This Saturday!!!
December 10th @ Gottscheer Hall
JMC34 w/ Dougie Poole, Anna Fox Rochinski, & Crosslegged
[link for more info]
This show is free but you can donate to the artists here.
UPCOMING SHOWS
January 20th @ Woody’s House
Woody Thomas, Ben Seretan, & Nico Hedley
February 17th @ Sundownstairs
Sweet Joey Vermouth, Slic, & Big Dumb Baby
March 23rd @ Sundownstairs
Youbet, Eliza Niemi, Ray Bull, & Blums
For more info go to JMCAggregate.com.
THE JMC AGGREGATE PODCAST
Episode #15 w/ Alice Does Computer Music
Episode #16 09/23/2022 show diary
Episode #17 11/11/2022 show diary
You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get podcasts. I don’t really care where you listen to it as long as you listen. I can’t promise it is good, but I can promise it is short! Seriously, each episode is like 15 minutes or less. How valuable is your time, really? You think you got better things to do with 15 minutes of your time? I guarantee you, you don’t.
TRACK REVIEWS
Sweet Joey Vermouth - ‘Darla Dean’
This song got stuck in my head the way crushes are supposed to, which is appropriate because Joey wrote it for his girlfriend before she was his girlfriend. He told me they met by DMing each other on TikTok where he is a small-to-medium-sized celebrity for teenagers. Darla and he both have the same breed of dog, so they talked about that, and eventually discovered that their pets came from the same breeder making them sisters. It’s cute.
I pointed out that writing a song like this for someone you aren’t dating yet is risky, and he agreed that it was a big gamble. That’s part of why I love the song! It sounds like - and actually is - the type of thing that happens in the last act of a romantic comedy. There is a meet cute, tense but optimistic conversation, fantasy, a grand gesture, then a happy ending. It’s the type of song you daydream about being in a situation where writing it would be an appropriate thing to do.
This is the part of relationships I find myself the worst at. I do really poorly at the beginning part where you find yourself once again feeling like you have never felt before. At the moment others are overwhelmed with puppy love and imaginations of what their future children will look like I always end up thinking to myself, "Wow this is going great we might be able to get four months out of this."
To me four months with someone is worth hoping for, but it doesn't feel like how the keyboard solo of this song feels. It isn't a chorus. I want to be able to catch myself thinking about the little dances people do when they're sad, but I can't. However, it feels good to root on people who can.
Cindy - 'My Mother'
It is under-discussed how bizarre parenthood is. Your parents grew you like a tomato plant out of ingredients made from their bodies, and they spent months (possibly years) within spitting distance of you twenty-four hours a day. Then you started to have thoughts they were not privy too. They remember when you could not figure out to bend your knees when you walked. They remember when you were still figuring out how to wipe your ass properly. They remember when it was obvious you had started to masturbate. Now they now have to talk to you pretending you are an equal, or else you will get mad! This is ridiculous!
For most of my childhood my mother was sick, but then she got better, and then we stopped getting along. My father also got sick, but he did not get better, and that is when we started getting along. Now, for the first time since adolescence, I am able to enjoy the time I spend with my mother and show her affection. There is a lot we remember differently. Of course, my memories are the ones that are true, but the more time passes the more I can see that the history we share is actually two parallel but separate set of events. At times this is upsetting because I feel she is rewriting my childhood, but even if her version of me as toddler is different than my own, hers is the only one left other than mine, and that is worth something.
“My Mother” is a very focused song that leaves room for ambiguity. A lot of its beauty is in the clear-sighted simplicity in its sound and subject matter. You have a mother; you owe her a lot; and one day she will be gone. The song relies on a playful keyboard flute hook and the sweet performance of lyrics that deftly stands on the line of devoted and obligated.
My mother
How could I just live without my mother
Cause she's the only one who bothers
For always alone with just my mother
Cause she takes care like you're no other
The Cradle - 'Joke's on You'
Ostensibly ‘Joke’s on You’ is about debased humiliation, and not the good kind.
It centers a haughty person down on their luck and calling for help, ignorant that they have been helped this entire time. It is humbling to look around at your conditions and know that all of this shit is actually the best case scenario. Could have been worse if you were poor! Or black. Or whatever. Some people are very fortunate in that they get a few extra lives, and other people go through the world knowing that everything they have done can be rendered futile with one innocuous decision. Imagine someone thinks they are tapping into their first extra life when we all know they’re on the fourth.
