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The Power and Business of Hip-Hop: A Reading List on an American Art Form

De La Soul, Posdnuos, Torhout/Werchter Festival, Werchter, Belgium, 1990. Gie Knaeps/Getty Images

Ever since Black and Latino Americans created hip-hop at south Bronx block parties during the 1970s, this highly original, uniquely American music has continued to evolve, while simultaneously taking root in countless countries throughout the world.

As cultural critic Harry Allen once said: “hip hop is the new jazz.” But like jazz, hip-hop is more than music. It’s a culture. “’Hip-hop,’ once a noun,“ Kelefa Sanneh wrote in The New Yorker, “has become an adjective, constantly invoked, if rarely defined; people talk about hip-hop fashion and hip-hop novels, hip-hop movies and hip-hop basketball. Like rock and roll in the nineteen-sixties, hip-hop is both a movement and a marketing ploy, and the word is used to describe almost anything that’s supposed to appeal to young people.“ Beyond marketing and corporatization, hip-hop culture has always included dance, rap, fashion, design, stretching language, reclaiming public spaces, and its creative, genre-spanning approach has allowed artists to represent their lives in a world that often ignores or misrepresents them. In the San Francisco Gate in 2003, Adam Mansbach, author of Go the F**k To Sleep described hip-hop culture as “assembled from spare parts, ingeniously and in public. Paint cans refitted with oven-cleaner nozzles transformed subway trains into mobile art galleries. Playgrounds and parks became nightclubs; turntables and records became instruments. Scraps of linoleum and cardboard became dance floors. Verbal and manual dexterity turned kids into stars, and today’s artists grew up listening to the first strains of the musical form.” As Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, put it, hip-hop culture is “naturally interdisciplinary” and composed of “mix signifiers, we break everything down to bits and bytes and rebuild something new.” I love the description.
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Queens of Infamy: Lucrezia Borgia

Lucrezia Borgia
Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | May 2020 | 33 minutes (8,371 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on world-historical women of centuries past.

If you love Queens of Infamy, consider becoming a Longreads member.

* * *

Mention the Medieval period and people free-associate themselves right into visions of plague, violence, and shit-covered peasants. The term “Renaissance,” on the other hand, conjures up stuff like humanism, science, and paintings of people that actually look like people. But late 14th-, 15th-, and 16th-century Italy consisted of more than just painters with Ninja Turtle names wanking their way from one Tuscan villa to another; it was also full of intrigue, murder, and complex intergenerational family drama. If there was one family that featured heavily in some of the most violent and licentious stories of the period, it was the Borgias — even today their name is a by-word for depravity. And at the center of many of the wildest Borgia stories was the beautiful, wily, thrice-wed Lucrezia.

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People have called Lucrezia many things over the years: seductress, murderess, femme fatale of the Borgia cabal. The attributes assigned to her didn’t come out of nowhere; as we shall see — and as Lucrezia noted herself — many of the men around her came to unfortunate ends. In portrayals where she escapes the villainess role, she’s often made out to be another hapless aristocratic daughter traded off into various political marriages, someone with no agency or ambitions of her own. The reality, of course, is much more nuanced. While Lucrezia was indeed married off several times to further her family’s agenda, as an adult she proved herself to be a skilled ruler loved and respected by her subjects.

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The Lie of ‘One Last Time’ with My Ex

Getty / Illustration by Longreads

Ella Dawson | Longreads | May 2020 | 15 minutes (3,819 words)

Henry and I had break-up sex on at least four different occasions, maybe more. I wanted to believe it was because we loved each other that much, when really I was unwilling to read the writing on the wall. It took me years to pry my fingers from his pant-leg and let go of our relationship. In fits of pique I wondered if he was the one who got away, less of a daydream than a deep anxiety that I’d bump into him decades later and love him just as much as I did the day we decided it was the last time. And the next time we decided it was the last time. And the time after that.

We technically broke up in May of 2014 at my college graduation only to get back together six days later when we decided we could overcome the hundreds of miles between Bakersfield and Berkeley. He told me his parents offered to pay for half of the gas required to drive up to see me — it was only when the summer was over that I learned he’d lied and paid for everything himself. We were smart kids who knew long-distance was doomed, but there are some lessons you need to learn for yourself lest you spend the rest of your life wondering if you would have been the exception. We weren’t. It only took us another two months of longing and conflict avoidance to break up again in the kitchen of his parent’s home.

The breakup was not mutual. I scream-cried like someone had died. When I stalked off to sob in the guest room, I expected him to follow me and take it back. Instead he folded his hands together on the kitchen table and clenched them tight, his willpower miraculously holding firm. This turn of events was as surreal as it was humiliating: I sat on the floor and stared at the portraits of his relatives above the heavy antique bed, the extended family I assumed would be mine someday. Two months wasn’t long enough to really try, was it? Two months was summer camp. It wasn’t even a full season. How had he already decided this wasn’t possible? Was I just not good enough to fight for?

We broke up for all the same reasons college sweethearts break up: our lives were taking us in separate directions, and long-distance was as shitty as everyone warned us it would be. I was graduating. Henry, two years younger, was moving to Asia for his junior year, for an ambitious study-abroad program and didn’t want to be the guy always on his phone. I was reeling with post-grad identity issues and undiagnosed anxiety and depression, and I often called him crying while my roommate scowled outside my bedroom. Once when my laptop stopped working, I had a full tilt panic attack over FaceTime as he helplessly Googled Apple store locations near my apartment. Simply put, I was a disaster and we were young. It was too much for him to handle and too much for me to understand, and I took our generic problems personally instead of seeing our breakup as the natural progression of events. All I could believe at age 22 was that he’d given up on our future together, and it must mean I wasn’t worth it after all.
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American Tests

Getty / Photo illustration by Longreads

Jakki Kerubo | Longreads | May 2020 | 13 minutes (3,314 words)

I was afraid I’d be deported. Did the interviewer know about my parking tickets from those days when I hadn’t quite figured out New York City’s alternate side rules? Or that once, after a bottomless brunch, I’d sung loudly on the subway, not caring that someone shouted the suggestion I “stick to shower singing”? My appointment was for noon, and now it was 6 p.m. I hadn’t eaten all day, but my hunger had receded, replaced with anxiety and a thudding headache. All afternoon I’d rocked myself for comfort as people streamed in and out of the interview rooms.

It was 2012 and immigration didn’t feel as fraught as it presently does, but it was nerve-wracking nonetheless. Getting a new appointment would take four to six months.

Finally, I was moved to a small cubicle with overstuffed binders covering every square inch, including the extra seats. Each one held the dense, intricate details of human migrant history — bloody wars, financial catastrophes, the incurable optimism of new beginnings. Behind the desk sat an overburdened federal worker. She was petite like me, but her caramel skin color contrasted my darker one, a hue my mother once described as the green-black color of boiled cowpea leaves.

