#also the heteronormative accusations make me laugh so hard

[cto10121]

Me: [pacing in the therapist office] But what really kills me are the people who believe that Musical Gelphie has more development than Fiyeraba and that Fiyeraba came out of ~nowhere. Putting Book Wicked aside for a hot second, the whole reason why Musical Elphaba and Glinda became friends in the first place in the musical is because Glinda played a mean trick on Elphaba, and Elphaba completely misunderstands it. She thinks Glinda gifting her the black hat was genuine! This leads her to ask Madame Morrible to include Glinda in her seminar and Glinda feeling guilty about her cruel attempt at humiliation and trying to assuage it by dancing with Elphie. That’s when they truly become friends. In so doing, the musical bases their entire friendship on a misunderstanding (!!). That’s what I mean when I say that Musical Wicked is fundamentally the Glinda Show. The two of them don’t become friends when they recognize their similarities or as a natural reconciliation of their differences. They are friends because Glinda felt white liberal guilt for a hot second. And then in the very next scene, Glinda tries to make Elphaba “popular” by making her to act and look like her. She still doesn’t accept Elphaba! So yeah, Musical Gelphie is a cursed ship to me, very cursed. I may bitch about Musical Fiyero being a Glinda clone (basically Book Avaric + Book Fiyero’s background), but at the very least he did accept Elphaba, green skin, Animal rights, and high C#5s and all. And the musical has at least a handful of Fiyeraba interactions pre-As Long As You’re Mine which shows their attraction to each other. I don’t know, does that make sense?

Therapist: Musical Wicked just sounds cursed all around.

Me: I know!

[crimeronan]

On the topic of How Do You Handle XYZ Comment, I've always wondered how you handle terrible responses on your toh takes. Like I know the toh fandom doesn't lack piss on the poor reading comprehension and they also really enjoy wildly out of touch takes, but I've never seen any comments on your princess luz stuff of that nature. I'm sure they must be there but maybe I'm too early? But anyway, how do you tend to deal with the "acktually shipping luz and Hunter is incest" and the "ur not a real lesbian because putting amity in a poly ship is lesbian erasure" and the "as a white person kinda sus you make the poc woman an empress" kind of responses? Ones that are technically not hate and maybe if you squint could be from people who aren't inherently trying to do bad but just lack the maturity needed to engage with the internet at large?

this ask made me giggle. honestly, i haven't received as much pushback as you might expect! way less pushback than i expected. in the princess AU, i've gotten a LOT more "this is actually too grotesque for me to stomach" comments than "this is problematic" comments, which is fine. horror-thriller isn't for everyone, those comments do not upset me.

i have had a Few run-ins with bad faith people, whom i mostly block. there's one prolific commenter in toh tumblr fandom who would repeatedly write angry essays on my humor meta posts -- essays that were all about how belos is too evil to be sympathetic and/or about how hunter is a soft gentle boy who shouldn't be jokingly referred to as evil. then they'd go "i can't help my active and conscious decision to type a bunch of rude fucking words and then my active and conscious decision to send those rude fucking words because i'm autistic :(((" around the fourth or fifth time this happened, i was fucking done with that nonsense and finally blocked them. shoulda done it after the first comment tbh!! no more autism exceptions.

as for the rest of it, my main management strategy is to simply.... preempt the bad faith comments?

i had a LOT more unpleasant and conflict-filled fandom experiences when i was in the raven cycle fandom. that was my first exposure to "you can't ship multi-gender polycules if anyone involved is gay" and "queerplatonic het relationships are just heteronormativity shipping that you're trying to get away with." having dealt with those takes before, i've found a few different ways to disarm bad faith readers before they get started.

first is to be super open and honest about my interests. i talk about what i find compelling in different relationships All The Damn Time. it's really hard for anyone to accuse me of only wanting hunter to fuck amity if they've seen, like.... anything i've said about hunter and amity.

same with hunter and luz. the only negative reactions i've really gotten to how they're written in the princess AU is like.... two people being squicked by camila thinking they're romantically involved. i REALLY expected more pushback on the touchyfeely bed sharing stuff, but from what i remember, there's never been Any....? not even from people who consider them siblings.

i expected a lot of pushback on how mean hunter and amity are to each other, since it's taken So much farther than the canon. but it turns out that there's a very large overlap between people who like dark horror AUs and people who like hunter and amity murdering each other. (in a fluffy fic i don't think this characterization would fly Nearly as easily.)

i find that being funny really disarms people, too. when you look at any of my toh meta posts that could be controversial, they're basically all funny. people are a lot more willing to listen to what you have to say if you make them laugh, and it's harder for them to get angry at you.

and then the last thing is that i think i'm in sort of a privileged position in toh fandom. i've written a lot of controversial subjects and relationships and characterizations.... but i've also written some WILDLY popular mainstream fic. and people who like the mainstream fic don't really want to beef with me about differing niche opinions, bc there's a level of respect there. which they might not have for a writer they don't like.

but anyway. when things Do happen, i almost always just block and move on. there are so many people here who get what i'm talking about that there's no need for me to try to convert people who don't, you know??

