Every Narrated Day, One More Piece Fall into Place

The first show in Montreal that I went to after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic was the record release show for the crossover band Prowl’s new album The Forgotten Realms. Prowl was one of the last bands I saw before COVID hit, so it was serendipitous that I got to bookend two-ish years without shows with sets by them. The show was packed, and people danced for every band, even the out-of-town ones. The vibes of the night were high, and with a huge first set by the new Montreal band Scaramanga, it was obvious that the city, like many others, was benefitting from the post-Glow On boom with bigger things to come.

Later that year, a group of promoters announced they were planning a festival, the Montreal Madhouse, that would feature a two-day bill at the Foufones Electriques of all Montreal hardcore bands to flex the strength of the local scene. The festival sold out, and the flag was planted for a new era in Montreal Hardcore.

Running the festival back for a second edition was a no-brainer, but the second would now feature a few non-Montreal bands. It felt important for me to document the festival as a gesture toward the scene and how strong it has been for the last three years coming out of the pandemic. With that in mind, here are short descriptions of each set.

Thursday

Cloned Apparition: There were moments during the set when I wondered if Cloned has the greatest potential of any punk band in Montreal.

Scaramanga: Before they started, it felt like a giant red button that read “PIT ACTIVATION” was about to get pressed. It did.

After Scaramanga’s set, I went outside and smoked a cigarette with my friends. When we ascended the stairs back into the show, I was still floating from my edible but charged from the smoke. While Bruiserweight set up “Can’t Hardly Wait,” the Pleased to Meet Me version,* played over the PA. I hope that you stop to notice life’s small, perfect moments, like your favourite song playing right after a dart and right before a beatdown band plays.

*I specify the album version here because the Tim demo is actually my favourite version.

Bruiserweight: Nothing could describe them better than the vocalist’s mosh call being “I wanna see some smooth brain, dum dum bullshit.”

On a recent episode of the Axe to Grind podcast, the three hosts discussed their predictions for hardcore in 2024. Patrick Kindlon expressed that he thought that shows would become more violent, exclusionary, and less accessible as a reaction to the giant boom in hardcore, due in large part to the welcoming and positive atmosphere spurred by bands like Turnstile, Angel Du$t, and Militarie Gun. During Bruiserweight’s set, a song stopped because a fight had started in the pit after a male attendee attached a woman in the crowd. It was the first fight that I had seen at a show in a while. This is not to suggest that the fight involved a Bruiserweight fan, that this was Bruiserweight’s fault, that Bruiserweight brings out meatheads, or that this was evidence of a seachange in the Montreal hardcore community, just that I thought of that quote while it happened.

Friday

Deathnap: I know that death metal on hardcore shows is one of the big trends of the last two-ish years, but it’s just never been a genre that has never clicked with me. Maybe it’s because I came to hardcore through youth crew instead of nu metal.

The selling point of the first edition of the Montreal Madhouse was that it sold out Foufones Electriques with a lineup of strictly local active bands.* This second edition featured non-locals for the first time, bringing in Spirit of Vengeance, Reality Denied, Friction, and Mil-Spec from Southern Ontario. The first three of those bands played right after each other in a block during the middle of Friday’s schedule.

*The last time I saw Wild Side, the singer referred to the venue as “Foufanoos” and now it is the only way I can say it.

Observations on the cultural differences between Montreal and Toronto, as observed through hardcore at the Montreal Madhouse Festival:

1. Spirit of Vengeance: Toronto bands have a greater variety of rhythms in their songs and more parts per song. Even SOV’s really heavy chugga chugga parts are distinct and make each other pop.
2. Reality Denied: Before they start playing, RD’s bassist drapes a keffiyeh over his cab, and it reminds me that SOV had draped a t-shirt reading “Welcome to the rez. Duck motherfucker!” over their bass cab. Toronto bands aren’t scared to be loud and proud about their identity and beliefs.
3. Friction: Friction played a tight 15-minute set, and I then realized that all three of these bands just did that. Short and sweet, leaving the audience asking for more instead of playing an extra song or two that, over the course of an entire fest, tires out the crowd.

Nuke: For a band playing for the first time in seven years, Nuke sounded so much like bigger chuggy bands of today, which I mean as a compliment.

Mil-Spec: Imagine if Fucked Up was a touch lower brow and had two-step parts? Mil-Spec is that dream realized. They turned in the most engaging, dynamic, and tight set of the fest. (That means the best.)

Béton Armé: After a lot of chugging and heavy bands, singing “whoa-oh” and dancing to French oi was as perfect as an ending possible.

Saturday

Verify: Few things demonstrate how different hardcore is now than in 2012 than there only being one XVX power violence band on the fest.

Pale Ache: Reminded me of what was so exciting about metalcore when I was younger.

Apes: Reminded me of why I just started to listen to Terror instead.

