A column about music, and about how the music informs our lives. Today's author is Joe. See the previous songs HERE.
"Downtown"
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
from This Unruly Mess I've Made
2016
Let's survey the history of Macklemore on this blog. I won't try to be cute about it; I'll tell you why I'm doing this right here at the beginning. I've been thinking about Macklemore because he was kicked off of Ed Sheeran's stadium tour, for reasons that bothered me. When I'm bothered by something, I usually turn to the blog, as one might do with their own diary or journal when attempting to explore their emotions surrounding a particular subject. I'm trying to "get to the bottom of it," as they say. Why does something that happened to Macklemore in the year 2026, at least fourteen years past his cultural and commercial peak, perturb me so?
A column about music, and about how the music informs our lives. Today's author is Nate. See the previous songs HERE.
"Strange Taxidermy"
Westside Cowboy
from So Much Country 'Till We Get There EP
2026
The media will lie to you and let's keep it a buck I'll lie to you too but believe me Natalie that I'm telling you the truth right now.
So let's agree to this; you don't go from zero to Glastonbury side stages and opening for the Latest Last One True Rock Band without having to eat the Shindustry Shplant allegations like a full English with blood sausages and all. And fuck it, while we're getting along let's also agree that even if the idea of integrity has been purchased, pressed, juiced, and drained from the sin-blasted godless youth with nothing left to worship but the goddamn dollar, that there is still such a thing as shame and anyone buying their way up the wrung of the recently-deceased rock genre certainly would be bearers of that particular miracle.
And lo, these are the hurdles that Westside Cowboy must clear on its debut album, It Goes On. And what light through yonder window breaks; they goddamn do it for the most part.
Songs is the main thing, but a solid set of influences and some panache will go a long way. You know what a lot of kids got into during the pandemic? Hum, apparently, though all those kids are making PC music now, so goddamn if James Murphy wasn't putting his middle-aged penis right on the bruise all those long 20 years ago. But you know what Westside Cowboy was listening to, I'd bet the farm and the myth of American family farming on? Goddamn Modest Mouse back before they became the Grateful Dead for dudes who did too many narcotics to be into Wilco. Oh, laugh it up if you must, but check out what's happening rhythmically on "Well Done Kid, You Did It," then come look me in the eye and tell me that's not Jeremiah Green's music back when he was living in a Pacific Northwest shack and huffing degreaser. Peep these recurring moments of moody Built to Spill guitar whammy-bar sputterings and this overarching feeling of woe-isn't-me isolationism and tell me this has its bones in anything that was born after 9/11. Please be serious.
Lenderman has to come up in this conversation, because he must if any conversation that even suggests the idea of "country" in a rock context begins and ends with him. "Cowboy" is there in the name and it's not just a movie genre; these whippersnappers are trying to find their own Lonesome Crowded Liverpool, though the parts of the soup that reeked most of cowpunk have been steamed off. It's vibey, is the thing, and it gives that same easy-breezy frictionless hang that Lenderman has mastered and perhaps started to curdle a little bit. But that ease of use is about where it ends because you'll never walk away from It Goes On thinking that Westside Cowboy are just 'avin a laugh. Get your Dipset voice ready: these kids Really Mean It. This has its guts in the idea of writing in a journal, or writing on a LiveJournal at least, or a Tumblr, or whatever it was these dorks did when they wanted to confess their crushes to each other back whenever wherever it was when they were spilling hormones and guts on the internet sewer pipe. You can hear how embarrassing it all is, and you don't embarrass yourself unless you never really had a choice.
They've got a couple tricks, and one of them is to start banging on the toms and keep banging on the toms until everything else catches up. All the best songs here do that—"Well Done Kid, You Did It," "Worried Age," "Coyote"—and all the second-best songs start with that idea and yank the rug out before you get to fully shoot your wad—"Pin Up Boys," "Dobro." Sorry about that wad shooting thing I said a minute ago. It's all better than it has to be, especially if you're designed to break into a subgenre without any bonafides. Maybe it's Maybelline, or maybe they're just that good.
A column about music, and about how the music informs our lives. Today's author is Joe. See the previous songs HERE.
"Camera"
Charli XCX
from Music, Film, Fashion
2026
I googled "what should a middle-aged man wear to a pop concert".
I didn't get an answer, because there's not actually an answer to such a question. If you're asking a question like that, you're thinking too much about it. It didn't actually matter what I wore to the Charli XCX concert. I knew I wasn't going to be like the rest of the crowd—I am in my late 30s, I am male, I am mostly straight. These are identity things that I cannot change, and so it was always going to be impossible to "fit in" at such a venue, in such a crowd, here to see such an artist. The question wasn't whether I should even try. The question was actually: would I be able to not give a shit and just enjoy myself?
Well, yes and no. This is a journey, a work in progress. I was impressed with the crowd (and not in a sexual way, which would be creepy, and would absolutely earn everyone the right to call me the creepy old guy I was trying so desperately not to be... even though, yeah, totally my crowd in that way, I'll admit, here, on this blog, just between me and you, friends forever) in that they were mostly on their feet the whole time, dancing. Even during the opener, friend of the blog underscores—this was the most "into it" I've ever seen an audience during the opening act. During the 29(!)-song Charli XCX set, most of the young women were standing and dancing the entire time. Loved it.
But I couldn't join them. I mean, I could, but I couldn't. Didn't have it in me. Too self-conscious. This isn't a pop-concert-specific thing with me. I'm mostly like that at weddings these days too. Occasionally I can push myself an do some stiff dancing for a couple songs, but it takes a lot out of me. I'm self-conscious about that kind of thing even when I'm around my peers, let alone around a crowd that inadvertently makes me feel othered. I know that no one cared. No one would give a shit or give me even one second of attention or acknowledgment if I stood up and danced to "Club classics." Everyone is the protagonist of their own story. No one is paying attention to anyone else. I could've danced. But I still felt it, that barrier. The only thing I ever knew to help break that barrier down was alcohol, but I know now that the knocking down of barriers with that aid was mostly a sham, that it was all in my head, that I have it within me to dance but struggle to bring it out in a true and honest way.
I had a right to be there, at the pop concert. At this particular pop concert, anyway. I love Charli XCX's music. I respect her as an artist (and not in a parasocial way, which might unfortunately the case with a lot of her younger fans, but so it goes with pop stars in the 21st century). Compared with mostly all of her peers working in this specific genre, I have managed to connect emotionally to Charli's music the most. I discovered the kinship with brat, and am delighted to find that the connection stays strong through Music, Film, Fashion. To be ultra-clear here: when I say "connection," I mean with the art. I know you might be thinking otherwise, with me being a heterosexual male and she being an objectively attractive female who has a purposefully attractive style and chose to do the one thing on stage that could've gotten me to admit to anything even close to a "crush" in an oblique, distant way (smoking a cigarette, goddamn so fucking cool, jesus fucking christ). Physical attraction is an absence of emotion. When I turn to consider my emotions, I am thinking about the art, and how the art affects me, and how I can relate to it, and how I know that the art is speaking to something that I already felt before I pressed play.
Charli XCX is the only pop artist that I trust is being her true and honest self in her art. She has described her tour (and thus, the art that she is presenting on this tour) as "50% party, 50% existential crisis." The latter obviously makes her real and true (who among us hasn't felt that way), but it's the former that gets me to trust her. There are pop stars that party, but Charli XCX is the only pop star whose parties are clearly, obviously a distraction from the existential dread that surrounds us. She's upfront about it, which is the part that I respect. There is no reasonable person on earth who could listen to "365" and think that Charli XCX is unironically describing herself as a "365 party girl." It's coated in irony, in sarcasm, and it's made clear in the songs that directly address the dread that these emotions are being covered up by the party, that the parties are temporary, that the dread is forever.
You wanna know what the biggest singalong bit of the concert was? In "Camera," Charli sang the line "Yeah, I can finally be totally honest, it's like I'm looking down the barrel of a gun," and every single 20-something woman in the audience yelled "Fucking shoot me!" That kind of thing resonates with me, because I too feel the darkness, and I too use elaborate ruses as a self-defense mechanism. It's not that I'm actually going to shoot myself, it's more that I am an active participant in the pageantry that in turns acts as a promise that I never will shoot myself, despite the darkness that surrounds me and you and everyone else.
