With a handful of dark and rainy months still ahead of us, now’s
the time to curl up in front of the fire with a good book. Thanks to its
fruitful history and multi-talented roster, there is an abundance of books closely
tied to the Sub Pop family that rocks just as hard as your favorite TAD album.
Here are just a few of our preferred picks from here at the Sub Pop Airport Store!
Bruce Pavitt’s Sub
Pop USA: The Subterranean Pop Music
Anthology, 1980-1988 is a one-stop shop for everything you’d ever want
to know about the formation of Sub Pop, Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger
Makes Me a Modern Girl is a thoughtful and inspiring memoir
highlighting her experiences in Sleater-Kinney, while the graphic novel Black Hole by Charles Burns heavily
influenced La Luz’s most recent album Weirdo
Shine. (Additionally, Charles Burns contributed illustrations for Sub Pop
in our early days and is most visible on our Sub
Pop 200 compilation!)
To make your book reading experience even richer, we’ve
compiled the accompanying list of some of our favorite book and record pairings that will surely satisfy even the most ferocious appetite…
Melbourne’s Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever just shared their cheeky new video for ”Julie’s Place,” the first single off their forthcoming EP (and Sub Pop debut), which we here at Sub Pop are stoked to release later this Spring.
True story: After the band spent their video budget on an idea that didn’t work out ($$¯\_(ツ)_/¯$$), they decided to film singer/guitarist Fran Keaney mowing his lawn on a Saturday morning. This simple idea actually ended up being much more in the band’s utilitarian style. So in a sense, out of defeat of an excess of options came a lean opportunity to do something more truthful.
[Photo Credit: Rubin Utama]
“Julie’s Place” levels up on everything that made Talk Tight such an immediate draw. It’s about being young and dumb but full of bravado. Sprinting guitars mimic singer Keaney’s pangs of heartache, his awkwardly sensual lyrics calling to mind the chaos and confusion of being around someone you can’t get off your mind.
You could (and should) feel the same about this band; follow Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever everywhere in the known universe… via Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
Here at the tail-end of 2016, it’s a little tough to deny that this has been an inordinately trying year. A brief and sadly incomplete list of the events that brought us together to cry, reflect, regain composure, and then cry again would include the death of Bowie, the Orlando nightclub shooting, the death of Leonard Cohen, the Ghost Ship fire, and… Well, the list goes on. Enough so that the world actually does kind of seem like it’s a crumbling gingerbread cookie right on the fragile edge of oblivion. We should (and, we very much hope, will!) all do what we can to respond to these challenges, and those that are sure to come.
There are also, it’s worth remembering, some things to celebrate from 2016. And, some of those very things are compiled in Sub Pop’s Best of 2016 collection, which many of us here at the Airport Store contributed to, and which can be found here:http://bestof2016.subpop.com/.
Here, also, is a summary of all the neat holiday items we started carrying at the Airport Store that just may provide a welcome distraction from the horrifying chaos that is modern times:
Music
The Ventures’ Christmas Album (CD)
The New Possibility: John Fahey’s Guitar Soli Christmas Album (CD)
It’s that time of year again where we thank you for being the best customers imaginable in the world of music-buying peoples far and wide.
In an effort to show our unending appreciation of you, we’ll now attempt to coerce you into spending even more of your hard earned shekels with us this holiday season… by offering 20% off on all* Sub Pop Mega Mart orders over $25 starting today and going all the way ‘til 11:59 pm on January 3rd. Believe us when we say that we’ve got some of the best midsize-indie-record-label-branded merchandise your heart can handle, and we’d really love to sell it to you and your loved ones this holiday season. Knit hats, gloves, and sweaters? We’ve got ‘em. Things designed to make you sweat (like sweatshirts and sweatpants, gutterbrain)? We’ve got those too. Trinkets and trash? Enough for everyone! We’ve also got a slew of really exciting 2016 releases that you might have missed out on from bands like Clipping., TAD, LVL UP, Goat, Kristin Kontrol, Morgan Delt, and so much more.
All orders placed by December 19th are guaranteed to ship out before we close up shop for the year, so get your orders in early and often. Related to this impending warehouse closure, any orders placed between December 19th and January 2nd will not ship out until after we are back in the office on January 3rd.
Thank you in advance for your impending (wildly overzealous, we hope) gift buying spree.
Love, Sub Pop.
*All Current and future pre-orders from excellent artists like Pissed Jeans and Jesca Hoop are excluded from this 20% off sale. These items do, however, count towards reaching your $25 qualifying order total, so definitely pick those up too!
As 2016 finally
limps to a close, we’re happy to provide you the pleasant distraction of this the November edition of thee No Fly List! This month’s dispatch is stuffed with plenty of
product placement and peppered with the sort of almost-humor you might expect from a tippling uncle
at Thanksgiving. In what follows we’re going to explore what is perhaps Sub Pop’s most well-known, provocative, overused, and frequently misunderstood expression: “LOSER.”
If you have been keeping up with No Fly List posts from Sub Pop’s airport store since the beginning, you’ve probably wondered what our fourth most asked question is! (See top three FAQ’s)
Wonder no more! It’s “What is loser, and why loser?” (Which, yes, is kind of actually two questions, but they’re related and we’re calling the shots here, so deal with it.) Let’s dig in…
According to LOSER; the recently expanded book by Clark Humphrey that chronicles the diverse Seattle
sound and punk scene, it’s, “a statement
of defiance against the yuppies’ obsession with ‘winners.’” The term “LOSER” or “losers of the music industry” was a
reaction to corporate industry driven trends and views.
