howdy pardner!

welcome back to my emo rap deep-dive series! for those just joining us, i'd encourage you to go back and check out chapter one: sprite. and chapter two: dirt. first.

so why am i even writing this to begin with? if i'm being honest, it's not all entirely educationally-motivated. i've been really wanting a way to share my favorite genre of music with people (maybe it's a subconscious testing of the waters before i begin to record my own music?) and collect their thoughts. but every time i went to share a link in ~music, i'd deliberate over and over, "what should i share?" it's been so hard for me to pick one single song that's all-encompassing and anthemic (is that even a word? i keep using that word) of the genre as a whole.

so instead of spamming ~music, or having to cherry pick a small number of tracks, i thought i'd use this as an opportunity to provide a little historical background and, hopefully, maybe, inspire a new appreciation in a subgenre that very often gets overlooked, or thought of as basic / whiney / overproduced.

that said - hopefully you've all been following along, and i'll stop stalling! let's dive right into chapter three of our emo-rap deep dive - dirty sprite. or, how did we go from OutKast to Lil Pump?

let me open with a question. what do the following have in common?

polish composer and piano virtuoso frederic chopin
controversial american rapper lil pump
american actor and i guess also musician? corey feldman

you guessed it!

opiates.

all of the present characters used opiates in their lifes, typically throughout the better parts of their creative years. chopin was using medicinal opiates in order to aide with his tuberculosis. feldman fell into and has since (i believe) fought his way out of a heroin addiction. lil pump sips promethazine by the bottle just to party (hyperbole. don't drink prometh by the bottle) which is a prescription medication often used as a sedative or used to prevent coughs or nausea. often sold as a mixture of promethazine and codeine, itself being an opiate. if you've seen a rap music video in the past two to three years, you may have seen this bottle somewhere throughout.

where do all of these drugs come from?

the answer to that question actually holds a lot of relevance to the history of emo rap itself, but to answer it, we first have to go all the way back to the 90s.

off we go!

believe it or not, drugs as a matter of discussion weren't always ever-present in the rap game. from the late 70s to the early 80s, only about 10% of all rap songs mentioned drug use, whereas in the early 90s, we see that number jump waaaay the fuck up to 45%, to eventually hit 69% by 1997 [source]. this is all taking place around the same time that we saw the decline of major urban neighborhoods due to the effects of white flight, decreasing the amount of tax dollars flowing throughout these areas, and leading to a decrease in public services that would include decreased effectiveness of, say, fire brigades or police squads.

with poorer households now making up a majority of these neighborhoods, the illegal drug trade quickly grew in popularity as a way to make money on the business end, and a way to escape the day-to-day on the client end. a plethora of burned, broken into, or otherwise abandoned houses became a seemingly limitless amount of places to go about the production of drugs - most notably, crack cocaine. these houses came to be known colloquially as trap houses, and the music inspired by this phenomenon, trap music.

this sound grew it's roots in the early 90s thanks to the early projects out of the south like UGK (title: Cocaine in the Back of the Ride), Three 6 Mafia (title: We Got Da Dope), and The Showboys (title: Drag Rap). coincidentally, the showboys are actually a group out of new york, though gained the height of their popularity touring around southern states.

as we head into the mid-nineties/early-naughts, we see the emergence of a few acts that really take this sound and run with it. setting the roots for the coming commercial explosion of the trap sound, we see examples like OutKast's "Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik", Lil Jon's "Who You Wit". we're gonna see lil jon's name pop up a few times as we go through this.

taking the reigns from these majorly influential projects, we next see T.I. come to the stage for his second album "Trap Muzik" in 2003. much to the surprise of the industry (his debut album did not go over all too well), Trap Muzik debuted at number 4 on the Billboard 200, sold over 100k copies in it's first week, and was later in 2012 called one of the classic albums of the last decade by Complex. the album features many early hits from T.I. like "Be Easy", "24's", and even some tracks with producer credits from Kanye West like "Doin' My Job". still sticking to their guns, pioneering the trap sound, we continue to see records from Lil Jon and Three 6 Mafia taking to the radio such as, respectively, "Get Low" and "Stay Fly"

paving the way towards the 2010s, we begin to see the rise of artists like Gucci Mane and his debut album "Trap House" (aptly titled eh?) hitting the Billboard 200 with tracks like "Icy", Young Jeezy with internationally-charting tracks like "Soul Survivor", and most notably in modern trap, producer-powerhouse Zaytoven with work on tracks like "Papers" x Usher.

