Ten Thousand Buttons – by to earth with love

A hypersonic, hypercritical, metaphysical manifestation.

  • Baffling.

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    “Love, Energy, and Heavy Music, baby!”

    Those words, if uttered by just about any other rock group, would be completely mundane. But to hear a group like Metallica say something like that… is this a concert or a yoga routine? Love, energy, heavy music. It’s almost like Love Angel Music Baby, but somehow, dumber. Baffling.

    I’ve been baffled a lot by some musicians lately.

    Ed Sheeran, for instance, is an insanely baffling figure… hugely popular, with some of the most tortuous unlistenable music known to man. Ed Sheeran, with his immense (and frankly unwarranted) fanbase of former tumblrinas and wannabe hipsters, has chosen to eschew sanity by taking a “middle of the road” stance on politics. Interesting, as he’s only decided to be outspokenly milquetoast on Palestine, but he has no problem taking sides on other global issues. In fact, Ed Sheeran is completely fine advertising the fact that he is on Ukraine’s side of the Russia/Ukraine fiasco, but somehow even showing a teeny tiny bit of empathy for survivors of an ongoing genocide is “too political”. He couldn’t keep touring with someone who said two HORRIBLY offensive words (Free Palestine) because it was ruining the chill and wholesome vibe. Come on guys, let’s all hold hands and kumbayah, that’ll solve things, right? Baffling.

    Another baffling musician: Taylor Swift. I’ll be the first to admit that I was never a Swiftie, and frankly her music is so saccharine Disney Princess that I have a hard time believing her fans are sincere. Another outspokenly milquetoast musician that picks and chooses certain political stances when it directly benefits her image. But the thing that racks my brain the most lately is not even actually political, it’s just bizarre.

    We all know that The Life of a Showgirl was Taylor’s biggest flop. I’m trying to be objective and as nice and polite as I can possibly be about it, but even Swifties will admit that TLOAS is mid at best. We all know, as well, that Taylor is addicted to easy money-grab opportunities from her fans, so it’s not shocking that she’d release 30 billion variants and remixes and “Taylor’s Version”s of even her worst album. I was taken a bit aback that she somehow had MORE songs to add to an already abysmal medley, but not surprised.

    But… why on God’s green earth is there a song about CLEVELAND, of all places, on the bonus addition to TLOAS? What??

    Okay, I understand that Travis Kelce’s family is from Cleveland and it’s supposed to be a wink and a nod to that, but why not just write directly about how nice they are?? Of course, obviously, the song isn’t even about Cleveland or her in-laws… somehow. It’s about her haters being super jealous of how sexy Travis Kelce is. Again, incredibly fucking baffling choices being made in the music industry. Who is telling her these ideas are good? They just aren’t. People who are secure in their relationships don’t have to constantly remind everyone around them how sexy and hot their husbands are. They don’t care about haters. It’s an incredibly childish and silly thing to care about in the grand scheme of things. Baffling.

    This brings me back to Metallica and their childish (and spineless) concert devotion to being deliberately apolitical. I am not a huge Metallica listener to be quite honest, they are just too angry and intimidating for me to fully devote myself to listening to all the time. I do enjoy a couple of their songs. But it was my understanding before now that they wrote about the horrors of war and the police state. Metal, in general, tends to lean into anti-establishment themes. A band named “Metallica” that genuinely is the most popular metal band on earth, should theoretically have some political views that ruffle a few feathers. Left or right.

    So color me shocked and astounded when I saw the viral clip of James Hetfield pausing mid-show to announce that Metallica is the band of “love, energy, and heavy music”. What? Which Metallica songs are about love and vibes and bliss and all that? Does Metallica even listen to Metallica? I’ve never once heard a Metallica song and gotten warm fuzzy happy feelings. You listen to Metallica when you wanna set a dumpster on fire, or punch a hole in a wall. They’re not Phish.

