History Mixtapes
History Mixtapes explores how music and history intertwine. We will explore how the past can come alive by using music as a primary source, but also think about how listening to music and musical exploration can help us see the past through different lenses and lead us into new ways of connecting. We all tell stories with music: in playlists or mix tapes or other myriad mechanisms. And no one puts their story -- or the past's story -- to the same soundtrack.
History Mixtapes
Season 2 History Mixtapes: Kyle Riismandel
Exploring the Suburban Punk Rebellion: History Mixtapes with Kyle Riismandel
In this episode of History Mixtapes, host Katherine Rye Jewell announces the start of season two, reflecting on her creative journey and the inspiration behind her new book project, A History of Alternative in 10 Bands. Katherine then engages in a detailed conversation with Kyle Riismandel, Associate Teaching Professor at Rutgers Newark, covering everything from the historic suburban punk scene to the impact of cultural production on suburban youth from the 1970s to the 1990s. They explore themes of rebellion, nostalgia, and moral panics, all set against the backdrop of the evolving suburban landscape. Key tracks discussed include the Middle Class's "Out of Vogue," Cheap Trick's "Surrender," and Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs."
Hear all the musical mentions in Kyle's playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ_bIX7g9SjAXoMNsP1bmBIMEyt298Br-&si=_BOV3RltixjW-k5v
History Mixtapes: Kyle Riismandel === [00:00:00] Kate Jewell: Hi everyone. I'm Katherine Rye Jewell, the host and producer of History Mixtapes. You'll notice that there's been a bit of a gap in episodes, which is particularly bad as I've been sitting on a really good one, which will follow. I'm officially declaring this season two of History Mix Tapes, care of my production and marketing team of one. I started this podcast outta a feeling of a creativity crisis. I felt stuck. I wanted to write something new, but circumstances of life and paid work got in the way. So I started this podcast to test my skills and see what I could do on my own. I've learned a ton, and while I might not be the best audio producer, I'm certainly getting better. I've had fabulous conversations with historians about mixing their love of music with their historical endeavors. I think there's something really fascinating about seeing how engaging with music reveals how we approach the work of history. Behind the scenes. [00:01:00] This project did its job. It sparked a creative resurgence for me. Back in May, I had a brainstorm. Yes, I'm continuing to write about college radio, exploring the 1920s to the 1970s. That book is nearing completion of a first draft. In May, I realized that I'm not done writing about college radio in the present, especially the musical implications of this medium over the last 40 years or so. And so as this spring semester wound down and I was reflecting on the conversations I've had with historians of this podcast, I realized I had a different book I wanted to write. It's called a History of Alternative in 10 Bands. And in it I'm gonna explore the concept of alternative music as it has evolved since the 1970s. Yes, I mean alternative rock, but I think it's a bigger concept than a specific genre of popular music. Also, today's episode will sound a bit different as I'm trying to use a new editing tool that is making adding my song [00:02:00] clips a little difficult. As always, I will post a link to the playlist for the show in the show notes. But before we get started, here's how I see the point of making history mixtapes and the impulse that is at the center of both this podcast and now this 10 bands book project. I'm hoping this will be the introduction of that book, but we will see. The editing process is long. Kate Jewell: Your list is probably better than mine. I'm not by nature a list maker. I don't do top fives. I don't do best albums of the year. By nature. As a historian who teaches college students, I like to make things complicated. It's actually a pretty annoying historian quirk. Well, it's complicated, is never a satisfying answer. College students usually come in with a pretty firm idea of how the world [00:03:00] works. My job is to make them ask better questions or wonder about different explanations. People are messy. Music scenes are messy. Artists obviously are messy. There is no straight line that can be drawn from a single cause to a single effect. Context is everything. To explain a historical or cultural phenomenon, a development in epoch, what have you. We have to make choices. We find the best lenses through which to view a moment to reveal all the messiness that is happening beneath the broad brush stroke changes. There are no right answers in doing that kind of work, and so you'd probably tell this story or that story, whatever story it is you want to tell using different lenses than I would fine. That debate is what animates the fun part of list making or [00:04:00] constructing a playlist. Comparing your list with my list on an arbitrarily defined field, IE best second song on a second album, top five songs to walk the dog. It makes for great conversation and helps us get to know one another, but we can also use this approach to tell deeper stories, and that's what I'm doing. I'm exploring what bands should define the story of alternative haggling over who best represents a moment is fun, but the key is to get to the underlying messiness somehow to pull out some defining features. As a historian, I tend to be much more interested in the consumers of music than the producers. I'm fascinated by the secondary act of creation when we make the music ours. In talking about the concept of selling out with musician Will Oldham, he cited a kind of incongruity in the term itself. If an artist truly connects with listeners, the song [00:05:00] becomes the listener's possession. The truly sold out artist is the one who wants to keep determining the meaning of a song after it has left the vocal chords or guitar string been pressed onto vinyl or rendered into digital waveforms alternative rock. Through the history of these 10 bands represents an era of music when fans and music consumers grasp to retain control over the meaning of music and participation in it. Whether that meant engaging with artists or forming community over shared aesthetics and musical appreciation. The struggle seemed so vital because of the rapid changes in both the business and dissemination of music during alternatives years, plus the increasing headwinds of Americans, uh, in their ability to, let's say, make a living or find meaningful. Community culture itself became a battleground in the 1980s and 1990s with popular music providing the prize to be controlled. [00:06:00] Now let's turn to my conversation with Kyle Riismandel, who delves into these exact issues in his playlist. Just to note a content warning that this conversation with Kyle does involve discussions of suicide and teen self harm. Kyle Riismandel: My name is Kyle Riismandel. I'm an associate teaching professor of History and American Studies the director of the Graduate program in American Studies at Rutgers Newark. I work on space and place media history. Cultural history, cultural studies, suburban studies, and I've taught a class on space and place in American music. My book is called _Neighborhood of Fear, the Suburban Crisis in American_ Culture. I'm gonna talk about, songs about the suburbs from the eighties. Kate Jewell: what's the story you wanna tell with this? Kyle Riismandel: So for who aren't familiar with the book, part of the argument is that in this period, in the seventies and eighties and into the 1990s, the suburbs become a place of inherent danger that [00:07:00] residents see all kinds of things around them that they see are scary. And it allows 'em to do a bunch of things It creates a wave to power for them, including hardcore punk, which I write about, the Mall and Mallrats, a lot of that is produced through popular culture and music. So there's a significant part of the book that's about music, also being familiar with, the PMRC, which I write about. So there's also that element of music being beamed into homes through MTV and the radio. These are songs that, in some sense produce the space of the suburbs in the 1980s, particularly the idea that young people, teens, and to your point, particularly men or young boys, are dangerous and they need to be regulated. And this produces a notion of what's scary about them. Particularly hardcore punk. I'll talk about some other things too. Kate Jewell: Where do we start with the danger of the suburbs? Are they safe at first and then get dangerous or start off with, some danger. Kyle Riismandel: Yeah. This is contested as most historical things are, but it builds on the idea that the [00:08:00] people who are moving to the suburbs and the late sixties and into the 1970s and beyond are going there because they see them as safe. The cultural production is the Leave it to Beaver type is white, it is crime free, the environment is safe, et cetera. Despite what we know. None of those things are true. It's like what Stephanie Kunz writes about in her book, _The Way We Never Were_ about this idea of the fifties and family values that is masking, dark thing, sexual assault, teenage pregnancy, racism, et cetera, But the people who are moving are buying into that idea and finding a much different landscape. Kate Jewell: So is your first song capturing the danger? Is it capturing an image of these as safe spaces, or is a place where the fears are starting to creep in? Kyle Riismandel: So it's that moment when it's beginning to shift, we always talk about emergences, not origin. So when are things visible rather than when did they start? the first song is "Out of Vogue" by the Middle Class, which I argue is the first suburban hardcore punk song, part it articulates this disgust, with suburban lifestyle, with consumerism, with [00:09:00] being cool. The cover of the album is what looks to be two little girls on a California suburban street. It looks exactly like _Poltergeist_. If you really look closely like at which they build over the, native American burial ground. The song is about that anger, and it's about 55 seconds of Criticizing the suburbs. there's this kind of, dialectical discourse going on of the _Brady Bunch_ is still popular, this idea of suburbs as safe, placid, family friendly, then the emergence of kids growing up in a much different world, encountering divorce, but up families, that don't cater to them, drugs more available. A lot of hardcore punk, particularly, on the West Coast is about how much they hate where they live. This song is about that. Kate Jewell: So we're starting with the perspective of the kids themselves. Kyle Riismandel: The beginning of the pushback against an oppressive, consumerist lifestyle, right? The lazy middle class intellectual as Bad Religion puts it, or the idea that their parents preach these values. You should go to church, you should play sports, you should be hardworking. And yet, every day they come home and get shit faced, right? This [00:10:00] contradiction in the suburban values themselves. And they start to produce this other idea of this place that is resistant to the kind of hegemonic suburban culture. Kate Jewell: How important is California in this? Kyle Riismandel: This is always a tricky thing because it emerges sui generis, right? It's like neither urban or suburban in a certain way. But it comes out of the suburban lifestyle, suburban architecture, the way people are disconnected from each other, relying on cars, which. California is basically the best example. Texas and other places are close. Most of the hardcore stuff I write about is from California, although not entirely. That chapter is about zine culture and the underground ways in which people connect themselves to this rebellion, even though they're in Massachusetts, New Jersey, or Michigan, in their own scenes that are largely about the same ideas, but never quite get as popular. Kate Jewell: Could you explain the zine culture a little bit more? Kyle Riismandel: Zines go back a fairly long way with print, although