Rayne Fisher-Quann

Rayne Fisher-Quann on Her Go-to Karaoke Songs, Putting Weird Little Things In Her Hair, Nobody’s Fool by Avril Lavigne, and more.

May 24, 2022

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Rayne Fisher-Quann is a writer, cultural critic, and TikToker based in Toronto. She’s built a reputation as an “internet it-girl” from her sharp video and Substack essays on topics such as complex female characters and the current state of discourse, and her profiles of artists like Denzel Curry, Caroline Polachek, and Courtney Barnett. If you’re still hungry for recs after reading this post, Rayne occasionally takes a break from essaying to share recommendations on her newsletter, “internet princess”. Lucky for us, Rayne is here to tell us what she’s been into.

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My list of perfect karaoke songs

I love karaoke and have spent years painstakingly crafting and empirically testing a list of perfect tracks. These are those tracks. EASY (low-effort crowd pleasers): Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus Cool by Gwen Stefani Hand in my Pocket by Alanis Morissette Torn by Natalie Imbruglia INTERMEDIATE (either stylistically harder or easy but requires moxie): Laid by James I Touch Myself by the Divinyls Cherry Bomb by the Runaways Common People by Pulp HARD (requires moxie and technical skill): Hook by Blues Traveller Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind(If you pull off Semi-Charmed Life in a public karaoke setting, you are potentially about to fuck the most bitches that anyone has ever fucked. Personal note: I can run this track start to finish without so much as GLANCING at the lyrics..) BONUS: I'm So Tired by Fugazi. In my opinion, this is the funniest karaoke track ever. Play it really straight.

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Obscure and/or British Reality Shows

I LOVE reality television!!!! I especially love reality TV from the mid-2000s – it has a sort of unpolished rawness and grubby-handed gold-rush ethos that elevates it far beyond whatever Netflix is pumping out today. The great thing about British reality TV is that all of it looks like it’s from the early 2000s. The people are uglier, the camera quality is shittier, the vibe is weirder, and the stakes have never been lower. My only rule around these is to watch them with a friend because otherwise it actually does veer into pathetic territory. I like I Wanna Marry Harry, 100% Hotter, My Hotter Half, and Boy Meets Boy.

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Nobody’s Fool by Avril Lavigne

Like many Canadian women of a certain age (20), I am an Avril devotee. The thing that I love so much about Avril is that she’s kind of insane and a lot of her songs don’t make sense (I really like to think about which Radiohead song she could possibly have been singing at the top of her lungs – fitter happier?). Her first album is obviously nothing but hits from start to finish, but the most underrated track is Nobody’s Fool. It’s like kind of a spoken-word style rap about the music industry, and it’s not technically “good” by any stretch of the word, but I laugh out loud every time I listen to it and sometimes also start tearing up for reasons I don’t understand. She sounds super serious and severe the whole time but she’s rapping lines like “I’m not the milk and cheerios in your spoon”. I play it every time I walk to the grocery store.

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Putting Weird Little Things In Your Hair

I have really thick hair. A hairdresser once told me I have 3x more hair per square inch than the average person, and I believe it even though I have no idea how she could have calculated that. I’ve come to embrace my hair by piling weird little things on top of it like a bird building a gross but beautiful nest – I usually don’t even have to use clips or anything, but anyone can do this with pretty much anything if you buy a little pack of plastic claw clips from the dollar store. I think it always ends up looking very avant-garde and artistique and only a little bit like a third-grade art project. Here are some of the things I knot into my hair: Safety pins Flowers Pens/pencils String Decorative combs Earrings

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Batman (1966)

This is one of my favourite movies of all time. It’s one of those movies that you either adore or don’t get at all – whenever I recommend it to people, they either say it’s the funniest movie they’ve ever seen or they say they turned it off 20 minutes in. It’s extremely campy and very homosexual and, in my opinion, was decades ahead of its time: it perfectly satirized a kind of extremely corporate contrived superhero filmmaking that didn’t even really exist yet. I quote the line “they may be drinkers, Robin, but they’re also human beings” extremely regularly.

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COMMUTED

I went to a Crywank show last month but I had an anxiety attack and had to leave before they actually came on. I’ve been doing this kind of a lot lately – leaving shows before the headliner plays is actually a bonus recommendation from me. It helps you really appreciate the openers. Luckily for me, the opener at the Crywank show was this Toronto artist called COMMUTED and he totally rocked my world. He makes kind of surreal dance-pop that sounds sort of like if LCD Soundsystem was more manic and also covering the Barenaked Ladies. I’ve been listening to this song literally every single day since I first heard it.

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Rayne Fisher-Quann

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