On Transitioning in Public Spaces

I’ve been avoiding writing some version of this post for some time, but here we are.

Okay. I’m trans. If you’ve been reading this for a while, if you follow my Twitter, or if you know me from elsewhere, you’ve probably noticed something going on. I mean, this blog used to be named after me, or rather my birth name. It was embedded in the URL! But in 2020, during the pandemic that seemed to destroy everybody’s mental and/or physical health, I was stuck at home, slowly falling apart as I finally took the time to try to make sense out of my seemingly permanently confused gender identity. Beyond that and the fact that live music wasn’t really happening, I was also faced with a conundrum of writing for a website whose very name misrepresented me to my core.

First I had to find my own name. I went with the most obvious choice to me, the only choice that ever really made sense to me: Patti. Is it an homage to Patti Smith? Well, sorta. I mean, it is. It’s not like I can even defend every song of hers, or every thing she’s ever done. But unlike plenty of producers of mainstream media, she’s always been one to openly subvert society’s expectation of gender performance, and I have always admired that in a unique way. At a certain point, I had to just move forward and stop endlessly questioning every decision I had to make. I accepted the uncertainty, the risk, and the vulnerability. What else could I do? Delaying further became increasingly painful.

And then I had to rename the website. Now it’s Metronomic Underground, a blatant reference to one of Stereolab’s most kosmische songs. In the process, I undertook the tedious task of updating every single internal link on the blog. I also had to rename my musical pseudonym. Ironically, I had originally chosen The Nowhere Man in 2008 specifically in reference to the agender or genderfluid character in the Yellow Submarine film, which fascinated me since childhood. However, the drawbacks associated with that name had become too great. For one thing, there’s a million other people also using it. So now I’m Chromatic Apparition. I think it suits me and my music better.

Earlier this year, I’d decided I should try to write a post in commemoration of this blog’s 15th anniversary, sort of like I had for the 10th, in order to properly introduce the new blog name. I also wanted to celebrate five years in Berlin and perhaps allude to my personal changes. But life got in the way and I never found the time. It didn’t help that I didn’t really know what to say.

Well, now I do. As previously posted, I went to five concerts in the span of two weeks after a very long lull. I’ve written some about the experience of live music during a pandemic, particularly now that most people are ignoring it, downplaying it, denying it, or trying to find their peace with it and have a good time despite it. But something else struck me hard these past two weeks. In the past, despite timidly identifying as non-binary, I believe I was generally seen as a man and afforded some of the typical privileges of men. At this point, I’m about a year into hormone replacement therapy, and I seem to be generally treated as a woman, which usually brings me joy. However, people in public spaces treat me quite a bit differently now, which does not always bring me joy!

At all of the four large-scale concerts I recently attended, I experienced multiple incidents of people threatening my space in ways I’d rarely dealt with before. I was pushed and jostled constantly without any sign of concern or apology. I was hit hard with a bag without any sort of acknowledgment. People repeatedly intruded into my space without comment. When I protested, I was often completely ignored, as if I didn’t exist. I stood powerless as a man used his female partner as a battering ram to barge into my spot. He had the presence of mind to ask if he was bothering anyone, but when I responded in the affirmative, he looked right past me and pretended not to hear. The Beach House show was probably the worst experience of them all, despite that that was the one show to which I hadn’t gone alone. My partner, who is also a woman, intervened on my behalf on two occasions, but was only barely met with better success.

My life in public spaces outside of concerts hasn’t been much better. I’ve had men blatantly cut me off and push into my space on public transit. I get interrupted more often. I’ve been overlooked and ignored by service personnel at bars and in other queues. I’ve had bored men start talking to me and asking me questions despite my obvious disinterest.

It’s not like none of these things happened to me before. They did. But it was different. It was infrequent and less of a pattern. It wasn’t every time I went out. If I spoke up, I could usually get my aggressor’s attention and sometimes even argue for my space back. I mean, even the way people look at me has changed. Men used to make eye contact in order to assess how threatening I might be, and I always looked away first and presumably made it clear who was dominant. Women rarely made eye contact with me if not necessary. While earlier in transition, I was frequently looked at with confusion or open disgust or contempt, and that hasn’t completely gone away. Now, if I don’t get that treatment, men size up my body; my eyes are an afterthought. On the other hand, women do actually look at me now, and sometimes we even politely negotiate for an open seat on public transit; at least, until a man simply skips right past us and takes it for himself.