“I’m sorry for the wait,” the woman told me. “We misplaced your file.”

I was about to take my citizenship exam.
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Secret Museums

Christian Ohde/McPhoto/ullstein bild via Getty Images

B. Pietras Creative Nonfiction | Summer 2019 | 16 minutes (4,291 words)

 

I was a freshman in high school when my religion teacher faced the class and asked, with a knowing smile, “How many of you have seen pornography?”

There were about twenty boys in the classroom that day, and until then, we probably weren’t paying full attention—some of us were thinking about lunch, others about the quiz next period. But when the question came, everything in the dusty room seemed to go still; the air itself seemed to thicken, to prickle against our skin. Tense, wary of a trap, we watched one another out of the corners of our eyes. Did he really expect us to answer honestly? And what would happen if we did?

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Funk Lessons in Sonic Solitude

Universal Music Group

Read an introduction to the series.

DJ Lynnée Denise | Longreads | April 2020 | 16 minutes (4,096 words)

Hive is a Longreads series about women and the music that has influenced them.

* * *

As a teenager, Luther Vandross co-founded his favorite singer’s fan club. I can see him now, watching her seasoned shoulder bounce and measuring the funk in the Black church two-step she makes in post–chitlin circuit venues. He’s standing stage left, holding onto the curtain for balance; he’s lip-synching every song, calculating the mastery of her diction and phrasing; he’s studying her like a text, setting the stage for his own practice — one that would place him at microphones behind David Bowie, Chaka Khan, Barbra Streisand, Cissy Houston, and Donna Summer. This Luther was Twenty Feet from Stardom and rising.

Young but wise, Luther Vandross the teenage boy understood how Patricia Louise Holt from Philadelphia became the legendary kick-your-shoes-off and snatch-your-own-wig when the tension builds between music, voice, and audience type of singer. Luther Vandross presided over the fan club of none other than Ms. Patti LaBelle.

Strange things happen when an artist is moved to a new depth by another. We become fanatical about the fantastical beings who place us deeper into the abyss of craft. The management of details of who these artists are and how they come into being become a rite of passage. We obsess over the decisions they make to bring an album to fruition and take pride in knowing as much as we can, from the major to the minor: collaborations, music video direction, hair color, shoe size, inspiration behind the lyrics.  We fancy ourselves experts of our muses. And when it comes to Black music, the stakes are higher — people stay questioning our responses to the brilliance of Black artists; reading them as tribal reactions as opposed to a focused study of mastery. But no. I’m from the school of Luther — and by that, I mean I’m a listener committed to homemade scholarship, community-based research questions, and an organic framework to interpret the artistic offerings of those I crown as legends.


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There’s a strong chance that I became the unofficial president of the artist Joi’s fan club 25 years ago. For 25 years, I’ve paid attention to her musical movement and to the ways she holds court on stage. Today, I feel confident that if asked to write a dissertation that argues the genius of what I refer to as her crunk-funk sound, I’d have my Ph.D. Dr. DJ Lynnée Denise. Joi occupies space in the lineage of artists who thrive across genre lines. How is that possible? Ask Prince, ask Aretha, ask Nina, ask Stevie. Black people live hyphenated lives, so it’s fair to say our musicians embody and shift the context of what W.E.B. Du Bois called “double consciousness,” musical cross-pollination made available to the Souls of Black Folk

The three of us — Joi, Du Bois, and myself — have something in common: Nashville.

* * *

I saw Joi for the first time while I was sitting in the living room with a group of artists I met during my freshman year at Fisk University. She was in a video wearing a trench coat, hanging on a meat hook in a blue-lit walk-in meat refrigerator. She was squirming on beat with the hope of being released. The video was for her first single, “Sunshine & the Rain.”

Black people live hyphenated lives, so it’s fair to say our musicians embody and shift the context of what Du Bois called ‘double consciousness,’ musical cross-pollination made available to the Souls of Black Folk.

It was Du Bois who taught me about the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a masterful a cappella ensemble, who with their carefully crafted compositions saved the university from collapsing in the face of mounting financial struggles in 1871. They toured cities along the route of the Underground Railroad using harmony to trace the path of freedom before eventually landing a paid gig in England, performing for its Queen. Du Bois graduated from Fisk in 1888, 109 years before I did. In his famed essay “Of the Sorrow Songs,” credited by Black theologian James H. Cone as one of the first pieces of writing in the 20th century to treat Black music with serious academic inquiry, Du Bois reflects on Fisk’s institutional significance: “To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.”

In 1993, I stepped onto the campus of Fisk University less than three months after the L.A. Riots. I had Latasha Harlins on my mind: a young Black woman who was gunned down by a Korean shop owner in South Central Los Angeles for allegedly stealing an orange juice. When the shop owner was sentenced to probation in November 1991, less than six months before a jury acquitted the officers responsible for the beating of Rodney King, L.A. blew up in flames. I arrived on campus with inspiration brought on by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s insightful observation that riots are “the language of the unheard.” That outburst of symbolic rage brought me a sense of peace. With one suitcase and a green trunk plastered with stickers that ranged from images of Marley to Meat is Murder slogans, I showed up ready to learn and receive.

Upon arrival, an upperclassman escorted me to Jubilee Hall’s third floor, and just as Du Bois described, it was pristine, brick-based, and towering above my West Coast head. In this place of Black music history, I had a room of my own and a branch from Joi’s family tree was down the street.

Joi is the daughter of legendary NFL football player Joe Gilliam. A member of the Pittsburgh Steelers, he was the franchise’s first Black quarterback to start as a season opener. Both Joe and Joi were legacy students at the historically Black public university Tennessee State, walking distance from Fisk.

The local artists in the room witnessing me witness Joi’s video for the first time knew who she was and dismissed my awe with, “Oh that’s Joi.” I was in her hometown. She was their hero. “Joi from down here,” they said with regional pride from blunt stained lips. “She been on that different shit for years.” I took that to mean Joi was ahead of her time and an inspiration to the folks who watched her take shape.

Her absence in the city of Nashville, or more accurately the ghost of her dopeness, made me think about what it meant to leave home in order to be seen. Like when your ambition outgrows your zip code and the only way forward, as you’ve been told through myriad migration narratives, is to move north from the South; even though what you offer the North is rooted in the back-homeness of the funky South. Joi journeyed to Atlanta — 250 miles below Tennessee. She complicated the idea that Southern folks have to leave the region to become known or relevant. So, when André 3000 proclaimed at the 1995 Source Awards that “the South got something to say,” Joi was one of the leaders in saying, through her music, what needed to be said.

[Joi] complicated the idea that Southern folks have to leave the region to become known or relevant.

