Thee Compleat Mariana Timony 2020
Things I Wrote This Year + Unreleased B-Side "I Owe It All To Burger Records"
Welcome to the final issue of Weird Girls Post for the year 2020! I started this newsletter in March at the kitchen table on a horse farm in Scarbro, West Virginia. I’m writing this in December at my desk in Brooklyn, New York. Soon I’ll be going to California. I’m beyond grateful for everyone who has come along on this ride, especially to those who have reached out to me saying that something I’ve written here has resonated with them. I’m truly thankful for every letter, comment, and message. It means more than you know.
On that same note, I’ve always been embarrassed by self-promotion as I prefer to let the work speak for itself. That said, I’m really proud of the writing I’ve done this year and thought it’d be cool to use this final issue to round it all up. Consider it a sort of greatest hits of my own, for anyone interested.
My best pieces from this year are linked below: album reviews, interviews, and features for Bandcamp Daily; two things I wrote about my favorite band of all time for Tone Glow; and a few of my favorite Weird Girls issues. Then I’m sharing an excerpt from an unpublished piece about my experiences with the notorious Burger Records. I was never a true “Burger girl,” but I was a part of that scene and I have something to say about it. A Weird Girls Post b-side to end a weird ass year.
Okay, that’s it for now. Wishing the music family health, safety, and prosperity every day. See you all in 2021!
MT
Album Reviews
Svitlana Nianio & Oleksandr Yurchenko, Znayesh Yak? Rozkazhy: I challenged myself at the beginning of 2020 to write about music that wasn’t guitar rock and this lovely fairy tale of a record was my first stab at it.
Jackie Lynn, Jacqueline: This review is memorable because I took a break halfway through writing it to go drink a beer and shoot a shotgun into the woods behind the horse farm in West Virginia.
Gum Country, Gum Country: I would like to shout-out my editor at Bandcamp Daily, J. Edward Keyes, for letting me get away with all the snark in this review.
Cut Worms, Nobody Lives Here Anymore: This review also contains a sort of bitchy line I thought for sure was going to get the axe, but my editor let it slide. See if you can spot it.
Peggy Sue, Vices: I write a new review every week as part of Bandcamp Daily’s Seven Essential Releases feature, and this was one of my favorites from the year.
Interviews
The Ascension Descends on Sufjan Stevens: This is the only interview I’ve ever done where everyone I know lost their shit when I told them about it because everyone loves Sufjan. Just for fun, here’s an excerpt from our interview that didn’t end up in the final piece, but I think is so charming and cute.
You say there's there's scholarship that happens when you write songs. Is that because you're a scholarly guy, like you just read a lot and that comes in or…?
No, it's really Wikipedia and Rhymezone. All my YouTube ads are as if I’m learning English as non-primary language. Because I’m constantly on the thesaurus and dictionary and the rhyme dictionary, it’s almost like it thinks I’m not an American trying to learn American English. It’s really funny. My search history is really hilarious. I mean, I’m as educated as average. I went to Walden School, I have a liberal arts undergraduate degree, I studied literature so I’ve read stuff. I wanted to be a writer and that's why I moved to New York, so all that's there. But you know I also grew up on Star Wars and American top 40. But no, I’m not a scholar.
Tim Burgess of the Charlatans Picks His Bandcamp Favorites: Tim had been big upping Bandcamp on his Twitter feed for a while, so I got it into my head that maybe he’d agree to do an actual Big Ups with us, and he said yes. I could tell how much he truly adores music, so it was a real joy to speak with him for this piece.
On “Beyond the Pale,” Jarvis Cocker Finds His Creative Spark in a Cave: Jarvis Cocker is one of the most famous people I’ve ever interviewed, which is why I think it’s hilarious and cool that this interview was done from a horse farm in West Virginia.
Hayden Menzies of METZ Picks His Bandcamp Favorites: I wrote this as a valentine for my friend Kevin, an awesome musician who helps me out when I’m having trouble articulating certain technical things about records I’m reviewing (I couldn’t have written this review of Bully without him.) He’s a huge METZ fan, so I thought it’d be cool to write this for him to read.
Features
Captured Tracks Compilation Pays Tribute To American Indie Rock’s Overlooked Pioneers: I loved everything about writing this feature about an overlooked scene of American jangle bands bashing it out at the dawn of the Reagan years. Fun fact! The interview I referred to at the end of the Lust For Life issue of Weird Girls was with Pat Thomas of Absolute Grey, conducted for this article.
