Spoonboy

"One time I was at a show of yours and I saw you sitting alone in the kitchen and I went up and said hello and I was nervous and excited because I think you're such an amazing song writer and I'm bad at being social and I accidentally offended you and you called me rude, which was totally justified, mind you, and now I can't listen to your music without wanting to cry." I'm just curious if I'm missing a piece of this story because this doesn't sound very rude alone!

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:44:00 -0400

you’re referring to this post, of course, and i don’t actually remember what anonymous was talking about, anonymous, but you are right, on it’s own the story doesn’t sound very rude. reading between the lines though, when they say they “accidentally offended” me, i assume they must have actually done something… accidentally offensive. it’s pretty rare that i’ll call someone rude, and i would never say something like that for no reason! but whatever it was that happened, me and anonymous buried the hatchet, so it’s all good now!

uncontroversially, i love the blue album, pinkerton, and the...

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:37:20 -0400

uncontroversially, i love the blue album, pinkerton, and the b-sides and haven’t payed any attention to the rest of it. i always skip “no one else.”

You mentioned Nate Ruess in the Ke$ha ask- what are your views on his music?

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:52:00 -0400

sorry i kinda sat on this question for a while. i realized to answer it accurately i’d actually have to listen to more than just the radio singles… so i kinda put it off.

here’s my position on fun. (the band). i appreciate that there is a rock band that is doing something interesting (or at least different) and original (or at least more originally derivative) who is achieving huge mainstream radio success. let’s be real. it’s been a long time since there’s been an interesting rock band on the radio. i want to like fun. they just make it so damn difficult.

like, “we are young” had a lot going for it. a) jonelle monae fucking rules. b) the lyrics “we are young, so let’s set the world on fire” are basically the same lyrics from against me’s “i was a teenage anarchist.” i like against me, but when they released a song dismissing their former politics as their attempt at a break through radio single, i thought that was pretty annoying. there was a weird novelty in a song that had basically the same chorus achieving HUGE mainstream success where against me’s single kind of flopped. with that said, “we are young” is just a terrible song. it doesn’t make any sense lyrically. it’s disjointed musically. you can barely hear jonelle monae. and last summer it felt like you couldn’t get away from it. it was on every radio station. sometimes multiple radio stations at the same time!

when the “some nights” single came out i wanted it to redeem “we are young.” i was like “ok, cool, this sounds like paul simon. i love paul simon.” but then once again it was inescapable. the song was playing all the time. it was hard not to notice how stupid the lyrics were. like what’s all this melodrama about? feeling conflicted over being in a band? worrying about someone “jacking your style?” and then the music video comes out and there’s this weird nonsensical civil war movie thing happening? like “let’s act like the civil war wasn’t a huge historically significant part of american history that has ramifications still playing out today. no, in this video we’ll ignore any of the politics of the civil war and dumb it down into a metaphor for inner indecisiveness.” gross. i love music videos and it’s rare that one goes so far to make me dislike a song i’d felt neutrally about before. (also, the “we are young” video is just unwatchable).

then recently nate ruess’s duet with p!nk, “just give me a reason,” has been all over the radio and it’s really not helped anything. there’s this long running trend of male pop stars and rappers guesting on female pop stars and rappers’ songs and using their guest verse to negate whatever it was the lady was saying in the first place. in the fictional narrative of “just give me a reason,” ruess basically listens to p!nk’s first verse lamenting how their failing relationship is killing her, and responds with “it’s all in your mind.” it’s basically “bitches be crazy” with an emo boy gloss.

to be fair though, i listened to the fun. record and some of the format’s stuff and there were a couple songs i liked here and there. “carry on” is an alright song, and i actually really kinda liked “all alone” in a smashmouth meets fatboy slim meets everclear kinda way.

the format was basically an inoffensive pop rock band as near as i can tell. “dog problems” almost reminded me of regina spektor, just with her quirky intensity replaced by nate ruess’s typically masculine passive aggressive self loathing.

and i guess that’s the thing. he’s obviously got an ear for melody and pop and when he helped write a song for ke$ha it ruled, because ke$ha’s persona is interesting and charming. when nate ruess sings about his own life i’m like “shut up you overprivileged whiny dufus.”

so i guess that’s the long answer. just don’t ask me what i think of that florida georgia line/nelly song “cruise.”

What UK cities are you playing?

Wed, 22 May 2013 13:51:00 -0400

glad you asked. the dates are below and the details are all here.