It’s infuriating. Haha. Joke’s on them.
Liza Winter - 'Steeping'
Stops go by
I sit on a train
See your eyes
When I close mine
This song is beautiful! It is pretty simple present-tense narrative of a person disassociating on a train in a state of longing. The lyrics are sung over the strumming of an acoustic guitar accompanied with sparse but charming guitar twinkles, and it ends when a memory of the missing partner is interrupted by the realization that they missed their stop on the train. Bada-bing bada-boom, now you're sad.
For a while I was not sure why this song stuck with me the way it did, but I realized recently that it is the title and what it implies. What is the difference between steeping in a feeling and wallowing in it? Nobody steeps tea for the hell of it; it is something you do because you want the tea made by steeping the leaves. Wallowing, however? That's definitely the main course.
ZOOMDWEEBY - "ReWiNd'
ZOOMDWEEBY consistently displays one of my favorite traits a musician can posses by having many audible influences and never sounding like a specific one. It feels new, but also as if it was made by someone roughly my age with roughly the same formative taste. I had the lyrics to this song sent to me, and I still have no clue what this song is about. The imagery is specific, grandiose, and vivid, but it all made the song feeling secretive. Mysterious in the way handsome men in movies are mysterious. Attractive because it is hiding nothing, but still has something inaccessible and faintly out of reach.
'ReWiNd' isn't even my favorite ZOOMDWEEBY song. It's just the one I think is most interesting.
HUSHPUPPY - 'I'm Trying'
Yes, my friends, I too am a sucker for nostalgia, and this song immediately brought me back to 2008. Aggressive but soft. Propulsive and focused but also lilting. It reminded me of Vivian Girls and Times New Viking. It made me feel the way I felt when I stopped seeing that one therapist who said if I could try to make friends on the Internet if I was having troubles with loneliness. A lot of 2022 has been spent trying to avoid discussion of the late-aughts lest I get sucked into vibe-shift discourse, but ‘I’m Trying’ had me missing the music scene that proliferated right before chillwave.
Nostalgia in and of itself is almost never interesting, but the why behind it cane sometimes have merit. HUSHPUPPY really nails the crux of what made lo-fi and shitgaze so compelling. We wanted music that sounded like equal parts having-a-crush and about-to-fight. I still don’t know why.
Banny Grove - 'So Happy, So Good'
In 2022 it feels edgy to have a song emit genuine positivity. We’ve had two years of every press release reading, “This album is a meditation on anxiety and imposter syndrome in the wake of the ongoing COVID pandemic and the ever escalating climate collapse” which makes us forget that pop songs used to be like, “I love ta go dancin with my baby shee boo shee boo.” The scraps of positivity we do have are lyrics as a collection of individually wrapped slogans lab-designed to be re-enacted by 30-year-olds on Instagram Reels.
True to its title, this song is about feeling happy and good. There have been many days where I have held back declaring how much I love life because everyone else is talking about a 15-year-old in Missouri who bulldozed his high school with his classmates still in it or a new bill Republicans introduced requiring McDonald's workers to be chained to the frialator. Saying you are in a good mood feels like you are telling someone to go eat shit and die, and it shouldn't be like that. Nothing is everything. Sometimes I feel like we have empathied ourselves into only feeling misery.
:et's imagine that patience and compassion grow into two legs
And you walk on them
'So Happy, So Good' isn't saccharine. The lyrics are rapped in a Hip-Hop1.0 style where the flow was kind of just talking but doing it cool. Very "Fab Five Freddy told me everybody's fly." It's about the joys of life and the moments where it feels like you are an empty vessel rapidly filling up with all the beauty around you. The song sounds like how Spring smells. The leaves haven't bloomed yet but you can tell they will soon by the scent of the dirt. The air is crisp, but not cold. You can go for a walk for the first time in months. Where I'm from this usually happens around April, but every once in a while you'll get a day like this in February and think about global warming. Not that global warming isn't serious, but fuck that. Enjoy the weather.