[trensu]

I've recently reread Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall, and I can't help but think it'd be a fun modern day steddie au.

It's a bit of a stretch, probably, but Eddie could work at a struggling, obscure charity. Not sure exactly which role, but the charity is so small it doesn't even matter because if any of the, what, five or so people who work there get caught in a scandalous situation it would mean bad, reputation-ruining press for the group. And Eddie getting photographed while he, idk, drunkenly makes his way home after a quickie in the alley behind a bar or smth is MOST DEFINITELY bad press. Now, Eddie may not care what people say about him, but he also doesn't want to be responsible for the charity's collapse either. He's not heartless.

In order to rehabilitate his public image, he needs to get himself a respectable boyfriend. You know, so he could be a PR-friendly type of gay. Does conforming to heteronormative expectations for his hypothetical queer relationship make him wanna grind his teeth to dust? You bet your ass it does!! But again, he can't have the death of the charity weighing on his conscience.

He's bemoaning his plight to his bestie Chrissy, who has the brilliant idea to hook him up with Steve Harrington.

"No. Nope! No fucking way," says Eddie. "He's a dick who thinks he's better than everyone else!"

Chrissy gasps in offense. "Not true! Steve's actually a really sweet guy, and I know if you just gave him a chance, you two would make a great couple!"

"Chris, I already gave him a chance. Like, two years ago at that Halloween party. Put the moves on him, took him home, and I woke up completely alone, fully clothed and sadly untouched the next morning. And the one time someone thought we were together? He laughed. Like the thought of dating someone as low on the social ladder as me was absurd. The guy hates me!"

Chrissy looked completely baffled. "Well that doesn't make sense at all! Robin said-- nevermind, there must've been some misunderstanding."

"I know you find this hard to believe, my love, but your girlfriend is, on occasion, absolutely and completely wrong," Eddie crosses his arms defensively. "Whatever. It doesn't even matter because it's not happening. And he's not even my type."

"Now that's a lie. He's totally your type," Chrissy counters smugly. Damn her for being his best friend for nearly a decade and knowing him better than anyone else on the planet. Eddie, maturely, sticks his tongue out at her, which she immediately reciprocates because they're besties for a reason.

"Even if he wasn't," she continues, "he's exactly the kind of person you need for this! He's a Harrington, for one." Chrissy starts ticking off fingers. "He chose to work at a public school even though he could've gotten a cushy, better paying job at his dad's company. Not to mention, his inheritance is big enough that he doesn't even need to work!"

"Ha, so he's stealing jobs from more qualified candidates to fuel his own ego!" Eddie tries, but Chrissy narrows her eyes so venomously it makes Eddie feel a twinge of guilt for the admittedly baseless accusation.

"And, and!" Chrissy plows on as if Eddie hadn't interrupted, "he volunteers at after-school programs for underprivileged kids. You literally cannot find a more wholesome or attractive guy for this. I mean, his own parents still parade him around occasionally when they wanna score brownie points with the press."

Eddie opens his mouth to make a snarky comment and instead grimaces when Chrissy kicks him under the table. Then she metaphorically kicks him in the teeth with the most sugary sweet tone when she finishes her last, most pertinent point.

"Besides, beggars can't be choosers."

Eddie throws his arms up in dramatic defeat. "Fine! Fine. I guess I can at least give this a try."

Chrissy squeals excitedly and starts tapping rapidly on her cell. "I'll let Robin know so she can help set up a date!"

Eddie drops his head in his hands and lets out a pathetic, drawn-out groan of misery.

"Trust me, Eddie-bear, this is gonna work out perfectly and you can thank me in your wedding speech when you two get married!"

--

One week later sees Eddie walking into a restaurant that is so far out of his price range it might as well be on another continent. He feels severely underdressed in his only pair of unripped black pants and the wine-red button down that Chrissy bought him for his birthday that was a size too small and pinched uncomfortably across the shoulders.

Steve spots him from the table he'd picked for them, and stands up as Eddie approaches like some kind of old timey gentleman. Eddie is abruptly certain that if Steve had been wearing a hat, he'd have removed it respectfully as if Eddie were a proper lady. He goes so far as to pull out Eddie's chair for him. A part of Eddie melts a little at the treatment, but a larger part beats that part with a nail bat and feels a bit condescended.

"Eddie, hi," Steve says with a tight smile. "It's, uh, it's good to see you."

Eddie swallows down a sudden bout of nerves. He sees Steve's eyes flicker down, and for a brief, completely insane moment, he thinks Steve was following the line if his throat down to where he had left a probably less than appropriate number of buttons undone on his shirt (which he cannot be faulted for because seriously, Chrissy should know his shirt size by now). But no, of course not, because Steve's eyes continue down to look at the wine list at their table.

"Hey, yeah," Eddie responds awkwardly. "Um, same."