Deadbolt: “If you call us ‘female-fronted,’ you’re a fucking poseur.” The best hardcore band in Montreal.

Puffer: While I think last year’s edition of the fest had a greater sense of excitement because it was the first one and I was discovering new bands, a lot of the metalcore on the second day ran together. JFC, was it wonderful to watch Puffer play pub rock near the end of the third day.

Plus Minus: How good does a hardcore band from before your time need to be in order to draw you in? After I listen to their EP in my car, will I regret leaving after three songs? Will I ever get why the oldheads went crazy?

I guess that now I wonder what the future is for this festival. Do they invite more bands from across the country to participate? Does it eventually get so big that it merges in vibe with This is Hardcore, Sound and Fury, LDB, Outbreak, FYA, etc? I love the close-knit feeling that has been evident in the past two years and is that only possible with a lineup that is mostly locals? Maybe it’s also fine for it to not grow because there’s nothing wrong with appreciating our present.

I Think I Love You

When I first started listening to Cheap Trick, I couldn’t believe that a genre existed that appealed so much to my taste as power pop. I had never heard of the subgenre before, and I immediately set about trying to find other classic rock bands that focused more on melody and songwriting than riffs and solos, which was initially difficult without the skeleton key of “power-pop.” This quest eventually got easier as I discovered bands like the Raspberries, Big Star, and the Toms, but what I found interesting is this subgenre seemed to lend itself to bands that were more often than not ignored in their own time and then given acclaim many years after. Catnip for Timmy.

Since then, whenever an artist is described as an obscure power-pop artist, my ears perk up. That happened recently with Matthew Sweet, who I had almost certainly never heard of before, but who also felt familiar. I started with his most popular album, Girlfriend and found that it hit a good spot for me of occasionally touching on deeper things that I was feeling, meaning mostly grief about my dog dying, but also blending that with classic tropes of guitar pop. The end result was something in between what I think of as the golden era of power-pop, the Mice, the Toms, Tom Petty, and more popular 90s alternative rock, which in this case means the 90s output Sweet’s contemporaries R.E.M.

Guitar solos.

This morning, when I went for a run, I put on Matthew Sweet’s second album Earth, which precedes Girlfriend in his discography. Given the evolution from Girlfriend to 100% Fun, I expected this early release to be a shaggier, raw version of this 90s music. Instead, I was surprised to find something that drew a lot more from 80s Album-Oriented-Rock than the Replacements or Big Star. That was unexpected, as in the late 10s drawing influence from AOR was briefly a conscious creative move for some bands, namely Crying, Sheer Mag, and White Reaper, but that wouldn’t have been the case in the late 80s, when the dregs of yacht rock were still kicking around.

For example:

What does it say that Sweet jumped from one trend to the next as it was just emerging? What does it say that part of me wants to like the 80s cheese more?

I don’t and deep down know that Girlfriend is a significantly better album, both sound-wise and songwriting-wise, but there’s a spot inside me that is only reachable with chorus pedals, synths and Rockman amps. Just the way it is.

Love

This past weekend, my partner Rebecca and I celebrated our 10-year anniversary with a party where our friends and family could come together to celebrate us. In an effort to be countercultural, we chose a 10-year anniversary party in lieu of a wedding because we think that weddings are too much work and more trouble than they are worth. All of our friends who have gotten married have experienced tremendous stress in organizing the wedding and dealing with all of the minutiae of the ceremony. We thought that if we had already been together for ten years by the time of the party, then what was the point of a further ceremony or milestone? Many friends had gotten married when they had been together for less time, so was it not more impressive to spend ten years together?

Ironically, the party was still a huge amount of work, and we were still stressed about organizing the evening. When explaining our plan for the night, friends would tease us about having a new world-y event that was, for intents and purposes, still a wedding even though it was not technically a wedding. But who doesn’t love a technicality? Our younger, more activist-inclined friends would call it a non-wedding or anti-wedding and everyone older than 30 would call it a wedding. We thought having a party to celebrate our 10-year anniversary would mitigate that, but it’s also important to remember that you have no control over that, and people will never do what you want.

The party was perfect and I don’t think I would change anything.

Still, I found I got caught up in the idea that nothing would change. That we would cross the threshold of having been together for another year just like we had for the nine previous ones. Instead, I found that every time I looked into Rebecca’s eyes, all I could think of was how much I loved them. No other thoughts in my mind, just pure love because we had just spent a weekend celebrating our love. Maybe this love was always there, and I know that it was always this strong, but if what this ceremony did was insert a spade into my heart to dig up a depth of feeling that I didn’t know was there, then I can’t express how thankful I am for that.

In my life, I find that you are more often than not in the presence of love diminishing, where long relationships are beginning to falter, where new ones are burning out quickly, where those in positions of power are showing that they never consider something resembling love in how they treat people. This can be exhausting, and it is easy to accept that this is the way love works. It’s less easy but much stronger to remember that the opposite is true. That love sustains you and unlocks a deep happiness in you that changes the way you are and makes you a better person.

