My Guitar #2

Hey, I just really like writing about my guitar.  

Here's the beginning of Justin Sandercoe's Beginners' Course for guitar. Dude is a legend. I would be nowhere near where I am with guitar without him. 

My guitar is important to me because it’s like a friend to me. I went to the guitar store in 2015 with my dad to go pick out a guitar for me. He had played guitar for over half his life, and he knew I was interested in music, so he wanted to teach me to play. I didn’t really know what to consider when picking out the guitar because I didn’t know anything about them, so I’m pretty sure he made all the decisions. When we got home, he tried teaching me to play chords for a few days, but I got frustrated and stopped letting him teach me. He taught me three chords, and said that “Hey Jude” by The Beatles could be played with those 3 chords, but he didn’t say which order they were in. I gave up so hard that I didn’t pick up the guitar for 4 more years.

In 2019, I was active on a Discord server dedicated to the famous 70s folk singer, Nick Drake. He was a very unique, idiosyncratic folk fingerstyle guitarist, so it’s no wonder that most people who listen to him are also interested in playing guitar. I made three friends on the server who were always talking about playing guitar, and it made me jealous and intrigued to finally pick my guitar back up and start learning. I had already written some songs without any idea about instruments, so I needed to start with some kind of instrument. The people on the server were confused at the fact that I had written songs without knowing how to play an instrument. But I was eager to show them what I could do once I would learn it. 

One of the reasons I hadn’t picked the guitar back up yet was because I despised watching video tutorials and I knew I would have to watch some if I wanted to learn an instrument. I got over this fear and I started watching a YouTube channel called Justin Guitar. He had some very good tips about practicing things you’re not so good at, mastering your chord changes, the most important chords you should learn, and daily practice routines. I watched his entire beginner course. I recorded an album of demos, mostly on guitar, after a few weeks of watching his videos and picking up a few chords. I showed it to those 3 friends, but I was a little disappointed with their reactions. The friend I cared about most didn’t even listen to it.

By the time I was done with Justin’s beginner course, I didn’t really talk to any of those friends anymore. However, I made a new friend on the same server who started messaging me and talking about music. We started sharing our own music/songwriting ideas. The moment after I sent him my music, he said that he liked it and that he wanted to collaborate on a song together. I was amazed that he thought that much of me as an artist, especially since I was self conscious about my guitar playing. We would often call each other and play guitar together and share ideas during those calls. 

He also told me about how he was self-taught with guitar and how playing guitar should be more of an exploratory process. His lack of having a schedule in real life goes into how he has no rules for playing guitar. I haven’t gone back to a structured schedule or lesson plan for guitar since then. I just pick whichever songs I like to start learning, because now that I have the basics, I can expand my skills into nearly anything of any difficulty and I will pick it up eventually with perseverance. By picking other people’s songs to learn, I gradually pick up on complex skills to put in my own songs. 

He has told me the most beautiful things about how the guitar is a part of you and you begin to feel it more as you spend more time with it and you will become better without even realizing it. You will realize your own style like every other guitarist has. Each guitarist has a guitar style as unique as their own singing voice; I’ve only noticed this after learning to play it myself. My guitar is important to me because those friends are the most important people I've met in my life and the songs are the most important things I’ve written; the guitar itself has been a companion and guide through all those phases of life. 

Conceptions of Rock Music in the West, Versus Its Diffusion to Eastern Europe

(Based on Rockin’ the Borders: Rock Music and Social, Cultural, and Political Change by Bjorn Horgby & Fredrik Nilsson and Rock Around the Block by Timothy Ryback.)

Following the Second World War, in the 1950s, several countries experienced a post-war economic boom. As this boom allowed people to spend less time working and more time relaxing and enjoying art, this was the first time that pop music became a significant part of everyday youth culture. Rock music was the most popular kind of music at this time. Rock music emerged as an evolution of various African-American music genres, as a style more accessible to white individuals. Rock took inspiration from genres such as blues and jazz regarding its instrumentation, structure, and lyrical content. The rise of rock music coincided with the emergence of the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union as the world’s two most powerful, starkly opposed countries during the Cold War. As music is an important form of self-expression, early rock music was inherently tied to the political movements of the era. Similar forms of rock music diffused all over the world from the US, but cultural variations also caused significant differences between the styles of rock made in different countries. This includes a unique culture surrounding rock in Eastern Europe, much of which was occupied by the Soviet Union during the Cold War (Horgby and Nilsson).

