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?
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.
There was this kid named Derek that I went to elementary school with who used to just show up at my house all the time during our summers off from school. I don't know that I would say that I disliked him, but we weren't really good friends either, so I always felt awkward when he would appear at my parents' back door apropos of nothing. The first time he did it, I was surprised but mostly fine with it, but then he started to do it all the time.
One of the times he showed up we went on my home computer and he went on a bunch of porn sites. It's not like I didn't have the pre-pubescent interest in porn too, but I did find it weird that he wanted to do that with me in the room. My mom found them after and I got in trouble. Another time, he came and I just hid from the windows and pretended I wasn't there.
During the summer after we graduated and before we started high school, he again came and talked to me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to go to the movies with him. We took the bus together, something I was about to start doing multiple times every day, but wasn't comfortable with yet. I had been to the movies by myself with friends tonnes of times already, but we had always been driven there by our parents, so the autonomy of not just going to the movies, but getting there by myself was alluring. Recently turned 13, this bus trip on the Bellamy 9 to the Eglinton Town Centre* Cineplex was the first thing I did that made me feel like a teenager.
*To be re-named the Eglinton Warzone in the future, when it became Scarborough's premier wrestling pay-per-view venue.
It was nice that Derek knew where he was going and could lead me through the process of transferring bus routes at Warden Station. Despite normally finding him annoying, and kind of weird in the cloying way he approached the girls in our class, on this day I found the conversation with him easy as we walked across the parking lot to the movie theatre. Compared to the version of him I saw every day in school, he seemed more relaxed and down to earth, free of the social pressures of a class full of pre-teens. Maybe it was actually me that was responding to that lack. It's hard to know.
When we got into the theatre, we bought tickets to see the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, which was Derek's choice, and our reason for coming. It wasn't something that I would have ever picked, as I was deep in my phase of only watching comedies starring Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, and Martin Lawrence, but at this age I also curtailed to mostly whatever anyone else wanted. Venturing out of my comfort zone, as much as seeing a blockbuster summer movie filled with movie stars can be qualified as leaving my comfort zone, proved to be great. It's hard to properly describe how a general crowd pleaser like The Italian Job hits when you've never seen that sort of movie before. The action! The quick jokes! The sexless romance! Is this the best movie I've ever seen? Why isn't every movie centred around a heist?
I left the theatre feeling like I was walking on air. Free of our parents shepherding us towards the parking lot having finished their parental task of taking us to the theatre, we went and hung out in the arcade, not playing any games because we didn't have the change too, but just drifting around and looking at the demos playing on the machines. Derek put a loonie into a small mechanical vending machine and received a cheap fake silver chain in a clear plastic container. While we again walked across the parking lot to the bus stop, Derek spoke about giving the chain to a girl that he liked at the trailer park that he went to with his parents in the summer.
Less than a month later, I started grade 9 at St. Mike's and took the TTC for two hours every day. Over the next four years, I basically lived on the transit system and it became my key to unlocking and learning about the city of Toronto. I was usually the person among my friends who knew how to get to places and the way that subways, streetcars, and buses connected was a language that I understood well.
The 2021 IMU Award for Biggest Surprise goes to Big Nothing - Dog Hours!
I guess that it's fair to say that I was already a fan of Big Nothing, as I liked their debut 2017 EP a lot, and enjoyed their first full-length pretty well, if less than the EP, too. I also saw them play a great show supporting the EP in the summer of 2017 and it was one of those nights that reminds you that punk is good, the scene still exists, and that it isn't you, it's just what you do.*
*A band that my friend Autumn was in opened this show, but the singer started throwing up all over their guitar pedals out of nerves like 20 seconds into the first song and the band didn't start back up after that. I empathize with them, but also can't lie and say that it wasn't funny in a cringe way. After the set Autumn said, in classic Autumn style, "I don't know what they were upset about. It was mostly water." Big Nothing, making me respect them a lot, mentioned how much guts it took to perform at the start of their set.
I knew that I would check out their new album Dog Hours eventually, but it also wasn't at the top of my most-anticipated releases. Colour me dumb because it's by far the best thing that either they or Spraynard have put out. The punk is turned down and the jangle pop is turned way way up to huge dividends. Only at the end of February, but it's at the top of my list so far.
