Shane Greenberg, The Syndicate

💭 Thoughts on audio cassettes, Damien Leone’s “Terrifier” film series, and running towards the shark.

Shane Greenberg is Senior Manager, Publicity at the entertainment marketing agency The Syndicate, writer of the That Scans Substack, and occasionally, can be found in your podcast feeds on Love and Doubt. Read his most recent entertainment piece, a love letter to pop music by way of historical re-evaluation, over at i enjoy music. Greenberg’s clientele includes musicians, comedians, festivals, record labels and more. He lives with his family in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

🎯 Current focus

I handle PR for Final Girl Records which is an independent record label and collective based in Brooklyn, NY and Los Angeles, CA. ​My favorite part about working with the label is getting to be the publicist for the self-proclaimed “slut rock” band Um, Jennifer? who released their debut EP, The Girl Class, earlier this year. Its title track earned critical praise from Billboard and NYLON. They’re funny, talented and hard working. They’ve put out two excellent singles over the past few months – “Went on T” and “Fishy” – that I think encapsulate a lot of what they’re about and where they’re headed. Um, Jennifer? remind me that there is always joy to be found in solidarity and community. Check out their recent interview with one of my favorite writers, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, over at Hearing Things.

💿 Piebald’s “Barely Legal & All Ages”

I listened to all 41 tracks on Piebald’s Barely Legal & All Ages (2001, Big Wheel Recreation). I couldn’t find the discs that came with the original copy I bought as a teenager, but I had the empty case with no CDs, so I burned .mp3s onto two CD-Rs. I have a bluetooth Discman that I connect to a bluetooth speaker, which is how I listened to this. Last year, I inherited an old car with a CD player. I’ve been listening to a lot of CDs in there, too. I don’t like that new cars don’t have CD players.

Across the double disc compilation, there exists two hours, twenty-three minutes and thirty-four seconds of studio takes, live tracks, demos, German radio clips and various other audio recordings that span the band's early years. It’s a fascinating document of a band evolving in real time. Hailing from Massachusetts, the band palled around in the late-nineties/early-oughts with the likes of Cave In and Converge, and started out as a fairly generic hardcore band, albeit accompanied by an idiosyncratic sound all their own. There’s a cover of “I Saw Her Standing There” on the second disc, and a preview of how their sound would change in the years to follow with a live take of what would become their biggest song, “American Hearts,” that was officially released a year later on 2002’s We Are The Only Friends We Have. The lyric that stood out to me upon listening to the live version was “And I said sir, well have you heard / That this country is unequal still? / History continues itself.” I saw them on a Saturday night in October at The Echo in Los Angeles the day before they headed to Las Vegas to play Best Friends Forever Fest. Now in their forties, the band is tight, seasoned and simmered on the hot plate of time, sounding more confident and joyous than ever. They closed their set with “American Hearts,” and the singer Travis Shettel jumped into the audience to sing and dance with us. The lyric that stood out to me seeing the song performed live was “This place has broken my American heart.” It was passionate and poignant, a balm for our broken American hearts.

📚 From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

I’m currently reading From Hell by writer Alan Moore and artist Eddie Campbell. A graphic novel of historical fiction surrounding the Whitechapel Murders (1888-1891) and Jack the Ripper. The comic was issued serially between 1989 and 1998, and a film adaptation of the book was released in 1999. To call the book engrossing would be a gross understatement. It’s so captivating that I have to stop myself from reading too much of it in a single sitting, to savor its mood. It’s bewildering in all the best ways. There’s a particular page in the seventh chapter that features a television and a Marilyn Monroe pin-up on a wall, while Jack the Ripper reels a victim into an alley in nineteenth century London, that I thought I was imagining and had to widen my gaze to confirm I wasn’t hallucinating. An extremely dark, haunting, conspiratorial odyssey through the depths of human psychology. Beautifully rendered by Campbell, the illustrations are shocking in their vividness, perfectly embedded underneath the madness of Moore’s fantasies.

