Outro

A lot has changed for us individually, as well as collectively since Oh! Industry launched in fall 2007. When we started Oh!, we had no idea if anyone would read or listen, so the experiment felt at once deeply private and communal. As it turns out many of you not only read and listened with care, but also talked back with words of encouragement as well as contestation. You shared thoughts that made us think harder. You traveled with us, but also guided us to places we never expected, or never anticipated we could love so much.

The project of Oh! Industry never began, nor does it actually end with the three of us in “girl-group” configuration, or as individuals. The ALOTR—our Audre Lorde of the Rings—has always been about an expansive, if still deeply intimate communion with so many of you from generations prior, alongside and well beyond our own.

Even though we—KT, CBB and ATV—are saying goodbye as the primary contributors of Oh! Industry with this post, it is with deep bass-thumping thrills and pleasure that we welcome a new, fierce assemblage of writers, thinkers and misfits. Patty Ahn, Inna Arzumanova, Peggy Lee and Madison Moore are ready to carry on the collective spirit, while remaking Oh! in ways the three of us would surely never imagine. Their new attitude launches tomorrow, June 21, on the summer solstice, so come back and see!

But before handing this stellar new crew the keys to the treehouse, KT is going to take us out with one last sonic stroll down memory lane, commemorating what Oh!—and all of you, our dear readers, interlocutors and friends—have meant to us through this journey.

xoxo,

ALOTR

***

I was living for a dream, loving for a moment

Taking on the world, that was just my style

- Survivor, “The Search is Over” (1984)

I’ve always been attracted to lyrical displays of humility swaddled in the sonic hubris of a power ballad. And what better way to try to make a gracious, if admittedly still crotch-rockin’ exit from the primary caretaking duties of Oh! Industry with my sisters, CBB and ATV, than to summon the echo of a song many folks already mock as a shallow imitation—if they remember it at all—of more substantial rock balladry from the same era by bands like Journey?

For 80s aficionados, Survivor, both musically and stylistically, always felt more like the Monkees to Journey’s Beatles. Their lead singer, Jimi Jamison (already a replacement for Dave Bickler who blew his vocal chords shortly after the band struck it big with “Eye of the Tiger”) seemed to share Steve Perry’s hairstylist, but without Perry’s prominent schnozz to add some gravitas to those bouncin’ and behavin’ feathers. Perry’s Dark Crystal features gave him that “hugly” (hot-ugly) edge that totally ratchets up a rockstar’s cred. And as you know, we at Oh! have always liked it both “hugly” and pretty, more Monkees than Beatles, legit and sometimes just legitimately dorky.

The search has come full circle

Our destinies are one…

When we began Oh! Industry almost three years ago, our heads and ears were flooded with urgent pop declarations like the one I opened with of “living for a dream, loving for a moment.” We felt like we were “taking on the world” with our distinct flourishes of style that we too often felt obliged to mute, or at least modify as we made our way through the minefields of the academy and the “other worlds” each of us belonged to, or sought remote communion with.

All of you, our readers, friends and secret-sharers, took pleasure in our long-windedness, the ideas askew, the concepts “not ready for primetime” but culled from pop and primetime repertoires. For that, we are always and forever grateful, and we feel we’ve shared many ephemeral and unwritten destinies with all of you. But to take another sonic turn to the changes and landslides made salient in the familiar warble of Ms. Stevie Nicks:

Time makes you bolder
Children get older
I'm gettin' older too...

The time together in Oh! definitely made us bolder. We grew to understand how the lack of discipline we feared within ourselves was not a weakness but a strength, a starting point for different techniques of listening, reading, writing that carry their own affective discipline and praxis. Our time together also saw us—children of the corny navigating through the academy’s elaborate mazes—getting older, feeling time as we never had before, and quite honestly, feeling the burden of the imperative to “make it count” in ways quantifiable to those who enumerate using methods we have yet to fully grasp.

In short, even though we know we’ve done the work—done our work while working through so much here on Oh!—it’s time for our Fellowship to hunker down and steel ourselves for the last and most treacherous stretch of the journey towards the fires of Mordor. Hobbitry and (to accommodate ATV’s height), poised and flowing Elfistry, remain in our hearts, even as we each face the fraught, final climb at our own pace.

Wilson Phillips’ “Hold On” has been one of our enduring ur-texts, and a “Wilson Philipina” karaoke favorite that CBB and I have performed together at the Smog Cutter on many occasions. But for our curtain call today, we’d like to dust off another of the trio’s huge hits from 1990: “Hold On’s” flipside (no pun intended)—the aptly titled “Release Me.”