The PC has been fixed and updated (yay!) but in the meantime I’ve fallen a little behind in my writing (boo!) so I’ve been frantically trying to catch up (blerg!). Doing what I can when I can, though, and making sure I don’t stress out over it all. And I’m not stressed! Which is good, right? Even when I’m trying to squeeze some words out before or after a busy shift at the Day Job?
Anyway. Been listening to a lot of new tunes lately, such as the new boygenius record (fittingly entitled ‘the record’), and it’s quite good! It’s been getting a lot of positive press and high-grade reviews. And let’s be honest, a group with Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker in it has no business being half-assed now. Three phenomenal songwriters writing flawless alternapop. I highly recommend it.
WELP. Looks like the PC in Spare Oom has gotten to the point where I need to a factory reset. I probably needed to do it anyway as it’s been acting up in various ways over the last several months. Nothing big…until now. Previously the internet would disconnect, or I’d suddenly be super low on memory, but lately weird things have been happening like one single program eating up 98% of the CPU usage, or File Explorer seriously lagging.
I mean, it could very well be that a recent update got hosed (such as a driver download crashing due to said internet disconnect) or I somehow acquired some malware somewhere along the line. Mind you, other than the odd problems, everything ran totally fine once I ran a few cleaning apps. Until it happened again.
So anyways, this means that yesterday afternoon I decided to do take the plunge and do that factory reset after all. I’m not too worried about it, considering that this is the very first time I’ve done it for this PC in the three (four?) years I’ve had it. Having problems at this PC’s age is rather impressive, actually.
Which sadly means that I’ve given you this boring post instead of something about music! Oh well. Hopefully things will be back to normal soon!
Sorry for the lack of quality entries this week! Meant to get something up here today but my PC had an update that didn’t update correctly and it’s causing everything to be kind of wonky. Going to run some diagnostics and turn the unit off while I go to work today to give it a rest. Hopefully it’ll be back to normal this evening.
It’s that time of year: throwing Revolver on the speakers and doing our taxes. I’ve been playing that album every year when I file, and this time out I have the added enjoyment of listening to the full Super Deluxe Edition while doing it!
I’ll hopefully have something more substantial to post on Thursday!
Back in the spring of 1986, I remember being excited whenever I heard a Beatles song on the radio, especially if it was one of my favorites like “Rain”. (The song in fact does show up on one of my ‘radio tapes’ from summer of the previous year.) Back then, the idea of a song being twenty years old felt like a lifetime ago, its release five years before I’d been born. When you’re growing up, songs like that just seem so…distant.
Here in 2023, the music of twenty years previous was the music I listened to in the basement of my family’s house while I wrote The Persistence of Memories, what made the mixtapes I’d play on my commute to and from the candle warehouse, what cds I’d buy at Newbury Comics in downtown Amherst. This is music that still shows up on my playlists, like Sleeping with Ghosts and Hail to the Thief and Absolution and The Matrix Reloaded.
I think about this a lot, now that I’m older and especially now that the history of rock music has expanded and evolved since its early days in the late 50s (at least when it was starting to be called that, at any rate). I read a lot of music histories and biographies these days and this sort of things slides into the consciousness of my mind.
The fact that I was around and paying attention when so much popular music history was made, from the late 70s onwards. That when I started paying attention to what was being played on the radio as a preteen, FM had finally sprinted past AM as the most popular radio band (around 1978), music videos became more than just a rare specialized form of promotion (late 1981), and so many of its players and originators were still around, still clubbing and still releasing music.
This doesn’t make me feel old, far from it. Quite the opposite. It makes me feel glad and lucky as hell that I’ve been around to witness as much of it as I have.
I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say about this down the road, but for now I’m just going to say that this is partly why I’m still as much of an obsessive music nerd as I am. Not for fear of missing out, but because I’m utterly fascinated by so much of this history as it’s happening. New sounds, new productions, new imagery. As well as the circularity of styles; the resurgence of shoegaze, the evolution of electronic music, the new generations of punk, and everything in between.
I seem to have finally caught a cold and gotten a fever for the first time since I started the Day Job last March. That’s actually a pretty good run! I’ve had a few days where I was running on fumes (these were usually the midday 11:30 to 8 shifts) but this is the first time in quite a while that I called in sick and taken the day off! I also have today off as well, and hoping that the cold/fever has already broken by the time this posts, as A also has the day off and we were planning on going out to do stuff.
Either way…going to take the rest of the week off and recuperate. See you next week!
Nothing all that new to say today, sorry. This week’s Day Job schedule has been kind of weird and full of mid-shift hours, and I’m trying to make it a new habit not to force myself through blog posts and writing sessions if I don’t have the time or the spoons for it. Being healthy and all that.
