#masta just

[konjkitkatty]

PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE PLAYER THREE-

OKAY, OKAY OKAY TAKE HER, YOU CAN HAVE HER, PLEASE JUST CALM DOWN

[pruneunfair]

Not only did they treat Charlotte as some discounted furniture to give to the next desperately horny man, they also fucked up one of my favorite ladies in waiting

How the hell are you gonna take the PERSONIFICATION of women working together, the same woman willing to FIGHT someone if they try anything on her allies and then say "Ah yeah she's the perfect one to get with the guy with a fiancé! Buts it's different this time cause Mastas is really badass so she's actually not like other girls!"

Like..season two Mastas would've been by Charlotte's side comforting her, not letting it all side and even becoming his mistress of all things.

Congratulations Remarried empress! You managed to somehow fuck up the entire point of your goddamm story!

Oh Charlotte you deserved better than a hypocrite fiance who cheated on you and his sister taking advantage of the broken engagement shamelessly. Being a good person didn't save you and your kingdom from getting screwed over cause you're not the FL. Didn't you know? Only one woman deserves to have it all and rest can rot. You deserved better than a creep husband who drugged people and a major simp of the FL. But you're in the way of author's "not like other girl" MC who's the only one worthy of love, and success.

[silusvesuius]

just another masta neloth wannabe

[thekidsfromyestergay]

MCR midnights

If you start Foundations at 11:56:47, you will hit midnight at the curtain drop after "she will always be the whore"

If you start The End. at 11:58:08, you will hit midnight at the start of Dead!

If you start Planetary at 11:56:40, you will hit midnight at "get up and go"

If you start Skylines at 11:57:37, you will hit midnight on "cave you call a chest"

If you start Helena at 11:57:19, you will hit midnight on the final chorus after "when both our cars collide"

If you start Sleep at 11:56:48, you will hit midnight as the "just sleep" breakdown kicks in

If you start Save Yourself at 11:56:40, you will hit midnight on the wo-ah's after "you motherfucker"

If you start Mastas at 11:58:55, you will hit midnight on the final "XO" (and the kickass solo)

If you start Not Okay at 11:57:21, you will hit midnight on "trust me"

If you start Best Day at 11:58:21, you will hit midnight on the group "someday"

If you start Mama at 11:58:17, you will hit midnight on "you should've raised a baby girl"

If you start Heaven Help Us at 11:57:16, you will hit midnight on "someone save us"

If you start Desolation Row at 11:58:28, you will hit midnight on Ray's solo

If you start Teenagers at 11:57:59, you will hit midnight after "all together now"

[caltropspress]

Earl Sweatshirt: A Geography of Grief and Growth

I made myself the poet of the world. The white man had found a poetry in which there was nothing poetic….I had soon to change my tune.

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

I suggest that we do not necessarily need to hear and know what is stated in its entirety, that we do not need to “master” or conquer the narrative as a whole, that we may know in fragments.

—bell hooks, “Teaching New Worlds/New Words” (1994)

Breakin’ ’em down to micro-fragments.

—Saafir, “Battle Drill” (1994)

What is asked of me is not to ascend but to descend.

—Robert Bly (1990)

1.

Earl Sweatshirt’s arc, swerving and dervishy, isn’t difficult to see, as we’ve witnessed it with him—we’re either interlocutors or interlopers, both with questionable motives. So when Earl looks back on school daze, as he does on “OD,” we look back with him (though ours is often an imperial gaze [HOW COULD IT NOT BE?]). We tee-hee and titter as we hear that “somebody tooted in the student commons,” tooted being the most puerile word for gas he could have chosen. An array of scatological options were ignored. It’s a deliberate gesture toward juvenilia. He doesn’t want his expression to be too mature, ha. He wants to welcome you to the romper room, ha. Remaining a kid until the moment he expires, apparently. So he sets the adolescent scene: the student commons. “The bell rang,” and the accused student was spared the prolonged opprobrium. In about four seconds, the student will begin to post. He “went home and argued in the comments,” channeling his embarrassment elsewhere, talking shit (shit) on the internet behind the safety and quasi-anonymity of a screen—an odd facade. He can walk right up to your avi and diss you. That’s his philosophy. The public humiliation replaced with a private self-possession. The discomfort of the crowd exchanged for the solace of solitude.

2.  DID AN ANGEL SPEAK?

The sonics of “tooted” and “student” are twee, giggle-inducing. We laugh along with the concatenation of m and n phonemes [somebody | student | commons | rang | went | home | then | in | comments]. The near-homophonous commons and comments scan hysterical. With “OD,” it’s easy to confuse adolescence with adulthood. That “somebody” committed this social transgression seems defensive. Maybe it was him—the subject, Earl, Thebe—seeing as how the rest of the song is delivered in the first-person. Embrace the Age of Immaturity. Channel the Fat Boys: Darren Robinson’s flatulent beatbox. Place it beside the disorderly lyrics that Bobbito spits: “I write my own shit from finish to start, / Diminish the heart, / I eat a knish and then I fart.” Like the Cenobites, Earl kicks a dope verse, and only that. “I keep my sentences short,” he says on “EAST.” Beauty is brevity, brevity beauty. A “brevity pack,” as Earl has referred to the Feet of Clay songs. He strives to be live ’cause he got no choice. He runs his own business like James Joyce. In A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man, a similar flatus incident unravels. At Clongowes Wood College (Stephen Dedalus’s Coral Reef Academy), a “stout student who stood below…on the steps” by the name of Goggins “farted briefly.” Sonically, the sentence shares much with Earl’s opening line. Dixon asks, in a “soft voice,” “Did an angel speak?” But the others react with bellicosity and name-calling (stinkpot; flamingest dirty devil). Goggins doesn’t retreat home; he simply asks, “It did no one any harm, did it?” You still bet that you can harm me, but you don’t alarm me, Goggins might say another way, reprising Del the Funky Homosapien, echoplexing Masta Ace. 

3. 

Earl “watched the doppler move,” the wavelength shift—the siren song of the “toot,” something insidious—or maybe it’s just the tremors we’re feeling. Woop, woop: that’s the sound of the beast, KRS would say. The frequency shivers. The shift, the movéd doppler, means Earl is immediately older, he’s the child who “get[s] introduced to violence,” even if he acknowledges the line was inspired by his nephew on a playground in South Africa, experiencing apartheid reincarnate as a whiteboy cuts him in line for the slide. Cranly, bullying Goggins, “shove[s] him violently down the steps.” The doppler moves. It slides into violence—like the violence visited upon the MOVE compound located at 6221 Osage Avenue in Philly in 1985. Gradations of black/white. ELUCID mentions the “gray on [his] face showing age” on his Osage (2016) project. Isn’t it strange—how the youngins can turn cold, hoarfrosty, in an instant? The grayscale cover to ELUCID’s tape is graced by a photograph of Birdie Africa, the sole child survivor of the siege. The bone fragments of the MOVE children have since been used in anthropology courses at UPenn and Princeton—case studies. It’s a good trope. Fascinating stuff.

4.  TRYIN’ TO TRANSFORM YOU BOYS TO MEN LIKE DAYCARE

When JuJu of the Beatnuts asked, You want pain?, he wasn’t referencing the dramatical-traumatical pain Earl negotiates—JuJu’s question posed a ruffneck and ruffian pain on “Watch Out Now.” Somewhere closer to Marcy, where Jay-Z’s streets was watching. Earl clocks minutes, anaphoric with what he watches (I watched the doppler… / I watched a child…), much like Dylan’s portentous hard rain in which he saw endless racialized visions: “I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it”; “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’”; “I saw a white ladder all covered with water.” For Earl, the ladder is a slide. The saw is watched. Witnesses all.

5.

In “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” bell hooks writes that she “came to theory because [she] was hurting”: “I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.” hooks says that she “came to theory young, when [she] was still a child,” citing Terry Eagleton who argues that “[c]hildren make the best theorists.” Children, Eagleton insists, possess “a wondering estrangement.” No wonder, then, that “since a jit” Earl has found no use in “giving up.” He rather make it make sense. 

6.

