From the Bookshelf of Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge…

there was no one I could really save but myself ... That's what I mean when I say Sleater Kinney was my rescue and salvation: It was the first time I felt I could be vulnerable in my creativity, in which the emotional and psychic stakes were neither futile nor self-annihilating. That unlit firecracker I carried around inside me in my youth, eager to ignite it at the slightest provocation, to detonate my whole being and fill the room in glowing spectacle, found a home in music.

there was no one I could really save but myself ... That's what I mean when I say Sleater Kinney was my rescue and salvation: It was the first time I felt I could be vulnerable in my creativity, in which the emotional and psychic stakes were neither futile nor self-annihilating. That unlit firecracker I carried around inside me in my youth, eager to ignite it at the slightest provocation, to detonate my whole being and fill the room in glowing spectacle, found a home in music.

Yet there is much music that survives de-and recontextualization and that needs no experiential reference point. In this case, the role of the fan is still to be a participant, and to participate is to grant yourself permission to immerse, to willingly, gladly, efface and subsume yourself for the sake of the larger meaning but also to provide meaning. It’s symbiotic.