brainsplotch

"Oy, Wanker, Bloke, Telly"  This is a descriptive term, for a certain strand of Britpop, that I recently heard podcaster Yasi Salek use on the most recent episode of Bandsplain (about the band Blur--who, coincidentally, I love). It made me laugh out loud, because this is just the sort of British pop music I tend to gravitate towards. It's the sort of music that wears its Britishness proudly on its Union Jacked sleeve. While the subject of this post, The Smiths, aren't of the 1990s Britpop movement, the music they made in the 1980s certainly helped pave the way. Now, let's take the time machine back to that magical year of 1986 that I have discussed so much in this blog: Sometime during the first week of college freshman year, a particularly outgoing floormate--I can't remember exactly who this was--knocked on my door and introduced himself. (The irony of me forgetting who this kid was is not lost on me. I think it might have been Bob D., but I'm just guess...

The day after the Drive-By Truckers show, feeling numb and emotionally drained from the election results, we left Detroit (after a much needed and good breakfast in the Shinola Hotel restaurant) for Metro Airport. From Metro Airport, we flew to Washington, DC. Being consistently nervous about ever getting to the airport too late, we made it through TSA and then "set up camp" at our gate a good three hours before our plane departed. Almost everyone on our plane was watching live coverage of Kamala Harris's speech at Howard University. I initially wanted nothing to do with it, but did end up changing my mind and watching about half of it. It didn't make me feel any less depressed. From there, I watched the first half of a documentary called 26.2 to Life , about a group of San Quentin inmates who train to run a marathon, which is comprised of over 100 laps around the perimeter of the prison yard. It was just the sort of life-affirming, positive content I needed at that m...

I saw Drive-By Truckers perform at Saint Andrews Hall in Detroit on election night. As I wrote on social media, "if I'm gonna stress out about the election anywhere, I may as well do it here with Drive-By Truckers. The whole evening had an eerie feel to it. I was too worried about the election to completely lose myself in the show, which is a shame because the band was absolutely cooking all night. It seemed that Patterson Hood in particularly was full of nervous energy. I know Hood's political leanings and I know he was likely worried about the election as much as I was, but was channeling all of this anxiety into his performance. Of the four times I've seen DBT, this was without a doubt the most incendiary show I'd ever seen. There were people in the crowd who were looking at their phones at election results. I didn't want to know, though I looked at these folks--most of them middle-aged white people--and tried to surmise who they were rooting for. Though mos...