Kiss the Lips of Life

I am the only Blue Jays fan that I know in Montreal, but I suppose that I’m lucky to have good enough friends who still ask “How are the Jays doing?” when we are catching up. My usual response is that the team is driving me a little crazy and that they are good but not great. I don’t know that this description matters to people who aren’t following the sport, but it communicates all you need to know to those of us invested in the team. They were supposed to be better than this and compete for a World Series. It’s not that they aren’t doing that, it’s just that it hasn’t been as pretty as we all hoped.

It’s hard to know if this is a mark on the team or just the nature of baseball. During the good times, such as today glowing after a 8-1 series-clinching win against the Dodgers, it feels like there is nothing to worry. Four days ago, after an awful series loss against the Mariners, who always embarrass the Jays in Seattle, it was obvious to the entire fanbase that this was an unserious baseball team. I would love to quote Earl Weaver and take the long view of the 2023 season, but the bad stretches have felt awful.

Despite this, the 2023 Jays have really won me over and I find myself pulling hard for them. I guess this isn’t surprising considering my baseline of investment in the team, but it feels like it should be stated. I had reservations with the “no fun” approach that the front office took this offseason in trading away Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and my forever Guy Teoscar Hernández but the serious, fundamental-forward, White brand of baseball that was expected never fully came. The Home Run Jacket may be gone*, but we still have Whit Merrifield pimping home runs and Kevin Kiermaier teaching Jordan Luplow how to dance in the outfield after a win.

*Except for its brief triumphant cameo when Vladimir Guerrero Jr. won the Home Run Derby at this year’s All-Star break.

The team’s ups and downs have seemed drastic, but they’ve been mostly consistent on the whole. They mostly go 5-4 on road trips and that’s okay. They are good but not great. There will be one or two small trades this weekend. With this level of just being there, I find myself comparing the current team to the ones that I was so invested in during the aughts. While the level of contention is drastically different in the two cases, I think there are a lot more similarities than it seems.

From 2000-2009, I was always angry that the Jays weren’t good enough, but also not bad to excuse their lack of contention. There was always enough there that idealistic fans, of which 17-year-old Timmy was absolutely one, would dream about one major move to get the Jays over the hump and challenge the Yankees and Red Sox for the then-lone Wild Card spot.* Maybe we were more than one big piece away, but maybe the Halladay/Wells/Ríos would have won Division Series. They wouldn’t have really done anything in the playoffs, but giving the hope of that time feels nice. Validating the “could have” of that time is a way of validating being a Blue Jays fan.

*Even I am not sick to believe that we ever could have contended for a division title during that time.

I find myself caught up in the “Why can’t you guys just be good?” consternation these days, but the backdrop of the baseball is decidedly brighter. I won’t ever be able to stop melting down over bad performances, but it’s just silly to not admit that the team is consistent right now. We’re kind of on the other side of the middle hump and instead of being the 7th or 8th best team in the American League, the Jays are now the 5th or 6th best team. It’s only a small change, but in a season as long as MLB’s, that one spot makes a huge difference in the stakes and importance of each game. We are in the same spot of smiling and thinking to ourselves about how the rest of the league doesn’t know the joy of watching Whit Merrifield (Reed Johnson) every day. The hurry up and wait of August just actually will give you something at the end now.

The New Face of Death

During the summer of 2003, my family went on a trip to Montreal to see the city’s baseball team, the Expos, play a home game before being relocated to Washington DC to become the Washington Nationals. I had always been a baseball fan, but this time in my life, just before I started high school, I fell in love with the sport and formed a personal relationship with it. Each morning when I woke up, I would read the Sports section of the Toronto Star and read through the previous evening’s boxscores and stats. Underneath the division standings, the Star would list the league leaders for major statical categories and bold the names of Blue Jays players, which they also started to do for Expos players that summer.

I loved Vladimir Guerrero, and I was proud when the Expos traded for Bartolo Colon* and went on a run to finish second in the National League East. Even though they finished 19 games back of the Atlanta Braves and more than 10 of the Wild Card, it felt important that this misfit baseball team, who were being passed around the league and constantly in flux, was not just admitting defeat and waiting for their eventual move to Washington.

*Despite Colon’s many years of excellent pitching for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and Cleveland and his later meme years with the Mets, I always think of Colon as an Expo because of this season.

I bought an Expos hat to wear before the team folded and was excited to put it to use in Montreal. I had seen the Detroit Tigers play the Angels in Detroit when I was younger, but this would be my first MLB experience outside of SkyDome as a more mature fan, where I was keen to follow the game. My family never took any vacations as a group since those funds were instead funnelled toward our Jays tickets, so the experience of going somewhere with my parents and sister felt equally new.