they might not have been [00:11:00] called that at the time. zine is short for magazine, but they're generally self-produced, not-for-profit. representing some sort of counterculture or counter political movement or celebrating something underground or marginal. Hardcore punk's a good example, but there's lots of, queer and lesbian zines from the seventies that are really, important to that scene spreading around the country or people being aware of each other and their identities. It's necessary, I think for hardcore and for punk to have spread in the United States, particularly the non-New York punk version. So like flip side, maximum rock and roll, you can find these online. They're mostly digitized now, which is pretty cool. Kate Jewell: So if we're comparing a zine to a mix tape, how do you understand the relationship between those two media formats? Kyle Riismandel: They're both forms of collage and taking elements and reconstructing them for new meaning. Zines are almost always copied. They might be two or three pages and just folded, but they're almost always artistically done in the opposite style of, say, a glossy magazine. So it's not Vogue, it's not Playboy, it is [00:12:00] explicitly, you can see the lines. You can see the stitches. Mix tapes operate the same way you're trying to take these things you love, these things you care about that you want someone else to know and put them in a format that can take and understand differently. Particularly in the seventies and eighties, like mainstream rock culture, which was about these big stadium shows. It's not about authenticity and punk zines being about that. When I teach it, I show a Rolling Stone from 1979 and then we look at the first edition of Flip Side, And we see, how is this different? Kate Jewell: So with this song "Out of Vogue" have been, associated with the particular zine culture or seen or place or, circulated on mix tapes or college, radio or not. Kyle Riismandel: That's a great question. Probably not. It would've been very hard to get the single. I don't know offhand. I probably could look, but my guess is where a hundred to 500 were probably ever made originally. It does appear here and there, and as cassette tapes come around, that becomes part of how punk spreads because it's easier to copy, move things around, outside of copyright or even just, having access to [00:13:00] reproduction, itself. So unlikely it might've been written about. Kate Jewell: Know, looking at some of the early zines those that come later once there is more of a label structure, putting this music out. You can really start to see some of these larger regional scenes starting to develop and networking. But it sounds like this is before there was really any kind of infrastructure for that. Kyle Riismandel: It's emerging and again, the cheap, studios and like Long Beach, where you can literally record a whole punk album in an hour, and it only costs you 200 bucks, which you work your shift at the gas station or the ice cream store or whatever, right? So there's like that famous picture of Henry Rolls and Ian Mackay working at Baskin Robbins, right? And that's part of the ethos the idea of Slack Motherfuckers exactly that, right? I'm not working for you, I'm doing this job so I can make this music. I'm not doing this job because I think this job is important or anyone should care about it. The idea that DIY we can put this out, we can have control over it, we can profit from 'em if it's profitable, which for most bands wasn't. That's like where Epitaph comes from, for [00:14:00] example, which is probably the most successful of those labels, at least in terms of sales. you could argue Discord or other places that were more successful culturally or an influence. Kate Jewell: So we're starting with, Out of Vogue. Where are we going in this story? So we've got the kids. They're pretty unhappy. of castigating, this consumerist world that they've been raised in. Where are we going from there? Kyle Riismandel: So I'm gonna talk about a song that's, extremely popular, captures something important about this moment in the late seventies and early 1980s for suburban kids. So it's Cheap Trick's Surrender, which everybody knows I think, or everybody's listening to this podcast, probably knows. And the reason I'm picking is one, it is t redolent of these same themes, right? It is articulating this kind of suburban en we, this like feeling of being disconnected generationally, feeling of being disconnected spatially, that the thing you connect to is through your headphones as much as anything else. And that stuff is usually rebellious, People are listening to Foreigner and Middle Class, right? It's not as if these are two different worlds. I'm sure if you talk to [00:15:00] artists even now who are in punk, they'll be like, oh yeah, I love the Bloe record, or I love, whatever. they love music, but it's also from this film _Over the Edge_. It's relatively obscure. It was hard to get for a very long time. So there's a scene in the movie where the main character, on his headphones and listen to "Surrender," escape his parents fighting. And this, he's in trouble with them or whatever. but the film is based on a true story. In the early 1970s outside San Francisco, there was, a rash of teen crimes done by quote unquote mouse packs: petty crime, graffiti, breaking windows. The writer of the film, and the director who later did River's Edge read this article and adapted it into this film _Over the Edge_. And it starts with this preamble that says, there are this many suburban kids in the world in these planned communities and nothing for them to do. here's their story, It zooms in on this desolate like landscape they shot, in this planned community in Colorado. It's, whose name I don't remember. but the name of the town of this movie is New Granada. The theme of the movie is we moved out here for our kids. And yet the whole movie is about them [00:16:00] drinking, smoking, fighting, right? Like the core things that we associate with Mallrats and teen misbehavior. Um, the movie ends with a big town hall meeting in the school with the parents, the police and the principal saying, what is wrong? What are you doing? These children? What's wrong with them? the kids lock 'em into school and set it on fire. And their teen rec center blows up. " Surrender" always brings to mind that film as trying to break through to the mainstream. And in fact, it was shown in theaters and taken outta theaters. It came out at the same time as _The_ _Warriors_. So they both got taken outta theaters and _Over the Edge_. Eventually found a home on HBO, which is where most of us saw it, but was never super popular. But the folklore is that it inspired "Smells like Teen Spirit." So connecting the dots between hardcore punk, suburban on we, and then, punk going popular in the early nineties. Kate Jewell: I'm getting like shades of _Heathers_, but of in a way that, mainstream audiences maybe couldn't accept in the same way could _Heather's_. Kyle Riismandel: Yeah, what's brilliant about the movie is [00:17:00] it's not ironic. It's from 1979. It's not stylistically interesting. It doesn't have a viewpoint in that sense. It feels very grounded. Almost all the kids are non-professionals or their first movie. So it's Matt Dillon's first movie, but a bunch of others who like basically don't do very much after that. There's maybe one adult in the movie who has like a real career. I think those movies are a little more referential, more knowing about what they're trying to do. Whereas this feels like a movie about real people struggling with this and it has this ending, which is ridiculous and is not connected to any real story, but feels like the logical outcome of this story. There's a great, poster It's the kids and the parents, and they look like zombies, but like in that seventies style with dead eyes staring so good. " These kids are over the edge." It's like amazing. I show that class too, so I'm like, you guys aren't gonna understand this unless I do this. So it's unreal. But surrender is central to that movie. And also another version of the mixtape, the soundtrack, [00:18:00] right? Soundtracks were huge. It has the cars, it has punk stuff. It's fascinating. Kate Jewell: That's really interesting. especially the way that Cheap Trick stands in for a lot of youth culture in the 1970s. I think it's a Cheap Trick song that is the intro to That Seventies Show, Kyle Riismandel: What's Kate Jewell: example. Kyle Riismandel: playing a Big Star song, Kate Jewell: That's right. Kyle Riismandel: Because, like, why couldn't they just use "In the Street"? I don't know. But apparently Alex Showan lived off that the rest of his life. that was how he made all his money, because he was, indigent essentially, 'cause Big Star records didn't sell. Kyle Riismandel: They wanna safe family like they saw on tv. They want to send to good schools. They want racial segregation or class segregation without maybe sometimes even articulating it that way. What they find is the opposite, right? All of these problems are now super visible to them in a way they hadn't imagined. It's that moment when we discover Love Canal and this school is built on top of toxic waste dump. And these kids all have all these diseases thinking they were getting this brand new school in a brand new community, like exactly what the suburban dreams should have been. The movies and the music play on those two [00:19:00] things, right? Because what is Cheap Trick, but a nostalgia act in a way, right? They're playing fifties rock and roll for a Seventies audience, or an Eighties audience. Channeling the themes, right? Because they're a generation older, not connected to, the youth culture in the same way, but still getting at those ideas as a way to connect to teens and the way that hardcore does without largely any artifice. It's pretty direct, both in music and lyrics. Kate Jewell: So we've got the kids. We've got the, what, how do I wanna say it? This is ladder up to kind of the Hollywod- ification and kind of the big arena rock ish versions of this, or connections of this. So I'm curious about Where we are headed next in your mixtape. Kyle Riismandel: It's funny you mentioned 'cause you're right, so what sort of happens from 79 on, you have Grease, this real nostalgia piece, which is satirical on stage, but is serious in film, much like Forrest Gump, Against a movie like _The Warriors _or even _Over the Edge_, which is dystopic in its essence. I [00:20:00] write about _Fast Times at Ridgemont High_ as well, which is splitting the difference, right? It's a comedy about abortion, about teens with popular music in it, right? It does all of the things and I think is popular for that reason, which leads then into the kind of John Hughes ification of the teen comedy that takes out some of the explicit politics, the social stuff. I'm gonna do a song I don't think anyone will ever do on this and it does connect to the mall. Fast Times is used in the book and a way to introduce this idea of teens at the mall and what they do there. the opening sequence is like showing them at the movie theater, the pizza, the arcade. And those are places where you drink, smoke, fight, and fuck. This is throughout the discourse about malls from the early eighties on. The song I'm gonna pick is Pacman Fever by Bruckner and Garcia. Kate Jewell: Oh my goodness. Kyle Riismandel: for those who don't know, Bruner and Garcia were songwriters who capitalized on the popularity of arcade games in the early eighties by putting out an entire album of songs about arcade games. This is also the [00:21:00] era of the novelty song, right? Like much like the fifties, we had this like real explosion from the mid seventies into the early eighties of songs about everything. Truckers, right? CB radios, hula hoops, rollerskating, car wash, Kung fu fighting. Kate Jewell: Pina Coladas. Kyle Riismandel: Cheating on your spouse, is really what that one's about. This is, I believe 82 or 83. some people might remember this, but Pacman was as big as Star Wars, in those years, Pacman merchandise made as much as Star Wars merchandise/ It could not have been more popular. Breakfast cereal, Sunday morning cartoon, t-shirts, bootlegs, games, right? Like