I’m aware that there are other factors at play here as well. I was never particularly fond of large crowds, and I didn’t exactly enjoy many of the physical aspects of going to concerts. I’ve probably lost some of the resistance to that discomfort that I built up over the years before the pandemic. I also know that people are restless at the moment and ready to party hard to make up for the time they feel they’ve lost. There are probably still plenty of people who still aren’t comfortable with concerts, which means the balance of people who do show up is perhaps skewed towards the rowdier, ruder, and more reckless fans.

This is all profoundly bizarre for me. Everything about transitioning is bizarre. I don’t say that to mean anything negative about transitioning in itself. It’s rather the experience of transitioning in society that is needlessly stigmatized and uniquely challenging. I’ve never been happier with my identity and my body, and yet there are countless struggles in practically every facet of my life. I just want to live my life, seek the care and community I need, and not have to worry about my safety or comfort any more than I did in the past. But if my concertgoing experiences continue in this trend, it is not likely that I will be going out as often as I did in, say, 2019. I’m not happy about that. I don’t know how else to feel right now. Maybe I’ll find some other way to spend my time and money. Or maybe I’ll build my confidence and learn to assert my needs more effectively.

Ten Years of Music Reviews

Today marks ten years since I posted my first review on this blog: Morrissey's 48th birthday concert at the Pageant in St. Louis, Missouri. It's hard to believe that I've managed to write almost 200 posts on this blog in the meantime. I have no plans of stopping now, but as I mentioned in my previous post, I'm in the process of moving to Berlin, where I expect to continue growing my tastes and expanding my interests. I will miss the wonderful festivals and the plentiful concerts by local and touring acts that grace the Austin music scene, but I suspect that Berlin has its own treasures to uncover.

Quite a bit has changed in ten years, both personally and in terms of the music industry at large. Ten years ago, when I was at the peak of my collector's mania, I was living in St. Louis and second-hand vinyl was plentiful and cheap. Hence, I amassed a huge collection of vinyl often purchased as cheap as a dollar per record. Online retailers such as iTunes were already growing in popularity at that time, and CDs were already clearly on the way out, so they were generally also plentiful and cheap.

Now I'm in the midst of packing my things in preparation for an international move. While I'm considering what to take, I'm substantially trimming my physical music collection. Those cheap 90s CDs with terrible packaging that I criticized in one of my first posts were some of the first things to go. As previously mentioned in my post about selling my old Devo records, my tastes have also changed somewhat, which made getting rid of some things easy. However, my preferences on how to collect have only continued to evolve, and since that post I've even gotten rid of the Hot Potatoes greatest-hits album that I advocated for.

In that case, I at least kept a digital copy. Since hard drives are so cheap, it's an easy choice to keep a lossless copy of a CD whose packaging is unimpressive but whose musical contents are still worthwhile. (I've written about that before, too.) Even vinyl records have started to lose some of their appeal to me. At this point, I only want to keep my absolute favorites, the prized rarities, the limited presses from my friends, or the ones with the incredible artwork. Considering how expensive new vinyl is, especially compared to lossless digital downloads, it's rarely worth it for me anymore.

Ironically, I still love record stores, even as they continue to transition to selling more and more vinyl and there is less and less that I actually want to buy in them. There's still an appeal to the hunt and the random chance that leads to a new discovery. And anyway, I no longer feel obligated to indefinitely keep everything I buy: I can always spin an album for a few months and then decide to pass it back into circulation. This gets to the heart of a complicated issue: the matter of collecting versus curating. The reality is that there is too much good music to possibly own it all.

Streaming is a convenient middle ground, but I'm not entirely sold on it. On one hand, the low royalties associated with it are well-documented and the source of much consternation. On the other, it does make music widely accessible in a legal manner that was never possible before. Some royalties are better than none, and the discovery aspect is real. Despite my hesitation, I can't deny that Spotify is incredibly useful at times. I still love SoundCloud, too, even if I'm concerned for their long-term stability.

The increasing market share of streaming services reinforces the question of the ephemerality of music. For better or worse, I still cling to the notion of possessing music, but now I accept digital possession as valid in a way that I never let myself before. However, even that concept of possession is changing for me. Do I really need to have a flac or mp3 of every song I like? Is it really worth tracking down every obscure b-side of a new favorite band? Why bother, when I can just find those tracks on a streaming service on the rare occasions that I actually want to hear them?

