"Each and every person on earth deserves to live fully with dignity, equity, justice, and joy. Instead, our capitalistic societies have created a world that is most supportive of the wealthy and the elite, and the predatory corporations and policies that drive their disproportionate success."
Bon Iver has shared a surprise new song entitled "AUATC."
Produced by Justin Vernon, Jim-E Stack, and BJ Burton, and featuring contributions from Jenny Lewis, Bruce Springsteen, Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner, Phil Cook, and more, it's Bon Iver's second single of 2020.
The song dropped today along with a music video created by Aaron Anderson and Eric Timothy Carlson and starring Randall Riley. Filmed in New York, the video is mostly a montage of simple, beautiful footage of Riley dancing across bridges and through neighborhood scenes, all while wearing a mask. It's distinctly summer-in-the-time-of-COVID-core, from its DIY feel to its vaguely anticapitalist implications. (The video begins and ends with a few brightly colored cartoons depicting engorged, Monopoly Man-like men in suits all eating vast amounts of cake).
The song's acronymic title stands for "Ate Up All Their Cake," so its anticapitalist arguments aren't exactly covert.
Unlike Taylor Swift's recent folklore, in which Vernon was featured, the song isn't a product of COVID-19 isolation. It's actually been in progress since 2018, when Vernon shared a rough demo. His digital platform PEOPLE described the song as "a rough draft of a song Phil and Justin worked on last summer. We want to finish it but havent had time in the same space to do so. We're open to ideas."
Like Bon Iver's first release of 2020, "PDLIF"—which benefited first responders and patients through the humanitarian aid organization Direct Relief—"AUATC" comes with a call to action. This time, the message is even clearer than the first one's: Down with the corporations that are swallowing us all whole.
Sonically, "AUTUC" is similar to Bon Iver's most recent LP, i,i, which is richly complex, warm, and joyous, like the sound of a raucous summer beach vacation mixed with a few drug-fueled escapades into parallel dimensions.
"AUTUC" begins with a bittersweet, jingly piano riff reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland" era. It starts with Vernon's vocals, digitally processed into a surreal warble as usual, and then erupts into strings, harmonies, and euphoric, expertly mixed acoustic guitar and the odd whistling woodwind.
It's all a bit chaotic, and it definitely requires good headphones—if you listen to it in mono it can sound like a wall of sound—but a closer listen reveals Bon Iver's characteristically adept production skills, which resemble those of a particularly excellent chef. Electric strings race from one headphone to the other; drums kick things off to a sprint; the song ends with a wall of warm, ghostly "oohs" before collapsing back into a soulfully spare outro.
As usual, Bon Iver is on the cutting edge of culture with his releases, preserving a sense of mystery with each of his eras. After rocking the folk music world with For Emma and building a mythological legacy off his time in an isolated cabin, he's since completely thrown off any semblance of genre, and he's turned Bon Iver into a gigantic family-like collective, which now appears to be involving itself in the dismantling of capitalism.
Perhaps the progression of Bon Iver's career is a good blueprint for how we should all live: Take some time to process our trauma in isolation before finding our crew, trying some stuff, getting to know God and then dedicating ourselves to achieving equality for all the world's people.
The "AUTUC" release was accompanied by a distinctly anti-capitalist statement from the creators, as well as a call for donations to Minneapolis Sanctuary Movement, Red Letter Grant, Equal Justice Initiative, National Independent Venue Association, and 350.
The letter shows that Bon Iver's been using quarantine to do some self-reflecting—about his (or their—it's unclear who's exactly writing the letter) own privilege and complicity within capitalism and his own impetus to dismantle it, both within the music industry and in general.
Here's the band's statement:
Each and every person on earth deserves to live fully with dignity, equity, justice, and joy. Instead, our capitalistic societies have created a world that is most supportive of the wealthy and the elite, and the predatory corporations and policies that drive their disproportionate success.
The average person is cast aside and unheard; marginalized communities are further oppressed due to race, economic status, gender, sexual orientation, creed, criminal record, housing stability, education, ability, documentation status, and more. The pandemic further magnifies these grave inequities and this unchecked greed.
