Even More Meat: The Noisy the Vampire Slayer Compendium

 I’m Sara Mae and I’m the front person of Philly band, The Noisy. I started watching Buffy for the first time when I was living alone in Baltimore in 2020. It was the only thing that gave me hope that year, engaging in this tradition of the people I loved who loved Buffy first. It was my way of sharing something with them even if we didn’t talk all the time. In that way it connected me with artists I admired who were also inspired by Buffy (and this list is still growing!). I watched Buffy be ridiculous and funny while staring down the barrel of true despair and never giving up, never ceasing her fight for the soul of Sunnydale.

I think there are also really meaningful implications about her staying rooted in Sunnydale, being accountable to a small town, and trying to save the world through saving her immediate, local community. I didn’t anticipate that on The Secret Ingredient is More Meat I would turn back again and again to the supernatural and the monstrous for its visual universe— vampires, half-human half-birds, witches, Catholic mythology, even a sort of cookie monster on the new Tony Soprano… I like the framework of a monster of the week which structures the show and obviously at the risk of being too cute, this album does examine a lot of my inner demons.

My poem about Buffy is actually the closer of my chapbook, published with YesYes this spring, Phantasmagossip. I thanked Sarah Michelle Gellar in the acknowledgements! Despite the BTS legacy of the show being one of Joss Whedon’s abuses, the women of the show and the stories they embodied were bigger than him. I still turn to Buffy when it’s fall or when I need to feel some hope about humanity. As I prepared to drop my deluxe album, The Secret Ingredient is Even More Meat to drop, I am going back nightly to cook pumpkin soup while Buffy is on, to plan album release things while Buffy is on, to fall asleep while Buffy is on. Its goofy horror and its heart are essential parts of the rhythm of my life.

Hi, I’m Jonah, and I live in Philly. I write music reviews, interview musicians, and I used to play in bands as a drummer, and I write fiction. For Halloween growing up, I chose being a vampire at least half a dozen times between kindergarten and maybe 8th grade. I’ve always been enamored with vampires, as well as medieval stuff too. This was before I watched Buffy. I’m not sure how many times I’ve re-watched the series from front to back. Maybe five? Maybe 8? I know I’ve watched seasons on their own, and most recently I was inspired to watch season five of Buffy after Michelle Trachtenberg. It was good. It was funny. I understood Dawn so much more this time around whereas I thought she was annoying before, but she was being a teenager trying to be included, figuring herself out.I remember liking the Buffy movie because of it’s campiness and I don’t know, a teenage girl killing vampires just seemed cool.

 I’ve never felt entirely connected to my gender as a man or at least the expectations that come with it. I’m fine with identifying as a cis dude, but I’m not fine with all the pre-determined gender roles that don’t always align with who I am and what I actually feel. You know, all the expectations that have been put on me as a man have never once considered how I want to be in a relationship or how to exist in the world. I love my hairy chest and my beard—and sure, I wear flannel which could easily be considered one sect of a male archetype that exudes some idealistic lumberjack manly man, but a lot of times, I’m not, and in many other ways according to normative parameters, I’m not. Buffy strips all that bull shit away. It challenges expectations of all the things we’ve been taught of how to think and be. I can just be what I am, and I can’t even tell you everything that is and I believe that we should have more of that. People are fluid. We are still evolving. We are not static. We are not one thing as we are many, just like Buffy, and much of the characters on the show.

Sara Mae: What was important to you about Buffy when you first started watching it? Why does it remain important to you now?

Jonah: Upon further reflection, I think I liked the fantasy aspect of Buffy mixed with the real world. That’s fun. It carries a humor that is the right amount of quippy while holding a levity of real stakes. Even though I also like the original Buffy (the movie) as well, I liked that balance in the show itself. When I re-watched season 5 recently I was a little surprised how much I laughed at their jokes (also, you can see how Willow starts to get a little toxic in this season imo).

I think the story arcs are really fun to watch and each character has a very distinctive story. I love all the characters' journeys through insecurities and struggles while intertwined with the supernatural. Good storytelling, unique characters, completely, and entirely original (so many shows copied off Buffy). I think I love and have loved Buffy because it subverts societal expectations of who or what we should be as people. To name some of the greats before I move on to stretch out the contrast of what Buffy is, we have to mention Ellen Ripley played by Sigourney Weaver, from the Alien series. Absolute legendary character who is strong-willed, super smart, and even-keeled – a roll originally written for a man.

