Of all the casualties of ~~the year from hell~~ 2020, one sticks out for me the most.
Pearl Jam.
I had motherfucking PEARL JAM tickets. I was going to see them on the Gigaton tour, and they cancelled back in March.
You have to remember that this was before sports and gatherings were cancelled, well before any widespread loss of life. Back then, I didn’t know anyone sick from COVID-19, let alone anyone who had died from it. Hell, these were the good old days when nobody wore masks outside, and you couldn’t tell the flat-earth anti-vaxxer loser crowd from anyone else until they opened their mouths.
I gotta say, that concert cancellation felt like I’d been emotionally kicked to the curb. I had such high expectations and I was psyched. When it was cancelled, it was the first thing that really made COVID-19 feel real to me.
Of course, all the other shit that has happened since, and the unbelievable loss of life due to the disease makes this moment completely pale in comparison to our current reality. But in March 2020, this was my personal turning point.
Live music continues to be a casualty of the pandemic. At least my Pearl Jam tickets are electronic and the concert has just been postponed. I am hanging on to them in the hopes of seeing Eddie Vedder and the boys when the apocalypse is over.
So I can’t say that I was super surprised when my tickets to see The Black Keys that same month were also cancelled and my money was refunded. That one was like getting a kick to the gut when you are already down, but it wasn’t unexpected either. The shitty thing is while I still have the Pearl Jam tickets, The Black Keys ones just plain evaporated when the money was refunded.
Did I mention I miss live music?
It doesn’t look like we are going to get to see concerts any time soon (or at least not until the vaccines are out there in far higher numbers than today).
In the meantime, I am going to take us to enjoy the memory of my month of March 2020 that never was. That’s right, we are continuing our exploration of the Letter B. This week, we are going to check out THE BLACK KEYS.
About Them
What do you think of when I mention Akron, Ohio?
If you are anything like me, you said tires. Akron was the home of the American Rubber Industry at the start of the 20th Century, to the point where the city called itself ‘the rubber capital of the world’. Four major tire manufacturers were located there: Goodyear , Firestone, Goodrich and General Tire. In fact, much of the housing in the city was built in part by the rubber industry to support the workers.
So circular black round things are nothing new to Akron. But flat ones made of vinyl there are somewhat more rare. I know I was surprised to find out that Akron was also the home of Chrissy Hynde of The Pretenders, the 80’s new wave/punk band Devo, and this week’s rockin’ duo, The Black Keys.
Also, some guy named LeBron James is from there, but since he left Cleveland it is a sin to even mention his name.
Patrick Carney was born in Akron in 1980. His dad worked for the local newspaper as a reporter, and his mom worked for the city. His parents divorced when he was 6. His dad listened to all kinds of music and introduced him to many different genres. He lived part time with his mom and part time with his dad. Turns out, his dad’s house was right around the block from where Dan Auerbach lived.
Auerbach is a year older than Carney. His mom was a French teacher and his father ~~smelt of elderberries~~ was an antique dealer. It was his dad’s collection of old Blues records that infected young Dan with a love for music. He grew up with Bluegrass and Blues in a time when other kids were listening to Nirvana and Soundgarden.
As it turned out, there was a pretty strong musical background hidden in the neighborhood where both boys grew up. Auerbach, the cousin of one late great Robert Quine, was fated to meet Carney, the nephew of saxophonist Ralph Carney, who worked with the also late-great Tom Waits.
Or, going by genres… a combination of experimental rock and Blues/Jazz. Yep, sounds about right.
Their friendship first developed in highschool. Despite being in very, very different circles (~~cheer captain and bleachers~~ soccer captain and social outcast) the boys found a shared interest in music. They began jamming in 1996, with Auerbach learning guitar and Carney playing drums (and recording with his shiny new 4-track tape recorder. )
Not much came from this until Auerbach, a fresh dropout of U of Akron, began touring. He tried to make a living doing small bar performances, but quickly found most venues would demand a demo tape. Auerbach reached out to the only person he knew who had recording equipment - Carney. Carney agreed, allowing his basement to be used as a studio while Auerbach found his bandmates.
Who, fatefully for us, never showed up.
The duo ended up jamming out in the basement. Their chemistry led to them producing a 6-track demo consisting of “old Blues rip-offs and words made up on the spot”. They sent this rag-tag demo off to 12 labels. Only one label replied: a small-time one out of Los Angeles called Alive. The year was 2002.
The duo needed a name. Their moniker came from schizophrenia - I kid you not. And neither do I. (We also don’t.) A mutual acquaintance, Alfred McMoore, would leave incoherent messages referring to the boy's fathers as “Black Keys” - you know, those piano keys like D-Flat or C-Sharp or B-SharpSharp. In March of 2002, the duo played their first live performance at Cleveland's Beachland Ballroom and Tavern, to an astonishing eight people. The duo needed a “big” release to make it “big”.
So, they had to “come up” with something “big”.
The Big Come Up (2002) is Indie as fuck. Much like their first demo, it was recorded entirely in Carney’s basement on an 8-track tape recorder. (If you are following along: Upgrades, people. Upgrades! !) It’s a mix of Blues covers and original tracks, and despite it’s roughness, it’s a beautiful example of the duo’s sheer talent. Honestly, the loose, rough-around-the-edges nature of this thing suits the music exceptionally well. Tracks like I’ll Be Your Man, Busted, and Heavy Soul are lo-fi, Bluesy blasts of distorted guitar, sultry vocals, and ~~thinly mixed~~ thumpin’ drums. What can I say - there’s an undeniable charm in simplicity.
And this big come up was not going unnoticed. The boys achieved some decent sales, and garnered a bit of a cult following. Critics started to notice them, and soon, they managed to land themselves a whole new deal.
That’s right, they were moving up in the world. The Black Keys started mowing lawns full time.
Truly, the dream job.
Look man, I said the sales were decent, not amazing. The duo still needed cash for the road, so they did what they could to make ends meet. Mowing lawns really paid off when they earned themselves a new record deal, this time with Mississippi’s Fat Possum Records.
Evidently, they completed their second album within mere days of signing. Possums are inspirational, what can I say.
2003’s Thickfreakness is every bit as Indie as their first album. It was recorded in the same style as its predecessors - i.e., Carney's basement on ye olde 8-track tape recorder. This time, however, all the recording was done in a single 14 hour session. Apparently, this strategy was necessary since the band had spent all of their advanced pay on rent. In other words, it’s basically a live album. It’s raw, it’s rough, and it’s rockin’ - and yet somehow, it’s as smooth as the petroleum jelly on its cover. Oh yeah. Thick AND freaky.
Actually, quick side note on the cover art of this album: the band had almost zero idea what they wanted to do for it at first. They drove around Akron searching for ideas, and only got one when they stumbled into a Super K-Mart. There, they found a can of Pomade hair styling cream, and were struck by inspiration. They rushed it home and took the image we all know and love by lighting it up with every lamp in their house. Patrick Carney’s hand is seen in the image. Now you know!
Any way, if you liked their first album, you’d love Thickfreakness just as much. Tracks like Hard Row, Set You Free, and the titular Thickfreakness are explosions of catchy riffs and Bluesy euphoria. Critics hailed it once again, and soon, The Black Keys were garnering even more attention than before.
Many compared them to the White Stripes, and not always in a positive light. There was a certain level of derision in the comparison, since both bands were duos from the midwest that played Garagey Blues Rock and had a color in their name.
Hmm. Okay, when you put it like that they sound pretty fucking similar. But I mean, it isn’t completely unfathomable that it happened twice…now, if I were to go start a band called “The Grey, Door-Unlocking, Straight Lines”, THAT might be a bit copyright infringe-y.
This also gave rise to their first big time advertising offer. They could have gotten £200,000 for letting a company use one of their songs in an English Mayonnaise Ad. Mayonnaise: the international benchmark for when you are hitting the big time. However, they turned down the offer in order to not be perceived as “Sell outs”. This may be foreshadowing, unless I forget to follow up on this. I guess we’ll find out later.
The band faced a challenge in their third album. Their previous record studio, a basement, was no longer available to them after the landlord sold it. They found the answer in Akron’s industrial history: a makeshift studio in a former tire factory.
Released in September of 2004, Rubber Factory received critical acclaim. It was the first of their albums to chart on the US billboard 200 (at a respectable 143). Stand-out songs include the two singles, 10 A.M. Automatic and Till I get my way/Girl is on my Mind, the latter of which being a double A-side. The duo rolled across the globe on a world tour, spawning a live album fittingly called Live in 2005.
The boys were doing pretty damn well. Enjoying the success of their previous album, they went on to finish up their deal with Fat Possum. The 6 track album Chulahoma: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough acts as a tribute to Bluesman Junior Kimbrough, who had previously signed on with the Chunky Marsupial label. Recorded in an Akron Basement, it’s a classy tribute to a good musician.
But the most important part of Chulahoma was that it set the boys free from the… pouch, I guess? Marsupials are weird. The point is, the boys could now sign on with a different label. And after Rubber Factory, they certainly had options.
The Fat Possum contract satisfied, the band signed with Nonesuch Records in 2006. Later that year, the band released a second live album, Live in Austin, which was recorded in 2003. The band also landed a few major advertising gigs, including Sony, Nissan, and Victoria’s Secret.
You’d think with all this new popularity, the band would go for a real, serious studio for their fourth album.
Magic Potion (2006) was recorded in Carney’s Basement.
I guess some habits are hard to shake. Auerbach was quoted as saying, “We like the sound of odd rooms. It's got concrete floors and walls. The upstairs floor is the ceiling. The mixing desk and computer are on top of the tool desk built by the old guy who used to live there.”
The band took the finished tapes, and had them remastered for $350.
When they were returned, the duo discovered that their master tapes had zero bass. In a move that Carney still regrets, the band went “Oh, Ok” and mailed them off to the record label anyway.
The album was their first to contain all-original songs, and included three singles: Just Got to Be, a pretty started Bluesy-Rock song. Your Touch which ~~could also be a Victoria's Secret deal~~ is a pretty straightforward Rock song. You’re The One is a bit more reserved, but not a ballad by any stretch of the mind.
It’s 42 minutes of their standard, Bluesy Rock and it’s worth a listen. It also spawned the band’s largest tour thus far, filling theaters and 1,000-seat venues.
In 2007, producer Danger Mouse began working on a record for one Ike Turner. Turner was an early Rock and Roll legend, and when Danger Mouse asked if The Black Keys would like to record a few songs for the project, they jumped at the chance.
Unfortunately, the deal did not go through. Later, in 2007, Turner passed away. The band was left with a scattering of material that they decided to use to build a new album.
Attack & Release, their fifth studio album, was born of this and produced by Danger Mouse. The band noticeably moved away from their “homemade” ethos by recording in a professional studio. They also hired an outside producer. Danger Mouse helped the band out with buttery-smooth production values and instrumental flourishes.
The net result was an album that debuted at #14 on the Billboard 200. This thing is a real Beaut’. It brings a whole new sheen to the Black Keys’ signature brand of garage minimalism. The band stepped out of their established comfort zone, and came through better than ever. I’m talking backing vocals, guest guitarists, flute players. Dogs and cats, living together. Mass hysteria. Hell, why not throw in a jaw harp and a bass clarinet? We’re getting creative here.
Front to back, this album is thoroughly enjoyable and remarkably clean, especially if you’re used to their more rugged early work. Check out the banjo-inspired riffage of Psychotic Girl, and you’ll understand. Fun fact: that song is certifiably catchier than syphilis. I Got Mine and Strange Times are fast, thumping, and should probably come with a speeding warning. Yet the Keys showed a softer side here too - Remember When is a beautiful two part slow burn, and the album’s final track Things Ain't Like They Used To Be is a silky, freshly-mowed Bluegrass duet.
The production quality on Attack & Release became a staple of all of their future albums.
Have you ever wondered about those crazy stupid instructions you sometimes see on everyday items? Like, Q-Tip instructions where they say not to put them in your ears? (Which is exactly what I do, because they scratch that itch so good.) Well, if you look at the cover of the 2010 album Brothers, you totally get the same vibe. It was a success, with two songs off of it - Tighten Up and Howlin’ For You - generating tons of buzz for the band. Both had significant airplay.
If I am completely honest here, Howlin’ For You was my introduction to the duo. I remember hearing it on the radio one day and thinking how different the sound was, and how fresh it sounded compared to the hillbilly-hey-ho kinda stuff that was then all over the airwaves.
In reality, the success of this album probably saved the band. Auerbach had been dabbling in solo projects and had let everyone know - except Carney. Carney had been going through a particularly shitty time, as his wife had cheated on him, stolen money, and lied to him repeatedly. He had just gone through a bad divorce (is there such a thing as a good divorce?) and his last important relationship was with his bandmate - who now wanted to do music without him.
Fuck.
Fortunately, the duo got their proverbial shit together and decided to keep making music. The title of the album reflects this re-commitment to the band. Brothers is darker, because Carney was in a dark place when it was made. The vibe of the record resonated with many. It won Grammy awards and gave the band some significant airplay and critical momentum. The boys went from being Indie darlings to mainstream music icons with this release. It has just been re-mastered and re-released for its 10th anniversary.
The slow burn of success finally peaked for the band with El Camino in 2011. Seriously, you have already heard songs from this record, as they had massive airplay. If you somehow have lived under a Rock, this is a great place to start for the band. If Brothers was their Rated R, then El Camino is their Songs for the Deaf. Tracks like Lonely Boy and Gold on the Ceiling and Little Black Submarines were everywhere. The album received absolutely universal acclaim, and anyone who doesn’t like it is a flat-earth QAnon supporter. Well, probably.
Perhaps one of the best things about the album is that instead of the classic title vehicle, the cover has a Plymouth Voyager. A van. With woodwalls, ffs. Anyone that knows any history of the band knows that the van there was a picture of the first vehicle that they toured in, making it the ultimate kind of in-joke. Carney, never one to be shy, compared the appearance of his home town to the cover of the album, saying that Akron was, “A busted up parking lot with a busted up car.”
But at least we know that van had good tires. It was from Akron, after all.
El Camino propelled The Black Keys from an opener to a headliner. They were soon selling out venues all over the world. To new listeners in 2011, they seemingly came out of nowhere. But to the eight early fans that had seen them (perhaps when they toured in that fugly van) this was the culmination of years of steady effort.
Now they had to prove to the world that this record was not a fluke.
Turn Blue, their eighth effort, came out in May of 2014. El Camino had been such a massive hit that the boys felt the heavy weight of expectations.
They did not disappoint.
Clearly inspired by Auerbach’s love of the Blues, this effort made numerous global top ten lists. Critics LOVED it. Tunes like Fever and Bullet in the Brain made you think you were listening to an album from the 60’s that was also somehow brand new. Their unique brand of Bluesy Garage Rock mixed with Psychedelia was unlike anything else out there. The cover art was supposed to be reminiscent of hippie mind control, and helped portray them as modern throwbacks.
The boys had truly found fame. They were now headlining world tours, selling out stadiums, and finding their way into mainstream culture. They performed for the third time on SNL. Carney was having twitter fights with Justin Bieber fans (I mean, not the worst thing you could do) and, somewhat to his surprise, this kinda shit now made the entertainment news. Even the album was announced in a tweet by retired Heavyweight ~~ear muncher~~ boxing champion Mike Tyson.
The Black Keys had a massive global tour in support of the record. They were on top of the world.
And they were very soon burnt out.
The constant grind of touring got to them. They got into music to make music, and felt that they were just too drained to do so.
So they took a break. A long one.
After a five-year hiatus where fans feared that they may never return, The Black Keys finally dropped Let’s Rock in June of 2019. The lead single from this album, Lo/Hi, was a gritty guitar-themed track that showed that this duo still had all the right moves, despite the long time between recording projects. The album itself is a scorcher. All of the songs were written by Auerbach and Carney in the studio, with neither of them bringing in anything pre-worked. They’d mess around with a lick or a theme for about an hour and if something in it clicked, they’d continue. If nothing did, they’d ditch it and move on.
This approach may sound similar to many QotSA fans, as it mimics pretty closely what Josh does with his parade of artists out at Rancho de la Luna when coming up with material for The Desert Sessions.
The title of the album was inspired by the execution of convicted murderer Edmund Zagorski. As he was strapped to the electric chair and asked if he had any last words, Zagorski said, “Let’s Rock”.
So now you know how the album got its title, and also why it has an electric chair on the cover.
I have no fucking idea why it is a pink electric chair, but the cartoon lover in me wants to think that it is because of the clearly pink zaps of electricity that the chair delivers.
Pink zaps or no, the band had a hit record. It was an international stand out, and remains one of their best recordings.
And I, like some of you, was going to see this goddam tour before COVID. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck.
I miss live music, and I for-fucking-sure am going to catch them the next time they tour. I encourage you to do so too.
Links to QOTSA
The Black Keys have shared a stage with QotSA a number of times at concerts and festivals. These guys are true contemporaries in the music world.
However, things have not always been super-duper between them. Patrick Carney has lit into Josh Homme and Lady Gaga in the same sentence. Commenting on Gaga’s song ‘Perfect Illusion’ (that our boy Josh plays guitar on) Carney has been quoted as saying: “I’m lost because the guitar at the top of it sounds so shitty...It’s like ‘Eye Of The Tiger’, but not even nearly as good as that. It sounds like Hulk Hogan is playing the fucking guitar.” Gaga was not shy about replying, saying about Carney that, “...he’s not as snarky as I would be, watching him in a guitar death-match w Kevin Parker and Josh Fucking Homme”.
Here’s the video for Gaga’s Perfect Illusion - judge for yourself. All I have to say is that I may have been high when writing this, but I’ve never been quite as high as her shorts are in this video. Somehow this song that involves intense crotch chafing in the desert has over 150 million views.
It is also notable that Mark Ronson and Josh Homme worked on this song together, and that Ronson went on to produce the latest QotSA album Villains.
Their Music
Next Girl - Godzilla looks way fucking bigger in the movies. But man can he sing.
Tighten Up - The most unbelievable thing about this video is that two grown men would be at a children’s playground without Karen calling the cops.
Howlin’ For You - Alexa Wolf: A Sexy Assassin With A Troubled Past. Also, I am pretty fucking sure she is a Cylon. Someone better tell Las Teclas de Negro.
Lonely Boy - Say what you will, but buddy here has some moves.
Gold On The Ceiling - You know the van at 0:08 is an Easter Egg. Blink and you miss it.
Dead and Gone - Just in case you missed it.
Fever - Auerbach looks more strung out here than a busted guitar. The cuts from actual TV Evangelist audience members make this video a bit creepier than it needs to be.
Turn Blue - Watch out for Hypnotoad. Oh SHI~ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD
Just Got to Be - The boys appear to have snuck into a rural elementary school gym to record this video. The song still kicks all kinds of ass.
Lo/Hi - I gotta say, the pink lightning bolt is a nice touch.
Strange Times - Lazer Tag: the game that is never quite as fun as you think it will be.
Your Touch - This video starts with the boys getting shot. Fuck, the mean streets of Akron are WAY tougher than I ever gave them credit for.
Show Them Some Love
/TheBlackKeys - just short of 7,500 members. Maybe if they had made that Mayo ad, more people would be in this subreddit. See, I told you to pay attention! That was totally worth it.
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The Era of Disco: a short-lived genre that was inspired by a lifestyle.

