Music on F L O T I S S E R I E 🕳️ 🐇

Wed, 04 Nov 2026 14:59:53 -0600

Writing Slowly on how writing is ultimately about thinking. I’d add to this, only to say that having a reading practice with breadth and depth makes for better writing. Also, a great obituary for Juan Atkins, Detroit hero.

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 16:11:45 -0500

🎵 : Streets of Bakersfield - Los Hermanos Mendoza

RIP Dolores Huerta.

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:32:04 -0500

🎵 : Transmission - Joy Division

One of my longtime besties was a hyper-local, late-night radio DJ in the early 90s, which gave our entire friend group a legacy of sonic mess (complimentary). Much love for local radio. See also: regional music rabbit holes.

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 22:30:07 -0500

🎵 : Cardi B’s latest entry in the NPR Tiny Desk series

I book-maxxed in 2026 thanks to finally caving and buying an eReader. No, I don’t want to talk about it, and yes, it turns out I like to read a lot more these days when it’s on a screen.

My energy for books is flagging after a speed run, though I expect to finish another 2-3 before the end of the year. I am enjoying Searches: selfhood in the digital age by Vauhini Vara — she is doing something similar to what I’m noodling with here, arranging a vignette of personal reflections with common-place book-keeping. It also reminds me a little of Ullman, in that she captures the texture of a tech era through first-person writing (interspersed with some revealing chatter using ChatGPT). Related: getting cozy with Ethan Mollick.

I am also 100% committed to finishing the Edmund Fitzgerald book in November, as assigned by Beloved Book Club. There will be jokes.

Music note: I was given two music assignments in recent weeks: my team directed me to listen to the latest Taylor Swift album, and my kiddo curated a playlist of Lucki songs with specific instructions to listen to him using headphones. I liked pieces and parts of both artists quite a lot, playlists updated accordingly.

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 09:50:12 -0500

Go Brewers! And a news clip of Foenem talking about his viral song.

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 17:56:33 -0500

🎵: Walking on Thin Ice - Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono: a feminist analysis by Cara Kulwicki, former blogger at Feministe. I was worried this series was lost to time, but it turns out it’s hosted on Ono’s site. Kismet.

Get a cool Yoko Ono shirt from Bread and Water Printshop. See also: the feminist blog cohorts remapping.

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 17:09:00 -0500

🎵 : Neva Play - Megan thee Stallion

EJ Dickson on the sport of online harassment, by NPR’s It’s Been a Minute.

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 07:25:09 -0500

🎵 : Who is He (And What is He to You)? - Bill Withers

Steve Albini on the problem with music, originally printed in 1993 in The Baffler, republished in 2007. It reads from a particular time and place in the music industry.

Albini’s 20 favorite songs from Far Out magazine

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 13:54:28 -0500

Some blog notes:

I’m doing most of my writing here via iPhone apps, and tinkering later. This means I’m making a lot of post-publish edits, buyer beware. (Welcome to the indie web where things are forever unfinished.)
Remember that what makes songs, poems, writing, books, and games mimetic - and websites and platforms - is that they function something like a mirror. Their meanings emerge through interaction and reflection, and you drive (unless an algorithm, or author, or designer, or coder, or instructor drives), while you iterate through your own perspectives and relationships. And today, virality tends to happen when something produces outrage, especially when units of content are removed from their original, and often more local, context.
Original blogs were considered something in the spirit of “problem-based learning” praxis, and pro-tech, fwiw. A lot of early ed tech started here, all in good faith and tech optimism. Today many blogs are self-marketing machines, but that’s not what I intend to do here. I don’t want a new, glittering platform, I enjoy several already; I’m here to ponder and learn while welcoming comment and critique within open, defined web parameters.
I’m rusty in this area, though I hear there’s a new Freire documentary online. The neighbors are hosting a yard party with a group showing of Minecraft after dark. I hear kids laughing through the roar of cicadas. There will be a fire. Life is good.
In my experience: when I read to diagnose rather than understand, I have probably lost the plot.

Loose Ends

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:48:51 -0500

🎵 : Pere Ubu - Humor Me
🎵 : Party Dozen - Wake in Might

I happened to catch an up-and-coming band called Yolk at a local festival, and it took me down some regional music rabbit holes. I suspect the local music scene has some juice.

I’m old, but I’ve heard enough about basement shows to know Madison has a growing, thriving live music scene outside the usual venues. The kids are stressed and pressed, and it seems like they’d rather be pressed against each other than locked online with us. Can’t blame them. Yolk hangs with Milwaukee band Social Cig, who have been touring the region and have all the ingredients to go large.