so we skip forward 5-7 years and things look...different.

instead of having chart-toppers like "Smack That" x Akon, "Hey There Delilah" x Plain White T's, or "Umbrella" x Rihanna

we see a lot of love for things like "First of the Year (Equinox) x Skrillex, "Sail" x AWOLNATION, and most importantly by far, "Versace" x Migos which was quickly popularized by Drake's remix. the rest of 2013 serves as the absolute corner stone of modern trap music seeing the success of songs like "Swimming Pools (Drank)" x Kendrick Lamar, "Started From The Bottom" x Drake, and of course, the absolute trap anthem, "Love Sosa" x Chief Keef.

in that avalanche of tracks, we get the recipe that will come to make up the bulk of today's trap music:

1. edm-inspired instrumentals
2. triplet meter rhyme
3. heavy 808s and crystal clear hi-hats.

over the next few years, we steadily start to see these three ingredients come together to produce some absolute bangers leading up to the trap zeitgeist.

in 2014:
"Fight Night" x Migos
"Black Widow" x Iggy Azalea
the ever-memed "Lifestyle" x Young Thug

in 2015:
the year of Fetty Wap with tracks like "Trap Queen", "679" on the Billboard 100
"No Type" x Rae Sremmurd
"Flex" x Rich Homie Quan

in 2016:
"Panda" x Desiigner
"Broccoli" x DRAM
Drake jumping back in with "Jumpman"
"Down in the DM" x Yo Gotti

and then, finally, we arrive at 2017 - the year that caused the internet's busiest music nerd anthony "melon" fantano to pose the question "have we reached peak trap?". up until recently, the term "trap music" was actually not all too commonly associated with rap music - instead referring most commonly to a subset of edm with (still) heavy 808s, thicc bass drops, and dirty breakdowns. however, with the musical zeitgeist quickly moving to seat rap at the throne over rock music, and with the internet popularizing songs like "Ultimate" x Denzel Curry, "Flicka Da Wrist" x Chedda Da Connect, and "U Guessed it" x OG Maco, the term has now been absolutely overtaken as many rap fans find themselves infatuated with the sound. this causes the scene to absolutely explode throughout 2017 with songs like:

"Humble" x Kendrick Lamar
"Bad and Boujee" x Migos
"Bodak Yellow" x Cardi B
"Look At Me!" x XXXTentacion
and of course
"Gucci Gang" x Lil Pump

this year sees the debuts of several artists that are still dropping bangers today, like the previously listed Cardi B, Lil Pump, XXXTentacion (rest in peace), A Boogie wit Da Hoodie, and (again) of course, 6ix9ine.

analogous to the rise of screamed lyrics, heavy instrumentals, and prettyboy-frontmen of mid-late 2000s rock bands, we see the rise of trap music today.

now, the final question to be answered.

how do we get from rap songs with hedonistic lyrics, heavy 808s, and loud-personality frontmen, to a subsect of the genre that nearly predominantly speaks of subjects like death, addiction, loss, and suicide?

i'll see ya soon for the fourth and final installment of the emo-rap deep dive - chapter four: xanax sprinkles.

welcome back, class!

i'm actually kinda having fun with this project lmao. dive into the comments and let me know what you lot are thinking! this is the second installation in, what i believe will be, a four part series. enjoy!

in the last chapter, we learned a little about how rap in the 90's began to get a bit more introspective, self-reflective, and focus on some generally harsher, more grating topics. while all eras definitely have their hype music (see: "Nuthin' But a G Thang" x Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg or "Slob on my Knob" x Three 6 Mafia, we slowly began to see songs like "Slippin'" x DMX or "Rock Bottom" x Eminem which slowly began the trend of rappers using their music to really peel back the curtains of their lives, using their music as an escape into catharsis from their daily struggles.

however, emo rap does seem to have something else happening inside of it. it's not just simply sad or emotionally-charged rap music, that's been around for quite a long time! what's that extra layer that gives us the gritty, rough, and often-whiney nature to modern emo rap? for that, we turn to the name of the genre itself.