After my encounter with the “Sunshine & the Rain” video, I listened to the song on repeat for what felt like a year. It filled the void created by LaFace’s TLC and the Sean Puffy girl group hip-hop soul phase that I struggled to embrace as I was figuring out my own listening practice on an HBCU campus where musical tastes were shaped, almost exclusively, by homecoming anthems and Top 40 hits. Don’t get me wrong, I loved to see the Chicago students at Fisk rush to the dance floor when hearing the first two bars of the “Percolator,” and I fucked with Mary J. Blige from day one and still do. But I had real questions about the war on originality that was creeping into the Black musical lexicon in a Bad Boy kinda way. The art of sampling was now complicated by intellectual property laws and there was less cutting and scratching, which meant that turntablism was, in certain ways, becoming a less crucial, or at the very least a less prominent, part of the sonic footprint of the culture. Plus, audiences of the music seemed to be growing less and less concerned with the original songs — and by default less concerned with the Black musical lineages shaping my ear as a DJ. It was a pivotal moment for me, defined by my acceptance of the loneliness that comes with walking against trends. I made up for it by going in deep. I had a campus radio show on WFSK where I organized weekly themes that explored different eras and genres of Black music: Black women funk artists 1970–1975. New Wave 1983–1987. Jazz trumpeters 1963–1969. In the face of my early days of digging through the crates, the corporatization of hip-hop was creating what music scholar Harold Pride calls “pedestrian listeners” out of my peers and further alienating lesser known artists whose work stretched listeners with innovation. For me, Joi was a bridge.

* * *

Dallas Austin is one of the minds who, alongside Pebbles, gave the world TLC. Around the exact same time, Austin was working on Joi’s debut album The Pendulum Vibe — together they created a call to arms for folks looking for sophisticated melodies and enough lyrical depth to drown in. Songs like “Fatal Lovesick Journey” had me pondering codependent relationships while puffing Black & Milds and drinking Alizé. There was well-placed wailing, playful and unapologetic sexual confidence, and a genre-defying Southern-rooted sound. Anti-formulaic, the music from this album spoke to my heart and gave me hope that Black America had something to compare to the brilliant U.K. soul coming out of London. Though raunchier in her approach, Joi was in the Mica Paris and Caron Wheeler category for me. I even had fantasies of her settling down in London like Jhelisa and her cousin Carleen Anderson did in the ’90s, leaving their Black American (Mississippi, Texas) imprint on the British sound and reinforcing Paul Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic.

I recognized these women and Joi as kindred spirits. After about the 50th listen of the Pendulum Vibe (and after spending that year with “Sunshine & the Rain”), I sat myself down and said with all honesty, “This a bad bitch and the masses ain’t gon’ understand.” Predictably, critics have long used the abstract term the underground in describing the spirit of Joi’s work. I’m skeptical of the word “underground” because it makes an assumption about what success looks like and sometimes strips the agency of artists who don’t aspire to have commercial appeal.

But was I happy to have an “underground” to turn to when H-Town wasn’t enough? Yes indeed. Sitting with the work of these artists, both from America and overseas, felt like a humanizing way to break from the overly familiar. Humanizing because the music compelled me to listen with insatiable curiosity. Something that white men who own record stores and collect Black music are not only allowed but encouraged to do. Knowing that Joi existed was a way for me to stay aligned with wayward women. Excavating their sonic stories, the way Saidiya Hartman does Gladys Bentley’s, became a primary interest to me. Joi was a gateway into a world made up of women musicians who, compared to their male counterparts, were pushed to the sidelines of Black music history — Nona Hendryx, Lyn Collins, and the women of George Clinton’s P-Funk empire: The Brides of Dr. Funkenstein and Parlet. Embedded in Joi’s vocal cords is a deep knowledge of Funkentelechy and “Dandelion Dust” cosmology, a heavy load of legacy to carry. I was a believer. 

* * *

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been one of those people who rolls their eyes when I hear my favorite song from a new album that I’m spending time with being played on the radio. I’m suspicious of what becomes widely accepted, afraid to see the artists I love hand over their authenticity to the police of mediocrity guarding the door of pop music in America. And yeah, everybody gotta eat, but why eating gotta equate to contractual agreements that alter your purpose? Prince’s decision to pen the word “slave” on his face in the ’90s gave us an idea of what can happen when sitting down at the negotiating table with corporations who measure your worth by your marketability. Our collective ear becomes less sophisticated, we develop a forgetfulness that separates us from our pasts. I wanted to keep Joi in my personal library of “underground” artists where she was protected from the fuckery — following her own North Star to musical freedom like the Jubilee Singers.

Joi’s recorded performances embodied all the funkiness my little soul had been waiting for at a time when Black radio was pinned under the thumb of payola. She’s cut from the same cloth as Jimi Hendrix, Betty Davis, and Vanity. One minute she gives you seasoned performer on a FunkJazz Kafe stage alongside Too $hort; then range and multidimensionality on stage with FishBone and De La Soul the next. I traveled to see both of those shows from Fisk University, leaving “the yard” for places like Memphis and Atlanta to experience Joi in action. My fellow Joi-chasing friend and I coordinated our travels so that we could make it back in time for 10 a.m. classes the following morning; driving along the highway, we passed various symbols of the Confederacy — flags, bumper stickers, and Cracker Barrels. We were two women from Cali on a mission. We invested time and our scarce college-level income into loving her work because Joi always delivered, which made the payoff immediate.

* * *

Between 1996 and 2006, Joi recorded three more studio albums. Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome, from 1997, became a highly desired cult classic, shelved before its release due to the collapse of EMI. It was then picked up by FreeWorld, Dallas Austin’s newly formed label following EMI’s collapse, which folded shortly after. Fortunately, it can now be purchased through her website, a gift for fans who were searching high and low for a copy. Her next two albums were 2002’s Star Kitty’s Revenge and 2006’s Tennessee Slim is the Bomb, which was released on Raphael Sadiq’s Pookie Records. The music industry’s instability led Joi to reissue both albums independently, in the spirit of Prince. He had become one of the first major artists to market his albums through a personal website to be in direct conversation with fans in an effort to cut out the middle men — middle men who were typically attached to the bodies of white record company executives or Black music moguls like Berry Gordy or Suge Knight who modeled their music businesses after them.

Joi’s recorded performances embodied all the funkiness my little soul had been waiting for at a time when Black radio was pinned under the thumb of payola. She’s cut from the same cloth as Jimi Hendrix, Betty Davis, and Vanity.

In addition to her solo work, Joi had a major hand in shaping the Atlanta Dungeon Family/Organized Noize sound. She sang background on Goodie Mob’s classic first album Soul Food. Equally impressive was her work on projects with a range of artists like George Clinton, Sleepy Brown, Big Krit, 2 Chainz, Queen Latifah, and Tricky from London. She collaborated with Raphael Sadiq’s on his Lucy Pearl project, replacing former En Vogue songstress Dawn Robinson and adding a welcomed edge to the group’s live performances. In addition to studio collaboration, she joined Outkast on their final tour in 2014 and was a backing vocalist for D’Angelo’s The Second Coming Tour in 2015. And still, with curriculum vitaé in hand, Joi found time to help, as she would say, “wipe down” a few aspiring singers through her artist development business, Artisan Polishing.

