I grew up going to flea markets. In Texas, we get mangos, corn, and watermelons. Plentiful enough to bury your family. Cheap enough to make heaven feel mundane, and fresh enough to make me feel shame when I buy cups from the Hop.
But our apples can’t hold a candle to New England’s.
I met them first at Riverview Farm. I met them last at Riverview Farm. My freshman year, FYSEP carted us there, and the orchard enamored me. I could step over the tree’s roots and reach into their crowns. I plucked and gnawed into varieties before I learned their names. It was havoc under the branches. I tore through row after row — until I drew this one particular apple. It stopped me. It was massive and it was yellow and it was juicy and it was sweet and it was tender. I could not design an apple I could want more.
I thought nothing of them. Filled my bag with them, then ate one a day until they were gone. I’ll go again next year, I thought. You know what happened the next year.
Now, I am a senior, and the season of Ginger Golds has passed me by. I forgot to return to them. Their skin is too gentle for transport. They wrinkle and rot quickly. They grow here, but I am unsure where else.
I think that last bite, in 2019, was our farewell.
Here is a song by Will Woods. It is about loss. It’s not really a salve. It’s anticipation, fear, and screaming disappointment. Then moving on.
My world is different now, and I have an X-hour at 12.
Not long ago I decided to take part in the Dartmouth Radio. The station soon became my second home, and I made friends who would stand by me no matter what. WebDCR became my favourite hobby. It gave me an opportunity no talk non-stop about things that mattered to me. It gave me a fun fact for every Dartmouth introduction — “I’m Antônio, a ’25 from Brazil, I use he/they pronouns, and co-host PCSD on WebDCR every Tuesday.” It gave me a refuge from my dorm and my day-to-day boring activities and lectures. But, not long after getting involved with it, I realised it had also given me a community of incredible people with incredible stories to share.
As we reopen the virtual space of WDCR’s blog, I am excited to read, edit, comment, share, and uplift my radio peers’ voices. In this long-awaited rebirth, our priority is to make others heard; to create space for stories that, whether already told live or not, belong to our widely diverse and unique community of artists. Radio is all about communicating thoughts one deems worth sharing. It is about making yourself heard, and bringing others along the way.
In our humble, yet insanely crucial written sector, we hope to highlight experiences and topics that are deeply personal and intrinsic to who we are, and yet create connections over our collective identities.
Here, you will find verticals written by other radio hosts; reports from our News Department; important weekly updates on our schedules, and, overall, a lot of personal insights into who we are. This radio is ours, and taking up, reclaiming, and rebranding this space is a small, gentle step towards the fortification of our communities.
From WebDCR, with love and hopes of a great blogging future,
Ps. Radio isn’t dead
Ps2. If you are interested in writing for WDCR blog (about literally anything), hmu on antonio.25@dartmouth.edu!
Gone are the blissful summer days of quarantine in which all our playlists began with MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This,” and, after a witty array of virus-themed throwbacks, concluded with “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” by The Police.
Now, we listen to Phoebe Bridgers’ “Would You Rather,” and start to cry at her lyric: “quarantined in a bad dream,” and wonder how she predicted this all so well back in 2017 as we log on to our fifth Zoom call of the day.
Whether you’re breathing in that glorious, musty scent of your Dartmouth dorm room, waking up at 2PM in your childhood bedroom, or somewhere in between, here are some new songs that just make sense in quarantine that are not “Toxic” by Britney Spears – or worse, that celebrity rendition of “Imagine.”
“Beach Life-In-Death” by Car Seat Headrest
Word on the street is that the album Twin Fantasy was actually written about Will Toledo’s failed relationship with a furry, but hey, it still works for this listicle so I’ll go with it.