I beat you to the point. Having gained experience, there’s nothing you can tell Earl that he doesn’t already know, that he hasn’t already seen. He’s seen enough, had enough. He doesn’t await the mob’s pursuit; he places the noose on himself, he RE: DEFines it within his own lexicon. His noose, therefore, “is golden.” He’s a young youth, rockin’ the gold [noose], DEATHWORLD goose. He speaks with criminal slang, with a split tongue like ELUCID. Where ELUCID was “true and living, actual—no dull axes, owner of all heads,” Earl is “true and living, lonesome,” with no skulls to keep him company. He has to square up with the “pugilistic moments” on his own. 

7.  I AM OLDER THAN I ONCE WAS AND YOUNGER THAN I’LL BE

I’m thinking of “The Pugilist at Rest” (1991) by Thom Jones, whose epileptic protag describes a “grainy black-and-white photograph” of the bronze statue called The Pugilist at Rest. The pugilist, with a pocketful of mumbles, has “slanted, drooping brows that bespeak torn nerves” and a forehead “piled with scar tissue.” Torn nerves and scar tissue—sounds like the physical manifestations of grief. And, yes, Earl has grieved, and he continues to grieve—as listeners, we’re accustomed to his grief pedigree, as per Ka. In the past, Earl was “panicking a lot”—he just “want[ed] [his] time and [his] mind intact.” That’s a cold fact.

The narrator of “The Pugilist at Rest” readies himself for a cingulotomy—a psychosurgical procedure that will “cauterize a small spot in a nerve bundle in [his] brain.” In other words, he wants to keep his mind intact. The neurosurgeon promises the operation will lift “the heaviness of a heart blackened by sin,” which is what convinces the narrator to agree to it. Good grief, he thinks, he’s been reaping what he sowed. He “can’t go on like this,” barely living “with a deadening sense of languor,” a phrase which calls to mind Earl’s lethargic, slugabed flow. Feeling insane in the membrane, like he’s a Soul Assassinated, exploring the depths beneath his whooligan behaviors. 376 was a brothel. “Good and evil are only illusions,” Jones writes. In anticipation of the surgery, the protag considers the worst-case [so what, so what] scenario: “If they fuck up the operation, I hope I get to keep my dogs somehow.”

8.  MOURNING & MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLIA

Grief carries its own antidote along with it.

—Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798)

“Grief is the door to feeling,” Robert Bly says. But Earl, on “Grief,” told us he “ain’t been outside in a minute”—and that minute, whether we’re speaking with criminal slang like Nas on “It Ain’t Hard To Tell” or not, is an eternity. Earl hadn’t crossed that threshold, hadn’t kicked in that door. MIKE would realize it much later on “No Curse Lifted (rivers of love),” how you “had to walk through the grief,” even if it “was the worst feeling.” In 2015, though, Earl found these passageways distorted. Like the undulating photograph on the cover of his first mixtape. Like the blur-obscured selfie on the cover of Some Rap Songs. Like the static-scrambled cover of I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside. Earl’s dealt in fragmentary confuzzled noise for a full career. He’s been standing on the corner, red burnt, moving down alien lanes paved by GBV, greenthinking to himself. It ain’t hard to tell that Earl “don’t act hard” and yet is a “hard act to follow.” The density or opacity of his exterior notwithstanding, grief don’t come easy. “As men,” Bly says, “we’re taught not to feel pain and grief as children.” So Earl spits somnolent, numb-tongued and slack-jawed. Like he said on “Cold Summers”: muffle my pain and muzzle my brain up. 

“I’ve been alone in my shit for the longest,” he spit on “Grief,” and in work as recent as “Vin Skully,” he’s still figuring out “how to stay afloat in a bottomless pit.” Bly says that “we receive something from our father by standing close to him—something moves over that can’t be described in material terms.” Bly speaks of being in a “conspiracy with his mother” from early on. Earl finds himself “thinking ’bout [his] grandmama” while he wallows and lies in a bottle. “Grief” catalogs all the things his mama taught him. Earl’s work, of late, is autodestructive. He peels away and pastes back haphazardly. He vibes with this Bly shit: “If you can deny something so fundamental as grief in the whole family, you can deny anything. And then how can you write poetry if you’re involved in that much denial?”

Bly goes on to quote Alice Miller, the psychoanalyst who gave us The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979): “When you were young, you needed something you did not receive, and you will never receive it. And the proper attitude is mourning.” Mourning is the proper attitude, not blame—mourning. Mourning makes its way through moaning and mumbling—Earl’s current intonation. On “Grief,” he “cut the grass off the surface [and] pray[s] the lawnmower blade catch the back of a serpent.” Philip Larkin’s poem “The Mower” (1979) leans more literal: “The mower stalled, twice; I found / A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, / Killed. It had been in the long grass.” Larkin’s speaker genuflects before the innocent critter, recalling how he “fed it, once.” Now, he mourns how he has “mauled its unobtrusive world, / Unmendably. Burial was no help.” Earl, of course, is less forgiving of the serpents in the grass. They’re threats, not friends. Still, a void opens up when the mower—(and let’s not forget the lawnmower is a modernized scythe)—does its mowing. Grief is the door to feeling, and on the other side:

Next morning I got up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

9.  NOBODY KNOW WHO MADE THIS WELL, FOR IT WAS HERE WHEN I WAS BORN

“Come get to know me at my innermost…”

Riveting, Earl raps. Earl raps are riveting. We fix to the flow—riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s. We’re invited to know Earl, to become familiar, and his “innermost” is a constant vacillation between optimism and [afro]pessimism. The sudden switches—these switches on bitches like fixed with hydraulics—establish what Danny Schwartz, writing for Rolling Stone, called an “uneven terrain.”

Earl’s “family business [is] anguished,” and that’s recognizable. We’ve known Earl (on “Chum”) with the “pendulum swinging slow” and low. He holed up, hostage-like, in his “heart’s bottomless pit.” Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842) brand of captivity. “I was sick,” that narrator says, “—sick unto death with that long agony.” Something tells me there should be an exclamation point there (SICK!). Earl Sweatshirt was down, down, down. “I was in the fucking pits for like 10 months post my pops dying,” he said in an interview. The Spanish Inquisition ain’t shit.

But for these countless downs, “OD” tracks the ups like naloxone in the nasal membrane. “Now I need atonement,” Earl notes—he makes a case for reparations. He “sets the goal[s]” like some motivational speaker. If “half [his] wings is broken,” he can “spread the other for [his] brodie OD.” Somewhat circumspect as he’s “tiptoeing,” yet the approach is laden with “too much love.” Even when his “sister showed in a rut,” he’s joining arms with her and “getting over, sending up.” That rut she walks—like Eudora Welty’s worn path (1941)—is a path through the pinewoods, and she’s suddenly Phoenix Jackson. “She was very old and small,” Welty writes, and she moves “with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock.” Even with her pentium processing and pendulum low, she swings back up—the rise of her namesake. She screams phoenix, her feathers and flames are one skin. “Living in the moment,” Earl raps, and his craft is bars. “You been corrupt”—and, sure, who hasn’t?—but you recover with “some ginabot.” Welty’s Old Phoenix surveys a spring “silently flowing through a hollow log.” She bends and drinks and says, “Sweet gum makes the water sweet.” It’s the equivalent to Earl putting “shilajit in his sippy cup,” which is “healing cuts revealingly.” And, yes, from a “sippy cup,” so we’re back to toddling around again (“Since a jit,” he says). “I can’t give enough,” Earl raps, his last winding-sheet made of nard and myrrh. 

10.

We crouch and teeter, caterwauling along the ledges, for we’ve got these clumsy feet of clay. This is the intended effect[/defect]; this is the rubble of what Earl calls the “crumbling empire.” This is us feeling the violent vibes of the “death throes” he speaks of. Why would we expect anything to resemble traditional song or rhyme structure when the earth quakes, civilization trembles, and Earl’s dungeon shakes? His chains have fallen off. The tenor is tremors. He’s living the trife life—hell on earth—but still living. Earl’s done trying to not look down—he embraces an outer appearance which scans dour; he deliberately gazes into the pit, inviting the vertigo, for it “haunts the whole of existence,” as Fanon says. But Frank B. Wilderson III promises a “vengeance of vertigo.”

11.