So if you’re a fan of pop music you’re likely one of the many people who enjoyed seeing 2020’s mini disco revival. I myself was here for it, I’ve always loved researching the past of pop music as I’m sure many fans of pop like doing too. I’ve always found the era of disco to be the most memorable time of pop music, and seeing it have a small return was amazing.
We’re arguably in a turning point in music where the direction of the general public’s preferred musical interest could go either way; disco-influenced music could be one of the options. I wanted to talk about the era itself and various aspects of it. The time period in which disco was popular is what made it so special, of course the music was amazing, but when discussing disco you can’t not mention what went into it.
Though I do believe that many people on this subreddit are quite familiar with the era, I’d love to just go over general knowledge sort of stuff. I’m expressly talking about the era from the mid-to-late 70s rather than covering the revival, I will cover the artists (and who they represent) as well as some memorable albums of the era..
So if you’re not too familiar with the era of disco I hope this helps. I’ve also listed some playlists where you could get a little familiar with what disco sounded like.
Apple Music - Disco (Station) / Disco Essentials
Spotify - Disco Forever / Disco

1. The Genre of Disco.

I. The Sound of Disco
Pop music of the late 70s was disco itself, the genre was popularly known as dance music that originated from R&B/Soul. DJ’s would remix songs from that genre forming tracks into club-appropriate music, which would then gain notoriety thus becoming a popular form of dance music and eventually becoming pop music of the late 70s. The genre of disco was technically a sub genre of dance music, but became popular enough to be considered a genre itself. Disco stands out from other sorts of music of that time especially since it was an early form of electronic music, highly produced and engineered sounds formed the musical composition.
The notable style of disco-music is called four-on-the-floor, with every beat you can hear a bass drum. At the time of its popularity, disco was differentiated by its lack of lead guitar, it used electronic elements but only lightly put the electric guitar to use. Bass guitars and drums were much more present in the sound. But there are two other instrument types that are notably associated with disco, string synthesizers and orchestral instruments. Synthesizers remained popular throughout the 80s and are now associated with 80s pop rather than disco. But orchestral instruments, particularly horns and strings continue to differentiate disco from other forms of pop.
II. The Remix
For a song to play at a club it’d often need to be longer to fit with the atmosphere the club would go for, DJs would remix the songs by adding external elements, or repeating parts of the song(s) creating a lengthier mix. This became an evident trend in clubs and especially in the initial stages of disco. Producers soon caught on to this trend and made sure to create lengthy songs to comply with what the DJs were looking for.
Typically, preferred dance songs of that era would only last up to four minutes, not enough time for a song to be enjoyed at a club. Record producer, Tom Moulton came up with larger vinyls for singles to have extended times, first appearing with the 10” vinyl which would cover one track making the song 9-10 minutes longer. Moulton then came out with a 12” vinyl that would only hold one song that could make it last up to 20 minutes, deeming those songs maxi-singles.
After the emersion of maxi-singles songs became longer, an average disco song was 5-7 minutes in runtime, with special editions of the songs lasting up to 10+ minutes. These songs would have a lot to do with mixing engineers. With the amount of instruments and the layering of vocals, producing a disco song would require a lot of effort. Music engineering wasn’t common in that era so to have created a disco song wouldn’t be as simple as recording a live band, a producer would record different parts of a song at different times then put them together. On top of that, to make it into a disco mix would take a much longer time due to the preferred length of the song. However, this trend popularized the concept of remixing.
III. Forms/Differentiation of Disco
Disco coexisted with rock, which had been a popular genre among the general public and had dominated the music industry since the late 50s. Disco was quite easily differentiable from other popular genres based on its upbeat nature and use of musical engineering, its innovative nature was captivating and had spread to other parts of the world. Two popular sorts of disco included Euro-Disco and Italo-Disco.
Euro-Disco (specifically clubs) had already existed prior to American Disco. The two weren’t too different but definitely took notes from each other. The European style of the genre had also emerged from clubs and from the mixes that were crafted by DJs. Euro-Disco wasn’t centred around one country as the concept of dance music was popular in various parts of the continent. Many European artists obtained American success, they did so by bringing different sorts of aspects to the genre. German based artists Boney M mixed reggae tones into disco while Munich-based Giorgio Moroder produced some of disco’s most notable hits, by introducing electronic sounds into the music. Swedish group ABBA, the first Swedish winners of Eurovision produced and released massive disco hits in both America and Europe.
Italo-disco emerged in the late 70s around the time American disco lost its popularity. Italian disco was often sung in English using similar instruments as western disco. It became popular in Europe but due to the American distaste for disco in the early 80s, it never truly saw any peaks there. Italo disco eventually faded in the 90s and was divided into various dance genres. Though many Italian artists hoped on the disco trend that style music never got tired, there was always fresh new styles and different forms of dance music. The trend of dance music in Europe remained popular throughout the following decades, and even in today’s popular music the genre of dance does much better in Europe than in America.
Despite disco finding its origins in R&B/Soul, club DJs wouldn’t be limited to playing those records, disco was also influenced Latin American Salsa music. The upbeat tones would perfectly fit the sort of music required for a club setting. The polyrhythmic tones went on to inspire future disco records, and would include Latin American instruments.
Compared to Rock, American disco was a lot more upbeat and promoted a good-time; it was meant to make people dance. The music style would be played at clubs and was known as dance music whereas rock was better associated with festivals. The bigger differentiation came from the musical composition, four-on-the-floor made disco songs have a set tone that would continue throughout a song, rock would have a sort of tone that would centre around an amplified electric guitar. However, some rock songs/artists would be associated with disco due to the use of orchestral instruments. The Electric Light Orchestra used strings in their songs which would suit the sort of sound that was preferred for disco, but the band was known for the genre of orchestral-rock rather than disco.
Compared to Funk, disco is meant to make the listener dance. Funk is similar to disco because both originate from R&B/Soul, but funk is notably slower than disco, though it usually contains the same characteristics. An easy way to differentiate the two is by use of strings, disco music tends to make more use of strings than funk does. There’s also a lack of engineering in funk due to a band being present, this wouldn’t require heavy production after a recording is done. Disco found influence through funk because of the electric bass guitar, which was a popular element of funk. The bass-provided element of groove became a part of disco and can be found in most disco recordings.
Due to the various instruments present, disco songs couldn’t have all elements recorded at once. Most recordings back then were created with live instruments, a band would likely be present with rock/jazz recordings. Having those instruments recorded after the original composition—or even before—didn’t come off as organic. Electronically produced songs were foreign to traditional musicians/producers as a result, the genre received a lot of flak due to the style of production.

