Saturday, March 16, 2024

Liberation (TOTR 470)

 


Liberation (TOTR 470)

-originally aired on WTTU 88.5 FM The Nest on Saturday, March 16-, 2024

-audio archive posts after the live episode


The Tennessee Freedom Singers - Tennessee Rise

Lindsay Lou & Billy Strings - Freedom 

Zo Tobi - Blessed Unrest 

Anna Surento - Wake Up Now

Mat Callahan et. al. - Stand and Fight

Average Joey - Bumper Sticker

The Fellow Travellers - Let's Go Walking

Brian Claflin & Ellie Grace - I'm Gonna Walk It with You

MGMT & Christine and the Queens - Dancing In Babylon

Gojira - Liberation

Refused - Liberation Frequency

Thunderclap Newman - Something In The Air

Afro Celt Sound System - Life Begin Again

Brewer & Shipley - Witchi-Tai-To

Ali Lizzi & Michael Shlofmitz - We Are One in Harmony

Sarva-Antah - Earth My Body

Sun Drum Forest - We are one with the infinate Sun

Akron/Family - Sun Will Shine

Kula Shaker - Great Hosannah

The Peace Poets - Our Liberation

Rafeef Ziadah - We Teach Life

Darryl Purpose - Song for Rachel Corrie

David Rovics - Once the Last Palestinian's Killed



Saturday, March 9, 2024

We Laugh At Danger (TOTR 469)

-originally aired on WTTU 88.5 FM The Nest on Saturday, March 9, 2024

-listen to the live audio archive here: Stream episode We Laugh At Danger - TOTR 469 by Teacher On The Radio podcast | Listen online for free on SoundCloud


Austin Lucas - Baby, I'm An Anarchist

Against Me! - Bob Dylan Dream 

Against Me! - We Laugh At Danger

Against Me! - I Was a Teenage Anarchist 

Laura Jane Grace, Joan Jett, & Miley Cyrus - Androgynous

Laura Jane Grace - Dysphoria Hoodie

Laura Jane Grace - Hard Feelings

Laura Jane Grace - Punk Rock In Basements

Dim Wizard - Believe in the Magic

Dollar Signs - Legend Tripping

New Junk City - Cleveland

Holy Locust - Live Wire

Holy Locust - Fallen Crown

Holy Locust - Breaking The Wheel

Nick Shoulders - Blue Endless Highway

Nick Shoulders -Won't Fence Us In

Nick Shoulders - Snakes and Waterfalls

Hurray For The Riff Raff - Little Black Star

Hurray For The Riff Raff - The Body Electric

Hurray For The Riff Raff - PRECIOUS CARGO

Hurray For The Riff Raff - Rican Beach

Hurray For The Riff Raff - Alibi

Hurray For The Riff Raff - Vetiver

Hurray For The Riff Raff - Ogallala

Croy and the Boys - I Know About No Money

Micah Schnabel - Blame It On Geography 

Harbottle and Jonas - Love Will Tear Us Apart 

Here Comes a Regular - Against Me!


Wednesday, March 6, 2024

The World Needs 'Hurray For The Riff Raff' Right Now - Live Review 3/5/24 Brooklyn

 







I needed these songs before they were written. I didn’t know how much I needed them, and it seems Alynda Segarra knew they needed to write them, because the world needed them. The world needed the new songs by Hurray for the Riff Raff. 

I needed these songs in constant rotation since the album dropped 12 days ago. I needed these songs on headphones, on car trips, for ugly crying. I suddenly knew that I needed to hear these songs performed live by a tight and energetic band.

This means I needed to find a secondary market ticket to a sold out show. I needed to make spontaneous travel plans to one source of the Riff Raff origin story, New York City, specifically Brooklyn. I needed the sense of hungry trance and religious possession that provided the focus to make these plans, as ridiculous as that seemed at the moment. 

I achingly needed to hear Alynda Segarra sing these songs, play their acoustic guitar, and express gobs of humble gratitude in their brief remarks between songs. I especially needed to hear Alynda chant to the “rocks and stones” right along with the “books and poems” in “Vetiver.” May we all chant to the things that ground us and give us hope.

