Gina Harris's Blog, page 135

Band Review: Steven Battelle

Steven Battelle, recently of LostAlone, is a singer, musician, and songwriter who released his first solo album, Exit Brain Left,  this year. I am reviewing him after he was recommended by Ray Toro.
Initially my favorite track was "Steven Battelle", with its captivating beat and almost island feel. It was the first time I had seen a musician have a song with their own name, but LostAlone did have an eponymous song as well.
Things started coming together when I found the lyrics. Referencing fear, and enduring despite it, having the music sound so optimistic makes the song a celebration of life. Having it named after Battelle himself makes it deeply personal. This is his triumph.
Except it is only track 3. It comes after "Powers of Denial" and "The Jump", but then there is still much to come, with the final track being "I'm Still Finding out Who I'm Going to Be".
That's more realistic. As freeing as it can be to move forward in one part of your life (like spending time as a solo artist), and as much as there are moments of euphoria along the way, then there are new challenges, and new needs to silence doubts and gather courage. As much as you learn who you are, there can be many facets of that identity left to explore.
That resonated with me personally. I don't claim a perfect understanding - I don't even want to speculate about how "A Christmas Cartel" fits in - but it makes me want to wish Battelle well on his journey. Given that, it feels like this could be a good album for people working on self-discovery or pondering life changes.
For LostAlone fans, you will probably find the album more experimental (and in some ways more intimate) than the band working together, but for all of their tracks with musical layers building together in majestic strength, they had a lot of songs that explored different types of sound as well.
"Steven Battelle" is still a favorite, but "Nine Miles of Light" has a similar feeling of inspiration, "The Ocean Chorus" has a kind of dreamy beauty, and I think you will enjoy the hard guitar in "Last Night on Earth".
http://stevenbattelle.co.uk/
https://www.facebook.com/StevenBattelleOfficial/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8E2g_e4EVPXEBeOTXr-dwQ
https://twitter.com/StevenJBattelle

Open

I talk to the same friend from yesterday pretty regularly. Recently we were talking about me learning to drive again, with her offering to help. One thing I have learned, which she confirmed, is that horrible discomfort and fear I felt then is normal, where most people still feel that way until a while after they have their license.
I know that now, but then I thought it was something wrong with me, and I said it was always easy for me to think that I was worse than everyone else. She said that was odd, because there are very few things I do worse than other people.
I know what she meant. I am competent in a lot of ways. Maybe I over-analyze, but I do figure things out that way. I still feel like there are things wrong with me that are not wrong with everyone else.
It does go back to that time. Why was I the one they picked on out of everyone else available? Was I the only one that would be a total joke? That's what it felt like. I am not impressed by the theory that the secretly wanted me, but it does seem feasible that the insecure base I was built on drew them to me. The last time I was groped, I was having a really insecure night; perhaps predators sense weakness.
If that insecurity that I carried into grade school and junior high with me made me a more attractive target, it also made it take a heavier toll. I don't think we should need extra reasons to be kind, or to not go out of our way to be cruel, but okay, here is one: You don't know the background against which your victim is hearing that "teasing".
What I heard was that I could never be loved, and it was against the background of being fat. In one way it was like the playground attack before - I did not understand that accepting abuse for a place in the circle was an option; I thought I was just out. It was different in that I was able to open myself up to friendship again. Romantically, I couldn't.
I don't know if that's because I was older, or I simply got lucky with friendship. It may just be that I handled the later event wrong. I compartmentalized in a big way. I cut off the romantic part of myself, and taking away the impossible part allowed me to function in other ways.
I'm not saying I did a great job of it. I would have stormy weekends about twice a year where I would just hate my family for not being there for me, or even really loving me. There were ways in which they could have been more supportive, but this was not their problem. I was a lot less open and trusting (which, incidentally, can make it hard for other people to know that their support is needed or how it is needed).
And I still liked boys all the time. But they couldn't like me back, so I couldn't like them that way. I became a very helpful person, assisting with homework and volunteering to decorate for dances and managing sports teams. It was gratifying, but I wasn't letting myself be a full person. It would have been perfectly normal to like boys, if I could have been a normal and acceptable girl. I was so sure I wasn't.
I am not completely sure now. Sometimes there were things that happened that were kind of like flirting, but it had to be just teasing, because no boy would ever see me that way. No boy actually asked me out, anyway. Maybe the sturdy walls were a problem, but there seemed to be plenty of corroboration that I was pathologically unattractive. So even when I was in love, I didn't say it.
That seemed like the only viable option. When I did let my guard down, thinking that I could love someone who could love me back, and finding out that I was horribly, horribly wrong, the only thing I wanted for six months was death. That I could have years ahead of that kind of emptiness and loneliness felt unbearable.
Except that I eventually pulled out of that, and I gained a greater perspective on what I had been doing wrong, and how I had let people I didn't even like define me. It was a step in healing.
So maybe if at some point I had taken a chance, and told Mike or O.B. "I love you", maybe they would have broken my heart, but maybe I would have healed then, and moved on, and become a normal relationship having person.
It seems equally possible that if I had entered a relationship at some point I would have been overly clingy or defensive or hurt him with sarcasm or done something else wrong, but then maybe I would have been less wrong the next time. I don't know; I only have now.
But the one thing that is very clear now is that if I want to be cherished - if when I am listening to myself and asking for what I need and that's the word that comes to mind - then I need to let myself be open to that.