Gallons of rubbing alcohol flow through the strip, and Earl’s lips. He’s “refilling the pump”—his heart, yeah—but with a sawed-off shotgun, hand-on-the-pump posture. There’s “no concealing it,” not even with a concealed carry permit. He brandishes right back at “the enemy up in arms bearing snubs.” The mood swings; been down so long it looks like up to him. The turns require tourniquets. This is some Battle of Dak To torture—somewhere between Retaliation and the Heavenly Divine. Emotional turmoil seems violent by design, and Earl’s “memory [is] really leaking blood.” Fear not, the blood is “congealing, stuck.” Like Havoc says, “The Mobb rollin’ thicker.” Prodigy cites it, too: “This ain’t rap—it’s bloodsport.” But Earl has known that all along—he’s been “mobbin’ deep as ’96 Havoc and Prodigy did” since 2013.

12.

HipHopDX’s Kevin Cortez referred to listeners having to “sift through the muddle” in order to appreciate the bars, but where muddle suggests a disorderly conduct, a kaos network, Earl’s style, more appropriately, models. The woozy, wavy, and inner-conflict-war-torn vocals model an abstraction that anticipates the listener’s loyalty. This is what I’ve got, brief and cryptic as the gesture may be, the model says. Writing for NME, Dhruva Balram described Earl’s lyrics as “slurred,” but slurry is the form.

13.

If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side…

—Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (2005)

So if we’re giving ourselves over to the woozes and waves, we’ll just as well find ourselves lost. Let’s go—like those tourist books run by students—and let’s wander eastward. Follow our napkin-scrawled directions and disorientations to a somewhere elsewhere. Let’s go east for a second, for a spell, on a lark, in the dark (word to AKAI SOLO). Earl’s bloodwork contains “pieces of slums”—or more aptly, [sLUms]. He’s hand-to-hand with that Jungle Boy MIKE, but also the god Mike Davis. “[T]he cities of the future,” Davis wrote, would be “constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood.” Just the same as an Earl Sweatshirt verse is built—under the tutelage and overstanding-sharing, symbiotically, with MIKE. Davis says our cities aren’t “cities of light soaring toward heaven,” but a world that “squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.” Smells like somebody tooted in the student commons. Smells like a slum village, something we’ve smelled before—possibly coming straight from the slums of Shaolin. 

14.  ACID EASTERNS

Earl trekked to the East and squinted into “one beacon in the dust weaving”—like Clint Eastwood arriving out of the hazy horizon ether of High Plains Drifter (1973). But Earl is heading to the East, blackwards. And though Brother J claimed you can’t define what’s direct from the East, Jeru told us on The Sun Rises in the East that you can’t stop the prophet either. So on “EAST,” Earl traverses a tricky terrain—it’s tricky, tricky, tricky because it’s an acid western landscape: an acid eastern.

The path isn’t direct or linear—it zigs and zags like rolling papers, and stimulates the same. “Double back when you got it made,” Earl says at the start of his journey “EAST.” The objective is to talk sense condensed into the form of a poem like Special Ed once did on “I Got It Made.” Instead, Earl’s poems—his L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems—skew [non]sense, go form[less], and vaporize rather than condense. Lyn Hejinian in cinnamon Timbs: “constant change figures / the time we sense.” The narrative is hallucinogenic (note: “how the story careen against the bars”). Earl’s bindle contains “thirty racks and weed [with] no fat in the collard greens.” That’s how he gets funky on the mic like an old batch. That’s how he gets sincerity on the mic: “Off top it’s me—no cap, / I don’t bottle things.” That buck that bought a bottle could’ve struck the lotto, maybe. But Earl’s “canteen was full of the poison [he] need[s].” He gets where he’s going like El Topo, bereft. The “trip was long and steep”—that being an acid trip—so let me see you try to ride a horse into the chasms of the canyon.

“EAST” is a death meditation, a grand duel between Dantean and Donneian lyric voices [he damn-near well should’ve double-tracked the vocals]. In a 2015 interview with SPIN, Earl is asked about the worst thing he did that year, to which he replies: “Umm…acid?” He elaborates: “I took it at a time when I really didn’t need to be taking acid. I had like a fucking existential crisis at, like, four in the morning. But it was tight. We reeled it back.” Jodorowsky called El Topo (1970) an “eastern” in that it “incorporat[ed] ancient eastern wisdom in the materiality of American cowboys.” For Earl, it’s more a rhinestone cowboy—he holds the cold one like he holds an old gun (as evidenced in the “EAST” music video). DOOM was no stranger to grief, of course, and the rumors persist regarding the bad acid that precipitated Subroc’s early demise (“Bad Acid” also being the original title for “December 24”).

Estranged Earl, alienated—a high plains drifter (not Clint Eastwood, though) who rechristens a town “Hell” through a baptism of blood. Like the Beastie Boys’ version, Earl pulls out a pair of pliers and pulls a bullet out of his chest. He pulls through, true and living. “I’m long distance from my girl,” Mike D raps, so he’s “talking on the cellular,” but Earl is more alienated than that—beyond racking up roaming charges, immersed in dead zones. He “lost [his] phone and consequently all the feelings [he] caught for [his] GF.” Relationships can’t be sustained in these bleak and barren locations. All the blood has been drained from the ruddy faces—sanguine scenery. In his essay “On the Acid Western,” Jonathan Rosenbaum discusses how the subgenre “refuses to respect or valorize bloodshed.” Memory really leaking blood. Congealing. Stuck. To paraphrase Rosenbaum, Earl’s acid eastern “formulat[es] a chilling, savage frontier poetry to justify [his] hallucinated agenda—a view at once clear-eyed and visionary, exalted and laconic, moral and unsentimental, witty and beautiful, frightening and placid.” Earl’s “innocence was lost in the East,” and obsessives speculate whether this refers to Samoa or New York City—how far east we going? Countless spirit-questers pit-stopping at ashrams, searching for that Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal guide. 

“I wait a beat,” Earl says. His canteen stays filled, auto-replenishes. His “cognitive dissonance shattered” and the “necessary venom restored.” Jodorowsky reportedly once taped snakes to his chest for an experimental theater performance. As if it matters if you think it matters anymore. Or, as ELUCID says, “Words mean things but don’t have to.” Acids and bases. Occident and Orient. Western and Eastern. Up is down.

15.  NOTHING LIKE US EVER WAS

Earl’s “EAST” accordion beat—or whatever Orkes Gambus Al Fata instrumentation is at work—is more madcap than madvillainous. In my head is Erick Sermon, though, speaking about how “the flow slow…like a jazz player, or someone on the accordion” on “Knick Knack Patty Wack.” But I’m less concerned with the flow of air through bellows—compressing and expanding—than I am with Earl’s rendering of wind. (Somebody tooted.)

“Let the dead be dead,” Carl Sandburg says at stanza’s end in “Four Preludes on the Playthings of the Wind” (1920). Later, he reports, “The only singers now are crows crying.” And so Earl, a lonesome crow, reminds us—and himself—that “the wind get the ashes in the end” on “December 24.” The whining, wheezing consonance of /-nd/ in “wind” and “end” manages to evoke both the wind itself and the circularity of life. The bar whooshes and whips until we’re at our end, the terminus. That circularity, that full circle: ashes to ashes. “We are the greatest city,” Sandburg repeats, “the greatest nation: / nothing like us ever was.”

Global winds be blowin’—[Of the Soul]—and so billy woods cites that same line on “Haarlem”: “Thebe said the wind get the ashes in the end, bruv.” Check the configuration of the rhime: 

The wind | gets | the ashes | in | the end   {birth}                    {life}                {death}

Even that get does work—whether it’s the violence of Death Grips’ “get got”; Too $hort threatening you to “get in where you fit in”; or the satirical sadism of Keenen Ivory Wayans’ I’m Gonna Git You Sucka. The wind wins out—it gets what it wants. On “EAST,” the wind—infinitely personified—“whispered to [Earl], ‘Ain’t it hard?’” It ain’t hard to tell that it is. How about some hardcore? Yeah, we like it raw like M.O.P. But those burns yield ashes. In Adrienne Rich’s poem “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” (1989), she struggles with the words she uses, knowing “[t]his is the oppressor’s language / yet [she] needs to talk to you.” I know it hurts to burn, she writes, but writing is no less ardent. “The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning.”

Let me bring it back to Robert Bly. “In the ancient times,” Bly says, “the movement for the men was downward—a descent into grief. It’s referred to in the fairytale as ‘the time of ashes.’” Ashes, he explains, is the “code word for the ‘out of it’ time.” 

