#i had to work through like 70 layers of embarrassment to write this | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

amphtaminedreams · 4 years

Text

Farewell to Spooky Season, AHS Style: Lookbook no.12

Hi to anyone reading,

Happy belated Halloween!

I capitalise it because if I'm gonna recognise any day as sacred, it’s the spookiest one of the year! Halloween 2020 obviously hasn’t been as exciting as usual, parties and club nights being banned has meant there’s been far less opportunities to dress up, but I still managed to get out for the night before they announced the upcoming second lockdown and do a couple of spooky movie nights (and carve a pumpkin!)!

I originally intended for this lookbook to be last minute halloween costume inspo but I was lazy and didn’t manage to get it out on time-a lot of these looks minus the makeup and maybe an accessory or two could work on any day or night out so I thought I’d go ahead and post it now anyway. Celebrating the fashion moments of American Horror Story is something I’ve wanted to do for a while; it’s probably not the first show you’d think of for sartorial inspiration but Mr. Ryan Murphy has fucking fantastic taste in stylists and the first five seasons of AHS in particular, which I’ll be focussing on in this post, have given us SO many amazing looks. The man may be guilty of many things-subjecting us to the character of Will Schuester, trying to turn Richard Ramirez into a thirst trap, embarrassing everyone who raved about how good Scream Queens was when he wrote season 2-but costume related laziness is not one of them. We see more consistency in a Ryan Murphy character’s wardrobe than we do in their story arcs and I respect that because honestly, as much as I love joining in when it comes to ripping into his ability to cohesively bring an AHS season to a close when it airs, I’d probably be the same; if you put Lady Gaga in front of me and told me to write her lines I’d probably end up getting overly invested in what her character was going to be wearing in the scene too.

So! Enough Ryan Murphy bashing from me! I’ll get on with it! Starting with 3 season 1 inspired looks:

Murder House: Elizabeth Short, Tate Langdon and Violet Harmon

-striped jumper from caitlinlark on Depop, kick flare jeans from ellagray-

When it comes to reflecting on season 1 of American Horror Story, all I can say do is thank the internet overlords that Tumblr has moved on from the romanticising school shooters and wearing normal people scare me tops phase to instead collectively taking the piss out of the “GO AWAY, TATE!”, “YOU’RE ALL THAT I WANTTT! YOU’RE ALL THAT I HAVEEE!” exchange.

In terms of fashion *moments*, whilst season 1 doesn’t stand out as much as the seasons that come after, Violet and Tate’s wardrobes did give birth to a bit of a 90s grunge renaissance with their oversized knits and faded jeans and layering of textures. It did also give us good costumes in the form of Alexandra Breckenridge’s Moira O’Hara and Mena Suvari’s portrayal of the Black Dahlia, Elizabeth Short; unfortunately, I didn’t have a slutty maid costume lying around so I did the best I could at giving the outfit Elizabeth wears when she makes that fateful visit to the Murder House a modern, more party appropriate update.

In terms of season rankings, Murder House isn’t my favourite. It starts off really great but lulls a bit towards the end and I could never get behind Violet and Tate as a couple because you know, one of them is a school shooter who sexually assaults the other’s mum, and that’s a hurdle that I think most couples might struggle to get over irl. That being said, it was the season that started it all and showcased some of the most innovative writing and directing on TV, and it opened up a spot for horror on primetime television which as far as I know was kind of unheard of before then. Back when I first watched it, I had no idea what to expect not only because I’d never seen horror in a serial format but also because it seemed to be able to get away with the kind of storylines you’d expect network executives to fire people over. It introduced us to Jessica Lange and Sarah Paulson and Evan Peters and Denis O’Hare who would go on to make the show what it is today and more importantly, through Jessica’s glorious portrayal of Constance Langdon, provide us with an endlessly versatile meme format for this trying time.

Asylum: ‘60s Lana Winters, ‘70s Lana Winters, and Sister Mary Eunice McKee

-afghan coat from louisemarcella on Depop, red AA skater dress from julietramage, pink gingham co-ord from zshamim-

I think we can all agree: Asylum would’ve been a perfect series of television if it wasn’t for the completely unnecessary alien storyline. Like, I get that they fit in with the whole good vs. evil theme as a kind of non-biblical alternative to the idea of a higher, all-powerful being but there was already so much going on that it just wasn’t needed. Aside from that, I think the general consensus amongst watchers of the show is that Asylum has the best writing of any season and I think I’d tend to agree. It’s not my favourite because it’s too depressing to rewatch but if we’re talking the first time round, this is the series that had me hooked. Lana Winters?

Iconic.

Sister Mary Eunice? Iconic. The Name Game? Iconic. Remember when you couldn’t go a day on Facebook without seeing that one photo of Naomi Grossman as Pepper used as the go to “what I really look like” photo in one of those “expectation vs. reality” style posts on your newsfeed? Those were simpler times.

Because this season was mostly situated within the hospital, we didn’t get that many proper outfits but when we did, they were stunning; if I had to state my absolute favourite AHS character of the entire show I’d probably go with Lana Winters and the part her wardrobe played in her characterisation would 100% play a part in that. The late 60s/early 70s was such a wonderful period for fashion and through her character we get to see both of those explored a little. Of course there’s also *that* Sister Mary Eunice scene with the red slip dress and suspenders too which yes, could be a perfect halloween costume, but I also strongly believe should be a perfectly acceptable outfit for any day of the year.

Coven: Misty Day, Madison Montgomery, and Zoe Benson

-chiffon dress from rags_to_riches on Depop, pinstripe corset from hanpiercey, and tennis skirt from mollie_morton-

I hate to be a basic bitch but I have to say it: Coven is my favourite season of American Horror Story. Once you get over the complete waste of Evan Peters’ acting capabilities that resulted from the *choice* to have him play Kyle, the unnecessary rehash of the Evan/Taissa pairing from season 1 in what I can only assume was an attempt to capitalise on the popularity of the questionable Tate/Violet relationship, and the subsequent sacrifice of any interesting character arc we could’ve foreseen for Zoe Benson beyond her obsessing over a resurrected, non-verbal frat boy, it’s a perfect season. A supreme (heh) balance of horror, humour, and character drama, as well as the stunning aesthetics and forever quotable dialogue, make it my go-to season if I’m ever considering a rewatch. And if you disagree, let me jog your memory with the most mainstream (not to get all “normal people scare me” and suggest AHS is not a mainstream show, I literally just mean in the sense that even those who have never watched the show will have seen this) reaction GIF set any FX show has even spawned:

Buzzfeed employees had a field day, Emma Roberts enthusiasts (I mean me) finally saw her cemented as the pop culture icon Scream Queens has since showed us she deserves to be (because not enough people have seen Unfabulous, Nancy Drew or Scream 4) and the gays everywhere rejoiced at the year’s worth of meme fodder they’d been provided with. It was Madison Montgomery’s world and we were truly just living in it.

And the fashion! I mean, Stevie Nicks meets 21st century teenage witches! Come on!

Freakshow: Dandy Mott, Maggie Esmerelda and Elsa Mars

-olive green satin skirt from morganogle on Depop, headscarf from tonijordan, platform sandals from elliefewt, PVC skirt from bethpin_, corset top from sadieflinter, beret from house_of_erotique, flame detail platform boots from mad_rags_vintage-

When people talk about the declining quality of AHS, they usually point to Freakshow as the beginning of the end, but I have to completely disagree. I wasn’t a fan the first time round but on rewatch it’s probably the most emotional season of them all; no, there aren’t as many “horrifying” moments as in other seasons and Elsa is probably Jessica’s worst performance (which is still an incredible one by anybody else’s standards), however it makes up for it with the most sympathetic bunch of characters yet, and on the flip side, also one of the most amusingly depraved with Finn Wittrock’s Dandy Mott. Fans usually argue that the season went downhill once *SPOILER* Twisty the Clown was killed off but for me, he really primarily served as the catalyst for the far more interesting devolution of Dandy, who, imo, is the show’s strongest villain to date, rivalled only by Bloody Face. Then there was the episode Orphans too which made me cry buckets, the sole AHS episode to do so.

We got a lot of great fashion content in this season too: the theatrical opulence of Elsa Mars’ wardrobe, “Maggie”’s nomadic fortune teller costumes, and all those twee suits we saw Finn Wittrock in. Highly underrated if you ask me. It seems an odd choice for me to use Elsa’s Dominatrix look as an inspiration for one of my looks here when we have that Life on Mars performance outfit and all the extravagant robes Jessica got to waltz around in for reference buuuut I didn’t really have anything to do the vibrancy of either of those justice so I went with the black leather option which is much more me. Am I saying I moonlight as a dominatrix? Maybe. Lol, no. I wish. It’s not for lack of trying. WHERE ARE ALL THE GENUINE TWITTER PAYPIGS AT!? Your girl wants to insult creepy men and get some new clothes out of it xoxo

Hotel: Hypodermic Sally, Liz Taylor, and The Countess

-silk white bralet from xlibby_maix on Depop-

Hotel is another season that I liked a lottttt more upon rewatch, once I knew I was okay to tune out the (completely predictable and utterly nonsensical) Ten Commandments Killer storyline that so much of the season initially seems to hinge on. I love Chloë Sevigny but the fact that her and Wes Bentley’s wooden John and Alex Lowe are positioned as the protagonists at the expense of the far more interesting Liz Taylor, James March and Hypodermic Sally really does a disservice to what is an otherwise great season upon initial viewing.

The visuals this season are magnificent and I think if I had to pick one character’s wardrobe to steal from the entire cast of AHS characters, it would be The Countess (a toss up between her and Misty Day tbh, so I kinda just settle for low-key channelling both). No fucking idea where I'd wear any of her clothes to but I’d make it work. Liz Taylor and Hypodermic Sally have some amazing looks too-there’s just honestly so much to choose from; that being said, this post wouldn’t be complete without a specific ode to the vampire goddess Elizabeth Bathory, who is everything I want to be in life minus the murderous qualities:

Everything. EVER-Y-THING. LOOK AT HER!

Lady Gaga is really a fucking goddess isn’t she. And people were claiming before they’d even seen it that she couldn’t act? A patriarchal society doesn’t like women that can do it all. Just saying.

Anyways!

That’s it for now! I hope you enjoyed the post if you did read til the end! Sorry I couldn’t get this out before Halloween, I was typing and Picmonkey-ing madly from 2 in the afternoon on the 31st but I taking fucking forever to get ready and had to abandon all hope of getting it out on the day by 4PM. I’ve got so much content planned and it sucks because a couple of them are lookbooks which now feel completely redundant given we’re heading into a second lockdown, but maybe I should just do it anyway? The grunge inspired moodboard I just did seemed to get a good reception too so I’ve got some more of them planned.

As always, hope everyone is keeping well, and feel free to inbox me with any suggestions, queries or even just to say hi if you need someone to talk to! I check here quite a lot so I should see it. Lots of love to everyone in this time!

Lauren x

67 notes · View notes

allamericansbitch · 4 years

Text

well since y’all asked

everything will be below the cut so people can just ignore this lol

the wild thing is like... everything everyone was saying from both sides makes sense. the good and the bad. i’ll start off with a pro and cons and then do a short track by track

pros:

i agree with what people are saying about how well this style suits her voice, it perfect. it’s smooth and calming but also doesnt stick her in a box and will allow her to kinda move with it and change things up as she sings, which i know she loves to do.

the production is exactly her too. it’s r&b beats with classic strings... liek that’s completely ariana grande. it’s so interesting and it weirdly works well?

i feel like you can tell she was just in her element making these songs. i feel like she tapped into something that can be so endless for her and new ideas will be constant.

idk if it’s just me adjusting to hearing her sing but her pronunciation is getting a lot better

every song has at least one good and attractive part to it... there are no songs that i am so completely confused as to why it’s on the album.

it’s for sure my favorite era for her in terms of style

also her best album cover (but sweeter is close second)

cons:

okay... there is a pattern with this album. every song had a really solid start. so many times i was in love with the verses and the melodies she was singing but... my god are the choruses weak. it’s just one line... repeated... like 4 times... then we move on... and i was sitting here like ‘oh that’s what we were building up to?’ and it happened with every song. so i completely agree about it kind of falling flat most of the time.

it’s so repetitive. besides the choruses mostly all being weak, the themes are all the same. like the 14 songs on the album are all about two things: her being horny or her being in love. that’s it. why did we need 14 songs to tell us two things.

another point: why were there 14 songs? so many filler tracks that just add nothing to the album for me. she could’ve honestly made a solid 10 track album and it would’ve been a good clean piece of work.

the lyrics... oh my god the lyrics. the one thing i saw people saying, both fans of the album and not, was that the lyrics were really bad... liek they had to prepare people. and my god. there were some points that straight up sounded like 14 year old stan accounts arguing on twitter... ‘you sound dumb... shut up’ SHE USED THAT LYRIC AS A HOOK... she thought it was so good it deserved to be the hook like? and also there’s a lyric that just straight up says ‘read a fucking book’ lol. the good or tolerable lyrics are basically ones she already used before on other songs? like how many time's has this woman sung about fucking while watching movies...

she needs to stop putting out albums so frequently. a lot of the complaints i see people having is just that it doesnt feel finished or polished enough to be an album. like she should have waiting a few months and refined things. it feels like a stepping stone rather than a destination. she doesnt have a clear vision, narrative or purpose driving the album at all.

track by track

shut up: this was the first taste of bad lyrics like this is the song about being dumb and i fully was like omfg this is the whole song isnt it. i dig the production though.. this might have the best production of the whole album for me.

34+35: i felt like i was listening to a horny 13 year old boy during the chorus lol. it just felt really immature at some points... like the giggling every time she alluded to 69 wasnt necessary. also the end where she says ‘mean i wanna 69 with ya’..... sweetie you didnt have to tell us we know we can add. i did like the melody of the pre-chorus. the ‘i’ve been drinkin coffee, i’ve been eatin healthy’ is really catchy and good

motive: god i had such high hopes for this. it first started and i loved the production and the prechorus worked really well... but again that chorus weakness really fucked it. and doja’s part doesnt really fit the song for me? it feels out of place and like she should’ve been put on a more upbeat song

just like magic: first song i actually liked and added to my library! i finally heard a good chorus that didnt feel like it completely slowed down the momentum of the song and helped move it along. and the lyrics are cute. i think for me she needs to improve on the difference between a cute lyric and a cringy lyric... like cute: ‘middle finger to my thumb and then I snap it’ and cringy: the rest of the album. also one thing there’s a lyric about her listening to music she wrote and like girl you had 34 writers on this album... what are you listening to two words? every time she brags about writing it’s kinda embarrassing like.... at no point am i impressed

off the table: this production would have been so good.... if it actually did anything else or went anywhere. it stayed the same the entire time.... for 4 minutes. also stop letting men on women’s music because it seriously never works. her vocals are really pretty though.

six thirty: i really like her vocal delivery in this... like kinda dropping off at the end and just starting to talk? it’s interesting. also the chorus really had potential because it actually got bigger and more layered and interesting but again with the one lyric ‘are you down’ repeated like 3 times then the chorus is just over it’s like... oh okay

safety net: again amazing verse delivery and melody... IF SHE TOOK IT ANYWHERE it would have been great. and again with the male features... not necessary. the bridge is cool with them both singing but other than that it feel flat for me.

my hair: that smooth electric guitar intro is everything. and this sound of this song is so good.... but.... am i the only person who kinda feels weird about ariana, a white girl, being like ‘you can run your hands through me hair... dont be scared’ like?? why would they be scared... your hair is straight lol. it just toys with the whole idea of ‘don’t touch a black women’s hair’ for me. idk it could totally be a me overanalyzing thing. but god is she sang about anything else this would be my favorite song. second song i added to my library.

nasty: if i had to pick one song that was my exact expectations for this album before listening to it it would be this one. the electronic hip-hop beat with the harmonies and vocals, all paired together for a song about her being horny (again), like yeah this all fits. it feels lost in some places though. like some points i feel like i have no idea what part for the song we’re on or what’s happening and we’re just treading water. and another weak chorus with 1 lyric repeated over and over again. (also random side not that intro of her talking reminded me of when she gave that billboard interview and people were mad at her bc she starting talking with an accent even though shes white... like thats what i thought of i was like ma’am you are a rich white theater kid form florida you do not speak like that)

west side: the production in the beginning is so cool? where is sounds like a tape rewinding kinda? love that. but other than that like... no point to this song being included on the album... it’s 2 minutes and it falls flat pretty early on.

love language: this was the one i saw most people agreeing was the best one/most hyped. i expected to be a ballad but it’s one of the more upbeat ones and honestly thank god. a chorus that actually has structure and goes somewhere? wild. good and creative lyrics? WILD. anyway the production is great and reintroduces that kinda 70s vibe from motive but in a refreshing way. really good tie in. third song added to the library.

positions: i honestly didn’t even listen to this when it came out so i really had no idea what to expect. again the strings and orchestral pairs so well together... one of my favorite instrumentals on the whole album. i 100% see why this was the lead single and i agree with it completely. the most catchy chorus and it moves the song forward WHAT A CONCEPT. also very good placement on the tracklist because it was really refreshing. at this point it kinda started to drag on a little but this picked it right up. it also kinda threw me completely off balance because i was so familiar with the pattern of good verse weak chorus good verse weak chorus, but this is the opposite? weak verses but amazing chorus. forth song added to library. also i am genuinely curious why it’s the album title? it doesnt really fit the theme of the album but then again one of my complaints is that it doesnt really have a theme to begin with so...

obvious: the imagery i got when the music came in was like a dark 80′s lounge with dark wood furniture and i loved it lol. the same thing with positions, a surprising and refreshing combo of weak verse but good chorus which was nice. i can see it easily getting me stuck in my head, especially that hook. fifth song added to my library.

pov: this is the other song off the album i heard everyone generally loved. i would say this has the best theme and story of the entire album. it has an interesting concept that isnt overly used and the whole song is pretty good decent verse and decent chorus. i love the end where she gets powerful and has more grit in her voice and we get more emotion out of her... wish she didnt wait until the last 30 seconds of the whole album to finally deliver with that but sure. sixth song to be added to the library.

overall i was pretty surprised at how much i enjoyed it? i really expected not to the way everyone was talking about it. i think it is a good album with just some clear flaws, that could have been easily fixed if she didnt rush the album out so quickly. better lyrics and better judgement/deliberation of which songs deserve to be on the album and it would have been so solid. i would give it an overall rating of 6/10.

here’s my current ranking:

#text #send me asks about yalls opinons too!!

