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terrainofheartfelt · 3 years

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"It's you, it couldn't be awful"

A Playlist For Dair Appreciation Week, Day 7 - Fave Quotes & Lyrics

I haven’t the faintest idea how to make gifs (seriously I think all of you are witches) so I made this playlist, because there is nothing I love more than scrolling through my spotify library and just projecting all over it.

Track listings and links with opinions & lyrics under the cut, because this thing is long, because I have no restraint.

(Note: I intentionally left off all tswift bc if I didn’t, we’d be here all day)

Section 1: The Bops

Little of Your Love - HAIM

A bop that embodies the energy of the 4b arc, and an energy of “Oh for crying out loud, Humphrey”

You’re just another recovering heart / I wasn’t even gonna try / you wouldn’t even give the time

Stop runnin’ your mouth like that / ‘cause you know I’m gonna give it right back

Hate That You Know Me - Bleachers

It’s “You owe me ten / You owe me twenty!” & “I was hoping it would go away / I was humiliated” & basically all of While You Weren’t Sleeping, tbh

Some days I, I wish that I wasn't myself / No luck! / And I hate that you know me so well

I Like Me Better - Lauv

Heavily featured in all y’all’s gifsets—and rightfully so!!! It’s also like the perfect counter to the previous song.

To not know who I am but still know that I'm good long as you're here with me

Sweet Talk - Saint Motel

It’s about Blair roasting Dan for filth and him being completely charmed by it.

when you laugh / I forget that it's about me / But it's alright / Yeah, cause being your punchline / Still is something

No Reason to Run - Cold War Kids

In the perfect version of the show that lives in my head, this is the end credits song that plays as the two of them frolic in Rome.

I have evolved like a fish growing legs / Woke like a lightbulb clicked in my brain

You Make Lovin' Fun - Fleetwood Mac

The song for the couple that fucked in an elevator. Bless the work.

Sweet wonderful you / You make me happy with the things you do

No Matter What You Do - covered by Jakob Dylan and Regina Spektor

The energy is “I have a lot of affection for you but you are so annoying.” And this is the obligatory post-breakup s6 song.

No matter what in the world you do / Hey, I'll always be in love with you

Don't Take the Money - Bleachers

I see so much love for tswift on this website (valid) but I feel like the world as a whole sleeps on her collaborator Jack Antonoff bc he is brilliant and his act Bleachers has some of my favorite songs ever. Like this one. Antonoff has said before that the title phrase is more metaphorical than literal, like an idiom that means don’t take the easy way and give this up, because it’s genuine. Real “I want to have a sleepover with you” vibes.

Somebody broke me once / Love was a currency / A shimmering balance act / I think that I laughed at that

In the Morning - Nina Simone

It’s about the domesticity! And the “Our relationship is our world”! And the “we’re young and still have so much life to live so everything’s gonna be okay.” did i title a smut fic with lyrics from this song maybeso.gif

Please be patient with your life / It's only morning and you're still to live your day

This Must Be the Place - Talking Heads

This is a canon dair song bc @mysteriesofloves titled a fic after this song, them’s the rules. But for real, this is such a good one. The lyrics are intentionally scattered, a little bewildered, like “how did we get here? how did this happen? who found whom?” and finally “who cares? we found a home in each other.”

The less we say about it, the better / We'll make it up as we go along

Cleopatra in Brooklyn - Frank Turner

Chosen for the title obviously, but the lyrics capture the royal/5b arc pretty well, I think. The narrator carries this tongue-and-cheek comparison of the woman he’s singing to to Cleopatra through the whole song, comparing himself to Marc Antony, and ending with this really earnest kind of declaration. I’m obsessed with this songwriter he’s a genius please give him a listen.

These people are adjectives to your proper noun

I'll come find you when your fortunes fail you / I'll die with you when the gods desert you

Morphing into Section 2: Pure Vibes

Walking on a Dream - covered by Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness

The original is by Empire of the Sun (and omigod I just realized the coincidence), but I first heard it covered by McMahon, and he’s one of my favorite musicians of ever so I just love his rendition. And this song is sort of like...about finally deciding that the reality of love with someone is so much better than the idea of it.

Thought I’d never see / The love you found in me / Now it’s changing all the time

Wake Me - Bleachers

Jack coming for my life yet again. This song is so romantic but also so melancholy? Which is such a Daniel Humphrey Vibe.

And I'd rather be sad with you / Than anywhere away from you

All I Want - Joni Mitchell

I’m a white girl with a mother who grew up in the 60s, so I love Joni. And this song is so bubbly and joyful, but it’s also about a relationship between two imperfect people and wanting it to work anyway. Big “Despicable B” vibes!

All I really want our love to do / Is to bring out the best in me / And in you, too.

Dust to Dust - The Civil Wars

A friend in undergrad got me into the Civil Wars by showing me their live videos, and they have such incredible musical chemistry - like, the synchronicity of their ensemble is so good that it even comes through on their studio recordings and it makes these simple lyrics hit SO HARD.

You're just lonely / You've been lonely too long

NFWMB - Hozier

Ok, this had to be like the first ask I ever sent @bisexualdanhumphrey bc they wrote this fantastic meta post about Hozier and Derena but I said: “consider: NFWMB is a Dair song.” And they said, “You right.” I stand by it, and that’s why this song is on this list.

If I was born as a blackthorn tree / I'd wanna be felled by you / Held by you / Fuel the pyre of your enemies

Friday I'm in Love - covered by Phoebe Bridgers

This song - especially this cover - gives such Secret Friendship Arc vibes a la the end of 4x16...the inherent romance of eating pizza and falling asleep on the couch together

Always take a big bite / It’s such a gorgeous sight / To see you eat in the middle of the night

A Case of You - Joni Mitchell

Queen Joni again. Like! I am a lonely painter / I live in a box of paints. & The “You’re the star of Dan’s book” of it all in these lyrics!

I remember that time you told me / You said “Love is touching souls” / Surely you touched mine / ‘cause part of you pours out of me / In these lines from time to time.

Longing to Belong - Eddie Vedder

This is my thinly veiled attempt to tell more people about this: a song written and performed by Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder on ukulele, that is actually the softest love song in the history of western music.

All my time is spent here / Longing to belong to you

Bones - Josh Record

Okay, so, that Moment on the Couch at the end of 5x02? That’s this song.

And darling, when your feet are cold / Wait up, I'm coming home / And all of you I will hold / My love will clothe your bones

Cinnamon Girl - Lana Del Rey

The song for when you reach the end of plausible deniability - One all consuming paralyzing thought & You need to go back to Brooklyn - and it scares the heck out of you.

