Hi readers and listeners! How is everyone? What have we been filling our senses and souls with these days to salve, survive, grieve and thrive?
After delving into the youthful roots of my insomnia this past HTFHTS issue, I’ve been thinking a lot about the media I grew up with - the stuff that really sucked me in and massaged the curatorial folds of my brain without any algorithmic inputs.
Nothing about this exercise has been subtle or in any way repressed for me - I have always been obsessively staring and listening, grabbing at all things equally shiny and revolting, seeking out dark stories that made me nervously lol at ennui, licking up melodrama, and sneaking in sexy stuff that made my body feel insane.
This here episode of HTFHTS is a cheers to just that - growing up! - and all the feelings and sounds of going from a baby to a kid, tween to teen, and every slimy step in between.
It’s a soundtrack of curiosity and confusion (Swirlies, Fernanda Abreu, Jura & Helene Norup Due) an exercise in deep self-questioning (OHYUNG, The Linda Lindas, Cocteau Twins), dissent (Colourbox), fantasy (Cola Boyy, John Carroll Kirby & JGrrey, Kimiko Kasai & Herbie Hancock, sogumm) and declaration (Sequoyah Murray).
To listen to EP 6: Growing Up on Moon Glow Radio, check out my set on Mixcloud.
As always, here’s a link to the playlist without the DJ frills. (Though if you only listen this way, you won’t get to hear me impersonate Mark Hoppus 😬)
Growing up, I was (and continue to be) extremely uncertain about a lot. My internal monologue never really shut up, and when I didn’t get to what I believed to be the root-cause of something, I spiraled.
However!
Whether or not I “got” something, it, frequently and completely, got me.
Allow me to digress for a second and steal a podcast premise from two of my brilliant contemporaries who absolutely do not know me, but talk to me in my kitchen once a week. I’m not sure I could explain this otherwise.
Culture - do you know her?
In Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang’s incredibly funny and almost sickeningly poignant podcast “Las Culturistas,” they always ask their guests to do a quick personal scan and locate at what point in their lives they discovered that culture - yes all of culture - “was for them.”
Growing up knelt one foot in front of the television, I did have that striking “ah-ha!” cultural moment - though I didn’t recognize what it was then, and can only label it as “culture” now.
It, like many things in the 90s, revolved around cable television, and for me, that meant sibling stations MTV and Nickelodeon.
Let’s say I was 8 years old and let’s definitely say I was not allowed to watch MTV - which only meant I watched it faster and furiouser than I watched anything else, and all the time.
With an older sister roughly 6 years ahead of me, I was very channeled into alt 90s TEEN STUFF, and then some.
Not only was I aware of every Pearl Jam lyric, I was also [duped into] performing [an electrocuted] Eddie Vedder routine - this specific head-banging dance for the amusement of my teen sister and her friends, after they’d rubbed an inflated balloon against my perfect-for-the-task long, wavy hair.
I remember performing this at synagogue once.
All of this is a ramp up to say I was very obsessed with music videos as a kid (I’m still obsessed with music videos), and watched all of the countdowns, as well as the twilight, format-less video shuffles (the coolest), for many years of my early life.
It was wholesome, too, because pre-Internet, I had me and basically only me to tell me what was going on and how I felt about it.
Now that I say this, though, I do realize I have a repressed memory: VH1!
VH1 was in the mix, too!
It was a really simple journey from MTV to VH1 - channel 51 to 52. Not my go-to, but definitely a filler and an easy one-button tap.
The best VH1 show at the time was definitely music video showcase “Pop Up Video.”
Pop Up edits supplied informative and often silly facts about bands/singers, as well as behind-the-scenes production accounts. By no means a progressive text (here, they simply can’t resist the low-hanging fruits of femme/slut shaming and body critique!), the program is a prelude to the fomenting, monstrous feedback loop we know so well today, galvanized, of course, by the Internet and social media platforms like Twitter - an artifact of our human desire to categorize, label, and critique.
While it did kind of set the tone for social schadenfreude, Pop Up dragging had no viral component, and thus could only be expected to travel the radius of a living room with the reach of your few closest friends.
In other words, TV at the time was a much safer vehicle for this instinct, as it did not include a machine-learning component or algorithm tweaked to individual taste and habit; the violent and parasocial feedback loop we know so well today was still a very safe ways away.
And that’s just one reason I’m grateful, dare I say PROUD, to be a millennial who spent whole days glued to the television!
Bringing it back.
It was in this type of pop culture headspace that I snuck in countless hours of music videos, feeling wonderfully badass knowing they absolutely weren’t made for me and yet made me feel so very weird and alive.
One of my big sister’s top listens at this time was Björk’s second album, Post, and I, a gay, avant-garde child, glommed onto everything about it - the pinks and oranges of the jewel case, the huge array of genres (I didn’t know what a genre was, but I certainly knew something different was happening here because so many of the tracks sounded strikingly different from each other), the lyrical subtleties and big big dramas, the flintiness and the longing - the screaming!
I looooooooooooooved it.
Another thing I loved equally at the time was the animation programming on Nickelodeon - in particular, the sexual, boogery, hairy, and rotting “gross-ups” of the NOT-children’s-children’s series, “The Ren & Stimpy Show.”
(Disclaimer: as much as I loved this show, I can’t bring myself to watch it anymore knowing that its creator, a man in entertainment, is a sexual abuser who, like so many men in entertainment, groomed children. I’m devastated and angry that this is the trajectory of just about everything since the beginning of time, and feel like one thing - perhaps the only thing - I can continue to do to is call it out when I see it.)
Anyway.
When I first saw the music video for “I Miss You,” which fused together two seemingly disparate things that I loved, I had my extreme and memorable Las Culturistas culture moment. Aha!
Things can be combined? To enhance each other? And tell an even bigger, more colorful story? And make one GIANT art!!?!?!??!
It blew my fucking mind. That’s when I knew culture was for me.
Here is the video for your viewing pleasure. If you care to, put yourself in an 8-year old’s jellies and imagine how it’d feel, how it’d sound.
While prepping for this HTFHTS episode, I also curated a pretty long, but certainly not exhaustive, YouTube playlist of the music videos I was super into growing up.
Included are Prince & The Revolution, The Smashing Pumpkins, Madonna (the best Madonna song, in fact, and it’s not up for debate), Tori Amos, Lauryn Hill, White Zombie (lol!), The Breeders, and more. Also, and of course, there’s Hype Williams’ canonical 90s fisheye lens, which defined Hip-Hop and R&B videos of the day and ushered us into the digital age with TLC’s 1999 “No Scrubs.”
These are just some of the zany brainy things that were spinning around in my mind, all the time, when I was growing up. What was spinning around in yours?
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