    We all know that James Hetfield was referencing both Ed Sheeran’s apolitical posturing AND Hayley Williams consistently calling out ICE and racism at her shows. To me, a metal band that is so deeply established that they have a fucking residency at the Las Vegas Sphere has no place punching downward (if you can even call it down, tbh) at someone because they’re “too political”. James, you represent a genre of anger and defiance. What is so scary or freaky about Hayley Williams telling ICE to suck her dick? Is too metal for you? Baffling.

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  • Album Review- From Under The Cork Tree

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    FROM UNDER THE CORK TREE BY FALL OUT BOY (2005)
    RATING: 8.5/10

    At one point in time, believe it or not, my Spotify Wrapped told me that I was in the top 1% of all Fall Out Boy listeners for that year. I think it was maybe 2020 or 2021. Regardless, I’d be doing a disservice to anyone reading my blog if I didn’t review this album. It’s been literally 21 years since I bought this (on an actual CD! In real life!) and memorized every single word to every song. Being 13 that year really did prime me for emo fandom.

    But I digress, From Under the Cork Tree is widely considered by fans of Fall Out Boy to be their best album. And for a good reason: it’s edgy, punchy, catchy, wistful, and self-referential at times. No self-deprecating lover of the emo genre would dare go without listening to at least a couple songs off this particular album. I’m sure there are emo purists out there waiting to send me angry comments about how Fall Out Boy will never be “real” emo like Sunny Day Real Estate or whatever. And to that I say, duh. But it’s also the first taste of emo most of us had in our young lives at the time. It would be unfair to completely disregard its effect on the emo community, past and present. What next, MCR not counting as goth? Cripes.

    From Under the Cork Tree has so many golden moments, it’s kind of hard to pick a couple of songs off the whole thing to mention as favorites. Even on songs I’m not super into, there are lyric bombs that stick in your mind far beyond your time hearing the song. For instance, Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner… how could anyone ever forget the bridge where Patrick Stump violently (and eloquently) describes choking his lover to death with her necklace? Or, one of my favorite lyrics off the entire album from the song XO:

    “To the love I left pressed between the pages
    Of the Bible in the drawer
    What did it ever do for me? I say”

    Whew. If you’re religious or not, I think those three lines can accurately paint a picture of someone who is at their lowest and most miserable. Of course, lines like this meant it was damn near impossible to share this album with some of my little middle school friends back in 2005… if they had diligent parents reading the lyrics about sex, violence, religion, etc, they were totally forbidden to listen to Fall Out Boy at all. Luckily, I managed to convince my own to ignore all that and let me have this CD. Thank God.

    So, as I mentioned before, it’s hard for me to pick favorites because I can easily sing this album out loud back to front. But for this blog’s sake, I’ll talk in depth about a couple.

    The song 7 Minutes (Atavan Halen) is probably one of the most memorable of all the songs on the album in my opinion, if you somehow avoided the radio classics (Sugar We’re Goin’ Down, Dance Dance, or A Little Less Sixteen Candles). The fast paced thrumming of the guitars, the punky feel, and the utterly fun lyrics that speak to teenage love affairs make 7 Minutes easily in my top tier of Fall Out Boy songs. I love it. “I keep tellin’ myself I’m not the desperate type but you’ve got me lookin’ in through blinds”? Classic. Not to mention the rest of the song is clearly the anthem of all bruised and broken hearts sitting out on the sidelines while your prom date dances with the cool kids. A rejection anthem, if you will.

    Obviously I’m going to mention at least one radio/MTV favorite. Sixteen Candles (I’m not typing out the full song, cry about it) is peak mopey emo underdog. You want the underdog to win, and he probably will, but in the meantime, you hear him frustrated at his own awkwardness. “I set my clocks early because I know I’m always late” is what I mean when I say Fall Out Boy drops lyrical bombs. You don’t even have to know anything about the band or the lead singer to know how much it sucks to constantly make the wrong move. Yet, the almost hopeful backing track with its catchy guitar riff keep you on the edge of your seat, rooting for this nerdy little ant-guy who can’t seem to get anything right. Also, an aside, but the music video for this song is absolutely insane… if you told me to guess what it would be about, never in a million years would I say “vampire street fight”, but yeah. That’s Fall Out Boy.

