from “Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock after Riot Grrl”

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Long before the idea for this book organized itself into anything remotely coherent, I was trying to write about the Ophelias, a four-piece band originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, and connected to what singer Spencer Peppet wryly described to me as the “boygenius cinematic universe.” I’ve been listening to the Ophelias since at least 2016, when one of my dissertation advisors mentioned that his student was in a band. Since then, their music has become, for me, variously a comfort and a challenge, a crepuscular fairy tale within which I found myself cocooned during times of heightened emotional intensity: as I defended my dissertation, for example, or rounded the corner on a difficult period in my relationship, as I packed boxes, slowly and alone, in a place I didn’t want to leave. 

Like the greatest bands, the Ophelias have a sound both instantly recognizable and necessarily singular. But more so than any music I have discussed in this book, that sound has from the beginning felt so threaded to the folds of my life that I have never known how to talk about it, how to discuss what feels important to me about their music without also talking about myself in ways that threaten to overshadow the magic they make with my own story of its working. 

Here too, I have been unable to disentangle myself from what they do, and I have not tried to hide this fact. Instead I hope to render what feels special about their music not in spite of but through my own experience. Any attempt to do so is, for my part, necessarily caught up in questions of place, and not just because the Ophelias intentionally and often discuss Ohio; it’s also because the moments when I came to know their music are also those moments in which my heart was breaking because of that same state, synonymous with the Three of Swords experience that floods my nervous system every time I leave it.¹ And because any discussion of place is really a discussion about the people who live there, trying to tell you about Ohio requires detours around how I see the vibrant and queer and joyful communities who raised me reflected in the Ophelias’ worldview, how their approach to music partially performs what it’s felt like to live there, in or alongside a margin.

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Mic Adams (drums), Andrea Gutmann Fuentes (violin), Spencer Peppet (vox/guitar), and Jo Shaffer (bass) have been making beguiling indie records since their high school days, when they found in each other relief from traditional boy-rock musical cultures. In March 2023, the Ophelias were poised to release an EP of covers and had just headlined a sold-out show in Brooklyn. We talked the next day around my brother’s dinner table, Peppet sporting a Frankie Cosmos hat, and the rest of the band Zooming in. Among other things, I was grateful for the opportunity to finally get some help articulating what I loved about their gorgeous and perplexing music—and that’s what I asked about first.

“I feel like the best way to describe our band is in images,” Peppet told me, before rattling a few off: “Midwest; gas station slushie; sunset through a window; blue hour.” These pictures immediately made sense to me when I heard them, because they felt sentimental in a way that ties directly to a sense of place, or a way of living there. But if it is easier to describe the band’s inscrutable approach with such effervescent imagery, they have nevertheless honed their sound into something that feels solid. Ever self-aware, the band’s term for it has been “Midwest moth music,” a combination of whimsical cottagecore and a darker, gothic melancholia. 

“I remember we’d have to find spaces to put on shows,” Peppet said of the band’s early Cincinnati days. “A lot of times we’d end up in warehouses, community buildings, stuff like that. We would have to go to Michael’s and get stuff to decorate the stage.” For the Ophelias, this way of making one’s own fun is deeply tied to a sense of home, of the Midwest in general and Ohio specifically. It’s not like New York or L.A., they told me, where a young band might try to hop on a friends’ bill at the next show; these are spaces and scenes that have to be built.

Like their previous records, their latest—Spring Grove—is at least in part about this kind of peripheral geography. Named after a Cincinnati cemetery (the third largest in the nation), the album creates mystical sonic atmospheres while dropping hints about its origins along the way. “We all stan the Midwest,” Gutmann Fuentes said amid laughing agreement. “I think that growing up in the Midwest—it does something to you,” Peppet continued. “It’s just a very specific set of experiences and I feel very protective of it.” As I myself have experienced, Peppet told me that in her view, “People love to shit on Ohio. People love to be like ‘Oh my God you live in New York now that’s amazing, good for you.’ People love to act like escaping Ohio is the best thing you could possibly do and I think that they just don’t understand. They don’t get it.”