In the meantime, please enjoy this new tune from my favorite super-local band. That building on the album cover is about three streets away from my apartment, and I have walked past that red Karmann Ghia many times!
Conformity is a hell of a drug. I’ve said that before and I still stick by it.
Conservatives drafting up laws outlawing transgender care, targeting LGBT+ people with “Christian”-based hatred disguised as ‘moral concern’, outlawing drag shows, banning books, avoiding major health concerns by lying about them, bending the rules to gather more votes, chasing away the homeless instead of helping them, embracing gun culture to the point of pornography, refusing monetary assistance for those who need it, hating on anyone who isn’t cis and white and rich…need I go on? It’s like the fucking Reagan/Thatcher eighties all over again.
And they won’t listen to anyone telling them otherwise. Not that they can’t, but that they don’t want to.
We’re not asking for special laws. We’re not asking for preferred service. We’re not even asking for special privileges. All we want is the same thing the rest of you have. Just one bit of peace. And you won’t give it to us.
*
What the hell does this have to do with my music blog?
I think about this all the time these days. I mean, it’s hard not to, when several media avenues are filled with this bullshit. Again, forty years later. Same shit, different generation.
I’ve often mentioned how college radio opened my eyes and blew my mind when I was fifteen, when it became apparent that I was not going to fit in with the cliques and social circles of my small town. Even then when I encountered a style of music that resonated with me, I didn’t just connect with it, I took a deep dive. I’d obsess over discographies, get familiar with album cuts and b-sides, learn the band’s backgrounds. I read about the bands’ local fanbases, their inspirations and influences, and why they sounded like they did. That led me to other bands, other alternate ways of listening and thinking. I may not have physically latched onto the scene in the same obsessive way, musically or fashionwise, but mentally and emotionally I’d allowed myself a complete immersion.
That is to say, I’m pretty sure that unlike your casual music listener, I swallowed the whole idea of ‘the alternative’ fully and completely. I pretty much stopped trying to connect with the popular or the status quo. I could connect if I wanted to, but only when I wanted or needed to. [I will freely admit that I had to bow to the status quo for a few years in the 90s, mostly out of financial and emotional desperation, but that’s another story.]
I know many people who don’t take the spiteful evangelical right-wing conservative base all that seriously, partly because for a small but annoyingly loud base, they’re mostly all bark and no bite. I try not to take them too seriously myself by remembering that there are so many more people out there whose social mindset is calmer and more compassionate. It’s easy to slip into the feedback loop that there’s a constant WAR! going on (after all, this base prides itself on such hyperbole) that makes one want to fight back with equal vigor. I mean, this is truly a muddy, chaotic battlefield here, if we’re going to roll with the metaphor. Those at the sidelines might not understand how terrible it is in the middle of it all, and those caught in the middle might not notice how peaceful it is at the sidelines.
Over the years I’ve altered my point of view about all of this, partly because I was utterly sick of reacting to it all. Someone says or does something shitty, I respond emotionally, they double down, and so on. The feedback loop continues. It was taking me nowhere. It was physically unhealthy for me, and something had to change.
I had to remember what I’d learned in my youth: conformity is a hell of a drug. Why was I playing right into their emotional mind games? Why was I reacting every single time? I mean, let’s be real: I don’t have to play by their fucking rules. Never mind asking why I’d been doing so in the first place, because that’s not important. What is important is knowing that I don’t owe them the pleasure. I don’t owe them the satisfaction, especially if they’re spending all their time taking mine away.
It took me a fucking long time to figure that out because of so many social niceties and conflict avoidance issues drilled into my head over the years. It’s not only weird to admit I have that clarity now, but that I’d figured all that out decades ago, back when I was a moody-ass teenager with an obsession with alternative music and the lifestyle behind it. And I decided that considering that I already knew the answer, I didn’t have to dwell on the time wasted…I just had to pick up where I left off.
The status quo and the rigid conformity and the hatred and the ignorance and the bigotry will always be there, unfortunately. It’ll come and go, just like any other cycle of life. The most we can do for ourselves is to remember that we don’t have to play by their fucking rules.
I’m not entirely sure if it’s my weird work schedule last week that threw me off, or that I’m just trying to avoid doing the hard work needed to get through this frustrating patch, but I’m having trouble focusing on MU4 again lately. And that needs to be fixed. I’ll hopefully have something up on Thursday!
Oh hi there! Don’t mind me, just listening to the new remaster/reissue of New Order’s 1985 album Low-Life while working out the second chapter of MU4. I’ve been creatively busy these last couple of weeks and I’m happy to report that things are going well so far, at least as far as scrappy first drafts of first chapters are concerned. Exactly where I need to be right now.
I’m planning on returning to the blogosphere next week, so I’ll see you then!
Walk In Silence 