As popular rock music emerged in the 1950s in the United States, it was considered by its listeners as an expression of dissatisfaction that could bridge the gap between races. The cultural connection between black and white music fans over rock music had a significant effect on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The hippies arose in the 1960s, which represented the anti-system/counter-culture ideas among the young rock fans in the US during the controversial Vietnam War (Horgby and Nilsson). 

Along with images of dissatisfaction and liberation, rock music conjured images of anti-tradition and authority, counter-hegemony, and sexual freedom. Elvis Presley was one of the most iconic American rock artists, whose highly anti-traditional and sexualized “macho man” image caused great scandals. Companies and governments in power took it upon themselves to censor the “dirty” imagery associated with rock music. Rock music was developing similarly in Great Britain, where legendary bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones emerged; these British bands adopted the drug-heavy culture of the hippies and the anti-hegemonic messages of rock, but also created their own unique subcultures, such as Mod (Horgby and Nilsson). 

American music mainly first diffused to Eastern Europe with jazz in the mid 20th century. Eastern governments, under Stalin, were highly disapproving of the popularity of jazz because it represented an American cultural invasion, and had a rebellious and chaotic image. Eastern authorities made efforts to censor and arrest jazz musicians. However, jazz was too popular to contain, and jazz ultimately became accepted as an appropriate form of music in the Soviet Union. This paved the way for rock to diffuse to the East more smoothly. It was successful in Poland and Hungary, two liberal countries who developed their own styles of rock. However, this diffusion was still not without backlash and criticism (Ryback). 

Similar to jazz, and similar to the backlash against rock in the US, rock in Eastern Europe was seen as a symbol of American imperialism, the social ills of youth, and anti-nationalism. Multiple legal bans of rock music occurred, resulting in instances of great violence between the youth and authorities. The music was considered by its fans to be an escape from communist political ideas that felt forced upon them. The popularity of the music prevailed. The end of an anti-Soviet counterrevolution in Hungary was an important turning point for Eastern European rock culture; Hungary lost the revolution, and was overtaken by Communist leader Janos Kadar. However, Kadar importantly supported Western rock ‘n’ roll culture, and set the path for Eastern European rock musicians to further innovate their own styles as rock progressed to newer styles like punk and post-punk (Ryback). 

The Politics of Pop and Rock Music in Cold War Eastern Europe

 (Based on "The Communist Culture Industry" by Raymond Patton and Up From the Underground: The Culture of Rock in Postsocialist Hungary by Anna Szemere)

    Patton’s and Szemere’s writings describe the relationship between rock and pop music and politics in Eastern Europe during the later years of the Cold War; Szemere focuses on Hungary in the 1980s-1990s and Patton focuses on Poland during the 1980s. The authors agree that art is inherently political, but this creates a tension because artists must find a balance between what is socially acceptable and profitable, versus what can express political views.

Szemere argues that politics are inherent to art by using a loose definition of politics. Government and policies are not the only kind of politics; nearly every aspect of our lives are political. Neutrality is almost impossible; all statements either support the state or not, and each viewpoint is considered politics. Szemere also writes that musical subcultures are inseparable from their contexts: “The idea of a musical subculture assumes structural correspondence and cohesion among a specific musical style, verbal and visual images, and patterns of behavior, including ways of speaking, fashion, and uses of mass media” (15). The lyrics, to the artist’s fashion, to the expressions in their singing style, all represent their culture and politics. 

Rock music in Hungary was an essential part of shifting public discourse and dismantling the state’s legitimacy towards the end of the war. Rock music was a bridge between socialist cultural policies of the East and market consumerism of the West. Hungarian rock music was defined by three different labels for artists: underground, alternative, and mainstream. Underground music was related to involuntary subjugation by a higher power. Underground artists had less resources, but they were homogenous and had a strong bond. Alternative artists had a voluntary choice to be different from the majority. Alternative artists were varied and fragmented; the shift to capitalism at the end of the war was the tipping point for the collapse of their scene. Both underground and alternative music were passionately against the communist state. However, Szemere argues that the spirit of capitalism, which many of these musicians supported, was incompatible with countercultural art. After the transition to capitalism, many underground and alternative musicians fell into poverty due to the lack of economic regulation.