There's things I wanna say to you, but I'll just let you live / Like if you hold me without hurting me / You'll be the first who ever did

You and Me - You + Me

You can be flawed enough but perfect for a person

Section 3: Songs for Dancing in the Kitchen with Your Lover at 1 am

Cigarettes and Coffee - Otis Redding

The “Dan and I have a real connection song.” It’s about the romance of commonplace things when they’re with the right person.

But it seemed so natural, darling / That you and I are here

I'd Be Waiting - Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats

It’s “I just want to spend the day with you” but in like, slow-dance, sexy harmonies format.

If you ever get lonely if you never did

Never My Love - covered by Jakob Dylan and Norah Jones

The “Words of Affirmation” love song they deserve, and an underrated love song from Laurel Canyon, imho

What makes you think love will end? / When you know that my whole life depends / On you

Dancing in the Dark - covered by Morgan James

Okay so these lyrics are such Dan lyrics to me, it’s charmingly self-aware and self-deprecating. And this cover by Morgan James turns this staple rock song into something ~sexy~

I'm dying for some action / I'm sick of sittin' round here trying to write this book / I need a love reaction / Come on, gimme just one look

Oh Me Oh My (I'm a Fool for You) - Aretha Franklin

They’re literally always making each other laugh! It’s about feeling safe enough to be uninhibited and unselfconscious in your joy.

To make you laugh / I would be a fool for you

I Fall in Love Too Easily - as done by Chet Baker

No one, but no one sounds as sweet or as smooth as Chet. I know it, you know it, Hozier knows it. And this song and it’s titular thesis is so Them, it’s such a central part of their respective characters, and one of the things that makes them compatible.

My heart should be well schooled / 'Cause I've been fooled in the past

For Me Formidable - Charles Aznavour

Due entirely to this fic (Part II of a god tier s4 au) This is the end credits song for their full feature length Nora Ephron romcom.

NSFW Honorable Mention: Dinner & Diatribes - Hozier

it’s the definitive “men get pegged” representation, iykyk

#dairaw21 #playlist #i may have gotten a *little* carried away...#i regret nothing #dair

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smallblueandloud · 4 years

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1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 for the writing ask- I AM SO SORRY I COULDNT STOP!!! xoxo

aaaah these questions look SO GOOD thank you so much <3 <3 for this ask meme, which will be open all weekend!

1. tell us about your current project(s) – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?

i pulled open all of my WIP google docs for this and my laptop started whirring ominously, lmao. this is going to be a Little Long but i love talking about my wips so who cares!! (under the cut because EXCERPTS)

guys and dolls but gay - very, very casual rewrite of guys and dolls if sky masterson was a woman. i’m loving how chill i’m being about this one because it’s so much fun to not have to worry how i’m going to write lyrics in a not-weird way and just focus on the story. this one’s first because it’s theoretically closest to being finished.

sky, laughing: “oh? people. all the people you turn down every day. well, i imagine there’s someone out there that’ll catch your eye.”

sarah, stiffening: “...yes, there will be.”

sky: “and what might this person be like?”

sarah: “he will not be a gambler, for one.”

sky does not miss the pointed pronoun. “i’m not interested in what he won’t be, i’m interested in what he will be.” she sits down on the desk, in a pointedly masculine pose, and sets her fedora next to her - at her most Hot Queer, basically. “how will you know when he gets to you?”

my fic for the aos rarepair fic exchange - i can’t give any plot or ship details, for obvious reasons, but it’s 1.3k and i’m having fun with it!

steven roadtrip of destiny - canon divergent fic set at the end of steven universe future where steven goes on a roadtrip instead of... canon. it deals with some heavy emotions and it’s also a character study so it’s tentatively shelved until i get around to rewatching suf. but i am projecting on steven like crazy and it’s really, really cathartic. it’s taught me a lot about myself too lmao.

He’s never been anonymous before. He kind of likes it. It means he can fold his arms on the table and put his head down without Pearl worrying about his posture, or someone asking him if something’s okay.

In the last few months, he’s grown to hate people asking him how he’s doing, or if he’s okay. He always ends up lying, because he doesn’t want to worry them, and he ends up feeling worse.

Probably because it’s more of him supporting other people without supporting himself.

He should have told someone how he was feeling. He should have reached out. Sadie could’ve helped him. Lars would’ve listened. Connie would have hugged him and then found him the appropriate mental health professional.

(God, Steven wants a hug. Also the appropriate mental health professional? Whoever that would be.)

untitled aos fic - i don’t want to give a lot of details because :eye emoji: and also i don’t know much about what the plot of this is going to be anyway, lmao. but here’s an excerpt:

daisy “that actor who doesn’t shut up about data harvesting” johnson (@daisyquake) tweeted: two weeks :eyes emoji:

Elena Rodriguez | Seven Cents S2 Streaming On Netflix Now! (@yoyorodriguez) retweeted and added: the problem with being friends with daisy is that you SHOULD have some insight into what her tweets mean but you still have no idea

Fitz (@justfitz) retweeted and added: Try being married to her

untitled star wars twins fic - because i am a total and massive nerd. i’m just kind of stuffing everything i have feels about from the post-anh era into this and planning on figuring it out later? i’m really loving talking about the culture of alderaan (and the culture of the survivors) and also i just love writing luke and leia’s relationship... so much......

(no excerpt for that one because i’ve basically posted all of it in various posts lmao)

aos ds9 au - i’ve posted a LOT about this already and i want to keep the plot a surprise but fsk is in this and married and half the cast is aliens, what else do you need in life.

“Good morning,” says Jemma, coming into the room with her hair wet and her uniform crooked. “Hello, darling.”

“Hi,” says Daisy, turning her face up for a kiss. Jemma obliges absently as she walks past, looking around the room.

“Has anyone seen my hair clip?”

“No,” say Fitz and Daisy in unison.

and of course, last but never least in my heart, chapter 3 of the magnum opus - writing this is on hold until my brain decides to stop hitting me over the head at every possible moment, but there’s like... 2k written so far? it’s. it’s going.

“Yeah, yeah,” says Coulson, and makes quick work of the right gauntlet. It’s only halfway through the left one that his fingers slow and he says, quietly, “Simmons designed these, didn’t she?”

She lets out a quick breath. “Yeah.”

He stays quiet for a few more seconds, finishing up the last of the straps, making sure they’re tight enough. Finally, he says, “She should be helping you with these.”

Daisy pulls her arms back and swallows down some words, or maybe a couple of feelings, or maybe a sob. “Yeah, well.”

2. tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project

the last sentence of the magnum opus!!!!!!!!!!

no, lmao, i’m gonna try to be serious. i really, really want to write some librarians fic in the near future? also MORE OF THE SENSE8 AU. i’m DYING to write some stuff about that. especially sam’s cluster, for some reason? Let’s Make Him Suffer (Comedically)! one day i’m gonna finish that list of what cluster/situation each song is about and then it’ll be over for all of us!