We must continue the fight to topple capitalism as we know it, and recognize our collective participation in its dominant institutions. Bon Iver acknowledges our own position within and use of capitalistic practices. It is with recognition of our privilege that we are fully committed to using our unique platform to challenge and change capitalism within our industry, and far beyond.
We must empower and embrace our vulnerable neighbors. We must fight racism and sexism and classism to build a stronger foundation for the home we all deserve. We must support the leaders and organizations working to change our world for the better. From providing safe and stable housing, to empowering women, to liberating incarcerated people, to celebrating art and music, to fighting climate change, these organizations work tirelessly to foster a world that celebrates our humanity on a local, national, and global level. Please explore, support, and take action:
The story of psychedelics is intertwined with the story of music, and tracing their relationship can feel like going in circles.
For thousands of years, artists have been using naturally-grown herbs to open their minds and enhance their creative processes. Since LSD was synthesized by Albert Hoffman in 1938, psychedelics have experienced a reemergence, blooming into a revolution in the 1960s, launching dozens of genres and sounds that focused on acid, shrooms, and all of the portals they opened. Around the 1960s, scientists also began studying the relationship between psychedelics and music, and even back then, researchers found that, when combined, music and psychedelics could have therapeutic effects on patients.
More modern studies have discovered that LSD, specifically, links a portion of the brain called the parahippocampal—which specializes in personal memory—to the visual cortex, which means that memories take on more autobiographical and visual dimensions. Other studies have found that LSD can make the timbres and sounds of music feel more meaningful and emotionally powerful. Today, psychedelic music still thrives, and you can hear flickers of those early trip-inspired experiences all across today's modern musical landscape.
"There is a message intrinsically carried in music, and under the effects of psychedelics, people seem to become more responsive to this," said the psychedelic researcher Mendel Kaelen. "Emotion can be processed more deeply. It's a beautiful narrative. It's like a snake biting itself in the tail."
All that said, psychedelics can be as dangerous as the archetypal live-fast-die-young rock and roller's average lifestyle. They can destabilize already fragile minds and can encourage further drug abuse and reckless behavior. Often, psychedelic revolutions have coincided with colonialist fetishizations, apocalyptic visions, and appropriations of Eastern culture.
However, sometimes psychedelics and musical talent can come together in a synergy so perfect that it can literally create transcendent and healing experiences. Hallucinogens affected each of these following musicians in a unique way, but their experiences with hallucinogens produced some of the greatest music of all time.
Harry Styles — She
In his revelatory Rolling Stone profile, Harry Styles spoke out about how magic mushrooms inspired his most recent album, Fine Line. Inspired by Fleetwood Mac, the 25-year-old apparently spent a lot of time at Shangri-La Studios in Los Angeles tripping and listening to the old psychedelic greats.
"Ah, yes. Did a lot of mushrooms here," he said in the interview during a tour of the studio. "We'd do mushrooms, lie down on the grass, and listen to Paul McCartney's Ram in the sunshine."
Things even got a little violent, as they often can when dealing with hallucinogens. "This is where I was standing when we were doing mushrooms and I bit off the tip of my tongue. So I was trying to sing with all this blood gushing out of my mouth. So many fond memories, this place," he reminisced affectionately.
Kacey Musgraves' dreamy song "Slow Burn" was apparently inspired by an acid trip. Listening to the lyrics, you can hear the influence of psychedelics twining with country and singer-songwriter tropes. "I was sitting on the porch, you know, having a good, easy, zen time," she said of the songwriting experience, which she said happened out on her porch one evening. "I wrote it down on my phone, and then wrote the songs the next day with a sober mind."
LSD, she said, "opens your mind in a lot of ways. It doesn't have to be scary. People in the professional worlds are using it, and it's starting to become an option for therapy. Isn't that crazy?" Her affection for the drug also appears in her song "Oh What A World," which contains the lyric, "Plants that grow and open your mind."