* * *

The very first time I met Joi was in Nashville in 1995. With the same woman I had traveled to Memphis for Joi’s shows, I was trying my hand at concert promotion. We had a little money, a venue, and enough love for Joi’s two-album catalog to take a chance. Within a week, Joi agreed to perform for an amount that had little to do with what was acceptable for her craft and effort and more to do with her willingness to help us see our dreams through and to come home to show her people where she had been. It’s no small feat to have Joi on your roster of events as a young promoter in the industry, and she gave us the cultural capital and experience we needed to break into that world as young Black women. Almost a decade later, I would connect with Joi again when she was featured in an event I produced in Brooklyn called Slum Beautiful: Music from the Gut of Black America in 2010. The title of the event was taken from a song from Outkast’s Stankonia album. I wanted Joi to do the work of reminding New York of its connected history with Black Southern culture and people — it’s a city that tends to forget. The next time I saw Joi was in Atlanta for an event I organized called Erotic City Weekend, bringing the work of Prince and Joi’s unique performances back together again.  

In 2015, I made my way back home to Los Angeles after being away for nearly 20 years. Synchronicity had it so that Joi had left Atlanta and moved there a few years before me. We connected on a more personal level and spent significant time talking about our shared love of the many interconnections of Black music. It was through our conversations that I learned about the Caravans, a 1950s soulful gospel group that featured among its members Shirley Caesar, Inez Andrews, Albertina Walker, and James Cleveland. They were responsible for ushering a new style of gospel that complicated the notion of sacred music with their collective blues ministry sound. She also encouraged me to pay closer attention to Parliament singers Glen Goins, Garry Shider, and Walter “Junie” Morrison, as their voices, too, embodied the tension that exists between Black faith and psychedelic funk. I learned in those moments what it means to be a student of the artform you’re undertaking.

Shortly after landing, I began creating events in L.A. and inviting Joi to make various appearances. My work had taken a turn over the years. I was excited about my developing relationship with the academy, as I had become a lecturer at California State University, Los Angeles in the Pan-African Studies department. I worked closely with the department to shape the social experiences of Black college students who often found themselves at the mercy of and/or ignored in official university events. In 2016, I invited Joi to conduct the Q&A following the screening of the Afro-Punk documentary with the festival’s original founder and the film’s director, James Spooner. During the conversation, Spooner shared with the audience that it was the first time he had been invited to screen his film and talk about the roots of Afro-punk since his departure from what had become a corporate funded cultural institution. Most recently, I invited Joi, along with Jessica Care Moore, to be on a plenary for a conference I coproduced with UCLA in honor of the late, great Aretha Franklin. What I love so much about Joi is her proven record that she is committed to blurring the lines and steeped in the art of interdisciplinarity. She engaged with students, wowed faculty, and in the process, brought a funky sensibility to the art and practice of scholarship. Upon spending a considerable amount of time listening to her latest album, I decided to visit Joi at home, which brought our multi-decade relationship into its third dimension. 

* * *

In 2018, Joi sat her ass down in a studio and pulled diamonds from a year of solitude to create her most recent album, S.I.R. Rebekkah Holylove. The journey of the album begins with three words that push us to the other side: Bitch I’m Free. S.I.R. Rebekkah Holylove is what happens when anticipation meets expectations. It is noteworthy that this album, too, was produced independently. Joi’s is the only voice on the album. Don’t be fooled into thinking that there are three other bad bitches in the studio making it happen. It’s just her. She wrote all the album’s lyrics, arranged all its vocals, and produced some of the tracks. She used very little of the vocal compressor, an effect that most contemporary singers rely on, creating distance between authenticity and the voices you think you love.

Here I was, 25 years after seeing her on a screen swinging on a meat hook, sitting in Joi’s L.A. studio — a live/work space she calls “The Funky Jewelry Box.” Inspirational posters and Dolly Parton, Led Zeppelin, Natalie Cole, and Minnie Riperton album covers draped the walls. It was an incubator for critical artistic thought up in there.

As I settled and began to think about questions that would unlock the door to the mysteries of this project, Joi unwrapped detox products from Dr. Sebi that Erykah Badu had sent her. “It’s a perfect time to fast,” she said, while removing the bubble wrap from a dark brown bottle of bodily goodness. She sat at her recording station in an electric blue velvet cushioned vintage chair, “a rare find from a spot in L.A.,” she bragged, “undiscovered by hipsters and still affordable in its dealings.” The chair, shaped like a throne, was perfect for the matriarchal-themed nature of this album. Above her was a classic studio microphone that looked committed to its job and familiar with the racy nature of Joi’s spirit. There’s an intimacy between the two. We agreed to listen to the album. She pressed play and guided me through the sonic journey — joint in hand, ears on guard.

Joi’s racy songs stand out on the new album, and they have a long history. On “Narcissia Cutie Pie” from Pendulum Vibe, the artist explores sexual fluidity and bright dark fantasies about the spectrum of desire, while songs like “Lick” from Star Kitty’s Revenge and “Dirty Mind” from Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome help us remember sex as a powerful creative tool. S.I.R. Rebekah HolyLove builds on Joi’s collection of sex-positive cantatas with “The Edge,produced and arranged by Joi with additional editing by Brook D’ Leux. A bass-heavy funk monster that promises listeners a key to cities where “we can fuck until the dawn, making love til’ cherries gone.” Another Paisley Park parallel. I mean, yeah, you’re married boo, but this is a complicated situation, the song implies. Cheating could become an option if good dick [or fill in the blank] is involved, and not many of us are willing to share that kind of ethical vulnerability on wax. And I don’t mean no disrespect to your official union, she asserts, but you fuck me right and you’re mine tonight. We never once forget that Joi is a human being dealing with the most undesirable and the most pleasurably outrageous scenarios that life asks us to consider: infidelity, heartbreak, orgasmic accomplishments. The appeal is that she’s aware of the costs. I’m standing on the edge with you / so if I jump will I fall or fly

S.I.R. Rebekkah Holylove is a tribute to an album culture long forgotten. With the push for iTunes singles and music streaming culture, the intimate relating of album between artist and audience has been compromised. The album holds its own against a culture that produces music at a rate almost impossible to enjoy, I’ll be listening to S.I.R. Rebekkah Holylove for years to come, and The Pendulum Vibe brought me here years ago. Joi said she drew from various experiences to produce this album. She continued to work on other major projects (both in television and music), without compromising the integrity of her solo work. In her words: “I have one of the most peaceful lives [of] anyone I know, but I recognize that solitude and peace is something I earned and it was necessary for this particular juncture.” 