The shared energy across these scenes is generative. Weird and lovely industrial, metal and punk bands are everywhere in the Midwest. The warehouse scene in my neighborhood turned out several excellent groups, from Crazy Doberman to Data Unknown, and brought real punk and avant-garde acts through an otherwise sleepy community. I’ve been thinking about them since I discovered Party Dozen earlier this year, who come out of Australia’s warehouse scene.

I mentioned in a previous post that I grew up in (greater-, greater-) Chicagoland, on the Jorjiana side of the ombré. In my day, house shows brought Freddie Gibbs and Daniel Knox through.

In other news: I heard there was a mosh pit at the local high school Homecoming, so I asked the kids what they mosh to today. Turns out, they love Foenem’s hits celebrating the Milwaukee Central Library and the Milwaukee County Zoo. Talk about zeitgeist. I’ve been watching this scene since 414BigFrank went viral last year.

1000 Mountains: a Gary, Indiana, reading list

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:32:06 -0500

🎵: A Thousand Mountains - Freddie Gibbs and The Alchemist

Yesterday I cut through Gary to get around a traffic jam on the toll road and picked up the Dan Ryan and the Skyway. Since living in Madison, I’ve made some version of that drive more times than I can count. I grew up south of Gary, at the edge of what a colleague called “the Chicago ombré,” and in my twenties my friends and I spent our weekends in The Region, thrifting our way across Lake County and hitting 18+ hip hop clubs in East Chicago. (King Von measured the same gradient from the city side in “Took Her to the O.”) To many, Gary is the city you drive through on the way to somewhere else.

The Skyway has a long political history: Chicago built it in 1958 with revenue bonds, then the bonds defaulted in 1963, and the city spent the next few decades catching up on deferred maintenance, according to Louise Nelson Dyble’s history of the road. In 2005, the Daley administration leased it for 99 years to Cintra and Macquarie for $1.83 billion, making it the first existing toll road in the country to be privatized. Eleven years later, the consortium sold the lease to three Canadian pension funds for $2.8 billion. The crossing now costs $8.10 in a car, and CBS Chicago reports that tolls have gone up more than 200 percent since the lease, about three and a half times the rate of inflation.

Indiana saw the incentives in this arrangement and followed along. In 2006, then-governor Mitch Daniels leased the Indiana Toll Road to the same Macquarie-Cintra group for 75 years and $3.8 billion, and he used the money to pay for Major Moves, his statewide highway program. Stateline’s 2012 retrospective called the lease one of the most divisive things Daniels did as governor. The bill passed without a single House Democrat, and the Region hated it. At a town hall in Crown Point, one resident told Daniels the deal amounted to taxation without representation. The operator went into Chapter 11 in 2014, and an Australian fund bought the lease the next year for $5.7 billion. A big share of the original money built I-69 between Evansville and the Crane Naval Base, at the other end of the state. When Eric Holcomb later approved a truck toll hike in exchange for another $1 billion, he had to deny in public that the Region was once again paying for highways its drivers would never use.

The state keeps the paperwork on deals like these. The Indiana State Archives opened a new downtown building in Indianapolis on Thursday after 25 years in a “temporary” warehouse on East 30th Street, a former RCA record-stamping plant whose roof leaked partly because people shot holes in it. An old combination safe in the new building holds the state’s original constitutions, Jim Jones’s church incorporation papers, and Donald Trump’s application for a casino in Gary. Upstairs, a conservator expects to spend four to six weeks piecing together a Porter County survey map that had broken into fragments. The reading room is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, and the staff asks you to make an appointment so they can pull the boxes before you arrive.

Gary has been on the wrong end of these deals since before it had a name. Paige Williams’s New Yorker piece on Gary and U.S. Steel asks whether a company town once called “the most miserable city in America” can remake itself. U.S. Steel founded Gary in 1906 to house the workers for its mills, and in 1920 Carl Sandburg published a poem about how the people running the place saw those workers.

Freddie Gibbs grew up on Gary’s east side, and Jeff Weiss has profiled him twice. The 2021 profile in The Ringer catches Gibbs around his Grammy nomination for Alfredo and opens on a 2009 visit to his Van Nuys apartment, where Gibbs told Weiss that robbing freight trains was a popular hobby back home. Weiss’s earlier piece, The Miseducation of Freddie Gibbs, adds that one of Gibbs’s teachers got fired for robbing them too.