However, truly mainstream Hungarian pop music was not as politically controversial. The music industry was dominated by large record companies. They would refuse to release music that was sonically challenging or politically controversial, in the interest of profit. This caused a lot of musicians to “sell out” and make homogenous music. Only the underground clubs could play the music that the Stalinist state considered “inappropriate” (Szemere). 

Patton writes about the same issue of the tension between ideology and financial necessity in popular music. They argue that this was one of the key factors in shaping the cultural landscape of music in Poland in the 1980s. Some Polish artists were passionate about their political ideals, many of them being anti-communist, but they also had to consider what kind of music would be the most successful, and what kind of music the most powerful record companies would want to release. They also had to be mindful of the political policy that shaped music: government censorship and other mundane institutional constraints. 

Patton also goes in-depth on how the Polish government treated the music industry in the 1980s. The government needed to support pop and rock music culture out of necessity because it helped a lot of money flow through the economy, the government got a share from the money made from music, and music was an important tool for educating and uplifting the public. However, this was a very rocky relationship between the state and the music industry. Live performances were common because they made more money for both the state and the artists, but these were also where one could hear the most politically wild and controversial music, compared to the highly regulated radio stations. The government also hurt Polish musicians through the use of martial law and other types of political repression of communist dissenters. 

Short Essay on My Relationship to Music

You all probably know this stuff about me, but isn't it fun when you get an assignment for school to write about your favorite thing in the world?

 Music is very important to me in my life. When I was a child, I was exposed to the music my family liked, much of which was from the radio. My dad loved rock music and my brother loved pop music. I didn’t consider myself a real music fan until I was 12. That was when I discovered a Norwegian pop rock artist named Sondre Lerche whose music I loved. His music explores a variety of genres, including folk, jazz, and experimental, so I think it was an excellent starting point to introduce me to lots of genres that I hadn’t considered listening to before. I made accounts on music websites like Spotify and made a lot of discoveries through them. 

My personality at that time urged me not to follow what everyone else liked, so I spent many months mostly listening to obscure artists. When I was 13, I started looking into the artists who inspired all my other favorite songs, so I started listening to slightly bigger names like Kate Bush, Bjork, Sonic Youth, and Joni Mitchell. This was also when I realized I really liked experimental music. The term was completely unfamiliar to me until then. I found it weird that experimental music was so great, and that it clicked with me immediately, but it’s so far removed from pop culture that most people don’t even know what it is. The world of experimental music is so vast and interesting, but it doesn’t seem like the larger culture of art appreciation values learning about it and preserving its presence in our lives as much as they do for other art forms. Regardless, I was happy to discover experimental subgenres like ambient, glitch, and noise rock. These genres felt like a special secret for me to discover, and it made me feel unique. But I also love all kinds of other genres like folk, electronic, jazz pop, and indie rock.

As I got older, I joined more online music communities and continued to discover more artists and albums. I also met lots of people through Discord that were making their own music, and I started to feel inspired to finally make my own music. I had been interested in singing for a long time and I had performed in several musicals, so I felt like I had some talent there. When I was 17, I finally picked up the guitar my dad had bought me years ago and started to teach myself how to play it. Months later, I was comfortable writing songs and recording them. I made a few rough demo drafts of albums that I hope to improve in the future. I don’t take my music too seriously right now, and my level of production is very humble, but I hope that sometime I will be able to go farther with it. 

Music has only increased in importance for me as time goes on. Following what some of my music fan friends do, I now listen to new albums every day and rate how much I like them out of 10, and sometimes write reviews of them. I listen to over 24 hours of music per week on average. It’s overwhelming because I don’t re-listen to a lot of the stuff I find except the ones that really blow my mind. But this routine also helps me feel like I’m making progress in exploring the seemingly endless world of great music, and being able to highly value my favorite albums. 

My Autobiography of Being a Writer

The month was November 2020, and I decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month, or Nanowrimo. It was the eighth month that the COVID-19 pandemic was continuing to sweep the nation, and I was still required to stay and home and quarantine. So, I thought it was a good opportunity to use the extra time I had sitting around at home to finally write the novel I had been cooking in my brain since I was a kid, for almost a decade, The Star Spirits. I had never written something so long before, but since I had so much experience writing and I was already in college, what would stop me from finally finishing it? 