Obviously, I haven't quite made final decisions on these matters, and I suspect my preferences will continue to change. In the meantime, I'll still be going to concerts and writing up reviews when I can. After ten years, I'm happy to report that I still enjoy live music and critical analysis thereof. I'll still be listening to as much recorded music as ever in one format or another, and I will probably continue to occasionally get inspired enough to write about that, too.

Recent Changes

I'd like to do something a little different and introduce a few changes to this blog.

Over the past months and weeks, after spending a lot of time writing reviews of all the concerts I've been attending, I started thinking about some bigger picture ideas about music. My first thought was to write a post explaining my changing musical interests and directions, and I may still write such an essay, but in the meantime I took the more measured step of writing an About page. My previous attempts at introduction didn't feel representative anymore, so I decided I needed a fresh start at explaining the purpose of this blog. I also moved the Music Game to its own page in the process.

Then I decided that I wanted to provide more space for the opening acts of the concerts I've attended. A few (e.g. Haii Usagi or Other Lives) have always stood out to me, but many were not properly labeled, and some were not even scored. I've gone back and applied retrospective scores where necessary in best faith of my thoughts then and now.

This led to a realization that there were several formatting issues that I wanted to clean up. Most are so minuscule that I expect no one to notice them except myself, but in the process, I reexamined almost every post I've written. Along the way, I corrected the stray typo somehow left unnoticed for years, I expanded my usage of labels, and I added notes where I felt like a comment or update was necessary. My early posts were often rambling, inconsistent, or even sloppy, and while I haven't changed their occasionally idiosyncratic nature, I have intermittently added a comment to contextualize some of my ideas.

I don't expect anyone to suddenly feel inspired to re-read my old posts – any changes I have made are decidedly minor. But if someone were to stumble into the archaeology of this blog, I want to present a slightly more consistent perspective. At any rate, I do encourage readers with any curiosity to review the (relatively) new About page.

I also noticed one other thing when reviewing my old posts. I used to write about a wider variety of topics (not just concerts!) and many of these posts were shorter and more to the point. Since I think about music a lot and frequently have realizations or ideas that don't fit inside a standard review format, I want to again open myself to the opportunity of writing different types of posts. Don't expect a constant stream of two-sentence nonsense blurbs, but don't be surprised if you see the occasional shorter, less structured exposition of some musical topic on my mind.

The Music Game

I'd like to introduce a new feature of Patti's Music Reviews: the appropriately-titled Music Game. Inspired by the Film Walrus' Movie Game, this is simply an exercise of one's creative ability to think of songs that fit a set of conditions. If you look on the right side of this blog, just below the description, you should see a subsection containing the game's basic interface. [Edit 2014.06.05: It is now located on its own page and linked from the top of the website.]

The rules are simple. Press the button that reads "Draw Cards". You will see three short words, phrases, or statements appear. Each of these items or cards represents a theme, topic, or other element distinguishable in modern music. The idea is simply to name a song that meets the criteria of at least two of the cards.

For example, I just drew "Subject of a documentary", "Reinvention or genre shift", and "City". How about David Bowie's "A New Career in a New Town" from 1977's Low? I don't know if it was ever the subject of a documentary (although Bowie certainly has been), but the instrumental song stands as part of Bowie's shift from glam, funk, and soul into experimental and electronic realms. And if the word "town" in the title isn't close enough to city, then what about the fact that the album is part of the classic Berlin Trilogy?

Anyway, the subject matter runs a wide spectrum, including lyrics, genres, statistics, history, personnel, and technical information. We've tried to keep any one card from being too obscure or difficult, but in knowing that challenging cards can sometimes be the most fun, we struck the balance of including some of these ideas but encouraging the pick-two-of-three concept.

Playing in a group is recommended, either by taking turns or by each throwing out suggestions. As such, there is no "winning" or even really any scorekeeping, although if you really are the competitive type (can you tell that I am not?), you could certainly devise such mechanisms. The key is to be creative and have fun. Liberal interpretation of the cards is welcomed, if not encouraged.