the whole. Kate Jewell: I have, in my hallway, a Pacman poster, It's not a hologram, it's the one where it's like on one side it looks like one thing, and then you move to the other side. It looks like something else. Kyle Riismandel: The reticular ones, like, Yeah yeah. Kate Jewell: It's pretty rad. I found it at an antique store in Waltham. Kyle Riismandel: Oh, that's pretty cool actually. But it's a perfect example of how popular it was that it's still detritus in a store, right? It carries something. When I was working on the book there was [00:22:00] like a resurgence or, or I guess a, a surgence, it wasn't resurgence of scholarship about like arcades and video games. As home systems got more popular, there's a book about boyhood and arcade culture, but no one really wrote about it, in the way I'm writing about it, both as a spatial construction and cultural phenomenon that dovetail with this broader thing i'm arguing about the suburbs. This song is indicative of the popularity and visibility of the arcade in that moment when we've forgotten just how big it was because they're, virtually gone. They've only come back as Dave and Busters to some degree. I'm not criticizing it, but I do think it's a little bit lost that in a moment in 1984, you could see people at lunch, in a pizza place from an office playing Pac-Man and then going back to work just like you would see kids in the arcade. It was, virtually everywhere. Kate Jewell: As we're talking, I'm starting to notice something interesting, I did not grow up in the suburbs. I grew up in a small town in the late eighties, early nineties. I can remember being of wistful and desiring and talking with my friends about [00:23:00] how we wish we had the suburban. Lifestyle that we could like ride our bikes in the streets. We could, know, ride our bikes to each other's houses. Kyle Riismandel: Yeah. Kate Jewell: Technically we were close enough, but it was in Vermont and there like giant hills in between, Kyle Riismandel: Right. Kate Jewell: So like that was gonna happen. know, I can remember being very envious as a kid of these things. even as I was also very grateful that I was not growing up in this world of conformity. I had a lot of leeway. My parents were very free and letting of decide what I was interested in and what kind of pop culture I gravitated to. They were like, cool, whatever. I don't like it, but your thing, whatever. but at the same time, I am still very prone to this kind of nostalgia Even though we're unpacking these cultural products is having these like really significant dark sides and revealing like all these structural problems with the American economy in the post World War II era, as of spins out [00:24:00] in era of de-industrialization, at the same time, we still love this stuff. what is that? Kyle Riismandel: Oh boy. So I think it's a few things. Like one is we're both white, and I do think there is a significant component of post-war whiteness that is constructed an idea of the past that is, nostalgic, The things that maybe didn't even affect us, but allowed us to have privilege. So I just wanna say that as like the premise, because I think nostalgia generally speaking is probably a toxic sort of political impulse, for all those reasons. But it's a real feeling that I think many of us have. I do think there's some element. and this comes out in a number of ways over this period of time with the relationship to high and low culture, right? We don't really talk that way anymore, but this idea that there are things that are guilty pleasures or whatever, that we still, created that category, that space, so that we can still like things that we know are bad, right? Creator is bad or the topic matter is dark, or it's just not [00:25:00] aesthetically good. I look at this playlist I made for the book and just looking at somebody's bands and thinking about the people in them and what they're up to now. Do I endorse Wasps? "Fuck, Like a Beast"? I don't know. Should he have a cod piece with a saw on it? That seems bad for women, but also it's ironic Those layers in which it could work all those ways. and I do, maybe as I'm getting older, there is something simple about it. With the past it feels knowable. the lack of outlets, the narrow worldview, things available to you feels graspable and that's safe and that feels good and you have control over it, I think, I'm no psychologist. but there does seem to be something to the past and place that allows people to have that wherever they're from. Even places of trauma or sadness. Kate Jewell: So now you look at something like the stratospheric success of a show like Bridgerton there is this kind of crossover of effect and still also conversing with some of those problematic nostalgic like that you have [00:26:00] to make this a multiracial world, to acknowledge this is a mythical fantasy construction. But we're still gonna let it be that, that still in and of itself has value, if we can now, know, just of look beyond ,the structural problems that created, that world. Kyle Riismandel: The category of pleasure is pleasurable and the guilt is the politics of the framework or whatever you're putting around it. And I do think it does come outta that culture wars moment. The culture wars in that moment is there's a deep investment in intellectuals, the upper class, et cetera, in tradition, traditional family, traditional religion, and I'm using those words in quotes 'cause it's bullshit. Their version of what they think tradition is or should be. And also the classics _The__ Closing of the American Mind_ this idea that by embracing anything popular, anything populist, it is somehow degrading the quality of our culture and our people rather than thinking about how we degraded education. And that actually is the [00:27:00] problem. I think about that context all the time in teaching this period 40 years on from the eighties, what do I want students particularly graduate students to think about what is this cultural context that is structuring these conversations, and I read about in the book too, in the pm RC, the Satanic panic. All that part of it too. Kate Jewell: So I just taught, well, actually, I didn't actually teach the PMRC. What I did was I had a little rebellion moment in my classes where I didn't wanna teach the things that I had planned. Instead, I did my book talk for them. Kyle Riismandel: That's fascinating. Kate Jewell: mean, were really into it the ploy for this was I gave the students three points of extra credit on their final, if they go do a radio show Kyle Riismandel: Ooh, that's Kate Jewell: on the college radio station. Kyle Riismandel: Yeah. Kate Jewell: so I wanted to show them what is college radio? What has it meant? So I did my book talk and in it I talk about the Santa Barbara station getting in trouble thanks to Tipper Gore intervening. And I had the slide, I put the Filthy 15 up and they are so [00:28:00] confused by the occult being on this list. I have to point out that the Twisted Sister song is now like a Zyrtec ad. Kyle Riismandel: Right. Kate Jewell: know. Kyle Riismandel: Are what they are, which is not dangerous. Zyrtec is not a dangerous drug but it could be selling something more awful, I'm sure. Kate Jewell: We are so beyond that moment, culturally speaking, even as we still continue to live in a world of the culture wars. That the culture wars are raging on, the mechanisms of them have shifted to new topics. Kyle Riismandel: Yeah. I think the people who are fighting them have gotten better. They're smarter at Kate Jewell: It was never about Twisted Sister. It was never about Murphy Brown. It was always about power and control. Kyle Riismandel: One of the first things I say in cultural studies literacy classes is every relationship is a relationship of power. What you're trying to do is understand it, right? Who has it, who's wielding it against him for what reason? Because I think they have trouble sometimes understanding that even within the family unit things they think of as democratic or fair are still about some level of exploitation and [00:29:00] power. It's sometimes very hard for them to do it. But I think this is also like what I'm getting at in the book is, concept is this idea of productive victimization, right? The idea that if you can figure out how to figure yourself as a victim. You can turn that into a new kind of power. You can leverage it to do things. Sometimes there are very real things that you need to do, protect yourself physically. But other times it's to exert power in these other ways that seem, apolitical when they clearly are. But you seem like the person of common sense against the crazy thing these people wanna do, right? I think it speaks to this is a formula. It's not simply about that one context or that period of time. Kate Jewell: As our class structure in the middle disintegrates the culture wars expressions we're seeing now, know, they share a lot of the 1980s, but that dissolution of the middle, has furthered, it feels like the stakes are higher. We're dealing with the same structures of issues, it feels like we're closer to the dissolution of idea or the [00:30:00] premise that this could ever be something that we aspire to. Kyle Riismandel: Yeah, and I think that's often why it got called the culture wars, right? 'cause it felt. Even if it was not right, it was posed as disconnected from people's material reality, right? That it was not a Marxist reading of these people, but instead about their environmental, moral, environmental life that would degrade, these values, right? Now it's being explicitly posed as a class issue to people, in the way that is really unproductive for them. But they are buying into as a salvation from their status, right? That they want to be rescued, high tariffs or other things Those culture wars are now being explicitly fought that way. Kate Jewell: So where are we headed this mix tape? are we headed in an uplifting direction or? Kyle Riismandel: I did wanna talk about Satanic panic and the culture wars. So will do it through Ozzy Osborne's "Suicide Solution." Which you probably know about, but maybe your "listeners do not. was part of, a lawsuit Ozzy Osborne and the record company, for causing, [00:31:00] quote unquote causing the suicide of a fan who is huge into Ozzy Osborne. this also happened with a Judas Priest song, um, another court case. Both were ultimately, the artist won. They were not shown as liable for these suicides. I think it's ex exemplifies this moment of: the teen is susceptible, right? A lot of people write about the seventies beginning this crisis of the family. Natasha Zaretsky, Robert Self or other people are saying, and probably many others I'm forgetting, so apologies, that because of second wave feminism, because of divorce, gay rights, right? This is eroding this like traditional family and therefore teens particularly are at risk. And if they're at risk, what are they at risk for? They're at risk to subliminal messaging. They're at risk to, gay, right? Whatever it is. this is part of that, that there are subliminal messages in music. In the documentary about the Jewish priest Halvar, the lead singer says something to the effect of if we could put a secret message on our records, it would be buy more records. It does us no good to have our fans kill themselves. Immediately exposing the stupidity of it. But the fact that [00:32:00] those court cases go to trial, shows how deeply scared people really were. And this is again, the tip of the iceberg on this moment maybe even third wave parenting, right? So there's like the kind of 50 stuff and Momism and Dr. Spock and the 70 stuff of just let them be. And then they come back to, you know The book I use to tell the story is called Backing Control, right? It doesn't take a metaphor, right? it tells you what it is, by this guy Gregory Baden Hamer and his wife, whose name escapes me. they made a video about how to deme your son, presumably his, bedroom. So they go through the bedroom and take them to posters. They tell you what signs to look for, they indicate AOC Cult or Satan Worship. And again, this is one of hundreds of these videos, It is a large industry. and probably still is an industry. like suicide solution or Judas