CHAPPELL ROAN “Good Luck, Babe!” b/w “Read & Makeout (Demo)” (Island / Amusement, 2024)

    This is one of those songs that snuck into my life and took it over completely for days on end. In my personal canon, it belongs up there with “Heartbeats” by The KNIFE and “Call Me Maybe” by CARLY RAE JEPSEN as far as songs that I have obsessively consumed. A blog I won’t cite once referred to the latter song by claiming “there are zero songs that are catchy and also bad.” That’s the idea here. If you can make a song that sticks in someone’s head, it’s good. It doesn’t matter if they like it. If it’s in their head, it’s a hit. Living rent free and all that.

    Fortunately for me, this song’s catchiness and greatness are mutually reinforcing. I can’t remember exactly where I was when I first heard it, but I was probably at the gym. I don’t listen to music when I exercise, so I’m at the mercy of whatever playlist the current staffer has chosen. Over the summer, I kept hearing this one song that seemed to blend into the rest until it got to the very end and became really slowed down. I liked that part a lot. I still do. I’d hear it again a few days later and think Is this the song that’s slow at the end? I was always glad when it was. After a few listens I finally Shazam’d it and realized this was the CHAPPELL ROAN I’d heard about. Late in the summer, I added the song to the monstrously undifferentiated playlist on Apple Music I’ve called “AAA Pop,” mostly for alphabetical organization reasons. Whenever it comes on, I have to listen to it at least twice. If I can’t think of another song to listen to when I’m getting in the car to run errands, I’ll listen to it (at least twice). I eventually looked up the lyrics and liked the song even more. I’d caught the “you’re nothing more than his wife” and puzzled over it before realizing she’s chiding a woman for breaking up with her and falling for a man that she’ll eventually marry. Then she says to her, “I hate to say, but I told you so” and rubs it all the way the fuck in. Loving that for her ex-lover.

    Apple Music tells me I’ve listened to this song more than any other in September, October, November, and, now, December. That only counts the times I chose to listen to it via that app, of course. The listens at the gym or on the radio or anywhere else don’t count toward the total but do still imprint it onto my consciousness. There’s also the delightful MTV VMA performance that pulls from entirely (for me) unexpected sources. Setting a castle on fire with a crossbow and dancing around with sword-wielding knights while wearing chain mail and plate armor is literally heroic. I can now add to my list just a few listens of the actual record. In the fickle world of music streaming services, where no one really owns anything, I’m grateful to have my grubby mitts on a copy of “Good Luck, Babe!” b/w “Read & Makeout (Demo)” because it’s all mine. It also sounds really good for a modern vinyl release on a major label and I’m glad it wasn’t pressed by GZ Media. I would have been happy with it being a one-sided record, but throwing a vinyl-exclusive demo track on the b-side makes this an even sweeter purchase. The song itself shows her range as a performer and indicates what might be a more contemplative direction than some of the songs on her first album revealed. I’m here for it, either way. “I just wanna read and make out” is as good a New Year’s Resolution as anything else you might consider tonight.

    That a-side, though. Stunner. Jill Mapes of Hearing Things argued it was “a fever-dream of a hit made possible by the ‘Running Up That Hill’ frenzy of 2022, with an addictive chorus in an octave hardly anyone can reach, that could have been released anytime in the last four decades if it weren’t for its blatant sapphic longing.” That comment covers the sonics and their timelessness about as well as anyone could. The one part I’ll add is that the indelible line “you’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling” reminds me of a line from DANZIG’s “Soul on Fire,” in which he tells his lover he’s gonna “make you shake till the world aligns,” a line that I took to mean that he’s going to fuck someone so hard Earth will no longer be tilted 23.5° off its axis. In the same way, CHAPPELL ROAN is telling her ex-woman that alcohol won’t numb the feelings she still harbors for her. The world would have to stop spinning, regardless of its rotational orientation, before her ex’s pangs of regret will subside. She’s telling this woman she’ll have to wait until the heat death of the universe before her passionate longings cease, and then, to cap it off, tells her “good luck, babe!” It’s a reflection of the supreme confidence CHAPPELL ROAN feels about inhabiting her body, her lived experience, her relationship status. That we could all be so bold…

