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Friends, I’m so excited to share this episode about punk rock with you. Not only does it weave in and out of where the source of many of my ethics come from, it also features a reunion between myself and an old friend, the musician Ted Leo, who I haven’t spoken with for almost twenty years.
Ted is best known for his band Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, but also for his project with Aimee Mann, The Both, his solo albums, and his hugely influential mod-punk band, Chisel.
On this episode, Ted and I talk at length about how punk changed our lives, but – perhaps more importantly – why that punk rock network and community matters now.
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? One of my favorite AEWCH moments was when Fugazi/Minor Threat frontman and Dischord Records founder Ian MacKaye agreed to be on the show… and our conversation on AEWCH 119 was really incredible. A very different kind of conversation than this one with Ted, but still adjacent to everything.
WHAT BOOK SHOULD YOU READ? A great introduction to the ways art and politics and mutual aid interwove during our punk coming of age is We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews which features longform interviews with musicians, but also leftist political figures of the time.
MORE ON TED Ted’s website is here, and he also posts frequently on bandcamp, where you can support his music via donation. Here’s Ted’s Stereogum interview about his solo album The Hanged Man. And just for the fuck of it, here’s Ted singing a karaoke version of Kelly Clarkson’s “Since You’ve Been Gone” with comedian Paul F. Tomkins in tow.
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When you use patreon, you’re not only supporting me, but accessing an economic model that isn’t about paying people for their labor, and instead showing care and appreciation of who they are.
Friends,
All good art has a spiritual component, but how? Sometimes it’s obvious, of course; for example, a book or film will have spiritual content. But what about art that isn’t apparently spiritual but has deep spiritual meaning and resonance? I wanted to talk about the spirit in an unlikely place: rock music. So I invited my friend, Dave Le’Aupepe, frontman of Gang of Youths, back onto the show. Dave was last on the show back waaay on AEWCH 31back when the show was primarily video.
Dave’s latest album with Gang of Youths is Angel in Realtime, which was one of the most celebrated albums of 2022, particularly in Australia. It’s a beautiful meditation on death and discovery, blending rock, minimalist composition structures, and excessive layering.
This is a wide-ranging episode covering angels, mythology, representation, politics in music, the dead, and more. I’m so happy to share it with you.
CH
SHOW NOTES
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? Since the episode begins with a little back and forth about how people don’t know what to ask musicians, here’s AEWCH 109 with Stephen Malkmus about music and Giles Deleuze. One of my favorite eps, for sure.
WHAT BOOK SHOULD YOU READ? To compliment Angel in Realtime, I suggest the most profound expression of loss ever written as a novel, Jame’s Agee’s A Death in the Family.
Friends, what can I say? A few days ago, Against Everyone With Conner Habib got a shout out in the Guardian from one of its listeners: Michael Stipe from R.E.M.
I’m floored by this.
I am really moved and almost overwhelmed by this. This person has had such a huge impact on my life, and has provided such a profound directional force of imagination for me.
More and more, I realize that listeners and supporters of the show represent a very special group of people. You’re listening because you really care about the substance of the show. Not because it’s poppy or familiar or always easy to digest, but because you love meaningful engagement.
Just wanted to share. And to say to you who support the show, thank you for helping make the show possible.
This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib onPatreon! Thank you so, so much.
Wanttobuy the booksmentionedonthisep? For Blindboy’s books you should order from Amazon. His two short story collections, Boulevard Wrenand The Gospel According To Blindboy as well as the book on Irish-English, A Dictionary of Hiberno English(by Terrence Dolan), which he helped re-release, are all a little bit of a pain to get from bookshop.org in the US, so I am unfortunately directing you to Amazon for them. Still, get them. Get them. For the other books mentioned on or related to this episode, please go to my booklist for AEWCH 140 on bookshop.org. It will help supportindependentbookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.
Friends,
Jacques Lacan once said something like, the only difference between “normal” people and paranoid schizophrenic people is that the latter has their frantic-Charlie-Day-bulletin-board on the surface. We all draw lines between seemingly disparate points, and our connections are ultimately meaningless. It’s just that you can see that process in the paranoid schizophrenic person.