The Stories Behind Big Crown Records’ Soulful Singles: Bandcamp Daily editorial art assistant Josie Keefe and myself spent a vibey early spring evening at Big Crown’s Greenpoint office talking through records with label co-founder Danny Akalepse. Less than two weeks later, COVID was shutting down New York City and I was on a train to West Virginia, where this feature was eventually written.
Led Bloody Zeppelin, That’s Who
One of my personal mottos is “always amuse yourself first,” and the fact that I wrote about my favorite band, Led Zeppelin, not once but twice this year for experimental music newsletter Tone Glow will never not be amusing to me.
Led Zeppelin is For Girls for the “Songs of Summer” Issue
Here’s an unpopular yet correct opinion about music: Led Zeppelin is for girls. Don’t believe me? Just read any straight male music critic on Zeppelin and you’ll find them completely missing the point of this greatest of rock bands by focusing in on shit like a) what guitars Jimmy Page used and how he used them b) the sound of Bonham’s drums on “When The Levee Breaks” c) why Led Zeppelin II is a superior record to Houses of the Holy (no), etc., as if trying to break a magic spell by pedantically examining each of its parts on the material plane. But they will never break the Zeppelin code because Zeppelin is not for men to understand, they are for girls to feel. [Read More]
Whole Lotta Love on the Way to Pittsburgh for the “Road Trip” Issue
Though I’d never driven into Pittsburgh before, I knew that this tunnel was the one that would lead me into the city and I was looking forward to seeing the its skyline as my first image of the world I’d once fled in a tangle of panic and fear. “Whole Lotta Love” had been playing for the past few minutes, a song I know in my bones. Suddenly, as the tunnel exit loomed ahead, it dawned on me that the moment I emerged would be the moment the outro would hit on the song: Bonham’s drum fill leading into that final burst of orgasmic riffage and wailing from the only band who could ever do it properly. [Read More]
Weird Girls Post Greatest Hits 2020
Issue #8 - Follow The Sound: The most-read issue of Weird Girls Post is this one from late July in which I wrote about the future of music journalism, my travels to West Virginia, and why I believe that music is a force for meaning in the world. I put a lot of myself into this issue and to have it be received so warmly was really gratifying.
Issue #11 - Lust For Life: A personal reflection on the emotional wreckage left when your music scene dies. Full of embarrassing shit that I wish had never happened, but equally full of magical shit I will never not be grateful to have experienced.
Issue #7 - Mountain Punks of West Virginia: An issue about DIY musicians and record labels in West Virginia, written while I was still living there. My love letter to the beautiful Mountain State.
Issue #6 - A Reading From The Book of Weird Girls: A story about being uncool and feeling unmoored in Nashville, Tennessee.
Issue #3- The Horse Issue: The horse songs playlist at the end of this issue was put together before Substack allowed Bandcamp embeds, which inspired me to send them a stupid tweet about it...and they started supporting Bandcamp embeds shortly thereafter. This is clear evidence that being an idiot on the Internet occasionally works out in your favor.
Issue #2 - If Music Exists, So Do We: A crossover with Tone Glow, where I asked the writers to reflect on how their relationship to music had changed in the early days of the pandemic. Bit of a snapshot in time, but I love all the writing and think it’s quite unique in that nothing here is prescriptive. This really is how the writers felt about music in that moment. Perhaps I’ll do a follow-up in 2021.
Excerpt: “I Owe It All To Burger Records”
As everyone in music knows, Burger Records dissolved earlier this year after allegations of sexual misconduct against musicians on the label began piling up online, notably in an anonymous Instagram account called “Lured By Burger Records.”
I came up in the Burger scene and learned to be a music journalist by covering that scene via my music website, Lo-Pie. In 2016, I achieved some local notoriety by writing an editorial called “Sick Sad Scene,” criticizing Burger for their collaboration with Hedi Slimane of YSL. Because of that piece, many people messaged me during the whole Burger meltdown asking for my “thoughts.” I did indeed have many thoughts, but the toxicity of the situation made me reticent to share them piecemeal. Instead, I resolved to write them at-length and got as far as 7,000 words before giving up, as wading into the situation felt imprudent and ultimately unnecessary at the time. However, I do feel there were insights of value in what I wrote, so I’ve excerpted a part of the original essay here.
“What are you recording on?”
“Oh, um, it’s just an old cassette recorder. Look. See? I make tapes, too.”
