From 2009 to 2017, this website featured a series of entries collectively titled “This Used To Be My Playground,” named after a 1992 Madonna song. It explored my relationship to the popular music of the 1990s, when I was in high school (1989-93), college (1993-97…ok, ‘99), and experiencing my first romantic relationships, some heartbreak, a surprisingly robust social life, the freedom of a car and an open northern California road, a too-early marriage, and about a year-and-a-half of fatherhood before the decade ended. This particular series taught me how to really write (the first few entries are terribly clumsy), and was one of my favorite creative experiences.
A bit of a change-up this month. I am turning this space into a forum for my firstborn son, at least for this entry.
From the time he could hold his head up in a toddler car seat to the time he was a teen in the front seat clutching the dashboard as my single-dad beater Corolla hydroplaned across another puddle in a downpour, I have controlled what’s on the car stereo.
He has some thoughts on this.
Without further ado, everything written hereafter is by my now-adult kid:
I don’t think things really happen in terms of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts anymore, but a decade ago they were a big deal. Some artists that you would normally associate with autotune or studio magic would show up in a Chicago office and prove, yes, they can in fact sing. T-Pain comes to mind…or maybe Stephin Merritt would remind you just how exciting they used to be. Just a bunch of old fat guys (keep in mind they are old and fat and old) in a close up space recreating par-for-the-course pop songs. I don’t think my father was much of a Magnetic Fields guy, but boy howdy, they break my wee little heart. He’d rather listen to AC/DC deep cuts…I will not be oh so cutting or harsh on this entry, readers. But I will get my licks in. Oh readers. I don’t even know if there is a 69 Love Songs Tiny Desk Concert. There probably shouldn’t be. Who would care?
2004
I am son of the Holy Bee (Cade), maybe you’ve heard of me, I can’t remember… I love all of the loyal readers. All seven of you. Just joshing, the Holy Bee boasts a monthly readership that I could only ever hope of dreaming to achieve in my neck of the atomized cultural woods. He earned it, I’d love to luck into it, all over it. Not to say that this audience is a product of anything other than wit and aplomb. I have produced for you here an actual article, taking a page out of my father’s book, detailing some of the albums I remember my father playing for me and my thoughts on them some decade plus later. Not backed by the same level of research and rigor you are used to, but backed by considerable heart. Lots of edits and re-edits (not really), lots of love (that’s true). Lots of the idea that I want some mark on this website when my father inevitably dies, so we and — more importantly I — can say we collaborated on an artistic project. Something every father and son can and should do, if they are so inclined. As opposed to, I guess, going fishing. Screw going fishing!
I kind of pity people who have an absolute zero in the artistic aspiration department. But I really should not. In fact, I pity myself even more severely. It is–not as I have been brought up, but as I have determined on my own–deeply lame to want to be creative when you have no business doing so, as I have recently realized (not true, see below* — ed.). Gore Vidal published his first novel at the age of 19, that was my mark when I was 16. A decade has passed and I have not exactly published a goddamn novel.
Ok, enough of these boring self-flagellations. Here we go, my first attempt at blogging (7th) although I used to have a secret and regrettable music journal, meant to impress older people (read: girls) with better taste than me (didn’t exist). I thought for a while that if my taste was good enough, that if I watched the right movies and listened to the right bands, that would be enough to win over the people I liked. I never really considered developing a personality of my own, and my presumptuous attitude towards those with otherwise normal affinities has burned a few bridges. Being really good at consuming media does not get you a girlfriend!
I could not help but shit on boring Burger Records artists like FIDLAR and the other brand of music enthusiast button pin, a satanic individual by the name of Jack Antonoff, who currently produces both Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar albums, but back in the day made horrendous indie rock music and the world’s worst Beatles cover. He’s the one who bought the Abbey Road console on reverb.com listed for 5 million dollars.
