Everything is a website. Or a meme. Or an app. I sign up for this one and another one. Sometimes there’s a shortcut, like Facebook autofilling my information. How did we work before there was Slack? I was a barista in those days, so I don’t know what an office was like. Do restaurants use Slack now?
It’s odd to type in a url to do a task like plan a social media post or to make a doctor’s appointment. In my mind these are things that should happen on paper or by phone. If one must use a computer, my brain says to itself, I suppose they could use TextEdit or Microsoft Word to input the relevant information. Because this is where my computer education began, it is still how “real” computer work happens, in my head.
Recently I was spending time with a young friend of mine, someone who is in the 3rd grade and is eight years old. I don’t recall why, but I explained what it felt like to get a phone call when I was a kid. Most people didn’t have caller ID, so you never knew who it was. There was one phone in the house, and when it would ring, everyone in the house would hear it and wonder who it could be. We all hoped it was for us, if it was good, like a friend calling or an invitation to a party. The parents would sometimes dread the phone ringing, if they were worried about bad news or if they were particularly busy. But the excitement of a phone call coming in was still felt among us all—something new was happening, something we couldn’t predict, something we would pick up and talk to and discover in real time the next steps to engage with it.
That sounds so fun my friend said. She suggested that we could delete all of the contacts in our phones so we never knew who was calling. I told her that wasn’t a bad idea, but still it would only be a mystery for us who had deleted our contacts, and not for anyone else. Part of the magic during this time was that no one knew who was calling them, and everyone shared in the experience of the phone ringing. As the caller, you never knew who might pick up either! She agreed. I thought for a moment about how strange it was that she’d never experience that feeling.
Born in 1990, my sliver of Millenials are the youngest people alive who still remember life before the ubiquity of the Internet. We also remember what it was like when we first got the Internet. I make jokes to my Gen Z friends about wild dial-up adventures that blow their minds—Geocities layout websites that would take hours to create, having to wait minutes after every click because of the slow speed, the AOL chatrooms, AIM, MySpace Top 8—and I don’t feel old. I feel like wow, I’m so grateful I have this perspective. As much as the nostalgia for pre-Internet time can be painful or just sad, remembering how we were before is important in the same way that history itself is important.
When I was in high school, genuinely perplexed I asked my mother why we had to learn history. It’s already happened, I said. Why do we need to know about stuff that is over? So we don’t make the same mistakes twice, she said. History is important so we can learn from our past.
Now that we are officially an era where pretty much everyone in the US has had the internet at home for about twenty years, information on how this affects us is beginning to become available. We are seeing an epidemic of loneliness and isolation; depression, anxiety and suicide among teens as a result of social media use; the dismantling of nations as a result of inherently polarizing algorithms; prior tech employees speaking out against the very technologies they helped build because they are terrified of the ramifications we are quickly barreling toward. It’s one thing for a nation to be glued to TikTok during a national election—it’s another for elections to stop happening completely because we neglected to address huge problems like radicalization on Youtube and Reddit, misinformation on social media, and the news-feed-as-an-echo-chamber issue. In short, it doesn’t work for us, as humans in a society together, to have instant access to a worldview that is presented as truth but which is actually a carefully curated (via algorithm) feed for exactly the person looking at it, based on insane amounts of data points which are gathered with your unwitting permission to collect them and then used to target your exact brain and interests and age and background and to then serve you exact the stuff that will keep you glued to the screen for as long as possible. That’s the truth. Your feed is designed to keep you there. That’s the only thing that is always true about your feed. Again: the only thing that is always true about your news feed, is that an algorithm made it specifically for you, specifically to make you keep looking and scrolling.
We love to celebrate what the Internet gives us. I love memes too! I love meeting new people, and I love that I can theoretically market myself on social media (this is becoming less possible too, as the algorithms shift to acquire even more of our attention). But there was an Internet before social media which could still give us some of the good stuff, and way less of the bad stuff. I’m not suggesting we return to ’98 and dial up. I’m suggesting that this idea that we live in a magical time because the Internet and social media have changed all of our lives for the better may not be true. In fact, we may have actually had more empathy before social media proliferated our entire society.
I find it hard to want to be part of social media in any capacity lately. The content that goes viral rarely touches me the way (I assume) it touches all of the people who liked and shared it. TikTok reminds me of cringy early adopter Youtubers. Including numbers next to every post seems fundamentally silly and wrong, like a continuation of a popularity contest from middle school. Same with numbers on Spotify. What’s wrong with publishing streaming numbers like we use to do record sales? As in, every so often, rather than in real time in huge characters next to the primary place we all stream music? If using numbers in this fashion doesn’t beg us all to compare and despair then I don’t know what does.