6 notes · View notes

rushingheadlong · 5 years

Text

The Hazier Days - A Queen gen fic

Summary: It’s too hot for embarrassment as Brian finally caves to the summer heat.

Wordcount: ~1,600

Tags: Non-reader fic, no pairing/gen, some minor body image issues… otherwise just lots of soft fluff

Notes: Listen it’s barely above freezing where I live and I’m coping by writing summer fic do not judge me for this. If anything blame @tenderbri for putting the idea of 70s Tank Top Bri into my head in the first place.

Summer is bearing down on London, the weather turning from pleasantly warm to uncomfortably sweltering in the blink of an eye.

Brian spends his days working on his thesis research in labs barely cooler than the city outside, slowly boiling in jeans that stick to his legs and shirts unbuttoned a hair past what should be respectable in an academic setting. It’s hardly cooler at night, even with the old windows in his flat propped open and fans blowing stale air around the room, but at least Brian can strip down to his pants in the privacy of his own home. That, at least, is better than the nights where they have shows and Brian is forced into one-too-many layers as a concession to Freddie’s taste in fashion, leaving him soaked through with sweat and light-headed from dehydration by the time he finally stumbles off the stage.

Evenings, though, are spent here, in the windowless practice room in some forgotten corner of Imperial College as Queen spends hours upon hours in rehearsal. Their efforts are paying off, and with the addition of John their little group is finally coming together in a way that almost feels unreal - but Brian still wonders, sometimes, what he’s doing here, what he hopes to get out of all of this, when his focus should be on his doctorate…

Tonight, though, the only thing weighing Brian down is the slowly climbing temperature in the room, not guilt over his unfinished dissertation or anxieties over the inevitable fight with his father if Brian decides to set aside his studies. The summer heat sinks into his body, leaving his thoughts lazy and his limbs leadened, only his fingers moving as he plucks out an absentminded tune on his Old Lady, the beginnings of a song coming through with each repetition of the notes.

“That sounds lovely,” Freddie says.

His fingers comb gently through Brian’s hair, a soothing gesture that’s almost enough to put Brian to sleep. Across the room Roger and John are working out some fine detail of the rhythm line in the song they’ve been trying to perfect for the last few days, and Freddie had used the small break in practicing to offer to braid Brian’s hair to get the heavy mane off his neck.

On a normal - or at least a cooler - day Brian might have demured, embarrassed by his frizzy hair that doesn’t quite know what to do with itself now that he’s not aggressively straightening it every day. But it’s too hot for embarrassment and Brian had ultimately agreed rather quickly, taking a seat on the floor in front of Freddie’s chair to give the singer full access to Brian’s hair.

“It’s something,” Brian says. He plucks the same note a few times - something sounds off about it, his guitar gone slightly out-of-tune in the heat of the room, but he doesn’t feel particularly inclined to fix the issue at the moment.

Even speaking takes far too much effort, Brian’s words coming out soft and almost mumbled as he struggles to think of anything other than how hot he is. He conceded to the heat and wore shorts to the studio, baring his knobbly knees and too-long legs to the world rather than roast in a pair of jeans. His shirt is almost fully unbuttoned and hanging open and loose over his chest, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows, and still Brian feels like he’s going to melt into a puddle here on the practice room floor.

“Well, I like it.” Freddie sections out Brian’s thick hair, nimble fingers weaving the strands together into a simple braid and tying off the end with a stolen hair tie. “There. How’s that feel?”

Brian reaches back and touches the braid, running his fingers along the length, feeling the spots where his hair is already fighting to escape its woven confines. Brian wonders what it looks like, and then decides that maybe he’s better off not knowing. “Good. Thanks.”

“You’re very welcome,” Freddie says. “Although…” Freddie plucks at Brian’s shirt, which is drenched with sweat and sticking uncomfortably to his skin. “You still look far too warm, darling. Why don’t you just take this off?”

The others didn’t hesitate to lose their shirts early in the session but Brian has been resisting, undoing more buttons and rolling his sleeves up further rather than relinquishing the garment altogether. Even in the privacy of the practice room room Brian can’t help but feel a thin tendril of shame curl up through his chest at the thought of exposing that much of his body at once. He’s too gangly and too thin, long-limbed in a way that’s awkward instead of enticing, and he thinks he’d rather pass out from heat exhaustion than embarrass himself in front of his friends like that.

“I don’t want to,” Brian mumbles.

Behind him Freddie huffs, clearly gearing up to keep pushing the issue, but before he can say anything Roger calls from across the room, “He’s right, mate, you look pretty fucking miserable. There’s a spare shirt in my bag if you want it, at least it’ll be dry and lighter than what you’re wearing now.”

The others are all looking at him now, their scrutiny making Brian’s face flush hotter than it already was. For a moment Brian’s stubborn streak rears its ugly head, makes him want to refuse simply to prove that he’s committed to the decisions he’s already made… but it’s too hot to get into a useless argument with his friends, and once again Brian finds himself quickly relenting to the suggestion.

“Fine,” he says, and passes his guitar off to Freddie so he can stagger to his feet, grimacing at the feeling of his sticky skin peeling away from the practice room floor.

Roger’s knapsack is thrown haphazardly against the wall, books and papers and various odds-and-ends spilling out of it, but despite the shock of chaos that seems to always seems to follow the drummer around it doesn’t take Brian long to find the shirt that Roger mentioned - though his heart slowly sinks as he pulls it out of the bag.

“Rog, is this what you were talking about?” Brian asks, waving the shirt in Roger’s general direction as he digs through the bag with his other hand, even though it’s readily apparent that there are no other clothes there.

“Yep, that’s the one,” Roger confirms. “Might be a bit short, but it should still fit fine enough to rehearse in.”

“Right,” Brian says faintly, though Roger has already turned back to his conversation with John.

He looks down at the shirt in his hands and weighs his options. It’s barely a shirt at all, just a tank top, and that’s really the problem here. No sleeves to hide his boney shoulders, no excess fabric to mask how thin he really is, arms and pits on full display… Paired with the shorts he already has on, he might as well be wearing nothing at all for how indecent - and ridiculous - he’s bound to look.

But then again… if it’s too hot for embarrassment, maybe it’s too hot for propriety as well.

Before he can start overthinking things again Brian strips out of his shirt, taking just a split-second to relish the feeling of having the damp garment off and the dry air against his skin, before finally tugging on the borrowed tank top. It’s a hair too small, riding up to show a scant few inches of skin along his waistband, to say nothing of how exposed Brian feels having his arms on display like this… He’s profoundly grateful that there aren’t any mirrors in the practice room, so he doesn’t have to see himself like this.

“Hey, that doesn’t look bad on you,” Roger says as Brian tries, and largely fails, to get the tank top to stretch enough to fully cover his stomach. “You wanna keep it? I hardly wear it anyway.”

Brian can’t stop himself from making a face at the suggestion, though some of his anxieties fade away at Roger’s easy compliment and the lack of judgement from the others.

Only Freddie laughs, but it’s directed at Roger as he says, “Leave him alone, Rog, you know our Brimi doesn’t like your garish taste in clothing.”

“Garish?” Roger echoes, voice full of faux indignation. How they have the energy to wind each other up like this, Brian has no idea. He may be slightly cooler now but Brian still feels tired and sluggish, his thoughts too slow to even begin to join in with the others good-natured bickering.

Instead he makes his way back over to Freddie, taking back his guitar and sinking down to the floor with his back against the wall. The stone feels frigid against his overheated skin and he sighs, almost content for the first time in hours, and lets his eyes slip shut - just for a moment, just until Roger and John are done hashing out this section and they can get back to rehearsal…

“Freddie, d’you want to show us that new song you were talking about?” John asks, quietly, a few moments later. “Walk us through the rhythm section, and give Brian a chance to cool off for a bit?” He nods towards the guitarist and adds, “He looks like he could use the break.”

Brian doesn’t hear John’s suggestion, or notice when the three of them glance in his direction. He’s already dozed off, lulled to a hazy sleep by the heat, his Red Special held loose in his lap and his long limbs stretched out, sweat drying on his bare skin and a few loose strands of hair blowing gently with every soft exhale.

Queen doesn’t have much time left in their practice session, but none of them have the heart to wake up Brian now.

“Sounds like a perfect idea to me,” Freddie says as the three of them dive back into work, and leave their friend to sleep in peace.

#brian may fic #queen fic #queen band fic #brian may imagine #my fic #brian #(no beta minimal edit we die like men)

55 notes · View notes

incarnateirony · 4 years

Text

I went off on a rant to a friend about things like Gamble Era, and miscellaneous idolized past authors, and you know what, fuck it. I'm going to say it out loud. And listen, listen this is NOT going to be my normal "Whatever you like :)" post like, this is literally an accumulation of horse shit I've seen talked about in any and all lanes for years that have been driving me fucking bananas for years. Don't just read this going HAHA I HATE GAMBLE TOO and then be shocked when I slap at inexplicably favorited authors in this fandom beyond that.

------

God how can anyone genuinely like Gamble, like, literally, legitimately and 1000%, not even about her killing Cas or whatever, what kind of pure trash TV do these people intake in mass that they think Gamble was good at her job I can not emphasize enough how cripplingly disappointing the shift from S4-5 to 6-7 was I know art is in the eye of the beholder or whatever but JESUS. FUCKING. CHRIST.

Fuck constructivist theory there's a point when things are just clearly trash Benefits S7 had: Just da bros uhhhh *flips through pages* Anything else? Are dick jokes art?

Her era was overrun by plot holes you could fly boeing jets through -- and I don’t mean shit like when fandom goddamn made up in their own damn head about an angelreaper retcon even though the reaper in the same episode they said was a retcon said the deadass opposite of what everybody fucking wound themselves up about, just deadass yawning voids -- it had unstable mechanics on previously established species shit, the villain plot was one giant monster of the week that tried desperately to go back to how they handled shit like Azazel as a threat but miserably failed, the monster had the dumbest weakness possible, the characters themselves were unstable in their characterizations and not even in that general "I don't like what the show is doing with them" but episode to episode Sam flipping from ripping Dean with laughter over gay jokes to woke-sounding sentiments

The cinematic style was gone and just vacant, it was neither the overexposed horror desaturated film nor the vivid fantasy of Carver, it just sat there like an unpolished lump

While later seasons also lost the classic rock vibe for budget reasons, that too disappeared in her era so we had no film energy, no story energy, no character energy, no villain energy, no structure energy, and we didn't even have the fucking cool tunez but we had dicks allergic to windex

It even lacked the elements that gave Kripke era value

Dusty americana died, all we had left was teenage girl fuckin emo sad boi drama And even that was miserably piss poor

I have never seen such a visionless fucking disaster successfully air an entire season on my fucking TV

I will never, EVER be able to outline what a fucking disappointment it was to go from S4-5 level show maturation into this negative embarrassment by season 7.

S6 Kripke was still around to some extent and that's the only reason I can deduce, S7 minded, there was any substance to it, even if her writing and editing crew at the time were a goddamn tire fire. And then people turn around and yell feminism if you criticise the giant fucking blazing slag heap that was her era and blame anyone and everyone but her and here you FUCKING go and she does half the shit all over again in the Magicians

(The friend replied: "The season only works in reverse, which is a crime on serialised TV (and just bad screenwriting)." )

That's just it though, it's like S7 we were suddenly back to fucking episodical TV like S1-2 because enough fuckbats yelled about Good Old Days. Only instead of ʷĤε𝕣є'𝓼 đα𝒹 or 𝐓Ħⓔ DεᗰＯᶰ 卄𝓐ｓ Ƥl𝓐𝓝Ş ℱⓞｒ Ⓜ𝔢 it was ħ𝔞ⓗａ 𝓓ＩＣ𝐤ᔕ 🍆

I mean fucking sure this show started targeting late teenage women but Kripke had started maturing it forward and then Gamble fucking rolls along and it's like she's writing for 13 year old boys suddenly

Well I say that's what she seemed to be writing for but at the time the marketing was gross objectification going LOOK PRETTY BOYS WITH GUNS and that was it, that was the substance of what they gave a shit about and apparently the kind of demographic they thought constituted the sum of the SPN audience which, go get fucked guys, seriously. No fucking wonder the ratings got gouged in half over the course of a year. And fandom yells BUT FRIDAY DEATH SLOT but go sit and spin, S6 was friday deathslot too but before Kripke disappeared as the last thread holding SOME kind of cohesive value in the piece together in S6, that went to shitfuckhell in a handbag at light speed. People migrated to SPN Fridays S6 just fine. They LEFT season 7 and then people plug their ears if they don’t like that. And Carver had to fight all S8 to get it back, /but succeeded, and then-some./

oh and lemme head off fandom dumbfuck argument #72 about “well Dabb’s ratings are lower than Gamble’s were so he sucks and ruined it worse” go take your fucking ass and google “national primetime ratings decline” and enjoy exploring the last fucking 70 years of TV history. Pointing out a show crashes within a year because of massive failure is not the same as people being intentionally fucking daft sods to the TV universe’s decline over the last decade so like, don’t. Don’t be that person. Because you’re still embarrassingly wrong.

(The friend replied: "That's why I don't get why people care about what the vocal minority have to say. They *already* got what they wanted. It crashed and burned. Nobody in their right mind in corporate world is gonna be like, let's try that again, let's throw more money into that burning pit That's just not happening. Gay angels or no, it just ain't." )

I mean that should have been obvious when 1. Carver brought back Cas and pretty much immediately promoted him to Regular 2. Misha then got promoted to lead credits in S12, no matter what circles of intentional, willful ignorance fandom argues about what the credits mean for petty piss fights

"LOL & MEANS HE'S LESS IMPORTANT" Shut the fuck up and sit down you basement dwelling shitlord, go watch the A-Team, tell me how Mr T is the least important character

Also unpopular fuckin opinion Robbie Thompson and Ben Edlund are not That Great. Compared to what they were SURROUNDED with they were exceptional but Berens and Yockey could run circles around them both. They just happened to give fandom shit they liked during dark times so it made them fun. Robbie Thompson and Ben Edlund are basically the baseline value of our current writing team on random names. Give me Robbie Thompson and give me Davy Perez and I see no fucking difference. People compare Edlund to Yockey because of certain shit he pulled off but like, no? If there WAS a comparison it’d be like, Meredith, and even then I can’t see any way Edlund is substantially better than Meredith but could list the other in reverse?

But if we're talking about being able to write pieces with more than 1 or 2 layers of impact I'm sorry, it's rose colored glasses that makes people idolize them

Like if people seriously objectively fucking sat and reviewed the methodology and substance of their past idol authors to the demonstratable level of the current crew where I am DEAD ASS HAVING DISCOURSE WITH THE EXEC PRODUCER ABOUT BAUDRILLARDIAN CONCEPTS AND DELILLO in the middle of a hypercomplex postmodern two-directional commentary piece on some scaffolding of sociopolitical representation commentary that SAILS past the level the ‘activists’ in this fandom think about, literally, what people like is Gay Shit They Got lobbed at them or shiny visuals. And you know what, whatever, sure, like what you like IDGAF but don't sit here like Thompson was some fucking Shakespeare. No, your fucking "meta" you -- you, in any lane, anyone, any ship, anywhere, ever -- wrote by COMPLETELY randomly associating whatever storyline you could staple on to try to pretend the text was doing what you want at the time -- is not the same as author intent and actual weight and merit to the cohesive structure of what they build.

YES YES I KNOW, Death of the Author, someone just popped that up in their head, like the ten thousand posts I've made over the last 209349 years addressing how people abusive the fuck out of the term and that's fine, interpret shit however you wanna make it do jumping jacks but don't sit here entering the time you attached Little Bo Peep as some sort of intrinsic value to Dean trying to find Sam in 1492 and act like that's some deep critical shit the authors thoughtfully laced into the piece, these are not the same fucking conversation.

Big hollow voids of statements doesn’t make a better author, it makes you bust your ass harder to actually give any sort of consequential meaning to the piece, and that has nothing to do with the quality of the author or text themselves, that has to do with your interpretation in a piece devoid of genuine thematic subtext so people desperately try to bobby pin some bullshit together. Which also is probably why this fandom can’t tell the difference between coding, interpretation, subtext, and text for their fucking life anymore.

Protip the entire goddamn writing room is pouring that gay shit in your cup that's been triple brewed above Robbie or Edlund’s pots and people are still complaining it isn't enough

Another point that drives me up a wall, "LAZARUS RISING IS THE BEST EPISODE EVER" okay like lmaooooo what the fuck are you smoking Was it impressive as fuck at the time yes it was. But again, fucking perspective. I literally went back and watched it like a month ago and I realized it was a fucking void of content compared to our modern writing, it just had one of the most impressive entrances, it DID have good directing (YES MANNERS WAS GOOD, NO DISRESPECT), and it introduced a character everybody loved. Dean was still a halfass caricature

You wanna know why everybody made that shit gay right away Because there was no fucking substance around it it was a wallpaper of a cool looking episode that was otherwise blank space to run around in on dialogue they should have thought to construct better if they didn't want it to be gay

And sure since then the author room has picked up the big gay ball and started actually turning it into some shit which, great, but this is yet again a matter of structure and intent versus throwing rotten pasta at the wall and seeing if the mold makes it stick. I don't care if you have a vegan recipe that converts the fucking mold on the pasta into a healthy sauce base that isn't what it was thrown at the wall like, and no amount of complimenting the original chef's moldy pasta means it was some tasty shit before you added 10,000 ingredients they never fucking thought about or at least a second chef came along and figure out what to do with the pile of goo.

Fandom would stop being this miserable fucking putrid stinkhole if people would collectively apply some goddamn perspective to the content they argue about before even bothering to engage with uwustiel/cest dot tumblr dot com in irrelevant argument #9238428934 they use to fence off whether they should enjoy the content or try to explore it for its value or not because there is NO. MORE. PERSPECTIVE.

YOU KNOW WHAT? IT’S FINE TO EVEN ADMIT YOU LIKED THINKY-FREE TV, THAT’S FINE, THAT’S YOUR RIGHT.

