culturenosh

[culturenosh]

We love her again

Charli XCX is pop's foremost wannabe troll (not pop's foremost actual troll - that's Selena Gomez). So of course she would use the occasion of her most irritating album rollout to soft reboot the plainspoken vulnerability that animated her early work.

The part about "So I" that gets me is the first verse - how it touches on the ways that well-meaning cis people dehumanize trans people via idolization ("You're a hero/ and a human"), and how her consequent inability to recognize SOPHIE's genuine care compromised the relationship they could have had ("You would say, 'Come on, stay for dinner'/ I'd say, 'No, I'm fine'"). It's so simple, but the step-by-step pace of her melody makes it feel like she's putting in so much effort just to hold onto the bare facts of her words, surrendering to grief when the countermelodies squeeze in at the end of each stanza ("nowIreallywishIdid"). It's the same kind of tactic she used in the True Romance days, using pauses and rhythm to imply worlds of meaning in between the things that are actually said.

Crash strained to balance its conceptual narrative about fame with the personal narrative of her relationship with her boyfriend and her fans, as well as the actual reality of Charli's place within the pop ecosystem. It felt strongest as a series of love songs in which Charli roleplayed as a personification of the industry's vampiric cynicism, but that framework fell apart when she took swings at radio-bait. I felt like, perhaps, she was no longer for me. It's still possible that I won't love Brat, her upcoming album; "Von Dutch," the lead single, is fun but lightweight, and her public persona has become increasingly caustic and humorless since Pop 2. But I'll take any evidence that her earnest femininity is still intact, somewhere beneath her brittle bravado.

[culturenosh]

First piece of the new year! I wrote about Jane Remover’s album Census Designated and tour for 48 Hills. There was more I wanted to say here - she’s in an interesting place as an artist, where she’s still developing her style independent of her influences and she’s not quite there yet - but this record is very good and it’s fun watching her evolve.

[culturenosh]

We 🥲

YEAH THAT'S RIGHT WE'RE BACK WE WEREN'T JOKING AROUND NOW GET IN THE CAR BEEP BEEP LET'S RIDE

CHARLI XCX - SPEED DRIVE [5.07]

Oliver Maier: A dark cloud seems to hang over Charli XCX as of late. Last year's perfectly passable Crash was touted by her as her "sellout" album, and while it charted impressively, it didn't demonstrate the effortless hitmaking that Charli sometimes implies she could pull off any time, if she only felt like it. That success instead has rather randomly gone to the risible "Speed Drive," her first UK top 10 since 2015 and first Billboard entry since a year prior. There's a lot I don't like about it, but enumerating its faults feels futile when it has the baked-in defense of just being a cute song for the Barbie movie!(!!!) Put simply, though, it's lazy to the point of feeling contemptuous. I have far fewer reservations about switching my brain off and having fun with pop when it feels like the artist is laughing with me, not at me. [2]

Alex Ostroff: On Crash, Charli started leaning into obvious interpolations to try to hit the charts. Hopefully, "Speed Drive" is the tail end of that tendency and not her new normal. The mashup of "Hey Mickey" and "Cobrastyle" works significantly better for me than the way she lifted from September and Robin S. for Crash singles, and there are a few excellent line deliveries, but this still feels like Charli on autopilot. The album's worth of unreleased songs with SOPHIE do more exciting and interesting things sonically than this PC-XCX retread, and if she isn't pushing the boundaries of pop music in weird and abrasive new directions, I'd much rather have the hooks and big choruses of "New Shapes" and "Lightning" than an under-two-minute sketch of an idea. The problem, of course, is that Charli on autopilot mashing up Robyn and Toni Basil, but fully committing to the performance and vocal delivery, still ends up giving us a: [6]

Alfred Soto: Charli XCX's reputation as a unsung pop master crumbles every time she releases another middling single. From the "Mickey" lift to the perfunctory rhythm track, "Speed Drive" is closer to assembly line than a Barbie factory. [4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The best Charli XCX songs in this lane are cleverly stupid ("Hot in It", "Yuck") or stupidly clever ("No Angel", "Vroom Vroom"), but this is just normal, garden-variety dumb -- less a song and more a collection of Pavlovian cues for stans to go wild over. All points here should be allocated to Easyfun, who at least does his job competently. [3]

Will Rivitz: Crash was Charli's worst release in nearly a decade for more reasons than I can fit in these few sentences, but most salient to "Speed Drive" was the record's uncharacteristically smooth polish. Her music achieves transcendence when it leans into its unsanded edges and hungover hedonism, channeling self-destruction and snottiness into bombast and excess. If it sounds like a first or second draft slapped onto Spotify before it's had the chance to hit a mastering studio, it's succeeded. Crash was too careful to hit those same highs, and as a result, its attempted mess felt lethargic and flat, indulgence as a single drunk cigarette instead of half an Adderall chased with absinthe. So, since "Speed Drive" sounds like it was mastered on a 2015 MacBook speaker and plays its two main interpolations as insouciantly straight as possible, it represents a return to form. Mess is more. [7]

Aaron Bergstrom: A perfectly acceptable Charli-by-numbers exercise: shiny, metallic PC Music production smeared over otherwise kitchy sonic references (and "Cobrastyle," which rules in any context); lyrics referencing cars, Japan, or cars in Japan; halfhearted attempt to tie it all back to Barbie somehow. [5]

Rachel Saywitz: Sonically, "Speed Drive" is one of the more interesting songs from this year's Barbie soundtrack -- unfortunately, that isn't saying much. A flurry of bubbling synth patterns echo the song's title, but what should be an exhilarating digital rush is overset by drab lyrics that sound like they came out of a Mattel exec's secret poetry diary (+ charm bracelet which unlocks the diary + a copy of the 2006 hit Barbie mocap film, The Barbie Diaries): "She my best friend in the whole world / On the mood board, she's the inspo / and she dressed in really cute clothes." Charli is in on the joke, but the joke isn't actually a joke -- it's a corporate branded major studio movie that was made to sell more toys, unable to subvert its maker no matter how many jokes it makes about male CEOs, discontinued toys, and "tax evasion issues." Can we just get Charli to soundtrack one of those poorly animated Barbie movies that know exactly what they are? Can we get a Barbie: The Princess and the Pauper remix album? Oh my god wait that would be incredible Mattel please call me I'll revoke my DSA membership please [5]

Hannah Jocelyn: I am a Barbie movie defender; you take your $100 million toy commercial and make the best possible trans allegory a cis woman can make, you have my respect. (Just as Little Women is the best queer movie a straight woman can make, love ya Greta!) I feel like mainstream feminism-attempting films, Barbie included, are so preoccupied with being Statements they'll sacrifice any momentum to get a message across. This is much less messy and complex than the movie it soundtracks, content to get in and out with its endearingly obvious samples. Charli's attitude makes the song sound more chaotic than it really is, but that effortlessness is a neat contrast to a movie that tries really fucking hard. Suddenly, I want to buy a 2024 Chevy Blazer EV. [7]