But wait, how did we get here? It’s so hard to believe that I’m finally pursuing full versions of the stories that I said I would finish “when I was grown up”. But I can’t acknowledge my current passion for writing fiction, and starting ambitious projects, without giving credit to all the things throughout my childhood that helped to change me and sharpen my skills. This is my story of being a writer. 

Starting from my earliest memories in childhood, I was always told by the adults around me that I was smart and creative. From Kindergarten, I was placed in the “gifted” class section after taking a placement test. Now, it’s definitely a silly concept to me that you would be able to tell if an actual kindergartener was more “gifted” than another kid, and that you should bring in the idea of academic competition to their lives that early; I disagree with the kind of program I was put into. But I have to admit that having that sense of competition drove me to continue to strive higher in my academic life. I excelled in all subjects, including reading, math, and science, because I wanted to keep my status as “gifted”. Even though I was good at a lot of things, one academic activity spoke to me much more than everything else we did in school, and that was writing. 

My first memory of writing my own story was in first grade. My elementary school had a tradition called the “Young Author’s Project” where, every year, we were given a blank white hardcover book in which we were free to write whatever story we wanted. My first story that I wrote was inspired by the white book itself and its magical possibilities; it was titled The Blank Book. The story was about a girl who discovered a blank book, and then got thrown into a magical world inside of it where she meets a fairy. My favorite genre was fantasy, especially cartoons and anime that included fairies, like Tinker Bell and Winx Club, so everything I wrote was fantastical. 

The Blank Book was a simple start, but I realize that it was a starting point for the same characteristics I would put in my other stories for years to come. The genre was magical realism, I created my own lore about magical creatures and the world they lived in, and I created characters based on classic literary tropes. The next two years for my Young Author’s Project, I wrote two sequels to The Blank Book.

At the beach, there was once a fairy named Atta. She had Bright Blue curly hair which shimmered as bright as a pearl. She was half mermaid, actually. She was mostly a fairy with gills. Then one day she decided to go for a walk. And then a bat with silver wings went past her and snatched her wand! … Moonglow cave was one of the darkest caves in the land! Atta lost the bat half way through the cave.

In these sequels, I introduced new characters, such as Atta (pictured above), and went into more detail about what the fairy world looked like. I revealed that the blank book from the first story was secretly a time machine, and the fairy world was Earth millions of years ago. I remember that the second story, Sarah and Atta, was so long that I needed my mom’s help to cut down the story. I now realize that this was the start of my tendency to craft long and complex plots with significant arcs. 

Throughout elementary school, my parents bought me endless amounts of notebooks. Every Christmas, I would open my presents, and there would be at least five fresh new blank notebooks for Lyla to write in, and it made me genuinely happy. I eventually had entire bins full of notebooks. But what did I write in them? I came up with dozens of story ideas and made lots of drawings and doodles of the characters and objects in those stories. Around this time, I also became interested in posting on Internet forums, and sometimes shared my stories with other people. As I re-read those old stories, however, I notice that I rarely ever finished any of them. The concepts were just too large to finish before I got distracted by the next idea clogging my mind, and I started writing in a new notebook or new document. 

Eventually, my mom started sending me to writing workshops at a local program called 826CHI. Each workshop was centered around a different theme, and they were always quite specific and quirky. In third grade, when I went to a workshop about zombies, I wrote a short funny story inspired by Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video called “The King of Zombie Pop”, in which a zombie visits Michael Jackson’s grave and gets an autograph from the now-zombified Jackson. 

The staff at 826CHI would regularly go through their archives of student-written content and publish their favorite works in a book series called The Compendium. To my surprise, they decided to publish “The King of Zombie Pop” in The Compendium. I went to a showcase at the Printers Row Lit Fest, stood on stage, and read my story to the audience. It went surprisingly well; it felt very natural for me to read the words I wrote, and the audience would laugh at the funny parts in the story. After that moment, I realized a couple things: one, I was really proud of my unique writing style and others were starting to appreciate it too, and two, I also liked to write short silly stories and not just epic fantasies. 

In middle school, I started to get a better grasp of my epic ideas, and didn’t always leave my stories unfinished. I cherished each fiction writing assignment in school, which were rare among all the analytical essays and math problems. I wrote enthusiastically for every assignment. I had a very strong passion for a particular story I wrote in 6th grade called Lorna’s Kingdom, another fantasy tale. It was both the longest story anyone in the class had written, and my teacher’s favorite story from the class. 

