!!! and music magazines and trying hard to find something cool

My friend Matthew just sent out a newsletter featuring three playlists he made inspired by the NYC record store Other Music. Third on the second playlist (Vol. 2. 2002-2003) is the song "Me and Giuliani Down By The Schoolyard - A True Story" by the band !!!. What a banger. I listened this morning on my walk.

Then I remembered how I first found out about the band !!!...a magazine! I think it was SPIN but it could have maybe been NYLON, both were staples of my adolescence. I definitely remember reading about !!! and the strategy for pronouncing it—you could say three of any percussive monosyllables, like pow-pow-pow or bang-bang-bang, though I think most people settled on chk-chk-chk. !!! is so antithetical to SEO that you simply can't search "!!! band" anywhere.

I loved magazines sooooo much...because I was interested in cool things. And music magazines at the dawn of the iTunes store were kind of the perfect thing for me, because they offered mystery (who is this band? they sound cool) aligned with semi-convenience (let me see if they have any songs online for purchase...) but only through effort (will my dial-up internet survive long enough to acquire song??). Offerings were limited (there was only so much page space) which created outsized impact on the reader (hey, I still remember first learning about !!! after all these years) and all of it combined into this irresistible PRINT MEDIA AURA. People got paid good money to look for cool shit and share it with the common people. I had no reason to believe they'd steer me wrong.

I did not grow up in a super cool place. I guess Vermont is sort of cool now, insofar as Noah Kahan is cool, and Phish has maintained a certain kind of cool after all these years...but in the '00s Burlington's cultural products tended toward "crunchy" rather than "cool." So it was up to magazines to tell me what was cool, and I would nod and said, Whoo! Alright – Yeah... Uh Huh.

I do think that the thing about getting into Cool Shit is you have to work for it a little. You have to recognize your position as an uncool person, and see if there's anything you can do about it. The thing about the phones we have now, with their forever enabled internet, and their content apps that are really shopping apps, is they deliver a false sense of coolness on a silver platter. They synthesize the coolness and then encourage you to swipe one tab over to buy the coolness for yourself. Only that frictionless ease actually ends up deactivating the spark of cool you might have thought you observed. It's too simple. The journey is over before it has begun.

I think that's what inspired me about Matthew's Other Music newsletter—a record store is a place where you must use your own hands to do your own digging, but also this record store had a newsletter where they did some curation for you to help send you on your way. I find this so beautiful. Vast archives of releases await the eager traveler, but there's a nudge toward the good stuff if you need it. An energy I try to maintain in my blogging, keeping the flow open in both directions, of course!

This is also what I like about how Biz Sherbert is doing her American Style newsletter—lots of old-fashioned blogging (she just had someone share their experience bartending at Glastonbury) and street-style photos with reported quotes, very much hip magazine vibes. There's a little bit of mystique, a bit of AURA, preserved within this format, at least compared to video of people talking about their outfits. Video, especially plain old iPhone video, serves up the whole enchilada without offering any space to let you project your own glamour and intrigue. Not everything needs a full multimedia documentation. Where's the fantasy in that?

It's kind of funny, looking at that picture of me reading SPIN. Like, whoomp, there it is. If you face someone who's on their phone, you don't know what they're up to. They could be playing a game, or swiping on a dating app, or texting their mom, but all you see is their hand and their phone case. There's something deliciously uncool about reading a magazine with the cover visible for all to see. I need to know what's going on. I must find out what's hip and happening. I am on a journey...I am seeking...

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