Priests, right? It representative of that whole thing, in terms of the moral danger of the suburbs in the 1980s. And again, particularly because of things like cable, it's unedited. It comes straight through, at least broadcast TV and radio have the FCC Keeps kids away from these [00:33:00] things, Kate Jewell: , to what extent was there a teen suicide crisis of the 1980s? Like, I lived through one, but it was very localized. We did have a significant amount of suicides in my high school. uh, we had three in one year in my sophomore year. And then the following summer, one of the counselors who counseled people through, took his own life Kyle Riismandel: Oh my God. Kate Jewell: and subsequently of people who were in high school during those four years, there have been five more. As I learned it is a kind of contagion, it's a social contagion that happens, once they see it happen, it becomes a possibility. Can that happen at a societal level? Did it even happen or was this a moral panic. Kyle Riismandel: Both. I'm glad you went there 'cause I was gonna go there too. One of the core things I figured out in writing the book about all of these things is for every one of the threats I detail, they're real. Right now to the extent to which they're real or pervasive, differs quite a bit. Kidnapping is [00:34:00] not nearly the, quoted numbers of 10 or 20,000 a year by strangers. It was like 70, right? The vast majority of kidnappings happen between people who know each other and are usually part of custody disputes, right? And so in the Eighties there was extremely high rate of suicide among young men, particularly working class, but also suburban. There was a belief that it was contagious, That communities would undergo this shift. Once it happened, which again, I'm not a psychologist, so maybe true, but that was the belief part of the moral panic is the belief that, this can't possibly be for no reason. There is some cause that we can locate in this morally corrupt, cash hungry industry and that must be where it's coming from. this is what they have in common, right? It ranges from all these things, whether it's subliminal messaging in this or D and D or other fantasy games, how kids get this idea that they're all powerful. They could do these things that it's okay to die, you'll be reborn and, all this stuff. But there was a high number of suicides in that period up through [00:35:00] what you're talking about too, it goes away in terms of the news. as the economy gets better, I think that's part of it. Broadly speaking, people see their lives as possibly having, a better future, in the middle and lower working classes. The story of the book is what you're talking about by the time we get to Columbine, we're ready to see culture as the problem. We're ready to see, this is the explanation. We are not ready to look at systemic causes for young men being violent towards themselves and others. Kate Jewell: Yeah. And I remember, my parents were both very astute in this moment. My dad was a minister and a counselor . I remember them talking about how this was a very depressed area, economically. It had been extremely hard hit by de-industrialization, and it was isolated. This is a hunting community, in Vermont. And so, you know, the means and all of the, the pieces were right there. And so I think in their minds it was, it was a pretty straightforward set of reasons as to why this happened. but when you are confronted with the [00:36:00] tragedy and schools that didn't necessarily handle things the right way, I just remember, this is so Vermont. the after the second, student took his life, like the whole school went to his funeral. I think it was after the third that year. There was no snow on the ground as I remember. So that was probably in March they had us do a giant circle, I think they called it a yurt circle, where everybody in the entire school, was like 500 kids had to hold hands one person would lean forward and they, you'd alternate and the next person would lean back. And so you were like one giant, self-supported circle. Kyle Riismandel: I am fascinated by this. Kate Jewell: I remember like holding my friend head being like, what Kyle Riismandel: are we Kate Jewell: this? Kyle Riismandel: we bringing it? a Kate Jewell: Yeah, Kyle Riismandel: ritual. Kate Jewell: It was so weird. it was basically like, don't kill yourself kids. Like we're all depending on you. And I was like, Kyle Riismandel: here. Kate Jewell: voice of chain. Literally. That was the word. Don't break the chain. It was so weird. Kyle Riismandel: I'm not surprised, but it's also, I'm working through it. Kate Jewell: You can see the crunchy granola [00:37:00] conversations that brought this about in that particular context. But what's so interesting about that is that was a solution. Vermont's, class structure is very stratified, That it is very much a haves and have nots. So you have like the Bernie Sanders class that moves in the hippie trust funders of move in the second home. You have the resort communities and then you have the people who used to work in mills, and all of those jobs have gone away. And so what you have left are a seasonal, and service work Kyle Riismandel: exactly. Kate Jewell: There you have like the perfect disconnect of this solution Kyle Riismandel: The degree to which people were adrift for addressing it, right? That the tools that they knew worked or would be helpful, they couldn't implement. Given the school structure, given parental rights, given a lot of these things that were coming apart, there was some degree weirdly of consensus in the culture war era that schools and parents still, at least in many suburbs, were still doing real sex ed and actually [00:38:00] talking about suicide. I don't know if it happens anymore, but it seems like it would be much harder to do. It is that moment of true deep down fear about children that, crosses all these things. What do we do? Clearly we're not doing the right stuff, and yet what we know is it's about It is about your access to healthcare. It is about your access to guns, Fairly confident at this point in history knowing those things. And again, partly why I wrote the book was trying to understand that. When I give a talk about it, I almost always start with, I grew up in this place. I show pictures and I go. Why were my parents afraid? What were they afraid of? What was realistic about this thing? Why did they think these things? And then they were not nearly like any the people I write in the book. building to Columbine, Dave Collin wrote an amazing book called Columbine, which I think people should read if they wanna understand it. Part of what he's saying is everything we know about these kids is wrong. Every media narrative you've heard is basically inaccurate, or in some way just skewed beyond belief and not reflective of these interior lives of these people, the best we know them or what their lives were like day to day. When I read it, [00:39:00] it struck me oh, it's exactly where the book needs to end because the framework that discourse had made this logic inescapable. Because it was powerful for all kinds of people. People wanted to regulate guns. It was powerful for people who wanted church back in school. It was powerful for politicians who could run on it, every politician running for president in 1999 is talking about we need to return to these, in the wake of the Clinton scandal right? So it does connect all those dots. This has turned way darker, than we imagine, but, the book's called _Neighborhood of Fear,_ right? Kate Jewell: I think, know, there's a reason why I, as a product of this era am turning to a concept like mixtapes to analyze the past or our relationship with the past. These things were very therapeutic in personal sense, that they were a means an escape. Even as you're listening to these songs that have these darker tinges that they are, they're not escapists in the sense that you are getting a very real, confrontational, encounter with the things are making so angry. At the same [00:40:00] time, they're providing a different kind of sense of community before we get things like social media and, online niche communities where go find little group of weirdos And so I think that there is, a positive side to this nostalgia. At the same time I'm just really interested in it as a form and as a concept and as a way to tell stories that we're expressing ourselves by producing these things, or trying to say something about something that we care about. Kyle Riismandel: Yeah. And The foundations of cultural production, which is nothing new, right? To the degree to which we want to admit that. And the mix tape is just explicitly that, right? Here's this new story using these things, or here's this thing I want express to you about what I feel or who you are, your relationship to me or to the world, I love finding in record stores, like people's unlabeled tapes. I buy those for 50 cents. I want to know what is on here. I find that so much more thrilling than virtually any other cultural experience, But, and I mentioned that. 'cause in part it's [00:41:00] about this kind of joy that's been lost in some of these things. They've become so at every moment that it feels as if you cannot escape. Like, Kate Jewell: Mm-hmm. Kyle Riismandel: Together a Spotify playlist, it's like, would you like this song? You have kids, so maybe you can answer this, but been said that kids are listening to way more old music than ever. Kate Jewell: When my son bust out with Coolio's, fantastic. Voyage, Kyle Riismandel: boy, Kate Jewell: years old, he knew all the words. I was like, what is happening? Kyle Riismandel: that is Kate Jewell: is happening? Kyle Riismandel: almost like he's been possessed, like Coolio came back. Oh my God, that's a good Christmas movie. And he comes back as a little white kid. Kate Jewell: Do you wanna throw in a bonus track here? Kyle Riismandel: In thinking about this theme and the cultural production around it in music, I think the only way to end it, is with Arcade Fire and "The Suburbs," which is all of the things we talked about, rolled into one. It's the critique, the nostalgia, the longing, the sadness, the desire, For these things all together in these songs. a concept album, which itself, is like a nostalgia thing, doesn't really exist, in [00:42:00] mainstream music. the fact that it wins the Grammy Award for best album that year as a total surprise, speaks to something people wanted out of albums in that moment. And also this kind of nostalgia for the suburbs, right? That is tinged with sadness and regret, but also hope, right? the songs are about wanting the suburbs to have been better than they were, That they remember. the music, the lyrics, it's a vibe album, for lack of a better word. you can really pick any song off that album. they're all in some way about this, some more explicitly than others. the suburbs, the song is probably the most explicit. Kate Jewell: I think that captures the multi-varied themes in the, fascinating. Kyle Riismandel: I've been actually trying to put together a 33 and a third I just haven't been able to figure it out yet. Kate Jewell: Well, that would be a good one. Yeah, Kyle Riismandel: We're like around 20 years now, or 15 years, Kate Jewell: yeah, Kyle Riismandel: I feel like I'm the only person to write it, quite frankly, Kate Jewell: It's time. Well, I look forward to seeing that. And, so what's next for you, other than 33 and a third potentially? Kyle Riismandel: I've begun this project on the cultural history of cable, tentatively titled it's not tv, it's cable. I want to, go back pretty [00:43:00] far, which is partially why it's called it's not tv, cable wasn't about TV in the origins, as you probably know. talking about where it comes from. It's DIY roots. working class roots, urban and rural roots rather than suburban, this suburban and ways in which it's used to disseminate this kind of neoliberal capitalism. Kate Jewell: thank you so much for your mix tape and for this fascinating conversation. Kyle Riismandel: it was super fun. Thank you for listening to this episode of History Mixtapes. For more information, find our show notes for Kyle's playlist and stay tuned for more releases through the academic year. Okay.
