Ep. 2: 7-Year-Old Rhinestone Cowboy

Episode 2: 7-Year-Old Rhinestone Cowboy, 01/29/2021

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Episode 2: Extras

For making it to the blog, I’m giving you a special look at me in an alternate reality where I am a hot and rugged ranch hand.

Okay, that’s it, that’s the peek. Any more Cowgirl Sally pictures and we might rip the time/space fabric or whatever.

And if you’re interested…

This light jacket is super cute and for sale @Carmatnight.

Gabe Wilk, Musician and Producer

Check out Gabe Wilk’s Birthday EP over at BandCamp. It’s a lovely, moody vibe. Give it a listen, immediately.

Oh, and here’s that link to the Spotify Playlist I made after that Stone’s Throw Records party at Marble Bar.

Click here! It’s good.

Okay, friends! Thanks for checking out this week’s episode extras; you’ll find the transcript for today’s episode and track list below.

SWDW Ep. 2 Transcript

Hello. My friends. What is happening...by the grace of Uncle Bernie’s mittens you have made it through this week and I, for one, super proud of you. You did it.

Happy Friday or whenever you’re attending to this, happy that day too.

You are listening to Sally Whoever Does Whatever and I’m making space for you every single Friday morning, just as long as I survived the week before, and I didn’t get distracted for some reason.

Sally Whoever Does Whatever is a show where I talk about whatever I want and get to spin whatever records I wanna listen to that day and I’m simply jazzed about that. Thanks for joining me.

Oof, okay, so I’m gonna kick this off by saying thank you. Thank you all so much for listening to Episode 1 of the show last week. The feedback, the encouragement you gave was just...it was really sweet, so kind. 

Like many of us, I don’t know how to take compliments and receiving those from you was kind of overwhelming but super exciting, but I will just say that I really want to go back and tell a few shit heads in middle school that I have been told now I have a very “funny personality,” okay? So, there. Funny in a good way though, okay?

Oh my God, I’m a mess. No, no. All of your direct messages, your comments, your likes, your shares—they were very just touching to say the least.

My girl and fellow Registered Nurse, Ms. Hanna Kim out in Queens, NY, hey what’s up? She called me early last Friday morning and was like, you know, she had just listened to the show, and she said, “you’re not really going back to nursing are you?” And I was like, “uhhhh, well, umm...I do need to eat food to live so....yeah, that’s the plan.” 

Baby needs sponsorships. Someone tag Bumble BFF in that last episode because, damn I think I gave them like a shit ton of free advertising. Soooo many of you messaged me that you were gonna start using it! I love that friendly energy! You guys are so wholesome. I adore you for it.

Maybe you guys need to start connecting in my comments section. OMG let me be your friendship router. Dude, I love that. That’s Sally Whoever life goals.

Okay, anyway, I just feel like I really gotta make sure you guys know that your love was not unnoticed by me. I feel really grateful for this collection of special people who just kinda jumped out last week.

It’s been a really weird year, we need to give each other flowers while we can still smell em. So. Here is a virtual bouquet from me. Thank you. Love you all.

Alright and you know, big thanks to everyone who shared your first ever screen names with me. I gotta say...our generation is weird as hell. I love us.

Some of you guys were not as dramatic as I was growing up. Some of your screen names were so simple! Straight up like cute, “tiedyesocks,” that’s from my girl Roci, “kpmangoes,” “Tropicanna 007,” I mean, although actually I will say that, after talking with the owner of that handle, it may have like turned into a coping mechanism in some way. So, let’s just say, we were a weird generation.

After my first - which was made by my mom, and I will get to that in a second, all of my handles were like really sad, like I think there was one that was like, “Take Your Meds,” and there was an “OGBlueBaby, ”okay but that one is sad but also kind of gangster so I still like it. Some of you though definitely gave me those same #sadbaby emo, vibes which I appreciated. I am looking at you “haveubeenused” and “alltrumanifesto.” We were meant to be friends. 

Also a LOT of us are like….hyper-aware that our first screen names were....what’s the best way to say this? We were just like asking to be kidnapping victims? Jess in Youngstown, Ohio, she said she was “LilDuckie87” which in 2000 was like saying “Hi I’m 11, please abduct me.” I don’t think our parents knew enough about the internet to screen this shit for us. I think we all know that now as parents in this day and age we would NEVER let our kids put their birth year in their usernames or anything that would like allude to them being children.