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Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs (Benjamin Herold, Penguin Press, 2024)

    This book caught my eye because one of the five families profiled was from “Chicago’s North Shore.” I was dying to know whether I would be familiar with the suburb in question. I was. I grew up just north of Evanston in Wilmette. So that was enough of a hook to pull me into the book. The other locales are suburban Atlanta, a series of Dallas exurbs, Compton, and Penn Hills, which is just outside of Pittsburgh and is the author’s hometown. So, Benjamin Herold, too, has the personal connection motivating his interest in this topic, and it’s one that his interview participant forces him to reckon with toward the end of the publication process.

    As with other books I’ve read this year, I have that selfish entry point that draws me in but the writer then takes my hand and pulls me further into the pages. The way Herold does it is by weaving together stories from these five families in big and small sections that serve to emphasize the same story of America’s suburbs as told from different perspectives. The first section introduces us to each family, their members, goals, and history, while hinting of directions to come. For the Becker family (with one exception, all names except public figures are pseudonymous, of course), it’s clear that their inexorable march further and further away from Dallas’ inner ring suburbs is motivated by a fear of Black and Latinx families. They never come out and say that but the idea screams off the page in how they corral their children’s teachers for extra help at school, for instance. When they are not able to do that because the same teachers are working with students who have newly moved to the suburb and also need support, the family sets their sights further north into smaller towns with newer construction and smaller schools. That same idea of opportunity hoarding is present in a within-suburb, not between-suburb, context in the Adesina family’s story in Evanston, a town that is segregated just like the city immediately to its south. Truly, the idea of white flight is one of the common threads tying together all the stories, but it plays out differently with each family.

    Where this book contributes to an understanding of white flight beyond opportunity hoarding is what happens to the suburbs after the families who flew have flown. What that means can vary from crumbling infrastructure (as in the sewer system in Penn Hills) to understaffed and underpopulated schools (as in Compton). This is just another version of opportunity hoarding, though. Herold says as much in the preface, arguing “the diversification of suburbia did not lead to a universal American dream, untethered from whiteness and extended equality to all” (p. 7). In other words, Black and Latinx families seeking the safety and security of the suburbs that white people have enjoyed for years are in for a rude awakening if they think they’ll have the same experience. The suburbs are no promised land; there’s nothing magical about their ZIP codes. This is likely most evident in the Hernandez family’s experience in Compton, a suburb of Los Angeles that has not had the stereotypical white wealthy demographic of an American suburb for decades. Although the family’s father has been mostly happy with how his son’s elementary school recognized and rewarded his child’s inquisitiveness and proficiency, he still has doubts about whether to stay in Compton or return to Mexico for a better opportunity.

    The bitter irony of the changing demographics of the suburbs is that for some Black Americans, the suburbs had been a place where they were trying to escape whiteness itself for generations. As Herold explains in the introductory section on the Robinson family (in Gwinnett County, Georgia), “one in six Black people fleeing the Jim Crow South settled on the edge of a city… but by the start of World War II, 20 percent of Black Americans were already suburbanites, largely united in their hope of finally being left alone” (p. 73). It seems difficult to find evidence of this first suburban element in the suburbs today. In fact, the Robinson family later grapples with the legacy of segregation as they move further from Atlanta. The issue of school desegregation had reached the Supreme Court in 1992 and the majority opinion was that it was essentially fine that DeKalb County’s schools had resegregated after the Civil Rights era because hey, the schools tried. So much for Black families hoping to escape the clutches of whiteness.

