This is a theory/fandom meta post I wrote a few years back, and I’ll be honest – while it does read a bit as a first draft, I’m still quite proud of it.
Due to the length of the column, I won’t be reposting the whole thing here; I forgot how long some of my posts were! Instead, a few notes as I reread it:
Number one, I’m genuinely surprised not just at how succinct some of these points are but at their relative lack of presence in discourse otherwise. It’s true that I haven’t been particularly present in fandom for the last while — I think 2021 was sort of my last hurrah in that sense — but I find it strange that even as incest-kink as a deeply Queer Thing comes up more (Empty Spaces, dollkink, etc.) the fact that there’s a long tradition of it doesn’t as much.
Two, I was actually checking the date and more than a little confused at me mentioning drag moms/drag kids this early on! I didn’t get into drag myself until mid-2023, and so I’d forgotten that I had even this much knowledge of the subculture before then.
Finally… I’ve always expected to get more hatemail about the ‘incest isn’t inherently bad’ thing? Perhaps it’s that I make such a point of differentiating between incest and incestuous abuse, but normally the kind of people who send hatemail aren’t the type to care about that sort of thing.
If you like the work I do, please check out my SubscribeStar over here! $5 a month goes a long way in helping to support me and my goals.
Our rerun post today is an old zine review, this time from Vanessa Maki! Full text below:
What does it mean to start over? What does it mean to reset the system, to reboot the software of your own mind? Vanessa Maki’s powerful poetry chapbook press ctrl – alt – del engages with this question with incredible grace and bluntness in equal measure. The chapbook carries the metaphor of a filing system throughout, with some files deleted and hanging around the ‘recycle bin’, and poems having names like ‘LOVE.exe’ and metaphors about admin control.
control is the slight luxury / when you happen to be admin / i configure /i install / i have control / control of body /
-“ADMIN”, pg 4 of ‘press ctrl – alt – del’, Vanessa Maki
I thoroughly enjoyed the poems in this chapbook, both under their own power and how they link with each other. It’s one thing to write a collection of poetry and another to make that collection cohesive. The same motifs repeat, never all at once; bitter fruit, broken glass, storm warnings and system shutdowns cycle around the poems, uniting to form an uneasy see-saw between the organic and the artificial. It circles back to oppression – to being traumatized, mentally ill, black, queer, a woman – and the constant balance of untangling what is ‘natural’, what is ‘real’, what is learned.
Of particular note are the final three lines of the chapbook.
i have no idea what it’d be like to be a fully functioning system that never needs constant repairs.
-B.S.O.D., pg 23, Vanessa Maki
While my marginalizations are largely different, this is a sentiment that lands, and lands hard. Being marginalized and traumatized in an oppressive system feels, most of the time, like a constant experiment in jury-rigging complex fixes with tape and glue. We survive day-to-day, waiting for the next big hit.
Vestigial to the chapbook itself but nevertheless part of the download file and the project, the image poems that come along with the chapbook expand on the theme. Each of them are short, fitting into a pop-up alert box that draws on older versions of Windows. While all of these are excellent, “DOWNLOAD ME” i think is some of the purest expression of the theme. Others expand further on the unhealthy relationship that weaves its way through Maki’s poetry, and all of them are further illustrated with pixelated icons. A skull and crossbones, a piece of pizza, a recycling logo.
One thing that I would have liked to have seen with this chapbook is interactivity – the format, with the dialogue boxes and talk of a system, teases at it but doesn’t fully follow through. It would be fascinating to see the disparate pieces of the chapbook put together in something like Twine or another digital-humanities interface.
Unfortunately time marches on; I’ve removed the buy link from this version of the post since it seems this chapbook isn’t for sale anymore (although I’m sure if you’re super interested, Maki would love to hear it) and X is basically a graveyard of accounts. But Vanessa Maki is still very much around and writing – her Payhip and other works are over here; and she can now be found on Bluesky over here!
There’s been a lot of people making peace with the political atmosphere with “well, we’re gonna get a lot of great music out of this” — which, I don’t think that’s a great coping mechanism, all things told. But so far, I can’t disagree. There’s a general atmosphere around music criticism that music is somehow worse or less diverse than it used to be, and that might be true in some senses. But every time I do one of these roundups, I’m always stunned at the variety and quality of the stuff that comes across my feed.
Before I get into the nitty-gritty, a few details about Genrefvckery. If you’ve released something lately and you’d like me to review it, send it my way! You can find me on Bluesky at @fiversdream or on SubscribeStar right here. There’s also a contact form on this site. I can’t guarantee I’ll get to everything but this is a great way for me to hear about stuff I might not otherwise. If you want to know how I find stuff, the best advice I can give you is to listen to music with purpose. The more diverse, strange and niche you make your listening habits, the more Spotify or Apple Music or your listening platform of choice picks up on that. My Release Radar gives me weird stuff because the algorithm knows I want stuff with less than 10k listeners.
