Alone in the City, like a Single Flame

Of all the jokes, ideas, and things that have stuck with me from the 155 podcast, formerly blink-155, the one that I might think about most is the idea of “walking around music.” The old blink episodes were an immediate listen to me and a genuine highlight of the week, as it hit this particular sweet spot for me at the intersection of cultural criticism, cancon, and the pop-punk subculture circa 1992-2015, all filtered through the lens of blink-182, a band that I’ve obsessed over probably more than any other band in history.

Weirdly, I have many more “favourite” bands than blink-182, but they occupied such a huge place in my mind right when I was starting to define my musical taste as a pre-teen that their place in my brain is outsized. I was obsessed, and MuchMusic was giving me content, quickly becoming a figure 8 of influence.

Anyway, this idea of “walking around music” comes from chapter 3 of 155, when they transitioned into having themed months of their podcast, talking about a specific band or genre before moving on to something else the next month. I think the idea first came up during the first edition of Green May (take a wild guess who it was about) while discussing the song “Burnout” from Dookie. The two hosts were at a loss to describe the ethereal, nostalgic feeling that the most impactful music from your youth gives you. In this case, it’s pertaining specifically to the feeling of being a suburban boy listening to 90s pop-punk and eventually settling on “walking around music.” What they meant by this, or what I assume they meant by this, was that listening to the first song on Dookie reminded them of the feeling of walking to places as a teen, fresh with your first experiences of independence, and those memories being scored by that music. For me, All Killer, No Filler and Punk-O-Rama 8 would qualify as walking around music, as I have such specific memories of being on my grade 8 class trip to Ottawa and listening to those CDs on my Walkman while, well, walking around the city. It’s a term for music that strikes you as being unbelievably cool and exciting as a young person, and maybe more importantly, something new to you that you’ve never experienced. 

I should mention that the two hosts of 155 have never specified this reading of the term, and this is me dramatically extrapolating what they’ve said on the show so far (“Man, this is some walking around music.” “Oh fuck yeah dude.”). I also think walking around music can be applied to any era of music in your life once you understand the original context. Does me listening to Everything Sucks by the Descendents and Borders and Boundaries by Less Than Jake during the first month of second year qualify them as walking around music? Forty Hour Train Back to Penn and We Are the Only Friends We Have in third year? In my mind, yes. This is because the vibe of walking around music stays with you. I wasn’t as impressionable as I was as a 12-year-old, but I was equally excited about music.

What spurred the idea of this post was that this past winter, I was listening to the Greet Death album New Hell while I walked to my friends' house in January.* I was going through it school-wise at the time, and the mopey shoegaze of Greet Death was hitting me like nothing else at the time. I would work during the day, feel like a moron, listen to Greet Death because I was sad, feel even sadder because New Hell was hitting such a tender spot in my heart, and then… cook dinner for like two hours. New Hell is a winter album, as the band comes from Michigan and understands how coldness works its way into your being in a way bands from the rest of the States don’t, so trudging through the show to it felt like an enthusiastic handshake. As I crossed Bennett, I was illuminated like St. Paul, and it came to me: Greet Death is walking around music.

*Yes, I thought of this idea eight months ago and am only now writing—an IMU tradition. It may have also been February!

The pieces were all there. It’s a union of an independent music experience you’re having on your headphones vs the communal experience of being at a show, combining with the world around you in a way that makes sense to you at that moment. Am I just saying that walking around music is a historicized experience of finding the perfect soundtrack for something? That seems shallow and doesn’t express the strange, esoteric understanding of what walking around music truly is. It’s like that, but better.

Remember that You'll Always Be Part of a Ska Band

A common theme in my love of New Tone ska is that the releases have slightly disappointed me. I built up Kill Lincoln's Can't Complain, Bad Operation's S/T, and JER's Bothered/Unbothered a crazy amount before they were released, hoping that New Tone's ska-punk classic would come with one of them. Those records all wound up being good (maybe great?), but ultimately my expectations were way too high, though I've also come around on Can't Complain being better than I initially thought.

Bad Time Records put out a fantastic comp last year, The Shape of Ska-Punk to Come, Vol. II* and while most of the tracklist was bands that I was familiar with from the label, the fourth track by Eichlers really surprised me because it featured ska upstroke guitar over emo-trap drums. The vocals were also effected in a Wicca Phase/Lil Peep style. Honestly, it wasn't for me at all, but I was almost glad to see that someone was trying out this combination, because I hadn't heard anyone try it before.

*We've got to stop with the Refused/Ornette Coleman references. It's even worse than "____ is fucking dead."