First developed/stumbled upon in the summer of 1988, “LOSER” made its way onto a Sub Pop t-shirt that very year. Consistent with the label’s aesthetic embrace of apathy (and characteristic
of the time), images were sporadically
misprinted, contained gaps, and sometimes were even screened in reverse. You can scope photos of the original “LOSER” shirt in such books asEverybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge by
Mark Yarm, and Experiencing Nirvana: Grunge in Europe by Bruce Pavitt.
In grunge speak, courtesy of Sub Pop’s current CEO Megan Jasper back when she was still the label’s receptionist, a
loser is a “cob nobbler.” And, the greeting “Dear Loser” was used
endearingly in the infamous Sub Pop rejection letters of the early
nineties. The term was later used to market a
Sorachi Ace-forward American pale ale developed in Seattle by local brewery
Elysian. It’s also a term used in the card game contract
bridge.
So that’s why Loser Editions! And, why don’t you
have Bloom, Fear Fun, or King Tuff on colored wax? It might be because you didn’t pop in to the Sub Pop store at SeaTac. The Sub Pop airport
shop is often the last place you might be able find one of these limited
slick discs before they hit the wicked online aftermarket. When the pre-sale is sold out and the stash at your favorite shop has dwindled to nothing, your Loser Edition might just be one
plane ticket away.
More “LOSER” related fact and fiction…
One of the earliest
singles I’ve scored since becoming a Sub Pop employee is TAD’s long-out-of-print 7” single for “Loser” b/w
“Cooking With Gas” (SP55). While this release was limited to
3,000 copies on a green transparent vinyl 7”, both tracks are now available on the deluxe
edition reissue of 1990’s Salt Lick. The 45 has a killer back cover by celebrated local cartoonist
Peter Bagge, which exists now on a fine black t-shirt.
Are we forever going on about “LOSER” this and “LOSER” that because of the Beck
song? Fuck no! Beck was/is not on Sub Pop. He did, however, put out the 1994 release One Foot in the Grave on Olympia-based label K Records (the latter day reissue of which is occasionally stocked on vinyl in the
‘non-Sub Pop’ section of the airport store with the rest of the PNW titles and related
artists).
Life as a “LOSER” is not for everyone. Tourists regularly walk by the store and stare. Some stop and think out-loud how unsuitable something like this would be for
their youngster. Others imagine their
choice of relative sporting a big, bold “LOSER” (as punishment or gift, who can say?). For those daring and/or proudly unambitious enough to let their “LOSER” flag fly, however… As the holiday season approaches, this charming stocking awaits, (available online only!), as does a great heap
of othershit that saysLOSER on it.
Now if you don’t have any other questions; beat
it LOSER!
Philadelphia’s Pissed Jeans have been making gnarly noise for 13 years, and on their fifth album Why Love Now, the male-fronted quartet is taking aim at the mundane discomforts of modern life—from fetish webcams to office-supply deliveries. The album will see its worldwide release on February 24th, 2017, and we’re pretty fucking psyched about it.
Pissed Jeans’ gutter-scraped amalgamation of sludge, punk, noise, and bracing wit make the band—Matt Korvette (vocals), Brad Fry (guitar), Randy Huth (bass) and Sean McGuinness (drums)—a release valve for a world where absurdity seems in a constant battle trying to outdo itself. Why Love Now picks at the bursting seams that are barely holding 21st-century life together. Take the grinding rave-up and lead single “The Bar Is Low” [link] which, according to Korvette, is “about how every guy seems to be revealing themselves as a shithead.”
As they did on their last album, 2013’s Honeys, Pissed Jeans offer a couple of “fuck that shit type songs” about the working world, with the blistering “Worldwide Marine Asset Financial Analyst” turning unwieldy job titles into sneering punk choruses and “Have You Ever Been Furniture” waving a flag for those whose job descriptions might as well be summed up by “professionally underappreciated.”
And the startling “I’m A Man,” which comes at the album’s midpoint, finds author Lindsay Hunter (Ugly Girls) taking center stage, delivering a self-penned monologue of W.B. Mason-inspired erotica—office small talk about pens and coffee given just enough of a twist to expose its filthy underside, with Hunter adopting a grimacing menace that makes its depiction of curdled masculinity even more harrowing.
No Wave legend Lydia Lunch shacked up in Philadelphia to produce Why Love Now alongside local metal legend Arthur Rizk (Eternal Champion, Goat Semen). “I knew she wasn’t a traditional producer,” Korvette says of Lunch. “We wanted to mix it up a little bit. I like how she’s so cool and really intimidating. I didn’t know how it was going to work out. She ended up being so fucking awesome and crazy. She was super into it, constantly threatening to bend us over the bathtub. I’m not really sure what that entails, but I know she probably wasn’t joking.”
The combination of Lunch’s spiritual guidance and Rizk’s technical prowess supercharged Pissed Jeans, and the bracing Why Love Now documents them at their grimy, grinning best. While its references may be very early-21st-century, its willingness to state its case cement it as an album in line with punk’s tradition of turning norms on their heads and shaking them loose.
Read more on Pissed Jeans from Maura Johnston here.
Why Love Now will be released on CD / LP / DL, and is available for preorder now here. LP preorders through megamart.subpop.com will receive the limited Loser Edition on lavender vinyl (while supplies last).
And at last, let us encourage/facilitate your obsessive following of Pissed Jeans on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