Brad Shoup: Like the vast majority of thinkpieces this movie elicited, this isn't really about Barbie, is it? It leaps into a gear and holds; there's nothing to distract you while the motor hums. It ends with Charli chanting "red lights," like she's desperate to pull over. [4]

Andrew Karpan: Perhaps the most important of the pop hits salvaged from an '80s nite at a club near you, "Speed Drive" is already a Greatest Hit among the stans, and justifiably so. Charli boils down what these nostalgia grabs are all about: misrememberences of a more understandable past, the fantasy of driving cars, the mood board stretched infinitely into the promise of a new century, the crux of Barbie itself. [10]

Jonathan Bradley: [A whiteboard with "Charli XCX Barbie soundtrack????" written on it and nothing else.] [3]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Even on this throwaway soundtrack cut where Charli sounds like she's putting in 25%, her pop flourishes and mannerisms are undeniably powerful. It's the way she rhymes "whole world" with "inspo", knowing it doesn't work; the way she races through the chorus like she's bored and speed-reading random words on a page; the way she robotically drones "Li-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ghts," unbothered at the laziness of the hook. This can't even clock in at two minutes. Give us nothing, queen! [7]

Kayla Beardslee: Charli understands how to craft a hook better than 99.99% of all musicians that have ever existed. [7]

Dorian Sinclair: I would not have thought to combine "Hey Mickey" with Robyn's "Cobrastyle" at all, let alone as part of a massive Mattel movie. Perhaps this is why Charli XCX is a pop star and I decidedly am not. The result mostly works, though it feels a bit less than the sum of its parts. And while I don't entirely get the focus on the car, maybe it's so she can run it back for the Hot Wheels film? [6]

Peter Ryan: Pop's foremost interpolator doubles down for a truly inspired how-hasn't-this-been-done moment. As a chase scene backdrop it's an [8], but on its own it's not even her third-best car tune. [5]

Katherine St Asaph: Brainless, reckless fun utterly unfit for purpose. The song is called "Speed Drive" and is perfect in tempo and stupidity for racing down the highway faster than God intended. And Charli still interjects "hah!" like no one else. But when do you go on the highway? When you're planning on driving for more than 2 minutes! [6]

Jeffrey Brister: Sleekly built, moves quick without fuss, pushes up a bit, but never really crests into high gear. I'm not asking for transcendence, but maybe an acknowledgement of a higher power while you lightly tap the gas pedal? [5]

Edward Okulicz: Having stopped writing good Charli XCX songs years ago, Charli XCX has, with this, ceased to even sound like Charli XCX. The only good bit about this is the "Mickey" interpolation. Driving around with this would give me a headache within about two miles. [2]

Vikram Joseph: In which Charli decides to write an AI version of a Charli song before the machines get there first. [4]

Will Adams: I will own up to being one of those who were WRONG and DUMB about "Vroom Vroom" when it first came out; I still wouldn't rate it highly, but I recognize its importance and impact on pop music. Special thanks to "Speed Drive" for helping me through that process by demonstrating what "Vroom Vroom" would sound like if there were significantly less effort. [3]

Jibril Yassin: Sucker needed this more than we did, but I'll take any new Charli songs that use actual choruses again. [8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: I applaud Charli for staying faithful to "Hey Mickey": the only good thing here is the hook. [3]

Crystal Leww: Funniest thing about this song is that one of my best friends in the whole world made an edit of it, and once we were out, the original played and I was like, "man this is so slow." And then she told me that the BPMs are actually exactly the same. Good song for Charli in her popstar elder era, but I'd always rather be listening to the edit. [5]

Michelle Myers: This would have been a fine addition to my 2009 pre-gaming playlist. I can taste the Smirnoff Ice and MAC Lip Gloss. [6]

Samson Savill de Jong: This is a banger that resists much discussion, just pounding you with being really really good and fun and HOT (but not, funnily, at all sexy). It needs a third verse, as it's over just as it really gets going, but ultimately probably better to leave you wanting more than wishing it was over -- though I find it hard to imagine this couldn't have stretched all the way to 3 minutes. [8]

Ian Mathers: It's good, but I've gotta knock it for three things (all possibly totally unfair, but that's the Jukebox babey!!!!!): 1. "Mickey" is a fine song but I am so sick of this kind of interpolation; 2. it reminds me at least by implication of "Vroom Vroom," and you, ma'am, are no "Vroom Vroom"; 3. it's only my second favourite 2023 soundtrack Charli XCX is featured on. [6]

Leah Isobel: Enough time has passed that we can admit Crash was mid, right? That in marking the moment in which Charli finally, actually committed to being a pop star, it also signaled her turn from real emotion to two-dimensional shtick? That her fanbase not only enabled this particular turn, but made it her only viable option? That her career is now defined by the need to please a group of people who treat her work as impersonal meme-bait instead of creative output from a real person? That, viewed in this light, the fact that "Speed Drive" has become her biggest hit in a decade makes perfect sense, even though it's the unsatisfying sonic equivalent of a single leftover french fry, drenched in grease? That pop stardom is, in itself, the reduction of a real personality and perspective into a flat and marketable image; that the aching, sincere heart of True Romance is actually dead and buried; that my youth is never coming back; that all I have left is this shitty, misogynistic world? And that, despite everything, I am physically and emotionally incapable of scoring a Charli XCX song that samples fucking "Cobrastyle" lower than this? [4]

Tara Hillegeist: It says a great deal about Charli's grasp on how to make hedonistic abandon actually catchy, even after the multiple ways that particular approach to imperial phases has shown their ass, that she can nearly faceplant on a still-mangled enunciation of "kawaii" and yet almost get away scot-free with her brazen interpolation of "Hey Mickey." I can yet imagine this scoring a campily villainous dance number in a Russel T. Davies SFnal dramedy on BBC Three and working. Sadly, Rusty's currently on contract to Disney instead, so an entirely different sort of Toymaker seems to have run off with the obvious bait for tiresome queens at present, and I'm not sure the vibe quite comes together as the prophecy was meant to foresee. Too bad. It'd be an [8] if it did, but only hypothetically. [3]

Nortey Dowuona: The problem with "Speed Drive" isn't the flat, pedestrian drum programming, even though that roots the song to the ground and never lets it become the exciting driving song it's meant to be. The problem is Charli constantly pushing forward in her music to embrace the more compelling and vivid music of the late '10s, only to be over-praised for a competent rehash of already marked territory by her elders. The same happened to Earl Sweatshirt, who doubled back to play in more conventional positions then, after the praise, re-doubled down on his direction. The way to engage with their music is to stop jumping up to beg them to pander to our changing taste and the industry's desire to cling to conventional wisdom. Let the Charli XCX of 2014 go -- she doesn't exist anymore, Charli's competent Toni Basil cover notwithstanding. Maybe actually trust them to chart their own paths -- you crafted your own, right? [6]