Kate Jewell:everyone. I'm Katherine Rye Jewell, the host and producer of History Mixtapes. You'll notice that there's been a bit of a gap in episodes, which is particularly bad as I've been sitting on a really good one, which will follow. I'm officially declaring this season two of History Mix Tapes, care of my production and marketing team of one. I started this podcast outta a feeling of a creativity crisis. I felt stuck. I wanted to write something new, but circumstances of life and paid work got in the way. So I started this podcast to test my skills and see what I could do on my own. I've learned a ton, and while I might not be the best audio producer, I'm certainly getting better. I've had fabulous conversations with historians about mixing their love of music with their historical endeavors. I think there's something really fascinating about seeing how engaging with music reveals how we approach the work of history. Behind the scenes. This project did its job. It sparked a creative resurgence for me. Back in May, I had a brainstorm. Yes, I'm continuing to write about college radio, exploring the 1920s to the 1970s. That book is nearing completion of a first draft. In May, I realized that I'm not done writing about college radio in the present, especially the musical implications of this medium over the last 40 years or so. And so as this spring semester wound down and I was reflecting on the conversations I've had with historians of this podcast, I realized I had a different book I wanted to write. It's called a History of Alternative in 10 Bands. And in it I'm gonna explore the concept of alternative music as it has evolved since the 1970s. Yes, I mean alternative rock, but I think it's a bigger concept than a specific genre of popular music. Also, today's episode will sound a bit different as I'm trying to use a new editing tool that is making adding my song clips a little difficult. As always, I will post a link to the playlist for the show in the show notes. But before we get started, here's how I see the point of making history mixtapes and the impulse that is at the center of both this podcast and now this 10 bands book project. I'm hoping this will be the introduction of that book, but we will see. The editing process is long. Your list is probably better than mine. I'm not by nature a list maker. I don't do top fives. I don't do best albums of the year. By nature. As a historian who teaches college students, I like to make things complicated. It's actually a pretty annoying historian quirk. Well, it's complicated, is never a satisfying answer. College students usually come in with a pretty firm idea of how the world works. My job is to make them ask better questions or wonder about different explanations. People are messy. Music scenes are messy. Artists obviously are messy. There is no straight line that can be drawn from a single cause to a single effect. Context is everything. To explain a historical or cultural phenomenon, a development in epoch, what have you. We have to make choices. We find the best lenses through which to view a moment to reveal all the messiness that is happening beneath the broad brush stroke changes. There are no right answers in doing that kind of work, and so you'd probably tell this story or that story, whatever story it is you want to tell using different lenses than I would fine. That debate is what animates the fun part of list making or constructing a playlist. Comparing your list with my list on an arbitrarily defined field, IE best second song on a second album, top five songs to walk the dog. It makes for great conversation and helps us get to know one another, but we can also use this approach to tell deeper stories, and that's what I'm doing. I'm exploring what bands should define the story of alternative haggling over who best represents a moment is fun, but the key is to get to the underlying messiness somehow to pull out some defining features. As a historian, I tend to be much more interested in the consumers of music than the producers. I'm fascinated by the secondary act of creation when we make the music ours. In talking about the concept of selling out with musician Will Oldham, he cited a kind of incongruity in the term itself. If an artist truly connects with listeners, the song becomes the listener's possession. The truly sold out artist is the one who wants to keep determining the meaning of a song after it has left the vocal chords or guitar string been pressed onto vinyl or rendered into digital waveforms alternative rock. Through the history of these 10 bands represents an era of music when fans and music consumers grasp to retain control over the meaning of music and participation in it. Whether that meant engaging with artists or forming community over shared aesthetics and musical appreciation. The struggle seemed so vital because of the rapid changes in both the business and dissemination of music during alternatives years, plus the increasing headwinds of Americans, uh, in their ability to, let's say, make a living or find meaningful. Community culture itself became a battleground in the 1980s and 1990s with popular music providing the prize to be controlled. Now let's turn to my conversation with Kyle Riismandel, who delves into these exact issues in his playlist.
Speaker:Just to note a content warning that this conversation with Kyle does involve discussions of suicide and teen self harm.
Kyle Riismandel:My name is Kyle Riismandel. I'm an associate teaching professor of History and American Studies the director of the Graduate program in American Studies at Rutgers Newark. I work on space and place media history. Cultural history, cultural studies, suburban studies, and I've taught a class on space and place in American music. My book is called Neighborhood of Fear, the Suburban Crisis in American Culture. I'm gonna talk about, songs about the suburbs from the eighties.
Kate Jewell:what's the story you wanna tell with this?
Kyle Riismandel:So for who aren't familiar with the book, part of the argument is that in this period, in the seventies and eighties and into the 1990s, the suburbs become a place of inherent danger that residents see all kinds of things around them that they see are scary. And it allows 'em to do a bunch of things It creates a wave to power for them, including hardcore punk, which I write about, the Mall and Mallrats, a lot of that is produced through popular culture and music. So there's a significant part of the book that's about music, also being familiar with, the PMRC, which I write about. So there's also that element of music being beamed into homes through MTV and the radio. These are songs that, in some sense produce the space of the suburbs in the 1980s, particularly the idea that young people, teens, and to your point, particularly men or young boys, are dangerous and they need to be regulated. And this produces a notion of what's scary about them. Particularly hardcore punk. I'll talk about some other things too.
Kate Jewell:Where do we start with the danger of the suburbs? Are they safe at first and then get dangerous or start off with, some danger.
Kyle Riismandel:Yeah. This is contested as most historical things are, but it builds on the idea that the people who are moving to the suburbs and the late sixties and into the 1970s and beyond are going there because they see them as safe. The cultural production is the Leave it to Beaver type is white, it is crime free, the environment is safe, et cetera. Despite what we know. None of those things are true. It's like what Stephanie Kunz writes about in her book, The Way We Never Were about this idea of the fifties and family values that is masking, dark thing, sexual assault, teenage pregnancy, racism, et cetera, But the people who are moving are buying into that idea and finding a much different landscape.
Kate Jewell:So is your first song capturing the danger? Is it capturing an image of these as safe spaces, or is a place where the fears are starting to creep in?
Kyle Riismandel:So it's that moment when it's beginning to shift, we always talk about emergences, not origin. So when are things visible rather than when did they start? the first song is "Out of Vogue" by the Middle Class, which I argue is the first suburban hardcore punk song, part it articulates this disgust, with suburban lifestyle, with consumerism, with being cool. The cover of the album is what looks to be two little girls on a California suburban street. It looks exactly like Poltergeist. If you really look closely like at which they build over the, native American burial ground. The song is about that anger, and it's about 55 seconds of Criticizing the suburbs. there's this kind of, dialectical discourse going on of the Brady Bunch is still popular, this idea of suburbs as safe, placid, family friendly, then the emergence of kids growing up in a much different world, encountering divorce, but up families, that don't cater to them, drugs more available. A lot of hardcore punk, particularly, on the West Coast is about how much they hate where they live. This song is about that.
Kate Jewell:So we're starting with the perspective of the kids themselves.
Kyle Riismandel:The beginning of the pushback against an oppressive, consumerist lifestyle, right? The lazy middle class intellectual as Bad Religion puts it, or the idea that their parents preach these values. You should go to church, you should play sports, you should be hardworking. And yet, every day they come home and get shit faced, right? This contradiction in the suburban values themselves. And they start to produce this other idea of this place that is resistant to the kind of hegemonic suburban culture.
Kate Jewell:How important is California in this?
Kyle Riismandel:This is always a tricky thing because it emerges sui generis, right? It's like neither urban or suburban in a certain way. But it comes out of the suburban lifestyle, suburban architecture, the way people are disconnected from each other, relying on cars, which. California is basically the best example. Texas and other places are close. Most of the hardcore stuff I write about is from California, although not entirely. That chapter is about zine culture and the underground ways in which people connect themselves to this rebellion, even though they're in Massachusetts, New Jersey, or Michigan, in their own scenes that are largely about the same ideas, but never quite get as popular.
Kate Jewell:Could you explain the zine culture a little bit more?
Kyle Riismandel:Zines go back a fairly long way with print, although they might not have been called that at the time. zine is short for magazine, but they're generally self-produced, not-for-profit. representing some sort of counterculture or counter political movement or celebrating something underground or marginal. Hardcore punk's a good example, but there's lots of, queer and lesbian zines from the seventies that are really, important to that scene spreading around the country or people being aware of each other and their identities. It's necessary, I think for hardcore and for punk to have spread in the United States, particularly the non-New York punk version. So like flip side, maximum rock and roll, you can find these online. They're mostly digitized now, which is pretty cool.