At the game, everyone knew that the team wouldn’t be there next year, and the crowd, though loud and festive, was small. Vlad, unfortunately, had a scheduled day off. The Expos won, and while the crowd walked to what I now know is Pie-IX metro, they chanted, “Yankees suck.” They hadn’t played the New York Yankees that day, so my impression was that this spontaneous action was this fanbase, who had gotten the rawest deal of anyone since the Giants and Dodgers moved out west, was resisting the authority of the league, both the owners that were taking their team away and the attention paid to the Derek Jeter Yankees, who were never out of the spotlight.

Seeing the Expos be driven into the ground and then taken away was a formative episode in my learning about baseball. Even then, I knew it wasn’t fair to the devoted fans I saw in the tunnel well before I had any class consciousness or opinions about how the league is run. Relative to the NBA, NHL, and NFL, teams rarely move in baseball, so it feels more significant, with higher emotions, when it does. Before the Expos moved to Washington, you would have to go back to, funnily enough, the Washington Senators becoming the Texas Rangers in 1972 to find the last time that relocation had happened.

I say all of this because it was recently announced that the owners of the Oakland Athletics are planning to move the franchise to Las Vegas. The A’s had been in a bad way for many years, and even the exciting high of the team’s playoff runs came with the caveat that they were doing so on a shoestring budget and never really stood a chance against teams who

I first became attached to the A’s when I read The Summer Game by Roger Angell as a pre-teen. One of the book’s chapters was Angell writing a feature on Vida Blue,* who had taken the league by storm as a teenager. With MLB’s significant western expansion being relatively new in 1971, Angell presented a new version of baseball and documented a league breaking with its past while introducing almost ten new teams in new markets. Central to this were the A’s with their wild green and yellow uniforms, initially purposefully garish but now clearly top tier, and their exciting team of counter-culture stars, Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, and Reggie Jackson.

*Rest in peace to an absolute legend not given his due praise by current fans.

This fascination continued into high school both because of the fun, bad-boy nature of the A’s teams I was watching that featured Jason Giambi, Barry Zito and Jermaine Dye but also because of the stories my dad told me about how Rickey Henderson had single-handedly beaten the Jays in the 1989 ALCS. At this time, the Jays were amid their 22-year playoff drought, and the team was perpetually and maddeningly underperforming. In contrast, the A’s seemed unbelievably cool to me. They were a glimpse into how fun baseball could be if you put the right group of players together (and played outside of the AL East).

Nowhere was this more evident than the 2012 and 13 incarnations of the A’s, one of my very favourite teams, Blue Jays included. Led by Josh Reddick, Yoenis Cespedes, and Coco Crisp, the team was blue-collar and gritty but not in that annoying Red Sox way. They were a team of players who had been cast aside by other franchises, they overachieved and mounted huge comebacks, and it was unbelievably easy to root for them. This team was also the perfect fit for the city of Oakland, which existed in opposition to the bursting, creeping tech metropolis of San Francisco. Their fans were passionate, invested and crazy, creating an unbelievable atmosphere in the decrepit Oakland Coliseum. Of course, this team played in an out-of-date shithole. Other teams wish they could have that ambiance.

The way the fans responded to those A’s team was particularly impactful because they were a vision of what I wished games at the Dome could be like. After twenty years of mediocrity and a blockbuster, franchise-righting trade going south, fan apathy was high in Toronto. I saw fans whipping their arms around as Grant Balfour entered the game and dreamed of being able to be involved in something like that. I saw the wall of bleacher signs, with one for every personality on the team, and envisioned a blue version around the 100 level. I had no idea at the time that I was about to receive just this in 2015, so after the fact, it seems like it all makes sense for that transition to have happened.

All I can say now, as both a baseball fan and a labour organizer, is that I am so sad for the fans in Oakland, who built the reputation of their team and the culture around it, and how they have been treated by the people that run their franchise. If you were to ask any casual with only a passing familiarity with Major League Baseball, many would recognize the A’s yellow-brim hats and know Jose Canseco. The league is losing one of its marquee franchises, no matter what attendance, revenue, or payroll might say, and that is just so sad. It’s sad for everyone who cares about baseball because teams like the 80s and 00s A’s are what our sport is built on.

People who don’t care about sports will ask why you cheer for laundry and how you can invest so much of yourself in something that matters so little in the grand scheme of things, but those people never seem to pop up when a team gets stolen from the people who created it. The passion and emotion in baseball are often only visible during its peaks and valleys, and sadly, this is one of those times. It’s impossible to quantify what the Oakland A’s mean to the people of Oakland because you can’t measure love and joy. John Fisher will say it’s a business decision or that it’s the city’s fault, and that is probably what he believes in the matter, but the fans are getting their home taken from them, and I just don’t think that’s a fair deal.