Frank Falisi: The streamlining of Charli's glitch-heat into soundtrack-ready radio-licking songs is good! PC Music was always a project about products, caring and careful as it was. Pop is a product about the project of being alive -- it's its own experimentation, it doesn't require archness. But to be alive is to seek out live wires and hearts to plug into, to give shape to. The pastiche that has haunted Charli's work in recent years takes as its engine dead objects: nostalgia (Crash), flippancy ("Hot Girl", Bottoms), and now, incorporation (Barbie). Can you feel a song begin to think of itself as servicing an occasion instead of a feeling? But you don't have to rope in career tea-leafing to know "Speed Drive" is plain boring. More like a treatment for a song than a composition moving through ideas, it cannibalizes the occasion of "Vroom Vroom" for a compensatory GM tie-in, settling for chorus as brand shoutout and production that's nearly apologizing for itself. Haters -- Lovers? Likers? I can't imagine a human being loving this song -- will tell me it's a fun, short song written for a fun movie that's been over-think-pieced and that doesn't deserve the hyper-scrutiny it received. I still think we deserve better than just "just" as far as the product-as-art future Barbie takes to be inevitable. I also think -- whatever their occasion -- all the song sequences in the film felt disposably-conceived, thinking a little of partnering with the image and thinking a lot about servicing the partner, which is the brand. Maybe pop music in cinematic space has always been product placement of a kind. Or worse, once it was a way to show love through intertextuality and now it's the moving image as Tumblr page, a cloud of association, a hungry rolodex of fits. And the suggestion of a pleasurable essence isn't the presence of pleasure. I know there's no purity, I don't want purity. But you have to let "want" in, have to want "want" to mean more than "get." Otherwise it's the experimental rendered in a language we already know. What I mean is: every day the inclusion of "Boom Clap" in The Fault in Our Stars feels surer. [2]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

[culturenosh]

I interviewed Hannah Diamond for 48Hills! This feels like a big milestone for me. I still remember listening to "Attachment" in my dorm room in 2014. I didn't quite get it, but I've followed her career since then and she's quietly become one of the most interesting pop artists working - with a real, deep awareness of what pop is and how it works. I’m very honored that she shared so much with me, and kind of in awe that this happened at all.

#hannah diamond

[culturenosh]

Pop should be stupid

I once described Troye Sivan as emotionally vacant. I stand by that. While his music uses the signifiers of the Emotional Pop industrial-complex - the misty synths and pealing guitar tones, the explosive choruses, the Allie X and Noonie Bao cowrites - his vocal delivery tends toward the soft and whispery, never achieving the kind of cathartic release that this particular strain of pop music tends to reach for. His version of total surrender is synonymous with absence; he needs his inhibitions in order to remind himself that he exists.

In the past, this has made the sexuality in his music feel strangely limp. "Bloom" is supposed to be a bottoming anthem, but its jumbled metaphors leave the impression that he's reaching out for something, anything, to keep from losing himself in pleasure; the chorus' giggly euphemism comes across not as sexy and playful, but solemn, serious, tightly wound. It's the clean and beautiful fantasy of sex, not the weird and goofy reality.

This Troye era seems to be about correcting those faults; the wink-wink nod to poppers on "Rush" felt a little glib, but his straight-to-camera delivery of the line "Man, this shit is so much fun" was right on. He's stepped back far enough from himself to see that two (or more) bodies together means twice (or more) as much insecurity, awkwardness, silliness.

"Got Me Started" goes further, frontloading its silliness with a sample of "Shooting Stars" by Bag Raiders - a song that might be best known to modern audiences (or, at least, to me) as the soundtrack to a Nicki Minaj meme. Looked at cynically, it reads as pandering and tasteless, spoiling the hushed intimacy of the song.

But upon closer inspection, the sample's puppydog goofiness is actually reflected throughout: check the dance move where Troye briefly drops his pants and wiggles his butt for the camera, the whispered "let's go!" before the chorus, the chipmunked vocals, the jittery rhythm. The song is intimate, but it's not serious, and its joy is featherlight. If you laugh at the sample - as I did on my first listen - that's intentional. Sex is funny; it's weird; it's stupid. So is pop.

[culturenosh]

Are the VMAs irrelevant?

For many years, The Grammys were built around the "Grammy Moment" - a cross-generational, cross-genre ideal that was meant to celebrate recorded music as an art form in all of its permutations. They were intended to illustrate the broad appeal of the American music industry's products, and to point out the connections between, for instance, Macklemore and Madonna. These performances were artificial and self-congratulatory, but the logic isn't terrible: take two seemingly contrasting musicians, build a bridge between their styles and themes, earn buzz and profit for advertisers.

We can say something similar about the VMAs, except the prototypical "VMAs Moment" isn't about music at all. The artists featured at the VMAs might have important and resonant things to say in their work (I will always go to bat for Britney Spears' artistic bona fides, for instance), but that's not the show's value proposition. It's about the art form of celebrity - or the promise of such. We're promised a platform to watch famous people be famous, to demonstrate the value of fame to society. When celebrities who practice the art of fame differently collide in MTV's pop-culture coliseum, the narrative result can echo for decades.

And yet every year the VMAs seem to be fighting for their existence. The original VMAs ceremony in 1984 was slated as empty, meaningless, and invalid; since at least the mid-2000s, the show has battled accusations that it's old-fashioned and irrelevant. In any given year, the VMAs are the worst that they've ever been, a sure sign that the show can't go on. And then, a few years pass, and what was once the nadir of pop culture becomes nostalgia-bait, held up as an example of when celebrities mattered.

In the moment, I think, we're always hyper-aware that celebrity is a function of marketing, and that MTV itself is a compromised platform to sell "youth culture" back to us. During the ceremony, we see all the interstitial moments that remind us that our favorite celebrities are essentially just theatre kids who go lucky, that pop culture's gatekeepers are corny and desperate. Then, as time passes and the music industry creeps closer to total collapse, we forget all that. What we remember is that the show went on, and that for a few minutes, we were entertained.

[culturenosh]

The end of history

My parents love Jimmy Buffett.

This might be the least surprising revelation imaginable. My parents are boomers, both born in 1960. My dad is an army brat, the third of four boys; my mom is the daughter of a doctor who worked at universities up and down the East Coast. They met at law school in the 80s and proceeded to corporate careers, a house in the suburbs, two kids, two dogs, annual vacations.

When I imagine their lives - how they see themselves - I think they see themselves as simple. Not as in unintelligent, but as in easy to please, humble in their aspirations, clear-eyed in their morals. This is particularly true of my dad. His parents grew up in a farming town in rural Virginia. They were high-school sweethearts. Their straightforward Americanness filters through to him: he embraces normalcy as an instinctual birthright. He wants to do well, to look back on the day and know that he's put in the work, to go home and pet a dog and eat a good meal. He wants to earn his simple pleasures.

