Welcome to the 42nd edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 41 right here. Please let me know what you think. Thank you for being here. Here is the welcome blog.
I’ve lost track of the different “phases” and “stages” of the pandemic at this point. It has been too long — today marks seven months since The Last Normal Day — and it has all melted together. I know I’ve had a NASCAR phase and a Tom Collins phase and a “becoming an Entourage guy” stage and a “started a new Tumblr” stage (still going!). In a quick search of my tweets and my texts, one of my friends reached the “my high school ex got married” stage of the global pandemic (s/o Allison). There’s been a lot.
My “Joyce Manor phase” became imprinted on my mind when I got five rolls of film developed last month and returned the above photo, which is of a Joyce Manor video — some sort of live session that was being played in an RV or something — on my television in my living room. I did not remember taking the photo, but based on the roll, it was sometime in June?
[Editor’s note: I searched through some texts, and it appears this photo was taken June 14 (happy Flag Day!) after I watched whatever John Oliver episode about the police had just come out and the new Chappelle special that came out then, too. So I cleansed with a lot of Joyce Manor videos and then ended up watching live videos by a bunch of bands from the College Park ‘scene.’ Again, we’re living in a global pandemic, and I should not be held responsible for these decisions.]
Joyce Manor was my early pandemic playlist. As soon as it got too hot to keep the windows open for a good portion of the day and the mid-Atlantic humidity tightened its grip a little bit more, I turned up the volume on Million Dollars to Kill Me and Never Hungover Again a little bit more. It was the perfect summer record. There’s a certain rawness in the climaxes. You’re going to be sweaty no matter what you do, so why not embrace it? But the contemplative nature of the songs started unveiling itself to me. After all, we’re all inside with our thoughts during a global pandemic.
A baseball writer in California recommended Joyce Manor to me in 2014 when I spent the summer out there. Never Hungover Again had just come out. I knew them mostly as a Tumblr band, I guess. According to my last.fm, I did not take him up on that recommendation. It didn’t really take hold until 2016 when that baseball writer and another baseball writer were talking about “Fake I.D.,” the first song off Cody on a podcast. Then, things clicked into place for me, even if the lyrics were a little too verbose for me.
I provided some trenchant analysis in September 2018:
But the energy from “Fake I.D.” and “Christmas Card” and “Victoria” and “Heart Tattoo” and “Fighting Kangaroo” packs a punch, and then the scope of the songs got larger as time went on with songs like “Think I’m Still In Love With You” and “Million Dollars To Kill Me” and “Friends We Met Online.” “Constant Headache” is still the band at full bore, its most maximal and its most punk.
Over the summer, though, one of the enjoyable parts of combing through the discography and finding what songs burrowed their way into my mind. I walked around my apartment singing, “I wanna see what’s going on,” from “The Jerk” and in the quieter moments, the more meditative guitar line from “Big Lie” would make itself at home. I listened to “Eighteen” on repeat at times over the past month or so. “Stairs” feels desperate.
I spent an evening obsessively searching YouTube for any live performances of “The Jerk,” the most intoxicating earworm in the discography, and inadvertently found the soundtrack for those summer stages of the pandemic when it felt like everything was falling apart.
Here’s a playlist:
Have a good Wednesday.
Happy birthday, Benn!
Thank you for reading the 42nd edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.
[Instrumental]
—D.G.