oneweekoneband:

Teenage Fanclub - “The Concept” (from the “Young Adult” OST)

Teenage Fanclub at the Movies

The movie “Young Adult” opens with Charlize Theron sitting in her car popping a Memorex tape (the 90 minute kind, no doubt) into her car stereo. She plays Mavis, the ghostwriter of a popular book series for tweens. She is on the way to her hometown, set on rekindling her relationship with her ex-boyfriend (now married and a new father.) Mavis pushes the Play button on her stereo, cranks the volume up, and the distorted feedback of guitars floods her car.

It’s Teenage Fanclub’s “The Concept”, a song that sonically belongs in the era from which it comes from. The track can be found as the opener to Teenage Fanclub’s third album,”Bandwagonesque”. The fuzzy guitars are grungy, and the plodding bass lines give the track a hint of shoegaze. It sounds familiar enough to tell you it’s from the 90’s, yet obscure enough not to be dated. This was not the 90’s “Jesse’s Girl”. This was about another girl, but it’s not “About a Girl”. 

“The Concept” is the nicest, most sensitive douchebag song ever. Norman Blake sings about a groupie who “wears denim wherever she goes.”. The song makes fun of her musical taste and recounts the girl’s virtues as though they were faults. It’s coming from a point of view of the narrator’s own insecurity and feelings of inadequacy.  He talks about her liking him for his long hair and how she supports the band he’s in when he himself isn’t particularly that impressed with it. He likes her enough to have her drive him and the boys home from gigs, but not enough to stop taking advantage of her. The idea of her is attractive, but there are parts of her he can’t accept. His awareness of this is crushing. “I didn’t want to hurt you…”  he says over and over, but it’s what he does.

There is a gorgeous guitar break in the middle of the song between the mea culpa’s: Fender-drenched ellipses as far as the confession is concerned, the narrator struggling for some kind of explanation for his behavior. There isn’t one, so the apology is what he comes back to instead. The song’s guitars noodle towards its end, leaving the declaration open-ended. It’s a one-sided break-up, a rehearsal of an apology, an unsent rejection letter.

If you saw “Young Adult” and had no idea what the opening track was and who it’s by, you may have missed the 90’s alt-rock reference but the song scores the sequence perfectly, and sets the tone for the misadventure to come.

Teenage Fanclub week has been great at One Week / One Band.

proposed new gchat icon colors

katherinestasaph:

Green: “Hi! I’m here! You can talk to me!”

Blue: “I’m here, and you only wish you could talk to me.”

Yellow: “I’m not here. (But we’re still cool.)”

Orange: “I’m not here. (And we’re not cool.)”

Chartreuse: “I’m not here… unless you know who you are.”

Red: “I’m busy. Don’t fucking talk to me. I don’t even know why this window is open.”

Pink: “I’m ‘busy.’ I would secretly love for you to talk to me oh god save me from my busywork.”

Brown: “We have not spoken in three years, and doing so now would be unseemly. This is not a green connection. It has rotted.”

Black: “I am only here because you back-and-forthed my Craigslist apartment or listserv entry. I don’t even know what you look like.”

Silver: “I am actually a bot.”

Gray: “I’m offline.”

White: “I’m a ghost: offline for you but online for everyone else, because fuck you, that’s why.”

Mint: “I’m here, because I am using Google Glass. (Very expensive.)”

You’ll want to tell them to take full responsibility for themselves and move the fuck forward. You’ll want to say that no big break is going to make it easier to get up in the morning and write. What makes it easier is trusting your own instincts and noticing that you have giant ideas percolating in that herd-animal brain of yours, you just have to dig in and find them. After you find them, you have to write something terrible that eventually, through a lot of editing, over and over and over, becomes something great. If you go pawing and kicking at doors of editors and publishers and agents and all you have is the creative equivalent of a half-eaten burrito from yesterday’s lunch, you shouldn’t act surprised when they want to turn that pile of cold beans into, say, a book about candlemaking, even though you couldn’t give a shit about candles. You aren’t owning your stupid writing career. You’re being a lazy sack of fuck that wants a Mommy to make a little color-coded schedule for you and to stop you at lunchtime to spoon-feed you your Spaghettios.

Ask Polly: Jesus, My Struggling Writer Friends Never Shut Up! | The Awl

BRB, taping this up above my desk.

Source: The Awl

I was sexually assaulted at a rock show (my response to “I Was Groped on the Subway” in the NYT)

jennymack:

This morning, I read Kimberly Matus’s powerful account of what happened to her on a New York subway, and it moved me to write about my own experience with sexual assault in public. It’s something I’ve talked about in therapy and with Brian, and I’m still working to resolve my feelings about it. I thought this might help, too.

——-

In July 2009, my boyfriend Brian and I headed to Carborro, NC for XX Merge, a music festival hosted at the Cat’s Cradle to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Merge Records. During M. Ward’s set (night four of the festival), we stood on the floor, enjoying the music, when I bent down to get my phone, which was in my purse at my feet. Suddenly, a hard slap landed on my backside — not a playful slap, not a grope, but a stinging, wind-up slap. I stood up, in pain, and looked at Brian.

“Did you just do that?” It was too hard; he wouldn’t hit me like that. He looked back at me confused. I placed my hand where a red welt was developing.

I turned behind me, and to this day, I wish I could remember the faces I saw, but it was dark and there were five of them. A group of friends, all trying not to show their guilt, laughing among themselves, staring straight ahead.

In my mind, I grabbed each one of them by the throat and made them tell me which of them was the guilty one, and which of them were just the cowards who looked on. I’ve fantasized about jumping on stage right afterward, grabbing the mic and shaming them to the whole room. In reality, I broke into tears and ran to the back patio behind the building. Brian followed me as I crouched among the smokers, letting out heavy sobs. I felt violated, I felt dirty, and most of all, I felt robbed — robbed of the evening, robbed of the set I was missing, robbed of the memory of my happy vacation.

I’m still very angry about it today. I still envision choking the men who stood by and laughed as they watched their friend sexually assault a stranger. Not one of them apologized. Not one of them even looked me in the eye.

The dress I was wearing at the time, a green dress I loved, has since been given away, because even years later, it still hurt too much to wear it and remember. Going to concerts has never been the same for me — being up front makes me incredibly anxious, because of who might be standing behind me. I once left a show because I felt like I was being pushed around and had a panic attack. I don’t even like being in close crowds of any kind if I can help it.

Even almost four years later, the emotions are still raw. I still feel robbed, and want for justice. It will likely never come. I was happy to read that in Kimberly’s case, undercover officers witnessed her attack and arrested the man who violated her. This is the dream end scenario for any woman who has ever been groped, slapped, assaulted or harassed in public. But I know her ending is rare.

The majority of women who have been assaulted by a stranger in public (and there are many) will probably never find the resolution they seek. Like me, they will continue to envision what they would have done differently in the moment of their attack. Reading Kimberly’s story was comforting to me. Sometimes the bad guys do get caught. Sometimes, there is justice.