It's 'cause he likes you

One thing that became clear in reviewing these things is that we tell children really stupid stuff.
Telling kids that if someone is picking on them they should just ignore it? That's worse than stupid.
Yeah, some bullies might get tired and move on, but a lot of them will get much worse. When their motivation is attention, withholding attention might just make them try harder. For me, they just got bolder until I lashed out.
Worse than that is the impact on the one doing the ignoring. The times when I ignored abuse are the same times that I internalized it. When I stood up for myself, I felt much better, like maybe I was worth defending. Maybe I was worth something. What I ignored, I carried around for years.
Another really wrong-headed thing we tell girls (and sometimes boys too) is that if someone is picking on you it's because he likes you.
It took me a long time to be able to talk about what happened that day. The first time I told someone, it was a counselor and I was crying. I lied to her that I understood now that it didn't really mean I couldn't be loved, because I still could not accept it, and if I told her that she would have kept going.
The second time I had trouble breathing, but I could keep from crying as long as I didn't make eye contact. Most recently, I talked about it with one of the friends who had been there.
She told me that in the summer after that, she had been hanging out with another girl and some guys, including Steve, and he propositioned her. "You know what they say about when guys pick on you..."
That seems like a terrible response. In her defense, we were talking about how impossible it is for me to feel attractive because of that, and she was pointing out that it could have happened because I was attractive.
It still doesn't make me feel attractive because it was abusive.
I have thought of that, since we talked. Maybe "What do you think?" was not a dismissal, but an opening. Then it all just seems horribly twisted.
That can fit into a larger discussion of competition and hierarchy and the need to put other people down, and it is worthwhile to have that discussion, but that's not where I'm going now.
It feels important to spend some time on that rather broad definition of "likes". The word itself has positive connotations, but we're not using it that way if we're associating it with abuse.
In that context "likes" can mean...
feels attracted to you but resents that attraction because you are not the type that he believes he should be attracted to.feels attracted to you but doesn't believe he can get you, so he resents that.feels attracted to you but has a twisted view of male/female relationship where "liking" does not provide any reason to treat with kindness or respect.wants to have sex with you, or grope you, or at least get to see your breasts, with or without your cooperation and definitely without any worries about the emotional impact on you.
But it's a compliment. Then I think about teenage girls who romanticize jealousy because it shows how passionate he is about you, as opposed to possibly being a better sign of him thinking he can and should be able to control you.
I have friends who have been beaten by men who loved them, and lied to and raped and all sorts of horrible things by men who wanted them. Some of those men were bad people, and some could have been better people with some better role models for how to treat people, and in a society that doesn't regard women as property, so yes, there is a lot of room for improvement there.
There is room for improvement in our understanding of how to win fights. Those times when I stood up for myself, I did so by being really mean. With two people who made fun of me for being fat, one I shamed for failing fifth grade, and one I told "I wouldn't talk with that face". And it was good in that these incidents didn't haunt me, but still not a great way to relate to people. The one kid was really hurt, and the other one might have been hurt underneath wanting to kill me.
I would like to have better strategies to offer. Sometimes I think maybe I should have just kept asking people "Why?", like an annoying child. It certainly wears parents down. (Why do you want me to go out with you? Why would I want to? I don't know.)
Until we get there, let's not pretend that harassment is a compliment or that abuse is cute or that the best strategy is silence. When we know that society sucks and don't know how to fix it, the answer is not to lie.