I guess that sort of brings me to my first username. My family got the internet really early, probably in 93 or 94. Maybe that’s not early or maybe it was the norm? I don’t know, it felt early. I know that I was the first kid on the block with AOL.

My dad was or still is like techy-gear conscious to A FAULT so he’s always stayed pretty up to date as far as that stuff goes. I remember having a DVD player suuuper early and like my dad was so eager to get it installed that he did it THE DAY he had shoulder surgery. He had painkillers ON BOARD, he set up like a ramp system in our living room. He used it to like help lift a new TV and DVD player in place. Even as a kid, I remember watching him do it and be like, “oh damn, this is like a source of pride for him.”

Anyway, when I was 6 or 7 and my parents had just got back from a resort vacation in like DR or Mexico, my bad, I don’t remember which exactly, and in true white suburban mom fashion, my mom was really excited to “share” the *culture* she had acquired and okay, this is some real colonizer shit, I am super aware of that— she set up my first screen name on AOL as “chicita” as in...Spanish for “little girl,” chicita.

But like, worst of all, chicita was spelled with a C instead of a “Q U” but because she didn’t know the language or the spelling difference, and I lived in a small, very Finnish (as in like descendants of Finland) town at the time, so I don’t think there was anyone there who would or could have noticed?

I did change it as soon as I kind of woke up to the fact that a) this was kind of a shady name for me, like this little white girl to have, b) i took a summer Spanish camp and quickly realized this screen name read aloud like “chisita” and perhaps most importantly c) uhhhhh…..pedophiles. It’s not good to tell the world you’re a LITERAL LITTLE GIRL like when you’re just hanging out on the prairies of the world wide web. Okay? I just don’t think our parents knew to watch out for this kind of stuff. They didn’t grow up with internet; they were too busy checking our Halloween candy for razor blades and being worried we’d be indoctrinated into Satanic Cults.

Little did they know we were out there getting wild on the internet. I mean I know I was, just...I was bad. Honest to God, my friends and I were TERRIBLE online. We were ordering “free” shit, which our parents would later be invoiced for, oops, doing pranks emails, Age Sex Locationing all over the chat rooms.

We were acting crazy on that thing. Dude, I was cat-fishing  DAILY. Always like a 16-year-old girl because that’s what a pre-teen thinks is like the Golden age, you know, you get your license. You know, I’d always be like “Oh yeah I live in some posh sounding country and definitely not a like this tiny town in Michigan.

I was having a wild good time and yeah, I saw some horrible terrible stuff way too early that has likely scarred me in some way but uh I guess accepted that as the risk of surfing the mysterious waves of the World Wide Web. No risk, no reward, am I right?

Okay, Mixing up my metaphors here but the internet in the late 90s was like the wild west and I was a 7-year-old rhinestone cowboy. I was out there breaking hearts, taking names. I had a LIST of internet boyfriends who I would ghost basically immediately and was kinda ready to destroy the e-reputation of anyone on my WANTED list because I was THE baddest bitch in the “I love kittens” chat room, okay?

Oh god, yikes, what the hell. That sounds so terrible. Please kids, be safe online. Stuff is crazy out there. Don’t get into trouble. I think today’s kids are smarter but, who knows.

Jesus Christ, I swear to God, I’m gonna talk about more than the internet on these shows but like Lordy, we live here now! This is the least going out I’ve done since my last super controlling relationship—that’s not a joke, that’s just the truth. We never leave the house because there is nothing to do...you know there is something going on, I guess. Anyway, we used to make away messages but now we just ignore texts because we are ALWAYS here.

Ok, let’s actually stop and talk about the music because that’s like, the reason I’m here, or at least part of it. I’m gonna play a track you that you could say is a Christmas song but also I kinda refuse to accept that jingle bells are only allowed in December. Plus I have it on good authority that the year this was released people were still playing it in July, okay? I was a child so I’m not going to take a stance on that one. But I will say that my big sis, Sonora, aka Mecca, aka DJ Diosa Dynamite, and my dear fellow bruja, see just throwing in some other Spanish for you guys, oh my God, someone stop me, Oh my God. Okay, anyway, she said, “Listen. It’s a Christmas song, but we can still enjoy it all year long. She’s like “THE FIRST WORDS of the song are... ‘It’s beginning to look a lot like….”

Okay, does that give it away? I am talking about Outkast’s Player’s Ball, of course. I’m gonna play the reprised dirty radio version which definitely tones down the holiday cheer but still has some like Ho Ho Ho action.