Similarly I've been fascinated by Eichlers' record My Checkered Future because it presents a completely new take on the genre. Until the last few years, ska had been so stuck in its ways on both ends of the sonic spectrum. Good bands were often super orthodox and focused on trying to play an authentic version of rocksteady and bad bands were goofy Reel Big Fish rip-offs. Worse than there being no bands at that time was that there were almost no bands trying anything new or interesting. Eichlers is as far away from that trend as possible since it's a mix of emo-trap, hyper pop, and ska-punk. The songs are super short, which I always love, and the record is all over the place.

After giving it a listen for the first time and moving on, I saw a video of Eichlers playing live, featuring just the singer performing with a laptop, and it confirmed that it really wasn't for me. I love the idea of this band and the approach that they're taking, but ultimately there's a generational disconnect with some of the influences that I just can't get around. I'm just never gonna like emo-rap or tik-tok and have accepted that. That being the case, I still see weirdo kids making ska and that makes me happy because I was one of them once.

The most obvious parallel that I can think of for this record is the first three Bomb the Music Industry! records, which similarly took ska to places that it hadn't explored before. BtMI! (which I've always much preferred as shorthand for the band vs "Bomb") was the first ska band I heard to use fake drums and instruments the way they did and to me, Eichlers seem like a new version of what BtMI! were doing from 2003-2006. When I was in high school, I was so excited to be around what Bomb the Music Industry! did mostly because of how different it was. The songs were great too and I still like a lot of them, but their innovative things felt important and revolutionary.

So even though I don't like My Checkered Future, no matter how many times I listen to it, I have to respect it for being what it is and trying something new. I don't know man, this seemed a lot more articulate in my mind. 

The Killerman is Killin'

I'm deep into yet another writing of my thesis proposal, so all I have to offer is that I've returned to this music video a lot during the pandemic. I'm not sure why, but it's really comforting to watch it, and it's been reliable as something that shoots good feelings into my brain when school and a worldwide illness start to weigh a little bit. Is it creeping up my list of all-time favourite music videos? Yes!

Making All Our Bones Run Cold

 I've been finding it hard to write lately, so I did what I usually do when that arises and tried to think of a baseball post to write up. Laboured over that for about two weeks, and the end result wasn't quite the "professional" standard I aspire to on the WordPress, so instead it goes up here:

Something I struggle with is the urge to gatekeep being a baseball fan constantly. In my heart of hearts, I don’t want to, and I want to make sure that being a baseball fan in Toronto is fun and welcoming because sports can be such a toxic mess, but every time somebody I know hasn’t been a fan that long says something I find mildly annoying, it drives me up the wall. I understand that this makes me sound like an asshole, but I exclusively direct this attitude towards men if it makes you feel any better.

Most of these fans came on board with the Jays during the 2015 playoff run, which captured the attention of Toronto in a way that no baseball team has done since. Maybe only the 2019 Raptors have done the same thing? I was as excited as I could get about sports during that Jays stretch run, but I also wondered how I would deal with the bandwagon since that was a phenomenon that I hadn’t dealt with yet as a baseball fan. I expected to be holier than thou, much like I am at this moment, but I found it to be a great experience. Ticket prices shot up, but the atmosphere at the park and around the team was fantastic, and there was more energy than ever before. 

Those years of playoff contention proved to be short, though, and it wasn’t long before the team tended back toward its familiar place in the middle of the American League East (somehow, the Orioles shot down to the basement even faster than us?). I found it much harder to deal with these new fans as they navigated the usual routine of the team being mediocre. Fans seemed to live and die with every game the same way they had when the games mattered more, and I wanted to shake people and tell them it was okay to tune out Steve Pearce at-bats.

I wonder if part of me is changing too. I also had a period where I cared too profoundly and dramatically about each game when I was younger and single and didn’t have as much to do, so it might just be a phase that everyone goes through when they’re finding their own identity as a baseball fan. You’re always going to look back to seasons past during the summer, no matter the vibe. 

More and more, I find myself inching closer to my dad as a baseball fan. I used to carry such a massive chip on my shoulder about advanced stats, but now I find it so tedious when they’re brought up on the broadcast. Rather than living and dying with each pitch, I find myself pulling out and looking big picture. It doesn’t matter if Vlad (and Teoscar and Lourdes and Kirk and Chapman) are slumping right now because, to quote my dad quoting Earl Weaver, we do this every fuckin’ day.

Too Good to Be True

 I recently discovered the band Dazy via their collaboration with Militarie Gun, one of my favourite active bands, on the song "Pressure Cooker". The tune is huge, but it has a lot more poppy bounce than your typical MG song and that intrigued me. Looked into Dazy and lo and behold, they, like Militarie Gun, have been on an extended kick of releasing short EPs for the last two years. All of them are collected, along with some new songs, on the comp MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD, which rocks. Personal favourite cut is "Crowded Mind (Lemon Lime)".