    It’s not just the courts that have helped to keep some suburbs mostly white either. In telling the Adesina family’s story in Evanston, Herold introduces one of the members of the local PTA. Lauren Adesina, the Ecuadorian single mother who is the focus of this section’s story, meets a white parent who reflects on how the “PTA functioned as a kind of sorority for white stay-at-home moms.” Lauren herself is not interested in joining the PTA because “It seems like Mean Girls for adults” (p. 159). Both of these statements are true and point toward how white women are responsible for the caretaking and maintenance of whiteness in the suburbs. Plenty of other moments in the text reflect this control, from most of the Becker family’s experiences outside of Dallas, as well as the liberal (but not progressive) members of Evanston’s District 65 who attempt to take over the school board when they think the Black superintendent went too far in supporting racial equity work during the initial months of the pandemic.

    Herold himself doesn’t escape criticism, either. Toward the end of the second part of the book, he relates how Bethany Smith, the woman who lived down the street from his childhood home, called him out on the project of this book. Due to the nature and outcome of this interaction, Herold uses her actual name. Her response to Herold’s intrusion into her life is cutting: “I enjoy talking to you, and I’m all for what you’re doing. But there has been a long history of white people telling Black people’s stories and profiting off of it. That right there is what I’m having an issue with” (p. 306). He takes the criticism in stride and they work through the complications of how her life fits into his project. As a result, she pens the epilogue to the book, which functions as both a sign-off to the text itself and a chance for her to provide a different perspective on the story Herold has been telling about her. It reminds me of the work I’ve done with assent and consent when conducting research with human participants. As one of my professors put it, “We make research out of people’s problems.” That’s no argument against doing research, but it does mean academics and journalists should take care to consider their positionality when doing the work. Herold’s text provides an entry point into considering that idea even as it tells a larger story about what is happening throughout suburban America.

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FUCKED UP Someday (Fucked Up, 2024)

    This is the third full-length from FUCKED UP this year. Even vocalist Damian seems struck by this development. At least, that’s the feeling I get from listening to his introductions on his podcast, Turned Out a Punk, when he’s sharing recent band updates. Tellingly, he also says they have one show in December in Toronto and then only one for the first few months of 2025. They’re not a band that tours relentlessly (anymore) but the tone of his voice as he shares that development signals a bit of weariness with matters relating to the band.

    Maybe I’m just reading too much into things. Damian has also alluded to the fact that he’s not as involved in the songwriting or lyric writing with the band as he was even 10 years ago. Or, that’s what I glean from Vish Khanna’s Kreative Kontrol podcast episodes where Mike has been a featured guest. Whatever the case, this is as prolific as the band has ever been in terms of songs and releases in a given year. There was also a digital-only single, a cover song on a comp, and three one-day-only digital live album releases from this year’s summer tour. Like I said, it’s a lot.

    That said, this process seems to be fruitful for them in the sense that it reflects the ways that bands need to be a little creative and out-of-the-box in order to continue making a living playing music. I’m speaking here of their practice (five times this year now) of making an album available on Bandcamp for only 24 hours. For most bands, that process probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. Surprise dropping albums is one thing; making them ephemeral is another. But that speaks to the touch-and-go (not only in the record label sense!) nature of the sounds that brought the band together. Strike while the iron’s hot because that fire is not going to last.

    This record, of course, is the third in the day cycle, following 2023’s "One Day" and the August 2024 release of "Another Day." At that point, I figured that was it for the cycle. The overriding question of “what could you do with just one day?” expressed with a pre-COVID album and then that same process later on in 2022. So, two variations on the same theme. In my review of “Who’s Got the Time and A Half?,” I figured that was the logical extent of the project. Now, it seems there are at least four parts to it and this is the third. That also means “Who’s Got the Time and a Half?” isn’t part of the same cycle, even if it’s made from similar ingredients. Someday, it’ll all make sense.