(Weiss, bless him, professes not to understand the rabbit metaphor present throughout Gibbs’ work, yet confidently persists.)

Gibbs’s father, Warren Tipton, spent about twenty years on the Gary police force and later sang with the Chi-Lites. He died in May, and AllHipHop’s obituary places him in the same Gary music scene that produced the Jacksons. That detail stuck with me because my ex-father-in-law was a police officer and chief of police downstate during the same years, and also played drums in a local band. Jamelle Bouie has historically described police departments as “jobs for the boys,” a steady public paycheck handed to working-class men, and that fits both of their careers better than anything about their relationships to law and order. In towns where the mills were shedding jobs, a badge was one of the few paychecks that came with a pension, and a man who could sing still needed that safety net.

Policing in the Region has much uglier chapters than that. The Chicago Sun-Times has spent years covering the federal case against the Sin City Deciples, a motorcycle club founded in Gary in 1967. One member admitted he worked as a Gary police chaplain while killing two men, one of them the son of a former Gary police chief. The Chicago Reader’s Tiger King of the Midwest profiles Roy “Roy Boy” Cooper, who ran a tattoo shop called the Badlands with Bengal tigers in cages next to the chairs. Tattooing was illegal in Indiana then, and Cooper’s lawyer reportedly steered him to Gary because the police had bigger problems than a tattoo shop — as long as it paid its taxes. Media Burn has raw footage of Cooper setting a leashed tiger on a pool table while his wife runs through the rest of their animals, which included a grizzly bear and a baboon. In the video, Lady Cooper recommends taking the animals out in public, to the grocery store, socializing them on the locals.

Anderson went through the same collapse with auto parts. General Motors moved in during the 1920s and eventually ran two divisions there, Delco-Remy for electrical systems and Guide Lamp for headlights. By the time Jon Alpert made Dirty Driving: Thundercars of Indiana for HBO in 2008, a town that once had 33,000 GM jobs had empty factories and shuttered stores, and what was left of it went to the Anderson Speedway every Friday night. The Herald Bulletin caught up with one of the film’s drivers, Sammy Hawkins, as he flew home from the New York premiere to a Firestone job in Noblesville that he expected to lose. His line in the film is that Anderson doesn’t make cars anymore, but it can still race them and wreck them.

Music in Gary started in the mills. Joe Jackson ran a crane and played guitar in a band called the Falcons, which never got a record deal, so he kept the mill job and trained his sons into the Jackson 5 instead. Their first contract came from Steeltown Records, a Gary label, in 1967, and “Big Boy” was a local hit before Motown signed them.

Detroit turned its losses into techno. Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson learned Kraftwerk and Parliament from a late-night DJ called the Electrifyin’ Mojo, and by 1987 more than half of Detroit’s manufacturing, retail, and wholesale base was gone, as SPIN reported in 1998. Midstory’s Built to Boom traces the line from the assembly plants through Motown to techno, and May describes sampling industrial noise, traffic, and construction into his tracks.

The techno ran straight into the rap Jorjiana grew up on. NPR’s piece on how Detroit and Flint became havens for rap dark horses credits the producer Helluva with a “basement sound” of ominous pianos and synth stabs, which he built by crossing West Coast gangsta rap with Detroit techno, and it describes the Flint rappers as a crew of flippant, vulgar jokers. Flintside’s history of the Flint scene shows how a co-sign from Detroit’s Peezy lifted Rio Da Yung OG and everyone around him. Lil Yachty spent years showing up on Michigan records, and he later vouched for Jorjiana too.

Jorjiana is 21, and a single mom, and from Michigan City, just down the shore from Gary. The Times of Northwest Indiana profiled her recently after “ILBB2” took off, and her Complex interview covers a childhood spent moving between relatives while her parents struggled with addiction, bouncing through the greater area in foster care. By her account, her music career started with screwing around with her friends around town. She and her friends were bored during the pandemic, so they freestyled in her car, and she posted the results, doing actual numbers. She told Justin Moran that her friends talked her into cross-posting the TikTok clips to Instagram, which she barely used, and that’s where the A&Rs found her. At the time she didn’t know what an A&R was. In a clip Complex posted, she admits she doesn’t know who Freddie Gibbs is either, so what ties her to Gary is the shoreline more than any influence. She should get familiar with his catalog (and a metronome!).