We know what it is like to take ashes in our hands. How light they are! The fingertips experience them as a kind of powder… Ashes, we note, find their way into the whorls of our fingertips, cling there, make the whorls more noticeable, more visible, more clear to us. We can take our own fingerprints with ashes.

Ashes, then, aren’t simply for the wind’s taking—ashes are for us, are necessary for us to transcend the grief the boys, the men, and the man-child experience. Bly points to the various cultures that have used ashes in initiation rites: “Ashes Time is a time set aside for the death of that ego-bound boy.” Ready to give up, so you seek the Old Earth. The elders cover your face—even your whole body—with ashes “to make [you] the color of dead people and to remind [you] of the inner death about to come.” Consider Earl’s ashen white face produced in the negative imagery of the “Grief” music video.” “The word ashes contains in it a dark feeling for death,” Bly says. “Ashes when put on the face whiten as death does.��

Earl Sweatshirt is a far cry from knocking blunt ashes into caskets.

16.

Feet of clay, hands of light…

—Moor Mother and billy woods, “Furies” (2020)

For Cheryl I. Harris, Earl’s mother, the feet of clay refer to a vulnerability we all possess no matter how formidable we may appear to become. Earl invokes the King of Babylon’s dream, a dream of an idol “meant to represent all the empires of the world,” echoing Sandburg’s imperious “greatest nation.” Earl believes “we at the feet of clay right now…We posted up live from burning Rome.” Imagine the ash pile. So Earl is here, ostensibly, to turn the disco into something dismal—how Mtume becomes “MTOMB” with its entombed sonics, as if he’s rapping from within a wall, the victim of some Poe immurement. 

17.

“I remember woods,” Earl raps on “OD.” “I remember Endom when he wasn’t remembering much, / I remember love healing the ruptures.” I remember is also the refrain and title of Joe Brainard’s poem-memoir, a term which aptly describes much of Earl’s recent output. Brainard’s memories bum-rush into the present:

I remember a dream I used to have a lot of a beautiful red and yellow and black snake in bright green grass. I remember painting “I HATE TED BERRIGAN” in big black letters all over my white wall. I remember liver.

If Earl recalls love “healing the ruptures,” then he also likely recalls Fanon: It is essential to convey to the black man that an attitude of rupture has never saved anyone. But Fanon also speaks of young Black men “maintain[ing] their alterity. Alterity of rupture, of conflict, of battle.” Earl, “feeling rushed, grew up quick.” He echoes Biggie, who “grew up a fucking screw-up,” and Raekwon, who “grew up on the crime side” (though Earl’s mama taught him, as we know from “Grief,” how to avoid the pigs, persecution, and prosecution). Eyes on the clock, Earl acknowledges this “trip around the sun” is his “25th,” so “give it up”—his survival alone deserving of a standing [on the corner] ovation. He celebrates life with “gin and rum.” Again, notably not gin and juice—murder was never the case. The only death is the inner death, the death of the ego-bound boy, that Bly describes. Earl’s gin is the drink of be[gin]ning, of genesis (“Light them Phillies up then…”), of Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, when I was dead-broke, man… “We wasn’t supposed to be alive,” Earl says, yet here he stands.

18.  RUMINANT

Stare at the Feet of Clay album cover—an evocation of folkloric imagery: a Grimm forest with gnarled tree branches—and the enchanted, diabolic goat lying in wait. Earl’s parasocial following speculate G.O.A.T., of course, but I’m more inclined to mythopoeic possibilities. The Feet of Clay goat glares like Baphomet but frolics like a faun over fractured beats. “OD,” Earl has stated, “brought [him] up out of [his] little wreck”—a wreck of wracked nerves. Adrienne Rich encourages “diving into the wreck” (1973).

I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power.

Earl’s right there with her, submerged and blacking out, but still surviving: Really leaking blood, but refilling the pump.

In her essay “Teaching New Worlds/New Words,” bell hooks invokes Rich’s struggle to navigate the “oppressor’s language.” For hooks, as a Black writer, managing that is even more difficult and historical. “I think now of the grief of displaced ‘homeless’ Africans, forced to inhabit a world where they saw folks like themselves, inhabiting the same skin, the same condition, but who had no shared language to talk with one another, who needed ‘the oppressor’s language.’” hooks explains how Black folks have “remade that language so that it would speak beyond the boundaries of conquest and domination.”

Earl Sweatshirt, especially in his later work, has “altered [and] transformed” English, just as “enslaved Black people took broken bits of English and made of them a counter-language.” The emotional wreckage is also a linguistic heap of fragments—micro-fragments, if we’ve learned anything from Saafir. Earl, in the tradition of his ancestors, “put[s] together [his] words in such a way that the colonizer ha[s] to rethink the meaning of the English language.” “The grammatical construction of sentences in these songs” by Earl, just as by the spirituals of hundreds of years prior, “reflect[s] the broken, ruptured world of the slave.” That crumbling empire Earl mentions was faulted by feet of clay.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2019, sharing a dais with his mother, Cherly I. Harris, Earl spoke to this lineage directly: “Rap music is slave music—the modern-day iteration of it. Slave communication had to be encrypted. You got a code.” He shifted: “If I know what I’m saying…I can teach it to you.” On Feet of Clay, Earl is teaching to transgress. “I’m cracking my own code,” he says to an audience member during the Q&A, “how it comes out garbled…,” and then he trails off, as if making a deliberate effort to keep his answer cryptic.

hooks always saw language as “a site of resistance.” This included the incorrect usage and placement of words—she called such practices a “rebellion.” Weaponizing syntax. hooks recognized rap music as a continuation of this fight—the latest [sound]clash, hip-hop artists as rebels without a pause—while still acknowledging the collateral damage it might cause.

Rap music has become one of the spaces where black vernacular speech is used in a manner that invites dominant mainstream culture to listen—to hear—and, to some extent, be transformed. However, one of the risks of this attempt at cultural translation is that it will trivialize black vernacular speech. When young white kids imitate this speech in ways that suggest it is the speech of those who are stupid or who are only interested in entertaining or being funny, then the subversive power of this speech is undermined.

Or, as Earl once said on “Chum,” “Too Black for the white kids and too white for the Blacks,” an axiom he’s come to loathe. Perhaps Fanon had the better bar on this subject: “The white man had the anguished feeling that I was escaping from him and that I was taking something with me. He went through my pockets. He thrust probes into the least circumvolution of my brain. Everywhere he found only the obvious. So it was obvious that I had a secret.”

Despite the pitfalls (and, yeah, the pit is bottomless), Earl’s words play [wordplay] a part in retraining minds, all while exorcizing his own demons through a steady diet of ashes and fractures. hooks promises us that “in the patient act of listening to another tongue we may subvert that culture of capitalist frenzy and consumption that demands all desire must be satisfied immediately.” Through his embrace of a language that indulges in passion and cerebral coding, Earl “heal[s] the splitting of mind and body” so common within Western metaphysical thought. Earl Sweatshirt speaks “words that do more than simply mirror or address the dominant reality”; he builds blips into a reality that is worth the rewind.

Images: Dead Man, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1995 (screenshot) | Teen at 1990s computer photograph, Unknown (c. 1996) | James Joyce, Age 2, Unknown | ELUCID, Osage album cover (2016), photo by Michael Mally, Philadelphia Inquirer | The Boxer at Rest, bronze statue, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome, Italy (330-50 BC) | Alphonse Legros, The Pit and the Pendulum, second Plate (1861) | High Plains Drifter, dir. Clint Eastwood, 1973 (screenshot) | Subroc on an Apple IIc, Unknown (c. 1987) | Earl Sweatshirt, “Grief” music video, 2015 (screenshot) | Arthur Rackham, The Water of Life, Grimms Fairy Tales (1916) | Dead Man, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1995 (screenshot)

[witchofhimring]

Being the daughter of Navier Trovi

-You are a miracle, something the Empress never thought she would have. Your first cry made the reality set in. She was a mother. She held you in her arms and for the first time the Empress did not care who saw her tears. The tiny baby squirmed and cried in her arms, the beginning of a new life.

