Kat Says: “Take Me Back To Anything, Anything Before This.”
A look back at Cruel World, Just Like Heaven and a sad state of affairs.
Are you enjoying Kat Scrawls? Do you think your friends would enjoy it? Please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend who likes good tunes and silly essays, and please always feel free to respond to this email and share your thoughts with me—or “like” it or leave a comment, or tweet it or something. Just spread the love and holler back, I’m always here for you ;)
Nostalgia is a helluva drug.
I’ve been away from your inbox the past few weeks, mainlining nostalgia on a golf course in Pasadena, CA.
I spent two back-to-back Saturdays wading in the sonics of my youth. The first was an ironically, brutally sunny day where me, a few friends and a sea of aged goths revived our post-punk roots at Cruel World Festival.
The second was an indie dance golden-era celebration called Just Like Heaven that, in the apt words of The Hives lead singer Howlin' Pelle Almqvist, served as “the best music festival of 2005.”
Both of these one-day events went down at the Rose Bowl Stadium. Both were healthy reminders that rock bands are pretty cool and DJs aren’t the only thing worth dancing to. One of them was a little more exciting than the other. Both of them were better than living in the fresh hell scape that was this week.
A few words on nostalgia from Neurology Live:
The reward centers of the brain, including the hippocampus, the substantia nigra, the ventral tegmental area, and ventral striatum are activated during nostalgic activity. This reward center involvement explains the very common phenomena of feeling pleasant emotions upon hearing a song from the past, even if the song was not necessarily a favorite song at the time, it was prevalent in popular culture or in a person’s life.
Oh, what a Cruel, Cruel World we live in today. I just heard Andy Fletcher, keyboardist for Depeche Mode, passed away. Depeche Mode was a band I kept talking about two Saturdays ago. They were a perfectly dream-worthy act to headline Cruel World Fest in 2023. I’m thankful I got to see them live, on my 18th birthday exactly, in fact. I was with my mom, and I wore a latex, fetish nurse dress. Some guy told me I was so pale, it looked like I was dead. I’d never been happier.
Further Reading: “Depeche Mode Changed My Life” Discogs, 2020
I guess Depeche Mode won’t be headlining Cruel World in 2023, but the 2022 lineup was incredible all the same. Some bands from the late ‘70s hold up better than others, as one might imagine.
Our day started bright and early around 2 p.m. We missed the baby bat goth bands—the ones that are still releasing relevant records—but we were just in time to see Christian Death play absolutely nothing that anyone knew. We came for the hits, people! What do you think this is, an audition?
Organizers must have thought so. I can not say Cruel World Fest was “well planned.” Three stages were spread across the converted field, sand traps taped off—or not! Stage monitors turned up to an appropriate volume—or not! As my group sat trying to watch the Violent Femmes, we had an easier time hearing the birds that mated in the tree above us. It felt like we were literally sitting in my high school-era 1998 Mercury Sable, streaming “Gimme the Car” on someone’s tin-can phone. Perhaps appropriate!
But not everything was a disappointment. Dinah Cancer and her band 45 Grave sounded absolutely smashing. I waited 2.5 hour for a vegan burger and it was actually pretty damn good. I got to see Blondie do, like, every hit of the band’s career, and even though you could tell The Church pretty much hates “Under The Milky Way,” I heard it live! (The sun was still out, but we’ll take what we can get.)
Waking down the hallway of a former school or driving through a former neighborhood triggers reward pathways in the brain, resulting in positive feelings of nostalgia. These good feelings are generally a common response to past reminders whether the experiences in the former environment were considered positive or largely neutral, but not if those experiences were unpleasant or personally hurtful.
Honestly though, two performances meant a whole lot more to me than anything else. Firstly, I got to see Public Image Limited, which means I got to see John Lydon live.