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And I have to pause here to explain that if you grew up in Ohio during the ’90s, and likely other times besides, the feeling of an unspoken expectation to “get out” pervaded your consciousness before you were aware of why or where it came from, like a middle school rumor that everyone suddenly whispers. “It bears mentioning that I come from a place people leave,” Hanif Abdurraqib writes, and while there are probably a lot of places in the United States where it’s expected that if you want to “do something” with your life, you’ll have to move on, the feeling that I know is the one that’s particular to Ohio, which calcifies a fierce and righteous underdog mentality in everyone who chooses to stay or return. After years of conversations with strangers who admit they “actually liked” that one time they passed through; after the accumulation of a series of national jokes (“The mistake on the lake,” “the fumble,” “the drive”) that embedded themselves in public consciousness before I was even born; after years of media narratives overrepresenting the region through the figure of the “white working class” that purportedly propelled a racist sexual predator to the presidency;² after learning that young people use “Ohio” as slang for “anything weird, cringey, or random”; after coming to understand that the two symbols attributed to life in Ohio are rural flyover country and urban rust-belt decay;³ the formation of an entire identity is necessary in order to move through the world while loving this place on purpose. 

Which is not to say that there aren’t good reasons to leave Ohio; it’s just that they’re not the reasons people usually assume. It’s not as much that there’s nothing to do here, for example, especially in what have been and are still, after all, big cities. In my estimation, it’s more to do with the fact that since I’ve been alive, the state has been doing everything in its power to make life as miserable as possible for everyone who isn’t a middle-class white man, efforts that have lent an ironic literality to one of Ohio’s most infamous landmarks. Increasingly right-wing and insulated by partisan gerrymandering, the state government has moved in recent years to follow the kinds of reactionary legislative attacks on gender-affirming care, the book bans, the anti-DEI and anti-abortion measures sweeping red states post-2020.

As I sit here listening to the Ophelias, trying to find the language that would do justice to the queer beauty of Ohio, organizations like the Human Rights Campaign mark 2023 as the “Worst Year On Record for Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislation.” Arrested at protests, afraid in the classroom, targeted by laws or harassed on the street, my queer and trans friends, my nonwhite friends, my educator friends, as well as those marginalized in multiple ways at once, feel mere existence becoming fraught in the state where they have built their lives. It is difficult not to imagine this as the ultimate point of such bills, to imagine that banning books about queer/nonwhite identity or policing bathroom stalls could be anything other than an effort to force us out, one way or another, to make us unwelcome in the place we love.

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Which is to say a few things that might need to be said, depending on how you come to this, first of all that, yes, Ohio is diverse, in spite of what one might assume based on a Republican supermajority in government, in spite of the rurality surrounding our cities and the stereotypical white rage to which it is not reducible, but which, we must be clear, does exist there. And because Ohio is diverse, this is also to say that it is paradoxical, that it exists for people like us as a matter of cracked glass, both institutionally normative and socially fantastical at once. The violence of the state coexists, in other words, with the music we make, as florid and devastating as anything anywhere, and in part a reaction to our circumstances. 

For those of us who grew up loving Ohio’s cities and the people who increasingly find it difficult to live in them, the state therefore feels a destabilizing duality, caught between the beauty we have witnessed and the nightmares it visits. Hence the question of leaving is never altogether absent, even if temporary, or at least it feels present for me, sitting now in another Midwestern city characterized by these same paradoxes, listening to “Soft and Tame” again, over again, a song from 2024’s Ribbon EP, a song that exemplifies everything dusk and October about Peppet’s guitar tone, which here opens the track in a heart-wrenching 13 arrangement, sounding alone before the full progression begins—and that sequence is itself an ascendant longing that builds steadily into a sweeping and gentle explosion before Peppet delivers one final, fading verse:

You tell me it’s not my home after all

I don’t belong, I’ll make my own

Giving up love in the south of Ohio

I hate it here, in the in between 

I wanna feel safe, I wanna feel seen

The curve of the hills when the sun is gone

A knot in my throat, another fucking song

Woven together tightly in this stanza is a pair of twin heartbreaks: an ambiguous split inflected with implied long-distance complications, and the feeling of being told that you don’t belong in the place that you thought was your home. 