I've always been a big fan of the novel Catch-22, which I predictably checked out because of my high school obsession with the ska band of the same name. As a 32-year-old, and really as a 22-year-old, I can say that the novel is significantly better. After reading Catch-22, I read Heller's last novel Portrait of the Artist, as an Old Man. It has a godawful title and while the book isn't as bad as that might imply, it wasn't far off. That soured me, but I've had Something Happened sitting on my to-read bookshelf for ages and decided to pick it up for the trip to Ontario that I'm currently on. Since I wasn't familiar with most of Heller's other stuff, I wondered if he was a one-hit-wonder, but it doesn't seem that way. Still really funny and irreverent, but in a completely different setting than WWII.

I mentioned the trip in the last paragraph to forecast it being the topic of this paragraph. WRITING. Returning home is always weird. The trip has been the most social that I've been since the beginning of the pandemic, going to my first show, dinners at restaurants, and seeing a ballgame. The social guilt of COVID is and will continue to be there and I always have a voice in my head telling me I should just be staying inside, even though that has killed my brain over the last two years.

We've been in Montréal long enough now that it has become the new home and that coming back to Ontario doesn't carry the same degree of homey-ness that it used to. Speaking English in stores feels weird, though it took about a day to get used to it, and even more jarring is seeing people without masks. That being said, the city that I knew and that I will always deeply love is still right where I left it and I still get around intuitively because it's what I've always done. As my French friend Valentin said, "Connecting with your roots man, there is nothing like it."

Tomorrow I'll be Perfect

 I've recently run into the most problems that I've ever had with grad school. So far, I've felt most comfortable in grad school and it's an environment where I know that I am capable to take on whatever challenges are presented to me. That changed over this past year, when I've had to re-do the proposal of my research project a few times and keep finding that I haven't made any progress through it. It feels like something is wrong or that there's a giant thing that I'm missing, even though I'm doing my work the way I've always done it.

I hated working in the office in the art gallery and held onto the idea of going back to school to do a PhD as the thing to get me through that time. No matter how much of a dick my boss was being, how petty people in the office were being, how disheartening it was to see how the art world actually works, I knew that I would be past it all in about two years and move on to what I actually loved. It felt even better when that was proven right during my first year and change in the program. I blew through my coursework, got to teach a lot, and did some cool extracurriculars. Then, probably partly due to COVID, everything seemed to slow down and work became harder and harder to do. Even though it felt like I was working hard and trying my best to re-frame and re-think things, it would always come out as a different version of the same thing and I would have to start over from the same place.

An unfortunate result of this was that the Flatliners lyric "What do you do when doing what you love gets you nowhere, it gets you nothing"* from their song "July! August! Reno!" was the first thing to pop into my head. I hesitate to identify with a statement from '07 orgcore, but I guess that's where we are baby. I haven't even listened to that song in ages, but the lyric was the first thing I thought of when I asked myself about how to phrase a post about struggling with school. Didn't want to put it in the title, because lord is that dramatic, but it bears inclusion in some form, so here it is.

*Never thought of Cresswell as a particularly strong lyricist and the fact that it was more or less impossible to type out that line in a way that made sense grammatically supports me in that thinking.

The better metaphor for this that I've held onto for the last three-ish months is that I am Dave Stieb, putting all of the work in, toiling through the entire game, only to have the whole project yanked out from underneath me right when I thought I had finished. I guess that the important thing to hang on to in that is that though seeing myself in an under-appreciated pitcher who suffered though defeat after agonizing defeat helps me feel not so useless at the moment, he also got the no-hitter eventually and he's still the only one to do it for us and hopefully that means that a victory is down the road for me too.

 

Graph Paper Guiding the Way

 Hard to describe just how hard orange and green CanCon rock videos that were just concerts hit in 2003.

I always figured that this was just a typical "boys out on the town" song, but it's actually about DnD? Don't know what I thought "Picked up an Elven barwhore" meant when I was 13!

Anecdotes! Anecdotes! Pt. 16

A precursor to the following anecdote is that in the summer of 2009, my friend Erik moved into a house in Leslieville with my friends Chris and Quinn. I basically lived at that house that summer and it was a fun time having our own place to go in the city for the first time. Since it was everyone's first house, everything inside was shitty in an endearing way. Their shelving unit for their DVDs, showing you just how long ago it was, was all lopsided and barely standing and Erik described it saying "Yeah, I got drunk the other night and tried to build it." Being young and just not caring about how things turned out and also thinking that drinking before doing chores was very funny to me.

Later that summer, Pat and I were the first ones to move into our new place in Guelph. We were excited about our new house, which was in a better location and was bigger and nicer than our previous one.* Everyone else in our house hadn't moved up yet and the excitement of the school year hadn't taken hold yet. We just bummed around, picked up a few things for the house, and then hung out at the new house, Fuck Mountain.