To take a second…music right now is incredibly good. Amazing albums are being cut every day. I think it is natural and respectable to give up on finding new music, or caring about it, but an assertion that new music has gotten worse, makes you sound like the audiences who shit themselves in front of Stravinksy. Just ridiculous. Music doesn’t magically get bad because we get old. It’s quite clearly the other way around. And another thing…
Has the Brooklynite “trade synths-for-guitars-self-loathing” completely subsumed good old fashioned rock and roll? What is the actual issue with guitars or vice versa? More importantly, are people ready to embrace something that is not what they like automatically? We cherish an open mind. Those parents of the kids who cried when they saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, they managed to temper themselves in many cases, are those kids paying it forward, even fucking at all? The answer is no. It’s a cesspool. But my parents have been a light in the sewer, as we will discuss.
I wrote a test essay to my dad about this when I was creating a mixtape I never finished, but was too afraid to not only finish the essay, but send it in the first place, to say that synths are better and guitars are lame, as a means of getting a rise. This was worthless, in fact. And also just a riff on something James Murphy of DFA and LCD Soundsystem said years ago, a person who is insufferable, and a band that has suffered some severe overcorrection in the late 20-somethings division of cultural tastemaking. LCD Soundsystem is pretty good, I will not talk about them anymore for fear of making someone upset for liking them too much, or liking them not enough. I would go so far as to say that LCD Soundsystem is the single most polarizing band among my generation, but that is a post for another time.
At the end of the day, someone has to program the synths, and for people who don’t watch live music anyway, the appeal of the mere ability to demonstrate a captivating live performance still seems to generate an inherent bias against the synth, or the plug-in, or the what-have-you. The Holy Bee might tell you they are not legit because they cannot play any instruments. What gives?! That only matters at live shows. Don’t we spend thousands of pages more or less bringing the Beatles to completion for figuring out the studio is an instrument? What part of the record do you want to hear? Guitar players loop and finagle and molest their sound to oblivion, but because other bands’ source is from a keyboard attached to a someothering sound device, it’s illegitimate? A guitar solo is not any more inherently worthwhile than a synth solo just because the bald guy producing it is better at orgasm faces.
Animal Collective
As a proud Depeche Mode supporter, among millions, and as someone who loves anything else that makes brilliant pop music, let’s take a chill pill. Have fun, sing along, this enjoying music stuff is not difficult. In terms of music appreciation we kind of figured it out in roughly 2004, poptimists and rockists alike folded underneath the crushing weight of Clipse and Sufjan Stevens, at least as far as professional critics go. And this is a good thing! The problem now, is the criticism that pays a living wage is predicated on making sure hordes of 17-year-olds don’t firebomb your office for giving the latest pop star du jour anything less than a prostrating admission of their holiness. Christgau is still churning out the same post-punk fetishism, thank god. My favorite contemporary critic, Tom Breihan, is having a mental breakdown because all of his favorite artists seem to be either cartoonishly anti-semitic (Kanye) or serial rapists (most musicians).
What made the critics flip their little peaheads? Was it just “Hey Ya” that did some weird shit to the cultural landscape? Some good, some bad, certainly. Even in ivory towers, you need helping hands from the ones who built it, those clamoring from the walls, half-mummified. Slave labor. A bunch of African-American geniuses halfway through the 20th century are not the only thing that happened, although they are mostly what happened. Elvis is like when your niece puts sprinkles on the cookies you painstakingly folded, rolled, and cut and tells everyone they did it all by themselves. I recommend Just Around Midnight by Jack Hamilton if anyone is interested in this exchange between race and popular music at this time. It’s a magnificent book inspired by a song that was originally going to be called not “Brown Sugar” but “Black – ”…never mind. Honkeys did have good ideas musically, throughout history, and I want to acknowledge this, but…
…2009 Brooklyn Indie is not an effective example of this, unfortunately, despite being one of the more important scenes of my lifetime. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Grizzly Bear, TuNe-YaRdS…god TuNe-YaRdS sucks and is embarrassing for everyone involved. The other two bands are all right though, check out “Is This Love” by CYHSY, an absolute bop.