Never again

In Wednesday's post, I said I didn't know at the time how much it had affected me. It hurt too much to think about, so I couldn't know it until later. I also was not aware of the strength of the walls I put up.
It wasn't a very conscious effort. I had already known that you can never let a boy know you like him, and tried to follow that, but I got much worse - more scared, more defensive, and less aware of what was going on inside.
There was an incident that I have always remembered, but I had not connected it to this issue until recently.
Spring term of 1991, I took a football coaching class. I was completely out of my league. I learned a lot, so I don't regret it, but it was a struggle to keep up, and it's the wrong time of year for watching games and learning from them. I observed every football practice I could.
There were two ways to get there. You could take the bus, which involved a transfer and waiting for the right bus, so it took twice as long as going over the footbridge and cutting through the woods. I love walking through woods anyway, so that was the obvious choice, until this happened.
I was on my way back from practice and a guy pulled up on his bike. He struck up a conversation that started out normally enough. What classes are you taking? My response included that I was studying French.
"I know some French; voulez-vous se coucher avec moi?"
I was not familiar with the "Lady Marmalade" then, but it didn't have to be threatening. That could be a normal immature thing to say and a joke, but he started getting creepier. I was not receptive to his creepiness, and he eventually took the hint and buzzed off. Except he didn't.
It soon became obvious that with me on foot and him on a bike, he should have been disappearing much faster, and he wasn't. I waited until I was on the footbridge to test it - it's out in the open and there are always people around - but yes, when I stopped, he stopped, and he didn't start going again until I did.
I decided to go back to a different residence hall than the one I lived in, so I hung out at Carson for a while, and it seemed to work out. I don't remember ever seeing him again, even if I can't rule out that he ever saw me again. It did freak me out. I started taking the bus then, and I hated it, but when I did try the path again a few weeks later I couldn't enjoy it.
That's not why I remember it so much though. Somewhere between realizing that I was alone in the woods with a creep, and then realizing despite being in front of me he was following me, I realized there was a chance he would try something, and I knew that if he did I would not stop fighting until he was dead.
That was new for me. I have always (at least since seeing my first action film) felt ready for a fight. I think that sense of readiness has made people step back at times, and I like that. I had still never before anticipated killing someone. In that moment it felt very real.
It was rare for me to feel like I was in physical danger. Usually the danger was emotional and I was well-guarded against that, so it is the physical time that stands out. It didn't just stand out, and it practically screamed, and what it shouted was that NO ONE IS EVER GOING TO HURT ME AGAIN!
And they didn't. Not for sixteen years, when accident and coincidence caught me with my guard down. Then it nearly killed me.

Band Review: LostAlone

I have had LostAlone on my recommended list for a while now, after a mention by Frank Iero. It seemed reasonable to pair them with his review.
It remains hard to know what to say about them. They feel like a very unique band, not in that they never remind me of anyone else, but in the way that they do.
I have seen some comparisons to Queen. I don't think the sound is similar, but they impart a majesty to their music, which does correlate. I think this is best heard on "Hostages" and especially "Crusaders", which soars musically and references epic themes.
In that way, LostAlone actually reminds me more of Styx and REO Speedwagon. That is not meant pejoratively. They have a big sound, and there is some philosophical heft, but it is still comfortably rock.
That could give the band a niche - fans of melodic '70s rock that can be comfortably turned into a full-on musical should check LostAlone out - but it is the other similarities I hear that make everything so fascinating.
"Honey and Burlesque" reminds me of "Longview" by Green Day. There is a primal rhythm sometimes (like on "Telepathy Nights") that reminds me of Queens of the Stone Age. They do covers of Metallica and Darlene Love. There was even a song that reminded me of "Every Snowflake is Different", the song My Chemical Romance performed on "Yo Gabba Gabba" ("Love Will Eat You Alive").
There is also some really aggressive guitar. All over the place.
None of that is intended to make them sound unoriginal or derivative, but to point out their breadth. LostAlone can go a lot of different places, in a lot of different directions.
With all of that being found in there, it is a terrible shame that LostAlone is no longer together, apparently as a result of a restrictive and unsupportive label.
It can also be an opportunity as they work on new projects. I will be reviewing Steven Battelle next week in conjunction with Ray Toro's new album, because he recommended Battelle. I was not previously aware of the connection between Battelle and LostAlone, other than both having been recommended by MCR members, but now it's synergy.
http://www.lostalone.com/
https://www.facebook.com/lostaloneofficial/
https://www.youtube.com/user/lostalonevideos
https://twitter.com/lostalone