But don’t SIT here acting like a lot of these former train wrecks were “better authors” or somehow objectively “better content.” No like, you like not thinking about shit that much and staring at pretty boys or whatever, good on you, but you literally like, objectively, some of the shit I’ve seen go down is like genuinely trying to compare a toddler’s fridge art to a Vasarely and hold them both up in front of people who do art for a living. They ain’t gonna shit on the kid’s fridge art, but they’re gonna go “awwwww she’s gonna grow up to be a great artist!” before breaking down on Vasarely’s vector illusion shit, sorry, that’s just how it be. I’m sure the kid had some sort of vision to drawing the triangle over the square that kinda looks like a house but the hypercomplex thought processes simply aren’t there.

Just people STUCK in weird idolization of shit that is so far past irrelevant to the current piece in play and fighting to win arguments while trying to convince themselves they're right and secretly dreading how titanically failboat wrong they are ignoring the sound of the glacier having ripped through their hulls SEASONS ago. The ice water has already leaked onto the fucking DECK and people are still arguing about completely ridiculous shit or fancying things that were 1/10th of the value of the current content they're claiming isn't good or enough or valid compared to the shallow specters that birthed them out of old aeons.

Dead-ASS Kripke picked shit because it “sounded cool.” I’m sorry if there weren’t some model guys fandom wanted to hump everybody would be making fun of the fedora-tipping mindset that probably is where the fucking trenchcoat came from and may have debated giving Cas -- sorry, “CASS” because “COOL” -- katanas. But sure. Way, way deeper and more intricate than the Jungian intertextual post modern piece that’s so tightly knit it’s making fandom unwittingly comment on themselves.

I thought people grew out of that shit when they were like 16 unless they were incels

(My spidey senses detected someone unironically preparing to inform me about stealing borrowing the imagery from Constantine on reflex, because you know, that’s some peak intertext right there.)

Dead ASS that writing logic is that motherfucker that wanders into your freeform RP server with Spawn knockoff miasma chainsaw arms under his leather trenchcoat shooting twin Deagles with a vague story of wanting to face his demon overlord father that’s written like a looney tunes villain, in the middle of you cowriting with your lit-savvy friends trying to make a fun fantasy adaptation rendering fascism and corporate america and then he gets upset when nobody wants him to shit lightning -- /fight me/.

SERIOUSLY FOLKS. WANNA ENJOY THE SHOW AGAIN? GET SOME PERSPECTIVE. LET GO OF FETISHIZING WEIRD WARPED MEMORIES AND LINES OF ARGUMENT INSIDE YOUR OWN HEADS ISTG IT'LL HELP.

The day I find an argument that makes season 7 legit good TV rather than, at very best, “fun junk TV I had a cool ride on”, that does NOT involve evoking arguments distinctly born out of petty shipping culture arguments and/or (generally the same) attaching their own shit with a stapler to MAKE it have some sort of meaning at the time it was airing (rather than later showrunners making it add up to something), I’ll eat my fucking arm.

𝓯𝓾𝓬𝓴. Carver era had already gone through dramatic changes that deepend the scope of the show and even then, 15.09 Bobo’s The Trap held more ACTUAL commentary on this fandom than Thompson’s Fanfiction episode did as a supposed fandom-commentary episode much LESS 15.04 as an actual meta framed episode. Fanfiction was like 4 years behind and completely fucking unplugged, whereas the base of the show itself is more integrated now in these dynamics than any attempt at meta episodes back then were.

old days it took one goddamn episode of dreaming for people to 1. start talking about Freud and 2. pretend the whole everything after that was some Freudian masterpiece even when, if it were, it would have been an entire avalanche of dropped balls. But two seasons of direct citations and literal manifest avatar-bodies of Jungian psychology elements and it’s hard to pull more than a peep out of the fandom about it because they’re too busy yelling about tulpas or sirens from before most of the people around here hit puberty.

𝓕 𝓤 𝓒 𝓚

furthermore why does anyone that idolize season 7 for what they think fits their bill think season 15 is gonna end how they want when they’ve been taking the piss out of season 7 over and over and over and over again IN THE TEXT as being dumb as SHIT

𝕀ℕ 𝕋ℍ𝔼 𝔽𝕌ℂ𝕂𝕀ℕ𝔾 𝕋𝔼𝕏𝕋

WHY SET YOURSELF UP FOR DISAPPOINTMENT

TO WIN TEMPORARY ARGUMENTS? THAT YOU’RE ACTUALLY LOSING FROM START TO FINISH?

actually you know what

rolling back to the whole “empty/subtextless stuff making people bust their ass” seems to be what you miss. Saying, “I miss empty, shallow, shitty writing” doesn’t really sound as good though so we change “what I like” into “this is talentless trash” it postures better, but it seems to be the people who have objectively fucking refused core tenets the show has evolved over the last 7 years, most explicitly the last 3-4, and absolutely refused to soak them in the form they deliver in. And they’re mad. Because it isn’t hollow. They can’t run around in fucking blank space and plug absolute horse shit into the voids and then posture like they’re supreme in this noncommital wasteland. Because everything’s built out and structured in and loud as fuck and people are debating the actual installed and even dogmatically cited work of philosophers driving the ideology of the show now and they can’t get away from it, and/or actually have to pay attention to the whole show and think about it all as a picture instead of the parts they want, so it’s “bad.”

I just sensed like 50 readers shoving their foot into that shoe. Good.

Jesus christ I’m pretty sure that’s what it is in hindsight after yelling all of this. These characters can’t be used as sock puppets anymore that people can win bullshit arguments unless they literally delete the entire principle of the modern show -- and this goes for MULTIPLE lanes really, each in their own way -- so now it’s “bad.” And that’s just not how this works.

#supernatural #spn #rant #vent #mildew

15 notes · View notes

jessejostark · 4 years

Text

JESSE JO STARK: I’M DOING MY BEST TO GIVE FANS A SAFE PLACE TO EXPRESS THEMSELVES

We call up the LA singer-songwriter to talk about working with Yungblud, challenging music industry toxicity and the hidden meaning behind new track “Tangerine”.

When you think the words “indie rock” what comes to mind? If it’s exclusively scruffy Brits (guilty as charged!) then broaden your horizons with Jesse Jo Stark. The godchild of Cher and daughter of Richard and Laurie Stark, the duo behind rock n’ roll outfitters Chrome Hearts, she’s been steeped in art, music and fashion from a young age – and it shows.

Now, she’s all grown-up and a bonafide Malibu dream girl penning introspective, seventies-tinged songs of longing and loss that you can’t help but sing along to. A Stevie Nicks for the iPhone Generation, she’s honed a femme fatale persona for both the stage and IG, where she enjoys a 300,000 strong following of fans who eagerly hang on to every one of her cryptic captions.

Curious to get to know the woman behind the mystique, we call Jesse up to talk all about her musical origins, working with Youngblud and latest track “Tangerine”.

Lovely to meet you Jesse! Let’s talk about your beginnings as a musician: when did you first start making music?

I used to think that songs just came into existence and spilled through the radio speakers like magic. as soon as I realised that someone actually wrote them and made an idea into something real, I’ve been making records. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t singing or writing words or playing guitar.

And who are your main musical inspirations?

The Cramps, Linda Ronstadt, Merle Haggard, The Clash… I also love when artists that I respect make playlists introducing me to new types of music. I’ve recently fallen in love with Sharon Van Etten, Blood Orange, Big Thief, and The National. I’m an obsessive person with the things I love so when I like a song I listen to every song by that artist and that always leads me to another.

So how would you describe your sound to someone who hasn’t heard it before?

I never know how to answer this question but I love how my band describes it: “it’s like romance, ‘70s AM radio with your lover’s head on your shoulder, but it’s also eerie like the Devil’s wind.

What’s been the biggest moment of your career so far?

Touring. I love playing every night and looking into different people’s eyeballs while I sing to them. I miss visiting new cities and meeting new people. When I walk on stage and my band starts playing and I see a room full of people take their time to fall into me. When they start to dance and wrap themselves around each other it makes me believe in magic again. It feels like we are all under the same spell.

And outside of music, what are you passionate about?

My family and friends, my clothing line Deadly Doll, driving, cooking, arts and crafts, my dog Billie, reading, writing and the beach… I’m a little bit Cali.

Yeah, I hear you’re LA born and bred, which must have been great! How has living in the city impacted your sound?

It’s impossible to know what a city does to a person’s taste, but the people I’ve had around me have had everything to do with it: music is God in my family… Plus, I’m sure being dipped in sunshine does something to a girl’s voice.

I’m sure! What’s something you wished people knew about you?

That I’ve been playing and writing music my entire life! I don’t think people really realise that writing songs and making records is the main thing that I do and something I have always done.

Your parents are well known as the founders of legendary brand Chrome Hearts — have they influenced your decision to pursue a creative career?

My parents are my favourite legends. I’ve watched them work tirelessly my entire life and build and support the other people in their community. It’s all about connection with them, making honest pieces that add to the world. That’s what I want to carry on.

Coming from such a fashion-conscious background, is style an important form of self-expression for you?

I have an anxious reaction to style and art that manifests in endless strings of ideas on how to make it more interesting to me. The reinventing and refining process is what creativity is to me. I never like to follow another mood board: it’s all about making your own.

Here’s one for the Yungblud stans out there. What was working with Dom on the “Strawberry Lipstick” video like?

It was just a really fun day! I was stoked to be a part of it, aesthetically it felt right at home for me. I fully understand the Dom craze now and I’m into it

I hear you’ve also been busy with an exciting music project of your own: tell me about your new track “Tangerine”.

“Tangerine” is a transformation about a complex character living with different moods and shedding layers. Once you peel back that skin you get the sweetness.

Love that metaphor! I’m also loving the video that’s coming out for it too, what were you trying to express there?

This video is so important to me because it was filmed in Malibu, where I grew up. I was so embarrassed about that for so long because everyone has such a weird vibe about the westside and LA. But I grew up here, my friends and family are from here. I was a misfit by the beach and just like the tune being about what’s underneath the face, this video highlights where I grew up. It’s me, just lipstick, denim and my Camino, driving past places I used to smoke, make out, swim and fall over and over again to learn about myself.

On a heavier note, there’s recently been a round of high-profile sexual misconduct allegations about men in the rock and indie scenes. What steps do you think the music industry needs to take to make it a safer and less toxic environment for women, people of colour and queer people?

Hearing allegations about sexual misconduct is always disappointing. The toxic masculinity women have to endure on a day to day basis is unsettling, but it doesn’t end there, because we are also dealing with diversity issues as well. People are being judged for their unique differences — be it race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, physical abilities or religious beliefs. We are obviously not doing enough to educate people.

I think the best thing we can do is to talk about it and keep talking about it until bolder solutions are being presented. Personally, I’m trying to do my best to be a strong woman and give my fans a safe place to express themselves.

Education is definitely an important one, I don’t think we can ever overstate that. So what’s the biggest thing you’ve learned in 2020?

Being grounded, love, patience and letting go. The world is so silly sometimes and we forget to inspire each other. Nothing really matters except those moments when you feel the life you’re living. We need to slow down, clean up, live true and lead with love.

Finally, what are your hopes for the next year?

I hope for love and continued change. I hope, in the US, that we find ourselves in the hands of a real leader that leads with kindness and empathy. I hope we all can reflect on the current conditions and act gracefully by supporting each other, hearing each other and respecting each other.

#jesse jo stark #hunger magazine #interview #music #2020

1 note · View note

larryfanfiction · 6 years

Photo

Boxer! AU

👊 Box of Rain by indierection (amandamoraisa) (26k)

Louis is definitely not the next Muhammad Ali, just an illegal boxer with no prospects for the future. Harry is a hippie Uni student that in his free time informally works as a ring boy. Somehow he manages to always get tangled on the ropes and at the same time charm the pants off of all the fighters and patrons. They meet in Manchester in 1977 and, even though they don’t seem to have much in common, they… Well, they just sort of click, really.

The one with a friendship ruiner game of Monopoly, Harry always ending up in jail for wanting to save the world, Louis face to face with his archenemy and way too many references to 70s music.

Also staring Zayn as a brooding anarchist punk rocker, Liam as the nerdiest and nicest boxer in all Britain and Niall as a bookmarker that can easily convince people to bet fortunes, but can’t make his friends realise their mutual crush on each other.

👊 Small Doses (Loving You It’s Explosive) by QuickedWeen (38k)

Louis Tomlinson finds himself at Vitality Fitness to try and turn his life around after having left his cheating boyfriend of four years. The gym’s owner, Liam, quickly becomes a good friend, but his right hand man is rude and dismissive from the get-go. Louis and Harry continue to clash all while Harry is trying to move his way up the ranks in Manchester’s amateur boxing circuit, but they can’t seem to stay away from each other.

👊 The Blood of Words by MediaWhore (24k - WIP)

Louis Tomlinson hasn’t sworn off relationships per se. He just doesn’t think he’s quite ready for one yet, despite his therapist’s encouragements. He’s comfortable in his position as editor for Styles Publishing and he’s happy to focus on his career while he gives himself more time to heal.

Enter his CEO’s brother, a boxer with a heart of gold who is determined to carve himself a space in Louis’ life and, more importantly, his heart.

👊 Auf Wiedersehen, Sweetheart by Conscious_ramblings (19k)

Louis and Harry had been childhood best friends, but had been separated by evacuation as the city they grew up in was destroyed around them. Now, twelve years later, they are both back in London, and through chance they meet again. In a time when you can’t admit to being gay, for fear of arrest, admitting to your best friend that you love them seems like an insurmountable obstacle.

Featuring boxer Harry and mechanic Louis, much pining, and a lot of post war Britain

👊 i can’t help myself from how my heart is racing by flicker_album (13k)

Louis is just trying to be a good friend by working out at the gym that Liam owns. He never expected to (quite literally) run into Harry, the hot boxer who sings embarrassing songs in the locker room showers.

👊 The Battle is Now (my eyes are closed) by harrytomlinsun (10k)

Harry has a big imagination. You need one when you write your own songs, and he kind of wants to write a whole album dedicated to Louis, from the way he moves, to the thin layer of sweat that covers his golden skin and the determination that settles in his eyes. Louis makes him think of a lion cub most times, with his feathery hair, puffed chest and tiny frame. But right now he looks more like the Lion King. Harry feels as if he should get on his knees for him – for several different reasons.

Or, Harry is a struggling artist with some regrets and Louis is a street fighter with rage problems. There is a lot of dark alleys involved.

👊 The Boxer by benniejets (11k)

Harry never really did anything crazy. She lived with her father, who owned one of the best gyms in West London, with some of best looking people; female and male. She always ran her father’s errands when she wasn’t study; including bringing him his mail. When she had walked into the gym on an average Thursday, she spotted a new girl in the gym who nearly made her stop breathing.

👊 Strength in Softness by larrymylove (16k)

“As soon as he saw Harry’s picture, he froze. It was a picture of Harry practicing his boxing, heavy black gloves covering his fists as he punched at a bag hanging from the ceiling. His face was focused and he looked like an absolute beast. Louis reached out and touched the picture with his finger, consistently amazed by the duality of Harry. As he started at the picture, he wondered if Harry had pink nail varnish on his toes when it was taken, and what other tattoos and secrets he had buried underneath his workout gear and hard expression.”

Or, the one in which Harry is a boxer/trainer, and teaches Louis that there can be, and is, strength in softness.

👊 It Couldn’t Hurt by caballero78 (28k)

When his past comes to bite him on the backside, Louis Tomlinson isn’t going to go down easy. He’s stubborn, competitive and wonderfully uptight enough to deflect anyone coming in and overthrowing everything he’s been working towards for the past five years. He will fight dirty.

It’s not until he pushes a little too far does he realise he’s met his match.

👊 Fight For Me by Mie1412 (101k)

“So, we’re friends?” Louis asked timidly, his blue eyes looking up at Harry through his lashes, Harry’s chest suddenly feeling all weird.

Fuck everything. His life really was one big mess at the moment but maybe he should just go with the flow and see what happens. Couldn’t get any crazier than it already has been anyway.

“Yeah… we’re friends.”

[Or the one where Harry’s an underground boxer, Louis’ the prize and now Harry has to fight to protect him]

More Masterposts

#ma #masterpost #boxerau #boxerma #boxerauma

235 notes · View notes

hurt-care · 5 years

Text

The Fitting

I got really inspired by Finnpeach's post and I honestly have wanted to write something like this for ages. Please enjoy this F/F 1860s/70s era sweetness.

There was no rescheduling it now; Miss Louisa Abbott would be coming via a coach at any minute with the selection of underpinnings to be fit and finished. The problem was that the lady she was set to fit was feeling remarkably under the weather.

Miss Catherine O'Malley sat at the small tea table in her room with the morning tea service in front of her and a lace-trimmed handkerchief in her lap. She'd woken with the prickle of dryness in her throat and the beginnings of congestion gathering in her nose. The cook had brewed her up a spicy ginger tea with a hefty dose of lemon and honey, but it did not seem to be making much difference.

From her window on the upper level of the multi-story brownstone, she looked down at the city street below. It was a quiet, grey-looking morning and despite the fact that it was April, she'd had the fire in her room lit for the day.

Yet unmarried, Catherine had taken up residence in a family property in the city while she completed some education at a nearby ladies' institute. Her small staff took care of her and the house was a popular gathering place for some of the other women of education who also lived nearby. The lengthy salons were spirited discussions between young minds and Catherine relished living on her own in the city.

There was one particular young lady who was not of the same class, but who had come to be a great friend to Catherine. Miss Abbott first came to outfit Miss O'Malley in the finest underpinnings in Boston when she'd first taken up residence in the city. Her mother had sent some money to outfit her with a few new corsets and chemises, and Catherine had contacted Miss Abbott at the recommendation of a friend from the ladies' institute.

From that day, they were quick to become kindred spirits. And then they found themselves becoming closer and more intimate. Miss Abbott had once said that there was nothing more sacred and intimate than the layers of silk and linen that hid beneath a lady's gown. They'd soon discovered the pleasure of exploring each layer of each other, bit by bit.

As was the usual routine when Miss. Abbott visited, Miss O'Malley had given her house staff the day to themselves with the instructions to return in time to prepare her dinner service. James, the footman and valet, had offered to ride over to Miss Abbott's shoppe and tell her of Catherine's ill-health, but Miss O'Malley had declined. She needed the new corset for a ball in Concord the next weekend and there would be no other time to fit it.