Then there she was- Rebecca herself. A ruined black dress, scary yellow glowing eyes, full of vengefulness. She reminded them of the evil queens from fairy tales, but she looked younger than they usually were. Her skin was as pale as a sheet. She floated over to the throne, staring at the messed pile of dirt. She turned around, and everything froze. She stared right into each and every girl’s eyes. She lowered her face and spoke. Everyone was absolutely terrified. “Give me the seed.”

I can’t forget that when I graduated from middle school, a girl that I barely knew wrote “You have such a talent for writing and I hope it will take you far” in my yearbook. It struck me that someone had noticed my passion, even though I did not have many opportunities to show it publicly. 

Around that time of my transition between schools, I wrote what was probably the longest piece I had written and finished so far, The Ultimate Scary Story. It was based on all the scary “folk tales” we had spread around at my summer theater camp year after year. I found a way to fit all the different tales into one timeline. I changed the characters’ names to the names of my campmates. Every week, I would finish a chapter, print it out, and read it to my friends at camp. They got so involved in the plot that I wrote a sequel for them. I was too old to come back to camp, but I hung out with my former campmates at the nearby Dairy Queen the next summer, and had my friends read the chapters. The genuine bonds that I held with those campmates over The Ultimate Scary Story is one of the fondest memories of my entire life, and something I have not yet recreated while sharing any of my other stories. 

CHICAGO, IL—An 8-year-old girl in the Belmont Central neighborhood has been murdered by a man disguised as a clown statue within her home while she was being babysat. The parents of the victim as well as the victim’s babysitter were interviewed by news anchor Robin Wren. “He looked just like a statue to decorate a child’s room. He was smaller than an average man, and he looked shiny like plastic. It was the craziest disguise. I had absolutely no idea he was a real person! I was so surprised when I found out he was a real person, because her parents told me they didn’t have a clown statue,” said Kat A., the victim’s babysitter during the time of the murder.

(Pictured: An art project I did during my sophomore year of high school where I drew scenes from what I considered the most important stories I had written or planned to write (counter-clockwise from bottom-left, in chronological order from my life): The Blank Book, Monica’s Hall, Bella Gratch, The Star Spirits, The Elementals, The Witch Princess, Lorna’s Kingdom/Colorix Club, Autumn Spies, Hyperstation Eliminate, and The Ultimate Scary Story.)

In high school, I was exploring lots of different activities like debate and theatre, but writing was still my dream career. However, lots of things changed about me as a writer. There were different outlets where I shared my writing: a playwriting/play-production club called Copala, a drama class with a playwriting unit (which led to me going to an associated playwriting camp), and finally, a creative writing class (senior year). I noticed that the various stories I was writing for these activities were very different from the fantasies I churned out during my childhood. In fact, some of my new stories involved no fantasy elements at all. They primarily had simpler concepts that focused on conveying a certain profound message, or tone, rather than just trying to make a complex fantasy plot with numerous characters and worlds. 

For example, perhaps the work I’m most proud of during high school was titled White Lines on the Freeway. The concept wasn’t entirely original. Around this time, music was becoming a huge part of my life and was inspiring me. The folk singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell was one of my favorites. I decided to write a play for Copala that was inspired by the lyrics of Mitchell’s album Hejira, a minimalistic folk album about a woman travelling all over the country, looking for love. My play follows a similar concept, and doesn’t necessarily follow a traditional plot structure, particularly because the album itself is so abstract in narrative. The main thing I tried to convey was the complexity of Joni’s character, and her emotional distance from others. This makes it difficult for her to connect with others’ feelings. 

JONI: Phyllis, I see something of myself in everyone. In my possessive relationship with John, so many of my feelings couldn’t be expressed. So now I’m returning to myself, these things I had to suppress. I knew no one was gonna give me everything, but either way, we all come and go unknown, each so deep and superficial, between birth and death. I wish you could have discovered that, at least for a while. But it wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. You know, love always sucks us back to the same old way and makes us forget. We’re only particles of change, orbiting around the sun, but how can I have that point of view when I’m always bound and tied to somebody?

