Category: Live Music

Writer’s Note: This article was originally published for another journal. It’s shared here, to continue celebrating the artists who have inspired me so much. This show was easily one of my favorites of the year, and my article about it entirely changed how I write about music. I realized I didn’t want to write reviews; I wanted to write about life. Anyway. I hope you like it.

The set list is written on paper towels. The books I just bought are leaning against the speaker, itself a six foot monolith reminding me that I forgot my ear plugs. The drums won’t stay where they were put. And a rug just crowdsurfed past me.

It’s a Tuesday night, and I’m at Pilsen Community Book Store.

The past week has been rough for us, y’all. Twice, we’ve had undisciplined, insecure men pass our house and scream homophobic slurs and threats at us. This past week was also mine and Folky’s “un-aversarry”, the yearly countdown until our wedding. We took the opportunity to get out and enjoy ourselves, only to be witness to someone else being called a slur.

The upside is, I now have a counter on my phone’s home screen for “days since I last punched a queerphobe”, and I can’t wait to reset it. My grandfathers didn’t shoot nazis just for me to let them walk comfortably on American soil, you know?

Anyway. Pilsen Community Book Store. If you’ve never been, and you’re not getting ready to send me flame mail for decking a homophobe, then I recommend making the trip. Tucked on the city’s lower west side, Pilsen is steeped in history, art, and culture, and PCBS is a microcosm of that. While most bookstores strive to carry “something for everyone”, this one caters specifically to the consciously curious. Stocked floor to ceiling (literally) with books on queer history and health, the ongoing injustices our BIPOC siblings face, the broken American prison system, the environment, anarchist and socialist political theory, feminism, and much more, PCBS may not have “something for everyone”, but if you have even a faint interest in learning about the world around you, or more specifically, the people within it, you are almost certain to find something that speaks to you. Personally, I left with two books on queer history; when the present fight is too hard to face head-on, I find that it helps to remember the battles of the past that we have withstood, every single time, to remind myself that we will outlive this, too.

Being indirectly involved in the Chicago music scene (a fancy way of saying “my friend is the DJ”), the majority of the shows I cover are ones I picked. Folky and I have different tastes in music; while I’m more into industrial, phonk, and the like, he leans heavily into hip hop and folk (where his nickname comes from). Where we meet is punk, before once again branching at the spot where folk punk and post-punk meet. To be honest, I did not think there would be a day where I needed to write about a folk punk show. I have frequently (and playfully) hassled Folky over his love for folk punk. It’s the only genre that sounds worse when recorded with better equipment, like some terrible musical poltergeist. Maybe just leave it alone, you know? It wasn’t meant to be heard like that. But this show didn’t just speak to me, it grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me until I was ready to listen.

Trans femme fronted and Washington based, Pigeon Pit initially caught my attention with their track Soup For My Family. Darkly humorous and as in your face as a can of Campbell’s to the cranium, Soup For My Family introduced my partner to what would quickly become one of his favorite folk punk acts. True to the soul of punk, Pigeon Pit operate on a hair thin margin, so we rarely see them here in Chicago. Their last trip here was marred by transphobic comments and rudeness, so I’m relieved that this show was in a much more friendly environment.

So much so that when a fiddle “went out of tune during the transition”, there was a chuckle from everyone and nods of recognition passed through the audience. If you know, you know, as they say.

When interviewed about their 2017 album, Treehouse, Pigeon Pit’s Lomes Oleander shared where she was at the time: newly out, carrying the grief of losing a friend, being 21 and staring down an uncertain future. ”I buried myself in the people who got me through. This is my journal from that time.“

In Chicago, years later, when the lyrics to a song dedicated to “all the trans motherfuckers” escaped Lomes for a moment, the crowd filled in immediately, and she picked it up from there. Something in that exchange felt special, and it took me a little reflection to understand why. Is that not the queer experience, summed up in one interaction between artist and crowd? Our strength is in our unity and our willingness- no, our ravenous need, to uplift and help each other. We endure, not because any benevolent overlord gave us permission but because we simply refuse to do anything else.

My good friend Sam, himself a folk musician, once told me about a conversation he had with a friend of his. Sam’s friend asked why trans people “need to be so loud about it”. Sam, a battle-tested comrade who will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with queerfolk, replied “they’re fighting for their rights while politicians are trying to ban their existence, they have to be loud about it.” Blessedly, his friend realized this for the reasonable response it was, and has since dropped the issue entirely.

If someone had asked me why queerfolk are so loud about our rights, I don’t know that I could have worded it so succinctly. Are we even that loud? Is our existence and our taking up as much space as anyone else really that noticeable? Maybe. Or maybe our refusal to stay in the margins is the dramaticized problem for those who are inconvenienced by our existence, and no amount of noise we make will ever be acceptable.

So to be in a place where I look around and am surrounded by people just like me, where every single person is looking out for every other person there, where I am not a minority but just another homosexual at a show, where I can safely rest my head on my partner’s shoulder for a moment without having to check my surroundings for someone who might make a scene about it… To be in a place where we are, literally, loud. Among my people, a community built on queer joy and queer love, all releasing their pain and rage in a mosh pit while also caring so deeply for every stranger in that place, letting no one fall and letting no one leave feeling like they weren’t part of something, if only for a night.

When we’re faced with terrorism, when people try to take away our sense of safety and peace, to threaten our rights, it’s hard to stand and fight and feel like you belong anymore. It took a group of country-style badasses from Washington to remind me that the only way we lose is if we surrender.

So say what you will about how folk punk sounds terrible (it does), but it’s as punk as it gets. DIY and unpolished, no one is asking for more monitor and no one is arguing with a sound booth or a lighting guy. It’s just a band, on the floor of a book shop, barely containing their drums and embracing fully their refusal to contain their rage, their grief, and their demand for a better tomorrow.

I won’t explain the rug, though, that’s your mystery to deal with. Come find me at a show and ask, I might even remember how the rug got there in the first place.