In spite of her blossoming head-cold, Catherine found it difficult not to feel a rush of excitement as she watched the street for Louisa's coach. She toyed with the trim of her dressing gown, running her fingers down and across the pale swell of her own chest, rubbing her palm there to warm the chilled skin. She wore just her chemise and robe with an added shawl for warmth. There had been no point to dressing for the day if she was just going to be made to undress again. The maid had set up her boudoir for the fitting with her mirror and a small pouffe to stand upon if necessary, along with a table for Louisa and a chair.

There was the clatter of hooves on the cobblestones slowing to a stop out front and Catherine stood, craning her neck to see down to the street. Louisa emerged from the carriage and the driver unloaded two small cases from the rear.

Catherine stood and rushed to the mirror at her vanity, looking at her pale reflection and the slight tinge of pink around her nostrils. She pinched her own cheeks for a bit of colour and then hurried downstairs to meet Louisa at the door.

She opened the front entrance and stood back, letting the young woman carrying the two cases inside.

“Good morning!” Louisa chirped, giving a broad smile as she set down the cases. She shut the large front door behind her and then turned to Catherine. “Oh, I've missed you!”

Catherine blushed and smiled.

“I've missed you terribly,” she said.

Louisa bit her lip and grinned coyly.

“We're alone?”

“We are,” Catherine confirmed. “The staff have gone down to the wharf for the afternoon.”

Louisa shed her travelling coat and tossed it on a chair.

“Good. Forget decorum then.”

She approached Catherine with the same broad grin on her face and moved to embrace her.

“Oh, sweet, I'm sorry,” Catherine said, stepping back. “I'm afraid I'm a bit under the weather.”

Louisa pursed her lips and then frowned.

“Oh no! Why didn't you send word? We could have done this another day.”

“I have that salon and ball at Malcolm's this weekend and I need the corset for my gown,” Catherine said. “I know, I wish I could have changed things but this was the only time that would work. I do apologize. I don't think I'm too poorly, but-- ehh-”

She stuttered and as if she'd cursed herself by saying she wasn't thatill, Catherine fumbled in her dressing gown pocket for her handkerchief and smothered a small, restrained sneeze.

Tsh-GXHT!

Louisa made a soft sound of sympathy.

“Oh, love,” she said, reaching out to tuck a loose strand of Catherine's hair back and stroking her cheek. “I'm sorry. We'll try to make it as easy as possible.”

“Thank you,” Catherine said, flushing pinker. “I feel like I must look a mess. I do like to be a bit more put-together for you.”

“No sense in being put-together if we're just going to undress you anyhow,” Louisa teased. “Should we go up? If you're not well, I don't want to keep you too long.”

“Yes, it's warmer up there and Mary's set up my dressing room for the fitting.”

They brought the cases upstairs and into Catherine's bedroom, shutting the door to keep the warmth of the fire trapped inside. Louisa unclasped the buckles on the cases and flipped them open, revealing layers of delicate lace and silk and linen.

“I've been hard at work,” she said, reaching in and retrieving a pale pink silk-covered corset with velvet piping and embroidered flowers.

“Oh!” Catherine gasped, reaching for the delicate garment. “Oh, you're outdone yourself! It's beautiful, Lou.”

“It'll suit you beautifully.”

“I don't want you to catch my chill, but I can't help myself, I'm so pleased,” Catherine said, leaning in and kissing Louisa's cheek.

“I'm healthy,” Louisa said playfully. “I don't want you to stay away from me. Can I say a proper hello?”

She sided up close to Catherine and slipped her arms around her, embracing her. They tucked their heads next to each other, leaning in.

“I like your hair like this,” Louisa remarked, running her fingers through Catherine's loose cascade of blonde waves. “I don't think I've ever seen it down.”

“I told Mary not to bother with it today,” Catherine said shyly.

“It's lovely.”

“Thank you. You look lovely today too.”

Louisa pulled back so she could see Catherine's face.

“Well, I knew I was coming here,” she said with a grin. She gestured to the corset. “Should we try it on, then?��

“Yes, please,” Catherine said.

She stood in front of the large mirror and shed her robe and shawl, standing only in her chemise with the lace trim at the neck. Gently, Louise wrapped the corset around Catherine's waist and held it in place at the back where the strings would be tied.

“It looks perfect,” Catherine said, running her hands down the velvet trim.

“It's as if I'm somehow familiar with your shape,” Louise teased and Catherine laughed openly.

“Will you lace me?” she asked. “I want to see how it looks with the gown.”

“Of course.”

With practiced hands, Louisa threaded the strings and began to tighten the corset row by row. She tugged hard, forming the boning into the delicate hourglass shape. As she yanked on the next row, she heard Catherine gasp.

“Is it too tight?”

Heh-TSCHHT!

The gasp had not been a gasp at all, but a slight hitch of breath. The gentle, soft sneeze made Catherine stumble a little but she regained her balance.

“I'm so sorry,” she said, embarrassed. “Louisa, love, my handkerchief is in my dressing gown pocket. Can you reach it?”

“I've got one right here,” Louisa said, fishing in her skirts and holding out a small linen square. “You can return it later.”

Catherine dabbed her nose carefully and sniffled a little.

“Should I keep lacing?”

“Yes, please,” Catherine said, admiring her shape in the mirror.

Louisa tugged the cords tighter until the corset was laced fully.

“The gown's in the wardrobe there,” she said. “Would you help me put it on?””

“Of course,” Louisa agreed. “I'll fetch it.”

“It's the coral silk.”

Louisa opened the large wardrobe and took out the dress, pooling it on the floor and taking Catherine's hand to help her step in. She gathered up the top of the dress and pulled it up over Catherine's corset and helped her into the arms.

“Oh, it's beautiful,” Louisa said breathlessly as she buttoned the delicate pearl fasteners along the back of the dress.

Charlotte stepped towards the looking glass and inspected the fit.

“It very nearly matches the colour of my poor nose,” she remarked, still holding Louisa's handkerchief. She dabbed it gently against the pink nostrils.

“You look beautiful,” Louisa said softly, coming up behind Catherine and pulling her long hair back off her shoulders to reveal the delicate neckline of the dress. “I almost want to say please don't wear it to the ball. I don't want anyone else knowing how beautiful you are.”

Catherine reached up and took Louisa's hand, kissing her knuckles.

“I will have thoughts for no one but you.”

“Good,” Louisa said with a smile, circling her arms around Catherine's waist.

“Louisa, I'm sorry I--” Catherine stammered, slowly pulling away. She pressed the handkerchief to her face as she shuddered with a small, restrained sneeze

Ngh-GXT!

“Bless you,” Louisa soothed, stoking Catherine's hair.

“I--”

Catherine could not speak further. Her breath hitched wildly, the swell of her chest rising and falling as she struggled.

Ehh...hehh---eh-TSGHT!

She stepped away from Louisa's touch, pinching the handkerchief to her nose.

TsXHT! Ehh-TSGHT!

She stifled the sneezes as much as she could, keeping the sound soft and quiet despite the strength of the itch in her nose.

TshCCHT!

She took a shuddering breath and swayed suddenly. Louisa rushed forward, putting a steadying hand on Catherine's back.

Ehh-GHXT! TshHXT!

Catherine swayed again, clutching a hand to her chest.

“I'm ever so dizzy,” she managed to say between hitching breaths. “I-- the corset---I--ehhTSXHHT!”

“Sit, love,” Louisa urged, turning her towards a chair.

“No,” Catherine gasped. “I—it's too tight, I can't—ehh....heh-TSGHT!”

She reached for the buttons of her gown, fumbling blindly at the fasteners.

“Shh, I have them,” Louisa assured her, hurrying to unbutton the back. Catherine clutched at the heavy mahogany wardrobe for support, breath rushing in and out in shallow gasps. And then she began to cough, her chest straining against the corset with each dry bark. Louisa shoved the gown down and began to loosen the strings, tugging and threading as fast as she could until the corset was finally loose enough to pull down.

Eh-TSGHHHT!

Catherine sneezed loud and rough, no longer able to contain her sneezes as delicate stifles.

“Oh, love,” Louisa said, gently taking Catherine's arm. “Here.”

She guided the sniffling woman over to the massive four-poster bed and sat her down.

“Let me,” she said, taking the handkerchief from Catherine's grip and carefully wiping away a mess of tears and snot from Catherine's face. Catherine made a small, whimpering sob and Louisa could see her bottom lip beginning to tremble.

“Oh, sweet, I'm so sorry you're not feeling well,” she said, sitting beside Catherine and gathering her up in her arms. Catherine's head rested against her chest and Louisa stroked her hair soothingly.

“Let's get you settled into bed, dear heart,” she said. “No more fittings today.”

35 notes · View notes

bountyofbeads · 5 years

Text

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/music-black-culture-appropriation.html

I'd encourage all of you to read -- actually read -- the reported essays in the #1619project. If these ideas or facts are new to you, if they upset you or make you uncomfortable, if they challenge your idea of America, ask yourself: why?

For centuries, black music, forged in bondage, has been the sound of complete artistic freedom. No wonder everybody is always stealing it.

By Wesley Morris | August 14, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 18, 2019 7:52 PM ET |

I’ve got a friend who’s an incurable Pandora guy, and one Saturday while we were making dinner, he found a station called Yacht Rock. “A tongue-in-cheek name for the breezy sounds of late ’70s/early ’80s soft rock” is Pandora’s definition, accompanied by an exhortation to “put on your Dockers, pull up a deck chair and relax.” With a single exception, the passengers aboard the yacht were all dudes. With two exceptions, they were all white. But as the hours passed and dozens of songs accrued, the sound gravitated toward a familiar quality that I couldn’t give language to but could practically taste: an earnest Christian yearning that would reach, for a moment, into Baptist rawness, into a known warmth. I had to laugh — not because as a category Yacht Rock is absurd, but because what I tasted in that absurdity was black.

I started putting each track under investigation. Which artists would saunter up to the racial border? And which could do their sauntering without violating it? I could hear degrees of blackness in the choir-loft certitude of Doobie Brothers-era Michael McDonald on “What a Fool Believes”; in the rubber-band soul of Steely Dan’s “Do It Again”; in the malt-liquor misery of Ace’s “How Long” and the toy-boat wistfulness of Little River Band’s “Reminiscing.”

Then Kenny Loggins’s “This Is It”arrived and took things far beyond the line. “This Is It” was a hit in 1979 and has the requisite smoothness to keep the yacht rocking. But Loggins delivers the lyrics in a desperate stage whisper, like someone determined to make the kind of love that doesn’t wake the baby. What bowls you over is the intensity of his yearning — teary in the verses, snarling during the chorus. He sounds as if he’s baring it all yet begging to wring himself out even more.

Playing black-music detective that day, I laughed out of bafflement and embarrassment and exhilaration. It’s the conflation of pride and chagrin I’ve always felt anytime a white person inhabits blackness with gusto. It’s: You have to hand it to her. It’s: Go, white boy. Go, white boy. Go. But it’s also: Here we go again. The problem is rich. If blackness can draw all of this ornate literariness out of Steely Dan and all this psychotic origami out of Eminem; if it can make Teena Marie sing everything — “Square Biz,” “Revolution,”“Portuguese Love,” “Lovergirl” — like she knows her way around a pack of Newports; if it can turn the chorus of Carly Simon’s “You Belong to Me” into a gospel hymn; if it can animate the swagger in the sardonic vulnerabilities of Amy Winehouse; if it can surface as unexpectedly as it does in the angelic angst of a singer as seemingly green as Ben Platt; if it’s the reason Nu Shooz’s “I Can’t Wait”remains the whitest jam at the blackest parties, then it’s proof of how deeply it matters to the music of being alive in America, alive to America.

It’s proof, too, that American music has been fated to thrive in an elaborate tangle almost from the beginning. Americans have made a political investment in a myth of racial separateness, the idea that art forms can be either “white” or “black” in character when aspects of many are at least both. The purity that separation struggles to maintain? This country’s music is an advertisement for 400 years of the opposite: centuries of “amalgamation” and “miscegenation” as they long ago called it, of all manner of interracial collaboration conducted with dismaying ranges of consent.

“White,” “Western,” “classical” music is the overarching basis for lots of American pop songs. Chromatic-chord harmony, clean timbre of voice and instrument: These are the ingredients for some of the hugely singable harmonies of the Beatles, the Eagles, Simon and Fleetwood Mac, something choral, “pure,” largely ungrained. Black music is a completely different story. It brims with call and response, layers of syncopation and this rougher element called “noise,” unique sounds that arise from the particular hue and timbre of an instrument — Little Richard’s woos and knuckled keyboard zooms. The dusky heat of Miles Davis’s trumpeting. Patti LaBelle’s emotional police siren. DMX’s scorched-earth bark. The visceral stank of Etta James, Aretha Franklin, live-in-concert Whitney Houston and Prince on electric guitar.

But there’s something even more fundamental, too. My friend Delvyn Case, a musician who teaches at Wheaton College, explained in an email that improvisation is one of the most crucial elements in what we think of as black music: “The raising of individual creativity/expression to the highest place within the aesthetic world of a song.” Without improvisation, a listener is seduced into the composition of the song itself and not the distorting or deviating elements that noise creates. Particular to black American music is the architecture to create a means by which singers and musicians can be completely free, free in the only way that would have been possible on a plantation: through art, through music — music no one “composed” (because enslaved people were denied literacy), music born of feeling, of play, of exhaustion, of hope.

What you’re hearing in black music is a miracle of sound, an experience that can really happen only once — not just melisma, glissandi, the rasp of a sax, breakbeats or sampling but the mood or inspiration from which those moments arise. The attempt to rerecord it seems, if you think about it, like a fool’s errand. You’re not capturing the arrangement of notes, per se. You’re catching the spirit.

And the spirit travels from host to host, racially indiscriminate about where it settles, selective only about who can withstand being possessed by it. The rockin’ backwoods blues so bewitched Elvis Presley that he believed he’d been called by blackness. Chuck Berry sculpted rock ’n’ roll with uproarious guitar riffs and lascivious winks at whiteness. Mick Jagger and Robert Plant and Steve Winwood and Janis Joplin and the Beatles jumped, jived and wailed the black blues. Tina Turner wrested it all back, tripling the octane in some of their songs. Since the 1830s, the historian Ann Douglas writes in “Terrible Honesty,” her history of popular culture in the 1920s, “American entertainment, whatever the state of American society, has always been integrated, if only by theft and parody.” What we’ve been dealing with ever since is more than a catchall word like “appropriation” can approximate. The truth is more bounteous and more spiritual than that, more confused. That confusion is the DNA of the American sound.

It’s in the wink-wink costume funk of Beck’s “Midnite Vultures” from 1999, an album whose kicky nonsense deprecations circle back to the popular culture of 150 years earlier. It’s in the dead-serious, nostalgic dance-floor schmaltz of Bruno Mars. It’s in what we once called “blue-eyed soul,” a term I’ve never known what to do with, because its most convincing practitioners — the Bee-Gees, Michael McDonald, Hall & Oates, Simply Red, George Michael, Taylor Dayne, Lisa Stansfield, Adele — never winked at black people, so black people rarely batted an eyelash. Flaws and all, these are homeowners as opposed to renters. No matter what, though, a kind of gentrification tends to set in, underscoring that black people have often been rendered unnecessary to attempt blackness. Take Billboard’s Top 10 songs of 2013: It’s mostly nonblack artists strongly identified with black music, for real and for kicks: Robin Thicke, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, the dude who made “The Harlem Shake.”

Sometimes all the inexorable mixing leaves me longing for something with roots that no one can rip all the way out. This is to say that when we’re talking about black music, we’re talking about horns, drums, keyboards and guitars doing the unthinkable together. We’re also talking about what the borrowers and collaborators don’t want to or can’t lift — centuries of weight, of atrocity we’ve never sufficiently worked through, the blackness you know is beyond theft because it’s too real, too rich, too heavy to steal.

Blackness was on the move before my ancestors were legally free to be. It was on the move before my ancestors even knew what they had. It was on the move because white people were moving it. And the white person most frequently identified as its prime mover is Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New Yorker who performed as T.D. Rice and, in acclaim, was lusted after as “Daddy” Rice, “the negro par excellence.” Rice was a minstrel, which by the 1830s, when his stardom was at its most refulgent, meant he painted his face with burned cork to approximate those of the enslaved black people he was imitating.

In 1830, Rice was a nobody actor in his early 20s, touring with a theater company in Cincinnati (or Louisville; historians don’t know for sure), when, the story goes, he saw a decrepit, possibly disfigured old black man singing while grooming a horse on the property of a white man whose last name was Crow. On went the light bulb. Rice took in the tune and the movements but failed, it seems, to take down the old man’s name. So in his song based on the horse groomer, he renamed him: “Weel about and turn about jus so/Ebery time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow.” And just like that, Rice had invented the fellow who would become the mascot for two centuries of legalized racism.

That night, Rice made himself up to look like the old black man — or something like him, because Rice’s get-up most likely concocted skin blacker than any actual black person’s and a gibberish dialect meant to imply black speech. Rice had turned the old man’s melody and hobbled movements into a song-and-dance routine that no white audience had ever experienced before. What they saw caused a permanent sensation. He reportedly won 20 encores.

Rice repeated the act again, night after night, for audiences so profoundly rocked that he was frequently mobbed duringperformances. Across the Ohio River, not an arduous distance from all that adulation, was Boone County, Ky., whose population would have been largely enslaved Africans. As they were being worked, sometimes to death, white people, desperate with anticipation, were paying to see them depicted at play.

[To get updates on The 1619 Project, and for more on race from The New York Times, sign up for our weekly Race/Related newsletter.]

Other performers came and conquered, particularly the Virginia Minstrels, who exploded in 1843, burned brightly then burned out after only months. In their wake, P.T. Barnum made a habit of booking other troupes for his American Museum; when he was short on performers, he blacked up himself. By the 1840s, minstrel acts were taking over concert halls, doing wildly clamored-for residencies in Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

A blackface minstrel would sing, dance, play music, give speeches and cut up for white audiences, almost exclusively in the North, at least initially. Blackface was used for mock operas and political monologues (they called them stump speeches), skits, gender parodies and dances. Before the minstrel show gave it a reliable home, blackface was the entertainment between acts of conventional plays. Its stars were the Elvis, the Beatles, the ’NSync of the 19th century. The performers were beloved and so, especially, were their songs.