Okay, I’m just getting ridiculous now, it’s time to wrap this up. Let’s play some music. All vinyl records, gonna get a little weird, but I’ll start you off easy. Don’t wanna scare anybody away just yet. 

Shout out to Dan from Deep Tenor City who reminded me to check back in and say peace out when I end it. So, you’ll be hearing from me again in a few. Let’s do this. 

Okay, well, RIP DOOM, that one I think for many of us hit hard. Three months later and we’re still kind of mourning. We’re still working through that ourselves I think, um luckily there is hopefully like a lot of his stuff still out there that we haven’t got to hear yet. You know, a lot of these more prolific performers definitely do have backlogged songs and lyrics and works so maybe we’ll be lucky but if not, we just have to kinda look at those moments we’ve had with his music in the meantime, you know. 

I know that one of those circumstances for me is that I look back at this party, it was at Marble Bar in 2019, Marble Bar is here in Detroit. It was a Stones Throw Records party with Peanut Butter Wolf, J Rocc, Dez Andrés on the ones and twos, like a stacked magical night. It was so good.

It was at that party that I met one of my first Detroit pals, Gabe Wilk, who is a seriously brilliant musician and producer, I’ll put his BandCamp link up on the blog today, but I met him at this party and we sort of instantly hit it off as like two music nerds just like zoning out on the dance floor. Transfixed, but like everyone who was there, was there for the music it seemed. You know, sometimes how you go to parties and people are like bumping around, it’s crazy, there’s rude people...this was not one of those parties. Everyone was there because they were really like nerding out about how good the lineup was. 

Every single song was a BANGER that night, they projected 90s music videos on the walls, Steve Arrigton from Slave came out, kind of randomly and in like a very sublime way, and performed live...it was a ridiculously good time. It was just one thing after another. I do have a playlist from that night somewhere, I’ll throw that up online too.

Anyway, we’re just dancing heavy, sweating it out, and then suddenly the lights got dimmer, and like flashing and kind of ominous and that’s when they dropped MF DOOM’s “Accordion,” and when I say dropped, it loud as FUCK. It shook, you know? You could feel it.

Gabe and I like whipped our hands around and looked at each other like “Holy shit! Do you hear this? They’re playing According!” We were both looking to eachother like, we didn’t know eachother but we recognized that we were both like super fucking excited that this song was being played and it was just one of those musical “moments.” Anyone who really loves music or like is I think involved in anyway in music, they know like these moments in their life when they’ve really felt moved by sound and by musical circumstances, so that was definitely one for me.

Like here I am in Detroit, I had maybe moved there like six months before. You know, from New York and trying to see if the scene was gonna be good here, and I feel like that was the moment I was like, “The scene’s not just gonna be good in Detroit, the music scene is gonna be better.” And that’s just my opinion, but I remember after going to the party being like, “Damn, Detroit has it going on.” 

And so we just kind of connected instantly, like hell yes, they’re playing this song, we both instantly recognized the track, it was just really like moving. And I think that DOOM just had that way with his shit. I think there is like a universal strangeness that so many of us, especially those of us who maybe feel like we’ve got a really misunderstood side, and I think that’s all of us. I think a lot of us feel this way. So I think that because DOOM was able to kinda tap into that strange misunderstood feeling in all of us, he was really able to touch a lot of us in that fashion. So yeah.

DOOM was the GOAT, what else can I say. 

Oof, so yeah. RIP MF DOOM, man. I could go on, RIP...

It’s just a strange and very villian-y way to go out. I mean DOOM really did say he wanted to control the narrative with the mask, the persona in general, and I feel like us getting no real answers even three months after the date of his transition ….well it’s just really a Doom way to go out and I don’t know if that was the intention and none of us necessarily know but, I mean, it felt right?

Anyway, I just hope he and his family are at peace and that’s all we can ask for. 

Alright, well, okay, everybody. I hope you enjoyed that, I hope you have an exceptionally great weekend and a great week after that. Thank you so much for joining me, I appreciate every single one of you. Honestly truly, appreciate you. Thank you so much for joining me here on Sally Whoever Does Whatever, you’re the best. 

You can find episode transcripts plus extras over on the SWDW Blog. Link is in my bio on Instagram, head over there and give me a follow and a share if you would be so kind. I would totally appreciate it. @sally.whoever is the handle.

Okay, Adios, friends.