John Lydon, as you may or may not know, is the real name of Johnny Rotten, the lead singer of the Sex Pistols. Now, a lot of snobs would tell you that “the Sex Pistols are just whatever, man. They’re a punk boy band. They’re not that great.” And to those people I say “THAT’S ALL BOLLOCKS.”
Idk. The Sex Pistols and Johnny Rotten are pretty formative for me. I was a loser kid who spent most of my time being bullied in school, and I have a very clear memory of the first time my mom sat me down to play Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pixtols. It was a freeing moment. It was a chaotic moment. It sounded like all my angst and disappointment could be weaponized for good. It sent me on the path to find all these other bands that performed at Cruel World. It made me who I am today.
Just before PiL hit the stage, I started to cry. Just a few tears, lil eye wells running over. Then I got worried that Lydon, being 66 years old, would not, like, have it anymore? I couldn’t have been more pleasantly proven wrong.
This motherfucker is wild. This motherfucker is crazy. This motherfucker sing-screams with wide eyes and grabs on his balls and rinses his mouth with whiskey and spits like no time has ever gone by. Watching him perform was a master class. I realized that he’s not putting on an act. He’s just being himself, and every band leader and every maniac front person is putting on a him. It was 4 freakin’ p.m., and I got to see the big boss dad of everything I enjoy do his thing.
Seven days later, I’d watch Peaches tear up that very stage as the first act I caught at Just Like Heaven. She walked around half naked, singing about little tits and hot vaginas, lookin’ fierce as fuck at 55 years old, playing an album that just turned 20. It’s all a lineage. It’s all related.
Bauhaus was the other big one. I’d say it was the biggest one of all. Peter Murphy is 64 years old, and he put on the most enthralling, most cinematic, most emotionally-immersive performance of any band across those two weekends. He pulled us all into the vampire’s den, the sky full of smoke and the moon full, and that band gave us the capital-g Gothest experience of my entire life.
They played “In A Flat Field.” They played “Double Dare.” They had us swaying like willow trees to “She’s In Parties.” They milked every second of the goth-rock epic “Bella Lugosi’s Dead.” Peter Murphy hung his microphone stand over his shoulders like a cross and sang “Stigmata Martyr.” They played my favorite song “Dark Entries,” then finished the set with a cover of David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.”
Murphy is a literal god, and when he tripped over his mic stand during that last cover, we all held our breath for a moment. Like, this dude is no spring chicken. He’d just given the performance of a lifetime, and then he fell—but then he got up! And he kicked that fucking mic stand right off the stage! And we all screamed and cheered, and I hope he didn’t feel too embarrassed, because it was honestly the most rock star shit I’ve ever seen. I hope I grow up to be anything like Peter Murphy and John Lydon and Debbie Harry.
Omg and Devo was also amazing. And Morrissey was pretty good, but the best thing about his performance was the end when he started screaming “Rats! Rats! Bulging eyes staring at you!” and then walked off stage while a loop of a young man shooting himself in the head played for two minutes. What in the actual fuck? What a disturbing diva.
Nostalgia can be a useful emotional strategy or a harmful addiction
The positive responses evoked by nostalgia can help protect people from the emotional burden of situational disappointment and even from anxiety. When used as a coping strategy, a person can deliberately trigger feelings of nostalgia by listening to familiar music, looking at old photos, or visiting comforting environments of the past.
I spent the week between Cruel World and Just Like Heaven in Los Angeles. I went to a Magic Castle, had some of the best darn food of my life, hugged my friends, stayed up too late partying, got a really good deal on a rental car and decided LA drivers are pretty fucking polite, actually.
Meanwhile, there was a shooting down the street from where I was staying and a mass shooting in Buffalo, NY. I subscribe to the NYTimes daily news update emails, but it’s been a few months since I could bear to read them. It’s been 92 days since Russia invaded Ukraine, and there have been 179 mass shootings in the United States in that same amount of time.
