don't cry for meeee, bushwick transplaaaaants!
on the intricacies of a scene everyone is sick of talking about, managing resentment, beauty youtuber drama (for a half second), and my album of the year so far.
My hope, in this moment, is that I’ve created a safe space here over the course of 11 newsletter editions – I say that because I’m about to share some embarrassing information with you and I’m banking on you rewarding me with the same grace you always do. Okay? Okay.
On the day once-beloved beauty YouTuber Tati Westbook uploaded a 43-minute long video entitled “BYE SISTER…,” I went out and bought myself a quesadilla and a vanilla Coke for dinner on my college’s campus, sat on the patio outside of the school bookstore, and hit play. And lemme tell you: I relished every moment of that goddamn video.
I was never a “YouTuber person” (I have no idea what a Smosh is, why the fuck would I know that), but I did let myself get caught up in some of the beauty YouTube nonsense, mostly because I loved buying glitter and dark lipstick with my retail job paycheck and would occasionally watch product reviews – at least it wasn’t some guy doing “challenges.” They were actually informing me as a consumer while also providing me with the petty drama I required for sustenance! At this point, the actual celebs weren’t delivering my TMZ fix like they used to! We, as a nation, had been starved! Anyway, I had held a vendetta against YouTuber James Charles ever since the year prior to these events, when he cut me in line at DragCon New York (long story, I’ve lived a full life), and now his chickens were coming to roost: this 30-something-year-old woman was mad at this 20-something-year-old friend of hers because he did….something. What James Charles did isn’t really the point here.
My understanding is that she was mad about a few things, the main one being that he promoted someone else’s line of haircare gummies (you can roll your eyes with me, I give you permission) when he’d promised to only promote her brand of gummies. Maybe? I think? She was also mad that he had hit on a waiter – this part of the story produced the bulk of the lines everyone continues to quote on Twitter. I’ve been stewing on it, and I really believe every working comedian at the time fell to their knees the second she strung these three phrases together, delivered in this specific manner, without even trying.
However, there is one quote from the saga that I, personally, have continued to use pretty much every day. I just realized that it’s not in the original takedown video, it’s in a video she posted later giving “updates” or whatever. Tati Westbrook, who I’m sure had received attention from corners of the internet she had never expected to all due to the wide audience of this original video she uploaded, said the following: “I have clooosed that door in the spiritual realm, and I am asking to not be used in any way, shape or form in videos involving divination.”
It’s a hilarious thing to have to say. She said it like the tarot people had been hyenas at her door and had left her with no choice but to address it. So bizarre, the whole situation. Anyway, this was all a long walk to explain to you that I say “I have closed the door to the spiritual realm” multiple times a day, about everything. It’s my first response when I’ve grown tired of talking about or doing something. It means I’m done. It means that it's a wrap, everybody go home. So now, let’s finally get into what I’ve been closing the door to the spiritual realm on most consistently as of late.
Maybe the initial wave of interest and/or rage has passed by now, and I’m writing this newsletter about something that is no longer relevant, BUT! It seems like a lot of major music writers (or music writers with podcasts) have been giving their takes on this whole Dimes Square/”indie sleaze” thing, and they’re often forced to do it with caveats. “Oh, well, I’m not in my early twenties right now, but I can see how they feel about…” “Well, I don’t live in New York, but I think…” I don’t want to say that anyone is begging me to chime in (at this point, you’re probably mad I even decided to touch this and I’m kind of shocked you’ve read up to this point), but you all keep shouting me out, diva! I am the intersection of those two groups, and I didn’t just start living here yesterday, and I have a keen interest in the history of music in this city. If you listened to the Interview profiles, I’m the “scene”’s core audience. So, let’s talk about Dimes Square – because I think, to a certain extent, it’s a figment of people’s imagination, but I do think I understand why they imagine it so vividly.