not only did the 90's prove as a time of great growth and evolution in rap, but it saw the expolsion of a new genre of rock music as well. with roots set in the 80's, emo rock first gained major commercial popularity with bands like Green Day and The Offspring quickly moving albums to the tops of the charts with songs like, respectively, "She" and "Self Esteem". as the genre fell face-first into the zeitgeist, we quickly saw a rise of early emo rock groups like Lifetime, Jimmy Eat World, and one of the most influential early emo groups - Texas is the Reason. throughout the decade, the prophecy foretold by the Rolling Stones in their track "Paint it Black" quickly began to unfold. teenagers were wearing black, goth kids slowly started to emerge from the depths of the underworld, and hot topic was finally starting to make money. the foundations and roots of emo have been set, ready and waiting to lead us into the 21st century.

the year is 2000, and pretty much everything is fucking awesome. we see the launch of the indestructible classic Nokia 3310. we get video games like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, and of course, Pokemon Gold and Silver. the billboard charts are full names that make us go "oh yeah!" like Destiny's Child, Aaliyah, Erykah Badu, Montell Jordan, 3 Doors Down, Backstreet Boys, Creed, Madonna, and the list goes on and on and on.

the 2000s saw an absolute unit of a revival of the newly restructured emo genre, quickly launching off massively influential tracks like "All the Small Things" x Blink 182, and we even see the creation of the first emo-centric record labels across the late-nineties and early naughts. this means that a lot of the emo bands of the time had not only better representation and access to the innerworkings of the industry, but better access to resources which would help them promote and distribute themselves as well - this is what allowed a lot of bands to leap and bound right into the hot topic t-shirt wall.

one of the bigger labels we came to see was Vagrant records, moving to quickly sign groups like The Get Up Kids, Hot Rod Circuit, Dashboard Confessional, and Saves the Day. with the internet in their toolbox, some major corporate sponsorships funding the whole gig, and a huge amount of confidence in the future of emo, Vagrant set out on what's considered to be one of the most influential projects in the (still) early days of emo when they launched a nationwide tour with every band in their label in tow.

shortly thereafter, Jimmy Eat World launches the biggest single of their career "The Middle", Dashboard Confessional break heavy into the mainstream, and Madison Square Garden goes absolutely wild for Saves The Day, Blink-182, Green Day, and Weezer.

emo is starting to get big, and people are starting to realize that there's money to be made here.

this brings us now to the mid-ish 2000s. everyone's on myspace, everyone's got a motorola razr, everyone's getting into skating or bmx, and every chick with jetblack black hair or fishnets is going absolutely fucking crazy over Brendon Urie from Panic! At The Disco. this is the part where the big money steps in and major record labels start signing a lot of emo bands left and right. this massive cash injection into the industry saw the rise of a lot of bands which would go on to not only define the industry, but to define the middle school and high school lives of a great number of their listeners. as the emo singularity entered the phase of it's big bang, we saw the rise of a number of stars like Taking Back Sunday, Simple Plan, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and many many many deep breath many others.

fueled by industry investments, teen angst, and a desire to be different, this led to an explosive rise in popularity for the genre, with many songs quickly moving to RIAA gold/platinum status and Billboard chart success like "Misery Business" x Paramore, "Miss Murder" x AFI, or "Check Yes Juliet" x We The Kings. this massive influx of success inspired some of the best parties, most genuine moments, and most cringiest photographs of our many young lives. very frequently this music was used as an escape for those who felt that their problems were going otherwise unrecognized or misunderstood, who felt that they were sad or alone, who hated the seeming lack of control that they had in their own lives - constantly living under the legislature of parents, school systems, or cops that always seemed to hate us edgy confrontational teenagers.

however, like Sam Smith would come to say, "too much of a good thing won't be good for long." what happens when a star shines too bright? what happens after a supernova?

things go dark.

it's now that we begin to enter the part of this whole movement that we've all repressed - and it starts with bracelets.

sigh.

it's 2010-ish.

vuvuzelas are hilarious, "TiK ToK" x Ke$ha is topping charts, and highschools everywhere are full of Silly Bandz and sex bracelets. we've reached a point of absolute pop culture saturation with the emo vogue. while songs of the previous era like "Welcome to the Black Parade" (linked earlier) or "Dirty Little Secret" x The All-American Rejects still hold an anthemic position in the musical zeitgeist, by and large, emo simply was no longer enough. the all-black motif was drab and dark. the music didn't cut deep enough, the lyrics didn't hit hard enough, the vocals weren't powerful enough. we needed something stronger, something more powerful.

this desire for harder hitting music led to an underground rise of hardcore bands like La Dispute and Pianos Become the Teeth. these bands were very much hitting in the right direction, blending the angst and yearning of modern emo music with the strength of metal instrumentals and vocals hit home with a good number of people still looking to hold onto the last bastions of the emo movement.