During minstrelsy’s heyday, white songwriters like Stephen Foster wrote the tunes that minstrels sang, tunes we continue to sing. Edwin Pearce Christy’s group the Christy Minstrels formed a band — banjo, fiddle, bone castanets, tambourine — that would lay the groundwork for American popular music, from bluegrass to Motown. Some of these instruments had come from Africa; on a plantation, the banjo’s body would have been a desiccated gourd. In “Doo-Dah!” his book on Foster’s work and life, Ken Emerson writes that the fiddle and banjo were paired for the melody, while the bones “chattered” and the tambourine “thumped and jingled a beat that is still heard ’round the world.”

But the sounds made with these instruments could be only imagined as black, because the first wave of minstrels were Northerners who’d never been meaningfully South. They played Irish melodies and used Western choral harmonies, not the proto-gospel call-and-response music that would make life on a plantation that much more bearable. Black artists were on the scene, like the pioneer bandleader Frank Johnsonand the borderline-mythical Old Corn Meal, who started as a street vendor and wound up the first black man to perform, as himself, on a white New Orleans stage. His stuff was copied by George Nichols, who took up blackface after a start in plain-old clowning. Yet as often as not, blackface minstrelsy tethered black people and black life to white musical structures, like the polka, which was having a moment in 1848. The mixing was already well underway: Europe plus slavery plus the circus, times harmony, comedy and drama, equals Americana.

And the muses for so many of the songs were enslaved Americans, people the songwriters had never met, whose enslavement they rarely opposed and instead sentimentalized. Foster’s minstrel-show staple “Old Uncle Ned,” for instance, warmly if disrespectfully eulogizes the enslaved the way you might a salaried worker or an uncle:

Den lay down de shubble and de hoe,

Hang up de fiddle and de bow:

No more hard work for poor Old Ned —

He’s gone whar de good Niggas go,

No more hard work for poor Old Ned —

He’s gone whar de good Niggas go.

Such an affectionate showcase for poor old (enslaved, soon-to-be-dead) Uncle Ned was as essential as “air,” in the white critic Bayard Taylor’s 1850 assessment; songs like this were the “true expressions of the more popular side of the national character,” a force that follows “the American in all its emigrations, colonizations and conquests, as certainly as the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day.” He’s not wrong. Minstrelsy’s peak stretched from the 1840s to the 1870s, years when the country was as its most violently and legislatively ambivalent about slavery and Negroes; years that included the Civil War and Reconstruction, the ferocious rhetorical ascent of Frederick Douglass, John Brown’s botched instigation of a black insurrection at Harpers Ferry and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Minstrelsy’s ascent also coincided with the publication, in 1852, of “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” a polarizing landmark that minstrels adapted for the stage, arguing for and, in simply remaining faithful to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, against slavery. These adaptations, known as U.T.C.s, took over the art form until the end of the Civil War. Perhaps minstrelsy’s popularity could be (generously) read as the urge to escape a reckoning. But a good time predicated upon the presentation of other humans as stupid, docile, dangerous with lust and enamored of their bondage? It was an escape into slavery’s fun house.

What blackface minstrelsy gave the country during this period was an entertainment of skill, ribaldry and polemics. But it also lent racism a stage upon which existential fear could become jubilation, contempt could become fantasy. Paradoxically, its dehumanizing bent let white audiences feel more human. They could experience loathing as desire, contempt as adoration, repulsion as lust. They could weep for overworked Uncle Ned as surely as they could ignore his lashed back or his body as it swung from a tree.

But where did this leave a black performer? If blackface was the country’s cultural juggernaut, who would pay Negroes money to perform as themselves? When they were hired, it was only in a pinch. Once, P.T. Barnum needed a replacement for John Diamond, his star white minstrel. In a New York City dance hall, Barnum found a boy, who, it was reported at the time, could outdo Diamond (and Diamond was good). The boy, of course, was genuinely black. And his being actually black would have rendered him an outrageous blight on a white consumer’s narrow presumptions. As Thomas Low Nichols would write in his 1864 compendium, “Forty Years of American Life,” “There was not an audience in America that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the dancing of a real negro.” So Barnum “greased the little ‘nigger’s’ face and rubbed it over with a new blacking of burned cork, painted his thick lips vermilion, put on a woolly wig over his tight curled locks and brought him out as ‘the champion nigger-dancer of the world.’ ” This child might have been William Henry Lane, whose stage name was Juba. And, as Juba, Lane was persuasive enough that Barnum could pass him off as a white person in blackface. He ceased being a real black boy in order to become Barnum’s minstrel Pinocchio.

After the Civil War, black performers had taken up minstrelsy, too, corking themselves, for both white and black audiences — with a straight face or a wink, depending on who was looking. Black troupes invented important new dances with blue-ribbon names (the buck-and-wing, the Virginia essence, the stop-time). But these were unhappy innovations. Custom obligated black performers to fulfill an audience’s expectations, expectations that white performers had established. A black minstrel was impersonating the impersonation of himself. Think, for a moment, about the talent required to pull that off. According to Henry T. Sampson’s book, “Blacks in Blackface,” there were no sets or effects, so the black blackface minstrel show was “a developer of ability because the artist was placed on his own.” How’s that for being twice as good? Yet that no-frills excellence could curdle into an entirely other, utterly degrading double consciousness, one that predates, predicts and probably informs W.E.B. DuBois��s more self-consciously dignified rendering.

American popular culture was doomed to cycles not only of questioned ownership, challenged authenticity, dubious propriety and legitimate cultural self-preservation but also to the prison of black respectability, which, with brutal irony, could itself entail a kind of appropriation. It meant comportment in a manner that seemed less black and more white. It meant the appearance of refinement and polish. It meant the cognitive dissonance of, say, Nat King Cole’s being very black and sounding — to white America, anyway, with his frictionless baritone and diction as crisp as a hospital corner — suitably white. He was perfect for radio, yet when he got a TV show of his own, it was abruptly canceled, his brown skin being too much for even the black and white of a 1955 television set. There was, perhaps, not a white audience in America, particularly in the South, that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the majestic singing of a real Negro.

The modern conundrum of the black performer’s seeming respectable, among black people, began, in part, as a problem of white blackface minstrels’ disrespectful blackness. Frederick Douglass wrote that they were “the filthy scum of white society.” It’s that scum that’s given us pause over everybody from Bert Williams and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson to Flavor Flav and Kanye West. Is their blackness an act? Is the act under white control? Just this year, Harold E. Doley Jr., an affluent black Republican in his 70s, was quoted in The Times lamenting West and his alignment with Donald Trump as a “bad and embarrassing minstrel show” that “served to only drive black people away from the G.O.P.”

But it’s from that scum that a robust, post-minstrel black American theater sprung as a new, black audience hungered for actual, uncorked black people. Without that scum, I’m not sure we get an event as shatteringly epochal as the reign of Motown Records. Motown was a full-scale integration of Western, classical orchestral ideas (strings, horns, woodwinds) with the instincts of both the black church (rhythm sections, gospel harmonies, hand claps) and juke joint Saturday nights (rhythm sections, guitars, vigor). Pure yet “noisy.” Black men in Armani. Black women in ball gowns. Stables of black writers, producers and musicians. Backup singers solving social equations with geometric choreography. And just in time for the hegemony of the American teenager.

Even now it feels like an assault on the music made a hundred years before it. Motown specialized in love songs. But its stars, those songs and their performance of them were declarations of war on the insults of the past and present. The scratchy piccolo at the start of a Four Tops hitwas, in its way, a raised fist. Respectability wasn’t a problem with Motown; respectability was its point. How radically optimistic a feat of antiminstrelsy, for it’s as glamorous a blackness as this country has ever mass-produced and devoured.

The proliferation of black music across the planet — the proliferation, in so many senses, of being black — constitutes a magnificent joke on American racism. It also confirms the attraction that someone like Rice had to that black man grooming the horse. But something about that desire warps and perverts its source, lampoons and cheapens it even in adoration. Loving black culture has never meant loving black people, too. Loving black culture risks loving the life out of it.

And yet doesn’t that attraction make sense? This is the music of a people who have survived, who not only won't stop but also can’t be stopped. Music by a people whose major innovations — jazz, funk, hip-hop — have been about progress, about the future, about getting as far away from nostalgia as time will allow, music that’s thought deeply about the allure of outer space and robotics, music whose promise and possibility, whose rawness, humor and carnality call out to everybody — to other black people, to kids in working class England and middle-class Indonesia. If freedom's ringing, who on Earth wouldn't also want to rock the bell?

In 1845, J.K. Kennard, a critic for the newspaper The Knickerbocker, hyperventilated about the blackening of America. Except he was talking about blackface minstrels doing the blackening. Nonetheless, Kennard could see things for what they were:

“Who are our true rulers? The negro poets, to be sure! Do they not set the fashion, and give laws to the public taste? Let one of them, in the swamps of Carolina, compose a new song, and it no sooner reaches the ear of a white amateur, than it is written down, amended, (that is, almost spoilt,) printed, and then put upon a course of rapid dissemination, to cease only with the utmost bounds of Anglo-Saxondom, perhaps of the world.”

What a panicked clairvoyant! The fear of black culture — or “black culture” — was more than a fear of black people themselves. It was an anxiety over white obsolescence. Kennard’s anxiety over black influence sounds as ambivalent as Lorde’s, when, all the way from her native New Zealand, she tsk-ed rap culture’s extravagance on “Royals,”her hit from 2013, while recognizing, both in the song’s hip-hop production and its appetite for a particular sort of blackness, that maybe she’s too far gone:

Every song’s like gold teeth, Grey Goose, trippin’ in the bathroom

Bloodstains, ball gowns, trashin’ the hotel room

We don’t care, we’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams

But everybody’s like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece

Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash

We don’t care, we aren’t caught up in your love affair

Beneath Kennard’s warnings must have lurked an awareness that his white brethren had already fallen under this spell of blackness, that nothing would stop its spread to teenage girls in 21st-century Auckland, that the men who “infest our promenades and our concert halls like a colony of beetles” (as a contemporary of Kennard’s put it) weren’t black people at all but white people just like him — beetles and, eventually, Beatles. Our first most original art form arose from our original sin, and some white people have always been worried that the primacy of black music would be a kind of karmic punishment for that sin. The work has been to free this country from paranoia’s bondage, to truly embrace the amplitude of integration. I don’t know how we’re doing.

Last spring, “Old Town Road,” a silly, drowsy ditty by the Atlanta songwriter Lil Nas X, was essentially banished from country radio. Lil Nas sounds black, as does the trap beat he’s droning over. But there’s definitely a twang to him that goes with the opening bars of faint banjo and Lil Nas’s lil’ cowboy fantasy. The song snowballed into a phenomenon. All kinds of people — cops, soldiers, dozens of dapper black promgoers — posted dances to it on YouTube and TikTok. Then a crazy thing happened. It charted — not just on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, either. In April, it showed up on both its Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and its Hot Country Songs chart. A first. And, for now at least, a last.

The gatekeepers of country radio refused to play the song; they didn’t explain why. Then, Billboard determined that the song failed to “embrace enough elements of today’s country music to chart in its current version.” This doesn’t warrant translation, but let’s be thorough, anyway: The song is too black for certain white people.

But by that point it had already captured the nation’s imagination and tapped into the confused thrill of integrated culture. A black kid hadn’t really merged white music with black, he’d just taken up the American birthright of cultural synthesis. The mixing feels historical. Here, for instance, in the song’s sample of a Nine Inch Nails track is a banjo, the musical spine of the minstrel era. Perhaps Lil Nas was too American. Other country artists of the genre seemed to sense this. White singers recorded pretty tributes in support, and one, Billy Ray Cyrus, performed his on a remix with Lil Nas X himself.

The newer version lays Cyrus’s casual grit alongside Lil Nas’s lackadaisical wonder. It’s been No.1 on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100 singles chart since April, setting a record. And the bottomless glee over the whole thing makes me laugh, too — not in a surprised, yacht-rock way but as proof of what a fine mess this place is. One person's sign of progress remains another’s symbol of encroachment. Screw the history. Get off my land.

Four hundred years ago, more than 20 kidnapped Africans arrived in Virginia. They were put to work and put through hell. Twenty became millions, and some of those people found — somehow — deliverance in the power of music. Lil Nas X has descended from those millions and appears to be a believer in deliverance. The verses of his song flirt with Western kitsch, what young black internetters branded, with adorable idiosyncrasy and a deep sense of history, the “yee-haw agenda.” But once the song reaches its chorus (“I’m gonna take my horse to the Old Town Road, and ride til I can’t no more”), I don’t hear a kid in an outfit. I hear a cry of ancestry. He’s a westward-bound refugee; he’s an Exoduster. And Cyrus is down for the ride. Musically, they both know: This land is their land.

Wesley Morris is a staff writer for the magazine, a critic at large for The New York Times and a co-host of the podcast “Still Processing.” He was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

Source photograph of Beyoncé: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images; Holiday: Paul Hoeffler/Redferns, via Getty Images; Turner: Gai Terrell/Redferns, via Getty Images; Richards: Chris Walter/WireImage, via Getty Images; Lamar: Bennett Raglin/Getty Images

#archives #music #must reads #african american history #american history #history #arts and entertainment #entertainment #entertainers #news #latest news #trending news #hip hop news source #1619 #1619project

1 note · View note

bucky-at-bedtime · 6 years

Text

Familiar

Summary: Steve wanders into a record shop looking to make a dent in his to-do list. He doesn’t expect the owner to make a dent in his life.

Pairing: Steve x reader

Warnings: Guess what? more fluff.

Words: 2,800

A/n: So, I wasn’t planning on posting this but... here it is?? Thanks, @averyrogers83 - you gave me this idea and I really like how it turned out... Please give me feedback! I know this is kinda cheesy but I liked writing it. Love u all. seriously 💛💛💛 I might make this a multi-chapter thingo if it gets a good response... what do you guys think?

ALSO I only have one person on my Steve taglist so, like, feel free to shoot me an ask to be added to that?? Or any of my taglists tbh

Masterlist

The record store was in a quiet part of town, and in turn, the store was pretty much empty, aside from the clerk whose head was resting on her folded arms - possibly asleep at the counter. The shelves were covered in a thin layer of dust, occasionally broken by a fingerprint or some sign of the products being moved, and records in cardboard sleeves were scattered, almost randomly, across every surface. Many of the corners were worn and many images were faded, but there was a shelf of brand-new records to one side - records still covered in plastic wrap with vivid artwork and photography. A bell chimed quietly when he pushed the door open, but the girl sitting at the counter didn’t budge.

It felt like a place out of time - something that shouldn’t have survived so long - just like him.

As soon as Steve entered, a feeling of comfort washed over him. The familiarity of a record store - rows upon rows of vinyls and posters with torn edges - it even smelled the same. He inhaled deeply, surveying the shelves around him and looking for anything familiar. There wasn’t much, but that’s okay - he wasn’t here for his old music.

He dug into his pocket, pulling out a tattered notebook and flipping to the page with his to-do list. He let out a sigh as he stared at the list, he was pretty sure he would never catch up with the modern world, not with the amount of entertainment in the world. Not after so much time had passed.

He wandered down one isle, his fingers lightly tracing the tops of records, searching for ‘Nirvana,’ one of the bands on his list. After what felt like a very long time, his fingers finally came to a halt, drifting over the title of an album - ‘From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah’ by Nirvana - and he quickly pulled it out, studying the cover.

“I wouldn’t go for that album,” a sweet voice interrupted his perusing and he flinched slightly at the sudden noise breaking the tranquility of the record store.

“Sorry, you just, don’t seem like you know what you’re looking for and that-” you gestured to the record in his hands, “-is Nirvana’s worst album.”

He blinked lamely at you, confused by your sudden appearance. You ignored his silence and began to flick through the record yourself. “This, is their best album.” you smiled, holding up ‘Nevermind,’ Nirvana’s second album, gesturing for him to take it.

“Uh– I didn’t realise it was so obvious. My cluelessness, I mean.” he had finally collected his thoughts, and stuttered out a response, placing the first record down and taking the one from your hands.

“Well, you were frozen in ice for 70 years or something - I connected the dots.”

“Ah, so you did recognise me,” he mumbled, scratching the back of his head in embarrassment.

“Yeah, I watch the news every once and a while.” you chuckled, picking up a few stray records, intending to sort them into their proper space.

“Right, of course,” he mumbled, a small smile gracing his features as he followed you down the isle, intending to buy the record and leave. “You uh, seem to know a lot about Nirvana. They a favourite of yours?”

“Not really. I just know a lot about pop culture. Working in a place like this - you learn a lot about music. Plus I have a lot of spare time.” you glanced back at him, watching curiously as he read the back of the record.

You assumed the conversation was over, and turned to continue working.

“Hey, wait, would you– would you be able to help me? I uh… need to try and catch up so if you have any suggestions…”

You turned immediately on your heel, grinning towards the tall blonde man. “I thought you’d never ask,” you said, excitement lacing your voice as you immediately starting to make a list in your head. “I’m y/n, by the way.”

He chuckled lightly at your excitement, a sweet smile reaching his cheeks as he watched you filter through the records in your arms, dropping the pile on the counter in front of you and pulling out two records.

“Ok, we have ‘Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band’ - The Beatles, I’m sure you’ve heard of them.” You looked up to gauge his reaction and he nodded his head in confirmation.

“Already heard a few of their songs,” he mumbled, taking the colourful record from you and adding it to the Nirvana one.

You held up the next record, a single. He stared blankly at the plain white cover, reading the title out. “Spice, Wan-abe?” His face was set in a grimace, immediately judging a book by its cover.

“The Spice Girls - Wannabe,” you corrected, laughing at his pronunciation. “It was really popular in the 90s, everybody in the world knows the lyrics to this chorus,” you mumbled, piling it on top of his other records.

He was still staring at the cover, suddenly unsure about your judgement, but he followed as you began to rush down another isle. “This place is like a maze,” he murmured, eyes trailing over the tall shelves in alarm, “How do you know where everything is?”

“I’ve been in this place pretty much every day since I was born - my dad owned it,” you explained, tracing your fingers across the spines of a few records. “I know this place like the back of my ha– here it is!”