A$AP Rocky — L$D
While A$AP Rocky's affection for LSD isn't a surprise given his propensity for writing about the drug, apparently the rapper has an intellectual approach to his psychedelic experimentation.
"We was all in London at my spot, Skeppy came through," he told Hot New Hip Hop about his experience writing LSD. "I have this psychedelic professor, he studies in LSD. I had him come through and kinda record and monitor us to actually test the product while being tested on. We did the rhymes all tripping balls."
Apparently his first acid trip happened in 2012. "Okay, without getting anyone in trouble, I was with my homeboy and some trippy celebrity chicks and…" he said in an interview with Time Out. When asked how long it lasted, he said, "Too long, man. Twenty-three hours. I was trippin' till the next day. When I woke up, I was like, Damn! I did that shit! That shit was dope. It was so amazing. It was a-ma-zing. Nothing was like that first time."
Acid changed his entire approach to music and success. "I never really gave a f*ck, man, but this time, I really don't give a f*ck," he said. "I don't care about making no f*cking hits." Instead, he focuses on creating. "It's so hard to be progressive when you're trippin' b*lls," he said. "You make some far-out shit!"
The Beatles' later music is essentially synonymous with LSD, and the band members often spoke out about their unique experiences with the drug. According to Rolling Stone, the first time that Lennon and Harrison took it was actually a complete accident. A friend put LSD in their coffee without their knowledge, and initially Lennon was furious. But after the horror and panic faded, things changed. "I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass. It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience in 12 hours," said Harrison.
Paul McCartney had similar revelations. LSD "opened my eyes to the fact that there is a God," he said in 1967. "It is obvious that God isn't in a pill, but it explained the mystery of life. It was truly a religious experience." Of LSD's effect, he also said, "It started to find its way into everything we did, really. It colored our perceptions. I think we started to realize there wasn't as many frontiers as we'd thought there were. And we realized we could break barriers."
Using the drug not only helped the band create some of the most legendary music of all time—it also brought them closer together. "After taking acid together, John and I had a very interesting relationship," said George Harrison. "That I was younger or I was smaller was no longer any kind of embarrassment with John. Paul still says, 'I suppose we looked down on George because he was younger.' That is an illusion people are under. It's nothing to do with how many years old you are, or how big your body is. It's down to what your greater consciousness is and if you can live in harmony with what's going on in creation. John and I spent a lot of time together from then on and I felt closer to him than all the others, right through until his death."
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds (Remastered 2009)www.youtube.com
Ray Charles — My World
The soul music pioneer allegedly once described acid as his "eyes." Charles was blind, but LSD is said to have allowed him some version of sight. Though he struggled with addiction, Charles eventually got clean, though his music always bore some markers of his experiences with the subconscious mind.
Actually, blind people on LSD and hallucinogens can experience hallucinations of different kinds, though it's somewhat rare. According to a study in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, this happens because during a trip, "the plasticity of the nervous system allows the recognition and translation of auditory or tactile patterns into visual experiences."
Clapton struggled with drug abuse throughout his life, and LSD certainly had an influence on him. While he was a part of Cream, he frequently played shows while tripping, and according to outontrip.com, he became "convinced that he could turn the audience into angels or devils according to the notes he played."
Before he was creating the ultimate dad rap, Chance the Rapper was an acidhead.
"None of the songs are really declarative statements; a lot of them are just things that make you wonder...a lot like LSD," said Chance the Rapper of his hallucinogen-inspired album, the aptly named Acid Rap. "[There] was a lot of acid involved in Acid Rap," he told MTV in 2013. "I mean, it wasn't too much — I'd say it was about 30 to 40 percent acid ... more so 30 percent acid."
But the album wasn't merely about acid; like much of the best psychedelic music, it was more about the imagery and symbolism associated with the drug than the actual drug itself. "It wasn't the biggest component at all. It was something that I was really interested in for a long time during the making of the tape, but it's not necessarily a huge faction at all. It was more so just a booster, a bit of fuel. It's an allegory to acid, more so than just a tape about acid," he said.
