Two Deliverances: Oolong and Carly Cosgrove
The incoming class of 2020 Quarantine Emo Night finally graduates
Before Steven Hyden and I reviewed and hashed out one of the biggest albums of all time at Book Soup this past week, we had a really productive heart-to-heart about our possible futures in Substacking. I gave him my usual shpiel about procrastination and perfectionism and how I end up writing 5000 words when 500 will do. To which he gave me the same advice he has ever since Substacking became a viable platform for people like us - post less words, more often. Hence, the header of this (and hopefully future) posts - two related emo bands/albums/songs/etc. at most, at a time. But this ended up being damn near 3000 words anyways, old habits die hard.
As far as what brings me to these two albums, I figure I’m a nostalgic person by nature - ok, I run a Remember Some Guys Substack, I am a nostalgic person by nature, enough with the equivocating. And maybe that’s why I find myself working in two unrelated fields that offer me an endless number of opportunities to make use of feeling both subjectively and objectively old.
Having accepted my receding role in establishing The Narrative, most of my work nowadays consists of 10 or 20-year anniversary pieces or some other, less time-specific form of Remembering Some Guys or Subgenres. The animating force in every one of these pieces is the tension in how 2004 or 2013 really isn’t that long ago, until it’s embodied in something that has both a pop culture and personal carbon dating; I can remember the first James Blake album for either its creation of an entire cottage industry of Fake Blakes (whither Active Child or SOHN?) or a destitute, transitional period of time where I shared a Silver Lake apartment with a dude who slept on the couch and another dude who wore a Fluxblog T-shirt despite never reading the site (he claims to have bought it in a thrift store).
The latter feels so very remote when I have an IRL job and a real home and the person occasionally napping on the couch is my wife, not someone who disappears for two weeks at a time without warning. But no anniversary piece has ever proved as emotionally destabilizing as the first time I took a gander at the medical chart of my new 18-year old (and thus, adult) patient and realized, “this person was born after 9/11.”
(and thus, can’t appreciate Dipset on the same level)
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