Album Review: Parachutes by Frank Iero and the Patience

I have gone back and forth on whether to consider this a new band or not, having already done a concert review for frnkieroandthe cellabration.
As much as I mourn the absence of HoCho and welcome the return of conventional spacing and spelling (unless "patience" actually refers to people under the medical care), I am going on the premise that the most important factor in continuity is Frank himself, and that it is reasonable to view this outing as a continuation, and evolution.
The first thing you notice is that Parachutesis much louder than Stomachaches. That might not be the right word, but there was something low-key before that is gone. You hear it right away on the opening track, "World Destroyer". (The title implies a certain aggression.)
It's not all anger. Right after "World Destroyer" you go into "Veins! Veins! Veins!" which has an exultant feel. It reminds me of "Joyriding", so there are definitely connections between the 2014 and 2016 albums, but there is still a noticeable difference.
The track that tied it together for me was "Remedy", when the word "stomachaches" jumped out at me.
Listening further, the song contains a conflict of being ruined by being fixed; the remedy is a malady, and there is no solution for the new malady. Most significantly, it ends "until you came through and made me believe I was worth being saved." The wish in "Joyriding" was "I hope I die before they save my soul".
There are many ways in which it is easier not to feel and love and hope, and yet all of the hardship together brings something better. At least it can.
Parachutes is alive with emotion. Stomachaches had feelings, but Parachutesfeels like they have all broken through and are spilling over. Everything is messy now. "Oceans" just aches, and "Miss Me" is so plaintive it's almost country. There had been a little safety reserved before, but now everything is out and open.
There is a terrifying plunge up head, and having a parachute can make that work.
http://frank-iero.com/
https://www.facebook.com/frankieromusic
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrFqjFvMcUTR9wZWByPmjDQ
https://soundcloud.com/frnkiero-1
https://twitter.com/FrankIero

What do you think?

My sisters and I once figured out we have a tendency to over-explain things, which we attribute to having a father who would always take things wrong. You had to be the bad guy in any disagreement.
I am also aware of many circumstances in my youth where I did not have the right words to understand and explain myself in a situation. It would be frustrating and it's why I write about things so much now. Realistically, those were people being toxic anyway and more concise language probably wouldn't have helped. That doesn't change my need to figure things out.
The day after the harassment and assault, I ran into Matt again. I literally have no memories of seeing any of them in school again, except once seeing Steve and the he looked really run-down - like the other person I have seen looking like that had a drug addiction spiraling out of control - but I am not even sure that they all didn't move away. However, that day I saw Matt, and I asked him something.
I don't remember exactly how I phrased it. I wanted to know if all of that meant anything. An apology could have been nice. Because his main thing had been asking me a hundred times to go steady with him, and because I had shouted "Yes" to get him to go away, it came out as mainly a question of whether we were going steady.
I may not remember how I asked, but I remember his answer really clearly: "What do you think?"
I didn't have the words to answer, but I can come up with a few now.
I think you just reinforced that no boys could ever sincerely like me. Maybe I have been afraid of that all along, but having it confirmed is tearing me apart inside. Can you please tell me I am wrong about that?
I think that I was at a table with other nerdy girls (and some others were overweight), and that you only picking on me means that somehow there was something worse about me - something less attractive and more repulsive and less eligible for any kindness, and I have never stopped believing that.
I think it's interesting that it happened on a day when we didn't have any boys at the table. Is that why it happened? If we were clearly marked as someone else's territory we could eat in peace? Some of the boys in my social group were real jerks, but if they were also protection maybe  I should have appreciated them for that.
I think it was stupid of me to say "yes" to get you to go away. I should have let the teacher handle you coming in and disrupting the room, but I was so embarrassed that I couldn't think straight. Then again, I think that it sucks that when my friends and I were laughing together that the teacher on cafeteria duty that day told us to pipe down and be considerate of other people, but that no one had a problem with what you were doing.
I think that in that school there were at least fifty boys that I thought were cute, and there were boys in my classes that were smart, and there were boys that I talked to that were nice, and there were probably even some that were all three, so I can't understand why my most significant interaction had to be with you.
I think it's pathetic that there was nothing more interesting to you that you even have time to pick on someone.
I think I'd like to know that the problem really was you, but at least one of you got married and had children, and I never did, so I'm afraid I that am the pathetic one. And I think I'm pathetic that I got so scarred from this when it meant nothing to you.
But I didn't have the words then. I didn't even know how deeply it had affected me then. I didn't figure that out until much later.
So I swallowed it up inside and tried not to think about it. I became good at sarcasm, which doesn't require any depth or understanding, but it doesn't fix anything either.

