kasperobscene's Journals on Buzznet

... And The Songs That Saved Your Life.

kasperobscene — 2009-02-18T10:40:00Z

"the songs that saved your life". "But don't forget the songs
That made you cry
And the songs that saved your life
Yes, you're older now
And you're a clever swine
But they were the only ones who ever stood by you"- The Smiths, "Rubber Ring". So I'm the kind of loser geekface who cares far too much about popular music. it is my lifeblood, my reason for living, the fire in my heart and the love of my life. So i thought I'd make a list of sorts of a few of the songs and bands that have meant a lot to me over the past decade or so. Some of these are songs that at one point summed up how i felt, some of them are by bands that meant the world to me. This is not a definitive list at all, but it's a start; an introduction to the Kasperian heart, if you will.

Blur - Country house

Laugh all you want, but this is the song that started it all. It was 1995, I was ten going on eleven, i saw this video on TV and IT. CHANGED. MY. LIFE.

No, really. It did. Not because it was a mindblowing work of musical genius, but because it was the song that introduced me to Blur, and once I got into Blur, that was it. Suddenly, over the following few months, it became clear both to myself and to my surroundings, from parents and relatives to fellow school kids and my teachers, what kind of kid I was: I was That Weird Kid, the one who listens to "different" music and doesn't care about much else. The weird obsessed fankid, the pop music obsessive. That was who I became that autumn day in 1995, and that is who I have remained since then.

Manic Street Preachers - Faster
If you know me at all, you will know that I am a huge fan of Manic Street Preachers. The album this song is from, "The Holy Bible", is my favourite album of all time. There are quite a few songs I could choose to represent the Manics, but I chose this because it encompasses so well so many of the things I loved about this band back when they were the most important band in my life - actually, scratch that, they were the single most important thing in my life. I defined myself by this band, they influenced me in far too many ways for me to list. They introduced me to more books, bands, films, and ideas than I can name, they gave me something to believe in when I had little else, and they made my shitty, lonely, unhappy adolescence just a little bit more bearable.

The Smiths - Half A Person
Ah, The Smiths. How did people get through their teens before this band existed? I know, of course, that people did somehow manage - my own parents were both well into their adulthood before this band even formed, and they turned out fine. But on some level, I just can't imagine getting through the trauma of adolescence without having this band in your headphones to tell you that, though it might seem like it, you are not alone. Someone out there understands, someone knows exactly how you feel and is able to articulate it much better than you ever can. That person's name is Morrissey, and he has been singing the story of my life since before I was even born. There is such great comfort in this. Simply put, The Smiths epitomise everything I love about pop music - they were the greatest example of how life-affirming and life-changing music can be. They are the sad, hurtful, confusing parts of your life spat out on vinyl and distorted into something beautiful.

Belle & Sebastian - Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying
I met my best friend through our shared love of this band. That's reason enough for them to be included here, but there are many other reasons why i consider them one of the most important bands of my life. When I was nineteen, after years of loving this band, I finally got to see them live. After the show I met their singer and chief songwriter, Stuart Murdoch, and had a complete fanboy attack, gushing about how they're my favourite band since The Smiths, and all kinds of things that I should probably be embarrassed by. But you know what? I'm not embarrassed by that in the slightest. Because this band summed up my awkward, lonely teenage years better than almost anyone I can think of. They made me realise that hey, it is OK to be fifteen and kind of bookish and geeky and lonely, and I don't have to be cool and overly confident and loud and brash or any of those things. They steered me onto the path to finally accepting myself, standing up and confidently declaring: I don't need your sex & drugs & rock&roll; I'm into snogging, tea, and indiepop.

The Libertines - Time For Heroes
Sometimes a band comes along just when you need it to and sum up a part of your life, or your feelings, or what you want your life to be like, that you desperately needed someone to articulate and put to music for you. The Libertines were that band for so many people. They were not the most original or innovative of bands, but they had something special that countless bands that came after them tried to emulate, something none of them succeeded in. This song is not my ultimate favourite Libertines song, but it goes a long way towards summing up what so many of us loved about the band: it's in the jangle of the tune, the youthful optimism of the lyrics, and the feeling that, shit, this actually means something. I met a lot of the people i now consider some of my best friends through my love for this band, and they'll always have a tiny piece of my heart.