"A daughter Your Majesty!" Countess Eliza stared in wonder at the baby in her arms. Navier held out her arms and her daughter lay crying out. A shaking finger touched the babies tiny fingers, so much smaller than hers. Tears rolled down the Empresses face. For once the proud Empress did not care if anyone witnessed her tears. Right now she was just a mother with her newborn baby. "She's gorgeous." Heinly said in awe. Navier passed her daughter over and her heart ached as the baby fussed. Heinly kissed the baby's forehead. 'Thank you. Thank you so much." His eyes had tears in them. Navier smiled. "No. Thank you. For everything." For a while the couple watched the new life in front of them. A perfect combination of their love. "What shall we name her?" Navier already had a name in mind. "Y/n."

-Navier already has a nursery for you. It is right next to her bedroom once you are old enough to sleep alone. During the day when she is working there is a bassinette placed next to her. Sometime Navier will instinctually bend over the cradle, completely leaving her work abandoned. She loved to hear your little cooes and bright eyes. Each little detail on your face is carefully studies by the Empress. She really can't get enough. Her ladies are little better. The ladies are constantly sitting beside the cradle or carrying the baby. And for the love of God the amount of baby things they've brought! Laura is definitely the most enthusiastic out of the bunch.

The Empresses papers lay forlornly on the desk. Utterly abandoned until later that day. Navier was busy tying a bow around baby Y/n's waist. Nian had brought a new dress for the baby, a pretty lilac blue. Y/n was young, but had began to recognize voices. She was especially excited upon hearing Nian's voice because that meant treats and getting fussed over. "Awww." Laura stroked the thin locks on the babies head. "I can't wait till she's old enough for tea parties!" Lady Rose exclaimed. "Maybe she'll prefer playing with swords instead." Mastas Violet considered. Navier grimaced. Although she liked Mastas, the thought of her own daughter wielding a weapon made her nervous. Call it overprotectiveness, but Navier wanted nothing to hurt her daughter.

-While Navier is indulgent she takes your education very seriously. The best tutors and books that money and influence can by are made available. She gets updates on your progress and will sometimes test you. Even though you are a woman she believes you have the same right as your brother to knowledge. History, philosophy, warfare, politics and economics and more will be devoured.

"Mommy look!" Y/n ran up to her mother. In those little hands was the newest translation Y/n had just finished. At twelve you had shown an aptitude for languages. Navier, who had been talking to one of the Lords turned around. She bent down slightly and hugged her little girl. Y/n shoved the paper excitedly into her mother's hands. Navier admired her daughters work and pressed a kiss to her forehead. "Very impressive sweetheart." Y/n glowed with pride.

[pruneunfair]

Why Laura is the worst remarried empress character. *crack post*

this bitch here gets on my nerves more than anyone.

Shes one of Naviers lady's in waiting so her sole purpose is basically propping Navier up as the one true empress. I don't hate her for that, if I did then I'd hate all of the ladies in waiting. It's how she does it, all of the ladies have a certain theme to them, Eliza is the motherly and mature one who handles conflict with grace most of the time, Mastas is the badass knight tomboy who can wreak your shit in under 5 minutes, Rose is... wait what even is Rose's thing? I don't think she has anything about her other then loyal servant.

Anyway back to Laura, her thing is that she's a angry redhead who tears down other women who don't emulate exactly what she thinks a good woman is (take a good guess on what she considers being a "good woman) the bitch already gives Navier a poor introduction to Rashta, calling her a filthy thing that was found in the woods and is already looking to steal Naviers man because she's really beautiful and Sovieshus attracted to that so.. I guess it's Rashtas fault for being a slave who took what options she had?

She instigated so much shit that did not need to be instigated. Rashta tears a dress (on ACCIDENT mind you), Laura slaps her, calls her a wench and then it's supposed to be a big surprise when Sovieshu has her locked up for being a bitch, nah you expect me to feel bad for her? I was smirking with Rashta when I read that line. It doesn't even end with Rashta, Laura also wasted no time in seeing Krista as enemy like all the other ladies just because Krista didn't get on her knees for Navier and then insists Navier throw her out of the palace after a misunderstanding. There was NO sex, all that happened was Heinrey had his head on Krista's lap and Krista had NO CLUE that he was drugged, she assumed he came onto her and her only crime was not telling everyone the truth when did learn what happened .

But is that it? Promoting internalized misogyny is pretty bad but is there anything else.

This. "Use it on his majesty."

She considers infidelity to be so awful that she tells Navier to basically drug Sovieshu with a love potion and SA him.. I'm sorry what!? Sovieshu is a POS but in no way does that mean SA should be even considered! Yeah who gives a shit if Rape is the worst thing a person can do to another as long as it's your husband it's fine! (It's not, Marital rape is not only absolutely disgusting, it was used as an excuse for decades that married couples can't be abusive.) Thank God that this was during a season when Navier still had all her common sense.

Also her names Laura. That tells you everything you need to know about her.

I usually like to call her Cinderellas step-sister since she kinda looks like an evil step sis, but you know what? Anastasia doesn't deserve to be compared to that bitch, because she is leaps and bounds better than Laura can ever dream to be. If you want a red haired character that's written with the finest character development Disney could make, watch Cinderella dreams come true or Cinderella a twist in time.

[konjkitkatty]

went a little crazy when i saw an excuse to draw your lamb and goat!!!!!! masta wishes you and them a happy (late) halloween!!!!!

[milligramspoison]

So now the portion of the tour for 2022 is over, l'd like to share my (and fan!) favorite (and iconic) moments from it :)

Sorry in advance for the long ass post :P

Europe:

Live debut of Foundations (Eden night 1)

Disappear for the first time since 2010!

Live debut of Surrender the Night <3 (my first MCR song ever so I FLIPPED when this happened)

Live debut of Boy Division!

Gerard crawling on the floor

Frank moaning in Destroya for the first time in years

FINALLY being able to hear Mikey's line in Vampire $$$

Cemetery Drive for the first time since 2012 (Eden night 2)

Only Hope for Me for the first time since 2012

Tour debut of House of Wolves

Ghost of You for the first time since 2011

Tour debut of S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W

Headfirst for Halos for the first time since 2009

Live debut of Mastas

The first two shows having Gerard in normal dad clothes then the third show has the bloody mess we all know as Meta Man (MK night 1)

Deathwish for the first time since 2007

Saying moan instead of actually moaning during Destroya

Bulletproof Heart for the time since 2011 <3 (MK night 2)

Ray and Gerard kissing after Destroya

“How'd you get that off my closet door”

Rat attack documentary played before the show (MK night 3)

Mikey dedicating Helena to Rowan and Kennedy <3

Cancer for the first time since 2012

Rowan dancing on stage before MCR goes on with the crowd cheering for her <3

Piss and vinegar

Tomorrow’s Money live debut (Dublin night 1)

The “fuck the queen” chant

Frank's moans during Destroya

Frank telling a fan to listen to Gerard

Frank picking up a (fake) rat

Piss on stairs (Dublin night 2)

“These are my best friends”

Fuck the queen chant round 2

Ponytail Ray

The birthday balloons for Bandit's 13th birthday (Warrington)

Gerard dedicating Teenagers to Bandit for her 13th birthday

“My little bee keeper”

Gerard cardboard cut out

Save Yourself for the first time since 2011 (Cardiff)

“I'm just giving myself an ass pat, sorry”

Frank attempting to toss a hat onto his head

Oil Gerard (Glasgow)

Na Na Na being dedicated to Grant Morrison

Sleep being dedicated to Kristan Morrison

“It's time to drink my piss”

Grant getting the drum head from the Glasgow show

Frank completely shredding it

Mikey Mouse shirt (Paris)

MERCI POUR LE VENIN

Gerard taking a leap of faith

Joke about drinking Frank’s piss

Video of the band making pancakes (Rotterdam)

Ray playing guitar with his wine glass

Fans recreating this

Mikey wearing a happy birthday Kennedy shirt for Kennedy's 3rd birthday <3 (Bologna)

The crowd singing happy birthday to Kennedy for her 3rd birthday <3

Gerard stating that they hope it won’t be a long time before they come back :)

SHORTS GATE (Munich)

Discussion of Twilight

The Da Vinki twins went to the show in Budapest

Slow clap moment

“How many of you are MCR Veterans..Trademark”

Na Na Na played a second time in Warsaw but faster

Engagement during Teenagers!!

