What I'm spinning on the way to the drag show tonight

WE'RE DROPPING WEEKLY PLAYLISTS NOW

So after I made the perfect Brian Wilson mixtape, I got a lot of demand from the public and my producers (aka my handlers, Missy and Ryan Long) to make weekly 80 minute playlists. I love making playlists. For those not in the know, I was a DJ on WLCA from 2007-2010. I even had a morning show called The Wake Up Call with Jon and Snix.

Anyway, I have certain rules about playlists. They must flow. They must be surprising. They cannot repeat artists (with some exceptions). I don’t put bands with the same members — especially vocalists — too close together (with some exceptions). I was raised in the era of burnt CDs, so I make them 80 minutes to vibe with the constraints of the early-to-mid 2000s.

So, I decided this week, I would share my hype mix for the drag show tonight in Grafton. Like every other sort of playlist I make, it’s subversive. Your expectations for a hype mix probably make you think it’s going to be a bunch of high-energy songs you’d normally hear at a drag show. You wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, but you wouldn’t be right either.

Even with my hype mixes, I demand variety. If I was bopping high-energy shit for more than an hour, I’d have a migraine. This is the shit that will accompany me getting ready, pre-gaming, getting into my 1989 Ford LTD Crown Victoria, and cruising up the Great River Road. It has some lulls. It needs some lulls.

So, here is the playlist:

Yeah, those in the know understand. They take one look at this thing, nod, and say “yeah, that’s a he/him genderqueer aging hipster driving an old car up the Great River Road to a drag show playlist.” But there’s probably only one of you, and it’s my wife, and she already loves this shit. She’s queer as hell and has ADHD. If you know, you get it. If not, it’s too hard to explain why those are credentials, so let’s move along.

Obviously, the first song has to get the motor running. Motors may run on gasoline, diesel, and batteries, but they especially run on 1970s classic rock. Mississippi Queen by Mountain is a god-tier rock song. Also, as the event is called Majesty on the Mississippi, a nod to the great river plays well into the theme.

But it’s not queer. So the next song has to be hype and queer.

Enter G.L.O.S.S. (Girls Living Outside of Society’s Shit). Gloss is a trans-fronted feminist hardcore band. They hail from Olympia, Washington (the home of the 90s grunge scene). They dropped an EP that goes absolutely hard as fuck, got offered $50,000 from Epitaph records, and turned it down because they didn’t want to funnel more money to evil corporations. Epitaph is a branch of Warner Bros. It doesn’t get more evil than that without iconic mouse ears.

So we’re at track three and you have no idea what the hell it means. Most of you don’t read Japanese. I don’t read Japanese. The album cover has anime tiddies. You must wonder what sort of shit I get up to. To answer — I get up to insane early 2000s femme-fronted Japanese jazzy prog punky hardcore. The band is called Midori, and they performed in school uniforms and would climb speakers and crowd surf. The juxtaposition between the girlish J-Pop and the insanely hard instrumentals is like smoking crack for my ears.

Now we get to a block of three hyperpop/cringe bops. This is what the weird girlies listen to with the fun queers. To start the block, we gotta get local. 100 gecs is a polarizing group from St. Louis. Dumbest Girl Alive is a real standout from their sophomore album featuring the vocals of Laura Les, who is a dynamo in her own right. This is followed by Charli xcx’s Vroom Vroom. You’ve heard it. Trust me.

If you haven’t heard of bbno$ (pronounced “baby no money”), then you are missing out on peak gender envy. It’s impossible to see a man embrace that much cringe happily and not reexamine your own social anxiety. His track check is a fucking earworm with its God damned hooks and sampling of Low Rider by War.

At this point, we’re groovin’. We’re already having a good time. We’re rolling a later joint. We’re thinking of hot Grafton babes. We can set the cruise control.

Watch this video. You’ll get it. The same is true of literally every Alex Cameron song. Any of them could have filled that slot, but the chorus of “far from born again; she’s doin porn again,” has been in my head all week, and I needed to incorporate it somehow.

Around this time in the playlist, I start thinking about Grafton and fried fish, so I had to go cuntry (because it must still serve). Limp Wrist & a Steady Hand is peak gay country. However, Lavender Country walked so My Gay Banjo could medley. Dropping in the 1970s as the first gay-themed country album in known history, Lavender Country is a cornerstone of gay history. This knowledge should be up there with the knowledge folk singer Dave Von Ronk fought cops at Stonewall.

Obviously those bops got me in my feels, so I had to throw down some of my driving to the St. Louis Loop in 2009 queer indie faves — NYC-based Magnetic Fields and Swedish Jens Lekman.

FEELS OVER. CORY, YOU’RE GOING TO A DRAG SHOW, GET OUT OF YOUR FEELS!

Fine! I’ll throw down a four-play of some solid 80s dance mixes. You know these songs, you love them. It’s gonna take all eight minutes of the full-length I Feel Love by Donna Summers to get out of them feels. You may not recognize London Boys, because they died tragically in a car wreck before they found fame outside Europe. However, this song doesn’t do them the justice of the extended video edit of this song.

Everyone knows the amazing out bisexual crooner, Frank Ocean, and his love song about a man, Forrest Gump, but not enough people know about Kwamie Liv. I discovered her on DatPiff, which is also where I first found Frank Ocean (and Chance the Rapper and Flatbush Zombies). The duet she does with Detroit-born Angel Haze is fucking brilliant. This video is also beautifully animated and really hits with the music. It’s downright haunting.

Sodom & Gomorrah by genderfluid icon Dorian Electra follows to get me back into the game. Obviously, I am prone to hopeless romantic flights of fancy within my own mixtapes. I cannot help it. I am such a loverboy. So, I gotta let Dorian Electra get nasty with it.

SOPHIE, God rest her beautiful soul, worked with almost everyone in the industry as a producer and beatmaker while also pioneering hyperpop in her own right. Faceshopping is probably my favorite work of hers, and it definitely helps me get into the correct headspace for tonight. She was also a trans icon, and unfortunately died in Greece in 2021 at 34 from a tragic fall. She will be greatly missed, and music will not be the same without her.

For the final track, I thought of what my favorite song to drive westward on the Great River Road toward a beautiful sunset it, and the answer is surprisingly easy. It’s Kerosene by the beautifully nonbinary and surreal artist Yves Tumor. Their work reminds me of what would happen if Prince had spoken at length to the DMT elves that dictate reality with their weird little songs.

Anyway, whether you have exquisite enough taste to enjoy my works or not, I hope to see you tonight at Grafton’s first ever drag show. It promises to be a historic evening and a revolutionary act. Show up and support something this cool. The support is needed and valued. It will be at 3rd Chute tonight at 8 p.m. It’s free to enter, but buy me drinks.