I know this is not your typical Holy Bee chow but listen, hold on, I’m not the Holy Bee, I am the son, I am the local boy done decent, product of both Sacramento and Yuba City. If you heard a reference to two beautiful boys in your time reading this blog, I am the elder, less beautiful one. The project, the mystery. A lot of time on this spinning planet we call earth, just a rock in a void, oh my god we are all flesh-columns made whole by an unforgiving particle that We shall not name (don’t you just hate hardcore atheists). Norm, I think, has a thing on this, like everything else, the devout Christian he was.
For someone born in 1974 (practically 1975 — ed.), Holy Bee’s taste is kind of ancient, but then again entirely young for his age. I suppose he kind of likes everything as long as it conforms to a specific set of standards. When I try to find a gap, it’s mostly just pop music, as you might imagine, conveniently filled by my mother. You write what you know, you listen what you know, I do NOT begrudge anyone for this, let alone my father. But might I interject, in defense of female-led rock bands not named Sleater-Kinney, a group called Hinds, a Spanish band who put on a downright terrible show in Denver that I saw in 2018, they completely sucked, but sound like your favorite band’s favorite band on record. Like Violent Femmes but if they were good and exciting and didn’t sound completely evil.
Hinds
In 2004, the Holy Bee was raving over American Idiot, which is insane, in retrospect. I think I aged out of American Idiot in 2012, and I was 14 (for the record, I revisited Dookie last year, and that is some good shit), the Holy Bee was 29 when it came out. Someone born in 1974 should love the music of the 90’s, and he does, but not totally. Ace of Base, Nazis they may be, made two excellent singles, but he would not be caught dead repping for them, nor Destiny’s Child, nor the summer of 1997 when arch-villain Sean Combs dominated, maybe he scored some points here. Lynyrd Skynyrd were Nazis in a kind of intense, traditional way but they get a pass. No Doubt, Lauryn Hill, Hole, too many things omitted (I think maybe my dad liked Miseducation can’t remember but too-bad so-sad for him if he did), too many things that are too important that I think can be attributed to the fact Holy Bee is somehow pro-Churchill despite being a smart, well-educated man. I wrote a longer anti-Churchill screed here but decided against it. Google “Bengal Famine.” The speeches he made when Hitler was kicking his ass do not absolve him entirely, but I do like them a little, at least.
Things vouched for on this blog are generally good, and described as such. If Holy Bee said something stinks, it either was actually bad, or was a bit girly, ahead of its time, or avant-garde. He is the foundation upon which my bourgeois nonsense taste was built, along with my mother. Both actually have fantastic taste as far as Gen X’ers are involved. Gen X’ers are insufferable I’ve determined. Somehow worse than boomers and millennials, combined. You can’t just skate by while the country erodes into oblivion and expect me to chalk it up to strange coincidence. Gen X enjoyed America’s best all-time economy and turned it into dogshit slipping between my fingers.
Music used to be wayyyyy better, I guess. At the end of the day, the best of us are easily identifiable as such, I will admit. If we can say Gretzky was the best hockey player, we should be able to bestow other superlatives. Sports should be treated as art, and vise-versa. Is that not the point of Idle Time? We list artists, we pointlessly mess with instruments and balls and occupy ourselves. I used to ask my dad for favorites, for lists, and he relented, yet, among friends, he was more than willing to say a random good album was ever so slightly better than Velvet Underground and Nico. He was lying to me! He loved making lists. Velvet Underground and Nico is a better album than Anodyne by Uncle Tupelo, if that was not already clear.
For instance, Shakespeare, that dude was extremely fucking good at what he did, and will be read for centuries beyond our own comprehension, until the sun engulfs the earth, invented like a thousand words, and has an entire conspiracy based on the idea no one person could ever accomplish what he did. I hate the Shakespeare conspiracists. Even if he was, what a buzzkill! And there are a lot of really accomplished, intelligent people out there who think Shakespeare is a conspiracy created by who knows what. No throughline, no justification. They just cannot stand the idea one person so completely eclipsed their best artistic efforts fifteen-fold. Shakespeare is properly rated. The Beatles. OK, we are familiar with the Beatles here. Let’s put what they did into relatable terms. Seven years. Think about seven years ago, that was 2018, were you a fundamentally different person in 2018? Do you regret decisions made in 2018? Maybe the Beatles more or less invented popular music as we know it in the time it takes to get from 2018 to now. But for me to introduce myself properly I might need to zoom out, explain myself and my father, what was happening when my brother and I were in the back seat, subjected to whatever Holy Bee felt like listening. For instance, a podcast hosted by Larry Miller (Larry, along with Mike O’Meara, were the only podcasts I listened to back then that weren’t filled with cursing in an era when your mom was still insisting I shield you from that — ed.). Well, when we were young, we were listening to some good music, but also Kings of Leon, stuff that will stand the test of time, and something called the Gaslight Anthem.
