Blaugust #4: Snapshots in Sound
On the music that defines my life, songs I relate to as an abuse survivor and system, growing up with darker kinks/fetishes, and being stubborn. CW: abuse.
My love for music has always been there. It stretches as far back as my memory can reach and slingshots forward into the future. It settles within me and keeps me going like a second stomach. My father was a music teacher and trombone player, my nana sang, my favorite cousin sings opera, and I make shitty Soundcloud music without knowing music theory at all whatsoever. I've always been someone who admires music more than they breathe or create it--my insecurities and perfectionism get in the way of me producing more music—but I think that's fine. Music is beautiful and it needs appreciators just as much as it needs producers, and the music I make is more focused on expressing pain than it is on being listenable music. It's just another form of expression for me, and one I do for fun because I know I will never be as good at music as I am at, say, writing. Music theory just eludes me, and I end up staring at the Circle of Fifths like it is a hypnosis spiral. I used the Bonzi Buddy voice for lyrics in most of my pieces. I do not take this shit seriously. I think it's good to have some forms of creativity you don't take seriously when you are a creative person. I'm just messing around; I'll be leaving the genius up to Martin Gore, Russell Lissack, and Elizabeth Eden Harris, thanks.
My favorite music growing up was R&B and Rap, but I listened to just about everything I could get my hands on. In toddlerhood my favorite song to scream at the top of my lungs was Goodbye Earl; by seven my favorite song was Like A Boy by Ciara. (Though I understood that the song was about double standards in society, hearing a woman sing about being "like a boy" really moved me at that age, because even if I couldn't relate to the relationships aspect, "what if I was like a boy and those privileges were awarded to me and I wasn't sexualized by everyone" "what if I was like a boy in the sense that I legitimately might not be a girl" and "what if I was like a boy because being a girl is too burdensome" were thoughts that raced through my head almost daily. To hear it spoken aloud without shame in the wonder...)
I have always used music to color in the background parts of my life, and as such I am able to define and divide my life's "eras" by the kind of music I would listen to most often during that period of time. It's never been something I've written down before, but it's something I've thought about extensively, especially as I shift into a hyperfixation on music history.
But where do I start? I have dissociative identity disorder. I've been so many different mes and I barely remember any of them. I've changed my name about 80 times because of this and I don't remember what happened last week and I am barely a body. I think that this is what stopped me from writing it down for so long: doing so would feel too similar to a therapy intake appointment, the ugly puddle aftermath of the spilling of the guts. It's not just that doing so would leave me feeling too vulnerable, it is also that doing so would leave me too confused to keep myself intact going forward. I'd forget myself. I'd splinter.
I don't think that's the case anymore, though; I haven't splintered in so long! So my take now is this: whatever. I'm going to try my best and throw this up. So here we go, snapshots of a few eras of my life, in the form of 3 playlists:
PLAYLIST 1: THE DEBUT SINGLE(T)
Goodbye Earl - The Chicks
Big Girls Don’t Cry - Fergie
Umbrella - Rihanna
Like A Boy - Ciara
Beautiful Girls - Sean Kingston
Unwritten - Natasha Bedingfield
GOODBYE EARL…
I always have to wonder what people thought when they saw four year old me screaming at the top of her lungs WELL IT WASN'T TWO WEEKS AFTER SHE GOT MARRIED THAT WANDA STARTED GETTING ABUSED!!!!
I didn't know what it meant at the time but I was still drawn to the song in its entirety. I had been a Chicks fan since I was three, which was before the Great Slaying of Me, and after my Slaughtering I became even more infatuated with this specific song (and also Not Ready To Make Nice, which of course I didn't understand the backstory to, even when my mother explained it to me; I just knew the band had been wronged, and that I was mad as hell along with them! I was always so angry.)
The Chicks defined my toddlerhood. When we went on road trips, I made my mom play Goodbye Earl on repeat through the car radio while she listened to her own music on a CD player. I screamed the lyrics. I knew them all by heart, word for word. When I was in kindergarten my teacher called my mother and told her I recited the I Have A Dream speech word for word after reading it only once the day prior, and I think about this and I think about me whispering to myself during a panic attack Mary-Anne and Wanda were the best of friends… and on and on, each word of Goodbye Earl, right away Mary-Anne flew in from Atlanta… she held Wanda's hand and they worked out a plan…., and I wonder what happened to that kid with that knight-strong memory. It was after the Slaughtering. I guess the splintering worked as intended, because I seemed intact despite being only an aftermath within.
I so desperately wanted my own Mary-Anne.
BIG GIRLS DON'T CRY…
After my slaughtering I developed severe agoraphobia. I never left my mother's side when we went grocery shopping; if she got gas I reclined my seat and curled up into the fetal position and shook and shook and shook until she got back, so I wasn't visible to anyone looking into the car; I begged my parents to never leave the house if it wasn't absolutely necessary. During this time I was also very close to my aunt, Amy, who I wrote about in All Caps GOD; this was before she learned to hate me.
