Down the Wormhole
Lil Uzi Vert, powerviolence, bananas, and more
Welcome to the wormhole, a weekly Deep Voices dispatch. Consider these emails an exercise in music lover world building. I’ve spent my life digging into this weird and fruitful universe of music and art and I’ll be ~paying it forward~ here just for paid subscribers. Subscribe for access (a little more than a dollar a week. Cheap!), and to support the work I do getting out the playlists, interviews, and essay every week. Don’t forget, you can also buy a Deep Voices shirt! Double sided!
This week: A rollerblading guitarist, Joanna Newsom in fiction, Kitty Pryde, DJ magic, and multiple bananas.
Northern Exposure, rollerblading, and Mark McGuire. One of the best songs of the year has got to be “Anhedonia” by wizardly guitarist Mark McGuire. The song is a deeply emotional instrumental piece he recorded in 2020. Towards the end of the song, though, McGuire incorporates an audio sample of a man orating wisely at a funeral. “When we're stripped of all our worldly possessions and all our fame, family, friends, we all face death alone. But it's that solitude in death that's our common bond in life,” he says. “Only when we understand all is vanity, only then, it isn't.” Heavy stuff.
It took a little bit to figure out what the sample was from. A historic recording of some prophetic poet of the past? Not quite. Gotta say, my money was not on an old episode of Northern Exposure. Wisdom hides in strange places. Apparently, like forgotten ’90s sitcoms. Which you can now watch on Tik-Tok.
I’ve only really ever been a casual McGuire fan and this made me feel like I should take my interest to the next level. To start, I figured I should follow him on Instagram, where his username turned out to be @thespiritskater. That’s because most of what he posts are videos of him rollerblading. He’s got light up wheels in this one, his shirt open to his bare white chest. “You know i love hitting that big hill at edgewater,” the caption says. “rippin it here on a hot summer night.. 🦾👽 #inlineskating.” I love this dude so much!
The Music of Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte. Have you read this book? I sure have. It’s a doozy. I was captivated, moved, tickled, bummed out, and nauseated in equal measure. The book is a series of linked short stories about sex, identity, the internet, and the malleability of self, which as life’s great opportunity, is almost universally wasted. The book’s not about music, but in one of the linked short stories, there are several references (Korn, Phish) I greatly appreciated. But I have a light bone to pick with Tulathimutte (or with his character Bee) who calls