We’re wrapping up the month, and that means we’re wrapping up the first volume of Tunegrape. Next week will be issue #2.1!
We’re also wrapping up a collection of posts on how we experience music, the connections we form with it, and the relationships we build through those connections.
Next week? When music throws a punch.
‘Map of the Problematique’ by Muse
I’ve never seen Muse live, but I’ve experienced them in a way I’ll never forget. After all, Matt Bellamy’s massive voice seducing listeners over brilliant riffs expressed through effect-laden guitars is made for nothing if not experience.
Courtesy of an unnamed reddit user from r/musicsuggestions.
“Map of the Problematique” is from the album that brought them to greater international acclaim. I was introduced to the band through their “Knights of Cydonia” video on constant rotation on the music video network Fuse. Both songs are emblematic of the approach explored on this album.
While their arena rock sound was already established, "Black Holes and Revelations” used electronics and effects to make that sound even bigger. Layered, dueling guitar lines echo and reverb through the speakers in “Map of the Problematique” before the instruments merge into a single crunchy woosh of a riff. Bellamy sounds like he was born at the center of Madison Square Garden as he laments, “I can’t get it right,” several times over.
“Knights of Cydonia,” meanwhile, owes a larger debt to surf rock artists like Dick Dale with its stretched-out, tremolo main riff, in addition to the spaghetti western soundtracks of Ennio Morricone. It’s a sound, along with a music video, that cribs liberally both from that classic genre of western movies as well as Quentin Tarantino’s pop culture-pastiches.
Maybe it’s the band’s movie-ready sound that makes nights soundtracked to their music so memorable. Whether it’s that or something else, when I hear Muse I recall racing through the streets of Thessaloniki, Greece in my weed dealer’s car as we smoked spliffs and blasted their new album, “The Resistance.” It was him, his friend, and a few of my friends from my study abroad program, in addition to myself. We had recently begun hanging out with him and he quickly went from dealer to friend. He even helped us sneak into a professional soccer game without tickets, as well as escape from some hooligans who stalked after us after the game in the safety of a belly dancing bar.
The sound of our small communities
From the very beginning music has been a community experience. People have gathered to hear music in celebration, in sadness, and in spiritual purpose. These moments can range from serious to downright silly, and we all have them in our memories.
College is an especially fertile time for such experiences. With all the alcohol, music, and young people, there’s bound to be some group singing. And when it comes to drunkenly singing a song together, one track that’s hard to beat is “Point/Counterpoint” by Streetlight Manifesto.
Around 2010, after more than one party on Westland Avenue in Boston, as the clock approached 3 or 4 a.m., a group of college students from Berklee School of Music and Northeastern University would gather in a room to sing “Point/Counterpoint” together. Everyone knew every word, and we would yell them into the center of the room, our voices converging and likely traveling through the ceiling and floor.
Each of us brought our unique memories of one single song together in those nights. Each throat, strained from shouting, was pushed there through youthful encounters with the band. And, truth be told, at 19-years-old there existed between us nothing but youthful encounters.
Not long after, a different group of friends and I were rapping together in an apartment on Calumet Street as the clock approach 3 or 4 a.m. This time, the song was “Enter the Ninja” by Die Antwoord. This was our ritual afterparty. Every weekend we would come home and repeat this celebration. My girlfriend at the time and I would fill water bottles with vodka and Crystal Light powder. Then we would join our friends to sing the chorus and rap the verses as we swigged gulps of berry-flavored booze.
That relationship probably peaked in those nights, as did Die Antwoord. Or, for them, was it with “Chappy?”
It was on my return from a three-year excursion (no, not a war) to the West Coast that my encounters with music in the midst of communities kicked into high gear. While sometimes music is best experienced alone, encountering it with other people often adds another dimension of joy. That’s especially true for concerts. After all, it was a live music discovery that granted me my decade-long parasocial relationship with Mitski.
On moving from San Francisco to Hoboken, New Jersey, I immediately started going to shows with a childhood friend. Our first show together again was Modest Mouse’s Brooklyn stop of its Golden Casket Tour in 2021. It was my second time seeing them and second time seeing them with that friend. Our first was in New Jersey at the 2010 Bamboozle Festival. Live music has always been special to me, going back to Patent Pending shows around Long Island or seeing Green Day in 2005 on their American Idiot World Tour.
These were the communities I had indelible music experiences with; experiences that only we’ll truly know. No other crowd will be the same as that one in Farmingdale, NY, at the now-closed Crazy Donkey for a Patent Pending show. Some other group of friends might rap Die Antwoord at 3 a.m. in an apartment. But not the same apartment, during the same year, with the same flavor Crystal Light packets in their vodka. Or the same history between each other.
There are few rushes quite like experiencing music with other people. That’s true whether you’re experiencing a song through discussion or through bodies banged against each other. And for me, the latter was always the more rewarding—if more painful—experience.
How does it feel to be in a mosh pit?
Is it a good show if you don’t feel like you’re going to puke? Is it a good show if you don’t take an elbow to the head?
