Low diatribe

Yungblud has been the subject of my wife's most recent obsession.

Initial judgement: he's not my particular cup of tea. She played me songs and I sat through them — tolerant, pleasant-adjacent, probably reading as sullen. I had a ready verdict: derivative. Oh, that's just Sabbath. That's AC/DC. That's Radiohead. That's Bowie. I said it like it settled something. Our oldest granddaughter shook her head. I asked her if he was cringe, which she told me was itself cringe. I filed that away for future reference and kept my verdict.

Then one Monday, a Lollapalooza after-show was announced. That Thursday. 11 pm in Chicago.

I bought tickets and we went.

I want to be honest about what I brought to that night.

I drove, because I'm the driver in our relationship. I endured the lines. I stood in the crowd while her enthusiasm moved at a frequency I wasn't quite tuned to. I was there, and I was good about being there, and I was probably not as good about it as I thought I was at the time.

That's the part worth naming. The gap between the version of yourself you're performing and the version that's actually showing up. I was doing the right thing. I wasn't fully doing it.

The theater was one I'd frequented in my youth. I lived in Chicago from 1990 to 1995 — the last neighborhood I lived in was around the corner. Three and a half hours from home now, which is a different relationship to the place than I used to have.

I saw Ministry there on New Year's Eve 1989. Naked Raygun the following year. Front 242, KMFDM, Nine Inch Nails, They Might Be Giants, The Sundays, The The with the Cranberries opening. A catalog of a particular era.

Walking through the doors carried its own weight — the same walls, the same room, my younger self revisiting memories through older eyes.

Then Yungblud took the stage.

He puts on an incredible show. The energy was real, the connection with the crowd was real, the craft was evident. Some of the fans were pushing, grabbing, screaming — impossibly ear-splitting amounts of screaming — performing their fandom more than experiencing it. But the rest of the crowd quieted that down without ceremony. They were here for Yungblud, and they weren't going to let anyone ruin their experience. There was something I recognized in that — a room protecting what it came for.

I found myself paying attention.

I'm listening to his latest album now.

Not because I made a deliberate choice. It crept in without fanfare or announcement, and now I catch myself humming favorites while I go about my day.

I find myself repeating the same cycle. I try something I'm scared to do, or think I won't like, and I find out I was wrong. Not always — sometimes the thing really isn't for me, and that's fine. But often enough that I should probably hold my initial assessments more loosely than I do.

The derivative thing is worth revisiting too. Every artist I named as a source — Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Radiohead, David Bowie — as revolutionary as they may have been in their time, was themselves synthesizing what came before. So was Ministry. So was Naked Raygun. Human existence is derivative. We absorb our environment and make something new from it. That's not a flaw in the lineage. That's the lineage. I knew that. I just applied it selectively, to support my judgement.

Yungblud has me looking at my other prejudices.

I have bristled, for a year now, against calling Low diatribe a blog. The word felt dismissive — small, amateur, the internet's junk drawer. I preferred other framings. A resonance system. A transmission. Anything but the obvious thing.

But if it walks like a blog and talks like a blog.

Same with podcast. I was adjacent to the beginning of that one — close friends who were early minor podcast celebrities, back when the term was coined in 2004. I have the full been-there-done-that relationship with it, the t-shirt I now use to wash my car. Podcasts, in my mental model, are the vaguely coherent ramblings of basement fanatics. Blogs are where people frontload their entire account of backpacking through Spain before getting to their recipe for paella.

For years I had a running joke. Whenever someone said something like oh, I didn't know that, or nobody told me, my response was: I thought you read my blog. The joke being that I didn't have a blog.

A year ago, I started one. I just refused to call it that.

And there is nothing separating me self-publishing these words, and reading them aloud and distributing an mp3 through an RSS feed, from a blog with a podcast. The technology is identical. The format is identical. What's different is my mindset.

Magritte painted a pipe and wrote beneath it: Ceci n'est pas une pipe. He was right. It isn't a pipe — it's paint on canvas. The name and the thing are not the same.

I've been refusing the name as if it could diminish the thing. But the distinction lives in the work, not in what I call it. Calling it a blog doesn't make it less. Calling it a podcast doesn't make it basement ramblings. Those are my associations, not the thing itself.

My wife was right about Yungblud. She wasn't ahead of me on it by accident — she was listening without the apparatus of judgment I'd built around it. She got there without navigating any of that.

The people closest to us are often carrying signals we haven't tuned to yet. Not because we're not paying attention, but because we've already decided what frequency we're on.

I endured the lines. I drove home at 4 am. I was there imperfectly, doing the right thing for reasons that were partly right. Imperfectly present is still present. Not showing up would have been the easier choice and the worse one.

The prejudices are mine to name and mine to dismantle. I'm working on it. Yungblud is evidence that the work is worth doing.

If I can sing along to Zombie on the drive home, and watch Disney's The Lodge because he's in it, I can write a blog and produce a podcast.

The pretense was always mine to put down.

Even if I am rambling from the basement.