album here
A live album (obviously), by She/Her/Hers of a performance at the Heretic House in Portland, OR. It's considered pop punk, at least by Emma grrl. As many live albums are, it's a mix of original works and covers. The vocals are all beautiful raucous shouting, like friends partying together, getting drunk and shouting declarations of love. The lyrics are mostly pretty affirming, like yeah, some things suck, life is really hard, but we are alive and that's what matters.
Several of the songs are about dealing with gender transition, dysphoria, prejudice. Some are just about trying to love yourself. Overall, the music feels like getting free therapy, especially sung this way, with just loud guitar strumming and intermittent explosions of laughter.
I'm planning to listen to all of Emma's albums, but I only just started. I know there are more versions of some of these tracks, more produced, more clean. But it's all punk, so maybe this is the purest form it can take.
The performance of music predates its recording by thousands of years, right? We value the recordings because we can hear them again and again, the same as looking at old photos and remembering the sweeter parts of your past. Scratch that, actually; while recordings of live albums are like photographs of great events, studio recordings are like paintings. There's a lot more doctoring involved, and the production is part of the art, and the point is to more closely realize some internal vision. Looking at an old recording that you engineered and produced is like seeing some old painting you made, where you can maybe appreciate how you've grown since then, and maybe appreciate the choices you made at that point. But it's still wrong to see it as the definitive version of something that was always meant to change with time and be kind of ephemeral, at least to the exclusion of all other interpretations of that same song.
Music is partly a performance, and it usually involves emotion, and both of those things matter, every time. A lot of performances just involve having fun. Sometimes, your friends are around. Some of my favorites and the meanings they had: Layne Staley's last performance of God Am, Eddie Vedder singing Black after his good friend died... I lost my train of thought.* (Why are these all 90s-centric?) Whatever, I'm fine with it being preserved forever.
This is a lot of personal interpretation for a review, isn't it? Nope, dead fucking wrong. It makes no sense to add a false objectivity to something like deciding how good music is. The person listening, their inner world and experiences, and the specifics of when it's being enjoyed by them are all inseparable from the review and interpretation of music. It's why you can be aware of something for years and years in the back of your mind, revisiting it over and over, not caring for it until one day when it's exactly what you need. This was exactly what I needed right now. Emma's honest but hopeful songs about living with yourself and the world around you, and this mess of a review typed out all at once. Both kind of messy, both kind of perfect.
* I remembered what I was thinking about. The talk show performance of The Outsider when Maynard had that amazing hair.