Weekly Recap (Feb 19th-25th, 2024)

Discover Weekly

- Shadow Cliq - Say My Name! (Here I was, minding my own business, listening to a pop song which felt like 2000s bubblegum pop - Britney Spears etc - but with a modern rock / electronic twist, but then the screams! Pretty impressive!)

- Bloodywood ft. The Snake Charmer - Great Is Born Raw - From "Beyond Legacy" (Epic! Cool! Nice! You go, guys!)

- Manapart - Roombaya (Very System of a Down down to lyrical themes.)

- LYLVC - Into Nothing (Her voice reminds me of someone and it's bothing me...)

- CORPSE - life waster (Finally, something that fits The Vibe! There was some metal before this, but not stuff that'd fit The Vibe.)

- Stoneside. - Once (Stoneside.! It's been too many months <3 They're definitely The Vibe. I just haven't got to S yet in making that playlist, I'm at L now.)

- Forged in Fire - Pull Away (The Vibe!)

Again, so many covers!! Why??

Will Ramos' Riptide is The Vibe!

I was working on The Vibe and got to Lordi on my Liked songs and realized I haven't "liked" nearly any of their songs on Spotify, even though I used to be very much into them back in the day, about 15 years ago. So I went ahead and liked all their songs that I like, and some that I had not heard yet like Amen's Lament to Ra II (because I liked the first one) and all the SCGs (Scarctic Circle Gatherings), since the ones I have heard were these cinematic, athmospheric things, more like audio clips than songs, and I figured they might fit The Vibe. And then I heard Radio SCG 10 🤣 It's like a radio channel's own commercial, where they play clips of the kind of music they usually play, but this time they were all Lordi songs, but just played in different styles of rock. 😂 It was hilarious! Not The Vibe, but hilarious!

The SCG Awards was very punny as well. Entertaining, but not The Vibe.

That seemed to be the direction they went into. Oh well. I had fun listening to them and some of them did fit The Vibe, so...

It's cool that people like Ca$his and MGK talk about their mental health struggles so openly, I support that. (Ca$his on his Knox Hill interview and MGK on his newest song.)

Release Radar

- Ashnikko - You Make Me Sick! - Dora Jar Remix (This remix is very weird. Them making an official Visualizer together and publishing it on Ashnikko's YouTube channel, I take that as a possible sign she wants to take her music even further from the mainstream and even more towards an alternative sound. I prefer the original song, this just managed to infuriate me when Dora Jar cut off the vocals right before the gorgeous "I'M MAD!!" scream. My brain demands metal!!)

- Knox Hill - Corny White Rapper (Didn't do an Initial Reaction post or a proper Lyrical Breakdown of this. I was at work when the video dropped. I made it to the premiere, but had to go straight back to working after it, so I didn't have time to type my first thoughts after seeing it. I was also mentally not in the right place - not confident enough and too tired, because of my own mental health struggles - to properly break down the lyrics later. But in the next 6 days I jotted down some random thoughts the lyrics provoked in me, finished, edited and posted them on Monday.)

- HalaCG ft. The Forgotten - Big Buff Woman (🏳️‍🌈!! Is Hala gay?? I've never thought about her sexuality, before now.)

- Angel Haze - Rose Royce!

- Statik G ft. DMX - Back 2 Life (Oh wow, this DMX guy has 10 million monthly listeners on Spotify! I really hope these huge collabs make Statik G's career blow up, the dude really deserves it, he's so talented!)

- Berried Alive - Toxic World (🖤🤟🏻)

- Anthony Ray - Any Reactor Can Get It (Am I a reactor? In some sense, yes, but in another sense, no. I'm not a YT reactor. I used to be a YouTuber, I made translation videos and fought about copyrights, etc. So if this is about that, I get it. I can't make out the lyrics, so idk. I like how the song sounds, though.)

- Borknagar - The Wild Lingers (New album out today! This is from that, no doubt. I just got off work, morning shift, so I haven't yet got the time to deep dive into the album.)

- Savage Ga$p ft. Kxllswxtch - brand of sacrifice (Catchy and aggressive. Pretty good.)

- Nik Nocturnal ft. Bad Wolves - OCTANE (YES!! I saw the YT video - Nik aimed to write the most radio friendly metal song he could, AND A RADIO CHANNEL ACTUALLY PICKED IT UP AND IT'S PLAYED ON THEIR CHANNEL!! I know he made it as generally mainstream and modern as we possibly could, but it's still The Vibe. Nik is like... the biggest metal YouTuber rn. Hands down.)

- Einar Solberg - Down - Live (Interesting how he sings the word "down" very high xD and the rest is sung lower. His background is prog metal - which aims to be complex to play, more art and talent than entertainment - so I'm pretty sure it's intentional and that it has a meaning. Again, the belting, with a little bit of distortion, near the end is my favorite part.)

