was Superunknown and Down on the Upside by Soundgarden. In my college days, it was Alice in Chain’s last album just prior to the death of Layne Staley, which fans nicknamed Tripod. In 2016, Cough returned after a long absence, released Still They Pray, and headlined the first ever Doomed & Stoned Festival in Indianapolis. It was a year of transition for me with a lot of upheaval in my personal life and “Possession” seemed to capture my inner storm perfectly, which inspired me to write a few words about it.

Give us three bands that we need to keep our eyes out for.

White Wail: The grooviest psychedelics this side of Berlin are nested right here in Yob country, my hometown of Eugene, Oregon. White Wail is best described as part-Graveyard, part-Radio Moscow, with a special kind of DIY electricity that has made them hands down one of the most entertaining live acts in the region. Their upcoming second album is going to put them on the map for many people, I predict.

I by White Wail

Reptile Master: Norwegian doom-sludge clan with two guitars, two basses, a drum, and one unhinged vocalist. You’ll find none fiercer. “The Sorcerer’s Weed” (opening number off their first LP, In The Light of a Sinking Sun) is positively frightening. I can feel its seething rage filling up my chest cavity like pneumonia every time I listen to it. I believe they’re expecting a new album out in the first quarter of 2019, if not sooner, and I can't wait!

Chrome Ghost: The ultimate contrast of light and dark come to us from a relatively unknown band in Roseville, California. The secret sauce here involves incredible vocal harmonies pitted against massive, crunchy riffs, something that’s done very effectively in their recent EPs, ‘The Mirror’ (2018) and ‘Reflection Pool’ (2017). Now, they just need to take this show on the road so the world can get better acquainted with them.

Shallows by chrome ghost

Tell us about your personal music collection. Vinyl? CD? What's your prized possession?

People think I have a huge vinyl collection, but mine is quite modest, really. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have a bigger collection and show it off, but unfortunately, I haven’t a lot of money to put into it, really. My most prized records come from bands I’ve supported from their earliest stages, like Holy Grove, Menin, Soom, or Vokonis. CDs have come to dominate my collection, not so much by choice, but quite a few promos are sent to me that way. Mostly, I have a vast digital collection that takes up almost six terabytes of data. Since I’m doing a lot of podcasting, this allows me the easiest point of access to put together my mixes for The Doomed & Stoned Show.

BelzebonG at Psycho Las Vegas (Film by Billy Goate)

What is it about this particular type of heavy music that makes it mean so much to you?

To me, doom metal and stoner rock has incredible staying power. It’s something I can listen to over and over again without growing weary of it. Add to that the fact bands in this genre take so much care in crafting their live sound and you can go to any doom-stoner show knowing you’re going to have an incredible time, perhaps even walk away with a better experience than the record gave you. I was constantly disappointed by the concert experiences I had while immersed in mainstream metal. It just never sounded as good as the records did. With doom-stoner music, my experience has largely been that a band's show can, and often does, transcend their studio recordings. It’s just the ethic of our scene; we're fanatical about sound.

With BelzebonG

What makes it all worthwhile for you?

That's a really good question. My philosophy is that as long as we’re all still having fun, it’s worth it to keep doing Doomed & Stoned. With that said, it can be very demanding and stressful, especially as we’re increasingly turned to by bands, labels, and PR firms to host track and album premieres. The gratification of a piece well done -- whether by me or by one of my team members -- is ultimately what keeps me going day-to-day. I find a lot of joy in developing talent and even helping writers and photographers hone their craft, gain greater name recognition, and develop the confidence to even branch out on their own as freelancers. Several have gotten gigs with larger outlets like Noisey due to their work here and that just blows my mind.

When Melissa first started, she wasn’t confident at all that she could do an interview. Next thing you know, she’s interviewing Wino, negotiating contracts with promoters, booking venues, and organizing a music festival with international acts. I’ve very proud of the team and everyone who has been a part of it, if only for a season. I'd add to that my relationships with growing record labels and ambitious promoters, who I've been able work with to get bands like Tombstones, BelzebonG, Spelljammer, Vokonis, Cardinals Folly over here to play for the first time in the United States.

With Disenchanter

How would your life be different if you weren't spreading the word about music?

I suppose I’d be spending more time playing the piano, something I’ve neglected more than I’d like to admit since starting Doomed & Stoned. There are some gnarly pieces by Beethoven, Liszt, Scriabin, Godowsky, and Prokofiev that I've half-chewed, just waiting for me pick them back up again. Either way, I don’t think I can stay passively involved in music. I have to be playing it or writing about it, preferably both.

Usnea play 'Random Cosmic Violence' (Film by Billy Goate)

Ever been threatened by a band or a ravenous fan?

No, but I’ve been doggedly pursued on Facebook by overly enthusiastic bands trying to get me to review their albums. What they don’t realize is that I’ve got a very heavy editing backlog -- it takes at least 2 hours and more commonly 4, 6 or even 8 hours –- to prep a feature length piece for publication. To review a record, I need even more time to let it soak in. I have to find something in it that connects with me on an emotional or at least an intellectual level or I can’t write about it. Because of that, I don’t write very many reviews a years. Maybe a half-dozen traditional, track-by-track reviews, though I do try to write at least one short review a week on our Facebook page.