In some perverse way, these thoughts are the core reason why I wanted to attend this concert. Despite everything I felt, the weirdness about being not like other people in the crowd, the discomfort of dancing and not dancing, the not even knowing what to fucking wear to such a thing, I knew that the music that would be played from that large, elaborate stage was going to betray the fact that, ultimately, the artist up there feels the same exact way I do. She's the star of the show, and she feels like she doesn't fit in either. The music speaks to that feeling.
And the music and the performance and the artist all work together to address the problem in concrete ways, I'd argue. I've been thinking about the backup dancers, and how this was not like anything I've seen with any other pop star performance (like on the TV or whatever), how usually the dancers are all strictly coordinated, but these women were more like a loose cohort of pals, often times crowding the stage to dance around and headbang and make sexy faces at the camera. At one point, most of them were just lounging around on the ground, smoking cigs. Sometimes all it takes is surrounding yourself with similarly minded people to feel better.
I've been thinking about the opener, underscores, a.k.a. April Harper Grey, a.k.a. our featured RC artist from 149 weeks ago. This artist started the year playing pop-up events out of a fucking U-Haul truck, and is ending it playing an active part in a stadium tour. I choked up a little bit when Charli brought her out mid-set to play one of her own songs to a rapt crowd. Personally, it unlocked something that I didn't quite understand about her 2026 album U, in that it represented the step after brat in pop music, how it took what was already twisted, and shatters it into broken pieces. But then that just really speaks to the idea that underscores is in the same boat as us, that Charli is taking her along and branding her a kindred spirit. Mostly, it says to me that Charli knows that the only way we're gonna get out of this fucked-up world alive is finding people who feel the same way, and bringing them under the big tent. I was there for the same reason underscores was there.
And I've been thinking about many parts of the show felt like I was at a legit rock concert. There were live musicians—guitar, bass, drums, keyboards—and Charli XCX stood in the midst of them, at the microphone that was on a microphone stand, and belted out songs that are—assuming you can strip away the pop music lacquer that covers everything by design—legitimate rock 'n' roll songs. "Rock Music" obviously, but that led into "Yeah," "Apple," and "Wink Wink," and so on. It was fantastic how she met my own sensibilities in the middle. Not for my sake, of course, but for her own. This is about making the tent bigger, and it's about having the power to do so, being talented enough to do it and curious enough to want to in the first place.
I had similar thoughts six years ago, when Charli XCX's rival Taylor Swift decided to "make indie music" in folklore and evermore. I wrote at the time what a joy it was that someone like me had a legitimate access point to an artist and a sound that I hadn't previously, and I was grateful that it happened. I can see now that it was all a COVID-induced mirage. I see it now that we have the best Charli XCX song and one of the greatest songs of all time period, "Sympathy is a knife," and then the horrendous, embarrassing follow-up (clap-back?) song by Swift, "Actually Romantic." This sequence of events both shattered my perception of the world's biggest pop star, and also clarified a lot about how music works and how I can and should respond to it. The best Swift song of all time is "betty," and I see that now as a talented artist writing pure fiction, and anything that I'm pulling from it coming from my own mind. I view Charli's best songs as works of pure non-fiction. Only one artist is doing this because they need to. Only one artist is doing it because they couldn't function emotionally if they didn't build these protective structures out of song. The other artist is just doing it for the show.
Maybe that's the wrong choice of phrase, "for the show," because I was at that Charli XCX show, and the show was part of the art too, the art that made me know where this artist stands, and where I stand, and where all these fans surrounding me stand, and how there's not much difference between any of us.
I do wish that I could be like Pam sometimes, who ably dressed the part (and for my money was the hottest person in the stadium, on or off the stage), and could sing along to songs like "Girl, so confusing" without having to justify it to herself through figurative speech. But I'm stuck with what I got. I am a tall, hairy, mostly unattractive male, and I am mostly straight, and I am cisgender, and I am old and getting older. And I fucking love this music, and I feel connected to it, and so I try to use that to understand myself a little better. What I understand is that it's okay to feel awkward and out of place, and that, instead of cowering away, I should face it, crack a joke, put on something sexy, and just be myself.
Yeah, I can finally be totally honest, it's like I'm looking down the barrel of a gun.
A column about music, and about how the music informs our lives. Today's author is Joe. See the previous songs HERE.
"Settle Up with Your Downfall"
Sincere Engineer
from Probable Claws
2026
Fuuuuuuuuck, I figured it out. The answer to a mystery that's been bugging me for years. And it ain't pretty.
Okay so the main mystery requires us to break the fourth wall briefly. No strangers to that around here, but still, I figured I'd warn ya anyway. Especially since when I start talking about the blog in a meta sense, I fear that it gets boring, because I assume that no one actually gives a shit about inside baseball bullshit on the blog. Consider yourself warned.
We operate on Blogger. The URL says "blogspot," but that's due to a grandfather clause. From what I recall (and I didn't do any supplemental research to back these hazy memories up), PoYB originated on a blogging platform called "Blogspot," and then at some point, Google LLC Or Whatever The Fuck bought it out, and pushed it under the umbrella of their own blogging platform, called "Blogger." But they didn't change the URL. So you type in "blogspot," but when I go to the interface where I do all the editing and publishing, that's blogger.com.
All that to say that this website that I am typing these words on right now is owned by Google. Been that way for a long time. I am still here due to inertia, and due to the overwhelming horror of even thinking about trying to move over ten thousand blog posts over to a different platform. Plus, it's free. This is the understanding, and ultimately, the first-level mystery here. Why is it free? Why have I been allowed to operate this dumb blog free of charge, free of ads, for almost twenty years? What's the catch? There's always a fucking catch.
When we talk about "what is free on the internet," then what we're really doing is asking who is the customer, and what is the product. You can think about Facebook as a well-known example. Facebook has never charged a membership fee, as far as I'm aware. Though you might get swindled out of money through spam ads and deceit, it's never been Facebook itself asking you to pay money for its services. It's free to use. So what does that mean? That's means that you are the product. In this case, it means that all your personal information is documented and sold as many times as possible, mostly to advertisers but to other even more nefarious entities as well I'm sure. You can think about it like you would a cow on a farm. Why is it that cows are given a free place to stay, free food to eat, free medical care when necessary? It's not because the farmer gives a shit about the cow, it's because the farmer is keeping his product safe, before it is sent to be slaughtered.
So if we're operating for free here on Blogger, then the question remains: in what ways are we the product? Why have we been allowed to languish here in relative obscurity (relative to other websites around the internet) for free, doing as we please in this space? In what ways are we the cows, awaiting slaughter? I don't think it's as simple as the Facebook scenario. I don't think it's as easy to pull our personal information from these words. I've done what I could to prevent people's identifying details from entering the algorithm, and I myself have typed a LOT of personal details about myself, but I'm just one guy, and it would take a lot of effort for to pull the necessary info from my shitty prose for very little payoff (i.e. selling the personal info of ONE GUY doesn't feel worth it to me, from the perspective of someone who sells personal info to advertisers).
I think I have the answer, but let's first talk about a different mystery that's been floating around these parts for the past few years. This mystery has bothered me for a long time, and it's necessary to talk about here in today's post, since it occurred to me the other day, suddenly, out of the blue, that the mysteries have the same exact answer. So put a pin in the first one for a few paragraphs, and let's discuss the second one.
I've mentioned offhandedly a few times over the years that, on the aforementioned Blogger interface where I act as editor-in-chief, there is a tab for "Stats." Here, you can see how many "hits" the blog has, over the last eighteen years, broken down in yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily chunks if you need them, as well as specific visitor counts for individual blog posts. So I can see what blog post has the most traffic, and I can track traffic over the past however long, to see if more or less people are visiting the blog during certain times of the week or certain times in this blog's lifespan.