- Infected Mushroom - Wider REBORN (This reminds me more of Psycho, the first Infected Mushroom song I heard, than the other REBORNs. Doesn't create a mental image but is more like background music.)

- nothing,nowhere. - Shadow Craft 

Mimi Barks has an album dropping soon. I wish she would have given a specific date. I REALLY want to check it out! (She had written a pinned comment under her music video FSU four weeks ago, saying people can pre-order the album now.)

I really don't like that Knox is reacting to Tom McDonald again... I wasn't sure about Tom, whether he's incredibly dumb or incredibly smart for being such an edgelord. 'Cause he's like one of those 12-year-old internet trolls, you know, who just say anything they can to piss everyone off, not putting any thought behind their words, just repeating the most outrageous shit they've heard up until that age. OR he could be pretending to be one, because when you piss people off they pay attention and then if you make actual valid political points, a lot of people hear them. I don't know much about American politics, so I wasn't sure which one he is and listened to some of his music.

And then he made a song with Ben-fucking-Shapiro of all people, called Facts, and said "there are only two genders, boys and girls". I listened through the rest of the song and he doesn't have bars explaining 'this is how they teach us when we're kids' (using "boys and girls", instead of "men and women" gave me a little hope that he might)... But yeah, he doesn't. He really is stupid enough to write a song called Facts and have inaccurate information on it.

Do songs always have to be 100% accurate? No, they're art. But this song is called Facts. I don't think it's that big of a stretch to assume a song called Facts would only contain facts. And not children's level biology/psychology facts, or facts that are about 10 years outdated.

Sex is what's between your legs, gender is what's between your ears (your brain). One's sex can be male, female or something between those two, which is called intersex. When a baby is born, their sex is assigned based on their genitalia, if they have a penis or a vagina. Their genitalia might also be something between those, where they'd be assigned intersex. But. At this point, doctors cannot, and it's unnecessary to, know if the baby has the internal reproductive organs of their assigned sex, what their chromosomes are (XX, XY, XXX, XXY, XYY, XXYY are at least some of the possible options, I learned this in high school), what their hormone levels are gonna be when they grow up, etc. The baby could still be intersex even if they have a penis or a vagina.

Male and female brains look different in brain scans. Brain scans of transwomen have shown that even though they were assigned male at birth, their brains look like the brains of ciswomen (women who were assigned female at birth). So, this indicates that sex and gender are not the same thing.

It's not a stretch after these scientific facts to go about the route of respecting the gender identity one has, right? It's much easier to ask the person than to scan everyone's brain. Trans people make up about 1% of the world's population, that's about 81 million people. It's much more time and cost efficient to apply the evidence we have of those transwomen's brain scans to the rest of the 81 million people and allow them to live their life with the gender they identify as. There's still more studies to be done to scientifically prove nonbinary people exist, and I don't even know how that works in the field of psychology, where this falls more on, rather than neuroscience (I've heard). But psychologists are nevertheless starting to agree on the theory that it's a real thing, and some countries are changing their laws to accomodate that.

I've known I'm nonbinary since I learned it's a thing. I've never felt quite like a girl and hated when people called me one. I tried to be as little of a girl as I felt was socially acceptable, rejecting anything "too girly". (And that's why I'm so into it now - I'm healing my inner child by consuming all this girly/feminine media, that I denied myself growing up. It's ok to not be a girl and still enjoy girly things.) When I was in my early 20s, around a decade ago, I got to thinking about my gender again and realized I have the internet in my pocket now (my phone), I can google and see if there are other people who feel like this as well and if there's a name for it. I did and only found Tumblr. But it was something! I wasn't alone, other people felt "not like a woman, not like a man" as well! There wasn't any scientific evidence yet, or any vocabulary to describe it in Finnish, so I stayed in the closet. And now we're getting there. Yey. I came out in 2020.

So, Tom is evidently pretty far right/conservative on this issue. And presenting the opposing theory, that there are only two genders, as a "fact". Which it is not, it's a theory, and the opposing theory of multiple genders seems to be the one "winning", so... Get with the changing times or be left in the past, Tom.

Knox claims he's in the middle, politically, and that he wants to create a healthy political discourse between the two sides and feature both the left and the right on his channel. And lately, he's been so far on the right wing that I'm starting to lose hope. Sure, hear them out as well. I'm done with them, but you do you. But swing back, will you?? Currently, he's just swinging between the middle and the right. I can't remember the last time he featured a left wing artist (who actually talks about politics). Chinchilla, maybe? Feminism is left wing?

I'm so done with politics in general. All politics have done to me lately is make my life miserable. I'm escaping into The Vibe and hoping Knox will come to his senses...

I still love his music, and him as a person (platonically). I just disagree with who he decides to react to, to "create a healthy, balanced discourse". I feel like it is so out of balance and I'm almost falling from my side...