Send in the Clouds

Hi, happy holidays to you. This time of year can’t help but feel like an interregnum, despite my inner 17-year-old-boy continuing to point out that, Actually, calendars are arbitrary markers of time and there’s no reason to believe January 1 2025 will be fundamentally different from December 31 2024. This year, of course, the holiday season is almost literally an interregnum, and, among other things, I’ve spent a lot of it oscillating between a kind of blissed-out indifference to what’s coming and a deep dread that reveals that indifference as simple emotional bypassing. Nobody knows exactly what 2025 will be like, only that it will be immensely difficult for everyone, and that some will have it worse than others. 

This was not a very fun year for me, overall, but I did have a lot of fun. In March, I returned to my PhD program after taking a year off. I started this newsletter around the same time, hoping to put into practice here what I was examining theoretically there. Much of what I’m working on has to do with the way that people use music as a form of self-authentication, how we are, in my view, loose and gaseous associations of things, and that some of us wrap songs or albums or bands around ourselves in an effort to  give definition to those associations, to make their shape suddenly apparent. You might do this when you hear a song and think that it expresses something you’ve been feeling but couldn’t put to words. You might talk about that song as a way of demonstrating to the people around you—and to yourself—who you believe yourself to be. 

People do this with everything, really. I love the English football club Tottenham Hotspur, for my sins, and I love to talk about them. There are a million reasons why, but part of it is that I semiconsciously believe supporting Spurs (and having an interest in the Premier League, and calling it “football” instead of “soccer”) communicates a whole battery of specific things about how I understand myself. Tottenham, for all of their money and talent and history, do not win championships, they haven’t won a trophy of any kind since 2008, and their highest peak in the last couple of decades was losing the Champions League final in 2019. At their best, they play an incredibly exciting form of high-octane, high-scoring football that is almost always beautiful, even when it’s not successful. That’s an attractive proposition to me and part of why I remain in love with them. If I were from North London, my love of Spurs would communicate something very different: a connection to where I come from, to my family, to the club’s legacy. I’d be no more or less COYS, but my fandom would mean something different. (I'm also fully behind Ange Postecoglou, and I want you to know that, too.)

I’ve written in this space before that I think music criticism is a form of memoir, which is an ongoing idea of mine that develops into different things the longer I sit with it. At the moment, it seems to me that by making the choices I make as a critic—to review or not review certain albums, to use certain language in describing them, to draw on certain metaphors or illustrations, to bring to mind certain other albums or artists in comparison—all say as much about me as a writer, thinker, and person as they do about the music itself. Reading music criticism in this way over time can be a fascinating process of understanding writers as, essentially, unspoken characters in their own work (which is especially fun when the writer is someone I know).

With all of this in mind, I wanted to share some of my favorite pieces that I wrote this year. This is in part simply a norm of the writerly world, and an excuse for self-promotion, but it’s also a way of me reminding myself that everything I wrote this year, at its core, returned to my dissertation; taken together, it demonstrates some shard of the person I spent this year insisting myself to be. 

Without further ado:

In January, the Los Angeles Review of Books published my essay “I Will Never Die, Pt. 2.” This is an excerpt from the memoir that forms the other half of my dissertation, and it centers around my experiences as an evangelical college student in the days around Katrina. It’s pitched as a meditation on death, which it obviously is, but there are also plenty of musings on how music bored a cavity in the super-dense anxiety I felt as a young Christian and, eventually, gave me something like an escape route. 

In February, Pitchfork published my review of Mannequin Pussy's I Got Heaven. I have talked this record to death on Taxonomy and don't want to say anything else about it, only that I'm proud of how the review came out.