Kate Jewell:So if we're comparing a zine to a mix tape, how do you understand the relationship between those two media formats?
Kyle Riismandel:They're both forms of collage and taking elements and reconstructing them for new meaning. Zines are almost always copied. They might be two or three pages and just folded, but they're almost always artistically done in the opposite style of, say, a glossy magazine. So it's not Vogue, it's not Playboy, it is explicitly, you can see the lines. You can see the stitches. Mix tapes operate the same way you're trying to take these things you love, these things you care about that you want someone else to know and put them in a format that can take and understand differently. Particularly in the seventies and eighties, like mainstream rock culture, which was about these big stadium shows. It's not about authenticity and punk zines being about that. When I teach it, I show a Rolling Stone from 1979 and then we look at the first edition of Flip Side, And we see, how is this different?
Kate Jewell:So with this song "Out of Vogue" have been, associated with the particular zine culture or seen or place or, circulated on mix tapes or college, radio or not.
Kyle Riismandel:That's a great question. Probably not. It would've been very hard to get the single. I don't know offhand. I probably could look, but my guess is where a hundred to 500 were probably ever made originally. It does appear here and there, and as cassette tapes come around, that becomes part of how punk spreads because it's easier to copy, move things around, outside of copyright or even just, having access to reproduction, itself. So unlikely it might've been written about.
Kate Jewell:Know, looking at some of the early zines those that come later once there is more of a label structure, putting this music out. You can really start to see some of these larger regional scenes starting to develop and networking. But it sounds like this is before there was really any kind of infrastructure for that.
Kyle Riismandel:It's emerging and again, the cheap, studios and like long Beach, where you can literally record a whole punk album in an hour, and it only costs you 200 bucks, which you work your shift at the gas station or the ice cream store or whatever, right? So there's like that famous picture of Henry Rolls and Ian Mackay working at Baskin Robbins, right? And that's part of the ethos the idea of Slack Motherfuckers exactly that, right? I'm not working for you, I'm doing this job so I can make this music. I'm not doing this job because I think this job is important or anyone should care about it. The idea that DIY we can put this out, we can have control over it, we can profit from 'em if it's profitable, which for most bands wasn't. That's like where Epitaph comes from, for example, which is probably the most successful of those labels, at least in terms of sales. you could argue Discord or other places that were more successful culturally or an influence.
Kate Jewell:So we're starting with, Out of Vogue. Where are we going in this story? So we've got the kids. They're pretty unhappy. of castigating, this consumerist world that they've been raised in. Where are we going from there?
Kyle Riismandel:So I'm gonna talk about a song that's, extremely popular, captures something important about this moment in the late seventies and early 1980s for suburban kids. So it's Cheap Trick's Surrender, which everybody knows I think, or everybody's listening to this podcast, probably knows. And the reason I'm picking is one, it is t redolent of these same themes, right? It is articulating this kind of suburban en we, this like feeling of being disconnected generationally, feeling of being disconnected spatially, that the thing you connect to is through your headphones as much as anything else. And that stuff is usually rebellious, People are listening to Foreigner and Middle Class, right? It's not as if these are two different worlds. I'm sure if you talk to artists even now who are in punk, they'll be like, oh yeah, I love the Bloe record, or I love, whatever. they love music, but it's also from this film Over the Edge. It's relatively obscure. It was hard to get for a very long time. So there's a scene in the movie where the main character, on his headphones and listen to "Surrender," escape his parents fighting. And this, he's in trouble with them or whatever. but the film is based on a true story. In the early 1970s outside San Francisco, there was, a rash of teen crimes done by quote unquote mouse packs: petty crime, graffiti, breaking windows. The writer of the film, and the director who later did River's Edge read this article and adapted it into this film Over the Edge. And it starts with this preamble that says, there are this many suburban kids in the world in these planned communities and nothing for them to do. here's their story, It zooms in on this desolate like landscape they shot, in this planned community in Colorado. It's, whose name I don't remember. but the name of the town of this movie is New Granada. The theme of the movie is we moved out here for our kids. And yet the whole movie is about them drinking, smoking, fighting, right? Like the core things that we associate with Mallrats and teen misbehavior. Um, the movie ends with a big town hall meeting in the school with the parents, the police and the principal saying, what is wrong? What are you doing? These children? What's wrong with them? the kids lock 'em into school and set it on fire. And their teen rec center blows up. Surrender" always brings to mind that film as trying to break through to the mainstream. And in fact, it was shown in theaters and taken outta theaters. It came out at the same time as The Warriors. So they both got taken outta theaters and Over the Edge. Eventually found a home on HBO, which is where most of us saw it, but was never super popular. But the folklore is that it inspired "Smells like Teen Spirit." So connecting the dots between hardcore punk, suburban on we, and then, punk going popular in the early nineties.
Kate Jewell:I'm getting like shades of Heathers, but of in a way that, mainstream audiences maybe couldn't accept in the same way could Heather's.
Kyle Riismandel:Yeah, what's brilliant about the movie is it's not ironic. It's from 1979. It's not stylistically interesting. It doesn't have a viewpoint in that sense. It feels very grounded. Almost all the kids are non-professionals or their first movie. So it's Matt Dillon's first movie, but a bunch of others who like basically don't do very much after that. There's maybe one adult in the movie who has like a real career. I think those movies are a little more referential, more knowing about what they're trying to do. Whereas this feels like a movie about real people struggling with this and it has this ending, which is ridiculous and is not connected to any real story, but feels like the logical outcome of this story. There's a great, poster It's the kids and the parents, and they look like zombies, but like in that seventies style with dead eyes staring so good. These kids are over the edge." It's like amazing. I show that class too, so I'm like, you guys aren't gonna understand this unless I do this. So it's unreal. But surrender is central to that movie. And also another version of the mixtape, the soundtrack, right? Soundtracks were huge. It has the cars, it has punk stuff. It's fascinating.
Kate Jewell:That's really interesting. especially the way that Cheap Trick stands in for a lot of youth culture in the 1970s. I think it's a Cheap Trick song that is the intro to That Seventies Show,
Kyle Riismandel:What's
Kate Jewell:example.
Kyle Riismandel:playing a Big Star song,
Kate Jewell:That's right.
Kyle Riismandel:Because, like, why couldn't they just use "In the Street"? I don't know. But apparently Alex Showan lived off that the rest of his life. that was how he made all his money, because he was, indigent essentially, 'cause Big Star records didn't sell. They wanna safe family like they saw on tv. They want to send to good schools. They want racial segregation or class segregation without maybe sometimes even articulating it that way. What they find is the opposite, right? All of these problems are now super visible to them in a way they hadn't imagined. It's that moment when we discover Love Canal and this school is built on top of toxic waste dump. And these kids all have all these diseases thinking they were getting this brand new school in a brand new community, like exactly what the suburban dreams should have been. The movies and the music play on those two things, right? Because what is Cheap Trick, but a nostalgia act in a way, right? They're playing fifties rock and roll for a Seventies audience, or an Eighties audience. Channeling the themes, right? Because they're a generation older, not connected to, the youth culture in the same way, but still getting at those ideas as a way to connect to teens and the way that hardcore does without largely any artifice. It's pretty direct, both in music and lyrics.
Kate Jewell:So we've got the kids. We've got the, what, how do I wanna say it? This is ladder up to kind of the Hollywod- ification and kind of the big arena rock ish versions of this, or connections of this. So I'm curious about Where we are headed next in your mixtape.
Kyle Riismandel:It's funny you mentioned 'cause you're right, so what sort of happens from 79 on, you have Grease, this real nostalgia piece, which is satirical on stage, but is serious in film, much like Forrest Gump, Against a movie like The Warriors or even Over the Edge, which is dystopic in its essence. I write about Fast Times at Ridgemont High as well, which is splitting the difference, right? It's a comedy about abortion, about teens with popular music in it, right? It does all of the things and I think is popular for that reason, which leads then into the kind of John Hughes ification of the teen comedy that takes out some of the explicit politics, the social stuff. I'm gonna do a song I don't think anyone will ever do on this and it does connect to the mall. Fast Times is used in the book and a way to introduce this idea of teens at the mall and what they do there. the opening sequence is like showing them at the movie theater, the pizza, the arcade. And those are places where you drink, smoke, fight, and fuck. This is throughout the discourse about malls from the early eighties on. The song I'm gonna pick is Pacman Fever by Bruckner and Garcia.
Kate Jewell:Oh my goodness.
Kyle Riismandel:for those who don't know, Bruner and Garcia were songwriters who capitalized on the popularity of arcade games in the early eighties by putting out an entire album of songs about arcade games. This is also the era of the novelty song, right? Like much like the fifties, we had this like real explosion from the mid seventies into the early eighties of songs about everything. Truckers, right? CB radios, hula hoops, rollerskating, car wash, Kung fu fighting.
Kate Jewell:Pina Coladas.
Kyle Riismandel:Cheating on your spouse, is really what that one's about. This is, I believe 82 or 83. some people might remember this, but Pacman was as big as Star Wars, in those years, Pacman merchandise made as much as Star Wars merchandise/ It could not have been more popular. Breakfast cereal, Sunday morning cartoon, t-shirts, bootlegs, games, right? Like the whole.
Kate Jewell:I have, in my hallway, a Pacman poster, It's not a hologram, it's the one where it's like on one side it looks like one thing, and then you move to the other side. It looks like something else.
Kyle Riismandel:The reticular ones, like,
Kate Jewell:Yeah
Kyle Riismandel:yeah.
