MY CITY WAS GONE (BUT THE GROOVE REMAINED)How My Dad’s Radio Turned Me Into a Rock & Roll Archaeologist

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I didn’t find rock & roll on a turntable. I found it in the living room of a basement apartment with cinderblock walls, bad lighting, and AM talk radio humming like a mosquito in a jar. My dad—Cincinnati born, East End raised—had a gruff voice, a union soul that got swallowed somewhere between Nixon and reality. By the time I was old enough to listen, he was already tuned in daily to Rush Limbaugh, letting that voice coat the air like cigarette smoke.

But here’s the trick: before the shouting started, there was the groove.
That bassline.

Hypnotic. Repetitive. Perfect.

Doo-doo… doo-doo…
Doo-doo… doo-doo…

It looped like memory. Like loss. Like something you couldn’t shake even if you didn’t know why it hurt yet.

I didn’t know the song was “My City Was Gone” by the Pretenders. Didn’t know Chrissie Hynde was from Akron. Didn’t know she’d written it about returning home and finding a strip mall where her childhood had stood. All I knew was that something in that groove told me the truth, even if the host didn’t.

It wasn’t until years later that I found out that my dad’s old neighborhood—Cincinnati’s East End—was gone too. Torn down after he’d left. Swallowed by progress or neglect or both. No one talked about it. No plaques, no documentaries. Just silence. Like it never mattered.

But the groove remembered.

Every time that bassline played under the bluster, the ghost of East End danced. My dad never noticed. Maybe he couldn’t afford to. But I did. I inhaled it like damp air and static. Like inheritance.

I became a rock & roll archaeologist. Digging in grooves. Peeling back frequencies. Listening for the what-was buried beneath the what-is. Finding emotion in repetition. History in heartbreak.

And when I finally heard the full song—with lyrics—I cried.
Because it was all there.
Because the music had told me long before the words did.

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Some kids inherit heirlooms.
Some kids inherit silence.
I inherited a bassline.

🧠 Netflix’s Mind Control Triple Threat: They Cloned Tyrone, It’s What’s Inside, and Maniac

Welcome to the control room.
Netflix is quietly building a sinister new genre niche: stylish, subversive explorations of identity, memory, and manipulation. Whether it’s through cloned rebellion, psychic tech start-ups, or pharmaceutical hallucinations, these works whisper the same truth:

Your mind is not your own.

Here are three titles currently available on the platform that form an accidental but electric trilogy—a hall of warped mirrors reflecting how easily the human psyche can be rewritten.

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1. They Cloned Tyrone (2023)

Directed by Juel Taylor
🎛 Blaxploitation meets behavioral science.

What begins as a neon-soaked street mystery rapidly unfolds into something much deeper: a surreal satire of systemic oppression via science fiction. They Cloned Tyrone centers on an unlikely trio—Fontaine (John Boyega), Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), and Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris)—who uncover a government plot to clone and control Black communities using everything from perm chemicals to fried chicken to gospel music.

The genius of the film lies in its layers: it's hilarious, grimy, stylish—but also terrifying in its implications. The enemy isn't just The Man—it's culture as camouflage. Even the rebellion might be pre-programmed.

Control Vector: Cultural infiltration, chemical sedation, clone tech
Mood: Afrofuturist X-Files

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2. It’s What’s Inside (2024)

Written and Directed by Greg Jardin
🔮 The party game that rewrites your mind.

A new release that’s flown slightly under the radar, It’s What’s Inside is a cerebral indie chamber piece that explodes into something Cronenbergian and uncanny. A group of old college friends gather for a reunion in a fancy rental home—but when one of them unveils a strange tech-device that lets you literally inhabit another person’s body, things unravel fast.

What starts as a novelty spirals into betrayal, identity collapse, and bodily terror. It's not just who you are that’s up for grabs—it’s whether “you” even exist at all anymore.

Control Vector: Mind-transfer technology, internalized envy
Mood: Coherence meets Black Mirror by way of a bottle of ayahuasca

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3. Maniac (2018)

Created by Patrick Somerville, Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga
💊 The algorithm is your therapist now.

In this overlooked gem, Emma Stone and Jonah Hill star as two lost souls in a retro-future dystopia where trauma can be “solved” through a pharmaceutical trial. What unfolds is an odyssey through genre-warped hallucinations—spy thrillers, fantasy epics, gritty crime tales—all shaped by their damaged psyches.

