Sam Johnson
A handy list of ten cursed locations to check out this Halloween, rated for your convenience.
0 Comments
Peter Grieser Imagine you’re the “boy” Vince Staples is dismissing in “Yeah Right.” Imagine trying to tell him your career is about to take off, and he cuts you off, sneers and a mockingly repeats “boy, yeah right” at you ad nauseum. Imagine looking in the mirror in a dingy club bathroom, squinting to see through the graffiti scratches and replaying Vince’s words over and over again in your head: If your song played, would they know that? Is your real talent self-deception? Your ears ring; all you hear is tinny rumbling, a broken car stereo wheezing out its last bass thumps before dying. It’s one thing if you are lying to yourself. But Vince exposes your real crime—you are deceiving everyone around you. Your girlfriend? If she finds out who you really are, it won’t end well for you. Come correct, and she won’t let you in. You think you can handle the situation before it spirals out of control, but Kućka’s haunting whispers sit on your shoulder, reminding you that you “got an enemy that changes dependin’ what direction you’re facin’.” In a panic, you run out of the club, heaving and fumbling for a cigarette in the alley, but you just can’t shake the feeling that Vince and his crew are following you. But at this point, there’s only one thing you can do: keep moving forward. Keep pretendin’, make it real until every cell replaced, erased. You light that cigarette, look up, and a shadowy Kendrick Lamar approaching you, his braids slowly swaying with his confident gait. He starts with a whisper, you can barely hear him. But he keeps talking, walking, getting louder, getting closer. Soon, he’s inches from you, he’s yelling, and with each syllable, moving his head like he’s shadowboxing. K-Dot twilight the zeitgeist. You try to explain your conversation with Vince earlier, but it’s no use, Kendrick is on a roll now. He keeps yelling, and you’re still distracted by the assembly line beat. I don’t fair fight, but I bear fight. What have you gotten yourself into? Madeline Rose Williams
(Primarily written in short bursts after 1am in Notes on my phone when I couldn't sleep.) I used to be ashamed of loving Lana Del Rey. I hate to admit it, but it’s true. People dismissed her as this weird, flipped MPDG: melancholic, obsessive, empty. And I thought they might be right. (Blue Jeans, Video Games, Ultraviolence) But at some point, I stopped apologizing for her, or for listening to her. (That was around the same time I stopped apologizing for myself constantly.) And that was a very good decision on my part. I could get into how she’s a symbol — well, not just a symbol, way more — of representations/constructions of femininity: a kind of frozen 3D-printed mechanical sculpture of idealized feminine behavior. Lipstick, lashes, hair done up to the point where it looks like a frozen Pantene commercial. The whole deal. I could go down a rage-spiral about how people (okay men, mostly men, nearly always men) love to complain about the tangibly crafted nature of this look, about how it doesn’t look “natural,” how it’s a deceptive facade (another rabbit hole). I could talk about how complicated Lana is: the fact that she’s not most people’s idea of a feminist icon, not even mine; the stressful and confusing thread of patriotic symbolism that runs through her work; the rampant appropriation. But plenty of people have gone over all of the above, and done it better than I would. (Meaghan Garvey, for starters.) What I can talk about, though, is why I do love her, almost in spite of myself. (A disclaimer: this is about what I was looking for, what I found in the character that emerges from her music, to me. We're past assuming direct, autobiographical narrative, right? Especially with artists who are women? God I hope so. Also Lana is deeply, deeply — I don’t even want to use the word problematic because that doesn’t even begin to cover it. But yes. That. Anyway; on we go.) When you’re a well-behaved, approval-craving, morally-minded young thing who just wants to please people, it starts to drain you. And when people are cruel, you start to wonder how you can maintain your personal system of ethics. And if you do want to maintain belief in people’s capacity for love and justice, and try to be a good person yourself — whatever that means — you're going to need an outlet. Lana was my outlet. She sang about being heartbroken, sure, but she also sang about not giving a fuck. She’s got songs about falling in love, all while retaining a kind of artistic distance from the whole mess, letting yourself feel without fully getting involved. It’s not that it’s a lie when she tells someone she loves them — it’s just that she seems to only partly believes it. (Shades of Cool, Brooklyn Baby) And she (or rather the character/narrator) finds a way to regain power when being used and drained and taken advantage of. Seems to find power in that very thing; in giving yourself into a kind of powerlessness, always knowing that you can flip the script. Just because you didn’t murder him and throw him in the back of his own truck, knocking back a whiskey and driving off alone into the night, doesn’t mean you didn’t kinda want to. It doesn’t mean you couldn’t. (Kinda Outta Luck) That distance is appealing. And her attitude towards being objectified is a deep relief from the constant battle to be seen as a human being: fuck it, look at me, I’m gorgeous; don’t you want me, she says. Don’t you want to sweep me off my feet? (Burning Desire) The Lana Way is terrifying, but a release. Presenting a version of yourself — well, everyone does that, but this is a total escape. Pulling A Lana means that you can act in ways that the real you never would, you can inhabit a totally different persona: one that doesn’t care much about boys’ feelings, one that doesn’t mind playing along with their fantasies and watching them move like a puppet. Dance, dude. I’ve got you wrapped around my finger, and you think you’re in charge. Smile, kiss, laugh at a bad joke. It’s almost too easy. I don’t really play at that game in the real world, with real people. I actually like meeting people as equals, and connecting with individuals, and I don’t get pleasure out of being manipulative (most of the time). But at a point in my life when I was deeply hurt and fucked up beyond belief, I hopped on Tinder and went full Lana. It felt good to play the part and keep me (the small, bruised me inside) removed. Lana did the talking. But mostly, with a handful of exceptions, just listening to Lana does the trick. It gets the urge to stop caring out of my system. Keeps me from hurting others just because I’ve been hurt. Lust for Life came out last summer. It’s different. It’s not just addictive behaviors and a deep aching desire for fucked up romantic power dynamics, though there’s plenty of that (the stuff that drew me to her in the first place: escapist bad behavior, a protagonist enamored with making the wrong choices with the wrong people.) Lust for Life is it’s own thing — a collection of contemporary hymns attempting to understand the State of the Union. (What union, we wonder; what state?) “Is it the end of an era? Is it the end of America?” (When The World Was At War We Kept Dancing) Personally, I don’t care so much. Those aren’t questions that really concern me. What are we so worried about preserving? Vast, powerful hypocrisy? Widespread bigotry and racism and so on? But in a country, in a time (so far as country and time exist, which is a conversation for another time) where/when the pus is being drawn to the surface to such a degree that even those (us) who’ve ignored it for our whole lives can’t fail to notice all this rancid poison, Lana’s given us new songs to sing along to. Things are gross right now; repulsive. But they always have been. Her music, like us, is slow to adjust. (Get Free) Still, there’s plenty of anger and bitterness. Thank god — I still need an outlet for that, we all do. “All of my peaches are ruined (bitch)” she sings, breathy, appalled; an offended goddess, and I feel vindicated. I love a good Fuck You anthem. And no one’s got that shit down like Lana. (Cherry, In My Feelings) |
Archives
April 2018
Categories |