Without any further ado, here’s my top ten for songs released in November 2024!
Никогда (Nikogda) – Lena Katina, ShonZi
If you put on this song and immediately feel like the vocals are familiar, don’t worry, you’re not hallucinating — Lena Katina first found fame as half of girl group t.A.T.u.! Unlike her co-singer, Katina’s remained pretty liberal, which is no small feat in Putin’s Russia; while the lyrics of Nikogda are pretty metaphorical, other songs of hers have flirted pretty closely with controversial topics while never quite getting blunt. (Who can blame her, considering Pussy Riot’s prison sentences?) ShonZi is less familiar to me, but appears to be an up and coming rapper. Language barriers aside, this song is awesome. The beat is engaging, the synth is smooth, and ShonZi and Katina’s vocals fit together beautifully. It doesn’t even feel like as short a song as it really is — it taps out at under two minutes.
2. Pretty Sweet Little Mess – Lilie Hoax
Lilie Hoax is another musician who can clearly be described as ‘up and coming’ – the first time I listened to this track, I could swear she had less than 1k listeners, and now, a month and a half later, it’s getting really close to 3k. (And that’s just on Spotify.) It’s not hard to see why, either. The track starts with a music-box intro and Hoax’s sweet voice in an almost singer-songwriter style. Hoax’s accent adds a really nice element to the song — I’ve always been sad about how often singers are ‘trained’ into singing with more or less American voices, and it’s lovely when someone gets some popularity singing with their own accent. (Bastille is another great example.) But the real achievement of the song is the chorus — where Joni Mitchell switches with a whine of guitar feedback to Sleater-Kinney riot-grrl energy. The overall energy is far closer to Alanis Morissette or Imogen Heap than anybody more ‘normal’, and it’s the kind of thing I dearly missed from indie rock. The best part is that this is from her first album and she’s 20 years old. I just hope she doesn’t get less weird over time.
3. I’m Not Sorry – The Pinpricks
We’ve been to Russia and Australasia — this time we’re in Germany with punk duo The Pinpricks, comprised of fiery female frontwoman Ronja Kaminsky and bass player Nils Degenhardt. I’m Not Sorry is from their second full album, and it’s got the raw energy of second-wave punk mixed with the acoustic grit of the OG grunge bands. Think Le Tigre meets Vice Squad.
What entertains me is that they’re apparently promoting themselves as pop-punk — which, I suppose, is accurate given production values and verse-chorus-verse models, but I’m always a little surprised at what counts as ‘pop’. The lyrics and music video are also an absolute hoot — low budget visual fun with a story that’s a more violent ‘No Scrubs’. I say this all one thousand percent as a compliment. If this means we’re finally getting pop-punk with some actual guitars back, then I’m down.
4. Day to Day – Acid Flashback at Nightmare Beach
Acid Flashback at Nightmare Beach is the project of phenomenally talented musician Lonny Starsky, who released the gorgeous Jazz from the Other Side Of The House in 2023 and is back this year with several singles. “Day to Day” is — not quite a sad song. It’s introspective, melancholy, and both about depression and — if I’m not projecting too much as a trans person living in horrible times — trying to take life ‘day to day’ after being handed an awful hand. Out of all the songs here, I think this is the one where the lyrics have affected me the most personally, and Starsky’s tender voice just makes them land all the harder.
Starsky’s work also defies categorization in a way I really enjoy, both creatively and as a stubborn hipster. Her works are tagged on Bandcamp as everything from ‘alternative’, ‘bedroomjazz’, ‘progressive lonnywave’ (a personal favourite) and ‘psychedelic emo’. This particular single hasn’t shown up on Bandcamp just yet and I’m not personally sure what words I’d use, butI think a lot of these tags speak for themselves.
5. Baliza – Driade
In case this list isn’t making it clear, I genre-hop with pretty extreme regularity. I listen to, quite literally, everything; I find the people who say “everything but country and rap” or “everything but opera” to be cowards. But the first genre I ever got into as a genre, under my own power, was metal. So I’m quite pleased to have at least one proper metal song on here, and what a song it is! Driade is a new band for me, but have been around under a different name since 2020. They’ve got a powerhouse combination of musicians, obvious just from listening to them, and it takes chops to play this kind of metal. All metal is a step or two up in difficulty; black metal is pretty high up there! (Although I’m still debating with myself whether this is black metal, doom metal, or gothic metal. It combines a couple different genre traits, and their Spotify unhelpfully lists them “modern, aggressive, delicate music from Madrid”. The only useful part of that is knowing they’re from Spain.)
