Hello Darling Ones,

I’ve worked myself into a barely coherent paroxysm of rage over 89.3 The Current’s Essential Debut Albums poll. I love/hate when they do these kinds of lists.

Love: I am a musicgeek/pop culture nerd and talking about music is one of my very favorite things on earth to do. You’d probably be appalled to learn how much time I spend every day thinking about or listening to music. I think the only thing I do more of each day is sleep.

Hate: These kinds of polls bring out the worst in not just The Current, a radio station I have professed love for repeatedly and written about a lot, but also their listeners. These listeners love the shit out of music made by white dudes.

I can already tell you who is gonna be on the Top 10 of these essential album: Bowie, Prince, U2, Springsteen, Dylan, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Beastie Boys, The Beatles, and probably The Rolling Stones. I’ll let you know in May how close I am to being 100% correct.

Today’s paroxysm or rage comes because I decided to investigate what “essential” debut albums The Current was auto-populating on this poll. That was a mistake. Of the 220 acts on the list approximately 51 of them include women. That’s less than a quarter. To say I am incandescent with anger is an understatement.

The list the radio station included has Haircut 100’s debut album, but not Phoebe Bridgers’. And of course the debuts by everyone from The Beach Boys, The Beatles, and The Stones, but no oh. . . Carole King, Joni Mitchell, or Janis Joplin. I’ll admit these ladies debuts are not their finest records, but neither is fucking Surfin’ Safari.

What makes me the angriest is that lists like this and so much music journalism keep perpetuating the greatness of this music by white men. I love it too. I really do. But it’s not hard to be the greatest of anything when you’re only ever competing against white men. If all things were ever equal where would The Beatles be? We’ll never know.

Might I also add that the Twin Cities music scene is dealing with another round of sexual assault allegations by a dude in a popular band? Two weeks ago it was Har Mar Superstar. This time it’s Gabriel Douglas of the band Four on the Floor. They are not the the first two dirtbags in the Twin Cities music scene and they will not be the last.

What kills me, what absolutely slays me, is that so many men have either said “I knew that guy sucked” or “I had no idea that guy sucked” and AT THE VERY SAME TIME will fill out a poll like The Current’s 893 Essentials list and only include records by men, and somehow are incapable of seeing that these are all parts of the same complex problem. And that problem? Men do not respect women. Not their autonomy. Not their bodies. And most definitely not their art.

Fuck ’em all,
Jodi

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Dear Darling Ones,

I am not an avid Facebook user. In fact, I genuinely hate it. Back when I worked at The Nerdery (2009) my pal Malmsy asked me if he should get on Facebook and I said, “No. Facebook is where you go to hate people you used to like.” The performative nature of Facebook makes me want to barf all that time. Like, my estranged Sister #3 performs her life on Facebook in way that has very little resemblance to the actual reality of her life. It’s astounding.

Even though Facebook isn’t my scene people still insist on sending me messages via Facebook. I super hate this because my Facebook Messages are a forest of dick picks from men I do not know. I refuse to use or check those messages anymore because I don’t need to be assaulted by some random man’s penis.

Consent is a thing, even online.

This whole Jeffrey Toobin from the New Yorker masturbating on a work Zoom call makes me shaky with rage. The people who are shaming those of us who are kinda angry about this can fuck all the way off. Yes, we all masturbate. Should we be doing that during a work call? Not if you’re not a sex worker. You can be super sex positive and still be outraged at seeing your co-workers penis on a work call. It’s not prudish to be triggered and offended.

Accident my ass. We all know when we’re conducting hanky panky electronically you double triple quadruple check camera and sound and the name that text is gong to. Toobin knew full well what he was doing and you cannot convince me otherwise.

We really will forgive rich white men anything, won’t we?

I keep a folder in Gmail labeled “creeps,” with the worst email I get. I’m frequently viewed as a fetish object (freakishly tall, fat) and so men I do not know send me all sort of explicit and disturbing email. I keep them because I want to give whoever does the podcast about my murder plenty of material.

Ugh. Why does everything gotta be so much all the time?

