Kimya Dawson, Remember That I Love You (album). In this context especially the song 'Loose Lips', which was written during the GWB presidency but is even MORE relevant now: "And we'll pray, all damn day, every day /That all this shit our President has got us in will go away / While we strive to figure out a way we can survive / These trying times without losing our minds." The line "tugging on the sleeve of how things used to be" makes me well up sometimes.
Sleater Kinney's discography.
Like you said, Janelle Monae's entire discography.
Political musical soundtracks. Hamilton of course (and the mixtape) but also especially its nearest Australian equivalent, Keating!. I'm listening to 'The Arse End of the Earth', which comes as close as anything can to my almost entirely vestigial patriotism, with its general attitude of 'yeah, our history sucks and our present sucks too and we aren't anyone's shining ideal, but we have to start where we are and we're not entirely awful and we CAN make things better': "We can move this world / We can chance this place / Shifting inch by inch / At a glacial pace / Take it step by step / Build it brick by brick / Important innovations / And delicate equations / I'm running out of patience, can we make this quick?"
clipping's discography (if you haven't listened to their album Splendor & Misery yet... well, that's my rec. They were nominated for a Hugo twice, and didn't win either time but fucking should have. Their sound (experimental noise hiphop) isn't for everyone, but I love it.)
Ann Leckie's Ancillary trilogy. About fighting for personhood and independence from an evil empire on a broad and individual level. And spaceships and cyborgs and non-binary people.
Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire trilogy, in which the evil empire seems completely impossible to overturn, and it so clearly gets into the heads and hearts of everyone there and corrupts them in small and large ways and makes the unthinkable seem commonplace, but people still resist in various ways, and it is still possible to overturn it if you can find the right lever and place to stand. And spaceships and robots and trans people.
JY Yang's Tensorate series, with yet more resistance to an evil empire, and yet more trans and non-binary people, and also raptors.
And I'm going through a Tolkien thing right now, reading the Silmarillion, but the part of that which makes this list is the fanfic and fanart and meta which engages with race and colonialism and gender and sexuality in ways Tolkien would never have thought of and does the Loving Something Problematic thing so fiercely well, and is also FUNNY, and I need that right now.
Is it media content if I list watching one of my cats give the other one a brutally thorough face-washing while he closes his eyes and tilts his head up to give her better access? Because that and the endless stream of cute animal pics on the internet is sometimes a very important thing.
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Date: 2018-11-20 04:15 am (UTC)Mine:
Kimya Dawson, Remember That I Love You (album). In this context especially the song 'Loose Lips', which was written during the GWB presidency but is even MORE relevant now: "And we'll pray, all damn day, every day /That all this shit our President has got us in will go away / While we strive to figure out a way we can survive / These trying times without losing our minds." The line "tugging on the sleeve of how things used to be" makes me well up sometimes.
Sleater Kinney's discography.
Like you said, Janelle Monae's entire discography.
Political musical soundtracks. Hamilton of course (and the mixtape) but also especially its nearest Australian equivalent, Keating!. I'm listening to 'The Arse End of the Earth', which comes as close as anything can to my almost entirely vestigial patriotism, with its general attitude of 'yeah, our history sucks and our present sucks too and we aren't anyone's shining ideal, but we have to start where we are and we're not entirely awful and we CAN make things better': "We can move this world / We can chance this place / Shifting inch by inch / At a glacial pace / Take it step by step / Build it brick by brick / Important innovations / And delicate equations / I'm running out of patience, can we make this quick?"
clipping's discography (if you haven't listened to their album Splendor & Misery yet... well, that's my rec. They were nominated for a Hugo twice, and didn't win either time but fucking should have. Their sound (experimental noise hiphop) isn't for everyone, but I love it.)
Ann Leckie's Ancillary trilogy. About fighting for personhood and independence from an evil empire on a broad and individual level. And spaceships and cyborgs and non-binary people.
Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire trilogy, in which the evil empire seems completely impossible to overturn, and it so clearly gets into the heads and hearts of everyone there and corrupts them in small and large ways and makes the unthinkable seem commonplace, but people still resist in various ways, and it is still possible to overturn it if you can find the right lever and place to stand. And spaceships and robots and trans people.
JY Yang's Tensorate series, with yet more resistance to an evil empire, and yet more trans and non-binary people, and also raptors.
And I'm going through a Tolkien thing right now, reading the Silmarillion, but the part of that which makes this list is the fanfic and fanart and meta which engages with race and colonialism and gender and sexuality in ways Tolkien would never have thought of and does the Loving Something Problematic thing so fiercely well, and is also FUNNY, and I need that right now.
Is it media content if I list watching one of my cats give the other one a brutally thorough face-washing while he closes his eyes and tilts his head up to give her better access? Because that and the endless stream of cute animal pics on the internet is sometimes a very important thing.