Search Results for: Time

We’re Not All in This Together

Getty / Photo Illustration by Longreads

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | April 2020 | 8 minutes (2,043 words)

Call it a dystopia, call it the apocalypse, whatever it is, the fact is, right now, we all have the capacity to kill each other. It’s not an exaggeration, it’s just a fact: We are literally holding each other’s lives in our hands. In a pandemic, every single person’s actions have the most extreme consequences for every single other person. I’m not sure how you can get more serious than that. I’m not sure how people can STILL not take that seriously.

Fuck. It’s hard to express anger without just expressing it. The second you write it down it loses that volatility. How do I convey the rage I’m feeling right now watching families continue to gather together, watching friends clandestinely meeting, laughing like they aren’t responsible for the rising death toll? Should I do it in physiological terms? Ok, I’ll list the symptoms like an illness, since that’s what we’re working with right now: Shallow breath, rapid heart rate, adrenalin. A fucking waterfall of expletives. Shaking. I’m literally shaking with rage. My face is permanently scrunched, my throat twisted, like I’m perpetually getting ready to scream — to shout and kick and yell and punch. Or maybe an analogy works better. Feral animals, threatened and fearful, can explode into bouts of wild insanity. One minute they’re calm, the next they’re thrashing and biting, their eyes bulging and unseeing, their entire body a fist. Blind rage: Uncontrolled, undirected, unstoppable.

I saw all of those unctuous half-naked bodies packed onto a sweltering beach in Australia, knowing there was a pandemic, and I thought of all the humid holes in the ground packed together in Iran, awaiting the same number of dead bodies. I saw all those stupid drunk kids in bars in the U.K. knowing there was a pandemic, and I thought of all those abandoned nursing homes in Spain full of the same number of scared seniors left to die on their own.

But I’m not feral. So I just sit here, in the most populous city in Canada, simmering. And when I walk outside, when I run on the road, and I see a park full of people, or strangers face to face, I fucking stare. And I fucking shake. And I don’t say, “What the FUCK are you doing?” Because when I’m told to stay away for everyone’s health, I do. Even if they don’t. Even if they are the 20 percent who believe this is all blown out of proportion, who have the power to sink the 80 percent of us who don’t. Even if they are the reason we went from 90 percent of coronavirus cases spread by travel to 90 percent spread by community. In an apocalypse, a stranger can be a comfort. In a pandemic, they’re nothing but a threat. The community that is left is found in the human beings who distance themselves, not for themselves alone, but for everyone else. Maybe so many people don’t get it because it’s a human paradox: That the further apart we are, the closer we become. Read more…

On Dolly Parton and Being Seen

(Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images)

At Guernica, Chris Dennis reconciles his love of Dolly Parton despite her ironic combination of down-home folksiness, vulnerability, and painted artifice.

It is now mostly unclear why I thought it was a good idea to bring Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits to school with me. Like most children, I was still standing in the messy way-station between my own limited worldview and everyone else’s. But our bus had a radio with a tape player, and the bus driver, Mrs. Connie, would allow us to take turns bringing cassettes. It’s likely I’d really wanted to hear “9 to 5” after breakfast and there just wasn’t enough time, since I’d spent too long deliberating whether to wear the black or brown velveteen shorts that my mother had made for me by hand. I’d like to quote another country queen, Barbra Mandrell, and say, “I was country when country wasn’t cool.” But I don’t think country music was the central issue with my schoolmates that morning when the entire bus erupted in near-universal outrage. A Dolly Parton track from six years earlier was not the music of the youth in 1986. The kids demanded to know whose tape it was. I sat quietly, on fire with embarrassment, holding the cassette case in my lap. After only a few seconds Mrs. Connie turned the music off. When she handed the tape back as I exited the bus at school, she said, “I’m sorry. Maybe bring something else next time.”

I’m sure I’d heard the word “faggot” before, but this was the first instance where it gathered a tangible meaning. A brutal link was forged, and on the other side of it, a child’s version of self-awareness. The sudden shame I felt about my own joy at and adoration of a certain kind of music was confusing. It’s hard to comprehend the level of disgust or discomfort the other children had then, but it was enough that, in a matter of days, many of my classmates at Eldorado Elementary School either called me “Dolly” or “faggot.” This would be the way for years. The names would almost become synonymous. How did they know already, and how could this have been the thing, in the third grade, to make my difference visible? The uncertainty I had felt about my father knowing that I loved Dolly Parton had doubled back on me. He had just shown me it was okay to love it. I didn’t know how to tell him he’d been wrong.