If a particular set of cards seems totally impossible, then try to name an artist or band whose material fits the descriptors. Alternately, if you want an extra challenge, try to name a song that fits every combination of two cards, or try to name a song that fits all three cards. As another example, I just drew "Dissonance", "10+ album band", and "Guitar solo". Almost too easy – how about anything by Sonic Youth? Take "Candle" off of Daydream Nation, as long as you can call that instrumental guitar noise break a "guitar solo", which I will.

Have fun! Feel free to leave comments or suggestions for improvements or alternate gameplay styles.

P.S. I know that the game is somewhat rockist, or at least biased towards certain genres and styles, but that's what the authors know the most about. You can certainly try to apply classical or jazz works to the cards, but it may not be easy. There's no reason not to try if you'd like, though.

P.P.S. I should explain the "we" I've spoken of: most of the credit for the game goes to the Film Walrus and Jim Sabo. Thanks guys!

Why I've Been Absent

Dear readers, I apologize for my continued absence. I know that I always apologize for not writing much, but I have been fairly busy, you know, living my life and earning degrees and things. Anyway, these days I’m living in Germany and I’ve had enough going on here that I haven’t been able to make writing music reviews a high priority. I’m still willing to do it, though. For example, I might see Nouvelle Vague or Pere Ubu in the next month, and writing live reviews isn’t too hard to do. Of course, I did see the Junior Boys in New York City at Webster Hall in late July, but I was way too busy with my transatlantic move to write a review. So, we’ll see what happens. Don’t expect regularity, but if inspiration strikes, I’ll write something up.

I have been finding some good music while here. I got my hands on a few works of classic Neue Deutsche Welle (German New Wave) and that’s been great, or I could review the Boys Next Door’s album (their only one before they changed their name to The Birthday Party).

Statement of Intent: An Introduction of Sorts

[Edit 2014.04.21: Please note this post is very old and no longer accurately represents the content of this blog. You should instead read the About page. This post remains available for reference (and possibly humor). After all, I suppose there is some value in knowing how things started here.]

I'd like to do something a little different for once. I'd like to provide a sort of statement of intent, or an explanation of where I'm coming from when I write reviews. This will be a bit biographical, but I hope that you will bear with me as I attempt to clarify why I hold the opinions that I have. I barely ever introduced myself on this blog, so I'd like to do that in a more organized fashion now. (My previous attempts can be found in the opening paragraphs of my first and fifth posts.)

If you can't tell based on a quick statistical analysis of where my live reviews come from, I currently live in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. I am a student, and although I don't study music, I have been playing music as a hobby for about eight years. I have played in a few different bands of various degrees of seriousness, but my solo act (The Nowhere Man) is the only one currently active. Because of my background in music, I evaluate other people's music with a modest understanding of music theory and a degree of experiential knowledge. [Edit 2014.01.05: It should hopefully be obvious that I no longer live in St. Louis. I also haven't been a student in a very long time, and my own musical adventures continue to grow and evolve.]

Perhaps I owe it to my father for more or less introducing me to good music, but it wasn't until years later that I began to appreciate many of his favorite bands (The Beatles, Neil Young, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, etc.). My interest in music began with what was on the radio (bland modern rock), then went through industrial music (Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy, Einstürzende Neubauten, etc.), and has now taken me primarily in two different directions. The first path is the best of contemporary "alternative" bands, like Radiohead, The Faint, Belle & Sebastian, and in particular, The Smashing Pumpkins. The second path correlates moderately to the favorite bands of those bands on the first path, such as The Cure, The Smiths, Bauhaus, Joy Division, et cetera. All of these bands fall under the heading of post-punk, and I remember that when I first learned about these and other similar bands, I devoured every album I could find. To this day, finding "new" post-punk music is often more exciting for me than learning about new releases. [Edit 2014.01.05: I certainly wouldn't describe my tastes in such a sweeping binary anymore, even though the bands mentioned by name remain some of my favorites.]

Post-punk is arguably a very broad title, and I think that's fine. After the rebellious torch of punk music exploded on itself in 1977, the next ten years or so brought out some very creative music, and the most common thread is simply that it was born out of the energy of punk rockers that grew tired of the constraints of punk. Somehow, much of this music was largely overlooked at the time, especially in America. For me, post-punk brings together many aspects of modern music that appeal to me greatly. Of course, every genre has the possibility of doing this, and occasionally, each genre does. There are merits to be found in nearly every corner of the musical spectrum, but I find that certain corners tend to yield better results than others. This could be attributed to my own inherent prejudices. You decide.