It might’ve been spring of last year when I heard that name uttered for the first time. Well, it was written, not uttered, because no one ever actually called it that conversationally or out loud. I’d been to that part of where Chinatown kind of blends into the Lower, Lower East Side before, certainly. I had been to Seward Park about a dozen times, and I’d still recommend it as a lovely place to visit if you find yourself downtown and need a place to people-watch in. I only estimate it was around that time because it was whenever the major Metrograph layoffs were – to explain quickly, Metrograph is an art house movie theater in the area that allegedly began as a necktie mogul’s (???) vanity project, but is now actually kinda cool because they get great, knowledgeable people to do their programming. A double-edged sword on many levels, as so many things are.
The first time I went, I witnessed a conversation featuring the most pretentious person I’ve ever met in my life in that lobby, but then we parted ways and they went to watch whatever movie they paid for and I went to see a repertory screening of Clueless and screamed laughing as if I hadn’t seen it a hundred times before (truly a film that hits every time). I actually just saw a tweet a few hours ago where someone claimed that people only went to see movies there to be seen, which I am oblivious to – something that will become evident to you as I explain my view of everything we’ve yet to dig into. I’m simply there to see Rude Boy with four other people and fight the urge to jump up and down like I’m at an actual Clash show, not to appear like anything to anyone.
So, sometime last spring, a bunch of their workers were laid off. Instead of taking what was essentially NDA money, fired worker Will Harrison wrote this exposé-adjacent essay entitled “Escape from Dimes Square” for The Baffler for about the same amount of money. As someone who had hung out in the area for years but had no clue about this supposed slumming-ground-for-the-city-elite reputation it had among certain circles of terminally-online people, it was packed with revelation after revelation for me. At the time, everyone I sent it to agreed: what the fuck was this? Do people actually seek this neighborhood out for something besides $4 boxes of the best dumplings you’ve ever had at North Dumpling on Essex (still the best meal deal in Manhattan)? Apparently so. I tried to get a hold of people I knew through other people who lived right there, and even they had no idea what had been brewing right outside their window.
Though Harrison does get stuck in the weeds a little bit with the extremely-online-ness of it all at several points, I will give him his credit for acknowledging that it’s all an exercise in wish fulfillment. It mattered to him at least a little bit, for a little while, but he tells us to enjoy our sanity if we don’t know, because none of it matters. So much of his description of it seemed to center around “being seen” – people want to be caught in certain bars at certain times reading certain books. I think this was my first inkling that the concept of a “scene” was something I would never truly get to participate in, because my brain doesn’t work like that. That’s not to say that I’m superior to those people – I just wouldn’t even think to work that angle in order to make friends or impress anyone, and therefore, I am not good at either of those things. If I’m drinking, I’m there to drink. If I bring a book, it’s because I want to read it and for you to not ask me about it. I’m rarely anywhere to talk philosophy, so don’t come in swinging with that – though apparently, that’s what these allegedly-not-imaginary guys who moved from wherever are here to do. Whoda thunk it.
Here’s the thing: I have no idea what people who aren’t from here think New York is like. One of my dearest friends admitted to me recently that she came here from Chicago basically to live in Sex in the City, and she realized she was in for trouble when I told her I had only hailed one (1) cab in my entire life here (hailing it usually means you’re paying, and I don’t have the financial fortitude for that or regular Ubers – but I didn’t even pay for that one cab, which is why I was brave enough to hail it in the first place). As such, I usually think, alright, let them have their harmless fun. Let them go out and think they’re going to be Carrie Bradshaw. They’ll either move in a few years or be in neighborhoods I’m never in (I was wrong about that, because all the finance people fucking live in the East Village now). All good. It’s the same for these wannabes in (check notes) “Dimes Square.” Several people also pointed out that, despite the desperate attempts at claiming it was a cultural mecca, no actual, notable art had been produced from the scene, pretty much rendering it a moot point. This time next year, we’ll talk about this and laaaaaugh. Are we laughing? Maybe at me.
