Hell yeah, it’s a goddamn emo teen sad breakup thirsty horny dance party. If you don’t hear it and think “i am 16 again”, what’s the point? We’d have failed. Dance out your teenage longing.
Category: Indie Rock
go and throw your little hands up
weird sad dance party. perfect for social gatherings!
black tea, sunday night
gentle tunes for soothing times. a chill blend of quiet folk-tinged indie flavors to put on while sitting around with friends. invoke the joys of having best friends who all live within walking distance coming over on sunday night to just sit around and sip some black tea.
slice of life trashfire vibes
Hurting. Longing. Dancing to disco music.
A soundtrack to uneventful teenage days. Not the angsty side of youth, but the biding your time of youth. Music your cooler friends listen to that lodge in your head for processing, vibes from video games that incongruously feel like hanging out at the mall, something something identity. A cross between getting a ride from a friend so you don’t have to take the school bus and a Makoto Shinkai movie. Sort of works either as a playlist for work music or for waiting for everyone to arrive for book club.
firefly was always bad
spicy hot jams for working on your spicy hot takes
imo this is a good one for the last hour of a workday when you’ve emotionally hit a wall and need to rally and by rally i mean reflect on the relationship between the frictions of life and the value of life
sometimes we were wrong about things
version history
[June 27, 2022] the live version on spotify has swapped in some currently available instrumental pillows tunes to try to match the OG’s energy, added a few other songs throughout to address the gap created by how that goal is not, in fact, possible. it feels fucked to act like a tv show is the bad thing in June 2022 in, say, america, but here we are. rage against the dying of the light for ~63 minutes.
[Nov 24, 2021] the OG version of this playlist with a buncha good good pillows instrumentals from FLCL, which are in a constant state of on/off spotify. can be temporarily enjoyed via youtube, until something inevitably goes wrong there too.
wrapping up the work week
the other end of checking your work email on monday morning. a lot of genres, but it’s all friday. less of a getting coffee and drilling down to work playlist and more of a soaking up the morning light and the last cup of coffee of the work week playlist. yesterday was thursday. today, it is friday.
invoking the late-night creative golden hour
A playlist for anyone who gets their best work done around 10:30 pm, but has a day job.
Despite being wildly genre-agnostic, the vibe is pretty consistently mellow, warm, but a little melancholy throughout. All of these songs live in a world that’s mostly gone to bed for the day and has thus gotten pretty quiet. It’s not a late-night playlist that’s going to eventually lull you to sleep, but rather one that’s content to stay up with you for a little while. And if you put it on in the middle of the day, it’ll pretend it’s the nighttime with you.
the cave level from pokemon snap
Some twinkly vibes for taking pictures of bats and plants in a cave. That’s it. I just like this level from this game. Here, I made a one-hour loop of it! Put on the playlist, put this video on in the background, and just feel how cozy and charming this is!
I’m not interested in writing about the concept of nostalgia or its utilization in late-capitalism and/or the collective trauma of a pandemic or whatever vis a vis New Pokémon Snap. So instead here is every Pokémon featured in the cave level from the original N64 Pokémon Snap ranked by what they would sing at karaoke and how good it would be.
14. Zubat would croon “She Will Be Loved” by Maroon 5 off-key and get mad at people who happen to be leaving the bar during their performance.
13. Grimer would be a white guy doing Wiz Khalifa. He will butcher it. Everyone will be uncomfortable.
12. Weepinbell would do a Disney song and it will suck.
11. Jynx would dedicate her song to her boyfriend and then do a very warbly rendition of “Landslide” and it’ll make the crowd confused and uncomfortable for just a whole bunch of different reasons
10. Magikarp would do a very slow, 5-minute song that nobody’s ever heard of. It has a full minute of guitar solo played by a MIDI keyboard that Magikarp just stands on stage nodding along to. There is still a whole chorus to go.
