Earlylife Crisis, Suburban Lawn, American Pie
This week, recommendations include a youth music report, considering poetic disidentification, and a food/travel log from industrial Upper Peninsula, Michigan.
Recommendation: Nettspend Live at Terminal 5, April 28th, 2026 / “Pain Talk” / “halftime”
Interacting with new music can be kind of horrifying. I’ll play a track like Nettspend’s “halftime” and be completely wrecked by a billowing bass pulse with a panflute/recorder ditty arpeggio gliding over it. It’s not so different from plenty of music I’ve heard before; but, the fleeting cadence of the music’s youth and newness is enshrouded in menace. The fried, metallic sound is actually very normal—and that’s the scariest part. Showing it to a coworker still elicits pained faces—”wtf is this shit”—but the banal darkness located within the music is its own functional officewear. Watercooler type shit. Nettspend Nespresso.
This is the early life crisis. The midlife crisis is well established within the Gen X media we’ve inherited—that “you can change your life” rebelliously and drive the camaro off the deep end. The early life crisis is already chilling at the bottom of the cliff. Not driving off, but occupying the threshold of possibility for a perpetual state of life crisis. It’s an understanding that incredibly fucked up music is basically just kind of normal. Within the early life crisis, the status of the transcendental or altering your own reality is synonymous with having perpetual proximity with death, a placid dread. The early life crisis is ambivalent with how the midlife crisis precodes death. It’s not a fear of death, but a dapped up embrace. From Kierkegaard’s Fear & Trembling: “to contend with the whole world is a comfort, but to contend with oneself dreadful.” Nettspend is a comfort, contending with the whole world as a kind of worldwide “Pain Talk.”
A few days ago, I saw Nettspend with Alex Iadarola and our friends Rachel and Antonio at Terminal 5—a “back to the scene of the crime” situation after seeing 2hollis there last October. I’m admittedly drawing a bit of a blank in even trying to describe what went down. Rabid teen fans in hotdog and banana suits were pushing up against each other during the preshow—one holding a whole ass open Macbook (livestreaming maybe?) triumphantly above their head in the din of the crowd. People were slapping each other in the face and barking like dogs. There were bloody noses and security guards pouring water directly into people’s mouths. Everyone swayed in dangerous waves of compressed crowdedness. We were lucky to be sitting on a balcony like we were on an international flight, as minor fights broke out in scattered sparks across the space. Tufts of volumized “poof” haircuts made up 80% of the audience. Deer Park water bottles filled with vodka were clearly brought in school backpacks and crushed and disposed of outside the venue. Moshpits erupted every couple of minutes—as bass ricocheted in a particularly metallic timbre all over the place. Nettspend’s voice and navigation of a generic rap/autotune delivery was particularly virtuosic. He was the Batman villain in a condemned and damned Gotham City, proclaiming to the sea of teens: Who tf is u?
I’ve had a pretty insane experience with “youth music” over the last week (post-show from hosting ear and SS3BBY at PS1 last week). In Spring 2026, being 34 years old still feels early. The crisis, pretty normal. You ready?
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Suburban Lawns - “Janitor”
This week we’ll put a few excerpts dealing with disidentification into conversation.
First, the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, from a 1983 interview quoted in a new essay by the great Ian Penman: “I think ultimately I’m just a sound. I don’t know if I’m a human being.”
Next, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, from a recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel:
We’re not a car. We are not a car. The fact that I can buy this car brand one day and use another car brand another day, easy. Computing is not like that. There’s a reason why the x86 deal exists. There’s a reason why ARM is so sticky. These ecosystems are hard to replace.
Finally, the pre-chorus of Suburban Lawns’ “Janitor”:
Who’s your mother? Who’s your father?
I guess everything’s irrelative
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Pasties, Pentangle - “Light Flight”
I was in the upper peninsula (UP) of Michigan for work this week, photographing an electrical industrial facility. It was in a remote area about two hours driving from the hallowed football ground of Lambeau Field in Green Bay, WI. The trip was short, but I had plenty of time to take in the local offerings in the (only town for many miles), Iron Mountain. Dinner at Spud’s Bistro was a delight: I ordered the excellent pub pizza and my associate enjoyed the chicken and shrimp Alfredo. There’s a big Italian population in the area, I learned, because miners from all over Europe (especially Italy and Britain) came in during the mid-1800’s after their iron industries dried up. I learned more about this from the Spud’s bar staff, who I became friendly with, and who took me along for their post-shift drink at Bimbo’s Wine Press (an Italian pork store - but really, a bar).
There’s an intense remoteness to this area - not just geographically, but in terms of the cultural sensibility. People are extremely open and friendly, but in an understated way that suggests the isolation of long winter months even in spring. And everyone seems to already know everyone else. The Scandinavian migrant history of the area checks out here in this sense too. There’s an egalitarian spirit embedded in the commitment to maintain residence there. Bosses of industry seem to grow up there and plug into the raw material refining and extracting infrastructure. Those that aren’t in industrial labor or management seem to stay, or leave, but come back. One woman described her tenure in south Florida, joining a carnival there. She came back to the UP to raise her daughter. It seems like a good place to do that - a place that is still reliant on community in an actually intense social and material sense.
The following day, after I finished working, I went to try another local delicacy: the meat pies called “pasties.” It’s a pastry crust filled with stewed meat, potatoes, rutabaga, and so on, with many variations on the theme (but none too flashy). It’s not the most flavorful food, but filling, nutritionally complete, satisfyingly coherent. Reading a historical document on the wall of Dobber’s, I learned that the cuisine was brought over by Cornish miners (“Cousin Jacks and Jenneys”) who immigrated following the opening of the iron and copper mines. They would carry these pies into the tunnels, heating them on shovels in the dark, placed over the gas lamps, or would keep them body temperature in chest jacket pockets. Hundreds of people eating pie, tunneling in the ground, extracting resources, starting families, staying, leaving, coming back, forming the infrastructure and then expressing its social aspects over generations.
I suppose my recommendation this week is related to this sense of imperfect (maybe fraught, sometimes flavorless, potentially incredible) completeness that I consider about the pastie and in the UP. The humble form of the pie is very much secondary to its mixing, seasoning and the spirit and utility with which it’s eaten. Things have a way of cohering when the needs and roles of people and of social and material components are given (or take) space in the collective assembly.
Leaving Bimbo’s, it was beginning to snow (in April) to the amusement of all the UP-ers. As I had entered the mix for an evening, I was offered a ride back to the Holiday Inn Express. Thank you, Dennise and the rest of the generous Spud’s staff.
Here’s one great song for Spring, in the spirit of the meat pie and Cousin Jack and Jenney:
—Alec Sturgis