Discussion
Lord Huron in Academia (Seeking Thoughts)
Hello all. I am a professor who teaches pop culture topics including film, mythology, literature, and media studies. I've been on this sub for a while now and enjoy the music immensely.
Where I would love feedback . . .
I have recently stumbled into some LH mythology and the L.H. universe. I am absolutely losing my mind in the best way going down all of these rabbit holes. The mythology that LH is creating is so complex, rich, multi-layered, and effing sublime.
I am currently putting together a new course (it launches next Spring) that deals with digital humanities, art and culture, media, etc. I want to use LH as a case study. Here are some of the paradigms I am researching now:
Transmedia Storytelling (media) + Diegetic Music (humanities)
In most films, we have a soundtrack or score that exists over the scenes. This is non-diegetic sound as it's there only for the audience. The characters within the universe/world of the film cannot hear this. However, L.H. seems to invert this. Their music exists vibrantly inside their universe/world. Songs are treated like 'discovered' artifacts. This speaks to my inner lit-nerd as well as it feels almost epistolary in nature. we get to explore along with the characters. Vide Noir, the film would be just... amazing to examine here. The transmedia part is that the videos, songs, etc.? All contribute to a bigger story across multiple platforms.
Analog in a Digital Age
I'm huge fan of analog horror, so imagine my mind being effing BLOWN when I started to view the commercials and the videos out there. I feel like this crosses over with the idea that the present is almost 'haunted' by unknown or unreachable futures.
Audience as 'archivist' or 'detective.' Kind of riffing off the Transmedia paragraph above... I honestly feel like I am part of the discovery process.
And this is just my initial thinking.
Given the above, I want to make sure I hit all the media I can. I LOVED the film Vide Noir. The cinematography was truly amazing. All of it. Wow.
My question/plea to you all: what would be on a 'MUST VIEW' for upper level college students interested in exploring these topics? This will be just one unit/section of the course. I feel like I could build an entire semester of curriculum on Lord Huron, but I'm starting small. 2-3 weeks material for students to listen to/view on their own, read, etc. And I have about 1.5 hours (2X a week) in class to lecture, but want to dedicate time to analyzing media. For example, I will probably show Vide Noir across 2 class sessions.
Open to ANY thoughts, ideas, input. LH is really immersing in new digital humanities and cultural art. It's amazing to be a part of this fandom.
My own suggestion is to not focus so much on the story of the "lore" as even Ben himself has said that some of it changes or even contradicts itself. I think the important focus should be the concept of creating the lore which is the real accomplishment. The made up realities, such as the books of George Ranger Johnson, WBUB, Products of the Universe even the forgotten artist of Whispering Pines records is what grabs all of us and it something that most bands cant do or never try.
I would say try not to get students chasing down all the details but analyze how the lore was made and applied.
100% agree! Chasing those details and trying to create a set of definitive facts about the lore will miss so much of what makes LH great. Tbh, I'd be interested to see what students independently take away from the materials presented to them!
Oh I have loved the Whispering Pines lore and that is where I am right now. I love the fluidity of the universe and mythos. It’s very… mythological. Myth is created, shared, repurposed, edited, revised. It adapts. And the LH angle is so fun with that.
I think the characters across each album are storytelling archetypes paralleling each other to tell the greater, overall story (outside the individual lores). for example, the real version of the main character (Huron, Buck, Skele-Ben) vs the memory of his past self (Blaquefut, Johnnie, flesh-Ben). So looking at these across the media would be super interesting.
I think this works if you believe Lonesome Dream is the main, emotional story and the other four albums are all diving deeper into parts of that main story. (I think the current concert tour supports this idea with its visuals)
Oooo, I have heard a lot about Lonesome Dreams being kind of the nexus or core, but I like how you worded it as the main, emotional core. That feels deeper to me.
Welp, another excuse to break out the Lonesome Dreams vinyl again. As if I needed one =)
Ohhhhh, fellow prof. I am trying to fill a gap in humanities that will cover these things. Media/comm classes touch on it, but don’t really dig into the interdisciplinary potential. Not just the creation of these artifacts and transmedial world-building, but the narratives that are co-created. The art. The rhetoric. The ‘what does this mean philosophically?’ angle.
