#also this is my one of my favourite beatles podcasts

[javelinbk]

May Pang, interviewed for the Beatles Films Podcast, April 2023

May talks about driving John and riding on a bus

Int: So, you were the designated driver most of the time, then were you?

May: Oh... you know, it was great - when we were back in the States, when we were back in New York and you know, we had the car, we had this car, and we'd go out to visit, John was so thrilled at the fact that I would be the one driving, that it was just the two of us, there wasn't... he didn't go for the limos and all that. I mean, he understood it like if we're going to an opening, that's different, but you know on the daily basis he'd rather not deal with that, you know. And of course I took him on a New York City bus ride one Saturday morning and he was so shocked and all these people are sitting on the bus... getting on the bus and they see him and they're going... and you could hear the whispering, they're going "Is that John Lennon?", "No, it can't be!", "Yes, no I'm telling you, I think it is!". And then John's sitting there going like this with his finger holding onto his face and he's going "Tsk... it's the nose - it's giving it away, it's the nose." And then somebody finally yelled out and said "Hey, John! How you doing?" and he goes "Fine!" and he turned to me, "It's time to get off the bus."

#it’s time to get off the bus #it's the nose #poor johnny #we love your nose but I would also spot it on a bus #interesting to listen to this in contrast with the story of yoko insisting on taking limos everywhere they went #not saying anything #it's just interesting that's all #thank you may #I'll always be grateful to you for bringing our john back #also this is my one of my favourite beatles podcasts #check it out if you haven't already #the beatles films podcast #john and may #may pang #the found eighteen months #riding on a bus #audio and transcripts

[ryanscabinlife]

name 10 songs with 10 names in the titles that I like and tag 10 people at the end.

So I wasn't personally tagged on this, but after reading @allisonreader's post, I was inspired to do it. They left it open for their followers, so here I am listing 10 songs that I like that have names in the title.

I didn't realize writing a post with no pictures is extremely intimidating  🙃

i. Gale Song by The Lumineers - I can easily list the whole album where this song came from, but I only picked two that I like the most. One of them is the Gale Song. One of my go-to's when I'm having a campfire

Favourite line/s: "When you say my name, may it never give you pain"

ii. Marilyn Monroe by Nicki Minaj - I still remember when I first purchased the album Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded back in 2012, and this was the first song that really caught my attention. It's still one of my favourite Nicki songs. It's also special coz one of the few songs where Nicki did not rap.

Favourite line/s: "Truth is we mess up till we get it right" "I can get low, don't know which way is up. Yeah I can get high, like I could never come down"

iii. Vincent by Don McLean - One of the few songs that I remember my dad listened to when he was alive

Favourite line/s: ."..how you suffered for your sanity and how you tried to set them free. They would not listen, they did not know how" "And when no hope was left in sight on that starry, starry night you took your life, as lovers often do"

iv. Cecilia by Simon & Garfunkel - This song is a 'cleaning the house' staple for me. It just gives me so much positive energy

Favourite line/s: "Jubilation, she loves me again I fall on the floor and I'm laughin"

v. Angela by The Lumineers - the second song from the album Cleopatra - where The Gale Song also came from. Definitely a road trip/campfire song.

Favourite line/s: "Strangers in this town, they raise you up just to cut you down"

vi. A Rose for Emily by The Zombies - a really depressing song I discovered from a really depressing podcast. If you haven't listened to the Podcast "S-Town", give it a whirl.

Favourite line/s: "She keeps her pride somehow that's all she has protecting her from pain" "...as the years go by she will grow old and die. The roses in her garden fade away, not one left for her grave"

vii. Hey Jude by The Beatles - classic. Probably my favourite Beatles song.

Favourite line/s: "anytime you feel the pain, hey Jude, refrain, don't carry the world upon your shoulders" "Na-na-na-na-na Na-na-na-na, hey Jude Jude, Jude, Jude, Jude, Jude, Jude"

viii. Billie Jean by Michael Jackson - another classic. Don't have much to say about this song

Favourite line/s: "... be careful of what you do 'cause the lie becomes the truth"

ix. Think of Aaliyah by Boys II Men - probably the most 'deep track' on this list. A tribute to Aaliyah. RIP. A cover of "Think of Laura" by Christopher Cross.

Favourite line/s: "Hey Aaliyah, where are you now? Are you far away from here? I don't think so I think you're here taking our tears away"

x. Helena Beat by Foster the People - I still remember that year when I only listened to the album 'Torches' non-stop. It was a good year.

Favourite line/s: "You know those days when you wanted to choose to not get out of bed and get lost in your head again"

I don't know if anyone's gonna read this but if you did, consider yourself tagged!

#10 songs with names #10 songs tag #tag game

[michellemisfit]

TAG GAME

Thank you @suzy-queued for tagging me, as I was procrastinating, and this came at the perfect time!! Haha

1. Are you named after anyone?

I’m named after my mum’s favourite song by The Beatles (Michelle), which ironically is my least favourite song by The Beatles lol

2. When was the last time you cried?

I was PMSing hard last month, I basically cried for two days straight. It was crazy! And dehydrating.

Before that, the last time I cried was probably when we watched and discussed the Vincent VanGogh Doctor Who episode for @f-f-podcast - buckets of tears every single time!!

3. Do you have kids?

Nope. Just fur babies.

4. Do you use sarcasm a lot?

I stopped to really think about that and came to the unfortunate conclusion that sometimes I use sarcasm humorously, but mostly I use it when I’m being a bitch. Oops.

5. What’s the first thing you notice about people?

They’re demeanour. Happy. Shy. Kind. Helpful. Competent. Confident. Loud and rowdy. Just their overall vibe. I generally have no memory of what people look like until after I’ve met them several times and spent time with them.

6. What’s your eye color?

Green.

7. Scary movie or happy ending?

Happy ending. I hate jump scares.

8. Any special talents?

I can wiggle my ears.

9. Where were you born?

Zürich, Switzerland

10. What are your hobbies?

Podcasting, watching TV, drawing, craft, sewing, cooking, baking, reading, fandom.

11. Do you have any pets?

Two cats at home (Howard & Wiggins), and a whole lot of livestock at work. They count. I love them.

12. What sports do you play / have you played?

Volleyball and basketball in school. Tennis for 8 years, 2 years at club level. Roller Hockey for 10+ years, 3 years for the Swiss National Team.

Last time I went home to visit the family I brought back my custom painted hockey helmet. Look at that impact damage! s’probably fine… right? lol

13. How tall are you?

172cm (5’7’’ I think?)

14. Favorite subject in school?

German. Creative writing was my jam! Also I loved to read, and they encouraged that! lol

15. Dream job?

I like helping people. Doing something of value. And being creative. I currently have four jobs, each has one or two of these aspects. If you can think of a job that combines all four then please let me know! Haha

Tagging @accal1a @katherynefromphilly @ohfreckle and @creepkinginc if you fancy playing

#tag game #mys stuff #about me #q&a game #ask mys

[scoopstrooptm]

HC: robin & music

           i know some people were disappointed in vol 2 that there was no pay-off from that moment in vol 1 when robin is looking through all of nancy’s things in her bedroom and specifically looks at her tapes, and nancy getting vecna’d at the very start of ep 8 ---- but there was!! robin specifically mentions four artists while they’re frantically searching eddie’s trailer: bowie, blondie, the beatles and madonna. these could easily have been among the tapes that she found in nancy’s room. alternatively, this also potentially gives us some insight into the music robin likes if she was trying to think up artists that nancy might like off the top of her head ( and i’m glad that i predicted three out of four of them as being musicians robin would like lmao, and three of them are ).

          but what music does robin actually like? from the way she responds to eddie’s tapes, i can say with absolute certainty that she does not like metal, sorry eddie. in rebel robin, which is predominantly set in robin’s sophomore year in ‘83 and ‘84, robin specifically mentions her “pitiful music collection” when realising that operation robin ( i.e. discovering herself ) is much more important than operation croissant. she only bought one new tape in her sophomore year, and that was queen -- which she only bought for i want to break free. she also tells mr. hauser in the rebel robin podcast that she prefers cyndi lauper to madonna. she blasts out edge of seventeen at her house as a form of rebellion ( and while i don’t adopt robin’s book canon parents into my own portrayal, i do like that moment a lot and as i’ve mentioned before, that song is her vecna song ).

         so she does some discovering for herself in her junior year: she already liked annie lennox / eurythmics and continues to enjoy them. she likes bowie, and blondie and the beatles ( as i mentioned above ), she obviously enjoys stevie nicks & fleetwood mac, along with duran duran and culture club too. it’s impossible for her not to like prince after befriending steve ( raspberry beret is her favourite prince song, and her love for that song is part of the reason for why she chooses that red beret to accessorise her vecna flambé outfit ). she also becomes a big guns n’ roses fan after they release their debut album in ‘87.

         as for object of my desire by starpoint, the song playing in steve’s car when he’s driving robin to school in ep 1: it’s a very thematically appropriate song for both of them ( and the two of them definitely overlap when it comes to their music taste ), but i lean towards it being more of a robin choice than a steve choice. robin spends so much time in steve’s car once they become friends that they take turns controlling the stereo.

#&. headcanon ( robin buckley. ) #steve driving robin to school makes me so soft always #but i wanted to get these thoughts into words since music is so important in this show

[satisfactory-dreams]

HELLO AGAIN!!

Wow, are you a beach boys fan? I haven’t read anything about them but honestly I’ve always wanted to know more! The only biographies I’ve read have been ones about Van Halen and the Beatles :( So unfortuantely not a very large range!

But if you DO liek the beach boys, do you have any recommendations? Anything you learned about them?

Hope your day is going great and thank you for the good luck on my finals ❤️❤️❤️❤️ I guess I never told you my age, as well. I’m 19 and I’m a sophomore in college!

Yes, I LOVE them !!! I got super interested I'm them in summer 2021 and more intensely in spring 2022. Their history is SO SO CRAZY, I don't even know where to begin. I heard loads about them before, but what made me interested in them was Todd in the Shadows video about their Summer in Paradise album. They are a band that has so many good and pretty tunes but slso so MANY FLOPS. However I personally love a lot of the flops. The same podcast I mentioned, Rivals slso did an episode on them that is great to introduce you into the history.

As for recommendations, the books I mentioned in the last ask are pretty much what I've read so far, with the addition of a book about Carl Wilson that is sadly not an autobiography. I would highly recommend these books and the film Love & Mercy with Paul Dano, which is a fan favourite. There's also like 2 panned miniseries, I only saw The Beach Boys: An American Family which is vad and insensitive but I liked it for the camp value 😂

Nice to know you're close to my age, I'm 21 and in my final year of university. What do you study btw, I do languages.

Thank you for the ask, have a great day❤

#srs #srs tag #secret rocker santa

[somerabbitholes]

Hey, how have you been? Recommend me some of your favourite non fiction books please!

Loads of love

hi, i've been okay! here you go ─

Dreaming the Beatles by Rob Sheffield: about the beatles and why they remain popular; what it means to love them and how and why we still do

Futebol Nation by David Goldblatt: about football in brazil; kind of like a social history of the game developed in encounter will social, economic, and political forces

Fire in Babylon by Simon Lister: kind of like futebol nation in that it is about how west indies played cricket and how it became so important to the narrative of independence

The Lonely City by Olivia Laing: on loneliness in the urban space and how artists have negotiated it; memoir + art history + criticism, very well-written

Essayism by Brian Dillon: about the essay and why we write them; about essayists, how they write, on writing and reading

On Photography by Susan Sontag: about the ethical implications of photography; on the relationship between the photo, the photographer, and reality; the role of photography as an art form and also as a means of documenting the world

Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui: what the name says; looks at the different reasons why people and cultures have swum and how they’ve related to water

Bookshops by Jorge Carrión: kind of like a history of bookshops, also a memoir; about why the space matters and what we’ve done with it and what we might do with it now;

Justice by Michael Sandel: about justice in philosophical terms, and how laws are made based on how we philosophically approach justice

Istanbul by Thomas Madden: a history of the city

Mumbai Fables by Gyan Prakash: also a history of the city, but one told through key events that meant a lot to the city in political, economic, demographic, and cultural terms

Sweetness and Power by Sidney Mintz: about sugar and the modern world economy; it’s a microhistory, and i really like microhistories; also about how sugar was central to colonialism and imperialism and how it tied the colony and the metropole together

The Ocean of Churn by Sanjeev Sanyal: how the indian ocean has been a defining force for the history of its coasts from east africa and south asia and southeast asia

M Train by Patti Smith: how do i describe this? it’s a memoir, kind of; she contemplates, among other things, travel and writing and literature and art; very dreamy to read

The Letters of Vincent van Gogh: reading them is very surreal and it's my favourite thing to do that; also I'll read anything about van Gogh

some on my list that i'm looking forward to reading (soon) ─

Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Funny Weather and To The River by Olivia Laing

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green (i’ve listened to the podcast about fifty-eight times ─ so technically i’ve read it? but the hard copy still isn’t one I can afford, and it’s a book I want to own and annotate to death)

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova

Figuring by Maria Popova

Just Kids by Patti Smith

Pop Song by Larissa Pham

i hope you find something you like!

