Take a Beat w/ Our First Transitional Album Entries!!! And Also Kathie Lee Gifford (???)
On 7/24/24 we are surviving our 20s with help from Lorde and Grace Ives, finding out about Kathie Lee Gifford for the first time (and immediately stanning), and attending the Jellicle Ball.
NEW SUBSCRIBER-SUPPORTED TAKE A BEAT SEGMENT JUST DROPPED!!! Today you will be hearing from Take a Beat’s very first subscriber-contributor Samuel Joseph Gross!! as well as myself as we each talk about an album that helped us transition through strange and challenging times.
If you have an album that shepherded you through a weird or challenging or exciting or you-name-it time, please write it up and send it my way!!! Who knows - I’m operating off a hunch that fellow readers will connect with each other’s struggles and the music that helped them fight through.
TL;DR
Thank you to Kathie Lee Gifford for helping me discover and coin a new disease (of which I’ve got a severe case)
Thank you to Lorde for helping Sam feel seen in his early 20s
Thank you to Grace Ives for helping me feel seen in my mid-20s
Thank you to ballroom culture for making some sense of Cats: The Musical
A Take a Beat Case Study:
Josh Van Auken & Kathie Lee Gifford
A couple weeks ago I submitted my Girlie Theory ™️ thesis to the Take a Beat Institute and subsequently received the prestigious Gay Guy Ethnomusicology PhD, graduating valedictorian with full diva honors. With this new doctorate I can diagnose girlies, musicians and fans alike, of various pop cultural illnesses.
Today I am diagnosing this girlie, the girlie typing this newsletter, with Fast Adoption of Girlies Tendency, also known as FAGT. There is only one symptom of FAGT, and it is a high propensity to stan a woman about whom you know minimal information. This often manifests in seeing a woman on the street, in a video, even in a photograph and thinking “get this woman an HBO mini-series STAT!”
Based on my years of research, straight men are largely immune to FAGT, while woman and LGBTQ+ folks range from susceptible to highly susceptible. Of course, the highest rate of FAGT is in gay men, with an estimated 98% rate of affliction.
My most recent FAGT manifestation came thanks to Kathie Lee Gifford. I became aware of Kathie Lee Gifford just in the last month or so thanks to the enterprising new Twitter account called “kathie lee and hoda no context”:
Within 10x 30-90 second clips and one CRUCIAL supercut, I was gagged. She’s dry, she’s funny, she’s goofy, she’s lewd, and she was BORN to be on that slightly elevated stage.
So, I did some research (aka read her Wikipedia page), and here are some facts about my girlie Kath:
Born in Paris
Married a rich composer
Married a football player and sports commentator
Hosted a talk show with Regis Philbin for 15 years
Face of Carnival Cruise Lines in the late 80s and early 90s
Hosted the Today Show with Hoda for 12 years
Guest starred in The Suite Life on Deck
Cameo’d in Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!
Starred in some Hallmark movies
Written 4 autobiographies (so far)
Released 17 albums
So, for the love of god, would someone get this woman an HBO mini-series?!
Melodrama by Lorde
An Album for Sam Gross’ Transition Through: Early-20s Mess
The first time someone younger than you gets world-shatteringly famous is super annoying. Not like child actor famous or Olympic gymnast famous, where you have a few years in the spotlight courtesy of a vampiric system that bleeds you of your youth before a steady decline into designer drug habits (child actors) and local supermarket ads (gymnasts).
I mean the kind of person who comes out of the gate swinging and gathers real professional adult acclaim at a time when you’re still some idiot with braces who smokes weed out of tin foil and embarasses yourself in front of your girlfriend’s family at a nice restaurant by botching the word “charcuterie” (I’d never heard anyone actually say that word out loud).
For me, that person was Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor, better known to most as singer and Charli XCX collaborator/villain Lorde.
Lorde had the nerve to be born five months after me and then get famous. Rude. But she quickly broke down my jealous walls and won me over with her debut album Pure Heroine. She had crafted an infectious track list of anthemic bops about relatable teenage tropes – driving around your boring hometown, having a boyfriend who loans you his sweater and buys you orange juice, and *checks notes* class warfare? Was she writing these songs from inside my heart?
But then I left the safe comfort of my boring hometown with its white teeth teens and tennis courts and moved to a big city that made me throw everything I thought I knew out the window. The amazing things was that at that exact time, Lorde did the same thing. And four years later, she put out Melodrama and won my heart all over again for a new chapter of my life.
This was a new Lorde for a new me. That high school love? GONE! And we don’t even think about them anymore except for all the time. Now we’re the Queens of the Weekend, going from party to party and wondering if we’d still like our friends if we were sober. We’re crying in taxis (big city living!) and getting nostalgic over things that happened less than two years ago.