Amy was well-intentioned back then, but she was easily distracted. She went into a convenience store to buy some cigarettes and left me in the car while she "just ran out real quick", but it took her about twenty minutes to make her way back, I don't remember why. As I curled myself into a ball, forcing my body into its smallest folded-up form like some beautiful shredded origami piece, scenarios of my capture and further violation flooding through the vessels in my brain, this song began to blare on the radio.
BEAUTIFUL GIRLS…
Any time this song was on the radio, my family would rush to turn it off so I didn't hear it. Naturally this made me incredibly curious, but when I looked it up on Youtube and heard the full lyrics, I couldn't understand for the life of me why anyone would care about me hearing that. What the hell was suicide? It couldn't be that bad, could it? I knew someone the family was close to had committed suicide, and that was also a Forbidden Topic around me, but because no one told me what suicide actually was, I had to learn through Google. And when I Googled suicide, I saw suicide in its most raw and uncensored form—graphic images—and realized that I finally had a word for what I had craved as long as I could remember.
UNWRITTEN
The bus driver turned on the radio and let it play during the entire short drive from kindergarten to daycare at the elementary school, and I remember this song playing just about every day, including the day another kid—who had proclaimed himself my boyfriend—-told me that if I didn't—-
PLAYLIST 2: DOUBLE DIGITZ SIDE A
Get A Move On - Mr. Scruff
Surgeon - St. Vincent
Walking On Air - Kerli
Propeller Seeds - Imogen Heap
Gothic Lolita - Emilie Autumn
GET A MOVE ON
Mr. Scruff was the artist who made the sample music that came with Windows 7 OS. I had a deep interest in technology even back then, it's just how I've always been wired, and I had a specific interest in Microsoft Windows, its previous and upcoming operating systems, and various Microsoft software like Microsoft Agent, Office, Text to Speech, and Media Player. Literally I would spend hours recording videos of various things I forced Microsoft Sam to say, then I would set them to instrumentals of my favorite songs and upload the shitty amalgam to Youtube. When I was 10, I had a mission to read every Microsoft related Wikipedia article in one day. Yes, if you're wondering, I was diagnosed with autism eventually.
When I think of this era of my life, Mr. Scruff sticks out as perhaps one of the most prominent artists of the time. I listened to the Windows 7 sample music on almost a daily basis—I put him on the iPod Classic I still used even then and I took it with me when we visited my grandfather in hospice and, yes, I am ashamed to say it, I listened to Mr Scruff all throughout the funeral too.
SURGEON
If you know me then you may know I have a weird erotic fixation on vivisection. I don't really know why. I can tell you why it appeals to me in an erotic context—it is the most literal form of being inside someone, the intimacy and trust inherent to allowing someone to take you apart piece by piece, the vulnerability involved—but I can't really tell you what caused this kink or why I have it. It's obviously a fantasy-exclusive kink, though if we lived in a Star Trek future where I could survive being vivisected, I would not be disinterested! But this fixation came with so much shame, early on; I've had it since I was very young, and it just grew into something sexual from there.
I would consider this too TMI for this blog, but I also think it is important for people to see others discuss darker kinks and fetishes without shame. When I realized it was erotic for me, I was buried in a friend group that would have skinned me alive for feeling this way about erotic gore. As a young child, my best friend and I had an inside joke where we were cutting open this fake guy we made up called Sthomachs, because we constantly fought over him; the idea was we'd each date our own share of his harvested organs because he just couldn't choose one of us for good. I didn't know that this was abnormal or weird, so we made those jokes around others on Google Buzz (remember Google Buzz?) and our friends' parents ended up very very concerned. Everything around me was telling me to be ashamed of this fantasy, even though it was only a fantasy that I now think may have been caused by an attempt to cope with violent intrusive thoughts, and everything around me made me feel like an abomination, some sort of demonic being that was incapable of good.
Anyway, around this time Apple still did one free song per week on iTunes, and I had recently gotten an iPod Touch for the holidays. One week the free single was one of the songs from St. Vincent's Strange Mercy. I can't remember which one it was, but I was immediately enthralled by her voice, so I took to Youtube to listen to more of her songs… and I found Surgeon.
Best finest surgeon
Come cut me open…
I didn't know it at the time--I actually just found this out now—but this had been a quote from Marilyn Monroe in one of her diary entries:
Best finest surgeon—Strasberg to cut me open which I don’t mind since Dr. H has prepared me—given me anaesthetic and has also diagnosed the case and agrees with what has to be done— an operation—to bring myself back to life and to cure me of this terrible dis-ease whatever the hell it is—and there is absolutely nothing there— Strasberg is deeply disappointed but more even— academically amazed that he had made such a mistake. He thought there was going to be so much—more than he had ever dreamed possible … instead there was absolutely nothing— devoid of every human living feeling thing— the only thing that came out was so finely cut sawdust—like out of a raggedy ann doll—and the sawdust spills all over the floor & table and Dr. H is puzzled because suddenly she realizes that this is a new type case. The patient … existing of complete emptiness Strasberg’s dreams & hopes for theater are fallen. Dr. H’s dreams and hopes for a permanent psychiatric cure is given up—Arthur is disappointed— let down.
