They're among us, already here, already close, squeaking when they think they can’t be heard, carving from themselves the dross of mutant-skin, spitting on the ground in SLO’s agrarian respect, inhaling mist, purging smoke, and it’s too late.
And here you are, you fiery little collegiate ball of unease, coming with open arms to the name of the game, which, despite everything, is “assimilation.” You are frustrated with your social standing, the supposed peak of adolescence offering you no true interpersonal impulse. These aliens, calling themselves the UNDERGROUND, flick their eyes downward at you, and you reckon yourself the unfortunate appendage of a mass rejectamenta, the other members of which, try as you might, are nowhere to be found. You are sometimes emboldened with the muted desire to scream at someone for no reason, long enough for smiles to fade, past the time it takes for bits to exhaust. But you can’t do it. You’re idiotic and undeveloped, sheltered, hunched, envious, imagining yourself as a bloated hernia in some otherwise-perfect homeostasis of zinester population. You wish to live a late-adolescent life styled in a way becoming of an interesting adult. Lemme Tellya, this is WAVZINE, the treasured collection of the select harbingers of the mass changes in culture most important and idiolect-shifting, the ultimate opinion-bearers, truth-seekers, pointed with bloodbearing arms toward the forever SLO UNDERGROUND. This is a guide on how to cohabitate.
So...
The first thing anybody would need to put their faith in, despite everything falsely telluric San Luis Obispo might represent, is that somehow there exists among everyone here a Scene, worthy art, worth protruding into. This is a task of massive social importance: it’s easy to adopt an anxiety that there exists zipping between the mulleted mastheads, heist-film laser detection, a blank-faced contempt for the arrogantly incredulous. If you are seen as unaffected, uneager, or, God bless ‘em, a Lost Academic, you can peck away with your fluidless mouth any selterized hope of belonging to the UNDERGROUND. For if such a contempt did exist, the second thing anybody would need to believe is it being entirely justified, because it is, and shame on you. There exists something bloodsucking, insomuch as a dingy concert relies on a sort of prurient electricity, about the person completely unwilling to join in, remaining coy, smugly static at the periphery. To be the long-faced fellow at an orgy, the quick-to-judge queen, is, quite simply, no good. Art comes first from credulity and any display of its opposite is nothing but a disrespectfully lethargic assault on art itself. Repeat to yourself with an unmatched punctiliousness that there is something profoundly contemplative in an ambiguous series of maj7 chords; there is a lambent, tidelike excitement in a note repeated into a state of monotonous intensity. No lyrics, no problem. It is the ultimate, or, better, the only, externalization of all matters of deep adolescent turmoil: romantic, sexual, domestic, psycho-imbalanced, a perpetual shit-where-you-eat social/artistic. Believing this, any small-act show, regardless of the actual music played, becomes plugged in its pores with ambrosiac delight. Alcohol also helps with this.
You’re in the middle of things, where stuff is happening. Music isn’t playing yet, a ponent jumpiness forsure, maybe a squirming photographer pressing at the lonesome to pop some fit-checked fish-eyed candid, realness commemorated. Cigarette congeniality, the ticket-taker maybe under the ciggie spell themself, adding artificial years to a number probably too high already. People are floating around the stage, slick in their social diaspora, staring at the stage with an admiration of unknown viability, it now venal with polyethylene and wood. There’s a dimmity bumping pleasantly across the hills, if it isn’t already night.
If it’s not a house show, you will likely see yourself caked within a banal retail establishment beautified for this weekday’s pale night with the sickly-green LED strobing of UNDERGROUND culture. Funniness here. Place your mosh-interrupting bag somewhere undetectably Homer Simpson within the retail merchandise. Non-house shows are populated with grosser people, older people, just shockingly uncollegiate people, of a seriousness any currently dormed showgoer should have no problem gestalting as entirely uncouth, stark ruins of social success. You will have to make contact with them, like everyone here, in the name of good time’s intensity, hardcore being where it’s at, ‘round and ‘round in some starving mosh carousel. This is generally a wonderful arrangement, enabling one to touch the sweaty backs of passionate men at a rate unprecedented.
You can dance, perambulate, mingle. Or you can sit down, not do anything, which is to say dance, but in a manner categorically lame. This is where you witness first some lethargy, some guy with a hairdo ruched, sitting scrambled on a weathered backyard sofa—talk about fucked fabric—not saying anything, unsmiling: showing up, with the briskness of everyone else, at an orgy with a cock limply porn-addicted, that is, basked in a narrative standard of youthful party-life, the decaying member of an illiterati seduced by paper-thin imaginations, strobe-lit and aphotic and allowing cavernlike abandon to pervade smooth bodies, unseen, wild, unaccountable, free from responsibility. He had a feeling that tonight's gonna be a good night. Instead, like every time before, this poor guy is offered an array of precarious social tripwiring, an array he had to pay for, nobody knowing what to say, nicotine actually making you sadder, alone and gravitational, so he sinks. We can call this guy Robert Peape, to whom everything is simultaneously too much and too little. There is responsibility here and you shouldn’t have to be told not to be like him.
The music at a show unburdened with a polite audience’s consideration of domestic upkeep, naturally, is more intense, less decipherable: less nod-worthy and more thrash-worthy, though there are still those who rest in a sort of robotic nod, stiff as menhirs, eyes pointed studiously, and what you might take here as pretension I’ll delineate helpfully as the hypnosis in full effect, eliminating the functionality of one’s brain passed the extent that upward offal latches to the music, so deep into the UNDERGROUND’s adit that the light behind no longer illuminates any flavor of path forward, the music remaining in constant, invisible crash.