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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

Arundhati Roy: 1.3 Billion on Lockdown on Four Hours’ Notice

A labourer wearing a facemask rests next to parked bicycles used to transport materials in a wholesale market during a government-imposed nationwide lockdown as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus, in Kolkata on April 6, 2020. (Photo by Dibyangshu SARKAR / AFP) (Photo by DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP via Getty Images)

At The Finanicial Times, novelist Arundhati Roy reports on India’s ill-considered and anti-humanist response to COVID-19. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, offered four hours’ notice before the country of 1.38 billion people went into lockdown, where the monied sheltered in place, displacing 460 million migrant workers. Suddenly without jobs in a country without public transportation, the workers attempted to walk hundreds of kilometers to their home villages before the country halted their movement, forcing them into perilous limbo in makeshift camps.

The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

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‘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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Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure

Longreads Pick

Our old work routines cannot carry us through self-quarantine to a time when life will resume as normal, because pandemic has irrevocably changed the world we wish to return to. Instead of working through this, work on adjusting pyschogically first.

Published: Mar 27, 2020
Length: 6 minutes (1,692 words)

Shout Out to Myspace

AP Photo/News Sentinel, Jeff Adkins

Instagram and Twitter get all the glory, and the name Myspace elicits eye-rolls or shivers of embarrassment, if it gets any reaction at all. For those of us who lived through its heyday, Myspace is shorthand for the past, but you can’t underestimate its impact. For the music site Stereogum, Michael Tedder produced an epic oral history to document Myspace’s rise and fall, and more importantly, its myriad achievements in the musical sphere.

Back when Myspace launched in 2003, it was novel. People flocked to it to find music and friends who shared their musical passions. Bands like Sherwood and Taking Back Sunday used it to post demos and others, like Arctic Monkeys and Lilly Allen, used it to build their audiences. Some bands found major label contracts this way. The site connected people and changed the way the world shared and listened to music. Then the world changed and the site got usurped by the next new thing. Myspace tried in vain to resurrect itself.  Its new management made some egregious errors in the process. “It came to light that Myspace’s new owners ‘lost’ all of the music it hosted from its inception in 2003 through 2015,” Tedder writes, “reportedly misplacing more than 50 million MP3s from upwards of 14 million artists, in essence completely erasing a significant part of this century’s cultural canon.” But, he points out, “there was a time when Myspace was very much alive, and very much the center of many people’s lives.” Maybe one day enough time will pass to warrant an oral history of Stereogum and the other so-called music blogs that changed the landscape in the early 2000s. For now, this oral history is a fun long walk down memory lane:

Nate Henry [Sherwood]: I think I still have it on video somewhere, we’re on tour and we got a message from Tom from Myspace. Myspace had featured us on the front page. Back in the day they used to have a band on the corner when you logged in to the website. Someone texted me, “Dude, you’re on the front page of Myspace,” and I logged in and then shortly thereafter Tom from Myspace had messaged us. He was like, “Hey, I see you guys are climbing the unsigned charts on Myspace.” We thought it was spam and then we look and it’s like “No, this is the real Tom.” So we started booking some shows through LA a couple months later, and then we went through there and hung out with Tom and everyone at the label, and Tom kinda takes us on this Myspace tour and he was like, “I wanna sign your band.”

Dan Epand [Nico Vega]: I remember Sherwood had millions of followers, yet outside of Myspace nobody knew who they were. And just being like, “Well, that doesn’t feel authentic.” We didn’t want to do that. It never felt like it translated to real fans.

Jordyn Taylor [Artist]: As we continued, after “Strong” took off, we got the interest of Myspace Records. When I met with Myspace, they were offering a development sort of deal. But we were kind of past that. I had my fanbase. They were like, “Hey, so there’s not much we can do on our platform for you, but let’s send you up to Interscope.” So me being naive to the music industry — my dad was managing me — they had us set up a meeting with Jimmy Iovine and we’re like, “Who?” which is the fucking craziest thing now.

Nate Henry: We were, at the time, talking to several smaller labels, and we were just like, “Man, there’s nothing like Myspace, why wouldn’t we?” Looking back, I think it was a bad association. It’d be like a band getting signed to Coca-Cola Records. It’s just in the band’s best interest to keep the corporate part of it out of there, so I wish we would have negotiated, “Hey, we’ll release a record, but let’s not call it Myspace Records.” I think, at the end of the day, people look to bands and arts and music, they want it to sort of be … I don’t know if punk rock is the right word, but they don’t like it when it’s corporate. But we were young and hungry and we also didn’t wanna tell Tom “no” because at that time he had 200 million friends. So we took the good with the bad, but I think the bad was that we were gonna be lumped in with the Myspace brand from then on out, and when it died, we were gonna go down with it.

J Scavo [General Manager, Myspace Records]: The site was clearly music-focused. Tom was a music fan at heart. And he wanted to sign bands and use the platform to really make the case for being the major spine in record campaigns. He had a big forum that was at the time to help promote and develop these artists, and give them opportunities that they wouldn’t have elsewhere. He was our de facto head of A&R.

