Now four and a half years since pop moderator babuc and pop editor sereinik's first interview together, a return to form seems long overdue. Here we go.

sereinik: Hi, Babs!

babuc: Hello! Nice to be doing another interview after nearly 5 years.

sereinik: Yeah, it’s been an eon — well, publicly. Tell me about how you are — how are you adapting to the contours of quarantine? Give me a rundown of your general condition, mentally and physically.

babuc: Quarantine has been……..something. I lost a lot of weight over quarantine (which I wanted to do!) which was nice, but my mental state has certainly been oscillating more frequently. Online school was very difficult. During the summertime, I have really been trying to take pleasure in the small things—it’s been a lot easier following the stresses of constant Zooming and time-zone adjusting. Now, I am on a gap semester (year? probably?) to avoid the constraints of coronavirus — and also just chill out for a second. I think I need it.

sereinik: Proud of you re: the weight loss, and feel you deeply on the online school thing. Sans classroom, the dynamic and momentum of learning seems to seep out of the educational process. R.I.P. to me, then — unlike you, I’m not gapping and going full speed ahead with remote class from a thousand miles away. I’m glad you’re taking time for yourself, though, and making intentional decisions based off of your personal needs — I feel like we’re all trying to grip back onto our respective sanities, and re-centering the self really does need to be an active process.

babuc: Definitely. How is that process going for you? Any deep insights that you would have never known coming to light? Or just a lot of replays of Melodrama?

sereinik: Generally, I like to think of myself as a relatively self-aware person — I spend a lot of time reflecting and re-processing through my personhood and perspective. Yet like everyone else I’ve had to really reconfigure a lot of things to respond to the challenges of extended isolation and essentially being forced back into early adolescence again by living with my parents yet again. Despite it, I’ve been able to preserve at least some sense of self through lots of reading, a ton of writing, and steady music consumption on top of juggling a bunch of digital relationships. You wouldn’t be wrong about replays of Melodrama — Lorde’s been an inescapable part of my isolation, which is ironic given that Melodrama is written about a party. And how I would do anything to dance at one now!

Curious, in honor of the title of that record — do you consider yourself a person that loves the melodrama of life, or do you tend to avoid that sort of thing?

babuc: That is a very interesting question, and one I’ve honestly always struggled to answer. As the former sort-of stereotypical “gay” person in my public American high school (Go Wildcats) a description of that sorts has been pushed on me — “oh you just love drama” or what have you. And I reject that notion — I genuinely dislike creating or participating in drama, and to suggest otherwise because of how I act/who I like is homophobic.

But.

I can’t say I don’t thrive in the melodrama of life. You may or may not know this (you probably would though) but the prefix melo- means music, and ironically, melo- words are some of my favorite on the planet — melodrama, melancholy (if that counts), melomania, and of course melody. Seeing the dramatic ebbs and flows of life, whether sheerly coincidental or actually extreme, have become a thing of wonder for me, not just another drama to ignore. I notice any and all of them with interest, but keyword — NOTICE. Mess me with getting into some high school bullshit; I already graduated.

sereinik: It’s interesting that you frame drama in a queer-positive light — it’s strange and definitely historical how queer people have found both solace and violence in attachment to notions of “drama.” I’m thinking about how Broadway has been a safe space and general magnet for queer people for so long, but also the practice of tying queer people to drama is also what institutionalizes homophobic stereotypes. Nevertheless, I’m glad you see the tie as a form of empowerment – or at least have re-appropriated it as so.
And yeah, I feel so emotionally distant from high school despite age-wise not being so far away from it. And to some degree that includes Genius, too — it very much is a bit of a relic of my high school experience. Not to say that I don’t still love it — I still try to come on to do some work when I have a few minutes of free time, but it’s nowhere near as prominent in my life as it was years ago.

babuc: Yeah, I understand. Quarantine itself has felt like 4 separate years—so the time since our Genius interview has been at least ten. Of course, we are still editors/moderators, respectively, so we’re still on the site some, but I know it’s changed a lot since our February 2016 (!!) interview. For example, I now stan Beyoncé. How do you think the Genius community has been doing recently? How would you compare it to the “kinik clique” heydays of the way back when?