2. How Disco came to be.

I. The Rise of Disco
How was disco popularized, why did it stand out when rock was on a roll?
It was a response to rock music. Where rock was fit for concerts and festivals, disco was fit for clubs and parties. Disco was intimate while also universal, the overall tone was meant for enjoyment. The point was to escape the norm with the help of a club that would take your troubles away from you, all while you were surrounded by people who felt the same way. The intimacy that came from those experiences was translated into the music.
This isn’t to say that rock can’t be intimate, the significant difference is that disco is more openly sensitive than rock is. The instrumental composition and lyrics served as a welcome to the haven that was the dance floor. Prior to it becoming a trend, disco was freeing for people who didn’t feel comfortable in society, it was more popular among minorities, namely people of colour and homosexual men. After fights in favour of liberation in the past decade, disco became an essential part of their celebration.
Disco, as a genre, saw a predominant rise out of Motown Records, a record label that was known for black artists. Motown created a distinct sound in the 60s that made the music of black artists stand out; much of the aforementioned sound that is associated with disco came from Motown Records and their style of music. At that time, Motown made what was deemed Soul music, strictly associated with black musicians and generally upbeat music.
Soul Train (a televised program that would display black dance culture and soul music) was the spark that would ignite the general public’s interest in R&B/Soul music, finding the best way to enjoy it at clubs. With growing popularity of this genre, these songs would be necessary for any sort of club/party setting.
Around the peak of disco, it became a well known genre to the people it ran from; traditional Americans. Of course, the conservative population didn’t approve of it but the more openminded folk loved it, they’d go to clubs and join in all the disco festivities. Once it reached the mainstream there was a mass capitalization of disco. Record companies started to produce more disco records and clothing brands decided to favour the clubbers choice of fashion; it became an aesthetic. This decreased disco’s exclusivity but brought a brighter spotlight on the culture that people of colour and homosexuals shared, the popularity of disco essentially emphasized the fact that ancient prejudices had false notions. Though there were a lot of original disco-goers who couldn’t get with the trendiness, others welcomed the outsiders; club culture grew in popularity.
II. The Lifestyle of Disco
Disco as a genre was about clubbing, because it purely began in nightclubs. The word disco comes from the French term Discothèque which translates into a “library of phonographic records”, the term was then used to describe nightclubs. Club culture became an essential part of disco; doing drugs, wearing high-fashion to stand out, and being sexually liberated were all parts of the experience.
It was through the nightlife experience that disco was born. Going to a club and listening to the tracks would then make this sort of dance music a trend, radio play and record sales would lead to charting; which would then lead to mainstream media coverage which secured its spot as popular music. The general public’s attention on disco culture lead to mass popularity, many people would want to go to the clubs solely to experience the atmosphere. This boost in notoriety lead to certain clubs becoming exclusive, being invitation-only is what would drive people to talk about the hype around dance culture.
DJ David Macuso was one of the first people who would pioneer this concept of party-exclusivity. Mancuso’s house parties were invitation-only, which would be known as one of the first underground dance parties. The first gatherings of that sort took place in 1970, back when disco culture was just figuring itself out. Club owners caught onto this rising trend and deciding to keep their disco’s exclusive for the sake of notoriety.
Various clubs associated with disco were LGBT+ inclusive, which was rare unless the clubs were strictly made for them; controversy surrounding disco came from that fact, there were laws that restricted LGBT+ people from having fun. The genre of rock was often associated with cisgender heterosexual men doing drugs and having sex, but when you partly flip that it becomes homosexual men/transexual individuals doing drugs and having sex; which became the stigma around disco culture. The variety of people within those clubs (people of colour and LGBT+) brought a larger interest for the “normal” people to take a look inside, making music critics and various producers special guests to come see the enigmatic energy within most clubs.
Studio 54 became a notorious disco, and is now well-known in pop culture. The chaotic nightclub had celebrity guest lists as well as entry policies that would restrict various amounts of people from entering through the front doors. If you weren’t invited you’d have to look a certain way to gain entry, this is where high-fashion became an essential part of disco.
Women would sport glitter while the men would wear designer suits with glamorous button-up shirts. Drag getups and over-the-top styles of attire would be found more often at invitation-only parties (gradually making their way to the clubs), those parties required the guests to stand out in order to be noticed and ensure a second invitation. Glamour was necessary, for public entry into clubs such as Studio 54, an individual had to fit in with the aesthetic of the lights and music; your style of dress would have to be as loud as the songs being played.
Within each club would be a mass amount of drug use. Substances such as cocaine, poppers, and meth were highly popular; meth was nicknamed disco biscuits, due to its popularity among the clubbers. Cocaine became synonymous with nightclubs and lasted within club culture throughout the 80s and is popular to this day. No matter what sort of disco party it was, commercial or non-commercial, there would be extensive drug use. Doing drugs was a must for experiencing disco, substance abuse is one of the few things that grew in popularity with clubs among other aspects.
Though rock was strongly associated with sex, disco also became associated with sexual liberation due to the nightclub culture. The difference was that rock was almost strictly about male eroticism whereas disco was open to all sorts of sexual expression. Women were allowed to express their bodies while on the dance floor, wearing tight clothes was encouraged. And with Donna Summer’s various songs expressing feminine sexuality, women were invited to free themselves through disco. Homosexual men would also express themselves the same way, many disco clubs would be filled with various sorts of sexual activities going on in stairwells and balconies. The cause of such sexual activity was believed to be the amount of drug use.
Disco as a genre was exclusively associated with clubs because it was born there. How disco came to be was through the emersion of nightclubs, from the various sorts of music being played by DJs would become the sound of disco. Though the genre was short-lived, it was all about the nightclub lifestyle, which kept existing despite the downfall. Freeing yourself in a blacked out room, forgetting your troubles through any means possible was a mutual experience that many people enjoyed; but while discussing disco we can’t forget those who pioneered this lifestyle.

3. Artists of Disco.

Disco culture was formed by people who were celebrating their liberty. Minorities in western society found solace on the dance floor, many of them welcomed regular members of society to take a look inside the culture they had formed. One way of accomplishing this was through the release of music.
There was a lot that went into disco, before it became a genre no one exactly knew what sort of music DJs looked for, it could be R&B/Soul, Latin American, Funk, or even Rock. Disco being a lifestyle was one thing but the sound that came from it was evidently crafted through R&B/Soul and the work of Motown. Musicians created the sound that would then be captured and replicated by producers while adding certain elements that would match the tone of the clubs. Then the singers and songwriters would tell stories through their voices and lyrics, which would result in the genre of disco.
The following artists are some of the many notable people that are associated with the genre, but more importantly they represent the sorts of people that made disco what it is.
I. Nile Rodgers
If you’ve looked into the era of disco, you’re guaranteed to hear the name Nile Rodgers. The co-founder of Chic created the iconic band with Bernard Edwards in 1977, after the mild success of their self-titled debut album they released C’est Chic. While reaching new heights of success, Rodgers and Edwards produced numerous albums as Chic. But as the fall of disco began their working together came to a quick end, making Believer (1982) the final Chic album of the disco era.
After the era of disco came to an end, Rodgers produced hits int the 80s for various artists, including Madonna, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, INXS, and more. In 1992 Rodgers and Edwards reformed Chic. The band continued their work with Chic-Ism (1992), the band went on to tour and perform around the world. Chic-Ism would then be the final album the band had with Bernard Edwards as he died in 1996. Chic would continue to tour with various artists. Rodgers and Chic would return with a new album It’s About Time in 2018. Rodgers wrote and produced each song on the album, it featured artists such as Lady Gaga, Elton John, Hailee Steinfeld, Nao, and more.
Rodgers is a disco icon solely based on his productional work. The replication of his stylistic technique can be found throughout songs that are inspired by disco, what Rodgers did was he created dance music from jazz harmonies. The tone sophistication behind disco music is what stands out from his production, the use of various instruments such as strings are done in a way that’s subtle yet effective to the nature of dance. Rodgers represents the artists who put in the work behind the music, the people who created the sound that was associated with the clubs. Those producers made disco what it is.
II. Donna Summer
The queen of disco, Donna Summer was and remains the face of disco. Summer continued to flourish as disco became a fad, Summer adjusted for the times with newer sounds that fit the sound of the following music eras. Summer began her career right as disco was becoming a genre, her second album Love to Love You Baby became a disco phenomenon and is now said to be one of the first albums to feature classic disco traits.
As the style of disco became a trend, Summer went on to release hit after hit having a top 40 hit every year from 1975-84. Summer worked closely with Giorgio Moroder who helped create the iconic Love to Love You Baby and I Feel Love, the pair are often accredited for creating electronic dance music through disco. Summer is a notable figure in disco due to her contributions early on. The genre/sound was just forming and figuring itself out when Summer stepped in to assist the direction it was taking. Summer opened the gates for female sexuality and expression, she is often known as the first woman to do so through popular music.
Summer’s aesthetic of female sexual liberation went against the image that rock had put forward that only allowed men to express themselves that way. She represents the women of disco, those who had fought (and continued to fight) during the second wave of feminism, all to be able to express their sexualities. These women were judged but that didn’t stop them. Not only did Donna Summer assist in the creation of the genre of disco, she welcomed women to free themselves through music.
III. Village People
The Village People are a notable disco group and were known to be a safe side into disco for the general public; you’d enter in through the Village People then end up stoned inside Studio 54. Their comedic attire was welcoming and their beats were friendly but their work went beyond suggestive lyrics, their goal was to target disco’s massive gay audience.
Though it was a formulated group, they became quiet the notable faces of disco, their popularity helped disco become a trend. The heads of record labels wanted to market disco to the masses with the original intent to target another audience. Not everyone was okay with such in-your-face culture, people of colour and homosexual men having such a good time wasn’t something traditional Americans saw as acceptable; prejudice was still prominent. Village People helped diminish that sort of stigma surrounding flamboyant-disco-men, but they ultimately made fun songs that were catchy.
Village People represent the homosexual men of disco because they virtually introduced the public to gay men without actually doing so. This is the way in which homosexual men made their way into society without a massive sort of stigma; by showing the world that they’re not the way western culture had painted them to be. Female liberation wasn’t too controversial as it had been happening since the 60s through movies, but there were very few people who were open to the idea of homosexual liberation. Village People are disco icons solely because of this sort if destigmatization.
IV. The Trammps
The Trammps are one of the first groups of the early 70s to create the sound of disco. The band’s drummer, Earl Young is seen as the inventor of the classic four-on-the-floor style of drumming; he made the sound popular through the band’s hit song Disco Inferno (1976). Despite having impacted the genre of disco, the song wasn’t popular till it was added to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack a year after its release.
The Trammps’ early albums served as blueprints that would assist in the formation of what would then become the genre of disco. The element of dance music merged with R&B/Soul instruments became the sort of dance music required for the making of the genre. They’d use the help of MFSB (Mother Father Sister Brother, a group of thirty or more musicians playing various instruments) to create the orchestral sound heard within early disco recordings, which would then influence the genre itself.
Without any popular hits or notable accolades, The Trammps go unnoticed in the discussion of the era. However, they stand as a representation of the R&B/Soul artists that made the sound of disco, four-on-the-floor and extensive use of orchestral instruments are what made the genre distinct and what continues to differentiate disco from other forms of music.

4. Essential Disco Albums.

The trend of R&B/Pop musicians releasing disco records became popular in the late 70s. As the era of disco continued, more artists released disco records. Notably Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Cher all released disco albums the same year that disco was killed (1979); while also having no past affiliation with the genre.
Something to keep in mind is the genre of disco wasn’t too occupied with albums, singles were more popular at the time since clubs wouldn’t really play an entire album. While there are various artists who are associated with disco, most of their songs are known to be hits rather than their albums. Another thing to keep in mind is that rock was a lot more popular at the time, rock albums would take the spotlight from disco records, thus diminishing the legacy of a full body of work. The following albums are based on various lists, critical reception, impact they had on pop music, and general nostalgic memorability.
I. C’est Chic (1978) - Chic
Apple Music | Spotify
The iconic disco album by Chic contains two unforgettable songs of that era. Le Freak and I Want Your Love are two of the most essential tracks when it comes to disco. Le Freak peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and I Want Your Love at number seven.
C’est Chic was a commercial success, peaking at number four on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Billboard R&B charts for eight weeks. The album went on to sell over a million copies in the US. C’est Chic was critically acclaimed, receiving about a 90% from music critics. It’s retrospectively remembered as a disco masterpiece.
Fun fact, Le Freak was about denied entry at Studio 54. The story behind the iconic song is that the members of Chic, namely Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were invited to the club by Grace Jones but as Jones had forgot to mention her guests to the staff, Rodgers and Edwards were denied entry at the club. The lyrics ”Freak out!” were originally “fuck off” as they’d mirror what the doorman would say if they weren’t on the guest list. However, due to radio restrictions they changed it to “freak off”, but later settled on ”freak out” as that would sound better.
II. Bad Girls (1979) - Donna Summer
Apple Music | Spotify
Released at the peak of disco was Donna Summer’s Bad Girls. Prior to the release of this album, Summer was named the queen of disco after the popularity of songs such as I Feel Love and Love To Love You Baby. This album would be one to watch in order to assess whether or not she could uphold her reputation; Summer did not disappoint. The album was disco at its finest with hints of rock and electro music, which allowed it to stand out.
The album reached number one on the Billboard 200 with both the title track and Hot Stuff reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Bad Girls went on to sell over two million copies in the US. It was met with critical acclaim and received five Grammy nominations including Album of The Year, and won for “Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female” for Hot Stuff.
This album stood out from Summer’s other records due to the fusion of disco and rock. Despite being two competing genres, Summer’s song Bad Girls merged the genres, capturing two different sorts of interests together. This album is now said to have influenced various female artists, including Madonna, Janet Jackson, and Beyoncé.
III. Off The Wall (1979) - Michael Jackson
Apple Music | Spotify
This was Michael Jackson’s first album after leaving Motown Records. It was not only a departure from his staple sound but also a departure from The Jackson 5. This was a make or break album for Jackson to see whether or not he could disassociate himself from his well-known image; and as a result he made one of the most memorable disco albums in history.
Off The Wall peaked at number 3 on the Billboard 200, peaking at the same position for the Billboard year end charts. The album went on to sell over eight million copies in the US. All the (US) singles reached the top ten on the Billboard Hot 100 with Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough and Rock With You reaching number one. The Album went on to sell eight million copies in the US and received mass critical acclaim for Jacksons maturity compared to his past solo/group work.
Despite Jackson not remaining within the disco genre or without having any previous disco records, Off The Wall is considered one of the best disco albums. This is because of the record creating its own sound, not only with the help of Jackson’s voice but also because the production didn’t limit itself to stereotypical disco sound. It went beyond what the sound of disco was and what it could’ve become.
IV. Saturday Night Fever (1977) - Bee Gees/Various Artists
Apple Music | Spotify
Despite being a soundtrack, the Bee Gees perfectly captured the sound of disco. Stayin’ Alive is now synonymous with the 70s, and is Bee Gees’ biggest/most well-known hit. Saturday Night Fever is a soundtrack/compilation album and features four original songs from Bee Gees, and various other disco songs, some of which would become hits because of the soundtrack.
The album was a success in all aspects. It reached number one on both the Billboard 200 and the Billboard year end chart. Four of the six singles reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Saturday Night Fever went on to sell over sixteen million albums in US alone, it is the second best selling soundtrack of all time after The Bodyguard: Original Soundtrack Album, and it is one of the best selling albums of all time. The album was nominated for five Grammys and won each category, including Album of The Year.
Originally, Bee Gees had nothing to do with the soundtrack, due to legal clearance the producers of the film couldn’t get the songs they wanted to use in the film. Bee Gees were then commissioned to record songs for the soundtrack, including one called ”Saturday Night”, but due to too many songs having the same name they renamed the song Stayin’ Alive.
V. We Are Family (1979) - Sister Sledge
Apple Music | Spotify
This album is a corner stone in disco. Another album that was released at the peak of disco. Produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, We Are Family was a success through the composition and reflection of what disco was at the time; a universally-intimate experience. The lyrics reflect the escapism and freedom found on the dance-floor and within the walls of the nightclubs.
We Are Family peaked at number three on the Billboard 200. With He’s The Greatest Dancer and the title track reaching the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. The album and both aforementioned singles reached the top spot on the Billboard R&B charts. In 2018 the song We Are Family was selected for preservation by the library of congress.
This was one of the first albums that Rodgers would go on to produce after the formation and success of Chic. The work of Rodgers and Edwards on We Are Family stands out as it is one of The Chic Organization’s most notable efforts and doesn’t shy away from the stereotypical disco sound. We Are Family is now recognized as a classic album of that era becuase of its lyrical observation of the era, as well as its instrumental capturing of the sound of disco. — Those albums were released during the peak of disco, allowing them to capture all that went into the genre and what made it so mesmerizing. While there were many other artists that released captivating disco albums, those records have stood strong through time and have aged very well based on the nostalgic aspects.