Favourite Music of 2022

Big Nothing – Dog Hours

I’ve already written about this one on here, so I won’t go long. I found myself returning to this a lot and it started to take on different meanings, depending on when and where I was listening. It eventually became my album that I would put on if I didn’t know what to listen to. That’s huge because it means I’m in the mood for it all the time.

Bug Bath – Bug Bath LP

Don’t even know where I found this, but I discovered it late this year while scrolling through the playlist that I make every year as a recepticle for new music. I became rapidly obsessed with it and listened to it like four times in a row during all-nighter as part of my comprehensive exams. It hits a guitar-pop sweet spot that Happy Diving is the elected representative for.

Conway the Machine – God Don’t Make Mistakes

A small part of me thought that 2021 might have been the apex of Griselda Records and that it would be impossible to follow the highs of Boldy James’ Bo Jackson and Mach Hommy’s Pray for Haiti coming out in the same year. Their solution was just to have everyone who didn’t put out a marquee release last year do that in 2022. Seems simple right?

Benny the Butcher – Tana Talk 4

I feel like I got into Griselda at a time when Benny the Butcher wasn’t on his album cycle, so he was a member I wasn’t super familiar with as a result. Turns out that he, like all other members of this collective, is amazing. Plus, how can I dislike an album with a Kyle Lowry reference? Impossible.

Drug Church – Hygiene

After how popular Cheer was, I was suffering from hater disease and trying to find reasons to not like Drug Church anymore. Then I saw them open for the Bronx this year and they were so much better than I thought they would be. What a great band,

Future – I Never Liked You

I never would have expected Future to put out an album that stayed with me as much as I Never Liked You did, but damn is he consistent.

Greet Death – New Low

New Hell was one of my favourite discoveries of 2022 and I couldn’t believe that it took me two years to find it. This EP doesn’t quite hit the same spot as the masterful full-length, but it’s still the exact type of heavy mopey shoegaze that I want from this band.

Tony Molina – Into the Fade

Molina described this album as a cross-section of his body of solo work, meaning that baroque 60s folk-pop is next to fuzzy power pop. Is it a bad song that the latter hits me more than the former? Is it bad that I rely on that tropic rhetoric too much? In both cases I choose to ignore the problem.

white lighters – Breaker Boy

My hottest shoegaze take is that I get more excited about white lighters releases than Nothing releases. Like pretty much everything that Setta puts out, a bunch of these songs are new versions of songs that are kicking around, but I find that cool in an Alfred Gell-sort of way.

2nd Grade – Easy Listening

Easy Listening was one of my most anticipated releases after a year of listening to Wish You Were Here Tour and Hit to Hit constantly. It didn’t quite ascend to a new plane of existence the way I thought it might, but having sky-high expecations for bands is one of my worst qualities. Power-pop! It’s thriving!

Alex G – God Save the Animals

You ever drink a black coffee while walking down a rainy street contemplating your future to Alex G?

Spite House – Spite House LP

Saw them open for Militarie Gun this year and was so happy to find yet another band this good in the Montreal hardcore scene. Hits a really nice The Last Thing You Forget vibe for me, where agressive, hardcore-inlfuenced pop-punk (or vice-versa) isn’t cringe.

Prowl – The Forbidden Realm

Prowl was one of the last bands that I saw before COVID hit, so they’ll always hold a special place as a memory that tided me over during a huge gap in shows. Absolutely elite crossover and 2-steps. MTLHC baby.

New You – Candy

Finding an unknown band from another scene has always been one of my greatest pleasures. I used to comb through Myspace, enthralled with the idea that there was a whole world of bands out there making the coolest music in the world. The utopic dream of the internet, brought to you by New You’s 2022 EP Candy.

High Vis – Blending

I came to High Vis pretty late, well after the hype machine was in 5th gear (I know how to drive stick now, so rest assured that this joke is ironclad). Whereas most bands seemed to channel Britpop through Oasis, I feel like High Vis leans more on Blur and Supergrass, but also really drawing from the history of British guitar pop in the Smiths and Cure for their tones. Of course, this is all done by a group of british hardcore kids, which is the ideal delivery system for all types of music.

Two Solitudes

On November 30th, Christine McVie died and it made me think of myself as a young man. Only 24 and coming into my own while I began my master’s. I was growing out of my punk phase and it felt like my world was coming together around me. On November 30th, I was preparing for my comprehensive exams and it felt like I was on the precipice of the next major part of my life. To remember Christine, I listened to “Over my Head” as I continued to read and make notes at 10 PM.