sereinik: I think Genius has continued to democratize in terms of the diversity and spread of its user base in the last five years, which I think is a really wonderful trend. It’s also institutionalized a lot of the practices that — when we were coming up as users and editors — were much more ad hoc and casual, leading to (at times) really messy realities. At the same time, some of the organic energy — however chaotic and strange and bizarre it was — has also transmuted and become more disparate, so at times it feels like the community has become a bit of a shadow of what it once was in terms of its concentration and general ~ vibe ~. That could just be a shift in perspective for me, though, as you and I have migrated to the periphery of the website. However, per the resurgence of conversations about community reform (à la Crackar’s GEB forum post), clearly there’s some sort of push to make more coherent some of the love and infrastructural support for community I think that percolated throughout the site all those years ago.

Not to be an old man (“back in my day…”), but I have such fond memories of jumping on Google Hangout calls with Ewok and a couple “OGs” (Freeus, etc.) for some of the very first Community Hangout calls … as well as just developing real off-site friendships with people like streetlights or Michael Heal or Liz Milch, the likes of which probably would not crystallize in the same way today. Granted, a lot of those friendships have matured a lot in the modern day and were not necessarily in an ideal state back then (I was so immature, and my friendship with Michael was just roasting him publicly), but the possibility of them is more nebulous nowadays.

I’ll say just one thing about the “kinik clique,” the legacy of which lives on in both my username and cringey song pages … how brilliant, and how horrific. What a magnificent group of people bonding in (at times) such messy, strange ways. I mean, it was mostly just an onsite text chat (never vulgar, just chaotic) and people kind of offshooting different inside jokes from it, but in general what a lovely and bizarre vibe that was! To be fair, it remains the source of most of my residual relationships from Genius. And I miss so many of its participants!

What do you think, Babs?

babuc: I definitely agree with everything you’ve said, just with a much less interesting way with words. I’m certainly happy to see the growth Genius has undergone as a company over the last five years, but as a community it is hard to tell (especially given my activity level). Many of the things that were casual have become bureaucratized in my eyes, and the continued cycle of “staffer popular with community gets fired out of nowhere, often after recently being hired” (which trust and believe was common even in 2015-16) has certainly eroded the drive, in my eyes, to participate, but not the talent and passion of the community who still does it. As you said, a push for community reform is something I’d love to see happen — Genius is such an interesting site full of interesting people — which on a personal and institutional level is well-known — and that is something that should not change.

Regarding kinik clique — wow. I will say for context the average age of Kinik was like, 15? And given the amount of cancellable shit that apparently every famous person ever had done at 15, Kinik was doing pretty good. Jokes aside, I do truly miss it a lot. During my earlier years of high school, the Kinik community were honestly some of my closest friends. I still have a screenshot from 2016 of Angela saying she’s never retained a friendship more than a year — in January 2021, that screenshot will be five years old, and I still consider us friends. Things like that were quite meaningful to me, and certainly still are despite the constant passage of time.
A lot definitely changes over the years. Apart from things we’ve already mentioned — school, Genius career, our fake slightly-cringe-but-cute beef, etc. — what do you think has been your biggest change since our last interview?

sereinik: I think it’s impossible to moor the trajectory of maturation I’ve undergone to a single quality or moment. You know? I think I’ve grown so much as a human being on so many different facets — as a writer, as a friend, as a thinker, as a leader, as an organizer, as a politically engaged citizen, and so on — that I really cannot quantify and hold relative one next to the others. If I was forced to pick, maybe self-awareness? I think I’ve always been relatively self-aware but I’ve grown more and more conscious as the years have passed. I think I’m more thoughtful now than I ever have been — emotionally, socially, and introspectively. On a superficial level, I guess … maybe my hair? It looks a lot better now than it did when I was 15. I’m gonna spare myself the humiliation of comparison pics, but I’m quite stylish now, I think! Well, at least I try. Shuddering about the past.