* * *

Writing this piece felt like that time when Patti LaBelle and a fully established writer and producer, Luther Vandross, shared a stage one glorious night in 1985. It’s that moment when student, fan, and gatekeeper of the musical masters graduate into a league of their own, with a platform to articulate the many ways they’ve been shaped; a tribe of fellow artists marked by the legends. And because Joi’s work has been canonized by a global community, my work to unpack her work is really a citational practice. S.I.R. Rebekkah Holylove, is on a Black Atlantic continuum — a fantastic voyage will be had.  Catch up on your future. 

* * *

Also in Hive:
Welcome to Hive: Series Introduction by Danielle A. Jackson
Miami: A Beginning, by Jessica Lynne
On Watching Boys Play Music, by Eryn Loeb

* * *

DJ Lynnée Denise was shaped as a DJ by her parents’ record collection. She’s an artist, scholar, and writer whose work reflects on underground cultural movements, the 1980s and electronic music of the African Diaspora. Lynnée Denise coined the phrase ‘DJ Scholarship’ to reposition the role of the DJ from party purveyor to an archivist, cultural custodian, and information specialist.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

The Bigamist’s Daughter

Steve Chenn / Getty, Photo Illustration by Longreads

Robin Antalek | Longreads | April 2020 | 18 minutes (4,599 words)

In 1964, when my mother was pregnant with my younger brother, she found out that her husband, my father, had married another woman and that woman was pregnant as well. My father’s new wife had left her family and three small children, and then she and my father had created a subset family, making us a complicated algebraic formula, resistant to logic. He and his new wife lived together somewhere in Fairfield County, Connecticut, commuting distance to their jobs in Manhattan, where they had met. For a while they lived in his red Volvo wagon that smelled of his ever present Camel cigarettes.

Once, way before my brother, he drove us in that same red Volvo wagon down the wide tree lined Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn to a pre-war apartment building overlooking Prospect Park for a visit with his parents. The adults gathered in a room with windows that offered a view of the tops of the trees while, at 3, I remained in the kitchen with the housekeeper and a parakeet in a cage in front of a window that looked out onto a brick walled airshaft.

The bird turned its back on us while I ate Milano cookies. When dinner was ready the housekeeper took my hand in hers and led me into the big room. I was too full to eat the bright pink roast on the broad, gold-rimmed dinner plates, or sip from the tiny glass of tomato juice resting on a paper doily on a miniature plate. I know the attention on me was uncomfortable and confusing. My feet dangled from the chair in patent leather shoes and I was reprimanded by my father more than once for kicking the bar that stretched between the legs. Tucked in the large bureau behind me was a Batman and Robin coloring book, a gift chosen I supposed because of my name, not gender, along with a fresh pack of crayons, promised to me only if I ate my entire dinner. Later I am shattered, inconsolable, my face rubbed raw against the shoulder of my father’s tweed coat as he carries me from the apartment, a piece of meat still lodged between my cheek and molars.
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Escaping Coronavirus Lockdown Through a Stranger’s Solitary Walks on YouTube

From Sakura in snow - walking in snowy Saitama / Rambalac / YouTube, Photo illustration by Longreads

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | April 2020 | 25 minutes (6,184 words)

 

As one of the millions of people currently trapped inside their homes thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, wondering if the virus will still get them, I need an escape, not only from the trying monotony of indoor life in cramped quarters parenting a toddler who seems increasingly aware that something is wrong, but from the anxiety as well.

I worry constantly: about my 2-year old daughter; about my wife; my health; my job; my aged parents; the effect that broken social bonds will have on children’s development. I also worry about what medical professionals like my wife call “the surge.” We Americans hunker indoors waiting for the virus to decimate our communities like it has Italy’s, and for the bodies to fill graves that few people would want to dig. The tension of anticipation gnaws at you, leaving a pit in your stomach that no amount of gardening or strong cocktails can fill.

There is no actual escape from reality. What I crave is a brief psychological break at the end of these long days, which spring keeps making longer and longer. Sleep is the only real break; yet sleep is something anxiety is allowing me less and less of. So at night, after my wife Rebekah and I bathe and put Vivian to bed at 7:30, we want some quiet time. Sometimes I skate the vacant streets for 30 minutes. Sometimes I listen to music on headphones the way I did as a teen. Then Rebekah and I slouch on our living room couch doing work, replying to emails, and reading news. If there’s time left, we watch TV in our basement.

Wi-Fi provides the homebound masses instant COVID information. Zoom allows us to work remotely. Now a popular, hypnotic Japanese YouTube series provides me the chance for international travel and a reliable psychological escape during this time of limited mobility. In each episode, an unidentified man films the streets as he walks through Japanese cities for hours at a time. He calls himself Rambalac. He calls his episodes videowalks. He uses a high-definition handheld camera mounted on a stabilizer, and captures ambient noise with his Audio-Technica AT9946CM microphone. Filmed both day and night, his walking series started in Tokyo in 2017 but expanded to other cities, the suburbs, and countryside. His videowalks have very literal titles like “Walking in rainy Mizuho city by Clannad trail” and “Walking without reason in rainy Omuta, Kyushu.” His videos state: “Not a vlog, no intrusive faces or talking, pure Japan only.”

I know very little about photography or cinematography, but I could identify some of the effective elements of his technique. He employs no fancy camera work. No splicing, no zooming in and out, no disorienting panning or wobbling. He keeps the camera still and mostly aimed ahead. Sometimes he pivots to capture a broader scene or something he finds interesting, like a sign or river or view. There’s no music, no commentary, no narration, only his location’s ordinary noise. This is why his videos are so absorbing: He turns his viewers into his eyes, letting them see what they’d see if they were walking with him. It’s virtual reality tourism, lacking only touch and smell.

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On Watching Boys Play Music

Arthur Fellig / International Center of Photography / Getty / Design by Katie Kosma

Read an introduction to the series.

Eryn Loeb | Longreads | April 2020 | 16 minutes (4,059 words)

Hive is a Longreads series about women and the music that has influenced them.

* * *

Three songs into their set, the band has gotten loose and they’re starting to sweat under the stage lights. From where I’m standing a few feet away, I can watch the four guys — a standard formation, with the singer playing guitar, flanked by a second guitarist, a bass player, and a drummer — grimace and grin. The music is feverish, a hook-y mix of ’90s rock and country twang. Playing it, they look expert and at ease, like they’re exactly where they’re supposed to be. 

The lead guitar player is my husband. He’s been in a few bands since we got together more than a dozen years ago, and a few before that. Rousing and charismatic, easy to move to, this is the best of them. 