I first meant to check out Greet Death after they did an interview on blink-155 as a full band, which is basically the best thing you could do to win my attention, and I planned to go see them on tour in Montreal, but that fell apart like the rest of the world did with COVID-19 taking off.
They stuck around in the back of my mind since then, but I also lumped them in with Deafheaven as a blackgaze band for some reason. I listened to one of their new singles on my Spotify Release Radar playlist recently and thought it was good and then found myself thinking "Hey, this is good and right up my alley" when another one came on before I realized it was them.
That sort of experience convinced me that it was finally time and I put on their record New Hell twice today while I worked on my thesis proposal. I know I've mentioned a few times before that there a sweet spot in shoegaze for me and this is absolutely dead centre. The songs hit me pretty well and at certain points it felt like they knew it was currently that awful point between the middle and end of winter, where it's still dark, always wet, and lingering more than you thought it would. I figured that was a coincidence, but when I saw that they were from Flint, I realized they knew this feelings too.
Nothing else to say, just that I am really enjoying this record and it feels perfect for this moment.
Fair warning, I'm am reaching deep into the well of drafts of this one, so I can't promise that the level of thought and cohesion we all know is IMU's calling card will be present this months after the fact. Funny the way that happens, I'll jot down a few ideas to make sure that I don't forget an idea I found interesting, but the longer I go before writing it out, the more the connective tissue between the ideas disintegrates. In life as in blog.
A deeply embarrassing thing about me is that I was a "rap is crap" kid. I wasn't all the way there and had rap records that I liked as a teenager, an inevitability growing up in Scarborough, but I would say I was 60ish% of the way there. I feel like this part of my personality was especially turned up in early high school when I was starting to get into my local punk scene in Toronto and was digging my heels in to make "punk" my persona. It was also due to the commercial rap of the time being dominated by Eminem and G-Unit, which I still haven't come around to liking.
Still, most of my friends in my neighbourhood listened to that stuff and it was often a source of banter with us. I would tell them that 50 Cent sucked and had no talent and they would tell me that NOFX sounded like shit and nobody liked them.
During one of our debates, I was trying to make a point that punk bands were better musicians because they played their instruments live (in hindsight, full-body cringe) and they played the music on the albums (yet another FBC). Two of the guys I was with, Chris and Vito, said something along the lines of
"Are you dumb??"
"What do you mean?"
"The DJ plays the music."
"Yeah, from a record"
"No, they use the turntable."
They thought that a turntable was a musical instrument! And not in a poetic, "the DJ uses it like an instrument" way. They thought that turntables and the mixer were and instrument that played the actual notes of the song.
It was one of those crazy moments where a short statement succinctly communicates how dumb the other person is. A beautiful moment of catching the other person and them just having to sit with it. The extremely powerful feeling of "I know more than you."
In hindsight, is Get Rich or Die Trying or The Documentary better than Punk in Drublic or The Decline? Probably? A thought for a future draft?
Welcome to 2022 in I, Musical Genius. We are pivoting HARD this year and TRYING NEW THINGS. I, Musical Genius is going to INNOVATE and PUSH FORWARD. No more emo write-ups of albums. No more trying to sound intelligent when talking about movies or observations. We are putting our FINGER ON THE PULSE of culture. We will start with a discussion of a record.*
*I was reminded of the early viral video "Power Thirst" by Pinic Face today that my friends and I were all obsessed with in our university residence dorm. It's between that and "My New Haircut" for the things that best exemplify the early days of YouTube for me, though I wish people other than Pat and myself were familiar with the guy who did voice-overs of John Petrucci guitar instructional videos.** Maybe "Power Thirst" made me write out this dumb intro. Despite that, I still had to italicize I, Musical Genius, even though an moron probably wouldn't.
**My friend Katie married a great guy named Tom last year. I consider Tom a friend, but we were always kind of ships passing in the night. I feel like we have a lot in common and are two different versions of the same sort of Ontario punk guy. He's the only person I ever met who also knew these videos.
I found Esther Rose's album How Many Times last year, but didn't spend enough time with it for it to make it onto my year-end music list. Still, there are tracks on it and I've been enjoying it as some mopey winter music while the days are short and my mental capacity shrinks. I guess that giving a record its own proper write-up is actually more attention than something would get in a short list, but the prestige is reversed, I promise you.