Part of the blessing and the curse of doing this as a hobby, as opposed to full-time, is I don’t have a lot of opportunity to hear gossip, get into interpersonal dramas, know who's not speaking to whom -- that kind of thing. With that said, I really wish I could spend more time responding to every message I receive and developing deeper level friendships. Perhaps in time I will. My work schedule is so packed right now that it’s very hard for me to tear away and just relax and get to know people. On the positive side, it does save me from a lot of inter-scene conflict and allows me to be more of a neutral party when issues arise between bands, venues, promoters, forums, or fans.

Saint Vitus Live in Portland (Film by Billy Goate)

In the end, what would you like to have accomplished, or be remembered for?

I’m hoping we can be remembers for documenting this special era in heavy music history. I want to get better at showcasing the bands in their scenes and telling their stories, just like the writers and photographers of the Seattle grunge era were able to capture the imagination of the world with the Nirvana-Soundgarden-AIC-Pearl Jam vibe of that scene in the early-to-mid ‘90s -- what the 1996 documentary Hype! captured so well. I also hope I’ll be remembered for writing interesting, engaging, and relatable music reviews that aren’t pretentious crap. That’s still a work in progress!

Bell Witch at Doomed & Stoned Fest (Film by Billy Goate)

Many people may not realize the hours you devote to what you do for little or no pay. Is there a day job? If so, how do you find the balance?

This is most certainly not a day job. I have a full time job that I work 40-50 hours a week and I do Doomed & Stoned in the evenings and weekends. Right now, I’m not doing very good with the balance, to be honest. I’m an unrepentant workaholic, if I’m being honest with myself. That said, every other weekend, my mind and body revolt and refuse to allow me to do anything except sleep or just lay around watching movies or doing normal things like, you know, mowing the lawn. If I could will it, I wouldn't sleep more than four hours a night, hit every show that comes to town, review every new release, put out a podcast every week, edit every article within a few days of it being submitted to me. In other words, I'd manage Doomed & Stoned as if it were a full-scale entertainment website. However, I have to remind myself that I started this to build community and to have fun, so it’s okay to operate on a different model.

Filming Elder at Dante's in Portland (Photo by Matt Amott)

What's next? Any new projects?

This year, we’re on a roll with our compilations, thanks to some wonderful organizers who are embedded in their local scenes and are good at rounding up tracks from all the participating bands. We’ve released Doomed & Stoned in Ireland, Doomed & Stoned in Philadelphia, and Doomed & Stoned in New Zealand, Doomed & Stoned in South Africa, Doomed & Stoned in Sweden, and we're coming up on Doomed & Stoned in Deutschland, and our fifth anniversary compilation, Doomed & Stoned in Portland III.

Other than that, we’re in the third year of our flagship festival, Doomed & Stoned Festival, which takes place on October 6th & 7th in Indianapolis. Over the summer, we’ve had two new festivals: Chicago Doomed & Stoned Festival and Ohio Doomed & Stoned Fest. We’ll likely be doing a festival in Portland later in the summer, too, perhaps doing an all-dayer in Eugene, too. These are very much passion projects and we're lucky to break even on them, but the joy of putting on a successful fest that brings together members of the community, that brings bands like Vokonis and Cardinals Folly to the United States for the first time, is totally worth it. This is history in the making. More than that, it's vital therapy for our people -- refueling our storehouses with the power of the Riff!

Finally, other than the music, what's your other burning passion?

I have cats that I love to death. I’m a fanatical collector of B-movies, from the ‘60s and ‘70s especially –- the more awful the movie is, production wise, the more I delight in it. Probably that has a lot to do with growing up on Mystery Science Theater 3000. When B-movies and cats collide with music, I’m in a very happy place (see the band Gurt!). Also an avid fan of vintage comic books -- many of the narratives of the pre-code 1950s comic books were taking chances that rival many of the shocking storylines of Marvel and DC today. Surprisingly, one of the themes that I see recurring between titles is DOOM! It's a delight every time I discover one of these stories. Art, film, and music have a very important, symbiotic relationship and I find it tremendously gratifying to play historian and trace the threads of the past into the present and watch how they continue to evolve into the future.

I've also got a gang of cats that keep me in line and like to be very involved with the production of Doomed & Stoned, so much so that I've had to make cat beds in front of my monitor and in the drawer of one of my desks for a pair of twins I adopted from the pound some years back. They absolutely are enthralled with that desk of mind, whether I'm editing an article or interviewing someone for a show! Best of all, they love them some doom. They sleep soundly every time I've got the likes of Sea Bastard or Serpentine Path rumbling my speakers. Wouldn't trade 'em for all the vinyl in the world.

Meet The Team

North America

Billy Goate (Editor in Chief -- Oregon), Melissa Marie (Executive Editor -- Indiana), Frank Heredia (California), Elizabeth Gore (California), Stephanie V. Cantu (Texas), Chris Schanz (Washington), Papa Paul (Pennsylvania), Zachary Painter (Texas), Alex Watt (Oregon), Alyssa Herrman (Oregon), Hugo Guzman (California), Lara Noel (Chicago), Suzi Uzi (Chicago), Jamie Yeats (Montana), Stephanie Savenkoff (Oregon), Corey Lewis (Oregon), Colton Dollar (California), Adam Mundwarf (Oregon), Dan Simone (Ohio), Shawn Gibson (North Carolina), Tom Hanno (New York), Eric The Red (Oregon), Justin Cory (Oregon), Jamie LaRose (Florida).

