Mixtapemotions

  • My Favorite Place-Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers, February 8, 2021

    Country music is the sound of the South, talking about God, girls, and guns. Drunken Saturday nights and church on Sunday morning. Go up North and it ain’t all rock ‘n’ roll, though. I discovered Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers on a Valentine’s NoiseTrade sampler. Some indie mix tapes might make the coldest heart sceptic believe in love. The song Kellogg contributed to the mix was “Song for Lovers,” which is as much about existential dread as it is a love song. Years later, I discovered the rest of the album Gift Horse, which is Northeastern folk-rock, which is pretty darn close to country music. Kellogg sings about watching his family grow up, relationships that didn’t quite work out, the doubt in the existence of God, and life in the country.

    I GOTTA GET BACK TO THE COUNTRY. This song struck me today on my walk. I was born in a small town in Upstate New York. And calling it a town is a compliment. We lived off the beaten path down a dirt road that will tear up your car after a few months. If the potholes didn’t get you, the salt from melting the snow would. We’d have to drive 20 minutes to the nearest gas station. Two hours on the bus to school and two hours back, unless it was snowy. It could take all night. One year it snowed from Halloween until March and we hardly could get to town. In the early spring we’d make Maple Syrup at my grandfather’s farm. We moved to North Carolina when I was 10 where we lived closer to town (which is rightly called a town). I never lived in a city

    I GOTTA GET BACK TO THE CITY. until I moved to Korea. A small Korean city is 250,000 people. The town in North Carolina was maybe about 20,000 people. In New York it seemed like it was a population of 500, but I’m probably wrong. In Korea I could walk out my door 24/7 and buy something to eat. I could get anything delivered with a little language skills I didn’t need a car. The bus or subway got me there quickly. My current school is in the country with a jacked up bus schedule, but it is possible to get to work using only public transportation. I step outside and there are always people around. It gets hard to clear your head when taking a walk, but the convenience is quite incredible.

    THIS IS MY FAVORITE PLACE.  I often wonder which I prefer. When I was young, I dreamed of living in a big city. I didn’t know what that would entail–a small apartment, long hours on the job, noise, people constantly around me. Some days I long to go back to the country. I’ve entertained thoughts about learning a practical skill or getting into farming and moving to a life where I could be forgotten our of sight rather than erased among the masses. But I awake from the daydream realizing that I don’t have any of those skills. I never learned them. I wasn’t drawn to them as a kid, and I avoided working with my dad. I guess it’s life in the city for now. And if you have the ones you love around, it’s quite nice wherever you land.

    https://genius.com/Stephen-kellogg-and-the-sixers-my-favorite-place-lyrics

     

  • “Teenage Dream” by Katy Perry, Sunday, February 7, 2021

     

    For today’s blog post, I am going to assign a lot of homework. By the end of the lesson, you will know all about purity culture and how it affected a generation or two of evangelicals. The Cliff’s Notes version: purity culture is the belief that teenagers should wait until they are married in a heterosexual marriage. That is the only way to be blessed by God. Purity culture was steeped in evangelical and even crossed over to pop culture until the late 2000s. There were rallies called True Love Waits, and there were songs like Rebecca St. James’ “Wait for Me.” Some may even recall The Jonas Brothers wore purity rings, which were quite common among evangelical teenagers, and parishioners of the 20th-century doctrine. The idea was you wore the purity ring until you replaced it with a wedding ring. The Jonas Brothers have since taken them off.

    YOU THINK I’M PRETTY WITHOUT ANY MAKEUP ON. One of my favorite podcasts, Good Christian Fun, talks about Christian pop culture. The first episode was about Katie Perry’s Christian album, the self-titled Katy Hudson. Hudson is the singer’s actual surname. Later episodes have talked about Katy Perry from multiple angles and how she influenced other artists around that time. The daughter of a Pentecostal pastor, Katy Perry was obviously aware of purity culture. There are rumors that the song on the same album “The One That Got Away” is about her ex-boyfriend Matt Thiessen, the frontman of the youth-group favorite Christian punk band Relient K. Katy Perry is somewhat of a legend of the CCM scene. From songwriting sessions with Jennifer Knapp to featuring on P.O.D.’s “Goodbye for Now,” Perry was set for quite a career in Christian music. Speaking of goodbyes, Joshua Harris wrote a book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which was very popular among my classmates. He argues in the book that teens should not date casually, but rather focus on finding the right one through courting. Harris and Evangelical thought leaders inculcated a single interpretation of sexual purity for a generation. Juxtaposed to that book, Katy Perry’s first hit “I Kissed a Girl,” showed the star popularizing bi-curiosity. How far the evangelical darling had fallen. Youth pastors doubled down on the message, yet it seemed everyone was having sex. And if they weren’t having regular sex, they were doing oral or anal. Christian teens either hid it, denied to themselves that it happened, or just took the hit of shame and were ostracized. I used to think, “It’s just my youth group, right? Somehow we let in secular influence that others hadn’t.” 