*Your first university house always has to suck, right?

Pat had a new desk for his room and we decided that we would put it together together because we had nothing else. We were also through a joint and thought that it would fun to, like Erik, do some menial chores while high. We put music on and started working on different parts of the desk before finally admitting that we were getting tired and wanted to stop about 15 minutes in. I finished the chunk I had going, looked at it, laughed and then took a picture.

I'm sure that both this picture of a crooked shelf and my memory of Erik's crooked shelf aren't that funny to you, but they absolutely kill me. Simpler times, I guess.

Every New Beginning is Another Beginning's End

I'm going to dust off an IMU classic and use a series of YouTube videos to go through a few thoughts.

Riley Hawk put out a new video part this week (last week?) and it's the first stuff I've seen from him since Baker 4. I was surprised to hear Turnstile as the music for it when the video started and will admit that I found it a little hackneyed at first, with how popular GLOW ON has been since its release. Don't get me wrong, the album is good, but for some reason the idea of taking the most hardcore song from the album and putting it to a Baker part was wack to me.

That is, until the end of the song started and the refrain of "I want to thank you for letting me be myself" started to repeat over Riley skating rails. It's hard to not read this editing as an intentional metacommentary on Hawk's family and how awesome it has been to watch him blossom into his own distinct skater that is constantly supported by his dad. Once again, I eat crow.

Someone posting about the "Closing Time" on Twitter sent down a wormhole. I am unable to resist that specific type of 90s power pop, especially when the band is known as a one-hit wonder. I love love love the bridge octave riff. It's the exact type of guitar work that speaks to me. Maybe it's me relating heavily to that sort of failure. Is a one-hit wonder a failure? Is achieving a huge level of success only to be unable to replicate that better than mid-level excellence? I'm not sure.

In any case, I watched a bunch of live videos, because I had never seen a live performance of the song. In this performance of the song on Leno, the band cuts out the extended intro, instead hitting the piano riff right away and only passing once before starting the verse. Dan Wilson's shirt and haircut combo is very bad. He atones for it slightly by playing a red SG instead of the weird sort-of Les Paul thing (why not just play a Les Paul) he has in the song's music video, but then starts this wavy hip dance during the song's first chorus. The shirt and dance combo is some big douche vibes, but "Closing Time" is at the peak of its popularity, so you can't fault the guy for feeling himself.

I also wanted to get a sense of what it was like to see the song performed for a big crowd, so I checked out this video from Pinkpop. Lo and behold, he starts doing the hip sway again! That makes me hate the move! It being a performative thing that he does each time makes it so much worse.

However, I was eventually won over by this video of the band playing the song in their hometown Minneapolis in 2019. The full intro! The same SG! The crowd knowing the words! This time, he waits until the second chorus to hit the shimmy and he got me. Him being old and embracing the fun of the song got me and it made the dance move fun. What can I say?

It Is an Up-at-Dawn, Pride-Swallowing Siege that I Will Never Fully Tell You About, Ok?

My fantasy baseball league has been preparing for our next season of play over the last couple of weeks, which has put me back in touch with a group of friends who I rarely talk to anymore. One of these friends is new to the league, and fantasy baseball in general, and when we assured him that he would do fine and that playing a six-month season of baseball wasn’t as daunting as it seemed, he responded “I figure that if the idiots that I went to high school with can do it, I can.”

His point stands, but it also made me wonder how long is too long to hang onto anger around the social dynamics of high school?

I guess I want to start by saying that the sentiment of my friend’s remark is something that I can relate to. I didn’t have an easy time in high school either and being bullied and relegated to the lowest social class of my high school was something that I carried with me for a while after that time. It profoundly shaped me in both positive (drove me further towards my interests, concretely defined my personality at a relatively early age) and negative (destroyed my confidence and mental health) ways. 

I say this because I too know how it can be powerful to take the anger and resentment you feel towards the popular or shitty kids at your high school and turn it into a personality that works for you. Saying that you’re better than them now makes you feel a lot better and most of the time it’s true. You’re out of an environment where other people have a say in what you’re supposed to like, at least mostly, and it turns out that you were right all along even though no one believed you. The lowness that you once felt is now being equaled by highs that you’ve created yourself.

I think that it’s also embarrassing to hang onto that for too long in your twenties as a big part of your personality. How long can you complain about people being dicks to you ten years ago? There must be an inflection point where your resentment about people starts to outweigh the power that it was providing you and really, if you are still holding things from that long ago, aren’t you just proving them right?

I don’t know that what I said is 100% correct. That original hurt doesn’t ever go away, but I guess I’m just advocating for having a way to deal with it after a while. Or maybe I just find it cringey to hear that sort of thing. That’s all I can offer.