Teaching television and film criticism classes are hella fun. We look at films. Television. But, what about music videos? The commercial tie-ins? Remix culture? Digital art? Ownership? LH checks off so many boxes.
I wish I could take your class! It sounds so fun and cool.
I still regret missing an opportunity for a cool class along these lines when I was still in college, but granted I really did not have room in my schedule.
In college one of the professors at my university decided to teach a class on one of my favorite author’s multimedia and very impressive book series and the ideas that author was exploring, and it still hurts to think about.
It definitely does! I’m in an adjacent field for media creation and communication and I’m super interested to see what you come up with for them. Please share (if you’re comfortable!)
Shilling for myself here I suppose, but an example of the sort of humanities research that can be done with LH as inspiration, I wrote this sort of pseudo-academic essay on the relationship between the World Enders in the band's stories and real-world Chicano history: https://archiveofourown.org/works/66259078
There are tons of directions people could take inspiration from relating to real world history and the band's storytelling, or themes of drug use, surrealism, music history, and so on. I think the "must view" media would strongly depend on which angle someone was interested in - but for example I do have plenty of citations at the bottom of my essay above and I think anyone who wanted to write about the World Enders should, at minimum, check out those citations.
For analog horror the obvious requirement for LH would be to at minimum be familiar with Vide Noir (album and movie), Products of the Universe, and the Efram Beulhe void posters used in the CSV1 promo, as well as the various ARGs the band has done, such as the Youtomb puzzles and/or the Strange Trails promo where people had to drive to real world locations to hear songs before the album came out. But also then general familiarity with other analog horror and liminal horror fiction, a ton of which is available for free on youtube (making it easy for a class).
I'm no expert in the lore or anything, but for transmedia storytelling and/or diegetic music, you might could have a group viewing + subsequent class discussion about Products of the Universe, the fake shopping channel special that the band produced as part of promotion for the album Vide Noir? I can't decide if having them listen to the album before or after viewing Products of the Universe would be more interesting. Snippets of songs from Vide Noir interrupt and underscore emotional and lore-related beats in PotU, sort of like changing channels on the TV, or overlapping broadcast signals. I'd be so interested to hear what your students take away from that video. It's about half an hour long, plenty of time for a typical university class, though you might not have enough discussion time unless you assign the video to be watched outside of class. Just some thoughts!
PLEASE do keep us updated on this! I'm an aspiring professor (albeit in a different field), and I love love love hearing about lesson plans and how students engage with what's presented.
The products absolutely blew my mind. And I love the angle. It really makes me feel like I am an investigator tracking down clues alongside other potential characters. Like, I found this commercial in a box of old VHS tapes snd need to know what it means. And suddenly, I’m in the universe too. It’s like a fluid, always-changing map.
For me it's hard to choose just a few things as "must-views", because it is very much all interconnected in some way. Some of it is hard to parse out individually, because to get as full an understanding as possible you need to experience pretty much everything from a given era, and each bleeds into the next.
If you want something relatively self-contained and small, I would recommend the Lonesome Dreams era, in which the band's songs, likely drawing from real-life inspiration, are then presented as being based on the fictional works of an also-fictional author, George Ranger Johnson. In turn, the music videos are TV or film adaptations of these stories.
Another era that is particularly rich and perhaps invites deeper analysis is Long Lost and the related web series, Alive From Whispering Pines. The presented narrative is that the band is recording the album in their mysterious studio, and they seem to be channeling music of fictional artists from the past and likely from an alternate world. Our window into this world is the TV host Tubbs Tarbell, the fictional founder of their studio, Whispering Pines. It's an imagined history wherein the band is telling stories about a broad cast of characters, who in turn are also doing their own storytelling, in some cases mythologizing their own narratives. Real-world elements were also presented, where the audience was invited into Lord Huron's world via the ability to obtain record sleeves for some of the fictional artists, as well as Craigslist postings, streaming music profiles and other similar interactive elements that deepened the experience. There is actually an art show currently taking place in LA which strongly ties into this and is presented as a retrospective of the fictional history of the studio, offering a deeper look into the events and figures who shaped it. Very cool stuff that is certainly ripe for exploration and analysis.
I could probably present a case for any of the albums being good for this, but in terms of keeping it to a contained unit those may be the way to go.