    LET’S GO ALL THE WAY TONIGHT. I’m very hesitant to share personal stories because I’m a teacher employed by a Christian school. However, I’ve been in a state of self-censorship for years. I hope that the wrong person doesn’t read my blog. But if you can’t talk about your views as a teacher, what’s the point of teaching? I think that as I keep writing the personal stories will come, but I’d rather spend the end of this post giving a collection of resources on how I would advise others dealing with the traumas of purity culture and what to teach teenagers today. Two podcast episodes of You Have Permission about Purity Culture and Shame, the latter with therapist Matthias Roberts who wrote a book called Beyond Shame: Creating a Healthy Sex Life on Your Own Terms, which is on my Kindle waiting to be read. The people who teach us that the Bible is very clear haven’t read it without their own cultural biases. Repression has caused sex to get weird. It has messed up generations of people. It’s time to stop scaring and start healing. Sexually healing.

    Read the lyrics on Genius.

  • "Run Away With Me" by Carly Rae Jepsen, Thursday, February 6, 2020

    This album, though… I can listen to it from start to finish without skipping a track. This feels like a confession. At some point I’ll probably make a case for “Call Me Maybe,” which I still haven’t gotten sick of, but for today, let’s enjoy this banger, the first track on Carly Rae Jepsen’s finest album. Starting with an almost kazoo-sounding saxophone riff–though not strange at all–which plays under the vocals when Carly cuts to the chorus. Somehow I happened to find this album while riding on a bus one weekend exploring something new. This was in 2016 when I lived on campus of my school, so every weekend for my sanity I had to go on an adventure. This meant lots of time on the rural-to-city bus. I listened to a lot of music while on the bus and waiting to transfer. At this point I spent quite a few weekends looking for something new whether it was coffee houses, interesting restaurants, different areas of town, new places to watch the flowers bloom or the leaves change.


    YOUR STUCK IN MY HEAD, STUCK IN MY HEART, STUCK IN MY BODY. I can tell you a few good restaurants in Daegu. I know where to shop for _____. I can recommend an excellent place to get gelato. But those places change. New 맛집(popular restaurants) come and go. I can tell you the over-rated places. Hint: be very suspicious of Mexican food in Korea in general. I can tell you where you’ll spend too much money.  I’ll tell you that it’s not worth it to go to the Arboretum when the leaves change. There will just be too many people. However, if you do happen to be in Dalseo-gu when the leaves have changed and it’s approaching sunset on a clear day, don’t take the subway. Take a bus and watch the scenery go by in the window. You’ll have quite a show of color. I can’t separate a single weekend, but I do know that Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion was the soundtrack to my exploration.

    PACKING A BAG, LEAVING TONIGHT, WHILE EVERYONE’S SLEEPING. Those weekends feel like a lifetime ago. Last year I heard this song while I was in North Carolina shopping at the outlet mall on a very cold weekend. I end up going home about every other year. Now who knows when travel will normalize again. I don’t take the bus very often because of Corona, and I try to stay pretty local. I walk a lot, and take out food and coffee. I don’t carry a backpack much anymore. When you lived out in the middle of nowhere I carried my home with me. I often brought a change of clothes just in case I was on the other side of town or another city and couldn’t get home. The days of adventure are waning. Still whenever I hear this song it makes me feel like some weekend, in the near future, “we can turn the world to gold.”

     

  • "Photograph" Ed Sheeran, Friday, February 5, 2021

     