Well, I don’t know that I agree that the points, the pathways, or the reason we select either are meaningless, but I do like this metaphor. Still, my question is why do you draw the lines you draw? Why are they different from the ones I draw?
I asked my pal Blindboy Boatclub – member of The Rubberbandits and host of The Blindboy Podcast (and also one of the most productively absurd people I’ve ever met) – to join me to talk about all of this.
You might remember Blindboy from my appearance on his show back in March 0f 2019 (and I talk about it in the intro to this ep), when we talked about the occult, ghosts, sex work, and more. This is a continuation of that conversation, and it leads us into weird territory.
ON THIS EPISODE
Versatile Irish words like “craic,” “ride,” and “horny,” why we have boners in America, and why we can say cunt in Ireland
Drawing lines between seemingly disparate topics
Why showing the process in art reveals its livingness
“The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire.’
The connection between themes in our art and healing images in the world; and why birdflight is healing
Each problem has a virtue
Autonomous shadows and cartoon duck landlords
Anxiety, depression, and the recreation of time in the global crisis
• Here’s Jon Ronson’s story about his son saying the worst swear word ever.
• Duncan Trussell and I talked about the oblivion in the signal on his show here.
• Want to learn about the mind parasite of the fungal cordyceps? Yeah, of course you do.
• Here’s a good example of one of Blindboy’s drawings (which you can find in his books).
• AEWCH 40 with poet Zachary Schomburg is one of my favorite episodes of the show!
• My Irish Times essay about the changing nature of time and space is here. And here’s the Wittgenstein quote from it: “When we think of the world’s future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction,”
• Melancholiais my favorite Lars von Trier movie (maybe the only one I truly like?) and it’s a great comment on the power of depression.
• Here’s one of the first things I ever published, “Emit Time.” Just deciding that one of your first essays ever written would be a new ontology of time, nbd, Conner.
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Friends,
What an honor to go deep into the ways we are all connected with rock star, writer, TED Talker, and activist Amanda Palmer. Amanda is known for many things – her music, her band The Dresden Dolls, her book The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help which was kicked off by her TED talk, “Theartofasking” – but all of her accomplishments stress a spirit of giving and vulnerability.
We start with me recounting an event from the week before, when I intervened and stopped a man from committing suicide, and from there, we talk about the many, many ways in which we are all here for each other. This is an episode compassion, which means “to suffer with.” It’s about the jobs that artists have in our world, about the ways we close ourselves off from connection, about art and motherhood, about mutualism in animals, and more.
And yes, we both cry.
I’m so proud to share this episode, friends, and I hope it brings light to you.
Do contribute to Amanda’s patreon. Amanda has done so much for artists, particularly by laying the foundation for grassroots and associative economies.
• Here’s my little twitter tribute (in thread form) to LynnMargulis. Stay tuned to future episodes for more on Lynn and her work.
• Amanda and I interacted for the first time when she was kind enough to repost myexclusiveblogpostofaspeechbyTildaSwinton about art and light. The speech is stunning, and I was lucky enough to get it from Tilda’s friend, author WilliamMiddleton.
• I talk more about detachment and sex work on AEWCH 44 with writers Kelly Link and Jordy Rosenberg.
I’ll leave you here with the lyrics from Amanda’s beautiful song, “A Mother’s Confession” which is on the spotify playlist I made of Amanda’s music.
Our son is four months old his name is Anthony or Ash for short
And he’s too small to do things by himself
We were in LA over Christmas in a rental and we jury-rigged a place
To change his diapers on a shelf
I was peeing in the bathroom and had left him for a second
‘Cause I thought he couldn’t move and he was safe
As I came out I saw him falling in slow motion to the floor
It was probably the worst moment of my life
And then I accidentally stole a thing of chapstick from the safeway
I didn’t see it ’til I got out to the car
I would have usually returned it but I was overwhelmed
And late to take the baby to my cousins which was far away
In my defense, I’d bought like $87 worth of groceries
And the chapstick was a $1.99
I know it wasn’t the right thing to use
My newborn child as an excuse
But it felt like a good reason at the time
And as I pulled out of the parking lot I cried
And as I pulled onto the highway I said right
At least the baby didn’t die right?