On December 19th, Terry Hall died and it made me think of myself as a teenager. I was 17 and starting to understand who and how I wanted to be. I was different from other teenagers and I knew that listening to old ska was a cool personality quirk. On December 19th, I was in Kitchener and explaining to friends that I had failed my comprehensive exams. They sympathized with me and it made me feel less alone and stupid. This week felt like a denouement, where I would wrap up the phase of my life and try to pick up the fallen pieces in hopes of them pointing to another place of comfort. I watched Terry sing “Nite Klub” at the beginning of Dance Craze and reflected on community,

2022’s First Quarter Music Awards

Being the guy who is saying “Wow, there’s so much amazing stuff happening in music now!” is probably one of the corniest personalities to have, but unfortunately it is who I am. I may occasionally front as a hater, but deep down I am deeply earnest and care so much about bands and new music. In that spirit, here are some awards for the first musical quarter of 2022:

Biggest Leap: Big Nothing

After Big Nothing’s debut album Chris, I figured that the band would settle into a career of releasing music that was more or less the same. Chris was a touch more indie rock than the self-titled EP, but they were both firmly rooted in the new sort of Orgcore that has popped up since 2015. I was then proven a fool with their 2022 album Dog Hours, which took a huge leap sonically from their older stuff and flexed some much-improved songwriting. The band is now fully divorced from the Spraynard-style pop-punk that hung over the first two releases and is making mature jangly alt-rock. Trying to sound like the Replacements is a fool’s errand, because you almost always end up seeming like a try-hard, but Big Nothing pulls off that influence and adds a touch more folky pop that nods to other deep cuts for the true heads like Bill Fox. My favourite album of the year so far.

If It Ain’t Broke: Mach Hommy, Benny the Butcher

I tend to always favour an artist trying something crazy on new material, even if it doesn’t work at all. I find these sorts of efforts fascinating and more often than not, my favourite albums by an artist are the strange ones (Joyce Manor, Attack in Black). That being said, sometimes a quantity over quality approach where the entire career is variations on the same thing can be extremely good (Guided by Voices, Slayer). I tend to group Griselda records into the latter category, as you more or less know what you’re getting with a new release, but that is also always some of the most consistent and cool rap being made. Mach-Hommy put out a short mixtape to follow up last year’s Pray for Haiti and Benny the Butcher’s Tana Talk 4 is his first in two years. Ho hum, another two albums that satisfy you from beginning to end and you’ll return to a million times this year.

Worst Use of an Advance Green: Just Friends

I discovered Just Friends’ second album Nothing but Love in the summer of 2020 and was surprised that a mix of funk, rap, rock, and pop-punk (genuine Red Hot Chili Peppers influence?!) hit me like it did. Emo and pop-punk, which are I guess the subgenres that you would group Just Friends into based on their being on Counter Intuitive Records, can get so dull and monotonous, so I found a band doing something that literally no one else in rock music is doing. Over the course of the next year-and-a-halfish, they released a series of JFC Crew EPs that were some of my favourite music at the time. Usually there was a new song, a remix or alternate take of an old song, a cover, etc. These EPs made me really excited for the prospect of more material in the future and that came during early 2022 with the teaser EP Basic and the full-length Hella. It then bummed me out to find that all the songs I liked on the record had already been released on the aforementioned EPs and that all the other new songs fell flat. My theory is that this is because of a paring back of the bands lineup from 10ish players to 6 (including two singers), which has made things a lot less bombastic. That was the band’s strong suit and I hope they get back to that in the future.

Let Me Circle Back: Oso Oso

Listen, you know and I know that I am one of Oso Oso’s foremost stans and will go to bat for pretty much anything they (is it just Jade Lilitri?) do. basking in the glow caught me off guard a little at first, mostly because it was way different in style than the yunahon mixtape, but once I had time to sit with the record, I found that a lot of the melodies were super strong and had stuck with me. Like yunahon, their latest release sore thumb was dropped out of nowhere one morning with no rollout, which is the objective coolest way to release music. sore thumb caught me even more off guard than their last album though, as it seems to be a lot closer to a collection of purposefully rough demos than a polished final product. Reading between the lines, I think that this is because the songs were the last thing that Lilitri worked on with guitar Tavish Maloney and the former wanted to release it as a time capsule. I find the album interesting, but it’s hard to decide how I feel about it yet. Will it turn out to be a Pinkerton, lovable for its roughness and capturing a moment in time? Or forgettable because it’s unfinished? I won’t know until the end of the year in either case.

Brit Award for Best New Artist: Young Guv

I’m a huge fan of Young Guv’s 2015 album Ripe 4 Luv and thought that the Style Council-*sigh* style R’nB was a lot better than the britpop stuff that he tended towards with GUV I and II. Though Ben Cook was better than most at the La’s/Oasis/Blur pop-prock, it just became so popular in punk for a few years and I got so tired of hearing the same song played by ten different bands. The new album GUV III threads the needle between the two sounds and is dancey and synthy at moments, but still filled with lots of poppy rock. What I like most is that these rocks moments are still done with the production of his older stuff and it makes for a fun listen.

Timmy’s Theory of the Week: Hayden White and Metahistory

Listen, when I said “Theory of the Week,” I meant three posts spread out over two years.