With a drink in my hand and earplugs responsibly in place, I’m very aware that I’ve spent more than half my life essentially standing in the same spot: off to one side of the stage (close but not too close), eyes forward, shifting weight from foot to foot. I’d like to think that after so much time I’d be less conscious of where I used to be as it compares to the moment I’m in. But the truth is, when I’m at a show — whether the band onstage is comprised solely of men or not; whether the band is famous or unknown or the one my husband plays in — I’m never not thinking about it. 

In an important way this feels like a victory. As a teenager I was adamant that going to shows was essential to my being, something I would never outgrow. Going to a show meant supporting music that had fused with my identity and, crucially, doing it with friends who felt the same way. Going to a show meant being the kind of person who goes to shows — the kind of person I wanted and made sure to be. Even so many years later, it’s hardly a surprise that I married a musician.


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Now that I’m in my late 30s, things have shifted. Bodily and psychically, the relatively simple act of watching this band play is far removed from the ear-ringing dramatics I lost myself in as a teenager. The music itself is different: earworm Americana instead of sweetly sloppy punk. But with the shared vantage point comes echoes of some essential dynamics I’ve been steeped in — some might say implicated in — for more than 20 years, and that have informed the way I’ve listened to music and watched bands play ever since.

* * *

I’ve been watching boys play music since I was 15 years old, when I was growing up in a small town that felt farther from New York City than it actually measured in miles. It’s a classic story, the material thousands of songs are built from: The place I lived was boring and provincial; there was nothing to do but go to the mall, and music saved me. One day I started seeing flyers taped up on walls at school, broadcasting the names of a small crop of local bands alongside hastily scrawled logistical info and rudimentary collages, lazily appropriated photos, and the labored-over lettering that was the trademark of a certain kind of bored and vaguely artistic high school kid. Sometimes a photocopy would be tacked to a bulletin board in a classroom, and I’d let my eyes wander over to it while the teacher’s back was turned like I could will it to beam me up. The world they teased was one I’d been dreaming about, and the flyers were like maps to buried treasure.

My close girlfriends and I started going to shows every weekend. We could hardly believe our luck in finding this so close to home, a genuine local scene in our native territory, where we’d learned to expect little. Bands played in a big warehouse that had been converted to a skate park, or a small club in a strip mall abutting a Pizza Hut, or various firehouses and American Legion halls, and occasionally someone’s backyard. Self-deprecation was a trend when it came to naming — there was Not Good Enough, Last One Picked, and Humble Beginnings — as was alluding to a generalized toughness: Fallout, Eye 2 Eye, Inner Dam. They played catchy, snotty, buoyant punk music that was fun to jump around to, and snarling, screamy hardcore driven by bass riffs and body slams. It was all fast and loud and rude and messy, an ideal soundtrack for our restlessness.

Without exception, these bands were made up of boys, and boys accounted for the vast majority of people who came to see them play. Being a girl in this sea of boys was to be special — tough and wily and possessed of rarified taste. Right away, I knew I was where I wanted to be: in rooms where the air was thick with smoke and the floors were sticky and the sound was abrasive, with people who were attracted to things that didn’t exist for anyone’s approval. 

Kids from other towns and high schools converged at shows, and in these semi-secret spaces, we were drawn together and got close quickly. New faces gave way to new friendships and familiar frictions: long conversations and car rides, jealousy and competitiveness and unrequited love. Loyalty came quickly, and with it, the conviction that outsiders were not to be trusted — especially girls, since there couldn’t possibly be room for all of us. Everything revolved around the shows. The energy of being there rearranged my cells while sating a deep thirst; hours later, I always struggled to fall asleep, dreaming half-conscious dreams where the band was still playing, the music a stubborn throb, my limbs vibrating. 

That music was miraculous for existing within reach. Whether it featured crushing screams or a catchy chorus, it was right in front of me, something I could get my arms around. When everything was clicking — when the band was playing the songs I loved the most, when I tipped my head back and sang along, when the music pulsed intimately through my body in a crowd full of my friends, buoyed further by the promise of the night spooling out ahead of us — the glow of bliss and belonging was so pure and potent it made me dizzy.

I just want to get laid, went the chorus of one crowd-pleasing singalong, the singer repeating the line with a nasal swagger before switching to a scream for the kicker: before I die! Were these bands any good? In the thick of it, it hardly mattered. It was easy to love something that you could stand right next to, something not everyone could touch or even appreciate. It felt good. Leaning up against the stage, my face arranged into an expression of practiced nonchalance, was to insist that I belonged there — and that my attention and support mattered. It made me feel cool, probably for the first time.  

But I couldn’t do it alone. If those flyers for shows had been maps, boys were the passports. And that’s what we called the ones who were our friends: the boys. Along with monopolizing the stage, they were the ones taking money at the door, massed in the crowd, stationed behind soundboards and merch tables, and doing tricks on their skateboards outside. They were the loudest, the most obnoxious, the funniest, the sweetest and most cruel. They had less to prove than we did as girls, though that didn’t necessarily mean they were any less self-conscious or tried any less hard. They played guitar and bass and drums; they sang and scowled and snarled and cracked jokes. They scribbled setlists and hauled gear around and did sound check. They gestured for the levels to be turned up or down. It was all very important stuff, and they made clear that it had nothing to do with us.  

Were these bands any good? In the thick of it, it hardly mattered. It was easy to love something that you could stand right next to, something not everyone could touch or even appreciate. It felt good.

What did those boys really see when they looked at us? Where there was affection, there was also suspicion. One of the tensions churning had to do with authenticity. Have you seriously never heard of this band? What are you, a poser? Another related — but usually unspoken — tension had to do with intent. Did the girls really show up for the music, for the scene, or did we have a predictable ulterior motive? The relationship between us was two-sided, if not exactly reciprocal: If we were special for loving the music, the boys were special because they were the ones playing it. Our attention gave them an aura of confidence and power, while theirs made us both more scrutinized and harder to see.  

Inevitably, some of the boys who played music became our boyfriends, which came with its own set of privileges and responsibilities. I harbored crushes and dated two guitar players. On and off, for too long, I hooked up with another guy who was really the number one groupie of the whole scene, but whose gender meant that he was treated more like a celebrity than a charity case. But being someone’s girlfriend was never the point. My friends and I wanted to be noticed and known, valued as experts and familiars and friends and fans and confidants and critics — and also be desired. We quickly learned that it was impossible to comfortably be all of those things at once. In the lyrics of the boys’ songs — which we memorized and sang along to — girls were mostly agents of heartbreak, objects of longing or blame.   

Among the flyers and band photos and handwritten lyrics covering my bedroom walls, I had taped up a cartoon. Headlined “I’m On the List!” its protagonist and punch line was a serial dater of guys in bands, a girl whose style and self transformed from panel to panel, depending whose hand she was holding: She was alternately punk, goth, hippie, girl next door. “I’m on the list!” she shouted as she shoved her way to the front of lines, trying too hard in a way that made everyone around her sneer. While she cheerfully narrated all the good times she’d had being “with the band,” the illustrations revealed her to be an oblivious opportunist, a hanger-on. I’d torn it out of Details magazine and put it up as a way of showing that I got the joke. 