As I reread this passage, I see that there is a lot I would do differently. I copied large sections of lines almost entirely from Joni Mitchell’s lyrics, which made some parts of it almost nonsensical because of the idiosyncracy of her poetry; now, I certainly would have written these lines more naturally. However, this is still an obvious difference from writing about fairies and the lore of magical lands. Because I look back at this and still feel embarrassed, I guess the quality of the play itself isn’t the main reason why I’m proud of it; that would be the fact that the Copala club directors chose to cast and produce my play. The production was humble, but it certainly honored my vision for the play, and I was satisfied with it. Years later, while texting my friend Josh, I reflected on the play. He asked me how it felt, and I said, “A little embarrassing, but it also made me feel like a legitimate artist”. I found his response profoundly touching: “You are definitely a legitimate artist. The difference between fake artists and real genuine, bonafide artists is that embarrassment, that sense of self-doubt. So when you feel those feelings, remember they are signs of your genuine soul connection with art. Even the cringe; especially the cringe.”

I definitely doubted myself as an artist a lot throughout high school. My close friends didn’t seem to particularly care much about my writing, at least not for a while (I’m thankful that it’s been getting better lately). I was also getting rejected from a lot of creative programs at school; I wrote a long and ambitious play for Copala that didn’t get produced, I was in the bottom three auditions for Poetry Slam and didn’t make the team, and I never got any lines in the school musical. 

I didn’t come to terms with this self doubt until I wrote a very important essay in my first college writing class that inspired me to think critically about my inner self. I wrote about how upset all those rejections made me feel. I wanted to believe I was talented and gifted like I’d been told since I was five years old, but it didn’t seem to show itself when it was time for me to be seriously evaluated as an artist. But I had to realize that the purpose of making art isn’t to get awards and have big audiences. It’s about expressing yourself and having a greater, more beautiful connection with the world by exploring how it works and putting yourself out there in unique ways. 

So in college, my next shift was to start big projects that revisited the fantasy stories of my childhood, and I finally fulfilled those dreams after all that I had been through. I had to keep in mind that the ultimate goal was to finish the stories and be personally happy with them, rather than seek attention with them. My two most recent projects have been a Winx Club inspired webcomic, and my Nanowrimo novel, The Star Spirits. Both of these projects have been in my mind since I was about 11 years old. It’s not just about expressing myself creatively, but making my old self proud. I may not spend as much time watching fantasy shows now as I did back then, but I know that the old Lyla would have wanted college-age Lyla to use her sharpened skills to finally write these books in the form that I dreamed about. 

A page from my current webcomic, Colorix Club. 

If I was a pencil, and my various writing projects throughout adolescence helped to sharpen me, then I guess writing my novel transformed me into a paintbrush and an entire set of paints. Now that I have finally written a 52,000 word book inspired by the ideas I had accumulated since I had the first inkling of an thought about The Star Spirits while watching anime as a kid, I feel like I can conquer any writing challenge. 

“Wow, you’re right,” Filip remarked. He didn’t know why he had never tried to sleep after he died, even if he didn’t need it, just to feel what it was once like again. “Um, especially because we have each other now.” He laid down next to Nell and they slept together as the sun went down and the wind rustled the leaves of the trees outside. It really was the most beautiful thing to not just focus on one’s needs and missions all the time, but to take time to relive the sweetest moments in life, and feel the fullness of your heart.

Moving Beyond Fandom

    I had a friend throughout my teen years with whom I discussed music almost every day. We would often show each other new artists and say what we liked about them. It was cool to learn about new music and be able to share my old favorites, but I noticed a difference between the way I would talk about artists and the way he talked about them. He would often have an interesting story to tell about each one, and it was usually something interesting but tragic, such as “He was unfortunately murdered” or “This artist burned churches and killed his bandmate in self-defense”. Meanwhile, I never mentioned the life story of anyone I talked about. I just talked about how I discovered the music, how it sounded to me, and what the sound meant to me. 

Last year, I filled out a survey that my other friend was making about whether people tend to separate the art from the artist when it comes to music. I thought about his questions for a long time, and then I ended up writing a lengthy explanation about why I do not involve myself in the lives of the artists I like at all. I avoid reading articles about them or any interviews. I feel like it is not the case that just because someone makes art that I like, that I have the right to know about their personal life. Perhaps people won’t see me as a “real fan” of those artists because I didn’t take the time to learn about them, but my personal belief is more important to me. 

(Link to my friend's article.) 