THIS USED TO BE MY BACKGROUND
As an aside, if you listen to anything, please do listen to TV on the Radio. Their bassist, Gerard Smith died of cancer tragically young, and was a part of something truly special, they are one of the few rock bands of this era you can hang your hat on. Or upon which you can hang your hat I don’t know. Dumb rule. When I asked my father an annoying question like 14 years ago, something like, “who’s your favorite band right now?” — awful question — he mentioned TV on the Radio, and it has stuck with me to this day.
TV on the Radio
My dad loves animals of all shapes and sizes so much I give him grace, here are some remembrances of excellent, foundation-laying taste. And then some funny stuff that was playing in the car on the way to school. We were at the behest of the doohickey that hooked his iPod** up to the car speaker, my brother and I.
Challengers (2007) by the New Pornographers
This album smells like my dad’s deathtrap Corolla (I was just as scared driving it as you were riding in it, hope I covered up my terror enough to spare you too much trauma — ed.). An indie supergroup, if you must, this souffle (and I say souffle because the concoction of songwriters is not haphazard, like a stew, but in fact carefully measured) of Bejar, Newman, and Case had been turning out pop rock bangers by the time I could identify a triangle, isosceles or otherwise. They were, and had been, on fire. For whatever reason, Dad became obsessed with this particular effort. They have superior albums on either side of this release, by my estimation. Even though I thought the previous couple were better, I have a soft spot because this has such a powerful nostalgic effect, to a time before I knew the kind of worry I know now, and I know the songs by heart, and I know worry. I don’t know what the word “bohemian” means (lie) but this album sounds supremely bohemian. Like, if the decision to wear sunscreen instead of getting a tan could be an album, it would be this album. This is the not getting cancer soundtrack. This is the epitome of a Holy Bee car album. Clean, well manufactured, just, when you play a song from here. I am transported. And I love my father for it. Spaghetti dinner, chicken broc and spicy sauce. So much love here. So much to be ambivalent about, too, but I choose not to be. So much nothing, but to me, this album is everything.
Vampire Weekend (2008) by Vampire Weekend
So these guys actually went to an Ivy League school (did you know that!!!) and I think that makes me like them more somehow. I was famously put on the waitlist to University of Chicago while all my smarter friends attended Cal Berkeley, or other such egghead institutions. Am I deserving of such a prestigious Bachelor of Arts? I sure thought so, at the time. Yes. Did I work to get it? No. At the time I did not. Did a bunch of WASPs doing West African pop music tailor made to help me make friends with people who owned high-powered dishwashers put out a massive and brilliant self-titled? Yes. They did. Faux High-Life (google it) breeze around and yes you guessed it, the Holy Bee was all the way in. This is the wrong kind of performative racism, the one that personally makes me mad, because it fucking works. It’s worthless even pretending to be upset by the backing vocals that are obviously ripping off a rich tradition of indigenous Black music. The Columbia education and the classy Cape Cod upbringing and the punchable face of Ezra Koenig combines to create a product that I love despite itself. I tried to open on a girl by asking her if she thought she could beat up Ezra and she said no (that’s how big the band was in 2013 when their album topped Pitchfork, their lead singer was a first name kind of guy), which kind of stunned me. She could easily beat up all of Vampire Weekend, and I hope she’s figured that out by now. His name is Ezra and he went to Columbia and he made the best album of 2008 and he self-titled it after the band he called Vampire Weekend because he has no self-awareness.