I emphatically needed to hear Alynda sing the lyrics in person to “Snake Plant,” this raggedy outlaw and addicts’ glorious tragedy rant prayer anthem hymn. I needed specifically to hear about all the daily life stuff that hobo travelers deal with just to survive. We need this song to survive, so we all needed to sing along with, with some arms raised, to this lyric invocation:

“Tattoo with a needle and thread.
Most of our old friends are dead,
TEST YOUR DRUGS
REMEMBER NARCAN
There's a war on the people,
What don't you understand?
There's fentanyl in everything,
Don't become an angel with a broken wing.
We need you back down here on earth,
Nothing is as painful as birth.”

Like we need that stanza, like right now. We need that song sung and loud. We need it in spraypaint stencil and graffiti. We need “Snake Plant” in the cities and the towns and in the trailers and the shacks and in the squats and on the street and all the places they mention in the song, line after line. We need to remember that harm reduction can come in a poem and a song to tattoo on the soul of too many addicts dying and we can finally say we want you to live and we can sing you this song, okay? 

I desperately needed Alynda to sing “Ogallala,” to bring the despair and dread of these days around to the unlikely hope and holler and even dance despite and because of it all. I need to hear them say that they are still here, that we are still living brightly and boldly and beware. We needed to stop saying we were born in the wrong time and embrace our time, as the conclusion to this song so deeply and defiantly does:

“I used to think I was born into the wrong generation
But now I know I made it right on time
To watch the world burn”

I prayerfully needed Alynda to quote Palestinian poetry in the closing rousing rowdy glory of “Pa’lante.” This was already a song about claiming one’s own narrative, with a nod to the ancestors and Segarra’s specifically Nuyorican lineage. This song leaves the audience ready to get back and get out and do their own work. We needed the energy to internalize and energize and carry us out into the damp late winter Brooklyn streets and to our homes and communities. 

I needed the sore feet from these boots to remind me to always wear my comfortable walking shoes with insoles to concerts, because I am old. As I contemplate how I am too old for this, Alynda reminded us that time is not real. I needed them to say that.

I needed a certain t-shirt but they were sold out in my size, so I settled for a sticker. I needed the promo poster tacked on a venue wall, so I helped myself toward the end of the show. I needed this immersive, completely communal, revelatory experience in the live and narrative universe being created by Hurray For The Riff Raff. 








Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Alynda Segarra’s Past Is Still Alive: Poem-Songs Of Grief For Our Slow Show Apocalypse

 

To say a folk record is filled with narrative concepts and literary world-building might just be the fancy way to say that the words were so vivid that they crushed you under the weight of their epic emotion. In this season of over-listening and so many things to love, you just wanted one more album to destroy you with a soggy ugly cry, but now it is happening again and again. Such is the prolific unkempt bent of ragged American folk music during this slow show apocalypse. 


It is only 6am, and I am weeping into my first cup of coffee in hopes that someone somewhere will start their day with the new Hurray For The Riffraff record called “The Past Is Still Alive,” and that the set’s threadbare hope and relentless grief will give to that strange somebody else: such a catharsis as this. In their aching sense of their poetic song lineage, the album opens with a momentary nod to Neil Young’s “Unknown Legend,” and Alynda Segarra’s word-turning Nuyorican-Beat debts to Bob Dylan, Eileen Myles, and Pedro Pietri drop-in-and-out-of-lines that stitch themselves to the listener’s soul with the superglue of forever human grit and hunger. 


The “songwriter as poet” was a big idea and book topic during previous folk revivals, but has seemed perhaps too simplistic since. But then Dylan grabbed the greatest literary award on earth, and we are talking about singer poets again. Just recently, a musician and a scholar clarified with the “poetic song verse” concept to always situate the lyrical poetics in their comprehensive ineffable sonic package. Alynda Segarra is a master class in these sung poetic bursts. With listen-after-listen to this new joint, it was stunning-stanza-after-stunning-stanza that would slay me in my shoes, take my breath away, and rip my beating heart right out of its chest. So many words on this record are ready made for graffiti, for postcards, for tattoos, and yes, for social media sharing. It already feels like these lyrics are scars on the ancestor-tree-trunks of our lives. 