Eight years ago, when I was eleven and quite naive and impressionable, I started watching funny videos made by a Norwegian musical comedy group called Ylvis. I discovered that there was a community on the website Tumblr where people posted fan content about Ylvis and made online friendships through their mutual love for the group. I became obsessed with Ylvis and their fandom, and started religiously checking my favorite Ylvis-related Tumblr and Twitter pages every day. I became an expert on every piece of Ylvis-adjacent media, I saved enormous amounts of photos of the group to my computer, and I read and sometimes wrote ridiculous fanfiction stories about the group. 

As I got more and more involved in the fandom, my online situations became more toxic. I sustained Internet friendships with adults in their late teens and twenties, who sometimes talked about mature topics in front of me, despite knowing I was twelve. I later discovered an artist who was a friend of Ylvis named Sondre Lerche. I became as, if not more, obsessed with Sondre. My Ylvis phase was starting to end, and I was getting a broader perspective on what had happened. I realized there was a lot I disliked about Ylvis: many of their jokes were offensive and generalizing towards foreign groups, and their whole image was conceited and self-serving. I put Ylvis on a pedestal and disregarded all of this. Their fans also objectified them to extreme levels and acted like they were entitled to investigate and discuss their extremely personal issues. I ended up making enemies with Ylvis fans because I was annoyed with their behavior. 

I still refused to fully recognize all of that, and I let my Sondre obsession get into full swing, as I started saving many pictures and interacting with fans. However, I started to learn about new artists whose music I liked, and I was genuinely confused. Should I also save hundreds of pictures of them? Should I also obsess about my attraction to them and dedicate lots of time for learning about their life? I just didn’t have the same level of passion for every artist, and I was also a bit traumatized by what had happened with Ylvis after I left the fandom. 

I eventually adopted my pattern of refusing to learn about an artist’s personal life at all. As I got older, I became much more of a “music nerd” archetype than a “fangirl”. I focused significantly more on the music itself and the artistry of their albums. Now, if an artist I like or their fans do something horrible, I do not feel like it is my responsibility to justify it and defend them. I appreciate their art, but they are not my friend or object. 

My Guitar

Hey, I'm ready to make a bunch of new posts on here. Sorry that I'm about to make a bunch of posts on the same day, but I don't think anyone really cares anyway. All of the stuff I'm about to submit was written for 2 classes I'm taking right now: an English writing class, where I just happen to write a lot about music, and a seminar centered on the history of Eastern European rock music during the Cold War, which is super interesting.

Anyway, here's a short description for English I wrote that gives all the details about my first guitar. 

My dad bought me my first guitar in 2015 when I was 13 years old. The manufacturer of the guitar is Cort, which you can see written in a fancy font at the top of the guitar’s neck. It is a relatively smaller guitar, being easier for me to handle than my dad’s guitar or his friend’s guitar, but the difference is subtle, and I still struggle to hold all of it with my small self and tiny hands sometimes.

At the top of the neck, you can see the tuning knobs twisted in all different directions from all the times I’ve had to re-tune the guitar, as well as experiment with wildly different tunings from songs by artists like Nick Drake and Joni Mitchell. The top of the neck is also the dustiest part of the guitar since it can’t really be touched underneath the mess of string ends. The untrimmed edges of the strings curve and loop like an elegant bronze jungle. They weren’t always like that, they were more neatly trimmed when we bought the guitar; my dad later helped me replace them with a new set of strings. I had broken the third string while trying to change my guitar to a Nick Drake tuning (“BEBEBE”), and he decided to help me replace the entire set of strings, since they were all starting to deteriorate; I remember they had started to turn green like an old penny. The first string, the thinnest one, had to be replaced twice because I broke it again recently while trying to play a Nick Drake song. I have to wonder how many times Nick Drake himself had to replace his own guitar strings with all his wacky tunings in his songs. 

As you look down the frets, you see that the neck of the guitar gets wider, the frets get closer together, and the strings are further from the neck. These shifts help give the different frets of the guitar their unique sounds. There are also some dots among the frets that help me remember which frets are the fifth, the seventh, and so on.

A layered ring of black and white circles surrounds the hole of the guitar, which matches the pattern on the edges of the body of the guitar. Within the hole is a white label card in the darkness that also says Cort, with a fancy border design. On the outside, the bottoms of the strings are connected to six pegs that seal them to the guitar. Two of the pegs have broken heads, a remnant of my dad changing the strings after not having changed them for five years.