For the second half of this post, I would like to spend some time explaining my opinions on various aspects of music. Hopefully, this will help make sense out of my reviews. Everybody notices different things about music and is attracted or bored by certain aspects of songs. I would like to explain what catches my ear and appeals to me, since these are the things that guide me in writing reviews.

The first thing that usually grabs me when I hear a piece of music is simply how it sounds; that is, what instrumentation was used and how it was played and processed to end up sounding how it does. I absolutely love songs that just sound different. I like guitars, but I often like them best when they are used in unconventional ways or when they hardly sound like guitars. Using unusual instruments or performance techniques or recording methods or processing tools really attracts me.

The opposite to this is a band that continually uses the same instruments and tones with little or no change in total sound. This happens to be one of my biggest problems with a lot of metal music – the continual sonic attack of distorted guitars means that the notes and texture get lost and muddled in the mix. This can be desirable, but overuse leads to a generally uninteresting sound with no auditory depth. This is similar to how I feel about screaming. I usually can't understand what screamers are screaming about, and it is rather alienating for someone to expend so much energy into something that is largely ununderstandable. I prefer texture and melody over a harsh, vocal cord-destroying scream.

The next thing I'll probably notice about a song is its structure. This takes a bit more effort to analyze, but it's usually not too hard to figure out if a song is fairly static or has several different parts with different rhythms or textures. I'll take a dynamic song with several diverse parts over a verse-chorus-verse-chorus song any day. Everyone can write songs using the 12-bar blues or just three chords borrowed from the folk or punk back catalog – I'm far more interested in complex chord structures, tricky contrapuntal solos, a variety of multivariate segments, or completely avant-garde or nontraditional song structures. In particular, highly repetitious music can really bore me. Rarely is a chorus worth repeating more than three times in a song. I fault a lot of dance and hip-hop music for their repetition, but at the same time, these genres often excel at making really cool rhythms and beats, which can make an otherwise bland song quite interesting.

After general sound and structure, the main thing left to observe is the lyrics. Simply because of the devotion necessary to focus on all the words and make sense of them, this is usually the last thing I notice in a song, but that certainly does not mean I don't think lyrics are important. To the contrary, a song with little else to its credit can be extremely meritorious if its lyrics are top-notch. However, inane or prejudiced lyrics, even in an otherwise cool-sounding song, nearly instantly turn me off. I love listening to a song and learning something new or seeing something from an angle I'd never thought of before. Therefore, I'm incredibly tired of hearing songs about nothing more than trying to sleep with members of the opposite sex of the singer. Music about love/romance/sex is so incredibly dominant that it becomes a serious bore to listen to a new song that rehashes the same idea already sung about hundreds of times. Some bands, though, have realized that even these topics can be approached from new or alternative angles and made more interesting (for example, The Faint's "Casual Sex" or "Worked Up So Sexual"). Of course, a songwriter could simply pick a different topic and come up with something creative.

Generally speaking, I like it when bands try something out of the usual status quo. I love a healthy dose of experimentation, and I adore songs that just sound "out there" and cool and different. When I review, I tend to disapprove of bowing to mainstream interests and thus to appreciate the nontraditional.

Thanks for reading. Let me know what you think.

[Edit 2009.04.04: I'd like to clarify my grading scale here, too. I use letter grades. That means a "C" is average, "B" is fairly good, "A" is great, "D" is disappointing, and "F" is outright horrible. I use pluses and minuses as appropriate. I rarely give an "A+", since that implies that the work was quite nearly perfect, but I also don't give many "F" and "D" scores since I don't really like bad music and I usually avoid it.]

Electro Pop at Its Best

I caught wind yesterday of a post by fellow blogger idyllicmollusk that I figured was worth giving some attention to. I present you with "The Excessive Jubilance of Electro Pop":

http://www.sodblog.com/media/musical-sod/the-excessive-jubilance-of-electro-pop/

In other news, I noticed that the formatting on my posts is looking weird to me. Has this always been the case? The spacing is different for some of the posts and I don't like that. I'll try to fix that eventually.

[Edit 2008.10.06: I finally went through and did my best to correct all the weird formatting issues. I have no idea how things had got so weird and ugly.]

[Edit 2008.11.22: idyllicmollusk has become The Czech and now has her own blog from which she now hosts the above essay.]