Jon Pikus [Senior Director of A&R, Myspace Records]: Any good A&R person evolved as technology evolved. Myspace was absolutely a valuable research tool and it only became better from 2006 to 2008. It became the go-to place to look for new artists. I think maybe up to 2005 or so, it was definitely a place you’d go to look, but not maybe the place. But it became the place by the time I was there.

J Scavo: In the ’90s, I managed bands and then I went to Hollywood Records to run their artist development department, and then I sort of saw the digital revolution on the horizon and I sought out a job that would give me some experience in that realm. And I got the job to be the General Manager and run Myspace’s joint venture label with Interscope. It was housed at Myspace, all the employees were Myspace, but if and when things went well, Interscope could upstream them. And they did upstream a few of the artists we worked on. Myspace Records was an idea that Tom had, I think at the urging of Interscope. When I got there, there was one employee who was really just an admin person. I think there were some artists that were signed. But there wasn’t much action ’til I got there and built the staff.

Josh Brooks [Marketing and Programming Chief for Myspace]: I was managing Queens Of The Stone Age and the Distillers and Melissa Auf Der Maur. But when my company was acquired by the Firm, I reconnected with two friends at Myspace. I knew Josh Berman and Jamie Kantrowitz, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley with me. And they showed me, “The one thing that’s connecting everyone here on Myspace is music, and we need someone who gets it and who has those relationships.” All my bands were already using Myspace, and all the people I knew were using the platform as well. Musicians were organically building their own audiences. So, when the opportunity came to be a part of that connective hub, I said, “Great!” I built out that group from just a handful of folks to about 25 by the time I left four years later.

Jon Pikus: I was at Interscope doing A&R for a little over two years and then my dear friend and mentor Nancy Walker brought me to Columbia Records and I had a good run there for eight years. I never really wanted to leave Columbia Records. What happened was the regime changed and all the people I was working with left around 2005. It was time for me to move on and I was trying to find a new opportunity and this Myspace thing came up. Basically, my manager said, “Myspace wants to start a record label. They don’t have any employees yet. It’s a joint venture with Interscope” — he knew my history with Interscope — and he said, “You’re the guy for this, but you have to go interview with Tom and get him to say yes.”

Josh Brooks: I joined Myspace about five months before the News Corp acquisition. The first year really was a honeymoon phase. It was great because we had access to some really interesting creative projects, and there was nothing in the market like us. Within News Corp, it was an eye-opening experience; social media was just starting, but the sharing of media, clips, music was something marketing teams were just beginning to grasp. The film studios were quick to use Myspace to launch film franchises like Paranormal ActivitySaw, and Borat. As time went on, financial targets and ad supported programs were prioritized, and that’s where the squirreliness of a big media company relationship comes into play.

Jon Pikus: I went to the old Myspace office in Santa Monica before they moved to Beverly Hills and sat with Tom. What I thought would be a quick half-hour meeting turned into three hours of him and I sitting together behind his desk surfing from one artist’s top eight to another. And he said, “I’d like you to be the guy and start this label.” So they hired me and pretty much gave me a laptop and a cubicle and said, “Start the label,” [Laughs] with no real parameters.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Maria Elena Fernandez, Jake Bittle, Eva Holland, Naz Riahi, and Terra Fondriest.

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1. If I Wrote a Coronavirus Episode

Maria Elena Fernandez | Vulture | April 2, 2020 | 27 minutes (6,812 words)

“Tina Fey, Mike Schur, and 35 more TV writers on what their characters would do in a pandemic.”

2. On a Wing and a Mayor

Jake Bittle | The Baffler | March 30, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,274 words)

Are mayors the heroes of 21st century politics, or is going from getting the snow shoveled and the sewer lines fixed to managing a global pandemic a leap too far?

3. The Frontier Couple Who Chose Death Over Life Apart

Eva Holland | Outside | March 30, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,945 words)

“Artist Eric Bealer was living the remote, rugged good life in coastal Alaska with his wife, Pam, an MS sufferer, when they made a dramatic decision: to exit this world together, leaving behind precise instructions for whoever entered their cabin first. Eva Holland investigates the mysteries and meaning of an adventurous couple who charted their own way out.”

4. All That Is Lost and All That Is Remembered

Naz Riahi | Catapult | April 1, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,409 words)

On the 30th anniversary of her Navy captain father’s political execution, Naz Riahi recalls her love for him, and reveals a persistent grief that is always with her.

5. Ozark Life

Terra Fondriest | The Bitter Southerner | March 24, 2020 | 13 minutes (3,305 words)

“A photo essay of the intimate beauty of daily life in rural Arkansas.”