9. Ditto would do a song that somebody else has already done earlier that night, obviously.
8. Jigglypuff would be hella shitfaced and do “Sugar, We’re Going Down” but would only actually scream the choruses and either doesn’t know or is too drunk to pay attention to the verses. Jigglypuff really worked up the crowd first, so it will be a huge disappointment when you realize what’s going on.
7. Articuno will do “Born in the USA” and some people will be extremely into it and some people will be extremely not into it.
6. Koffing will throw everyone for a loop and do a surprisingly touching rendition of a Phoebe Bridgers song, but it will bring the mood down.
5. The Bulbasaur that are actually Ditto would do “Piano Man”. Everyone will roll their eyes, but get really into it. The crowd is all singing along by the end of it.
4. Pikachu is reluctantly dragged on stage by their friend to do Lady Gaga’s parts of “Shallow” with them. It turns out they’re a breathtakingly good singer, but they don’t like to show off. A bunch of men try to buy them a drink at the bar afterward, but Pikachu doesn’t drink. Pikachu leaves the bar to go home at 10pm on the dot.
3. Victreebell would do a terrifyingly metal rendition of Britney Spears’ “Toxic”. It will work astoundingly well.
2. Muk would do Biggie Smalls’ “Big Poppa” and it will slap.
1. Pikachu Riding Articuno would be the equivalent of Carly Rae Jepsen showing up at your local bar for no reason, singing “Cut To The Feeling”, politely waving to the stunned crowd, and leaving. No one will ever believe you when you say this happened.
Gender Euphoria
I’ve been in a perpetual process of self-discovery for about the last decade. I sat in a course I was taking at the time in college, reading an article about the experience of transgender and nonbinary people in Japan, and at that moment something clicked in my head, and I’ve spent the better part of 10 years trying to deny it with various success.
And if you have ever tried to do coursework while also dealing with the revelation that you are likely not the gender you were assigned at birth, it is not easy!
I’ve never been a particularly self-aware person, and so my feelings about anything about myself have been hard to say so far, making this a weird and hard post to write. I’ve been on a journey of self-discovery lately, and like most of the things in my life it’s led me precisely nowhere.
Okay, that’s not necessarily true. It’s led me somewhere, which is a place I didn’t really think I’d be at and, if I’m being honest, which I’m being with strangers on the internet for some reason, it’s a particularly scary one. I don’t like existing in a way where I stand out, I don’t like existing in a way where I feel the need to explain myself. I am nervous just writing this blog post knowing that someone could, with knowledge of my partner in playlists here, pretty easily determine who I am in Real Life™. I don’t like this because it feels like, in a world where most people have the answers to these questions, I still don’t, and even if I do have those answers, the reality is one that opens me up to a life of rejection, hate, and struggle.
But the thought of living a life as a lie is harder one, and the thought that maybe if things are kinda tough for me, they might be easier for someone else like me one day is certainly a nice one.
I don’t have the answers yet. But I feel like I’m getting closer.
Anyways, here is Gender Euphoria, a playlist I made for the moments where I can see a future where I’m comfortable looking in the mirror. They’re still pretty rare, but they feel wonderful when they happen, and I want to share that with you all. This is actually an extremely personal playlist as it’s one that’s sat on my own spotify account for a long time (with some exceptions. My personal one has “Man, I Feel Like a Woman” by Shania Twain on it, and I was NOT going to subject you all to that). But with the one day my cloaking field deactivates being tomorrow [ed. note after checking the date and doubling checking how long this draft has been in my inbox: whoops], I wanted to share with you all a playlist that imagines a slightly better tomorrow, and to share with everyone out there feeling a similar way a moment in time where maybe things feel a little better.
Some of these songs are a little less than euphoric but part of my specific euphoria is imagining a world where I feel like celebrating my journey so here we are.
Also, this playlist currently has the second most Carly Rae Jepsen of any Trash Garbage playlist and if you are wondering why, I have prepared a helpful guide:
nothing amazing happens here
songs for acting like a grownup. not songs about growing up, because actual teens listen to godawful music about growing up. i did not have good taste as a teen. i sure thought i did though.