But Maniac isn't just a trippy ride—it’s a razor-sharp critique of medicalized emotion, algorithmic empathy, and the fragility of self. The AI running the experiment is herself in mourning. The test subjects’ trauma is content. And healing is indistinguishable from simulation.

Control Vector: Psychopharmacology, memory looping, algorithmic dreams
Mood: Eternal Sunshine meets Brazil meets Neuromancer

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🧬 The Common Thread: Control Disguised as Cure

What binds these three projects is a subtle but crucial idea: control doesn’t always look like handcuffs or shock collars anymore. Sometimes it looks like:

• Your favorite food

• Your best friend

• A wellness app

• A drug trial

• A party game

• A voice in your head saying "You're fine."

Netflix, knowingly or not, is curating a new canon of psycho-satirical mind control stories—entertainment that gets under your skin by asking whether your reactions themselves might be synthetic.

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🧠 Watch If You Like:

• Themes: Identity crisis, digital paranoia, synthetic emotion

• Films: The Signal, Possessor, Sorry to Bother You, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

• Shows: Severance, Devs, Undone, Black Mirror: USS Callister

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👁️ Final Thought:

These aren't just stories about being controlled—they're about uncovering the moment you realize it’s already happened.

So go ahead, hit play.
Just remember: that feeling you have while watching? It might not be yours.

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.

Buckminster Fuller

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.

Oh Well, Whatever, Never-Ending

It starts with the drums—that fill—like someone kicking open the door to your own mind. And then it never stops. It never even tries to. Because Nevermind isn’t an album, it’s a trapdoor in the floor of your teenage soul. You fall through it in flannel and come out the other side blinking into daylight with your headphones still on.

It’s the smell of wet Converse and burnt microwaved pizza rolls. It’s the feeling of discovering that the world is rigged but your distortion pedal still works. It’s the holy communion of static and sadness, and you didn’t even know you needed saving until you heard Kurt say, “I’m so happy… ‘cause today I found my friends… they’re in my head.”

No one understood you yet there he was—mumbling, screaming, whispering in your Walkman, like he already knew your secrets before you did. And when Zag turned to you one day and said:

“You remind me of Kurt Cobain,”
he might as well have handed you a scepter made of duct tape and broken strings. That was royalty. That was sacred. That was one of the highest honors of your entire goddamn life.

Because Cobain didn’t just play music. He existed like a malfunctioning angel, beautiful and broken and too human for his own flesh. And Nevermind was the mixtape he tossed into the ocean for anyone else who was barely holding it together but still going to work, still trying to fall in love, still wondering what the hell was wrong with them for not being able to just be normal.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” was the anthem, but “Drain You” was the confession. “Come as You Are” was the open door. “Something in the Way” was the quiet cry underneath it all, the sound of a person dissolving into rain.

And here’s the truth: Nevermind never ends. You hear it in a gas station at midnight and it still makes your chest ache. You put it on while folding laundry and suddenly you're 14 again, wondering what the hell it means to be real. You listen to it in 2025 and it still kicks harder than anything new, not because of polish—but because of pain. Because of truth. Because of that impossible blend of apathy and yearning, of whatever and never-ending.

So here’s to you, Nevermind—
The album that gave us permission to be confused.
The album that rotted beautifully on CDs left out in the elements and our psyches.
The album that proved vulnerability could sound like a chainsaw through velvet.

Oh well.
Whatever.
Never-ending.

You’re still with us.

Even if some of us had to become adults.
Even if some of us had to become ghosts.

🎷 Vic Blackwing & A. Duvant — Live from the Imaginary Café

A Limited Cassette Release from Shadow Gramophone, 1971

Recorded at an undisclosed café in Montreuil. Audience: two poets, one stray cat, a broken clock.

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🔶 Liner Notes (Back Cover):

“There was no stage, just a circle of dim lamplight and some cables duct-taped to the floor. Duvant arrived late, smelling of ash and ink. He brought no prepared text. Blackwing unboxed his flute like a priest unwrapping relics. What followed was not performance. It was séance.”

They say this recording was never meant to be pressed. Vic Blackwing swore it only existed as a live experiment — a way to "see if language could breathe through brass." But a single tape survived, found stuffed in the lining of Duvant’s coat when he died. No label. Just the words: “Play this when memory isn’t enough.”