3. what is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway)

i spent about eight months imagining a scene where riza hawkeye was really injured and mustang was holding her in his arms (basically the promised day scene but with more privacy) so does that count?

hmm, just for some other possibilities: glinda telling dorothy about elphaba, laura somehow seeing or speaking to natasha during catws, a good omens au of the good place (specifically the ”i don’t even like you!” / “you doooooooo” scene), kencyrath au of star wars (ESPECIALLY THIS ONE, except setting up the first scene alone would take 7k, but i want to talk about leia and luke and their MESSED UP TRUST ISSUES in this au).

oh, also, something about star trek tng where jean-luc and beverly and jack were in love and then jack died and picard left. more specifically a scene set during the pilot episode where jean-luc very cordially offers beverly the option to transfer off the enterprise, that he wouldn’t dream of holding it against her, and beverly very cordially telling jean-luc to go fuck himself. i want to write 30k of that broken triad. i want it so bad. i dream of that fic. maybe one day when i find myself with a completely empty month or two, i’ll binge all of tng and Write Some Stuff.

4. share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)

since you and i have tww in common, i’m gonna do a tww fic! otherwise i’d have to reread literally every fic i’ve ever written, lmao.

(this is long but i put this post under the cut so i have RIGHTS. also consider this a sneak peek for the j/d fic in the sense8 au?)

“It’s okay,” says Helen. She sits for a moment in silence, seeming thoughtful. “The Congressman and I are in the same cluster,” she says eventually. “I’d- I supposed that’s easier on the Secret Service?”

“Yes,” says Donna. “The-”

She stops herself from saying anything further. President Bartlet and the First Lady aren’t exactly quiet about who’s in their cluster, especially with senior staff, but that doesn’t mean she should go talking about it in an unsecured room in LA, of all places.

To cover for her blunder, she gives up something else: “The same with Josh. They got really lucky with him, actually. It’s just him and me, so they won’t have to worry about anyone threatening the Chief of Staff through the barista in the local Starbucks.”

Helen looks up from the Ohio numbers she’d drifted back to, a slow smile creeping up on her face. “Josh is in your cluster?”

“Uh-” says Donna, feeling like national security wasn’t worth whatever she’s just blundered into. Oops. “Josh- Josh is my cluster, ma’am.”

She catches her mistake the second it’s out of her mouth, but Helen doesn’t call her on it, more focused on other revelations. “No wonder you two look at each other the way you do!” she says, sounding delighted. Donna shuts her eyes, praying for this to go away. It’s not that she’s ashamed of Josh - it’s just so, so complicated, and other people never think about how difficult it was. Still is.

i’m just... i really liked the idea of donna fumbling and having to reveal this to cover up for what else she was going to say? i don’t know why i’m so charmed by this. i think it’s because it would be impossible in the show - you can’t show what someone was going to say on television, not without a lot of setup and very careful scripting. it’s just a really fun situation to write about and i’m really proud of this conversation in general.

also helen santos was a dream to write and i love her a lot. i kind of want to write one of the fics in the series about her and her cluster solely because like... look at her. she’s a delight in literally every scene. i love her.

5. what character that you’re writing do you most identify with?

daisy johnson!!! i love writing daisy johnson!!!! she is the most adhd character i’ve ever written and i literally just have to transcribe my own inner monologue and it works perfectly!!!!!

Swing shift: 1600 hours to 2400 hours. Daisy always ends up getting back to her quarters at like 0030 hours, when Jemma is asleep and Fitz is reading some kind of technical journal. Then she has to eat replicated pizza, alone, and freshly replicated pizza is actually pretty hot but it feels cold at that time of night, like, spiritually.

6. what character do you have the most fun writing?

...whoops i literally just answered that lmao. uh. i also really love writing sky masterson in the guys and dolls fic? she’s just weaponized hot queerness in a suit and i love her for it. she is intentionally trying to seduce this repressed lesbian and it’s really funny and also really hot of her and it’s so much fun to write.

also, i wrote chidi for the tgp fic and it was possibly the most fun i’ve ever had with a pov, although that was also because i was purposefully trying to mimic the tone of the show. i still think that line about michael and a grenade is, like, the funniest i have ever been in my life. but chidi’s panic was surprisingly easy to write? all of tgp’s characters have such STRONG voices, it makes writing fic ridiculously easy as long as you don’t get stuck on a plot for six months.

7. what do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? would others agree?

oof, this one is ALWAYS tricky. uh? uhh?? i’m going to ruin everything by saying this but i basically alternate between the same two sentence structures and i am really frustrated about it. i also alternate between the same two styles of endings and i always use the same beginning (set scene, main character pov, thoughts-as-exposition, back to scene).

BUT ON A MORE POSITIVE NOTE i like to talk about emotions and relationships and character development!! i have my “queer subtext goggles” superglued to my face, lmao. i like to think about how characters must have felt about things in canon and how it must’ve influenced them. i like making people deal with the consequences of their actions, especially how it’s influenced they themself. i also just really, really like writing people who love each other, whether it’s romantic or platonic or anything in between. i just want them to be happy! i just want them to stick together! doesn’t matter what fandom, i stand by it.

#loudwithlaughter #sb and l rambles #sb and l answers #sb and l is writing #thank you for sending this in!!!!!#now for literally All The Tags lmao #aos ds9 au #verse: fitzskimmons thingy #fic: you're a candle in the window #verse: and it's golden #mcu ideas #tgp ideas #st ideas #fic: help me hold on to you #fic: on that bumpy road to love #jesus CHRIST that was a lot of tags #okay okay i'm pressing post now #this was such a delight thank you SO much for sending it!#the steven roadtrip of self discovery fic

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agemintherough · 7 years

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Revisiting Chapters Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three, and Twenty-Four of Gems Without Measure; A Pirate’s Treasure

Man, it's been awhile since I have done one of these. I have a lot to talk about with this batch, so let's jump right into it:

2) The gold exchange conversation is practically lifted word for word from canon. It was just too perfect of a Nami moment to change at all. If it isn't broken, don't fix it.

3) Okay, this was one of the hardest things for me to write: Connie and Steven on a date. I have mentioned before that I do not care to write or attempt romance, but this was important for me to do: the last perfect moment before Steven's world goes to hell. Steven and Connie have the potential to be one of the best couples in modern animation right now, but they are twelve and fourteen. I personally do not believe that you cannot have a real relationship that young, but they are definitely more than friends. They are the best of friends...jam buds, if you will.