(Now is the time to Google both “Dimes Square” or “The Dare” if you’ve had no idea what I’m talking about up to this point. Bless your heart. You should've turned back earlier, but now I’m going to trust you know the basics before continuing.)
Here’s the thing about the “scene” that bothers me and apparently no one else: it doesn’t feel geographically accurate. Now, if you don’t live here, it doesn’t matter to you, because it’s all in the same city. However, I feel like it’s important to stress that the venues these highlighted bands always seem to play at aren’t on the Lower East Side – most of them are in Brooklyn.
To me, Baby’s All Right is a key player in all of this – as are the deep Bushwick stand-bys of various capacities. Once these acts are big enough to be considered “notable,” that’s where they seem to flock. Maybe my vision is skewed because everyone I know who knows the artists – either personally or if they had seen them perform pre-hype-train – lives in Bushwick. I will say that the main “venue” everyone brings up in these profiles is Home Sweet Home, which is near “Dimes Square” but is mainly a bar that hosts select DJ sets. It’s not like you’re seeing scrappy young bands really thrash it out and shape themselves there, or like you’re seeing DJs who have free reign to reinvent the wheel. There are certainly venues in the Lower East Side to seek out for that, but there just doesn’t seem to be a correlation between the broader music scene I’ve witnessed and what everyone reports is happening. And again, geographic stickler here, none of those venues are right on “Dimes Square” or anything. So why is the “scene” still called that? Maybe it doesn’t actually matter. That was more me wanting to bitch about it. Okay, next box to check.
I recognized names on that NME list everyone got mad about – some of them have at least worked at paying their dues and I’d seen their names on bills before, don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to mischaracterize everyone broadly. And by the way, I do like some of those artists who’ve gotten lumped in with the title but who I think are actually doing something new with the sound and aren’t just being semi-ironic LCD-Soundsystem-lite – like Model/Actriz, who seem to be the collective critics’ pick for the “oh yeah, but they’re good, don’t shit-talk them” band. I personally think we can afford to be a little bit snobbish about it. If this whole “indie sleaze revival” that people want to pretend is happening is a reaction to lockdowns and losing chunks of our twenties and having fun again, I’m all for it….but I’d like to have standards for the music, if that’s okay. Can I have fun that’s good? Is that allowed?
Anyway, the second piece I will tell you is actually essential reading about this thing is much more recent, and it helped to answer the “why” question a little bit while also confirming some suspicions I’d held about the whole thing. On June 15th,bNo Bells published an essay by Millan Verma called “The Downtown Illuminati,” and I kind of just recommend you read it instead of waiting for me to break this whole thing down like I know what I’m talking about, because I clearly don’t. He’s following around the “micro-influencers,” whatever that means! He’s attending fashion house-sponsored parties, which are things I have never been invited to! He does actual investigative research and attends both events and shows at these decarmated hot-spots and does some casual interviews just to ask what it’s about, because he, too, is confused.
This quote he pulls from artist and model Ian Maverick, who is deeply entrenched in the art world here, sort of sums up my general understanding of why people are at least attempting to make this thing relevant and tangible:
Behind the masquerade of IG handles and cryptic substacks sits a community hunger for, well, community. These people are hungry for things to do, for people to meet, for life to be lived. Call it a reaction to isolation during COVID if you want, but it really boils down to this – everyone moves to New York for a reason, and that reason, at least in this community, is never really that different. It’s just creative people wanting to congregate with other creative people
Of course, I understand all of that. I, too, yearn for a lot of that. But what makes a scene a scene? What connects these people besides location and time? Does a scene even require that to begin with? If only people with those elite connections can pay to enter, how much of a “community” is it, and how much of a “club” is it? You could give genuine answers to all of these and turn my whole view of it on its head – again, I’m certainly not arguing that I know better, you could totally prove me wrong here.