He is, perhaps, the prototypical Jimmy Buffett listener. In "Everybody's Got A Cousin In Miami," when Jimmy says that line about being an "international investor... whatever that is," his speech patterns are a perfect mirror of my dad's. His view of humanity as a mass of people confused by the byzantine systems that rule their lives, dancing on the line between upstanding citizenship and corruption? That's my dad, too. Their shared attitude is one of befuddled complacency. This is a mixed-up, crazy world we live in, they say. It isn't changing. So why worry about it?

I heard this song more times than I can count growing up. As a kid, I liked the song's laid-back energy, its marimba and horn flourishes, its call-and-response backing vocals; it feels colorful and vibrant and harmless, like a vacation. I never noticed the verse about undocumented people slipping into the country beneath the nose of the military, the other verse about a drummer living in a "third-world jungle," the line "Everyone is an aborigine," the line "One way or another, we're all refugees/ Living out this easy life below the banyan trees." Is this empathy, togetherness?

For my dad, I think it is. From one perspective, it's a reminder that people have more in common than we think. It's the Global Village Coffeehouse of music; we may drive nice cars and work in downtown skyscrapers, but underneath it all we are simply part of the beautiful, singular, primitive tribe of humankind. Everyone wants this life. Everyone can have it. Everyone's got a cousin in Miami.

When I was a kid, my parents took me to a Jimmy Buffett concert. I don't remember it.

[culturenosh]

They got that Southern cooking

When Victoria Monet's "On My Mama" video went viral on Twitter, all I could see was Ciara.

I grew up in (the suburbs of) Atlanta in the 2000s. Just as I started to develop a concept of "cool," crunk exploded into a mainstream sound. Three of my classmates did a dance performance to Usher's "Yeah!" at our school's annual talent show in 2004. Though I was only tangentially aware of Atlanta's hip-hop culture - I'd seen the giant Def Jam billboard off I-85 - it still felt exciting when they did the "peace up, A-town down" hand gesture. I could tell that something had shifted in the culture.

To me, Ciara seemed just as big a star as Usher. That owl-whistle hook on "Goodies" immediately triggers memories of listening to 95.5 The Beat on the way to the pool or the water park on a hot summer day. She just seemed so cool, so effortless. With Ciara, the raygun beats were the centerpiece; she just floated on top, landing hooks without ever seeming like she was trying.

That soft presence made her an ideal pop crossover in an era where Britney Spears was still the center of gravity. "Goodies" was, famously, originally pitched to Britney, and you can hear her traces in the song's simple, undulating melody, its emphasis on youth and icy, withheld sexuality. Though Ciara's signifiers were proudly regional, her outlook was much broader. She helped to make visible the flow of sound from specific hip-hop subcultures to broad, down-the-middle pop. And while she certainly wasn't the only artist doing this, the combination of the particularities of her sound and the insinuating softness of her voice feels like it laid out a roadmap to be rediscovered by modern artists.

Monet, for instance. "On My Mama" isn't as hyperspecific as "Goodies" was - it gestures at Southern hip-hop history much more broadly. She pairs the hook from Chalie Boy's "I Look Good" with horns that recall HBCU marching bands in general and "SpottieOttieDopaliscious" in particular, while covering everything in a sheen of sun-glazed funk that's pure California. But she maintains a lithe, subtle vocal presence, gliding through the song's warm mishmash of time and place. If Ciara was the embodiment of a specific scene that was ready to transcend, Monet is a manifestation of something bigger and more abstract - a feeling, a vibe, an affect. Like Ciara, she doesn't communicate the auteurist dominance of a Beyonce or Rihanna, but an old-school entertainer's eagerness to please, translating the sounds of her youth to a bigger stage.

[culturenosh]

Is Róisín Murphy transphobic?

On Wednesday, the Twitter feeds of internet-pilled LGBTQ+ people across the world lit up with a dismaying piece of information:

Róisín Murphy had gone full transphobe.

It's not clear yet if this is real - as of this writing, Murphy hasn't commented, and this kind of screenshot is pretty easily faked. Still, the screenshot was enough to send certain segments of social media into overdrive. Her comments and replies have been inundated with disappointed, angry fans and transphobes who are thrilled to have found a new public figure to latch onto.

For at least two decades, Murphy's musical output and public persona have been centered on campy performances of diva-dom. Her voice communicates arch, haughty reserve even at her most emotional, and her work fits squarely within a post-disco dance-pop tradition that has been pioneered by queer people; her aesthetics play with superficiality, glamour, and gender in ways that feel particularly attuned to queer culture. The video for her song "Movie Star" literally shows her strolling around town with an entourage of drag artists.

Aside from the dismay, this comment seemed like unbelievable self-sabotage. She's spent her entire career cultivating a fanbase of people who do not fit within gender norms, pulling inspiration from the work and lives of queer people. Where did this come from? How could she have missed the point so spectacularly?

Yet, while I'm on record as a fan of hers, I watched this all unfold and felt... nothing. A little disappointed, but mostly numb - and, somehow, totally unsurprised.

In 2020, much was made of the supposed "disco revival." Artists like Dua Lipa, Kylie Minogue, Jessie Ware, and - yes - Murphy released records that nominally played with the sound and imagery of disco. I'd argue that, as a whole, this moment was more indebted to house and techno and turn-of-the-decade electropop - and, above all, the postmodern distance that characterized French touch. It wasn't disco; it was "disco." Rather than reflecting the physical thrill of real disco, it drew on the flattened, 2D aesthetic that has come to characterize that musical movement in online spaces. It was about nostalgia, not euphoria; and nostalgia is not depth.

While Murphy's Róisín Machine was easily the best album of this mini-wave - the most considered, the most well-written, the most sonically playful and experimental - it was still, at its core, backwards-looking. It was less interested in updating its influences than it was in projecting Murphy into an imagined past where her arch posture could still scan as transgressive. To her credit, the record did this very successfully! But while she took inspiration from queer music of the past, she also gracefully elided the need to pay attention to queer people of the present. Her allyship only ever extended as far as an aesthetic feature in a music video. She is a pop musician, not an an activist. She is not that deep.

In the past, I've been an enthusiastic booster of the gay-pandering-popstar-industrial complex. (I am, after all, a longtime Charli XCX fan.) This mode of listening encourages a parasocial connection between me and my chosen diva - I imagine that, because of our shared aesthetic taste, we must also share the same values and experiences. But aesthetics are just surface level, and pop stars lie. Their job is to appear the way their audience desires them to appear - to anticipate and direct those desires - so that the audience will give them money.

I'm tired of diva worship and popstars and glamour and beauty. I'm tired of rationalizing a good feeling in my body - the bouncy, stomach-dropping thrill of a four-on-the-floor beat and a catchy hook - as moral rectitude. I'm tired of idolization, tired of the music industry, tired of these predictable outrage cycles where everyone must grandstand on the internet. I'm tired of finding out, over and over and over again, that some famous musician that I will never meet thinks that I should die. But I'm never surprised. Surprise requires faith, and I have no faith in popstars.