I wrote all of the Steven/ Connie material first and wrote everything else around it. As I was doing so, I kept sending CyanideOreo what I was working on for feedback, specifically making sure that this fit the characters without getting any form or real kid romance. I was assured that this read more as a "Disney Romance," which is a perfect fit.

I did, however, draw on the early dates and special moments that I shared with my wife to make it somewhat accurate (in the same way that I used my thoughts about relationships in the previous chapter with Greg). Walking around through the nearby historic village has always been a wonderful time for us, especially when they have art fairs or other activities.

4) I am sure most of you have seen this great artwork based on this moment made by @cyanideoreo, but did you pick up the significance of what Steven and Connie were eating? Raspberry ice and cake was the order Mary Poppins placed at the Penguin Cafe in the sidewalk chalk drawing world (in addition to some tea) during the song "Jolly Holiday." This, of course, is subtle foreshadowing of where this date is going to go by the end of this chapter.

5) The only comment I am going to make about the newspaper article (which has been a small, rarely mentioned subplot since the end of the Davy Back Fight is that it is important and that there is a major clue about what is going to happen in the somewhat near future.

6) A coworker of mine had students create masks for a project of “The Masque of the Red Death.” They have been hanging up in her room all year. While there are quite a few interesting designs, my favorite was the mask that was a pack of cards, glued together and fanned out with eye holes cut into it. I put it in the story as one of the masks seen in the "mask game."

7) Kaku calling the Straw Hats "youngsters" was my way of getting the gag where he has an older voice than the characters expected without it being random.

8) Eirney is a character that jmr46718 and I developed in our discussions about the story over a year ago. We thought that Kalifa could benefit from having a sister, especially since she doesn't do much in-universe except follow her job description...

However, Iceburg's reactions to having no idea who she was is supposed to lampshade that this is one of the only original characters in this story.

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9) Steven and Connie, of course, sing "Jolly Holiday" from Mary Poppins. The only thing worth mentioning is I changed one part of the lyrics. I removed "You'd never think of pressing your advantage. Forbearance is the hallmark of your creed" with "You always treat me right with proper kindness. You're goofy, funny, charming; yes, indeed." I did this because this date is too innocent for any kind of "advantage" that could be overtaken.

Also, I couldn't NOT make the AGITR connection.

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10) As several people guessed, the events of “Steven Floats” happen earlier than expected! Of course, nobody expected it to be because of a tiny kiss! I honestly imagined this scene to be like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer's reindeer games sequence where Clarice kisses Rudolph and he flies while yelling "She thinks I'm cute!"

11) Steven is witnessing the scene from next chapter where the Gems and Nami come across a battered Usopp.

12) When I first posted this chapter, I messed it up and forgot that Steven's fall correlated to his negative emotions and went straight to him needing to stop by using his positive thoughts of the Gems (but not Rose).

13) Oh look! Two new characters! Nero is...well, there is a character in One Piece named Nero! I wonder if they are the same character? The other one, Apollo, is a mink, which was only introduced properly in One Piece two years ago. I am sure that they served their purpose after catching Steven. Boy, wasn't it nice that they pointed the kids in the right direction after seeing Steven's gem?

14) I wonder why Eirney is so interested in what a Gem is. Maybe she likes gemology?

15) Remember that Amethyst is wearing a redesigned dress that I created for her back in AGITR. As such, she is better concealed than the canon outfit she would be wearing at this point. One of the first things that was decided was to have Paulie wish that the other characters would stop being so shameless and be more like Amethyst, who would pick up on that immediately and use it for laughs. This is the beginning of this gag.

16) Picking right up from Chapter Twenty-One, Peridot is leading the charge to figure out where Robin disappeared to. We are knee-deep in Peridot's story arc of figuring out who she is and where she belongs. Keep an eye on her throughout this section: she may yet have an important role to play.

17) Again, a lot of setup from this chapter is taken from canon. It is necessary to keep the emotional integrity from this section. However, the key new addition to this scenario is Amethyst. This is basically an extension of her character development that began in "Tiger Millionaire" and "Maximum Capacity" that did not conclude until "That Will Be All." She is feeling a major lack of self-respect and now sees Usopp as a kindred spirit. It honestly wasn't something I had planned initially, but it made a lot of sense and tied into the plot in an organic way that builds upon what came before and what will happen moving forward.

18) This is the first legitimate acknowledgement of the radically different levels of violence that both shows possess and I think it's important to acknowledge it. Obviously it makes people like Greg and Pearl uncomfortable, but that doesn't change the people. Luffy is an amazing guy, but he isn't afraid to beat the crap out of you if push comes to shove. Amethyst recognizes that and accepts it far easier than Pearl, who is still struggling with the radically different dimension (but not for lack of trying, as we all know change is HARD for Pearl).

19) Speaking of, I thought the point of giving Greg a Devil Fruit was to make him useful, not to just sit around and do nothing! What gives?

20) Since the first strike in the Franky House isn't necessarily considered a quintessential Luffy moment like, say, the storming of Arlong Park, and more of a Straw Hat moment, I felt comfortable with letting Pearl give the first strike.

21) Peridot beating the guy (who was already down since she did not engage in combat at all) is deliberately my Batman Begins "SWEAR TO ME!" moment. I initially had her say just that, but it took me out and made it too blatant. That being said, Peridot trying to be as intimidating as Batman is hilarious.

22) I debated on having Chapter Twenty-Three end with Usopp's declaration for the duel, but I felt it made Chapter Twenty-Four stronger by leading us to that through the loss of Steven's innocence as his perfect day gets shattered at the last moment. This is why Steven does not appear outside of the small mention of him floating.

23) Dramatic Irony is such a great literary device. Literally every scene with Steven and Connie is deliberately the happiest thing in the world solely because it has to end in tragedy.

24) The masks were designed by CyanideOreo two chapters ago. That's what I call great collaboration!

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26) The beat that Connie and Steven are marching to is "Colonel Hathi's March" from The Jungle Book.

27) I debated about Stevonnie appear in the first part of the date, but I decided that their appearance was the perfect final moment for the innocence of the kids to remain intact.

28) Peridot discussing objectivity is important as she truly believes in it, as shown in “Message Received.”

29) The whole emotional/ color power was first glimpsed back in Chapter Twelve when Steven found Noko. I wonder what that could be?

30) jmr46718 was the one to come up with the idea to have Steven have his own duel with the Gems which is the culmination of all of Pearl's attitude problems. Originally, Amethyst would have been involved too, but I decided to make her decidedly empathetic to Usopp, so I limited it to Garnet and Pearl.

31) Steven has quit the Crystal Gems! I wonder what the new status quo is going to be now?

