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Not new and not improved, but BUTT. Badlands, Alberta.

They're the only band named after their own fans!

Totally fair to ask these questions. There's no real reason as to why I brought MT back. I guess it's because it's been a part of my life for the past 20 years. It felt weird not having it around. I have no expectation that people will visit or stick around. I realize there's plenty of other places you can spend your time (reddit, discord, slack groups, etc...). There's a lot of history within the topics here and for some reason, I didn't like that I just erased it. So, at the very least, I wanted to bring MT back purely for the historical snapshot of what useless things people were talking about from 2004 on. The only things that have changed are the server and software. Both were ancient and prone to spamming and attacks. The whole server was taken over by hackers in January which is why I shut it down. After moving to a new server and updating the forum software to be from this decade, I'm optimistic that the spam problems won't be as bad. I'm "present" in the sense that i check the site daily. I don't post much, never have. And I realize that things got really bad here the last few years. Life is crazy with 2 children under 4 years old so I do have bigger priorities. Hope this makes sense...

it s'all bout the he said she said bull shit!

Most of the old posters were just random Russians I paid to talk with me, but they all started working on another big project in 2015. Sorry to anyone else who thought it was real

Jesus I thought spam was back

this is tmonk by the way. apparently this is the account associated with my "real" email address

Is this the family reunion thread? I never thought i'd see this place resurrect, MT was definitely a product of its time and the sharp post-AMSP decline was overdue. Maintaining two fan boards for a 90's band that has an album every 5 years, in the age of reddit.. It's nice to know everything is still here, though. I spent a lot of my adolescence on this site reading up on bands and practicing my writing chops, so many memories.

Me: Okay I really gotta send out applications TODAY. Me: this is the greatest possible time I can think of to reorganize my desk supplies. Think I'll listen to the Decemberists. Remember Party Cheetos? That son of a gun really loved the Decemberists.

fuckin' solid tracks tho!

THY KINGDOM COME THY WILL BE DONE ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD AND FORGIVE US OUR TRESSPASSES AS WE FORGIVE THOSE WHO TRESPASS AGAINST US AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION BUT DELIVER FROM EVIL AMEN HAIL MARY FULL OF GRACE THE LORD IS WITH THIS BLESSED ARE THOU AMONGST WOMEN AND BLESSED IS THE FRUIT OF THY WOMB JESUS HOLY MARY MOTHER OF GOD PRAY FOR US SINNERS NOW AND AT THE HOUR OF OUR DEATH AMEN GLORY BE TO THE FATHER TO THE SON AND TO THE HOLY SPIRIT AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING IS NOW AND EVER SHALL BE WORLD WITHOUT END AMEN

I love bruschetta, and this summer I discovered caprese sandwiches - pesto, thick mozzarella slice, and tomato toasted on a baguette. It’s just so good. Herbs on bread is heaven on earth.

Reading a lot of my old posts is total cringetopia. Some of them still make me laugh but for a lot of them, it makes me wanna kermit

Basil just ends up shredded when I cut it anyway. I never put it in my salad but it sounds good. I am really into growing fresh herbs now. I have basil, thyme, rosemary atm. It was so hot in May that all my potted flowers died and the only thing alive at the garden center was herbs so I did those on my porch and it smells so good and I pick them and my hands smell good for hours and I put leaves here and there to scent the rooms in my house. Homemade pesto ftw!

lettuce is good. iceberg lettuce is an okay idea but it should never have made it further. lately i mix lettuce with kale in my salads. i disagree with kale but put up with it just in case there is a reward somewhere down the road. kale and chard can both go to hell.

hey!

Thanks for helping me by resetting my password @jonathan ! I'd like to echo Cindy's call for off-topic forums to once again require login for access if at all possible, there's some real dumb stuff from all of us on this site that at the very least should remain outside of the range of google searches if at all possible.

I went grocery shopping today. When I was looking at my list, I thought, “Lettuce? What do I need lettuce for? Maybe I just wrote lettuce because of all the salad I’ve been eating for dinner lately.” Then when I was in line, it hit me. I needed the lettuce for BLTs oh god oh fuck

yeah i realized just about the second after posting that, even I have a fuckin' alt on Reddit, lol. however, an alt with a real funny avatar to accompany the posts? yeah, dream on "reddyboys"...

ready to be in love again

i don't like say my actual location, but i was thinking of how to put myself on the members map. i thought... where should i put? so i went with my home town, in the spot where i would go hiking, where there was always a red-tailed hawk, where i saw the ghost of a native american. i was happy in that spot. and i just now learnt that it's called indian head. i think the hawk, and the indian's ghost are somehow related. it's funny because i don't even believe in ghosts, and i tell people, all the time, that ghosts aren't real. but in my mind i'm thinking, 'except for all the times i saw the ghost of the indian.' so that's my spot.

Good people of MT! Hello! I miss this place.

I respect that a lot Jonathan ♥️

Wow, thanks Jonathan. Really appreciate this. 2 kids under 4, YIKES!!! I understand!!! :)

I can't believe it's been half a year since I got the Slack invite. I accepted it and joined the website, but I am just a humble dumbass, so I couldn't figure it out. I'm glad MT is back up for this reason alone, although it looked like a lot more people were posting there? I saw box and Rose posting there at least. I actually missed a lot of people from MT!

Hey what's up milkychai I was thinking about Bella the other day and I looked up her Facebook because I'm creepy. I thought about sending her an email because I think I still have her personal email somewhere, but idk if that would be weird/creepy. 🤔

i like to think i'll live on forever in the archives of some digital anthropology department in the year 3000 that takes a genuine academic interest in the garbage i've vomited out of my brain here.