Country is a bit of a weird thing for me and I don't think I've found my "guy" yet in the genre. I didn't listen to it much at all until Daniel Romano pastiched it on his first solo records, which is what opened my eyes to the good parts of the genre. I'm long past my days of believing that any particular genre is good or bad or more worthy or important than any other, but country is still a path that I haven't walked too far down. I'm sure there is a canonical great whose vibe clicks with me and who will kick off a gigantic country period for me, but that's in the future.*
*Apparently we're doing a lot of notes today. I bought the album Hard to be Humble by Mac Davis in 2019 and wondered if that would be something I would get into by virtue of owning. Didn't happen, but it's still a funny record. Also of note, I found this guy only just died and wrote songs for Elvis in the 60s (cool I guess? I don't know) and Weezer in the 10s (funny).
Sometimes though, the mopey forelorn vibe of a good country song does hit the spot and I find that Esther Rose's album is doing that for me at the moment. While Romano committing completely to the gimmick is fun, especially when the songs are that good, I also like Rose's personal lyrics on the record. "My Bad Mood" and "Coyote Creek" back to back is my favourite part.
Becks and I are almost done Game of Thrones and the end of the show is pretty dumb. I was saying that it was still extremely watchable, especially as a binge, but that was before every episode was 80 minutes. Why not make ten 50-minute episodes instead of six 80-minute ones? High on twists and CGI, but low on good conversations. While the early part of the show showed people traveling everywhere for episodes at a time, everyone now just zips around to all corners of the map, which cuts out all the great character building that happened along those trips. I would also say that I thought Daenerys was dumb from the first episode, but that would require to wade into dumb fandom conversations that the show was surrounded by and that ain't me babe.4
I will also say that I'm at the end of season five of The Sopranos and it is the complete inverse, with the writing being just as if not more sharp than any other point in the series and characters growing now more than ever. Shout out to my twin Buscemi.*
I feel like the last six or seven years have been really good for punk and hardcore and when you combine that with the constant creative push forward that is always happening in rap, it's been an especially great time for music. Maybe I'm just too enthusiastic and that's boring, but damn homie you're the one here reading!
Angel Du$t - YAK: A Collection of Truck Songs
Something I found interesting this year was that both Angel Du$t and Turnstile released EPs ahead of their full-lengths and that every song on both ended up on the albums. A new style of marketing in the streaming age? A quirk of the Trapped Under Ice family tree? I think that AD's full-length ended up a lot better and is by far the best articulation of their sound. A great slow song featuring Tim Armstrong! Probably my album of the year.
Turnstile - Turnstile Love Connection
Like I said, I think the EP format worked out a lot better for Turnstile. Glow On is still a great record with cool songs, but this shorter release is more cohesive. This blew me away and maybe my expectations were too high. In any case, the feature music video for the entire EP is one of my favourite videos ever and one of the coolest things to ever come out of hardcore.
Tyler the Creator - CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST
Was never much of an OFWGKTA guy, but really enjoyed Tyler's last two records and how he's developed and changed as a rapper and producer as he gets further into his career. This album is my favourite yet and probably my favourite rap album of the year. Such an amazing vibe here that feels like you're touring Europe while listening to DatPiff.
Mach-Hommy - Pray for Haiti
Griselda Records and everyone associated with them has been pretty much bulletproof for the last couple of years and I've returned to this record more than any other. It has the same chill and mumbly/extremely hard contrast that Westside Gunn and Benny the Butcher have, but this record is super focused and the world-building is great.
Militarie Gun - All Roads Lead to the Gun I
For a while this year, I thought that this release might be my favourite release, but it felt like picking an EP felt like a copout. Feels like Dinosaur Jr. and the Lemonheads filtered through extreme hardcore and it's done basically as well as it can be. Would love to see what this band could do with a full-length, but am just as happy to see them continue putting out 4-songers.
Webbed Wing - What's So Fucking Funny?
Webbed Wing's first record Bike Rides Across the Moon was intriguing sonically but definitely unfinished in a few spots. This is a fuller version of their college rock from a punk background and is one of my favourites this year. Sometimes it's just fun to rock.