#commentary #revisiting #steven universe #one piece #water seven #jm46718 #cyanideoreo #drillmaster #fanfiction

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resbang-bookclub · 7 years

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AMA Transcript: Awoken

This past week, @professor-maka and @sahdah stopped in to chat about their work on their 2016 Resbang, Awoken! Here’s some of what went down:

Q: How did your fic change/evolve over time? Any deleted scenes/headcanons you couldn't fit into the fic?

ProMa: Sort of? In that I wasn't exactly sure how far I wanted to take the plot at first, and at one point considered a Medusa appearance but decided I liked flipping the villain expectation too much to fuss with it.

Q: How the frick did you write the songs and stuff?? It was so good and hilarious.

ProMa: Ahhhh I can't music which is why the songs are either poems (only the first, and it's intentionally bad) or I took actual songs and just--modified lyrics in the same meter.

Q: You wrote your own lyrics tho?

ProMa: I did. I carefully plotted to the meter of the original. Or in the case of Ox's first song, just kept a really trite meter.

Q: Gotta ask the obvious question: What made you want to do an Enchanted AU!!

ProMa: It's a really fun movie, and I just felt I could do something fun with it. Though I'll admit there's a heavy Enchanted Forest Chronicles in there, too.

Q: What was the hardest scene to write?

ProMa: Hardest to write was hmmmm... Maka waking up the second time. I got stuck in that section forever.

Q: And which scene did you write first?? Loved the song summons btw. It made me laugh so hard.

ProMa: I wrote it pretty much in order except in a few places where I wrote the song before the scene, so the taxi scene came first. The song summons was so fun to write. I wanted to take that scene from Enchanted and completely flip it on its head.

Q: Proma, I love the running gag with the disembodied music, was that from the AU's or your own detail?

ProMa: Disembodied music was just drawing from the brand of humor in Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Patrick Dempsey's reactions in Enchanted, and the reality of musicals. So basically my take on it, lol.

Q: How early in the process did you figure out that Ox was gonna be the prince? Were you always sure it would be him or did you have to narrow it down?

ProMa: Ox was my prince pretty much from the get go. He just fit what I wanted to do. I was going for the more noble version of Hans from Frozen.

Q: Was there anything weird that you didn't expect to make it into the final cut?

ProMa: The potty humor I definitely wasn't sure I would keep. But I am 14 at heart and kept it.

Q: Alternately, anything you wanted to keep but had to cut?

ProMa: I kind of wanted a Black Star appearance but time and plot arc did not allow. Also Wes was not in the original plan but he happened anyway.

Q: Tell us about the art collab! How did it work for you?

ProMa: They were really enthusiastic and supportive and started throwing ideas out from the get go!

sahdah: Read voraciously, threw my ideas at Proma.

ProMa: The poster image sahdah did was so great she worked on it forever! sahdah: Proma was super chill and awesome about things, I'd ask for direction and she gave like dress ideas. It was so much fun!

ProMa: And rogha's painting was lovely.

Q: What was the hardest thing about that poster image?

sahdah: Ahhh the coloring. I did pen drawing and scanned but I'd just gotten a tablet for digital so working the layers was interesting. I had lots of support from Proma and Aer!

Q: How many drafts did you do before you decided on a final image for the art?

sahdah: Um, it started off with just Maka, and then Ox got added. And then I think Kim was next - this is all on the same page - and I knew Soul in a beanie had to be there. So it just grew.

ProMa: It grew in the most glorious way possible. Sahdah kept sending me updates and I just [said] YES YES GOOD YES.

Q: I am jealous of how well-behaved this fic was for not having any deleted scenes.

ProMa: AHAHA I'm a weird writer. I delete sometimes, but not often.

Q: SEQUEL?

ProMa: Noooooooo no no no no no. Epilogue is my limit.

Q: What was your favorite scene to write?

ProMa: Either the vermin scene or Maka laying the smackdown on Ox. Both were fun. Maka as badass is always my jam.

Q: Is this a genre you'd want to do again?

ProMa: It was fun, I'd definitely do it again!

Q: Please tell me what inspired the "friendly neighbourhood broctologist" line because I literally laughed at it for 30 straight seconds.

ProMa: B* works in mysterious ways. He always gets my best lines. What inspired it? B* being B*.

[discussion of the rats/roaches scene]

ProMa: That scene is one of the more direct lifts from the film. It's really nasty. Vermin squick me so hard, but vermin summoning is one of the most hilarious things in the film. I HAD to.

sahdah: Giriko running in fear when he next sees them, lol.

ProMa: Poor Giriko, he only wanted some loot.

[discussion of how numerous people have not seen Enchanted]

ProMa: It's cute and funny and I did something completely different with the premise because Maka is no Gisselle.

Q: Real question time: Why George Michael?

ProMa: Omg. It was my server name because it was a play on the kiss thing and then I just--had to. Because Wham is awesome and cheesy and it fit.

Q: I'm kinda mad with how it was not awkward or cheesy. How do you put Wham in a story and make it charming?

sahdah: Promagic.

ProMa: I have no idea. I love Wham, they were my first album. Call it a labor of pure love.

Q: Did you listen/watch anything (besides the obvious) for inspiration?

ProMa: I had a playlist I've been meaning to post: http://8tracks.com/professor-maka/awoken. I'll have to make it not unlisted later lol.

Q: Is it possible for Mr. Proma to do a cover the fic songs?

ProMa: It'd be hilarious but he'd side eye me hard. Very not his genre. Well, maybe the Foo Fighters. :') I would laugh so hard to hear them performed though. Maybe someday someone will perform one and make my life.

sahdah: Soul singing Pearl Jam in the shower <3

ProMa: Mr.Proma sent me that song when we were dating, it was a nod to self.

sahdah: Awwwh, such a good husbando!

ProMa: Such good husbando. Well, boyfriendu then.

Q: If you had to do it over, would there be anything you'd change?

ProMa: Hmmmmm man I just reread it. I wish I'd edited another round, because I missed some dumb reppy shit and just dumb shit. Also, the ending could be drawn out a bit. So I would do that if I had it to do again. But I was in serious time crunch mode.

Q: I am so impressed with how much fic you can crank out, Proma.

sahdah: Proma cranked out the last bit of the fic in... what was it, like 2 days?

ProMa: Yeah, the last third was very fast.

sahdah: I'm like WAIT!!! SO MUCH I NEED TO ART.

ProMa: Sahdah did her second two pieces in like two days so MASS APPLAUSE.

sahdah: /head scratch like there was so much good content!

ProMa: And those pieces are great too.

Q: How does one do that, pull out quality in such a short time?

sahdah: Copious amounts of caffeine and manic cackling with Resbang partners. <3

ProMa: I write fast under pressure. It's a skill I picked up in school that weirdly translates into creative things. Thank you, undergrad all nighters.

