katymrow:

we were dropping bombs with our sneakers on,
and we were dancing in a minefield with a bottle of whiskey.
‘cause you can’t tell us what to do.

Art, I have been listening to this song and thinking of you.

Parents fight, kids record it and make songs, hahahahahahahahahaha. 

From the Proper Introduction:

When they started fighting, my younger brother and I would hang out in my older brother’s room all together until they stopped.  I used to get a certain kind of headache from their fights, kind of like when I get mall headaches, specifically when I go to the mall (I think they’re a combination of anxiety, noise, and uncomfortable climate temperature and I can’t take my coat off or something). 

It was always completely terrible and stressful.  When we lived in NY they always broke shit, so I never had more than a bed and a coffee table in my room which I always shared with my brother, because I figured ‘what’s the point?’  Eventually someone put their foot through the coffee table so that was that.  Sometimes I used to lock myself in the bathroom and cry, not out of empathy or any sympathetic reason particularly, or even a ‘my life is so terrible’ reason because I don’t think I had any concept of that, it was more of a twisted sense of ‘this is so annoying and I want it to be over I can’t enjoy my time when this is always happening’.  So, mostly out of annoyance.  My brothers seemed to react with the same kind of annoyance.  I might reach the ‘woe is me this sucks’ point if I got slapped or something, but I generally remained pretty distanced from what was going on, and wasn’t a factor in any of the altercations aside from the ones that I may have accidentally started by saying or doing something.  I was a miserable ghost trapped in some house where I was subjected to hearing and watching people abuse each other constantly.

ANYWAY.  We used to just hide in my brother’s room until things were over.  It was all about waiting it out.  But it happened so often.  This one time we decided to record them, to play it back to them and show them how bad it was.  But then we decided not to.  Instead we remixed it into some sort of song, which we took demented pleasure in.  Before long, at the first sign of explosive yelling or something being thrown across the downstairs, one of us was scrambling for the recorder.  We got creative about it.  I was often the person crawling around with the microphones because I was versatile in my sneakery, hiding in the hallway hamper, feeding mics down the heatvents, etc.  Sometimes I would just be perched places because I could run away soundlessly if they got too close.  More fights then didn’t mean more time hiding, doing nothing.  It meant more material, to make things!

It probably sounds kind of sick, me sitting behind a recliner stifling giggles while my parents screamed at each other or beat each other.  But what else could we do?  We had tried to stop them for years, and not much happened.  If we tried to stop them in the middle of fighting they would actively ignore us.  We had a very passive role where we were in an environment where we felt powerless and could only suffer.  At least this way, it felt like we were somehow doing something constructive.  And to be honest, by the time I was recording them I was so desensitized to their shit that I was barely bothered.

And so we collected recorded fights for years.  We had so much material.  We made albums out of it.  I didn’t do that much in terms of assembling the actual albums.  I would just listen through the fights and note when they said something that I particularly liked and would be like ‘we have to use this.’  I would help with the drum machine.  Mostly I helped in recording and my older brother mixed everything.  Those little scribble covers are mine though.

There needs to be a live cover of this song. 

this song is dedicated to art and piss jesus.