cuntry renaissance
spin that dial, girlie
discussed:
CUNTry (Beyonce’s version)
the fiber arts
Rawtime ASMR
Howdy, cowgirls! If you’ll indulge me for a moment, instead of the musings on life I typically kick the newsletter off with, I have some exciting announcements/housekeeping things.
First off, I have officially started my next book: The Girls’ Room: Bedroom Culture from the 1990s to y2k and Beyond. This is the book I was trying to write when I mistakenly got a doctorate, and is built off of ten years of research about girls’ bedroom culture. The idea is to present a history of bedroom culture and why it’s important and what we can learn from it.
I’m going to be documenting the process over on my insta and TikTok (@girlgutters in both places), so if you want an in-depth look at the book coming together, you can follow along over there.
SECOND, I am updated the paid subscriber perks for this here newsletter. If you’re a free subscriber, you’re still gonna get the newsletter every other Wednesday, BUT if you upgrade to paid you will get:
access to the paid subscriber chat where you can vote on newsletter topics, suggest topics, and generally enjoy the sleepover type vibe we are curating over there
access to the full internet bedroom archive so you can go back and read your fave posts whenever you want
digital copies of any zines I print this year, which I have two in the works right now eeeee <3
Ok - that’s all the shameless self-promo and updates I have for ya, so let’s get into the newsletter herself.
listening: the cuntry renaissance
You cannot spell country without cunt. And I, personally, am living for the cuntry renaissance care of our biggest pop star, our beloved pop ingenue, as well as a handful of underground crooners. I thought it was going to happen back in 2020 when “Old Towne Road” was absolutely everywhere and the boygenius girls were covering the pop-country classics and Orville Peck said “gay cowboys” on his debut. But I’m glad the girls saw what was happening then and saved it for the next election year.
Plus, now I can tell you without shame all about how pre-teen me found herself wearing down a cassette copy of The Chick’s Fly on a family trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, forcing my little sister to perform choreographed dances to this specific bop:
The breadth of artists now taking to a genre that the above fairly conventional white women were effectively kicked out of back in the 00s for publicly criticizing a conservative president reminds me that country music is still a kind of “final frontier” for pop girlies.
Country is a rigid genre whose conventions do not bend easily. But cuntry can be anything, as is proven by the records that haven’t left my heart yet: Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter, Adrienne Lenker’s Bright Future, and Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee.
In particular, the dial-spinning antics of Cowboy Carter and Diamond Jubilee find two girls at the opposite ends of the stardom spectrum reminding us just how hard it is to have a stake in country.
In Beyonce’s case, her sonic collages attest to just how far she had to go in order to preserve any piece of her history. Cowboy Carter — with is covers, interpolations, and stitched-together samples — is not an album Beyonce could have made without amassing the wealth and power necessary to weave together a history of Black music and its interventions into country as she does.1
For her part, Cindy Lee — the drag alias of Patrick Flegel — seems to have recorded her record through the tinniest radio speakers, her vocals wafting to us as if from another world. One in which the queens run the rodeo.
crafting: rug journals
My Instagram feed is slowly just becoming “art hoes I want to buy art from,” and Hannah Hanski (@gdgrlhanski) is the very first girl on my list.
Right now, she’s making these massive tapestry-esque tufted rugs that land somewhere between portraiture (above) and visual diary (below). The way Hanski weaves together an absolute assault of native Internet imagery, personal reflections, and the general abstract bullshit that seems to be batting around us all the time does something nice to my brain — especially after I’ve soaked it in the endless scroll that is social media.
So yeah, if anyone reading this has the hookup or wants to buy me one of these pieces, you won’t have to twist my arm at all.
obsessing: rAwTiMe ASMR
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the Internet and its little corners provide us with this weird, panoptic echo chamber of algorithmically bad vibes. And I don’t know why, but over these past few weeks, I’ve been tuning in to this YouTube channel that is all these rips of a public access cable show out of 1990s’ Austin, TX called rAwTiMe.
While the full episodes of the actual shows are good (think bootleg MTV), the VJ call breaks are even better:
As one commenter noted, these call breaks prove that the toxicity of Internet comment sections has always been around in one form or another. Let us hide behind a keyboard or a dial tone, and we will say the most heinous shit ever.
The hot goth girl VJs of rAwTiMe, however, are frequently unfazed by their caller’s bad behavior, often giving it right back to them. TinaRina who also went by Tiffy often has the most iconic rebuffs—rolling her eyes, deadpanning, and frequently railing against Limp Bizkit.
I’ve been putting these call breaks on in the background like they’re LoFi hip hop or something. Highly recommend.
Ok girlies! That’s all I have for you this week <3 Remember that I love u.
I have a lot of exciting things planned, like the first semi-annual Internet Bedroom ZINE, which is gonna be a REAL THING you can HOLD in your HANDS. So make sure you subscribe and tell a friend!!!
ok byeeeeeeee
xxx. rachel moss
It’s interesting to me that, for as often as they’re pitted against each other, both Beyonce and Taylor Swift are deeply invested in projects of reclamation. Beyonce’s eye towards preserving a heritage alongside personal history, however, often makes her projects endlessly more interesting than Swift’s.