Either way, though, this is a hell of a song and one I actually found much later than the rest of the list — it slid under my radar til well into December! I’m very glad I found it, and I’ll be keeping an eye on these folks.
6. Low Mood Season – Casey Lowery
This is the most popular song I think I have on this list, but in my defense… it’s very good. I love good singer-songwriter/folk-influenced work, especially when it’s not from the American South (Lowery is from the UK). And this song, about mutual struggles, hits in such a specific way. It’s not a coincidence that ‘Day to Day’ and this song are on the same list, but they also both came out in November, so who’s really at fault here? Winter, that’s who. Winter can go fuck itself.
Anyway, the production value on this song is incredible, but high production value also can’t do much for a song that’s already rubbish. Everything from the guitar to Lowery’s voice to the lyrics are like jigsaw pieces, and I’m almost annoyed at how much I like this song. I got a tiny bit of metal cred back with the last one and now here I am. Curses.
7. Say No To Drugs – We Don’t Ride Llamas
Now THESE folks are fucking cool. An Afro-Punk band of four siblings based in Austin, Texas, W.D.R.L. is made up of Chase, Max, Blake and Kit Mitchell. You might be expecting a silly song or a silly band, but ‘Say No To Drugs’ is actually a heartbreaking song about pain and — presumably — surviving withdrawal. With a surging soundscape behind Max Mitchell’s vocals, it’s a song you can fall into, and lyrics that might otherwise feel cheesy seem imbued with so much sincerity and genuine empathy that I find myself listening to the song over and over.
Another great note about W.D.R.L. – they were formed in 2014, which means 2024 was their tenth anniversary! Not a small achievement in today’s music world.
8. Riders On The Storm – Mortemia, Sirenia, Emma Zoldan
Next up is an absolutely bloody brilliant cover of ‘Riders on the Storm’ by The Doors. (There’s been a swath of really original cover choices the last few years — I only recently found out about In This Moment’s ‘ARMY OF ME’ back in 2023, on their album Godmode.) This is an odd case of redundant crediting, though; Mortemia is a one-man band comprised of Morten Veland, Emma Zoldan is the solo career of Emmanuelle Zoldan, and Sirenia in its modern format is comprised of…. Morten Veland and Emmanuelle Zoldan. So I don’t know what that’s about. Brand recognition? (Even that doesn’t make any sense, though, since out of all of these Sirenia is the most recognizable.)
Anyway, the song is gorgeous. The Doors are already a favourite band of mine — they’re often considered a precursor to the goth movement, which is one of those observations that sounds bizarre the first time you hear it, and makes sense the more you think about it — and ‘Riders on the Storm’ is, in its original form, a western-tinged song with just a hint of menace lurking behind its bassline. For the time, The Doors were already doing music much grimmer than normal — but of course, in today’s world of distorted guitars and shrieking synth, their work sounds very tame. What Mortemia and Emma Zoldan have done is take the lyrics and the basic frame of the song and opened it up to its full potential. It’s shorter, for one — two, the synths that in the 60s were still in their infancy are at full power here, and layered into a wall of sound that feels like a stormcloud. The guitars are louder, and Zoldan’s voice is a rich alto that feels like the only possible choice. (It would have been very tempting, I think, to go for either a male vocal or a soprano; but there’s a Valkyrie vibe to this that I don’t think would have come across with a gentler or more high-pitched voice.) For those keeping track, Sirenia et al. are Norwegian.
9. Charlie – The Hex
This time we’re in Ireland — look, I swear I didn’t plan this. And this is another band fresh on the scene, which always makes me feel good to cover! In fact, ‘Charlie’ is only their second single, after a release back in 2023. This is another pop-punk/riot grrl-flavoured song, and — amusingly — another revenge song, although this one is a lot more directly about jealously. The rhythm of the lyrics makes me absurdly happy, and I don’t have the knowledge to explain why — it’s just really well written. These girls also have incredible talent; for a second single, this is a hell of a song. They’re determined to play music in both Irish and English, and just in case anybody misses the memo, there’s a line in Irish in ‘Charlie’.
The members of The Hex are Caoimhe Garvin (singer), Katie Moran (lead guitarist), Helen McCarthy (bassist and pianist) and Peas Kelly (drummer). And I am looking very eagerly forward to their first album.
10. In Dreams – Suvitar
For our last song, we’re going to Finland! For those keeping count, we’ve had exactly two Americans on this list. (Which is still more than anybody else.) Suvitar is another brand new artist, which is amazing to me, cause this song is baller. It’s fast-paced with crunchy guitars and gothic vocals, so in other words, exactly my kind of thing. All I know about Suvitar so far is that this is her first single and that she’s very happily leaning into the gothic label. Which, GOOD. There’s been a SHORTAGE.
