I dated someone who was super into sandii which is how I found out about her like 15 years ago. She's a bit if a japanese suzanne vega in some ways, kinda sorta!?
@“exodus”#p71909
yyyyeah i could see that! she's around for a grip doing, like, kayokyoku until hosono et al break her bigger than she was and then the sunsets become her backing band. in general it's a little messy to try and follow holistically in my exp but she's never really missed for me. immigrants and that warning album were far and wide my biggest and most listened to finds of 2021
i'm totally behind on this thread, but nevermind that, check out what just popped up on my youtube:
https://youtu.be/7BgQEyKeQmE
[size=25]_!!!_[/size]
I've had a little freakout whether to post in the “noone” or “some people” thread, and I pray for a peaceful unity someday. I mean, nothing is known by noone! But this is definitely in the “some people” bracket, especially here: Music and Poetry of The Kesh, by that Ursula K Le Guin, and new age synth legend Todd Barton.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp5CTVJCrUE
What is it? Nowadays we'd call it a _transmedia extension of the Le Guin cinematic universe_, or something awful like that. It's a side project, from a novel. Well, a sort-of novel. _Always Coming Home_ is one of UKLG's strangest works: a dense fictional history of a Californian tribe who will be going to have lived in the future: the Kesh. It collects their myths, anecdotes, customs, recipes - and their music and poetry. But you can't hear a book, so Le Guin worked with Barton to create an album. It doesn't sound like a studio album, though - like the book, it sounds like field recording: songs are sung, crickets chirp in the background. An old woman mutters her dreams in an unknown language (apparently this is the voice of Le Guin herself). Banter descends into laughter, and a choir begins a deep devotional note, calling to a spirit we don't yet know.
I love this album, and I love the _fact that it exists._
https://ursulakleguintoddbarton.bandcamp.com/album/music-and-poetry-of-the-kesh
I was lucky enough to get the LP for my birthday, and the sleeve is full of obscura - diagrams and doodles and liner notes describing how each song was "found". The world needs more stuff like this. The world needs more people like these.
I've been listening to my ancient Live 105 radio broadcasts and thinking about how music probably helped me along the path to being a slightly better person. I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, where almost all visual media and news was telling me in no uncertain terms that being gay was terrible, a joke, shameful, or dangerous. Those were basically the options presented. My mom was left wing and believed in equality and things as much as was possible for her at the time (she had a friend who was a lesbian! she came over to the house!), AND I was growing up in the bay area, so there quite simply were gay people around whether I knew it or not. but even with that stuff in place, eeeeverything else around me was aggressively against homosexuality, peers made jokes about it, movies made whole subplots about it, etc etc.
But I was listening to this radio station that would play Dead or Alive, where you've got them saying "I'm not like the other boys!" which I could've interpreted as a hetero statement but I knew there was something different about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybbxAPSpLmo
Then they'd play Erasure's Drama right after that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEPQno_8Xs8
Then maybe some pet shop boys, etc, and then there'd be depeche mode which had this fluid bent with songs like master and servant. And I think whether I knew it or not, all this stuff helped me, once I was of more critical thinking age, to be like yeah, of course people can do what they feel and of course gender is fluid and amorphous and may not match your "presentation" etc. (I think all that stuff I mentioned like my mom, being in the bay area, helped me get to that critical thinking age sooner on subjects like this.)
I kind of wonder if that's not what the smarter conservatives are worried about - not that seeing a gay person in media will "make you gay," but that it'll make people understand each other and not hate each other by default, which their whole deal relies on. I think it conversely also gave me the incorrect impression that everyone was like me, and all musicians are left wing, which I eventually discovered was not true after listening to metal for a bunch of years (oops).
Anyway - music's cool! that's what I think
@“Salloumi”#p79487 I didn't know about the LP! One of my favorite books and my copy has the cassette tape
@“exodus”#p79956
I often think of this with regard to the way I grew up in front of my TV. My parents are and were religious zealots but I also just had a lot of time to myself to do whatever I wanted.
Thus and so, it was probably Pokemon's Team Rocket that began to blur the gender binary for me (also Dragonball Z: is Freiza a man or a woman and does that even matter?). Then the beautiful boys that populate the Final Fantasy series began to blur the boundaries of sexuality.