Why? For starters, this 13-minute epic is one of his best songs. The piece feels like a form of mixed media, with voice-overs, silences, and screams all pasted on top of each other. It also does an excellent job of taking the listener through the multiple cataclysmic mood shifts of the narrator, not unlike the ones I go through when stuck inside. Also, he really hits home on my current routine with,
What should I do? (Eat breakfast)
What should I do? (Eat lunch)
What should I do? (Eat dinner)
What should I do? (Go to bed)
Where can I go? (Go to the store)
Where can I go? (Apply for jobs)
Where can I go? (Go to a friend’s)
Where can I go? (Go to bed)
If anyone is doing something other than this right now please let me and Will Toledo know immediately.
“City Looks Pretty” by Courtney Barnett
Maybe Aussie Barnett is referring to Sydney when she sings, “The city looks pretty when you’ve been indoors for twenty three days, I’ve ignored all your phone calls,” but I’m choosing to apply the sentiment to Atlanta, Georgia (where I’ve been quarantining) as well.
Barnett, known for her deadpan wit and indie rock sounds, wonderfully captures the apathetic loop of doing nothing by chalking up her lengthy list of dilemmas with a hasty, “oh well.” The song draws to a close, falling into a meandering half-time before briefly speeding back up with an almost-urgent guitar riff, just to slow down once more. This mimics the anxiety felt from not being productive, but how, despite that, apathy triumphs still.
“It’s Afternoon, I’m Feeling Sick” by Sidney Gish
20W FNR superstar Sidney Gish, AKA my lyricist idol, perfectly captures the stifling boredom of being stuck in one (suburban) place for too long in this song. Gish playfully employs the use of random household objects like ping-pong balls and chopsticks to create her signature, spunky mashup of sounds. Listening to this song, which doubles as a stream of consciousness, I feel immediately transported to a Lady-Bird-esque bedroom alongside Gish as she records (as captured in her iMovie-made music video.)
I recommend reading through the whole song since it’s all applicable, but the most relatable lines to me are: “…Retire to her room, sit around and count the hours down till June, July and August end, and in this state I got like 4 friends left.”
“Bored in the USA” by Father John Misty
You can call him pretentious, snobby, elitist, and inaccessible, but Father John Misty is also pretty close to perfect when he sings, “How many people rise and say, ‘My brain’s so awfully glad to be here for yet another mindless day?’ ” With his aloof tone, detached lyrics, and artificial laugh track echoing in the background, Misty passively details the ennui of the quotidian. (He actually ghost-wrote that last sentence).
“Nobody” by Mitski
Obviously, I have to conclude with the Queen of Angst and Loneliness herself, Mitski Miyawaki. Because how can you not hear her opening lines of, “My god I’m so lonely so I open the window to hear sounds of people, to hear sounds of people,” and not relate, even if in actuality you’re perfectly fine?
Each song on Be The Cowboy seems to cover a new facet of isolation and loss, but I find this one especially compelling as it tackles heavy topics with musical lightness. Opening taps on the high-hat set a fast pace, piano chords push the song towards its catchy chorus, and the repetition of the title word begs to be sung back by listeners. Yet, when you listen to the lyrics, Mitski is far from the buoyant ease of these musical cues.
I admit, quarantine has not truly been filled with such angst and misery that these songs convey– my ABBA playlist has made many appearances and there’s always 100 gecs to listen to. But, there is something to be said about the above-average levels of loneliness many college kids feel at home or in isolation right now. Hopefully these songs can ease some of those feelings of isolation, or at least remind us how these artists are just as disconsolate as we are (but they make it look cool).
While these songs all thematically link to the quarantine experience, they are each fairly disparate from the others, both musically and emotionally. Yes, this is a testament to idiosyncratic musical styles, but also, each artists’ different approach to a shared theme of confinement reflects how there is no singular right way to feel in quarantine, and that’s okay. Isolation, sadness, and anxiety can manifest themselves in lots of different ways: raw guitar riffs, quippy lyricism, sparse instrumental interludes, or anything in between. In quarantine, I can experience all these musical motifs and corresponding mental states in just one day, one playlist. And now you can too.