You pulled out another record, briefly showing him the cover before thrusting it into his arms. “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - Elton John - Really popular in the 70s, Elton John is one of the greats.”

He nodded along, slightly overwhelmed by all the information, but glad to have someone who knew what they were talking about, rather than Tony’s bias towards ‘AC DC’ and Sam’s strange addiction to 90s boy bands.

“Oh! This is what’s playing now.” You pulled a black and white album cover from a nearby shelf and pointed up, gesturing to the speakers. “The Rolling Stones - Exile on Main st.”

A breathy laugh escaped his lips as he watched you shake your head from side to side to the rhythm of ‘Casino Boogie,’ squeezing your eyes shut in enjoyment.

“You really know your stuff,” he chuckled, adding the record to his pile.

You opened your eyes and he watched as they glistened with your passion for these records - the music, the artists, the store. You were at home here, and he found himself wishing he had something like that.

You added another couple of records to his pile - Michael Jackson, Prince, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston - before heading towards the shelf of modern music.

“Alright, there is a lot of good modern music, but there’s also a lot of bad modern music that’s really popular anyway - so I’ll try to be gentle.”

He laughed at your words and turned to watch as your fingers hovered over album titles and artists, your bottom lip pulled into your teeth.

“Uhmm, we’ll go with this.” You pulled out a dark record, holding it up to show him.

“Macklemore and Ryan Lewis - The Heist,” he read out, taking the record from your hands and studying the back of it.

You moved closer, so that you were standing next to him, your shoulder brushing against his own as you explained. “It’s rap, but some of the stuff on here is really powerful. Same Love is an amazing song about equality and homophobia and Wing$ is all about materialism and violence…”

He had stopped listening, distracted by the way you moved as you explained passionately. Your eyes had that look in them again, and he couldn’t tear his own eyes away. Your hands gesticulated, pointing to the tracklist as you directed him towards the best songs as he could see the excitement, the passion, in your movement.

He blinked, subtly shaking his head as he tuned back in.

“Oh, and ‘Cowboy boots’ is a bit of fun - good to sing along to.” you confirmed, pulling your hand away to look up at him.

“I’d like to hear that,” he mumbled, eyes widening as he realised what he’d said. He frantically tried to come up with a way to backpedal out of his statement, and he could’ve sworn he saw your eyes widen slightly, but you took it well.

“Oh trust me, you wouldn’t - I sound like a dying cat when I sing.” you laughed, taking a step back and picking up another album. “But, get a few drinks in me and I become the absolute queen of karaoke. Now that’s something you’d like to see.”

He laughed along with you, running a hand through his hair, already forgetting his awkward slip-up.

“Alright, last one.” You reached up to a higher shelf and pulled down a bright orange album. “Ed Sheeran’s first mainstream album - it broke the world back in 2011 when it came out, he’s probably the most popular male artist of recent history.”

You placed the final album gently on top of his pile, sending him an accomplished smile.

“Wow, this is a bit of a to-do list” he chuckled, staring down at the massive, colourful pile in his arms.

You laughed. “You asked, buddy.” You patter him gently on the shoulder and he could’ve sworn a shiver ran through his entire body at your touch.

“Wow it’s actually almost closing time,” you mumbled, noticing the sun going down outside and checking your watch. “I’ll ring those up for you and then close up shop.”

He followed you to the counter, watching as you carefully placed the record in a brown bag and hummed along to another song that was playing on the speaker system.

“So I’m curious,” you mumbled, pulling him from his trance, “you want to catch up with the modern world, why buy records? I’m assuming you have a phone and iTunes.”

He laughed gently at the question, the corner of his mouth twisting up. “I guess– I guess it’s just nice to have something I know. In the middle of everything so… so foreign and new, it’s uh comforting to have something… familiar.”

You felt a smile pull at your lips as you pushed the bag across the counter to him, your eyes meeting for a moment. His eyes were full of wistfulness as he looked back at you, a grateful smile on his lips.

“Well, the door’s always open,” you tilted your head towards the door, attempting to send him a comforting smile. “I mean, in a metaphorical way, not literally, I’m actually about to lock up”

He laughed, but thanked you gently. He knew it was strange, but he wanted to stay, to keep listening to you talk. your passion was exhilarating and it made him feel warm, as sappy as that sounded.

His head turned as if he was about to walk out, but he suddenly turned back to you, his mouth open as if he wanted to say something but he wasn’t sure how.

“You alright there, captain?” You smirked, organising the last few things on the counter.

“Can I walk you home?” He blurted the words out, unsure of how else to phrase it and your head flicked up in surprise, your eyes wide.

“I’m sorry - that was weird, I’ll just… go.” He turned on his heel, brusquely trying to escape his awkward moment.

“No!” You flung your backpack over your shoulder and rushed around the counter to meet him. “I’d love for you to walk me home,” you stated confidently, grinning up at him.

He smiled down at you. “Alright. Alright, let’s go.”

He pulled the door open, allowing you to walk out in front of him and you smiled thankfully, brushing a hair behind your ear. He held his arm out to you once you locked the door and you looped yours underneath, chuckling lightly at his old-fashioned, gentlemanly actions.

“I have an idea,” you stated, digging your hands into your pockets and pulling out some headphones and your phone. “I’ll show you some music while we walk - some of my favourite stuff, not world-famous like the records I gave you.”

You reached up and slipped the headphone into his ear, putting the other one in your ear and scrolling through your iTunes library, clicking on your favourote song by Rex Orange County.

‘Loving is easy

You had me fucked up,

It used to be so hard to see

Yeah, loving is easy

When everything’s perfect

Please don’t change a single little thing for me’

The song started playing and you began to him along instantly, knowing it off by heart. He sent you a smile and nodded his head along to the rhythm.

“This is nice,” he mumbled, his arm falling down and his fingers subconsciously intertwining with your own, he realised what he was doing, but it was too late, and he felt a blush spread across his cheeks when you didn’t pull your hand away. “Better than anything Tony tried to show me.”

You laughed at that, tapping your thumb lightly on the back of his hand. You were a little shocked when his hand grabbed yours, but of course Steve Rogers had some moves.

‘When you can’t even hide it

And it didn’t take forever to find it

I was all on my own

Almost glad to be alone

Until love came in

On time, on time’

He felt like he was floating and he couldn’t pull the smile off of his face. His heart beat in time with the song and he felt your thumb tapping lazily on the back of his hand he watched you in the corner of his eye, trying not to get caught.

Your hair fell loosely in front of his face and if he listened closely, he could hear your voice as you quietly sang along. He didn’t think you sounded like a dying cat at all.

He’d only just met you, but he knew he wanted to keep you around.

‘So, loving is easy

You had me fucked up,

It used to be so hard to see

Yeah, loving is easy

When everything’s perfect

Please don’t change a single little thing for me’

You glanced up at him, catching his eyes as he was already looking at you. You smiled, pulling your bottom lip between your teeth.

It was strange. A few hours ago, Captain America walked into your shop, looking for help with his to-do list. Now, he was walking you home, holding your hand and listening to your music. This was the kind of thing that happened in rom-coms, and suddenly it was happening to you in real-life.

His hand squeezed yours gently and you felt a blush rush across your neck, threatening to flood your cheeks. You averted your eyes, looking down at the pavement.

‘So listen girl,

When you can’t even hide it

And it didn’t take forever to find it

I was all on my own

Almost glad to be alone

Until love came in

On time, on time’

He pulled the headphone out as the song ended, and you looked back up at him, raising a brow inquisitively.

“That was... amazing, do you have his vinyl?”

“Of course I do,” you chuckled, “you’ll have to come visit me at the store sometime.” You said the words in a light-hearted tone, but you hoped with everything you had that he would come back.

“Trust me, I will.” he murmured, forcing you to smile again, the blush finally reaching your cheeks.

“Alright well, this is my place.” you gestured towards the apartment building and he nodded his head slowly in recognition.

You looked down at your connected hands and slowly released his fingers, letting your hand fall to your side.

“Thank you, for the records, and for teaching me about some of this stuff,” he mumbled, lifting the bag slightly.

You knew this was where you were supposed to say goodbye, and hope to see him again at the store, but you couldn’t just leave it at that. You had no idea where this new-found confidence came from, but you reached forward, pulling a pen out of your bag and lifting his shirt from his wrist. He was an old-fashioned guy - you decided to do something a little old-fashioned, and wrote out your number on his wrist.

When you were done, you glanced up at his shocked face, leaving towards him and pressing your lips gently to his cheek, as close to his lips as possible.

“Call me, Steve,” you whispered into his ear, brushing your fingers across his shoulder as you pulled away.

He nodded gently, a blush spreading across his cheeks. “I will, doll.”

You felt a shiver run down your spine as you turned away, entering your building and leaving Captain America on the side of the road.

Tags:

(If it’s crossed out, it wasn’t working)

Permanent Tags: @srgtsprout @thevillainway @redstarstan @just-add-butter @wildefire @dewy-biitch @emilia-dawn @helloitsrhys @twtwmm @comfortablenihilist @averyrogers83 @kittykat101ary @chameerah @obliviousocietea @vodkasindream @ciarawriitesmarvel @lauxeyson @mylovelymarvel @breezy1415 @xxashy999xx @movie-dates-and-choccy-shakes

Steve Tags: @benedictcumbirbatch (my only steve tag isn’t working this is sad)

#steve rogers #steve rogers imagine #steve rogers x reader #steve x reader #steve rogers x you #fluff #captain america #captain america x reader #captain america imagine #cap #marvel #fic #cute #imagine #reader insert #i dont know

566 notes · View notes

zinecuntroll · 6 years

Text

3 decades of Queer Women making Herstory through Music

Written for Pink Washed Zine issue #3

by Raquel Silva aka Raquel Smith-Cave

I turned 30 this year, more precisely last August and it’s also been 12 years since I had my first girlfriend. When I started thinking about my queerness more seriously back in 2005/2006 I quickly realized how it wasn’t that usual for girls to be fascinated by Linda Perry in boxer shorts and combat boots like I was at 5 years old. My mom says 4 Non Blondes “What’s up” was my favorite song back then and she even bought the CD so I could listen to it on repeat and not just wait for the video to magically appear on the TV. Thanks Ma!

Through my teenage years I had “Baby Can I Hold You” by Tracy Chapman constantly playing in my head. Mind you, I always have a song in my mind and I burst into singing at the most unexpected times, it’s mostly an unconscious act which can be embarrassing in front of people who don’t know me well. Honestly I don’t care much, it’s just a part of my nature and if I’m not murmuring or humming some melody it usually means there’s something wrong. So at around 15/16 I remember starting to sing the chorus for “But you can say baby…” out of nowhere in school breaks or while walking home. This happened constantly and exactly why my brain was stuck with this melody was a complete mystery to me. Maybe I heard it in passing or on the radio…? I could never find the answer but I did buy Tracy’s self-titled vinyl this year during Record Store Day and discovered it was released exactly 30 years ago. It’s a precious record, her voice is warm and familiar and her guitar is so soothing to the soul. I think I finally answered my teenage self on all that musical haunting.

Cássia Eller is a Brazilian artist who made the 90s a really wholesome, magical, golden time for every lesbian in love with husky voices. Her hit song “Malandragem” was part of this series called Malhação but I only found out she was the mystical singer behind that iconic childhood tune years after listening to it on the show. She tragically died in 2001 and even after that she still created major impact in society, when her longtime girlfriend won custody of their son, after battling against Cássia’s father who had never cared about his daughter until money was involved. Cássia was a shy person who became a complete lion on stage. Humble and almost too pure to handle the hype. She just wanted to sing to people and exorcise her demons while making others happy. Which she did and so much more. Her legacy is tremendous, as it still resonates with so many of us today and the world hasn’t really witnessed anyone quite as ingenious as her ever since.

It’s 2007 and I’m watching a live concert in a Portuguese music festival on TV featuring a wild ass singer with the screaming voice of my wildest grrrl dreams. It’s The Gossip! And Beth Ditto is rolling around the stage, singing her lungs out in front of a pretty chill crowd. I wanted to BE THERE. I probably discovered Gossip’s music through CSS who I was obsessed with at the time or probably from watching The L Word. The truth is: the more intrigued I was by the words of this fat, dyke, goddess the more comfortable I felt about my own identity. I was fat for most of my childhood and got bullied for it on a regular basis, just part of being in an all-girls catholic school life I guess. At 13 someone called me “Fufa” which is basically “Dyke” in Portuguese and it was the most traumatic experience ever. Years later I wish I could have thanked the girl who bullied me out of a closet I wasn’t even aware I was in. I don’t believe I was ever in the closet though. Honestly, falling in love with a girl was just as natural as having crushes on boys. It was just another question I had finally found an answer for. Beth Ditto’s pride in her queerness and blatant attraction to butch people while being a proud femme, fat, dyke made me feel represented in a way I hadn’t seen myself before and ok with my own desires. Ditto!

The first glance of The L Word I watched I didn’t really enjoyed. The image was dark and the plot seemed so tragic. It was Jenny somewhere in the first season. After one year I finally watched the whole 2 or 3 seasons that were out by then. Tegan and Sara play in one episode and are featured in the soundtrack, which I still go back to sometimes to remember really great tunes. What a blessing to have Tegan and Sara guide you through your first acid trip and “coming out of that closet” am I right Dana? (RIP) My love affair with Canadian people started right there with Tegan’s goofiness and Sara’s witty remarks. By 2007 “The Con” came out and became a staple to the LBGTQ+ community. So much so that the band released a special covers album last year, with many queer artists recreating those magnificent songs. In the records that followed their sound was purposefully re directed to more pop melodies which I couldn’t relate to anymore. They did make good use of their huge platform by launching the Tegan and Sara foundation, which fights for LGBTQ girls and women all over the world with the help of some amazing queer people.

The other tiny Canadian who owns my heart is Ellen Page. Ever since Juno, my gaydar was just screaming out loud in every direction possible and I’m so happy that she is now able to be herself freely. Just like Juno, my musical top 3 included Patti Smith and Iggy Pop… but not The Runaways. For me it’s actually Nick Cave. I never gave too much attention to The Runaways, though I knew about Joan Jett and her extremely queer badass persona from being a teenager obsessed with punk rock and riot grrrl herstory. Until Kristen Stewart got cast to play Joan for The Runaways movie and I finally listened to their 70s records. I fell in love with Kristen and Dakota’s version of “Dead End Justice” as well as the original. Gaystew was born to play that part. Just last week I saw Bad Reputation, a documentary about Joan’s life with lots of awesome people speaking about how incredible she is, as both a pioneer for women in rock’n roll and an advocate for human and animal rights. At 60 she’s still rocking the fuck out of leather pants, inspiring kids to start bands, making everyone smitten by her confidence and flipping the finger to the all the hypocritical social definitions of gender, sex and music.

It’s really difficult to write about Janelle Monáe. Not because I don’t have words but mostly because I have too many. Janelle caught my eye and ears with “Tightrope” where she’s prancing around wearing her uniform, as she proudly used to talk about her suit, an homage to her working class parents and Kansas City upbringing. I saw her live at the end of 2010, at a winter festival, where all my other friends went on to watch Sting’s daughter I Blame Coco and I stood front row waiting for Janelle. It was life changing. She danced, jumped, screamed and even painted something into a blank canvas throughout the whole set. Her band was impeccably orchestrated and the show was extremely cinematic, since many of Janelle’s inspirations are from sci-fi movies. Her music is layered and complex just like her personality. Over the years she has been extremely mysterious, one of the things I appreciated the most about her. This year that changed. After much speculation in the media, she said in an interview she’s pansexual, as someone who has had relationships with men and women, that’s how she identifies more comfortably. Above all she’s an artist with a very specific vision and talent, carving the path for Afrofuturism; to create space for black people but especially queer POC to conquer over the systematic racism, lack of opportunities and prejudice in our society. Her new record “Dirty Computer” is the materialization of that evolution, the most “Janelle” album ever. Covering everything from sexual freedom to political issues while using a pop funky beat. Reminiscing one of her heroes, Prince, who became a friend and mentor before passing away in 2016. And all I want for 2019 is to be in the same room as Janelle and take on another voyage dans la lune with all the other androids.

Annie Clark has also played around with the idea of being an alien or a cyborg, especially on her self-titled album from 2014. That’s when I saw her live for the time and I had to give into my friend’s obsession with her music. Last year St. Vincent released “Masseduction”, an almost perfect record, in my opinion. The song with the same title is most definitely an anthem for our generation “I can’t turn off what turns me on…” and after a long relationship with model/actress Cara Delevingne or that summer fling with Kristen Stewart, it was clear, Annie is queer. (Pun so intended) While songs like “New York” or “Los Ageless” can be associated to both of those relationships, Annie’s talent as an exquisite guitar player, fearless innovative sounds and unique live shows, have made her the intergalactic rock Goddess of our queer dreams.

Widely inspired by Annie Clark is my next musical Queeroe. Mackenzie Scott aka Torres. There’s something about debut albums that I really love and Torres self-titled LP from 2013 is definitely in my top favorites list. It’s really fucking sad music with raw emotion, as you can hear in “Honey”, “Jealousy and I” or “When Winter’s over”. Her second album “Sprinter” showed a very exciting evolution in her sound but it’s “Three Futures” from 2017 that encapsulates Mackenzie’s desire towards experimenting with her sexuality in a more explicit way. As seen in the video for the first single where she takes on gender roles as both feminine and masculine characters who are living the dreadful “American Dream”. Plus the cover picture for that record is her staring at a semi naked woman on a pole, marking 2017 as very gay year for music.