[culturenosh]

But I, I'm with you.

Meet Me @ The Altar's debut record, Past/Present/Future, neatly lays out their mission statement: use the sounds of the past, in the present, to represent the future. In its way, it's a sort of Strokesian proposition: their music is straightforward 2000s pop-punk revival stuff, without modern innovations like Olivia Rodrigo's Swiftian theatricality or Willow's genre-splicing rawness. (Sidenote: last year's Willow album rules.)

Their previous material made their reverence for pop-punk past into a virtue by foregrounding their exuberance. Things like Edith Victoria opening a song by screaming "I'M DOING MY BEST!!!!!," or the chugging easycore guitars slicing through the melodic sweetness on "Garden," indicated a band that really loved this music in all of its incarnations and offshoots. They knew their history and they wanted to show their work.

Past/Present/Future moves them into more streamlined territory, with mixed results. It's not a bad record, but it feels less enthusiastic, more concerned with selling the band as a lifestyle proposition; in other words, it's commercial. As such, even the best songs mistake bare, generic songwriting for directness. Consider "Kool." Its chorus sails on Victoria's sneering vocal, its verses neatly navigate the line between lovestruck admiration and teasing snottiness, its swaggering rhythms slip seamlessly into a dreamy haze when appropriate. And then, just when the song desperately needs a bridge... it ends. No complexity, no room to play with tempo or dynamic, just a straight shot from verse to chorus to silence.

Their earlier work balanced their awareness of pop-punk structures and melodic ideas with a willingness to bend intracommunity genre lines; they summed up the old scene's many different micro-sounds in neat packages. Here, though, that historical awareness turns against them just a bit. In trying to loop all of that sound into a more pop-friendly package, the band ends up blunting the rough edges that made pop-punk - and their old material, for that matter - feel so vital. Avril Lavigne already happened; we already know what this kind of music sounds like in a pop context. Where can it go from there?

[culturenosh]

Everytime I try to fly, I fall.

If "famous pop star flames out due to the dehumanizing effect of fame" is an overdetermined narrative, then "famous pop star makes song about how fame is dehumanizing" is an equally overdetermined response. There's no surprise in these career moves; no one who experiences major fame does so in a novel way. If there's a new method of expressing the pain of being looked at but not seen, the pop industry hasn't found it yet.

For a song like "Attention," then, the question isn't, "Is this illuminating?" It won't be. Doja's verses land on one-dimensional punchlines - "Got your head all in the dirt just like an ostrich" - and faux-revelatory observations: "You follow me but you don't really care about the music."

Instead, a song like this succeeds or fails based on its delivery and framing, and that is where "Attention" earns its limited success. Instead of aiming for pathos, Doja seethes, delivering her verses through gritted teeth. But, as usual with a Doja Cat song, the chorus bears most of the weight: she reproduces her own objectification, referring to herself as an "it" in her most honeyed vocal tones. It actually feels a little shocking in its directness.

Doja's work feels uniquely engaged with the performance of sexuality, the resemblance between the ways pop stars use their bodies and the ways that sex workers do. "Attention" is both the bottom of the pit and the top of the mountain; she is beautiful, and she is nothing. Success is dislocation. Capitalism, baby.

[culturenosh]

Pop music emergency

In 2018, I told someone I knew that I thought the next big popstar would be a Britney - that is, an artist who metabolizes the innovations of a previous generation, who success symbolizes that what was once transgressive and unique is now just a part of the playbook. At the time, I thought this fabled artist would take after Lady Gaga, reintegrating her art-shocked tendencies into something more normal.

But it turns out Gaga didn't need the help, and anyway, the next generation was tuned into Taylor Swift instead. Taylor is absolutely not for me - her work maintains a thread of conservative selfishness that I find utterly repellent, even when the songs are good - but I understand the appeal. She approaches her own life with a resolute sense of dignity and an ear for a good story, using the structures of pop to elevate the daily humiliations of womanhood into myths of power. Of course every artist in her wake would love her: she demonstrated a way of entering pop stardom without surrendering normalcy.

The first warning shot was Clairo's Immunity, one of the most sneakily influential albums of the last five years, which transposed Taylor's confessional style to the introvert's bedroom and proved that her disciples could succeed without relying on Taylor's more tabloid-y tactics. Olivia Rodrigo took that lesson and ran with it. Sure, Sour was very explicitly about one guy, but I'd argue there's a vast difference between Joshua Bassett and John Mayer. When Taylor wrote about the latter, the A-list sheen served both as a newsy hook and a noisy distraction; Olivia's comparatively smaller target allowed her own feelings to take center stage.

This is the point. The video for "Vampire," the lead single from her second album Guts, depicts Olivia performing at a VMAs-esque ceremony before her set collapses; the audience takes this as part of the performance and applauds her. But Olivia will not stop singing, even after security arrives to escort her offstage. What she feels is literally too big, too important, and too urgent to be held within the frame of the performance. It gushes out of her like blood.

The song's conflicting impulses swing between rage and pity - anger at this guy who used her for clout and made her compromise her morals, pity that he can never feel real emotions in the way that she can. He presumably wants to be famous, or is drawn by fame, but doesn't have the strength to handle it. This animates her delivery of the chorus' most important line: "Bloodsucker/ Fame-fucker." Sure, it describes his actions, but it also drives home something. He will never have fame, fucker. Because what does fame demand? Blood, sucker.

[culturenosh]

I'm incredibly, incredibly proud that my Pasteboard deep dive is finally out. Please read it if you like shoegaze, music, internet culture, or life in general.

#pasteboard

[culturenosh]

Lol I sort of forgot this blog existed. Anyway. My latest for Lefto! I really dug the latest album by Funeral Homes.

I couldn't quite figure out how to put this in the review - and it always feels a little unnecessary/prurient to talk about what an artist might be saying about their personal life in their work - but the press release noted that the record was partially about Sofia's journey with gender identity. I think it's pretty evident in the music.

When I started transitioning, I realized how fake and shallow my experience of the world had seemed; since then, I have felt my life become richer and deeper, which is both beautiful and really scary. I think Blue Heaven reflects that dichotomy in a graceful, thoughtful way. One of her influences for this record was Title Fight's glorious Hyperview, which is pretty evident in its sound; but Hyperview is intense and dark, where Blue Heaven is intense and bright. I described it to my partner as not just awestruck, but awful - as in, full of awe, positive and negative connotations included.

Blue Heaven is out now on Lonely Ghost Records.

#funeral homes #blue heaven #lonely ghost records #title fight #hyperview

[culturenosh]

I'm contributing for Left Of The Dial now! That's fun. For my first piece, I reviewed my favorite album of 2021, Cosha's Mt. Pleasant. It's good go listen to it.