Stay Positive (2008) by the Hold Steady
Craig Finn’s bar band laureate, the beerfly troubadour blah blah blah what’s important to note for the purposes of this article is that the Hold Steady were not played in the car, or at least not very much. That’s a personal sound, for my father. I suspect. It was almost too powerful. I have zero recollection of Stay Positive for the time, apart from some late night speaker level spins. A Midwestern bard pickled by a few flings too many. The Springsteenian dick-swinging works even better than Born to Run in some cases because Craig Finn is mostly just talking about something that happened to your buddy last week. Not some short-sighted assertion that we need to “get out of this town.” The lack of grandeur accentuates the everyman charisma that had become the Hold Steady’s trademark. In a way, I hold the Hold Steady in the same esteem as the best abstract artists. You could probably paint something like what’s hanging in front of you, or write some poetry about a weird one night stand, but you’ll never be able to do it as well as they did. “Sequestered in Memphis” is merely the second best song on the albums mentioned in this piece, the best is coming in the next paragraph, but it is the only song throughout the writing process I felt the need to put on while writing about it, which I think kneecapped the whole operation.
Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009) by Animal Collective
I had to find this one, kind of. This was locked away. This was something one of the Idle Time people liked, that my dad did not. Charitably, he said, “Animal Collective will make the best 30 seconds of music you have ever heard, followed by 3 minutes of nonsense”. I need to rebrand this band. I need to convince Holy Bee it came out 60 years ago. This was clearly something one of my dad’s friends begged him to listen to because they had good taste. But it was on the iTunes, when I was filling out my first iPod, it does meet the requirements, and goddamn did if it didn’t change my whole fucking life. I remember where I was when I first heard “My Girls”. The best music you’ve ever heard, followed by some amount of junk, my ass. Animal Collective is my second favorite band, behind the Beatles, so, the less I say about them the better. What if Brian Wilson got to do whatever he wanted and Van Dyke Parks didn’t feed him L.A. speed? What if you made an entire album out of the bliss that is listening to “Tomorrow Never Knows” with all the windows down on your way to the Pacific Ocean? What if you knew that nobody could ever judge you, and you could just be you, yourself completely and totally? Questions, answered and itemized by the magicians from Maryland. A true pop marvel, my dad probably likes 20% of this album, and in a post defending the elderly, for the first time, I will say its ok to be old and wrong and bad and stupid and not know anything about music because how could you not fall deeply in love with a song like “Bluish”! Like seriously listen to “Bluish”. Tell me to my face you don’t like it, while it’s playing.
Blame It On Gravity (2008) by the Old 97’s
Bike riding album story time. There was a dip, outside the house where my grandfather happened to end his life, where the puddle eroded, and I used to jump the bike like I won the lottery. I got the bike in a raffle. It was the first time I ever felt like I won something (this probably was not true, waking up was a victory), I was about nine, and I didn’t take the fancy bike, I took the mountain bike, that would take hard work, that would take the help of my late grandfather to get working properly because I knew my grandfather could do it and help me and fix it. The Old 97’s were the first real band I ever saw, at the Fillmore. Their lead guitarist was a ripper! Rhet Miller was an utter heartthrob, I think. Couldn’t really tell because of the contact high. I had to leave early because I was getting fried by the hippies that were there for the opening act called I Love Math or maybe a nice smart man by the name of Hayes Carll. Audience smoked a shit ton of weed, and I get green’d out at indoor concerts to this day. I knew my grandfather could help me catch my first fish. I knew he would always take care of my family the best he could despite himself. I catch air on asphalt depression in the car and I think of the old man.
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (2007) by Spoon
Spoon is a consistent outfit. All they do is execute extremely listenable rock and roll music. This was a band at the peak of their powers, doing whatever they wanted, and it got a lot of play in the Corolla. Expressing themselves wholly and beautifully. This was the second band I saw live, they opened for Death Cab For Cutie in Berkeley. Great show, got high again, still. That’s fine, one of my impermeable beliefs is that people should be allowed to smoke weed at concerts. Even if it makes me sick and scared.