It's traditionally been sort of a useless tool to me, since the readership of PoYB is not that large. Less than 100 people in my own life are even aware of this website's existence, and way fewer than that are even semi-regular readers. I'm not discounting the idea that there are people I don't know who are semi-regular readers, friends of friends and friends of friends of friends and whatnot. But if they exist, they do not exist in large numbers. They can't. This isn't that type of website. It's just a hobby. At the upper end of reasonable estimations, we could reasonably say that maybe 20 people are visiting PoYB a day, and even at five clicks per person, that's like 100 visits per day. Maybe sometimes people are clicking around and we get a few hundred clicks. That's reasonable. That's logical. And that's not really worth clicking the Stats tab over. Traffic isn't the point! I'm not creating content here! We're just typing for shits and giggles! Who gives a shit!
But I'll idly click the Stats option every once in a while anyway, and sometimes I'll notice strange spikes. There might be a day when we have like 3000 hits. Why? This is what I've been thinking about for literally years now. It happens often enough that I notice it, and it bothers me. It'll happen for like four days in a row, and then it will stop for days or weeks, before happening again. It's pretty obvious that the numbers are inflated for reasons outside of people literally visiting the blog to read what's written on it. It doesn't make logical sense for a Tuesday to have 200 clicks and a Wednesday to have 2500 clicks, especially when the post on Tuesday is a blog post about the fourth-most popular Fleetwood Mac album and the post on Wednesday is some hack creative writing blabber about a forgotten American sitcome called 'Til Death.
For a while, I had visions of, I dunno, a skeleton crew in the Blogger cubicles getting a notification that there is still one blog on their servers that is being updated daily, and those clicks coming from that staff, either out of curiosity or out of professional duty. Something like that. I wasn't sure whether I should be worried or not. I sincerely don't know what the entity of "Blogger" even looks like. Are there even workers assigned to that department? Or is it just an empty shell that can run on its own?
The suspicion has ratcheted up significantly over the past couple weeks. The Stats tab has gone off the chain. As of this writing, we've had about two straight weeks of approximately 25,000 hits per day. 2500 was illogical, but 25,000 is just laughably false. C'mon. There's no reason for it. The blogging itself is still steady, but no one is reinventing the wheel here. We're not "viral," because there's nothing that could go viral even if that was the goal, which it's not. And if you'll recall, individual blog posts get tallies too, so it would be one thing if we got 25,000 hits and a Bruce Springsteen retrospective said "24K" next to it, but it doesn't. At the end of the day, something like that usually says "8." Not eight thousand, but eight.
It doesn't make sense... until it does. Folks, I figured it out. These two mysteries are the same. They have the same answer. Why we are allowed to play around on Blogger for free and why there has been an increase in traffic, they are both related, inexplicably intertwined. The truth hit me like a ton of fucking bricks the other day. It's all so fucking obvious. Why haven't I thought of this before?
Google is using Puke on Your Birthday to train its AI.
Think about it. It all makes sense. The training tool is visiting PoYB to take the words written here for its own purposes, and that's what's bumping up the traffic. And Google is heavily (and disastrously) invested in improving their AI, which can read through pieces that humans have written in order to improve, and so why not use this resource, Puke on Your Birthday, where actual humans have written tens of millions of words, millions of real-life sentences typed by human hands? I can't even use the word "steal" here, because we're on a website owned by Google! For free! We are the product!
What if that's the reason Blogger still exists? It's the only reasonable explanation. There is literally no other reason that such a useless dumb bullshit website could hold any value. Our words are here, and the company that owns the words is using their robot to suck up everything we have created. And there's nothing we can do about it! This is the world that we have built. We have typed and typed and typed and all this time we have been sitting in the goo pods from The Matrix, living a lie while our brain power is sucked into the machine.
There's not really an upside to any of this. I have taken great pride in this body of work over the years, and it makes me feel like a chump that there's some underlying nefarious purpose to it. I also cringe at the idea of some AI bot taking on my writing voice, at the very least because that means that my voice is no longer unique. Worst of all, it feels like our fate here on this website is now irrevocably tied to the fate of AI, which as we all know is a bubble, and I fear that when that bubble pops, we'll pop right along with it.
What other option is there, though? I get a six-gig file sent to me every month, containing within it a full copy of the blog. I've always considered that an emergency option, moving away from Blogger onto some other platform. It's probably not as easy as it sounds, either. I'm sure if I ported everything over to Wordpress, there would be some jacked-up error with the formatting that would require me to manually fix 10,000 blog posts, and I'm not looking to choose to do that anytime soon. And as we discussed at some point earlier, I'm slowing down on the blogging but I'm not in any position to stop. Too much of my emotional wellness and overall sanity is tied to the act of typing in this space. I don't know what I would do if I was forced to stop. That feels like an exaggeration, but it's unfortunately true.
I could also just... give up caring. Accept the fact that this is the world that we live in. That the bad guys won, and that they have branded us all cattle, and that there's nothing we can do to prevent the slaughter that is headed our way. Might as well enjoy the free room and board while we wait.
A column about music, and about how the music informs our lives. Today's author is Joe. See the previous songs HERE.
"MIXTAPE LINER NOTES VAR. VII"
Frog
from 1000 Variations on the Same Song
2025
What I'm interested in is the idea of the music you listen to defining you in some way. Can you describe yourself with a playlist? There are a few ways of answering that question. The way I'm choosing to answer it today is by thinking of it as a synonymous question to another important one: What kind of music do you listen to?
I have attempted to answer the latter question many times, and I always end up confusing myself. The most accurate and least helpful answer I could give is "everything." It's accurate because I really do believe that I am at the point in my life that I can handle listening to and processing and reflecting on any example of music that could possibly cross through my ears at any point (the blog has helped me immensely in that regard). But that's not a helpful answer to someone who is asking, because they aren't asking about your brain and how it works, and they aren't asking in order to gauge how open-minded of a person you are. They are asking because they are looking for a connection. If you listen to a certain type of music and so do they, then that's something to bond over. If the answer is "everything," then the connection is there, but it's too weak. Either that, or the answer of "everything" gets misinterpreted as "anything," which is a completely different answer, and the worst answer there is. If you're the type of person who says "I listen to anything," then that means you don't actually listen to music, at least not actively, and furthermore you probably don't give a shit.
The answer that is still unhelpful, but perhaps a little less so, is "I listen to indie rock." That's helpful because, if you know what I'm talking about, then you instantly know where I'm coming from, and we can find common ground. But it's not entirely helpful because the genre tag of "indie rock" is basically undefinable at this point, if it ever even was at all. What the fuck is indie rock? Most of the time, I can't say. It's just easier to name bands, but even that is sort of pathetic, because I'm just naming my indie rock bands, and the genre, if it even exists, is infinitely wider than that, beyond my own personal scope of what I know and love.
I read a book over the past couple weeks that attempted to answer that corollary question of "what is indie rock?" It's called Such Great Heights, written by Stereogum editor Chris DeVille, and it attempts to answer that question by tracing the history of "indie rock" from its '90s origins into the near-present. The bedrock of this lineage is that it began as an off-shoot of alt-rock that was playing on college radio and was largely released on independent labels, and as it gained traction and cred, it was consumed by capitalism, basically, and turned inside out, i.e. turned back into the very pop music is originally attempted to counter. That's the most basic outline I can give you. The way the book fleshes out this central argument is by... well, basically just naming and describing a bunch of bands. I'm not knocking the book, that's literally the only way to do it, and I enjoyed the narrative immensely. But it's tough to describe the genre that you primarily live in when that genre is so inclusive that the meaning was lost even before you attempted to describe it.
I think this is actually a solution for me, not a problem. If indie rock at one point meant something, then at another point it opened up so wide that it doesn't mean anything anymore. And that process of opening up accurately mirrors my own personal journey. I started out within the confines of indie rock, listening to the bands of this genre almost exclusively, and then gradually opened myself up to new genres and new artists and new sounds, to the point where my own personal answer to "what do you listen to?" can't possibly mean anything at all.
What I'd like to do today, despite everything I've said about the impossibility of the task, is to attempt it anyway. I want to describe what I listen to accurately, and I want to do so through a playlist. Did you know that this is something people are doing? It's not hard to imagine. "Describing yourself with a playlist" is not a new concept. It's probably been done at least since the advent of cassette culture, if not earlier. But I've run into a few real-world examples of this recently, as I take my own mysterious journey through the weeds of non-monogamy (this post is about music, though, don't worry). In the race to get to know someone as quickly as a janky dating app will allow, a playlist can now be used as shorthand for describing oneself. "This is what I listen to" is another way of saying "This is who I am."