You will not hear applause. You will hear murmurs. Clinking glasses. Footsteps on wet pavement. The hiss of something old and unrepeatable. You will hear what happens when a flautist and a philosopher build a cathedral out of breath, doubt, and delay pedals.

Listen alone. Preferably after 2am.

— Lucien DuGarde, Shadow Gramophone Archives

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🔶 Tracklist:

Side A – Entrances

1. Blue in Green, But Smudged – [Flute + ambient noise intro]

2. Syntax of the Inner Monologue (Field Recording from a Mind)

   • “You don’t speak in words. You speak in weathers.”

3. Cigarettes and Synapses –

   • Flute mimics the rhythm of exhale. Words stagger, repeat.

   • “I smoked to rewind.”

4. Static Communion –

   • Interlude: Radio hiss. Late-night jazz DJ fades in, then Duvant:

   • “If you hear this… you made it.”

Side B – Departures
5. The Portable Cathedral (Chords in Dust Jacket Blue)

• “I lived in a book spine for six years.”

• Blackwing improvises underneath in E minor

6. Magnetic Ghosts (For the Tapeheads and Memory Kids)

   • Flute run through reel-to-reel delay, stuttering. Duvant’s voice glitches.

   • “The movie was never the same twice.”

7. The Triple Feature as Devotional Rite (Final Transmission)

   • Layered vocals, like prayers echoing off cinema walls.

   • “First film: descent. Second: delirium. Third: we crawl back blinking.”

Bonus Track (Unlisted)
🎙️ Vic’s Solo: “Shadow of a Bookstore That Never Existed”
Recorded accidentally. You hear a doorbell, wind. A single, mournful flute phrase. Silence.

TUNE-IN TUESDAYUnearthed Television Treasures, Restored for the Righteous📀 This Week’s Pick: DARK SHADOWS — THE REVIVAL (1991)“Where the undead wear Armani, and brooding comes standard.”

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Somewhere between soap opera and shadow play, Dark Shadows: The Revival (1991) clawed its way onto prime-time like a bat out of syndication purgatory. Dismissed at the time, canceled too soon, and now exhumed for the home video haunt—this one-season wonder is a slick, Gothic fever dream that dares to ask: What if Dracula was also a moody uncle with a fondness for fog machines and tortured monologues?

💀 THE PITCH:
A remake of the legendary 1966–71 daytime vampire soap, Dark Shadows: The Revival condenses and reimagines the Barnabas Collins mythos with cinematic flair, thanks to The Night Stalker’s Dan Curtis returning for one more moonlit ride. It aired on NBC, burned hot and fast, and was buried by the Gulf War. Now it plays like a cursed VHS from an alternate timeline where Twin Peaks bled into The Hunger.

🧛 WHO’S WHO IN THE COFFIN CREW:

• Ben Cross (as Barnabas Collins) is less lovable-ghoul and more tragic-Byronic vampire, a haunted portrait of regret and shadowed cheekbones.

• Joanna Going (as Victoria Winters/Josette) delivers the sort of wide-eyed intensity you’d expect from someone living in a time-slip love triangle.

• Jean Simmons, Barbara Steele, and Lysette Anthony round out the ensemble with elegance, menace, and several pounds of chiffon.

🕯️ THE AESTHETIC:
Think: fog-drenched graveyards, candelabras in slow motion, and lightning that always knows when to strike. It's what would happen if Interview with the Vampire slept in the same bed as Dynasty and had night terrors.

There’s a luxurious theatricality here—sometimes too much—but that’s the point. This is not minimalist horror. This is maximalist gothique with its collar popped, fangs polished, and string section swelling at every cliffhanger.

🩸 STANDOUT EPISODES:

• Episode 1: A deliriously fast origin story that doesn’t so much pace itself as it does leap into a coffin and slam the lid.

• Episode 5 (“Episode 1795”) classic time travel!: Where the show veers into costume-drama madness and proves it could've rivaled Hammer if NBC had let it breathe.

• Any scene with Barbara Steele, who walks in like she owns the genre—and, let’s be honest, she kinda does.

📼 DVD FEATURES (OR LACK THEREOF):
Sadly, most releases are barebones—no commentary, no featurettes, not even a whisper from the crypt. Which is a shame, because this series screams for a retrospective. Someone get Shout! Factory on the line. This deserves a haunted box set shaped like a mausoleum.