For most of my life I've thought of TV and videogames as sort of artistic gutters that I roll around in from time to time, whereas real Art was in music, movies, and books. Weirdly, I think it was talking to my toddler about videogame cover art that made me realize how impactful and formative some of these things have been to me.
@“yeso”#p79958 In many ways you have the definitive format
i haven't thought about jesca hoop in years when all of a sudden this song rushes back to me.
https://youtu.be/Y4AOr8eCjoI
This song rocks. I have no greater insights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiSTcdi82S0
i've really been feeling this song lately
https://youtu.be/rAUpD4FchZI
Woman has had a really strong output since that self-titled release but the way this song has lived in my consciousness for this whole month. Album is something
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_aT9pAGQo8
The new unit from the management company of BTS has convinced me that they really ran the numbers on the engaging audience with this new EP because they covered the youngest age able to attend concerts on their own representing that range with relatable concept of their videos and members ages- then make strong reach sonically for the millennials that have been Kpop listeners since they were around that same age that grew up with the 90s to early 2000s R&B girl groups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js1CtxSY38I
Me and my mom kept talking about how this has the feel of the radio version of SWV's "Right here"
with the MJ sample.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHwXoY0LiQk
The New Jeans EP feels so deliberately tailored to the taste of 90s retro trend and the maximum effectiveness is met because it honestly just sounds like catchy stuff from the era with higher audio fidelity. I'm also firmly in the latter half of that target demographic which grates me a little. I direly want to not like it >:O
Anyone listen to Low? If so, what are your favorite songs? I came across them by accident a few days ago. I‘m really into “White Horses” but I’m struggling to get into their other stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sebDnwlEnPs
@“bwood”#p82965 I'm personally partial to everything off “The Great Destroyer”, but I 100% get that they can be hard to access.
@“exodus”#p79956 it‘s funny how fluid bentness can seem to people both a thing to love and a thing to fear! And how the sublimity of it means you can love it before you’re taught to fear it - if you're lucky.
For me the big case study in the UK is **George Michael**. Possibly in the rest of the world too? I'm not sure. In the UK, we had this weird tradition of loving gay-presenting entertainers, on the condition that they never actually said they were gay. It was this weird cat-and-mouse game of innuendo: Kenneth Williams, Larry Grayson, Frankie Howerd (note, all men). Possibly because homosexuality was only (partially) legalised in 1967.
They were always out, but never out. In contrast George Michael has a timeline with an _in_ phase and an _out_ phase, the pivot point being **Outside**, essentially his diss track / coming out party / response to being caught in a toilet in LA (performing a 'lewd act' on a police officer). It is such a glorious F you to the media, and the public loved it, and I love it. I remember, and deeply regret, the cruel jokes that went round the playground. But with Outside he had the last laugh:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwZAYdHcDtU
_"I'd service the community, but I already have, you see."_
Also, police dancers, in a toilet.
But before that, was the in period _really_ in? Not if you know the subtext.
**Fastlove Pt.1:** cruising. _"I do believe that we are practising the same religion."_
**Spinning The Wheel:** trying to reconcile desire with the fear of AIDS. _"I will not live in fear of what may be."_
There must be so many more examples in hindsight, such fantastic code not just for gay desire but any desire, lust, a celebration of the self. And he did some of that most potent stuff while under scrutiny. I was too young at the time so I don't really know how it all went over: was it like Williams et al; everyone knew it but nobody would say it? Or was everyone in denial? After all, from Wham! to _Faith_ he'd been built as a universal sex symbol.
And did he reach the people who he was _really_ speaking too? I have a feeling he did. I miss George Michael.
@“bwood”#p82965 I‘m a big fan of their song “Drag.” It’s definitely a downer, but one of the best downers ever.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UNMJQUc4ZAo
Rediscovered Life of Agony‘s Ugly after randomly mentioning it in passing to a friend. It seems like people mostly remember them for their more metal debut River Runs Red, but this is the one that really clicked with me back then. I tried out some of their more recent stuff and it just wasn’t doing it for me, a shame.
Obligatory (pretty friggin' solid!) cover to suck you in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4429AFjAFE
Some random selections and, yeah, both of these songs are about the singer's mother.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsfX4wsDfOk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddbThTyGJwQ
And for a bonus,[ a song not about their mother](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFrcPiUS1q0&list=PL854ATB9a_24Ai0BUxgJ8VN6BUN-_9hJG&index=4) (I think!) that's a little heavier.