It made me feel as seen as the first album but with the new dimension of acknowledging how far we’d come from all that teenager stuff. Now we were a pair of unsure bad bitches drinking and dancing our way through a new city while promising ourselves that we’d unpack all this shit in therapy later. It was the right album for the right time, and it was perfect.
- Sam Gross, 28, Brooklyn
Janky Star by Grace Ives
An Album for My Transition Through: Mid-20s Mess
We don’t talk enough about how hard it is to be in your mid-20s. At least, nobody told me that bit of insight until I was SMACK DAB in the middle of those goddamn years.
Science tells us that the peak age for physical performance AND the age at which your brain fully matures is 25. So I grew up looking forward to age 25, when I would intelligently move my lithe body from one fantastical success after another — but to my dismay, the prosperity I envisioned turned out to be just that: a fantasy.
Because it turns out, the first thing you do with that fully developed brain and peak body is make mistakes, or, to put it bluntly: Fuck the fuck up.
And, in hindsight, this is actually a fairly explicable phenomenon! Sure, you finally have that fully matured brain, but then you have to figure out HTF to use and WTF to do with it. And everything that has happened so far was a result of the efforts of your pre-25-year old brain!! And it often turns out where that underdeveloped brain brought you is… not quite where you’d like to be.
In my experience, here is where a pre-25-year old brain can drop you off before running away from the scene of its crimes:
In a city that you love but no longer want to call home
Single for the first time as an openly gay man
In a career that’s going to hold you back from what you want in life
Amidst ~baby’s first ever tragedies~ in the form of lost love ones
And, not for nothing, DRUNK
And while I was fortunate enough to have the means to address each of these curvy AF curveballs thrown my way, each required a daunting amount of time and a grueling amount of effort. This meant that progress was often dispiritingly incremental. And the corresponding relief? Proportionally tiny.
Grace Ives is also a 1995 baby. And her 2022 album Janky Star captures the product of the fully formed brain X zero wisdom equation =
Being a messy, messy bitch.
Across Janky Star Grace Ives is drunkenly injuring herself, being lazy AF, having anxiety attacks, and getting overdraft fees at the ATM. She’s contracting embarrassing crushes, drinking too much gin, struggling to take therapy seriously, and finding her only solace in pressing replay on her favorite comfort-watches.
NOW WHAT IS YOUR MID-20’S IF NOT ALL OF THAT?!
Grace sings all of this in dulcet tones befitting a lullaby, and at no point in the album does she present a path out of the various messes in which she finds herself — because this album is not about solutions, it is about recognizing and accepting the MESS that is transitioning into full-on adulthood.
Accompanying her soothing falsetto is Justin Raisen’s jarring electronic production, comprised of a wide-ranging array of synths, drum loops, guitar loops, and unidentifiable electronics, all continually clashing and interrupting one other. It’s discordant and it’s beautiful, which is all we can ask for when looking back and describing our mid-20s.
I am now at the wise-old age of 28(.5), which means I am squarely in my “late-20s”, but that doesn’t mean I am entirely rid of my mid-20s messes! Nor does it preclude me from landing in brand-spanking-new messes! It just means I am now wise enough to know that one’s “messy era” never fully ends. And in my future messy eras, Grace Ives’ Janky Star will be there to remind me of that weirdly comforting notion.
- Josh Van Auken, 28, Manhattan
Man About Town, Sans Context
Cats: The Jellicle Ball @ Perelman Arts Center
Friday night I fell out of a coconut tree and rolled into the Perelman Performing Arts Center for a performance of Cats: The Jellicle Ball. Of course, Cats: The Jellicle Ball lives squarely in the context of Cats: The Musical and ballroom culture, both of which came before it.
But my personal context for Cats and ballroom culture is quite limited: I have seen Paris is Burning once (PHENOMENAL) and I have seen one episode of Pose (let’s just say Ryan Murphy will never be part of Take a Beat canon). As for Cats, I devoured the coverage of the 2021 film adaptation shit storm, learning that the musical is nonsensical, often makes audience members uncomfortable, and once resulted in a harassment lawsuit that the audience member won. I also know there is a butthole cut of the movie out there that Twitter badly wants to see (release the butthole cut!).
I’ve also never owned a cat. I find them beguiling in a way that can be amusing but can also be genuinely disconcerting.
But the good news for me (and bad news for Kamala) is that The Jellicle Ball doesn’t require context!!!
During the hitherto unknown to me Jellicle Ball,
I decided I’m a Skimbleshanks stan
I was nearly moved to tears when learning how legendary an elderly cat character used to be
I found myself marveling at the perfect casting
I laughed a bunch
I consistently hooted and hollered
Context notwithstanding, I was invested in these outrageous cats’ stories and lack thereof, and I didn’t see a single butthole (tho we did see Rum Tum Tugger’s ass cheeks).
TAKE THAT, CONTEXT!!!
