DON'T WORRY, BABY

DON'T WORRY, BABY

GREETINGS FROM DETROIT

Parenting tips and a scene report from a local moron

Joe Casey

I have a baby now. I’m thinking as I write this on the couch next to that little colicky version of myself and my wife mushed together that it might have been a bad idea. It’s 5 a.m. on March 7, 2025, and I’m expecting the news of the day on the state of the country to be worse than the day before since yesterday’s news was just a tad shittier than what preceded it. I’m sure no period of history was ever truly the “perfect” time to have a kid. No matter how much fun the Little Rascals made the Great Depression look, every age has its own miseries and deprivation. Hell, even if the fruit of my loins wasn’t born at the very moment the American experiment died writhing in the gutter but instead came into existence a couple years ago, back when America was shitting blood, sure, but insisted it just needed to “lay off the party drugs and eat something green,” my sweet little offspring would still have had a tough road ahead. Its handsome father is but a simple singer in a mid-tier Midwest rock band and a lowly writer for CREEM. Their first words will be “Hey, mister, can you spare a dime?” Their second words will probably be some variation of “Gimme the money and nobody gets hurt.” I swear, if there’s ever The Little Rascals: The Next Generation (and, of course, there will be), please let them consider my infant for a role. It loves to perform, can be rigorously trained, works long hours, and has a father/manager who is as unscrupulous as he is poor. We just need to save enough money to buy a dinghy that can make it across the Detroit River to Canada when the time comes.

But in all seriousness, the kid should be fine. It can probably swim to Canada if things get too dicey. It’s me I’m worried about! You see, this whole “having a child" thing to “create love” or “find meaning and purpose in existence” is all well and good, but do you remember me listing off my jobs in the previous paragraph? Those are cool jobs! Those are the kinds of jobs where you gotta be on the razor’s edge, forever young, with your finger on the pulse of every tomorrow. You can’t do that when you’re stuck at home changing diapers all day because you’re the one in the marriage with the cool job. “Cool” means “unprofitable, scanty, childish" in this scenario. What is a cool guy like me to do?

Before we go any further, I promise right here in print that the next album is not going to be all about having a baby and how that changed my perspective. I won’t try to write some saccharine father anthem or put my kid in danger just so I can make “Tears in Heaven 2,” no matter how profitable that would be. I can’t guarantee my experiences with the sprog won’t seep into the lyrics at some point. I’ll just have to obscure it a bit, say change “baby” to “jittering, fang-mawed monster of capitalism” or “diaper blowouts" to “fecund sores in the landlord’s mouth.” Easy!

Truth be told, the band can probably survive a birth or two. We’ve broken through far more difficult roadblocks in our career. Try as they might, babies offer but scant resistance to a fully loaded tour van going at top speed. It’s simple science! No, economics, burnout, and the old bugbear of “creative differences” are far more pressing to the health of a band. Tours will have to become shorter, but that would help alleviate burnout, so that’s a bonus. Money was always tight, yet having a lot of time to stay at home when not touring saves money on child care, so that’s not too bad either. All that needs to happen now is for one of the other guys in the band to agree to let me push one of their toddlers out a window so we can write a megahit about the tragedy, and that’ll solve all our “creative differences” real quick. Yep, nothing is going to stop Protomartyr...not a goddamned thing.

I worry the most about how this child will affect my ability to bring you, dear reader, the most up-to-date reportage on the state of Detroit rock ’n’ roll. It was hard enough keeping up on the new bands as an aging scenester. You don’t get the invite to the cool basement punk show after reaching the age of the parents of the band in said basement. My mere appearance screams “Narc!” It certainly doesn’t help that I look like an extremely anti-Irish cartoonist from the 1920s’ rendition of a jowly, drunk beat cop. ’Tis sad but true. That’s even if my elderly body could take going to late Thursday-night shows, when I’d probably rather stay home and watch the new, hip Matlock. That’s just it, I love raging against time and lethargy, to force myself to broaden my horizons while waving off the tinnitus and fatigue. That I can vainly fight against. Fighting a baby? I’m pretty sure that’s illegal in Michigan.