I wanna see Animal Collective with the Holy Bee. Next line redacted…
On the subject of Spoon and Animal Collective (wow it’s been a week since I worked on this and they’re still linked), a person on X, the everything app, asked, what’s the best American band of the last 25 years? They specified American because assumably if you asked the question generally the answer would just be Radiohead, which would be correct. (Sorry folks, facts are facts, all the bands you care about are dead). American band is interesting…the Strokes, the White Stripes, Wilco? How many great albums could they manage? About two, respectively. We all agreed (meaning my online friends and I) the answer is Animal Collective, which would scandalize not only my father but the listening base here, but hey, we like our psychedelic beach boy pop soft shell crab sandwich wooks the way they are, making exciting music consistently, with stretches of 30 seconds that will make you shudder and goose up. Hint, it’s not 30 seconds at a time, its 3 minutes. It’s a fine line to tightrope traverse, for this crowd, a sweet spot between not experimental, but not Top 40. At least not post-Y2K Top 40, even though I do have a soft spot for some hits. I think it would be absurd to worship the Beatles like I do and not respect the craft that goes into something like “Love Song” by Sara Bareilles, a McCartney acolyte knows in their bones that’s money. But still, I’m a young guy, I like exciting experimental music. My favorite author, Thomas Pynchon, spent a lot of time making up silly fictional names, but spent an order of magnitude greater time learning physics, philology, and copyright law. These are what the best artists do. They seamlessly combine the high, and the low, they make dumb people like me feel smart for it, and give smart people an excuse to indulge their base instincts. Spoon is the best American rock band of the 21st century for those who are turned on but would not prefer to tune in, let alone drop out. Next time I see Daniel Britt I’m gonna shake his hand.
The ‘59 Sound (2008) by the Gaslight Anthem
This is the least memorable album featured on this blog and I am the only one who cares about it anymore, but the Holy Bee became obsessed with it for a time, for reasons I only slightly understand, I guess. (It was about two verses in one song that hit like a freight train, I’m not telling which — ed.) Put yourselves in the shoes of someone who is on the cusp of 30 but is ranting and raving about American Idiot by Green Day (Jesus, really taking the gloves off on this one, eh? — ed.), this is how you find that x, that variable result.
The first band I first saw live technically, having already mentioned Old 97’s and Spoon, was Rain, a Beatles cover band, at the Crest Theater, which Holy Bee subscribers…my father should come up with a term for his readers, maybe he has already? (I used “beeketeers” once, and was immediately appalled at myself — ed.) Let’s go with The Hive. The Hive probably knows about the Crest Theater. It’s a really cool spot, a legitimately impressive landmark of Sacramento. I’m taking my little brother to see a stand-up show there this spring. My mother, working there for several years, handled the arrival of Dwayne Johnson of all people. The Crest was a destination in those belittled, Sacramentan terms. His manager came up to her and said…“The Rock wants some Peanut M&M’s”. The luxuries of fame…
The Gaslight Anthem and, good lord, Kings of Leon, made some good waterpark music but golly gee it does not hold up. Listen to any random rock album from the late 60s or early 70s and it will be better. Also the 80’s and 90’s and 00’s, Movies work the same way. Things are just worse. I’m going to briefly become mean, but this is the kind of music your cousin who just got out of jail listens to. Born again Christian meth-addict jams, but secular somehow. Against Me! is much better. The Gaslight Anthem…they’re fairly shit. Across the board. I went back and listened to the whole album to make sure. You’d be much better served listening to the half-sold arena cryptocurrency laughing stock that are the Black Keys, whose Danger Mouse-produced album Brothers I loved…when I was 12 years old. The way to get better than rock music like this on the whole is too communistic for this red-blooded patriot forum (? — ed.) but we will see if attention spans are restored once First World access to fresh water becomes a violent proposition. Listen to some hot-blooded music tomorrow. Listen to Mclusky.