#book recs #anonymous #ask #booklr #nonfiction #books

[piratewithvigor]

My first thought in regard to every band that gets played on my radio station

ACDC: Every dad’s favourite band

Adams, Bryan: Every mom’s favourite singer until Michael Buble came along

Aerosmith: haha they thought Vince Neil was a lady

Alice Cooper: he’s a Game Of Thrones fanboy and I have proof

Alice In Chains: my sister doesn’t like them because she decided AC were Alice Cooper’s initials ONLY

Allman Brothers Band: good music for dropping acid to

Allman, Gregg: That’s too many Gs for one name

Animals: House Of The Rising Sun, or who even cares

Argent: Sometimes Hold Your Head Up is really catchy

Asia: Tuesdays

Autograph: one of the members went on to be a pharmacist

Bachman-Turner Overdrive: There are just so many pop culture jokes about Taking Care Of Business that whatever I say won’t be as funny

Bad Company: with their song; Bad Company, off their album; Bad Company

Benatar, Pat: Always getting her confused with Patti Smith

Black Crowes: I like them for Lickin, but it doesn’t seem to exist outside of one shoddy video on youtube and my old CD

Blackfoot: this band name feels kind of racy

Black Sabbath: Dio was not better or worse than Ozzy; just different

Blondie: I like Call Me, but Blondie confuses me stylistically

Blue Oyster Cult: MORE COWBELL

Bon Jovi: Hello, childhood trauma, I missed you

Boston: ONE GUY. ONE GUY DID IT ALL AND NO ONE KNOWS

Bowie, David: Don’t let your children watch The Man Who Fell To Earth, or David Bowie’s will end up being the third penis they see in life

Browne, Jackson: Another musician ruined by Supernatural

Buffalo Springfield: Jack Nicholson was at the riot they sing about

Burdon, Eric: no ideas, brain empty

Bush: ditto

Candlebox: ditto once more. Who are these people?

Cars: This band feels so gay and so straight at the same time, I can only assume they’re the poster children of bisexual panic

Cheap Trick: I played Dream Police on Guitar Hero so fucking much because it was the only song anyone who played with me could keep up with

Chicago: Chicago 30 exists, but they do not have 30 albums. Fucking riddle me that

Clapton, Eric: 6 discs in one Greatest Hits is too many. That’s called “re releasing your discography”

Cochrane, Tom: For some reason, everyone thinks Rascal Flats did it better

Cocker, Joe: Belushi did it right

Collective Soul: who?

Collins, Phil: If his biggest hits were done by MCR, they would be emo anthems, but because he’s 5′6″ and from the 80s, they’re not

Cream: *Vietnam flashbacks on the hippie side*

CCR: *Vietnam flashbacks on the war side*

CSNY: David Crosby; meh

Deep Purple: THEY’RE SO MUCH MORE THAN SMOKE ON THE WATER

Def Leppard: the only music for when you’re a heartbroken bitch but also a sexy one

Derek And The Dominos: Clapton and ‘Layla’ broke up

Derringer, Rick: Tom Petty if he was from the midwest

Dio: You thought it was an anime reference, but it was me, Dio

Dire Straits: You can tell how bigoted a radio station is based on how much of Money For Nothing they censor

Doobie Brothers: I have yet to smoke weed, but I listen to the Doobies, and I think that’s pretty close

Dylan, Bob: I take back everything I said about him in my youth

Eagles: Hotel California isn’t their best song, but the memes that come from it are second to none

Edgar Winter Group: @the--blackdahlia

Electric Light Orchestra: Actually an orchestra and sound a fuckton like George Harrison

ELO: I really hesitate to ask what happens with the 7 virgins and a mule

Essex, David: no prominent memories of him

Fabulous Thunderbirds: cannot spell

Faces: Who on earth thought that was a good album name?

Faith No More: I got nothing

Fixx: One Thing Leads To Another is a damn bop

Fleetwood Mac: I ain’t straight, but I’m simply not enough of a witch to enjoy them to full potential

Fogerty, John: He got sued cause he sounded like himself

Foghat: Slow Ride slowly becoming less coherent feels like a drug trip

Foo Fighters: He was just excited to buy a grill

Ford, Lita: deserved better

Foreigner: dramatically overplayed

Frampton, Peter: a masterful user of the talk box

Free: dramatically underplayed

Gabriel, Peter: leaving Genesis changed him a lot

Genesis: if someone likes Genesis, clarify the era, because yes, it does matter

Georgia Satellites: sing like you have a cactus in your ass

Golden Earring: Twilight Zone slaps, but it doesn’t slap as hard as this station thinks it does

Grand Funk Railroad: Funk

Grateful Dead: I like their aesthetic more than their music

Great White: there are so many fucking shark jokes

Greenbaum, Norman: makes me think of Subway for some reason

Green Day: the first of the emo revolution

Greg Kihn Band: RocKihnRoll is literally the most clever album name I’ve ever seen

Guns N Roses: They have more than three good songs, but radio stations never recognize that

Hagar, Sammy: I’m still trying to figure out where he lived to take 16 hours to get to LA driving 55 and how fucking fast was he driving beforehand?

Harrison, George: He went from religious to rock, and if he had continued rocking, he would have gotten too cool 

Head East: I respect people who use breakfast foods as album names

Heart: Magic Man and Barracuda are played at least once every goddamn day. They’re not even the best songs!

Hendrix, Jimi: I have both a cousin and a sibling named after Hendrix references

Henley, Don: Dirty Laundry gives me too much inspiration

Hollies: Somehow sound like they’re both from the 60s and the 80s at the same time

Idol, Billy: he’s doing well for himself

INXS: Terminator vibes

Iris, Donnie: knockoff Roy Orbison

James Gang: too many funks

Jane’s Addiction: if TMNT had a grunge band representative

Jefferson Airplane: *assorted cheers*

Jefferson Starship: *assorted boos*

Jethro Tull: The only band to make you feel not cool enough to play the flute

Jett, Joan: icon

J. Geils Band: I requested them on the radio once and it got played

Joel, Billy: he really did just air everybody’s business like that

John Cafferty And The Beaver Brown Band: literally wtf is that name

John, Elton: yarn Elton sits in my basement, unstaring. Please someone take him from me

Joplin, Janis: Queen

Journey: Stop overplaying Don’t Stop Believing. It takes away from the rest of the repetoire

Judas Priest: literally started the gay leather aesthetic

Kansas: another fucking band Supernatural stole

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: the man confuses me to the point where he isn’t in the right place alphabetically

Kiss: Mick Mars and I will simply have to disagree on the subject

Kravitz, Lenny: runaway vibes

Led Zeppelin: Fucking fight me if you don’t think they’re the most talented band (maybe not the most talented individually, but collectively, no one comes close)

Lennon, John: My least favourite Beatle for reasons

Live: I got nothin

Living Colour: slap a decent amount

Loverboy: do you not get TURNT the fuck up to the big Loverboy hits? Who hurt you??

Lynyrd Skynyrd: Sweet Home Alabama is a Neil Young diss track

Marshall Tucker Band: no opinion

Manfred Mann’s Earth Band: VERY STRONG OPINIONS THAT THEY AREN’T GOOD

McCartney, Paul/Wings: Power couple

Meatloaf: I have nothing but respect for a man who willingly named himself Meatloaf

Mellencamp, John: voted cutest lesbian of 1987

Metallica: I liked their appearance on Jimmy Fallon

Midnight Oil: I get them confused for Talking Heads a lot

Modern English: who?

Molly Hatchet: Hollies vibes, but also Georgia Satellites vibes

Money, Eddie: DAN AVIDAN, IF YOU SEE THIS, COVER TAKE ME HOME TONIGHT

Motley Crue: Stan Mick Mars and John Corabi. They’re the only ones who deserve it

Mott The Hoople: no one loves them except for David Bowie

Mountain: props for naming an album ‘Climbing’

Nazareth: I want to make a John Mulaney joke here, but I can never come up with one

Nicks, Stevie: witch queen

Night Ranger: I get them confused with Urge Overkill

Nirvana: Kurt Cobain was the ally grunge needed

Nova, Aldo: he’s Canadian, at least

Nugent, Ted: *serves a ghost as jerky*

Offspring: nothing here

Osbourne, Ozzy: this bitch crazy

Outfield: Your Love is kind of a sketchy song, but it slaps hard

Palmer, Robert: low quality Eddie Money

Pearl Jam: *grunts in Eddie Vedder*

Petty, Tom: I have so many feelings about Tom Petty and they are all good

Pink Floyd: which one is Pink?

Plant, Robert: solo career is a crapshoot, but his voice is unparalleled

Poison: I want them to write a song called ‘Alice Cooper’

Pretenders: I want to say good things, but I have nothing to say

Queen: A doctor of astrophysics, a screaming girl, a disco queen and a diva walk into a bar. It’s Queen; they’re there to play a gig

Queensryche: neutral opinion

Quiet Riot: they got big because of a song they hated. I love that

Rafferty, Gerry: the second-sexiest sax opening in all of music

Rainbow: Ritchie Blackmore created something very magnificent

Ram Jam: one good song and they didn’t even write it

Ratt: I’m sure they have more than Round And Round, but I don’t know it

RHCP: funky, but if you have paid money to hear them, you’re going to The Bad Place (I don’t make the rules)

Red Rider: basically Golden Earring

Reed, Lou: Walk On The Wild Side would be such a cool song if it wasn’t so dull

REM: American Tragically Hip

REO Speedwagon: Props for having a dad joke as an album title

Rolling Stones: Never in my life could I imagine the drummer being named anything but Charlie

Rush: How to make being uncool the coolest fucking shit

Santana: The world needs more Santana

Scandal: There’s something really funny about The Warrior being my brother’s “song” with his girlfriend

Scorpions: Was Wind Of Change written by the CIA? Only the spotify podcast I got an ad for once could say

Seger, Bob: A different variety of Eric Clapton (frankly a better variety, but that’s just me)

Simple Minds: we ALL forgot about you

Skid Row: Sebastian Bach is prettier than all of us

Soundgarden: music that makes you feel like you dunked your head underwater

Springsteen, Bruce: my arch-nemesis. Maybe someday, he’ll find out about it

Squeeze: according to my friends, the stupidest band name ever, but they’re theatre kids, so you know

Squier, Billy: If he can make it through 1984 alive, you can make it through whatever bad day you’re having

Stealers Wheel: Yet another band who I always mistake for George Harrison

Steely Dan: my house’s nickname for the Robber in Settlers Of Catan

Steppenwolf: Either makes me think of Jay & Silent Bob, Jack Nicholson, or that time I had to cut 6lbs of onions

Steve Miller Band: when you’re in the right mood, they slap hard

Stewart, Rod: my soundtrack to summer 2015

Stills, Stephen: Love The One You’re With Is Catchy, but the lyrics are questionable

Stone Temple Pilots: the only band to write a song about goo you smear on yourself

Stray Cats: an obscene amount of merch is available for them

Styx: Supernatural would have ruined them for me too if I hadn’t been into them previously. 

Supertramp: I hunted for Breakfast In America for two years and it was worth every hunt

Sweet: I will never understand my two-month obsession with Ballroom Blitz when I was 15, but it was legit all I listened to

Talking Heads: you may find yourself in a pizza hut. And you may find yourself in a taco bell. And you may find yourself at the combination pizza hut and taco bell. And you may ask yourself; ‘how did I get here?’

Temple Of The Dog: I keep confusing them for Nazareth

Ten Years After: somehow still relevant

Tesla: not the car or the dude

The Beatles: Evokes a lot of opinions from people. Mine is that I love them

The Clash: I showed my sister the ‘Lock The Taskbar’ vine ONCE and it still kills her

The Doors: evokes teenage terror from deep within my soul

The Guess Who: Canada’s answer to confusing question-themed band names

The Kinks: kinky

The Police: wrote the theme of 2020 and everyone somehow forgot it was about a teacher resisting becoming a pedophile

The Ramones: playing all of their songs in a row wouldn’t take more than 2 hours

The Romantics: you don’t think you know them, but if you’ve seen Shrek 2, you have

The Who: If someone can explain Tommy to me, I’d be glad to hear it

The Zombies: I think they happened because of the 60s

Thin Lizzy: Could the boys maybe leave town?

Thorogood, George: blues, but make it modern

Toto: the most memed song behind All Star

Townshend, Pete: just makes me think of the end of Mr. Deeds

T-Rex: Mark Bolan is an icon

Triumph: The no-name brand of Rush

Tubes: like the yogurt

Twisted Sister: they did a christmas album and my mom does NOT hate it

U2: U2 Movers; we move in mysterious ways

Van Halen: RIP Eddie

Van Morrison: honestly, who’s named Van?

Vaughn, Stevie Ray: Steamy Ray Vaughn

Walsh, Joe: The Smoker You Drink The Player You Get

War: Foghat, but even groovier

Whitesnake: the most successful band to be named after a penis

Wright, Gary: the 90s thanks him for writing the song every movie used for the “guy sees cute girl and it’s love at first sight” scene

Yes: To Be Continued

Young, Neil: The best part of CSNY

Zevon, Warren: the album cover of Excitable Boy makes me deeply uncomfortable for reasons I don’t understand

ZZ Top: has been the same three guys since 1969. Lineup unchanged. 