But I think I sensed even then that the joke was on us.

* * *

Outside of shows, watching the boys play music was a ritual — though band practice tended not to involve a whole lot of actual music playing. The girls (and some boys) would lounge around and talk, graze on snacks and soda while the band noodled around in the living room or garage. When the boys got it together enough to play a recognizable chunk of a song, we’d stop whatever we were doing and pay attention, nodding to the music, clapping appreciatively when they finished. 

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be in a band myself. I did, badly. I craved the creative outlet, the spotlight, the place I would carve out, the point it would make. Hilary and I were slowly learning to play guitar; Brianna was already good at bass. We figured we could convince another friend that she wanted to be a drummer. That was what boys did; they didn’t think they needed to be good at something before pursuing it. (They didn’t necessarily have to be or get good at all; talent was not a particular requirement.) One of our male friends could start a band on a lark and have a show in a few weeks. But the mid-’90s in our leg of suburban New York could feel a little stuck in the past when it came to what girls could do. 

Still, we dreamed up band names and doodled them on our notebooks. For a while we got together to write and play songs with simple melodies and tortured lyrics. We were pretty bad, like so many young bands driven by little more than excitement and impatience, but our inability to get our shit together felt more consequential, because it meant the scene we took so much pride in still had no girls in bands. (I’d heard whispers about something called riot grrrl, but it seemed mostly like a colorful rumor in Sassy magazine, a postcard from somewhere else.)

So my friends and I started a zine. We called it Thriftstore Injection, the title partly a rip-off from the name of a girl-led band in Blake Nelson’s 1994 novel Girl. In that book, a Portland teenager named Andrea discovers her own local scene and her life becomes an enviable, angsty blur of vintage dresses, punk shows, and the intermittent attentions of a damaged musician. Here she is describing a raucous show, in her signature breathless style: 

Boys were moshing and girls too and it was this big swirl of people and me and Rebecca looked at each other and then we both ran right into the middle of it. And everyone fell down and we were getting kicked and smashed and falling over everyone and rolling on the floor and then we got up and we were dancing like crazy and whipping our hair around and it was the wildest time! 

I read this book at least 10 times, seeing in it a version of my own life: the joyful frenzy of it as well as the constant self-consciousness, the quiet humiliation of trying to get close to something that could only ever sort of belong to you.

We made a new zine every few months and sold it at shows for a buck or two. Encouraging our readers to pick up the latest recordings put out by local bands, and proclaiming nostalgia for the TV shows of our childhoods, we used our new platform mostly to convey enthusiasm. We wrote as fans not only of bands but of low-level quirky subjects — Pez, ramen, cats — that we played up partly as a way of crafting a voice and identity for ourselves. When it came to the things we really loved, we tended not to describe or interrogate them in too much depth (demos by local bands are described variously as “incredible,” “amazing,” and “kicks so much ass it’s not even funny”). In later issues some light criticism started sneaking in (“sounds like they recorded in a box which makes it kinda hard to listen to … none of the songs stick in your head”), alongside earnest rants about racism, depression, and authority figures.

I read this book at least 10 times, seeing in it a version of my own life: the joyful frenzy of it as well as the constant self-consciousness, the quiet humiliation of trying to get close to something that could only ever sort of belong to you.

We interviewed a handful of local bands — most of them friends of ours — and one bigger score, a California band signed to a prominent punk label making a stop on a longer tour. We crammed into their van on a rainy Sunday before their show and pelted them with questions about their favorite foods, their influences, and the funniest place they’d ever peed. “What do you think of our scene so far?” we asked, craving validation so plainly that it’s clear even on a faded photocopy. “Looks cool,” the lead singer said, and my heart swelled. 

Looking at these zines now, I see an overeager patchwork of underbaked passions and opinions. “I don’t think that anything could ever make me feel the way that music does,” I wrote, skimming the surface of a deep and complicated connection. “I can’t do anything without music playing. It’s even better when you’re a musician, to be able to create music and understand things about it. I feel like I owe it my life.”

I believed it, though. And regardless of the inanities and insults, I was fiercely protective of the scene. I hated when there were fights at shows, because the fights were always started by boys and were only ever about them. To me, their involvement in such stupidity was disqualifying, an offensive distraction from what I believed — or wanted to believe — the scene was supposed to be about. Among those things (despite all the evidence to the contrary) was pushing back against aggressive macho bullshit, which was alienating not only to the girls but to boys seeking a refuge from the tyranny of high school. I cared about zines because they were a place for people to say something, anything; to articulate what they thought and believed, even if it was just “school sucks.” I respected the prevalence of straight edge because it was driven by a conviction, even if it wasn’t my own. 

I wanted the scene to be about more than it was, and after a couple of years I couldn’t ignore that it wasn’t really up to me. Meanwhile the warehouse/skate park that had been the best place to see shows had closed, and some of our favorite bands had stopped playing much. Most of what was left was hardcore music. Increasingly, I wanted to be less besieged by boys, my life less dominated by the things they made. I wanted to be less peripheral to the things I poured my attention into.

* * *

The scene had gotten me through high school, but when I got to college in the fall of 2000 (in New Jersey, not all that far from my hometown but miraculously absent anyone I knew) my attention transferred effortlessly to politics. While I was funneling all that would-be-riot-grrrl energy into national elections and local activism, I started writing for my school’s alternative paper, where a review of the new Cat Power record could sit comfortably next to a critique of globalization. This time coincided with the rise of girl-driven bands like the Gossip and Le Tigre and Bratmobile and Gravy Train!!!! With a new group of friends, I went to see these bands play in larger clubs in New York, dancing and sweating and singing along until our bodies ached and our voices went raspy. In those rooms, with all those women onstage and in the audience, there was a sense that we were part of something that mattered, something that had momentum, and that needed us.

I wanted to be less peripheral to the things I poured my attention into.

I’d felt that particular mix of heady idealism and physical abundance at shows plenty of times before, a fizzy warmth that swept through my whole body and was almost holy. I was always chasing that particular shiver. I missed the version of it I’d experienced close to home: the urgency and weight of it, the insider knowledge that had been so hard-won, the pride that came with staking a claim. But when I watched Le Tigre and Sleater-Kinney dominate the stage, I knew what I’d been missing. For me, there was less immediate intimacy in these spaces, but in some ways that meant there was more freedom.  

There were still boys. Regardless of geography, activism tended to parallel and overlap with music and those who played it, which included plenty of boys who believed they knew everything there was to know about both. It was a world of impassioned attractions, to both causes and people, and within it the boys I was interested in were still mostly ones who played music. But listening to their songs and going to see them play was an occasional thing, not a habit or an identity, or part of anything beyond it.