“Awesome!”
[Laughter]
Click. Silence.
So ends my interview with Sean Bohrman and Lee Rickard of Burger Records, done in the fall of 2011 in the now-infamous back room at Burger’s record store in Fullerton, California, where I had driven 40 miles on three freeways from West Los Angeles on a weekday night to conduct. Since Burger was mainly known at the time for being the only indie label putting out music on tapes, the joke was that I was also recording on cassette when every other music journalist had long since switched to digital.
I had fun at Burger that night, though I was nervous about my legitimacy as a music journalist. The interview (which you can read here, courtesy of the Internet Archive) was one of the first long-form features I ever wrote, in the year I decided it was time to stop folding t-shirts for a living and turn my dream of writing about music into reality. Luckily for me, it was the early 2010s and I lived in Los Angeles, which was already humming with the electric energy of a music scene in its nascency. Burger was the label at the center of it all.
Lee and Sean were kind to me, smoking me out and talking excitedly about their hopes for the label and what was happening with the local music scene. They seemed nerdy, but not predatory—at least not towards me (I was 28 at the time, the same age as them.) There was no talk of fucking underage girls like in that terrible Vice interview that was passed around as evidence of their inherent creepiness once accusations of sexual misconduct against the label and its bands began to pile up on social media. I liked them and wanted them to like me.
After our interview, I was inspired to wrap up and mail Burger my VHS box set of the Beatles Anthology to add to their movie rental section. The following week I received a thank you package from Lee filled with zines, candy, and a copy of Audacity’s Power Drowning, one of Burger’s first releases, on CD. “I don’t remember if we talked about CDs,” he wrote in the accompanying note. “But we make them sometimes!” Eight months or so later, I would be fucking him in the Burger van while drunk off my ass after a backyard show in East L.A.—an experience I recall in perfect clarity with only the fondest of sentiments. Look. See? I made tapes, too.
Fast forward nine years. I’m a “legitimate” music journalist and Burger Records is gone, canceled forever in the wake of numerous allegations of sexual predation against underage and not underage girls by Lee, Sean, and a number of bands on the roster, all of which were anonymously chronicled on an Instagram account with the lurid name of Lured By Burger Records. The label has shut down, their records pulled from all digital distributors, social media deleted, and videos removed from YouTube. Some of the accused bands have broken up, the ones that still existed anyway. Others will likely never play live again if any band ever does. I struggle to think of any precedent in rock history for such an occurrence—an entire music scene wiped from existence in the space of 72 hours—and conclude that there isn’t one. What a wretched end for a label and scene that seemed for a brief moment to be the center of the music world. It was the center of my world, anyway.
I covered the Burger Records scene with Lo-Pie, the website I started with my friend Kelly, and ran from 2012-2016. We founded the site because it had become obvious that we were in the midst of a unique moment in L.A. music that should be documented by people who were part of it. Though many sites were writing about garage rock—the dominant sound of the time—none of them were locally focused and, like all people in a happening music scene, we were certain that ours was the best. It felt like something we had to do. So, in true DIY spirit, we did it ourselves. We picked the name “Lo-Pie” because we wanted a moniker that reflected the idea of a community, something that had many pieces but was still a cohesive whole. And of course, food puns were in. But Lo-Pie really was a site by and for the L.A. music community. We published record reviews, interviews with local bands, and concert write-ups written by fans with varying levels of proficiency (I edited them all) and read by people we saw at shows that would happen every night of the week, often booking and promoting a lot of those shows ourselves.
Anybody who remembers Lo-Pie at all probably remembers us for Sick Sad Scene, an editorial I wrote in 2016 calling out Burger for partnering with designer Hedi Slimane of YSL on a fashion show in which local bands were used to add a veneer of underground cool to a corporate event put on by people who only cared about music inasmuch as they could use it to sell overpriced clothing. In the piece, I expressed outrage at how our diverse and vibrant music scene was being exploited and whitewashed by Slimane, and how willing Burger Records was to sell it out despite proclaiming themselves a DIY operation, a “label of love.”
