While Lit. Major’s new album As Seen On TV doesn’t officially drop until next month, we have already covered the first three tracks here: “E.A.S.”, “Organic Panic”, and “Small Boat”. Now, we return to cover the next three songs from the record, “Borne By Fire”, “Gutted”, and “Sound Effects”.
For those unfamiliar with Lit. Major, or those who didn’t catch the first post: The project belongs to Remy Josef (he/him), a queer artist and teacher from Connecticut who styles himself as a “sad song singer.” His raw DIY sound captures no nonsense, and the sparse production lets the emotion in his music shine.
As Seen On TV captures the zeitgeist, and though Remy masks his references in metaphor, anyone with a tuned ear and close eye can make out the events inspiring his songs. “Borne By Fire”, the fourth song from the album, pays homage to Aaron Bushnell, who in 2024 live-streamed their self-immolation outside the Israeli embassy in D.C. in protest of the Palestinian genocide. Remy both celebrates Bushnell’s life and chronicles their act while damning the police who treated him like a criminal in his last moments of life: “They came running at you/Once they saw it coming true/Your husk staring down/The barrel of the guns/And if that doesn’t tell us/All we need to know by now/Then I don’t know what does”.
Bushnell’s self-sacrifice made headlines and became a matter of much debate, but it did little to quell the violence happening in the Middle East or against anti-genocide protestors around the world. On “Gutted”, the fifth song on As Seen On TV, describes how people in power use sorrow for profit, not just through war, but through using mass media to pummel us with images of their madness. But they forget their acts are trapped online in perpetuity so that we won’t forget: “We can all point our fingers/As long as we remember/What our fists are for”.
Related is the slow dirge “Sound Effects”, the sixth track on the album, which describes how we must witness every awful thing in sound and vision, usually in short soundbites as we doom-scroll through our feeds. But even a few seconds is enough to process the horror of the world around us, streamed into our eyes and ears at rapid fire through screens and speakers of various sizes, resolutions, and volumes. It makes us wish someone was playing around with a soundboard, not wanting to accept that the “sound effects” are really bombs, bodies, and neighborhoods blowing up, and not getting a break to breathe: “Just when the scene quiets down/Or feels like it’s all coming around/Someone hits play on the cue/And the sound effects resume”.
The more we stay tuned to As Seen On TV, the more we can’t wait for the rest, as Remy’s latest songs strike at our hearts and speak truth to power. The last four tracks will come out soon, but you can hear the first six below. And to make sure you hear the rest of the album when it drops, follow the Lit. Major Instagram account.
Written by Will Sisskind