The Others - This Is For The Poor
I got a lot of shit for being into this band - probably more than I've ever got from being into any other band. They were not, musically or lyrically speaking, a fantastic band on record - though their gigs were, at their best, utterly fantastic. They were not particularly innovative or groundbreaking. But they had something that I and certain other people considered to be special - something we needed at that particular point in our lives. And that's what it's all about, ultimately - latching onto something that makes something in your life make a little bit more sense for a while. I met a ton of fantastic people through our shared love of this band and grew closer to people I already knew because of them, I had some of the best times of my life at their gigs, and I have a tattoo on my arm of a lyric from one of their songs that serves as a reminder that there are always things worth living for, even when things are shit, when it all seems pointless, there will always be something that makes you want to say "fuck it, i'm not giving up" and keep going.

Hefner - The Sweetness Lies Within
Sometimes you love someone so much that trying to put it into words becomes completely futile because nothing you say, no words in any language you know, can adequately convey exactly how you feel. And then there are times when loving someone hurts you to the point where you start to think that maybe, just maybe, alcoholics have got the right idea. And that's when you listen to Hefner: their songs alternate between joyous declarations of everlasting love, and miserable, depressing whine fests designed to make you want to down an entire bottle of your preferred brand of hard alcohol while slitting your wrists and screaming "WHY, WHY, GOD, WHYYYYYY" into the great, big, bleak nothingness. This song is somewhere in the middle, leaning towards the former category; it remains one of my favourite songs of theirs, and it is guaranteed to make me go a bit mushy inside.

The Times - I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape
The Times are Edward Ball's sometimes-a-band-sometimes-a-solo-project. Edward Ball is my Number One Ultimate Hero Of Music. This is not my favourite song of his, but it's certainly in the top ten. And it gets bonus points for introducing me to the 1960s genius british TV drama The Prisoner.
The Times are one of the most underrated, underappreciated, underexposed bands of the past 30 years, and i do not use such terms lightly. It would be completely impossible to sum up the talent, diversity, and - yes - genius of Edward Ball in a single paragraph, and certainly just by pointing out one song or even one album. So I will state quite simply that he is my favourite and that there are many very good reasons why he is.

gender issues: we all has them.

kasperobscene — 2009-01-30T13:36:00Z

(man, i so wanted to title this "you think i have gender issues? NO U. also, this is kindasorta more of a rant than an actual essay or whatever. politely spewing some bile out on the internet, if you will.)

I have a lot of shit kicking around in my head right now, and as usual, most of it relates to gender. Shocking, I know. This past year or so has seen me gradually give up the crippling fear of anything relating to gender or queer theory that I've built up over the past six or seven years or so. While I still believe in action over theory - and in this case that means I would much rather live my life than read what other people have to say about it - I have come to the shocking realisation that while a lot of it has to be taken with a grain of salt, there is actually some sense to some of the things people are talking about! A mindblowing realisation, I'm sure you'll all agree.

Mostly I've been reading Kate Bornstein and Julia Serano. If you're into the whole gender thing, or just interested in reading about it from a perspective that might differ from yours, and which definitely differs from mainstream views of gender, both in terms of roles and identity, you could do much worse than reading Gender Trouble by the former and Whipping Girl by the latter. But I'm not here to wax intellectual about gender or to regurgitate concepts I've read about in books of gender and queer theory. That is not what I do - in fact, I would go so far as to say that this post has nothing to do with theory at all. I want to talk about gender roles and the myth perpetuated by mainstream society that says that "gender issues" are something that's specific to trans people, that if you have "gender issues" then there is something wrong with you.

Because here is my point: Our heteronormative, patriarchal society's rigid gender roles fuck everyone up. It's easy to point at the trans kids and go "they're weird, they're different, they have those gender issues" while completely ignoring the ways in which the norms and roles we are forced into and forced to adhere to as men or as women leave most people inadequate, unable to measure up to the standards set for them as members of their gender - one of two, of course, because we are told that being anything other than a man or a woman is impossible and unheard of. It is very hard to navigate a society with as rigidly defined gender roles and norms as ours without either accepting that you are an "other", an outsider, at least to some extent, or attempting to deny this and overcompensating as much as you can for what you have been taught to believe is a failure on your part to be sufficiently masculine or feminine - a "real man" or a "real woman".

Most people single out transsexual and transgendered people as people who have "gender issues". But you know who else has gender issues? That young guy who gets drunk every weekend and starts fights because he thinks he has to prove that he's a "real man". The teenage girl who wears more make-up than she feels comfortable with and goes on diet after endless diet because she has been raised to believe that that is what girls do. The middle-aged man who is uncomfortable with homosexuality because if a man can love another man and still be a man, what does that say about his own masculinity, about his own identity as a straight man? The list of examples is endless. I'm sure you can think of a few yourself - it is a common problem, one most people face whether they have the tools to recognise and articulate it or not.