Plenty of good bands started as friends goofing off: Devo began as a satirical art project at Kent State, and the Maels studied graphic design and film at UCLA before Sparks. Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers spends a lot of time on how they built their act for Top of the Pops closeups. Both bands treated the dominant screen of their time as part of the instrument. Jorjiana’s screen is the short-form feed, and I’ve been watching her work it for the last year or so: snippets of songs previewed, clips pushed to every platform, a freestyle on On The Radar at the end of 2024 that brought more than a dozen labels calling, a GloRilla remix, and co-sign from Lil Yachty. Caitlin Clark, slanted.

If you want to know what Gary is doing now, read Capital B Gary, which covers the city more consistently than anyone else. Start with their feature on Koney King, a Broadway diner that has been serving chili for more than a century, and then look through their 2024 year in photos, which has residents cleaning up parks on the East Side and crowds on the beach for the eclipse.

I, myself, had a run-in with a white supremacist Indiana biker gang in my twenties in West Lafayette, also connected to a money-laundering tattoo shop. Someday I’ll commit the story to paper.

Other notes: Akron went through its own version a decade later, with rubber instead of steel. Midstory’s history of how Akron became “the new Liverpool” describes Devo, Tin Huey, the Bizarros, and the Rubber City Rebels as kids from factory families trying not to follow their fathers into the plants. The scene got its home during one of the longest rubber workers’ strikes in the city’s history, when the Rubber City Rebels took over a rubber workers’ bar called the Crypt, as PBS Western Reserve tells it in It’s Everything, and Then It’s Gone. Chris Smith’s 2024 Devo documentary picks up the story from Kent State and follows the band into the early days of MTV.

A recent article on the Indiana Quaker community’s place in the Underground Railroad.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 20:56:59 -0500

Cap Times on Electric Heart, the new EP by Madison songwriter Whitney Mann.

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:53:00 -0500

In honor of Dolly (rest in power), some links:

Dolly Parton’s America: This nine-episode podcast offers a deep dive into the Dollyverse, covering Dolly’s biography and lore and her role as an icon within a broader story about American ideals. This series swept the best-of lists of 2019.
Professor and NYT contributor Tressie McMillan Cottom has long been the public’s expert on Dolly Parton, and her memorial tribute to Dolly does not disappoint. She reads Dolly as an auteur who held up the juxtapositions of American culture in a way that made them safely legible to the rest of us. Bonus read: Dr. McMillan Cottom on the enduring culture of blonde.
A cool embroidery of Dolly Parton by Jenny Hart.

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:33:15 -0500

I can’t believe it’s mid-August. I’m terribly behind on my reading list. Still, I did want to draw attention to this entertaining and extremely shareable article on the glory of Record Head, a legendary record store in Milwaukee. Make sure to watch their public access TV commercials at the link.

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:26:32 -0500

Garbage Day uses Jimothy to trace how virality works on the internet of 2026. Related: this story on how the algorithm has prevented us from producing a single “song of the summer.”

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:14:10 -0500

Henry Rollins and Ian Mackaye have taken on a critical calling: preserving the legacy of The Cramps for posterity.

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:17:42 -0500

I’ve been on vacation, which means I’ve been reading my fool face off. I’ve also caught several great live shows lately, including an incredible set by Australian no-wave noise band Party Dozen. It’s a two-person band and the saxophonist sings directly into the bell of her horn – energetic work.

Thu, 14 May 2026 09:51:40 -0500

Did poptimism kill rock n’ roll?

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:05:00 -0500

I’m seeing grunge icons L7 in concert with Amyl and the Sniffers this summer and have been reading a lot about the ’90s indie rock era in the meantime. One frame I keep encountering positions grunge as regional punk musicians navigating a global, corporate pop mainstream – awkward, crass and vulgar, but in the big leagues all the same. Reading the Auf der Maur bio reminded me that a lot of the punk scene was steeped in ideas about social roles and archetypes and oriented around upending them – or at least giving them a healthy challenge. This subculture was also populated by poets and artists in the classical sense. The retro polish around ’90s pop culture has flattened that texture, but it was genuinely a thing.

The era also introduced the woman rock star, introducing women who wrote and performed with full creative authority, not just as muses, groupies or singers. The reception from fans and critics was mixed, and the discourse around Courtney Love in particular was gross and volatile. Most of the positions she was vilified for read as entirely unremarkable today. I was a teenager during all of this, too young to meaningfully participate, but the aesthetic dominated my early adolescence. At the time I loved Tori Amos and PJ Harvey like kids now love Chappell Roan. What I forgot over time is how literary the era was, and how romantic, both in the literary sense and in relation to the New Romantics of the 1980’s. Big culture lessons for a starry-eyed teenager.

