Promotional Image for Jooselord's single "Quarantine"
On Oct. 8, 2021, Jooselord recorded a live album at The Pour House with members of his collective Krawz Bonez.
WARNING: Explicit Content, shot by Brandon Whippo
The show featured local rappers Buddahbby, Godrick, Austin Royale, Nunafterhours, 3AMSOUND and Jovi Mosconi, with Jooselord headlining the event. Our very own WKNC alumnus, the legendary Iron Mic, was the DJ for the show and kept things running very smoothly on the turntables throughout the night.
It was truly a unique experience with the addition of a live band to the latter half of the show. Not only that, but Joose had The Pour House record his performance and press it to a vinyl that will be available for purchase in the near future. This was another great collaboration of local artists showcasing the talent that the Triangle has to offer.
There are many ways to discover new artists, some better than others. While we can debate our favorite ways, I think I speak for everyone when I say the absolute worst way to discover a new artist is to find out they had to go public with #metoo allegations in response to career backlash. These headlines almost always override the artist’s music and work for exclusive focus on their victimization by the industry. In an effort to counteract that trend, here is an unusual artist I discovered through this less than ideal pipeline: Iona Fyfe.
The most immediately recognizable thing about Iona Fyfe is that she’s a Scottish artist who often sings in… well that’s kind of the confusing part. The language (or dialect of English depending on your feelings about the United Kingdom as a political entity) is called Scots, and it’s a surprisingly well preserved cousin of our tongue spoken in the rural south of Scotland, where the Celtic languages of the North mixed with Old English. It’s a strange thing to our American ears, where even the most divergent dialects of our country are still fully intelligible. In the slowest, syrupiest songs in Iona Fyfe’s catalogues, you might just think she has a strong accent. In faster folk songs like “Guise of Tough,” the language barrier is far more jarring. Fyfe’s language uses words and sounds that feel intuitive and gel with the musical/poetic vocabulary of the English tradition, but to our ears it’s mostly nonsense.
However, the effect of Scots is still artistically compelling to English speakers. Since we are steeped in the same musical and poetic traditions, and we share several roots, grammatical transformations, and entire words or sentences. The music still makes emotional sense, communicating everything important and not a lick more. Coming away from the songs, I found myself understanding what the music meant, but not what it was about, which makes for a fascinating if unmooring listening experience.
Then there’s Fyfe’s English language work, which is more accessible if less compelling. Her 2019 ep, “Dark Turn of Mind,” is entirely in English, and built around a cover of previous blog topic Gillian Welch. While the ep isn’t as good as her Scots language music, it represents something unique about Fyfe, that her music is conversation with the Southern American folk tradition. This connection is partly musical, Appalachian folk is built off the musical framework of Celtic and English folk, and partly ethnic. Since the 90s, many white southerners have begun tying their cultural identity to the Celtic tradition, rather than to the Anglo-Saxon or American Nationalistic traditions. Analyzing this cultural shift is beyond my pay grade, though it was a constant feature of my upbringing. The only place I’ve ever been outside North Carolina and the surrounding states is Scotland to visit my brother studying abroad. The label of “Scots-Irish” is a fraught identity, but it’s good nonetheless to see Fyfe reciprocating a more wholesome vision of white Southern identity from across the pond, especially by covering our music from our cannon.
I encourage you to check out the Iona Fyfe discography. If you aren’t a folk person, it will probably remain a minor curiosity to you, but it’s a gimmick that’s worth your time. I wish her the best on her post-Covid career, and hope to see her extend her relationship to American in the coming years, because God knows her nations relationship to Europe is strained right now
I treasure my screen time (my weekly screen time report is an embarrassing number). But sometimes, even when I want to be taking a break, scrolling through all of my endless feeds can be very emotionally and mentally draining. When I want to be on my phone or computer, but don’t want to scroll myself into the void, here’s what I do instead.