But, it’s also worth noting that Verma’s documented outings are a game of trial and error. He doesn’t hesitate in saying that many of the events he attends are not…”fun.” They’re stiff. They’re about standing around and witnessing. Are we simply too self-aware? Do people move here with this idea that something has to happen because they’re here? I also appreciated his note that even publications praising the scene don’t treat these people as people. That’s not necessarily the participants’ fault, but it did strike me as odd how, over and over again, this scene that was supposed to be about “fun” and a sense of sleaziness is always spoken about and projected as this sterile thing. I empathize with all sides of it, really. We want to create something, but the light of expectation shone on the “scene” is now so bright that people don’t even get the chance to develop into something good, they just have to go.
An anonymous manager Verma talks to corroborates this, and maybe expresses it more clearly than I can:
For one, the scene didn’t appear out of nowhere. Its roots were grown during COVID at secret parties that were mainly fronted by club artists, which is a reason why there’s such a strong club element in the production and DJ sets. Second, every artist in this scene is given an inherent advantage. They all start at the top floor of the industry simply because they’re in New York. They are going to the same parties as the writers, the photographers, and the record execs who have the power to put them on. This is, however, a double-edged sword, as it can put newer artists on a pedestal before giving them time to incubate and experiment with their sound. Still, compare that with Detroit’s rap scene: incredible artists there have been grinding for the better part of a decade but many haven’t received half as much shine as the artists in this scene.
To be self-involved for a moment (when am I not here?), I would love the opportunity to document any kind of musical movement as a piece of my “career” in “journalism” (the scare quotes need to be there, trust me). I love bands. I love musicians. I think, in a lot of cases, I understand how musicians work. I understand how they see me. I would love the opportunity to be there for when something happens. Now, this thing is supposedly “happening” in front of me, and my interest hasn’t piqued in the manner I wanted it to. Is it because I have no interest in the self-awareness of it all? The constant myth-making of it? The trying to will the thing into existence? It just all feels forced. It feels like it doesn’t hang together in a way that my brain can weave into something I passionately care about. It’s nostalgia with so little of the innovation. It’s groping for anything that will mean something to us again. Maybe that’s what I want to talk about next: innovation, or the façade of innovation blocking that which is actually innovative.
So, of course, the broader question is: why, besides the sense of community, are we trying to make this “happen”? Because that’s the issue I grapple with. It’s definitely due in part to the fact that so much of music media is based here, and writers and editors who live here hang out with the people who would try to propagate this thing, as the manager said – which isn’t a bad thing, and I’m not saying people desperate for this thing to be viewed as legitimate are bad people, it’s just the truth.
It must also come from that yearning for an “old” New York – a New York you read about in Please Kill Me or (in this case) Meet Me in the Bathroom, or see in movies and documentaries. It’s a New York that was once a spot for movers and shakers on the broader scale of indie music – which I would argue it’s not anymore. I say that as someone who was born here and will most likely die here and will probably not live in very many other places in between. It’s true that there will always be art here, it will always be a place people come to create things, but it’s not where the most inventive or original artistic scenes are thriving right now. Maybe it’s too fractured a landscape for that. There’s too much of everything and everyone doing the same thing in distant, closed-off circles. Like I said, there’s a disconnect. There’s a cry for humanity and spontaneity when there’s none to be found in the place where media and hype have chosen to shine the light.
The other thing that irks me is who is selected to be the face of this “movement.” Once again, it’s a guy in a suit play-acting as something clever. Who thinks he’s being transgressive. Who tricked the wannabe underground slummers that he’s transgressive, somehow. I don’t know this artist I’m referencing personally – I have no beef with him as a human being, I can’t speak to it. But the artistry and presentation of his project does not move or shake me. Obviously, if you just think it’s dumb and fun and want to enjoy that, fine. But why do people who look like him always get to be the face of transgression? Why don’t the non-white DJs in the outer boroughs ever get to be the faces of the city’s artistic output? Why are the bands singing about non-straight people relegated to “pretentious critic’s choice”? If he was making the most interesting music in the city right now, I’d say godspeed. But he’s not.