International

Roman Tamayo (Mexico), Sally Townsend (Australia), Calvin Lampert (Switzerland), Mari Knox (Italy), Svempa Alveving (Sweden), Juan Antonio (Spain), Angelique Le Marchand (UK), Jacob Mazlum (UK), Mel Lie (Germany), Silvi Pearl (Austria), Simon Howard (Australia), Matthew Donk (UK), Willem Verhappen (Netherlands).

Doomed & Stoned would also like to thank contributions from Ben Edwards, Brian Schmidt, Bucky Brown, Cherry Darling, Chris Latta, Curtis Parker, David Glass, David Knottnerus, Doomstress Alexis, Doug McHardlane, Drew Smith, Eleanna Safarika, Gonzalo Brunelli, Gustav Zombetero, Hannah Rachel Lowe, Jake Wallace, Joey Demartini, Johnny Hubbard, Jules Maher, Leanne Ridgeway, Marcel van der Haar, Mathew Jacques, Mona Miluski, Patrick Alex Thorfinn, Paul Bracamonte, Randy Beach, Sabine Stangenberg, Sandra Mez Russotto, Sandy Wright, Sarah Eriksson, Sean Schock, Stef Dimou, Steph LeSaux, Steve Howe, Thäedra Clare, Wendy Yashira, Ygor Silva, and so many others who have supported us directly or indirectly.

Mona Miluski from High Fighter sporting our basic black

Show your Doomed & Stoned pride! Get a t-shirt or sticker and become a patron of The Doomed & Stoned Show. You can also check out and share our free scene-by-scene compilation series. Donations help us to fund cool projects, such as new t-shirt designs, patches, etc. and helps with the much needed funds for web-hosting, data storage, and lots more besides. Most of all, we value your regular readership. Thanks so much for being a member of the Doomed & Stoned family!

[thefederalistfreestyle]

Hamilton: how Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical rewrote the story of America (New Statesman):

[. . .] Because of the success of Hamilton – it has been sold out on Broadway since August 2015, won 11 Tony Awards and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and is on tour in Chicago and Los Angeles – there is now an industry devoted to uncovering and explaining its references. Yet the sheer ebullience of the soundscape is not enough to explain why it became a hit. To understand that, we need to understand the scope of its ambition, which is nothing less than giving America a new origin story. “Every generation rewrites the founders in their own image,” says Nancy Isenberg, a professor of history at Louisiana State University and the author of a biography of Aaron Burr. “He [Miranda] rewrote the founders in the image of Obama, for the age of Obama.”

In doing so, Miranda created a fan base that mirrors the “Obama coalition” of Democrat voters: college-educated coastal liberals and mid-to-low-income minorities. (When the musical first hit Broadway in 2015, some tickets went for thousands of dollars; others were sold cheaply in a daily street lottery or given away to local schoolchildren.) He also gave his audiences another gift. Just as Obama did in his 2008 campaign, Hamilton’s post-racial view of history offers Americans absolution from the original sin of their country’s birth – slavery. It rescues the idea of the US from its tainted origins.

[. . .]

There is, of course, a great theatrical tradition of “patriotic myth-making”, and it explains another adjective that is frequently applied to Hamilton: Shakespearean. England’s national playwright was instrumental in smearing Richard III as a hunchbacked child-killer, portraying the French as our natural enemies and turning the villainous Banquo of Holinshed’s Chronicles into the noble figure claimed as an ancestor by the Stuarts, and therefore Shakespeare’s patron James VI and I.

James Shapiro, a professor of English literature at Columbia University, New York, and the author of several books on Shakespeare, first saw the musical during its early off-Broadway run. “It was the closest I’ve ever felt to experiencing what I imagine it must have been like to have attended an early performance of, say, Richard III, on the Elizabethan stage,” he tells me. “But this time, it was my own nation’s troubled history that I was witnessing.”

Shapiro says that Shakespeare’s first set of history plays deals with the recent past, ending with Richard III; he then went back further to create an English origin story through Richard II and Henry V. “Lin-Manuel Miranda was trying to grasp the fundamental problems underlying contemporary American culture,” he adds. “He might, like Shakespeare, have gone back a century and explored the civil war. But I suspect that he saw that to get at the deeper roots of what united and divided Americans meant going back even further, to the revolution. No American playwright has ever managed to explain the present by reimagining so inventively that distant past.” And where Shakespeare had Holinshed’s Chronicles, Miranda had Ron Chernow.

There are Shakespearean references throughout his play. In “Take a Break”, Hamilton writes to his sister-in-law, Angelica:

They think me Macbeth and ambition is my folly. I’m a polymath, a pain in the ass, a massive pain. Madison is Banquo, Jefferson’s Macduff And Birnam Wood is Congress on its way to Dunsinane.

Shapiro says that these “casual echoes of famous lines” are less important than the lessons that Miranda has taken about how to write history. “Another way of putting it is that anyone can quote Shakespeare; very few can illuminate so brilliantly a nation’s past and, through that, its present.”

[. . .]

I love Hamilton – I think the level of my nerdery about it so far has probably made that clear – but I find it fascinating that its overtly political agenda has been so little discussed, beyond noting the radicalism of casting black actors as white founders. Surely this is the “Obama play”, in the way that David Hare’s Stuff Happens became the “Bush play” or The Crucible became the theatre’s response to McCarthyism. It’s just unusual, in that its response to the contemporary mood is a positive one, rather than sceptical or scathing. (And it has an extra resonance now that a white nationalist is in the White House. One of the first acts of dissent against the Trump regime was when his vice-president, Mike Pence, attended the musical in November 2016 and received a polite post-curtain speech from the cast about tolerance. “The cast and producers of Hamilton, which I hear is highly overrated, should immediately apologise to Mike Pence for their terrible behaviour,” tweeted Trump, inevitably.)