Gerard taking down Stuart

Heaven Help Us played for the first time since 2008 (Prague)

Another mention of wanting to return

Clown Gerard (Berlin)

Story time about playing in Berlin for the first time

Hearing Frank laugh when he’s nowhere near the mic

“THEY ARE GONNA HAVE TO BURY ME IN THIS MOTHERFUCKING FILTHY CLOWN SUIT! I AM NEVER TAKING THIS OFF”

The interesting drum

Poncho Gerard (Stockholm)

“I went a little hard the other night with filth clown”

Pointing a rainbow out to Gerard

Mikey’s crooked heart <3

Pink shirt Gerard (two nights in a row in Bonn)

Admitting to googling their own lyrics (Bonn night 1)

Ray's hair being half up half down

Coughing during Destroya instead of moaning

Gerard talking about Hayley Williams

Frank watching Gerard perform Cancer (Bonn night 2)

Llama on stage (a toy but a real one would’ve been cool too)

Closing off the European portion of the tour with Cancer </3

North America:

Clown Gerard 2.0 (Oklahoma City)

Gerard laughing with sparkling water in their mouth

BURY ME IN BLACK FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2003

BEST DAY EVER FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2005

Sleep with an alternate outro

The shirt incident

“Lighten the fuck up, buttercup!”

Ray breaking his wine glass against his guitar

HANG ‘EM HIGH FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2011 (San Antonio)

Sleep with an alternate intro and different outro

Second unintentional Frerard moment

Besties moment from Ray and Mikey <3

Iero on the floor

Debut of the Sunshine intro leading into Sorrows

CHEERLEADER GERARD CHEERLEADERGATE (Nashville)

Summertime being dedicated to Kristin, Rowan, and Kennedy <3

Kristin livestreaming the show!!

Everyone (except Gerard) wearing Mikey Fuckin Way shirts!

The World Is Ugly for the first time since 2008; live debut of the studio version

Gerard almost drinking their microphone

Gerard twirling around and Ray cheering <3

Rowan and Kennedy’s drawings make their debut <3

Mikey doing a livestream prior to the show!!

Gerard singing on the floor (Cincinnati)

Frank stealing Mikey’s line in Vampire Money

SHORTS GATE 2.0 (Raleigh)

Gerard's story time about Bandit trying to make advil m&ms

Everybody Hates The Eagles live debut (kinda)

LIVE DEBUT OF BURN BRIGHT

Gerard in a bloody eyepatch

Gerard shushing the crowd (jokingly) so they can take advil

Sleep with an extended outro (Elmont)

Shorts for the second night in a row

Everybody Hates The Eagles for the second night in a row

Weird ass mask debut

Two fans wearing Petekey shirts

And someone else had the Petekey arm notes written on them

Anddddd two other people had matching Frerard shirts

Shorts for the third night in a row (Philadelphia)

Vampires for the first time since 2012!!

Pool Boy at the Vampire Mansion <3

Gerard calling Mikey Lil Mikey

Debut of the mystery shirts

Sunshine intro leading into FLW (Albany)

Shorts for the fourth night in a row

Mikey watching Waterparks perform

Priest/bloody eyes Gerard (Uncasville)

Eagles returns to the setlist

Ray and Mikey brushing their teeth before the show

Sunshine intro but with S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W

Skeleton Gerard (Toronto night 1)

CAUSE IM HER KIND OF GIRL AND SHES MY KIND OF BOY

Mikey wearing the happy birthday Goose shirt (Goose is what he calls his mother in law)

CAT GERARD (Toronto night 2)

Frank attempting to kick Mikey (jokingly)

Black Swan Gerard (Boston night 1)

Wholesome picture of Ray and Christa <3

Ray and Gerard colliding then hugging

Best Day Ever being dedicated to Thursday (Boston night 2)

Mikey blowing a kiss to Kristin <3

Frank wearing a headpiece

Ray rocking out with his sons <3

Crowd singing happy birthday to Mikey!! (NYC night 1)

Mikey dedicating Helena to Rowan and Kennedy again <3

Everyone except Gerard wearing Mikey Fuckin Way shirts for Mikey's birthday!

Drum is a Mikey shrine for Mikey's birthday

“How ‘bout you birthday boy?”

Fans wearing party hats for Mikey’s birthday

Gerard wearing the outfit he wore when he witnessed 9/11 (just a special moment honestly; NYC night 2)

DESERT SONG FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2008

Lily pointing Mikey out to Rowan <3

Frank crossing himself during Sorrows

Bathroom photoshoot

Gerard’s story time about running into one of the openers while with Bandit

Frank posting a picture of his ass and getting a ass tattoo (Detroit)

NURSE GERARD

Hey Chris in Detroit

“Lucky for him…I had other plans.”

Crossing out Cancer for Helena (not a favorite or iconic, just offensive lol this is a joke dw)

Hawaiian shirt Way Brothers (St. Paul)

Teenagers being dedicated to Gerard's mailman

Bullet hole makeup

Jackie O Gerard at Riot Fest

Wholesome Jamia moment from the LS Dunes set <3

Wholesome family moment from Frank during Weezer's set <3

Hey Chris at Riot Fest

Frank wearing a bandana around his neck

Frank facetiming his dad just before his set with LS Dunes <3

Mikey watching TBS (Taking Back Sunday) perform

CROP TOP GERARD (Alpharetta)

Teenagers was dedicated to the band's crew

MIKEY WORE EYELINER

First of the hometown shows and Gerard performed with Thursday!! (NJ night 1)

BAT GERARD

I NEVER TOLD YOU FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2008

Best Day Ever with Geoff of Thursday

DEMOLITION LOVERS FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2004

Frank Sinatra Gerard (NJ night 2)

PLANETARY GO FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2012

Teenagers was dedicated to Midtown

Cover of Frank Sinatra's My Way

Cherry taking a pic/recording Mikey :)

Miles getting excited when Frank said “trust me” <3

Gerard performing with Thursday

Gabe being one of the reasons why FOB8 is Pete’s villain origin story (iykyk)

BLOUSE GERARD!! (Firefly)

The entire band signs a mannequin leg

“You'll get this at the end of class”

Ghost Gerard!! (Sunrise)

Gerard took the trans flag during WTTBP <3

Frank going out on stage with HGP

Mikey going out on stage with Midtown

Gerard being unable to pronounce Florida

Ended off the east coast portion of the tour with Cancer </3

Dress in Houston!!

“I thought about wearing a dress in Texas before...but that's a story for another time”

Ray posting a peanut with a penis after the show

Mikey going out on stage with Midtown (again)

The return of dad clothes in Dallas

Teenagers was dedicated to the opening acts

“Get fucked at an airport bar”

Mikey wearing a Midtown shirt

Dad clothes again in Denver

Frank interacting with his kiddos <3

Teenagers was dedicated to Sydney

Adam of Taking Back Sunday said opening for MCR was the only way to get Mikey to return his calls

Ray moaning during Planetary Go

“Just sit back, daddy’s gonna take you where you need to go” Adam Lazzara, 2022 (Portland)

Gerard dedicating Teenagers to Taking Back Sunday

Gerard grabbing their phone to look at something

Tomato soup…hm

“Your turn!”

Meta Man cardboard cut out (Tacoma)

Sign for Gerard’s two cats, Mitch and Lotion

Frank going on stage with Kimya

Meredith and Andy went to the show!!!

“Cause if you think Mikey fuckin Way is coming out here to a cold audience, you’re mistaken”

VACUUM GUY AT THE VAMPIRE MANSION

RAY IN A PONYTAIL AGAIN

Teenagers was dedicated to Panda (Kimya’s daughter)

Gerard simping for Robert Pattinson in Batman

Gerard wearing a Twilight shirt

One of Frank’s kiddos giving a fan a paper set list

Smiley face drumhead! (Oakland)

Cum sign

Idk why someone did this but yeah

“Ray and I’s home state. We’ve lived here for...14 years?”

“I see a lot more flesh than usual. It’s fleshy out there”

Mikey and Frank almost bumping into each other before Skylines

Gerard chasing the tech off stage

Singing happy birthday to Worm

Mikey petting Worm’s beard

Gerard in an all black outfit with a rose (Vegas)

Ray rocking out with his sons <3

Ray patting his son’s head <3

Gerard dedicating Teenagers to Bandit again <3

KRISTIN WENT LIVE AGAIN

The drum was for Bandit <3

Engagement during Helena!!