Watch the Throne (2011) by Jay Z & Kanye West (a.k.a The Throne)
I needed to bulk this out, and I know 2011 is a little past the time period we are discussing, but it still actually counts as long as I never write for this blog*** again. I’ve been listening to Loveless by My Bloody Valentine while finishing up this draft, but I decided to put on The Throne while tackling briefly rap and the Holy Bee, again. The Throne is the team up of world-destroyers Kanye West and Jay Z. This is still, really, really awesome. I had to come by rap on my own, for the most part as far as I can remember, kind of. I remember vividly HATING Lil’ Wayne at his peak (more on this later), among other embarrassments, and in elementary and early middle school I was firmly a rock and roll purist. Now I can tell you, conservatively, 100 hundred artists in the genre of rap that would do nothing other than make you, reader, feel old. I was born in 1998 after all. I’ve been enjoying BABYTRON. Biggie Smalls is still the best to ever do it, but, and it pains me to say it, Kanye is a formative creative force in my life. His run from College Dropout to The Life of Pablo, is just indescribable. I’m sorry. He’s a stupid evil asshole now, or maybe he always was, but when he said “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” he was right and it ruled! Jimmy Page is by all rights a complete pedophile and I’m somehow less embarrassed to listen to Led Zeppelin. Oh goddammit, “Otis” just came on.
My dad, bless his heart, played Watch the Throne in the car with us during this period, I think. I already knew about Kanye, the Holy Bee had bought me an iPod and showed me how to move files from his iTunes to my device, so College Dropout, in particular, was in heavy rotation. Listen, something important to note about Lil’ Wayne. My dad was also my middle school history teacher, and in an idle moment I said Lil’ Wayne is trash (I was 11) and my father SPOKE UP FOR LIL’ WAYNE (something to the effect of, “not as bad as you think”) He was right. I think Holy Bee gets painted in a certain light by exactly just me, but he has a real appreciation for genius of all flavors and colors, and listening to songs like “Murder to Excellence” in headphones on the family desktop changed the game for me, and I would not be surprised if it affected him too in some small way (his answer could also be “hell no”). It was a contentious relationship I’d imagine, him and contemporary Black music. I haven’t really talked at all about Kanye with my dad despite him being probably my second favorite artist of all time (completely embarrassing), and we are comfortable talking about anything artistic. As an anti-Bush guy, did he feel excited when Kanye said what he did? Or did he feel it was disrespectful, not the time and place. Did he feel disappointed when he started rehashing Goebbels? That’s the benefit of never being a Kanye fan, I guess. At any rate, the Holy Bee is not rap-averse, in fact rap-curious, just there is a time and a place and a feeling where it works. My time and place and feeling is when I wake up and it lasts until I go to sleep. And I love it.
Thank you for spending this time listening to me yap. Check out my brother’s podcast that I produce here: https://www.youtube.com/@WinningTimeTapes
Email me at cdsnhwr98@gmail.com
And now a few footnotes from the elderly relic Holy Bee…
*Some parenthetical editorial remarks aside, I’ve tried to stay out of the way here, but this is the one part I take issue with. My parenting advice to the boys was usually quoting someone cooler than me (eg. Lester Bangs — no, not even Lester Bangs, Cameron Crowe via Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs.) Now will be no exception, I am going to throw some Rick Rubin at you: “Creativity is not a rare ability. It is not difficult to access. Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It’s our birthright. And it’s for all of us.” So being creative is your business (along with caring for “(hu)mankind,” as per Jacob Marley). Of course I’m pleased when people read what I write, but I write this website first and foremost for me.
** The timeless silver 160-gig physical click-wheel 6th generation iPod Classic, the pinnacle of all human technology as a far as I’m concerned.
*** In 2022, I officially retired the word “blog” for the Holy Bee of Ephesus because it’s dated and passe and always struck me as a very silly word. “Website,” “platform,” or “red-blooded patriot forum” are all acceptable substitutes.
December 2008…the year of Stay Positive, Vampire Weekend, Blame It On Gravity, and yes, The ’59 Sound. The Holy Bee of Ephesus website was up and running by now, and I had just posted my experience (the first of two) as a member of a paranormal investigation team, if you can believe it
Holy Bee of Ephesus 