5. The Ending/Revival.

I. Disco Demolition Night
At the time of its popularity disco was competing against rock, a genre that was already established and had appealed to almost everyone. A surge in popularity meant that the focus from record companies, media publications, producers, and most importantly radio was shifted on to the new genre rather than the classic genre of rock. When a disco song would play on the radio it wouldn’t be too likely for rock fans to jump up and enjoy the music; instead they’d despise it for taking the attention rock had. A lot of critics today look back and wonder if there was more to the story than just a competition between the two genres.
Disco was a Black creation, originating from African American based clubs, a lot of the top artists of disco were black people and had a massive poc following; they had just recently seen the defeat of segregation but racism still existed. In theory, this was disguised as other reasons to hate disco such it was too feminine or that club culture was toxic or that it wasn’t too appealing, and popularly that it was electronically produced. Modern critics argue that perhaps the outcry towards disco wasn’t because it was electronically recorded or that it was based around clubs but rather because it was coming from African American and homosexual self-expression/celebration.
While disco was in it’s peak with artists like Cher and Michael Jackson releasing disco records, Disco Demolition Night took place. That was a night in which rock fans fought against the popularity of disco, belittling the musical dominance of the genre. Taking disco records and burning them in the middle of a baseball game, making a statement that seemed poetic at the time, but as time happened to pass people theorized the true implications of that night; to destroy a black creation.
After that event had an impact on popular music, record companies started releasing disco music categorized as dance or pop to fit in with the new trend of leaving disco in the past. It still took time for pop music to adjust and create a new sound that would fit in with the thriving rock and R&B/Soul but one that would also stand out. While many record companies chose to fit in others had to permanently shut down due to the impacts of the massacre of disco. Most clubs survived but chose tom play different sorts of dance/upbeat music. It was further theorized by critics that the sudden distaste for disco wasn’t just due to disco demolition night but also due to rock producers and artists had pushed record labels to put an end to disco.
Fun fact, the Grammys had an award for Best Disco Recording that only lasted for one year (1980). The backlash against disco was so severe that the Recording Academy had to remove the category.
II. Post-Disco
The sound of disco was coming to an abrupt ending, artists had to stay popular and have hit records but those who were used to disco didn’t know what to do. Pop then had to discover a new form of pop music to fit in with the upcoming decade. Some artists chose to leave certain instrumental elements of disco behind but others stuck to the stereotypical sound, ultimately creating post-disco.
The main aspect of what post-disco decided to keep was the synthesizer, which then became associated with 80s pop rather than disco. Though rock music was highly influential and in-part did influence pop of the 80s, post-disco became more focused on electronic elements as well as musical engineering—two aspects of music that disco was judged for in it’s peak—. As post-disco became pop, the use of electronic elements in music became a lot more common, various genres (notably Hip-Hop/Rap) started using electronically produced music rather than continuing to have a live band.
III.Nu-Disco - The Revival
Nu-Disco is the revival of the once popular genre of disco. While predominantly evolving into House music in the 90s, disco music faded but returned through twenty-first-century sound; while it doesn’t sonically appear the same, it consists of the same sort of instruments.
Something to note is the difference between house music and nu-disco, house music became its own sort of genre (inspired by disco) whereas nu-disco is directly related to disco. House music consists of the four-on-the-floor beat that was once exclusively associated disco, however it rarely includes any sort of orchestral instruments which is how it can be differentiated. Also, House doesn’t contain any notable organic instruments, it’s purely curated and performed by DJs/producers with little-no inclusion of any live instruments.
Nu-disco is strictly influenced by disco but revolves around a much more electronic sound. While consisting of four-on-the-floor it doesn’t shy away from electric guitars—something that disco wasn’t too fond of—. The classic use of orchestral instruments aren’t always present in most nu-disco recordings, which is how it can be dissociated from disco and categorized as dance music.
Nu-disco wasn’t too appealing with its initial revival (late 90s), the popularity of dance music was based on the artist and/or trendiness of the song; also because other forms of music that were popular in the early 2000s/late 90s, namely R&B and Hip-Hop. The revival of disco through nu-disco saw a boost in popularity throughout the 2010s, by the help of funk-influenced music, two of the most notable hits include Get Lucky (feat. Pharrell & Nile Rodgers) by Daft Punk, and Uptown Funk (feat. Bruno Mars) by Mark Ronson. Those songs were more funk than they were disco but allowed for disco-influenced songs to gain an entry way back into popular music, but the main competition this time around was rap.
Music critics took note of the 2020 influx in pop music that is influenced by past styles of dance music. Two of the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 2020 hits include Dua Lipa’s Don’t Start Now and Doja Cat’s Say So, both disco influenced songs that had a notable impact on the forms of popular music that followed. With the aforementioned singles reaching mass popularity, the question becomes whether or not disco music could finally see a successful revival. Will pop once again be centred around club music?
Thank you for reading this. I’ve always loved the era of disco, it’s a monumental period of music especially because people who were discriminated created their own culture and then found the people who went against them at their doorstep.
Again, due to Reddit’s character limit I had to cut out links and extra paragraphs, so I made a follow up post on my profile, with some more album recommendations as well as some articles that could help with a deep dive into the disco era, if you’re interested.
So as I previously mentioned, we could be in a turning point of popular music. Based on the releases of the past year we could see two sorts of music gaining notoriety: either slow, subtle music or nostalgia-based pop music. Which of the two do you believe could gain popularity? Or will rap continue to dominate for now?
Some more discussion questions— - What aspect of the disco era do you wish would make a return? - What are your favourite disco songs/albums? - It’s rare that disco would make a complete return (in the sense of popularity in clubbing and high fashion), but which twenty-first-century aspect could merge into disco? - Which artist should try out disco?

[Let's Build] d100 interesting background events in a major city

Here's the intent: Events that MIGHT involve the players, but also might not. Nothing TOO catastrophic (like a tarasque destroying the city is too much. A public execution of a popular tavern owner, however- THAT's what I am looking for). There's a goblin invasion here in these examples, aaaand I think I might remove it- seems too big for what I am after here.