    A discerning listener can infer that the fourth album will be entitled "Today" given this lyric from “I Took My Mom to Sleep,” the fourth song on this album. It goes, “One day, you’ll understand, my keepsake / another day, comes after the heartbreak / someday, we’ll be free together / but today, you are my seed in a feather.” I was thinking it would be everyday but what do I know? There’s still time for it to be released this year, too. They marked December’s Bandcamp Friday with the release of “Someday (guitar),” which, as the title indicates, is the base guitar tracks for the album itself—nothing else. It raises the question of whether they’ll eventually go full Trent Reznor and release all of the base tracks from their recordings for their fans to use for remixing purposes. That seems unlikely given that most NIN fans are already interested in the idea of computer software based remixes, while the guitar-centric punk fans in FUCKED UP’s ant army are unlikely to obsess over the elements of the recordings in the same way.

    As for the album itself, the descriptor on Bandcamp calls it psychedelic punk and that’s not too far off the mark. There are repeating cycles of riffs that seem almost hypnotic when listened to on the guitar-only version of the album. It’s fuzzy, buzzy, and busy. The harshness of Damian’s lead vocals take a back seat, as he appears on only two of the songs as the main vocalist. Mike, and other singers with less blood and bile in their throats, makes up the remainder. When Damian shares the mic with Max Williams of RIFLE on “Man without Qualities,” the relentless obnoxiousness of the chorus grates with repeated listens. I was hoping this would be an autobiographical song about Josh Zucker, Mike’s guitar complement, as he has used this pseudonym as a credit previously. Sadly, that does not seem to be the case. Had it been so, it would have fit in with the album’s exploration of personalities and perspectives that are different from those of the band members who usually write the lyrics (i.e., Mike and Damian).

    In that respect, just as “Glass Boys” was mostly about trying to make sense of your life in the punk scene as you grow older within it, “Someday” seems to concern how everyone outside of white punks find their way through a society that has made the idea of kinship and families necessarily fragile and tenuous because of fraying social ties. It’s not about the war atrocities or the heartlessness of those in power but the embodied effects of living through those policies. The lyrics to “In the Company of Sisters” speak to that directly: The same hands you used to hold me / are the ones they use to control me / they want to criminalize our lives / I’m gonna set your world on fire. A song supporting reproductive rights would not have sounded as good from this band had they tried it 15 years ago. That’s not because anything in their politics has changed—their sound is more expansive now and can more easily accommodate a topic like this one. I was also surprised at how hard “Feed Me Your Feathers” would hit me when I read the actual lyrics. “I held my daughter in my arms / so she’d be there for someone else” is a line I couldn’t imagine from this band before now. 

    That ability to inhabit other perspectives and make them believable is a recurring theme on the album. There’s the frightened and alienated shut-in of “City Boy” alongside the refugee child of “Grains of Paradise,” the concerned mother of “Feed Me Your Feathers,” and two sides of the same coin in “Man without Qualities” and “The Court of Miracles.” In that first track, the lyrics describe a latchkey kid in a family that has guns to protect itself against imagined government intrusion. Things go wrong in the last line of the song when the kid left alone fires a shot that “finds a home in another child.” On the next song, the perspective shifts to a bike messenger immigrant to the United States, who knows it’s a place where “everybody can be somebody, but if your skin is dark, be careful who you are.” At the end of this song, the protagonist hears a gunshot near a regular delivery spot. When he cries for help, a resident replies “he’ll call the cops if I don’t get off their property.” There may still be other connections between the characters in these songs but this one stood out as readily apparent and emblematic of the album's idea that we are all connected in ways that might not always seem clear.

    The title track is still throwing me for a loop. For one, there’s what sounds like a mistimed cut-and-paste hiccup at the 1:12 mark. Then, there’s the fact that the song itself is about a baby who is also a grown man making his way through the world. Only the chorus brings me back to reality: someday it’ll all make sense / someday, it’ll all make sense / I’ll find a place where I belong / and stay there until it’s time to come home. The video doesn’t help matters and its use of swapping of the band members’ faces onto babies is also confusing and off-putting. It’s a lot to take in, even as it seems quite simple on its surface. I hope that someday it will make sense. For now, I’m glad to have this record in my life. As the chasing arrows in the o of the album title indicate, it’s easy to let someday become never as time marches on. It’s up to us to make sense of the world we’re given, as confusing, contradictory, and frightening as it may be.

