Bring your best, bring your brightest

I have, for... checks calendar the better part of 10 years advocated that we abandon subtlety in music, film, and possibly writing. This pains me for many reasons! I love subtlety, I love the implication of something, I love the exercise left to the audience member of meaning, I love all that stuff! But, as I've said many times to my friends: it's clear that a segment of the American voting people have decided to reject the use of critical thought with regards to their environment, so much so that all too many have screamed online at Tom Morello to "stop being political". Y'know, Tom Morello, political science Harvard graduate, also the guy who helped write Killing in the Name Of. In Peru, one of the most fascinating condemnations of the pro-capital liberal is the term "tibio" (translation: lukewarm) or "tibiazo" (translation: believe it or not, somehow more lukewarm than the previous word). The expression of no political thought becoming somehow the most deafening, less an acceptance of the status quo but more a willingness to participate in it becoming even more lukewarm.

I have been juggling this thought again in my head as we come to the head of yet another election year here in the US, seeing the same old playbook get trudged out once more, amidst yet another war, and the economy predictably in the shitter (and then some).

We need to be more obvious about what we express, it's clear that the reader/listener/viewer is no fan of exercise.

The song

Sister Wife Sex Strike - A Bigger Bomb

The mood

The ghost of Emma Goldstein has taken hold of you at the $5 minimum donation DIY show in a deli that used to be a church in Pittsburgh. You have had too many Yuenglings and somebody gave you their grandpa's Zippo lighter. Exits are north, and east.

The context

Somehow not only a band-from-online that I've loved but also one that I've seen live (and will again, at least one last time), Sister Wife Sex Strike is a folk punk duo that I first saw on Tiktok. I can say a lot about bands that I learned about through Tiktok but I'm thusfar 3 for 3 on learning about a band via the algorithm and then seeing them perform live within the month and enjoying the hell out of the experience. Go see your favorite bands live, you won't know when you'll get another chance! I bring you this because Sister Wife Sex Strike is ending, and if they're playing near you, you should make it out to the raucous show. I don't know what playlist I would put them on but I do know I have listened to their albums from start to finish so...I'm gonna do that again.

Who else can give you the folk punk banjo acoustic cover of Eiffel 65's "Blue"? Nobody else, that's who. Sadly, it's not on both of their covers albums, so it's a song about me as well.

Any mistakes made were by accident unless they made me look or sound super cool in which case they were 100% on purpose.