Homesick for a place that no longer exists
on the naked vulnerability of music video YouTube comments
Happy Friday guys. A few little things before I get into the meat of this missive:
the Blur episode of Bandsplain came out yesterday with my half-English friend Chris Ryan, who is extremely smart and extremely good at podcasting while also having some extremely wild takes (you’ll know what I mean when you hear the words “Spin Doctors”). We get into the music, the feud, the class considerations, the Fila tracksuit, the goss, the tea (PG Tips) and the brief period where Damon sounds like this:
I’m reprinting the Yasi x Night Gallery x Rolly Barthes tee for the holidays (it’s festive) and we are doing pre-orders for just a few more days.
There will be an actual gift guide next week, mostly music books but also some other things, with maybe possibly a wee rebrand of this whole Substack, so see you then!
My friend Josh Zoerner of the great Night Gallery made a book of music video YouTube comments called Fan of the Band and asked me to write the foreword. (The afterword? Is that what you call that? is by the also great Geoff Rickly of Thursday, whose excellent book Someone Who Isn’t Me came out last year). I have a very intimate relationship with YouTube comments; because of my Bandsplain work I end up spending way more time than I should reading them because they’re one of the best places to find information - often a guy who worked on the album or the third cousin of artist will leave a comment with a fact you’ve never heard before - but also because they’re often some of the most emotionally striking comments on the internet.
I read this foreword at a reading with the iconic Maggie Nelson (!!!) earlier this week (she wrote a fantastic zine about Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath and I accidentally told her I’ve read her book Bluets like 38 times and she was really nice about it) and I wanted to share it here, too. I also want to give a doff of the cap to the also iconic Meaghan Garvey, maybe my favorite music writer on the planet, who beat us all to the punch on this with her zine The Hand Inside You, a compilation of incredibly beautiful comments on various Mazzy music videos. She was also my guest on the Mazzy Star episode of Bandsplain, which is one of the best ones if I’m allowed to say so.
Here is the foreword, it doesn’t have a title:
I spend a lot of time on the internet for better or for worse, mostly for worse, mostly for work, often for purchasing things I don’t need at the behest of a beautiful TikTok influencer in Ohio with perfect lip filler and an Amazon storefront, but sometimes, sometimes I stumble upon the sublime.
There’s something disjointed and anachronistic about YouTube comments - the music video or song is like a static monument but people come to it in their own time, on little pilgrimages, leaving offerings of their devotion. The ones that really move me are confessional in a way that feels private; you get the sense that they’re not for attention or validation. They’re looking for something else, something purer, more intangible.
The top comment on the official music video for Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” is a widow publicly mourning her husband. He bought her that CD in 1994, she says. Then he became her husband for 23 years until he died in 2018. She uses this venue to proclaim her undying feelings: “I will always love you Wilson Reyes Jr. You will never fade from my heart or memory my love.”
It makes you rethink it all, to see the raw vulnerability and earnest devotion and the two-dimensional joy and pain in these comments, recontextualizes the whole place, the entire world wide web and all its denizens, so lonely, so isolated, in so much anguish, lashing out at each other or grasping desperately for relevance or just to be ever so briefly seen. So much of life is just wanting to be seen. Part of it maybe is just needing a place to put things you can’t carry. The rest, the rest of it is made up of a million individual motivations and pay offs, the same fabric that makes up fandom, everybody gets something different but also the really the same, out of their connection with a song, with music.
There’s a 2004 romantic comedy starring Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, and J.Lo called Shall We Dance (which is of course about the transformative power of dance to heal relationships and change lives) that stuck with me way longer than it maybe should have because of one little burst of dialogue, delivered by Sarandon’s character to her husband, played by Gere.
We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness'."
I think about an ex-boyfriend of mine who once told me he doesn’t want to be seen, he just wants to be loved. I didn’t understand it then but I think I understand it now. It takes vulnerability to be seen. It costs vulnerability to buy love. That’s the exchange rate. There’s no free lunch. Ass, cash, or grass…nobody rides for free. He maybe didn’t understand that, but these people who drop their naked pain into the blank box and click “comment,” they do.
The top comment on the “Fade Into You” video currently has 723 replies. 723 confirmed witnesses, at least. To one of those, now deleted, the original poster replied: “I know no one here knows him. But his name was read. Now forever known. And this alone brings me some solace. He was a great man.”
Now forever known…may we all be so lucky. *
*this is a hack ending but I’m rusty and I was in a hurry okay
To close out, here are some of my most cherished YouTube comments on that Mazzy Star video:
@mazzyellisriddick419
My dad named me after this band and he passed away when I was 5 .he said I would sing like her. & he absolutely adored her songs .now I listen to this song almost daily to feel a embrace of him to me .️
@slimcat0072
Sometimes it seems like life is just the time between traumatic events. The space between tears....
@slh5248
Close my eyes... and I'm right back in 1994, preteen with the world ahead of me. No flaws, no mistakes, no regrets.. Just a world of hopes and dreams ...endless possibilities that have just faded into distant memories....
@CostaRicaMan100
I ran into this song and reminded me of my first love who died seven years ago of leukemia, she was only 38 and still feels like it was yesterday.
Many dreams didn't come true and rest assured pride tore us both apart, I didn't have time to say I'm sorry.
@NoLuvNdezeInnaNetStreetz
October 22nd 2024, my 37th birthday and I am here grateful for my experiences and the loves I’ve had lost and will have again. I pray that whoever reads this gets everything in this lifetime that their hearts desire and if they don’t I pray their next life is better than this one. May all of your pain be champagne 🥹
@Chad_Thundercock
Here's to all of us who are homesick for a place that no longer exists.