Was going to write about Chromatica or Bon Iver, or maybe another album, but it all that seems a bit pointless right now. Instead I have some poems. I’ll share a little excerpt from each, as well as a link. A lot of these poems were tweeted by @KavehAkbar and @BenPurkert.
To breathe it in, this boulevard perfume
of beauty shops and roti shacks, to take
in all its funk, calypso, reggaeton,
and soul, to watch school kids and elders go
about their days, their living, is, if not
to fall in love, at least to wonder why
some want us dead. Again this week, they killed
another child who looked like me. A child
we’ll march about, who’ll grace our placards, say,
then be forgotten like a trampled pamphlet. What
I want, I’m not supposed to. Payback. Woe
and plenty trouble for the gunman’s clan.
I’m not suppose to. But I want a brick,
a window. One good match, to watch it bloom.
...I promise if you hear
Of me dead anywhere near
A cop, then that cop killed me. He took
Me from us and left my body, which is,
No matter what we've been taught,
Greater than the settlement
A city can pay a mother to stop crying,
And more beautiful than the new bullet
Fished from the folds of my brain.
Nikki Giovanni, “For Saundra“
so i thought again
and it occurred to me
maybe i shouldn't write
at all
but clean my gun
and check my kerosene supply
perhaps these are not poetic
times
at all
who was there who was there & now everyone
is watching your life from inside but I’m afraid to watch
them beat you watch torture throbbing dry & long
with ache & blue-black bruising so I don’t
& another black body is blown out smoking wick
Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Between the World and Me
But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.
I really want to match the vibes here you so I’m going to play something that’s a little weird but stay with me.
Yes, I love this one. I know it’s 3AM and we’re in your East Wheelock eight-room triple, but I’m about to play something I really think you’re going to like. Just like, close your eyes and try and follow the lyrics ok? I know this one is a little out there but please just give it a chance.
Ricky can you turn the lava lamp on? Word. This song is going to knock your socks off I promise. *I pass you my Dab Pen.* Just try and relax. Just wait for the beat switch and you’re in for a treat. I promise you that you haven’t heard anything like this before.
Yes, Boloco is on its way. Can we just have 2 minutes of quiet? Frank is about to really lay it down. Really, he’s dealing with a lot of stuff that I, a white, straight man, can relate to and explain.
Ok, ok maybe that didn’t hit you like it hit me, but this next one is really going to do it. I don’t care if you’re about to throw up. I really need you to experience this with me.
*I’m lying on my back on the couch of your East Wheelock 8-room triple and waving my hands like I’m orchestrating Alt–J’s hit song “Breezeblocks.”* Does anyone have cash to tip the Boloco dude? No?
Wait wait this is my favorite part. Is the lava lamp on?
I don’t want to spend a lot of time meditating or philosophizing on music in the time of corona or any other lukewarm-at-best hot takes, but I did see a tweet that felt very true:
The hell zone is an anxious, semi-agitated state where you're just sorta "off" for the whole day and time flows like you're wading through chili and your hell zone will NEVER sync up with other peoples hell zones and that'll always make you feel weird and stressed out
So I thought I’d recommend two songs this week. One to listen to while you’re in the #Hell Zone and one to listen to when things are going “alright”!
Both songs this week are based around very synthy and strange soundscapes, but will start with music for when you’re wading through that chili. “Human Bog” is from Baths, an L.A. based solo project by William Wiesenfeld. It’s suitable for being sad but won’t catapult you anywhere unexpected.
I wish I knew anything about music so that I could more accurately describe it, but it’s mostly Wiesenfeld’s voice on top of a couple layers of mellow and drawn out synth. The hook, “I’m queer in a way that works for you / the lengths I go to get held on to” certainly lives up to the title of feeling like a human mud soup, but also, hey, big points for introspection and self-awareness! Also I learned through googling that bog is also British slang for the bathroom. How whimsical.