The first time I was presented with such a playlist from an ostensible stranger, I was sincerely disappointed. Our brief conversation prior to that had showed promise, with mention of Frightened Rabbit (one of my all-timers), Tango in the Night (recently written about on this blog), and Motown (fucking duh). But then she dropped the link to her 50-song playlist subtitled "get to know me by my favorite music," and I had a tough time with it. Lots of B-team stomp-and-holler tunes, lots of pop rock songs that were clearly pushed up with the help of algorithms on TikTok and elsewhere, plenty of songs that exist firmly in the post-commercialization of indie rock, and a big handful of songs that I like but that don't scan as cool or hip or anything that I'd use to describe me as a person, even in combination with other similar songs.
You can see the problem. Well, first, the problem is me because I'm a snob (snobbery justified, I'm doing the fucking work to get to know music intimately enough to accurate judge it). But the other main problem is that it is clearly very hard to describe yourself via a single playlist. If my takeaway is negative, then it's either that we don't have compatible views on what is "good music," or the playlist made it easy to misinterpret the type of person that swiped-right pal is (or wants to present herself to be). And neither of those achieve the stated purpose of making a connection via the music.
There were plenty of other scenarios that would have played worse, I think. A step lower than the playlist she had would have been a playlist filled with basic pop music, like 50 songs comprised of Taylor Swift and Bruno Mars and Ella Langley (I had to look that last one up). A step lower than that would be pop music but pop-country, a playlist full of Morgan Wallen and Jelly Roll and Charley Crocket. A step lower than that would be, I dunno, a playlist full of artists I don't listen to anymore because they are sexually abusive? (The playlist that I checked out did indeed have Ryan Adams and Lizzo, but I'm trying to be sensitive and forgiving here, it's tough to share a part of yourself like that.) And then the bottom rung would probably be no playlist at all, because you don't listen to music.
A step above it, however, would probably be artists I've never heard of, but who are operating in niche genres that I am aware of and enjoy (like maybe a playlist full of hyperpop artists or something), shit that's cool and I know it's cool even though I don't know this song specifically. A step above that would be a narrow range of artists, but a depth of knowledge about those artists. For example, if I got a playlist full of Paul McCartney tunes, both the hits and the ultra-deep cuts, then I'd like that a lot, even if Sir Paul, whose music I love deeply, isn't necessarily my number-one favorite artist of all time. And then, of course, the top rung would be a playlist from a stranger full of music that I know and love and appreciate and feels like a mirror for my own musical soul. Doesn't happen too often.
Okay, so I'm going to create my own playlist. That's what I'm leading up to here. But I want to be clear about the what and the why. (I also want to make it clear that I'm not trying to shit on my once-and-probably-former friend, who made a good faith effort to make herself known, which I appreciate so much, even if it's not gonna work out, for reasons related and not related to music. I believe that you take a little something from everyone you've ever met, including in this specific and too-hot-for-the-blog context, and so why not the concept of a Playlist Describing You from this random person I might never talk to again.)
I don't want this be misinterpreted as an attempt at the Top 50 Songs of All Time. If you want a(n already outdated) copy of that, you just read this 2024 blog post (might take you a couple hours). I can love a song without letting it define me. In fact, many of the songs I love have extra gravity in my life because they were found outside of my comfort zone. I don't think "Welcome to the Black Parade" defines me at all, or means anything to me, besides the fact that it's one of the best songs of all time. To think that I am anything like the typical person who grew up with My Chemical Romance would be a gross misunderstanding of who I am and where I've come from.
On the other end of the spectrum, I also don't want this to be misinterpreted as a cool list of 50 random but certified cool songs that I've been listening to lately that you can chill with and "vibe" with or whatever the fuck. I can type a list of 200 good songs in about five minutes while blindfolded right now if you need me to, but the music I put down there would not give an accurate or full picture of who I am. Obviously you're going to find good music on my playlist, but it's been specifically curated for a singular purpose. I chose these songs because they accurately reflect what I like to listen to and what that might say about me.
If I'm going to make the claim that "I listen to everything," then I'm forced to admit that a 50-song playlist is not going to reflect that claim. There's no way I can cover every facet of my musical interests on such a playlist. So instead of trying, I'm going the opposite way. I'm narrowing the scope. The other claim of "I listen to indie rock" would be the shortest and easiest path to pursue. And more importantly, it wouldn't give anyone the wrong impression of what I "typically" listen to, or who I'm trying to describe myself as. Think about what you would believe about me if I said a song to describe me is "betty" by Taylor Swift. It's a fantastic song. If you ask me, it's the only Taylor Swift song that actually matters. But is that who I am? Do I want people thinking I'm a Swiftie? Do I want people to think I gave a single shit about what asshole jock she married or what private jet she's taking to buy a cup of coffee? Do you see how just adding the best songs would be counterintuitive to the purpose of today's mission?
There are countless other examples of music that were left off this playlist for similar, but far less cynical, reasons. You'll note, for example, that there is no hip hop on this list, even though I have grown in the past five years or so to deeply appreciate the genre and all its many facets, and consider a few rappers some of my favorite musicians of all time. I think it's more about knowing something, and wanting someone to assume what you know and what you don't know based on that song.
If I were to put Kendrick Lamar's "Swimming Pools (Drank)" on this playlist, this would be an excellent encapsulation of a piece of music that I love. Great fucking song. That second verse is bonkers. And I know it well, and think about it a lot. Being an alcoholic, it actually means a lot to me to hear a song that's questioning whether drinking is worth it in the long run, and speaks to the struggles we all have with substance abuse. I also recall walking home from McNally's somewhere one night drunk as shit and listening to this song and feeling the impact within me, years before I knew why. But if you saw this song on a playlist, would you be able to pull any of this out of the playlist? No. You would have to make assumptions. Which is okay, that's kinda what you're gonna need to do if you're checking out 50 songs from a guy trying to make himself known through the songs. I'm just saying that the assumptions have a greater chance of being wrong with a song that I know well from a genre I know less well.
There's a difference, in other words, between listening to something that you enjoy, and knowing something and the context from which it came fully and completely. If someone is going to be asking me about a song, I want to be speaking intelligently about it and the world in which it exists. I want to expound upon it. I could try to speak to "Swimming Pools (Drank)," but anything I have to say about it collapses inward. I don't know context, I just know what it sounds like (to me). It's all important when it comes to explaining "what you listen to."
But I want to be clear that this is not a playlist of the best songs. I'm not saying that I have "better taste" then you. That would be an obscene thing to say. Music is so fucking subjective, and I am continually humbled by how vast musical tastes can be. I'm not asking anyone to love every song on this list, because that's not the point. If I was going to make a playlist like that, I could. I took "Rock Me Gently" by Andy Kim off the playlist below at the last minute. I fucking love that song. It's better than most of the songs on here. If you're looking for a great song, start there. But it doesn't answer the question we're answering today. It says nothing about what I listen to typically. It is one exception out of many, many, many exceptions. It's some hokey '60s pop song made by a goober without another hit in one thousand years. That's not what I usually listen to. I listen to "Rock Me Gently," basically every day of my life, but that says nothing about me.
This playlist does say something about me. I think. I actually don't care, you should know that too. Care about someone knowing me, I mean. It's cool when someone does know me, or care to know me, like that feels good, but I'm not trying to make a habit of seeking that out. There's too much of that in the world. We are a society obsessed with trying to make ourselves understood by any means necessary. This blog has perpetuated that mindset way too often, and I'm trying to cut it out. I don't need you to understand me.
A column about music, and about how the music informs our lives. Today's author is Joe. See the previous songs HERE.
