Ohio All The Time

Grieving in public has made me annoying

Last week, I had the absolute joy of speaking to the “Musical Critique/Musical Practice” seminar at Ohio State, a cross-departmental lab co-taught by Barry Shank (Comparative Studies) and Ryan Skinner ([Ethno]musicology). I was excited to do so for a million reasons, including the fact that Barry (one of my dissertation advisers) and Ryan (one of my committee members) have been mentors to me in my long journey toward finding a scholarly home and a professional career.

I’ve given a couple book talks back at OSU, which did in their own ways feel like full-circle moments, occasions to celebrate and reconnect with the community that helped me get to where I am today. Still: this one felt different. I have a full-time job now, which hasn’t yet stopped feeling strange. But this was also special because the students in this seminar all read my book in preparation, the very first readers of this project at least in this, its nearly final form. (There will be proof-reading, of course; but it’s about as done as it’s going to get at this point.) I was so grateful for their engagement and careful attention. It’s a privilege to have them read and offer some feedback.

The conversation turned around questions of nostalgia in the contemporary indie rock revival, particularly as it relates to “the sound” (and implicated politics) of the 1990s; feminist affect (particularly via Soccer Mommy’s “Cool”¹); and finally, Ohio, all themes I was grateful to know came through in the text, as they’re some of the central and most important ideas that I was trying to communicate with.

Barry has questioned whether or not “nostalgia” is the right word for a project that reprises the past only to actively interrogate the present (he doesn’t think so, and I don’t disagree); but the students seemed to follow many of the listeners I spoke with for the project, who feel nostalgic while listening—even if they weren’t alive to experience the 90s themselves. To get at feminist affect, meanwhile, we listened to “Cool” in its entirety. In the conversation, someone quoted a passage from the book that helped to capture how they felt about it:

Instead of moving linearly through a clear beginning, middle, and end point, “Cool” continues to oscillate around variations of essentially one chord or sound, always already built through juxtaposition. In this way, the song mostly refuses to build tension, performing its own title by remaining within a consistently subdued atmosphere.

Finally, after a lovely moment that brought nostalgia and feminist affect into conversation with one another, the discussion paused. After a beat, someone (maybe Ryan) asked, “Can we talk about Ohio?”

This question made my heart swell.

OATT

Since leaving Ohio, my personality has changed in a few ways, not all of which are directly related to that move. Yet it’s true that in the past year, I haven’t been able stop bringing the state up in whatever conversation,² a pattern that, when I first noticed it, seemed to me like something I might be getting away with—hopefully a quirk that was interpreted as pseudo-charming or at least inoffensive, a testament to how much the state means to me and something indicative of my values.

Particularly in the context of Ohio’s national reputation—negative, need it be said, and this year exacerbated by both an odious vice presidential nominee and a Tik Tok vernacular that uses the state as a stand-in for “anything weird, cringey, or random”—it always feels necessary to be loud about my commitment to the place, a commitment having nearly nothing to do with geography and everything to do with people. I’ve long felt this way, but only more so once entering academia, which remains deeply elitist and hierarchical on some levels: people who go to state schools, particularly Midwestern state schools, aren’t usually the ones getting the fellowships, prizes, or prestigious jobs, the jobs with high pay, low teaching loads, and plenty of sabbatical periods.³ They are also the people, in my estimation, who are often doing the best work.

I’m a Scorpio who mostly feels misunderstood by the wider world. I was born in Cleveland and have lived most of my life in Ohio, a place that anyway—and more so than other, similar states, I think—produces a culture of pride. I’ve had conversations with peers whose eyes move over my shoulder when I tell them where I teach or where I did my PhD. I hope this helps at least make sense of the fact that I have a hard time shutting up about my home state, even if, as I fear, I am straight up starting to annoy people. Of course, there’s also the fact that I’ve recent left, and won’t likely return.

While I Do Sort of Wonder Whether Readers Would Enjoy Posts About Matters Related to Academic Publishing, This is Not That

The last chapter I finished in Big Feelings was so because it was the hardest to get right—and I’m still not sure I did. I was trying to write about The Ophelias (again, always), and though I had a lengthy and wonderful interview with the band from which to draw, I kept getting distracted by Ohio: Despite my difficulty articulating anything clear about the mysterious captivation of their music, what I do know for certain is that they are a deeply creative, queer band who makes music that’s always inflected with, and sometimes directly about, Ohio, namechecked in a variety of ways across their albums. It therefore started to feel impossible to talk about how their music works without lengthy detours into the cultural politics of the state, my own relationships in it, and my grief at having left.