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High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (Marc Masters, University of North Carolina Press, 2023)

    The title of this book is so perfect that I’m shocked it hasn’t been done before. The explanation of it works well, too. As Masters writes, “In the technical lingo of cassette, ‘high bias’ means high quality. The higher the bias, the better the sound. The story of the cassette tape has bias, too. Every person who encounters a tape adds something to that story, whether by listening to it, recording over it, or passing it on” (p. 4). So, right from the jump, you know you’re taking a trip through the world of the varied uses of compact cassette tapes all around the world. It’s not just limited to a celebration of the aesthetics of heartfelt, hand-written j-cards on deeply personal mixtapes exchanged between friends and lovers. As far as historical treatments of musical formats, it’s much more accessible than Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format.

    That said, the third chapter, which is about the long history of international musicians and labels who use tapes as sonic art, is a mess of names, locations, labels, and bands that is hard to follow. It’s like a verbal version of the disorientation of a tape that is decaying and falling apart in your cassette deck. I had trouble making any sense of it really. It seems so purposely disorienting, but that seems like the point—using a cassette to make music is going to result in a lot of time-consuming confusion. So maybe the chapter does work…

    When Masters slows down a bit to reflect on the implications of the cassette tape as a means of sharing music, his insights truly shine. As he explains, “Cassettes can offer a way to avoid corporate streaming services, whose offer of listener freedom is a bit of a mirage, considering the algorithms that push them toward specific artists, gather their personal data, and subject them to advertisements. Cassettes can also provide a more intimate way to share music with others. Giving someone a handmade mixtape is surely more personal than sharing a playlist, whose creation is more akin to data entry and which is usually accessible only through paying for subscriptions or enduring ads” (p. 156). Shortly thereafter, Dave Doyen from the Tabs Out podcast quips “It’s hard to make a CD-R not remind you of Staples or OfficeMax” (p. 165). It’s also hard to argue with their positions. I took the time to listen to a few tapes friends had made me over the years while I was reading the book, and I was surprised at how strongly the music was able to bring me back to where I was when I first heard it. The same goes for the tape I made for myself that has 16 different versions of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” on a 60-minute tape—yeesh. I really don’t have the same emotional imprint with playlists or links friends have shared with me, so it only makes sense that having a unique physical artifact that contains the music will be more powerful than a list of letters and numbers in a URL.

    Now, forget everything I wrote in the preceding paragraph and follow these links to access a rip of a cassette I made in 2004 that is nothing but metal riffs (almost no vocals at all) ripped straight from my records, CDs, and tapes. (Side A and Side B) I confess that I used a MiniDisc (where’s the book on that device?) to capture and sequence the riffs, but the way I shared it with my friends was through repeated dubbing of tapes in my bedroom. Early in the lockdowns of 2020, one of the dudes from Negative Insight zine created a Web site dedicated to reminiscences about and postings of old mix tapes and I was lucky enough to be written up on his insta and the site itself. Both are now gone, but, luckily for you, the SoundCloud still exists.

    Friends who received that tape tried to make their own with using cassettes, but they couldn’t get the instantaneous transitions to work. You’d think pressing pause on a cassette would work just fine, but it wasn’t close enough as the digital precision of the MiniDisc format. Listening back to it now, on the MZ-R55 itself, I recall the split-second reflexes it took to stop and start the recordings at just the right moment, and then the further splicing of the captured sounds, all on a display about the size of a postage stamp. Obsessed barely begins to describe that level of intensity. I can’t imagine conjuring it now.