Jazz great John Coltrane was a regular LSD user who used the drug to create music and to have spiritual experiences. Though he struggled with addiction throughout his life, LSD was one drug that had a major artistic influence on him. While it's not known for sure if the album Om—which includes chanted verses of the Bhagavad Gita—was recorded while Coltrane was on LSD, many rumors theorize that it was.
"Coltrane's LSD experiences confirmed spiritual insights he had already discovered rather than radically changing his perspective," wrote Eric Nisenson in Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest. "After one early acid trip he said, 'I perceived the interrelationship of all life forms,' an idea he had found repeated in many of the books on Eastern theology that he had been reading for years. For Coltrane, who for years had been trying to relate mystical systems such as numerology and astrology, theories of modern physics and mathematics, the teachings of the great spiritual leaders, and advanced musical theory, and trying somehow to pull these threads into something he could play on his horn. The LSD experience gave him visceral evidence that his quest was on the right track."
Jenny Lewis — Acid Tongue
Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis wrote the song "Acid Tongue" about her first and only experience on LSD, which happened when she was fourteen. She told Rolling Stone, "It culminated in a scene not unlike something from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—the scene where Hunter S. Thompson has to lock the lawyer in the bathroom. I sort of assumed the Hunter S. Thompson character and my friend – she had taken far too much – decided to pull a butcher knife out of the kitchen drawer and chase me around the house… At the end of that experience, my mom was out of town on a trip of her own and she returned to find me about 5 lbs lighter and I had—I was so desperate to get back to normal I decided to drink an entire gallon of orange juice. I saw that it was in the fridge and decided that this would sort of flush the LSD out of my system, but I didn't realize that it did exactly the opposite."
The Beach Boys' mastermind Brian Wilson was famously inspired by psychedelics, which both expanded and endangered his fragile and brilliant mind. After his first acid trip in 1965, an experience that he said "expanded his mind," Wilson wrote "California Gurls." After the trip, however, Wilson began suffering from auditory hallucinations and symptoms of schizophrenia, and though he discontinued use of the drug, he continued to hear voices; doctors eventually diagnosed him with the disease. Wilson later lamented his tragic experiences with LSD, stating that he wished he'd never done the drug.
Though it led Wilson on a downward spiral, LSD inspired some of his band's greatest work—namely the iconic Pet Sounds, which launched half a century of "acid-pop copycats."
The Flaming Lips — Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
The Flaming Lips' "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" is widely believed to be the product of lead singer Wayne Coyne's LSD experimentation. This theory is corroborated by the fact that the album's cover features the number 25 (and LSD is also known as LSD-25). They also frequently reference LSD in their music, which includes an album called Finally, the Punk Rockers Are Taking Acid.
the flaming lips yoshimi battles the pink robots part 1www.youtube.com
Jimi Hendrix — Voodoo Child
While there is still some general contention on whether Jimi Hendrix hallucinated frequently, nobody really doubts that he did. According to rumors, the legendary musician even used to soak his bandanas in acid before going onstage so the drug would seep through his pores.
According to one source, Hendrix did more than just play music while tripping. He was also an expert at (of all things) the game of Risk.
"Jimi would play Risk on acid, and I never — and me personally — ever beat him at all," said Graham Nash in an interview. "He was unbelievable at it. He was a military man, you know, he's a paratrooper, and I don't know whether you know that about Jimi, but no one ever beat him at Risk."
The Doors — The End
Jim Morrison was a documented LSD user, and it eventually led him out of his mind. "The psychedelic Jim I knew just a year earlier, the one who was constantly coming up with colorful answers to universal questions, was being slowly tortured by something we didn't understand. But you don't question the universe before breakfast for years and not pay a price," said John Desmore in Riders on the Storm: My Life With the Doors.
Morrison used many different drugs during his lifetime, but apparently LSD had a special place and he avoided using it while working. "LSD was a sacred sacrament that was to be taken on the beach at Venice, under the warmth of the sun, with our father the sun and our mother the ocean close by, and you realised how divine you were," said Ray Manzarek. "It wasn't a drug for entertainment. You could smoke a joint and play your music, as most musicians did at the time. But as far as taking LSD, that had to be done in a natural setting."
