Content Nausea No. 17: Almost Had To Start a Fight/In and Out of Patience
I want, I want, I want, I want not to feel numb about death
Welcome to the 17th edition of Content Nausea. This is the first post of the new year, and I am looking forward to attempting to make this a thing again in 2020. So this is the new year?? Here is the welcome blog. Please click the heart at the top of the page and maybe forward this to someone you know who is probably bored at work?
Shortly before the last decade started, we all came up from Benn’s basement to watch the ball drop in his living room and then watch someone set off some fireworks in the middle of Milchling Drive. I spent a couple days thinking about that moment. I wanted it to be perfect. So I pulled out the lime green iPod Nano that had shepherded me through the final three years of high school, put in earbuds and queued up “Walkabout” by Atlas Sound featuring Noah Lennox of Animal Collective. That had to be the final song I heard in 2009. At some point a little after midnight, I listened to leaked versions of “Norway” and “Walk in the Park” from Beach House’s leaked Teen Dream. I could already tell that was going to be a defining album of the year. I wanted to wrap myself in it.
Eventually, we went back inside and watched a bunch of movies (Office Space, Clerks II and probably Wayne’s World) before going to bed around 6. Later, I watched Jeremiah Masoli and Oregon lose to Terrelle Pryor and Ohio State in the Rose Bowl, and Anna and I watched The Hangover. It turned out I kind of sucked at that point in my life. I was also a 17-year-old boy.
That is how I came into the 2010s.
It’s 2020 now. I did not put as much thought into things as a 27-year-old. I went to happy hour, came home, worked, contemplated the lyrics of “Home” by LCD Soundsystem — “this is the trick, forget a terrible year” — before posting them to multiple social media channels, cleaned the kitchen, took a shower, shaved and started to make my to-do list for New Year’s Day when I looked at my phone and realized it was 11:51. I came into 2020 listening to “Wasted Days” from Attack on Memory by Cloud Nothings. It was early in the song when the display on my phone went to 12 a.m. I sat and marinated in it, and then I wrote these paragraphs.
Welcome to 2020. Honestly, I’m not sure if I thought I would be more than this, and that’s pretty good.
This is my decade-in-review blog. I laid out a nice schedule at the beginning of December for when I wanted to blog albums of the year, songs of the year, a year-in-review, albums/songs/shows of the decade, etc., but it turns out life does not bend to my posting schedule, which is unfortunate. So whatever, you can let it sit in your inbox however long you would like. Just know I been real.
Here is a look back at the 2010s through the lens of what I was listening to when I was driving around. I stole this idea from Schnabel because it was a good one.
2010
It is hard to consider 2010 as part of the decade. Of course, you can be pedantic and say the decade is actually 2011-2020 instead of 2010-2019, but that’s much less tidy. I don’t like mixing the 1s and the 2s, so I lump 2010 in through 2019. But 2010 is different spiritually. I ran a 4:54 mile in 2010. I was still a boy. So much was uncertain, but at that point, that feeling was exciting.
Anna made me two summer mixes that formed the backbone of my listening for the next couple years. Japandroids released “Younger Us” and Wavves released “Post Acid” at the beginning of the summer. Those three months were spend shuttling between Bel Air and Aberdeen and Churchville mini golf and Fallston with Gauntlet Hair, Sleigh Bells, Male Bonding, Cloud Nothings (of course), Best Coast, Toro y Moi and the rest soundtracking late-night drives, aimless explorations and whatever else. Allison taught me what Invincibility was, and I am not too old to turn on Japandroids and drive recklessly through a not-actually-that-remote stretch of 136. Shoutout to “Rill Rill.”
There’s a rough attempt at re-creating those mixes (it was the mp3 era, so there are some strays that aren’t on Spotify) here and here.