Mo Troper - Dilettante
Mo Troper was one of my biggest finds this year and I gave Beloved a tonne of spins ahead of the release of Dilettante. While this isn't as focused as the former, I really like them leaning into the Guided By Voices vibe of a 28-song record where most songs are under 1:30.
Just Friends - JFC Crew Vol. I &II
Nothing but Love was in constant rotation during 2020 and even though I'm sure Just Friends' mix of pop-punk/funk/pop/rap is not for everyone, I find it super refreshing to see a band be so focused on not sounding like anyone else in punk. Seeing them also try new stuff here, doing remixes of songs, singles that sound like nothing else they've done, and a SONG FEATURING LIL B, was even better.
Anna Fox Rochinski - Cherry
I don't remember how I found this record, as I had no frame of reference for AFR or her old band Quilt, but this was one of the more original-sounding things I heard this year. A little shoegazey, but never slow, poppy, but off-kilter, firmly post-punk but definitely dancy. "Party Lines" and "Epilogue/Overture" are two of the best songs of the year.
ALLBLACK - TY4FWM
I had high hopes for this one after NO SHAME 3 and even if it didn't live up to that, this was still a tight full-length that has everything that makes ALLBLACK one of the best rappers alive. It makes me want to yell "Thank you for fucking with me!" all the time.
2nd Grade - Wish You Were Here Tour Revisited
2nd Grade has dominated my listening over the last two or so years and though I'm jonesing for a new full-length, this re-release of their first record, with new full-band versions of 7 of the songs from the original is a great replacement. "Favourite Song" has, predictably, been my favourite song of the last few years, so hearing a new cut of that was particularly great. The band is so jubilant that you can't help but love it.
Was having a supremely hard day working through my thesis yesterday. Both now and in my MA I've found that the further you get into a self-directed research project like this, the more of a toll that it takes on your mental health. It sucks.
During this I started listening to the tracks that Bad Time Records has released from the forthcoming compilation The Shape of Ska-Punk to Come Vol. II. Included on this was a new Jeff Rosenstock song that made me start to tear up while listening and these are the reasons I can think of:
1. Rosenstock returning to ska and making a song that sounds like the early days of Bomb the Music Industry! that I love and connect to so much.
2. Rosenstock caring about ska as a genre enough that he still makes ska songs and wanted to contribute to this comp by an emerging label to give new bands the rub.
3. Me getting emotional while struggling with school reminding me of the bad old days of my undergraduate degree when it felt like Jeff Rosenstock was the only person in the world who understood me.
A pleasant part of the recent... renewal... of interest... in ska? (trying my hardest to not say revival) is that a lot of new media about ska has accompanied it. I was a message board rat during the 2000s, which I would say was the height of that culture, and during that time it felt like there was a lot of cool internet stuff and communities focused on ska that were both fun to read and helped really expand my understanding of the genre. As the 00s moved into the 10s, it felt like there was a lot less of that, though I guess I could also chalk that up to me becoming more focused on exploring other genres of music for a little while.
On one hand, I agree with the current view that saying ska died from like 2007-2019 unfairly glosses over the contributions of bands like the Fad, We Are the Union, and labels like Community Records.* On the other hand though, I think the generalization that the vast majority of ska shows were either headlined by Less Than Jake (still making good records then!), Reel Big Fish (vomit emoji, especially in 2010), or Streetlight Manifesto (opinion changes daily), or featured bands trying to be them, was correct. As sad as it is to say, I think that it's also fair to add the Johnstones to that list, specifically in Canada. I kept trying to find new bands, and I never got tired of listening to the genre, but shit did get pretty dark there for a bit and there was slim pickings.
*An interesting wrinkle is that this is also when Bomb the Music Industry's popularity began to really take off, but also when they began to feature less and less ska on their records, which I don't think is unrelated.
This is all to say that I am once again writing about happy I am with the current generation of new ska bands, all creating interesting music and none dressing like a caricature of a 90s cartoon character the way white kids from the suburbs did in 2012. Along with these new bands have come a bunch of new internet stuff around that, and I'm thinking of the In Defense of Ska podcast in particular. It's not always great, but I really appreciate that it always focuses on the bands and how important they are, which is not something that often happens with ska. More so than any genre of music I can think, ska bands seem to be subservient to the genre norms.