SPOONBOY & THE VANDELLAS (martha as backing band) UK TOUR!! w/ DELAY and MARTHA

JUNE

3 - KINGSTON, ENGLAND
4 - LEEDS, ENGLAND
5 - EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND
6 - GLASGOW, SCOTLAND
7 - DURHAM, ENGLAND
8 - SHEFFIELD, ENGLAND
9 - NORWICH, ENGLAND
10 - MANCHESTER, ENGLAND
11 - NOTTINGHAM, ENGLAND
12 - BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND
13 - EXETER, ENGLAND
14 - SWANSEA, WHALES
15 - LONDON, ENGLAND
16 - BRIGHTON, ENGLAND

SPOONBOY (solo) w/ DELAY and KATE’S PARTY IN IRELAND

19 - GALWAY, IRELAND
20 - DUBLIN, IRELAND

last minute show tonight! spoonboy/ jean trapezoid/ a game of KICKBALL!!

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:45:26 -0400

oi! come a little early to kickball tonight to see some acoustic music from:

JEAN TRAPEZOID
ex-dc, currently drifting, future pop star playing sweet sweet tunes on a little ukelele.

SPOONBOY
local songwriter guy, about to leave for the UK for a month. come say goodbye!

and then as is tradition every monday night, we’ll play a rousing game of KICKBALL!

COME AT 9:13pm!
18th & california st. NW DC
FREE, duh.

***NEVERMIND THE CLOUDS. IT’S NOT GONNA RAIN.***

the question on everybody's minds: did you watch eurovision??

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:56:42 -0400

what’s eurovision?

Has anyone ever told you that you sound like the singer of After School Special?

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:56:00 -0400

which after school special?

buttercan: sexy dreams - spoonboy took this video last night....

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:19:00 -0400

buttercan:

sexy dreams - spoonboy

took this video last night. theo said it was a cool angle and then went, “oh no wait, yr just really short.” thanks theo.

it was anti-prom, so i wore a tie. this made up for when i was in high school and i was going to go to a queers show instead of prom, but then i couldn’t because i got food poisoning. much cooler than a queers show anyway.

DID YOU JUST PLAY AT ANTIPROM, I HOPE I HAVE THE RIGHT BAND

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:18:00 -0400

yes, that was me.

comments on the "sexy dreams" video and conversation from Tilly Q

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:22:38 -0400

Tilly Q sent me this commentary on the spoonboy “sexy dreams” video and the conversation that surrounded it and asked if i would post it here. i’ve been archiving the conversation around the video here and some of that conversation is referenced below. if you’d like to get in touch with Tilly, her e-mail address is tillyqtillyq@gmail.com.

So I get the feeling that this conversation might’ve already come and went, but I still want to weigh in a bit. First, a bit about me, I’m a white trans woman who currently lives in a place that calls itself names like “the dyke capital of the world” of course what that really means is it’s the cis white upper-class dyke capital of the world, and I share many of those identities and privileges. I’m white and I have lots of class privilege, meaning, among other things, I’ve had access to a private college education (where I learned to use words like privilege, oppression, trans* etc), and when I can’t find any jobs that will hire a trans woman I can still get financial support from my family and survive comfortably. Even still, in this “dyke capital” I often feel super isolated and unwelcome, because although I am a dyke, other dykes don’t always believe it. Incidentally, this place which is NOT accepting/welcoming of me is also often way accepting of (white) trans men and (white) trans masculine genderqueer people.

I feel this is important to talk about because looking at the criticisms and comments so far, most folks are just using words like genderqueer and trans* to describe themselves, but I get the feeling that only transmasculine people were criticizing the song. I get this mostly cuz’ve the talk about binders and the familiar cursing spoonboy as a cis man (which, keep in mind, spoonboy has said isn’t actually an identity that spoonboy holds).

My feelings and I have a lot of ‘em:

To me, this song has been very important thru out my life. When I was a boy, it was a song that I would listen to over and over again, with the volume turned as low as I could to still hear it without being afraid my parents might hear it as well. I didn’t know what it meant to me back then, but it was a song that let me understand my deeply hidden gender dysphoria and it was a song that had someone who sounded like me singing about gender confusion, a topic I couldn’t find the words to talk about with my own voice. I sang along to it a lot.

I was unaware of the video, but found it yesterday and saw all this controversy about it. I got really worried. I was like ‘OMG this music video will be offensive and make me hate the song’, but then I watched it. For me, the video was fine, it seemed silly and playful, but it didn’t at all feel like trans people were the butt of the joke (how rare!). I think it’s fun to be silly with such an intense thing as gender! Afterward, I read thru all of the criticisms and saw some really valid points there.

It sounds like it was way hard for folks who experience gender dysphoria that they deal w/ using binders to see the part with the binder, I feel that makes soo much sense, and I missed it because that’s not part of my everyday dysphoria. I hope the trigger warning helps people later on.

I want to talk about the things that some of the critics said about appropriation. First, from my own experience, it took me months after I knew I was trans to admit it to myself, because I kept saying “I don’t want to appropriate anyone else’s experience, how do I know I’m reallly trans*?” Especially thinking I was a cis boy in dykeworld (which supports trans boys without question…). Something about being hyper critical of cis men felt like this community wasn’t giving me the possibility of having a complex gender. When I found the strength to explore that gender without much support from my community, I found out that I am trans. When I went outside with a dress, at the in between phase where I didn’t know if I a was a boy or a girl, whatever my identity was, I was always putting myself in emotional and physical danger. Notice how at the end of spoonboy’s description of the video they had to tell people not to sexualize them in the video. That is a transfeminine problem, whatever spoonboy’s identity is.

The other thing I want to address relates to what I read in the critiques and also what I read in lizz mazer’s post. Everyone talked about appropriation a lot, but I wanted to bring up something which I have been trying to learn that complicates things. Basically, can we keep in mind that different oppressions like race and gender, although they are linked, are NOT the same and can NOT be talked about in the same way. Personally the first time I ever heard the word appropriation was about cultural appropriation, and that’s where I think it’s origin in radical communities is (if not, plz correct me). I think that for a lot of people who are oppressed by racism, white people culturally appropriating is always harmful. No ‘understanding each other better,’ no ‘doing it with respect’. We, (white people) still do it a lot, but we can remember that it causes harm and we can work on it. I’m getting this from things that I’ve heard folks of color say, and I hope I am not misinterpreting.

This stark barrier, as I understand it is because there is a long history of cultural appropriation being used as part of colonialism. I do not think this rings true for gender. I do not think there is a long history of cis people appropriating trans people’s experiences (there are comedy movies in which cis men play people like me and I’m the butt of the joke, but I don’t think that compares to the history of cultural appropriation in colonialism). I do not think it is possible to appropriate gender, and it feels really unfair to use a word like “appropriate,” which I think is a word that holds power because cultural appropriation can be so harmful, to serve a white trans interest. Please also question words like cis supremacy. Cissexism does not work just like racism, and white trans people have a lot of work to do working through our racisms.

Back to the video, like I just said: to me, appropriation of gender identity is a non-thing. I saw spoonboy walking around public places as a lady and all I was thinking was ‘Aw they look really pretty.’ I also just want to bring up the way that spoonboy kept being criticized as a cis male. I have to admit that while I’m not a man-hater, I don’t really trust men a lot of the time. That said, my community (remember dykeworld) can be super critical of cis men. To me, isolating cis men is isolating potential transfeminine people. For my community and lots of genderqueer/trans communities, trans men can get away with being much more harmful than cis men can, and still be loved by the community. This is transmisogyny and it creates a community where trans woman and other transfeminine people feel isolated and unsupported. Masculinity is violent to people growing up male, especially if those people do not fit the box of male as we were supposed to.

The part that really hurt me in the video is some of the lyrics of the song, but I’m happy they’re in the song all the same. The lines are:

me and Jenny had a good time laughing,
taking off our clothes to explore each other’s bodies,
she said I don’t wanna disappoint you,
but you could never be my girrrll.

I sing along with them all the time because the hurt they cause is also validating. They hurt because I’ve heard those words (maybe not exactly) from my community of dykes. I know that as trans as I am, because of my genitals, there are ways in which I may never get to be accepted as a dyke, there are many dykes that I could fall in love with, but I know that I could never be their girl (until they work thru some trans misogynist baggage). This is because of my community’s own failings, and I am responding to these critiques because I think that this conversation here is an example of that same exclusion that surrounds me.

I’m happy this song exists and I’m happy the video exists (though I get less love feelings from it than from the song itself, tbh). I get that as trans people we always have to be prepared for someone to do something harmful to us, but please leave space for allowing everyone to explore their own genders, I think we’ll all be better for it.

I AM SO EXCITED FOR SUNDAY

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:34:31 -0400

i know, right! (i assume you are talking about this:)

SUNDAY, MAY 19
doors 9pm | tickets $15

TITUS ANDRONICUS
nj springsteen punk - http://www.titusandronicus.net/

THE SO SO GLOS
brooklyn garage pop - http://www.thesosoglos.com/

THE MAX LEVINE ENSEMBLE
dc awkward punk pop - http://themaxlevineensemble.bandcamp.com/

@ THE BLACK CAT
1811 14th st. NW
tickets - http://www.ticketalternative.com/Events/22977.aspx

you've been doing a lot of these lately so i'd like to ask if you could say something about "this is war"?

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:26:00 -0400

“this is war” is about how fighting against a status quo will always be perceived as violent and aggressive, even when that status quo itself is a culture built on violence and aggression.

it’s about how in not challenging that status quo, we passively accept that violence and endorse it implicitly. we may not agree with the drone attacks that the u.s. regularly carries out against civilians in the middle east, but we are paying for them with our tax dollars. we may not agree with the kind of economic and psychological violence that capitalism enacts on us daily, but we still need to work to pay rent, we still buy cereal that’s produced by a conglomerate that is also a weapons manufacturer. there is already a war happening between the interests of those who hold power and the rest of us, and unless we decidedly take action against it, we are already acting on behalf of the oppressors. we take part in a system that is set up to benefit them.

the u.s. is waging war against us constantly and taking action against imperialism and capitalism is self defense, not aggressive violence. people are starving and kicked out of their homes because of a government and economy that protects the financial industry before it helps its own citizens. that is violence, not the actions that are taken to challenge that status quo. that’s what the song is about.

This is War… by spoonboy

You mention nihilism in more than one song, and I wonder what your thoughts are on the topic of nihilism.

Thu, 16 May 2013 13:41:00 -0400

against essentialism. i pick and choose my negations. in those terms, i find nihilism alternately useful and self-defeating.

Could you talk a bit about "Hegemonic Blowfish"?

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:18:53 -0400

certainly.

DC: 5/19 - TITUS ANDRONICUS, THE SO SO GLOS, THE MAX LEVINE ENSEMBLE @ THE BLACK CAT

Tue, 14 May 2013 16:45:32 -0400

themaxlevineensemble:

SUNDAY, MAY 19
doors 9pm | tickets $15

TITUS ANDRONICUS
nj springsteen punk - http://www.titusandronicus.net/

THE SO SO GLOS
brooklyn garage pop - http://www.thesosoglos.com/

THE MAX LEVINE ENSEMBLE
dc awkward punk pop - http://themaxlevineensemble.bandcamp.com/

@ THE BLACK CAT
1811 14th st. NW
tickets - http://www.ticketalternative.com/Events/22977.aspx

this is gonna be a lot of fun! you might need a ticket. just sayin.

ben-levin: Animating. bepstein, looking kinda sketchy.

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:15:15 -0400

ben-levin:

Animating.

bepstein, looking kinda sketchy.

anybody else getting a ton of spam every day about...

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:19:00 -0400

anybody else getting a ton of spam every day about “expanding garden hoses?” strangely, it’s not a euphemism, these e-mails are actually selling garden hoses.

i was literally this close to taylor swift this weekend. yes,...

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:39:40 -0400

i was literally this close to taylor swift this weekend.

yes, she touched my hand. yes, my guitar playing just got 100 times more country/pop/dubstep. yer gonna like it.

um. i saw taylor swift on saturday. (pix by the incomparable...

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:36:00 -0400

um. i saw taylor swift on saturday. (pix by the incomparable bobbie d.)

SPOONBOY T-SHIRTS AND POSTERS NOW AVAILABLE FOR MAILORDER!

Thu, 09 May 2013 15:22:00 -0400

i’ve gotten a bunch of requests that i put t-shirts up for sale online, so i’m psyched to let y’all know that my friend linsday ann bottos will now be selling spoonboy t-shirts and posters through her lunamoth etsy shop! you can order them by clicking on the links below, and while you’re over there you should check out her awesome artwork as well!

SPOONBOY BATMAN T-SHIRT - $12
screen printed on pre-shrunk 100% cotton white t-shirts.
available in XS, S, M, L, XL

“CULTIVATE MORE PSYCHIC ENERGY” POSTER - $7
screen printed 11x12.5” poster.
poster will be shipped flat

both of the above images were co-designed by another awesome lindsay, lindsay eyth, and you should check out her etsy shop too! thanks!