There was Sarah Connor played by Linda Hamilton, who starts as damsel in Terminator, then ends up being very militaristic, battle-centric, ready for anything in Terminator 2. And the most legendary for me is probably Xena: Warrior Princess, played by the great Lucy Lawless. Xena was absolutely fearless, and an incomparable warrior. Buffy on the surface appears to have just the warrior traits and the super girly girl vibes, but really, I think she is all of the mentioned characters all at once.  She is everything. The subversion is all and I just have to watch without projecting.

Sara Mae: I said some divisive things about Spike on our planning call… and clearly your Spike paraphernalia would reveal you to be team Spike. Talk to me about this wild position!!!!

Jonah: Lol, I am team Anya - she’s my favorite. However, my friend worked at Fox in Los Angeles at least a decade ago and one day she was like, do you want this Spike bust, and I was like, yes please. The picture with Buffy and Spike just looked cool. In 12th grade, my friend Ashley made me a Sarah Michelle Gellar collage because she knew I loved Buffy. I don’t know where it is now. However, Spike is a great character. Omg, season 6 is so dark all around.

Sara Mae: I love the “Welcome to Sunnydale” poster in your room. If you were visiting, who would you write a postcard to from Sunnydale?

Jonah: I’d write it to my buddy Jordyn or Joy. They are both big Buffy fans and I’ve talked about Buffy a lot with both of them.

Sara Mae: What real-life bands would you recommend to play the Bronze? Is there an episode where the live band particularly struck you?

Jonah: Recalling, I would deff say Cibo Matto is absolutely the best one. Buffy and Angel have a little tiff. Angel tries to read Buffy and their relationship status, Buffy says “There is no us,” and she proceeds to drag Xander on the dance floor and I’m pretty sure try to make Angel jealous. She totally uses Xander in that moment, but, oh well.

Other bands: Hum Cloakroom Fog Lake, Spirit of the Beehive, Chelsea Wolf, Bon Iver, St. Vincent, Anika, Leaf, Lomelda, Bleary Eyed, King Krule. I could keep going but I’ll Stop. 

Sara Mae: Just got to see Lomelda open for Big Thief last night and I love that thought! I think Wednesday, Mannequin Pussy, Tenci, Weyes Blood, FINOM. I would say not Vampire Weekend!

What song should the Noisy play at the Bronze and why? Does Philly have a version of the Bronze…

Jonah: “Glass of Olives” feels perfect for the Bronze - it’s very shoegazy, has this nice droning wall of sound, and the part without the wall of sound is easily a scene where Xander is being jealous or something, there are a lot of opportunities for some eye gazing in this song, for everyone to sit in the tension. It’s space vibes, slow, but grandiose, nice tempo, perfect for the sludgy 90’s vibes of the bronze.  Second most Bronze is “Little Grill” - good 90’s connection vibe, the “Tell me I’m pretty” lyrics fit all the angst of the Buffy cast, good guitar rock out section that gives that little grittiness.

Right now in my head, I’d say Ortliebs is as close as it gets, but there are a bunch of places in West Philly venues I haven’t been to yet that might fit the bill.

So which demons correspond to which songs from the deluxe and non-deluxe albums?

Sara Mae

Episode 1 Scene 1 Vampire

Well of course we have our delicious opener. I think this vampire sets up the conceit of the entire show being that women are the ones actually in power. As someone who has complicated feelings about my own gender—my first song on the record is specifically called “Little Grill” not little girl—the way this show explores girlhood and specifically teenage girlhood is very dear to my heart. It shows a distorted, fantastical version of the very big and very real feelings you feel growing up as a girl and trying to pretend to be normal, trying to fit in while hiding these strange, outsized parts of you. And when you’re the vampire, you’re having to act out teenage girlhood when actually you have a certain dysphoria of fangs and likely a century plus of feeding on peoples’ blood. This song explores a similar question of dangerousness, and a feeling of dislocation when it comes to performing “normal girlhood.”

Jonah

This reminds me of the Mandela effect because until you wrote this paragraph I actually thought it was “Little Girl.” This brain fart, shall we say, could also be indicative of the default expectation when seeing a word so incredibly similar, and the expectation for a “Little Grill” to in fact be a “Little Girl,” at least at first glance. Is this conflation? I don’t know. My brain fart feels like it could be tied to these gender expectations, or any expectation for that matter that we can put on to words, or people, or things, without actually sitting with the subject, really listening, or in this case, examining. Which reminds me of Buffy, the girly girl who wants to be just that but who is mad strong without any large muscles or what we as a culture have deemed as manliness. I still get that the song is a play on words, and even better, a direct subversion to the idea and the word and the classification, which is nice, which is Buffy.

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