My sexual assault

There are two problems with the title.
It implies that there was only one. That's not true. This one isn't even the worst, really, though that gets us into the other problem.
I have a hard time calling it a sexual assault. I have given many excuses for that: it wasn't really that bad, it was just teasing that got out of hand, it could have been much worse. If you don't think it should be considered a sexual assault, pretty much any reason you have for it is one I have thought of and justified.
But it doesn't work. If it happened to someone else, I would not minimize it. Happening to me, it had a huge impact. It changed the way I saw myself and the world and how I interacted with the world in ways that are still issues.
I was in junior high and leaving school. It was after school had gotten out, so there was less supervision. Steve came up to me and ripped my shirt open. I assume the next stop would have been my breasts, because they were always the preferred destination. He did not get any farther, because I at least had good reflexes and kneed him right away. He laughed, but he also stopped. I snapped my shirt back up and kept going.
Usually that story focuses more on the harassment that had been happening at lunch. Jason asked me to go with him, and I ignored it, then Matt started repeating the question and wouldn't stop, following me to my next class. Steve was just egging them on at that point. The other two were there when Steve came for my shirt.
I have always focused on the verbal part because that was where the big lesson came from - if a guy is acting like he likes me, it's a joke. But there was another lesson with it, with that second part. It taught me that a guy doesn't have to like you to want to get under your shirt. It meant that the joke could be dangerous.
I think to fully deal with this, I need to refer to three conversations, and one event, so we'll be doing this tomorrow, Monday, and Tuesday as well.
The one conversation was short anyway, and it was that Jason didn't remember any of this. That was after a Facebook friend request decades later. He felt bad when I reminded him, especially because he has a daughter now, but it was not the milestone for them that it was for me.
Dealing with the legacy of that is part of any growth I hope to make, but there are several things that have me thinking of it more.
A lot of my writing about the Trump campaign focused on the racism, but there was a lot of sexism too, peaking with the release of the Access Hollywood tape. I posted on Facebook reminding people to be sensitive, because defending bragging about assault as something all guys do can be kind of hard on survivors. A lot of women liked it, some of whom I knew had personal reasons, and some of whom I found out later had those same personal reasons. I suspect that there are still more events that I don't know about.
There was also this blog post about how depression is not always strictly chemical:
http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2016/09/its-not-binary.html
I have carried some of those stories with me for a long time, but it was only putting them together that I saw the common thread: the women had all been sexually abused when young. There is an unspecified number in one group, but it's a lot.
Also there were two questions asked on Twitter by two different people, asking women about their assaults. Because they were phrased differently, they brought different things to mind. That is why I had to realize there was more than one, but it was also where I saw that they both quickly got hundreds of responses. Do you sometimes doubt those statistics about how many women get assaulted, and how many get raped? I wish they were inflated.
So the title is important. This happened and it mattered. I am acknowledging that and I am letting myself be angry about that. And I know I blogged recently about how anger isn't helpful as a long term strategy, which is still true, but it can still be important to feel and know that something is unjust. No matter who else believes in my value, I need to, and this really hurt me.