Morrison himself—a visionary who was also a drug-addled narcissist—was kind of the prototypical 1960s LSD-addled rock star. Alive with visions about poetry and sex but lost in his own self-destruction, he perhaps touched on something of the sublime with his art, but in the end he went down a very human path towards misery and decay.
Like many of these artists' stories, Morrison's life reveals that perhaps instead of using hallucinogens and psychedelics as shortcuts to a spiritual experience, one should exercise extreme caution when exploring the outer reaches of the psyche. When it comes to actually engaging with potent hallucinogens, that might be best left to the shamans, or forgotten with the excesses of the 1960s.
On the other hand, we might do well to learn from the lessons that people have gleaned from hallucinogens over the years—lessons that reveal just how interconnected everything is, that shows us that music and memory and nature may just all stem from the same place.
If there's one thing that could be said of our modern era, it's that nothing exists in isolation.
One could even say that nothing goes in just one direction anymore—instead, things are moving in multiple directions, operating in loops, often meeting at crossroads. For a long time, at least in the music industry, things appeared to be stratified, separated by genre, linear visions, and arbitrary categories. Rock artists toured with rock artists; indie stars opened for indie stars. Patrician music lovers looked down on pop-lovers, and pop-lovers bullied indieheads. Success could be purchased with a record deal and marked by a position on a top chart. Gender was divided between a man and a woman. Feminism was disconnected from race and class.
Times are changing. Pop, like fashion, has become fluid and multidimensional. Elton John can collaborate with Young Thug. Lady Gaga can ricochet from electronica to folk and back. Harry Styles has become a bisexual icon and a truly great songwriter, capable of drawing from multiple genres to create nuanced and political pop music.
And now he's going on tour with Jenny Lewis, Koffee, and King Princess. They'll all be opening for him on different stops on his 2020 "Love on Tour" tour, which will begin in April.
A little background: Jenny Lewis is an iconic songwriter who fronted the band Rilo Kiley before creating a body of intensely powerful solo work. Koffee is a singer-songwriter, rapper, and musician from Jamaica who's generated a huge amount of buzz in a short time by putting a fresh and experimental spin on reggae. King Princess is a dream pop star who may or may not be capitalizing on queer aesthetics but still embodies an inspiringly out and proud image.
Styles' choice of openers is brilliant because it brings together so many different devoted and passionate fan-bases. Queer fans will relish the chance to dance along to King Princess, while indie traditionalists and older millennials will come for Jenny Lewis, and Gen-Z fans of cutting-edge music will show up for Koffee. All these musicians are bound together by one common thread: Their music is really, really good. And isn't that what matters in the end?
Unfortunately, the existing tickets sold out with stunning speed and cost an exorbitant amount of money, sadly prohibiting many of Styles' fans from enjoying the experience. (Many of them feel scammed). If Styles were to truly embrace the ethos of his commitment to breaking down all genres and boundaries, he'd make his concerts free, but alas, one can only dream... Until then, let us keep listening to our descriptively titled crossover Spotify playlists (shoutout to "Creamy" and "Pollen"), saying "okay" to Boomers who insist that there are only two genders, checking Co-Star for evidence of discernible meaning, and praying for the day when everything and everyone will truly be free.
Sure, the topics they sing about might be destructive and controversial—but typically, we let men get away with writing about the same themes without blinking an eye.
Who could forget the firestorm that erupted around Lana Del Rey in 2012? The number of think pieces and posts smashing her for her purported glamorization of depression and sadness rose to the thousands, maybe millions.
She wasn't a feminist. She ran around with gangsters and slept with old men in her music videos. She loved Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. She wanted to die.
Lana Del Rey - Tropico (Short Film) (Explicit)youtu.be
All in all, she acted exactly how a woman shouldn't—at least within the confines of a culture that polices female emotion. Del Rey, in her years of early stardom, broke boundaries in that she acted like a man, embracing her freedom to the fullest, living on the road without fear of consequences as many men have always been able to.