3 Doors Down: They feel a little modern to be on a classic rock station, but whatever

38 Special: Why 38?

#I made this instead of doing homework #Classic Rock #Meme

[monkberries]

So here goes: Personally I find Paul to be hot with a beard. But it annoys me because there’s always some Paul stan who’s like “he was super depressed during that time you know” anytime someone says how hot he looks with a beard. Like first of all, I don’t think we should go around diagnosing people and assuming how he felt 24/7 just based on a couple of quotes when we don’t know him, and second of all I was just saying he looks good. Also idk why Paul stans want to pretend like Paul is STILL a victim when he’s definitely not. He’s a super successful billionaire musician. He’s fine.

I'm going to assume all four of these were from the same anon; I received another along these same lines that seems to be from someone else:

OKAY. There's a lot here.

As I've said before, I think the concept you are both talking about - that Paul is the favourite, that people will attack you if you criticize him, that people are vilifying John more now - is true, but is also a matter of perspective. I think sometimes we perceive the whole fandom as just the people we're surrounded by; that can be true in smaller fandoms, like for obscure shows or whatever, but for the Beatles, the fandom is so much bigger and more spread out across generations, social media platforms, and works of literature than almost any other fandom. There are literally thousands upon thousands of books either about or tangentially about the Beatles; there are pockets on every platform from tumblr to twitter to podcasts to instagram to facebook etc., and it branches off even more niche within those to like, facebook groups specifically for podcasts about the Beatles, or discord servers, or livejournal threads, or music forums, or fics on ao3. There are fansites with thoughtful speculative articles like heydullblog and blogs specifically reviewing Beatle books like beatlebioreview and sites cataloging every bit of minutiae like the Beatles Bible, all with their own flavor of comment sections. And not only that, the Beatles fandom spans generations and cultures in a way that almost nothing else ever has or ever will.

And this is not even going into the shifting narratives that have been in play over the years surrounding Paul specifically, and the huge, huge difference between the perceptions of him by the authors and the Counterculture People, the perceptions of him by regular ass Wings fans who have only idly flipped through Rolling Stone while waiting in line at the local bodega, and the perceptions of him by everyone in between, who may or may not have been unconsciously influenced by the wider narratives about him.

All that is to make the case that the fandom that you are experiencing on tumblr/twitter is an extremely small fraction of The Fandom at large. For every Paul stan on twitter that yells at people for not believing that Paul literally invented music, there is a John stan in a facebook group going on about John's supposedly tireless peace efforts. For every nuanced, well sourced post on amoralto's blog, there is someone in the Beatles Bible comment section saying that John and Paul hated each other. For every fan who's read the major Beatles bios with a critical eye towards bias, there are plenty more fans who just absorbed them as straight fact. This is not to say that your experiences are not real or valid! They absolutely are! What I am saying is that there are infinite permutations of infinite Beatles fandoms out there, and the people you see who insist that Paul is still treated worse than John, I would imagine, are occupying various permutations of the fandom where that is more true, alongside the one they share with you. It's not for me to say whether the Paul or John people have the upper hand on the whole - truly, I don't think anyone has enough perspective on the whole fandom to make any judgment on that, no matter what general Grand Pronouncements anyone may make about The Fandom.

As I've said before, any overly defensive "stan" behavior, whether it's for John or Paul or George or anyone, is exhausting to me, so I definitely understand where you're coming from re: him being supposedly underrated. He is literally one of the most successful musicians of all time; as of the beginning of this year, he is worth 1.2 billion dollars; and, thanks to his own efforts and the efforts of quite a few fans and writers out there over the decades, he now enjoys an incredibly positive "granddude" reputation. There are ways in which it can be exasperating to read yet another indignant refutation of music reviews for RAM that came out fifty years ago, when his last three albums have hit the top 3 in the charts in both the US and the UK and have gotten great reviews. I have seen people wonder, honestly wonder, how much more money Paul could have made, how much more respected he could have been, if the rock press had been inclined to give RAM good reviews. When I see that, it does start to feel like fans of Paul, at least the defensive ones in the fandom permutations I occupy, are arguing with the author photo of Philip Norman in the book jacket for Shout!. It's not that I think those arguments and discussions are not worth having; I do think they're worth having because I believe that the only way we can continue to grow is if we grapple with the mistakes made in the past. But there is a strange kind of disconnect that happens when you read about someone indignantly defending Wild Life as though the members of Wings are currently, actively having eggs and rotten fruit thrown at them, and then you remember that Paul is currently, and has been for many years now, one of the richest men in the entire world.

As for the misogyny thing, I'll copy and paste a quote from Erin Weber which may explain a little better than I can:

"Where it starts entering into serious discussion for me is when you have professional grown men (Schaffner would be the most glaring example of this, but not the only one) repeatedly using the term “pretty” or “pretty-faced” to refer to another grown man. (Norman does the same). Schaffner doesn’t only do that once or twice, he uses one of those exact words at least fifteen times in his references to McCartney. “Pretty-boy” is also a term that at least one journalist has used to describe Paul, and that’s not a stealth insult: that’s an overt one. (My husband, who hates the Yankees, routinely used the term “pretty-boy” to insult Alex Rodriguez. And it wasn’t meant as a compliment).

My reaction to this is based both on studies that I’m aware of (I’d have to hunt them up, but I’ve seen them referenced before) which argue that the use of feminized language can be a method of stealth insult/diminishment when used by men to describe other men, and my own personal experience. It is difficult to see a situation where a grown man using the term “pretty” or any variation of the word “pretty” to describe another grown man means it as a compliment. Even if its purely meant as a descriptive term, it is a descriptive term that is weighted with significant meaning and is feminizing. And given the rock press’s obsession with masculinity and its insistence, as noted in other studies, of using masculine terms to portray a song as good and feminizing terms to describe them as weak or inferior, I don’t think its a coincidence that a rock press that knew well the power of masculine and feminine language commonly used feminized language, particularly in the 1970s and 80s, to describe McCartney."

I personally see this more as pseudo-homophobic than pseudo-misogynistic (like, when I see a man called "pretty" by another man in an insulting way, I immediately think "oh, that author wanted to say a gay slur but he's too Professional"), but the two things can get muddled together, I suppose.

Anyway, actionable items:

Diversify Your Fan Experience. More perspectives can really help gain a fuller understanding of not just the fandom but the Beatles themselves. Don't be afraid to be wrong, and don't be afraid to be right; always be open to learning new things and hearing new insights.

If All Else Fails, Block 'Em.

#macca #anonymous #i guess this is #hot take tuesday #? #even though its thursday night #about the blogger #for reference

[blu-whale]

Beth Johanssen Headcanons

okay so i have many headcanons for ALL the characters in The Martian, it’s my favourite book, and i love the entire ares3 crew very much, but Beth is my favourite so i’m starting with her

She’s not the space nerd you’d expect 

Like you really want her to, but her first love was computers, and she never had a space phase (no pun intended) as a kid, so she doesn’t know that much about the history of spaceflight or other planets 

obviously she knows a lot about space, she’s an astronaut but she only knows what she NEEDS to know

She is a true crime nerd tho 

She ADORES Agatha Christie, and that brought her into the true crime community

 Podcasts are her BITCH and she will listen to them all the time, but especially when she’s on runs 

she got into them in college but they really carried her through astronaut training 

Anglophile 

This girl FUCKING loves England. The Beatles are just one example of her weird obsession with that country

She wanted so badly to meet the queen when she was younger

 She specifically asked NASA for royalty news while she was up in space, but they said no 

VERY attached to her tech

Like gives a name to every computer or gaming system she owns.

 Her in-space computer was Candice, her work laptop is Johnathan, her gaming computer is Sam and her personal is Kyle. (yes she does have three) and her pc is COVERED in stickers. 

When her last laptop died (Gregory) she cried. Like literally cried. That computer got her undergrad and had been with her for too long not to. 

Coffee snob 

She won’t buy it from Dunkin, it has to be at least Starbucks but she actually prefers local, and will spend at least 15 minutes searching for an independent before resorting to a chain. 

She got a premium coffee maker (with all the bells and whistles) for her birthday one year and it is one of her most prized possessions 

Is definitely addicted to caffeine and got headaches if she didn’t get her fix, but when NASA found out they made her detox on decaf for three weeks, and was confined to two cups a day for the remainder of time as an astronaut 

Once she got back tho, she was right back to her old ways. 

Night owl

Obviously not a morning person, she HATES waking up, but she also loves staying up. 

It’s something about being awake while the rest of the world sleeps

Also it’s just fun to stay awake 

She’d work for hours into the night before she became an astronaut 

let’s be honest, she still does even after she’s back from space

Chris hates when she does this, because “sleep is vital to good health” 

she gradually stops for Chris’ sake, but when he’s gone for whatever reason, she’s up until 3am

She has an extreme morning routine

Will not be productive if she does not follow this routine to T 

It goes: hit snooze at least three times, drag herself out of bed, make coffee, drink coffee, 20 minute workout,  shower, get ready for the day, stop for coffee on the way to work, go to work. 

It takes her like 2 hours to get fully awake. 

No one can talk to her until at least her second cup of coffee 

Also when in training, she hated the schedule so much but never complained  to her team, (only to friends, and the crew was shocked to find out she hated it) 

#the martian #beth johanssen #mark watney #chris beck #alex vogel #rick martinez #melissa lewis #andy weir #headcanon #ares3 #aresIII #ares 3 #i don’t know what tags to use lmao

[sgt-paul]

EP.144 - PAUL McCARTNEY, THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST

new podcast alert!!!!! a very lovely one. so here i typed up some of my favourite moments because obviously i’ve got nothing better to do:

paul listing all his favourite shows (homes under the hammer?, american pickers?? storage hunters???) and saying that they show his mental age:) (listen after he said that he watches infomercials, nothing can surprise me anymore)

so apparently whenever check my machine comes up during this promo period he HAS to sing it. he likes it!!! 

horse rides are exceptionally fantastic.

"communing with nature"

"ludicrous" ... "that's a rapper" literally lost it at this point

paul loving that england has the season changes

"bagels with hummus and marmite".. his midday break with a cup of tea. the ultimate little meal. him being sad when it's finished

veggie burgers and sausages are his favourites because: bbq = dad role

when the page starts to blur it's bedtime

when he said he never knows how to pronunce "marcel proust" .... flashbacks ey!!!

"if he's on a talent contest he'd get booed off" referring to bob dylan's reinterpretations of his own songs

him being able to "find an optimistic exit from a bad situation". as always. him wanting to be your guide

"i only know that sgt. pepper's was 67 the rest of it, i have no clue" ... honestly, the rest isn't all that important anyway so i think you're good paul

calling america the land of conspiracy theories

"come on girls give us a beatle scream" and him being delighted that it still sounds the exact same as in the 60s

my brain momentarily switching off when the getting better anecdote etc are brought up

him saying that the movie two of us (where there is a john and a paul played by actors, as he very appropriately described it) he thought was okay, because it starts with the disclaimer that it's a fictional story

him not knowing that in new york you have to call ahead (dakjgkvbas)

YEAST

him saying that he now wishes that he just sat and hugged john but that would be "slightly out of line" and adam chiming in that maybe that's what alcohol is for (cracking paul up in the process), "enabling you to hug and be hugged"

his hitchhiking incident and him never giving anyone a freaking lift after that also i appreciate his kind and generous nature but how reckless was this man in the 60s jesus

him crying when rehearsing god only knows with brian wilson. he loves music so much i-

me ignoring the kanye parts

"you can't expect the kids to still be playing old rock and roll records. that's for us"

coolest person he's ever met? his wife, nancy..... and elvis :)

#old paul #HE SOUNDS SO ENERGETIC AND LOVELY AND ENDEARING #I WANT TO LISTEN HIM TALK FOR HOURS.... his voice is so soothing and i genuinely just love the way he talks #like when he really gets into a story and he sounds super enthusiastic and lets out those old man chuckles #aaaah:) #anyway overall an enjoyable one #the random questions were great and i feel like the host really made paul feel at ease. so thats always good #(also......) #(can i just politely say that the first idk ~30 minutes or so were so good without all the beatle/john talk) #(refreshing) #(and i honestly think that when this is the case he just gets more relaxed and later when the topic arrives #he is more chill and open. i mean obviously we heard some stories for the 100th time but there were some other interesting parts as well) #(like when he talked briefly about two of us i found that to be telling as to... what didnt happen between them in the 70s) #(or when he said that years later 'you think of little things like oh THATS why that happened') #(honestly my mind went to stuff like the book notes. you know 'funeral' etc..) #(but maybe that was just an odd comment from him idk #AAAAANYWAY this is way too long. i just wanna hear the freaking album already........) #// #grandpaul #r #(can i just say tho that we really need more interviews like this. not the same stories but also not the very in depth serious stuff either) #(a good relaxed lowkey convo)

[96thdayofrage]

It was the mid-1980s, and African American rock ‘n’ roll, R&B and blues musician and activist Daryl Davis had just finished performing a set with his band in a bar in Frederick, Maryland.

As he left the stage, a White man—who would later reveal himself to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan—went up to Davis, put his hand around his shoulder and expressed his approval and admiration for his performance. “This is the first time I heard a Black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis,” he told Davis after they exchanged pleasantries. Surprised with the statement, Davis quickly replied, “Well, where do you think Jerry Lee Lewis learned how to play that kind of style? . . . He learned it from the same place I did: Black blues and boogie-woogie piano players.” The White man was in disbelief and refused to accept Davis’ proposal.