Did you know gas is about $6 a gallon in LA? I’m lucky if I can find it for $4.50 in south Florida. I’ll also be lucky if I can find a place to live here. Florida’s rent prices are spiking at what is probably the fastest rate in our country's history. Since March of 2020, Miami’s median rent has been raised by 58 percent. Many people wake up one morning to find their rent has been raised no less than $1,000, effective immediately.
The Mayor of Miami said he was going to off-set the cost of rising rent by donating a portion of the profits from Miami’s new cryptocurrency, MiamiCoin.
However, nostalgia can be so easily provoked that it is possible to become addicted to the pleasure of nostalgia, just as a person can become addicted to any activity that stimulates the reward centers of the brain. Nostalgia can be used excessively as a crutch and the positive feelings of nostalgia may serve as a substitute for living in the present-day if current, real life troubles take more effort than a person can tolerate.
Just Like Heaven was organizationally a bit better than Cruel World, but I’ve actually seen most of these bands before, during their heyday and all that when I was a moody teenager escaping the horrors of the hallway via live music. It was somehow a little less magical, but all the same exciting.
Peaches, as I said, was an incredible way to start the day. She’s a consummate performer, the top to top all tops, as I told my friend Brad. I also have to say how wildly impressed I was with The Hives. I’ve never been the most dedicated listener, but I will do whatever I can to catch that band in a headline performance on tour. The singer is fucking hysterical.
“This is the best festival of 2005,” he said. “I don’t remember it being this good, but it is now.”
I achieved a lifetime milestone when I saw Franz Ferdinand live. There was a two year period where I kept their first two albums in heavy rotation. They had a female drummer, which I don’t remember being the case but found really wonderful, and so did Bloc Party.
Speaking of iconic females, we got to see Santigold perform, and she was an absolute queen. Also, I think M.I.A. was the Bauhaus of Just Like Heaven, for me. She blitzed through her hour-long performance, crushing my ears in the best way with a mega-mix of hits delivered with absolute vocal precision. Her lyrics hit harder than usual. “It’s getting crazy around here,” she said. “Sometimes you have to get violent.”
She finished her set with a new song. I don’t think it’s been released yet. The chorus goes; “When things are critical / we’re gonna need a miracle.” A lot of people in the crowd were already walking away to go see Interpol, because it’s easier to burrow yourself in something you already know than face something new.
New things can make you feel uncomfortable. Nostalgic things make you feel cozy and safe, but nostalgia always comes with the bittersweet reminder that things will never be the same as they were. There’s no real going back to yesterday.
You can dance to The Shins and Modest Mouse, but you still have to go home to the news that another angry young man walked into an elementary school in full body army and murdered 19 fourth graders and two teachers. You can try not to look, but you’re still gonna hear the clip of Ted Cruz walking away from an interview because someone asked him to take a stance on gun control.
“I’m sorry you think American exceptionalism is awful,” Cruz said. “You’ve got your political agenda. God love you.”
Rats. Rats. Bulging eyes staring at you. Goodnight and goodluck.
Editors note: If you would like to call Congress and make a plea for gun reform, Amnesty International has a helpful prompt that will look up the number of your local representative and make that easy for you.
That’s it. That’s this week’s newsletter.
Absolutely Necessary
(This is the part where I share songs that are so good, they’re absolutely necessary to listen to. That’s it. That’s the bar.)
WOOOOO, what a fucking ride, right? Being a human in 2022 is not fucking easy. Sorry I made you read the longest essay ever. I’m not gonna carry on listing a bunch of songs after all that, but the newsletter playlists HAVE been updated, and there are a TON of NEW songs that are going to make your life feel better for having listened to. I promise.
Have at ‘em.
I made two Spotify playlists for this section that you can follow: one weekly playlist updated with just the new stuff every week, and one cumulative playlist that will host every song I pick ever (until Spotify tells me it's full). Check them out! I made them for you—and me, but mostly you.
Thanks for tuning into my newsletter. Listen to the playlists on Spotify. One is updated weekly with all the songs from each edition. The other is cumulative with all the updates ever!