Why do these characters suddenly know me better than I know myself and why I am thinking about my dead father too -- and why I am crying again, but I am also dancing too. Maybe it is because I left Detroit in ways that Segarra left New York and those same Woody Guthrie post-Kerouac hobo yearnings define my life too, as do all the compassionate weirdos and nomadic drifts and cultic solidarity in our marginal niches of defiance and desire. 


I can imagine other poet songwriters have tried to write a record this timeless for these times (actually have a few that I would keep in the same revered company as this), but there’s gentle but ceaseless gravity to these themes and to these lines, whereas this record joins its enclave of myth and legend already great, as if it was already written and already here, as coherent of a prayer to address our collective incoherence as I can dream or imagine. 


Maybe climate grief and familial grief are the same thing? Maybe we were really born to watch our nation dissolve and our world burn with such wide-eyed vulnerable open-armed intensity? Maybe when my counselor acknowledged that my music fandom was a highly reliable and recommended form of self-care, he intuitively understood how a record like this will help me cope with things that I otherwise couldn’t manage?


As our counterculture pasts and fates will have it, I remember encountering the younger Segarra as the fabulously-fringe traveler-character who populates these songs, when I first saw them sing at a rural southern DIY queer music festival around 20 years ago. As they would periodically pierce the indie music veil and as critics would sing their praises, I would whisper to myself: I remember them; I knew about them back when; I really like them. I would always say that I need to see them live, but then, I would just miss them. I finally caught their hometown set at the 2022 New Orleans JazzFest, when they were out supporting the “LIFE ON EARTH” album. 


Over the decades, I would learn one or more acclaimed tracks from each new Hurray For The Riff Raff drop every few years, but I never gave their catalog the deep-dive or hours-long headphone rabbit-hole that it deserves and requires. Until now. Now I am falling in, all in. 


If I am to believe all the buzz in the handful of days since “The Past Is Still Alive” dropped everywhere you get your music, I am not the only person who has temporarily ditched all their other artists and listening agendas to bask full-time in the powerful magnetic storytelling and loving queer protest art of Alynda Segarra and Hurray For The Riff Raff. 


-Andrew/Sunfrog

Tenasi

27 February 2024

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Now or Never (TOTR 468)

 

[pictured The Unlikely Heroes]

-for Black History Month, an episode of black and brown folks in punk and punk-adjacent music

-originally aired on WTTU 88.5 FM The Nest on Saturday, February 17, 2024

-audio archive posts after the live episode


The Black Tones - Rivers of Jordan

The Black Tones - Ghetto Spaceship

Brittany Howard - Power To Undo

Pure Hell - These Boots Are Made For Walking

Death - World In Disguise

The BellRays - Cold Man Night

Bad Brains - I Against I

TV On The Radio - Wolf Like Me

ESG - Dance

Fire Party - Walls of Mind

Shift - In Honor of Myself

JER - Breaking News! Local Punk Doubts Existence of Systemic Racism

Big Joanie - Fall Asleep

Guitar Gabby & The Txlips Band - Die Today

Generals of Monrovia - You Bring This On

Bloodplums - Trouble

Radkey - Seize

45 Adapters - Now Or Never

Xnecessityx - Humanifesto

Xnecessityx - If Not Now, When?

FEVER 333 - BURN IT

Thirdface - No Hope

Turnstile - Better Way

Alliteration - Reuse

Alliteration - Spinn

Skip the Needle - We Ain't Never Going Back

Unlikely Heroes - Sun

The Beatnigs - Burritos

Love Equals Death - Pray for Me


Tuesday, February 13, 2024

On the traveler’s trail with folk-punk messenger Average Joey and their new album Impermanence


 When folk-punk found me in need of folk-punk, more than 20 years ago, folk-punk fostered scruffy joy and defiance under clouds of anxiety and apocalypse. 

