Extra, extra! Bleed all about it
In late April, 2016, I painstakingly crafted a pitch about the 20th anniversary of one of my favourite albums and offered it up to a beloved pop culture outlet’s submission platform. I figured I had a decent shot. “___ Turns Twenty” retrospectives were all the rage in the 2010s, and I had written for this place a few times before and seemed to be in good standing. But I can’t say that the response was much of a shock, either. The editor also loved the record but worried that it wasn’t big enough among their readers to merit coverage. They encouraged me to pitch other outlets, though, because surely someone would want it.
Most of the music outlets that I had written for had died by that point, but I was as determined about this as I managed to be about anything then. So I reached out to the music editors at a site where I was doing movie stuff. “I’m mostly a film writer these days, but I did start in music journalism a hundred years ago, and wanted to pitch you something on one of my favorite albums,” I started. “The 20th anniversary of Amazing Disgrace by The Posies is coming up on May 14 and I’d love to write an op-ed on why this largely forgotten record still matters. The perfect juxtaposition of the sweetest power pop and the sharpest, most amusingly bitter lyrics, it still works as both a singular work of cynical genius that might actually put Alex Chilton’s latter Big Star work to shame, and as the perfect thesis statement for the band’s entire left of center career.”
“I am personally a big fan of the Posies and that album, so <3’s to this pitch,” one of them responded. “Unfortunately, an informal poll of our staff confirms my fears that not a whole lot of people have them on their ’90s radar or would be interested enough in an article celebrating an anniversary of an album they’ve never listened to.”
Running out of time and contacts, I reached out to the new editor of the one Kurchak-byline-sporting Canadian outlet that still existed with a desperate CanCon angle: “Is there any chance that you’d be interested in CanCon adjacent nostalgia features? The twentieth anniversary of Amazing Disgrace by The Posies is coming up, and from what I recall, it was far better received up here than it was in their native USA. They also spent a lot of time touring up here with The Monoxides and treble charger (I believe I still own the copy of The Stink where tc called them their sister band) and were all over CFNY and Chart around that period, so I’d argue that they have at least honourary Canadian status.
“Amazing Disgrace is one of my favorite albums of all time, and I think that masterwork of sweet power pop harmonies and bitter lyrics that would make Sister Lovers-era Alex Chilton blush deserves some love.”
(Bless my heart for thinking that anyone would know or care about The Stink in 2016.)
I never heard back.
It was very on brand for subject and writer.
Five years and even fewer music outlet credentials and contacts later, I didn’t even bother to pitch anything for the album’s silver jubilee. But I do have this not entirely dead newsletter. And I did write about them in my book. (Albeit not as much as I’d originally intended! My editor told me to strike a line in Step Two where I said that my favourite Seattle band was The Posies because it was redundant, given that I talked about them more in depth in a later chapter. I was too tired to fight her, so I let it go. But “my favourite Seattle band was The Posies” is a succinct, specific way to describe my feelings for grunge at the time that would have made sense to anyone who understood that music from that time period that is separate from what I said about them later. I regret that it’s not there.) So I figured I should say something. Although I’m afraid that whatever I attempt to say will be about as successful as the weightlifting attempt on the cover.
I wouldn’t call Amazing Disgrace my favourite album of all time — mostly because I don’t have a singular favourite album. Or band. Or best friend, for that matter — but it is always the first album I bring up when someone asks me for any kind of top ten or desert island disc list. Even if I can’t give it a definitive rank, it’s the album I know needs to be there. I clung to it like a lifeline when I first got it and I’ve come to appreciate it even more as the years have flooded on. I don’t know if I’m impressed with them or a little alarmed at myself when I think about how relevant it still is to me now, but it’s had a way of growing with me.
Even that damned cover has become more meaningful to me with time. As a gangly 14 year old who had never touched a weight, I thought “shit, that looks painful and embarrassing.” As a 39 year old with a failed fitness career behind her, I actually think about the malfunctions that would go into that collapse and how long it would take to recover physically and mentally from it. Which I guess is a fancy way of saying “shit, that is painful and embarrassing.”
The songs have grown with me, too. I deeply identified with their angst as a teenager, but I get them now. The regret, the impotent rage, the sadness, the futility, and the too-clever quips and occasional moments of posturing that try and fail to conceal these emotions. Or even take the edge off. Not even the sweet, pitch perfect power pop harmonies with which they’re delivered offer more than a quarter of a spoonful of sugar for this medicine.
Whatever the mid-90s power pop white person equivalent of spitting fire might be, that was what Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer were doing on Amazing Disgrace. Sometimes they were being petulantly flippant (“Black birds flying overhead/ Who gives a shit” in “Ontario,” “I’m writing you a hate song/ I don’t want to have to hold your hand/ I’m writing you a hate song/ And I’m hoping that you understand” in “Hate Song,” “for a start, take two Grant Harts and call me when you die” in “Grant Hart”).
Sometimes they were guilelessly broken (“I hate to see what trials can be/ Expected of the ordinary/ Before you can recoil in horror/ You’ll discover life is life’s destroyer” in the 90s-ironically-titled “Precious Moments,” “But I don’t have the guts to prevent the decay/ And I’m terribly twisted around what I say/ And the courage that I threw away/ I don’t have it now” in “Throwaway”).
Most of all they were so fucking over everyone’s bullshit, including their own, and frequently incisive about it. “Grant Hart” is a blistering but self-aware assessment of the rock trends of the time. “Daily Mutilation” is exactly what it says on the tin. The title of “Everybody Is A Fucking Liar” is, by far, the least piercing part of the track. (The best part is probably “A man’s an Edsel in his own way.” But “And you who reject masculinity/ Baby, Im with you/ As soon as you forsake virility and aggression too” is a close second.)
But there are some shreds of hope laced through all of this beautiful misery. Sometimes it feels like they’re trying to convince themselves more than anything. “There’s an upside/ There has to be an upside” sounds less like a declaration than a plea with every repetition in “Please Return It.” There’s also the surprisingly reassuring “You can fight it if it doesn’t kill you/ You can fight it if you want to fight in “Fight It (If You Want)” though. And the very last lines of the album are “You may never ease your mind/ But you will never cease to find me still around…”
For reasons that are too ridiculous and long to get into, especially in a newsletter that is already ridiculous and long, I’ve been sucked into a mobile phone game for the past couple of weeks. I’ve spent a fair amount of that time listening to Amazing Disgrace while playing the damned thing. And I’ve started to think of the album as a kind of starter pack for my life: There are the songs I could use when I was feeling cynical and sharp-tongued. The one I required when I broke up with the best friend I just couldn’t fucking deal with anymore (yeah, it was “Hate Song”) and the one I turned to when I things inevitably frayed with the friend I’ll always love but can probably never welcome into my life again (“Song #1”). The ones I’d need when I was in the fetal position and the ones I’d need when I should probably try to get out of it.
25 years to the day after I bought Amazing Disgrace, I definitely have not eased my fucking mind. But I haven’t ceased to find this album still around for me, either.
So happy birthday, you beautiful, bitter bitch of an album. Maybe I’ll successfully pitch a proper story on it at some point in the next 25. Or at least figure out drop D tuning and finally learn how to play “Please Return It.”