    While I was going through my MiniDiscs this weekend, I was delighted to find that I’d made an attempt at another riff tape. I made about 30 minutes of recordings but had not sequenced them yet. That sequencing is also a crucial part of the process of making the riff tape. Had I used only cassettes, I would have had to switch each album, tape, or disc at just the right moment. Instead, using a MiniDisc allowed me to be listening to an album, think “man, I’ve always loved that riff,” and then run it back and record it for later. I eventually made pages of notes on the sequence I wanted the riffs to take for the final tape. Then began the laborious process of editing the order of the riffs so that it flowed the way I wanted. There are intro parts, main riffs, transitions, bridges, secondary riffs, drum fills, breakdowns, solos, outros, and everything else that goes into a song. All told there are close to 100 different riffs on each side of the tape. The longest is the “Hell Awaits” intro, which is over two minutes. The shortest are from songs I can no longer place and only last for a second or two at most. I no longer own many of these records, having sold about half of my record collection when moving states about eight years ago. I know I could just Shazam the riffs to find out where they are from, but it’s also more fun to think of these two sides of tape as a unique composition from my past self.

    A few years later, the band I was in at the time had a show coming up at a bar with a real sound system. This was unusual for us, being a DIY hardcore punk band that usually played basements, so the idea of recording our set and our new songs for posterity made sense. I was able to plug the MiniDisc into the soundboard and capture our set from that night. Our band put the live recording out as a self-released cassette. I hand-dubbed 42 copies of the recording onto 90-minute Maxell tapes later that month. I’d forgotten that I’d recorded the BLACK DOVE set from that night as well. So, I ripped that to my computer this weekend.

    It’s clear that MiniDisc as a format was a significant, though inconsistent, part of my music-listening life (and I didn’t even mention using it to rip MP3s from my computer or sample audio from television or VHS tapes for mixes). I don’t know enough about how others have used it to say with any authority whether these uses are unique or all too common. I can imagine there are other uses of this format that push boundaries and connect communities the same way that cassettes did. I’d love to hear more about them.

(The first four paragraphs of this review originally appeared in issue #3 of the zine Anxiety's False Promise, published in March 2024.)

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Response to Chicago Tribune Editorial Board's CPS Teacher Absenteeism Editorial

This is a lightly edited version of the letter I sent to the Tribune's Editorial Board in response to their editorial about CPS teachers' absenteeism a few days ago. They did not publish my letter, but I present it here for your consideration.

Dear Chicago Tribune Editorial Board:

    As a teacher in a suburban Cook county school district, I take exception to the implication that I should feel jealous of the teachers in the Chicago Teachers’ Union as they engage in collective bargaining for higher salaries. You state that teachers in the union make a median of $95,000, which is above the national median. Although this is true, it elides the fact that Chicago’s cost of living is also above average for the nation. It stands to reason that if teachers are required to live in the city to teach in its public schools, then they should receive a salary commensurate with the cost of living in the city.

    The other part of your argument is that because over 41 percent of teachers were chronically absent, all teachers do not deserve raises as part of collective bargaining. That statistic may be shocking at first blush, but a further investigation into the reasons for teacher absences may be revealing. As the editorial states, this number does not include breaks and holidays. (It shouldn’t, as those are not instructional days.) To suggest that winter break, spring break, and other holidays are somehow enough time off from work for teachers is silly. Reasons for teacher absences can range from personal illness to caregiving for a child, parent, spouse, or other family member to personal days. The board implies that teachers can somehow schedule their illnesses or their obligations to their families around the provided breaks, which is ridiculous.

    More generally, the critique of teacher absences as some kind of symptom of what is wrong with the district misses the point. In her book Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, Eve L. Ewing, a former CPS teacher and current associate professor at the University of Chicago, argues that “any enterprise dealing with the care and nurturing of children is likely to be inefficient at times, and striving for efficiency often requires sacrificing things like care, patience, and flexibility” (p. 122). Simply put, the corporate cost-cutting model is in conflict with the care work central to educating children. Beyond that, there’s no reason to think denying the CTU’s request for a raise will cause teacher absences to decrease. That claim is unsupported by the evidence and reasoning provided.

In Solidarity,

Tall Rob

(Yes, I used my real name and address in the actual letter; I know the rules!) 

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