To my ear, this is a doubly and quintessentially Midwestern sentiment, especially insofar as this kind of indie music teaches us to hear the word “love” capaciously, to include all manner of intimacies, some without names; but while anyone here can come to feel alienated from what they had once taken for granted, it is notably some external other who’s telling Peppet’s character that she doesn’t belong, somebody else making her feel unseen and unsafe. 

Thus, the feeling of needing to get out of Ohio that any resident may at points feel takes on a particular urgency for Peppet’s character, who is being actively rejected. It is the kind of alienation that might resonate especially for those who have been similarly ostracized from their communities, for the kinds of women and queer people who see themselves in the Ophelias’ music, made to feel unwelcome whether by individual bigots or the implications of state policy. It is an example of the subtle but unmistakable ways in which this band creates queer-feminist affects that draw in and consolidate listenerships similarly caught “in between.” 

Vibrating with my own life and the profound, precious time I spend in Ohio, the Ophelias use imagery, text, and sound to render a distinctly queer Midwest, both a reflection of actually existing communities and a fantastical imaginary of the not-yet-here, the contingent ephemerality of the worlds that come into being only in spaces where queer lives are allowed to thrive. The fact that queer folks do thrive in Ohio and in the broader Midwest coexists with the fact that queer life is still an irruption into the here and now, a disruptive force that must be constantly reimagined as the world variously maintains its apathy or acts on its antipathy. 

“Queerness is a longing that propels us onward,” says José Esteban Muñoz, because queerness is, in his formulation, never quite here yet. What matters is our capacity to glimpse it, most often through art, and how we then act to bring that dream into reality. Queer is potential beauty that flitters across the inadequate present; in this way, it is not unlike the Midwest, where we have to build worlds that don’t exist but could, perceiving a better version of this place in the very reality of what’s already here.

This contradiction also gives birth to another, necessarily entwined: because of the particular ways that the Midwest produces beautiful communities as well as structural violence against them, because of the ways that the Midwestern imaginary is in part constituted by the act of leaving it behind, the thriving/hurting that we do here produces a leaving/returning contradiction from which we will never escape. And this is precisely where my own experiences come to overdetermine how I hear the Ophelias: there is no way for me to hear Peppet sing those lines in “Soft and Tame” and not remember what it felt like to be alone in Los Angeles, standing on a hill at twenty-four years old and realizing with finality that I had indeed given up love in the south of Ohio, that I couldn’t go back even if I physically returned. One of many ways in which this chapter tries to raise contradictions that persist without collapsing is this: Big Feelings is an academic book that has been subjected to a rigorous peer-review process, yet it is also personal, and nowhere more so than this chapter, about this music, which sounds hitherto nonexistent shades of bittersweet and evokes Ohio at the very moment when I have left, again (again!), after multiple returns. And I don’t mind telling you that I’m mourning it, not just the leaving but also what I perceive to be lost potential, the fact or the sense that I never stayed long enough in one place to see the rewards of what I put into it, that I was always catching glimpses before starting over somewhere, or trying to pick up where I left off. It is in fact essential to confess that I hear each leaving in the way that Peppet’s guitar crunches its chords together, in Shaffer’s note selection, plucked out one at a time like so many stars.

In allowing myself these sentimental digressions, I am trying nevertheless to advance an argument: first, that there is a both-at-once experience of living in the Midwest, home to the most beautiful people I know and the site of radical violence upon those same people. This, I want to suggest, has something to do with, is perhaps uniquely expressive of, the way that some of its most important theorists have formulated the condition of queerness itself, which is to say (second) that I am positing some kind of a connection between queerness and the Midwest, certainly not homological, but resonant insofar as “attention, desire, and action are structured by the material conditions of place” (Kopcienski 2023, 32). Third, there is the dialectical leaving/returning that the first two points engender, even if you never leave, even if you never return: both somehow haunt us, I want to say, imperceptibly imprinting our psyches in the way that all geography does, but which in this case specifically is about a certain type of yearning that you’re doomed to be caught within, unresolved, so much given up by either choice.⁴ Something about the particular poignancy in the Ophelias’ intricate arrangements evokes these feelings, straddling multiple lines/borders/liminalities. It is impossible to leave and it is impossible to stay, because your life is here, because it won’t have you; because you carry it, because it’s fragile.