Hamilton tries to make its audience feel OK about patriotism and the idealism of early America. It has, as the British theatre director Robert Icke put it to me this summer, “a kind of moral evangelism” that is hard for British audiences to swallow. In order to achieve this, we are allowed to see Hamilton’s personal moral shortcomings, but the uglier aspects of the early days of America still have to be tidied away.

There’s a brief mention, for instance, of Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hemings – whom he systematically raped over many years. But the casting of black and Hispanic actors makes it hard for the musical to deal directly with slavery, and so the issue only drips into the narrative rather than being confronted. There’s a moment after the battle of Yorktown when “black and white soldiers wonder alike if this really means freedom – not yet”. Another sour note is struck in one of the cabinet rap battles between Hamilton and Jefferson, in which the former notes acidly, “Your debts are paid cos you don’t pay for labour.”

In early workshops, there was a third cabinet battle over slavery – and the song is available on The Hamilton Mixtape, a series of reworkings and offcuts from the musical. When a proposal is brought before Washington to abolish slavery, Hamilton tells the cabinet:

This is the stain on our soul and democracy A land of the free? No, it’s not. It’s hypocrisy To subjugate, dehumanise a race, call ’em property And say that we are powerless to stop it. Can you not foresee?

Ultimately, though, the song was cut. “No one knew what to do about it, and [the founding fathers] all kicked it down the field,” Miranda explained to Billboard in July 2015. “And while, yeah, Hamilton was anti-slavery and never owned slaves, between choosing his financial plan and going all in on opposition to slavery, he chose his financial plan. So it was tough to justify keeping that rap battle in the show, because none of them did enough.”

***

In March 2016, Lin-Manuel Miranda returned to the White House. This time, one of the numbers he performed was a duet from the musical called “One Last Time”, sung with the original cast member Christopher Jackson playing George Washington. After Alexander Hamilton tells the first US president that two of his cabinet have resigned to run against him, Washington announces that he will step down to leave the field open.

It is the political heart of the play’s myth-making, comparable to Nelson Mandela leaving Robben Island. The decorated Virginian veteran was the only man who could unite the fractious revolutionaries after they defeated the British. Washington could have become dictator for life; instead, he chose to create a true democracy. “If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on./It outlives me when I’m gone.”

For a nation just beginning to think that Trump could really, actually become its president, seeing the incumbent acknowledge that his time was nearly over was a powerful moment. For Obama watching it in the audience, it must have felt like his narrative had come full circle.

Towards the end of the song, Hamilton begins to read out the words of the farewell address he has written, and Washington joins in, singing over the top of them. It was a technique cribbed from Will.i.am’s 2008 Obama campaign video, in which musicians and actors sing and speak along to the candidate’s “Yes, we can” speech.

In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama had written, “I learnt to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.”

This was the promise of his presidency: that there was not a black America or a white America, a liberal America or a conservative America, but, as he said in his breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, “a United States of America”. The man who followed him clearly thinks no such thing, but nonetheless the nation must learn to move on.

In his farewell address in January 2017, Obama returned to the “Yes, we can” speech, using its words as the final statement on his presidency:

I am asking you to hold fast to that faith written into our founding documents; that idea whispered by slaves and abolitionists; that spirit sung by immigrants and homesteaders and those who marched for justice; that creed reaffirmed by those who planted flags from foreign battlefields to the surface of the moon; a creed at the core of every American whose story is not yet written: yes, we can. Yes, we did.

For the playwright JT Rogers, this is the true triumph of Hamilton – giving today’s multiracial America a founding myth in which minorities have as much right to be there as Wasps. It is political “in the sense of reclaiming the polis” – the body of citizens who make up a country. “The little village we live in outside the city, everyone in the middle school knows the score verbatim,” Rogers adds. “They recite it endlessly and at length, like Homer.”

the full long-read here!

[akria23]

TGD Articles #1

The reason I love The Get Down is not just because its about a part of my own people’s history in this genre of music…but because it’s a metaphorical speak in the image of many artist that’s lived that life coming from a colored, poor, and seemingly broken land. The cultures that represented in this show – they’ve always been at the pinnacle of all the big art forms. Often times that history was erased replaced with the face of someone else, the credit is given to those it didn’t belong to and even when correct credit is given the tale is spun to make it negative – our form of dance was something violent, dangerous or not a real form / our music was/is degrading at best and tasteless at worst / our art was never art just unnecessary incoherent scribbles used only to mark ownership and ruin what was once perfect. Time and time we’re shown that the lighter the flesh the easier the content is to swallow but TGD isn’t about that harsh reality. In fact, these young men and women are to focus on their own moment trying to breathe some life into their own dreams that there's no room for that story. So what happens is we get this ultimate focus on this representation, on this reality that I think isn’t shined on enough for people like these. You have real artist who’ve lived through similar events as these, whose history match. These too are our stories, and TGD remembers that, they remind of that, they teach that to those who hadn’t known.

I’ve been doing this thing lately where I’ve been feeling this need to describe everything by one word and one word only. The only rule was that the word had to not only speak for the entirety of the piece but that it must also trickle down to having more than the one meaning. Sometimes this is difficult…this time it was simple.

Freedom.  