It made me think a little bit about this NME cover story debacle that happened recently – the quick rundown, if you don’t run in music journalist Twitter circles (good for you), is that this band with like 200 followers and one song on Spotify that had received absolutely no hype up to that point, called Picture Parlour, were on the cover of the last huge British music magazine. I can’t bring myself to be too concerned – they’re all digital covers now, there’s minimal risk to it on the publication’s behalf, AND an inside source told me that the writer was genuinely a fan of the band’s live show and tackled it with pure intentions. However, everyone’s complaint is that there were plenty of bands who deserved the exposure more, which is a fair point. I’ve never seen the band live, so I can’t speak to it, but the song was fine. It was safe. People suspected there had been other...let's say, familial connections and financing that certainly hadn’t hurt in getting the band off the ground and playing some major dates so quickly. I can’t prove that to you now, and I won’t swear to it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that was true. It’s often the case with this high-profile bands.
The point I’m getting at is that I was confused by accusations from the band’s defenders that it was simply misogyny that sparked the ire of the detractors (three members of the band are women, I think) – a hundred well-meaning guys all yelled “yeah!” in solidarity. I’m usually the first person to yell “misogyny,” because that’s usually what it is, both in this business and pretty much every other business. While I think more bands with women should get that major attention, why is it always women who look and sound like them, and come from their background? If they were the second-coming, I’d shut up, but they’re not. Okay, so they’re a good live band. There are so many good live bands. I’m not saying damn them to hell, but I shouldn’t be scolded for thinking critically about why it’s them who were chosen.
I think about all of the groundbreaking R&B albums of the past ten-ish years – the celebration they get is never, never enough. I’m not saying this band doesn’t deserve its moment eventually, but why do I always see them and not any of the musicians who are reinventing the concept of genre can be and mean right in front of our eyes? If everyone has a fair shot? If everything is truly equitable? To paraphrase some incredible writing by Jessica Hopper (who retweeted one of my essays last week, I’ll never recover), it’s like when Trump got elected and everyone said “wow, I bet everyone’s gonna start making great political music again!” but something like Solange’s A Seat At The Table had already come out earlier that year. And just think: she’s someone who was already well-known, who is related to one of the most famous people on Earth. It still will never be enough. Think about those who start even a smidgen lower on the totem pole. Is it because her experience is not yours that you feel it doesn’t reflect us? Is it because it moves in shapes you can’t photocopy and distribute as your own? Is it because it’s not easy to digest? I don’t know. This tangent has gotten away from me a little bit, but I still don’t know.
There are people doing great things in this city right now, but they’re apparently not worth rounding up and advertising for people elsewhere (who don’t want to hear any more about us as a town, by the way, and I understand), so no one knows about it. Listening to a guy in a suit sing about girls and play DJ sets at a dive bar is one thing. Having him be the face of a city that is humming with life in places he’ll never travel to is another.
All of this thinking led me down another tangential path to ask: what’s defined the sound of New York for me in the last decade or so? It’s tough, again, because things are so fractured. So few bands that I love sound exactly like each other – it’s hard to pin anything to one sound, which is why I find the notion that there is a singular identifiable movement laughable. I think of the concept of “indie sleaze:” and think about the huuuuuge list of artists that supposedly fit under that umbrella. Does Santigold sound exactly like It’s Blitz!-era Yeah Yeah Yeahs or LCD Soundsystem? By the way, when we reference “indie sleaze,” why the fuck are we never referencing that first Santigold album? Or someone like Peaches? Or, if you want to go back to the early Strokes days, a certain era of Le Tigre? Jesus H, I fucking love Le Tigre. Once again, people who do not look like James Murphy create something original and we can only talk about James Murphy and the fucking James Murphy clones (no offense to James Murphy personally).