Phone Games
I feel like everyone is entitled to at least one silly little phone game that they are way too into. For me, it’s the app/website Cardgames.io (right now I am going through a major Farkle phase but I have played most games on there). Whether it be a card game, an adventure game or something where you have to tend to crops, let yourself have a game or two on your phone. It’s all in good fun.
There are two types of quizzes I frequent in my free time: personality quizzes and knowledge quizzes. Recently, I’ve been loving the Taylor Swift Sporcle quiz where you have 11 minutes to try and name every song on every album. Sporcle is a generally good resource for the knowledge/trivia based quizzes, but you can find them on all corners of the internet.
The “Wikipedia Game”
You know the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” phenomenon? It’s kind of like that, but with Wikipedia. As Wikipedia describes it on the Wikipedia page for the game the objective is: “Players (one or more) start on the same randomly selected article, and must navigate to another pre-selected target article, solely by clicking links within each article. The goal is to arrive at the target article in the fewest clicks (articles), or the least time.” This is fun on your own, but is especially fun racing a friend.
Catch Up On Favorite Podcasts/Current Audiobook
I feel like all I do is recommend my own blogs but I have written a blog with some podcast recommendations, as well as several blogs with book reviews (“You Have A Match,”“Tweet Cute,”“The Unhoneymooners”). But if you have your own personal favorite that you haven’t listened to in a while: do it, it’ll be worth it.
Set The Phone Down
If you’ve exhausted all of these, maybe screen time should come to a close. Or not, I won’t tell you what to do.
As I wrote about in “My Year Writing For WKNC,” I’ve been involved one way or another with WKNC for about a year now, and I want to share a few of the many wonderful things about the Triangle’s very own 88.1.
The People
Whether it be sharing memes in the Discord, eating lunch together in the lounge, or waving to one another on campus, I’ve met some wonderful people at the station. It’s a blessing to be surrounded by people who have seemingly infinite knowledge about music and who are incredibly talented.
New Music Everywhere, All The Time
I used to have this irrational fear that I would never be able to listen to all the music in the world, and that I could have a favorite song out there that I just hadn’t listened to. WKNC has exposed me to hundreds of new songs and bands and diminished this fear almost entirely. If I ever get bored with my music, I know I can always tune into HD-1, HD-2, go to the blog, the YouTube channel, or our Discord to find something new to listen to.
The Interior Design
I cannot stress how many stickers and posters adorn the doors and walls of the station. I notice something new every time I walk into the station. Not to mention the LED lights that set the ambience in the HD-1 and HD-2 studios.
The Coolest Opportunities
I’ve gotten to DJ at The Den, write blogs for the station, and interview my peers. I’ve also seen my fellow DJs get to attend festivals and conferences, express themselves creatively and achieve other wonderful things through WKNC.
Creative Outlet
Making playlists has always been my jam, but getting to share them with people live for one hour every week is such an immense privilege.
Our Amazing Advisor, Jamie
I’ve never met someone so radically supportive and accepting. Not to mention, she’s pretty cool, herself. I, and I’m sure the other DJs agree, could not ask for a better advisor.
If you’re a student at NC State on the fence about getting involved at WKNC, go for it. Seriously, it’s changed my life, and your time at WKNC can be whatever you want it to be.
Women’s March for Abortion Rights in Raleigh – photo by Erie Mitchell
Going to the women’s march for abortion rights in Raleigh recently was a big moment for me because was my first protest since the pandemic started, but during it my thoughts briefly wandered to something else. During a quiet moment between speakers I noticed they were playing “Scoop” by Lil Nas X. Now this is a great song, and it got the crowd going, but it got me wondering if we could do better.