OH MY SWEET SWEET LONGEST THREAD OH HOW I'VE MISSED YOU

ok thanks bruv

MT rebooted for a new generation. With Zac Efron and Dwaynetherockjohnson.

Wowzas. It's been ~10 years since I was last on here. Talk about blast from my past. Hello everyone. Glad MT is back up.

its not the end of the world Its great MT is back though! i thought it was gone forever! hope you guys are well

I (co-)run a forum, which includes some former AtEasers and so far a couple of people from MT. AtEase is dead too so it's kind of the last holdout. Send me a PM if you're interested and I'll link you.

friend a

Can you retitle the thread Jun Togawa thx. If anyone is actually still reading or was ever reading and prefers full albums rather than live performances, these two albums are a good representation, the first is her earliest work as a lead vocalist of Guernica (which could appeal to Joanna Newsom fans if you want something with more electronic production but in a theatrical classical art pop style), and the second is a best of comp Togawa had personal involvement in creating, that includes most of her best solo songs and work with her backing band Yapoos from the '80s.

1978 album from Taeko Ohnuki and 1985 album from Togawa. Both of these (great) albums have apparently been rejected by the artists later on, admitting they were forced, even sellouts, but even if this is Jun Togawa's poppiest album, it's still less pop than PIL and Joy Division. The way Jun Togawa covers and deconstructs Angel Baby on this album is so radically unlike the way Haruomi Hosono and friends had once paid sweet homage to nostalgic American rock n roll favorites and created "city pop" in the process. Tbh I am feeling Jun Togawa much more than city pop right now. Like vaporwave and Grimes, any good intentions that most poptimist artists may have had (re: critiquing America, or patriarchy, or capitalism, or critiquing Japanese culture's deformation by those things) were swallowed by the irony of needing to become what they most opposed in order to "convincingly" critique it, an irony that they may even have rejected as distancing and condescending to their audience (e.g. Grimes later claimed nothing she did was ironic) while simultaneously becoming attached to the perks of their new pop life, to the point they started to sincerely embody the opposite of what they once believed in. Jun Togawa never did that. Selling out. Not selling out and selling out are both miserable in their own ways and the art that comes out of selling out tends to be more interesting actually (even if/because the artist may be less worthy of personal admiration) but there is a certain moral center in the way Jun Togawa engaged in the pop game, in a way that seems to have prevented her own complete commodification (somehow she even evaded being fetishized as an orientalist otaku icon decades later, the way Mariya Takeuchi is). This morality is lacking in Radiohead, and lacking in the nu-Grimes who makes libertarian comments against public transit and worker rights (to stay in character??). One can play devil's advocate and say that all pop is inherently "commodifying all the pain," so it's no difference if one fights against that process or not, and maybe fighting is just performative and bourgeois and the artist who fights is really just asking for it but wanting to retain their appearance of good character because this is what their privileged circle, who know no harm will come to them for a minor resistance, demands... so maybe the listener who prefers artists who fight their own commodification is like someone who doesn't trust a person who was assaulted unless they can prove they fought, and maybe just like in that case, such a preference ends up reinforcing the oppressive ideology- it implies anyone who doesn't, or can't have the luxury to, visibly oppose capitalist racist patriarchy, must WANT to be assaulted by it, which is of course, a reactionary view... But when the end result of trying to avoid that false dichotomy is a pop with NO resistance, a pop born out of a knowledge that there is no inside or outside capitalism/patriarchy/racism, and therefore resistance is impossible... well, most people just take that kind of pop as a sincere affirmation of capitalist racist patriarchy, or appreciate it in later decades for the very nostalgia it was (not) critiquing, and the artist who developed that style with all this fancy justification, may just be thinking too much. That's when you need that punk to come along and sing Angel Baby out of tune.

An old idol falls, a new idol is born. Momoe Yamaguchi was considered the biggest pop star of the '70s, then she abruptly retired to get married, and Seiko Matsuda became the "eternal idol" in the '80s. Yamaguchi's final music such as this song LA Blue was exploring a city pop aesthetic, which often involved recording in LA. Some LA based session musicians (or members of Toto) who later worked on songs like Human Nature for MJ were playing on city pop songs by Mariya etc, and of course MJ was also influenced by Japanese artists like YMO, explaining the similarity of some of the Jacksons' '80s work and city pop.

Jun Togawa in art mode. Again, this has nothing to do with "city pop" except maybe in questioning it. Far from being some obscure microgenre, city pop was just a name for the dominant pop music of the time, expressing the dominant ideology of the time.

Early and late Jun (cover of Vanessa Paradis)

been lurkin gp since 2002 tbh

Well, Jeffrey, I got on here, because I called MY cell phone to tell you faces of death would be on tonight at 9. Then My cellphone wouldnt pick up, so I knew you was ONLINE, On my new fucking laptop, using the damn phone to get online. So I get online to send you a message here to call me, and I see all this shit about "Get an erection" And How you are gona love all over this Natalie girl. Let me be the first motherfucker (literally) that you have ever met to show you a difference between a gay man, and a gay boy. Fuck you, Im done with you. I hope she can pay your bills, and I hope she can house you and cloth you. I will be DAMNED If some fag will use MY computers, to DISRESPECT ME, By talking love bird shit behind my back. Ill be moving to Hell by myself. Your ex-lover, Pablo.

It makes me sick that you would do this all over an internet crush. And I'm fucking Jeffrey Dahmer, I should know about sick things. You've crossed the line.