Anyway, I started thinking about pop artists in New York in the late 2000s and early 2010s that felt emblematic of the city, and the first thing that came to mind wasn’t (sonically) very “sleazy” at all. In fact, the criticism from some people (your beloved Pitchfork gave this album a 5.9, which is absurd to think about now) was that it was too sleek. Too minimal. Yet, it feels lifelike to me. It feels like being drunk on the subway. It feels like laughing in an alley where the pavement is still wet from the rain. It feels like a blast of cold air breaking up sticky walls of humidity and condensation you swear is landing on your skin. It feels like dodging in and out of traffic and watching people smoke and being 25 and insufferable because you don’t know how to sit with yourself, don’t know how to sit with this person you’re supposed to be in love with, don’t know how to sit with the sleekness, so you bury yourself in what the rest of them would perceive as filth. It’s the places humming with life that the ex-substitute teacher will never travel to.
Dev Hynes relocated to New York when he was 22 in 2007, and while on hiatus from his prior musical project, Lightspeed Champion, he christened his new endeavor “Blood Orange” and spent a few years playing under the name in clubs before releasing Blood Orange’s debut single in January 2011. That first track didn’t make the cut for the first Blood Orange album, Coastal Grooves, but ten other songs did. The list of influences on these tracks are as follows: Chris Isaak, Billy Idol, Japanese pop outfit Yellow Magic Orchestra (which I definitely hear), F.R. David, trans icon Octavia St. Laurent, Gregg Araki movies (bitch, I love Gregg Araki – know this fun fact about me), and most importantly, his prior three years in New York. He would compile early versions of the tracks onto tapes and listen to them while he was traveling around the city at night – I thought I’d read before that he’d traveled around on a motorcycle, but that might’ve been a little bit of mythologizing on my brain’s behalf.
Even just the titles of the songs nail it: “Forget It,” “Are You Sure You’re Really Busy?,” “I’m Sorry We Lied,” “Can We Go Inside Now” (no punctuation). They’re ostensibly about those relationships – a half-desperate bloodhunt for stability with the body they happen to fall into (I feel like “Champagne Coast” sounds so cool and aloof, but those lyrics are borderline puppy-panting-at-your-feet), a half-disinterested brush-off (I forever relish the rejection of “Forget It” and Hynes’ specifically cruel delivery of “what the hell is wrong with youuuu?” on “The Complete Knock” in particular). It feels like it’s pantomiming the boy-meets-girl story at some points, as if to suggest that only a warped version of that can exist in this environment and we can only poke fun. There are mentions of invisible brides and the reassertion that we’re done, the cold cut-off is the only way we can proceed. There’s a sense of constant, frenetic movement – never aggressive, never a shove, but flitting from melting, painted face to melting, painted face, dabbing tears as we descend the stairs and carrying on grandly again by the time we reach the bottom.
That little harmonized, wordless vocal that first comes around at the three-minute mark in “Champagne Coast” captures a whole lot of that for me. It’s the sound of the moment you realize how heavy your head truly is by the time the night ends, letting it roll back and almost groaning at the relief your neck must feel as every thought you’ve had rolls around in there too, barely listening to whoever’s attempting to get your attention – just so amazed that this medicine ball attached to you won’t snap off, that gravity wouldn’t let it. Fingers ghost over guitar strings to mimic one of those miracle limbs going numb. Big, weighty piano hits crumble at the bottom of the stomach as pentatonic melodies weave around its collapse. Call-and-response Greek choruses play everything caught in the tumble up there, all communicating in abrupt sorta-kinda-statements that make you feel like you’re entering the conversation in its middle. It is about the other moving bodies in your peripheral vision, but it’s mostly about you. It’s a profoundly lonely-sounding album, to my ears. “Bittersweet” is a loaded word, but it balances something both removed and agonizing – both sexless and overwhelming – with one tray in each hand.