    Before “Shape of You,” Ed Sheeran was known primarily as a singer-songwriter. His albums + and X took clear influence from The Beatles, Carol King, Elton John, James Taylor, and the ballad writers of yesteryear. But he had a knack for throwing in a few rap bars along the way. With every record, Sheeran gained more acclaim. His sophomore record produced the mega Billboard #2 hit, “Thinking Out Loud,” which won two Grammys including Song of the Year. The final single from the album, “Photograph” was written in collaboration with Snow Patrol‘s Johnny McDaid. Sheeran drew inspiration from his long distance relationship with singer/songwriter Nina Nesbitt (the featured musician on Kodaline’s acoustic version of “Brand New Day”). The two spent five months apart. They would eventually break up, but the song remains a gem on Sheeran’s second best-selling record. 
    LOVING CAN HURT. “Photograph” was the song that introduced me to the talent of Ed Sheeran. Unfortunately, because of the hit “Shape of You” on his next album, Divide, I cast Sheeran aside and forgot about the truly inspiring lyrics on the X album. Songs like “Even My Dad Does Sometimes,” “Tenerife Sea,” and “Afire Love,” and the song I chose today, “Photograph,” show of tenderness without gushing with sentimentality. The music video doesn’t address the topic of the song. However, it shows young Sheeran with his first love–music. The video is a collection of old footage of Sheeran playing music throughout his childhood and teenage years.  This song was especially impactful to me in 2016. I had taken on the responsibility of coordinating the native English department at my Christian school. I was the only native English teacher who remained that year, so I was left with the task of assembling a new team. One coworker was particularly disrespectful and hard to manage. I was learning to work in a Korean system. But one other aspect of this year was particularly stressful. In February of 2016, my boyfriend of six months was conscripted. Korea has a mandatory military service that all Korean males must complete before the age of 30. This meant very limited phone conversations and not seeing him for six weeks at a time.

    LOVING CAN HEAL. Unlike Ed Sheeran and Nina Nesbitt, we did not break up. The time we spent together, we used it to build our relationship. Because we had many common interests, we spent every moment doing this things together. Museums and discovering new places to find ____ foods, shopping, talking, going to the park. Simple but it kept us together. We made plans to watch shows together. We read the same books. We talked about them whenever we could. It may have been expensive with all of the traveling, but it was money I would gladly spend again. I don’t wish for the hard times again. But when you go through the tough times, the lessons you learn are the most valuable. The mistakes you make are never erased but you can look at when you do it the right way, you remember why you don’t do it the other way. 2016 was a year the built my future. It was a foundational year at work. I learned how and how not to be a leader. And I learned how to love deeper. Love isn’t always the tender moments, but also the work in between. And you gotta pay the bills if you want to play on the weekends, hence long distance. I think love is really about balancing the sentimental with the practical. Swerve to the left, it’s just a fantasy. Swerve to the right, it’s just bitterness.

  • This Love~Maroon 5, February 4, 2021

    Love them or hate them, it’s still incredible how long of a career Maroon 5 has had. Today we’re moving out of ’80s and ’90s vibes and replacing synthesizers with keys. We’re traveling back 2004 to the first song I remember from Maroon 5, their second single “This Love.” Is this song a love song or a breakup song? The verse says that Jane, the titular character in the album’s title and mentioned in this song “got on a plane/ Never to return again,” but in the chorus singer Adam Levine says that although “this love has taken a tole on [him, he] won’t say goodbye anymore.” Much of the focus of the song is on the relationship, so I’ll justify it as a love song.

    MEMORIES. In 2004 I was in high school. Maroon 5 debuted as a pop-rock band, which had only been a thing since the late ’90s. Of course there had been rock bands that went pop, but they usually consider themselves rock bands. You could argue that the Beatles was a pop-rock band, but they came from a time that pop music was rock music. I remember hearing Matchbox 20’s lead singer Rob Thomas talking about how he was proud to be known as a pop band. And while you might call Maroon 5’s first album pop-rock, they strayed from that sound in their subsequent albums. I remember hearing this song in the car with my friends sitting in the parking lot of the liquor store as my friend’s mom went to pick something up. My friend said, “What do you think the cops would think? My mom is buying alcohol and she’s driving a car full of teenagers.”
    LOST STARS. I had hope for this band when I heard this album. I thought we could use a band that incorporates funk into pop and light rock. Indie rock at that time wasn’t afraid of falsetto, why should the mainstream? But the band lead me through disappointment after disappointment throughout their musical career. With the exception of their last album which brings the band back into the studio and even includes a lengthy jam session, Maroon 5 stays pretty secure in the realm of music written to make money. When I saw the movie Begin Again, I thought about how Adam Levine’s character was exactly how I felt about the band. I was a little charmed in the beginning. But after a while in the relationship, they started being unfaithful to my musical needs. They started sleeping around with other producers that warped their songs. The lyrics became drier and lacking the passion I needed in a band. The band says their trying hard to “feed [my] appetite,” but I just see lazier musicianship. Run away Jane. Don’t buy a return ticket.
    RADIO EDIT. I saw the music video on MTV and Fuse. That was my first exposure to this song. It wasn’t the most graphic video, but it was a little graphic for the time. It tries to focus on a then very skinny Adam Levine, shirtless, and in bed with the woman he’s making love to. He sings into the camera the line: “I tried my best to feed her appetite/ Keep her coming every night.” When the song hit the Top 40 stations I heard those lines. I didn’t think too deeply about it. Yes, it sounded sexual. But I didn’t think too deeply about it. They then played it on the light rock stations, you know the ones that they play when your mom goes to the hair saloon, between the Eagles and Enya. However, around this time the FCC was on a rampage against sex. We had seen Janet Jackson’s breast in the super bowl earlier that year, so it was important to get rid of every notion of sex in the media period. So, some stations started censoring this song. “Keep her —- every night.” Others did not. I really hate when a song gets censored on the radio. I don’t think that everything should go, but if a song is going to be a hit, there should be an alternate recording. By censoring this song, it sounded so much dirtier. Double entendres appear in Shakespeare, but a wise English teacher isn’t blacking out the books before school. It just gives the “perversion” more power. The FCC certainly succeeded in making sex more enticing for society.