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👁️ FINAL VERDICT:

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4 out of 5 ravens)
A lush, misunderstood gem. Perfect for rainy nights, velvet robes, and deep sighs. If you like your horror beautifully sad, your romance tragically doomed, and your TV forgotten by network execs but loved by the dead, this one’s for you.

💿 Now streaming in your nightmares—or better yet, grab the DVD before it vanishes again like a ghost at dawn.

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🕰️ NEXT WEEK ON TUNE-IN TUESDAY:
"They Came From Outer Space" (1990) — what if stoner alien twins with a Corvette were your after-school babysitters?

Until then, stay rewound, stay bewitched.

Buzz Drainpipe Reporting from the Swamp-Slicked Inferno: METALLICA – LOAD (Deluxe Edition Box Set Review)

Let me tell you somethin’, kid—the devil don’t wear black anymore. He’s sweatin’ bourbon in a leather vest, strutting down a neon-soaked boulevard of busted amps and barroom prophets. And Load—yes, fucking Load—was his soundtrack all along. Twenty-eight years on, and Metallica’s most polarizing detour finally gets the decadent, whisky-aged, barbed-wire-and-mascara box set it always deserved.

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🧨THE DELUXE BOXSET: WHAT YOU GET

Picture this: a greasy lunchbox from the bad part of town, stuffed with relics and ruckus.

• 4 LPs + 4 CDs + 1 DVD + Cassette – This ain’t just music, it’s a baptism in blues-metal apocalypse. The remastered album roars like a rusted muscle car in heat.

• The B-sides, Demos, and Rehearsals – Alternate takes that reek of bunker sweat and bourbon breath. Stripped-down jams of "Bleeding Me" and "The Outlaw Torn" show a band unshackled, oozing molten sincerity.

• Live Shows from ’96–’98 – Peak ‘hair slicked back, soul laid bare’ era. They're not thrashing—they’re testifying.

• 48-page book – Photos of Hetfield lookin’ like a desert preacher. Essays from band members finally telling you: yeah, we knew you’d hate it, and we didn’t care.

• A METALLICA-branded Zippo lighter – Because of course.

• "Memory Remains" hand-cranked toy box – A cursed object. I love it.

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💥THE SOUND: PRIMAL SLUDGE ROCK NOIR

Forget what you think you remember. This ain’t mall-metal or grunge-lite. Load was Metallica doing swamp blues through a gasoline-stained mirror. It's Howlin’ Wolf if he’d had a Mesa Boogie amp and a therapist. This is rock 'n roll with contusions.

• “Ain’t My Bitch” kicks it off like a biker bar brawl. Slide guitar and growls like someone sandpapered Sabbath.

• “Until It Sleeps” is Gothic gospel — Hetfield crying in the church of internal bleeding.

• “Bleeding Me” is a nine-minute descent into a man’s soul, cranked through doom-blues and psalmic sludge.

• “The Outlaw Torn” – truly one of Metallica’s greatest compositions. And now you get the full-length version restored, not butchered for CD length. It’s cinematic doom poetry.

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🗣️TO THE HATERS: Y’ALL MISSED THE POINT

You wanted Master of Puppets II? Too bad. In ’96, Metallica weren’t chained to thrash—they were possessed by swamp-rock spirits, chain gang ghosts, and desert mirages. Load was about shedding armor. Hetfield said “I wanna sing, I wanna bleed, I wanna groove.” And goddamn, he did.

If Ride the Lightning was lightning-in-a-bottle fury, Load is the bottle itself: busted on a motel sink, filled with backwash, secrets, and Southern Comfort.

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🖤CONCLUSION: ONE OF THE BEST ROCK ALBUMS OF THE ‘90s

No, Load doesn’t belong in metal’s box. It belongs in the pantheon of ‘90s rock & roll audacity. With Load, Metallica did what real rockers do—they followed the itch, not the algorithm. They went south, spiritual, sleazy. It’s Ziggy Stardust meets Soundgarden at a gas station in Bakersfield.

This deluxe edition boxset is a mud-caked monument to a misunderstood masterpiece. Put on your snakeskin boots. Light that Zippo. And remember: the outlaw always rides alone—but now we can ride with him, cassette hiss and all.

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Buzz Drainpipe
writing this from a bathroom stall covered in scribbled lyrics to “Hero of the Day” and chili dog wrappers shaped like flames 🔥