I keep craving and coming back to folk-punk today for the same honesty, the same over-sharing, the same grit and gravity that doesn’t do “toxic positivity,” but does do radical self-care and inclusive community and unconditional love as revolutionary survival skills. 


Enter the artist known as “Average Joey,” as one of the more real and relatable one-mand-bands in current folk-punk, a person who is doing all the things, and the things include a nomadic path, in a modestly tricked-out camper van, a life of voluntary subsistence that is ravenous with lived poetry encounters and festive eruptions, out on the margins. The political and existential crises have shifted a little in the intervening decades since my first folk-punk fits, that is, things have gotten even worse, but the ache for love and community to cope with daily life, while agitating and subverting “the powers,” has not.


I’d seen folk-punk coming on as a genre, long before I was fully immersed in Against Me! and Defiance, Ohio records and organizing a folk-punk festival on one August night in a rural Tennessee barn around 2003, because even before that I was reading Boxcar Bertha and watching my friends hop trains while we explored “the vanlife,” long before it was called the vanlife. We were ready for folk-punk as its all-encompassing thing that it would become, as soon as we saw a punk with a fiddle, a traveler kid with a banjo, maybe camping with friends on their communal land in remote California, maybe busking for dollars and change on the Asheville streets. 


Folk-punk helped me survive my last decade on the rural commune, helped me navigate the grief of war, and was as-safe-a-place-as-any to “act out” my last years of active addiction. Folk-punk was there when I got in heaps of trouble at work, when I wondered if the meager material and social benefits of “selling out” and getting a “real job” were actually worth it after all. 


Not unlike the account called “folk punk dad” and their great podcast “Back on the Grind,” I am that graying folk-punk grand-dad who still craves the visceral salve to every moral crisis that folk-punk-addresses. I am not necessarily saying folk-punk is a “new religious movement,” but as a generous form of outward anarchist praxis, it might be in the themes it explores and the mutual aid it practices. And now, the new Average Joey joint arrives to break and remake the hippypunk heart of me as spiritual seeker in the holy headphones, to supplement the typical places where one heals, in counseling sessions, on yoga mats, and at 12-step-meetings.


I first discovered Joey on the “Roots, Rednecks, and Radicals” podcast and was all-in right away, immediately blowing up their inboxes on multiple accounts with fanboy appreciation. Songs like “Cliche” or “Bro, I Told You I Contain Multitudes” or “Anarchists Who Don’t Do Anything” had me tapping along and whispering “that’s right” and “amen.” 


A quick scan of their web presence, and I learned they were also a prolific poet and zine-publisher, even releasing an audiobook of radical analyses of our collective context. Next thing you know, we are co-organizing a gig for Average Joey, in a storefront Unitarian Universalist church, in this-here micropolitan-college- town, because the venue Joey had played at previously when in these parts, that brewery had been essentially shut down by a coalition of cops, actual nazis, and anxious landlords, after said venue did the next right thing, by hosting one too many drag brunches.


Joey’s latest (Impermanence, out everywhere since 2/2/24) knocks the listener from the first bursts of the opening track called “Hello, Hell.” The raunchy keyboards get saucy from the gate, and it’s clear some crazed circus caravan has rolled into the town square. The piano suggests there might be a roadhouse saloon nearby, because how did that hobo fit that Steinway in his rucksack anyway? The tattooed-dancing-girl-vaudeville-vibes immediately made me think of mismatched striped stockings and early 00s Dresden Dolls and maybe crave some episodes of Carnival Row. The entire set is so laced with wonky samples, as to almost make us want to listen to this by candle-light on headphones, in the wee hours while microdosing (don’t worry my fellow sober pals, my default setting is psych-enough to not require microdosing). 


This 12-song and 45-minute album is a weird monk’s mindmeld, and everyone knows that Teacher On The Radio mainlines the mystical in most everything, but this is next-level real heart balm, the sacred seeking in practically every song surely gives this album a moral center and a narrative arc. As I finally scribble this review-essay from a modest Mardi Gras on the eve of the Lenten season, I am drawn again and again to the ripping revelation contained in “WTFWJF?”