An assassination plot is underway to take out the leader of the [City Guild]. It takes place in [1d10+2] days.
The city's [Government Official] was just murdered by a political rival. This won't be discovered for [1d10+2] days.
Goblins have been tunneling under the city walls for decades in preparation for a massive invasion. Nobody has noticed the sunken ground over their tunnels yet, but the invasion attempt is set to take place [3d20+10] days from now.
The largest brothel in the city is currently holding a "the best lover in the land" competition. It's the first one ever, and people are talking about it all around town.
The city's annual combat tournament begins in [1d6+2] days. Anyone may enter, but no weapons of any kind or spells are allowed. It is held in a dirt floor arena behind the market square.
The city economy is tanking. This is evidenced by more than the usual number of vagrants, and and unhappy residents all around. A riot in the city center will take place in [1d4+2] days. Flyers for a "demonstration" can be seen all around.
Every Friday in the city merchants slash their prices by 25%. People who live in the city depend on this, and thus the only folks really shopping during the week are outsiders.
The King will die from apparent natural causes in [1d6+3] days. The actual cause will be the effects of long term poisoning by his wife.
The circus comes to town in [1d6+2] days. It will show up unannounced outside the city walls. The circus is going to use magic to pickpocket everyone who attends and then disappear into thin air.
A building the players visit will burn to the ground in [1d3] days. [1d6+1] adjacent buildings will also perish in the towering inferno. Everyone burns to death unless the players intervene.
The confirmation of the city's new Ambassador happens in [1d4+1] days. It will draw huge crowds, and pickpockets.
A blood red moon will take place in [1d3+1] days.
The Festival of [Noun] occurs in [1d20+2] days. The city is abuzz about it.
A monthly group of traders are arriving to the city. They bring with them strange and exotic wares from surrounding cities and lands.
A group of adventurers are causing chaos in the town. The guards are alert and put on edge due to them. The PCs can stop them for a hefty reward.
Some miscreant has opened the city’s aviary, and now there’s a storm of birds all around the city so thick it is disturbing market business city-wide.
A man proclaiming to be a prophet of a deity is going around the town doing “miracles.” In reality he’s just a powerful [mage/sorcerewarlock] looking for a following, but his magic is having unintended consequences.
A caravan heading for the city will be ambushed and robbed in [x] days. If it's not stopped, there will be various supply shortages within the city.
A prisoner will break out of jail in [x] days. If not stopped or captured this criminal will go on a crime spree. 1-2 burglary / 3-4 mugging / 5-6 murder
A related group of (guilds, merchants, nobles) will be robbed in [x] days
A specific (guild, house, merchant, museum, noble) will be robbed in [x] days
In [x] days, an estate auction takes place. The deceased was an (1. alchemist / 2. artificer / 3. collector of the unusual / 4. ex-adventurer / 5. explorer / 6. inventor, mage)
In [x] days, a delegation of diplomats (nearby realm, distant realm, race) passes through the city on their way to the capital.
In [x] days, a herd of animals (cows, goats, pigs, sheep) escapes from the market and runs amuck in the city. If not stopped, random animal event for 1d6 days, every few hours roll 1-2 amusing animal mischief, 3-4 injury caused by animal, 5-6 property damage caused by animal.
In [x] days, pilgrims arrive in the city on their journey to "x"
In [x] days, a traveling merchant passes through the city. He or she sells things that are not commonly available in the city.
There is billowing smoke in the distance, but if investigated, it is no fire. Instead, an alchemist has gotten a little too eager and mixed dangerous chemicals. He's still inside the shop where the smoke is billowing from, and will die if not rescued...
The alleged leader of the local thieves' guild has finally been caught, and being made a public example of... though he insists it's a case of mistaken identity.
There's a nasty illness going around the city. Lately, more and more are falling ill. It's nothing terrible, and few actually die, but there's murmurs of it having an unnatural source...
An incredibly rich businessman is giving away all of his wealth. Citizens are wondering what could cause him to have such a change of heart.
People are going missing in the poorer districts of the city. Whispers abound of a man-sized beast that drags people off in the night...
The mayor has fallen quite ill. Crowds are leaving flowers at his home hoping for a healthy recovery, but the outlook is not great...
A priest is trying to get a mob going by preaching loudly in the streets, but he keeps getting chased from one gathering to the next by the city guard. He preaches the power of the people and is aiming to cause a city wide riot. This will take [2d10] days to get going and the players will find his sermons a couple times as the crowds gradually grow in size and malcontent.
The thieves guild is stealing from estate sales. They find rich, recently dead posh folks and drop by at auctions and property sales. They seem to be nabbing a lot of nick-knacks and low value magic items, but nobody can figure out why. In reality, they are searching for a puzzle cube that had been divided up long ago by a bunch of old society adventurers. When put together, it reveals a dungeon rumored to be rife with riches.
An orb at the top of the mage's tower has begun to glow brightly. It seems harmless for now but people are beginning to get spooked. A mob will form and attack the tower in [x] days.
The heir to the crown has been injured in a hunting accident and it is said that he may be near death.
A local healer is suspected of consorting with demons. She is due to be burned at the stake in [x] days.
A local priest has miraculously saved the life of a child. A feast is being held in his honor tomorrow night.
Two rival thieves guilds are ramping up a dispute over territory and innocent shop owners are being squeezed by both sides.
The Field-Marshall Captain of the Guard has just died. The position of the successor is unclear. Crime and Military Threats to the Peace are increasing in frequency by the day.
The ruler has or will soon have an arranged marriage, the new spouse arrives in 1d4 days under a cloud of some controversy, but with much pomp and ceremony.
A tax collector went rogue, and abused their power in a public fashion by killing a shop owner that failed to pay. The public is out looking for him seeking fevered vigilante justice.
The price of grain is being manipulated by a consortium of importers. The poor suffer, and the hungry are swelling in the streets.
A gate in the city wall has been poorly maintained for years. This failure in the kingdom's defenses has not gone un-noticed, and in 1d6+2 days raiders will arrive to take anything they can get their hands on. It will be bloody.
A madman just claimed to have poisoned one or more of the wells in the city; Panic is beginning to grip the populace.
A young ward of the [prominent noble] has developed an extreme interest in a fad that is gripping the youth recently. This public embarrassment has gone on long enough now that it has been decided: actions must be taken.
A love triangle has gone awry amongst two members of the royal court. One of the lovers has secrets that could embarrass the monarchy at best, or be used for purposes of blackmail at worst. Some of those secrets have already been whispered in the streets, and its only a short time before bigger ones leak out too. Dangerous ones.
The King flagrantly wastes taxes in a visibly corrupt scheme to make the royal quarters even more lavish. The populace decides to do something about it over the coming week, and tensions are already starting to simmer in the streets.
The Guards have been stopping and inspecting all outbound cargo, for some reason. It is putting a real strain on shipments and clogging up the traffic. In reality, the thieves guild managed to steal a precious magical artifact from the Supreme Wizard during an epic heist. Trouble is, they can't get it out of the city now with all the heat.
A terrorist has unleashed a Discord Bottle in the middle of a local wedding. There were many casualties, and even the bride and groom both attempted to kill each other. This has happened at least once before, recently, and it has people on edge- leery of outsiders.
There's a crazed monster on the loose, that likes to run across rooftops and jump on folks in the dead of night, or so the rumors say. Rumor or not- the city guard is imposing a curfew tonight: nobody in the streets after dark.
A major counterfeiting operation gets uncovered in 1d4+1 days. There's a chance that it was operating undetected for months, and a significant amount of fools gold and silver coin entered the local economy. Penalties for re-circulating the fake money are very harsh. (10% of player gold gained in the last two sessions turns out to be phony).
There's been a real crackdown on Vice in the city, and alcohol was outlawed last month! Bootleg can still be found, but only under heavy secrecy and for high dollar.
Whispers are everywhere about an impending fisherman's strike. After a string of fatalities due to deliberately unsafe working conditions, the city's workers are fed up and are calling for economic democracy. If the players can't help somehow, rioting starts in 2d6+1 days.
Tenants in the city's largest housing block are gathering together for a rent strike to oppose unsafe conditions and their landlord's continued abuse of power. The landlord owns a fleet of merchant ships and is threatening to not sell necessary medicine and food to renters who participate in the protest. It's getting ugly.
A cave-in is about to occur in 1d8+2 days in the middle of the town’s market. The town has only the resources to begin picking up the pieces, not investigate the cave-in just yet, leaving the PCs free to explore.
A royal child is about to be born in 1d20+5 days, and rumor has it the child is not the king’s...
A ship arrives into port, but no one is on the ship...
The firstborn children of each of the town’s councilmembers shows up dead in front of the temple in 1d6+3 days. The arraignment of the bodies appears to be a failed attempt at some kind of ritual.
The town’s water supply is draining slowly, and no one knows why. In 1d6+2 days, humongous roots sprout from the ground and twist through the buildings, causing havoc and massive infrastructure damage. In reality, this was caused by a local Secret Society, and only they can undo what they have unleashed.
A druid wanders into the city every few days with his companion. He is convinced that someone is opening a portal to the abyss and bringing death to his nearby grove... but it's only being affected by actual pollution from the city itself.
An arsonist is in town. The town guard is investigating but so far haven't let on that they have any leads. Every [1d6+2] days a new fire is started. (Amp this up by having the fires be places the PCs have visited...)
The city's graveyard have a hidden cryptid, and if not found, an occultist group of merchants will make a citizen disappear every [1d4] days. After [1d10+10] people are missing, a bigger event happens. [1. Zombie outbreak 2. Ancient evil back to life 3. Random wild magic surges happens 4. Various people lose memory of the recent missing ones]
The wishing ponds in the city overflow slightly every day, and in [1d4+2] days the coins that were there rain down in the city (causing some injuries and some lucky people getting some money).
The town guard are busy putting around posters of a missing kid. If the PCs look into it [2d4] days, the child can be found alive, buried in the graveyard. Otherwise, the child is later found dead in the grave by the city guard with scratch marks on the inside of the coffin. In either case, suspicions arise over who deliberately buried this child, and why...
All the cats in town start to use the market as litter box. After [1d20] days, an epidemic of a strange disease starts that makes merchants get sick enough that they begin closing down the economy. After the disease spreads, the PCs will find no shops open.
The Princess is facing an arranged marriage to a nearby kingdom's Prince, but it has been rumored she's been in a relationship with a local bard commoner for some time & some folks at Court & in the street are speculating that they plan to run away before the wedding, which is to happen in 1 week. That is EXACTLY what they plan to do. They want help getting out of town unseen, while the King would handsomely reward someone who stopped this plot.
A local cult is sacrificing beggars in fiendish rituals down in the sewers at night, then by day is serving the flesh to the populace via a tavern they own. As the days go on, more and more people can be seen glassy-eyed and dreamy, with fresh tattoos depicting the cult's symbol. In 2d20 days, the cult's new army will make an attempt on the King's life.
In 2d6 days, there will be a extravagant parade through the city. Everyone in the city seems bristling with anticipation!
A dust storm is coming tomorrow that will last 1d4+1 days. It reduces visibility in the streets to 20 feet, and forces all the vendors outside to shut down.
It becomes unseasonably cold tomorrow, and each day it just keeps. Getting. Colder. The wizard's tower is the first place to freeze solid with ice that seems to be emanating outward from it, and no-one has seen the wizard since the cold snap began...
A royal baby was born just before the PCs arrived, and the town is decorated with millions of beautiful flowers. The public is antsy for news of the new arrival and hopes to see the little one soon.
Tonight as the PCs sleep, the city guard will begin rounding up all [Background]s for interrogation. (Acolytes, sages, outlanders, soldiers, etc). They received intelligence that the local secret society has been using [Background]s to further their goals, and the King is ready to take drastic measures to ensure their plans fail.
Rats are getting out of hand- they are EVERYWHERE. The people can hardly sleep with all the movement and scratching, and beggars in the streets are starting to look diseased. In 1d10 days, a druid shows up claiming to be able to rid the city of rats, but his true intentions are much more sinister.
Another rich nobleman has turned up dead today and his young wife is inheriting all of his wealth. The odd thing is this is the third time she’s been widowed and always to wealthy men in the city. Her latest husband’s son is seeking to hire someone to search for evidence of foul play on her part.
A famous healer is coming to town and the whole community is obsessed with him because of everyone he’s helped. He is only in it for the money, but nobody can convince the public of that- they absolutely love the guy.
[1d6] days ago a meteorite hit just outside the city walls, and people have been trying hard to get valuable pieces of the meteorite to sell off but the biggest piece of all was mysteriously taken. Everyone in town is on the lookout for it, even the city guardsmen.
The Prince is NOT the son of the King. This will come to light in [1d4] days, at which time the King will call for the public execution of the beloved Queen. The public will be devastated if she is actually killed.
It's the day of the Inventor's Faire, which goes on for [2d4] days. Artificers will come from near and far to show off, win awards, and make some sales. Mishaps and explosions are discouraged, but expected by the public.
It's the City-wide Bake off! Rival bakers come to test their baking skills. Cookies and sweets are abound.
The annual lantern festival, "Night of a Thousand Lights", is happening! At midnight, citizens gather to light mini lanterns that float up into the sky. The old timers recant how the lanterns are to lead missing travelers and long lost loved ones home.
It's the annual Mimic festival! This city actually enjoys Mimics for their versatility and celebrates by letting them be in their natural form and feed them a feast!
Holes (5-10 ft radius, 3-6 ft deep) have been appearing around the city since [1d6+2] days ago, causing traffic problems and some house damage. There’s a 10% chance that a hole will appear below where the party is resting, waking them up.
A clear Druid message has appeared in the sky, something all people can see, but no one knows its meaning. The message disappears after [1d4] days, when the secret battle between two different druid circles ends, leaving only neutral sentient plants outside the city.
Somebody has wrote and spread around the city a harsh truth about some guards who failed in protecting the people a long time ago. The people are furious and want justice, but in [1d8+1] days someone will discover it was fake information used as a cover for a prison break.
Something strange is happening in the city: people claim to become lost when walking down the street, but reach their destination [1d12] hours later, which is extremely confusing. There’s a 20% chance of this happening to one or more players. This is the effect of a powerful mage trying to learn how to manipulate time in secret, but in [1d4+3] days she will be stuck in a reverse time-stop spell of her own creation (only she is frozen in time), and the effects on the public will end.
A cheerful Halfling is giving luck coins to everyone who listen its story. The story changes for everyone, since the Halfling is a deity trying to inspire and help people who will need it to survive a future tragedy.
The prince is marrying a Medusa, something no one expected and is causing confusion among the population. Days later, the princess reveals she has married a weretiger instead of a Tabaxi. No one is sure how to react.
A long famous restaurant is closing since the owner “has no more inspiration.” It'll be selling food one last time in [1d4] days, and some lucky customers will receive one of its secret famous recipes! The lines are expected to be ridiculous.
The city's water source becomes tainted. By deliberate poison, accidental pollution, or (some speculate) a possible ooze infestation, no one is quite sure yet what the cause is exactly yet.
A merchant cart carrying various goods was too heavy for a bridge and collapsed into the river below. Traffic is being rerouted, but travel times through the city are doubled for [1d10+3] days due to the extra congestion while the bridge is repaired. The merchant lost something of great value downstream and wishes to have it returned, but it may have travelled into the sewers...
A very bad blight has spread through the city seeming to emanate from the nicer side of town. Sick people begin filling the streets more and more each day. In [1d20+5] days all the businesses will close as the workers are too sick. The source of this affliction is irrelevant at this point- what the city NEEDS is a cure!
The town guard are intentionally allowing crime to run rampant in certain areas which is giving the King a bad reputation. Is this a matter of principal to protest a refused pay raise? Perhaps a personal vendetta between the guard captain and the leader? Has some kind of payoff occurred, funded by an unknown third party? Or are they just bad at their jobs, but because [PLOT_REASON] there isn't anyone better to take their place?
Members of a [secret society/Thieves/Assassins guild] receive instructions encoded in prayer material that's distributed during regular religious services on where to meet in secret, information on missions/targets, illicit materials/substances, or other intel of value that cannot be exchanged in public. Are the priests/clerics in on it? Or are they being unknowingly manipulated by an unseen hand?
The local blacksmith disappeared over night. Not even his family have any clue about his whereabouts. Although the locals suspect it has something to do with the large quantity of [insert rare material] he acquired- because there's no way he could've afforded it.
A poster campaign critical of the monarchy has been rather more successful than is comfortable for some of the upper crust. This is leading to raids, arrests and increased patrols by the already overworked night watch.
A strange black mold is spreading through the city, popping up in isolated spaces. A cult of mad druids are to blame, as over the last few weeks they've planting strategically placed cultures of the fungus. The cult intends to chain together several rituals of the Plant Growth spell to turn the city into a forest of deadly fungus.
A prankster has started throwing illusions all over the city. Doors, manholes, and other such items are turning out to be illusory quite often as a result. The city watch are on constant guard for the perpetrator and will often poke and touch objects they're suspicious of while on duty.
A local elderly priest died in the middle of a special ceremony. The gathered crowd is awestruck as a brilliant light descended on his body, explodee in a harmless but temporarily blinding flash, and the body was gone. Even more mysteriously, now a handful of citizens have an invisible mark on their right cheek that glows whenever they near or enter the temple/holy site where it happened. The Royal Wizard wants a formal investigation, but the city guard doesn't have the manning.
The King's wife/daughter is having an affair with a notorious villain in the city. It gets discovered in [2d8] days.

[Inspo & Commentary] Rings

You've seen jewelry, let's talk more about rings. Scroll down for the list of designers.
soundtrack

Gallery

Inspo Gallery on imgur

Getting Started

Assuming you're reading this because you would like to wear rings and currently don't, here's a quick FAQ.

Materials?

Most common precious metals used in jewelry are silver, gold, platium and variations thereof. You will rarely find pure metal jewelry, reason being that 100% silvegold is actually soft and will warp and become damaged with little effort. The most common alloys for jewelry are:

Stainless Steel: what your kitchen cutlery is made of. Marketed as a cheap alternative to silver.
Sterling Silver / .925 silver: 92.5% pure silver mixed with another metal, commonly copper.
Yellow Gold: (usually) an alloy of gold and some other material, preserving the yellow colour of the gold.
Rose Gold: An alloy of gold, copper and some white metal e.g. silver. The copper gives the metal a rosy tint.
White Gold: An alloy of gold and a white metal e.g. silver. Personally I don't see the appeal when silver is 1/10^th the price.

Karats?

When buying jewelry it's important to know what the precious metal content is (or whether it's made of precious metal at all) as this plays a huge part in the quality of the jewelry and how much you should expect to pay.
Sterling silver is the benchmark for quality silver. Sometimes referred to as .925 silver, sterling silver is 92.5% silver by weight. The vast majority of silver jewelry is made of sterling silver - anything new that doesn't specify the quality (.925 / sterling, .999 / fine / pure) is of dubious quality and should be avoided.
Gold content is measured in karats. The scale goes from 0 to 24, with 1 karat being 1 part gold to 23 parts other material. Therefore, 16K gold is 50% pure gold and 24K gold is pure gold. The karat rating for white gold or rose gold is the same - 18K gold and 18K white gold contain the same amount of gold but the gold is alloyed with different materials to change the colour of the resulting alloy.
Metal alloys are generally much harder and resistant to wear. A higher percentage of pure precious metal is not necessarily better or more desirable.

Plating?

Plated jewelry is made from a material coated with a very thin layer of the specified metal. Plated metal is much cheaper than pure metal or an alloy. The material beneath the plating is usually copper, nickel, brass or silver. Jewelry from fast-fashion stores like H&M are generally made of copper or nickel plated with silver or gold.
Vermeil is a restricted term for a specific kind of plating. Whilst plating can be done to any metal with any plate thickness, vermeil is always silver plated with a layer of gold at least 2.5 microns thick.
Be cautious with plated jewelry. The price makes it very attractive but there are down-sides:

The plating has a tendency to rub off over time, ruining the appearance of your formerly-gold/silver jewelry.
The exposed metal may cause side effects:
- Some people are allergic to nickel and will develop a rash.
- Copper has a tendency to turn your skin green for a few days.

What should I buy?

Only buy pieces that speak to you. Think of jewelry like a tattoo. It's expensive, you're likely to keep it for a long time and wear it regardless of the rest of your outfit. If you're not sure whether you like a given piece your money would be better spent on something else. If you're not comfortable wearing it that's a lot of money left sat on your dresser.
Start simple. When making a big change in your wardrobe it's good to take it easy. Try a few small, simple pieces first e.g. a couple of stacking bands or a plain signet ring.
More is more. A single piece of jewelry will stand out in a bad way. The consenus from the jewelry thread was that it takes a few pieces to appear intentional and blend into an outfit. The sweet spot is 3-5 pieces total - less if you're wearing only one type, e.g. max. 3 rings, more if you're mixing it up e.g. 2 rings, a bracelet and a chain.
Sterling silver is king. IMO stainless steel does not look good in real life. It may look exactly like silver in the photos but trust me, when you place it side-by-side with silver it looks cheap. Stainless steel is duller, has a gray-tone and brushed-metal surface. It's a hardy material that's very resistant to scratches and wear. Sterling silver on the other hand is much brighter, can be polished smooth or oxidized to add detail and develops a patina over time. Gold is nice but it's very expensive. Mixing metals is hard to pull off so if you buy gold you may feel limited in terms of choice and price when buying future pieces.
Feel free to ignore this advice. If you want gold jewelry, go for it. If you want to wear more rings than you have fingers don't let me stop you. There are no rules - this is just advice for those who are dipping their toes into jewelry for the first time.