"My Uncle's Navy"
Neko Case
from Hell-On
2018
I am not a good man. I am not moral. I am flawed. I make mistakes. I take too strong of a stance on certain subjects, and am too ignorant of others. You shouldn't listen to me as I flail around on this blog looking for something to say. I turn too often to my emotions, which are vague, not very well thought out, and I use this blog as a crutch, as a way to work out those emotions in real time, which feels good in the moment but over time curdles into something ugly and old and outdated. So turn away. This is hypocrisy in action. But I'm writing it because that's what I do, for better or worse.
I have no reason to put the term "allegations" in the search bar, until I do. I've said this before too many times: I don't go sniffing around. It finds me. And once it does, there's literally nothing I can do but take a stand. It's how I've conditioned myself to behave. It's something I have trained myself to consider important. I'm talking about sexual abuse, of course. You know this. You could smell it in the air, that there is a path and that it is leading me here, yet again, through this blog post. How to grapple with the classic art vs. artist conundrum. You're getting defensive already, because that's what people do, and I've learned to accept that. It's easy to say you're against sexual abuse but it's hard to articulate how that opinion might and possibly should resonate through the act of creating and consuming and engaging with art. Most people don't want to bother. It hurts too much. I get it, I really do.
And it's so fucking easy, when it doesn't affect you. There are so many abusers whose art I would never have given a fuck about anyway, and it's so goddamn simple to say "fuck that dude" and brush it under the rug and forget it ever happened (the art, I mean). It's easy too when you get there early enough. Like say a revered Irish musician dies in a motorcycle accident and his music is once again passed around and his legend grows and those of us who didn't know him in life feel the pull toward the immortal art, to engage with it now that the body of work is set in stone, to reflect on what it means now that the artist is gone. Which is fucking powerful stuff, truly. Always is. Except for the little whisper you might hear too, from off in the corner, tiny voices mumbling about how it wasn't actually this way, the artist was actually not the type of person who you'd be inclined to revere under normal circumstances, and maybe there was a sinister strain of the legacy that will be hushed for as long as it takes the obituaries to unwind like royal carpets.
Here it is, in brief, the whole history of my path-crossing with an artist, contained in a single sentence: there were a few songs chosen for publication on the blog by various contributors, I was interested but not swayed enough to explore more, I was made aware of the Oscar win, and remembered that particular factoid, up until he died and a more than a few friends reached out and said I should listen, and I listened, and it was nice, there were a few powerful songs, I didn't quite get there but listened enough to appreciate the body of work and what it stood for, thanked friends for the recommendation, and then, a day or week or some time later, I read a blog post by Neko Case.
I don't need to explain how my mind works when it comes to this shit, because I've done that before. Too many times. Enough times, in fact, that the blog now has it's own "cancelled" tag (the term "cancelled" used slightly ironically, because I don't believe that "cancel culture" is real, which is also something I've explained too many times). I can never unlearn the fact that Glen Hansard at best was a sexual harasser and at worst a child molester. I don't need to explain why learning such a thing, and believing women when they make those claims of a person who isn't even around to defend himself anymore, is something that would irrevocably alter my ability to engage with this person's chosen art. I don't need to explain it because I already have.
What I do need to explain here—or maybe I don't, but at the very least I have the foolish urge at this juncture to attempt it anyway—is how this is all a personal decision, for me. I am not here to argue that you should not listen to Glen Hansard's music. I am not saying anything about your decision one way or the other, because that's your decision. I make a decision every single day regarding what music I listen to or don't listen to, and you do the same. Those are separate decisions. Just because I make a decision to not listen to a particular artist for a particular reason doesn't mean you are beholden to the same thought process. You can listen to whatever you want. What you listen to says nothing about you as an individual, and says nothing about your moral standing in this world. Unless it says everything. It does, and doesn't.
The second Neko Case blog post I read spoke more elegantly about the decisions that I make in this context than I could ever write about it. One, in that it really is as simple as believing women when they say they were abused. Two, in that it's perplexing to feel this one particular way about the art and the artist who made it and how feelings about the artist could irrevocably affect the art he made, and then be made to feel like you're wrong, that you're overreacting, that art and artist can be separated, that it's okay to dance to "Don’t Stop 'Til You Get Enough" at a wedding. As if it's totally okay to continue to pull positive emotions from the art of someone who put a lot of negative emotions into the world.
It is though, is the thing. It's okay to do that. There's a judgment on my part, but the judgment only exists in my inability to understand how other people operate. I feel so strongly about something, and I am genuinely perplexed when other people don't feel as strongly about it as I do. That inability on my part is probably my fatal flaw. I am continually caught off-guard when I am placed in the minority opinion. When I'm made to feel small when I refuse to listen to Arcade Fire, for example. It's assumed that it's just posturing on my part, that I'm relinquishing a previously cherished art because I'm trying to act all high and mighty or whatever. I'm not judging the act of listening to the work of abusive artists at all. I'm jealous, even, that one might have the capacity to operate that way, to listen to great art and manage to forget about all the cruelty that was ignored in order to make it. I can't do that.
So what I'm saying is that it didn't feel right to listen to the Frames or the Swell Season or any solo stuff from Hansard, at least not after reading what I read and putting some pieces together and believing at least one woman. But this blog post is arguing for grace for those who have been listening this whole time, and don't want to believe. I am here to tell you that I understand, and far be it from me (some asshole cishet straight white dude who's never met any struggle in his goddamn life) to act morally superior when it comes to what art you choose to engage with. I will defend your right to listen to Glen Hansard, and Arcade Fire, and Ariel Pink, and Kanye West, and Aerosmith, and Michael Jackson, and Hookworms, and Cheap Girls, and on and on and on and on, for as long as men are out there treating women and children poorly, and then going into the studio to create art that speaks to that experience of abuse or doesn't. I can't do it, but that's just me.
At the very same time, I acknowledge what flaws within me are not allowing me to listen to the art, and I need you to have grace for me, and understand that I'm coming from a place of empathy, empathy for victims who have spoke up and victims who need Neko Case to speak up for them and victims who were never given the chance to speak up. I know firsthand how hard it is to forgo art that means something to you, in order to stay true to this feeling within you, and how sometimes it's just easier to ignore that feeling, to just listen to the music. I want you to know that I understand you.
It's so hard because the act of not listening doesn't do shit. It accomplishes nothing. It effects no meaningful change whatsoever. It feels pointless. It's a gesture and it is meaningless. No one would have to know I don't plan on listening to Glen Hansard anymore (or starting to listen to Glen Hansard, as the case may be) if I wasn't writing about it. The writing about it might actually be detrimental, because now it feels like I'm needing to defend something, or I'm again posturing and HERE'S PROOF, or that I'm trying to send a signal out into the universe that I have the moral high ground because I'm taking some pithy stance about some bullshit that has nothing to do with me.
Isn't that all what Neko Case was talking about, though? In that second post, she was talking about how easy it is to get pulled into the abuser's world, because that's what they do. It's so easy to defend an abuser, because in order to be an abuser, you need to have the ability to manipulate other people. You could, say, groom a teenager and marry them and create a song that is so meaningful to so many people together, and win an Oscar together, all proof that this is worthy art, that it has made a positive impact on the world. And what, now some dipshit fucking blogger is trying to take that away from us?!
Glen Hansard was a good man! Glen Hansard created great art! Glen Hansard's art is so fucking important to me. Glen Hansard was beloved. Glen Hansard worked tireless to improve the lives of so many. Glen Hansard was a champion of the people of Ireland! Glen Hansard made tangible efforts in attacking the problem of homelessness! Glen Hansard's admirers, especially in his death, prove that he lived a good life and that he was a good person!
Some of that is undoubtedly true. Maybe even all of it. But I can't hear any of that in his music anymore. I just hear the abuse. Same as it always goes.
And now we've reached the point where I feel like I'm talking in circles, because I am. It feels that way because I'm trying to say two things at once, and they are both true, and they are opposed. I'm saying that it's not okay to listen to Glen Hansard, and I'm saying that the idea of not listening to Glen Hansard is an intensely personal choice and that I completely understand why you would still listen to Glen Hansard. I'm saying that we each need to make that choice for ourselves, and I'm asking that you defend my decision the same way I defend yours.