Kate Jewell:It's pretty rad. I found it at an antique store in Waltham.
Kyle Riismandel:Oh, that's pretty cool actually. But it's a perfect example of how popular it was that it's still detritus in a store, right? It carries something. When I was working on the book there was like a resurgence or, or I guess a, a surgence, it wasn't resurgence of scholarship about like arcades and video games. As home systems got more popular, there's a book about boyhood and arcade culture, but no one really wrote about it, in the way I'm writing about it, both as a spatial construction and cultural phenomenon that dovetail with this broader thing i'm arguing about the suburbs. This song is indicative of the popularity and visibility of the arcade in that moment when we've forgotten just how big it was because they're, virtually gone. They've only come back as Dave and Busters to some degree. I'm not criticizing it, but I do think it's a little bit lost that in a moment in 1984, you could see people at lunch, in a pizza place from an office playing Pac-Man and then going back to work just like you would see kids in the arcade. It was, virtually everywhere.
Kate Jewell:As we're talking, I'm starting to notice something interesting, I did not grow up in the suburbs. I grew up in a small town in the late eighties, early nineties. I can remember being of wistful and desiring and talking with my friends about how we wish we had the suburban. Lifestyle that we could like ride our bikes in the streets. We could, know, ride our bikes to each other's houses.
Kyle Riismandel:Yeah.
Kate Jewell:Technically we were close enough, but it was in Vermont and there like giant hills in between,
Kyle Riismandel:Right.
Kate Jewell:So like that was gonna happen. know, I can remember being very envious as a kid of these things. even as I was also very grateful that I was not growing up in this world of conformity. I had a lot of leeway. My parents were very free and letting of decide what I was interested in and what kind of pop culture I gravitated to. They were like, cool, whatever. I don't like it, but your thing, whatever. but at the same time, I am still very prone to this kind of nostalgia Even though we're unpacking these cultural products is having these like really significant dark sides and revealing like all these structural problems with the American economy in the post World War II era, as of spins out in era of de-industrialization, at the same time, we still love this stuff. what is that?
Kyle Riismandel:Oh boy. So I think it's a few things. Like one is we're both white, and I do think there is a significant component of post-war whiteness that is constructed an idea of the past that is, nostalgic, The things that maybe didn't even affect us, but allowed us to have privilege. So I just wanna say that as like the premise, because I think nostalgia generally speaking is probably a toxic sort of political impulse, for all those reasons. But it's a real feeling that I think many of us have. I do think there's some element. and this comes out in a number of ways over this period of time with the relationship to high and low culture, right? We don't really talk that way anymore, but this idea that there are things that are guilty pleasures or whatever, that we still, created that category, that space, so that we can still like things that we know are bad, right? Creator is bad or the topic matter is dark, or it's just not aesthetically good. I look at this playlist I made for the book and just looking at somebody's bands and thinking about the people in them and what they're up to now. Do I endorse Wasps? "Fuck, Like a Beast"? I don't know. Should he have a cod piece with a saw on it? That seems bad for women, but also it's ironic Those layers in which it could work all those ways. and I do, maybe as I'm getting older, there is something simple about it. With the past it feels knowable. the lack of outlets, the narrow worldview, things available to you feels graspable and that's safe and that feels good and you have control over it, I think, I'm no psychologist. but there does seem to be something to the past and place that allows people to have that wherever they're from. Even places of trauma or sadness.
Kate Jewell:So now you look at something like the stratospheric success of a show like Bridgerton there is this kind of crossover of effect and still also conversing with some of those problematic nostalgic like that you have to make this a multiracial world, to acknowledge this is a mythical fantasy construction. But we're still gonna let it be that, that still in and of itself has value, if we can now, know, just of look beyond ,the structural problems that created, that world.
Kyle Riismandel:The category of pleasure is pleasurable and the guilt is the politics of the framework or whatever you're putting around it. And I do think it does come outta that culture wars moment. The culture wars in that moment is there's a deep investment in intellectuals, the upper class, et cetera, in tradition, traditional family, traditional religion, and I'm using those words in quotes 'cause it's bullshit. Their version of what they think tradition is or should be. And also the classics The Closing of the American Mind this idea that by embracing anything popular, anything populist, it is somehow degrading the quality of our culture and our people rather than thinking about how we degraded education. And that actually is the problem. I think about that context all the time in teaching this period 40 years on from the eighties, what do I want students particularly graduate students to think about what is this cultural context that is structuring these conversations, and I read about in the book too, in the pm RC, the Satanic panic. All that part of it too.
Kate Jewell:So I just taught, well, actually, I didn't actually teach the PMRC. What I did was I had a little rebellion moment in my classes where I didn't wanna teach the things that I had planned. Instead, I did my book talk for them.
Kyle Riismandel:That's fascinating.
Kate Jewell:mean, were really into it the ploy for this was I gave the students three points of extra credit on their final, if they go do a radio show
Kyle Riismandel:Ooh, that's
Kate Jewell:on the college radio station.
Kyle Riismandel:Yeah.
Kate Jewell:so I wanted to show them what is college radio? What has it meant? So I did my book talk and in it I talk about the Santa Barbara station getting in trouble thanks to Tipper Gore intervening. And I had the slide, I put the Filthy 15 up and they are so confused by the occult being on this list. I have to point out that the Twisted Sister song is now like a Zyrtec ad.
Kyle Riismandel:Right.
Kate Jewell:know.
Kyle Riismandel:Are what they are, which is not dangerous. Zyrtec is not a dangerous drug but it could be selling something more awful, I'm sure.
Kate Jewell:We are so beyond that moment, culturally speaking, even as we still continue to live in a world of the culture wars. That the culture wars are raging on, the mechanisms of them have shifted to new topics.
Kyle Riismandel:Yeah. I think the people who are fighting them have gotten better. They're smarter at
Kate Jewell:It was never about Twisted Sister. It was never about Murphy Brown. It was always about power and control.
Kyle Riismandel:One of the first things I say in cultural studies literacy classes is every relationship is a relationship of power. What you're trying to do is understand it, right? Who has it, who's wielding it against him for what reason? Because I think they have trouble sometimes understanding that even within the family unit things they think of as democratic or fair are still about some level of exploitation and power. It's sometimes very hard for them to do it. But I think this is also like what I'm getting at in the book is, concept is this idea of productive victimization, right? The idea that if you can figure out how to figure yourself as a victim. You can turn that into a new kind of power. You can leverage it to do things. Sometimes there are very real things that you need to do, protect yourself physically. But other times it's to exert power in these other ways that seem, apolitical when they clearly are. But you seem like the person of common sense against the crazy thing these people wanna do, right? I think it speaks to this is a formula. It's not simply about that one context or that period of time.
Kate Jewell:As our class structure in the middle disintegrates the culture wars expressions we're seeing now, know, they share a lot of the 1980s, but that dissolution of the middle, has furthered, it feels like the stakes are higher. We're dealing with the same structures of issues, it feels like we're closer to the dissolution of idea or the premise that this could ever be something that we aspire to.
Kyle Riismandel:Yeah, and I think that's often why it got called the culture wars, right? 'cause it felt. Even if it was not right, it was posed as disconnected from people's material reality, right? That it was not a Marxist reading of these people, but instead about their environmental, moral, environmental life that would degrade, these values, right? Now it's being explicitly posed as a class issue to people, in the way that is really unproductive for them. But they are buying into as a salvation from their status, right? That they want to be rescued, high tariffs or other things Those culture wars are now being explicitly fought that way.
Kate Jewell:So where are we headed this mix tape? are we headed in an uplifting direction or?
Kyle Riismandel:I did wanna talk about Satanic panic and the culture wars. So will do it through Ozzy Osborne's "Suicide Solution." Which you probably know about, but maybe your "listeners do not. was part of, a lawsuit Ozzy Osborne and the record company, for causing, quote unquote causing the suicide of a fan who is huge into Ozzy Osborne. this also happened with a Judas Priest song, um, another court case. Both were ultimately, the artist won. They were not shown as liable for these suicides. I think it's ex exemplifies this moment of: the teen is susceptible, right? A lot of people write about the seventies beginning this crisis of the family. Natasha Zaretsky, Robert Self or other people are saying, and probably many others I'm forgetting, so apologies, that because of second wave feminism, because of divorce, gay rights, right? This is eroding this like traditional family and therefore teens particularly are at risk. And if they're at risk, what are they at risk for? They're at risk to subliminal messaging. They're at risk to, gay, right? Whatever it is. this is part of that, that there are subliminal messages in music. In the documentary about the Jewish priest Halvar, the lead singer says something to the effect of if we could put a secret message on our records, it would be buy more records. It does us no good to have our fans kill themselves. Immediately exposing the stupidity of it. But the fact that those court cases go to trial, shows how deeply scared people really were. And this is again, the tip of the iceberg on this moment maybe even third wave parenting, right? So there's like the kind of 50 stuff and Momism and Dr. Spock and the 70 stuff of just let them be. And then they come back to, you know The book I use to tell the story is called Backing Control, right? It doesn't take a metaphor, right? it tells you what it is, by this guy Gregory Baden Hamer and his wife, whose name escapes me. they made a video about how to deme your son, presumably his, bedroom. So they go through the bedroom and take them to posters. They tell you what signs to look for, they indicate AOC Cult or Satan Worship. And again, this is one of hundreds of these videos, It is a large industry. and probably still is an industry. like suicide solution or Judas Priests, right? It representative of that whole thing, in terms of the moral danger of the suburbs in the 1980s. And again, particularly because of things like cable, it's unedited. It comes straight through, at least broadcast TV and radio have the FCC Keeps kids away from these things,
Kate Jewell:to what extent was there a teen suicide crisis of the 1980s? Like, I lived through one, but it was very localized. We did have a significant amount of suicides in my high school. uh, we had three in one year in my sophomore year. And then the following summer, one of the counselors who counseled people through, took his own life
Kyle Riismandel:Oh my God.