Unable to reconcile its divergent trains of thought, both of my peer reviewers had issues with or at least serious questions about the chapter. So did Barry. Then my lead editor on the Tracking Pop series came back with more. I revised each time, but knew more needed to be done. So I took it to the American Musicological Society Popular Music Study Group Junior Scholar Symposium (AMS PMSG JSS), a cumbersomely-named event where junior and senior pop music folks are paired up for a supportive writing workshop. There, I hoped to finally get some concrete suggestions for finally making the chapter coherent. “Yeah, it’s not working for me,” my session’s leader said by way of kicking things off. The writing’s good, people agreed. But it doesn’t come together.

I left that session really discouraged. Was I just forcing the issue, the same way I force my heartbreak into conversations with friends, changing the subject, as if Ohio was a partner who had suddenly left me? Was I making this about me, when it’s the band who really matter? I sent the chapter out to more friends, along with my editor, who helped motivate me through a final push.

“Can we talk about Ohio?”

Finally, someone else was asking.

I’m Dreaming of a Midwest Book Tour

The whole class murmured in agreement, scrolling ahead eagerly. They asked me how I’d come to such a shift in register, why I decided to insert myself into the narrative as I had, and there. I had to, I told them. I’d get home from a long drive and cry and write and it had to go somewhere. After all those revisions, at some point I had to just choose to keep it in, risking failure. I kept it in for people who’ll get it, I told them. I kept it in for you.

Ryan is a rigorous academic, not prone to empty flattery. It meant the world to hear him say that he understood the stakes of my book after reading the Ohio chapter, that he heard the music differently because of it. It worked for him, and not just because he could follow the references. Barry agreed, and then exercised one of his superpowers: The ability to distill the essence of what any text has tried to say in a way more insightful way than I could have imagined articulating, a kind of total-picture clairvoyance that always surprises me while simultaneously gesturing outwards from that initial condensation, exploding the main point so it touches everything else.

I can’t explain what a lightening this felt. Maybe it was possible after all for the chapter to help me process my grief and help the reader understand something meaningful about The Ophelias, about their creativity, their orientations, the place that formed them whether by affirmation or rejection. Maybe, with each small revision, I wasn’t spinning my wheels so much as carving away, down to something underneath, however gradually.

I’m so lucky and proud to have written this book. But that doesn’t mean I’m confident about its quality. Do the arguments hit? Will it resonate with people? Important, smart, and kind friends have encouraged me all along the way, but this was the first time a class of not-inherently-invested students talked with me about the project. And it meant a lot.

Successful or no, the Ohio chapter is as real as I wanted it to be, and I really hope you’ll read it. In the meantime, I’ll listen to this

and cry hard.

1. The second chapter is basically an expanded and revised version of this article. Can you spot the mistake in it?

2. Frequent interjections pattern themselves around famous people (e.g. “You know, Kim Deal is from Dayton”), or else are concerned with differentiation (between the major cities, all of which produce different cultural identities, or else between Ohio and other parts of the too-imprecisely-named “Midwest”). “You’re trying to tell me that Kansas and Michigan are a part of the same region?,” I ask in disbelief as my friends quietly leave the room.

3. Job figures are more variable and nuanced, I think, but on the level of prizes and awards, the statistics here are pretty damning. Let’s take two slightly less than random examples: the “Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry” postdoc at Washington University in St. Louis, and the American Musicological Society’s “Paul A. Pisk” prize for “most outstanding scholarly paper read at an Annual Meeting of the Society by a graduate music student.” These are the first awards that occurred to me to look into, because I live in St. Louis, because I applied for the postdoc (being one of the premier and only interdisciplinary humanities fellowships out there, and as a PhD in “Comparative Studies,” it was one for which I had once hoped to be competitive), and because I just got back from the AMS. For the 31 MII Postdocs listed on this website, 17 went to elite, private schools (USC, Princeton x3, Stanford, Harvard x5, UChicago x3, Penn, Yale, MIT, Columbia); five were international; four were not listed; and five went to state schools (some of which, like UC Berkeley and UCLA, barely count). Of these latter five, ONE was from the Midwest—the University of Michigan. The breakdown for the Pisk prize is much the same: As you can see here, there has been but a single, lone recipient from a state school in the Midwest, and that prize was awarded in 1994. Same story for the Howard Brown Fellowship.