Near the end of 2021, I went to a bar night organized by my union at Concordia and met a bunch of grad students from other departments at the university. A student from philosophy and I talked about our experiences in grad school for a while and eventually she asked me who my favourite theorist was.* I panicked and said previous Theory of the Week entry Pierre Bourdieu because I didn’t want to seem basic by giving my actual answer of T.J. Clark. Marxist art history is basic! What a world! However much I am influenced by T.J. Clark in my research though, I think that I were to be honest with myself about who is the person I turn to most in theory and philosophy and who has had the most piercing effect on the way I think about the world, it would have to be Hayden White.

*If you aren’t an academic, I’m sure this made you cringe. I completely understand that, but I also loved the question.

Hayden White and Metahistory

Hayden White is a historian whose most popular shit came out in the 70s and 80s, though I like to celebrate his entire catalogue and find his 90s essays great too.* He’s most well-known for writing the book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19^th Century Europe, which birthed a subgenre of historical researching and thinking called, you guessed it, metahistory. White sees the writing of history as a literary process, as in his opinion even the acts of choosing events and organizing and emphasizing them are part of a process of story-building.

*White has two popular books, Metahistory and Tropics of Discourse, but after finding success with those in the 70s, he committed to only writing essays for the next 30ish years. I find that, and that fact that he won a lawsuit against the LAPD about illegal intelligence operations on college campuses, commendable.

Broadly, you could say that White’s big contribution to historiography is to approach studying the history of history in the same way that comparative literature scholars approach the history of literature. He’s obviously influence by Northrop Frye (shout out to the statue beside Vic library at UofT, where I wrote a big chunk of my MA thesis) in doing this, and pulls from Frye to say that there are four basic stories that are told in history: the Romance (good guy perseveres and wins), the Tragedy (a fall from grace or defeat), the Comedy (good guy loses, but is vindicated), and the Satire (good guy recognizes the futility of the struggle). White and Frye call these stories “emplotments”, but I like to think of them as metanarratives, where each new history is a permutation of a story that already exists. This doesn’t mean that nothing is new, original, or distinct, but just that things are more similar than we realize because humans tend towards grouping things together in ways that they’re familiar with.

Here’s two tables that I used during my master’s to help illustrate these ideas:

Doing this sort of wide-ranging structural discussion is tough because the research demands are crazy. You have to read A LOT to start a project like metahistory and a lot of that reading won’t even end up being useful. White narrows this process down by focusing on 19^th century European historians to make his point, Jules Michelet (Romance), Alexis de Tocqueville (Tragedy), Leopold von Ranke (Comedy), and Jacob Burckhardt (Satire), as well as four 19^th century philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche (order is the same yo), Karl Marx, Georg Hegel, and Benedetto Croce. Beyond each of these writers exemplifying White’s metanarratives, there’s also other elements of the text that go along with them, like the types of tropes they use, the way they make arguments, and the political ideology of the text.

White was introduced to me by Sally Hickson while I was researching my master’s thesis at Guelph. I knew that I wanted to write about the critical receptions of Manet and Caravaggio, but I was having a trouble finding any sort of theory that fit into what I was interested in, which has always been a weakness of mine. I thought that the critical environment around those painters was still captivating, despite having been written to death, and it was hard to translate the way that I understood that environment, which we experience through text, into words. Also still a weakness of mine. When I started to read Metahistory, all of my ideas started to make more sense and it felt like I had found a Rosetta Stone to properly frame all the stuff I wanted to talk about in my thesis. I tended to already think the way that White does, finding relations and trends in ideas to make them easier to swallow, but just hadn’t found anything in academia that said it as plainly and convincingly as Metahistory did.

It also helps that metahistory has been taken up in my niche corner of art history focusing on artist biography. Art historians like Cathy Sousloff and Philip Sohm have used the ideas that White laid out to as a way to reflect on the history of art history. I’ve always been fascinated by the personalities that we attach to artists and how that can be reflected in museums, movies, books, etc. The best example of this would be the cult of personality around van Gogh. How did we get to that point? How much like this personality was the artist themselves? Why did people want that? I think that art history that draws upon metahistory gets closest to those answers.

If you were to lump White into any genre of theory, it would be structuralism, so much so that when I think of structuralism in philosophy or theory, I tend to just think of the table that breaks down the four emplotments of metahistory. I feel like structuralism is a bit of dirty word in current academia and that most people think it oversimplifies complex ideas and in doing so, strips them of value, though this could also be my insecurity speaking. Putting aside that White was well-versed in and wrote about all the post-structural critiques of his stuff for decades after, I think that this criticism of structural work like Metahistory speaks to an overarching problem of elitism in academia. I’ve seen a million presentations where people talk in circles about Derrida and Deleuze while that might the ideological mode-du-jour, the points are never clear. At the risk of sounding too Crane-like, it’s not like I’m a rube in these scenarios. I’m a grad student! I’m your intended audience! There’s no sense in getting too theoretical when you could say it more plainly and I’m way too fuckin’ tired esotericism for the sake of esotericism.