⚠️ Swimming towards the shark

A recently aired “This American Life” featured Sarah Polley discussing her memoir published in 2022, Run Towards the Danger. Polley’s story revolves around a severe concussion she received after a fire extinguisher fell on her head, and the long recovery process she endured. After years of doctors and concussion specialists telling her to avoid the lights and sounds that had suddenly become unbearable, she meets a doctor that tells her to do the exact opposite, to run towards the danger, and expose her concussed brain to the very things it was screaming at her to avoid. She felt completely fine after a few weeks of the exposure therapy treatment. I think about the characters Polley portrays in Doug Liman’s “Go” (1999) and Zach Snyder’s “Dawn of the Dead” (2004), and how they also ran towards the danger, and how Polley herself, as writer-director of “Women Talking” (2022), ran towards the danger by crafting a quiet, contemplative, ensemble period piece in a Hollywood over saturated with sequels, prequels and reboots. It won her an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. The podcast episode was titled “Swim Towards the Shark,” and opens with a vignette of interviews highlighting a group of swimmers who, in the midst of a shark attack this past summer, rather than swim to shore to hail a lifeguard, swam towards the shark and person being attacked. They saved that person’s life. I have been trying to remind myself to swim towards the shark.

Image credit: Karlotta Freier

🏋️‍♂️ Having an incredible work ethic that inspires others

I look up to my supervisor at The Syndicate, VP, Publicity, Brendan Bourke. Being in public relations is often a thankless job. The media landscape is ever-evolving, and getting artists, labels, comedians and brands the worthwhile coverage they deserve in the press is more difficult now than ever before. Nobody knows this more than Brendan. He was Death Cab For Cutie’s publicist when Transatlanticism was released, and before that, too. He just received an RIAA platinum plaque for his work on that album. The first platinum plaque he’s received after thirty years in the business. I bought the CD when it came out, and at the time, probably did so after reading about it in a magazine or online due to his work. He’s always excited to hear new music from artists of any size, and has an incredible work ethic that inspires me.

⭐️ Dallas

My son turned one in November. His name is Dallas. His late maternal grandfather was born and raised in Texas, and his favorite team was the Cowboys. I was also in a band called Dally, named after the Dallas character in S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders. Matt Dillon plays him in Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation. We mostly call our son Dally. We threw a “Lone Star” party. Texas themed. My mother-in-law went to see The Eagles play at The Sphere in Las Vegas, and we had her pick up some Lone Star Beer – à la Rustin Cohle – for the party, as Lone Star surprisingly doesn’t sell their brew in Southern California. We also served Texas style breakfast tacos from HomeState, a favorite local spot that has the best queso in L.A. and is owned and operated by two sisters from Texas.

🎶 Audio cassettes

Lately, I've found myself drifting toward audio cassettes. The sound isn’t great for most of them, in fact a lot of them sound horrible, but that's part of the appeal of the format, as well as their relative affordability compared to vinyl. I like to imagine how my thoughts on this subject might be different had I been around when cassettes were the dominant format. Some tapes sound surprisingly well after years of laying around, in particular my copy of Ministry’s third album, The Land of Rape and Honey. I pre-ordered the reissue of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II on double cassette and am looking forward to being simultaneously disappointed and delighted by its sound quality.

🤡 Damien Leone’s “Terrifier” film series

Extremely low-budget gore fests with terrible (read: good) acting has endeared me with its disgusting charms. The movies’ “Art the Clown” character, played by David Howard Thornton, popped up at Spirit Halloween outposts around the country, terrifying real customers for marketing stunts to promote the third installment. Spooky, but this time…it’s Christmas! The second film in the trilogy cost $250,000 to make and grossed over $10 million at the domestic box office in a limited theatrical release. People walking out in droves after the first ten minutes? Puking in the theater? Sign me up. I attended the West Coast premiere of Terrifier 3 at Beyond Fest and had a great time in a packed Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. The third entry in the series topped the previous film’s box office haul in just the first week, debuted in the number one spot and broke a record for highest grossing unrated film. Deadline has the scoop on the cost-conscious, streaming-heavy strategy with the films’ distributor Cineverse.

Follow Shane on Instagram & Substack and check out The Syn here.

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