When I log on to my apps and websites, or reference a meme as if it were included in Merriam-Webster: America’s Most Trusted Dictionary, I do so with one foot out the door. Here we are in yet another era: one that seems like it will last forever, because it is simply too awesome not to. We all thought the same thing about AOL, and we were wrong. The only constant is change. I look forward to the change that is imminent in our current Internet era, but I really hope I don’t end up nostalgic for this one too. That would mean we got worse. Let’s try and do better, hey?
]]>Working toward a career goal in entertainment comes with a lot of baggage. Movies depict a certain sequence of events, ads promise a kind of instant gratification, and our elders say they were able to work their way up the ladder, buy a house, pay for college for the kids and retire. Never mind that movies aren’t real, that ads are intended to manipulate (at worst) and influence (at best) our spending habits, and that the jobs our elders had no longer exist. In spite of widespread understanding of these facts, our careers are still prodded and picked at by well-meaning friends, family, and even other creative professionals. The unspoken assumption is that there is a correct way to build a career and that if you do it that way then you will predictably meet a series of milestones on your course of upward growth.
Maybe there was a golden era of the American workplace in which upward growth was essentially frictionless. My grandfather started at IBM in the 1960s as a computer engineer and worked for 30 years, during which time he bought a house, supported a family of four, put two children through four-year college programs, saved for retirement, and had access to legitimate health benefits. It wasn’t easy, but his job did make it all possible.
The people I know whose careers fell on a similar timeline to his have similar experiences. But the years before this “gold era” were similar to how things are now: people with socio-economic advantages are able to move upward at a fairly rapid pace, and everyone without socio-economic advantages is able to exercise upward mobility only after figuring out how to catch up. The college student with a job that pays her rent does not have access to the same opportunities as her classmate whose rent is paid by his parents so he can attend an unpaid internship for a semester.
Someone will tell you that they can get someone else to do it for free. Often this is just a negotiation tactic. You’re worth more than nothing, so make a case for you over this imaginary free laborer.
I mention this because we now live in a free labor economy. Companies and individuals in power positions have a bad habit of bullying workers for free labor, even when it’s technically illegal. Perhaps this fear mechanism was born out of the crash of 2008 (when many of the people in power positions were still in college), or perhaps we are becoming exponentially shameless in our power hunger, with each passing year putting greater distance between the richest and poorest among us and more attention is given to the loudest people with the greatest number of followers. It is money and popularity, not skills and experience, that are winning in the job market right now.
Prioritize fair pay in your business. Even if you are relying on the generosity of a friend at the moment, make it a priority to pay them what their work is worth as soon as you are able to.
Name your price and back it up. I hope you never have to experience someone in the music business bullying you, but it can happen to anyone. Someone will tell you that they can get someone else to do it for free. Often this is just a negotiation tactic. You’re worth more than nothing, so make a case for you over this imaginary free laborer. (One exception to this rule is when you are being generous to a friend!)
When money is tight, consider an exchange of skills instead. Are you an audio engineer who wants production experience? The more that you develop your skills the more bartering power you will have when you want to acquire new ones.
Communicate. This is very important. Your communication style will be different from other peoples’, and will likely evolve over time. You want to be as clear as possible. With experience, you’ll be able to read situations quickly and avoid problems before they become too big to solve.
Decide what your values as a business owner (and/or colleague) are, and resolve to never be lazy about upholding them. If someone you work with is not meeting those standards, don’t be afraid to talk about it and challenge them to do better. (The flip side of this is, obviously, that you must live by these standards as well!)
It is my hope that through the shifting tides of our current economy, we develop new and effective ways to uphold fair business practices. I’m always curious to hear from others about their experiences doing this (positive and negative), so please feel free to contact me about your experiences!