Burger was at the height of their cultural relevance then and to speak against the label in Southern California was practically unheard of, so the article had a big local impact. It gave voice to many people who had felt silenced by Burger’s omniscience, but it also lost me some friends and had at least two Los Angeles music hacks publicly calling for my head. One chided me for being an “entitled Millennial” and the other accused me of “starting controversy,” with both insinuating that I should be grateful the fashion industry was paying attention to Los Angeles music at all—as if it were Slimane doing us the favor rather than the other way around. An L.A. musician with whom I’d been close attacked me online and in a series of text messages, calling me names and forbidding me to attend any Burger event ever again. She posted a long sob story about suffering abuse at the hands of Burger after the label was canceled. If nothing else, I suppose that whole experience qualifies me to put in my two cents about Burger now that everyone else is at the level I was at then.
It might surprise you to learn that, where others were delighting in the downfall of the once mighty Burger Records, I felt gutted by the whole thing. First and foremost I was sickened by the fact that so many young women had experienced trauma thanks to Burger’s complete disregard for their safety at their shows and in their store, which had always been a concern to people who gave a shit. The only criticism of Sick Sad Scene that actually angered me came from people saying to “chill out” about the possibility of underage drinking due to the event’s open and unmonitored bar. This was something Lo-Pie took very seriously at our own all-ages shows. It seemed ridiculous that YSL should be held to a lower standard than punk-ass DIY promoters, but clearly, Burger and their supporters didn’t think it was a problem at the time.
However, there were aspects of how the meltdown played out that bothered me. The longer it went on, the less it seemed to be about actually helping victims and more about just destroying Burger altogether. The whole thing became tinged with a kind of vituperative glee that grew increasingly nauseating as people outside of the Burger scene felt entitled to demand public contrition from anyone who’d ever been associated with the label, no matter how small or distant the capacity. It was if Burger was the only label in the world who had ever harbored predators and so, by erasing them, the sins of rock and roll could be scrubbed away—or at least make everyone feel like they’d taken a moral stance against such sins once there was no longer any social risk associated with taking such a stance, especially individuals and organizations who’d been responsible for platforming Burger in the past.
A disturbing lack of self-awareness began to permeate the online discourse as people accused Burger of fetishizing teen girls while concurrently proclaiming the teen girl a magical engine of music culture that should be respected and venerated, which is itself a form of fetishization, albeit non-sexual on its face. Other things were just petty, like the music being trash or the men being ugly. Then there was the weirdly puritanical criticism of bands on the label for having vulgar lyrics or performing naked, the former Burger girls transforming in their early twenties into mini-Tipper Gores clutching their pearls at the sight of a dude in his underwear onstage or a dick on an album cover. Really?
I was also troubled by the way the anonymous stories on the Lured By Burger Records Instagram were being reposted with no further fact-checking by some large music websites with international reach. While it’s completely understandable why survivors, in fear of retribution from their community, would feel the need to use anonymous social media posts to safely speak out against their abusers, for journalists to amplify the allegations as fact with no verification has the potential to do immeasurable harm to both parties (see: the Rolling Stone rape story.) It’s quite easy to say these men “probably deserved it” and so it doesn’t matter if what has been written about them is true or not, but such a sentiment is much closer to vengeance than it is to justice.
Since I can already hear the internet mob coming to beat down my door and call me a victim shamer, I would like to make clear that none of this is not to say I didn’t believe the stories on the Lured By Burger account nor is it my intent to defend Burger Records or any of the actions allegedly taken by the accused. I also recognize that my own judgment is clouded. There’s a lot of grief that comes with realizing that something that was important to your own life caused harm to others, and one of the stages of grief is denial. Too many of the details shared in stories on the account lined up with experiences of my own for me to disbelieve them, but I also knew that reality was more complex than what could be reflected by anonymous Instagram posts. Where some people saw only monsters, I saw my friends. Were they really such monsters? Were we all?
Scrolling back now through my own personal Instagram and also Lo-Pie’s to the years 2012-2015 is like beholding a gallery of the canceled and the abused, images of bands who have been canceled, and crowds filled with young women who were likely behind the anonymous allegations against them. But it’s also a document of a time when the coolest people in the music world were begging to be a part of what was happening in Southern California, though they’d probably deny it now.
Case in point: I remember queuing up for beer with some friends backstage at Burgerama when an older blonde woman came over to cut in line under the guise of smoking a joint with us. She was very nice, but I was surprised at how nervous my friends suddenly became in her presence. It wasn’t until after she had moved on that I learned the woman was Kim Gordon (I have never cared about Sonic Youth.) Yes, Burger was so cool at one point that even Kim Gordon hung out: Something everyone conveniently forgot during the whole cancellation, though I don’t see why she got a pass when nobody else did. (I’d also like to selfishly note that Lo-Pie was the only music publication to give Gordon’s rebound record—released on Burger—the bad review it deserved.)