Sizing?

It can be difficult to size jewelry, particulary if you're doing it yourself. Here's some methods you can use ordered by ease/accuracy:

Use a ring sizer at home. Nowadays they make plastic ring sizers and many online brands will ship you one for free or low-cost. IMO this is the best way to take your ring size but watch a guide or two on YouTube to make sure you get it right.
Use a cloth tape measure. Take a measurement of your finger in mm using a flexible tape measure and use a size chart to convert to your desired scale.
Use your existing rings as a guide. If you know the size of your current rings (or you're sizing for a friend or partner who knows theirs) you're pretty set. I bought a thumb ring for my girlfriend for Christmas and compared her current thumb ring to one of mine to get an idea of size. When it turned up it was slightly smaller than expected but still fit.
Have a professional jeweler size you. You can ask a jeweler to measure your fingers in-store though you may be uncomfortable doing this if you don't intend to purchase anything. Alternatively, try some pieces on and note what size they are if they're a good fit.
Go to the showroom and let them measure you or try the pieces in-store. The most accurate if you're buying a specific brand. Obviously only an option if you live or travel nearby.
Pay to have the ring resized. If the ring is too large any jeweler will be able to resize it for you. It's more difficult/expensive to size a ring up, especially if it has details the whole way round. If in either doubt size up, make sure they have a good returns policy or don't buy.

Sizing Tips

Remember that each of your fingers is a different ring size. The fingers on your dominant hand will be thicker than the fingers on your non-dominant hand. The size of your fingers changes depending on the temperature so rings that are loose when it's warm may fall off when it's cold or vice-versa. When measuring at home take a few measurements in different rooms, inside / outside or at different times of day to get an accurate measurement.
If you're not fussed about which finger the ring will sit on, measure a few candidate fingers of similar size (±1) and order a ring in the size between. If the ring arrives and it's too large / small then wear it on the larger / smaller finger.

Where to buy?

Online: I buy most of my jewelry online. Most designers have an instagram presence and online store. Check the tagged photos on their instagram accounts for inspiration. The more mass-produced brands will have sales on holidays e.g. Christmas or Black Friday.
Independent retailers: Your city may have an area with lots of independent designers / craftspeople / markets - you're likely to find a lot of unique pieces here and physical locations for the designers listed below.
Thrift: You may have some luck at thrift stores or second-hand / charity / pawn shops. In some cities there are second-hand stores that only sell jewelry.
Grailed et al.: The more popular brands (e.g. The Great Frog) will appear on places like grailed or eBay.
On the high street: You're unlikely to find men's jewelry in high street retail / department stores. Most of the jewelry is very delicate and targeted toward women or married couples (wedding bands). The stuff you do find will be relatively inoffensive bands and signet rings.

Designers

So you want a ring but you don't know where to look. Great! See the gallery for general inspo and check out the list of designers below.
I've tried to categorize the list to make it easier to find the kind of rings you're interested in. If you have suggestions for more designers please let me know in the comments.
Most designers will produce other types of jewelry e.g. chains, bracelets, necklaces, pendants in a similar style.

Simple Rings

Small-to-medium size rings with plain or very simple designs. Stacking bands, signet rings, rings with a single motif like a chain, feather, nail etc.

designer	web	ig	price	description
TWOJEYS	twojeys.com	@twojeys	$	Silver-plated brass rings with unique designs offering a cheap entry point into jewelry. Occasionally do sterling-silver variants of popular designs. Bit of a weird "community" drop-based Instagram presence.
Vitaly	vitalydesign.com	@vitaly	$	Modern-architectural-streetwear-techno-vampire jewelry in raw or gold-plated stainless steel.
Silver999	Etsy - Silver999	not found	$	Tons of sterling silver designs with pop-culture / religious references.
Onyx.925	onyx925.com	@onyx.925	$	One man and his surfboard making plain rings with a rough, hand-crafted look in the south of England. Potential for custom hand-engravings.
The Silver Stone	thesilverstone.co	@the.silverstone	$	Simple motif designs with various inspiration, made in California.
Love for C/O	lovefor.co	@loveforco	$	Swedish design inspired by religious iconography.
The M Jewelers	themjewelersny.com	@themjewelers	$$	NYC jeweller dealing exclusively in custom-made. Letters, names, years of your choosing. Wait for a holiday for 45% off.
Scosha	scosha.com	@scosha	$$ - $$$	Don't be fooled by their instagram - their mens' offering is mostly simple signets.

Industrial Rings

Medium-to-large rings with lots of sharp angles, clean lines and bulky shapes. Man-made, brutalist aesthetic.

designer	web	ig	price	description
OSS	oss-oss.com	@ossofficial	$$	Brutal-industrial-spaceship rings from Spanish designers based in Paris.
Iolom	[iolom.jp](www.iolom.jp)	@iolom_official	$$	Principally works with brass and sterling silver; elegant clean lines and geometric shapes. Distribution outside Japan very limited.
Chin Teo	chinteo.com or ssense - chin teo	@chin_teo	$$$	Natural meets industrial with a mix of clean, wound designs vs. rough-hewn and hammered bands.
Werkstatt:München	werkstatt-muenchen.com	@werkstattmunchen	$$$	Big, biker-industrial rings. Lots of wound-bands and stacking sets. Some skulls.
Parts of Four	partsof4.com	@partsof4	$$$	Huge. Impractical. Outrageously large, really, gigantic. Some of the most unique jewelry I've seen, for better or worse.

Natural Rings

Various-sized rings with designs or textures inspired by nature. Think flowing water, rock formations, gemstones, emphasis on natural wear and tear. The counterpoint to industrial's man-made aesthetic.

designer	web	ig	price	description
Innerstone	inner-stone.com	@_innerstone_	$	Sets of delicate stacking rings and bands with textures inspired by nature.
Alice Kaufmann	alicekaufmann.com	@alicekaufmannjewellery	$$	Danish designer creating organic pieces based on the flow of the metal itself. Some zero-waste pieces made from by-products of other designs.
Alicia Hannah Naomi	aliciahannahnaomi.com	@aliciahannahnaomi	$$	Australian designer creating delicate-yet-rough rings inspired by the nature around her.
gone.archive	gone-archive.com	@gone.archive	$$	Polish designer creating rough-hewn, primitive designs like rock-formations. Extensive use of black diamonds.
Fallow Store	fallow.com.au	@fallowstore	$$ - $$$	Not a designer per se, but a reseller of other designers similar to ssense. Grungy, big industrial/nature inspired rings. A good place to follow to get inspiration; stocks many of the designers on this list.
Sofia Lorena Perelson	sofialorenaperelson.com or Fallow Store	@sofialorenaperelson	$$ - $$$	.999 fine silver / gold rings in simple designs. Due to the softness of fine / pure metals the ring will tarnish and warp creating a unique, highly personal piece of jewelry.
Alex Skeffington	alexskeffington.com	@alexskeffington_	$$ - $$$$	"Inspired by the elements, the human body, rock and roll, techno music, a theatrical lifestyle and deep personal emotions. Her designs feature unique organic forms of .925 silver, in heavily textured freehand surfaces. Each piece bares luxurious weight and significant stature."
Kei Shigenaga	keishigenaga.com	@keishigenaga	$$$	A clash between of rough-hewn oxidized metal and elegant, flowing silver with elements of kintsugi repair.
NODE by Kudo Shuji	nodebykudoshuji.com	@node_by_kudo_shuji	$$$	Wild sci-fi designs often contrasting clean, melting chrome-like sections with heavily oxidized, distressed parts. Distribution outside Japan extremely limited.

Biker Rings

Big fuck-off rings for letting everyone know you ride a Harley Davidson, play in a rock band and do a lot of drugs.

designer	web	ig	price	description
Clocks & Colours	clocksandcolours.eu/	@clocksandcolours	$	Detailed, medium-sized rings under various themes - western, nautical, nature. I find a lot of their designs to be tacky but they have some simpler pieces I've considered purchasing.
DAD of Sweden	dadofsweden.com	@dadofsweden	$	Lots of skulls.
The Great Frog	thegreatfroglondon.com	@thegreatfrogldn	$$	What you think of when you think of biker rings. Worn by all your favourite rockstars. Big skulls, motorcycles, animals.
Songyan Jewelry	Etsy - Songyan Jewelry	@songyan_jewelry	$$	Jewelry by Chinese designer Songyan Han. If The Great Frog were founded in the East.
Han Cholo	hancholo.com	@hancholodesigns	$$	Pop-culture rings. Voltron, He-Man. Makers of the MF DOOM ring.
Black Rock Jewel	blackrockjewel.com	@blackrockjewel	$$	BIG rockstar rings from Copenhagen. Chunky rings, big stones and skulls.
Lugdun	lugdun.com	@lugdunartisans	$$	Handmade ancient viking rings and pendants. Maybe the most unique thing on the list outside Macabre Gadgets.
King Baby	kingbabystudio.com	@king_baby_studio	$$$	Big rings inspired by Americana. Clean silver and gold designs.

Macabre Rings

Macabre / goth rings. Skulls, death & witchy things.

designer	web	ig	price	description
Blue Bayer	Etsy - BlueBayerDesignNYC	@bluebayer	$	Lots of unique designs, although some of them seem to be lifted from The Silver Stone or vice-versa (particularly the goat and branch rings). Not sure what to think but I grabbed this from the streetwear list.
BLACK SØLV	blacksolv.ca	@blacksolv	$ to $$	Goth, romantic, and sci-fi influences with polygonal shapes and desaturated gems. Lightly femme aesthetics.
Macabre Gadgets	macabregadgets.com	@macabregadgets	$$	Big rings made of marble with some silver / gold elements. Design inspired by the macabre - lots of skulls, skeletons and dead things. Infamous for their dick ring. I have yet to any of their pieces pulled off outside of their lookbooks. Please share any everyday fits you find with me so I can justify buying one of their pieces.
Brooklyn Smithy	Etsy - Brooklyn Smithy	@brooklynsmithy	$$	Another Etsy store selling all kinds of designs including a fair few skulls and eyes.
KD2024	kd2024.com	@kd2024_lsdluxurysilverdesign	$$$	Intricate designs in a mix of gold & silver. Claws and other animal parts. Lots of big stones.

Fashion Rings

Mainstream, avant-garde or high-fashion designers that don't fit into the other categories.

designer	web	ig	price	description
Lucas+	lucasplus.com	@lucasplusjewelry	$$	NYC designer creating jewelry with his "positive" motif.
Khiry	khiry.com	@khiryofficial	$$	Inspired by the designer's African heritage.
Voodoo Jewels	voodoojewels.com	@voodoojewels	$$	Rings with lots of multi-coloured stones.
Good Art	goodart.com	@goodarthlywd	$$$	A bit of a bizarre one. While most designers focus on traditional jewelry, Good Art makes a lot of... things. Chapstick caps, AirPod cases, corkscrews and smoking pipes.
Cody Sanderson	codysanderson.shop, Sorrel Sky, Buyma, Grailed	@codysandersondesigns	$$$-$$$$	Native American silversmith creating jewelry based on traditional Navajo designs in Santa Fe, NM.
Tiffany & Co.	tiffany.com	@tiffanyandco	$$$	Probably the most famous jewelry designer in the world. You may be tempted to write them off as over-priced and over-hyped but (as a biased Tiffany-bracelet owner) I have to admit that the quality is incredibly high. ~~Their silver pieces are rhodium-plated~~ and there is a noticeable difference in the durability and brightness of my Tiffany bracelet vs. other silver jewelry I own. Edit: I can't actually find any evidence that their silver is rhodium-plated. It's important to do your research before buying things!
Thomas Sabo	thomassabo.com	@thomassabo	$$$	Big rings inspired by Asia. Lots of small stones and inlays. One of the more successful designers with physical locations in tons of major cities / malls.
Alexander McQueen	alexandermcqueen.com or ssense - Alexander McQueen	@alexandermcqueen	$$$	Rings in classic McQueen style.
Gucci	gucci.com	@gucci	$$$	It's Gucci.
David Yurman	davidyurman.com	@davidyurman	$$$	I suppose you might consider these to be rings for classic menswear. Signet rings with marble or some other opaque stone, elegant bands. Some outrageously intricate signets with fuckton of stones and sky-high prices to match.
Ugo Cacciatori	ugocacciatori.com	@ugocacciatory	$$$	Big, intricate rings and bands in either silver or a mixture of silver & gold.

Vintage

Places to buy vintage / second-hand rings online.

designer	web	ig	price	description
VintageJewelryEden	Etsy - VintageJewelryEden	not found	$	Vintage European silver jewelry sold in the USA.
1st Dibs	1stdibs.com	1stdibs	$ - $$$$$	All sorts of vintage jewelry from across the spectrum.

Custom Signet Rings

Signet rings were traditionally engraved with a design and worn on the pinky finger. You would use the signet to stamp and seal letters with your personal insignia in wax.

designer	web	ig	price	description
Deakin & Francis	deakinandfrancis.co.uk	@deakin_francis	$$ - $$$$	Established 1786. Custom signet rings and other jewelry in a variety of materials, shapes and stones.
Dexter	familysealrings.com	@dexterrings	$$$ - $$$$	Custom signet rings in a variety of materials, shapes or stones.
Rebus	rebussignetrings.com	@rebussignetrings	$$$$	Exclusively gold, custom signet rings in a variety of shapes or stones.
Hancocks	hancockssignetrings.com	@hancocks_london	$$$$	Established 1849. Custom signet rings and pendants in a variety of materials, shapes and stones.
Coast Handworks	coasthandworks.com	@coasthandworks	$$$$	Custom engraving of bands and signet rings by a modern designer & engraver based in Canada.
Castro Smith	castrosmith.com	@castrosmith	$$$$	I really hope you're still reading because Castro Smith does some incredible work. Hand-engraved, incredibly detailed signet rings in multiple tones. Ready-to-order one-of-a-kind pieces and the opportunity to order bespoke.
Ruffs	ruffs.co.uk	@ruffs1904	by quote	Established 1904. Custom signet rings in a variety of materials, shapes or stones with the opportunity to recycle existing jewelry.