Mikey having a random book signing (Aftershock)

Crowd surfing a…a sex doll during the LS Dunes set

Frank attempting to do a bottle flip at the end of the LS Dunes set

Ray, Jamia, and Frank’s kiddos watching Frank from side stage <3

Gerard’s shirt saying scabs

Gerard gagging on the microphone

The drum saying choke me which goes perfectly with the point above

A deer running around during WTTBP

THEY SOUNDCHECKED DESOLATION ROW (LA night 1)

GERARD WITH A FLAMETHROWER

CHEERLEADER DRESS IS BACK

“This song is about my favorite fucking human” spotlight proceeds to go onto Frank

Gerard got a haircut

THE SHOW WAS FILMED

Teenagers being dedicated to Quentin Tarantino

DESOLATION ROW FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2011

Mikey with his family during I’m Not Okay <3

GERARD COSPLAYING PRINCESS DIANA (LA night 2)

I Never Told You being dedicated to glow in the dark skeleton man

“DO YOU HAVE THE KEYS TO THE LAMBORGHINI BECAUSE IM GONNA DRIVE THAT MOTHERFUCKER INTO A TARGET”

Dedicating Teenagers to a fan

Frank singing Teenagers to Lily <3

Frank hugging one of the twins prior to encore <3

Frank waving to his kids prior to Foundations <3

THEY SOUNDCHECKED ALL THE ANGELS (LA night 3)

THEY SOUNDCHECKED I DON’T LOVE YOU

THE SHOW IS BEING FILMED AGAIN

Foundations being dedicated to Doug </3

I DON’T LOVE YOU FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2019

Teenagers dedicated to a random fan again

KILL ALL YOUR FRIENDS FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2008

WTTBP being dedicated to Doug’s wife and kids </3

ALL THE ANGELS LIVE DEBUT

THEY SOUNDCHECKED SING (LA night 4)

GERARD IS DRESSED AS DRACULA

Teenagers being dedicated to Bandit for the third time as well as dedicating it to her friends <3

Bandit attending the show with her friends

RAY SLAPPING GERARD’S ASS AGAIN

Ghost of You in the encore!!

Mikey bringing Rowan on stage for Kids <3

Rowan making heart hands at the crowd <3

THEY SOUNDCHECKED SISTER TO SLEEP TWICE (LA night 5)

VACUUM GUY COSPLAYING GERARD

SISTER TO SLEEP FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2003

SING FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2012

Teenagers dedicated to the crew

Dinosaur in the pit

GERARD HAS WRITING ON THEIR ARM

FRANK POSSIBLY WROTE ON GERARD’S ARM

LIVE DEBUT OF FAKE YOUR DEATH

Gabe’s son having to be “evicted” during Midtown’s opening set

Ray rocking out with his son during Kids <3

Gerard throwing fake insects to the fans

The final bow </3

Luigi cosplayer comforting emos at the first day of WWWY (cause it was canceled)

Katy Perry welcoming the orphans/emo kids to her Vegas residency show due to the first day of WWWY being canceled

Katy bringing an emo kid on stage with her and starting a mosh

THEYRE ALL IN THEIR REVENGE OUTFITS (WWWY night 2)

FACIAL PROSTHETICS

Opened with I’m Not Okay!

BAT BUCKLE

MIKEY HAS BLOOD ON HIS FACE

FRANK WENT BALD

CONFETTI WAS LITERAL VAMPIRE MONEY

Secretary of Salmonella

Gerard misaddressing the crowd as Utah

First time Foundations isn’t on the setlist since it was released (not a favorite or iconic, just really strange cause we’re all so used to it every night lol)

Frank walking onto the stage like an actual old man

Gerard flipping the crowd off before the show even started

Hayley (from Paramore) mentioning and thanking MCR <3

Person who did their prosthetics last weekend is back! (WWWY night 3)

Adam from TBS sitting on a whole ass person (ik it’s not MCR but it’s too funny to not include)

Foundations returned to the setlist!

Gerard dressed as an army general

GERARD WORE LIPSTICK

OPERA MUSIC BETWEEN SONGS

Mikey wearing the Kristin Fuckin Way shirt <3

GERARD GOT A MEDAL

GERARD BROKE THE MIC STAND AT THE END

Closing off their final US show with Kids </3

Jamia, Kristin, and Christa taking a photo with each other <3

MCR’s first time in Mexico since 2008!

Another sex doll for some reason

“You look good today baby boy” Anthony to Frank during LS Dunes’ set

GERARD IS JOAN OF ARC

Gerard spelt fuego wrong

GERARD SPOKE SPANISH

“WATCH ALL THE SHIT YOU DO”

Mikey winked and smirked at the camera

Gerard playing a telephone sound

FILMING NOTICE BEFORE MAMA

Gerard shouting out Frank and the rest of Dunes <3

NEW INTRO BEFORE FLW

Gerard got an axolotl plushie <3

Ending the North American tour and the final show of 2022 with Kids </3

If you’ve made it this far, first of all, hi! Secondly, ty for looking through this haha.

I’ll probably do this again when they’re in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan next year, so stay tuned! :)

[khiphop-discussions]

So I just found out that Perry from YG Entertainment, the original YG Entertainment prior to BigBang and 2NE1 debut, is missing?!

I remember YEARS ago hearing Danny Im and Masta Wu (it was either that episode or the one with Choice37), talk about how "nobody" knows where he is on Danny's podcast. However, they were so casual and lax that I thought they meant that people from YG Ent had just lost contact with him over the years. I just saw on tiktok that he's MISSING missing. As in, ID channel (not literally on the ID channel), police investigation, even his biological family hasn't interacted with him since 2010 in the LA area. If you search "Perry YG Entertainment" on tiktok there's someone claiming to be a family member who says the part about them missing since 2010.

Here's the original tiktok I'm referencing though (non-family member):

[mastamillaopenforcommissions]

Today, I quit my job! That was stressful and a relief at the same time!

I decided to make a Ko-fi for whoever want and can support me as an artist!

Any kind of support is always appreciated even just a like or a reblog!

Please spread me like a wild fire! Remember I also take commissions, have an EtsyShop and sell some art prints!!

Thank you so much!

[imbouttasue]

I wanna say this and I'm sorry if your gonna hate me very much,am I the only sees sovieshu as a red flag wife to the numerous crossover families in gonna insert him? Because gosh darn,it he's so hot. And in sorry if I wanna discredit kosair,kosair,kosair. If you hate sovishu,so much,why dont you go and fuck him? You don't have a problem cheating on Charlotte a literal princess from whitemond with uhhh the tomboy mastas(I honestly,don't know what you see in her honestly) so,kosair,big deal but go and make sovieshu yours aka make him your wife.

Soviehu is a redflag from all angles and that's his appeal lol.

Kosair x Mastas is basically the author trying to include diversity (tomboy trope) in the story but failing miserably. It's the same with McKenna x Dorsey because it ruined the canon elements in more ways than one. These couples doesn't exist to me because their story is just so unnecessary.

[kai-zenkira]

Yeah,okay. (i love to read your crackships because I am starving for more hehe). Imagine one day,kosair,dekis and rezef have to see therdeo in nightwear and I can imagine their reactions. dekis would hold it in eventually wanting therdeo to be comfortable and happy,rezef would seem to love it and wanting to take therdeo here and right now while for kosair(that bitch),he would only offered a blush to therdeo and at the same time acting nice to save face as he doesn't want to show affection in public

(I headcanon in the RE au,after therdeo found out that navier didn't punish kosair(its canon he is cheating on therdeo with mastas) for what he did,he began to ignore navier resulting in rumours from naviers ladies in waiting on how cruel therdeo is while therdeos workers and servants put their foot down and defend therdeo especially celphius and therdeos family.

(Only gonna answer the last part.)

Mckenna found out about the cheating and then told Phineas,who told Pereshati [Peri and Therdeo are in an open relationship], who told Therdeo. Therdeo just left Kosair without a word and started ghosting him. When he found out Navier knew he started ignoring her too.

The second he ignored Navier people started hating his ass.

They turned on him so fast it gave him whiplash.

They spread rumours that he was jealous of her that since he is gay (bi) he must want her husband because why else would he not like her.