Hearing about this incident on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast made me realise that I had been just as ignorant and oblivious as this man about the extent of the artistic contributions of Black people to American music. The moment also sparked within me many questions about my state of ignorance. Why did I not know about these artists? How much more did I not know? How much of the music I listened to was indeed Black?

As an Indian girl growing up in Kuwait in the 2000s, my exposure to American popular music came primarily through television channels like MTV Arabia (the Middle Eastern iteration of MTV) and MBC (Middle East Broadcasting Center) as well as the radio station Radio Kuwait FM 99.7. Hit singles from a range of American artists, including Black artists, were in heavy rotation along with other shows. My favourite was an MTV show called ‘Rewind’ which played classic pop, R&B and hip hop hits from the previous decades. Songs were played in cars and at parties and hummed in classrooms by local as well as expatriate teens of various nationalities who, like myself, were unaware of the cultural and historical backstories of the music.

For example, I heard of Elvis Presley, dubbed the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” on television shows and news media due to his iconic status, but until recently, I had no idea that Presley was profoundly influenced by and “borrowed” from Black blues, gospel and rhythm ‘n’ blues artists of and before his time. He was influenced by radio performances of then local Black disc jockeys like B. B. King (who later came to be known as the “King of the Blues”) and Rufus Thomas (who also became a successful recording artist) and by performers at the Black nightclubs he visited during his teenage and young adult years.

Furthermore, I only recently learnt that many of Presley’s early recordings were covers of original songs by Black artists and that some of his biggest-selling songs like ‘Don't Be Cruel’ and ‘All Shook Up’ were penned by a Black musician by the name of Otis Blackwell. In fact, the first time I heard about it was last year in a YouTube video of a speech that Michael Jackson gave in 2002. While facts like this have now become somewhat common knowledge for most people in the West, my lack of awareness of Blackwell and others like him may be the residual effect of a time in the United States’ past when racial segregation permeated every aspect of life, including music and entertainment.

Dr Portia K. Maultsby is a renowned ethnomusicologist and professor emerita at the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University and the founder of the university’s Archives of African American Music and Culture. Maultsby took up the study of African American popular music traditions in the 1970s when there was no one looking into it as a valid area of research. She explains that segregation ensured that White Americans remained ignorant of Black musical traditions.

“Due to the segregated structure of the country for years and years, White Americans were kept away from the sounds of Black music,” Maultsby says.  During this time, many Black jazz, gospel, R&B and soul artists enjoyed popularity in and even toured different parts of Europe. However, within the United States, Black artists were relegated to the so-called category of ‘race music’, an umbrella term—later replaced by ‘rhythm ‘n’ blues’ in the 1940s—used to denote essentially all types of African American music made by Black people, for Black people. The songs were distributed by mostly White-owned record labels catering exclusively to Black audiences, which meant that the White population remained largely ignorant of the large volumes of work that was recorded by countless Black artists. Black artists also did not get paid as much as White artists or have as many resources, and segregation ensured that their performances were limited to smaller venues.

By the early 1950s, however, a number of independent radio stations (again, mostly White-owned) began popping up, including rhythm ‘n’ blues or “Negro” radio stations. Since it was not possible to segregate radio waves, Black music became accessible to everyone and White teenagers began taking an interest in it. Seeing this, the music industry recognised the potential of appropriating Black music and record companies started making sanitised covers of the music with White artists to distribute to White listeners. But as Maultsby explains, they did so while “keeping the original artists in the background, unexposed” and rhythm ‘n’ blues music, covered and performed by White artists, was now marketed to the mainstream White listener as ‘rock ‘n’ roll,’ a term coined by radio disc jockey Alan Freed.

Record companies and White artists wanted the Black sounds and styles that appealed to the White audience but they did not want the Black artist. American record producer and founder of Sun Records Sam Phillips had been looking for “a White man with the Negro sound and the Negro feel” when he found Elvis Presley. The Beatles got their start by covering various blues artists like Arthur Alexander and rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry. Janis Joplin, who was dubbed the “Queen of Rock”, wanted to sound like a Black blues musician and was influenced by Lead Belly, Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton. Pat Boone covered ‘Tutti Frutti’, an original song by musician, singer and songwriter Little Richard, and reached 12th place in the national charts of 1956—several places ahead of the original.

Covers like these were made by record companies much to the disapproval and discontentment of the artists. Little Richard, nicknamed “The Innovator, The Originator, and The Architect of Rock ‘n’ Roll” and whose style influenced big names like the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Michael Jackson and Prince, told the Washington Post in 1984 that he felt as though he was “pushed into a rhythm ‘n’ blues corner” to keep him away from the White audience. He said that “they”—who he does not name—would try to replace him with White rockstars like Elvis Presley who performed his songs on television as soon as they were released. He believed that this was because “they” didn’t want him to become a hero to White kids.  

Little Richard’s statement reveals the racism and the lack of agency that Black artists suffered while under exploitative record labels. Exploitation happened to almost all artists in the music industry, but Black artists were particularly targetted as they would receive very little or nothing in royalties. Forbes reports that Specialty Records purchased ‘Tutti Frutti’ for a meagre 50 USD and gave him just 0.05 USD per record sold in royalties, while White artists received much higher rates—a discriminatory practice that was quite common in the industry. Richard, after he left the label in 1959, sued Specialty records for failing to pay him royalties.

Dr Birgitta Johnson is an associate professor of ethnomusicology in the School of Music at the University of South Carolina and teaches courses on African American sacred music, African music, hip hop, blues and world music. She explains that Black artists were not protected by copyright laws and would often have their music recorded and sold by record companies without proper contracts—in other words, their music would get stolen.

“Back in the day, there was no expectation that the Black artist could fight someone in court even though some of them did,” Johnson says. “If they didn’t have the copyright stolen from them, the record companies would own the music [instead of] the artists, and [the artists] wouldn’t know it because a lot of the time, they wouldn’t have the legal know-how to recognise what was happening in contracts. They wouldn’t get paid royalties . . . even though they were due royalties.”

While this exploitation of Black artists continued, in the late 1950s, after the development of smaller and more portable transistor radios, a wider audience of White teenagers began listening to Black radio stations. This new generation no longer had to depend on the family’s devices and gained more autonomy over what and who they listened to. “Young White people, who would become the hippies of the ‘60s, are the generation of people who started to press for their freedom . . . to [listen to] what they wanted to hear,” Johnson explains.

Listeners who heard the originals would call up the radio or go down to their local record store and ask for the originals, and record companies had to start supplying to demands to stay relevant in the market. “The covers made money but didn’t last long,” Johnson says, “because young White people no longer wanted the covers, the fake versions, the copies.”

The problem was that cover bands and artists tended to simply do whatever the producers asked them to do, which was usually to copy the original artist’s sound, style and moves, and more often than not, it made for bland and inauthentic renditions of the originals. The covers lacked the authenticity that Black artists conveyed in their performance and the young audience who had heard the authentic versions could see this. “They knew what the good music sounded like—it was almost like they understood... they may not have understood the racial dynamics of it, but they knew [the real thing from the fake],” Johnson says.

Moreover, artists who did covers were performing in styles that were foreign to them. “It was outside of their tradition; it was outside of their aesthetics; [and] they couldn’t bring the same excitement to it sometimes,” she explains. The music, performance and singing style had characteristic elements such as polyrhythms (layering of multiple rhythms), call-and-response, dance and improvisation—elements rooted in traditions that were brought to the United States by enslaved West and Central Africans between the 18th and 19th centuries. More importantly, the lyrics of songs by Black artists reflected the unique social customs, trends and living conditions of Black people, and these were not fully understood by people covering the songs. As a result, “[the covers] couldn’t compete with the real thing,” Johnson says.

Maultsby explains that due to the increasing popularity of the originals, record labels soon began recording more Black artists. However, she says, they watered down or “temper[ed] [their] heavy gospel-oriented sound” to make it more palatable for the White audience, and “one way they did [that] in the ‘50s and into the early ‘60s was to use pop production techniques” which meant a “background of strings and backup singers that sounded more White—concert-type singers—to soften the more raspier, emotional sound of the Black singer.”

By the 1980s, Black music gained exposure to an even wider international audience through television channels like MTV as well as broadcasts of live performances. Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, collaborations between interracial duos were used as a mass-marketing strategy to increase the reach of Black artists and pop production continued to be used to “soften the Black sound.” Record companies also paired up White artists with Black producers to achieve that ever-popular Black sound.  

“Thus, more White artists embodying or imitating aspects of the Black style made it acceptable and soon . . . that Black sound began to define the American sound,” Maultsby explains. However, this imitation and dilution meant that people could never experience authentic Black music.

According to Maultsby, who helped pioneer the academic study of African American popular music, the way non-African Americans experience African American music, even in the United States, is from the perspective of an outsider, and this applies to the international audience as well.

“By and large, within African American communities, music is created as a part of everyday life . . . music is a part of our lived experience,” Maultsby explains. “When that music is then taken out of that context and placed in the music industry, it becomes a commodity for mass dissemination, and it takes on a different meaning and a different function.”

She explains that the live performances of legendary artists like Aretha Franklin or James Brown were very different from the studio-recorded performances because the records were “mediated so that [they] fit a certain format that [could] appeal to a broader audience.”

“Record labels didn’t like recording performances live because they felt the audience interaction would interfere with the performance,” she says. “But that audience interaction [was] very much a part of the way Black music is created and experienced.

The writing and coverage of Black music both in and outside of the United States also did a poor job of representing its true essence. As Maultsby explains, White journalists who covered Black music would write about it from a White perspective rather than a Black one.

“A lot of misconceptions early on had to do with the music being reported by White journalists who reported through the lens of White audiences,” Maultsby says. “When journalists wrote about Black music . . . in the US—and this carried on to Europe and the rest of the world [including] Asia [and the] Middle East—they wrote about it through their observation of performances in venues with predominantly White or all-White audience, or in general, non-Black audiences . . . they did not go into the Black community to see how the music was performed and experienced.”

Writing about Black music and culture from a Eurocentric or White point of view has resulted in early Black contributions to popular music being misrepresented as well as erased from the general consciousness. Black culture was appropriated, exploited and diluted and in the process, consumers were left with watered down, commodified versions of the art that did not represent the people that were at the heart of creating it, and its after-effects have carried over to the present-day, among non-Western consumers.

Black contributions to music are also rarely discussed in mainstream media, which is largely controlled by White executives.

“The influence of Black music in a lot of American music are things that only get discussed in classes or documentaries—sometimes award shows—but mostly in formal environments, unless you’re from that tradition,” says Johnson. “[Artists like] Steven Tyler . . . [have] said, ‘I grew up listening to the blues; I love the blues’ . . . but the people who promote him don’t really have any interest in [promoting that] narrative because it’s really about selling a personality when you think about how the music industry works.”

She explains that though most people are analytically aware that the United States is a diverse country, images that are promoted by American companies are very White-centric. What is sold to the rest of the world as “American” is usually centred around Whiteness, whether that’s through music, movies, television or other forms of entertainment.

“The outside world sees a very limited package and predominantly a White or Eurocentric image . . . people look at America and assume this is basically a White space even though we have all this diversity—we’ve always had this kind of diversity of culture,” remarks Johnson, who often does not get recognised as Black American when she travels internationally. “When I go to China, they don’t assume I’m American. When I go to Thailand, they don’t assume I’m American."

Even though a lot has changed for Black musicians and artists in the United States since its “race music” days, the impact of racism and Eurocentrism lingers on and affects the way Gen Z as well as millennials outside of the United States, like myself, understand pop music in the 21st century. Many tributes have been paid to pioneering and legendary Black artists in award shows, documentaries and biopics and their contributions have been studied academically by scholars like Maultsby and Johnson, but my awareness of Black music and culture as a non-American is not only limited by what’s been given to me in the media, but also by what’s been left out of the conversations around popular music. How do we change this?

As Maultsby expresses, it starts simply with acknowledgement—just like a symphony orchestra’s roots are acknowledged to be European no matter who performs it or how it is reinterpreted in different cultures, or how a sitar is recognised as an Indian musical instrument whether it’s played in a jazz performance or a symphony orchestra, we need to continue to learn and acknowledge the Black roots of the music even when it has a local interpretation or variation.

“We all know [the symphony orchestra] comes from Europe; there’s no question there; we don’t try to claim it as our own conception, but we do participate in that culture. That’s how we have to think about Black American culture,” she says.  

We need to recognise African American music for its role in shaping Western popular music, and understand what constitutes Black musical traditions and what differentiates it from the rest of the world, rather than generalise it as merely American music. And while music may have transcended cultural and racial boundaries, transcendence should not come at the price of obscuring and erasing the source.

“It’s fine as long as we keep in mind the source of that music,” Maultsby says. “We can say it transcends race—it just shows how influential Black has been internationally—but at the same time, we don’t need to erase the group that created the music and make Black people invisible in terms of their contributions. And that happens a lot.

“If we are not reminded that Black people are the ones that created the music you love, we question their contributions to society and to the world. We shouldn’t need to be reminded every day. It belongs in our consciousness.”

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 51: Small talk, big deal

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 51: Small talk, big deal. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 51 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today we’re getting enthusiastic about small talk! 