  • Can’t Hug Every Cat, The Gregory Brothers ft. Cara Hartmann, February 3, 2021

     

    Love songs don’t necessarily have to be about a person. They can also be about places and things too.  Today’s song is my first joke song of the year. The instant likability of this song is a combination of comedian Cara Hartmann doing a bit about “Debbie,” a doe-eyed, soft spoken, emotional girl in her early to mid-20s talking creating a dating profile video for E-harmony and the Gregory Brothers taking the already-viral video and turning it into a bubblegum pop track, adding video clips of cat videos for good measure. The result is a feel good track that gives you the warm fuzzies for man’s second-best fuzzy friend.

    I THINK ABOUT HOW MANY DON’T HAVE A HOME. My family had a few cats when I was growing up. I remember my mom giving up our cat when she found out she was pregnant because she read that kitty litter could be harmful to prenatal development. However, after my youngest sibling was born my sister found a cat in my grandfather’s barn who was quite keen to her. One day she said to me, “will you help me? I want to take him home.” We wrapped the cat in a blanket and she carried the cat on her bike. My parents just laughed, but the cat now named “Maple,” bonded with the family. However, my grandfather wasn’t happy. He said that the cat (to him it was “Tommy”) was  a great mouser for the barn. He talked to my sister but ultimately he said that we could keep the cat. What kind of grandfather would make a little girl give back a barn cat?
    I JUST LOVE THEM AND I WANT THEM. Sadly, Maple was hit by a car shortly after my family moved to North Carolina. Perhaps a year after Maple died my mom decided that she wanted a yellow cat. She had a picture in her mind of the perfect cat. But the strangest thing happened that year. No shelters, breeders, or families we knew in the area had any yellow kittens. My mom asked around at church and within our homeschooling network. Nothing for at least a year. She even attended a birth. She wasn’t satisfied with the kittens. Finally, there was a litter of kittens. This large Catholic family in our 4-H group had a cat that gave birth to three kittens. There was a black cat, a grey tabby, and a yellow cat! The cat was to her liking. The black cat was already spoken for. My mom decided to take the yellow cat and the tabby. She said she found her perfect cat and his sister. 
    SORRY I’M GETTING EMOTIONAL. I haven’t had a cat since I’ve been in Korea. My clothes thank me. My mom named the yellow cat “Sunshine.” His hair was everywhere–every couch and sweater. Sunshine lived for 17 years and his sister “Starlight” for 18. I miss having a cat and look forward to the time when I can have another one. 

  • "Space Age Love Song" by Flock of Seagulls, Tuesday, February 2, 2021

     

    I’m not a fanatic about space, like many children, I was fascinated with the prospect of traveling to other worlds when I looked out at the sky. From learning about the nine eight planets from The Magic School Bus to watching Hale-Bopp in the late ’90s night sky, the universe seemed like such an interesting place. After school it was Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns then to PBS for Bill Nye the Science Guy and Arthur. Fast forward to February 1, 2003 (18 years and 1 day ago). The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. This grounded America’s space program for two years. 

    POP MUSIC’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE ’80S. This is my memory of the attitude towards the ’80s. I talked a little about this when I covered New Order’s “World (The Price of Love),” but my memories of the views of the ’80s in the late ’90s and ’00s (what a time warp!) were of awkwardness, terrible hair, men in shorty shorts with hairy legs, girls in tight pink leotards and leg warmers. Tight jeans, porn star ‘staches, and aviators. Farrah Fewcett hair. If you watch Dirty Dancing or Top Gun too much you might get a hair in the back of your throat from someone’s mullet in the back of your throat and if you try to wash it down with Root Beer, you’d taste the ’80s. I immediately turned off music that took “’80s chord progressions.” But then in 2004, there was a shift. Falling Up released their second single from their album Dawn Escapes, “Moonlit.” The guitar riff sounded like ’80s metal. Of course Falling Up was probably not the first musical act to bring back the ’80s, but I started to realize that the ’80s were going to dethrone the ’70s hold on pop culture. Just as long as nobody’s getting Flock of Seagulls’ haircuts, we should be alright.