and, as we've seen before, as this demographic loves to live fast and hard, the remodeled emo genre quickly skyrocketed into popularity with bands like Asking Alexandria, Bring Me The Horizon, and A Day to Remember rushing to the forefront of the movement. the rough, gritty nature of the instrumentals paired with the phenomenally screamed vocals seemed to add several more layers of separation between what we were listening to, and the "traditional" music we had been brought up listening to. this was new, this was edgy, but more importantly, this was ours. this was music that we knew the lyrics to, music that we could sing along with because we'd teach ourselves how to scream-sing when we had the house to ourselves, and music that, most importantly, we were pretty damn sure our parents weren't going to get into. they started using myspace, we left for facebook - abandoning the customized purple, black, and sparkly profile pages of yore.

however, there was something missing here. this was music we could connect to, sure. we were glad to have the songs we did to relate with! even still, we got greedy. connecting to it wasn't enough. we needed music we could fuck to. we needed eyecandy. we needed music that was brutal, strong, and beyond comprehension. we got gluttonous.

now we begin to enter the scene age. flashy colors and attitudes replace the black nature of the previous era. ostentatiously hardocre and brutal instrumentals (or alternatively, very pop-y, electronically inspired instrumentals) back vocals sang by artists who's image was crafted under nature and umbrella of being unconventionally attractive to this new audience. this led to projects such as "You Aint No Family" x iwrestledabearonce, "Sex Ed Rocks!" x SMOSH & ISETMYFRIENDSONFIRE, and (oh god,) "Bree Bree" x Brokencyde.

i know my language here is pretty overtly negative, not to make it seem like i hate every band from this era. i actaully like iwrestledabearonce, and a lot of these bands hold a great amount of nostalgia in my life. tracks like "Knives and Pens" x Black Veil Brides were anthemic of this late-stage emo-rock era, checking a good number of the boxes above, and drawing attention to the struggles of people of this era. for example, it can be said that the way emo-rap heavily goes about drawing attention to drug use/abuse is very analogous to the way that a lot of this late-stage emo rock draws attention to self-expression and self-harm.

this era was loud while it was here, and saw the popularity of a lot of projects like the following before it quickly died out around 2014/2015:

We Butter The Bread With Butter

"Wake Up" x Suicide Silence

Pierce The Veil

Sleeping With Sirens

and, often, scene music held no semblance of it's metal roots at all! you may remember hits of the era like "DON'T TRUST ME" x 3OH3!, "Shake It!" x Metro Station, "Good Girls Go Bad" x Cobra Starship, or "Sexting" x Blood on the Dance Floor.

palette cleanser: "Dirty Diana" x Michael Jackson (The Weeknd Cover)

so here we've arrived. the year is 2014, and the billboard is topped with pharrell, meghan trainor's debut single, "Shake It Off" x Taylor Swift, and the debut tracks from the likes of Lorde and Sam Smith.

...and some guy named Young Thug?

Wait, who's this Bobby Shmurda guy?

2 Chainz?

YG?

something's a-changing... where's the industry headed?

find out next time on the emo rap deep dive - chapter three: dirty sprite.

This was the first expedition of the Heroic Age, organized by Adrian de Gerlache, and funded by King Leopold's image problems. de Gerlache was a restless man of thirty, his life oscillating between breathtaking daring and breathtaking mundanity --- a man of the Belgian Navy, working on the fishery protection detail, then a seaman on an English vessel, failing to round Cape Horn and ending up on a scrapyard in Montevideo; an officer on a ferry between the prosaic Ostend and the boring Dover; then writing a flurry of letters, petitioning for a chance to go to Africa with Stanley, to the Arctic with Nordenskiöld, to anywhere with the Royal Geographic Society of Britain. Finally, a plea to the Geographic Society of his native land drew flame, a ship was purchased (MV Belgica), and funding was secured from the king. de Gerlache's crew included more than just Belgians; among others, the Norwegian 25-year-old first mate Roald Amundsen, destined for later fame, and the 26-year-old Pole Henryk Arctowski, a later authority on meteorology, who was much teased for his overappropriate name.

Belgica sailed south by the way of South America, where their reception was warm, the local scientists were enthused, all seemed well.

In truth, they were sailing into a world they knew very little of, into an implacably hostile world, and they were ill equipped for it. They reached Graham Land --- the northern part of the Antarctic Peninsula --- in the January of 1898, skirting west between the peninsula and the islands flanking it --- not knowing if what they took for the farthest tip of the continent was just another archipelago, kitted together with glaciers and pack ice. The same month a sailor was washed overboard and lost.