But first, thank you so much to everybody who helped us celebrate our anniversary month in November. We really enjoyed hearing and seeing all of your shares to help other people find the show and be able to listen to a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.

Lauren: Most podcasts still find new ears or new eyes, if they have transcripts like ours, by word of mouth. Whether you shared in the anniversary month in November, or you want to share Lingthusiasm at any other time of the year, we’re always incredibly grateful.

Gretchen: This month’s bonus episode is a Q&A with lexicographer Emily Brewster, who works for Merriam-Webster, answering patron questions about dictionaries and how they’re made and how words get into them and out of them and all sorts of things in that direction. You can listen to that and a whole bunch of other bonus episodes – almost twice as much Lingthusiasm – by going to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Hey, Gretchen, how’s your book going?

Gretchen: Oh, well, you know, it’s been out for a bit over a year now. It came out in paperback earlier this year. The media I’ve been doing for it has been dying down, which is nice to take a bit of a break, but people are still tagging me about them reading it on social media, and that’s really nice. What I’ve actually been working on this year has been this series of intro linguistics videos with this big educational YouTube channel, Crash Course – as you know, Lauren, because you’ve been working on it with me.

Lauren: I see that it’s a very well-practised answer to that question.

Gretchen: I mean, it’s a question that people have been asking me for five years now. The answer does keep changing, but I have had a lot of practice.

Lauren: I imagine it’s definitely in high rotation for people making small talk with you.

Gretchen: It’s a good way of getting into this idea of small talk questions – asking about people’s lives – and how we think about what types of things we can use to get into a conversation about how someone’s been doing or what someone’s been doing lately.

Lauren: This kind of small talk is something that is really important for building or maintaining social relationships, whether that is with the waiter at the café you’re at, or with your friends or family members. The name “small” in “small talk” is a little bit misleading because it diminishes what is actually the really important social function of this kind of language where it helps us ease into relationships whether that be with the waiter at our local café or our closest family members and friends.

Gretchen: I think that there’s the sense that small talk is either really easy or really difficult or what’s going on there and can we analyse those types of conversational turns in a linguistically interesting manner. I definitely think we can. I wanna pause and distinguish small talk, which are these questions, “How are things going,” “How’s the book,” “How’s the job,” “How’s the baby,” “How’s living in the place you’re living still,” “How about that local sports team,” “Nice weather we’ve been having lately.” Those are small talk conversations, and they’re not quite as rote as another topic we’ve talked about before, which is phatic expressions. That’s things like, “Hey,” “No problem,” “Bye,” “Thanks,” which are really very rote and very ritualised. When you say, “How’s it going? Good. How are you,” that’s phatic. But when you say, “How are things these days,” and you’re like, “Oh, well, you know, not too much. I’ve been doing this,” that’s when we get into small talk when it’s a little bit more original – but often not that original because you do end up with that certain level of rehearsal.

Lauren: Definitely trodding well-worn ground sometimes in small talk. Sometimes, it can take you in surprising directions. I always find it interesting which topics of conversation are appropriate small talk and how that can vary across different groups of people or entire cultures. It’s part of the whole collection of things that you have to learn about learning a language beyond just learning specific words and sentences. Have you found yourself in the middle of small talk different set of expectations before?

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, I always have this experience whenever I manage to successfully make small talk about sports that I feel like I’ve really gotten away with something. Sometimes, I’ll be talking with one person about – in Canada, it’s hockey. Montreal Canadiens have this big hockey game, blah blah blah, this thing happened, or like, Canada versus the US – the Olympics – that hockey game generally makes Canadian news. I’ll learn like, “Oh, it went to overtime and there was this big save at the last minute,” or something like that, and then I’ll get to mine it for small talk for like a week. I always feel like I’ve gotten away with something.

Lauren: Good making use of your limited engagement with sport.

Gretchen: I mean, I don’t engage with sport zero amount of the time, but I definitely don’t have as much deep engagement with sport as a lot of people do. So, I feel like I’ve entered a different world when I manage to have small talk about sport.

Lauren: I always find it interesting how small groups of people have their own expectations about what topics of small talk are appropriate. It’s always really a bit of a relief when you find a social group where they do the same kind of set of hobby references or things like favourite films and TV shows as the basis of small talk. It’s just like, “Ah, okay, this is a conversation that I can easily navigate.” It’s always a delight if you share those media references with people.

Gretchen: It’s really interesting because you can be trapped in that conversation of like, “Oh, here are two people who are just making references from The Office at each other, and I haven’t seen The Office” or insert TV show that’s popular that you haven’t seen. In some cases, you can pick up references. Like, I know all the references from Mean Girls because enough people have seen it. I know all the references from Oregon Trail, that very early video game that people played, even though I never played it because – you know, “You have died of dysentery,” or “So-and-So has died of dysentery,” is just a phrase that gets repeated. So, even though I haven’t played that game, I can make these references to a certain level of depth.

Lauren: Yeah. There’re the small talk topics of conversation and then there’s the media references that you use to build out rapport with people as well, which is another extra level of solidarity building and group building in the small talk process. Sylvia Sierra is a linguist who’s done some really nice work on The Oregon Trail, which is, I assume, why you brought that example up.

Gretchen: Yes, Sylvia Sierra has this great paper that’s about video game references as resources in friend interaction and how people quote video games. Especially, I think it’s like Gen X and Millennials quote video games as part of conversation to shift things into a more playful aspect for a serious topic or ways of maintaining group identity.

Lauren: Listening to how Gen Xers do that and why people do these media references has made me feel a lot less threatened by people who weave poetry or Shakespeare references in. Especially people from a century ago who just add a bit of a Shakespearean subtext to their conversation, it’s like, “Ah, they’re just doing what we do now with The Office.”

Gretchen: It’s the same thing. It’s funny. Speaking of Shakespeare, one play that was really popular during Shakespeare’s era was Troilus and Cressida where you have these two young lovers-ish, and they have this slightly creepy uncle who’s named Pandarus who tries to put them together and get them together. This is where our verb “to pander” comes from.

Lauren: Ah!

Gretchen: It’s actually a very old, embedded media reference that people have forgotten about. I recently read Troilus and Cressida for...reasons, and I was like, “Wait. This is the origin of this.” And you start spotting it in other Shakespeare plays where he has this Troilus and Cressida reference, which is kind of like having a modern play or show or something that’s like, “Oh, my book has a Hamilton reference,” and it’s kind of the equivalent of here’s this popular media property that you do your riff on and that you made clear references for.

Lauren: I feel a lot less cultural insecurity around supposedly high brow stuff like Shakespeare when you start realising the parallels between with how we do quoting of media references these days.

Gretchen: Also, this is something that I bring up a lot when I do media interviews with people who are in a generation or two older from me, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, my kids, they just talk in memes now. My teenager, their friends just talk in memes to each other,” and it’s like, “Yeah, they’re just doing media references. When you were their age, you used popular movies or popular songs, and you quoted lines from those. Maybe you quoted lines from Beatles songs or something.” This is the same thing they’re doing except the stuff they’re quoting is memes or popular videos on TikTok or something – or popular gifs – rather than quoting from movies or mass-produced cultural artefacts.

Lauren: Definitely a good way to really make sure your group of people you’re talking to are in on the same page of knowledge.

Gretchen: I think people find it reassuring because it’s like, “Oh, well, quoting movies didn’t destroy society and quoting memes is not gonna do that either.”

Lauren: The flip side of having a small group of people with whom you’ve built small talk on recurring references is when you find yourself in a situation where you and the person you’re talking to just have completely different cultural expectations of how small talk should function. We’ve had an earlier episode about how conversation can vary between people. There’s a much more highly involved style of conversation and there’s much less highly involved style of conversation, but in terms of small talk, we also have different genre expectations about what fits into small talk.

Gretchen: There’s that often-quoted thing about, “You don’t talk about politics or religion at the dinner table,” which is not true for everybody, but it’s quoted as a beginner level version of that.

Lauren: We do have an awareness about what we think of as appropriate topics for conversation. I had to really relearn how to do small talk in Nepal because there is a cultural expectation. Some people have talked about it as a genre of your small talk that you do with strangers and people you don’t know very well is a suffering story genre where, to show people how resilient you are, you talk about all the bad things that have happened in your life, whereas my cultural script on this is that you don’t tell strangers all the bad things you don’t want to. There’s a feeling that that is an imposition on someone you don’t know very well to lay out all of your problems in life.

Gretchen: You don’t wanna be seen as a complainer or something.

Lauren: Yeah. I think that’s a feature of small talk that wouldn’t be very controversial to say about Western cultures in general. It really took me a lot of time to get around the fact that people would tell me all these really exhausting terrible events in their lives and not because they wanted anything of me or they wanted me to fix it or feel sorry for them but just that this is the way that you show someone how authentic a person you are.

Gretchen: I think I’ve been in a version of that conversation in Western English-speaking contexts when people start talking about travel problems that they’ve had. Like, “And then MY flight was delayed for three weeks,” you know?

Lauren: I think once that genre does open up for Westerners, there’s a bit of –

Gretchen: One-up-manship?

Lauren: – trying to outdo each other – yeah. The problem when you say these things as big cultural generalisations is like, of course individual conversations don’t bear out like this. But it was really relieving when I started reading some anthropological literature on small talk in Western countries and small talk and genre appropriateness in Nepal and just like, “Ah, this has a name. It’s a known thing that other people have observed this cultural difference as well.”

Gretchen: There’s another genre of small talk which I think of as the “Who’s your father” genre.

Lauren: Um, okay, I have several potential understandings of how that could go. What is this genre?

Gretchen: This is a genre that I grew up with in Nova Scotia which is, when you meet someone, you need to figure out how you may or may not be related to them. Even if you aren’t necessarily related to them by blood, you need to figure out if you are or are not acquainted with some member of their family.

Lauren: Right, yeah.

Gretchen: I knew growing up in this that in certain contexts I needed to cite my mom’s side of the family or my mom’s mom’s side of the family or my mom’s dad’s side of the family because who do I need to cite so that the person who I’m talking to can place me in this lineage sense. Even now, if I’m talking to relatives, sometimes somebody will come up, and it’ll be like, “Oh, So-and-So – you know them because their kid was your age who you would’ve known blah blah blah.”

Lauren: That is definitely not a small talk genre that I encountered growing up nearly as much as that.

Gretchen: Well, I don’t do it as much now in my daily life living in a city, but there is an academic version of that as well where you meet somebody at an academic conference, and they say, “Oh, I’m a grad student at this university,” and you say, “Oh, who’s your advisor? Do you know So-and-So who I know who works at this university?”

Lauren: Oh my gosh, it’s so funny because when you were talking about small town Nova Scotia, I was like, “That’s a weird genre of conversation,” and then I was like, “Oh my gosh, I absolutely do that at conferences.” You’re right.

Gretchen: You’ve done the academic version of that. It can be easy to exoticise this like, “Oh, this is a small town,” but you can also do this in the professional sense of like, “Oh, you worked at this place,” or like, “You studied at this place. Do you know this person who also works on this topic,” or “Do you know this person who” – and they’ll be like, “Oh, yeah, they’re my advisor” or whatever.

Lauren: Yep. I have had that small talk at conferences many, many times.

Gretchen: It’s like, “Name a university and I’ll tell you if I know someone in their linguistics department.”

Lauren: I wanna return to this idea of questions and the kind of – because that is absolutely a go-to set of questions that I ask at conferences, and I feel like part of learning to navigate social interaction and learning to navigate this kind of small talk is having a little mental booklet of appropriate questions to ask in appropriate settings. That is totally a set of conference questions that I have.

Gretchen: In the academic context, asking somebody where they’re from – this tripped me up at my first few conferences – it’s not asking them where they grew up or even necessarily where they live, but it’s like, “What university are you at?” When I go to academic conferences now, people will say, “Where are you from,” and I know they’re trying to ask –

Lauren: Yeah, how do you deal with that now?

Gretchen: I know they’re trying to ask what university I’m at. So, I’ll say, “I’m actually not at a university.” I’m answering the assumption in that question even though it’s not overtly in the question. “But I live in Montreal, and I did my master’s at McGill” or something, so they can place me in their academic genealogy. It’s helpful to answer the hidden assumption in that question.

Lauren: I always find it incredibly awkward when you enter a small talk situation where someone’s set of go-to questions don’t quite match up with what you feel comfortable talking about. Sometimes, it’s because you might in an incredibly professional work setting and someone’s asking you questions about your family. It’s like, “Well, uh, how many kids I have is not really relevant to talking about linguistics, which is what we’re here for.” But sometimes it is a larger cultural thing around what is or isn’t appropriate to pull from your set of small talk questions.

Gretchen: There’s an often-cited distinction – and I expect this one may start breaking down when you start looking at smaller subcultures, like many things – but there’s an often-cited distinction between American versus French small talk conversations where Americans find it appropriate to say, “What do you do for work,” ask people about their jobs, even maybe ask people how much money they make, or what they’re paying for rent, or what they paid for a mortgage or a house –

Lauren: It’s funny. The first half of those I’m like, “Yeah, I would absolutely ask someone what they do for a job,” and then I would never feel comfortable asking someone how much money they earn.

Gretchen: I wouldn’t ask somebody how much they earn, but I remember being in my first few conversations, especially as a young adult starting out on my own, where people were swapping stories of how much they paid in rent for various places, and I found that so helpful, like how much you’re paying in rent there so you can kind of get an idea of what the rest of the market looked like in different places. That bit I’ve seen people keep doing.