"Baby It's Cold Outside" and Consent

I will be going to a really dark place with tomorrow's post, and there will be at least a few more building on it. I didn't want to go right there without warning. Today's post is to intended to move us in that direction but give a little buffer.
I have seen arguments that "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is rape-y, and counter-arguments that at the time it was written it was clearly about a couple conspiring to flout society's rules and do what both of them wanted. Obviously the song is intended to be light-hearted, but that doesn't mean that the criticisms aren't valid.
Now I'm going to bring in a sketch from a conservative show. I'm sure I could find the clip, but I don't want to give it any recognition. They were mocking the process of teaching about consent by calling everything "rape", including a guy just asking the girl if they could have sex. Ridiculous, obviously, but also completely missing the point of what they were mocking. This happens a lot.
Here is a quote from Rush Limbaugh:
"The left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it's perfectly fine. But if the left ever senses and smells that there's no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police."
My first thought is to tell Rush that the rape police are the regular police, but given the statistics we know about reporting, prosecution, and conviction, okay. What is more to the point is how he subtly uses condemnation of immorality to sidestep the fact that if one party in the sex act doesn't want to be there, that is a problem. This happens a lot.
This is where we bring in one of the books from the Long Reading List: Slut!: Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation, by Leora Tanenbaum.
It wasn't a revelation like some of the other books. It was more that it fit into things that I already saw, though with many horrible examples to drive it home.
The slut label is a form of social control. It can be used to by men against women, but it is also used by women against women. One interesting aspect was in how many of the examples, the label came either because of a sexual assault, or because someone told a lie to get revenge. I do not accept a morality where lying for revenge and tormenting victims is superior to people choosing to have sex and then doing so. If their morality had any righteous base, there wouldn't be the double standard where behavior that is applauded in men is punished in women.
So let's go back to the hypothetical couple in the song, and assume that there is equal physical desire, but one of them is held back by social pressure concerns. This includes the anticipation of pressure from all family members. A respectful partner could listen to those concerns and address them, but the song just keeps changing the suspect. I would like a greater level of consideration from my potential partner - especially if the sacrifice is all on my side.
The song makes it all seem like a joke, and the sketch makes it all seem like a joke, but there are real issues there. Just by setting up an eternal conflict where men are expected to pursue sex and women are expected to decline the offer even though they really want it, then it becomes very easy for men to not take the "No!" seriously, and they can keep going and not feel like they did anything wrong. Hence the man may not feel like a rapist - he was just being a guy - but it is rape.
There is not always physical coercion or drugging, but often there is emotional pressure, where a woman may agree even though she doesn't want to. She may do this to preserve a relationship in which she is not respected but because she believes that is normal. She may give in because of guilt, or a feeling that she should never disappoint anyone. There can be a lot of reasons where a "no" that is not respected becomes a "yes". It does not stop the "yes" from being regretted. She let herself down. She surrendered, and put someone else above herself. This can lead to a lot of things, including self-loathing.
It was calling those situations rape that the sketch mocked, but no one is calling them rape. They still belong in a conversation about consent, because it matters. It matters for people to know that they have a right to refuse, and it matters for people to know that others have a right to refuse and that the only appropriate response to that is acceptance. If the types of confusion tend to mainly fall along specific gender lines, there's a lot of tradition that goes with that. It is not tradition that should be respected.
Some men only think about this when they have daughters, and realize that their girls' will now be in the position of all of those other girls. Their standard response is often a hyper-masculine threat to any potential evildoers, because they have guns and shovels available. It's not practical based on the many potential threats, but it also falls into the same culture. Their desire to defend their property merely perpetuates the system where a woman is only protected when she is under the protection of a specific man.
It's important to look at the system. Maybe you would never rape a woman using physical force or drugs. That is something, but then do you blame her when someone else does? Do you think she brought it on herself when maybe her first time drinking she miscalculated how much it would affect her? Do you laugh at the other dudes' stories? Do you assume she's lying because he's a "nice" guy?
Here is an article with some things to think about, even though I kind of hate how much I like some of the examples:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/how-men-are-trained-to-think-sexual-assault-no-big-deal/

Band Review: Rowdy City

On the Rowdy City Twitter account there are a lot of references to "Dope Lyrics Matter", which is a track from one of their members, Ready Rock Dee. His solo work at this time is overwhelming the Soundcloud and Youtube pages.
That is interesting to me, because based on their description the larger group has been very successful, with a lot of touring. However, one member had died, and it seems like that might have thrown off the balance.
That has made it harder to get a sense of Rowdy City, but also their music itself isn't doing it for me. The lyrics are not that dope, and songs are remarkably free of hooks. Nothing has stuck in my head the way some of Litefoot's songs - including ones I did not like - did. Even the music videos are dull.
So I can't really recommend Rowdy City as they are, but maybe what they really need is to regroup; who are they now, without HD? Is that something they want to preserve?
If they decide then to change to support for Ready Rock Dee, that can be okay, but it should be a choice and not a default.
https://soundcloud.com/RowdyCity
https://www.youtube.com/user/RowdyCityNation
https://twitter.com/RowdyCity