In February they crossed the Antarctic Circle --- they sailed down the western side of the Peninsula, mapping and observing the flora and the fauna and for the lack of them, the stars and the moon. They tried to find a peninsula-breaching passage to the east side, the Weddell Sea, for their return --- and on the 28th of February, 1898, towards the end of the Antarctic summer, they got stuck in ice.

Some say this was an accident; some say this was on purpose: a ploy of de Gerlache or (say) the first mate Amundsen, to gain additional glory or experience.

If it was done on purpose, it nearly killed them all.

They would be stuck for over ten months, including two months of total darkness --- when Belgium sees the middle of summer, the Antarctic sinks to polar night.

They were unprepared: they piled on all their clothing, and it still wasn't enough to shelter them outside the ship. They had nothing to do: there was nothing but cold, darkness and death outside the ship; inside, the same hateful faces, the same ``three books and four issues of a magazine, a Bible and the mandolin that Amundsen tossed onto the ice by mid-March''. They did not have enough food: it was necessary to supplement it, but the choices were low. An officer by the name of Danco fell ill and died in June, raving that the others should promise to not eat him. A Belgian sailor went mad and walked out, shouting he was going to return to Belgium by foot --- he was not seen again, though several others claimed, for months, to hear him shouting outside, inviting them to join him. One more sailor did.

There weren't breaks in the ice to allow fishing; the nearest open water was (they thought) tens of miles away.

They had prepared, as best as they could, before all the horrors of the winter set in. In February, when the ship was still sailing, they had killed dozens of penguins, and harvested their meat for eating, storing it in the cold of the ship's open deck.

The meat might have been better fresh, but de Gerlache tasted it, and ordered the cook to not serve a gram of the disgusting slop to anyone. He didn't know the superstitious cook had adulterated the meat with soap and sand, spurred to this deception by the dream he had had of the birds talking like men, no doubt disturbed by how they already walked like men.

By midwinter, the men were ill of scurvy --- the lack of vitamin C, which first manifests as lassitude, weakness and soreness of limbs, and then goes to bleeding gums, falling teeth and other terrifyingly general symptoms. What's worse, at the time ``vitamin'' was an uninvented word; the two easy sources of it, vegetables and fresh meat, were not widely understood. de Gerlache was seriously ill by this point, writing his will, staring out his frost-encrusted window for hours at a time, willing the mountains of ice to move, at times twitching as if they did, and then shaking his head, knowing better.

Georges Lecointe, the ship's captain, was similarly ill; on his orders, the penguin meat had been dumped off the ship, and only its encasement in ice had kept it from being thrown in the waters. Lecointe stalked the ship, asking the crew strange questions --- later accounts have said he suspected some had been substituted with treasonous penguins, intent on sabotage, but this is likely nothing but malign rumors.

With de Gerlache and Lecointe so distracted, the first mate Roald Amundsen and the ship's doctor, Frederick Cook, acted. Cook had been with Peary in the Arctic,(footnote) and so knew fresh meat was the key against scurvy --- there weren't too many vegetables to be found in the Arctic --- so they walked round the ship, cracking piles of snow to find the piles and bundles of penguin meat.

(footnote: Indeed, Cook had claimed to have reached the North Pole with Peary (1909) and by himself (1908); neither claim stood against the scrutiny of outsiders. To read Cook's account of the Belgian Expedition is to come away thinking Amundsen hardly did anything; this is a constant pattern in Cook's accounts of his life and supposed deeds.)

This meat was of course no longer fresh --- it had been frozen for months. But it was good enough for a while.

With the cook now abandoning superstition in the face of survival, the meat was cooked and proved if not tasty, then at least edible. When it was served to de Gerlache, he did not ask what it was; when it was served to Lecointe, he said ``Is this penguin?'', and on being said so, cried out, made the sign of the Cross, muttered a few confused words on the state of his soul, and ate.

Thus empowered and restored, the crew organized a hunting party, with de Gerlache taking the lead. They marched thirty terrifying miles over the hills and valleys of creaking midwinter ice, in full darkness, the sun gone for weeks (and to be gone for still more weeks), until they found the edge of open water, and a small colony of penguins.