2011
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy landed in the CD player of my white Corolla at some point during the summer, and I never took it out. I spent a couple weeks planning my outfit for Emily’s 20th birthday party (Woods shirt, open denim button down, dark jeans [cuffed] and new white vans with the 3D Washington hat), and I felt good driving down. By the time I got on 95 to go down, I was all in with “Dark Fantasy” and the rest on a perfect late-summer evening. The gin bucket at that party was good. We sang “Happy Birthday” to Emily at midnight of the next day.
Honorable mention goes to the 2011 BROADTRIP mix when Anna and I drove to Albany to see Cloud Nothings and got stuck in a snowstorm and went the wrong way on the Thruway and eventually made it home after listening to the Cloud Nothings self-titled a zillion times.
2012
One of the first things I did when I landed in Southern California for the first time in my life was to make someone listen to “Wasted Days” from Attack on Memory. It was so dark, so raw and, at that point, so different from anything Cloud Nothings had ever done, and I was so captivated by it that everyone needed to hear it, even if the weather and the circumstance was the antithesis (though it was fitting for what wsa to come). It wasn’t quite in the airport parking lot, but we listened to allllll of it, like, right after I arrived. Tact! Otherwise, San Diego pop radio was the first time I knowingly heard “We Found Love” and “Good Feeling” by Flo Rida, which sampled Avicii, which sampled Etta James. We heard “We Found Love” so many times, and it remains one of the best.
Seven months later, I was hurtling back from Andrew’s house down Route 1 at some point late at night after watching the Olympics listening to Attack on Memory. It meant something else then. Also, I wish I still had the mixes from when Emily and I drove to Hopscotch because there good and very Of A Time.
Another honorable mention here is driving into a dying November sunset on the Main Line outside Philadelphia searching for a Chipotle while nursing a brutal hangover while listening to “Cali In A Cup” by Woods.
2013
The 130103 mix was created for the drive to see the ‘final’ Teen Suicide show (emphasis on the scare quotes) at Bell Foundry in Baltimore, but it is spiritually a 2012 mix. Jack was driving me to the liquor store in College Park in October to get alcohol (Yuengling, Port Royal white rum, Harpoon cider) for when Benn and Charlotte were visiting when another car ran the stop sign at the intersection of Calvert Road and Dartmouth Avenue and almost T-boned us. We were either listening to “Magnet’s Coil” by Sebadoh or “Web In Front” by Archers of Loaf. I’m not sure if that’s true, but that’s how I remember it.
Anyway, 130103 remained in heavy rotation through 2013, and perhaps I’ll do a whole newsletter about the mix, unless The Le Sigh wants to bring me back from another Monday Mix. The honorable mention here is listening to The Bones Of What You Believe by Chvrches and Get Olde by Crying while driving through the Florida panhandle in the middle of the night in a rental car.
2014
The outline for this post featured the line, “I do not have any good stories about driving around California listening to the perfect songs, unfortunately,” because I more or less kind of squandered my summer in Orange County. There was that one weekend where I didn’t leave my room except to get Angry Orchard tallboys at 7-Eleven and tacos from the Mexican place where they were never nice to me.
But that’s a false sentiment! Jack and I went to see Cloud Nothings at the Roxy in July, and after I picked him up in Echo Park, we drove west down Sunset Boulevard into the sunset while listening to Sunbathing Animal by Parquet Courts. What color is blood? Whoever she might be going to bed with, you can read about that in her Moleskine. Bodies made of slugs and guts.
We charged a ton of drinks to the American Express that my parents were paying for my gas through, and we cited the occasion as Anna’s birthday. That probably would not have held in the court of law, but it held up in Los Angeles for one night.
2015
It’s hard to remember a time when I was ever optimistic about job prospects and the ~industry~, but there was a sliver in time in late summer 2015 when I was 23 years old and like things were possible. Maryland held an open scrimmage on a Saturday in late August a couple days after Carly Rae Jepsen finally released EMOTION in the United States. There were no clouds in the sky, and the trees along I-95 South were still full and lush. The possibilities felt endless as we rolled through “Boy Problems” and “Your Type” and “LA Hallucinations” and “Warm Blood” on my way to Plato’s for a pregame omelette. That was the day where we realized Perry Hills might be Maryland’s starting quarterback in 2015. It was a significant time.