Thanks for reading! If you want to support me, my Patreon is currently decaying in a premature coffin and will not be returning, but you can support me on SubscribeStar for $5 a month! You’ll get all my columns 48 hours early, and one bonus column a month. For January, it’s a review of Night in the Woods, which I’m only seven years late to.
The rerun post for today was originally labeled a Gremlin’s Library post, but since you can read it for yourself online, I’ve recategorized at least the rerun version as Little Free Archive – only fitting, since I also reread the story myself, and got even more from it the second time round. Full text of the post is below:
“Then came that Thursday in February when I stepped into my psychiatrist’s office and was presented with a goat.”
This is a lovely, bittersweet little story about mental health treatments, hell, bipolar disorder and scapegoating. The narrator is given a Sadgoat to help with their depression – a goat who will absorb their depression while she keeps it as a pet – and at the end of the treatment, she releases the goat. However, what happens to the Sadgoat afterwards?
I think part of why I loved this so much was how it started with the bizarre and led into a completely sincere ending. It’s hard to take goats as a depression treatment seriously, and I was stifling a smile for the first part of the story. But Tidbeck’s writing is deft and clever as it tips the scales into full seriousness. It’s also a story that is completely realistic about the difficulties of depression/bipolar treatment; the narrator actually lists off all the treatments she’s tried before the Sadgoat. It feels good to read about somebody who actually reflects my experiences, instead of a watered down version of them.
One downside: this story apparently predates SH’s trigger warning system, so here’s a few big ones. TW for: depression/bipolar, animal death, animal abuse and uncooperative/semi-antagonistic doctors
I remember loving this story when I first read it; now, it cuts even more deeply. My connection to and love for animals is much stronger than it was at the time (I will, at some point, write an actual blog post about my little rat adventure) and my relationship with my mental illness has — I wouldn’t say changed, exactly, but five more years of living with it has changed my perspective, at least. Certainly a story that hit as almost cute before is now deeply tragic to me.
If you like the work I do, check out my SubscribeStar – you’ll get all my (proper, non-rerun) posts 48 hours early, and one bonus exclusive post a month!
TW: The zine itself contains some pretty graphic second-person descriptions of self-harm, deliberate starvation, suicidal ideation and severe depression. I don’t go into it much but in the off chance you get a copy of the zine, it’s worth knowing ahead of time.
I genuinely don’t remember where I picked up this zine. I usually have some memory or another attached to zines I pick up, but this one doesn’t bring back anything – which makes it a fun little enigma. Although fun isn’t quite the right word. It’s a stark, typed little thing, and the moment I open it, I’m slammed with prose that’s almost poetic, lapsing in between a rhythmic kind of pattern and the breathlessness of a rambling monologue.
Not that that’s a bad thing. if ‘i love you and i’m sorry’ reminds me of anything in particular, it is vent poetry, but in a completely undistilled form. It’s someone’s inner struggle, including the voice that rips you apart when you’re at your lowest and finds every single flaw with the way you do things, the way you are, the way you exist. Neurotypical people may read that and go ‘huh?’ For most neurodivergents, especially those with severe depression and/or PTSD, the concept is probably familiar.
The most interesting thing for me about Cameron’s work is that he stresses, over and over again, how nothing bad has ‘technically’ happened to him. His reminiscences of high school are mostly about his anxiety and avoidance of others; his parents aren’t mentioned in any significant way . There’s no trauma lurking like a shark behind the lines, at least not showing itself — just the trauma on the page of wanting closeness and never quite being sure how to get a version of it he wants. As someone who primarily consumes queer work, where a lot of our trauma is externally imposed and/or relating to dysphoria, it’s a perspective I appreciate; it’s easy to think of a lot of mental illness as inherently traumagenic, when the experience of being mentally ill is in fact traumatic in and of itself.
I can’t say I agree with all of the conclusions Cameron comes to, certainly re: love and art, but I also don’t think this is the kind of zine presenting logical conclusions as arguments on their terms. Still, I think it’s worth a read, and I definitely appreciate the little breaks — the middle pages in particular made me chuckle, and show a lot of self-awareness towards other vulnerable readers. (Trigger warnings on zines aren’t as normalized as they should be, and like I said, I don’t actually remember when I acquired this – but I’ve been collecting zines for a long time.)
Unfortunately, a search for Keith Cameron doesn’t yield anyone who quite looks like the right person, but if you’re interested in acquiring a copy, you can email kmecameron@gmail.com and see if you get a response.
Like the work I do? Help an indie reviewer and support me on Patreon or Ko-Fi!
Elliott Dunstan 