Maybe nobody should’ve gotten a pass because everyone knew there was something inappropriate about all the young girls in the scene, even if you never personally witnessed anything egregious happening. People whispered about teenagers hanging out at Burger Records for years. It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together. I recall having a conversation with a band member, who was later called out on Lured By Burger, where we both expressed disgust at Sean smoking weed with 17-year-olds at the store. “I mean I guess it’s fine if no one cares, but someone’s going to care one day,” we said, throwing up our hands as if that made it okay for us not to care right now.
It was tricky to care, though. At one point, Burger was so omnipresent throughout almost every facet of L.A. music that the only way to mount a meaningful protest was to leave the scene completely. While self-exile was a bummer for fans, it was career suicide for local musicians. Burger sponsored all the cool shows and the majority of bands with draw were all Burger bands. Refusing to play along out of principle meant being erased from contention altogether. Few people had the courage or even the ability to do that, so it’s obvious why many swallowed their consciences and looked the other way. Yet Burger had enablers that made it easy to question your own conclusions.
When the label threw a “Girls Night” at their record store, inviting young female fans to spend the night, it was so obviously inappropriate that it was shocking how there was no opposition from anyone in the scene. But the event was also hosted by Honey Power—the all-girl DJ collective run by college radio station KXLU’s Mukta Mohan and members of Burger band Summer Twins—and had a number of female-fronted Burger bands playing, so it was basically sanctioned by the community. Burger’s aversion to any kind of politics ensured that complaints could be framed as priggish nagging rather than legitimate concerns for teenagers’ safety. Nothing was unethical in the Burger scene because there were no ethics to begin with.
This, I think, is where the root of the problem really lay. Though many people have called out Burger’s motto of being “borderline-cultish propaganda spreading group of suburban perma-teen mutants” as evidence of their innate desire to lure in teenagers, they are hardly the first label to utilize the teenager as a marketing hook. Think of K Records’ slogan: “Exploding the teenage underground into passionate revolt against the corporate ogre worldwide since 1982.” The difference is that K wanted to harness the energy of the teenager to crush that which would exploit it. Burger just wanted to be teenagers, free of boring grown-up ideas like forethought or consequences. So it wasn’t that they intentionally “designed” their scene to attract teenage girls, as they were accused of doing during the cancellation, but rather that, by embracing a teenage worldview free of responsibility, they ensured that their scene was ripe for predatory behavior to occur without pushback when teenage girls inevitably came into it—just as they have into every music scene that has ever existed.
More dangerously, Burger’s lack of guiding ethos stripped away any critical framework teenage girls might have had for understanding that bad things were being done to them in the moment. They didn’t have the language to articulate it. Feminism was meaningless to these girls, which is ironic as it is perhaps the only ideology that might have given them the idea that their bodies and lives were worth more than their value as accessories for stupid men. But who was there to tell them that? There were no riot grrrls at Burger Records. The Burger girl was the antithesis of a riot grrrl: super feminine, self-infantilizing, wholly non-threatening, and willfully oblivious. I once pushed a female Burger musician about feminism during an interview and she bloviated, saying she hadn’t “connected” with the message yet. I dropped the subject as it was pointless to inquire further. Feminism was a foreign word in Burger world. Feminism was an all-girl DJ collective sponsoring slumber parties for teenage girls at the Burger Records store.
I read I’m With The Band recently, hoping that the memoirs of Pamela Des Barres would provide some context for my experiences in the Burger scene. Although Des Barres’ rockstar friends are obviously more famous than mine, what struck me is how similar so many of her stories are to my own: the bands who live together, the crazy after parties, the venues everyone goes to, the drugs everyone does, the greatest nights you will ever have with some of the most amazing people you will ever meet followed by the most degrading mornings you will ever know, all of it permeated by a gendered power dynamic that privileges men’s sexual pleasure over women’s emotional needs and agency. The similarities make clear how Burger’s behavior did not exist in a historical vacuum. In one chapter of her book, Des Barres talks about being appalled by the sight of pre-pubescent girls performing oral sex on each other while stoned party-goers stand around and gawk. In another, she describes being devastated the night Jimmy Page left her behind to go back to his hotel with teenage groupie Lori Maddox. Most of all, Des Barres captures how the sensation of being at the center of a cool music scene can be so intoxicating that it means you’ll do anything to maintain your position, even if it blinds you to everything bad.