There are songs (some of which were already mentioned) that instantly come to mind when you think of a protest: “Alright” by Kendrick Lamar was the rallying cry against police brutality, Gil Scott Heron created a phrase as relevant today as in 1971 with “The Revolution Will Not be Televised”, and Rage Against the Machine built an entire career around punchy, stick-it-to-the-man anthems like “Killing in the Name”. All of these are classics that have inspired millions and work because of their purposeful simplicity and universality as well as their strong musical fundamentals , but I feel like the best protest song is something that isn’t known for being played on the picket line. The best listen of a song is the first one, and I know I would be just a little more fired up if it was an unexpected song.
This brings me back to “Scoop”. Again, it’s a great song and has the energy level that aligns with a massive demonstration, but lyrically it’s about fame, sex, and looking really good; all fine things to make a song about of course, but maybe not one challenging Texas abortion law. Scoop is worth discussing here because of one important aspect: the context. Lil Nas X has become such a counterculture icon that he’s shifted culture itself, conversely every song and video he releases is accompanied by, let’s say discourse, on Twitter. Everything about him is rebellious, and this is the kind of artist I would want my dream protest song to be by.
Which brings me to what my dream protest song actually is: “Generational Synthetic” by Beach Fossils. From a strictly musical perspective (I think it’s important for a protest song to be a good song in its own right) it’s a great song that starts with a killer groove and doesn’t stop that groove, and it’s just low-fi enough to blend with the chanting of a crowd and have the voices not feel completely distinct. Thematically it deals with coming into one’s own and growing along the way with clever turns of phrase, “all your working inspiration // systematic exploration” is heady without sounding pretentious. And the chorus strips all of that away to create a universality that, like Kendrick’s anthem “Alright”, lets it be extracted from the song and become a rallying cry for the voiceless all on its own.
Lo-fi indie pop band Beach Fossils aren’t exactly an artist that screams protest, but there are some important notes I thought made this selection work. Their most recent album and interviews from lead singer Dustin Payseur about their upcoming project have shown a genre bending willingness and a specific focus on jazz that lends itself to going against the grain, and their videos especially draw from countercultural iconography with depictions of skateboarding and graffiti. One of the founding members left to become a Buddhist monk, so these aren’t a group of people who are sellouts. And the fact that this just feels like a weird choice is an asset because it doesn’t at all feel cliche.
Perhaps the most important aspect, though, is the scale of the lyricism. It’s not too long and wordy, which I think would get in a song’s way here, but also comes with a certain melancholic spirit, with a Payseur tapping into a weight of depicting an entire generation’s trials and tribulations that captures the essence of what a protest is in just a few lines.
This is just my personal pick of course, and there’s too much music out there to have a definitive answer. Mine might change tomorrow, but for now, “Generational Synthetic” is what I’m queuing up when I head to the next rally.
Autumn is in full swing (although, I wish it were at least 15 degrees cooler outside), which means my rotation of albums to circle through is autumn to its core. So, let’s get straight into it and look at the albums I frequent during the fall time. Hopefully this list can give you some inspiration or remind you of an album you haven’t heard in a while.
“Tapestry” — Carole King (1971)
“Tender Buttons” — Broadcast (2005)
“Any Other City” — Life Without Buildings (2001)
“Figure 8” — Elliott Smith (2000)
“Lesser Matters” — The Radio Dept. (2003)
“The New Abnormal” — The Strokes (2020)
“Just As I Am”— Bill Withers (1971)
“Hypnic Jerks” — SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (2018)
“Emmerdale” — The Cardigans (1994)
“Painted Shut” — Hop Along (2015)
“songs” — Adrianne Lenker (2020)
“Dark In Here” — The Mountain Goats (2021)
HONORABLE MENTIONS
“Our Extended Play” — beabadoobee (2021)
Unfortunately only four songs, so it’s not an album, but it’s so, so good.
“Speak Now” — Taylor Swift (2010)
Controversial to not list “Red,” but “Speak Now” (despite having a song called “Back To December” on it) is much more fall to me. An honorable mention because this probably isn’t up the alley of most WKNC listeners, but hey, you never know.