In Surgeon I felt the sexual entendre within Clark's voice even if I was too young to understand. For many it was likely metaphorical, penetration being the cutting open, but for me the fascination was very literal; I desired to be dissected, to feel a scalpel sink into my flesh and to feel fingers root around between my organs and to be studied in my all so my alien nature could lead to new scientific discoveries for humanity. I guess even if I hadn't been aware of Monroe's diary entry back then I still lived it in a way.
GOTHIC LOLITA
How old are you?
I'm older than you'll ever be
I've been dead a thousand years
And lived only two or three
I don't mind telling you
My life was ended by your hand
The kind of murder where nobody dies
But I don't suppose you'd understand
[Pre-Chorus]
Call off the search, we've found her
[Chorus]
If I am Lolita, then you are a criminal
And you should be killed by an army of little girls
The law won't arrest you
The world won't detest you
You never did anything any man wouldn't do
I'm Gothic Lolita and you are a criminal
I'm not even legal
I'm just a dead little girl
My obsession with this song—the fact that I'd play it on repeat for days, the fact that I felt like I vomited the song out of me, dreamed it up myself—should have been a damn clue.
PLAYLIST 3: DOUBLE DIGITZ SIDE B
Stubborn Love - The Lumineers
Nicotine - Panic! At The Disco
Halo - Bloc Party
STUBBORN LOVE
The first time I had a serious crush, it was on the best friend of my best friend's sister. I met my best friend's sister on a now-defunct online forum/magazine for girls called New Moon Girls Magazine, which was my main social outlet as a homeschooled autistic kid terrified of the world around her. Her name was Car, and she was 15 while I was 11.
Mostly we interacted over Tumblr. I joined Tumblr at 9, but only became active around age 11, when I felt I had outgrown NMG and needed somewhere else to settle. I was very technologically adept for my age, so in my paranoia I added an IP logger and visitor tracker to the main page of my blog. It told me the approximate location of everyone who visited my blog, their IP address, what time they visited my blog, and for how long they visited. Not very long after that, I started getting anonymous crush confession asks from someone in the same city as Car. I did not know anyone else in that city, nor did I have more than twenty followers at the time, so I came to the conclusion that it was her very quickly… I still don't know if it really was, but I think so. They typed like her, they sent me poetry they wrote about me that was written in her style, they sent me songs by artists she liked. Every indication said it was her.
One of the songs that anonymous person sent me was Stubborn Love. The anon told me it reminded them of our interactions and didn't elaborate much beyond that.
She'll lie and steal and cheat
And beg you from her knees
Make you think she means it this time
She'll tear a hole in you, the one you can't repair
But I still love her, I don't really care
When we were young
Oh-oh, we did enough
When it got cold
Ooh-ooh, we bundled up
I can't be told
Ah-ah it can't be done
It's better to feel pain, than nothing at all
To this day I still cannot figure out what that meant, but when I was hospitalized shortly after this, this song's Youtube page was the only website I visited for the half an hour each day we were allowed (supervised) internet access. This song, over and over and over, ruminating on why the person who supposedly liked me thought I was stubborn.
NICOTINE
The best friend I talked about in the previous section came from her own troubles and traumas, and she treated me terribly. I was diagnosed with autism the year I met up with her family in a small Minnesota town, and I did not know it until after our meetup, but her family was staunchly anti-vaccine. I told them it hurt my feelings to say that my autism was a fate worse than death and she laughed at me and doubled down. She had her best friend use his karate moves and flip me to the ground three times during the visit while laughing. Her room was so messy you could not even see the floor and I was forced to sleep on the mess.
Her favorite band was Panic! at the Disco. About a month after we met up, Too Weird To Live was released. She sent me Nicotine over email:
Just one more hit and then we're through
'Cause you could never love me back
Cut every tie I have to you
'Cause your love's a fucking drag
But I need it so bad
Your love's a fucking drag
But I need it so bad
[Chorus]
Yeah, you're worse than nicotine, nicotine
_—_and said that it reminded her of me and my social anxiety. I wish that had been the moment I stopped talking to her, but even as the hatred she felt towards me for my autism diagnosis only got worse, I still remained anchored to her side; I didn't have anyone else.
I think there's been so many patterns in my life, both good and bad; I also think the fabric forming these patterns is made of sheet music, sound and note, lyric and hymn. I think music defines, and defies, more than we think it does.