If you find yourself with some endorphins floating around— first of all, congratulations— secondly, check out “Youth” by Glass Animals. This one has a fun music video with a lot of my favorite music video things: being set in a diner, weird cameos by the band members, close up shots of someone pulling at their hair, and a dancing child.
The band describes itself as “psychedelic” which is a word that dried up and died long ago, but it’s a serviceable word for the all funky, synth woodwind things happening here. It’s fun, mostly upbeat, and also will likely not catapult you into either the Hell Zone or another strange mind space.
I had an extremely cursed drive from my brother’s house to my mom’s house today: it’s about an hour and a half on several different major highways, the George W. Bush Turnpike, the LBJ Freeway and also Tom Landry’s Highway, because apparently anyone can get a major interstate named after themselves around here. Anyways, Texas opened up for business today (yeehaw!) so the road was clogged with every Karen from here to the Brazos river aching to get her highlights redone. I was passed by a herd of F-150s going at least three hundred mph, hit a pothole that makes the Barringer Crater blush, and had the misfortune of witnessing an R.V. that had a custom spare-tire cover that said, and I wish I was kidding, “I need toilet paper for my bunghole.”
So that’s how things are in the Lonestar State, but at least I had some great driving music. I was blessed by my own discover weekly playlist a couple weeks ago, and found the upbeat, folksy quartet, Kuinka. Their most-played song, “Warsaw” is simply incredible, and it has a gorgeous, if not confused music video.
I turned to my friend Francie for some wisdom on this wild piece of media, and they said, wisely “He’s racist because… He was abducted by aliens?” Which yes, does seem to be the messaging here.
But they have a decently wide range that will make you want to kiss your darlin’ at the hoedown or bang on the washboard. They’re songs are also curse-word-free so you can listen with grandma or your zoom bible study.
Here are some of my favorites of their discography for easy listenin’
The final stop on our musical heartbreak journey (that I have planned, at least) is with a band called Odesza. If you follow me on Spotify, you probably have seen me listening to a playlist called “Electronic, but something is sad,” a loose descriptor for a genre I’ve always been drawn to. Bands like CHVRCHES, M83, and Phantogram all have different kinds of sadnesses in their synths— if we were to spread them on an easel, they’d all be shades of blue.
A Moment Apart has a few songs that I’ve fixated on, but the titular song is the that I come back to over and over again. It has a haunting hook, a melancholy, not quite human, but not quite not human voice that melodically sings “I love you baby / I loved you all wrong.” At least that’s what I heard on the first two-dozen plays. The internet disagrees, some posts suggesting “I loved your mess / I love you more”, another “I love you most / I love you more now.” Those are the only words, over and over again to a sanguine, danceable beat. It’s like that gorgeous, painful moment when you finally hear in “Hey Ya” by OutKast “But ya’ll don’t want to hear me / you just want to dance” and the whole song changes.
I had a great professor who has a whole collection of buzz words, but one of her favorites is “undecidability.” When a thing is either one or the other, but also both. Two possibilities at once, but also neither.
There’s a final couplet to a poem I read recently that I can’t find again but has been stuck in my head that was something like “my love was like a fish / in the wrong kind of water.” I might as well hear that in the song too: “I love you baby / I loved you all wrong.” Tragedy is in the tenses. Love is in the present, but the object Is stuck in the past. OutKast: “Nothing lasts forever but what makes / what makes / what makes love the exception.” If someone can hear “all wrong” from the lyrics, surely “all gone” is just as possible— barely a slant and he’s gone.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is that there’s something impossibly difficult about a relationship where everything was right but it fails anyways. My mind is constantly running scenarios like “what if this part was a little different or if I had sad this or if I hadn’t have done that or if he was a little more whatever.” But that is such unkind thinking. Bell Hooks writes in All About Love, “this process alone did not ensure self-recovery. It was not enough. I share this because it is far too easy to stay stuck in simply describing, telling one’s story over and over again, which can be a way of holding on to grief about the past or holding on to a narrative that places blame on others.”