Maybe that’s why, though the indefensible behavior of the label and its affiliates fills me with rage and disgust, I cannot in retrospect remake my personal experience in the Burger scene to be anything other than positive, even life-changing. I absolutely would not be where I am in my career today without Burger Records and what they did—and what they failed to do—for the music scene in Los Angeles. I can’t give myself the excuse of believing it all would’ve happened anyway because I don’t actually believe that. In so many ways, I really do owe it all to Burger Records. And I suspect that I’m not the only person from that scene who feels this way.
At the same time, there are many experiences from those days that could be remade into sources of chagrin and regret: Fucking in tour vans, drinking to the point of blackout, doing gobs of drugs backstage with boys who were venerated for no reason other than they played guitar. But the truth is that I liked doing those things. They were fun. They made me feel cool and validated in a way I wanted to be validated at the time because yes, while I wanted to write about music, I also wanted to get fucked up and fuck musicians. Of course I did. There is no point in trying to obfuscate that, nor do I feel any shame in admitting it because I don’t think there’s any shame in getting fucked up and fucking musicians if that’s what you want to do. It does not diminish my talent or achievements to have done either, except in the eyes of the jealous or the prudish. Or so I thought.
Halfway through writing this I received an email from a journalist who had recently done a podcast about the Burger Records situation, asking to talk off-the-record about my “experience with Lee Rickard.” Though I’d intuited that my name had probably been brought up because of Sick Sad Scene, I was taken aback at the mention of “my experience” with Lee, which I didn’t recall telling anyone about in years. I wracked my memory for any loose-lipped candidates from my past and came up maddeningly blank.
I listened to the podcast before responding. It was alright. I was surprised to learn that the owner of the Lured By Burger Records account had herself been a victim of sexual assault by a Burger artist, and it saddened me that she’d felt the need to take such an emotionally devastating course of action at the cost of her own mental health. But of course, she did. Who had ever been there to protect her? No one. I was upset by Jennifer Clavin of Bleached laughing approvingly about Instagram being used as “HR” for women who’ve suffered abuse in music scenes, her flippant demeanor telling of someone who has never had the internet anonymously weaponized against them. Then there was Sean Bohrman, pathetically protesting that he didn’t get into music to have to babysit bands, ask about abuse, or make sure people at his shows were safe. His voice was filled with the perplexed desperation particular to once-powerful men who’ve realized too late that they’ve ruined their lives through the abdication of a responsibility it didn’t matter they hadn’t asked for—it was theirs regardless. In spite of everything, I felt a little sorry for him.
When I called the journalist later that night, she explained that the podcast was going to be broadcast nationally and lawyers wanted verification for an anonymous allegation against Lee. She thought that maybe I could provide it. I told her the truth: my interactions with Lee had all been positive and I had never personally witnessed any inappropriate behavior from him towards me or anyone else. She seemed very surprised at my answers, which annoyed me. It was as if I’d been expected to throw Burger under the bus, having once criticized them in the past, or that all women who’d been involved with Burger would have only terrible things to say. She then told me it was Sean who had given her my name. He and Lee had assumed that I was one of the women who’d submitted a story about Lee to Lured By Burger Records, which is understandable. I read that post, too, and believed it. I had to believe it. The details were almost identical to my own experience with him—except for the fact that I’d had a great time. I guess that had been the difference all along, with everything.
Afterwards, I was surprised at how hurt I felt by the revelation that it was Sean who had brought up my name. Is that really how Sean and Lee thought of me? As some spiteful woman who would participate in anonymous bandwagoning on Instagram once their little fiefdom began to crumble? After all, when I took my swing at Burger in 2016, they were still powerful and my name was right there on top. Then I wondered if that’s why they thought I had written Sick Sad Scene in the first place: not out of an earnest desire to hold them accountable for stupid decisions that were hurting a music scene I believed was worth more than its value as a hunting ground for predatory cool grifters, but out of an imagined bitterness over romantic rejection. What a farce. I didn’t write it because I wanted to burn Burger Records down. I wrote it because I wanted to defend what they had built. Apparently more than they did in the end.
that was quite a "b-side" - i'd been sitting on this for 6 months (to the day, apparently!) working my way through what i thought was a just list of links, oblivious to what lurked beneath. that is an astoundingly forthright and nuanced take on that whole fucked up situation.