Maybe some of what she did was dangerous, a bad influence on some; but then again, are today's male SoundCloud rappers great influences? Were any of the rock and roll stars of the 70's, with their ethos of sex, drugs, and underage groupies?
It's been seven years since Del Rey dropped Born to Die and made the internet lose its mind. This year, another young, furious starlet—Billie Eilish—released an album called When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and was met with similar vitriol. Fans didn't know what to do with her. Many argued that the album glamorized mental illness and suicide.
However, the harsh reaction to Eilish's record leaves us with an important question. Eilish and Del Rey are far from the only artists who have released albums about reckless abandon and irresponsible, destructive activities.
Why don't we have this adverse reaction to male musicians who cover similar topics? Why don't we feel the same pit of concern in our stomachs when Lil Peep sings about suicidal ideation, or when Sufjan Stevens does the same on Carrie and Lowell?
This territory will never generate clear answers, as mental illness and emotions are as blurry and indefinable as gender itself. But across the board, the harsh reactions to Del Rey and Eilish's images—juxtaposed against the reactions to similar male personas—reveal that pop culture tends to demonize women who express themselves strongly or who act irresponsibly, while praising men for small admissions of vulnerability and excusing their rage and flaws.
Del Rey checked all the boxes. She was angry, irresponsible, violently expressive, in control of her own narrative and simultaneously devoted to the men in her life. She quickly became the face of the "sad girl" stereotype, which reached its peak around 2014 and was always an implicitly divisive cultural phenomenon. Many critiqued it—but soon others began to laud it as a revolutionary act, a "fuck-you" to a culture that profits off female subservience and silence.
In 2014, the Los Angeles-based artist Audrey Wollen coined a "sad girl" theory, which proposed that "the sadness of girls should be witnessed and re-historicized as an act of resistance, of political protest…girls' sadness isn't quiet, weak, shameful or dumb: it is active, autonomous, and articulate. It's a way of fighting back."
Although this is a tempting concept, it's far too simplistic to call sadness itself an act of revolution. Luxuriating in sadness for its own sake is never a positive thing. But when sadness—or strong, unrestricted emotional expression—is accepted without judgment, especially when it is used to motivate honest reflection and action, it can work as a powerful tool that women can use to challenge and deconstruct the systems of control that restrain them.
After all, it goes without saying that there are many systems predicated on sexist ideals that still need deconstructing. The music industry, for example, is still overwhelmingly male-dominated (a recent Forbes report found that women comprise 21.2% of artists and just 2.1% of producers).
Even when women do manage to break into positions of power, they face far more scrutiny than their male counterparts—just compare the legacy of Courtney Love, demonized and accused of murdering her husband even twenty-five years after his death, against that of any man whose wife suffered a similar fate. (Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath's ex-husband, was allowed to edit her poetry anthology—even though many of those poems were about how he was a major factor that led her to her death. In a roundabout way, it makes sense that half a century later, Lana Del Rey is comparing herself to the legendary writer in song).
Lana Del Rey - hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but i have itwww.youtube.com
A major point of the criticism launched at Del Rey—and Love, and other women who have traversed taboo territories such as rage and violent desire—was that she was not a feminist. But what critiques by so-called feminists missed was that by criticizing Del Rey's desires to sleep around and proclaim her own burning lust and unquenchable sadness, they were doing exactly what feminism was supposed to end—policing and delegitimizing women's desires and emotions.
When Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish—and their foremothers, like Rilo Kiley and Courtney Love—express traditionally masculine qualities like rage and desire, they're not only shattering norms through radical honesty and anger; they are also smashing second-wave feminist ideas that managed to be just as restrictive as some traditional gender roles.
It's no wonder, then, that they've faced so much backlash from the general public and critics alike. The phenomenon of condemning women for their strong emotions and irrationality while giving (mostly white) men liberty to screw up time and time again is not a new one, and it's not only reserved for music. When women do express unchecked, autonomous rage, they're often been labeled "hysterics," imprisoned, or defined by their deviations. In counter-cultural movements like the Beat generation, men were allowed to reclaim and capitalize on their madness and freedom, to write about and to find liberation in nonconformity—while the women of that era were largely erased from history, either confined to mental asylums or left to care for children while their lovers ricocheted across the country.