A recent episode of In Defense of Ska featured Dave McWane from Big D and the Kids Table, who were one of the most influential bands on me during my adolescence and legitimately played a gigantic role in shaping both me as a person and my outlook on the world. I've written about them and their effect on me before on here and I was about to say that I won't do that again, even though that's exactly what I'm about to do.
I haven't actually read that many interviews with Dave, who seems to be the main creative force in the band and is (I think) the only remaining original member, so I found his take on the history of the band interesting. In particular, McWane mentioned antagonism as a key part of the early days of the band, which was something I was always trying to name, but never really could. He mentioned that they never really enjoyed headlining shows because that generally meant that the audience was already on their side and was there to see them, whereas when they opened for other bands, whether that was the Dropkick Murphys or even bigger, but less punk ska bands, their was more of a friction with the crowd that the band thrived off of.
That sense of antagonism was palpable and was also a huge part of what drew me into the band. As much as they were still a ska band, they really did push back against other bands, labels, and trends in a way that, in my eyes, legitimated them as a punk band too. It felt like everyone in the band were actually punks, so that when they played fast parts or hardcore parts, it seemed completely natural, as opposed to the hackneyed "clean verse, kick on distortion pedal for the chorus" model that all bad ska-punk followed. A big part of that was me being young and impressionable and this being the first time I had heard the "fuck everyone else" message given in such an emphatic way. But even though I was a naïve teen who was inspired to take on the world from this record, that still matters.
A memory that sticks with me that kind of sums this sense of connection up is something that happened to my friend Pat in high school, who was just as into Big D as I was. It was definitely not cool to like ska at the height of third wave emo and Pat was wearing a Big D hoodie to school that had a checkerboard pattern across the front. In the halls, a guy we knew who was a hardcore kid, without even acknowledging or speaking to Pat, just said "ska sucks" under his breath. It felt like all the people who were into punk, in whatever way, hated ska, but Big D made it feel cool to say "Fuck them anyways."
Because Big D were "My Band" for a stretch of like three years, Good Luck, The Gypsy Hill EP, and How It Goes were all in my walkman on the way to and from school, something that seemed like a gigantic deal to me in like 2007 was the band starting to get a little bigger and also changing their sound slightly. From my perspective, on the band's new album Strictly Rude, which was released on the comparatively bigger punk label Side One Dummy, it felt like the antagonism was now clearly gone, though others didn't find the change as jarring as I did.
My take on the changes in the band's sound were that it was partly due to member changes. The liner notes to How It Goes featured notes from the members about the writing process of each of the songs (the best) and something I noticed was that saxophonist Dave Bush, who left the band between How It Goes and Strictly Rude, had lots of notes and seemed to figure into the writing process in a major way. When the band left their harsher ska-core sound for something that sounded a lot closer to regular ska-punk on Strictly Rude, my take was that Bush's absence was the reason for less interesting music. I've never heard anyone else mention this, but it's one of those takes that I'll probably carry for the rest of my life.*
*Another note on member changes: Guitarist Sean P. Rogen, who is maybe my favourite ska-punk guitarist, left the band somewhere after Strictly Rude. I think he was similarly integral to the band making good music and I feel like his absence is glaringly obvious on later stuff.
I had never heard the band, or I guess more accurately McWane, talk about this period of the band, aside from the usual puff pieces in music publications that always come out during an album promotion cycle, so when he started discussing the writing period of Strictly Rude, my ears perked up and I was eager to hear about it. He actually did echo what I thought about the songs, saying that they're happier or more positive compared to their earlier stuff, but he attributed that to the fact that it was a generally happy time in the band's existence. They were signing to a bigger label, touring all the time, and were still young enough to just bask in the fun of being a band and fucking around. When he phrased it that way, it made a lot of sense to me and softened the record a bit to me.
In hindsight, they didn't really sell out in the way I thought they did, but I also think it's fair to say that they did a little. There was a tone of political hope on the record, as I guess they were now done being morose about the Bush administration, but even then (and more so now) that type of political outlook didn't jive with me. Getting the band's perspective on the record made the context of the record a little more in focus, but I still think that 17-year-old me picked up on something real, so I've got to commend myself for that.