The word has found its place within the story. Its grown so much its become an entity of its own, it’s presence refusing to be ignored, it has weaved its way through characters and threaded itself to the spine of the storyline. Its more than the star gazing and the bird metaphors, it’s the hard lyric dropped on the backbeat and the spray from the can that paints every one of Dizzee’s mottos. Each character’s struggle is one marked by a quest of the word.

Mylene seeks absolution from her Father and his church. Like many of the characters, she desires to use her talent to transcend her from the gutters of rags to riches and class. To be raw, Mylene sole drive is for control, of both her own form and mind and through that her own message in her art. She is the one most driven by this need for the boys have total autonomy over what they perform and how it's performed, and while the girls may do back lib for her and therefore have not much say they are still free in form of body and decisions. We watch her transition from her father’s control, trying to fit her dream inside his reality, to trying to fit that same dream inside someone else’s who wanted her for her sex appeal.  In both cases, she was told what to think, feel and how to act. Her only purpose was to achieve theirs. It's only when the first chains are truly broken (with her father’s death) do we see her take a stand and start of this different path. We know this path is one of fruition because, in the scene where she finds herself at the party (this scene also mirrors with another character’s awakening), she's lost in herself, singing her way – carefree and just for the art. It is this moment that gets her the deal of a lifetime. Through Mylene we see many other characters in search for some form of freedom – including her mother whose wants to escape the marriage she's bound herself to, her ‘uncle’ who's made a life of trying to free others from poverty, and a broken city – and Jackie a drug addicted musician who finds himself lost in the biggest musical block until she frees him with creativity and inspiration.

Unlike Mylene, Zeke doesn’t know he's in need of being free. To be fair his prison is, in part, one of his own making.   Yes, his family and teacher put pressure on his to succeed their way…but he doubled that by trying to add Shaolin and the Kipling brothers to his track. There's nothing wrong with trying to succeed but you can’t walk to paths at once and that’s what Zeke finds himself trying to do and often finds himself taking steps backward instead of forward. He stretched himself thin instead of giving his all to one route. Maybe that’s why his story is heavy with guilt and sorrow because his goal was to make too many people happy – someone was destined to be let down – and if part 2 was any marker, that person is shown to be Shao, the brother who he's never really put his full trust in. Through Zeke we are shown sometimes we have too many options and refusing to make a choice can cause us just as much as making no choice, but also that our decision that can come with a duality. Zeke was free to choose…although I don’t know if his choice was all it was cut out to be. Zeke was inspiring though and with that came those who wanted that to shade them, such as Ra-Ra who latched onto this group because he saw the potential and hoped that his brain would be enough to lead them down the right path to creating a kingdom of their own.

Shaolin had the story of no choice. Shao lived in a mindset of survival and in that mindset all your decisions are fronted with that goal. His body was even more out of his control than Mylene’s, Fat Annie made sure of that from a young age. Even though he’s a jack of all trades (art, music, dance), even though deep down he's always hoped and has finessed his talents in wait of an opportunity, Shao never believed he would actually find a path to escape the world Annie had built for him. Leaving always meant ending back there. This is why he was enamored of Zeke – he was an opportunity, he was a promise of things Shao never had (a family, a partner, a bond) he was the road to freedom. He not only made him see, but he made him believe (this is also why I don’t like Zeke – Shao was always all the way in, damaging himself further, but Zeke always held a part of himself out knowing he had more than one route). When he gripped onto this idea, he couldn’t let it go, even if it meant getting his hands dirty. He was willing to steal, beg, borrow, and in one case assault for this thing. Because if he could do all those things to survive in a world he didn’t want to be in, what was stopping him from doing them when the destination was something he actually wanted? The sad thing about Shao’s story is it presented the reality of placing your trust in someone and having them drop your ass. Hope – it was so close and he knew it was gonna work. Growth-excusing the world he lived in and the things he had to do, to standing up and saying no. Devastation-having the foundation pulled from under his feet with the realization that having something and losing it may just be worse than never having had it at all. Reversion- of all the things he’d once known, the life he once lived, the thoughts he once had. Freedom is an illusion when life keeps proving that you deserve no such thing. And that ties in with Boo, he thinks he has no real tools to leave that place. The city has its claws in him, feeding off his anger and hardheadedness that keeps him in the belief that those like him and Shao were meant to be left behind and hardened for that life. Those who think they don’t deserve to be free succumb to their prisons.