So I sit here, couch-and baby-bound, missing out. But you shouldn’t be deprived of new music in Detroit just because of my inability to pull out. I can’t be at the barriers or down in the pit until this kid at least takes solid food. Honestly, even if I didn’t have a baby, I wouldn’t be caught dead “down in the pit”—it smells there and it’s full of lame dudes. Come to think of it, there’s terrible sound at the barrier, so I wouldn’t make a habit of seeing a show from there, either. Plus you have to show up too early. Okay, let’s just say my presence in the general vicinity of a rock show has been curtailed by this inheritor of my faulty genes, at least for a little while. But there is another way. I can live vicariously where all my other fellow homebound losers and creeps congregate: the internet.

This past March, Hamtramck, the little city within Detroit I’ve rhapsodized about in a previous column, had the Blowout festival. The Hamtramck Blowout has been running off and on since the late ’90s in some form. The early years boasted names like the White Stripes and Eminem before their fame, and the festival runs pretty much the same as it did back then: too many bands at too many venues when it’s still too cold to wander the streets unless you’re good and liquored up. This year there were a purported 220 acts over three days in 26 venues. Since I was babified and homebound, I figured it was my journalistic duty to comb through the band list online and compile a top five that might interest the typical CREEM reader. Let me be clear, there was a good amount of suck to wade through—too many bands that sound like wet Birkenstocks smell, mewly singer-songwriters, garage bands that should close the door and keep the car running, and groups with names so goofy I couldn’t even bother. Sorry, Fangs and Twang. To make the list they had to (1) have a Bandcamp page with more than one song, (2) be a band I have not seen before, and (3) give off that indefinable aura that they’ll be around for a little while or at least until this issue gets published. So with that out of the way...

TOP FIVE NEW TO ME BANDS IN DETROIT

(AND SURROUNDING AREAS)

2025*

FEN FEN

I’ve clocked their name on flyers across town for a couple years now but have never been lucky(?) enough to see them. Two types of bands seem to have flourished at the Blowout and the wider world recently: hardcore and fuzz. Fen Fen seem to have crossbred those styles in a truly dumb, fun way. If you know me, you know I’m unable to stomach hardcore unless it’s utterly moronic. So if I told you Fen Fen had a Stooges-esque plodder called “I Wanna Meet Your Dog,” you know why they’re here.

SAME EYES

It just feels right that a band that channels the sophisticated sound of’80s European synth-pop would hail from the fancy, tree-lined, collegiate streets of Ann Arbor. Oftentimes this kind of thing falls flat with ill-considered spacklings of keyboard or a singer too enamored with sounding like his nose is jam-packed full of toffee. From the ample evidence on Bandcamp, Same Eyes avoid those pitfalls while crafting something interesting out of the synth and the head-cold school of songwriting.

ZEM

An insider tip for these big, multi-venue festivals I’ve learned from experience is that the promoters try to lump like-minded groups together in places that sort of make sense (singer-writers at a coffee shop, DJs at a dance club, etc.). So seeing ZEM listed alongside bands I’ve seen before (Wild Shape, Double Winter) at the famously ramshackle Painted Lady bar had my attention. Their Bandcamp has only a split single and some demos, all endearingly sloppy garage rock. But would Detroit even be Detroit if there weren’t some new fun band drunkenly reanimating that corpse? I’d say no, so three cheers for ZEM.

ORIGAMI PHASE

The kids these days seem to really love their shoegaze. Or is it dream pop? Either way, I haven’t really cottoned to this new, TikTok-fueled version. It strikes me as all too surface and rizzed up. Shoegaze should be made by dorks. I don’t know if Origami Phase are dorks, but their music has the hermetic attention to detail and the ambiance of a moth-eaten sweater that smells of clove cigarettes that the old dork masters possessed. Also, not for nothing, Origami Phase is the most shoegazey/dorky name possible. Good for them.

SLIZZ

I don’t know anything about Slizz, and that’s what I like about them. They kinda sound a little power pop, yet the guitars ooze just a bit too darkly. Their songs have surprising little sharp edges where hooks should be. They have cool artwork on their Bandcamp releases. There’s not a lot to worry about here, sometimes good bands just exist.

I hope to someday see these bands in the flesh. When my child grows up, I hope it appreciates what I had to do to earn some cash and keep it fed. I hope it reckons with all I sacrificed: the thousand nights I could have been wedged by a terrible-sounding PA in a local dive listening to some local amateurs rewrite “Louie Louie” for the billionth time. Instead, I’m stuck at home. Perhaps it’ll shed a tear.

Wear a condom, folks!

who played the Hamtramck Blowout. In no particular order.