At least the baby didn’t die
And then we went to Sarasota
To see Neil’s cousin Helen
For her birthday she just turned ninety-nine
We were also there for Sidney
Who was ninety-four two days before
But he was sick, so mostly it was Ash and Helen time
She survived the Warsaw ghetto
And she always says I love you”
When she sees you ’cause she knows you never know
She’d worked for months while I was pregnant
On a gorgeous handmade blanket
Her almost-hundred-year-old hands crocheting every row
I’d been emailing her pictures of the baby and the blanket
Every day since she had sent it in the mail
But they were of one that someone else had knitted
She was really nice about it
Then I went and shoplifted a pair of ugly sunglasses
From Goodwill (they were on my head
I’d tried them on and left them there)
But that’s not really bad compared to
When we left the baby in the car
At least he wasn’t in there very long
And not directly in the sun
And thank god no-one walking by happened to notice what we’d done
I’m even scared to put these lyrics in a song
But
Everything is relative and everyone’s related
I can’t do that much right now
But take care of this baby
I figure everything’s technically all right
If at least this baby doesn’t die
And then I took a plane to Washington alone
So we could visit Jason Webley who’s his godfather
He’s playing the accordion
I couldn’t wait to see him and share tales of our disasters
Over dinners in his houseboat when I saw I’d lost my passport
So I got a rush appointment at the place where you replace them
And I drove the baby in and on the way I got a speeding ticket
When the cop came to the window I was shaking and I said “I’m sorry”
But you couldn’t hear me that’s how loud the sound of screaming was
Cause he was hungry and I think that I was speeding
Cause I panic when I hear him cry
My god what kind of a mother am i
And as I pulled out of the breakdown lane I cried
And as I pulled out on the highway I said right
At least the baby didn’t die right?
At least the baby didn’t die”
While I was waiting for my passport I was hungry so
I twittered for a coffee in the neighborhood
And there I saw a woman who was sitting at the bar
And it was noon and she was drinking
And she called across the diner to me How old is your baby?”
And she smiled at us nursing
And she said she had a daughter who was grown
And then she paused
And said she also had a son
And when I’d paid and was about to leave
I picked him up and crossed the room and touched her sleeve
I said, Hey, this baby wanted to say hi”
And she held him tight and she started to cry
And I’m sorry that this story’s gotten long
And that everybody’s crying in this song
And then I got back in the car I turned the radio and heater on
And sat there with the baby in the back
And they were talking about Syria and climate change and ISIS
And the candidates’ positions on Iraq
I feel so useless in this universe
I know I could be doing worse
I’m trying hard to stay at peace inside
I know it’s hard to be a parent
But this mess is so gigantic
i wonder if I should have had a child
And as I pulled out of the parking lot I cried
And as I pulled out on the highway I said
right
At least the baby didn’t die
At least the baby didn’t die
EVERYBODY:
At least the baby didn’t die!! right?!
At least the baby didn’t die!!
(i may not make it to the passport place on time!)
At least the baby didn’t die
(and they might revoke my license for a while!!)
At least the baby didn’t die
(and I might get caught for retroactive theft!!)
At least the baby didn’t die
(and I might get turned into the DSS!)
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Friends,
What an amazing conversation with music legend, political rock star, and one of my heroes, Billy Bragg.
Billy really needs no introduction, but in case you’ve missed his decades-spanning career in music, I’ve made a long spotify playlist of some of my favorite Billy Bragg songs for you here. Billy’s music has always held a special place in my heart and my activism, and his new book, The Three Dimensions of Freedom which focuses on his thoughtful versions of liberty, equality, and accountability, has only amplified my admiration for him. It’s a great book that you can read in a couple hours, and will enliven your sense of history and motivate you. Go get it.
