roses, bruises, 'bout your shoulders

This was supposed to be my More Joy Day post and then my Day After More Joy Day + Snowflake Day 13 post but then I had a fever and the ante_up_losers draft deadline jumped around and also Life Is Hard, so I'm only getting to it now. Anyway, here are some of my Opinions about various media objects, some fresh, some stored up, mostly positive, sometimes with caveats and lots of parentheses.

( Books )

( Documentary )

( Feature Films A: Five Excellent Canadian Films That Not Enough People Talk About, Especially in C6D Fandom )

. . . and I'm actually gonna break it there for now (and probably never finish it, knowing me), because this entry is once again much too long, and I have to let it go and move on to Day 14 (ask for help): I need a beta or team thereof! Most urgently for a fic for the Losers exchange that does live on Friday (augh how did this get so long it was supposed to be simple porn and also the ending feels really awkward), and also for some other projects (mostly kink_bingo fic and vids at various stages of completion).

At least I'm feeling pretty good about my C6DVD exchange project.

This started as a footnote on my post about this year's Folk Fest, but it got too big and too tangential, so I shuffled the bits around and now it's over here.

Okay, where are all the songs about polyamory? Or other forms of/more general consensual non-monogamy? There are gazillions of songs about kink, whether explicitly about actual kink practices & practitioners (either laughing with or laughing at), appropriating kink imagery for "poetic" purposes, or just handily lending themselves to kinky readings (pervertibles for your ears! :D ) --c.f. the enormous Kink Bingo playlist and participants' further suggestions in the comments. There are songs about serial monogamy. There are songs about jealousy, and about "cheating", which mostly imply a very narrow understanding of "fidelity". But I don't know of many songs about multiple concurrent, low-conflict loves.

I'm thinking about this because Romi Mayes has a song called "Sweet Somethin' Steady". I didn't hear her play it this year, but I mentioned it to a couple of people while in Winnipeg because it is the most interesting thing she's done that I know of. I have mixed feelings about it. I feel like it could be nudging towards a consensual non-monogamy anthem, at least the first verse, but the songwriter had no such aspiration. Here's a video of her playing it live in Nederland; skip to ~3:45 for the song, ~2:00 for her not agreeing with me (with annoying gender normativity on top of the mono-normativity), or ~1:00 for her pestering Danny Michel into doing a Christopher Walken impression:

The part that tickles me is:
don't want no fancy diamonds, don't want your mother's pearls
I don't want you to tell me that I'm your only girl
just want [someone] to come on over, pick me up and take me for a ride
why can't you be my sweet somethin' steady on the side?
And then it kind of goes downhill (I guess it still works as far as empowering women to enjoy 'casual encounters', which is what Mayes seems to want from it, but it in a way so detached as to be potentially exploitative?), and I ask, is this the best we've got?

I thought about it briefly, and put together a handful of examples of could-be-poly-if-you-read-it-right songs. The download link is here (32mb zip), my notes on why each track is included are behind the cut.
( who are we noisy fools who laugh and bend the rules )

Your turn now, dear readers; anything to add?