Let me be frank – Dizzee’s story is my favorite in every way possible…including this one. If Shao’s storyline thus far has been about the manifestation of freedom letting you down, then Diz’s is about that manifestation being the best thing that allows you to soar high. Free/freedom is a theme we see surrounding Dizz a lot. This is in part to his sexuality and in part to his rebellious artistry. He himself has atoned himself more freedom in one than in the other. Dizz is fearless and driven in the face of art. His train quotes usually as such ‘Forget safety, be notorious’. He goes all the way into a dangerous neighborhood just to see Shao’s new work. He added his own work to one of Shao’s trains and even went to a gang territory for another one of his own creations. His art presents not only his thoughts and beliefs but allows him to freely hide in plain sight though his write line and alter ego Rumi. He’s the only character whose freedom is always at the stake of being stolen (though his art being a crime) while also seeking a different form of freedom (both his sexuality and the legacy of his art). Dizzee’s story is like a caterpillar going through metamorphosis – when the audience first meets him we don’t realize his sexuality is on the table. It isn’t until we’re introduced to Thor that even becomes clear. Thor is interested upon first meeting when he hears exactly who Dizzee is and his explanation of Rumi. Thor immediately understands the representation of Rumi. He’s the first character to see the genius in Diz instead of weird because he’s the first to actually see him fully for what he is and understand his metaphors. Thor is actually the element that’s pushing Diz’s transition. We get a lot of signs of Freedom when Thor is around – when they exchange books Thor tells him to make it the craziest, nastiest, freest, most revolutionary piece he’s ever made – Thor has a train quote that goes ‘You have wings, Learn to fly’ – before Thor ask him to go to the club he ask Dizz ‘Doesn’t Rumi wanna rise from some Alien ashes, be a phoenix, find a new form? Set the alien in the top hat free bro, introduce him to the world’. This is forthcoming to Thor’s own form (the phoenix – one reborn) already settled and free in his own sexuality, the bird standing for both freedom and rebirth (which is a point diz is at during his last scene). I do think that Thor feels because he’s able to see Diz/Rumi so translucently that others will/can too. You see this when he invites him to the club and tells him not to worry they’ll let him in. – In the club scene, it's as though Dizz is actually leaving one world entering a new world, all the while with Thor leading Dizz forward with a guiding hand. This sense is deepened by the fact that the audio is cut and what we hear as they are in this new place is Thor’s joy (laughter) at sharing this new world with Dizz. He tells Dizz that “this is where free people come to be free, just birds singing in bird voices and doing bird things (basically free people doing free people shit)’”. When Dizz gives Thor the Set Me Free album and tells him that it made him think of him it makes sense because that’s the route Dizz has been on since meeting Thor. It is easy to see that Thor is his first male romantic action given his hesitant nature when Thor was first flirting with him on the train – he remained stoic until he did the turn with a La revolution before exiting. But Dizz is also a full steam ahead kind of guy once he decides to do something. We get another one of those scenes in the club. Because everything was so new Dizz is contained and awestruck but after the kiss and the first note of Come Set Me Free, all those walls fall and we see Dizzee in his most pure form.

This theme, of course, follows into part 2 as Thor is literally locked up and Dizz has shut down in his own way. This season also focuses on Dizz standing up for his place and himself. He’s no longer letting comments slide by, choosing instead to confront them head on. When Thor gets out we get this intricate scene that while drug induced, allows us free entree into Dizz’s mind where Thor is concerned. Love, art, protection and of course free as we’re reminded of Rumi’s destination. Some fans take the Boo-Dizz conversation to mean that Boo secretly knows about Dizz’s sexuality…I didn’t take it that way at all. When Boo says – remember when I used to know all your friends it was a reminder that Dizz like the rest of the characters was still locked in a box. There's a reason Ra says..yo that’s my brother in the face of Thor whose trying to help. None of Dizz’s family knows Thor. It’s the same reason he tells Boo no when he ask if he could come along to see Thor. So even while he's at the point of not apologizing for being an alien he’s not yet a phoenix. When we see Dizz again, he's at his happiest. He and Thor are shacked up in what I refer to as Paint Palace, isolating themselves from the outside world like they’re on a honeymoon and drawing their truth on every surface they can. As I’ve said in my other post, this is one of my favorite scenes – because everyone should be allowed to experience that kind of freedom. Dizzee is in a safe space, doing something he loves, surrounded by positivity and with someone who inspires this safe feeling. He doesn’t have to hide, doesn’t have to speak in half-truths nor outright lie. Thor doesn’t judge him, and although he’s his guide he doesn’t push or force him to move faster than his own pace will allow. The reason Thor is presented smiling and happy when Dizzee is lost in his art is because he is both enamored and in full support of Dizz during these moments because they’re when Dizz is at his most real. Thizzee does not overtly mention their feelings because the real message loses its meaning that way. You see all the other relationships/friendships in the show and they all tell each other their every feeling but when it comes time to put up…someone is often left hurt, disappointed and jaded.  Dizz is aware of all those feelings – love, protection, freedom – not because Thor says them, but because he shows through action. Thor is Dizzee’s manifestation of freedom and through he found himself on the path to accepting himself and freeing the sides of himself that others didn’t understand. Dizz is learning to fight for himself as much as he’s willing to fight for his art. Thor teaches him that Viva la revolution has space in other portions of his life. And that’s where we leave Dizz, transforming himself into something new…

Sometimes freedom is the fight for control, sometimes it’s the need to make a decision, sometimes it’s a manifestation, and other times it’s learning to accept yourself. The show made sure to sprinkle it in every character (even those I didn’t mention). As I said at the start, it was the floor the genre of music and art was built upon. Neither got much respect but still, artist used it as their route to escape whatever struggles they needed to overcome and the greatly exhibits that. These characters want to be kings and queens, they want to make their own mark on the world, leave behind their own legacy. They fight, love, and sometimes lose. They learn to learn to understand one aspect of one another they probably thought they would never see. That's what's so freeing about TGD, what makes it so damn good.

Video belongs to Anna on YT! This post was in part inspired by said video. The gifs are as credited.

[erinkappeler]

Apostrophe, Animation, and Aeroplane

At some point between Jeff Session’s and Rex Tillerson’s confirmation charades and the preliminary votes to gut the ACA (we finally got our death panel!), after a night of informal group therapy/ranting with some beloved friends, I found myself lying on their kitchen floor, asking sincerely and hopelessly the question so many of us have been asking lately: what the fuck do we do? We’re powerless in so many ways now. Innocent people are going to die just from the ACA repeal alone. 