On some level, I see White as the opposite to all of that. He gives you the tools to approach any historiographical project, which is often necessary in the humanities today, and branch out and diversify from there. In your bibliography, he is a Rickey Henderson-level leadoff hitter, who sets you up for success and sparks the initial action that you need to score, or erhm, reserach.

An Embarrassment of Riches

A crucial part of the baseball season for me is the selection of a new “guy” for the season, something that I’ve spoken about before. This is a highly nuanced process and is something that evolves throughout the early stages of the season. You need to carefully plan out who on the roster fits your personal “guy” criteria the best, but also adapt as you see them play actual games. I was convinced that Randall Grichuk was my new guy when he came to the team because in theory, he seemed like a clone of my all-time guy Colby Rasmus (good defensive outfielder with power who strikes out too much), but then found him boring as fuck on the field and even more of a loser off it.

*A note on the shades of conservatism in baseball players: Grichuk posted on Twitter all the time about hating how new players (re: Black and Latino) celebrate and then went at it with Marcus Stroman. Lame as fuck. Rasmus, from rural Alabama so there was no doubt about his politics, posed in this picture, which is hilarious.

2022 might be the most promising season for the Blue Jays that I can remember, but lost in the excitement around the team’s chances is a new dilemma: How do you pick a guy on a team that is ALL guys? I would say that Teoscar Hernández is the closest thing to my classical guys, but he’s also universally beloved and one of the best outfielders in the American League. Are there any Blue Jays fans in the world who dislike Teoscar Hernández? It’s hard to imagine. The same goes for Alejandro Kirk, who is so perfect of a guy that he resembles a create-a-player from The Show (short and fat catcher who sprays hits to all fields). This extends to the rest of the roster too as you have an all-you-can-eat buffet of every type of guy you can imagine: Weirdo closer who throws 100 (Romano), skinny soft-throwing submariner (Cimber), utility infielder with a penchant for clutch hits (Espinal), left-fielder who strikes out constantly and then looks like Barry Bonds (Gurriel).

Having this many guys available basically renders the selection process useless because there are too many people who fit every criterion. However, being a hipster baseball fan still requires that I have someone on the team who I like that nobody else does. To satisfy this, I have developed a new strategy: Just pick the shittest guy on the team that no one likes.

I tried this out last season, when I decided that I would be the one person in all of Blue Jays Land to stand behind Rafael Dolis. He was, to be honest, rightly derided by the fanbase because he blew a tonne of Blue Jays leads in the early part of the season and even then people seemed to know that this would come back to bite the Jays at the end of the season (it did). He also was probably the slowest-working pitcher that I’ve ever seen, so not only would he come in and give away the lead that the Jays had built up, but he would take about 30 minutes to do so.

Try to open your mind though. Can you not relate to someone who sweats profusely while doing their job as slowly as possible? If you answered no, are you cool? I don’t think so. It’s important to slow down, not unlike Dolis, and appreciate the bad moments of a baseball game too. The high of Vlad collecting 14 bases in one game in Yankee Stadium doesn’t hit as hard without having gone through a Dolis 30-30 (30 pitches, 30-minute inning) first. To watch Rafael Dolis labour six batters is to see a true reflection of the human experience.

This whole post was inspired by a new Blue Jay, Raimel Tapia, who was acquired during Spring Training in a trade with the Colorado Rockies. As soon as the trade was done, I knew that Tapia, who I had never heard of before, was going to be my guy this year. This first impression was mostly due to his style, wearing the top button of his jersey open, long bleached braids, high socks, and a chain, as it took Toronto’s surplus of vibes to unforeseen level. It also helped that his game, all speed and hitting for contact on the ground, was basically exactly the skillset I had when I played baseball. This type of player, who used to be the norm as the top of the lineup, has almost entirely disappeared over the last decade as a focus on sabermetrics has seen teams focus more on power and plate discipline and less on putting the ball in play. It’s a shame, because players like Tapia always made shit happen in the game. Not always for good, but happen nonetheless.

Like Grichuk, early returns on Tapia have been bad and he’s started the season with a pretty bad hitting slump and most fans have turned on him. I refuse to though. Should the Jays fulfill the destiny that most have outlined for them and make a deep playoff run, those games are when a player like Tapia reveals their true potential. All of a sudden being able to have someone who can score from first and play good defense in the outfield becomes something that can ensure your victory, rather than keep you from it like in April. The only game I went to in person last year was in late August after the Jays had acquired Terence Gore. While not a worldbeater, in the game he got on-base twice, drew the pitcher’s attention, and stole two bases in one inning during a rally. Those things matter, but you have to wait for the right moment. All guys take patience because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be guys at all.