Thanks to danhakimi and everyone else who left nice comments in the jewelry thread and encouraging me to make this post.
Note: my only qualifications for creating this post are owning a few rings, enjoying wearing them and having access to Google. Please read the comments and take everything with a pinch of salt. Thanks x

Bed Bath Beyond Queen Comforter Sets

The Mystery of the Bakersfield 3: Two friends disappeared, a third died in a drive-by shooting. Their families suspected the crimes were linked. How did Baylee Despot, Micah Holsonbake, and James Kulstad end up in the middle of an arms trafficking and murder plot in their California city?

Over the course of 34 days in the spring of 2018, three unsettling crimes played out in the city of Bakersfield, California. The families of the three victims realized their children all knew each other and ran in the same circles, and they began to suspect that all three crimes were connected. But what began as a crusade for justice among grieving parents took a shocking turn when investigators discovered that the so-called Bakersfield 3 were embroiled in a criminal underworld of black-market weapons smuggling, the Hells Angels, unspecified ties to drug cartels, torture and kidnapping, and a convicted felon nicknamed “The Boogeyman of Bakersfield.”
This is a genuinely bizarre case, and while I’ve never written up a case for this sub before, I’ve been following this story closely for the past couple years. The last time it was mentioned on here over a year ago, but there have been some huge recent developments in the last year that I thought deserved as comprehensive a telling as possible. And despite all that, it's nowhere near resolved. So without further ado...
Part 1: Missing
On March 23,2018, Micah Holsonbake, 34, went missing in East Bakersfield near the intersection of Flower Street and Mount Vernon Avenue. Micah was a clean-cut dad who worked in finance, a former high school debater who loved karaoke despite not being any good at it. He was presumed endangered missing until August 22, 2018, when teenagers swimming near a local park found an arm in the Kern River that was identified as his. The rest of his body has never been found.
On April 18, 2018, James Kulstad, 38, was murdered on a quiet block in Southwest Bakersfield. A father of two daughters, James was a serial entrepreneur described as the type of man who “could sell a dollar bill on the side of the road for a million dollars if he could just get 5 minutes with you.” His brother Ryan heard the gunshots from the next street over, but didn’t see the shooter, and he claims he held James as he died in his arms.
On April 25, 2018, Baylee Parrent-Despot, 20, disappeared from Rosedale, the upper-middle-class neighborhood in Northwest Bakersfield where she’d grown up. Baylee described herself as a “flower child” who had been born in the wrong generation. After facing a number of serious challenges, she was struggling to get her life back on track, and was said to be pregnant and trying to leave her boyfriend when she went missing. She has never been heard from again.
Local media christened Micah, James, and Baylee the “Bakersfield 3” after the victims’ families discovered that all three victims knew one another. In the wake of the links between all three disappearances coming to light, Micah’s father told a local news reporter, “Just to be blunt, something happened to Micah… and a month later something happened to Baylee, and I think it’s because she knew what happened to Micah.” And in between them, there was James Kulstad, who ran in the same drug-fueled circles as Baylee and had helped Micah move just weeks before they both were killed. Bakersfield is a city of half a million people, but on a social level, it can feel as insular as any small town — you’re rarely more than one or two degrees removed from anyone you meet — and even in a city where everyone seems to know everyone, it’s hard to buy three friends all going missing within the space of a month by sheer coincidence. But as time went on with few official developments in the investigation, it seemed like people largely lost interest in the case by late 2019.
Then, in 2020, the Kern County District Attorney’s office charged three people with a total of 34 different charges, ranging from first degree murder, torture, kidnapping, assault with a firearm, and illegal manufacturing of assault weapons. Two of the defendants were already in custody — and the third may not even be alive.
Part 2: Some Local Context
By every metric, Bakersfield is just a flat-out terrible place to live. It’s my hometown, I left for a reason, and the reason is that it sucks. Kern County suffers from a slew of serious socioeconomic and public health problems, the largest of which is probably related to economic and income inequality. A fifth of the population is under the poverty line, and crime rates are sky-high, especially drug-related ones. Opioid abuse is rampant, though it still falls second to methamphetamine, the most widespread drug in the area. There’s a significant issue with white supremacist gang violence. When I was 16, my 70-year-old next-door neighbor got stabbed in a biker gang fight at a tattoo parlor by a Hells Angel called “Delano Mike.” A high school chemistry teacher was literally arrested for trying to make meth in his classroom three months before Breaking Bad even premiered. This is a region with a lot of serious problems that go deeper than any one symptom, but suffice it to say, there’s a reason I moved away as soon as I tuned 18.
The other thing you need to know is that despite being one of the most conservative cities in California, there’s a widespread distrust of law enforcement outside of the police and courts themselves — and, frankly, for good reason. Corruption in the justice system is widespread, and basically a local tradition dating back to the tenure of longtime district attorney Ed Jagels, perhaps best known for ramming through 36 false convictions of ritual child abuse at the height of the satanic panic. (34 were eventually overtured, and the other two people convicted died in prison and never saw justice.) Jagels’ history of prosecutorial misconduct is also the subject of Mean Justice, a 600-page doorstopper by Pulitzer-winning author Edward Humes about the wrongful conviction of Pat Dunn, who is currently serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife despite a wealth of evidence that would suggest his innocence. In 2002, Jagels’ protege, an assistant district attorney named Steve Tauzer, was murdered by a former Bakersfield police deputy, Chris Hillis, after Hillis allegedly learned that Tauzer had a sexual relationship with Hillis’ 22-year-old son, an addict in recovery; facing first-degree murder charges, he pled out to manslaughter and received a 12-year prison sentence.
In 2015, The Guardian published an in-depth exposé about how widespread corruption within the local law enforcement community led to Kern County having the highest rate of police killings in the country: the deadliest cops per capita. And over the past several years, the Kern County law enforcement community has been mired in a police corruption scandal in which members of the BPD abused asset forfeiture laws to illegally seize guns, drugs, and money from suspects, which they in turn trafficked for personal gain. All this is to say that Bakersfield cops and prosecutors have not engendered much public trust outside of their own communities. In a city with high rates of violent crime, law enforcement has consistently put its own interests above public safety, justice, or victims’ rights. That's just something to keep in mind while reading.
Part 3: Down the Rabbit Hole
Micah
In the weeks and months prior to Micah Holsonbake’s disappearance, his family could tell that something was troubling him. Lance and Cheryl Holsonbake both recalled their son behaving erratically in the days before he vanished. But none of it seemed to make any sense coming from someone like Micah, whose family described him as intelligent and hard-working. He had a comfortable upbringing in Rosedale and worked his way into a lucrative career as a financial advisor despite only one year of college. In the photo his family circulated following his disappearance, he wore the suit and tie and placid smile of someone posing for a corporate headshot. But Micah was going through a dark time following a rocky separation from his wife and family, and had been struggling with a painkiller addiction for the past two years. The year before, he’d been laid off from his job after going on disability leave due to depression.
According to court documents, Micah owed drug-related debts to members of the Hells Angels as well as “the cartel.” One friend of Micah’s told police his life seemed to be headed in a downward spiral after he lost the ability to see his son, and often got in fights with others at bars. In one witness statement, an unidentified woman told police of a prior incident when she and Holsonbake were kidnapped at gunpoint and driven to an orchard in west Bakersfield. Holsonbake bolted from the vehicle as it was moving, she told police. That account was corroborated by a friend of Holsonbake's who told police that he said he had been kidnapped at gunpoint. He told his parents that he feared for his life, frequently thought he was being followed in his car, and rambled about various people he believed were out to get him, but they mostly wrote it off.
James
Micah had been hanging around with James Kulstad for some time before he disappeared. It’s not clear when they first met, but it appears they become friendly through the drug scene. Like Micah, James first became addicted to prescription painkillers after being hit by a car, before progressing to fentanyl patches and eventually heroin. He’d been a single father to his daughters Camryn and August. His obituary characterized him as a free-wheeling surfer who held a patent for an action sports product and earned the nickname “Joe Vegas” for his love of gambling and table games. Camryn, now 19, says she and James had an especially close relationship after her mother died when Camryn was an infant, and James often warned her against getting involved with drugs and partying in a clear-headed way, which made it even harder to watch him spiral downward in the years before his death. “I felt like I lost him before I even lost him, but I worked so hard,” she told a reporter. “I was working so hard on everything I could do to make him get better… I was hanging onto hope and whoever killed him took that away from me. I don’t have that anymore, I don’t have hope.”
In the wake of her father’s death, Camryn says that a number of stories and rumors about his life surfaced, further complicating her grief. “Some of the stories I’ve heard is that he was a really bad person these last 3 years,” she said in 2019. On the night of his murder, James reportedly drove to an acquaintance’s home in Southwest Bakersfield where his brother Ryan Kulstad was hanging out. Ryan claims that the homeowner allegedly owed money to James and told Ryan that if James came over to his house, he’d “call his boys and they’d come over there strapped,” which Ryan says he didn’t interpret as a serious threat. Ryan and James reportedly argued about this on the phone, and James showed up at the house a couple hours later. Ryan says he had just returned from driving someone else home and noticed a driver in a silver sedan behaving suspiciously as he returned to the house. Moments later, Ryan and his unidentified male passenger heard gunshots on the next block: an unknown gunman opened fire on James from another car, causing him to crash into a parked trailer. The same silver sedan was seen speeding away from the scene.
The owner of the home where this all took place was Dr. Sukhjeet Bajwa, who at the time was a chiropractor with a local practice. Bajwa lived in a quiet subdivision in Southwest Bakersfield. It was an unlikely setting for a drive-by, and according to initial news reports, police were at a loss for the motive behind the killing, or what James was even doing in the neighborhood at all. Then things began to unravel: Bajwa, it turned out, had been arrested twice in 2016 and 2017 after driving while impaired, and in addition to liquid heroin, Xanax, and hydrocodone, police also found two unregistered, loaded guns in his car, an AR-15 and a .22LR semi-automatic rifle with a fake silencer attached. All of this was detailed in a disciplinary complaint filed by the California Board of Chiropractic Examiners, and after Bajwa’s name began repeatedly surfacing in connection with the shooting, a rumor began to circulate about a black-market gun and drug trafficking ring in which Bajwa was supposedly a central figure.
It was the type of conspiracy theory most people instinctively write off as too bizarre to be credible. But it must have rung a bell to Lance Holsonbake. Before Micah’s disappearance, he told his father that he was “putting together guns for people,” according to a 2019 interview. Lance said he reacted in disbelief to this confession, because the idea that Micah would risk his career by getting involved in illegal gun manufacturing just didn’t make sense. “If you’re this afraid, just stop,” Lance recalls telling him. “And he’d say, ‘I can’t do that I can’t do that.’ He was afraid he did that they would hurt his family.” He wrote it off as paranoia exaggerated by his son’s drug use, and didn’t know how much of it was real and how much was in Micah’s mind. According to Lance, Bakersfield police initially suggested that Micah had left town of his own volition after getting mixed up in criminal activity and, from what I can tell, didn’t make much of an effort to investigate. Though the family says he was last seen on March 23, 2018, Bakersfield police claimed he wasn’t reported missing until April 4, and it appears they waited until April 13, when he’d been missing for almost a month, before BPD made its first public statement regarding his disappearance. After James was murdered a few days later, the Holsonbake and Kulstad families grew increasingly frustrated with the apparent lack of interest in investigating either case, and told the media later that as they began digging into the circumstances surrounding both cases, one name kept coming up with everyone they talked to: Baylee Despot. And within a week, Baylee Despot had also gone missing in Bakersfield.
Baylee
Baylee Parrent-Despot was 20 years old when she was reported missing in April 2018, and the families say that it was her disappearance that finally motivated the police and local news to start investigating the links between all three cases, for reasons that seem obvious to anyone who has ever seen the media react to a pretty white 20-year-old going missing. Her sister, Katelyn Parrent, describes her as “a girl that’s grown up in a good neighborhood, raised by good parents, had a good childhood, could’ve had everything she ever wanted,” much like James and Micah. And beneath the surface, she was as troubled as either of the men: after graduating high school, she’d run off to Vegas to marry her boyfriend, but their rocky relationship turned into an abusive marriage that ended just a year later in 2017. In the aftermath, she wrecked her car, lost her job, and in her mother’s words, “Her life just spiraled out of control.”
In July 2017, Baylee was arrested for disorderly conduct in front of her friend Micah Holsonbake’s house. This came as a surprise to her sister, who had at one point been friendly with Micah herself — she didn’t realize he and Baylee even knew each other. But even though he was 14 years Baylee’s senior, Katelyn remembered him as a clean-cut guy who worked at a bank, and their mother, Jane Parrent, says Micah helped her get a restraining order against an abusive ex-boyfriend. They didn’t see any cause for concern. Still, Baylee’s life continued to spiral out of control. The following month, she was drugged and gang-raped at an acquaintance’s apartment complex. She disappeared for days at a time and resurfaced with “horrible stories” or pleading phone calls begging to be picked up. On one occasion, Katelyn remembers, “She had none of her belongings, no shoes… A couple nights after that there were two vehicles that came to pick her up and we could tell by the look on her face that she didn’t want to go, but if she didn’t go, we didn’t know what would happen.”
Matthew
Not long after that incident, Baylee had a new boyfriend. Matthew Queen was 43 years old, a convicted felon, and an all-around bad dude. Not much is known about his background, with one major exception: in the early 2000s, he plead guilty to one count of making a false statement to a federal firearms dealer after he used a false address, but his real name, to purchase $11,000 in guns from dealers in Indiana. Many of those guns were later recovered at crime scenes in Detroit and Chicago. If you want an idea of what type of criminal mastermind we’re dealing with here, I recommend reading just the final ruling on that case from the 7th Circuit court of appeals:

“We reject Queen's argument that gun buyers may lie about a street address so long as they live within the state where the gun is sold . . . Queen in fact had once lived in an apartment at 2072 Egret Court, but he did not live at this address when he completed the forms and bought the guns because he was evicted on December 18, 2000, for nonpayment of rent."