Lauren: It’s funny how maybe if we were all more overt about how much we were paid, we could unionise through small talk.

Gretchen: Maybe we could! The comparison is that this is reputedly not socially acceptable in France where they tend to ask things like, “Where did you go on your last vacation,” or “What did you do on your last vacation,” which is not necessarily a small talk topic that I would bring up with somebody because maybe it’s presumptuous to assume they went or did something interesting for vacation.

Lauren: Interesting. That is definitely not in my set of go-to questions. How do you feel about the genre of “Do you have kids” or “Do you have pets”?

Gretchen: I mean, the thing is, I’m sure they’re very interesting for people who do have kids or pets, but because I don’t, it’s just a conversational dead end for me. I have to be like, “Do you wanna hear about my tomato plants? Because I know you’re trying to have small talk here, but like, no kids, no pets.” Or I have to adopt somebody else’s kids or pets and be like, “Oh, no, I don’t have kids, but my friend who has a kid who I was visiting just last week” – it doesn’t lead anywhere for me.

Lauren: I sometimes feel a bit the opposite where I know it’s a small talk question, and I should have a really pat answer, but I’m also living with a toddler hurricane, and I’m afraid that I will have too much information to share at someone. I think it’s this thing where, because this is ritualised small talk and we’re just doing it to build solidarity or pass time or establish some kind of common ground, for one person in the conversation, it’s not really an important question, they just pulled it out of their mental list of questions, and for the other person, it is an all-consuming part of their life. Like, there’re definitely points where I would not have asked you how the book is going.

Gretchen: I mean, I did get asked how the book was going pretty much constantly for five years while I was writing it, and when it was coming out, and so on. Some people were very apologetic about asking and be like, “Oh, I’m so sorry for asking, but the only small talk conversation I can think of to ask you is, ‘Dare I ask how the book is going,’” which was this interesting relationship. Especially academics would often act like that because in academia there’s this constant tension around “How’s the thesis going” or “How’s the dissertation?”

Lauren: I definitely – because it’s such a big project to write a PhD thesis, and people are often acutely stressed at various or many points throughout that process. Obviously, when I ask my own PhD students, it’s a very different question because they have to tell me what they’re up to. Basically, for anyone else, I don’t ask them until they bring it up, which is a meta information tracking happening in the list of small talk questions. It’s like, “Oh, well, now you’ve mentioned your dissertation, that means you must feel okay to” – or I’ll do a lot of that hedging like, “Uh, don’t tell me if it’s too stressful, but how’s the dissertation?” That’s very different to someone who just vaguely knows you’re writing a book or doing a thesis or something.

Gretchen: For me, it was interesting because there were definitely points in writing the book where I was stressed, but I didn’t find the questions stressful because if I was feeling stressed at the time, it wasn’t like I was thinking about anything else, so I might as well just tell you that I’m stressed. Or I might as well just tell you the like, “Oh, I’ve submitted this one draft, and I’m working on another draft now,” or something like that. I would generally have some sort of answer to that question because it was just so ubiquitous in terms of how it was taking over my life. I also thought, “Well, I want people to buy this book when it comes out, so if they’re gonna keep asking about it, that’s probably a good sign because that means they know I’m writing one.” So, I wasn’t as annoyed about it as maybe someone with a dissertation where they’re not trying to market it at the same time. I was like, “Well, if they’re asking about my book, maybe they’ll wanna read it – maybe they’ll wanna buy it.”

Lauren: I like your understanding of what’s happening in the small talk dynamic there. I mean, I think part of what happens when you think you’re just asking a like, “How’s the book” or “How’s the kid,” and then you get this response where someone’s like, “We were up all night. They didn’t sleep. They’re teething. Ahh,” and you’re like, “Oh, o-okay. I don’t know what to do here,” I think part of the tension here is going back to the idea of phatics that we talked about in that earlier episode where phatics are very much not about information. They’re just a little dance that you do with each other to be polite. I think the problem is when you sometimes ask a question, and you’re asking it in a much more phatic kind of like, “How’s the weather,” “How’s your kids,” just like, “All good.”

Gretchen: Yeah. And there’s a sense of “How’s your X,” where “X” is something they mentioned last time or something you know about them – you know, “How’s the job going?” You don’t really necessarily expect to hear, “Oh, everything is terrible, and I’m planning on quitting.” You know you might hear it, but you kind of want to hear, “Oh, I’m working on this now,” or something like that. It’s a way of trying to ask for a little bit more information. Yet, on the receiving end, that question still feels very personal.

Lauren: Yeah, so one person’s treating it far more like a phatic interaction, and the other one’s treating it as a much less phatic conversation topic.

Gretchen: It’s interesting because I feel like this is one of the areas of language that you learn how to do comparatively late in your development as a child and adolescent and so on. I remember when I was a later teenager at holidays, summer breaks, family reunions, seeing family that you maybe see a couple times a year, and it was really helpful for me that my mom would coach me into saying, you know, “You’re gonna be seeing a bunch of relatives over the next week. They’re gonna ask you how school’s going. It would be good if you think of a two to three sentence answer that you can give them that tells them something you’re okay with them knowing and lets you have a satisfying interaction there.” So, you can be like, “Oh, I’m in Grade 11 now, and we’re working on this thing, and it’s interesting for me.” She would coach me to think about that in advance and be like, “You can give the same answer to all of the relatives.”

Lauren: Oh my gosh, your mom should’ve been a discourse analyst.

Gretchen: I really think she had a missed calling here. That was really helpful for me because I feel like this is my first media training because every single interview I did about the book someone always says, “Why did you write this book?” and you have to have an answer to that, and you have to not be annoyed that you’re giving the same answer to that. The same thing is like every single time you see a relative that you haven’t seen for a year or two, they’re gonna say, “How’s the whatever going,” whether that’s, “How’s school,” or “How’s your job,” or “How’s the city you’re living in.” They’re trying to remember a noun that vaguely applies to you.

Lauren: I love the experience with relatives in particular that you see once every year or so, or old family friends, because they’ll be like, “How’s the basketball going?” and you’re like, “I have not played basketball for five years, and I was very bad at it at the time.” I think it’s so much easier to come from a place of “They’re just trying to have this social engagement with me” rather than a point of irritation.

Gretchen: It’s so easy to get irritated. And yet, what the person’s trying to do is express interest in your life, and if they say, “How’s basketball going?” – or for me it was like, “How’s debate going?” which was a really good question for a while, and then I stopped doing it and can say, “Oh, actually I’m doing that much anymore. What I am doing is this.” Because they don’t know that they should be asking you about your new hobby, but you can just segue into the new hobby.

Lauren: It’s not that they want a factual report based on their question. It’s not a legal interrogation.

Gretchen: Right. And thinking about the meta-question behind the question was also what let me figure out how to finally give a satisfying answer to the ubiquitous question, “So, you’re a linguist. How many languages do you know?”

Lauren: This is definitely one of those things where if you aren’t a linguist, it seems like a perfectly reasonable question to ask. If you are – it’s that asymmetry in how frequently you have to have this conversation, right, where you might not talk to many linguists, and so you want to ask them questions like this. As the person on the receiving end of it, you are constantly asked, “How’s your thesis,” “How many languages do you speak,” and it can be very – for a long time my immediate reaction to that question was frustration, but as you say, understanding the real question there is just “What do you do?”

Gretchen: So, if you happen to mention your cat, a natural thing for someone to do in conversation is be like, “Oh, how many cats do you have?” The person on the other end doesn’t care how many cats you actually have. They don’t care if you have one cat, or two cats, or three cats. The next thing they’re gonna ask is like, “How old are they? What are their names?” They’re gonna lead into the like, “Oh, let’s get the person to talk about their cats.” Or same thing with kids, the person doesn’t care how many kids you have. They’re just trying to make conversation. 

The thing that they think about when they hear “linguist” is language, so they’re like, “I dunno, let’s just put a question in front of ‘language.’” The thing that I did for a while is I would go into, in great detail, all of the languages that I had vaguely learned a little bit of because I was excited about this. I would have all these caveats around, “Well, I don’t really” – you know, you don’t really speak Latin, but it’s interesting because you learn how to translate it and to read it. And “Do we even know what it means to know a language? To what extent do I blah blah blah?” 

Nobody was satisfied with this interaction. I knew it wasn’t working for me because it was this very and long and detailed answer and didn’t give the other person space to keep asking me questions or to answer some of their own questions. The answer was too long. If it felt complete to me, it also felt intimidating. People would be like, “Wow! That’s a ton of languages.” And I’d be like, “Yes, but I don’t actually speak any of them very well.” 

What I learned to do instead was just pick one language that I feel like talking about right now and that this person would probably be somewhat interested in it and just answer with that one language and with a bit of a story to it. So, if somebody says, “How many languages do you know,” and I say, “It’s really interesting living in Montreal because there’s so much French, and I speak French,” and that gives them the space to ask questions about Montreal or to say, “Oh, I visited Montreal once. It was very nice.” 

Then we’re having a conversation where there’s a bit more back and forth, there’s a bit of questions and answer, the person can say something, or “Oh, I’ve always wanted to visit Montreal” or whatever, or they can talk about their speaking or non-speaking of French, and it doesn’t lead me into this exhaustive laundry list that nobody’s really happy about. It leaves open in later conversation if they mention Spanish or something, you can be like, “Oh, I speak a bit of Spanish, too.” You’re not lying, but you’re seeing the question for the purpose behind it and answering that purpose rather than getting hung up on the specific details of the wording of that question because the “How many” isn’t actually the part they’re interested in, it’s the, “You’re a linguist; you must like languages. Tell me something about language.”

Lauren: What I really appreciate is that you have used your linguist powers to do some analysis of what’s happening in the conversations that you’re having to more effectively do small talk. I think that’s a really great example of applying linguistics that we don’t often give people credit for.

Gretchen: I mean, this is one of the holy grails of linguistics in my mind is to understand that meta-question or understand what’s going on. I think of it in terms of Gricean Maxims in terms of pragmatics, which is another thing we’ve also done an episode about – this is the call back episode – which is the idea that anything that you say in a conversation, the other person will interpret as relevant to the conversation, and they’ll seek ways to construe it as relevant to what’s being said. If they say, “How many languages,” and you reply naming one thing about one language, that’s enough for that to be relevant to the conversation for the conversation to keep going, even though you don’t have to do exact literal responses to everything because sometimes what people are asking is actually a different thing at a meta-level.

Lauren: I think about small talk a lot from the perspective of something I find really interesting which is tracking knowledge state, so what the other person knows and what they might want to know. It’s basically coming to the same conclusion as you, just with my own particular interest in what language tries to achieve in conversations. Kind of going, “Well, the only reason they’re asking me about this thing that I am bored to death of talking about is because they haven’t heard about it yet.” I’m finding that as a way to feel more at peace. Especially years and years of doing retail, I found just being very zen about like, “This may be the umpteenth time I’ve done this this week, but this person doesn’t know about this thing.”

Gretchen: “Where are the bathrooms?” “Look, I can just tell you. I’ve said this so many times today, but it’s fine.”

Lauren: Using linguistics to make small talk more pleasant for you and the people that you are talking to, which may be useful if you happen to be listening to this in an impending holiday season, or if you’re starting a new job, or if you’re at a conference. Having some ways to navigate small talk are useful in so many ways.

Gretchen: I also think it’s useful in contexts where even answering a question like, “How are you,” feels awkward because you’re going through a hard time, and you don’t feel like it’s honest to say, “Oh, I’m good,” but you don’t necessarily wanna share or acquaintances don’t necessarily wanna hear the whole story about how terrible things have been. This post on Tumblr, which we’ll link to, gives the advice to say any at least mildly interesting fact about something you experienced relatively recently in the last few days. Like, “My cat got stuck in a cereal box today,” “Here’s something that’s on my mind,” or like, “I got a package in the mail,” or something like this. People will interpret it as a valid answer to “How are you?” People will take that at face value, and they’ll take that as the non-answer that it is where you don’t necessarily wanna declare that the whole world is fine because sometimes it feels like the whole world is on fire, or your corner of the world is on fire, but you don’t necessarily wanna have that fire conversation.

Lauren: Absolutely – we say at the end of 2020.

Gretchen: [Laughs]

Lauren: Use the power of conversational relevance to divert – yeah, and I think knowing that it’s okay to steer the small talk boat and that is still meeting the aim of the small talk is a good thing to know.

Gretchen: To go back to talking about, “Here are all the terrible things I’ve experienced in my life,” doing the like, “Oh my god, the news is so terrible, and I can’t believe how terrible it is,” sometimes you have that back and forth of like, “Ugh, it’s so terrible,” “Yes, it’s terrible.”

Lauren: That’s the Nepali-style solidarity building through suffering.

Gretchen: It does build solidarity. I think that gets us into this question of, “How can we use our knowledge of small talk and the agendas of small talk, the meta-questions or the knowledge states that people exist in, to make small talk feel good for what you’re trying to feel at the moment, “ whether that’s to build solidarity or whether that’s to distract you from what’s going on in the world. What can you do to shift the direction of a particular small talk thing?