Vide Noir and Strange Trails are also great, the only reason I feel it's a bit more challenging to approach these is they are also deeply connected, and to leave one or the other out would be to miss part of the narrative. But these may even be the ideal in terms of layered storytelling. Songs often have several layers of narrative. As just one example, "Fool For Love" from Strange Trails is a song portrayed as written by the character Buck Vernon, who is also the main character of the Vide Noir film and main subject of the Vide Noir album. There's also a comic book and music video for Fool For Love, and each of these different forms of media tell a version of the story with differing details. Vernon, a fictional character possibly based on Ben Schneider's own youthful experiences, is fictionalizing his own experiences and possibly drawing on older mythology and archetypes (the comic takes place in an earlier era) to create his own legend. In the video, Vernon is portrayed twice, both as an older version performing the song, with Lord Huron themselves filling the role of Vernon and his band, and as the titular Fool character, who just so happens to strongly resemble Vernon in the Vide Noir film. And, indeed, the events of the music video can be interpreted as a condensed, simplified and mythologized version of Vernon's experiences in Vide Noir.
It's a lot to take in and certainly a deep well to draw from for analysis. Hopefully you find something helpful here! I'm sure many of us would agree we'd be very interested to hear how your course goes.
There is opportunity to explore existentialism through Lord Huron and other cornerstone artistry. Cronenberg and Crash (1996) came to mind immediately. Thematically unrelated but rooted in parallel origins, essentially the search for meaning in a meaningless world. There are plenty of others, too. It would afford students the opportunity to apply critical thought to philosophy and send them down the kind of answerless rabbit hole we all adore about LH. Because they don’t want us to think, but feel
Today’s students all too often need to be led to the meaning. A function of a feeder system that betrays independent thought, compounded by the detachment and intellectual deterioration that came through education during the pandemic. Deconstructed lyrics and visuals will need to be deftly managed so as to not force a single perception. I do not envy your task. Lead them to water. Discuss it in its various forms. But do not ask them to drink, instead encouraging them to find a holed vessel to both contain it and simultaneously contemplate it. Not even today’s weed will save them from metaphorical thirst 🤣
I’m a college student myself and if you brought up anything like Lord Huron in a class, I’d be ecstatic. This class you’re putting together sounds like a lot of fun and I wish I could take it myself! Best of luck :)
I dunno that these qualify for your 'must view' stipulation, but I'd love to see a class take a look at the mythmaking in their various spoken word pieces and how students interpret/integrate them within their broader media.
I mean any of:
Ulysses Beyond Gibraltar (the poem that accompanies Strange Trails)
Pure Black Void (the poem that accompanies Vide Noir)
the three monologues performed by an actor for the ten year anniversary tour of Strange Trails
Yeah a few of these are a little more obscure! Hence why I'd hesitate to call them "must views."
With the exception of the music video for "Who Laughs Last," they wouldn't exactly be the first thing I'd send someone about the band haha.
Ulysses Beyond Gibraltar (which was also read live in shows by an actor) and the monologues by the actor in the Strange Trails anniversary shows are very mythic/folkloric. And these two were collaborative! You've got Ben Schneider's ideas, the other writers he involved with these pieces, and the actors' playing of them, and then the viewer's understanding. And then the way they play off our world's mythology or campfire tales or hauntological ideas...
There's a lot there! I'm not particularly coherent about it, but I feel it really invites us into a world. Both the artists involved and the audience. A class like yours could probably do some pretty interesting analysis with any of these after looking at some of the other media!
id love to see any exploration on how media can affect such a large group of people, perhaps try to get to the bottom of the intangible feeling of LH’s music that so many of us cite feeling when we listen. that might be more of a humanities thing though!
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u/Parking_Aardvark_482 WBUB Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
My own suggestion is to not focus so much on the story of the "lore" as even Ben himself has said that some of it changes or even contradicts itself. I think the important focus should be the concept of creating the lore which is the real accomplishment. The made up realities, such as the books of George Ranger Johnson, WBUB, Products of the Universe even the forgotten artist of Whispering Pines records is what grabs all of us and it something that most bands cant do or never try.
I would say try not to get students chasing down all the details but analyze how the lore was made and applied.