And of course, "gender issues" does not necessarily mean "issues with one's gender identity" - in this case, it means "issues with one's gender role". The main difference, in this particular instance, between that tough boy who beats people up to assert his masculinity and a transsexual man or woman is that the trans person has had to analyse both their gender identity and gender role because the gender they were socialised to be a member of is the exact opposite of the one they always have or eventually come to consider themselves a part of.

But to an extent, when it comes to that basic sense of not measuring up, of not being "good enough" as a man or as a woman, everyone shares the same frustration, albeit to a lesser or greater degree. And it is, of course, entirely possible to be perfectly comfortable in your gender identity - completely content and happy with being a man or with being a woman - and still feel deeply inadequate when it comes to the role you are told you must fulfil and the norms you must adhere to as a member of that gender. But I would still argue that all of these "issues" - all that insecurity, these feelings of not measuring up, the frustration and resentment that builds up because of it - are a symptom of a problem that, while it is being addressed and analysed, processed and deconstructed to death by gender theorists, mainstream society at large still seems quite blind to.

Because the truth is this: There are no "real men". There are no "real women". And there are people who don't fall neatly into either category. And as long as the myth of binary gender is still presented as fact by society as a whole, as long as we are still being told that there are definitive characteristics that make someone a man and a separate set of definitive characteristics that make someone a woman, we are creating a society of individuals who are confused about where they fit in, who strive to prove themselves as adequate members of their gender, and who, in smaller or bigger ways, will always fall short.

Of course, most people hide their insecurities, or never quite manage to get to a point where they're able to put their finger on what exactly their problem is. That tough boy might say he drinks to enjoy himself and he starts fights as a way of blowing off steam, or he didn't mean to anyway, or he just gets that way when he's drunk. The teenage girl with her endless diets is just trying to lose a few pounds for prom or to get into that new pair of jeans she wants. The middle-aged homophobe just thinks homos are gross or unnatural.

But I do think that if we examine these things we'll find that so many of the problems people face in their personal lives, as well as the problems they create for other people, are a result, in part or in whole, of the narrow constraints of the gender roles we have been pushed into and continue to attempt to force ourselves and other people into.

So that's my bit for today. While the patriarchal, heterosexist structures of our society, along with the gender binary it relies on, favours some people (straight non-trans men) over others (everyone else), ultimately this system hurts everyone. There are no winners in the gender game, it's just a matter of how much you lose. The more people realise this and start thinking about it and consciously reacting against it, the easier this world will be to navigate for those of us to have the most to lose, as well as for everyone else. Because this is not just about the young girl who doesn't know how to live because society has decided that her penis means she has to be a boy. It's not just about the teenage boy who wears hoodies three sizes too big for him and walks with a hunch to hide that he has breasts. It is about all of us, it affects every single one of us, and it needs to change.

OMG i'm so RETARDED.

kasperobscene — 2008-10-27T04:55:00Z

this suparimportant buzznet blog brought to you by fucktons of coffee, all the nicotine in the world and no food from a mental hospital in the arse of the world. just for the record.

so yeah, i'm reclaiming the word "retarded". i'm tired of seeing it used as - and yes, i'm going to paraphrase p. weezy, because i can - a synonym for shitty. like, can we stop that, please? hello, it's fucked up and ableist and offensive.

'sup, buzznerds! my name is kasper and i have a mental disability. partial agenesis of the corpus callosum, if you care. it's pretty obscure and basically makes me a special snowflake and i have way more oppression cred than you do, so like, you should all fellate me for ally points.

no, but seriously. like. i do a lot of stupid, ridiculous shit, as anyone who's ever met me or even communicated with me on these here internets will know. some of it is related to my being a big scary retard, some of it is not. so can we not refer to the shit people do that has nothing to do with whether or not they're disabled as being "retarded"? cos it's fucking ridiculous and stupid to do so. like hey, if you're my friend and we arrange to meet somewhere and i'm half an hour late because i got lost and then when we get there i don't recognise your other friend who i've met before, then i hereby grant you permission to go "lolz kasper, you are so retarded" (bonus points if you actually say "lolz" in real life, to my face, cos that shit's supercool), cos like, that would be a direct result of my actual mental disability. if i profess my love for some band you think suck, then you do not get to call me retarded for liking them, cos i'm pretty sure my taste in music is not affected by my brain being a bit wonky. so yeah. this post would be way more articulate were it not for a bunch of outside factors, and i totally have to go talk to doctors and shit now and i might edit this post later. but yeah. also, if anyone responds to this and is all like "yeah, using the word retarded is like, so totally lame" then i will personally hunt you down and put a fly in your chardonnay and make it rain on your wedding day and like, all sorts of shit. believe.