I'm strong like the mighty ox
Hitch me up and watch me trot
I'll tell ya there's love and faith to share
There's fresh clean socks and underwear
In the deepest part of the ocean's keep
There's strange and lingering mystery
Our bodies grow old and our muscles get weak
Our hearts and brains learn how to speak
Miya Folick - 'Nothing to See'
I liked the lyrics to this song a lot so I am going to do a line-by-line commentary of the song.
I know you've been talking to girls on the internet
Uh-oh.
She's only nineteen and I can't compete with that
He’s talking to a 19-year-old? My gut says you’re better than this guy, but I guess you can’t help who you’re attracted to. It do be like that sometimes.
I've been trying to change the way
I look so you like what you see
I've been losing weight so I can wear these Dolls Kill jeans
Dolls Kill are a massive apart of this revival of clothing you need to be starved and waxed in order to be comfortable in. Perfect reference for this song.
Why did I do that?
Why did I do that?
Nothing has changed, I'm just sad and in pain
Said I would never be desperate
Look at me (x2)
The things we want have this terrible ability to make us do shit we do not want. We sacrifice so much in order to get this one subject, and then when we don't get it we're left abject.
There's nothing to see here
Thеre's nothing to see
Desire hollows us out.
My mom was relievеd when she heard I was through with you
But my heart still stops when I see a green Subaru
Great rhyme! You? Subuaru? Genius! For real. It’s such a beautiful line. I once loved someone with a green Ford and whenever I saw one I thought that maybe I was seconds away from her stopping in front of me getting out of the car and saying she could not live without me. That, of course, was not going to happen, but the hope never died.
You told me that you loved me but you mispronounced my name
I never corrected you, 'cause I didn't wanna push you away
God damn, girl. You're killing me! Don't take that shit from someone! I get it though.
Why did I do that?
Why did I do that?
Nothing has changed, I'm just sad and in pain
Said I would never be desperate
Look at me (x2)
That was an embarrassing feeling I had. This person was my peer. We were supposed to be equals, but I followed them around like they were my babysitter and I'd be lost without them. I think I kept doubling down on my devotion because it felt like if I let them go I'd be abandoned, but they never wanted me in the first place! Why did I do that!
There's nothing to see here (x5)
There's nothing to see
There's nothing to see here (x2)
This line feels has two meanings. One being that you cannot see them because they have erased themselves through pursuit. The other being more like, "Nothing to see here move along please don't look at me." Wanting things is humiliating, truly. Gotta love it.
Why did I do that?
Why did I do that?
Nothing has changed, I'm just sad and in pain
Said I would never be desperate
Look at me
Why did I do that?
Why did I do that?
Now I'm wearing black 'cause you like me like that
Said I would never be desperate
Look at me
There's nothing to see here
There's nothing to see here
There's nothing to see
Pretty Sick - 'Self Fulfilling Prophecy'
As a person I am more or less exactly who I wanted to be when I was growing up, and I feel totally trapped in my own life. It is a real testament to the fact that whether you get the things you want or are denied them, what you long for will haunt you one way or another.
This song is beautiful and rocks. Also, the music video is fantastic. Very rare you see a good music video that feels as if it is doing something new these days.
Eliza Niemi - 'Sushi California'
Eliza Niemi fits lyrics into her melodies like someone who can win a game of Tetris. On paper these lines would be obtuse shapes, but she puzzles them together as if her each word she sings could only be followed by the next. ‘Sushi California’ mirrors this in a way, as it depicts a relationship that is clearly ending, but the good parts feel exactly like how they should and the bad parts feel bad in a way that locks into all of the narrator's complexes. It’s the kind of relationship that should have obviously ended yesterday, but also would do a great job of fucking up a kid sometime in the future.
The opening line of this song addresses her partner’s premature grief for their aging parent. A friend of mine suffers from this problem. The last few years has been marked by her anxiety over her elderly father, which is ironic because that’s a long time to mourn someone who hasn’t died yet. That’s irrelevant though, because these worries are more about the preparation than the event. Oh, you love this person? Well guess what, bitch.