Inspired by Joey’s readings in radical and historical Christianity, the opening lines lay out the thesis of my religious deconstruction that began in 2020: “Christ was crucified for sedition/Not for your sins.” That is, following Jesus meant public sedition against police brutality, not private atonements and liberal hand-wringing. Then with a refrain, Joey warns us about the war within every imperial church, one which spirit is surely losing: “Who do you serve/A Higher Purpose or authority?” Then: “Who do you worship/A Higher Power or powers that be.” I don’t practice Lent like I used to, but I reckon every leftist-Jesus-lover could gain strength from meditating on this track during the coming fast between feasts.


“Jesus Christ & Diogenes Walk Into A Bar” follows that, and tracks like “Indifference” and “Impermanence” and “Zen Tanks” and “No Thing,” all take different angles and many takes to explain our endless existential crises. The conclusion of “Impermanence” places the “poetic prophet” face-to-face with militaries and police and admits the difficult: “The pen is not quite as mighty/as the truth/That a Big Man With A Gun /Will do what he wants to.” Such honest admissions are also found in “Toxic & Fragile.” Talk about accepting some stuff that I cannot change. Talk about what is already one of my favorite new albums, released so far in 2024.


Look for Joey down the road. Imagine that he bags and instrument cases and canine companion are packed into the van and who knows who he’ll meet or what he’ll see as one called to the vagabond path, like the circuit-rider gospel barkers and painted carnies and holy medicine shows of old. This road show is because of Joey, a mystic-poet spun from a milieu that might include Walt Whitman and Willi Carlisle and always Dylan and maybe the Fugs or Holy Modal Rounders, not to mention their many folk-punk fellow travelers, and this all translates to politically-grounded transcendental troubadour with a box overflowing with left-adjacent empowering fanzines and stickers and patches, instead of gospel tracts. all available at the merch table. 


He’s humble about the itinerant singer’s actual mission while the world burns around us, the grief about avoidable tragedies that won’t keep Joey from trekking on. Amid it all, Joey is there, the traveling mendicant with a Patreon begging bowl. Watch their socials, because Average Joey might be on his way to your town, to shake up your day, to sing you a song in exchange for a bowl of soup, to tell a story and another story, recite some poems, park in your driveway or on your street, and enrich you from weariness again to a totally hungry human’s unreal hope. 


-Andrew/Sunfrog
Fat Tuesday/Ash Wednesday 2024


Saturday, February 10, 2024

Prove It To You (TOTR 467)

 

Prove It To You (TOTR 467)

-originally aired on WTTU 88.5 FM The Nest on Saturday, February 10, 2024

-archive drops after the live broadcast


Eurythmics - Power to the Meek 

Brittany Howard - Prove It To You

Carsie Blanton - Ain't We Got Fun

The Third Mind - Groovin’ Is Easy

Home Is Where - yes! yes! a thousand times yes!

Flying Raccoon Suit - Witch's Streak

Laura Jane Grace - Birds Talk Too

Laura Jane Grace - Hole In My Head

Short Fictions - Self Betterment in a Time of Loneliness

Liquid Mike - 2 Much of a Good Thing

Liquid Mike - Mouse Trap

Death Lens - Cold World

Spiritual Cramp - Talkin' On The Internet

MSPAINT - Post-American

Dollar Signs - Bless Your Heart

Taking Meds - The Other End

Hot Mulligan - Gans Media Retro Games

Hotline TNT - I Thought You'd Change

Single Mothers - Forest Fire

Beige Banquet - Ornamental Hermit

SPRINTS - Up and Comer

Spanish Love Songs - Exit Bags

Spanish Love Songs - Re-Emerging Signs of the Apocalypse

Trophy Eyes - Runaway, Come Home

Average Joey - Toxic & Fragile

Frog Legs - The All Is Lost Moment

Walter Etc. - Manic Pixie Misanthrope

AJJ - Disposable Everything

Sincere Engineer - Blind Robin