Pride Month Playlists: Emile Milgrim of Las Nubes

To see out Pride Month, we have a selection of queer-themed playlists from LGBTQI+ artists whose music we love.

Emile Milgrim, the drummer in Las Nubes, kindly agreed to share with us this curation of songs on Spotify that has helped form her as a musician and a person. A big thank you to Jamie from Audio Antihero for making this happen.

Tormentas Malsanas, the most recent LP from Las Nubes, is available on vinyl on Bandcamp. Make sure to follow the band on Facebook and Instagram for all the latest news from the Florida-based outfit.

In Formation By Association

Growing up, friends and films were my family – and the means through which I discovered much of the music I’d continue to appreciate in life. It made sense to approach this playlist from one of those angles, so I went with films, especially since friends introduced me to so many films, so both influences are essentially covered.

In the 90s we had to put a decent amount of effort into watching films, especially independent, and -gasp!- queer ones. I’m not trying to be all “old man yells at cloud” about it, but it did take time and coordination, not to mention the procurement of whichever experience-enhancing substances we’d partake in for film watching gatherings.

At its most basic, being a teenager in the 90s watching independent/controversial/artsy films felt subversive on its own, but making it almost-ritualistic turned subversion canonical. These films provided an approach to discovering identity, even in the slightest sliver of sameness – “Oh shit, that character is gay and so are we!”

Even in their more-mainstream counterparts we found homoerotic implications, slight nods to queer culture or history, the “quirky gay friend,” or my personal favorite, two women kissing (and if we were lucky, even more… I’m looking at you here, Bound).

We had to find ourselves in these places because then we weren’t really anywhere else. And as we discovered and ultimately defined ourselves through these stories, our identities incorporated anything of them we could grasp, their accompanying scores and soundtracks always being most salient to me.

Reflecting back on the sounds, I recognize many of them continued to weave their way into my adulthood and are firmly planted in my current (ugh, middle-aged) sonic-aesthetic identity; basically, everything in every Gregg Araki film, the beyond-just-a-punk abilities of unlikely composers like Craig Wedren, soul/funk/r&b (popular and otherwise), glam-punk-queercore, dubbed-out electronics & hip hop, torch songs, stunning orchestral sorcery, and of course, rock n roll. 

In no particular order, songs were chosen from: Bound, Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation, Nowhere, The Velvet Goldmine, The Incredibly True Adventure Of Two Girls In Love, Hedwig And The Angry Inch, High Art, Chasing Amy, To Wong Foo, Philadelphia, But I’m a Cheerleader, Silence of the Lambs, The Crying Game, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, Ed Wood, Clueless, Showgirls, Foxfire, Set It Off, Todo Sobre Mi Madre, Cruel Intentions, The Matrix, Y Tu Mama También, The Craft, and Empire Records.

Header photo by Sal Rispoli