You Can Never Go Home Anymore

First, our big news: Popular Music is pleased to announce “You Can Never Go Home Anymore,” a brief, weird tour of the American West Coast. This trip will mark our first shows in the Northern Hemisphere, and my (this is Zac) first tour in a decade. We’re very excited. We’ll have new music to share. We hope to see you there.

• May 10: Los Angeles at Non Plus Ultra, with Fashion Club & Rogue Squares (ticket link)

• May 11: San Diego at Black Cat Bar, with BirdofParadise & Leavers

• May 15: Seattle at The Rabbit Box, with Style King of the Week & Pseudo Saint

• May 16: Olympia at ???

• May 17: Portland at Holocene (early show), with Twingle (ticket link)

Stay tuned for further ticketing as it becomes available.

Glamour, Cookie Mueller and the Virtue of the Void

And now. I haven’t written anything substantial here in a bit, and the reason for this is embarrassing. 

Like most of my aging peers still pretending to be “artists,” I devote a considerable percentage of my waking (invasive) thoughts to the woeful economics of contemporary music making — the flagging futures of both its commercial and cultural currencies. It’s a shit business, and we are all just Wallace Shawn in my Dinner With Andre. Only older.

This exercise is worse than pointless, because it’s also boring — my thoughts about it even more so. That said, with so much of my ambient dread mired in marketplace abstraction, I worried that if I started typing something, I’d start complaining about “the creator economy” or “late stage capitalism” or whatever and never be able to forgive myself. So rather than indulging it, I thought I might write something messy in hopes of circumnavigating it. 

Something about Cookie.

Lately I’ve been reading Edgewise, Chloé Griffin’s loving oral history on the life of Cookie Mueller. Like nearly all of the Dreamlanders, Cookie had been an object of passing fascination for me since teendom — but I came to her writing pretty late, only picking up Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black when Semiotext(e) reprinted it a couple of years ago. It’s both a delight and a revelation — the kind of thing that feels like it’s been patiently waiting for you to find it, somewhere in the drop cloth covered recesses of some forgotten, better self. 

Throughout her fantastical tales, Cookie’s response to a life of mounting trauma is refreshingly old fashioned; rather than relish, wallow in, or “honor” her tragedies, she shruggingly transmogrifies them into something infinitely more productive: a good yarn. In the book’s introduction, Olivia Laing describes this as “the capacity of language to freeze even the most plainly terrifying or distressing material, to make it something that can be appreciated and shared, a communal pleasure rather than a private humiliation.” There is probably a more apt word for this sort of emotional alchemy, but owing perhaps to my own pathologies, I view this transformative power to be a kind of glamour. 

True glamour is, to me, a form of transcendence; a stubborn refusal to accept the reality of one’s station or circumstances. This may seem like a strange word for a junkie single mother who spent her best years among the sort of people who eat dog shit on film, but for Cookie (and the rest of the Dreamlanders who never made it to the multiplexes), the will to transform the incalculable indignities of just being alive into something… well, DIVINE, was the real transgression.

So while the wealthy may have the means to appropriate it, much like taste, glamour doesn’t actually belong to the people who can afford to pay for it. Because what true glamour demands is contrast; glittery things glisten best against the dross and debris and darkness. Diamonds may make for the obvious metaphor here (carbon, dirt, merciless pressure), but I prefer to think of glamour (and its romantic double, mystique) as more of a mushroom — thriving in the shadows, in obscurity, where the light is most forgiving. 

A Case For Obscurity

Glamour, mystique, transcendence: these words are romantic, ephemeral, ostentatious. It maybe explains why these concepts seem to have lost all currency in popular culture — a pop/cult that prizes and rewards “relatability” as its defining virtue. Personally, I fucking hate it. I don’t want to wallow in the mundanities of this cosmically meaningless life anymore than I already have to. There is nothing inspiring about affability; to be agreeable is not aspirational. Paradoxically, it all just makes me feel more alone. 

So then: it’s heartening to be reminded of a time, perhaps imagined, when a truly transgressive group of margin walkers wandered from willful obscurity into something wonderful. A time when an unequivocal fuck up from Baltimore found glamour in defiance — turning a bracing life into something better; something beautiful. 

So then: in these ever more quantifiable times, I try to take some solace in the fact that the qualities of art that I most admire are the ones that tend to flourish in the dark places. There is still a real romance to be found in obscurity. There is virtue in the void.