The UNDERGROUND is chattering among themselves, black and webby, pale and full. Learn first to give and accept compliments. Compliment somebody’s artful outfit, somebody’s tastefully thick maquillage, somebody’s shoes, somebody’s music, somebody’s taste in music, somebody’s vibe. The music being either good or bad is not something that needs to be stressed. You’re already here, aren't you, biting your cigarette, it now priapic from your mouth, like a car’s antenna that stays functional after a horizontalizing accident, channeling the four or five Honeyboys to score your closed-casket demise…the ciggie picking up everything around you, hidden cadets in the UNDERGROUND communicating covertly via these inhalable networks, giving their real thoughts only through the tactical means of the thinking aesthete, much more information orally transferred and sucked inside you than what could be pathetically produced from impulse and labeled precariously as an opinion, and don’t you look so good sucking it down, suck it suck it: sexual histories, friend-groups splintered, UNDERGROUND fresh-faced and incommunicado, sharp-jawed kids amassing the hazel eyes of half-homosexuals, signals that will float upward into the night’s repeated disparity, far above the city streets, and again somewhere new with identical days passed.
Clefted from the mass, auburn-haired, headtop set aflame with the plenum’s happenstance flicker, is somebody unsmoking. They sit at the night-street's curb, giggling, draped in some postbin thrift of orange and blue. This Is San Luis Obispo, you think to yourself with a strange and idiotic immediacy, eyes quiescent at the midnight midinette. I’ll tell you at the Bidenomic cost of your Wavzine-spent seconds just what this person would say to you if approached and retted with your distinct confusion. They would talk quickly, without the space for interjection: “I was beckoned here by the lead singer, one of the main guys. The guy sloppily stroking his, uh, fret, flicking his whammy, indulging himself to conclusion before a voiceless audience? This all being what he thinks he bought himself, but oh by gum is he pretty up there. I can’t take him seriously when he’s performing, toneless, mouth stretched in grotesque yawn around the microphone, ya know, curiously squinting at an evenly lit audience. His aged crow feet, the slamming of the sockets, its anxiety—and all that audience engagement. I mean, this guy has a job to do, a totally consuming start-to-finish ordeal, a service, not a symbiotic thing, fuck that. The show is there and the audience can do with it what it pleases. If they stagnate it’s your fault. It’s a ‘you’ thing. No more of this phatic call and response shit. The crowd should be moved by you, powerless to alter what should be already decided. These squinters, man. He fails. He’s done. He doesn’t appear lost in the music. He doesn’t put enough effort in his histrionics, the music separate from him, the audience asked to widen their fakeness for the time being. You see it right? He fails at truly loving his music and forces the audience to love it for him. He blanks, asks for the line. The anxiousness you feel is given. And these beautiful people. Tableau’s set. Bring your own body. I think they’re here to do something, working toward some shared idea. Authenticity, really, should be the first thing expended with them. Art’s, uh, thanatologick, above the body, borne, apotheotic. Leave yourself at the door. Does that require ‘fakeness?’ Please, uh, don’t tickle yourself. Don’t pretend to flay any genuine craniums with the use of the word ‘fake.’ Yes, it's fake, the audience is fake, everyone’s fake, you can click your heels on the way home with that one, congrats. And you’d be an idiot not to see how that’s a good thing.”
Nodding, nodding, nodding… back inside, and it puppets you, the pockets of thought now a hypnic jerk…a shove to your left, and now you’re responding to the audience, filed bodies, entropy, see it collapse, townhouse leveled at the baton’s gloved gripping, and we are back to the music, vibrations subterranean, flaunting whirligig, total fractionation… the facial hair around blown by sweat-sirocco and whipped by strobe-light, appearing now vermiculated and alive…in out in out, smoke it, growing terribly old, the easy ambiguity of the maj7 taking hold of woes immediate and generational, experienced and toponymic, stretching…a pregnant embonpoint that touches with its peak the rugged, yellow-green path of San Luis Obispo…back down now, sweet thing, feel your breath, awakening from coma to beeping of a snare IV, finding it harder and harder to tear yourself away, sweet little helpless girl, nodding, nodding, nodding…
The larva swells out your pink-bookend and colors the toilet bowl, you wondering in wordless idiocy whether anybody in the bathroom is watching. You carried yourself to and from, smiled with that pride, kneeling without shame over someone else’s ass-warmed porcelain, expelling from yourself the dross of a day spent credulous and excitable. They approach you, clothes second-handed, skin commonly white, ghostly, and their fingers appearing longer than they should, like trusswork splintering from the edges of blunt flesh, a fracturing that you imagine began at the bidigital. They capture you between these manicured tendons, press you tightly, past the assumed void of thinness, into their chest. They hold you and hold you tighter, the new socialites, the new cultural parasites, and it smells of tobacco, and you want to smoke that tobacco, but the effort of escaping seems to immediately contravene some atavistic doctrine. Stuck between arms hairy-masculine and shaved-feminine, hairy-feminine and shaved-masculine, you wonder if they’re wondering if you’re uncomfortable. Look at all these nicely cockbearing art-appreciators, so close now, you can see the floundering ghosts of their most recent softboy shave, holding you tight, sweet little girl. They listen to music you've never heard of, little girl. And you sink into them, huffing putrid mixtures of sweat and cologne, sink, flesh bending to your will, initiation, they are aliens indeed, sink into them, dorsums yawning in clefted stretch, follicles enlarging to birth chunks of multicolored fordite, their insides unfolding green, their offal metallic, revealing the pseudosphere’s pit; and as you’re left, a diminishing zygote, inside of them, no longer the ring but the toroidal center itself, awaiting the great light again, you take your mind away from you, and there, in its place, maybe all along: a luminescent maj7.
Dom Mary Harris is a member of our editorial team. She wrote the article. Sam Thome is one of our art managers. They made the graphics.