Q: Proma, [in the] epilogue, how does Ox fare with Kim?

ProMa: Omg Ox does not fare with Kim. She is all about dat Jackie. But I mean, he has his kingdom. Even if Spirit gives him constant shit for the rest of his days.

Q: How does Spirit react to maka moving?

ProMa: Spirit is so dejected. I haven't worked it out, but he would definitely seek Maka out. Might even just hand the kingdom to Ox eventually, and go [to the] whole other world. He will visit, that's not even arguable. That omake I will heavily consider.

Q: Proma, one thing that I was interested to see and that I think I'm glad about is that you didn't do the whole Aesop where Maka has to go back and learn how to break the curse, find happiness in her own world. While I can appreciate that message and I think it has its place, I also think that if people could really do that... there are probably people who would find a place and feel better somewhere other than their "home world." I mean, you could translate the "world" metaphor to people choosing to leave a toxic family of origin, which would be a good thing.

ProMa: Oh yeah, I was never going to go there. This was about Maka shaping her own life on her terms. I was not going for archetypes at alllll. Blair was always my choice for the fairy godmother role. It's so canon anyway. You can do some good things with that trope, it just wasn't the goal. Maka staying in her new life definitely came from the source -- even if a lot of the source is altered beyond recognition.

sahdah: I also love Maka working to improve herself on her terms. Like the details with the soufflé.

ProMa: I definitely borrowed some flavor from Wrede.

[more discussion of the vermin scene]

ProMa: That's one of the biggest actual pulls from the movie though -- I flipped it completely. Giselle summons vermin to clean the messy house. Yeah, that is not Maka. Maka just wants her crap back and she's not into the singing thing.

sahdah: Giriko! The real vermin, lol.

Q: Maka asking animals via Disney princess song to wreck Giriko's shit was one of my favorite things.

ProMa: It's Maka, she's not gonna sing to clean Soul's house, he can get off his own ass!

sahdah: Let's be real, he probably has a cleaning service, because of Mother.

ProMa: His house is spotless, there are maids. (Why a high powered lawyer in Enchanted couldn't hire a maid is beyond me.)

sahdah: Mc-Procrastinator, not Dreamy.

ProMa: Mc-raises kid in nasty house. I actually have a soft spot for pet rats, we had them in 3rd grade but an actual in my house rat would make me into a quivering pile of NOPE.

Q: Is it Mc-over? [ implied :( ]

[insert giant chorus of thanks]

ProMa: You guys asked great questions thank you! It was so much fun, I'm glad others thought so too!

sahdah: It was my pleasure, I love musicals!

ProMa: And thanks to my betas here too. Yulie and Sand saved my liiiife.

#AMA transcripts #rbbc #resbang

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ricardosousalemos · 7 years

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Various Artists: Singles: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack-Deluxe Edition

Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose in March of 1990, rending his tight-knit Seattle music community. As often happens in creatively fueled local scenes, community members rallied and turned their grief into art. Wood’s roommate Chris Cornell recruited Wood’s erstwhile Mother Love Bone bandmates Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard to record some songs he’d been working on. With guitarist Mike McCready, Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron, and recently relocated San Diego native Eddie Vedder, they called themselves Temple of the Dog, after one of Wood’s lyrics. Their eponymous album, released in April 1991, sold modestly thanks to Soundgarden’s profile, but Soundgarden were signed to A&M, in rotation on 120 Minutes, and toured with Guns N’ Roses.

On the night of Wood’s funeral, many of his friends and collaborators gathered at Mother Love Bone manager Kelly Curtis’ house, including director Cameron Crowe and his wife, Heart guitarist and Seattle native Nancy Wilson. Crowe had moved to Seattle several years earlier and fell in with the area’s incestuous network of rock bands, labels, college radio stations, and venues. Then 32 years old, he was already an ex-Rolling Stone features writer and accomplished screenwriter working on a new script for a romantic comedy that used Seattle’s burgeoning rock scene as its backdrop. On the night of Wood’s memorial, something clicked. “It was the first real feeling of what it was like to have a hometown—everybody pulling together for some people they really loved,” he told an interviewer in 2001. “It made me want to do Singles as a love letter to the community that I was really moved by.”

If Temple of the Dog were a spiritual origin of “grunge”—the name associated with the mainstreaming of Seattle-area indie rock and the culture it briefly spawned—then Singles (the film and soundtrack), was its commercial coming-out party. More than a year after duetting on “Hunger Strike,” Vedder and Cornell were merged into Matt Dillon’s Cliff Poncier character. Cornell appeared in the film as himself, fronting Soundgarden playing “Birth Ritual” in a club scene and, in the film’s most Wayne’s World moment, standing in stoned silence while Poncier blew out the windows of his girlfriend’s car with too much speaker wattage. While they were recording what would become Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten, Vedder, Ament, and Gossard actually had lines in the film, playing Poncier’s backing band in Citizen Dick. In one of the few Singles scenes about band life, Vedder and Ament mumble through an alt-weekly pan of the band’s LP to protect Poncier’s feelings. Crowe cuts to a close-up of the review, which paints Poncier’s music as “pompous, dick-swinging swill” that comes from being a big fish in a small pond. If he moved to a bigger, more established city like Minneapolis, the review snarked, he’d be a nobody.

The Seattle that Singles was shot in during 1991 was a very different city than the one it was a year later when the film was released. Like Temple of the Dog, Singles was the product of a bonafide music scene that was starting to make mainstream impact (bands signing to majors, journalists sniffing around to write trend pieces on Sub Pop), but it was released into an absolute hype storm. Effectively, by late 1992, both could enjoy the rare distinction of pre-emptively canonizing a musical movement. They were “grunge” before grunge was even Grunge. At the very moment it achieved mass popularity, grunge not only had breakout stars and a fashion style guide (flannel, long underwear beneath shorts, stocking caps) but its own scene supergroup and a feature film in theaters.

Grunge “broke” thanks to Nirvana, an absent presence in the film and its soundtrack. In a Rolling Stone diary entry dated January 24, 1992, a couple weeks after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” peaked at No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100—the same day Nevermind became the No. 1 album in the country—Crowe noted that Warner Brothers, the studio that had been sitting on Singles for months, was now suggesting a new title for the film: “Come As You Are.” By April 1992, Singles the film still didn’t have a release date, but Epic was pushing to release its soundtrack to ride the ascendant grunge wave. By mid-year, A&M was aggressively re-promoting Temple of the Dog to radio and MTV, and Epic released the Singles soundtrack two weeks before Soundgarden and Pearl Jam played the main stage at Lollapalooza. It is impossible to underestimate how much that summer and fall were suffused with grunge. Soundgarden was big (Badmotorfinger peaked at No. 39), but Pearl Jam became massive—Ten was a slow-building success, that peaked at No. 2 on Billboard in late August, a couple weeks before Temple of the Dog entered the top ten as well. In September and October, when Singles was in theaters at the same time that “Hunger Strike,” “Outshined,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and “Alive” were omnipresent on MTV and modern rock radio, grunge felt like a small version of disco in the Saturday Night Fever moment: a mass-media cultural phenomenon and style sensibility that had as many haters as acolytes. By December 1992, SPIN was calling Seattle “to the rock’n’roll world what Bethlehem was to Christianity.”