    I want to write about every song on this album really, but frankly, I know most of the people reading this have listened to this album or at least the three main singles. They were on heavy radio repeat for several years and I’m pretty sure I saw the Sugar We’re Goin’ Down video on MTV about a million times in the span of a year. You already know Fall Out Boy is awesome, I’m just confirming it. And yeah, I know that in recent years, liking Fall Out Boy (especially their newer work) is almost too corny, but I refuse to accept that narrative. Fall Out Boy are clever, exciting, and self aware. They are one piece of a larger second wave emo movement that my generation is still reveling in. I’m glad I got a chance to listen to them at their peak… it was a formative moment in my personality. Go listen to this album in its entirety if you haven’t already.

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  • Album Review: Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party

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    EGO DEATH AT A BACHELORETTE PARTY BY HAYLEY WILLIAMS (2025)
    RATING: 9.5/10

    I thought I’d kick off my music blogging experience with one of the strongest albums of the 2020s (in my humble opinion). Easily a masterpiece from start to finish, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party encapsulates what it means to be a world-weary millennial woman in a world full of hypermasculinity, racism, gun violence, and shitty country music. Hayley Williams does not hold back at all in letting Nashville and the rest of the world know that she’s unstoppable, but still introspective and sensitive to the world’s issues.

    When I listen to Ego Death, I get goosebumps right from the very beginning. My favorite track hits right away… I absolutely adore Ice in my OJ. If you don’t know the lore behind the song, Hayley Williams was once in a children’s Christian group and the lyrics in the first verse are sampled from one of their songs. That extra layer of delicious irony and self-reference makes the whole song so, so good. It’s got a bit of grit and sass, it makes you feel tough just listening to it. It tells the story of a girl who started at the absolute bottom and somehow ended up at the top of the world, without literally telling the story word for word. To me, an album that starts like this really can only go up from here.

    Honestly, my suspicions about going uphill were completely correct with the next track on the list, Glum. Ice in My OJ transitions so smoothly and effortlessly into a melancholy, anxious piece about loneliness and despair. The transition itself is a metaphor for how even the toughest people can live secret lives where everything really does bother them and nothing seems to help. It seems a bit simplistic when you read the lyrics but at the end of the day, Glum is an earnest song about how shitty things like depression and anxiety actually are. If someone as cool as Hayley Williams can admit to having those kinds of thoughts, it opens up the door to a wider dialogue about mental health, and I appreciate that.

    My second favorite song on this album is the third track, Kill Me. I felt the message of this song so deeply, on a personal level. “Carrying my mother’s mother’s torment” feels almost ripped directly from my own family history… and what’s crazy is, there are so many of us that know how it feels. “I guess this is where the bloodline ends” meaning, knowing your family history and choosing not to contribute. It’s a hard subject in an era where it seems like we’re moving backwards in terms of women’s rights to have (or not have) children. Choosing not to have kids is still quite controversial somehow. Kill Me is the ultimate anthem for the overlooked and underappreciated eldest daughter with the weight of the world hanging over her head.

    I want to skip ahead because although the next couple of songs are good in their own right, there are two more in the center of the album that quite frankly steal the show from all the other songs on the album.

    The title track, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, has a chill backing track with lyrics that betray its nature. This is not a chill song; it’s an aggressive callout that makes a reference to Morgan Wallen. If you don’t know who Morgan Wallen is, please spare yourself the google search and take my word that literally anyone (except maybe Kid Rock) is a better artist, and much less racist at that. While Morgan Wallen and fellow racist country singers might own bars on Broadway in Nashville, the only person everyone wants to see performing there is Hayley Williams. She’s once again letting us know that she’s at the top of her game, beloved, and not afraid to make weak racist men cower. I love it.

    The piece de resistance of the album, the crown jewel of bittersweet odes to one’s country, is True Believer. It’s not just a song about gentrification or racism, it’s about still having faith that one day things will be better. But make no mistake, it is very much an anti-racist ballad, making a reference to the poem Strange Fruit and children holding weapons larger than their bodies in their Christmas portraits. Hearing the song for the first time, I truly got shivers and goosebumps. The pain, the frustration, the ironies, the longing for a time that once was… you mourn along with Hayley. It’s a mirror held back into the face of a post-Trump America, saying, “Look at the shape of you!”. I’m really surprised that this song did not end up winning a Grammy… kind of a robbery in my opinion, but I digress.