Lauren: Alongside that, I think looking at your list of questions that you potentially have to also steer the conversation – I have occasionally had those super awkward moments with a group of work colleagues where no one has had a question that’s allowed people to open up in a way that feels appropriate for that space. And then someone has asked a question that’s worked really well or said something that’s like – I file that away. I’m like, “Ah, asking if anyone’s tried any new recipes lately worked really well in this work context.” It might flunk in another work context, but that’s now in my brain as an option to keep things going. I think open questions really help people to take it and run in a direction that they feel comfortable with. As someone who was asked for far too many years after they graduated if they were a PhD student in a work context, it’s just safer to ask open questions or just inflate someone. It’s like, “Are you a lecturer?” But even then, that can backfire.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah, everyone loves being asked if they’re a prof.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: One of the questions that I have that I use a lot in conference settings are, “How’s your conference going?” because this works for pretty much everybody. You can ask the same person this question multiple times on different days.

Lauren: It doesn’t matter if they’re a PhD student who’s here to just be an audience member or if they’re a prof giving a plenary.

Gretchen: It works in non-academic contexts, which is a lot of my conferences now. Another one that I have which is kind of a holdover from my time in academic conferences is, “What are you working on,” because this seems to be a common question in academia. But in non-academic settings, I like it too because it leaves open the question of, you know, this could be a side project, this could be a hobby, this could be a thing you’re doing at your job. It leaves that a little bit more open than, “What do you do for work?” Another conference that I was at recently, we were doing a virtual networking event and sitting around a virtual table, and somebody said, “What’s something you’ve worked on recently that you’re proud of?” And I was like, “Oh, this is a really neat way to get to know people at this table” because it gets everybody the opportunity to be like, “Oh, I wrote this article for this place” or like, “Oh, I did this thing,” and gets people the opportunity to share their work and share something about them. I like that one. I’m gonna use that again.

Lauren: I’m gonna add that to my list, too.

Gretchen: The other piece of hacking small talk tips that I learned when I was maybe about 13 – I think I was a young teenager. I remember being in my childhood bedroom when I read this book, and it was one of those self-help books. I took one sentence out of it, but it’s been a very useful one sentence, which is about all you can demand out of a self-help book.

Lauren: What’s this sentence? I wanna know. I can’t believe you left this until the end. This is one of those bad self-improvement life hacking podcasts all of a sudden.

Gretchen: “Please listen to us for half an hour to get the one golden sentence.” Maybe this is more obvious to people who weren’t 13 at the time and had been to more networking events, which I had not done very much when I was 13, admittedly. This was the notion of the occasion/location statement.

Lauren: Okay. Can you unpack that for me?

Gretchen: Yes, exactly. I will write you a whole little self-help book. When you’re in an environment with strangers or acquaintances – people you’re trying to strike up a conversation with – one thing that you can do that is not weird is you can look around and make some sort of remark about either the occasion – the event that you’re at – or the location – something in the environment. 

One example of this would be you’re at a party, you don’t really know very many people, so you go hang out by the refreshment table, and you start striking up a conversation with somebody about the cheese like, “Oh, this cheese looks really good,” and then you segue from that into, “Yes, this party’s been so much fun blah blah blah.” Or if you’re at someone’s birthday party, you can be like, “So, how do you know the host,” or the cliché – I’ve never done this – but at a bar or something, you go up to someone, and you’re like, “So, do you come here often?” Or if you’re trying to strike up a conversation with somebody at the post office, you can be like, “Wow! This line’s taking a long time” because we’re both standing in it or something like that. It’s this thing that you have in common in the environment either based on the time or the space. That was how I first started thinking about small talk. 

Although, these days, it also segues into doing events where you hang out in virtual space. I’ve been experimenting a lot with doing proximity-based chats where you have, here’s this virtual platform which lets you have conversations with more fluid groups of people rather than just being on a massive video call where only one or two people can talk at once. The thing that’s interesting about them is, on the one hand, there’s this built-in conversational topic which is, here’s this new platform we’re trying out, but on the other hand, that’s like being like, “Oh, look at this cheese tray,” or “Look at this chandelier.” 

Eventually, you wanna move on from that into another type of conversation that’s something you can have with not just anybody. You know, encouraging people to do introductions or introduce themselves in the chat or introduce themselves with each other or designating certain conversational topics or certain zones. I’ve realised that one of the functions of a conference when it comes to making conversation with people is that it gives you a different set of built-in conversational small talk topics that are different from what you have in ordinary life. You can say, “Oh, have you been to any talks that you really liked,” and then you can start talking about what happened in the talks. That gives you an entry into a different type of conversational topic than you might have with somebody that you run into in line at the post office even though, hypothetically, that person might be able to have that conversation, but you don’t have the shared knowledge that you could enter into it together.

Lauren: A small talk experience can just be that moment of small talk, and you have a nice chance to interact with each other. Or it can be that segue into a much deeper domain-specific or, you know, content-specific for linguistics, or feeling-specific if you’re with your friends and/or family. But it’s such an interesting genre to pull apart in and of itself.

Gretchen: It’s really interesting to think, okay, what do we have that’s that bridge between your phatic expressions, which are really rote, and your, you know, “Oh, we’re having this conversation that neither of us has ever had before, and we’re arriving at all these interesting insights.” You just don’t always end up there, and that’s okay. It can be much lower effort to do a conversation where one or both of you has had this conversation before, and you’re just having it with each other instead of with somebody else. It’s a genre that’s interesting to analyse and to figure out how to make satisfying for yourself as its own thing.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get you podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA socks, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found at @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet – now in paperback.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as @Superlinguo. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes and you wish there were more? You can get access to 46 bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom where they can talk to other linguistics fans and other rewards as well as helping keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include honorifics, a behind-the-scenes on writing Crash Course Linguistics and an AMA with lexicographer Emily Brewster. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their lives.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #transcripts #episode 51 #small talk #conversations #conversation #pragmatics

[brokenbuttonsmusic]

Laura Cantrell: Nashville-born, New York-based, Acclaimed Country Singer-Songwriter & DJ (& Kitty Wells Fanatic)

This post is a near- transcript of the Broken Buttons: Buried Treasure Music podcast (episode 2, side B). Here you’ll find the narration from the segment featuring the pioneering rock band Fanny, along with links, videos, photos and references for the episode.

Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Anchor or Mixcloud.

Music blog Stereogum used to have a running feature called “Quit Your Day Job” where they interviewed indie musicians about their current or former jobs. There was one with Marty and Drew from the band Blitzen Trapper. The two discussed being torn about walking away from teaching as their third album, Wild Mountain Nation, was starting to blow up. There was another where the lead singer of War on Drugs detailed some of the disgusting things he had to clean up while working as an apartment property manager. Mostly dead rats and clogged toilet stuff, but he did walk into an apartment that had been converted into a porno set. I remembered this discontinued “musician day job” feature while reading up on my next featured artist and it got me thinking. 

How many professional musicians do you think have a full time day job? How many juggle multiple side gigs and still manage to tour and put out records regularly? How many have really successful careers all while trying to make it as a musician? 

I don’t actually know. I did some research and there aren’t any reliable stats that I could find. There is a lot of anecdotal discussion on the topic. The consensus seems to be that most musicians are not getting by with music as their only, or even their primary source of income. I don’t think anyone is surprised by that. 

One Reddit user said less than 5% of musicians derive all or most of their income from music. He didn’t offer a source or anything, but he seemed very authoritative in his post. And then after a few more Google searches I lost interest and listened to more Laura Cantrell. 

Laura Cantrell’s story is what got me pondering how indie musicians go about juggling making art with the necessity of, you know, making a living to survive. In 2003, after two critically acclaimed albums, including a tour opening for Elvis Costello all across the United States and Europe, Cantrell was at a similar crossroads. Laura had risen to the position of Vice President of Equity Research at Bank of America in New York. Yes, you heard me right. Laura Cantrell was working as a corporate executive and touring with Elvis Costello at the same time. She actively worked on the road during the day and then performed for thousands of people each night.

Before we get further into what led up to this point and what came after, let’s hear a song from Laura Cantrell’s debut album, Not the Tremblin’ Kind. Here’s the title track.

That was Not the Tremblin’ Kind from Laura Cantrell’s first album back in the year 2000.

Laura grew up in Nashville. She played a little bit of piano and sang in the church choir, but did not get into performing music and playing out until her college years. As a teenager she worked at the Country Music Hall of Fame as a tour guide. This job, in addition to the influence of the diverse musical tastes of her parents, sparked an interest in traditional music, particularly classic country. She also became somewhat of an aficionado in this area. 

This love and knowledge of the early days of country music would help differentiate Laura as she honed her sound and selected her songs while developing as a performer down the road. Before that, however, it would make her an excellent college radio DJ and later an even more excellent DJ at WFMU, one of the best and longest running free-form radio stations in the country. Out of the New Jersey/New York area, WFMU is awesome to this day, with a wide array of programming where DJs still get to play whatever they want. 

Laura is my favorite kind of DJ, and the kind that has been dwindling in numbers since the rise of music downloads, which then gave way to streaming and endless algorithms. First off, she’s knows her stuff. She carefully curates each shows, and thoughtfully sequences each set within every episode. She packs in history, context and story to create something that transcends your typical weekend-afternoon-background-radio-soundtrack. I know this show is about under appreciated bands and artists, but Laura Cantrell’s contributions to radio deserve to be heard by more people. You can find her past WFMU shows, called The Radio Thrift Shop, archived on the WFMU website. You can hear her present day on her “States of Country” radio show on the Gimmie Country radio app, or on her SiriusXM George Harrison themed show “Dark House Radio,” on The Beatles station.

This concludes the part of the show where I babble my enthusiastic endorsement of Laura Cantrell’s past and present radio career.

Laura began playing music with others in college at Columbia University. Her jam pals included Andrew Webster, future member of Tsunami Bomb and Mac McCaughan, who would go on to form Superchunk and Portastatic + found Merge Records. The friends would call their band Bricks. A lo-fi, mostly apartment recording projects that played sporadic gigs over the years. 

Here’s the Brick’s song, The Girl with the Carrot Skin.

Living in New York, Laura began playing guitar and writing her own songs. She also plucked some choice classic country finds and incorporated them into her own performance catalog. One day she met a guy named John who asked her to sing on a song that would appear on his band’s next major label release for Elektra. 

That’s The Guitar from They Might Be Giant’s 1992 album, Apollo 18. John Flansburgh asked Laura to sing on that recording. It was the first time Laura recorded in a professional studio. John Flansburgh became a fan of Laura’s music and released her first recorded material as part of his Hello CD of the Month Club, an EP called The Hello Recordings in 1996. 

Let’s hear another Laura Cantrell song. This time one that she wrote with Amy Allison. From Laura Cantrell’s 2014 album, No Way There From Here, this is All the Girls are Complicated. 

That was Laura Cantrell with All the Girls Are Complicated from her last full length release, No Way There From Here. Actually, that was her last full album of new material, but Laura did release an album a few years back of her BBC recordings on John Peel’s radio show. That album is called At the BBC: On Air Performances and Recordings 2000-2005. 

I mentioned earlier that Peel was a big fan. Again, here’s John Peel’s full quote about Laura’s first album, Not the Tremblin’ Kind: "[It is] my favourite record of the last ten years and possibly my life.” Having the endorsement of the legendary English disc jockey was enough to give Cantrell wider exposer throughout the UK. She developed a loyal fanbase through regular appearances on Peel’s show, as well as US and European tours, including the opening slot for Elvis Costello. Which brings us back to Laura’s fork in the road. Before her third album, Laura decided to walk away from the corporate gig. She was excited to focus on music full time, but a little worried about walking away from the security of a successful career she liked and position she was good at.

From a spotlight CNN Business did on Cantrell in 2004:

“For several months until she finally quit, Cantrell balanced her day job with a growing schedule of rehearsals, gigs, recordings and publicity. On the day she appeared on the Conan O'Brien show she was at her desk until lunchtime.”

“And while life as a professional musician is a dream come true, Cantrell still looks back with fondness on more than a decade on Wall Street.”

“‘I came into Wall Street with a very typical kind of stereotype that it was all going to be people just obsessed with money. What I found was that there were just loads of interesting people who were a lot like myself, just doing it as a job and who had lives that were full of other things.’

‘So I miss some of the contact with people I met. Ironically it was a very supportive environment for me as an artist.’”

Laura’s first two albums were released on the the indie label Diesel Only, which was founded by her husband, Jeremey Tepper. Her third album was released by Matador Records, also an indie label, but with an impressive roster that included Liz Phair, Modest Mouse, Pavement and Sleater-Kinney. Released in 2005, Humming By the Flowered Vine continues Cantrell’s classic country sound, but with some evolved production and arrangements. Laura’s mastery as a song selector gets more and more impressive. This album includes a cover of a rare, unreleased Lucinda Williams song form 1975 called, “Letters.” 

In fact, Lucinda Williams herself was thoroughly impressed with Laura’s cover of “Letters.” She attributes the cover to bolstering her confidence to go back through her earlier material and look for her own buried treasures. 

From Blurt Magazine: 

“The inspiration for her journey through the past struck when she heard Laura Cantrell’s version of her song ‘Letters,’ which Williams wrote around 1975 and recorded on a demo but never officially released. Explains Williams, ‘She got a copy from a mutual friend and did a beautiful, really sweet version of it that made me think wow, she brought this early song back to life, maybe I should go back and review some of my old stuff. I’ve got all these tapes of old little songs, but I never thought they were good enough to do anything with.’”