Greta Thunberg: “We Just Have to Care About Each Other More”

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM - MARCH 06: Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg (C) holds a banner as she takes part in a "Youth Strike 4 Climate" protest against global warming and climate change on March 6, 2020 in Brussels, Belgium. (Photo by Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

At Rolling Stone, Stephen Rodrick profiles teen climate activist Greta Thunberg. Thunberg won’t fly, for climate reasons, and her willingness to make personal sacrifices for the Earth gets Rodrick thinking about his own influence on the planet’s future. The teen’s message is not all doom and gloom, it’s about taking action, now: she’s working tirelessly to influence politicians and decision makers because we still have eight years to reduce carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic damage to Earth.

My Greta travels featured a Vancouver-Zurich round trip and then an L.A.-Stockholm trip. In between, I fly from Vancouver to L.A. for another story. It’s the job, but I take stock in horror and calculate that my three flights burn more carbon than the yearly usage of the average citizen of more than 200 countries. I torch the atmosphere so I can hear others praise the girl who won’t fly.

“The phrase ‘A little child shall lead them’ has come to mind more than once,” Al Gore tells me in Davos, before sharing his favorite Greta moment. It was at the U.N. summit last fall. “She said to the assembled world leaders, ‘You say you understand the science, but I don’t believe you. Because if you did and then you continue to act as you do, that would mean you’re evil. And I don’t believe that.’” Gore shook his head in wonderment. “Wow.” He then gives a history lesson: “There have been other times in human history when the moment a morally-based social movement reached the tipping point was the moment when the younger generation made it their own. Here we are.”

Somehow, it was Greta turning her weakness into strength that made her a global icon. According to Malena, Greta fell silent after seeing a film in school depicting floating armies of plastic infesting our oceans. Other students were horrified, but quickly returned to their iPhones and talk of upcoming ski trips. Not Greta. She fell silent and obsessed over the climate’s demise.

“I felt very alone that I was the only one who seemed to be worried about this,” Greta tells me in Stockholm. “I was the only one left in this sort of bubble. Everyone else could just continue with their lives as usual, and I couldn’t do that.”

Greta read all she could and sometimes went online and battled with climate deniers, oft exclaiming triumphantly, “He blocked me,” to her parents. She eventually wrote an essay on the climate crisis for a Swedish newspaper. Eco-activists contacted her, and Greta mentioned the inspiration she took from the school strikes after the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, and suggested a climate version. The activists showed little interest. Greta didn’t care and slowly broke out of her cocoon.

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The Messy Making of a Nearly Perfect Hip-Hop Album

Al Pereira/Getty Images/Michael Ochs Archives

Twenty-five years after its release, Ol’ Diry Bastard’s solo debut Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version still sounds as fresh as ever. Hip-hop rewrote the musical language and pushed the limits of the English language the way only truly revolutionary art can. Then ODB came along and reinvented hip-hop. For Pitchfork’s weeky Sunday Review, writer Sheldon Pearce revisits Ol Dirty’s musical masterpiece.

As his Wu-Tang band-member Method Man said, “there was no father to ODB’s style: Without musical precedents, he leaned into aberration.” His original style came partly from being an unpredictable personality, and that meant an unpredictable life. “The album took nearly two years to make,” Pearce writes in his review, “because of this fitful approach. ODB was surrounded by a small team doing its damndest to keep him recording, but he could not be collected and he would not be…” Pearce awards ODB’s album a 9.3 on Pitchfork’s 10-point scale. I’d go further and say it’s perfect. I’d also rank Pearce’s review-essay at a perfect 10. This is what the best music writing looks like: incisive, lively, revealing, surprising, words deserving of their subject.

Those methods required several measures to wring an entire album out of Dirty. RZA was the hands-off architect. Buddha Monk was the handler, body man, and engineer, tasked with getting ODB prepped and into the studio, and making sure his vocals sounded right. Mastering engineer Tom Coyne was dubbed “the referee” in the liner notes for breaking up fights. Elektra A&R Dante Ross had the demanding task of shepherding the album to completion amid chaos. “I knew I had to get it to the finish line because there are times in life when you know you only have that moment in time, and you gotta get there,” Ross said of the Dirty Version sessions. “I had to get there, ’cause I strongly suspected that would not happen again.”

ODB’s volatility created only a small window for capturing his output. He was anti-prolific, so inefficient in his recording style that it made The Dirty Version even more of a marvel—not just catching lightning in a bottle but harnessing its electricity to power a generator. It’s impossible to overstate how much his jolting vocals jump out and strike you. On “Don’t U Know,” he lurches along, his singing barely adhering to melody and meter. On “Hippa to da Hoppa,” he punctuates every bar with a grunt, then becomes conversational, then does some straight-up showerhead crooning. Across chest-thumpers like “Brooklyn Zoo” and “Cuttin’ Headz,” he becomes a caricature, a monster of pure id born of New York City’s sordid underbelly.

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