    There are several other truly wonderful songs on Ego Death. I’m sure I could go on and on about Parachute or Hard, for instance. I’ve just chosen to highlight the true peaks of the album. Feel free to let me know if you’d like to hear more about this particular album from me, but I feel like I’ve yapped enough here. Needless to say, this album was played heavily in my household in the past year. Songs from it randomly get stuck in my head all the time. Maybe it’s because I’m the eldest, childfree daughter with a cursed family and a deep longing for an America that doesn’t exist anymore, but I really fell in love with Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party. I hope if you haven’t heard it yet, you give it a try. And listen to it from first to last, don’t shuffle!

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  • The Beatification of the Unwilling

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    So, unless you’ve been living under a rock (or in my case, outer space), you probably already know that Dolly Parton, one of the world’s nicest and most genuine musicians, has unfortunately passed away. You probably already know that Dolly Parton’s reputation precedes her; she was not only generous, talented, thoughtful, and a hell of a musician, she was also well known for her involvement in creating a charity that sent out free books to children all across the United States. Many of you probably even received those books when you were growing up. She was a role model for singer-songwriters everywhere, and a light in a world that is, most days, cruel and unusual.

    What’s strange about the death of Dolly Parton is not the circumstances behind it; death comes for us all eventually. For me, what is jarring and unusual is how quickly we as a society took hold of the news and changed her life into a narrative she never wanted or asked for. Everywhere you look, the “Saint Dolly” moniker has replaced her regular name. Suddenly she’s a saint who never did anything wrong in her life, never made a mistake or fudged up a little. And suddenly, the narrative has gone from “What a great person Dolly Parton was” to, “Saint Dolly this, Saint Dolly that”.

    I’m not going to sit here and write a giant list of the things that would probably disqualify Dolly Parton for sainthood. I like her a whole lot. She’s one of the few musicians who was ever able to rock acrylic nails and strum the guitar at the same time. Far be it from me to roll out the cancel-wagon and just be a total curmudgeon about someone who was a really kind and beautiful soul. But I just find it super cringey and indicative of a sick society that she can’t just rest in peace. It’s weird that people who claim to have loved her work and life’s mission so much would choose to alienate her in death by putting her on a pedestal she never asked for.

    One thing that sets Dolly Parton’s life apart from 99% of musicians that anyone has heard about is that she specifically went out of her way to NOT be an idol. She valued her peace and privacy, her quiet home life with her husband Carl. She didn’t want people to even know she was sick with cancer in the first place, and she didn’t want the public at her funeral. She wasn’t the kind of person who wanted a TMZ article about her passing. So why is everyone giving her the puffed up title of “Saint Dolly”? She clearly did not want that kind of status or pressure to be the most perfect person who ever lived.

    I guess maybe I AM a curmudgeon. I don’t like it when I see “Saint Dolly” on social media. It’s not because I don’t think she was an absolute saint of a person, at least as much as a rich famous musician could be. I just don’t believe it’s what someone like her would’ve wanted. Call her by her name and let her actions speak for themselves… it’s what she stood for in life.

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  • Hello World!

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    Testing…

    testing…

    is this thing even on?

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    Wow, it’s so crazy that I have the technology to broadcast my opinions virtually like this!

    Anyway…

    If you are receiving this broadcast, it’s because you are one of the lucky (or, more likely, unlucky) few to connect to my wavelength. Congratulations! You will now be subjected to my terrible musings on the state of the scene. If you would like to exit this ride, please tuck your head between your knees and hold on as you are ejected from orbit.

    Seriously though, I’m so glad to finally have the balls to say something, even if only two people are reading. Two is better than zero, right? Maybe there is only zero. Either way, I’m here and I’m not going to let up anytime soon. This space will be a place for music reviews, rants, raves, and other miscellaneous garbage that occupies my mind.

    I hope you enjoy!

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