There have been many times where I have thought to myself, "I wonder if this is the last time we will ever ever ever be together in this stupid restaurant we love?" That thought can occur so many times, and it is excruciating. Give me what I want or take it away, but for the love of God pick one soon. It would be easy though if it were just agonizing. Sadly, there are moments where you look at someone and everything feels perfect. In this way loving someone is a lot like gambling, because the thing that's bad about gambling isn't that you lose most of the time but that hit the jackpot some of the time. That's why people do it. It's terrible.
Eliza Niemi - 'Trust Me'
You can’t trust anyone with everything
But you can trust almost anyone with almost anything
‘Trust Me’ is a refreshingly optimistic song about what you can expect from others. Shocking news for our times, but apparently most people are fine! Granted, in some situations they will hurt you, but in most other situations they will be absolutely fine. Yeah sure, they might leave you in a puddle of emotional filth, but in exchange they will water your plants without killing them and make you laugh when happiness feels impossible and lend you $50 without being weird about it. People will leave, but you will be OK.
Eliza Niemi - 'Staying Mellow Blows'
This is a travel song. Eliza needed to get out town, so she traveled from Toronto to California and back, and over the course of this summer on the road she weaves in and out of what seems like a relationship or what seems like what might as well be a relationship to one if not both of the people involved. The narrative is opaque and full of references to things only the people there that summer could identify, and in so much is incredibly vivid. It is the mythology we all have for our lives, with our own little Iliads and Canterbury Tales. It is the same type of thing as me remembering that the day I first fell in love was October 28th, 2006.
I don’t travel. I was born in New York. I’ve lived in New York my whole life. I don’t go to places that aren’t New York, with the exceptions of Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania. When people express their desire to go to other places it confuses me. Like, “You want to go somewhere other than New York? Okay, random!”
From what I can gather the impulse to travel comes from the same place as my impulse to stay put. Being local is comforting to me because I can plan my life around it. I know at X I’m going to be doing Y and in 5 days I'll be in Z. The rigidly linear nature of tour seems to force this way of living on people. I’m going to sleep here and I’ll poop there. We think we are managing our time and our space, but what we are doing in truth is trying to manage ourselves. You can create a box to store your life in, or you can set yourself free, but either way it is only a story you tell yourself.
At the end of the song Eliza plays a homecoming show, and even though she instructed this man not to talk to her she spent the night looking to see him in the crowd. She doesn’t say if she found him, and I don’t think it matters.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Fanclub
Fanclub is a semi-regular recommendation series where I talk to Normal People about the Things They Like.
Click the links for the full articles.
vol. 2: Ahmad Zaghal (he/him) - Germantown, MD
I know Ahmad from Twitter.
vol. 5 Ryan Sheeham (he/him) - New Paltz, NY
I know Ryan because he is dating my niece.
Webring vol. 1: Rich Leichtung of AdHoc
Webring is a semi-regular series with different people who operate independent media.
This month I am talking to Ric Leichtung of AdHoc, an events promoter and zine based out of Brooklyn. Ric is an old friend of mine and we met when I impersonated them on Facebook while living at Market Hotel.
JMC: What defines AdHoc in terms of the people who work on it?
RL: I get questions like this a lot, and it never gets easier to answer. I think it’s just hard to articulate over text, and defining something ends up putting it in a box, which is the last thing I want to do with AdHoc and the work we do.
JMC: How do you describe what you do?
RL: We initially chose to express ourselves as a publication focusing on artists that weren’t getting the attention they deserved. We felt it was important to intellectualize music with longform music journalism because the things we were interested in were getting overlooked, not taken seriously. Over time we realized that writing about folks shouldn’t be the moment we stop helping, which gave way to promoting events and contributing to the local and touring creative economies.
JMC: Do you think the idea of daily music writing and album reviews is out of date?
RL: I think there’s been a TikTokification of media that has changed the way people consume things. People have unprecedented access to content, and it makes sense that there’s a move away from longform journalism. I think more good is done by embracing the way things change than fight against them. Ten to fifteen years ago it was really about the popularization of Spotify, but it has proven itself to be an inferior platform for discovery. I’d still like to think music crit is alive, it just comes in bite-sized video form.
JMC: How do you find new things you are interested in?
RL: TikTok. JMC: When you say you find TikTok to find things you like, what does that look like? Do you use TikTok in a specific way, or do you find these things through scrolling? RL: I put effort into training my algorithm to show me more things I might be interested in. I use it as a search engine for anything I’m interested in.