When I was 20, I fell in love with a talented singer/guitarist who had taken a year off from college to work at Sam Ash while he tried to find success for his band on a two-semester deadline. Their songs were pretty good: shimmering melodies and brightly plaintive vocals, but as they struggled it was clear they didn’t have what it would take. Still, I cared and I wanted him to know it. My best friend and I once raced out to Asbury Park to surprise him when his band played a show at a small club on a random weeknight. We arrived during one of their first songs to find my boyfriend’s mother sitting by herself at a cocktail table, the only person in the whole place besides the sound guy. I gave him a hug after their set and we never spoke of it again. 

I think about that anecdote a lot, and it still makes me cringe. There is something about the dream of playing music that can seem like a particularly delicate thing. To be onstage is to be vulnerable, exposed. It is a display of hope with an undercurrent of need, laying bare a longing to be noticed in a sea of others who understand that hunger — and many of whom share it. There’s a kind of immediate validation in playing, but getting beyond that is a lot more difficult, and wanting it isn’t enough. 

I think, too, about the word “support” — what it means for a girl, a woman, to support a boy, a man, in his pursuits, to show up and stand by and endorse his efforts, or to support a scene at large. In both contexts support is a resource; attention is currency. They can be deployed in ways that make you a participant or that make your position more of a passive one. They can be appropriated. Maybe this is especially true in a dynamic as visible and traditionally gendered as playing music. “Support” is related to both fandom and community, but it can exist without them. The shape of my support varied over the years, but it often involved some amount of glossing over the obvious, pretending things were OK when they weren’t. It didn’t always mean the things I wanted it to, or fully belong to me.

Whatever form it took or how earnestly I bestowed it, I always recognized and resented that my gender made my support a cliché. In some ways, it was as simple as that: I didn’t want to be dismissed as a girl, or as someone who watches. Today, what I resent almost as much as the stereotype itself is its hold on me. Not only the extent to which I still feel the need to object: I am not just a girl who watches boys play music! Not only because it forces me to admit that I care what other people think. What I try and fail to resist is this facile analysis, a flattened sense of burden and blame built on one-dimensional ideas about how men and women relate to each other and what our roles are as musicians and fans. In many ways, the lessons of watching boys play music are ones I reject. But I still learned them, and the songs are stuck in my head.  

Things should be less fraught these days. I’m not ambivalent about supporting my husband’s band; they’re genuinely good and it’s fun to see them play. In going to their shows, I’m supporting a person I love, doing a thing he loves — a thing he’s really skilled at and that I want him to be recognized for. And yet: As much as this dynamic is undeniably, fundamentally different from the one I grew up with, it sometimes resembles it, with the participants in their prescribed positions. And the part of me that loves seeing my husband onstage — that is proud of him, admires his talent, loves these songs, is still turned on — can feel like it’s at odds with the part that doesn’t want to just stand there and watch. 

This feeling is not strictly useful — as a musician’s partner, it is mostly just disruptive. Still, I’ve tried to pay attention to it. And at some point I noticed that my stubborn inner conflict could feel as good, as right, as its absence used to. It reminds me of what I regret, of all the things I’ve learned to look out for, and have come to question — the compromises I’ll accept and concessions I refuse to make. It shows me what I was always right about and what I needed more time to understand. It shows me that it’s possible to outgrow something and still hang on to a part of it. It underscores the distance of two decades and makes those years disappear, all at once. It can be as nourishing as the music, now that there is, at least mostly, room for both. 

* * *

Also in Hive:
Welcome to Hive: Series Introduction by Danielle A. Jackson
Miami: A Beginning, by Jessica Lynne

* * *

Eryn Loeb is the deputy editor at Guernica. Her writing about nostalgia, books, and feminism (or some combination of those things) has appeared in Poets & Writers, Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, the Awl, the Village Voice, the Rumpus, and the Millions, among other publications.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

‘Let’s Reset’: A Career Social Distancer Mends Some Fences

Sari Botton | Longreads | April 2020 | 6 minutes (1,521 words)

To appreciate the significance of the shift I’m about to share with you, it helps to know a couple of things about me.

The first is that I’ve harbored a lifelong aversion to the telephone, which stands in stark contrast to my family’s enthusiasm for it. For the entirety of my adult life, my mother and sister have spoken to each other five or more times daily, and in between chatted with countless friends and other family members. They roll seamlessly from one conversation to the next while I cower the second my muted iPhone starts vibrating, and have worked hard at Ferberizing my mom so she expects only a couple of calls from me per week.

If I were to self-diagnose I’d say my problem is rooted in lonerish introversion (a condition I’ve learned to over-compensate for; I now pass as a full-fledged extrovert), and a social anxiety that stems from my teen years when, even though I begged to have a pale yellow princess phone installed in my bedroom so I could make myself available to my friends and crushes, I dreaded actually talking to them. What if there were awkward silences I didn’t know how to fill? What if I said the wrong thing? What if, without visual cues, I spoke at the wrong time, stepping on a cute boy’s lines?

The second is my long-standing antipathy toward a group I’ve dubbed The Forgiveness Lobby — that well-meaning but preachy band of folks who, to my mind, short-circuit a multi-step process best given ample time. You know the ones — always posting platitudes such as “Holding onto resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” They pressure the aggrieved into relinquishing appropriate anger well before they’re ready — and before those who’ve aggrieved them have had sufficient opportunity to suffer the consequences of their actions, and come around to making amends. I’m all for genuine forgiveness, but that is something which must unfold at its own pace.

So imagine my surprise when, a week into social distancing thanks to Coronavirus, I suddenly wanted to call or Facetime with absolutely everyone, especially a handful of people I’d previously fallen out with, so we could bury our hatchets, large and small.

Maybe it was the void created by the sudden absence of friends I’m used to spending time with IRL — and the colleagues I used to work with side-by-side in the small co-working space I operated, which Coronavirus has forced me to shutter. Maybe it was the death toll, mounting daily, reminding me of my mortality and everyone else’s. Maybe it was the arrival of a mutual enemy, which has made it easier to bond with those I’ve been at odds with. Whatever the cause, I quickly found myself emailing people, asking for appointments to talk on the phone so we could start over. (What kind of monster just calls people out of the blue without any warning? Okay, okay — some friends have recently done this and I kind of…loved it…? Who even is Pandemic Sari?)

Of course, there have been exceptions, people toward whom I am not feeling terribly generous, even in my newfound state of grace. There’s the underminer/boundary-pusher I’ve been trying to shake for going on 40 years, who keeps resurfacing no matter how fervently I try to avoid her. There are exes I am resigned never to speak to again — unless, of course, they come forth with long overdue apologies. Until such time, I am standing on ceremony, deadly plague be damned.

But for a few notable others, I am all about rapprochement right now.
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