It’s a phenomenal time to be a queer musician. But while all of the attention being paid to contemporary queer artists is wonderful and important and completely deserved, it’s important to remember the artists who fought tooth and acrylic nail to carve out spaces for themselves in a largely white, straight musical landscape.
Autumn means a whole slew of new music, both releases and live performances, for all the queers to enjoy. Summer and its attendant festivals are behind us, and now we can swath ourselves in flannel and raincoats like the goddamn Seattleites we are and get on with it.
Maybe the best summary of Mykki Blanco’s raison d’être comes from Blanco herself. In an interview on Youtube, she responds to a question about acceptance by mainstream hip-hop by stating, “I didn’t come to be accepted, I came to be visible.”
Well folks, I did it. I spent the weekend in the tween-filled, EDM-saturated alternate universe known as Bumbershoot and I’ve lived to tell the tale. Ok, so I’m being dramatic. It was mostly really fun and only ever got uncomfortable or depressing when I watched fourteen-year-olds doing drugs or something.
Bumbershoot 2016 is overwhelming. Music, comedy, panels, food, pop-up shops, the list goes on. So here’s a handy-dandy guide to some of this weekend’s highlights.
Punk’s vitality lies primarily in its imperfection. In the unrefined fuzziness of a bedroom recording or the brutal sloppiness of a drunken live set, you can hear growth, change, disorder–in short, the sound of being alive. Punk widens the cracks in music’s surface enough for us to see the organ of humanity churning beneath.
This week I’ve been thinking a lot about hip-hop, which is maybe a weird thing to write. I often think about hip-hop because I am both an immense fan of rap music and also deeply fascinated by its effect as a social and political movement, but this week in particular it seems like that’s all I’ve been thinking about and listening to.
Since I write one of these pieces a week, there’s no possible way to stay on top of all of the worthwhile music being released. So, in order to remedy all of my oversights, I decided to compile some of my favorite releases of the year. Hopefully you’ll forgive me for not mentioning some of these earlier.
The 20th annual incarnation of the beloved/ horrific (depending on who you ask) neighborhood music festival lit up the Pike-Pine corridor this weekend, and Jetspace Magazine was there to see it all.
Goopy, glittering, and riotously fun, local punk outfit Mommy Long Legs will blow your face off. With songs that run the gamut from yuppie moms to chic, undead parties, the band is a raucous, irreverent delight, and one of the best bands in Seattle.
In case you live under a rock, Capitol Hill Block Party is a few short weeks away. If you actually live under a rock, let me know what your rent is like and if there are any vacancies.
It’s hard to be a teen. No generational group receives quite as much bad press as teenagers. They’re derided as impulsive, dramatic, petty, pretentious, reckless, and shallow. As an experiment, I typed news about teenagers into Google. Here are a sample of the results that came up on the first page: