I love someone canceling our plans, especially when the “no” comes with a traditionally “bad” reason like, “I’m out of energy” or “I just don’t feel like it.” It’s thrilling to be privy to a person prioritizing themself, and not just vicariously. Good for them!
That’s why I was stoked to read Santigold’s recent tour cancellation.
We were met with the height of inflation—gas, tour buses, hotels, and flight costs skyrocketed—many of our tried-and-true venues unavailable due to a flooded market of artists trying to book shows in the same cities, and positive test results constantly halting schedules with devastating financial consequences. All of that on top of the already-tapped mental, spiritual, physical, and emotional resources of just having made it through the past few years. Some of us are finding ourselves simply unable to make it work.
I like that it acknowledges not just the psychological toll of touring in an ongoing pandemic but also the financial one. This points to the problems with the system. If our favorite artists were saying, “I must take a break for my mental health,” we could think, “Ah yes, times have been hard for us all, and it is unfortunate that this specific artist is one of the individuals to suffer just a little bit harder than most.” But no, they are saying, “Our entire way of doing this is unsustainable.”
I can’t help but notice this year’s other high-profile tour cancellations have included Little Simz and Arlo Parks, who said, “it’s painful to admit… that I’m a human being with limits.” I haven’t crunched the numbers and I don’t know where I’d find them to crunch, but it’s interesting to see Black women making these decisions and being so open in their explanations.
They’re not the only ones, as Laura Barton’s recent piece in The Guardian makes clear. But Black women have historically been on the cutting edge of social change, perhaps because they face oppression on multiple fronts and get sick of the shit quicker than people who don’t. So I think it’s important we take note when Santigold and Arlo Parks speak, because it’s a signal that we need to catch up.
I don’t have system-level solutions for making live performance financially, psychologically, and spiritually sustainable in 2022 and beyond. When I plug my Patreon, I contextualize my desire for support by saying I believe direct relationships between artists and fans can make art better for both of us. But in the absence of major entertainment corporations spontaneously changing their business models, the voices of big artists like Arlos Parks can make an outsized difference for all of us.
Here’s one proposal:
In late 2019, I booked my first tour. I played 7 cities in 2 months, and my one continuous run of 4 dates included multiple days off between shows. At the time, I felt like an amateur for not packing my calendar. But the sense of each city and quality time I got with myself and others was lovely. That’s how I want to tour, once I’m able to return to live performance in the first place.
THIS IS MY PODCAST, THIS IS YOUR SLASHER-LIFE
Johanna Isaacson wrote the freakin’ book on The Babadook. It’s called Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror, and it’s about a bunch of other horror movies too. She kicks off This Is Your Afterlife’s FIRST EVER themed series, a run of four episodes in October about horror movies I’m calling This Is Your SLASHERLIFE.
First, I talk to Jo about standard This Is Your Afterlife stuff—hell, the afterlife, memories, her “coma” moment—and then we kick off the SLASHERLIFE series with an in-depth discussion of The Babadook! Hopefully it goes without saying, but there are gonna be spoilers up and down this series.
Content warning: woo woo Marxism, communal luxury, the “manosphere,” smoking a bunch of hash, Arches National Park, the grotesque feminine.
LEMONS AND LEMONADE
“R/HORROR, known as Dreadit by our subscribers is the premier horror entertainment community on Reddit.” And here’s Dreadit’s Movie Guide, including separate lists of films about zombies, vampires, “Lovecraftian” horror, and “were (or therianthropy) films.”
Pro tip: Add “reddit” to your Google searches. I’ve been doing it, and it leads me to not-just-Reddit sites that bypass so many of the ads on Google recently.
Have you heard of Environments, the OG nature sounds album series? Side 1 of the first album: “The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore.” The creator was meticulous and strange, and I’ve picked up 3 LPs in the past month. They rule.
Jo Isaacson makes 3 authors from publisher Common Notions I’ve had on the podcast in the last few weeks, and I’ve been poking around their catalog. If anyone wants to get me the rad-looking An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels from 2019, who am I to resist?
MAY I PLAY YOU A SOUND?
Remember these spiral wishing wells that used to be at zoos? Imagine being a quarter circling one at 1/4 speed. And the wishing well is a chiming guitar pattern that slowly picks up additional instruments as you revolve. Except it feels like it’s revolving around you, and it seems to get larger, not smaller like the circles of the quarter around the wishing well, so maybe you’re the wishing well, but you’re actually flipped over so you look like a little rounded pyramid instead of a sinkhole, and the guitar part is the quarter, stay with me, and it winds its way down from the top of you in larger and larger circles traveling down to your base.
Anyway, Oren Ambarchi’s new album Shebang is a nice way to unfurl into the weekend.
Psychologically ultimately,
DM