music moots with Sharkey Spice ("Colossus of Roads" by Hurray For The Riff Raff)
We are extremely back with Music Moots™, the blogseries where I ask someone to recommend me a song they like, and then I listen to the song and then write a little about it.
Today we have Sharkey Spice! Aka Erin Laura, an artist, writer and radio DJ who hosts a show called Sharkey Spice's Top of the Pops on Rochester New York's WAYO 104.3FM, and writes a corresponding newsletter. Combining humorous takes (Audrey Hobert is "ethical Taylor Swift"; the Ethel Cain vs. Lana Del Rey beef is "Depressed Girl Armageddon"), with incisive analysis (her essay on Imogen Heap's pivot to AI evangelism is a really smart dive into the ethics and aesthetics of AI in music), the Sharkey Spice perspective on pop is refreshingly intellectual yet levelheaded, which is exactly what we need at this time of loudly ahistorical analysis and the presence of those wriggling stan army brain worms. We will not go into another Dark Age!! Nuh uh!!
"I've been in 2 hilariously opposite musical moods recently which has me switching between deeply sad acoustic music and Whitney Houston club remixes...let's go with the acoustic side," Erin wrote me when I asked her for a song recommendation. Erin recommended "Colossus of Roads" by Hurray For The Riff Raff: "great lyrics, makes me cry, politically very relevant..."
Never have I ever listened to Hurray For the Riff Raff, so this is yet another benefit of the Music Moots, getting me into artists I'd heard of for years and never tuned into. "Colossus of Roads" is a beautiful folk song about one of the great contradictions of being American, which is that 'America' is supposedly synonymous with 'freedom', and yet there is so much stuff that people cannot do freely in this country.
Hurray For The Riff Raff leader Alynda Segarra cues up a vision of classic Kerouacian Americana: cowboy hat, cigarette, graffiti on train boxcar. Amid those visuals are explicit references to queer identity ("Meet me down in the Castro, we'll pretend it's 1985"; name-checking Eileen Myles and their poetry collection I Must Be Living Twice) plus a subtler moment where Segarra refers to themself as a "poster boy for the great American fall." In an interview with Them, Segarra, who is nonbinary, discussed "fuck[ing] around with gender" in their lyrics: "Referring to myself as a boy scared me a little bit." The romance in the song is likewise tinged with uneasiness: "I know that it's dangerous, but I wanna see you undress / Wrap you up in the bomb shelter of my feather bed."
I took a train from L.A. to Chicago a couple of years ago. It was an amazing experience for many reasons (the Amtrak steak doesn't need to slap as hard as it does?) but one of them getting to see how big and empty most of America is. There's just so much land. A lot of it still looks like it isn't owned by anyone in particular, though I know that's probably not true—every acre by now has no doubt been swallowed up in paperwork. We'd speed across the land, then arrive at 'civilization' and it would just be a small block of houses and then a couple of larger farms, yards full of enormous piles of metal scraps, a horse or two...then more land again.
My joke about politics for the past 10 years has been "America: too big." It was fun for a while to keep acquiring new states—an almost 200-year state shopping spree—and then we got them all, and then the romance wore off and we were left wondering what to do with all of them. America accumulating its United States reminds me of the tarot meme...
"Say goodbye to America / I wanna see it dissolve," Segarra sings. Sounds good to me! A scary concept, dismantling the empire, but it's going to happen one way or another, so why not make it fun? Ah, here comes Uncle Sam, pissed as hell, tapping me on the shoulder and pointing his signature finger into my airspace: well, if America dissolves, what will replace it? And I think the answer is already in the song—America too big, let's go smaller. A dance club in the Castro or a feather bed might be a good place to start.
Thank you Erin! Subscribe to the Sharkey Spice Substack and follow Erin on IG.