It’s not a perfect book by any means and rarely did it acknowledge queer relationships in a deeply meaningful way, but when it does click, it’s a real gift. My biggest fear is that I loved all wrong, that I loved with the wrong kind of water, that I loved inconsistently or inadequately, that some sort of flaw of mine put an end to one of the most positive experiences of my life. All of my thinking up to this point has narrowed the answer down to “Maybe?”
But there’s fundamentally a fear at the root, for which Hooks offers, ““Love as a process that has been refined, alchemically altered as it moves from state to state, is that “perfect love” that can cast out fear. As we love, fear necessarily leaves. Contrary to the notion that one must work to attain perfection, this outcome does not have to be struggled for—it just happens. It is the gift perfect love offers. To receive the gift, we must first understand that “there is no fear in love.” But we do fear and fear keeps us from trusting in love.”
“I love you more now” can’t possibly be it, can it? I don’t know how to feel gratitude for something with a painful absence. It’s even harder to feel that gratitude for someone gone. But wow, did I love our mess. I probably loved us all wrong, but damn I’m trying to love us more now.
“Motel 6” by River Whyless is in a totally different genre and struck me much more recently. I had most of their discography on repeat last fall, when I was slowly realizing that things with my partner were quickly slipping away. The slow friction of long distance was beginning to screech. The pace of the quarter system meant I couldn’t get away as often.
On the morning of my last visit to Bennington, we were listening to the album in his twin bed. The sun was coming through the east window. I hadn’t really listened to the words and none of the ugliness was apparent to me yet, but the first verse, “Long-time lover, have you gone? / I left you walking through / the parking lot of a Motel 6 / As I turned our van back east / Somewhere on the road we lost our way.” I thought the melody was nice, and it is, but I was slowly waking up to the whole song.
Sianne Ngai has a book called Ugly Feelings that gets at what kind of state I often listened to this song. The book is cool and important, but the introduction is what stuck out to me, the explanation of just what an uglyfeeling is: “unlike rage, which cannot be sustained indefinitely, less dramatic feelings like envy and paranoia have a remarkable capacity for duration. If Ugly Feelings is a bestiary of affects, in other words, it is one filled with rats and possums rather than lions, its categories of feeling generally being, well, weaker and nastier.”
I had Mitski, Bon Iver, and yes, “Heartbeat in the Brain” for the heartbreak: songs to listen to before, during, and after crying in the shower. But there’s another class of feeling— the ugly kind. It’s slower, more palatable to listen to while the 10º wind chill besieges the thinnest parts of you.
“Motel 6” is an ugly song then, an amalgamation of regret, inevitability, and slow loss. The chorus is desperate and uncertain: “In my mind / in my mind / I can save us all / I can breathe this all back to life.” But he can’t. The only things we know about the speaker is that he drives a van and he is leaving someone at a Motel 6. That doesn’t scream restorative power. Holding on and letting go are opposite actions, but I’m often trying to do both at once.
Coming “back east” is a retreat toward the old, the known, maybe even the comfortable. Something is always left behind in that movement. Writing about the album, Ryan O’Keefe remembers being broke after a tour, dropping one of the members off before she flew home: “Watching her check into the motel as we pulled away felt like an ending. It was as if I removed a pair of tunnel vision goggles and could see the world and my life for the first time since we started this band. I felt incredibly small, fragile, irresponsible, foolish, at a loss for what to do next and very alone.”
The chorus ends, “From a dream I’m waking up / And for the first time / I’m terrified of waking up alone. “I tried to use winterim to “get over it” but it simply wasn’t enough time. Still feeling the tequila heartburn from New Years, I slouched back East for Winter term and arrived to a dorm room practically haunted by better times. River Whyless became unlistenable.
I don’t understand it. I have a manuscript of poems about it, a weird creative non-fiction piece about it, and now a blog, at least partially, about it. Letting go and holding on are opposite things, but things always done together. I can listen again, though, and it’s as gorgeous as ever.