"you should stick around to see me hit the ground. it's such a pretty sound."

kasperobscene — 2008-10-24T11:06:00Z

this is one of tose embarrassingly personal journals, kind of. i won't say much, but saying anything at all is too much, i know.

i'm not going to go into details, but i'm going back into hospital for a while as of monday. you don't need to know how bad things are, but yeah, they're pretty bad. i'm not trying to be cryptic, i just don't want to be a dick and TMI all over your internet.

so uh. i won't be on buzznet much as of next week, for at least a few weeks. i'm kind of in a place right now where i cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would want to have any contact with me, but if for some reason you do, my email address is tapedeck at gmail dot com. i'll be logging in to read PMs on my phone if i get any, too.

i dunno what else to say. i'm sorry if i seem like i'm looking for attention or anything. i just thought i'd let you know. this is why my twitter is gone, too. i couldn't deal.

i can't really deal with anything right now. i'm sorry.

and hearts semicolon etcetera.

i am trying to find god

kasperobscene — 2008-09-23T08:01:04Z

but the fucker's too good at hiding from me. do i want a god who doesn't want me? ... probably. i do always want the one i can't have. i feel like my time is running out. i am getting desperate. forever breaking the heart of a god i don't believe in. one more guilt complex can't hurt.

we're not broken yet. we're not letting go.

kasperobscene — 2008-09-05T06:25:02Z

i need to go away for a while. working on that now. i've lost all inspiration, so i won't be writing. have no computer. hope you're all ok.

i hate doing this, but i need advice.

kasperobscene — 2008-09-03T16:16:46Z

what do you do when, in order to have a decent life you need two things, but getting one of those things will keep you from the other? i am in deep shit. the only clinic in norway authorised to help people transition won't let me unless i can prove i am absolutely stable. one of the main reasons i'm not stable is that they won't let me transition. you can see my problem here. i'm also dealing with some stuff that came up a few months ago. i'm dissociating a lot. i should be in hospital, but i can't. Fuck.

SHIT I THINK I JUST OUTGAYED MYSELF. 1000000 ANARCHIST POINTS FOR ME.

kasperobscene — 2008-09-03T12:23:23Z

i'm going to make a zine called YOUR ALL GAY: SEXUAL MINORITIES AND WHY I HATE THEM ALL. who wants to help me? it will be totes progressive and radical and awesome, i swear. i want people to write about why their own particular lololol sexual minority is full of wankarghs. don't worry, i'll only hate on my own! it's what i do best. well, mostly. i am also working on my perzine, HOMO BAD! which will win at failing. so far it is mostly tales of HOMOSEXUAL DEBAUCHERY. well jackson.

EMO KASPER IS EMO LOL

kasperobscene — 2008-09-03T04:46:11Z

i am tired of my brain never shutting up. fifteen years or more of near constant dissociation makes me really need a rest, but i can't have one. I don't even know what i'm protecting myself from. i fucking hate being crazy. i hate never being alone in my own head. nothing ever seems real. i just want some rest.

when they pin me to the wall i'll say i'm with america...

kasperobscene — 2008-08-18T14:16:00Z

i am writing from a motel in long beach. i got here on friday, i went to warped yesterday, i am horrifically sunburnt, stupidly broke until tomorrow afternoon, and very, very happy.

very short warped recap:
cobra starship own my heart. the academy is... are a million times better live than on record, in my humble opinion. travis mccoy needs to be president or something, he is far too awesome for this world. gabe saporta? still radiates cool, still stupidly, ridiculously beautiful. also caught some of street dogs' set. there was a circle pit. exciting!

and on saturday i got to hang with a friend of mine who i've known on the internet literally since pete doherty made good music. and that's a long time ago, people. ahahah i am mean. but yes, anyway.

ryland told me my shirt was badass. it has a roland synth on it and as such, of course, is just that. but you guys, i have a RYLAND APPROVED T-SHIRT. i win.

off to the east coast in a couple of days, to new york and boston to hang with some friends. should be good fun, and i'm glad i'll get to see that part of the country as well.