I think I also need you to understand my decision, as pathetic as that is. The "need" to "understand" is a pox that I have been trying to unburden people of recently. I think I've framed this blog as a vehicle to force people to understand who I am, and I think that this vehicle's failure has been the source of a lot of my anguish in recent years, and I am recently starting to move away from that, starting to believe that in letting go of this need, I will find true happiness. You cannot and should not understand me, and I cannot and should not expect anyone to. I alone know who I am, and that is okay. But still... while we're here... can't hurt for you hear what I have to say... even if you don't want to understand...
If there's a core principle in my explanation, then I'd say that I support the underdog. And let's apply "underdog" to victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence and child abuse. And let's then say that I am particularly drawn to supporting victims of those types of abuse. And let's acknowledge that that type of abuse is shockingly common. And let's say that there are tangible ways to support those victims. And let's say that I try to cover the narrow scope of that support in how I operate in my life. And let's say that one of the easiest and one of the hardest things that I do to show my support is my choosing the art I engage with purposefully and with intent. It doesn't do anything except that it shows intent. I choose to believe Neko Case and I choose to believe nameless Irish teenage women. I signal that choice to myself and (unfortunately for you) other people by not listening to a particular artist. That's my choice. That's my attempt at balance in this fucked-up world.
And I'm asking, just this once, for you to understand where I'm coming from. It would be so easy for you to get defensive about it, especially in this case. It would be so easy for you to say that I don't know what I'm talking about, that I'm not an Irish teenage woman and couldn't possibly know and shouldn't speak for them, that Neko Case had a personal ax to grind and is blowing things way out of proportion, that I'm speaking ill of the dead, that I'm making you feel bad by talking about an artist who has been so integral to your understanding of the world, that I'm just talking shit, that I'm forgetting about all the great things that Glen Hansard did, that I'm unfairly discounting all the very true and tangible ways that Glen Hansard made this world a better place to live in.
It would also be so easy for you to turn it back on me, to say that I have no right to be making this pointless decision, and by being high and mighty about this particular thing, I'm exposing myself as a hypocrite. That sometimes I feel my toes tapping to a Michael Jackson song, that sometimes I sincerely miss the days when I could watch and laugh at R. Kelly's "Trapped in a Closet," that I regret all the beautiful art that I gave up and it feels like a hole in my heart sometimes and then I type a sentence like this and feel selfish for expressing that thought and pathetic because what the fuck am I even doing. I feel like an asshole for having people watch Dogville and not really talking about the fact that the director and creator was an abuser until it was too late. I ate a whole goddamn pint of The Tonight Dough ice cream last night, knowing full well that the container of that ice cream pint featured the face of a sex trafficker who got away with his crime, and here I am knowing this and having written about it and hating this man and posturing that I take a stand against that sort of thing and yet eating his ice cream, and enjoying it.
There's no winner here. I don't feel like a winner for typing any of this. You don't feel like a winner by reading it. The countless victims of abuse are certainly not winners in any sense, because the abuse happened and the abusers get away with it, constantly. Maybe the abusers are the winners here, getting to see their legacy cemented while they treat people poorly behind closed doors with no consequences and then ride their motorcycles off to that great homeless charity gig in the sky. Let the rest of us losers toil away over what it all means, and what we could possibly do about it.
I don't have any answers for you, but I know I need to keep writing about it, and I'm asking you to just have patience with me, and a little understanding, for what I'm telling you needs to be done. But also that I hold patience and understand for you, and that I support you if you disagree.
A column about music, and about how the music informs our lives. Today's author is Joe. See the previous songs HERE.
"Suddenly Everything Has Changed (Death Anxiety Caused by Moments of Boredom)"
The Flaming Lips
from The Soft Bulletin
1999
I am bored.
"You're not bored, you're just a boring person!" That's probably true. I think a lot about this whenever my kids express to me that they are bored. I get worried, as a parent, when they say it (or whine about it). Not worried over the fact that they are possibly boring people—my kids can be whatever they choose to be, and if they choose to be boring people, then I'll accept that—but more so worried that they aren't equipped to handle the very normal feeling of boredom. That's not just them, it's all kids their age. The technology that surrounds them has been designed to capture their attention and hold it tight, and during moments when they are not within that technology's range, and are thus not holding attention for it, they interpret the absence of that attention as "boredom." That's how my generation has fucked their generation, and I'm sorry for it.
I am trying. I don't think I'm failing completely. Yeah, sure, there are limits on screentime, but that's not really what I'm talking about. More importantly, I think that my kids are pretty decent about occupying their time with creative playtime and make-believe. It's not something I consciously did (ironically, the screen showing Bluey a lot of the time over the past few years was probably really helpful in this regard). It also helps that they are three women around the same age, and have similar proclivities during playtime. Also, their playtime sometimes (or more than sometimes) devolves into fighting, which makes me upset, so it's not all butterflies and rainbows over here. But I would say that, in general, when there is a feeling of "boredom" welling up within the hearts and minds of any or all of my children at any point, they are for the most part pretty good at pulling themselves out of that boredom, and coming up with some bullshit to occupy their time.
What about me? That's the question. This is a blog post and I'm writing about my life, and so the question turns inward. Am I ever bored? The true answer is yes, but the point I'm trying to make here is that there is a difference between being stuck in boredom, and meeting the boredom head-on. If the question is "Do I have the capacity to handle boredom when it arrives?" then the answer, I think, is also yes. And I believe, since you are currently reading these words right now, that you know the answer to the next follow-up question already. How do I handle boredom? Ummm.......
Today is an anniversary of sorts, here on Puke on Your Birthday. Five years ago today, I posted a blog post. It was a Never Seen It write-up about the movie Doctor Zhivago. August 4, 2021 was a Wednesday. August 1st saw a Sunday write-up about the RC Album of the Week, which was the DMB album. On Monday the 2nd and Tuesday the 3rd, Puke on Your Birthday featured no new content. Starting on August 4, 2021, with that movie post, PoYB has featured at least one blog post every single day. Today, that marks five years of posts every day, no skips.
There's no real answer to the "why?" question on the tip of your tongue. There's no goal here, no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There's not even a finish line to cross, it's just a continuous churn of writing and publishing and writing and thinking about it and writing and commenting and writing and keeping lists of what was written and writing some more. "It's just something to do" is the humble way that I've described it to people lately. If you want to assume there is a purpose, then that's helpful, but if you want to think that it's pointless, then that's okay too. I know that sometimes writing every day has caused me great pleasure and occasionally it places a great painful ugly boil on my ass. I'd also be remiss to say that I wouldn't have been able to do it by myself, and that there were more than a couple days in the past five years when there was one blog post published and that blog post was not written by me.
So what, is community the purpose here? I don't think that's quite it either. Sometimes I pretend that it is, and of course no matter the answer I'm so goddamn proud and humbled by anyone who shows up here to read the words on the blog, or god forbid even write for this son of a bitch. But if I'm searching for community, then blogging is a tough sell. Brief flashes of togetherness surrounded by long stretches of time when it feels like I'm yelling worthless nonsense down empty hallways. Compared to the lives I see some of my peers living (and let's be honest, parents specifically), I do feel like I am able to get more of a sense of friendship wrung from some of the pieces of this blog than people my age and demographic might be able to find otherwise. Like, if I'm getting even two emails from friends with album reviews in any given week, then that's probably more friendly non-business emails from kith and kin than most people are receiving, right? If the blog brings together three other people on a Zoom about a film, then I am a lucky man indeed. I'm thankful for that.
But what I've been thinking about today, on the anniversary of PoYB as a daily endeavor, is that blogging is more emotionally beneficial if it's viewed as a personal quest. This can be considered in conjunction with the community stuff, which is lovely and similarly helpful emotionally, especially when it's clicking and people are involved and invested. Alongside that, I'd like to view writing as growth. I'd like to view it as a task that brings meaning to my life. And I'd like to view it as a legitimate way to address the boredom that comes for us all in adulthood.
I don't believe that blogging takes the place of anything important that would otherwise be present in my life. I believe that, were it not for blogging, I would be bored. Or else I would have found another way to handle boredom. Maybe I'd be reading more books or something, I don't know. But that's not the point I'm trying to make. I'm simply saying that there is boredom, and there is the way I have chosen to fill that otherwise boring time. Whenever I feel boredom creeping up on me, I start writing.