You know you’re an ace at finding under appreciated gems when you surprise Lucinda Williams by helping her discover one of her own songs. Let’s hear Laura Cantrell’s version of Letters.

That was Laura Cantrell with Letters from her 2005 release Humming by the Flowered Vine.

In 2008, Laura returned with an EP called, Trains and Boats and Planes with 9 songs about… trains, and boats and planes. It’s very good and it includes a fun cover of New Order’s Love Vigilantes. 

Throughout this time, Laura continued her radio show. She also started a family and became co-owner and co-operator of Diesel Only Records. 

In this clip from an interview with Face Culture, you can really hear Laura’s passion for country music and its roots. She talks about the importance of country’s influence on rock n’ roll, and how each artist is inspired by something great that came before. 

And Laura continuously pays tribute to the greats that came before through her radio show and on her own records. In 2011, Laura released a tribute to Kitty Wells called “Kitty Wells Dresses: Songs of the Queen of Country Music.” The collection includes nine Kitty Wells covers and one original, the title track, Kitty Wells Dresses.

From the Washington Post:

Here’s Laura talking about the inspiration for the album. 

“Kitty wore very typical stage clothes for women who performed at barn dances and in early country music shows,” says Cantrell, a Nashville-born, New York-based country singer and host of an old-time music show on the legendary radio station WFMU.

“They were these frilly gingham dresses, non-threatening and cutesy. It became this uniform that all the women of the era wore, and I always thought it was a great metaphor for how you can underestimate the strength of the person or the value of the artist underneath.”

That was the song Kitty Wells Dresses from Laura Cantrell’s tribute album of the same name, released in 2011. Wells was the oldest living member of the Country Music Hall of Fame upon its release. She was also the first woman inducted into the hall. Cantrell met and talked to Kitty about her album. She said that Kitty asked which songs were selected and as Laura began calling them out, Kitty would sing each one. 

I’ve mentioned all of Laura’s past and present DJ efforts, all of which I’ll link to on my website, brokenbuttons.com. Laura also continues to release music. She had planned a host of special activities for the 20th anniversary of Not the Tremblin’ Kind, which had to be put on hold due to all things 2020. 

You can contribute to Laura’s IndigGoGo campaign to help fund her new digital singles collection that she’s already started releasing. The plan is to release six singles with an A and a B side, all working with different musicians and producers. I’d recommend the $50 Kitty Wells Dresses Pack, which gets you access to the digital singles as their released, a signed CD copy of both the singles collection and the Kitty Wells Dresses album, as well as a copy of Laura's essay on Kitty and Patsy Cline from the book "Rock and Roll Cage Match: Music's Greatest Rivalries"

Laura Cantrell is the rare performer whose work is deeply rooted in its original source material while still feeling fresh and exciting. Laura’s radio shows can be described the same way. A buried treasure unearthing buried treasure and taking the old and classic and making it new and lasting and so much sweeter. Laura Cantrell.

References and other stuff to check out:

Laura’s Indiegogo campaign for her digital singles series

The Radio Thrift Shop - Laura’s prior radio show. You can stream past episodes and check out her playlists

Gimmie Country, where Laura hosts her current show States of Country. New episodes air 3:00 Monday EST. Laura chats during the show with listeners in the app.

Darkhorse Radio on Sirius XM. Laura’s other show dedicated to George Harrison. New episodes air Thursday at 3:00.

John Peel wiki entry about Laura

TMBG wiki entry about Laura

A Wall Street journal feature on Laura

An NPR feature on Laura

A CNN Business Week feature on Laura

Stereogum archive of the Quit Your Day Job feature

#Laura Cantrell #country #classic country #americana #altcountry #Kitty Wells #They Might Be Giants #TMBG #Superchunk #Dolly Parton #Loretta Lynn #Patsy Cline #Emmylou Harris #Lucinda Williams #WFMU #States of Country #Darkhorse Radio #The Beatles #The Radio Thrift Shop #DJs #John Peel #Spotify #Mixcloud #music podcast #music history

[aruskin]

April 27th: What is your favourite form of media? For example, do you enjoy books? What format do you prefer for books (physical, e-book, audiobook)? Did you love reading as a kid but find it challenging as you got older? How about movies, tv, or video games? Do you have a favourite series?

TV shows are probably my favourite. Compared with films, they’re both less commitment to start and allow for more character development. You also get an increasing sense of familiarity each time you come back. Wikipedia pages aren't bad – it’s nice being able to jump from one thing to other and I enjoy adding and rewriting things occasionally. I listen to podcasts alongside walks and baths a lot (Revisionist History is good). If I’m reading to practice a foreign language I'll usually listen to the audiobook at the same time to help me stay on track. As a kid I found reading books exhausting, with exceptions for a few series I got really obsessed with. I cracked reading regularly for a year or two when I first got into literary analysis and had the attention span to be analysing and deconstructing every line in the way some books are meant for, but now it’s gone back to taking too much energy. I haven’t read a book in about a year.

I don’t play video games often but when I do I play them for about a week straight. My all-time favourite one is called Don’t Starve. In short, you’re dropped on massive unexplored island with a bunch of different biomes and plants and animals and can construct increasingly advanced tools and contraptions out of twigs and grass and things to help you fend off various threats and survive the changing seasons. When I started off I mainly played the robot character and usually got killed by figments of my own imagination after my sanity drained from being repeatedly struck by lightning. It’s hard to communicate how intricate the world is – you could play it for years and not find everything there is to find. There are also two sequels which are each equally elaborate. The fun is that every time you die and restart you can adjust your strategy to plan ahead for the thing that killed you the last time. I think it's so engaging because every end goal translates down into a series of doable steps which give you constant sense of achievement.

Anyway, as a sample I cut my various favourites lists down to five items each:

Films

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Les Intouchables

Groundhog Day

Coraline

The Social Network

TV Shows

BoJack Horseman

Community

Game of Thrones

Dear White People

Parks and Recreation

Books

Never Let Me Go

Cloud Atlas

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The Great Gatsby

Wild Swans

Bands

The Beatles

The Postal Service

Sufjan Stevens

Tally Hall

Ezra Furman

#30daysofautismacceptance #2021

[eppysboys]

thoughts on yoko? so much of her behavior is undefendable but people turn on me if i dare criticise her

Oh dear, I have many thoughts. I don’t dwell on them, or I try not to anyway. 

There are plenty of things Yoko has done and said that are worthy of criticism, I think the hostility comes from a long history of racism, sexism and misunderstanding of John and Yoko as a couple and individuals that people want to correct and change. Untangling Yoko from John, taking everything ‘John’ out of the picture and seeing what is left, there are a few things about Yoko I can respect. She had some impressive ideas/art that I quite like (Cut Piece - 1965, would be the main favourite), she has continued with her art career throughout even awful periods, she has raised Sean. It kind of ends there? 

I can appreciate bits and pieces, tbh. After ‘68 in particular it just all rings a little false and cringey to me. I think there are some great avant garde artists who have much more impressive work who broke barriers and really make substantial difference, many are also woc and/or queer. Check out this article, this one and this one. Queer art. One last one here.

I think my disinterest and often dislike in Yoko’s art post-68 is that it lacks the authenticity. It’s like the disillusionment of having millionaires sing Imagine, you know? I’m a bit critical of any celebrity ‘activism’, and I do admire that she has the consistency of promoting feminism and equality. I think it takes a very strong lady to endure years and years horrific abuse by fans of her husband (and the childhood trauma she faced in Japan + suffering mental illness).

Once John and The Beatles comes into the picture it just goes a bit :/ for me. I don’t think JohnandYoko was healthy or as blissful as advertised for either of them and I think it’s fair enough to call that out given that they had a great deal of interest in selling themselves as a couple for the public to consume. I don’t think the amount of good, love and quality work they had/created together is that impressive/positive overall. Their partnership just strikes me as a product, and I’m not interested in buying. At best it was unhealthy and at worst it was abusive. They didn’t bring out the best in each other, not consistently enough anyway. 

People (particularly those who have endured hardship and trauma and mental illness in a society that doesn’t understand and sympathise) can’t be categorised as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, I don’t think so anyway. I empathise with John’s struggles, but still call him out on the bullshit. I don’t think he was the helpless child to the great Mother, he made awful choices and caused a lot of hurt. And she did too. I won’t list them, you could probably find that list somewhere else online. I think, for me personally, I can see the struggle with John for introspection, improvement, a healthy mind and positive relationships, I can see endless quotes about how generous and kind and gentle and brilliant and funny and sweet he was. I can see him trying, essentially. It’s easier to relate to, it’s easier to see and respect. There isn’t that kind of archive of positivity and redemption for Yoko, which makes it difficult to ‘like’ her. I respect her, as much as I can given her actions, but can’t force admiration for her for the sake of it. 

Another Kind of Mind podcast did an episode about Yoko, and it is great. Look it up and give it a listen! 

#asks #I'm pretty calm in this answer sdhklgs #catch me on another day maybe it'll be different idk #i didn't even go into her gigantic axe to grind with Paul and his reputation #because you know i'll just end up foaming at the jowls

[sunnydaleherald]

The Sunnydale Herald Newsletter - Monday, November 9th

DAWN: I gave birth to a pterodactyl. ANYA: Oh my god, did it sing?

~~Once More With Feeling~~

Submit a link to be included in the newsletter!

[Drabbles & Short Fiction]

Slayers With Benefits (Buffy/Faith, T) by Anonymous

Second Choice (Faith/Spike, M) by Anonymous

Never An Easy Way (Buffy/Faith, T) by calenlily

Los ojos de Satán (Buffy/Spike, M, Spanish language) by vogue91esp (vogue91)

Area Man Going To Go Ahead And Consider That A Date (Oz, Buffy, G) by RobberBaroness

Álterum Latus ad DISSEPTUM - Rewrite (Buffy, Xander, anime crossover, T) by Ariel_Schnee

Returning to the Hell Mouth (Buffy/Giles, not rated, spanking) by BetweenKandM

Bambina (Buffy/Angel, T) by melody's muse

Sunrise in Rome (Buffy/Angel, T) by melody's muse

The Smell of Perfume and Decay, Prologue (Dawn, Buffy, Spike, T) by TalesOfTheUnknown

[Chaptered Fiction]

Shadowy Legacy (Ch. 13 of Giles' Detective Agency, Mission 2) (Ensemble, Devil May Cry crossover, T) by madimpossibledreamer

Mistress of Puppets, Chapter 1 (Willow, Angel, Puppet Master crossover, not rated) by Darktopaz84

hammer & axe, chapters 1-9 (COMPLETE) (Faith/Tara, T) by nowrunalong

Mother says I deserve better, Chapter 1 (Buffy/Spike, T) by nothing_is_beautiful_and_true

Detention (v.2), Chapter 28 (Buffy/Spike, Adult Only) by Frillyria

Distant Thunder, Chapter 27 (Buffy/Spike, NC-17) by Axell

A (Mostly) Comprehensive Guide to the End of the World, Chapter 21 (Buffy/Spike, NC-17) by Annabellee

Flickers, Chapter 17 (Buffy/Spike, Adult Only) by Dusty

Switch, Chapter 3 (Buffy/Spike, NC-17) by Holly

M2J's YAHF Collection, Chapter 26 (Xander, multiple crossovers, FR13) by MandalorianJedi

[Reviews & Recaps]

PODCAST: Helpless (Buffy the Vampire Slayer S3 E12) by Buffy and the Art of Story

PODCAST: 6.03: After Life by Buffering the Vampire Slayer

[Community Announcements]

Elysian Fields Secret Santa 2020 at Elysian Fields

[Fandom Discussions]

META: The Curious Case of William Pratt by Niamh

PROMPT: Magic werewolves & were-leopards oh my (Xander, Oz) by Animefangirl0219

I found it hard to believe that the people of Sunnydale really bought the “it’s just gangs on PCP” narrative by inmymindthismadesense

Reboot thoughts with Stacey Abrams by PuckRobin

Season 4 Finale (Angel) by whatagwan23

I can't believe it took probably my 4th viewing of "Surprise" to see the foreshadowing of Buffy's dream by Willdon231

After years of loving BTVS I am giving Angel a try by valentinezero

Some Tara love- by alsoaperson

Has your Buffy crush changed over time? by wanderingtime222

Spike as the Doctor by thenicemailman

What episode/Motw/crossover would you have loved to see? by randomatomcollection

Currently on one of my many rewatches, and this episode blows me away every time by Siorray

5 by 5 by missingfmercury

Spike's conversation with Buffy in "Never Leave Me" by Willdon231

I love it when you take btvs out of context by Grebnesorwolliw

The final question from my intro to psychology homework, which I’m also taking as a freshman in coll by eli_lamb

Watching Angel for the first time by Mistic_Biscuit

S5 E21 The Weight of the World: what was in Doc's box? by ieatfrazzles

Just noticed that lyrics to a Beatles song is on a prop! by Grebnesorwolliw

Favourite nickname for Buffy/Angel characters? by TypicalPsychology6

The last three episodes of Buffy s5 or the Pylea arc on Angel s2? by jdpm1991

#buffy the vampire slayer #angel the series #btvs #ats