Project by: Peter Mamaev (12th Grade)
Project Advisor: Shafeiq Baksh
Student(s)’s Advisor(s): Peter Heinz

This has been… a cathartic trimester for the Peter Mamaev-Shafeiq Baksh obscure musical overview experience. What started as a fairly innocuous little passion project where Shafeiq and I just wanted to showcase some of our more niche music tastes to the broader world has, I dare say, taken up a much more “professional” motif. We have made both the mistake and the innovative improvement of becoming much more ambitious in our articles – if the first few actually released were relatively small-scale, a bit later in we decided that rather than zooming in on one specific weird artist, we wanted to cover broader themes (inspired by our surprisingly solid article on the relationship between punk rock and fundamentalist Islam). Not just single isolated acts, but entire histories of subcultures or quirks. Since we can’t publish the literary equivalent of a BBC documentary every week, we would insert smaller, more isolated little tales in between the larger articles. The other issue throughout this ordeal was, senioritis has yet hit me, so I was still desperately clawing at getting the best grades I could get (in a trimester colleges weren’t even looking at), which, alongside track, alongside the comic I run for the newspaper, created an honors project that was more difficult to keep track of than any other academic endeavor I had during high school.

This saturation of activities has resulted in us maintaining a, shall we say, spotty upload schedule. In fact, I recall desperately writing up a few articles here and there just to fill in the long, long absence periods. Try as we did, but our previously semi-consistent upload schedule readily devolved into chaos.

That said, I am still proud of the work done over this trimester, because while our schedule faded out of existence, the quality and length of the articles has, I dare say, improved. We’ve certainly upped the ante for ourselves this trimester, delving into more serious topics such as race riots (see the history of skinhead culture article), political propaganda and abuse of artists by record labels (K-Pop) and, on a less serious note, the musical counterculture’s evolving relationship with Satanism. All of these large articles required much more immersive research and work than our previous releases, because I know for a fact there are people who take these topic genuinely seriously, who have potentially lived through many of the events readily associated with these topics. While I realize few people ever actually read our articles, those that do I want to get the best possible experience out of them, one that’s entertaining but factually consistent and indiscriminately respectful. I think even despite the grinding, we managed to pull it off, drastically bettering the quality of our articles and hopefully making at least a small contribution to the ever-saturated world of pseudo-intellectual musical reviewing.