I’ve been listening to Coastal Grooves a lot recently. It’s a great commute album. Since I’ve finally landed a day job for the time being (!!!!), I’ve been replaying it almost non-stop. Along with my new listening, I’ve been toggling back and forth between that – an easy go-to listen chronicling a London native’s icy nighttime pangs of the heart – and my current frontrunner for my album of the year: a Chicago native’s largely-acoustic meditation on grief of all varieties, serving as both therapeutic, poetic siren song and depths-of-the-valley folklore storybook.
Jesus Christ, do I love Kara Jackson’s Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?. I really don’t have that many hyperbolic adjectives to share here (there’s a first for everything), I can only say it’s brilliant. Where Hynes’ voice is breathy and elastic, Jackson’s is smoky and resonant – while also feeling…I don’t know, pure, just in the way her phrasing works? There’s no frills in the delivery. The melodies sparkle but they never overextend themselves at the cost of straying from the storytelling’s immediacy.
A few weeks ago, I quite literally ran to go see part of her set at Celebrate Brooklyn in Prospect Park (it’s a lovely set-up they have there, highly recommend going while they’re still doing the free shows over the summer), and was gobsmacked by how even more refined and trained her voice sounded after time touring and promoting the album. She’d lived through her first Joni Mitchell-travelog days and let the experience only warm her voice, rather than weather it. She sat solo on a giant stage with only a guitar and no other band, launching into the “no fun” half of “no fun/party,” as it appears on the album – the beautifully-placed orchestral embellishments were missed, for sure by me, but she held the audience’s attention and spurred on such rapturous applause after every track that even she seemed surprised. She told us she loved New York, and it twinged my heart. No one I read or listened to said they loved New York anymore. Its earnestness almost got caught in my throat. I felt it pool right where my spine meets the bones in my shoulders.
I had heard this song at least three dozen times at this point, but I felt my insides constrict as the second verse came around: “I want to be as dangerous as a dancing dragon / Or a steam engine, a loaded gun / Be loved for my hazard and a will to destruct / And isn’t that just love? A will to destruct? / Isn’t that just love when you’re no fun?” I can’t speak for Jackson’s personal experience, but my general finding to this rhetorical question is, “Well, I thought it was. People who are actually fun seem to not think so. People who have a different set of problems, I mean. They seem equipped to deal with it – to know better.”
Every time I write one of these, I feel like I just end up projecting my self-help mantra of the past few weeks – whatever I have to tell or teach myself while I don’t have a good therapist or someone who lives near me that I can vent to with no concern. Last weekend, while listening to this album and trying to grapple with the incalculable weight of my life's bullshit again, I thought a lot about this act of managing my resentments – of having to tamper my emotions so that I can get through my day like a normal human being. I wouldn’t say it’s compartmentalizing anything, but a lot of what I do is set a second aside to acknowledge what I’m angry about and how that manifests in my behavior and thinking, and tell myself I’m not insane for being mad, because I’ve also acknowledged I need reminding of that. The resentment can exist, and just because the person who inflicted paint that shaped me as a person and that I can still recall vividly won’t acknowledge it or straight-up doesn’t remember it, it doesn’t mean I imagined it. For so long, I’ve been so sure I imagined everything. I have no idea what I actually remember about myself. I have no idea what other people remember about me. I have very few people to tell anything I might remember, nothing to hold it up against.