Boredom fills the gaps in between all the other important stuff, and the trick is to fill the gaps with something not-boring before the boredom can get there. The important stuff: family time, family- and home-related tasks, work obligations, social time with peers. Blogging doesn't replace any of that. But even if you add up all the time that all the important stuff takes up, then you're still left with extra hours in the day. And what do you do with those? You could do nothing, be bored, and complain about it. (You could scroll social media algorithms and be so bored that you don't even realize you're bored.) Or you could do something that whiles away those hours in ways that you can at least pretend are meaningful.
In a blog post nominally about "Sugar, Sugar" that I published four years and 364 days ago, the day after the Doctor Zhivago post that accidentally began it all, I laid out my reasoning then for starting Puke on Your Birthday as a daily website. The reasoning—or at least my retroactive understanding of that reasoning, five years later—was that I was anxious about school starting, and that I needed at least one thing that I knew had provided comfort for me, and hang onto that thing as hard as I could. (I was also drunk just fucking constantly, including while listening to "Sugar, Sugar" at the Foodery and writing the subsequent blog post about my experience, but that's neither here nor there, I suppose.)
But the underlying reasoning for blogging didn't actually change, even though my life as a whole was about to change significantly. I was adding, for the next two years, another "important thing," i.e. grad school. That was on the important things list from orientation to graduation, and then it wasn't anymore, and the list of important stuff changed again, and again when I got a promotion a couple years after that, and there will of course be many more changes to the important stuff in my life as the years go on, some I can predict now and some I could never. The fact remains the same though, that in between all the important stuff is a lot of time to fill. A lesser person allows boredom to infiltrate that space. I, instead, fill it with blogging. Which, for the record, is not all that important.
There are certainly moments in my life when I wonder whether this is all worth it, the blog. I've been feeling that way more and more lately, I'm not going to lie. But I haven't felt that way strongly enough to say fuck it and end the streak of five years and counting. This ritual that I've practiced for 1827 days in a row now, and for over nineteen years total, and for over 5000 blog posts total written by me, it's totally and irrevocably baked into my existence now. It's as natural as crawling into bed at the end of the day, or eating a meal, or taking the bus to work. These aren't things that I need reminders to do, no need to mark the calendar or make a to-do list. I just do them because that's how I live. Blogging is the same way. I feel boredom approaching, and so I look at the Blogger website, and I see what needs to be written, and then I write it. And as I'm writing, I do not feel boredom at all.
It is possible, maybe even probable, that I stop blogging every day in the near future. Not tomorrow (thoughts on Kraftwerk's breakthrough album Autobahn), not this week (whatever bullshit I can cobble together for Modern Baseball's Sports while in Wildwood), not next month (Record Club Week 400, featuring the dreaded Lana Del Rey; a Film Club Zoom discussion about, hmmm, I've been thinking Winter's Bone?), but I dunno, maybe next year. The trick will be to find another way to fill the boredom. The blogging isn't an "important thing," and so it's not going to be that big of a deal when I stop doing it every day. What would be a big deal is if I stopped blogging every day but didn't have any other way to address the boredom of a normal life. That's what I'm scared of. And since I haven't really come up with anything that sounds any more appealing than blogging already does, I might as well just keep blogging for now, and keep my eyes open for alternatives.
I am bored, but I have found that I don't have to be.
A column about music, and about how the music informs our lives. Today's author is Joe. See the previous songs HERE.
"Mistakes (Too Many to Name)"
The Reds, Pinks & Purples
from The Town That Cursed Your Name
2023
It's not really all that reliable, the number tracker. I suppose this is the 10,000th blog post published on Puke on Your Birthday, which is why I'm banging out a blog post really quickly, to note the occasion, so that the 10,000th post doesn't accidentally become a picture of a North Wildwood beach porta-potty or whatever the fuck.
But the number comes with plenty of caveats. Included in that count are the landing pages, like this one, which shouldn't really count. And then there are so many tiny blog posts littered around this stupid fucking blog that are just straight-up asinine, and probably should count either. Like this one, as just one example. We have 10,000 blog posts, but so many of them are lying in a landfill right now. And then consider all the blog posts that have been published and then since deleted. I'm mostly referring to all of Mike's posts, deleted in a pre-law school haze of regret, but there's been a few from my side of the fence over the years too. I recall a post from long ago whose premise was "here are all the other people on the internet who share my first and last name," which was deleted because there were just way too many redactions, now that I'm militant about not having my last name on this blog.
Anyways, you don't care about this. You shouldn't care about this. I'm just typing because I need to type something. I'm publishing late in the afternoon on a Saturday because I don't think you need to care about it, and I'm trying to make it easy to ignore. I could sit here and type all day about this fucking blog, but that would stretch the tolerance of our readership to its breaking point. No one thinks about this place in the same way I do. It's a nice place to visit for you, I hope, but it hasn't seeped into your bones and your blood like it has for me. You live your life and you come here when you want to.
I'm just realizing now that I wrote a long meta piece for our 1000th blog post. That was written toward the end of 2019, which means that, for the first eleven years of the blog's existence, we wrote 1000 blog posts, and during the 2020s, we've written 9000 blog posts. I think that post from 2019 is worth visiting if you want to know the origin story of how we got here. It misses 90% of the story as it stands now, of course, but that's what happens when you end up writing 9000 additional blog posts. In brief, here's where we've been since then.
In 2020, I blogged twice a day, with one of them being a blog post about whatever beer I drank that day, and the other being whatever I could cobble together. I learned that a blog-a-day habit was possible. I also learned (in retrospect, perhaps) that I was probably an alcoholic.
In 2021, I lost a sense of who I was as a writer, and found that maybe I still needed to blog every day. More on this discovery in a few days in another sappy anniversary post disguised as a Song of the Day, but suffice it to say now that this year, 2021, is when PoYB became its fullest form.
In 2022, I completed my only full calendar year of grad school, so the blog was kept burning but perhaps not as bright. Occasionally, I kept the lights on. I also got deeply into alcohol, more so than ever before, so you can start to see some of the cracks show if you read between the lines. Most importantly, the most satisfying blog project I have ever or will ever complete was worked through during 2022: Grannies Gone Wild. We peaked here.
In 2023, we had a good time through the year, but the summer yet again yielded another satisfying project: Summer Song Challenge. I already knew it was fun blogging every day, but it was cool to blog every day with other people. I felt a sense of togetherness through SSC that I hadn't felt before on this blog, at least not to that extent.
In 2024, we reached another peak, this time when we took the successful Song Challenge idea and blew it up to a yearlong project. By the end of the year, it felt like the ten of us or so had actually achieved something, a collective writing catharsis. It was deeply, incredibly satisfying. I don't think PoYB really ever recovered in the aftermath of Yearlong Song Challenge. The year also started with a bunch of individual weekly columns from some of our pals. Those all faded by the end of the year too, as they always do.
In 2025, then, we were basically hungover the whole year. Trying to find some sense of identity after losing so much. No overarching projects, just a diligent grinding out the blog on a daily basis. Oh, and Film Club too! Time will tell if this is something that will stand the test of blogging time, or if it'll fade like all other blog projects tend to do. If even one person still wants to watch movies with me, then Film Club will stick around.
In 2026, this year, I think I'm starting to get the sense that we're slowly petering out, losing steam, irreversibly. But maybe something will happen that will get us back and invested!
I don't think that we're going to end up with another 10,000 blog posts after this one. I guess you never know, but I think I know. There might eventually come a time when Record Club is literally the last thing standing, and so we'll still get at least two reviews every Friday, and a Sunday write-up for the new album, and those three-plus blog posts a week might eventually add up to 10,000 more posts. Theoretically. Realistically, though, the end of my life or the end of the world or the end of the internet is gonna get to us first.
Almost half of the blog posts published on PoYB so far were not written by me. With that in mind, I want to thank you for doing your part in making this website a cool place to be. At the very least, you made me happy, so hopefully you can feel good knowing that the arduous task of writing makes at least one human being's life better than it was before you wrote. I'm being sincere. Thank you.
Alright, that's enough for now. Let's get started on blog post #10,001.