Jodi

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Dear Darling Ones,

The problem with starting a daily diary in the middle of the plague is that you get a little superstitious that if you don’t update one day everyone will think you have died. I know this is the Internet of 2020 and, much like my actual life, it will take at least a week and a half for anyone to notice my absence. I still don’t want to worry anyone. Also, I know I could address these letters to myself and it wouldn’t matter again, because this is the Internet of 2020 and I don’t show nearly enough cleavage for people to give a shit about what I have to say. And I will let you know that’s a damn shame, because I have very good cleavage.

An update on recent going’s on: I slept like eight, maybe eight and a half entire hours in a row last night. Like, I didn’t even get up to pee. I woke up enough to think about getting up to pee but then I fell back to sleep apparently. It was fucking glorious and I’m hoping for a repeat tonight.

In related news: I was super productive today too. I worked a bunch for actual money. I hulled about four pounds of tomatillos and roasted them with a bunch of peppers while listening to David Chang’s excellent memoir Eat a Peach. I finished listening to the memoir because it takes a long time to husk tomatillos. The husks are so papery and the tomatillos so sticky. It’s kind of a nightmare. But the memoir, the memoir was good company. It was super interesting and I liked how Chang addressed some of the toxicity found in so many restaurant kitchens — especially the stuff Anthony Bourdain kind of bragged about in Kitchen Confidential.

I grew up in restaurant kitchens and my dad could have been the poster king for toxic masculine shouty kitchen jerks. It was only last weekend, while talking to my friend EM, that I remembered the dudes I worked with at Country Kitchen would hit on me all the time. I was in 9th grade and didn’t really know that what they were doing was hitting on me. I knew it made me uncomfortable and I would basically just run away. I spent a lot of time hiding in the woman’s bathroom.

It’s so gross. What’s worse is I want to somehow defend these men, because some of them were really nice, by explaining how I was 6’2″ in ninth grade and therefore. . .it’s ok? Like, what? NO. It was not okay. It is not okay and it will never be okay for grown men to hit on fourteen-year-old girls no matter how big they are. This happened more than thirty years ago and I still feel like it’s my fault.

Fucking men.

Anyway, tomorrow I’m making pork tomatillo chili and you should be jealous.

Retraumatized,
Jodi

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I was 16 the first time I passionately stated an opinion and after a grown man laughed at me and said, “Tell us what you really think.”

It was Mr. Davids who laughed at me. He was one of those short, square men who coached wrestling. He had been my US History teacher the year before, and the reason I’m such a dummy about US history. We spent most of our history class watching Sally Field movies because he thought she was cute. I know a lot about Sally Field movies and very little about history.

This happened to me more and more frequently as I got older, reaching its pinnacle when I worked at a software company in the early-aughts. Ever single white guy with a VP or Chief in his title did that to me, laughed and then told me to tell them what I really think.

My reaction to this bullshit usually varied from a weak smile to deadpan bitch face depending on how comfortable I was in the situation. I wish I could go back and ask those fuckers if they would like me to make it simpler since they obviously didn’t understand me the first time.

The post Day 108 of 200: On Listening to Sinead’s ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ appeared first on I Will Dare.

1.) That feeling you get when you think you have eaten all your Potato Oles and then you dig into the bag for your taco and you find not one, but two more Potato Oles. Side note: In college whenever someone at the newspaper would journey over the bridge & across the river to get McDonald’s our friend Dave would never order his own French fries, he’d just call “bottom of the bag.” I think about him whenever I find those hidden fried-potato gems.

2.) That feeling you get when your mailbox is flooded with the thank yous from the nonprofits you forgot you donated to while you were in a frantic, mindless, tear-filled rage during the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Rapey O’Budwiser.

3.) The dudes in your social media are always aghast when the latest #MeToo or Racist Horror Show comes to the forefront, but then they go back to talking only about all the music and movies and books they enjoy by white dudes. Maybe they are the testosteroni kinda like tenderoni (which I have just learned is also chicken tenders with mac & cheese, my new favorite thing) but with nards.

4.) Dudes who only re-tweet white dudes’ opinions on everything ever.

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