[culturenosh]

My ____ In Lists

Note: I was featured on Heavenly Creature Records' covers compilation, Los Compesinos!. It's a 28-track compilation of covers of songs by UK emo icons Los Campesinos!. Proceeds go to Gendered Intelligence, a trans-led nonprofit based in the UK. I'm a huge fan of the band Los Campesinos! - I have them tattooed on my chest - so this was a Huge Fucking Deal for me.

Last year, I submitted this essay to the zine Wendy House Press and got accepted, which was super cool, but as far as I know it isn't published online anywhere. I don't have much new writing right now so I figured this was a fine time to throw it up here for safekeeping. The original title was slightly different and I find it unbearably corny now, and I've also tossed in links to each song I'm referencing in each section, but otherwise I haven't touched the text.

**

1. “My boyfriend says he will leave me. Should I A)…” “Get down on your knees?” “Should I B)…” “Tell him where to go?” “Or should I C)…” “Kiss him until it shows?”

At 14, I think I know everything. At 14, I am an idiot, obviously.

I’m obsessed with being a pubescent version of a tastemaker — I’m gay, so I figure if I wrap myself in some kind of adult cool I can avoid being labeled as the annoying kind of gay. (This doesn’t stop me from doing musical theatre, so jury’s out on whether this is working.) In a way, it’s how I try to hold onto some element of manhood; I take shelter in a cultural canon so I don’t have to take the social risk of liking things that are too girly. I learn from my friends on the school bus that Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance are emo and emo is bad because it’s gay, so instead I read Pitchfork and gain encyclopedic knowledge of the Best New Music in the whole world. My friends aren’t impressed. To them, the Vivian Girls record sounds like a bunch of noise, and the dude from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah has the most annoying voice they’ve ever heard. Secretly, I kind of agree.

There’s also this band that got featured on Myspace — they’re a British band with a Spanish name and an exclamation point on the end, which I think is a little goofy but still cool. I don’t share them with my friends just yet. Listening to them sounds like opening up a portal into an alternate history I don’t really understand, but I want to. They have this song called “C is the Heavenly Option,” which is a cover. This band, Los Campesinos!, has two singers, one boy and one girl, and while the girl’s voice is light and pretty, the boy’s is kind of snotty and high and nasal. I like this. I like the way he starts the song by singing, in that snotty way, “My boyfriend..,” like it’s a snarl; and I like the way the girl responds later with “My girlfriend…”, sweetly, like it’s obvious.

The original version of the song, by the band Heavenly, also has a boy singer and a girl singer, but they sing about their girlfriend and their boyfriend, respectively, which makes the song less fun to me. I like the way Los Campesinos! weaponizes their dual-singer setup to make music history gayer. Though their original music isn’t explicitly queer in the same way, I feel less alone when I listen to them knowing that they’re willing to go there. I imagine a group of hip, well-dressed gay men and women doing cartwheels while singing the backing vocals, while the two lead singers stand in the spotlight onstage, arms outstretched. In my imagination, the audience erupts with applause.

2. “The last man standing is a girl.” “Four sweaty boys with guitars tell me nothing about my life!”

I feel really weird about my body. Like, really weird. I was chubby when I was younger and I still see myself that way. Even though my family takes pains to tell me that I’m not, I’m pretty sure they’re lying. When my hair grows long it gets curly and bushy, instead of straight and blonde like I want it to be, like the boy in my grade that I have a crush on. Even worse, I’ve started growing hair on my face and I really, really, really hate it — when I see pictures of myself I feel a deep revulsion somewhere. It makes me want to jump out of my skin or pull it off. Overall, I feel ugly and disgusting, too sweaty, too smelly, too icky.

It’s summer in Georgia and it’s hot as fuck. I love going to the pool, but I feel too self-conscious in my bathing suit to enjoy it that much. When I was in middle school, at my peak chubbiness, I resolved to lose some weight — so my mom started running with me a few times a week, just to the train tracks and back. I lost something like 20 pounds that way. I figure if it worked then, it should work now, so I start trying to run around my neighborhood regularly. I try doing this at 2pm. In summer. In Georgia. (I told you I was an idiot.)

I’m still listening to that British band, and their new album accompanies me on my sweaty, miserable attempts to get fit — in parts it’s a little too slow, but it has a big, sunny energy that I like. There’s this song called “…And We Exhale and Roll Our Eyes In Unison,” which bursts from my dinky little headphones like it’s made of stars. I imagine that I’m witty and snarky, and I like that the title communicates just how over it I am. The boy singer, Gareth, is really yelpy on it, even by his standards. When his bandmate, Aleks, wryly sings that “the last man standing is a girl,” Gareth responds by shouting that sweaty boys with guitars are irrelevant to him.

I like the way Aleks’ line crashes into Gareth’s, like it enables his epiphany. I like that the two together sort of refute all of the rock music I hear on the radio; it’s like the band is asking what else there could be, how music could be made to be more welcoming and less masculine. The image of femininity reigning victorious over a marketable masculinity feels very right to me as I try to sweat myself into a body that I imagine will be better, will be more marketable, will make boys like me.

3. “He whispered ‘oh my god, this really is a joy to behold.’ Thought he said ‘it’s a joy to be held,’ so I held him too close. It was a grave mistake: he never came back again.”

Someone’s played a really cruel trick on me.

Every Friday, we go to my friend Michael’s house to hang out in his basement and play Rock Band, watch movies, and eat junk food. There’s a boy in our group named Eli. Apparently, he’s bisexual. I like him, and not in the way that I liked that blonde boy from before. That boy was untouchable, sort of perfect — nice house, popular, blonde and floppy-haired. That was a crush I could indulge in from afar, but not one that felt accessible to me. With Eli, it’s different. We have similar taste in music; we actually hang out and talk. One night at Michael’s, while we’re all watching a movie, I end up laying next to him on the couch. I don’t remember how this happened, but it feels really nice. This crush blooms slowly, and it doesn’t feel threatening. We’ve been physically affectionate and we have things in common. It must be reciprocated.

One night in November, I’m woken up at 2am by a text from a number I don’t know. I ask who it is and they say they’re my secret admirer. I guess that it’s Eli, and they say yes. (I don’t think about how I have Eli’s number already, or question why he would be texting this to me at 2 in the morning.) I’m really, really happy. I still feel disgusting and sweaty and icky, but if someone likes me back, that feeling goes away. I ask the person on the other end of the line if they want to get Starbucks, since that’s what I assume people do on dates. They say yes.

A couple of days later, I send Eli a Facebook message asking when we’re going to get coffee. He says we’ll talk about it at school. Then I hear from a friend that he doesn’t want to go out with me, that he doesn’t like the way I asked him out over Facebook, and I realize what’s happened. I feel embarrassed and I feel wrong — creepy, pushy, overbearing, somehow like I was forcing him into something he doesn’t want. I try to laugh it off and tell him that someone was pretending to be him on the phone, but I don’t think he believes me. He says something about his mom not liking me because of all this. I’m angry at myself, angry at whoever was on the line, and — worst of all — angry at him for not liking me back. I don’t know what to do with this feeling; it eats me up. I become bitter and mean to him. He doesn’t deserve this.