Laura Jane Grace’s voice first made waves through my ears because of the collab Against Me! did with Tegan Quin back in 2007 for the single “Borne On The FM Waves Of The Heart”. The song didn’t stick to me that long and although I had heard Against Me! was my kind of band I never took the time to really listen to them. Until 2014, when “Transgender Dysphoria Blues” was released and it rapidly became one of the most important records of my life. I started watching many interviews with Laura Jane about the struggles of coming out as a trans woman in this fucked up world, specifically while being part of the punk scene, where there’s not much space for anything other than toxic masculinity. I related to Laura’s journey and with every single lyrics on “True trans soul rebel” since it felt like the most authentic punk anthem I had heard in a while. I went to their first ever gig in Portugal in 2015 and screamed as much as I could surrounded by my family of misfits, all wearing black and their heart tattoos on their sleeves. I dug into Against Me! discography but other than the single “I was a teenage anarchist” which I already knew, nothing got me hooked as much as “Transgender Dysphoria Blues” did. Laura Jane’s name is very much appropriate, for her Grace is felt through her screams as much as her written words, something I found fascinating while reading her auto biography: “Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout”. I loved every page of it, with original diary pieces, she takes us on a wild precious ride from her childhood and family issues to all the drama in the music industry or the tribulations of managing a band in this time and age. There’s really nothing more punk rock than being yourself and Laura Jane does it with so much effortless coolness and Grace.

I tried not to listen to Courtney Barnett for months. I had seen the hype around her but didn’t feel quite ready to embark in that journey and my queers did I regret it… She played at Primavera Sound Porto in 2015 and I started listening to her on loop only weeks after that. The heartbreaking part is that I was also at that festival. The good part is that she came back in 2016 to another festival in Lisbon and I was there just for her (and Father John Misty). Which felt like the stars had aligned with my musical desires. She’s unapologetically herself but not in the way that you would say so about Cardi B for example. She’s wickedly smart with her words and unexpectedly brutal with her chords, right before she opens her mouth she looks like the sweetest person you will ever meet and after you are transported to her own island, full of genius puns, sarcastic inputs about daily life or the state of the world. My favorite verse is from “Pedestrian at best” and I almost got it tattooed… “Give me all your money and I’ll make some origami honey”. Which to me roughly translates to: Fuck Capitalism! She’s also very open about her long term relationship with her wife and fellow musician Jen Cloher, making them the ultimate indie rock’s queer power couple.

2016 was the darkest year of my life. I stopped listening to music for months, stopped sleeping and my panic attacks would strike me even if I was in the middle of a busy street. It was scary to lose myself in such dark thoughts but then one day I listened to Shura’s song “Too shy” and felt like a little bit of me was alive again. Her debut album “Nothing’s real” came out around that time and her lyrics for the title song were exactly what I felt through my depression. In this song she is writing about her own experience with a panic attack that makes you feel like dying. And they do. “Too Shy” is a beautiful tune about unrequited love because you are simply too fucking shy to ever go for it and ask your crush on a date. Being shy and anxious almost always go hand in hand, as an awkward, quiet, weird introvert myself, discovering Shura’s songs and story gave me hope and made me gather the lost pieces of my own identity, leaving all the pain, shame and constant anxiety behind. Music really is medicine for the soul.

Julien Baker also has one of the best debut albums I’ve ever heard. Personally, it’s very special because it marks the beginning of my current relationship, as my girlfriend surprised me with Julien’s “Sprained Ankle” vinyl just weeks after we started dating. That vinyl did not leave my record player for the last months of 2016 and whenever I listen to it now, I am instantly transported to that moment in time. I was finally getting back on my feet and everything was falling into place, Julien’s gigantic voice echoed my natural melancholy, embracing my demons with a new found strength. I’ve seen her twice, both times a very out of body experience and had the pleasure to let her know how much her music has helped me. We hugged, talked and she even has the zine I make (CuntRoll) in her living room table because she likes it so much. She is someone I could definitely see myself hanging out in my group of friends and that’s what I love the most about this new generation of artists, who aren’t trying to be something they’re not for the sake of money or exposure. They embrace who they are and let the world decide if they wanna take it or leave it. And that’s exactly what we need right now, to accept and embrace people for who they are and the art they make. So we can all to the same in our own lives.

“Yeah I’ve got it I’m a man now…” are the verses that got stuck with me for weeks after listening to Christine and The Queens single “iT”. Yes, the capital T is on purpose as it represents testosterone, the hormone used by many Trans AFAB people to start the process of becoming more themselves. This androgynous handsome French creature original name is Heloise and since her worldwide success with her first record “Chaleur Humaine” she has shredded so many stereotypes through her music, her dancing and her style. I hate comparing artists but some people call her “ the French Michael Jackson” for a reason. My chin dropped while watching her cover for Beyonce’s “Sorry” which she transformed into her own song like it’s nobody’s business (please go watch it asap). This year she blessed as with her second LP just called “Chris” inviting the world to be a little bit closer to her. Chris is her nickname and presents us with a new image for Heloise, embracing her masculine vibe more than ever before, with short hair, loose clothing and talking proudly about queer issues in many interviews. The video for the single “5 dollars” is the epitome of gender fucking and the reason why I am even gayer now tbh. (You should watch that also!) The future is genderqueer.

I stayed away from the hype of “Girls like Girls” back in 2015 because I’m mostly suspicious of pop artists using gay stories to go with the trend of pink washing, ie Katy Perry “I kissed a girl” is a fucking jam but also really fucking problematic, coming from a cis het white female who has no idea the struggles of being queer. Hayley Kiyoko is most definitely not one of those artists though, as she has slowly but certainly become the Lesbian Jesus we’ve all been praying for. With “Curious” she let us know there’s a new fucking boss in town and she’s so fucking gay. What a time to be alive, 20gayteen is real and we are here to witness it all. Hayley’s not the greatest singer in the world, but she uses the best of her skills to give voice to all the kids who struggled with feeling alienated because they couldn’t fit in anywhere. She creates videos which are more like short stories, where she not only acts, but also writes and directs with her own team, never compromising her vision to tell the stories she wants to tell. Stories that resonate with so many queer people and we all know how important representation is, especially coming from an authentic source. To have such a person in the mainstream is what Tegan and Sara were thriving for a few years ago but the result wasn’t very genuine, something that doesn’t happen with Hayley’s songs. Her album “Expectations” doesn’t have big hits, other than “Feelings and “Curious” but it’s the debut album of someone with a huge potential and vision to take up the space for ourselves to tell our own stories and no one else.

Linn Da Quebrada is the musical Goddess of the moment. Eloquent, inspiring, caustic, no one is left indifferent after listening to her. And that's exactly what she wants, to leave us on our tiptoes waiting to be carried away by words of pleasure, empowerment, trans feminism and especially so much self-love. Each verse is a lyrical genius clapback in the face of this transphobic, sexist and racist society. Prejudices that kill so many queer people of color in Brazil every year. Her existence is transforming, rewriting the HERSTORY of the world and of her country, through the re-appropriation of funk, where SHE finally gets to be the protagonist of her own story and that courage surpasses linguistic or cultural barriers. In 2017 she released her first album “Pajubá” after a very successful crowdfunding campaign and also has her own documentary called “Bixa Travesty” which has gathered accolades through many film festivals around the world. The song “Bixa Preta” is a fucking iconic anthem for 20gayteen and for all of my maricones family out in the world fighting everyday for our existence to be respected.

We will NEVER be erased.

6 notes · View notes

life-unintended · 6 years

Text

The “film look” in digital - what I’ve learned so far

Let me start this article by addressing the elephant in the room: if you want a real authentic film look, shoot film! There’s just no way around that, no matter how close you can get with digital these days, there’s something about film that digital just can’t touch. I’ve been shooting film sporadically over the last couple of years and I still get a big ol’ smile on my face when I get the scans back from the lab, it’s a very different kind of reward than the immediacy of digital. Plus, the experience of shooting film has been extremely helpful for my digital photography - shooting with an old film camera forces you to slow down, learn the basics of the exposure triangle and focus on composition, as opposed to navigating through menus and letting the camera decide all of the settings for you.

My trusted Canon A1 ready for summer vacations

But of course there are a large number of practical reasons for shooting digital, and at least for my needs and reality shooting film exclusively is just not an option. I shoot digital 95% of the time, but I always strive to make my photos look as “organic” and close to film as possible, because that’s the aesthetic I like the most.

For the purpose of writing this article I’ve questioned myself where does my fascination with film come from, and I guess it’s probably due to the fact that all of my childhood and teenage memories where shot on film. When I think about film I think about long summer vacations, family get-togethers and embarrassing haircuts - in other words, instant nostalgia! And that’s the kind of warm-fuzzy feelings that I want to associate with my photos, so basically ever since I got my first mirrorless camera back in 2015 that has always been my reference.

The first roll of film I ever shot when I was around 10, with a tiny plastic 110mm film camera

Over the course of these last 3 years trying to emulate film I’ve tried dozens of different presets for Lightroom, some of them really good, but quickly discovered that these will only get you halfway there. If you apply a film-preset to a perfect digital image file, in most cases you'll end up with a perfect digital image with some vintage tones, but there’s much more to film than that! There are a lot of “imperfections” that come from the limitations imposed by the gear used and the film itself, which have been eliminated in modern digital cameras and just can't be introduced in post-editing.

The best way I’ve found to mimic these imperfections is to actually impose some of those same limitations when shooting digital, so here’s a few tips on how to do that:

1. Use vintage lenses

Modern lens are amazing pieces of technology. Most of them offer perfect corner to corner sharpness, great anti-flare coatings, amazing contrast, you name it. But if you're going for that 70s / 80s consumer film look, that's pretty much the opposite of what you need! Lenses back then where far from the perfection we know today, the consumer photography market was booming and there were a lot of different brands coming up with different designs, new materials, new focusing systems, etc. As a result, each lens had its very particular set of characteristics and quirks (sometimes design flaws, really) that got imprinted into every photo taken and ultimately defined its character. A perfect example of this are the Helios 44M lenses: these Russian copies of the Carl Zeiss Biotar became famous for a design flaw that resulted in a very unusual swirly bokeh. Earlier models displayed this effect very pronouncedly, but as they improved the design in subsequent versions that particular characteristic was lost, and that’s why the earlier models are the most sought after nowadays.

That classic Helios 44M-4 swirly bokeh

The good news is that these old manual lenses are (for the most part) dirt cheap and you can use them on mirrorless cameras with a simple plastic adapter, so you can get that specific look they were known for without any need for Instagram filters or post-processing magic! In my next article I'll go into more detail about these vintage lenses and how to use them.

2. Use manual focus

One of the biggest innovations in photography in the late 70s/early 80s was the invention of autofocus. Before that cameras were limited to manual focus, and even when the first AF systems were introduced to the consumer market they were rudimentary at best. Chances are that if you look at your film photos from that period, half of them will be slightly out of focus (or completely out of focus, depending on the competence of the photographer! ;)) But that’s not a bad thing at all, I feel that in most cases it only adds to the nostalgic feeling and can sometimes create an additional layer of mystery.

The missed focus on this one gives it a timeless feel

So if you want that classic film look, switch to manual focus on your modern digital camera or use an old manual lens. Don't be afraid to miss focus sometimes, this was something that took me quite a while to realize and “accept”, and I only did so thanks to shooting film. Some of my favorite photos shot on film are pretty out of focus!

Blurry? Definitely, but the fact that you can’t distinguish their faces makes this so much more universal

3. Use slow shutter speeds

Another limitation of film is the maximum ISO speed available, or Asa as it was called originally. Nowadays our digital cameras have incredibly high ISO sensitivities, but on film the maximum you get is 3200, though most consumer films are rated at 200 or 400 Asa. This means that to get a proper exposure on film you have to use much lower shutter speeds than on digital to get enough light, and as a result motion blur is highly likely. Personally, I love some blur, as it gives a sense of movement to an otherwise static medium. One of my favorite all time photographers, Anton Corbijn, shot many of the world’s most famous bands and musicians on film using slow-shutter speeds, to get some movement in the frame and that extra grit!

The subway rush - shot on a Huawei P10 smartphone

If you wanna try this out, I would advise to start with 1/30th of a second, look at the results and then adjust as necessary. If you’re shooting in bright sunlight this probably won’t work unless you use a neutral density, but again experimentation in the key.

A little extra tip: smartphones are actually great for this if you turn off the flash, as their small lens aperture and tiny sensor force slower shutter speeds to compensate.

4. Use High-ISOs for authentic film-like grain

This tip is in direct contradiction with the previous one (unless you’re shooting in really low-light), so usually you’ll have to choose between one or the other. It is also a tip specific to the Fuji X series cameras, as I haven’t tested other brands in this particular aspect.

I’m a big fan of grainy photos, it’s one of my favorite things about film. But the technology in digital cameras these days is so good that in most scenarios you’ll get perfectly clean images straight out of the camera. Even though image-editing software has also evolved tremendously in the past few years and can deliver very believable grain simulations, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not the same as the real deal and it also feels kinda like cheating to be adding fake grain. That’s where the Fuji X-trans sensors come in, in particular their latest iteration X-trans III.

My furry friend shot at ISO 12800

The ACROS film simulation when used with high-ISOs of 6400 and above produces some digital noise that, to my eyes, is very very close to real Black and White film grain - and the best part is that you’re not adding anything fake in post-processing, it’s a real side-effect of ISO just like with real film! So most of the times when I want to shoot in Black & White I’ll use my own Acros custom setting at 12800 ISO and use the SOOC jpegs. This technique also works with color film simulations, but not so well in my opinion.

5. Post-process your photos accordingly

Different films have different characteristics, so it’s important to decide exactly what film look are you going for and learn a bit more about what defines it. Is it a low-contrast or a high-contrast film? saturated or muted? Fine grain or heavy grain? These things will help you understand what you can do in post-processing to get closer to that film look, and most of them are very simple to adjust. Where it gets a bit more complicated is getting the right tones to match the original film stock, but with some investigation and patience it can be done.

Going for that warm Kodak vibe

Of course if you want to save time you can just buy one of the many film presets out there! Like I said in the beginning of this article they will get you close to the original film tones, so if your base digital file already contains some “imperfections” introduced with the techniques above, it’s as close as you’ll get to the real thing. You can also use in-camera film simulation settings to mimic some film types, which I already covered in my previous article.

Can you tell which is which?

These are some of the techniques I’ve learned by trial and error mostly, I hope you’ll find them useful if the film look is your thing too. I can’t stress enough that the best thing you can do is to actually shoot film whenever possible, not only it will be great fun but it will surely improve your digital photography as well.

Let’s end this with a fun little game: can you tell which of the photos below are film and which are digital? No cheating looking in the exif data, I’ll post the results in a couple of days! ;)

10:

#photography #film photography #film #digital photography #vintage lens #slow shutter #grain #grainisgood #post processing #fuji #fujifilm #fujifeed #fujilove #fujixseries #fujifilm x-t20 #fujifilm x100f #canon a1 #canon fd 35mm #helios 44m-4

12 notes · View notes

doomedandstoned · 7 years

Text

BAILEY’S CHOICE

Youngblood Supercult guitarist Bailey Gonzales shares her 10 favorite albums of Autumn.

Photo by Johnny Hubbard at Doomed & Stoned Fest

First off, let me preface by saying that this list is just a fraction of what I would include on a good, solid Autumn playlist, but everything must end at some point. Most of these you’ve probably heard, some you may not be familiar with, and others perhaps long forgotten and thus need a good revisiting. So here goes:

1. Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young – Déjà vu

youtube

This has been in my catalog since I first started smoking weed in the fall of my freshman year of high school and learned to enjoy the hazy, beautiful strains of intricate harmonies that permeate CSNY’s iconic brand of folk-blues rock. Their albums were always on rotation in my house when I was growing up, but until I started to fully understand its cosmic, layered beauty, Déjà vu fell more or less into the “lame music my parents listen to” category for me. Now it’s a staple, especially as the weather starts to cool and the leaves start to turn, and I’m thrown into some kind of sepia-tinged yearning for the past. Funny how things change. This album holds some of the group’s most acclaimed work; I can’t point out a single track I’d skip over.

2. Graveyard – Graveyard

Graveyard by Graveyard

Speaking of high school—I grew up in a very small town in Southeast Kansas, and when MySpace made its debut (yes, MySpace), I found a page for this indie label called Tee Pee Records that absolutely dictated what I would listen to take the edge of my Black Sabbath cravings—this is where I was ultimately introduced to stoner rock and all of the branches of the retro heavy metal genre—and one of them that always stuck with me as I worshipped this label’s releases thereafter was Graveyard’s self-titled album. There are so many great tracks on this album, with “Thin Line” being an absolute favorite and even an echoing of one of my darkest autumn remembrances (won’t delve into it, but the subject matter will lead you where you need to go). Fantastic, timeless album.

3. Jonathan Snipes & William Hutson – Room 237

youtube

Room 237 (2012) is a funny little documentary. I love it, despite the fact that this film lays out conspiracies about Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining that range from absolutely Kubrickesque crazy-but-plausible to totally ludicrous, leaping-to-judgement scenarios and breakdowns related to the hidden puzzles within the original adaptation. But, we are talking about music here: this album plays like Stranger Things meets Goblin meets John Carpenter. There is nothing necessarily special about it, but in trying to find an OST that would fit neatly within this list, this fella kind of jumped out to me. Not everybody enjoys soundtracks, and while I could listen to creepy, ambient synth all day long, every day, Room 237 seems like it could entrance any listener, especially with standout tracks like “To Keep From Falling Off” to “Universal Weak Male” and even with the closing track, “Dies Irae” which plays off the original theme from The Shining.

4. Trouble – Trouble

youtube

It blows my mind that this album was released in 1990. Everything about it screams, “I WANT TO MAKE YOUR EARS BLEED: ‘70s METAL STLYE.” It’s like a lost and very angry Sir Lord Baltimore album was found in someone’s murky basement and sold in a musty, long forgotten record shop. The kind of place where you might hear whispers of dark legends. Somewhere that may be evocative, in legend, of the kind of place that Mayhem’s late singer, Dead, slit his wrists, throat, and blew his brains out and everyone commenced for this orgiastic blood feast of mourning to say, uh, “let’s take a photo of his dead body and slap it on a bootleg album cover and make necklaces out of his skull...” It’s not that harsh, but there’s definitely something spooky, dark, and forbidden about it. You may ask yourself, if you’re just hearing this album for the first time: “Why don’t they play some of these tracks on the radio?” Well, my child...do you really want to know?

5. The Steepwater Band – Revelation Sunday

youtube

This collection of hot tunes from The Steepwater Band is, apart from 2011’s Clava, one of our band’s road staples. We often don’t agree on much when that road cagey feeling hits or when disagreements happen, which incidentally is why things tend to work well with us, but The Steepwater Band, Mount Carmel, and Gary Clark Junior are all things we can come to terms with through the van’s trebly stock speakers. Maybe it’s the bluesiness. Very moody folk-blues rock tunes, with a touch of whiskey-fueled country, is what these guys exhibit in songs like “Slow Train Drag,” “Dance Me A Number,” and “Steel Sky.” A plus material, in my book, and good for the road on a cold night’s ramble.