Almost exactly a year later, I was blasting EMOTION SIDE B in the Civic on I-83 North on my way to Harrisburg and another thing I was optimistic about undertaking.
2016
Every once in a while, I lean into being too on the nose, and I took advantage in summer ’16 when I was taking Chicago mass transit to Midway to fly back to Baltimore after Big Ten football media days. A week or two before, we were in Raleigh and listened to Light Upon The Lake by Whitney constantly. I felt like I had discovered new music for the first time in a long time, and I immersed myself in the record. It still holds up! And it was perfect for a steamy, stormy weekend in the Triangle. I knew Whitney was from Chicago, and I knew Light Upon The Lake’s opener, “No Woman,” references drinking on the train in Chicago, so I listened to it shortly before a July sunset on the train in Chicago. The security line at Midway ended up being much more manageable than I was expecting.
2017
Like with Whitney in 2016, Hoops was the major discovery of 2017 after we saw them at Shaky Knees (on the stage that Whitney was going to be on, as it happens) in Atlanta. Routines was the perfect soundtrack for a steamy, sunny summer, so we went back to the well for a summer drive to Hilton Head. From a car window, the south all looks the same to me below Richmond, and Hoops lulled me into comfort.
2018
Back in 2014, I drove out to rural Montgomery County to cover a football state semifinal at Damascus, and as I got off I-695 and onto I-70 West, I ended in a caravan of cars with Glenelg stickers on them. We were all headed to the same place in a Friday Night Lights-esque fashion, and that’s something that I haven’t really experienced again (though driving from Milwaukee to Green Bay in September comes close).
In November 2018, the Eagles were hosting the Cowboys in South Philly for Sunday night football, and as has become my pregame ritual, I was hurtling down I-95 and listening to Suburbia I’ve Given You All And Now I’m Nothing by The Wonder Years (How I Stopped Caring And Learned To Love Pop Punk will be another newsletter later this year). The illuminated Lincoln Financial Field rose out of the expanse of parking lots and warehouses on Pattison Avenue. The sun was almost down beyond the western horizon. The clouds were lit up orange. I had that Friday Night Lights feeling again. It felt like a big game. It felt like the center of the universe, and I was ready. (The Eagles lost).
2019
Climate change is real and will kill us all, but every once in a while, it makes things pretty nice. The last Saturday of August was rather crisp, and it was Emily’s birthday, so we spent it drinking White Claw and attempting to drink Natty Light seltzer at Transmitter Park in Greenpoint. We were there for a couple hours, and it was probably a top 3 day of 2019. The next morning was chilly. I drove to the BQE with my windows down and the vibes [fall] playlist rolling through the speakers. It was the perfect soundtrack. I stopped and picked up a breakfast sandwich back in Philadelphia and ate it while sitting in the parking lot outside the NovaCare Complex with the windows down, basking in the sounds of the upcoming fall.
2020
Well, we’re here now. One of my resolutions for the new year is to use my car less. Walking and SEPTA work fine. Something else I’ve been trying to do, too, is not wear headphones as much in the city. I want to be part of the natural rhythm of Philadelphia, and while it’s sometimes nice to choose the soundtrack for a sunset or a summer day or a ride on the Broad Street Line, the city has been taking of this itself for a couple hundred years.
It makes sense that the 2010s was defined by listening to music in a car. I turned 18 in 2010 and 27 in 2019. There are some prime driving years in there. Plus, I lived in the suburbs and spent two years commuting between cities. The stereo in the White Corolla and, later, the Civic (plus the CR-V at some #formative times last year) set the tone for how I felt and what I was going to do. For the 2010s, it worked.
Thank you for reading the 16th edition of Content Nausea. Please tell me if there are any typos or what you liked about this. It will get better in 2020.
And all I got left is
This shit attitude
At least music is playing in my head
—D.G.