Kate Jewell:and subsequently of people who were in high school during those four years, there have been five more. As I learned it is a kind of contagion, it's a social contagion that happens, once they see it happen, it becomes a possibility. Can that happen at a societal level? Did it even happen or was this a moral panic.
Kyle Riismandel:Both. I'm glad you went there 'cause I was gonna go there too. One of the core things I figured out in writing the book about all of these things is for every one of the threats I detail, they're real. Right now to the extent to which they're real or pervasive, differs quite a bit. Kidnapping is not nearly the, quoted numbers of 10 or 20,000 a year by strangers. It was like 70, right? The vast majority of kidnappings happen between people who know each other and are usually part of custody disputes, right? And so in the Eighties there was extremely high rate of suicide among young men, particularly working class, but also suburban. There was a belief that it was contagious, That communities would undergo this shift. Once it happened, which again, I'm not a psychologist, so maybe true, but that was the belief part of the moral panic is the belief that, this can't possibly be for no reason. There is some cause that we can locate in this morally corrupt, cash hungry industry and that must be where it's coming from. this is what they have in common, right? It ranges from all these things, whether it's subliminal messaging in this or D and D or other fantasy games, how kids get this idea that they're all powerful. They could do these things that it's okay to die, you'll be reborn and, all this stuff. But there was a high number of suicides in that period up through what you're talking about too, it goes away in terms of the news. as the economy gets better, I think that's part of it. Broadly speaking, people see their lives as possibly having, a better future, in the middle and lower working classes. The story of the book is what you're talking about by the time we get to Columbine, we're ready to see culture as the problem. We're ready to see, this is the explanation. We are not ready to look at systemic causes for young men being violent towards themselves and others.
Kate Jewell:Yeah. And I remember, my parents were both very astute in this moment. My dad was a minister and a counselor I remember them talking about how this was a very depressed area, economically. It had been extremely hard hit by de-industrialization, and it was isolated. This is a hunting community, in Vermont. And so, you know, the means and all of the, the pieces were right there. And so I think in their minds it was, it was a pretty straightforward set of reasons as to why this happened. but when you are confronted with the tragedy and schools that didn't necessarily handle things the right way, I just remember, this is so Vermont. the after the second, student took his life, like the whole school went to his funeral. I think it was after the third that year. There was no snow on the ground as I remember. So that was probably in March they had us do a giant circle, I think they called it a yurt circle, where everybody in the entire school, was like 500 kids had to hold hands one person would lean forward and they, you'd alternate and the next person would lean back. And so you were like one giant, self-supported circle.
Kyle Riismandel:I am fascinated by this.
Kate Jewell:I remember like holding my friend head being like, what
Kyle Riismandel:are we
Kate Jewell:this?
Kyle Riismandel:we bringing it? a
Kate Jewell:Yeah,
Kyle Riismandel:ritual.
Kate Jewell:It was so weird. it was basically like, don't kill yourself kids. Like we're all depending on you. And I was like,
Kyle Riismandel:here.
Kate Jewell:voice of chain. Literally. That was the word. Don't break the chain. It was so weird.
Kyle Riismandel:I'm not surprised, but it's also, I'm working through it.
Kate Jewell:You can see the crunchy granola conversations that brought this about in that particular context. But what's so interesting about that is that was a solution. Vermont's, class structure is very stratified, That it is very much a haves and have nots. So you have like the Bernie Sanders class that moves in the hippie trust funders of move in the second home. You have the resort communities and then you have the people who used to work in mills, and all of those jobs have gone away. And so what you have left are a seasonal, and service work
Kyle Riismandel:exactly.
Kate Jewell:There you have like the perfect disconnect of this solution
Kyle Riismandel:The degree to which people were adrift for addressing it, right? That the tools that they knew worked or would be helpful, they couldn't implement. Given the school structure, given parental rights, given a lot of these things that were coming apart, there was some degree weirdly of consensus in the culture war era that schools and parents still, at least in many suburbs, were still doing real sex ed and actually talking about suicide. I don't know if it happens anymore, but it seems like it would be much harder to do. It is that moment of true deep down fear about children that, crosses all these things. What do we do? Clearly we're not doing the right stuff, and yet what we know is it's about It is about your access to healthcare. It is about your access to guns, Fairly confident at this point in history knowing those things. And again, partly why I wrote the book was trying to understand that. When I give a talk about it, I almost always start with, I grew up in this place. I show pictures and I go. Why were my parents afraid? What were they afraid of? What was realistic about this thing? Why did they think these things? And then they were not nearly like any the people I write in the book. building to Columbine, Dave Collin wrote an amazing book called Columbine, which I think people should read if they wanna understand it. Part of what he's saying is everything we know about these kids is wrong. Every media narrative you've heard is basically inaccurate, or in some way just skewed beyond belief and not reflective of these interior lives of these people, the best we know them or what their lives were like day to day. When I read it, it struck me oh, it's exactly where the book needs to end because the framework that discourse had made this logic inescapable. Because it was powerful for all kinds of people. People wanted to regulate guns. It was powerful for people who wanted church back in school. It was powerful for politicians who could run on it, every politician running for president in 1999 is talking about we need to return to these, in the wake of the Clinton scandal right? So it does connect all those dots. This has turned way darker, than we imagine, but, the book's called Neighborhood of Fear, right?
Kate Jewell:I think, know, there's a reason why I, as a product of this era am turning to a concept like mixtapes to analyze the past or our relationship with the past. These things were very therapeutic in personal sense, that they were a means an escape. Even as you're listening to these songs that have these darker tinges that they are, they're not escapists in the sense that you are getting a very real, confrontational, encounter with the things are making so angry. At the same time, they're providing a different kind of sense of community before we get things like social media and, online niche communities where go find little group of weirdos And so I think that there is, a positive side to this nostalgia. At the same time I'm just really interested in it as a form and as a concept and as a way to tell stories that we're expressing ourselves by producing these things, or trying to say something about something that we care about.
Kyle Riismandel:Yeah. And The foundations of cultural production, which is nothing new, right? To the degree to which we want to admit that. And the mix tape is just explicitly that, right? Here's this new story using these things, or here's this thing I want express to you about what I feel or who you are, your relationship to me or to the world, I love finding in record stores, like people's unlabeled tapes. I buy those for 50 cents. I want to know what is on here. I find that so much more thrilling than virtually any other cultural experience, But, and I mentioned that. 'cause in part it's about this kind of joy that's been lost in some of these things. They've become so at every moment that it feels as if you cannot escape. Like,
Kate Jewell:Mm-hmm.
Kyle Riismandel:Together a Spotify playlist, it's like, would you like this song? You have kids, so maybe you can answer this, but been said that kids are listening to way more old music than ever.
Kate Jewell:When my son bust out with Coolio's, fantastic. Voyage,
Kyle Riismandel:boy,
Kate Jewell:years old, he knew all the words. I was like, what is happening?
Kyle Riismandel:that is
Kate Jewell:is happening?
Kyle Riismandel:almost like he's been possessed, like Coolio came back. Oh my God, that's a good Christmas movie. And he comes back as a little white kid.
Kate Jewell:Do you wanna throw in a bonus track here?
Kyle Riismandel:In thinking about this theme and the cultural production around it in music, I think the only way to end it, is with Arcade Fire and "The Suburbs," which is all of the things we talked about, rolled into one. It's the critique, the nostalgia, the longing, the sadness, the desire, For these things all together in these songs. a concept album, which itself, is like a nostalgia thing, doesn't really exist, in mainstream music. the fact that it wins the Grammy Award for best album that year as a total surprise, speaks to something people wanted out of albums in that moment. And also this kind of nostalgia for the suburbs, right? That is tinged with sadness and regret, but also hope, right? the songs are about wanting the suburbs to have been better than they were, That they remember. the music, the lyrics, it's a vibe album, for lack of a better word. you can really pick any song off that album. they're all in some way about this, some more explicitly than others. the suburbs, the song is probably the most explicit.
Kate Jewell:I think that captures the multi-varied themes in the, fascinating.
Kyle Riismandel:I've been actually trying to put together a 33 and a third I just haven't been able to figure it out yet.
Kate Jewell:Well, that would be a good one.
Kyle Riismandel:Yeah, We're like around 20 years now, or 15 years,
Kate Jewell:yeah,
Kyle Riismandel:I feel like I'm the only person to write it, quite frankly,
Kate Jewell:It's time. Well, I look forward to seeing that. And, so what's next for you, other than 33 and a third potentially?
Kyle Riismandel:I've begun this project on the cultural history of cable, tentatively titled it's not tv, it's cable. I want to, go back pretty far, which is partially why it's called it's not tv, cable wasn't about TV in the origins, as you probably know. talking about where it comes from. It's DIY roots. working class roots, urban and rural roots rather than suburban, this suburban and ways in which it's used to disseminate this kind of neoliberal capitalism.
Kate Jewell:thank you so much for your mix tape and for this fascinating conversation.
Kyle Riismandel:it was super fun.
Speaker:Thank you for listening to this episode of History Mixtapes. For more information, find our show notes for Kyle's playlist and stay tuned for more releases through the academic year. Okay.