6. Black Sabbath – Never Say Die!

youtube

Can people stop it with the “I’m tired of Black Sabbath” comments??? You know they are the reason we’re all here, and whether you like to admit it or not, you dig a good Sabbath tune either once in a while or every day. Doctor’s orders. Now I don’t think that a playlist is complete without a Black Sabbath album, but autumn seems the appropriate time for their fumbling, but strong conclusion — 1978’s Never Say Die! And I really don’t care that I know I’m in the minority for loving this album. To me, while it’s their most strained Ozzy-era album (I won’t even touch 13, so don’t ask), it’s full of premonitions of things to come, including a full out jazz brawl in “Breakout” that reminds me of the mean streets in Dirty Harry, and songs that might make the bravest of our genre cry, like “Junior’s Eyes.” “Shock Wave” goes through the typical rough and tumble changes that Black Sabbath fans learn to embrace, but it comes in wave after wave after wave. Hell, even the title track is nearly full-out punk rock. If you’ve avoided this album, please—give it a spin. Even if it’s only to hear Bill Ward sing. It’s the album I fell into when I joined my first band in the fall of 2008 and what pushed me into the direction of branching out to things I’d long avoided. I literally shit my pants every time the first synth breakdown in “Johnny Blade” comes over the speakers, and I think you should, too.

7. Madonna – Madonna

youtube

Speaking of shit you probably don’t wanna read…who out of us has given Madonna’s 1983 debut a spin? Anyone? Bueller? Yeah, I didn’t think so. For you folks who can appreciate this one, I applaud you for admitting it. It’s not a sin to listen to Madonna (tell that one to the Vatican), but unless she’s been covertly transformed into Lana Del Rey or someone else on the darker and more modern side of the pop spectrum, you’d be hard pressed to find an admitted fan in our heavy underground group. And you know what? I don’t give a single fuck (yes, I learned that language from M herself). She’s a goddess, an icon, a killer songwriter—if you don’t believe me, tell that to the $400 million she has neatly tucked away—and dammit, she taught me to give a little less of a fuck in times where I don’t have too many to spare. This is another reason my parents are badass. Who in the world would buy their kid the “Like A Virgin” album only if their 11-year-old can ask for it by name without getting too embarrassed at the thought of saying “virgin” out loud to the Camelot Music clerk? Yeah, that’s right. Anyway, listen to this. Just do it...Madonna would.

8. The Midnight Ghost Train – Buffalo

Buffalo by The Midnight Ghost Train

I met Steve Moss at a show in Topeka in late 2009 at a dive bar where the drummer from my first band was singing in his new group. We did the obligatory thing and then, holy shit—this band starts playing and glasses start clinking and I swear to god I thought the whole damn place was going to cave in. They play a bunch of tunes and I’m so fully entranced it’s stupid. After the show, I went up to their singer/guitarist and said, “Um, that was really fucking awesome. I loved how you slipped “Hand of Doom into the middle of one of your songs.” Bam. We were instant buds. I couldn’t believe that they had come out of Topeka, Kansas. Later, while they were prepping to record 2012’s Buffalo, we had a very memorable fall jam session and some shows together, and EVERY. DAMNED. TIME. I felt like there was just something insanely special happening. Buffalo proved to be an instant classic, and even though The Midnight Ghost Train boys seem to always be on tour, I visit with my old pal Steve from time to time when he’s around, and nothing can erase those crazy, almost LSD-like imprinted memories of our house shows together. Hell, we reunited again just last month in another Topeka dive bar. I still have almost 3 hours’ worth of an interview I need to write that documents Steve’s early life up until the recording of Cold Was The Ground. The circle goes round and round. And I sure as hell can’t shake that sound.

9. Creedence Clearwater Revival – Green River

youtube

I don’t know what everyone else thinks about when they hear the track “Green River” from Creedence Clearwater Revival, but I think of Gary Ridgeway. I know that’s way far off, but I can’t help it. I also think about the album cover, and how many people still try to copy it, unintentionally. And I think about Stephen King. If you’ve read a few of his novels, you know from some of his passages, he’s a total CCR freak. I’ll give him a pass for mentioning Springsteen so much just because he’s a damn genius. But I bet the casual listener has never heard the song “Sinister Purpose” on the radio airwaves. It sounds like it belongs on a damn Leaf Hound album or something. Thank god for small favors. This is the epitome of southern blues rock. All you Lynyrd Skynyrd fans can fight me (although I won’t knock them), but CCR has earned their grimy, yet rightful spot as the Bayou’s most raw and creepy rock group. And way down in the fall, there’s always a bad moon rising.

10. Buffalo – Dead Forever...

youtube

Man, I was going to write up a few more albums, but this is the end of the line, folks. Australia’s Buffalo caps it off with their 1972 album, Dead Forever... I can see this piece being released today, and that’s why I’m so glad everyone in this community puts out music that can rival little-known bands like Buffalo. I have a sweet spot for this group. Nobody will ever be able to answer why this killer band could never receive any airplay, and that question still lingers as absolute over processed shit continues to infiltrate the airwaves and real emotion can’t shine through. One of the promotional stickers for this record was, “Play this album LOUD.” Seen that before? Is history repeating itself in belittling our efforts to get out there and WARP THE FUCK out of people’s minds? I guess so. But we can fix that. Put the needle on some Buffalo, don your battle jacket, and work on getting some fuzz into some onlooker’s ears. Listen carefully, and don’t let the Buffalo situation happen to us all.

Hear Bailey's 'Autumn Vibes' Playlist on Spotify

Photo by Johnny Hubbard

The Great American Death Rattle by Youngblood Supercult

10 notes · View notes

micahblissd · 5 years

Text

LAYER ONE : THE OUTSIDE

Name: Micah Lee Bliss

meaning of name: Micah is a diminutive of Michael, which of course means “Who is like God.” Lee means dweller in the wood or clearing. Bliss means joy.

Aliases: Chet, Mickey, Cuzzo, Tadpole, Johnny Fuck, and maybe a couple others. More are definitely welcome.

place of birth: Huntington Beach, California

Species: Human

Race: White

Nationality: American

Gender: Male

Sexuality: Straight

Profession: Writer, journalist

eye color: Brown

hair style/color: Curly, black

Height: 6’ 2’’

clothing style: Casual, usually t shirts and jeans, though he cleans up well.

best physical feature: His favorite is his eyes.

Weight: 185, mostly muscle

Complexion: clear, can be a little pink when he wakes up

build: athletic

voice: mid pitch, sometimes scratchy, especially if he’s sick or he’s smoked.

LAYER TWO: THE INSIDE

fears: that people will use him for money or misguided notoriety

guilty pleasure: harlequin novels, listening to music too loud, eating bags of chocolate in one sitting

biggest pet peeve: cruelty when it isn’t deserved

ambition for the future: to do “real” movies

one bad habit: smoking when he’s nervous

one good habit: paying for food and giving it to a homeless person outside whenever he sees one

one habit they can’t break: pulling at the hair on the back of his head

one they’ve broken: He used to drink quite a bit in his mid twenties, and wound up getting a DUI. He’s got a little over four years sober.

LAYER THREE: THOUGHTS

first thoughts waking up: coffee, now.

what they think about the most: tattoos. He has a black dragon on the inside of his thigh and he wants more.

what they think about before bed: eh, he doesn’t think about much, but he does play like thirty minutes of merge dragons before bed.

what they think their best quality is: he doesn’t really think about it that much. Probably that he forgives.

what they think would completely break them: if he got married and his significant other died.

what they think was the best thing in their life: The best thing he ever had was the working relationship he had with Erica Caine.

what they think was the worst thing in their life: the awkwardness that sometimes came with people recognizing him in public.

what seemingly insignificant memories stuck with them: he did an awful lot of staring straight into a camera when scenes were happening.

LAYER FOUR: WHAT’S BETTER?

single or group dates: single.

to be loved or respected: to have both, there must be respect.

beauty or brains: brains.

dogs or cats: both.

coffee or tea: coffee.

showering in the day or night: day.

taking baths or taking showers: showers.

tv or movies: tv

writing or reading: reading

platonic or romantic love: both are good

iced tea or lemonade: neither

ice cream or smoothies: smoothies

cupcakes or cake: cupcakes.

beach or mountains: mountains

LAYER FIVE: DO YOU?

lie: rarely, unless he has to.

believe in yourself: he believes in something.

believe in love: yes.

want someone: sometimes.

work so that you can support your hobbies or use your hobbies as a way of filling up the time you aren’t working: make hobbies work.

have something you’re reluctant to tell people: if he’s dating someone, and they don’t bring it up, he almost never tells them he’s been in porn until it’ll eat him alive.

have an opinion about sex: yeah. Just be clean about it. Make good choices.

have many friends: some.

have as many friends as you want: he only wants like two

have something to make a scene in public about: no

have something to give your life for: that's… pretty dramatic.

have major flaws: he can be slow to commit, and if he’s having a lot of anxiety, may not communicate well.

have something you pretend or try to care about: no? You either care or you don’t. Simple.

have an image you project: no

think you’re polite or rude: polite

LAYER SIX: FAVORITES

favorite color: green

favorite animal: owls

favorite movie: Forrest Gump

favorite game: Skyrim

Sound: Elephants trumpeting

Song: Meg Myers’ cover of “Running Up That Hill,” Oliver Tree’s “Cash Machine.”

Band: Badflower, Post Malone, Oliver Tree

Outfit: White t shirt, blue jeans, converse, flannel, leather jackets, only wears ray ban sunglasses

Place: Huntington’s titular beach, november, 2am

Memory: The first time he ever had a fluffer “fluff” him in between scenes. He squirmed and even shouted.

Person: Lowkey Erica Caine, highkey all of George Washington’s spies

Show: that 70’s show, everything Bob Ross, basically anything about murder on netflix

LAYER SEVEN: AGE

Age: 35

date of birth: 10/25/1983

day your next birthday will be: Sunday

zodiac sign: Scorpio

age you lost your virginity: 17

does age matter: bITCH YES

LAYER EIGHT: PERSONALITY

moral alignment: chaotic good

Enneagram: type 8w7

four temperaments: phlegmatic

tarot cards: the fool

LAYER NINE: FINISH THE SENTENCE

i love: eighties music and eating burritos while laying in the sun

i feel: deeply, even if it isn’t obvious.

i hide: quite a bit, unless it’s specifically asked that i reveal it.

i miss: warm weather and swim shorts.

i wish: i had a dog.

i hate: unreasonable cruelty.

LAYER TEN: FAMILY

Relationships: A rich friendship with Erica Caine, though mostly casual friendships through work and pottery classes. Exes include in the emotionally abusive Lita Crombie, and some half baked relationships that fell apart with other entertainers. His childhood best friends are three guys from Huntington Beach. Tendo Weaver, Matt Barker, Teddy Kope, respectively called Matt B., and Teddy K. Tendo’s real name is Ethan, but he will only play games on an original nintendo ‘64. Those are his brothers.

Parents: Andrea Bliss, Walker Bliss.

Siblings: None.

Children: None, yet.

favorite childhood memory: He went to Tendo’s 12 birthday party. He and the boys walked through the woods at the park, and he tried holding onto a branch as he went down into a deep creek. The branch of the tree broke and he had nothing to hold onto. Tendo dies laughing, and makes everyone else turn and watch Micah fall into some dirty salt creek water. Good times. The best part was when he came up, he was dirty and covered in scratches. Tendo looked at him, a fat twelve year old, crying his eyes out with laughter, gasping, “You… Didn’t!! Make — a sound!”

favorite childhood toy: Nerf guns, usually. He got pretty good at shooting his shot, ayyye.

embarrassing story: Any time on set in the early days with a fluffer, accidental sexual injuries, or the time he had to get stitches because he tried to skateboard and landed left buttcheek first on a really sharp rock

favorite family member: He loves the FUCK out of his mom.

a story about that family member: When he, Tendo, Matty B., and Teddy K., snuck into Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. He played cool the entire way home, but was afraid to sleep. His dad was working night’s at the meat packing factory, but he woke up his mom crying, telling her what he did and asking with straight sincerity, “Can that happen, mom?!” She didn’t mean to laugh, but she did. Then she got up and made them each a cup of tea and they watched some public television until he fell asleep on the couch. It was 1994, and everything was cool; he was twelve at the time.

0 notes

cushyblog-blog · 7 years

Text

Not Just A Hashtag

Facebook statuses are covered in the same two words: Me Too. Twitter is rife with the hashtag and thinkpieces are spilling out onto the pavement discussing the impact of these two words. Me too. It’s not like I ever thought I was alone in this world. It’s not like I ever really thought no one else could understand what happens in the aftermath of abuse and harassment, but seeing it so boldly stated, for anyone and everyone to see, has been emotionally exhausting and draining, to the say the least. I’m so tired. I’m so tired of seeing women dragged through the mud because someone asks why people don’t speak up earlier. I’m so tired of having to relive abuse every time an abuser turns up in daily news cycle. I’m so tired of hearing what does or doesn’t count when it comes to harassment. But, mostly, I’m so tired because it’s happened to most everyone I know, and there’s only so many times I can stand in solidarity without feeling the weight of their worlds pressing down upon me. Upon all of us. I read these statuses, and I see their words and how angry we all are to have to keep opening ourselves up before an unforgiving and uncaring world, and I think that today might be the day I shatter into a million tiny pieces and never put myself back together again.

But, still, I get up every day and I put one foot in front of the other. I take a deep breath. And live my life.

These past few weeks have been emotionally exhausting for me, and I’m very sure for a lot of people. Having to look at the face of Harvey Weinstein and knowing what it is he took from these women settles underneath my skin in a way that makes me feel as though I want to peel back the layers and become someone new. So much has been said of the actions he took, and the manipulations he made and everyone seems to be shocked and horrified, but I don’t feel surprised. I feel sad. People can say what they want about someone being harassed at work and wondering why they don’t speak up, but in the end, it comes down to power. I was sexually harassed by a boss at my first “real” job and I reported it, but nothing ever came from it. I was told that it wouldn’t really matter and that I was making too much out of nothing, but it definitely felt like something. It felt uncomfortable and inappropriate. It felt wrong. I did what I thought was the right thing, but also, I was terrified of getting in trouble. Why are we so worried about causing trouble, or getting into trouble, when it wasn’t us who did the wrong thing? When something like harassment occurs, I have noticed it seems to be the person who has been harassed as the one who feels guilty, not the perpetrator. I remember feeling small and embarrassed when my boss would say things so very casually about my clothing, or what I looked like. I didn’t need to be, but any attention drawn to me of that nature felt like I had done something wrong. Nice.

These past few weeks have also allowed those of us who have been abused to find out new stories from those we love that would’ve never seen the light of day had it not been for a pervert being exposed in the news. In a lot of ways, yes, it’s good for people to begin having these conversations, but why does it take a powerful white man in Hollywood to be exposed for people to simply believe victims? Why is it so hard to simply believe us? I have never listened to someone who has endured abuse and harassment and thought they were lying. As someone who had to tell her own story, and who keeps telling her own story, I choose to believe others because I know how hard that story is to tell. Hollywood is rocked on its foundation because someone has blown the lid off of what they keep telling us is a “poorly kept secret”, but haven’t they dealt with this before? Roman Polanski can’t come back to the US because he drugged and had sex with a 13 year-old in Jack Nicholson’s jacuzzi in the 70’s, but when he won the Best Director Academy Award for The Pianist, he got a standing ovation because he’s a “great director”. When Chris Brown beat the living hell out of Rihanna everyone turned on him for a moment, yet he’s still out there making music and performing for screaming and adoring fans. Mel Gibson threatened his wife, beat her up, used the N-word on some police and also used some anti-semitic epithets, he gets to be nominated for an Academy Award. We don’t even have to mention Casey Affleck winning an Academy Award last year after news came out about his own sexual harassment scandal, right?

Do I also need to point out our very own “president” has admitted to grabbing women “by the pussy”? An admitted sexual assaulter is the “President Of The United States”. Please note the quotation marks, as he’s not my president and never will be. But, even the person who is supposed to protect us and lead us (laughable) has openly admitted to doing whatever he wants with women. And, he’s been elected as the leader of the free world. Jesus.

And then, there’s Woody Allen. His own daughter rips open her wounds to let people know he’s a monster who forced himself on her, and people are still clamoring to work with him. The excuses are all the same: “we don’t really know that happened” and “I wasn’t there, so I don’t know”...okay, sure Kate Winslet, way to stand in solidarity and speak out of both sides of your mouth. The people who are all stating Harvey Weinstein is a terrible person are also dying to work with Woody Allen. Do I have to remind you he married his step-daughter? I mean, that’s obvious, right? So, you’ll forgive me and all the others who aren’t impressed when people are now standing up and saying that something has to change. We need to do better when it comes to treating women differently. The world needs to do right by our children. But, only if they’re white, rich and famous. Got it.

So, what about the rest of us who aren’t wealthy and famous? What about those of us who wrote “Me Too” on Facebook even though it gave us a panic attack? What about those of us who sat staring at their status and deleted it several times before actually posting it? Will there be a cry for the injustices that have been done to all of us to be stopped? Will people begin to believe those of us who have been sexually harassed at work? Or, who have been attacked by someone they knew at a party? Will the girl who wakes up with someone’s fingers inside of her be believed even if she had been drinking? I wish I could say that with these new accusations pouring out, and this need to be heard, things would begin to change. But, I don’t honestly think it will. I think this world will collectively be appalled and then there’s going to be jokes about Harvey Weinstein made at the Golden Globes. I think abuse victims will become a cause and not actual people who want to be heard and believed. And, that is frustrating on an epic level. So, we will continue to write “Me Too” and wait for things to change, but we know they won’t. We will continue to scream our stories for everyone to hear, but a lot of people won’t listen. And, we will keep having to feign shock and surprise when someone else is revealed to be a sexual predator.

So, you’ll forgive me if I seem exhausted and irritable. The last few weeks have really taken a toll on me, and all those who have been through this before. Someone who I know can relate to my story looks at me with their tired eyes and we both know: me too.

1 note · View note