A column about music, and about how the music informs our lives. Today's author is Joe. See the previous songs HERE.
"Identity Crisis"
DARK THOUGHTS
from DARK THOUGHTS
2016
One of the thoughts I've had about Lizzo lately—what, you thought this was gonna be a blog post about West Philly greats DARK THOUGHTS? get your head out of your fucking ass, this is PoYB, of course a DARK THOUGHTS Song of the Day entry is going to turn into a blog post about Lizzo, psh—is that she is exploiting a misunderstanding about the dichotomy of Identity vs. Choice. Lizzo is not the first person to do this, nor will she be the last. I don't even think she has ever thought about her issues (her commercial and artistic issues, to be clear) in this way, or maybe she has and she's being purposefully obtuse about it. That's not what I'm here to determine. I'm just here to do the thing I usually do—bend over like Ace Ventura and grab my ass cheeks and mime talking out of my ass about whatever subject is on my mind lately. And this has definitely been on my mind.
So Lizzo's new album, the possibly but not necessarily ironically named Bitch—oh, and this officially counts as the RC f/u for this RC alumna, meet me at the bottom of this post for the official checkmark on that task—didn't really do all that well, commercially speaking. I assume it's not very good artistically, either, but that's neither here nor there. I've never thought her art was all that compelling and I didn't need to resort to self-aggrandizing but ultimately condescending courtroom fiction to make that opinion clear. The music is basic at best, lousy at worst, and always with a heavy stink of commercialism about it that's turned me off from the beginning.
What do we make of this? If you ask Lizzo—oh man, if only I actually could ask Lizzo myself, as opposed to having to hear her words through print on the snarky music blogs that I still read—then she'll tell you that they are OUT TO GET HER. She frames it like she always has: that she is a strong fat Black woman, and that the powers that be are doing everything they can do (manipulating the algorithms, basically) to keep her down. The irony is that there's probably more truth to that than we as a society seem willing to accept. I do think that institutional racism makes it so that artists like Lizzo are suppressed and held back. I do believe that your typical large Black woman with a strong voice is going to face more opposition than a classically attractive young white conservative male.
I'm talking here about the concept of Identity. In other words, what about "who Lizzo is" affects her life and people's reaction to her. When I talk about "racism," that's an Identity thing. When you hate someone because of the color of their skin, or treat them differently, that's a racist considering Identity. And that's wrong. I would condemn that, and have. If you're getting paid less because you are a woman, if you're getting kicked out of a coffee shop because you were born in Israel, if you are being made to feel less than because you are overweight, if you don't sell a lot of albums because the corporations that control the flow of music to the sheep who use streaming services are bending the algorithm toward their racist will, then that is identity politics! And it's fucked up!
And if I didn't know anything else about Lizzo, maybe we'd leave it there, shrug our shoulders and wish her the best. But that's not all we know about Lizzo. Here's what else we know: we know that she was credibly accused of being abusive. There were lawsuits accusing her of abuse her employees. This included such salacious allegations as forcing her employee to stick a banana up a stripper's vagina, against the employee's will. Lizzo's response to these allegations were the same as any other cishet white male abuser that we've seen countless times over the years: these are lies designed to take me down, but I won't let it, I will fight my accusers and call them liars and save my reputation. But we all know what all that shit ultimately means. We've gone through it countless times on this blog, what it means to be an abuser and what that might mean to the conversation about the art or lack thereof. Ultimately, someone who is credibly accused of abuse is not someone who I'm going to engage with on an artistic level.
Lizzo knows all this, though. That's the thing. She knows that she is an abusive piece of shit, and she also knows that people like her have verifiably been treated unfairly throughout history because of who she is. And so she uses that to her advantage. On purpose or just because that's how her mind has been trained to work, I don't know. Maybe a little of both. But what she's doing is mixing up the concepts of Identity and Choice. Her identity is that she is an overweight Black woman. Her choice was to abuse her employees. And when I consider her art, I am declining but ONLY because of her choice, and NOT because of her identity.
I'm actually inclined to give Lizzo the benefit of the doubt here, in that she just simply doesn't know, or can't understand, the difference between Identity and Choice. She has, rightly so, been conditioned to see any challenge toward her as a challenge of her Identity, and she's been conditioned that way because it's very often true! You can't let those fucking scumbag racists get away with that shit, you gotta stand up for yourself! And I'll stand right alongside of you in the fight to make sure that no one is punished simply because of who they are, and what their identity is! And if her music wasn't selling because of Identity, I'd stand up and fight! That's what Lizzo wants you to think, too! Come fight with me, she says! Buy my music, prove to them that an overweight Black woman can make great art too!
She's only saying that because she doesn't want you think about her Choice, though. Her choice to be an abuser. It's a completely separate thing. It has nothing to do with Identity. And, if she were to let anyone even once consider her Choice, then it robs her of her victimhood that she needs to survive the PR crisis of being an abuser. So it's really important that you think the albums aren't selling because of who she is! And not consider once that they might not be selling because of what she chose to do!
I guess what I'd ask is, one, do you see how fine of a line it is, between Identity and Choice? And two, do you understand how some people might take advantage of how fine of a line it really is? Lizzo is taking advantage of it for sure, attempting to tell you that she's not beloved because of her Identity, and completely ignoring the probability of the issue being due to her Choice. What other bad actors are muddying the water for you? Now that it's on my mind, I'm not going to lie, I see it everywhere.
What the purpose of all this is, understanding the difference between Identity and Choice, is that we can then understand how to respect and love Identity, and how to hold people accountable for their Choices. A person should NEVER be judged for who they are, and a person should ALWAYS be judged for what they choose to do. And if you start conflating the two, well then, you might just be a Lizzo fan in 2026.
A column about music, and about how the music informs our lives. Today's author is Nate. See the previous songs HERE.
"Keep Me in Your Heart"
Warren Zevon
from The Wind
2003
I was laying on a bed in the bottom half of the split-level house I grew up in at about 7:30 PM the night my mother died. The room was my grandmother's. It would have been the room she died in if she hadn't been transferred to hospice care at the end of her life. My parents had been sleeping there, moving down there while renovations were being done in their bedroom upstairs. Laying there, their clothes in open drawer and pill bottles on the nightstands, my Aunt Jen called down and told me to come upstairs because my mom was about to die.
Did I run up the stairs? Did I hustle with all the speed I could? Did I break a sweat? It's not that far to get from one room to the other in my childhood home. Could I have shaved a few seconds off?
My father and two of my aunts were sitting around my mother, who was pale and still. My father was clicking around on his phone, pulling up music to play as my mother passed, talking to her and telling her it was alright, that we loved her, that she could go, that she was alright. He played "Do You Realize??" by the Flaming Lips, which when played on YouTube has a few-seconds long intro of animal sounds, and I thought to myself "he's blowing this, she's going to leave this world to the sound of apes hooting."
When did she stop breathing? Was I there? I think I saw her take her last breath but if I'm honest with myself I can't really remember it. I recall looking for breath but I don't remember if I saw it. I can conjure the image both ways in my head right now, unsure of which is the true memory. I am afraid that I missed it, that we were playing music to a corpse.
I can't decide if it matters. It can't be known until it's too late what someone retains at the end, what senses are firing, what she was thinking if she was there, if she noticed that her sons weren't there.
Then it was over. She was gone and her body was just a body and there was a great exhale in the room. Dying is hard work both for the dying and the ones bearing witness and being there. It's groaning and pain and rashes and smashing ice chips on a marble countertop and buying soup and straining out the noodles and meat so all that's there is broth and it's calling people and answering questions and putting meals into freezers and sitting in a room with someone who cannot speak who you would kill to hear from again. It felt like a play had just ended or like we were coming home from an extended church service, loosening proverbial ties and taking off proverbial stockings.
I called my brothers. My dad texted his family. We set our phones aside and drank wine with the body, keeping the faeries away. We told stories, told jokes, said things that would have horrified her, thrilled her, made her laugh. We remembered how we loved each other, how she loved us. After an hour we snapped into the work that comes with celebrating a life and putting a body to rest. The work became its own escape until it was over, and now the rest of it happens.