L7’s music is not that deep – it’s metal for meatheads, by design – but their politics and presence were. While poking around, I found that L7 was one of four bands featured in the 1995 documentary film Not Bad For a Girl, which was co-produced by Love and Kurt Cobain. The film focused on several all-female indie punk bands and won Best Documentary at the New York Underground Film Festival in 1996. I’ve never heard of it before now. It got middling reviews from critics then, and it’s not available streaming in full in English, unless you’re viewing it here at this dubious Google Drive link – which I will do and report back.

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:17:46 -0500

A nostalgic read on how music nerdery bloomed online.

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:16:08 -0500

Watching the fallout: Fans discovered that the band Geese benefitted from a hefty marketing campaign. Folks are debating whether this makes Geese a “psy-op” or merely “sell-outs”, to use an old term of art. Meanwhile the marketing firm behind the push is getting a ton of attention in its own right.

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:44:53 -0500

Garbage Day on what makes something cool to Gen Z, and how this is impacted by the degradation of “pillars of coolness” in previous generations like culture rags and MTV. GD predicts that “cool” will be measured by lack of polish and “how many human beings left their house to experience it.”

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:21:29 -0500

What the internet was made for: A Chicago music fan secretly recorded over 10,000 live concerts from Nirvana to Sonic Youth to Spoon, and has made them all available online.

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:34:00 -0500

Taste the Music is a new audio series exploring why artists are driven to create. The first episode features storytelling and songwriting by friend of the blog Whitney Mann, where she chronicles her experience getting “the yips” onstage, and how she worked through it and picked up her guitar again.

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:05:06 -0500

This post is mostly an excuse to talk about my latest playlist: Digital Animal. This one consists of about 200 songs across genres, all reflecting on our human relationship to science and technology, futurism, digital culture and the internet.

When I’m chewing over a big idea, I like to compile resources in and around that idea to help support my thinking. Embracing my angst about artificial intelligence, I started compiling songs that reach back to the early 20th century, tapping into prior generations’ anxieties about telephones, television and early networking technology, adding more contemporary concerns as I went. The playlist runs from David Bowie and Blue Öyster Cult and Kraftwerk to Zapp and Radiohead, then forward into modern takes on social media, cell phones, and the internet from Missy Elliott, Gillian Welch and Charli XCX.

I like a playlist because it’s convenient, and because songs are one place where meaning and feeling are created simultaneously, and because it’s easy to spot salient patterns across disparate sources. Scholars in interdisciplinary studies have long argued that you cannot fully understand a thing without understanding what it feels like to live with it, and that cultural analysis may get you there faster than surveys will anyway. Meanwhile most writing about technology separates feelings from form and function. Art and music compress all three, and have the potential to surface ideas that professional and institutional language can’t. Art and culture frequently peg an issue down before emerging best practices are formalized in business and academia.

For anyone working in technology communications, that lag between culture and practice has practical consequences. The language we use to describe technical systems shapes what people can think and do about those systems. An institutional frame — efficiency, access, innovation, value — consistently misses important dynamics that people living inside those systems are experiencing as users and as people. Art keeps the human subject inside the frame, functioning as both anecdote and data.

Plus, it’s fun and we should collectively think about art as much as possible. So, treat every song like a portal.

What does it mean to be both digital and animal? Some observations:

Grief and sadness sit next to fun and ecstasy. Many of the older songs see computers as friend and companion, treating tech with a kind of tender curiosity, a toy that makes you happy as much as a medium for expressing longing and desire. These nevertheless tend to be layered with a sense of loneliness, a minor key, a dynamic that bears out through user research.
Between the era of telephones and the digital web, there are a charming number of songs about beepers, beeping and pagers. I’m hopelessly devoted to Missy’s “Beep Me 911” right now.
Recent songs are concerned about understanding identity and the self under the pressure of social media. Songs talking about social media persistently trawl the gap between your real identity and your public identity and personal brand, and how this dynamic can hollow out your relationships and quality of life. Songwriters like Jazmine Sullivan consistently refer to tech as a place of escapism, like retreating into the creation of a new Tinder profile while avoiding reflection on your last relationship. Comparison is the product, and sometimes it stinks.
Lots of songs from peak elder Millennial/Gen X songwriters are about watching the old analog world being swallowed by the new. The older the songs, the more aware they are of the machine across the room, and the more they lean into allegory. The contemporary songs don’t worry about the boundary between human and machine much at all, likely reflecting the high level of technical integration (and acceptance) we live with right now.