I’ve been thinking about the way we’ve been yearning for community too – how my ability to socialize or integrate myself goes in and out in waves. I attended a packed showcase/party a few weeks ago, and found it easy to start talking to people standing around me. Maybe it was because I went in knowing no one, and therefore, no one expected anything from me and I expected nothing from them. Then, at a show where I’ve met a bunch of people I've hung out with before, I clam up. I feel suspicious eyes on me – eyes of people I’ve felt totally safe under the gaze of before – and I can’t help but think I’m blowing it. I could be building that community for myself right now and I’m not. They all have each other and I’m just sitting here like a fucking idiot. Someone introduce me, someone do something besides fucking look at me like I’m a speck of dirt sullying the surface of your little middle school clique. In this particular situation, one of my friends finally pulled me over to chat, but then I felt bad that they were sidelined talking to me, the person no one wanted to talk to. Trust me, I have plenty of experience gauging how much someone doesn’t want to deal with me in a given moment. I usually know when to turn on my heel. They told me they missed me when they were the only person to tell me they were leaving, and I immediately felt ashamed for thinking that that can’t possibly be true. Look at the sorry performance I’ve just put on here.
One other friend present, who I’ve always felt comfortable with before, said exactly two words to me (“Hey” and “Elise”) and didn’t even let me get a sentence out before walking over to me – seated on the ground while they were standing – and placing a hand on each side of my head before kissing the top of it. They didn’t talk to me again the rest of the night. It’s like I was something sacred, something decorative to be hung on a wall. Don’t you want to catch up with something sacred, if you love it that much? Is a kiss a preemptive apology for having an off day and not getting the chance to talk to me? Does something sacred deserve a “go away” kiss? Or was it “give up”? Is this how people feel with me? Waiting for what face they’re going to get whenever I turn the corner? Waiting for me to either be obnoxious or silent with no in between? All the hand-wringing involved, all the careful steps, shadowboxing with someone else’s sudden onslaught of emotion. Reminds me of being in a house full of family. All I’ve done is turn into them when I promised that was the one thing I’d avoid doing.
Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? is not a New York-specific album, but it’s an album that deals in all types of solitude. There’s the dread of filling space left empty when you’ve been abandoned, or when you’ve determined that self-imposed isolation is the only cure to your ailment. It’s all packaged and communicated with admirable restraint, pairing thoughtful arrangements with cutting prose that feels worthy of the true folk tradition. It’s an assertion of freedom, but of loneliness too – having to reckon with the fact that you will push people away from you in order to sit with yourself, to continue to be difficult to deal with. Not everyone has to, but we do. It’s another resentment I have to manage – they just keep adding up.
“dickhead blues” has served as my song of the year, in a lot of ways. I’m not sure I have it in me to go step-by-step through the song, like I’m usually raring to do, but I will say that near the end of the song, there’s an almost joyous round of “If I had a heart, I’d know where to start,” with more Greek chorus vocals parroting the sentiment back or letting the words stretch into a different melody. For example, during one specific bar in the round, there are voices who go, “Staaart, start, start,” with notes in a configuration we haven’t heard before, and it feels like when spring blooms and all the trees flower and send us into sneezing fits as the petals bunch up under our boots and are stained with dirt or swept away by the time June comes around. It’s more like an invite than a command, but it knows I can’t. It knows we don’t know how to deal with these things, so we can’t begin. Someone taught us to be mean, and now we’re drained dry. I’m still trying to fill myself back up.
“I’m not as worthless as I once thought,” Jackson sings in the pseudo-chorus that comes both in the middle of the song and at the very end, after the round has reached its fever pitch, “I am pretty top-notch.” It’s all become another one of my Julianne-Moore-in-the-mirror-in-Safe mantras. I sing it in my head in the shower. I sing it in my head on my commute. I sing it when I’m walking the dog that isn’t mine. I sing it when I try on a dress I feel confident in, or when I don’t completely fuck something up at work. I’m trying not to quantify my worth by metrics I don’t feel I can fit into. I’m closing the door on the spiritual realm on forcing it all.
Kara Jackson opens her mouth and lets the most gorgeous sound end her song: “I’m uuuseeeeefuuuul!” It’s a clarion call, a clear bell ringing out in the wildfire-induced fog. It’s the most joyous thing I’ve encountered in so long. It’s the morning greeting I have to share with myself, swooping and falling like it’s sacred. It slams the door shut. The sound sustains.