Los Campesinos! release a new album during this time. It’s angrier — the guitars are soaked in distortion, the lyrics evince a new fascination with vomit and hopelessness — and it’s gayer. On the second song, “Miserabilia,” Gareth sings about driving a boy away by holding him too close, like he’s shown too much and been too open. He overflows the boundary between them. I think, “same.”

4. “I am fifteen years old, and my parents’ only son; like, I barely survived a girls’ school education. Prettier now that you’ve grown your hair long. I’m a slip of a man since I cut mine all off.”

“Well, I really like this band, Los Campesinos!.” “I’ve heard of them. Aren’t they kind of… faggy?”

It’s fall of 2010. I know Los Campesinos! are my favorite band ever of all time in the history of the world. Their third album, Romance is Boring, came out in January; it’s the first album I ever preordered, and I checked the mailbox every day after school to see if the CD had arrived. When it did, I ran up to my room, put in my headphones, and studied the lyrics booklet as each song hit my earbuds. I listened to that album over and over; I got all my friends into it, though looking back I’m not sure if that’s because they actually liked it or if it’s because I was just that annoying about it.

Now, in October, I’m in a boy’s car. We met because we were both cast in a production of The Laramie Project in Sandy Springs, which is a 30-minute drive down the highway. I’m 16; he’s 22. As discussed earlier, I’m sort of indefinably gross and icky; he looks a little bit like Adam Levine. I’m gay; he’s bisexual, but he has a gay brother who he takes pains to distance his own experience of gender from. (Like, his brother is apparently the bad kind of gay, while this boy is definitely, definitely not.) I like Los Campesinos!, and I play their music in the car; he says they’re faggy.

I don’t really have a lot to say to him, before or after this. I’m a little intimidated. In a text message, he told me that he wants to kiss me in the rain, but in person things feel awkward and the air is thick. I gaze at the highway passing by. Is my favorite band faggy? Does this make them bad to him? Why should I care, when they mean so much to me? Why can’t I speak? When he drops me off at home, I ask awkwardly, “So… w-what are we?” In retrospect, this is an absurd question, so I can’t really blame him for laughing.

There’s a line on Romance is Boring, on the bridge of the song “I Just Sighed. I Just Sighed, Just So You Know,” where Gareth elides the distance between man and woman and then, just as quickly, reinstates it. The girl he’s singing about has rejected him; her hair is long and she’s gotten even prettier. He’s thrown back to being fifteen, feeling inadequate, feeling unmanly, like a boy who couldn’t hack it even in a girls’ school. He cuts off all his hair, but instead of being more of a man and more worthy, he’s even less so. In the face of his idolization of someone else, his anger and self-loathing only get stronger — his feelings lead him past the point where he can see himself as a strong or effective man. There’s a sense of gender failure that’s new to his writing. While his past songs were more playful or comedic with gender roles, here his experience of gender feels more apocalyptic; when he sings these lines, the words “cut mine all off” are punctuated with drumbeats before the final chorus explodes in a wall of noise.

When I listened to Romance is Boring for the first time, these lyrics seemed to cut into me. I didn’t know why.

5. “The last time I was there, she let me wear her clothes. She painted my lips red, so that we both ensured I kissed her every inch. My god, the girl looked like she’d burned.”

By 2011, when Los Campesinos!’ fourth album Hello Sadness comes out, I’ve had my first kiss (not with the guy from the play, but a different college-age theatre boy). I’ve grown out my facial hair, since beards and mustaches are enjoying a sort of pop cultural renaissance and I figure I’ll feel better if I have something on my face that I can hide behind. I’m working very hard in school, aiming for college admissions in 2012, which doesn’t give me a lot of time to myself; as one of the only out gay people at my school, I feel extra pressure to present myself as a perfect member of the student body. But I’ve also started a band called Austen with my friend B, which gives me a space to write through the things I’m feeling about my body and my gender.

I see parallels in my writing and Gareth’s writing. In his songs, bodies have become something between comic and grotesque; they sag and smell, decay and burn. On Hello Sadness, the self-loathing edge that’s always been present in their music comes all the way to the forefront. It’s written in the aftermath of his breakup with another musician, and the dissolution of their relationship brings out all of his insecurities. On the second song from the album, “Songs About Your Girlfriend,” he adopts a sort of sneering rockstar pose, writing about seducing women with rehearsed jokes from a past relationship and making them purr “like a cat.” But other lines counteract his bravado — in the second verse, there’s a particular passage where Gareth describes wearing his lover’s clothes and makeup, kissing her entire body until she’s red from lipstick marks.

I get a kind of transgressive thrill when I sing along to this line. The admission of cross-dressing doesn’t play like misogynistic bragging; it feels like the kind of oversharing someone might do when they’re trying really, really hard to convince someone that they’re cool. It’s also the song’s most direct expression of intimacy. The other lyrics refer to sex somewhat obliquely — a line about “hard hands” and “soft spots” — but it’s inescapable in this image, and more romantic. Being kissed all over isn’t something someone does for any mechanical hookup, and it doesn’t display a cavalier approach toward sex that the song’s lothario posturing would imply. He tells on himself; his play for the kind of masculinity we might now call toxic is undercut by how he inhabits femininity in order to do so. On the song’s prechorus, as it tumbles into its snarling hook, a mass of voices sing back at him: “your mask is slipping.”

In retrospect, the songs I write in this time are about inadequacy. I write about not feeling in control of my body and about the idea of being turned away from community and family because of something innate and unchangeable about me. I write about wanting to put on heels and makeup, about wanting to leave my hometown for New York, about imagining myself as the heroine of the romantic British literature that we took our band name from. I imagine that this is all play-acting; maybe I have to imagine that in order to keep functioning. In any case, I get the sense that the role that I’m playing, the straight-A student and perfect representative of gay masculinity, is starting to slip.

6. “Two wrists, two wristwatches tick-tick-tocking; second hands, slightly out of time. A constant subtle reminder one of us will be gone before bells of the other chime.”