Great. Sounds like a great guy.
Lest you assume Matthew Queen might have hypothetically seen the error of his ways and cleaned up his act after this early foray into gunrunning, he absolutely did not. In December 2017, just a couple weeks into Matthew and Baylee’s relationship, they were arrested after police found four unmarked, unregistered, loaded assault rifles in Matthew’s car during a traffic stop. Neither he or Baylee said a word to the police, but while Matthew (who, as a convicted felon, was prohibited from carrying any guns or ammunition at all) was charged with several felonies, while Baylee pled no contest to a lesser misdemeanor and received three years probation. Later that month, she moved in with Matthew, his mother, and his estranged wife. Baylee’s family saw and heard even less from her. And in April, a month after Micah’s disappearance and just one day after she and Matthew attended a court date for the weapons charges, Baylee went missing. Her mother believed she was pregnant with Matthew’s child and was trying to leave him at the time. Matthew told police that she had connections through her father's side of the family with a Mexican drug cartel and believed they had something to do with her disappearance.
Local interest in the case reached an even greater frenzy after Micah’s severed arm was found in the Kern River in Hart Park on the east side of town, not far from from where he was last seen. It was positively identified in late December 2018. By this point, the family of the Bakersfield 3's investigation had amassed around 10,000 followers on Facebook and another 5,000 in a private group, and the story was a fixture on local news. Another curveball came around this time too, when a former friend of Baylee’s named Sara Wedemeyer, 21, filed a restraining order against Baylee’s mother, Jane Parrent. As it was reported, Sara had moved in with Matthew mere weeks after Baylee disappeared, and she was four months pregnant with his child when she attempted to take out legal action against Mrs. Parrent, whom she claimed was harassing her and her “fiancé” by hanging up missing person fliers in their neighborhood. The restraining order wasn't granted, but Queen allegedly began making disturbing social media posts about Baylee, Micah, and the Parrent family, with Mrs. Parrent as the primary target. And in mid-2019, the investigation seemed to grind to a halt.
Part 4: New Developments
On May 27, 2020, roughly two years after the first developments in the Bakersfield 3 case, the Kern County District Attorney held at a press conference to announce they believe Baylee Despot and Matthew Queen “deliberately and with premeditation" murdered Micah Holsonbake. Despot and Queen, along with a third man, Matthew Vandecasteele, were charged with the alleged kidnapping, torture, and first degree murder, as well as unlawful manufacturing of assault weapons, conspiracy relating to the murder and torture plot, and a slew of other assault and gun charges (34 in total). Queen and Vandacasteele were both in custody at the time the charges against them were filed, but even though Baylee still has not been seen or heard from since 2018, the DA’s office issued a warrant for her arrest, leading some to speculate she may still be alive.
According to court records, Matthew Queen allegedly believed that Micah Holsonbake had stolen a .44-caliber revolver from him. He and Baylee Despot kidnapped Micah, zip-tied him to a chair in Matthew Vandecasteele’s garage, and attempted to torture him in order to extract information from him. A blood stain in the garage matched Holsonbake’s DNA. Vandecasteele told police that he didn’t see or hear Micah on the night he was killed, but knew that the other two had brought him there to question him. After several hours, Baylee allegedly returned to the apartment seeming “flustered” and changed her clothes in a back bedroom. Before they left, “Queen told Vandecasteele that he had cleaned everything up and it was OK to go inside the garage.” The next day, Queen returned to Vandecasteele’s apartment and said he “needed help disposing of something” in a large black storage container in the trunk of his car. Vandecasteele claims he refused to help with disposing of the body, but according police reports, his Google history during that period of time included searches for “lye chemical formula,” “lye for sale” and “how long does it take to dissolve a human body,” as well as browsing for lye on the Home Depot and Lowe’s websites.
Queen, Despot, and Vandacasteele allegedly manufactured and sold AR-15s from gun build kits. Other witness testimony released by the courts described various kidnappings that witnesses allege Queen, known as “the boogeyman of Bakersfield,” committed. In one incident, Queen allegedly handcuffed one victim to a chair and put an electric dog collar around his neck because he believed the man had stolen a gun part from him. Another witness said that Queen and Vandacasteele showed up armed at his hotel room after the witness told Baylee where he was staying, and that he believed they intended to kill him because he’d been arrested “with a large quantity of narcotics that he was fronted or given without paying for them and the people who had gave him the narcotics could have been upset.” (According to the police report, surveillance footage from the hotel corroborates this account.)
It’s also believed that he made anonymous calls to the police tip line to misdirect the investigation away from himself: one such caller referred to Baylee as a “sugar momma,” a phrase which Queen reportedly used to describe her when he spoke to investigators in August 2019, and he also used the same pseudonym on the tip line that he did on social media. When police questioned him around this time, he denied being part of a criminal enterprise and claimed he could barely pay his bills. Then, while out on bail for unrelated gun charges in January 2019, Queen allegedly kidnapped another man at gunpoint and forced him to walk into the Kern River while Queen accused him of snitching to the cops. He’s been in custody since July of 2019 due to this kidnapping.
Part 5: No Body, No Crime
So where is Baylee Despot?
According to official statements from law enforcement, no one knows. After the warrant was issued for her arrest, a wave of speculation followed that she had faked her own death or fled to Mexico with the help of unspecified “cartel connections.” That story seems less and less likely as more details have emerged from court documents. Vandecasteele told the police that Despot was “falling apart mentally” after murdering Micah. He and Queen both suspected that she was cooperating with police on an investigation relating to the illegal weapons charges, called her a “snitch” in one interview, and told investigators he believed Queen “made her disappear.” In one interview, a female witness said Queen kidnapped her at gunpoint, took her to an orchard, and held an AR-15 to her head while he questioned her about whether Baylee was faithful to him.
When police questioned him about Baylee’s disappearance in July 2019, he said was depressed and off her medications, and she had said she wanted to die. When the investigator told Queen there had been allegations of domestic violence involving him and Baylee, some of which resulted in bruises, Queen said he never laid a hand on anyone. He told the detective she was clumsy. Despite all of this, Jane Parrent says that police have told her that they don’t consider Matthew Queen a person of interest in Baylee’s disappearance, and that there is "no known physical evidence that definitively confirms her possible death." She is now offering her own personally-funded $1000 reward for information about her daughter’s location.
The rest of Micah Holsonbake’s body has not been recovered, though according to court documents, investigators believe Queen may have buried him in the hills near Taft, a rural area about 45 minutes west of Bakersfield.
There have been no developments in the investigation of James Kulstad’s murder since 2018. Anyone with information is urged to contact the Bakersfield Police Department at (661) 327-7111, or the Kern Secret Witness program at (661) 322-4040. A reward of up to $10,000 is being offered for information leading to an arrest in this case.
Ultimately, what really frustrates me about this case is that even after this avalanche of charges, so many questions remain unresolved, and not just what happened and who did it, but why. If the investigation concluded that James Kulstad’s death was unrelated to the disappearances of Baylee and Micah, who ordered his murder, and what was the reason? To what extent was the chiropractor involved with Queen and Vandecasteele’s trafficking racket? Was Sara Wedemeyer involved with Baylee’s disappearance, and if not, how’d she end up living with Matthew and expecting his child just two months after her “friend” went missing? Why did Sara and Matthew harass Baylee’s mother for months after the disappearance?
More than anything, I’m still lost as to Baylee Despot’s motivation for any of this. Did she just find herself in too deep with no way out? Did she actively make the choice to become a gunrunner? Did Matthew, looking to settle a grudge against Micah, seek out a relationship with Baylee with the intention of using her to get to him? Did he kill her because she was cooperating with the cops, because she attempted to leave him, or because he was just a sociopath who felt she was no longer useful?
Or is there a chance that law enforcement knows more than they’ve let on? When investigators told Mrs. Parrent that Matthew isn’t a suspect in her disappearance, was that an indication that she may, in fact, be alive?
Probably not. But at this point, anything is possible.
Sources:

Baylee’s page on The Charley Project: https://charleyproject.org/case/baylee-cheyanne-despot
First news story about Micah Holsonbake’s disappearance, 4/13/20: https://www.bakersfield.com/news/breaking/man-reported-missing-april-has-medical-condition-family-says/article_8af62936-3f73-11e8-a82e-4b2ef30f031f.html
“Baylee Parrent-Despot reported missing for more than a month,” 6/8/18: https://www.turnto23.com/news/local-news/baylee-parrent-despot-reported-missing-for-more-than-a-month
“The Bakersfield 3: Reward offered in Baylee Despot case,” 9/18/18: https://www.kget.com/news/the-bakersfield-3-reward-offered-in-baylee-despot-case/
“Bakersfield 3 mothers recall their last contact with children,” news article dated 10/24/18 https://www.bakersfield.com/news/momma-loves-you-bakersfield-mothers-recall-their-last-contact-with/article_418f70a8-d7e0-11e8-ac3c-67a7fc8df3d1.html
“BPD: Missing man in Bakersfield 3 believed to have been killed, and his death shares similarities with disappearance of missing woman,” 10/20/18: https://www.bakersfield.com/news/breaking/bpd-missing-man-in-bakersfield-believed-to-have-been-killed/article_fbeb8eb4-04b8-11e9-bb07-17e07813288b.html
“Mother of missing woman fights harassment claims stemming from her daughter’s disappearance,” 12/18/18: https://www.kget.com/news/mother-of-missing-woman-fights-harassment-claims-stemming-from-her-daughters-disappearance/
“Micah Holsonbake dead; DNA test confirms arm found in river his,” 12/20/18: https://bakersfieldnow.com/news/local/bpd-believes-a-man-missing-since-march-was-murdered
“Stories behind the Bakersfield 3,” 12/20/18: https://www.kget.com/news/homicide-news/stories-behind-the-bakersfield-3/1669785945/
Ryan Kulstad appearance on Dr. Phil, 1/14/19: https://www.drphil.com/videos/a-young-man-describes-what-led-up-to-him-holding-his-older-brother-in-his-arms-as-he-died/
“A closer look at the Bakersfield 3: Where is Baylee Despot?,” 3/5/19: https://www.kget.com/news/local-news/domestic-violence/a-closer-look-at-the-bakersfield-3-where-is-baylee-despot/
“A closer look at the Bakersfield 3: Who killed James Kulstad?” 3/6/19: https://www.kget.com/news/a-closer-look-at-the-bakersfield-3-who-killed-james-kulstad/
“A closer look at the Bakersfield 3: What happened to Micah Holsonbake?” 3/7/19: https://www.kget.com/news/a-closer-look-at-the-bakersfield-3-what-happened-to-micah-holsonbake/
“One year later, mothers of Bakersfield 3 continue their search for answers,” 3/23/19: https://www.bakersfield.com/news/one-year-later-mothers-of-bakersfield-3-continue-their-search-for-answers/article_528a7650-4cfc-11e9-886c-23d55ec3c32d.html
“One year since death of James Kulstad, one of the 'Bakersfield 3’,” 4/8/19: https://www.turnto23.com/news/local-news/one-year-since-death-of-james-kulstad-one-of-the-bakersfield-3
“Mother of missing Baylee Despot speaks out on arrest of kidnapping suspect Matthew Queen,” 7/15/19: https://www.kget.com/news/local-news/mother-of-missing-baylee-despot-speaks-out-on-arrest-of-kidnapping-suspect-matthew-queen/
“Investigating the mysteries of what happened to the Bakersfield 3,” 11/3/19: https://www.turnto23.com/news/crime/investigating-the-mysteries-of-what-happened-to-the-bakersfield-3
“Defendant in alleged kidnapping waives right to preliminary hearing,” 11/9/19: https://www.bakersfield.com/news/defendant-in-alleged-kidnapping-waives-right-to-preliminary-hearing/article_b5a3274c-00c4-11ea-a1e9-635cd4a35c9e.html
“More charges filed against accused kidnapper Matthew Queen,” 1/1/20: https://www.kget.com/news/crime-watch/more-charges-filed-against-kidnapping-suspect-matthew-queen/
Press release announcing charges filed against Queen, Despot, and Vandacasteele: https://www.kerncounty.com/home/showpublisheddocument?id=4595
“Matthew Queen makes a court appearance in connection to 'Bakersfield 3' case,” 6/12/20: https://www.turnto23.com/news/crime/matthew-queen-make-a-court-appearance-in-connection-to-bakersfield-3-case
“‘Bakersfield 3’ member Micah Holsonbake believed killed by Matthew Queen over alleged stolen gun, defendant says in court documents,” 6/18/20: https://www.kget.com/news/crime-watch/bakersfield-3-member-micah-holsonbake-was-killed-by-matthew-queen-over-alleged-stolen-gun-defendant-says-in-court-documents/
“Documents suggest Micah Holsonbake was afraid of suspect Matthew Queen; suggest Queen attempted to mislead investigation,” 6/17/20: https://www.turnto23.com/news/crime/documents-suggest-micah-holsonbake-was-afraid-of-suspect-matthew-queen-suggest-queen-attempted-to-mislead-investigation
“Documents detail depth of investigation into suspected murder of Bakersfield 3 member,” 6/19/20: https://www.bakersfield.com/news/documents-detail-depth-of-investigation-into-suspected-murder-of-bakersfield-3-membearticle_ac1fb9a4-b278-11ea-962b-6b8ee0b03647.html
“Bakersfield 3 update: Matthew Queen appears in court, pleas not guilty to all charges,” 6/11/20: https://bakersfieldnow.com/news/local/bakersfield-3-update-matthew-queen-appears-in-court-pleas-not-guilty-to-all-charges
“‘Bakersfield 3’ member Micah Holsonbake was afraid of murder suspect Matthew Queen, became increasingly paranoid before he disappeared, documents say,” 6/17/20
Appellate court decision against Matthew Queen: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/408/337/509670/
Obituary of James Kulstad: https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bakersfield/obituary.aspx?n=james-john-kulstad&pid=188771330&fhid=6140

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