They fell among the birds with rifles, pistols, swords, cudgels, nets, gloved fists. In a fury of survival and hunger they slaughtered the birds, clubbing and striking them one after another, their beards stiff with frozen drool. The snow acquired a crimson hue; their cries were as harsh, bestial and varied as those of the doomed birds.

Adrien de Gerlache, the man of ups and downs, the noble-featured and mild-mannered Belgian officer, was the first among them, a demon with a saber and a pistol, his face and chest caked with diamonds of red frozen blood and penguin gore.

After the massacre was done, they tied the dead birds together into lines, fifteen to each, and then dragged, through the moaning winds of the unceasing darkness, them back to the ship.

de Gerlache himself fainted after the killing; the blood on his face and down it was from a copious nosebleed occasioned by the harsh environment and the monstrous occasion. Before falling down --- to be dragged back to the ship, just like his prey --- he raised his saber at the even deeper blackness of the open waters, and cried: ``Come, beast! We killed these --- we will kill you too! No matter how big --- we will kill mountains!''

The expedition lived on penguin meat and their official provisions for the rest of the winter. Boredom and the stresses of the alien environment continued to haunt them, and many felt guilty for their slaughter of the penguins --- or rather, haunted by it. Many mention in their memoirs the odd noiselessness of the battle, the utter surrender of the enemy, the terrible frenzy that overcame the men, as they ran from bird to bird, striking them down, crippling, stopping, slashing and crushing, then finally eliciting the discordant caws and croaks and cries the birds made --- the way they killed so many, and the way the rest slipped, like shadows, into the waters without as much as a ripple. One memoir, no doubt inspired by de Gerlache's ravings, mentions seeing a vast shape out in the water, a black iceberg that slipped underwater as the last bird quorked its last. But most of the memoir-writers wrote nothing of this all, choosing to imply a much more sanitized narrative of fresh meat.

Eventually spring came; the season of autumn in the northern world.

By January 1899 the ship was still stuck.

The ice was over two meters thick. There was open water, half a mile away, but it was not getting any closer --- and January was the height of Antarctic summer, meaning the halfway point!

Desperate to escape another winter in the ice --- and another war in search of meat --- they took to the ship's tools, and laid dynamite on the ice with drills and axes. The first explosions but warped the ice, and nearly crushed the ship's hull. The men attacked the ice with mattocks and hammers; some of the tools broke, their frozen nature no match for the native ice. A hammer's head famously shattered on the first blow, and a flying iron shard cut a line in Amundsen's cheek.

de Gerlache fell into a deep depression, and retreated to his cabin; around this time he covered its window with bootblack, and kept it so closed for the remainder of the expedition, referring to the view as ``the black mountain''.

In the meanwhile, Amundsen took control of the crew, and laid explosives right in front of the ship's keel. The blast rocked the ship and had the incensed captain Lecointe nearly shoot the first mate; but it had made for open water at the front, and with the ship's weight and the endless application of manual tools, the crew was ever so slowly able to move the ship forward. After two weeks of nonstop day-and-night work, they were in open water, the ice closing after them as if nothing had ever been there, and nothing had passed through.

It took them another month --- the last half of February and the first of March --- to navigate another six miles of the iceberg- and ice floe-choked water. By then the summer was over; the floes were knitting together into the impassable dead plateau of lengthy winter. But by the 14th of March, they were out of the ice, onto open water, and they immediately headed north, away.

The Belgian Expedition reached 71 degrees 30 seconds south. One degree of longitude is approximately 69 miles, and as the Pole is full 90 degrees south, the Pole was still some 1280 miles away.

Despite its name, the Belgian Expedition was the most multinational and, in a way, least greedy of the expeditions of the Heroic Age. Those that followed de Gerlache were much more conscious of the double glory they sought --- not just for themselves, but for their country.

As for de Gerlache, he did not return to the Antarctic. He joined Charcot's 1903 expedition, but left before it reached the Antarctic; he cited quarrels within the expedition, and others let understand he had suffered a major breakdown at seeing something vast and dark out in the ocean.

So lately I've been working on a chatty, digressive pseudo-non-fiction book that's 80% true facts about Antarctica, suggestively arranged, 15% amazingly truth-like lies about Antarctica, and couched in those two, 5% increasingly loopy lies about the sleeping penguin-faced menace that's waking up from beneath the Antarctic ice, any day now, because we made forbidden pacts with the quorking, cawing, tux-clad guardians of the Last Continent.

Ahem yeah high-quality discussion. What's the strangest creative project you've stumbled into, or thought of?