In May, I presented a paper at the University of Liverpool's English department academic conference. Rachelle and I went to Liverpool in 2022 so I could give my paper in person, and we fell head over heels for the city. (We also watched Tottenham draw 2-2 with Liverpool in a beer garden half a block from Anfield.) This year, I set an alarm for 2am, ate a pint of ice cream, put on a cute outfit, gave my paper over Zoom, and struggled to answer a single question through my fatigue's brain-fog. The paper is called "When Cool Becomes Cold: The Poseur and the Freezing of Subculture," and it uses John Wray's metal novel Gone to the Wolves, plus a bit of theory and some death-metal cultural history, to examine what, exactly, is so offensive about the presence of the poseur in said cultures. If you've ever wanted to read a one-paragraph phenomenology of a Morbid Angel t-shirt, here you go.

Later in the month, I wrote about Cindy Lee's use of drag, and about how we navigate desiring something that we know is unreachable and unrealistic. It's specifically about beauty and transness, but it's also about the attempt to escape into an idealized past as it's represented in recorded music.

My day job is as a copywriter at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, primarily working on non-classical concerts at the Hollywood Bowl and Walt Disney Concert Hall. This summer, Herbie Hancock reunited the original Headhunters lineup for the first time since the Head Hunters album to play it in full. I wrote about why this was such an important occasion.

The next month, my friend Emily, who runs an art gallery in New Orleans, asked me to interview the artist Dickie Landry, whose work she was showing. Landry was a founding member of the Philip Glass Ensemble and was an integral part of the whole NYC loft scene in the 1970s, which, as someone who also grew up in Louisiana dreaming of a bigger world, makes him a hero to me.

Also in August, the Los Angeles Review of Books published my rambling essay "True Believer," which is about seeing Nine Inch Nails in concert in the year 2000. This was largely an experiment in auto-criticism. I'm not sure that I did precisely what I set out to do with this piece, but I'm very happy with how it came out. It was also chosen as an LARB staff pick by fellow NIN fan AJ.

In September, I wrote a Sunday Review of Garbage's Version 2.0 for Pitchfork. I've also written about this one at length on Taxonomy.

The next month, I reviewed Geordie Greep's The New Sound, also for Pitchfork. I struggled with this record, which I thought was conceptually interesting but repulsive in large doses. It's rare that I actually challenge my own tendency toward black and white thinking on the page, and this review forced me to do that. Plus it marked the second time I've referenced the Woody Woodpecker theme in a Pitchfork review. I also discovered that my face popped up on a website notorious for its regressive attitudes toward people who aren't cis white dudes because of this review.

In November, I wrote about the reissue of TV on the Radio's Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes for Pitchfork. I've struggled for a long time to put into words what TVOTR meant to me in 2004, when the album was released. It was my second year of college, and I saw them play in New Orleans at a warehouse venue called Twiropa that would itself become as fundamental to my sense of self as being someone who liked TVOTR in 2004 was. A few months after that show, I started working the door at Twiropa, where I saw every buzzy indie-rock band willing to route a tour through New Orleans (and received a headbutt from Bernie Worrell during Jazz Fest). I also processed—or tried to process, or avoided processing—a lot of the evangelical conversion stuff I allude to in the first LARB piece while working that door. The building was destroyed in Katrina. At the time of the storm, I was living in Mid-City in a second-floor flat the waterline didn't quite reach, so wandering Twiropa's wreckage the first day we were allowed back in the city was personally devastating in a way little else managed to be. Much more to say there.

And finally, five days after my 40th birthday, Hearing Things published "Modes of Transportation," in which I try to trace how my understanding of my taste evolved over the first year of transition. As always, I feel like the piece doesn't quite fulfill what I envisioned for it, but it's also the first thing I've ever written that my coworkers and family friends and other people from outside of the world of the music internet have wanted to talk to me about, which made me feel vulnerable after the fact. I was mostly surprised and pleased to hear from several other trans women that they, too, had an intuitive sense that listening to shoegaze would help them feel their way through things.

Thank you for reading Taxonomy in 2024. I told myself I'd keep this thing free until I write on it frequently enough to justify asking you to pay for it. I'm not there yet, so it'll remain free for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, happy new year from Long Beach California.