    …AND I RAN. Music ran towards the ’80s sound. The Killers debuted around this time. Their first album drawing influence from The Cure. Little by little the “2000s” orchestra-hit laden Britney Spears/Backstreet Boys tracks gave way to new-wave sounding synth pop. Nowadays, if you look at a pop chart you will definitely hear ’80s influence. But what brought back the ’80s? Was it some sort of reaction to the conservative policies of George W. Bush mirroring Ronald Reagan? When I think of movies, television, and music of the ’80s I think of a time that was much more conservative than now. Television shows tried to instill morality, but yet tried to be edgy by introducing “issue” episodes. In the ’80s seemed like a counterreformation of the ’60 movements.

    THE SPACE RACE…ENDED. I’m writing a lot about a time before I was even born or have no memory of. Last year I enjoyed the Netflix documentary Challenger, which told the story about how NASA went from cutting edge to cutting corners. After America went to the moon, what was next? Mars? Venus? It seemed like nothing was in the way of human innovation. NASA introduced the space shuttle, a powerful rocket that was going to make going to space easy and common. Pop culture was space-obsessed.
    You don’t have to look far to find an ’80s song about space. It was the space age and everything was reading for the stars. Until the Challenger explosion. Upon closer inspection, it cost too much money to go to the moon, so NASA’s budget was slashed and with it our prospects manned explorations of the solar system. Of course we’ve made incredible breakthroughs in the field of astronomy since. It’s been mostly on the ground or in our back yard in the International Space Station.

    THE MULLET…TRIMMED. To tie everything together, much like the Space Age is still around in much less grand version of itself, so we have ’80s-styled dance hits without the hairspray. Or applied in different ways. America seems to be addicted to 1) conservative governments and 2) liberal entertainment. That doesn’t seem to be going away as Biden is probably one of the most conservative Democrats. SpaceX might take us to the moon. Let’s hope they don’t terraform Mars. Climate change may force us again to look to space, but really, though, is there enough time? Until, let’s enjoy some ’80s synth pop.

  • "Forever Yours" by Key (ft. Soyoo) Monday, February 1, 2021

    Last week when I blogged about BTS, I talked about my gateway drugs into K-pop. Shinee was one of them. The first song I heard from them was “Everybody” which oddly made me think of industrial rock. Later I heard their song “Stand By Me” when I started to watch the drama Boys Over Flowers. I’m sure I’ll talk about my love-hate relationship with Korean dramas later. If you listen to “Stand By Me,” don’t you hear hints of Rick Astley‘s “Never Gonna Give You Up“? Then in 2015 one of the biggest songs in Korea was Shinee’s song “View.” Some of the genius in Shinee’s producers is making hit songs that sound vaguely familiar. Sometimes you can pin a pop song comparison, other times you’re left racking your brain wondering where you heard that song before. 

    FOREVER YOURS. Key (born Kim Ki-bum) is one of the vocalists of Shinee. As the group’s career started winding down, Key started acting and becoming a TV personality on Korean reality shows. His talents stretch beyond music into fashion and philanthropy. In 2018 he released his first solo single, “Forever Yours” featuring former member of the girl group Sista‘s Soyoo. Key stuck to Shinee convention keeping the music semi-familiar yet fresh. Yet, starting out with the guest vocalist rather than the main singer is an interesting choice. And failing to feature Soyoo on the screen in the music video makes it seem a little lonely and incomplete. Speaking of the music video, if the song doesn’t give you early ’90s vibes, the video will remind you of a big budget music video from the year 2000. This is not to knock the song in anyway. In fact if you take the lyrics and translate them into English and watch the music video without listening to the music, it would too cheesy. Fortunately there’s the salty cracker that is the music.

    YOU LOOK LIKE YOU’RE INDIFFERENT TO EVERYTHING. Friends, this month is dedicated to love. I will share more love songs than normal. My goal is to write 13 days of love songs and one breakup as we welcome in the Year of the Ox and break up with the year of the Rat. But it might be a “social distanced” love song oe two. We will celebrate Cities day on February 20th. I wish everyone a happy “love month.” I wish that if you have love you’ll keep love and if you haven’t found it, the pandemic will end soon!