Even in second-wave feminist paradigms, women are generally expected to be strong and independent, bosses and mothers with ample supplies of confidence and level-headedness; and when the inevitable shattering occurs, as these expectations become too much, they're often written off as 'bad feminists,' bad mothers, or unfit leaders.
This trend extends from the arts into politics, where men are given liberties and room to mess up that women simply are not, a fact that is becoming increasingly apparent as more women enter the field. Much has been written about the double standard Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has faced because she, as Rebecca Traister put it, "governs like a man." Beto O'Rourke, in particular, has been the subject of dozens of articles about the double-standards implicit in his campaign. "Jack Kerouac-style, he roams around, jobless (does he not need a job?) to find himself and figure out if he wants to lead the free world," wrote CNN's Nia Malika-Henderson. "This is a luxury no woman or even minority in politics could ever have."
The solution to all this, however, can't simply reside within the conclusion that white men should police their emotions; making white male rage taboo would be like putting a lid on a pot of boiling water. It's also not productive to laud women's aggression or to fetishize female sadness for its own sake. Instead, there needs to be more discussion about how to understand and handle intense emotions and traumatic experiences, taking note of their fluid nature and divergent consequences. We need to talk about creating a world that fosters real, genuine liberation, and not just for white and cisgender women.
Ultimately, one of the few certainties in this territory of grey areas and spectrums is that strong emotions and human imperfections are not going away. Sure, maybe Lana Del Rey shouldn't have told that interviewer that she wished she were dead, especially when so many kids track her every move—but in truth, she was just vocalizing what many people are already thinking. The fact of the matter is that suicide has reached an all-time, epidemic-level high, rising by 30% in the past two decades alone; and the rate among teen girls has tripled since the year 2000. It's out in the open—women are afraid and sad and angry. So are men; so is everyone.
In light of this revelation, it's time to move past faded sexist stereotypes, to pick up the fragments they've made, and to look forward. Clearly, keeping everything in the dark isn't the answer, but combating stigmatization also isn't enough. Instead, to put it somewhat idealistically, the double standards that haunt politics and music need to be deconstructed and replaced by structures that provide people of all genders and creeds with equal opportunities and resources.
Overall, there needs to be increased focus on productive and attainable treatment and ways of handling emotions, as well as non-destructive ways to process the intensity of being alive—an experience that has always been genderless.
Eden Arielle Gordon is a writer and musician from New York. Follow her on Twitter @edenarielmusic.
The arrival of Jenny Lewis' fourth solo album, On The Line, is imminent.
And if "Wasted Youth" is any indication, the new record promises to be a wrenching and gorgeous trip. The third single released from On The Line bounces with a deceptively easy-going twang while meditating on addiction and lost time. It's a sound that lives somewhere between Dolly Parton and Carole King, sowing a saccharine sadness under its nostalgic pulse, but Lewis still effortlessly stakes her ground.
Beginning with a jaunty piano trill, the song's foreground is Lewis' voice lilting around a beautifully-echoing guitar lick, giving depth and vigor to the act of memory. But her lyrics are resigned and somewhat barbed in their look back: "Why you lyin'? / The bourbon's gone," she sings exasperatedly at one point; "Mercury hasn't been in retrograde for that long." The song rings with the sound of regret, but "Wasted Youth" makes a point of not wallowing in the pain of what's past. Instead, Lewis seems more interested in remembering as an act of survival, taking the days lazed away with drink and drugs "just because," as just more stories she alone gets to tell.
There's a lot to be said for a nostalgic artist playing with a walk down memory lane like this, recasting youth as something lost while not letting that loss consume her. Jenny Lewis makes "Wasted Youth" as an affecting experiment in memory while surrounding it safely in a wistful melody. The remorse of hindsight rarely sounds this self-aware, but Lewis has whole-heartedly nailed it.