JMC: Whose a good music crit follow? I have been having a hard time finding a good one on TikTok.
RL: I was thinking usage of crit would come back to bite me... I suppose I meant music discovery, because I care more about that than what someone who asserts themselves as qualified to wax intellectual about whether or not something is good. But for discovery I have a lot of overlap with Derrick Gee. There also aren’t specific resources I rely on either; it’s really just a nebulous algorithm. I’m really looking for people who are like, “Wow I discovered this thing and let me tell you all about why I think it interests me”.
JMC: Do you think there is a reason people dislike TikTok beyond “things are changing in a way I'm not prepared for?”
RL: I think it’s because they don’t understand how the platform has evolved. Many think it’s still all about karaoke and dances when there’s so much more. That and they haven’t trained their algorithm, which really shows they haven’t given the platform a chance.
JMC: Before you said you think people spend too much time fighting change. If someone asked you to make some form of independent media from scratch in 2023 how would you do it? Like what, should 22-years-olds who move to NY and have big ideas about “magazines” get started.
RL: Well I think part of the tough thing to accept is that the written word isn’t the accessible preferred medium for consumption; it’s video. Articles, features, etc, will spread quicker if they’re translated into a TikTok or YouTube format, which his a tough for some folks to swallow. To me if feels like the biggest generational difference between Millennials and Zoomers is being comfortable on camera and accepting their own digital footprint. There is something shitty about forcing yourself to put yourself on the internet to be heard. I definitely empathize with folks who don’t want to do that. Not too different from artists who excuse themselves from participating in Spotify or streaming services!
I guess it comes down to what these 22-year-olds are really trying to do. If it’s to put a spotlight on things they care about that need attention then using mediums that cater to that will be the way. A major issue with leaning into a TikTok though is that the folks who own the content aren’t truly in control of it. This is why so many people are fascinated by the idea of decentralized Internet and Web3. There’s no perfect way to do things, to be honest. There’s barely even a good way.
JMC: To be clear though, while there is no perfect way you are to a degree acknowledging that things are getting worst, correct?
RL: Mmm, worse how?
JMC: Well, you said that the way things are changing does alienate a lot of people who would much rather have their ideas speak for themselves.
RL: I don’t think that the format hurts the ideas. I think it makes them more accessible. It’s easier to get kids to learn something with an educational video than making them read a dry text book. I can see how some intellectual nuance is traded off, but I think there’s tremendous perks to spreading your message via social platforms rather than a website, and the big one is discourse. Continuing to focus on TikTok for the sake of doing so: you have comments in videos, users have the ability to stitch videos to react to them, people can duet them and comment on things in real time. That’s amazing!
JMC: I guess what I’m confused by is if you think it is better or worse? Obviously it isn’t a unipolar situation where all things or more good or more bad.
RL: I try not to think of it as better or worse, just different. But if I’m forcing myself to pick, I’d say it’s better because ideas and information spread more easily than text would. This is why the one of the toughest current issues we have is fighting misinformation.
JMC: What have you been reading and listening to lately?
RL: DeForrest Brown Jr. is one of my favorite music journalists to read, so I picked up his latest book "Assembling A Black Counter Culture" which looks at the history of techno from a sociopolitical lens. Nabil Ayers' autobiography "My Life in the Sunshine" is also on my list.
Asa-Chang & Junray's "Hana" was a big deal for me when I was 15, and it recently got a 20th anniversary remix record that I haven't been able to put down. Asa-Chang is an amazing percussionist and on the song plays tabla, which is an extremely difficult instrument to master. He inspired me to explore tabla virtuosos like Anindo Chatterjee, Zakir Hussain, and Yogesh Samsi. The variety of sounds these guys are able to get out of a pair of hand drums is incredible.
JMC: Who is someone's whose taste you trust a lot?
RL: I trust Emilie Friedlander's perspective on the state of media, I read her Substack and listen to her podcast The Culture Journalist every week. I trust The Read on all things pop culture, which is a podcast I listen to religiously that also has a Patreon and Discord community. Max Alper (@la_meme_young) has a really unique ear and is excellent at finding TikTok with really unique, sonically interesting things happening in them.