I’m curious how you think you’ve changed most, and if there’s anything about yourself now that would’ve surprised fifteen-year-old you if, hypothetically, there was some sort of time travel mechanism and we could go back into the past to communicate with your old self without messing the time-space continuum.

babuc: I certainly agree — I have also changed in an innumerable number of ways, and if such a time machine existed, I would probably not take it for fear of dying in a cringe-related episode. However, I definitely would point to one way that I feel I’ve changed the most—which is my social skills. I don’t know to what degree I would attribute their growth to Genius or not, but I have really grown to become more comfortable with and around people in the real world, and generally just understand where people are coming from more. That has traditionally been quite difficult for me, but it’s developed akin to the way a normal skill would—the more I do it, the better I get. And throughout my years in high school and my one-ish year in college, I’ve certainly done it a lot.

As Lorde would say, I’m 19 and I’m on fire.
sereinik: True that. We are on fire. In fact, OK, rapidfire. Musical artist you can’t get enough of right now.

babuc: I would say Men I Trust or Summer Salt. Two chill-ish indie bands I just kinda found somehow and have been really enjoying. I recommend the albums Men I Trust, Onkle Jazz, and Happy Camper.
For you: best movie you’ve seen since our last interview (2016 on), in your opinion.

sereinik: Maybe not the best movie but my favorite film that I’ve seen as of late is The Farewell (2019), dir. Lulu Wang. Or Melancholia (2013). Or Parasite (2019). Or Sorry to Bother You (2018). All breathtaking and deep. What’s your favorite smell?

babuc: That’s an interesting question. I generally don’t like artificial smells because they make my head hurt, so I would say either gardenias or the smell of the air just before it’s about to rain. What is the best advice you’ve ever received?

sereinik: Dude, advice is so situationally dependent; I receive a lot of advice and try to give a lot of it too. I dunno. Maybe: we don’t get to decide the degree to which people are hurt by our actions. Or perhaps: I am “worth it.” It sounds awfully cliché, but it was important for me to hear when I did.

What’s a word you always have trouble spelling?

babuc: I would say a word I have trouble spelling is also a word I recently discovered that has quickly become one of my favorites. Anemoia — a nostalgia for a time you’ve never known. On that note, what is your favorite word?

sereinik: I have so, so many. Luminous. Neon. Thrum. Graffiti. Colour (with a u!). Vicarious. Amanaemonesia — thank you, Caroline Polachek! And as a poet I am required to say: body. Like, The body a monument to grief. The body a tribute to itself. The body something electric, and something like deadwood.

Something you’ve read recently that has made you think?

babuc: Reading?? In this pandemic? No, I’m kidding. Although this isn’t quite a read, I would AOC’s speech about sexism from July 2020 in Congress was one of the more captivating things I’ve heard / read about online. I genuinely feel like misogyny has been quite overlooked historically in general, and that speech — reminding us how abhorrent it is that words like “f*cking b*tch” are thrown at any woman — let alone a sitting Congresswoman by one of her peers — so normally. What’s been one of your guilty quarantine pleasures? Please don’t say Tiger King, I still haven’t seen it and refuse to at this point.

sereinik: I have also not given Carol Baskin or Joe Exotic my time of day, thankfully enough for both of us. Biking! Actually, I’m not guilty about that at all! I kind of love it. Guilty about sleeping until ten. And lastly — something that makes you feel meaningful.

babuc: A great last question, as per usual. To take a more literal spin on this question, water makes me feel meaningful — in every way. I am in California right now; being at the beach is meditative solely due to the natural rhythm of the waves. There’s also a massive heat wave, and the simple joy of drinking cold water reminds me how lucky I am to be so happy in this moment — something I wouldn’t have pictured four years ago, or even four months ago. Water can be a cold symbol of maintaining nothingness, of preventing the inevitable, but for me, it is a simple joy — which builds the blocks to happiness on higher levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy. #babucpsychmajor2021?

sereinik: How apt, then, that I am sea rain. Goodbye for now, babuc. Kisses, as always. x