I’m still committed to pragmatic action (keep calling your reps! sign up for Wall of Us!), but I am also overwhelmed. This is of course the intention of the GOP; you don’t rush confirmation hearings and push to dismantle protective legislation like this unless you’re trying to suppress dissent by opening all these fronts at once. Knowing this doesn’t make it easier to cope. 

My kitchen floor breakdown happened in Boston. I also spent a lot of time in bookstores there, and I realized at some point while packing a suitcase to go back to the Midwest that I have been building my own protective wall out of books, as I’ve always been wont to do. 

These are my recent purchases:

In the immediate aftermath I wanted the planning books, the ones with clues about effective organization. But I’m in a crying-on-the-kitchen-floor phase right now, and I want the ones that remind me of how many times authoritarianism has won, and how people kept living anyway (when they weren’t murdered). The ones that acknowledge how many losses we’re going to have to deal with. The ones that remind us that we’re not exceptional and our country has in fact created this same situation in other countries time and again. The Sympathizer is one of these books; it wrecked me in so many ways. I don’t know how to talk about it coherently yet. I haven’t finished Going to the Dogs (about life in Weimar Germany), but it’s giving me an odd sort of comfort, especially in the author’s preface to the 1950 edition, where Kästner describes the rise of the Nazi party:

“People ran to follow the Pied Pipers, following them right into the abyss in which we now find ourselves, more dead than alive, and in which we try to make ourselves comfortable, as if nothing had happened. 

The present book ... is no poetic photo album, but a satire. It does not describe what things were like; it exaggerates them. The moralist holds up not a mirror, but a distorting mirror to his age. Caricature, a legitimate artistic mode, is the furthest he can go. If that doesn’t help nothing will. It is not unusual that nothing should help, nor was it then. But it would be unusual if the moralist were to be discouraged by this fact. His traditional task is the defense of lost causes. He fulfills it as best he may. His motto today is as it has always been: to fight on not withstanding!”

The Sympathizer ends in a somewhat similar place, actually: 

“We remain that most hopeful of creatures, a revolutionary in search of a revolution, although we will not dispute being called a dreamer doped by an illusion. . . . We cannot be alone! Thousands more must be staring into darkness like us, gripped by scandalous thoughts, extravagant hopes and forbidden plots. We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.”

I feel hopeless about the immediate future but I still believe in fighting on notwithstanding for our scandalous thoughts and extravagant hopes. A way out of this mess doesn’t exist if we can’t imagine it into existence.

But we also can’t live through this without mourning what we’ve already lost and what we’re going to lose. I find myself circling back again and again lately to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel’s cult classic album, in my ongoing attempt to reconcile loss and hope. In the Aeroplane is a concept album, a sort of palimpsestic narrative about an adolescent boy in the late nineties falling in love with Anne Frank (as much as it’s about anything – the lyrics are famously opaque and the narrative logic isn’t exactly linear). The songs seem to be about young love, sex, family trauma, and the Holocaust. They’re also about art’s ability to reanimate the dead and to help the living keep living. (In all of these themes it reminds me quite a bit of H.D.’s epic World War II poem Trilogy, another useful piece for coping with the persistence of human cruelty and our seeming inability to remember the lessons of the past.) 

I think part of what I find comforting about this album is the way it insists on the presence of the past, both as inescapable burden and as an incitement to ethical action and imaginative creation. Historical traumas aren’t described at a remove – they’re part of the fabric of life in the present. “Two Headed Boy,” for instance, overlays an erotic encounter (Anne and Peter in their hiding place? the contemporary adolescent boy and an imagined Anne? the boy and one of his contemporaries?) with bodies in the Nazi death camps:

We will take off our clothes

And they'll be placing fingers through the notches in your spine

And when all is breaking

Everything that you could keep inside

Now your eyes ain't moving

Now they just lay there in their climb

The eroticism of these lyrics – taking off our clothes, exploring the shape of a body, the flickering image of eyes rolling back in an orgasmic moment – is inseparable from the absolute horror of the past – the starving body that makes notches in a spine visible, the struggle to hold on to something internally while being slowly murdered, the eyes that can no longer move, the inevitability of becoming another body cast aside. It’s a grotesque pairing, but it’s also beautiful in its desire to breathe life back into the lost and in its will to look fully at historical suffering and to count it part of our present experience. 

This is also an album that understands the complications of giving voice to the dead in a particularly nuanced way. Apostrophe is the technical term for speaking directly to a dead person; Barbara Johnson describes apostrophe as “a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness” (30). In the Aeroplane flirts with and thematizes but never exactly uses apostrophe in a sustained way. The title track, for instance, describes the voice of a dead girl but does not throw words into her mouth; she is left present and absent, inescapable but untouchable. The desire to reanimate her makes the song, but the song stops short of presuming it can speak for her:

What a curious life we have found here tonight

There is music that sounds from the street

There are lights in the clouds

Anna’s ghost all around

Hear her voice as it’s rolling and ringing through me

Soft and sweet

How the notes all bend and reach above the trees

The usual direction of apostrophe is reversed – Anna’s/Anne’s ghost voice moves through the living speaker, making him into the ventriloquist’s dummy. And yet we don’t hear what she says through him, just that it sounds “soft and sweet.” It’s a dream of contact that can’t exist; the words we want to hear are left just out of reach. Leaving the content of Anna’s words a mystery is a beautiful solution to a literary problem: even if we imagine Anne Frank’s actual words here, some of which we have access to, being channeled through the living speaker, it is still the living speaker’s mouth that frames the words. We can’t hear Anne speak any longer, no matter how closely we listen. The next verse takes up this problem:

Now how I remember you

How I would push my fingers through

Your mouth to make those muscles move

That made your voice so smooth and sweet

This verse foregrounds the necessary violence in speaking for an absent other. It makes the figure of apostrophe fleshy and grotesque, describing the speaker as the ventriloquist who forces a corpse’s muscles to move through physical manipulation. It notes the fiction of speech at work here – the muscles in the corpse once made its voice smooth and sweet, but they don’t now. Now it is impossible for that murdered voice to be heard except through a brutal and clumsy approximation of what it once was.