A great punk show borders on baptism by combat. Through much of my life since turning 14, this was my church. I worshipped at the altar of the amplifier. My sacrament was a sacrifice—inducing pain or even injury for the sake of community.
But pain is okay in the midst of the sort of healing community you see in the Title Fight video. You might trade a bruised shoulder for a healed heart, a banged-up knee for a sturdier soul.
And there’s even a culture around it, passed from show to show. This is exemplified by the code of honor that’s followed in pits, with the golden rule being: If someone falls, pick them up.
I remember searching the floor for someone’s glasses or the time a fellow pit participant returned to my my lost Tulsa Drillers hat several songs after it had flown off my head during an I Am The Avalanche set.
My love for mosh pits began in the dive bars and venues of my local music scene. And I mentioned this being my church for a reason: My first local live music experience was a Patent Pending show in the basement of a Long Island church.
As someone who works out every day, participated in wrestling as a child and teenager, and got into more than a few fist fights over the years, you might say I need physical outlets to channel aggression or process emotions. The physicality of live shows bridged the gap between this need for release and the only other emotional salve I knew in my youth: music.
To this day that remains true. Even if I’ve found new ways to mosh. For example, I’ll never forget the first time I moshed to dance music.
But this part of the story starts with Black Country, New Road. Now, the first thing we need to get out of the way is I’ve seen people get down to BCNR. I know it happens. It’s on the YouTube. Or at least, I thought it was at the time I saw them in 2023 at Knockdown Center in Queens. Because now I search and can’t find it. Suffice to say, there’s no better moment to mosh than the pinnacle of “Turbines/Pigs,” but maybe I’m biased (you can see a little movement and fist pumping, but not what I expected).
But when we saw them that night in Queens, the crowd of 20-somethings barely swayed to the songs. As far as the eye could see, throughout the set, movement was kept to a minimum. Maybe these younger people worship at the altar of the amplifier in a different way and that’s fine, but we were mystified.
The counterpoint to that is Jockstrap.
It’s hard to find a video on YouTube that captures the experience of seeing Jockstrap live in Brooklyn in 2023, touring their remix album “I<3UQTINVU.” But this might be my favorite live show of the last few years. Everyone knew every song, and so everyone became one as we elevated to another plane.
The two-piece consisting of Taylor Skye, the producer, and Georgia Ellery, on vocals and strings and of BCNR fame, were on tour around the same time as BCNR. And, in fact, the band had another strings player subbed in for Ellery at the Knockdown Center.
During songs like “Concrete Over Water,” “Good Girl,” and “50/50” I swear I could feel the building shake as the crowd bounced to the beat and off each other all at once, like atoms in a frenzy, singing every word along with Ellery.
However, even standing still, I was blown away by “Turbines/Pigs.” Worship doesn’t have to be what you expect, as long as it’s worship. I understood the spiritual importance as I sat in a temple for Diwali for the first time, in the same way I understand the spiritual importance of seeing BCNR for the first time when you’re just 21 years old. Connection is connection, even if you’re just dipping your toe into someone else’s experience of it.
But these connections, these experiences, take on a whole new meaning when the artist participates by stepping into the crowd.
Communion with Cole Haden
Vice suggested that YHWH Nailgun is the last great band in New York. My counterpoint would be another New York City band that experiments with their instruments to create an industrial maelstrom: Model/Actriz. If most concerts are like a Baptist mass, a Model/Actriz show is like an Appalachian snake-handling worship service.
Cole Haden of Model/Actriz is what happens when you dip a diva of the highest order into a boiling pot of dive-bar punk primal instinct. The puppy dog hats; draped clothes, dresses, or skirts; forearm gloves all accentuating his prowl across the stage. The crowd clinging to his every swinging sashay. But the show is unleashed when he jumps off the stage and makes his way into the crowd, dancing with them, screaming and moaning over the clanging steel of guitars and a pulsing beat.
However, at each show I’ve been to the performance climaxes with their performance of “Amaranth.” It is moment in the service when the preacher and an audience member are linked through possession by a spirt beyond our realm. Beyond our understanding.
Haden stalks through the audience as the song begins. Feeling the bodies, giving in as they sway against him, pushing him through the crowd like a stick on a stream. His arm is raised above him as he carries the mic wire, and those in the crowd behind him keep track of its length.
But in the final reprise of the prechorus the chaos calms to the twinkle of a guitar as Haden sings the same few lines over and over, “See the petals stagger onto me, see my body carried splintered,” and so on. He and the crowd around him crouch to their knees as the energy in the room quiets and centers on him. He chooses a single member of the audience and, pressing his forehead against theirs continues singing. It feels like it could be an endless moment. Until his voice rises as he sings, “high enough for scattering.”
Then, back on his feet, he screams “amaranth!” The music comes back like a brick through a stained-glass window. The song ends on the crunching pulse of the chorus, Haden screaming over and over “amaranth, crawling to it.”
You walk out of the show knowing that he might perform that ritual in a new city every night. But not with those people. Not on that night. You walk out of that show knowing what you had with that room of strangers was something special. In that moment, together, we transcended.
What’s your favorite music experience? Tell us below for a chance at a future feature:
See you next week with a song suggested by another human.