Where Singles the movie was a romantic comedy with Seattle rock as its backdrop, its soundtrack, for anyone outside of the Pacific Northwest or the college radio universe, was a revelation. The 25th-anniversary reissue of the compilation revisits and further contextualizes this moment, with a bonus disc of demos, live versions, and other film ephemera never before issued on CD or vinyl. At the time, SPIN called the Singles soundtrack, “as close as possible to the ultimate Seattle music anthology…without sounding like a masturbatory Sub Pop collection.” Amid the hippest bands of the insurgent grunge moment and Mother Love Bone’s epic “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns” (which also appeared briefly in Crowe’s 1989 film Say Anything), Crowe was careful to include Seattle rock royalty (via a Hendrix deep-cut and a deeply faithful cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Battle of Evermore” by Heart (as the Lovemongers), and hire Minneapolitan Paul Westerberg for the score and two prominent songs (his first two solo recordings, to boot). Through the Singles soundtrack, Crowe expertly situated grunge within the ’60s and ’70s classic rock pantheon while, through Westerberg, not testing the rom-com demographic by putting TAD or Screaming Trees on the trailer. It’s not a perfect fit: though Westerberg’s DNA as the leader of the Replacements winds through grunge, the chipper, raspy power-pop of “Dyslexic Heart” sits oddly aside Soundgarden and Alice in Chains on the soundtrack.

About that contrast: Crowe was deeply connected to Seattle’s scene, but despite casting several of its key participants in the film, he had no pretensions about its death-fixated, deeply ironic, drop-D metal-punk indie rock scene serving as anything more than a backdrop for his du jour romp: Linda, a “U-dub” grad student in environmental policy; Steve, a civil engineer whose dream is to revolutionize the city’s urban transport with a latte-serving high-speed train; Janet, a naïve, love-seeking (and Fountainhead-reading?!) barista played by Bridget Fonda. Apart from catching bands in clubs and the Citizen Dick narrative, grunge is as much a lifestyle backdrop for Singles as the city’s booming coffee market. Consider “State of Love and Trust,” which along with “Breath,” represent the earliest (and best) Pearl Jam music (and provide evidence of how immediately the band congealed). The song appears early in the film as the background soundtrack to the moment when lovestruck Linda realizes she’d been duped by the Spanish man to whom she’d given her garage door opener. She drags her friend outside and has a good cry, in front of a graffitied wall reading “LOVE BONE.”

The broader context of Singles shows how Crowe, like the bands on his soundtrack, was coming into his own. The movie hit theaters a few months after the debut MTV’s Real World (which debuted in May 1992), and predicted Friends, which debuted on NBC in September 1994. Consider Friends through Singles: a cast of attractive late 20-somethings, all of whom (except Linda) live in the same apartment complex, date each other and…hang out at a coffee shop (Java Stop) when they should be working, with a popular soundtrack featuring…Paul Westerberg. An underrated aspect of Singles, even apart from freezing pre-grunge Seattle in celluloid, was Crowe zeroing in on an emergent audience demographic—late-20s/early-30s single white people—that television would capitalize on in the next several years, broadening the gambit of sitcoms past the workplace and family to the extended networks of young urban professionals.

Singles the film was successful, but the soundtrack was a minor phenomenon, cracking the Billboard Top 10 and eventually going double-platinum. Its success was enough to launch the career of one Screaming Trees. “They kept postponing the release of our album,” Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin remembered of the band’s commercial breakthrough Sweet Oblivion, “because the Singles soundtrack was getting all the attention.” Scene veterans from sleepy Ellensburg who’d signed to Epic in 1990, the Trees were filed under “heavy metal” and marketed as a hair band until grunge. Their anthemic single “Nearly Lost You,” powered by Mark Lanegan’s raspy baritone and a radio-friendly iteration of the band’s psychedelic power-sludge, made the soundtrack’s penultimate slot as a last-minute addition. Oblivion was finally released that September 8, and thanks to Singles it sold upwards of 300,000 copies, easily the band’s biggest seller.

As a commercial genre, grunge paved a lane through which bands like Screaming Trees could chase the rock mainstream. As a word, grunge was a perfect phonetic suggestion of how the music sounded and the musicians looked. The Trees were big, gruff guys—the kind of dudes who, per Mark Yarm’s essential grunge oral history Everybody Loves Our Town, got in a brawl with 10 club security guys in New Jersey the night before their national television debut on Letterman. They played “Nearly Lost You” with Lanegan sporting a shiner, after which Letterman admitted, “I’ll be honest with ya—I was kinda scared.”

The origin of “grunge”—which, though derided, is still as on-the-money as “punk” as a single-word encapsulation of music and attitude—is the stuff of legend. Sub Pop co-founders Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt had great ears for music and an even better knack for self-effacing promotion, and were obsessed with gaining credibility in the UK, which, in the label’s view, meant playing up the music’s blue-collar roots, occasionally to the cartoonish level of guitar-wielding loggers and lumberjacks (which Kurt Cobain hated). The word “grunge,” legend has it, was most prominently deployed by Melody Maker’s Everett True in a Sub Pop band review, though in Yarm’s book, Poneman claims True cribbed it from Pavitt’s description of Green River’s Dry as a Bone in Sub Pop’s mail-order catalog: “ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation.”

The mass media didn’t care about its provenance because grunge just worked. It allowed industry types to market music (and release films like Singles), and made the perfect peg for journalistic trend pieces, which often failed to sniff out the subcultural irony that defined so much of the Seattle scene. Most legendary in this respect is the sidebar to the New York Times’ “Grunge—A Success Story,” published two months after Singles’ theatrical debut, in which Sub Pop receptionist Megan Jasper created a one-woman hoax when prompted for a grunge “lexicon,” offering made-up slang like “swingin’ on the flippity-flop,” “lamestain” and “bloated, big bag of bloatation” which were reprinted verbatim in the paper of record (Jasper later fessed up in Doug Pray’s essential 1996 documentary Hype!).