Navier didn't actively help Kosair hide the cheating but she did not tell Therdeo about it.Kosair is suprised when Therdeo starts ignoring him and not responding to his letters. He doesn't understand what happened and he doesn't know Therdeo knows.

Heinrey is confused/annoyed at the sudden shift in Therdeo's behaviour and treatment towards Navier. He is also annoyed at the bisexual stereotypes people are using when spreading rumours. (He is bisexual but he doesn't know that).

[whoredmode]

The wild part about the games trying to separate themselves from hip-hop/gangsta rap in general is that, at least from the general idea of what SRTT could've done with its themes, there are plenty of songs that specifically talk about making it big and living the high life. Songs that speak about indulgence and excess wealth, and the consequences of it. Like I don't know what the general thought process is behind choosing songs for the in-game radio. But it really is just super odd to me that they wouldn't take advantage of that.

it is! luxury rap/hip-hop is a subgenre that would’ve tied in perfectly to the themes they were going for w srtt and would still be in-line w the series’ hip-hop roots. i suppose the argument for the emphasis on classic rock/pop that we get in-game is that it’s meant to feel more action movie-y, but like i said in my original post, i genuinely think once you step away from what set the tone of the original stories, you lose what made the games what they are. and looking at srtt as the beginning of the end….yeah.

and if you’ll give me a moment to add one more point to my music post. i think the most blatant showcase of this dissonance is in the title screens. sr1 and sr2, you start the game and are immediately welcomed w songs from artists like Masta Killa or Joe Budden. the tone is set before you even press play. srtt, sriv, and srr however. you get this ambient power synth that went on to more or less become the theme. srr gives it a western twist, but it’s still the same leitmotif.

the point is that it just like…there really is this feeling that the games did wanna separate itself from the genres it, at one point in time, very proudly and passionately showcased. and you can’t even make the excuse that the genres boxed them in or didn’t allow them to explore different themes/tones bc hip-hop is such a beautifully intricate and diverse genre that explores so many different themes, ideas, sounds, etc. it shows a real lack of care and knowledge of music to suggest that. as i ended the original post, it just makes me sad.

[omegaremix]

Omega Radio for August 15, 2020; #237.

Black Moon “Creep Wit’ Me”

Bun B & Statik Selektah “Basquiat” (f. Fat Joe & Smoke DZA)

Billy Danze “Ain’t Gone Do Shit” (f. Li’l Fame)

Ras Kass “Guns N’ Roses” (f. Styles P & Li’l Fame)

Murs & 9th Wonder “Ga$ Station Gucci Belt“

Gang Starr “Bad Name”

Pharoah Monch “Yayo”

Brother Ali “Situated” (f. Pharoah Monch)

Danny Brown “3 Tears” (f. Run The Jewels)

D.I.T.C. “Jugganots” (f. O.C. & L’il Fame)

Alchemist& Schoolboy Q “W.Y.G.D.T.N.S.”

Big Boi “Doin’ It”

Snak The Rapper “Knuckle Sandwich” (f. R.A. The Rugged Man)

Alchemist “Fork In The Pot” (f. Conway & Schoolboy Q & Westside Gunn)

Common “HER Love”

Freddie Gibbs & Alchemist “Frank Lucas” (f. Benny The Butcher)

Conway “Lemon” (f. Method Man)

Smoke DZA & Benny The Butcher “7:30″ (f. Westside Gunn)

Smif N’ Wesson “Ocean Drive” (f. Musiq Soulchild & Rhapsody)

Masta Ace & Marco Polo “Breukelen Brooklyn” (ft. Smif N’ Wesson)

Planet Asia “God Is Not A Fib”

Jadakiss “Huntin’ Season” (f. Pusha T)

Dave East “Godfather 4″ (f. Nas)

Salaam Remi & Joell Ortiz “Keep’n On”

Jeru The Damaja “Harriet Tubman”

Tribez & Maniac “Fire” (f. AG & El Da Sensei)

Twista “Summer ‘96″

Kool Keith “Blast” (Planet B RMX)

Heavy Metal Kings “Black Mass Lucifer” (f. Goretex)

Public Enemy “State Of The Union (STFU)”

DJ Muggs & Crimeapple “Just Because”

Evidence “Throw It All Away”

Hip-hop, rap, and backpacker.

[silusvesuius]

Just 2 expand on what you posted abt telvas gf/bf what kind of person would he be into? Would it b different the stuff he’s attracted 2 in a guy vs a girl orrrr … Ps I luvvvv ur nelvas stuff. Ur so rite & u must speak the truth 🫶 also would neloth react diff to him having a bf 2 a gf …. The ppl want answers

omg Thank you 4 this ask 🥰 my thoughtums under the cut

hmmmm this is very much in the nelvas lens 🔎 but i can't help it cause i swearrrr their existences blend into each other. so here's wat i think i believe talvas under nelothian watch would grow to want to be coddled and pitied by ... Women 🙆‍♀️ very gentle and patient women that he can view as very motherly. Where are his parents man if i was his age and being thrown around like a pizza by an old ass man i'd be crying so hard i'd want to go back home stat. i can't even picture talvas having fun ever in his life anymore so..... JKUIUDFDOFIOR i couldn't say it'd be someone that's on the same wave as him or is trying to change him into a more confident person.. he'd just want to be pitied a lot. but as i said not in the way that this pampering behavior would prompt him to realize he's being harshly mistreated by neloth, it just serves as empty words to soothe him and his Damaged Dead Decapitated self confidence and self perception 😸 as 4 men my first instinct is to say he;d like older guys but that's too obvious. but yeah. i think talvas has the most awful social battery so he hates loud or 'fun' people so he'd lean on men that are either very ' ' gentlemanly ' ' or generally Smart and have something interesting to say. it'd be harder for him to hold long-lasting relationships with dudes cause the only Dude his life revolves around is masta neloff 🏆 he'd feel a bit bad or awkward about leaving women tho just cause he's a nice boy. tho the thing that stays in both male and female dating ventures is him being unable to feel real love towards anyone. or should i say attachment. && i bet it makes him SAD. but he can't do anything about it. he's superglue'd to neloth in attachment terms tho.. talvas with him is the personification of that 'when the only person you know at the party is busy talking to someone else (guy standing awkwardly on the side)' thing.. his unability to get actually close with others just has to be blamed on neloth ruining his self image too. You know neloth will get pissed at his tea not being hot enough and then insult your entire existence he dgaf about making things really personal for no reason . KING.

First of all tho iiiiii jsut know talvas would NEVER tell neloth that he's seeing anyone. 1. cause it's none of his business 2. cause he's embarrassed about it. he doesn't just date often anyways so neloth doesn't have to know, not that a noticable change happens. if neloth found out about any relationship at any point he'd get nosy as faaaack for no reason even if he'd try to not be. Nosy. he can't help it 🥳 if he asks talvas what plans he has for the day && he answers 'none' like 3 days in a row he's gonna start yelling in his face like THAT'S HOW I KNOW YOUR STUPID ASS GIRLFRIEND DUMPED YOU YOU DEGENERATE WHAT FEMALE WANTS A BORING DRY AF FAILURE FOR A MANDon't ask me how i know u have a girlfriend though :) you were saying?

Second, as for his differing reactions, yk his blood is boiling and cooking him from the inside if it's a man. i think him witnessing other men have influence on talvas would just make him feel like talvas is being 'tainted' (by the wrong people..?) and put in a wrong direction for his life (neloth views talvas' relationships to men only as him being lead or tutored by them in one way or another; he expects him as a younger man Only to look up to ONLY other men if that makes sense). he'd be more intrusive and maybe homophobic for talvas' man-on-man dating just cus he thinks he actually owns talvas and he can't and shouldn't have other (especially older) men in his vicinity.. with women he'd just get mad @ them being very lovey dovey to talvas like to a baby. imagine just living your life and some old ass man starts grilling you about how you shouldn't coddle men and especially that dude you've been seeing cause he did nothing to earn it . also he just hates women in general, especially the type talvas would like.. women that are just kind from the heart and Angelic are useless beings to him. even then i still know he'd be a big fan of purity and kindness in a way.. like something he wants to study... he's not necessarily attracted to those traits but likes seeing how they come to the surface when someone with that docile nature is confronted with vile behavior... so like.. Talvas. 🍅🍅🍅🍅🍅🍅🍅🍅 that's it pretty much 🍅🍅🍅🍅🍅