]]>I will not be naked for the show but I WILL be exposing myself, emotionally, and I might try to do something I don’t do on a regular basis like bend over backwards while also trying to hit all the notes. This is all a normal part of trying to “give you something to talk about” (Bonnie Rait wrote a song about it, or maybe it was about Love…). Songwriting is one thing, but giving you the physical experience of the emotions is just as important to me. I can’t act, I can only go back to an emotional place I have been to before. Every time I perform for you I go back, even when I’m scared to. I learned this performing at open mics when I was a teenager—it’s always worth it to go back, ESPECIALLY when you’re scared to. If you can’t make it to the show tonight, I’ll be writhing and vocalizing a whole host of feelings for you anyway. The confusion, the anger, the self destruction, the desperation, the contentedness, the joy, the unbearable need to show up for your loved ones, the unshakable sense that you may disintegrate if you simply continue. I can’t help but write it all down and set it to music. Thank you for bearing witness. It is one of the gifts of my life to be seen. If I don’t see you tonight, I hope to see you irl sooner than later; it’s been too long and this album has been gestating for longer than we ever expected it to…it’s juuuust about time to share it. Love to you and yours 🙏 ~Party Nails
]]>From the books I was reading to my personal relationships to voice memos to synths and drum machines, watch as I deep dive into how I made my song "Bull In A China Shop".
Originally posted on Patreon on August 11 2023.
]]>Originally posted on Instagram on December 7 2023
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It seems wild to say now, but I didn’t want to be an artist. When I moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in music, I wanted to be a songwriter. I had also wanted to be a producer, but I was strongly encouraged to focus only on being a songwriter. When it came to engineering, editing, instruments, production and mixing, the phrase I heard over and over again was, “You don’t need to worry about that.” I wasn’t “worried”—I was interested, and already somewhat experienced. But I was also a woman with a voice, and experience performing my own songs on stage. I didn’t want to be an artist because it was a thankless task; I’d tried it for years and years and always found myself more interested in making stuff than making people hear my stuff. But women today are tasked with carrying the weight of us all sometimes. We are conduits for the unevolved creativity brimming out of everyone, especially men who can’t bring themselves to express their feelings with words. We use our bodies to showcase the media, our voices to sing the message, our spirits to shine light upon the audience and listeners. But we are birthing a half baked thought, one that was slowly enforced upon us by our collaborators, all of us unwittingly engaging in the insidious patriarchal practice of minimizing women to Pretty Things. It’s pretty to be a singer, a writer, an artist. It makes the men behind the scenes feel good about the thing (trophy) they can show the other men. With women in production, engineering and mixing, they are no longer trophies—they are simply in their vocation. A producer cannot show off another producer, or a mixer another mixer. “Don’t worry about that stuff…because then I won’t be able to show you off.”
I’m grateful for the collaborators who show me who I am. You know who you are. To me, this is what matters. @nazr.in has shown me myself so many times 🥹💖 To femmes and non-binary people everywhere: you’re allowed to be pretty AND not just a trophy. Call it by its name, patriarchy. Dismantle it one small decision at a time. Next time you’re working with a woman, pretend she’s a man for sec and see if suddenly you think she’s better at her job. 🤯
originally posted on Instagram on September 19 2023
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I always felt a little confused about my sexuality growing up; I defaulted to feeling “unhot”, yet fearless, with cis men. It wasn’t until I met other queer people that I began to consider identities out of the paradigm I’d been living in. I knew I was queer, but I didn’t know how. I loved being a woman, but I didn’t feel similar to the women I knew and loved. I felt like a boy that was a girl, that was happy to be a girl that was also a boy. I wanted to BE Simba and rescue Nala, but I also wanted to be NALA because she was so COOL. It never confused me—I grew up with my dad telling me I could do anything I wanted if I set my mind to it and a mom telling me about bygone eras of matriarchies and gender multitudes—I just found myself slightly invisible depending on the company I was keeping. I don’t care what pronouns are used for me, they all feel silly, so she/her is plenty fine 🤪 There will be songs about this journey that I can’t wait to share with you, and other writing. Right now I can say that hindsight is 20/20 that my fearlessness with men was my best attempt to get ahead of the sexism that was inevitably going to rear its ugly head, and this effort superseded any real curiosity about who I was actually attracted to. The truth is that I am pan—only attracted to people I have an emotional connection with, regardless of their gender expression. Hot people mean nothing to me if I don’t enjoy their company. I have always felt this way and always been a bit perplexed as to how so many uninteresting people were considered hot 😂 also I was so scared of not being queer enough for the queer community I had found to be so comforting in such a binary world—but of course I didn’t need to be scared because queer people are the kindest in spite of all obstacles (generalizing obviously, but also, pretty true) and it takes one to know one. Anyway that’s me, and I’m playing a @queersound event this Thursday 9/21 and I’m so looking forward to being in that room!!! If you’re in Los Angeles come on out and catch me raw and unplugged and PANSEXUAL 🥳🤘🎤🎶
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