In the Aeroplane’s simultaneous desire for and distrust of sustained apostrophe links it to Diana Fuss’s discussion of what she calls “historical corpse poems.” Fuss argues that twentieth-century literature is filled with poems in which corpses speak, but that,

the Holocaust appears to mark the historical limit beyond which the corpse poem hesitates to venture. The point is clear: after the unthinkable event of genocide, no fiction of the living dead can possibly be sustained. … The few Holocaust poets who do employ the voice of the dead tend to adopt neither an individual nor a collective persona but a unique voice that is both at once. “‘I am I’ -- /thousands of slaughtered I’s,” Jacob Glatstein declares in a poem that reveals not the poet’s desire to revive the dead but rather his own profound identification with the dead. Recent trauma theory reminds us that one might survive an unthinkable atrocity like the Holocaust and yet still not feel alive. (Fuss 64-65)

Anne Frank becomes Anna in “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” doubling her presence, making us think of a specific individual and of the mass of individuals simultaneously (how many individual Anne’s and Anna’s died in the camps collectively?). The song participates in the necessarily confused subjectivity of the Holocaust corpse poem. It also speaks to a belated survivor’s guilt – the guilt of one who wasn’t alive in 1945 but who recognizes that this is due to the simple accident of birth; the final line of the song is “Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all.” Why is the speaker here to imagine Anne’s voice? How can he do that, and how can he not?

Fuss argues that a poet who attempts to write corpse poems about the Holocaust “tentatively seeks to reverse the depersonalization of mass murder by lending to the unmourned victims of genocide his own individual voice. These singular poems do not presume to resurrect the dead, only to memorialize them from the respectful position of writers confronting the enigma of their own uncertain survivals” (65). This is the delicate project at work in “Two Headed Boy Pt. 2,” where the speaker acknowledges the need and the impossibility of giving voice, and the way this act is and is not for the dead:

And in my dreams you’re alive and you’re crying

As your mouth moves in mine, soft and sweet

Rings of flowers ‘round your eyes

And I’ll love you for the rest of your life when you’re ready

The necrophiliac insistence on eroticizing the ventriloquism of apostrophe – now it’s not just words that move through the dead girl’s mouth, but also the male speaker’s body – is both disturbing and yet part of the impossible project of memorialization. Fuss distinguishes “political corpse poems” from “historical corpse poems,” but these are in many ways one and the same. Fuss notes that,

[i]n political killings, the corpse is intended to function as a sign – a message (and most often a warning) to the living. … Political corpses are killed simply to make a point; deprived of subjective voice, these corpses do not so much convey a political message as become the message. The violent reduction of a person to a sign literally kills the messenger, stripping the body that remains of any meaning of its own. By giving voice to the cadaver, political corpse poems belatedly seek to undo this semiotic violence by multiplying the ways in which the dead body might signify and by complicating the terms of both its utterance and its address. These poems ventriloquize corpses not to perpetrate upon the dead another kind of profanation but to make manifest the violence of turning any physical body into a form of political speech. (61)

Anne Frank has of course become one of the most overdetermined symbols of the Holocaust. The potentially profane act of imagining an erotic encounter with her in this song becomes a way to work against the “violent reduction of a person to a sign”; Anne Frank the symbol becomes Anne Frank the individual, engaged in a radically singular and personal experience. It’s an invasive imaginative act, but it’s also a way to de-signify her death and to return her to an imagined personhood that exists apart from or in spite of state violence. Like so many of the images in these songs, it’s awful and gorgeous, heartbreaking and stomach-turning. It succeeds and it fails in its desire to reanimate the dead and to somehow make individual deaths both less symbolic and even more meaningful.

Fuss argues that “[h]istorical corpse poems offset the cultural process of forgetting with the literary work of remembering” and “invent[t] paradoxical new grammars to articulate the terrifying new realities of modern death” (66-67). As part of this tradition, the songs of In the Aeroplane invite us to remember as part of a way to resist future acts of violence. In “Holland, 1945,” Jeff Mangum sings,

And here's where your mother sleeps

And here is the room where your brothers were born

Indentions in the sheets

Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore

And it's so sad to see the world agree

That they'd rather see their faces fill with flies

All when I'd want to keep white roses in their eyes

We are not currently facing anything like the scale of death we faced at midcentury. But it’s hard not to think of that moment now, as our elected officials look their constituents in the face and tell them they would rather let those constituents die than support the ACA. I don’t know how to deal with people who’d “rather see their faces fill with flies.” I only know how to keep the dream of white roses alive, however fleetingly and imperfectly. And so I put In the Aeroplane on one more time and get ready to march and protest and call and write…

  Works Cited

Diana Fuss. Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy. Duke University Press, 2013.

Barbara Johnson. “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion.” Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 28-47. JSTOR.