Singles the movie doesn’t even remotely trade in this level of irony—that’s the opposite of Crowe’s thing—though the soundtrack’s incorporation of Mudhoney’s “Overblown” at least offers a sincere critique from the guy who many consider the linchpin of the entire scene (the soundtrack’s deluxe version includes a demo version). Opening with ur-grunge singer Mark Arm’s studio chatter, “Okay, grunge masters, he we go,” “Overblown” sounds like a mangled version of the Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat,” as Arm deadpans, “Everybody loves us/Everybody loves our town/That’s why I’m thinking lately/The time for leaving is now.”

In a particularly great anecdote from Our Town, Truly guitarist Robert Roth recalls watching Nirvana debut “Teen Spirit” live at Seattle’s OK Hotel while “across the street, there was a private thing where they were filming Alice in Chains for Singles.” Notwithstanding the synchronicity of an actual historical moment in rock lore coinciding with Crowe’s simulacrum of another moment, these shows help to understand just how different the bands lumped in under “grunge” were. Alice in Chains played unrelentingly dark, metal-influenced sludge-rock, though the harmonized vocals of guitarist/songwriter/hesher Jerry Cantrell and the vampiric Layne Staley set them apart from their contemporaries. Their 1990 single “Man in the Box” was the early breakthrough of Seattle rock, bridging the Headbanger’s Ball and Buzz Bin crowds.

Alice in Chains appear twice in Singles, playing Facelift track “It Ain’t Like That” and “Would?” which kicked off the soundtrack. Though the compilation’s two non-Ten Pearl Jam songs made it commercially valuable, “Would?” is unquestionably its best song. Penned by Cantrell as an ode to Andrew Wood, “Would?” is more generally about making bold choices, ignoring doubters, and accepting whatever consequences might come. If any song of 1991-2 could be called pure, uncut “grunge,” this is it: starting with a menacingly low bass rumble that blooms into a slithering goth-metal groove, featuring the tense interplay between Staley’s acidic snarl and Cantrell’s placid vocal, the lyrics drenched with the kind of looming dread pioneered by Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. The song’s odd structure lends it a further disorienting effect, like a slasher movie cutting to black at the exact second the protagonist opens the door to the dark basement. The key change signals a reprieve, but there’s no resolution; just when the song veers to a new path in the final bridge, it drops off suddenly, leaving Staley screaming a question that’s equally alluring and terrifying: “If I would, could you?!” while everything just collapses under its own weight. “Would?” concluding with a musical bridge-to-nowhere is as good an encapsulation of grunge’s performative nihilism as anything Arm, Vedder, or Cobain could summon.

“Would?” remains the best song on Singles, but the 25th-anniversary reissue of the soundtrack is dominated by Soundgarden, especially Chris Cornell, revealing just how much he contributed to the film’s blend of Seattle reality and cinematic fiction. It was Cornell who suggested Crowe include “Drown” on the soundtrack, an eight-minute epic from Chicago’s Smashing Pumpkins, who were still a year away from Siamese Dream. While Citizen Dick re-recorded Mudhoney’s epochal Sub Pop single as “Touch Me I’m Dick,” it was Cornell who actually wrote the songs for Poncier’s “solo album,” prompted by song titles jokingly devised by Ament.

Crowe loved the songs, especially the acoustic track “Seasons,” which recalled Zeppelin III and Pink Floyd circa Meddle and perfectly bridged the soundtrack’s past and present iterations of Seattle rock. Another song from what became the Poncier EP was “Spoon Man,” an ode to a quirky local street musician that appeared briefly in Singles and would be fleshed out into the lead single from Soundgarden’s magisterial 1994 LP Superunknown. The Singles reissue bonus disc contains Cornell’s original Poncier tape (along with some incidental music he composed for the film that went unused), including the stark “Nowhere But You” and the lilting, psychedelic “Flutter Girl,” both of which would reappear in more exquisitely produced form on the 1999 CD single for Cornell’s solo single debut “Can’t Change Me.” While Euphoria Morning marked a dramatic public shift for Cornell-the-solo-artist after more than a decade as Soundgarden’s howling frontman, these tracks reveal that he’d long had a quieter, more pensive side.

Cornell’s May 17th suicide after a Detroit Soundgarden concert came as a shock to rock fans and the Seattle community to which he meant so much, and, less importantly, provided a morbid coincidence for the 25th-anniversary reissue of the Singles soundtrack to which he contributed so much. As happens with rock star deaths, Cornell’s triggered countless appreciations of his significant contributions to 1990s hard rock, for which he was perhaps the single most prominent link to its 1970s and ’80s predecessors. It was also a reminder that of the five rock frontmen to emerge from that moment in rock history—Cornell, Cobain, Staley, Vedder, and Stone Temple Pilots’ Scott Weiland—only Vedder and Pearl Jam remain (they were feted in 2011 with a career-spanning documentary directed by Crowe himself). This is the thing about grunge: apart from its commercial success and validation of mass media hype, grunge-as-music was most often a very dark thing, populated by iconoclastic young men negotiating personal authenticity with unavoidable fixations on death, sickness, and pain. That many of those men sang passionately about the same things that led to their premature deaths is in the end, the legacy of that moment.

By definition, by stressing authenticity within the bounds of mainstream commerce, rock music has to die and be periodically resurrected. What made grunge—rock’s final mainstream “rebirth”—so potent and problematic was how it intertwined artistic tensions (selling out vs. staying true, community vs. commerce) with the musicians’ own deep-seated personal anxieties, fears, and sicknesses. That’s what made it feel real, what allowed for individuals to identify with it, and ultimately, what made it so commercially valuable. The music was often great, but more importantly, it was cast as the organic cultural product of a single city in the corner of a country, that, for many, marked an organic “victory” after years of post-punk indie rock bands slogging it out on college radio and vanning it between small clubs. For locals, on the other hand, grunge was an absolute hype nightmare that had little to do with music or community and everything to do with vulture-like industry encroachment and outsider social positioning.

Singles is often seen as a sui generis rock-historical document because of its ostensible realism. Crowe’s love letter to his adopted hometown--shot on site and cast with actual locals--was composed in the moments before Seattle became a synecdoche for rock’s latest rebirth, and was rush-released to coincide with a moment that it, in turn, further fueled. Twenty-five years later, when local scenes are inextricable from their immediate online hype and a churn of thinkpieces mourn rock’s latest “death,” Singles feels less like Hollywood realism and more like the conjured ghost of a dead moment. As in the early 1990s, so it is today: rock lies in wait, ready for its resurrection through some authentic commercial séance. Maybe Cornell knew best, growling on the Singles soundtrack: “The snake retreats/Admits defeat/And waits for the birth ritual.”

#reviews-albums

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