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1. Where boygenius is a Three of Cups band, the Ophelias are a Three of Swords band, and that iconography appears on T-shirts, stickers, and other, often handmade merch. Indicating a heart pierced straight through by three long blades, the Three of Swords tarot card invites us to face squarely whatever heartbreak or acute hurt we are experiencing, rather than running from, ignoring, or downplaying that pain. It suggests that healing can only come through sitting with, acknowledging, and respecting our feelings, through honest and open engagement with what we are experiencing, however difficult. ↩︎
2. Such dominant media narratives are perhaps most forcefully represented by my father’s hometown of Youngstown, symbolic because of how thoroughly its economy collapsed when the steel mills closed. Having worked in one his entire career, my grandfather was in some ways indicative of the demographic understood to vote for Trump out of feelings of abandonment. But such coverage tends to defer discussions about how he (and folks like him) immigrated here after the war, speaking not much English at all, and it seems to miss the fact that it was unionized, poor immigrants running those mills, seems to miss the fact that Trump’s base is actually on the whole more well-off than working class, the fact that white people of certain income levels remains an unbelievably obtuse category of analysis in a world where financial precarity is endemic to mere existence in this country. And this isn’t even mentioning the “disproportionate and specific consequences of deindustrialization, population loss, and economic decline” for people of color generally and Black Midwesterners specifically—many of whom live in Youngstown, composing some 40 percent of its population—all of which remains “conspicuously unaddressed” in any mainstream coverage of the region (Williamson 2020, 15). ↩︎
3. Something of this dichotomy is also reflected in scholarship, where on the one hand, queer theory has, for example, overwhelmingly focused on life in big cities like San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and DC. On the other hand, accounts of queer Midwestern life, already in the minority, have tended to focus on either rural contexts or else Chicago, creating a kind of rural/urban binary that excludes the many other sizeable cities housed within the large and amorphous idea of the Midwest, an extension of the old framework that equates cities with progressive (queer-inclusive) life and rurality with conservative (queer-exclusive) life (Manalansan
   et al. 2014). In other words, when people talk about the queer Midwest, they tend to treat the region (outside of Chicago) as a metonym for rurality, as if an urban Midwest is contradictory. It’s true that post- industrial cities like Cleveland continue to shed their populations; but as of this writing, Columbus is the fourteenth most populous city in the country. Indianapolis, with more people than San Francisco, toggles between fifteenth and sixteenth. Detroit, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Omaha all sit in the top fifty, above New Orleans, Orlando, and Newark (New Jersey). Certainly, these statistics don’t capture larger contexts and metro areas; but they nevertheless help me to identify the deficiencies in a persistent imaginary about the Midwest— in tandem, it must be said, with their often radically conservative governments— that flattens the contradictions emergent within such spaces, the diversity of the people who live there. Part of this likely has to do with the unique imprecision attached to the word “Midwest,” which claims both rust-belt cities like Detroit along with Great Plains regions like the Dakotas. Precious little can be found in common across such expanses, making any effort to theorize the Midwest difficult from the beginning.
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4. And this is what Midwest emo— that namesake subgenre— is all about. Riffing on the houses that appear on so many album covers and the housing of cassette tapes, Sean Peters (in process) writes that Midwest emo bands have preferred cassettes not just for their perceived DIY credibility, but in part because they capture something of Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology: “the sense of being haunted by lost futures,” which, in my reading, invokes not just the post- industrial collapse of manufacturing in the region but also the possibilities foreclosed by choosing to leave or choosing to remain there. The Midwestern homes featured on so many covers in this subgenre (paradigmatically, American Football’s 1999 record) are nostalgic and intimate because we so often leave them behind during formative years, or which, if we stay, are tied to uncertain futures amid systemic disinvestment. Cassette tapes, which house their own nostalgic memories, symbolize and reify lost futures in their anachronistic materiality. It is this sense of loss and liminality that contributes to the affective register of the genre, whose lyrics often concern the fracturing of relationships across long distances. While internet articles like Vox’s “It Shouldn’t Be So Hard to Live Near Your Friends” (Bernard 2024) testify to the fact that alienation and isolation are increasingly universal, I suggest that feeling forced to leave home is particularly fraught in a region with fewer opportunities to begin with, with much greater physical distance (and likely no trains) between you and the next city. ↩︎