We talk about
why the language of Marxism no longer works, and why we need a language of compassion
how to tend to individualism ethically, and how to have agency
how the alt-right and atheist bros and Brexit all arise from a sense of meaninglessness
how Billy’s model relates to the traditional tripartite motto of Liberty! Equality! Fraternity! and why he replaced “fraternity” with “accountability”
how holding some asshole accountable on twitter relates to accountability for political leaders
why Morrissey is a dick (not in the episode, but at Billy’s shows, he’s been calling Boris Johnson “Borrissey”)
the problem with “freedom of speech”
why concerns about no-platforming are ridiculous
why Flat Earthers have a point (not really, but sort of!)
gay slaps in the face (listen for Billy’s gasp, it’s great)
shifting fields of culture and what is acceptable and unacceptable
how one of his albums was deeply personal for me and wove into a time of abuse
AGAINST EVERYONE with CONNER HABIB 45: BEN CHASY (SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE) or OCCULT VIBRATIONS
AGAINST EVERYONE is fully funded by Patreon. Please support the show and contribute to my mission to bring deep but accessible conversations to the world, and you’ll also get great stuff. Signing up is easy, and contributions start at as little as a dollar per month.
One of my favorite musicians, Ben Chasny (AKA Six Organs of Admittance) joins me on AEWCH to discuss the occult properties and relationships of tones, chords, and intervals. We don’t just discuss them, Ben plays them, and we see what happens; in particular we use Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on music (starting at 32:00) and the evolution of consciousness to lead us. Also, on the four occult bodies, feeling the music versus allowing music to grow out of itself, why we need to listen to and through the entire body, Billy Idol and Francoise Hardy, Deleuze and repetition in songs, Ben’s Hexadic system for composing, and why music makes us feel the way it makes us feel.
There are four (yes, four!) musical performances on this episode. Here are the songs and when they happen:
Joan of Arc, Cap’n Jazz, Owls, and Make Believe frontman Tim Kinsella has long been a source of creative inspiration for me. So it was such an honor to have him on the show, and a pleasure to talk with him. The conversation is wide-ranging, but also intense.
We talk about music, of course; but also the occult, how art happens to us and why, the merits of making audiences uncomfortable, why utopia motivates us, modernism and ghosts.
SUPPORT THE SHOWVIA PATREON. Your contribution makes a huge difference.
Friends,
Dave Le’aupepe is frontman of one of the biggest Australian bands of the moment, Gang of Youths. And we sat down during his US tour to discuss rock and roll, living a serious life, and depression. He also plays two songs, “Persevere” (20:23) and a cover of “Chelsea Hotel No 2” by Leonard Cohen.
Dave & Gang of Youths’s music is a hopeful melancholy; they present the darkness but don’t wallow in it.
On another note, this is the first time I talk at length about my own life with suicidal depression. How it has surged forward in my life and then receded, and why. I hope this episode is helpful to those also facing the challenge of depression.
On a lighter note, Dave broke my camera! We laugh about it in the episode, but if you’re watching, rather than listening, you’ll see a big difference in the image about halfway through. So, sorry about the image difference. But hey, you just get to feel closer to us.
In AEWCH 13, I hang out with one of my favorite punks, Mish Barber-Way, singer/screamer of White Lung. White Lung is intense, loud, metal-meets-punk, and they’re truly awesome. (Rolling Stone named White Lung’s album, Deep Fantasy, one of the 40 Greatest Punk Albums of All Time.) So I made sure to ask Mish to play a couple songs, too, even though she’s used to playing MUCH much louder. There are acoustic versions of “Paradise” at 57:55 and “Stand By Your Man” by Tammy Wynette: 1:17:40
IN THIS EPISODE
Mish’s sordid, awesome past and present in the adult industry: 2:45
Who gets screwed up by being in porn and who does well and why?: 5:10
Strategies for public performances. Of all kinds.: 7:15
Radiating sexuality: 10:20
Our apocalypse survival strategies and the Amish at the end of the world: 13:15
How screaming gets you ignored in music, especially if you’re a woman, and why to do it anyway, and what Wilhelm Reich has to do with it: 23:00
Arousal and desire are not the same thing: 36:05
The missing language of gray area sexual encounters, and why we’re drawn to simple language, even though it doesn’t help us: 46:35
The complicated relationships that can frame assault: 51:05
Mish talks about White Lung’s song, “Paradise”: 54:40
Mish plays an acoustic version of “Paradise”: 57:55
Once you get what you want you can’t want it: 1:00:50
Why danger matters: 1:03:15
Mish plays “Stand By Your Man” by Tammy Wynette: 1:16:45
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Conner Habib 