This is a lyric from the song “Glue Me,” from Los Campesinos!’ 2013 record No Blues. Depending on the day, this is my favorite album of theirs; while it maintains the energy that defined their previous work, it feels more mature, and charged with an awareness that their neuroses are ultimately a little less than universal. That new perspective reflects in the references that Gareth makes throughout the album; this line, for instance, seems like a direct reference to the art piece Untitled (Perfect Lovers) by the conceptual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Untitled (Perfect Lovers) was created after Gonzalez-Torres’ lover, Ross Laycock, was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988. It’s a conceptual piece that consists of two battery-powered clocks hung side by side. Though the clocks are synchronized, the fact that each one is a separate machine means that they will fall out of sync over time; the batteries in one will die before the other, or the mechanism will break down and one will start running faster or slower. Gonzalez-Torres’ personal identity as an openly gay artist doesn’t necessarily mean that his art can only be read as Gay Art — it doesn’t mean that straight viewers can’t see their own relationships reflected in his work — but it’s hard to ignore that Untitled (Perfect Lovers) was conceptualized and first displayed during the peak years of a pandemic that disproportionately affected gay and trans people. Gonzalez-Torres looked into a public health crisis that uniquely affected his life (compared to broader contemporary culture) and produced a piece that depicts the fragility of human connection and the inherent impossibility of inhabiting someone else’s time. It speaks to how queer people inhabit time in a different way; the world is set against us, so the time that we do find togetherness has a special resonance.

This line doesn’t deal explicitly with gay sexuality or gender-bending like the other lyrics I’m writing around. Gareth usually goes to these images when he’s trying to describe emotions careening out of control, and No Blues’ comparative focus leaves less room for that. But Gareth referencing a piece by a gay artist does feel like an acknowledgment of the queer themes he’s included throughout his writing and a nod to the queer fans that the band has amassed. I’ve made or solidified multiple friendships with other queer people through Los Campesinos!’ music — the first friend I made at college, a year before No Blues was released, introduced herself to me because I was wearing a Hello Sadness t-shirt. The warmth and empathy that the band displays towards their queer fans, exemplified in this line, was foundational for me.

In 2013, I was nineteen years old. I was seeing an older man who lived downtown. I spent every weekend at his apartment; sometimes he’d take me out to the movies or to Central Park or to dinner. It is very, very hard to write about him. I spent two years of my life sleeping in his bed, eating with him, fucking him. I thought I was in love with him, and it’s probably still the closest I’ve come to the feeling. But it wasn’t love, not really; in him, I found someone to whom I could give up control, which gave me a kind of respite from my alienation and confusion. If I didn’t see myself as a desirable, worthwhile person, I knew he did because he couldn’t keep his hands off me.

This isn’t the kind of understanding that I would get from Gareth’s lyrics or from affirming relationships with my peers; it was objectification. But for a time, it was enough. I may not have felt comfortable in my skin or convincing as a man, but when he was a part of my life it didn’t matter. He structured my understanding of myself; if I overflowed in other moments, with him I could channel the energy that led me beyond the bounds of normal manhood. Like any relationship built from lack, this wasn’t built to last. I was in denial about being trans; he was wrestling with his own self-hatred, and losing. When he assaulted me, I felt like the floor fell out from under me.

I can’t say that “Glue Me,” or No Blues, or even Los Campesinos!’ work as a whole saved my life. I did that for myself. But I think their music, in its faggier inclinations, helped me to understand what I wanted and where I could go after my support fell away.

7. “Heart swells.”

Now, I’m a woman. My first tattoo was in honor of Los Campesinos! — the words “heart swells,” a recurring lyrical theme, in the shape of a heart on my chest. It was one of the first things I did entirely for myself. In a way, it was a dry run for starting hormones.

I’m not obsessive about their music anymore, but I still buy a ticket to see Los Campesinos! every time they’re on tour. Every time, I bring my idiot 14-year old self with me. She wouldn’t know she was a girl if I told her, but I know she feels something when they’re onstage; after all, somewhere inside me, I’m still her.

#los campesinos! #Youtube

[culturenosh]

Omori review

I backed the Kickstarter for this game in 2014, so now that it's out I figured I'd go for it. I beat Earthbound earlier this year so I was primed for this experience, and I enjoyed a lot of it, but the twist ending left a mixed impression on me; it recontextualizes most of the game in a way that isn't super effective.

Omori is billed as a psychological horror RPG, and there's a clash between the RPG mechanics - which inform the gameplay, mostly in the form of the segments set in Headspace - and the horror mechanics, which inform the story. This tension feels strongest at the end of the game, when it kind of drops the RPG battling completely in favor of Yume Nikki-style exploration (I haven't played Yume Nikki, my understanding of this is based on other writing about this game lol). RPG mechanics are built around choices both major and minor; you play a role, metaphorically growing with the character, even if that role is predefined. But horror requires a tighter grip to guide the player through the story, to draw our eye toward or away from certain elements. Instead of bridging that gap, each aspect of the game feels siloed off from the other.

I think this happens because the story structure is set up so that you don't know what the story actually is until the end. The game delivers its twist well - it keeps you guessing as to the actual content of the story throughout, and it has a lot of fun misleading you and using that mystery as a source of horror. But because the horror is so narrative-focused, and because the narrative hides its content until the very end, the mechanics don't grow out from the story in a meaningful way and they're not particularly tied into the horror. There's a couple of moments where they are, but those are exceptions rather than regular occurrences. The gameplay experience is very straightforward and remains very straightforward for most of the game.

This kind of has the knock-on effect of throwing it slightly off-balance. The RPG parts of the game are fun to play, warm and goofy and weird and unsettling all in equal measure, but they aren't that relevant to the story, and huge sections could be cut out without affecting it; alternatively, the RPG could stand by itself. I think the point is that Headspace is welcoming and we understand why our protagonist, Sunny, wants to stay there. But this also sort of red herrings the game's content, because this fantasy is presented to us first, before we know why it's there.

There's a lot of discussion about this game being about mental illness, and it leads you to believe at one point that it's about grief, but neither of those are accurate. It's really about guilt and redemption - it's Silent Hill 2 as ~a quirky Earthbound-inspired indie RPG~. But Silent Hill 2 is not fun in a traditional sense. It's interesting and compelling, sure, but the mechanics are built to make you feel alienated while you play. Omori's mechanics are simple and pretty enjoyable - the game doesn't really fight you, and for a large portion of its runtime it's not even trying to unnerve you.

When you get to the reveal, then, it feels a little surface-level. As a shock, yes, it's great, and there's definitely a whole segment of Youtube commentary and fandom of the "this game will BREAK you" type that this story construction encourages. But there's no meaningful reckoning with the actual content of that twist; it comes so late that the game can't really go anywhere with it, because it's over. And mechanically, because you play most of the game without knowing what you're actually playing - what the story you're expressing is - it feels really unsatisfying as a role-playing experience. You don't get to actually play the role, because crucial information about the role you're playing is withheld from you.

So it kind of takes away your ability to make choices that feel meaningful. it's not that you need to know what you're doing upfront, but that the game isn't honest about what your choices signify and why the world is being presented to you in this way. When the good ending implies that all is forgiven - that redemption has been achieved - it feels hollow. If I'd known what kind of story i was playing up front, I might not have gone about the game the way that I did; I might have made different choices, because I might not have felt that I deserved or was able to earn redemption. The game doesn't allow you to make those decisions honestly, and as a result, it feels like its exploration of trauma is mostly aesthetic.

Omori is available on Steam.

#omori #omocat