Is fretting about our relationship to tech and industry part of the human condition? Or is there something specific to tech that accelerates these anxieties and impulses?

A few favs:

I’m enjoying almost everything from the band Automatic. One of the band members is the daughter of the drummer from Bauhaus, and their work is heavily influenced by 80s era synth pop and new wave. I have several of their songs represented on the list, and particularly like “Black Box” off their 2025 album.
Erykah Badu’s “Cel U Lar Device,” which positions the phone as an instrument of interpersonal surveillance, has been on rotation in my house for (cough) years. It is also a reinterpretation of Drake’s hit “Hotline Bling,” itself forever memorialized as a popular meme format.
The Talking Heads’ 1988 “(Nothing but) Flowers” imagines a sunny life after the fall of industrial civilization. For the doomer, afropessimist take on this theme, check out Nina Simone’s cover of “22nd Century.”
Sophie’s “Faceshopping” is about the negative pressures of cultivating a public persona and brand, and tips a hat to our relatively new ability to use science and technology to curate a physical appearance that matches your internal (and digital) one.
Nobody talks about Ladytron anymore.

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 10:58:00 -0500

Like Rickrolling on steroids: I didn’t even know P2P music file downloads were still a thing, but of course, and the scene had a big week recently when somebody trolled SoulSeek by generating a bunch of popular songs sung in Homer Simpson’s voice, then quietly polluted the platform by offering the AI generated Homer files up to other users. Someone then set up a digital radio station of all the Homer Simpson songs called D’oh Radio. Here’s more reporting from Gizmodo.

There is a long tradition of Simpsonifying things that go online, so this is the latest iteration. We observed Homer covers going viral on social in 2024 and 2025.

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 14:05:14 -0500

Yet another playlist added to my playlists page.

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 17:35:28 -0500

RIP D’Angelo. And a good occasion to reread this excellent 2012 profile discussing fame, religion, and how his status as a sex symbol in his youth negatively impacted D’Angelo’s self-esteem - and ultimately his career.

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 13:50:05 -0500

Still maintaining this sprawling 1200+ song playlist of indie music across genres, focused on women vocalists and players. open.spotify.com/playlist/…

Girl in a Band

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 09:19:07 -0500

A quick read by a singular voice, heavy on descriptions of the New York art and music scene of the 90s. Like many punk memoirs, it’s a tribute to the many names that made the movement and a memorial for a city that no longer exists. Gordon’s voice is kind and bold, curious and smart. Her descriptions of growing up in LA and coming of age in New York are painterly and poetic. Her takes are generous for all but one person: her ex-husband.

All my respect to her for opening and closing the books with her raw reflections on Thurston’s mundane and deeply uncool betrayal.

Finished reading: Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon 📚

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 17:58:25 -0500

Nicki does party songs, Megan does praxis.

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 10:29:35 -0500

I’m v excited about the PJ Harvey Tiny Desk concert out today. 🎵

PJ Harvey is one of my favorite musicians because she is a weirdo and an artist in the same vein as a Kate Bush, or even a Bob Dylan, who concentrates on mythology, atmosphere, artistry and sense of place. For a lot of my life, my fav album was “Rid of Me.” It was present in a lot of formative moments as a kid and still resonates for me as an adult, despite some of its flourishes not aging well. As an adult, “Let England Shake” genuinely moved me. She draws on music and poetry traditions to explore what it means for England to be an empire, sitting atop a throne of bones and bloodshed. It’s ambitious and dark and sounds incredible, in part thanks to her use of the autoharp (yes, seriously).

She’s also among the artists who made a hard left in my musical interests as a kid, when she and John Parish released “Dance Hall at Louse Point.” This album was called career suicide when it came out because it is so atonal and avant garde. As an album, listening from beginning to end, it’s delightfully sinister. It could be a sister or a cousin album to Nick Cave’s “Murder Ballads.”

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 11:06:21 -0500

For the old heads, “No Alternative,” the 1993 AIDS benefit compilation album, turns 30 today. www.stereogum.com/1541231/n…

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 21:10:34 -0500

Made the mistake of telling my family I’ve had “Like a Rock” in my head all day, and now my family is streaming Bob Seger videos and old Chevy commercials.