The silence that follows is, in a word, excruciating. Eddie is seriously tempted to take the nearby fork and stab himself in the neck just to escape. So of course when the silence is broken its because they start talking over one another.

"Did you want to look at the wine m--"

"So how expensive is this--"

They stop simultaneously. With another tight smile, Steve gestures for Eddie to go on. Eddie clears his throat.

"I was asking what the price range is for this place? It's not my, uh, usual scene so I don't really know what to expect."

Steve's smile warms a little. "Yeah, no, don’t worry. I'm paying. "

Eddie can't even enjoy the small change in Steve's smile because the trailer trash kid in him reared its head at the implication.

"No! No, jesus, that not what I meant," Steve interrupts. "Look, I picked the place so it's only fair that I pay for this da--uh, outing."

"I can pay for myself, you know," Eddie snaps. "Just because I didn't have a trust fund doesn't mean--"

Eddie scowls. "No, I'd rather pay for myself, thanks."

Steve sighs and looks like his wants to pinch the bridge of his nose like a fed up school teacher. Which, good. Serves his privileged ass right.

"Listen, just let me pay this time. Please?" He barrels on before Eddie can protest. "If it helps, the chef is one of the kids I used to babysit when I was in high school, okay? She only started working here a couple of months back and I want to support her. She's fantastic, I promise. Worth every penny. But you know how it is. No matter how good you are at something, there's always moments of doubt and she's had a rough week."

Steve finishes with stubborn set to his unfairly handsome jaw. Jesus H Christ, what was Eddie supposed to do with that? Of course Steve had to have a stupidly cute and sentimental excuse to pay. Now Eddie will be the asshole if he kicks up a fuss.

"Fine," Eddie begrudgingly relents. The smile that forms pretty pink lips is one of the sweetest Eddie's ever seen. It crinkles the corners of Steve's eyes. Eddie swallows nervously and goes back to fiddling with his fork. There's a fluttering in his chest that he's trying hard to convince himself is heartburn. It isn't.

Fuckfuckfuck.

Steve's started pointing out different dishes that this El person apparently invented herself, but Eddie can't focus on his words. He's too entranced by Steve's voice and the way his whole demeanor relaxed when he started talking about El. Eddie again contemplates stabbing himself with the fork.

He's so fucking fucked.

[angelhummel]

Unpopular opinion maybe, but I don’t think Kurt and Blaine’s relationship was heteronormative. There were certainly issues with its execution, but I’m hard pressed to think of instances where Kurt was treated/coded as female. In fact, many of the examples people give of heteronormativity don’t stand up to scrutiny. Yes, Blaine was included in the “bro scenes” but he also had female friends and was grouped with the girls in Diva. If socializing with the same sex makes you a man and (cont)

(Cont) socializing with the opposite sex makes you a woman, what is Blaine? Sometimes the claims reveal more about fandom’s heteronormativity than the writers. Seeing Blaine’s comments about needing Kurt to be weak as proof that he’s a girl equates womanhood and victim hood, which the show didn’t do. No, they felt that fight was about how all relationships between gay men are about dominance, the opposite of heteronormativity. The accusations are a simplification of Kurt and Blaine dynamic.

Different anon -There’s a difference between being an alpha male, as the op claimed, and an alpha gay, which the show mentioned. The second one means that Blaine had higher social status due to his gender presentation. The first says that Blaine is hyper-masculine, aggressive and dominating and meant that he forced Kurt to be the beta in their relationship. It was 100% intended as an insult, as I’m pretty sure this person either stated or agreed that “Blaine would punch anyone who said he was girly.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Okay so I’m just answering both of these asks together bc I think they’re similar. And then we’re not gonna talk about it anymore lmao. Not even because these anons are angry or confrontational but just because I don’t wanna be too in the negatives today :P And both are in response to this and that if you wanna catch up 

First of all I just wanna say that calling any gay relationship heteronormative based on stereotypes and cliche ideas of gender roles and presentation is just not great. And if it was just the fandom being like “Oh Kurt likes fashion. That makes him the girl” then it would be bad enough. But I do feel like the show tried to push that at times. Tried to make one seem feminine or “weak” and the other seem masculine and strong 

And it was always unbalanced. Like one had to be winning and one had to be losing. Think mainly season 3 vs season 5. Like Kurt singing his lady Broadway songs, dressing up in tights, being laughed at for attempting to be manly, getting called delicate and too much of a lady (by Beiste of all people) while at the same time we see Blaine being more aggressive, picking fights, boxing, being seen in a newly sexualized light. Then in season 5, Kurt is working out and bulking up and feeling more confident and standing up for himself, while Blaine is falling behind and feeling like he’s losing and feeling self conscious about himself in all ways possible. It’s like this weird seesaw the writers always had them on. 

(Also side note but I am really confused by Blaine’s sexualization in the show? Like they dress him up in little green suspenders and pink bowties and everyone makes fun of his looks but also they put him in the tightest clothes possible to make sure nothing on his body is left to the imagination, and we’re treated to plenty of lingering shower and locker room scenes. And even when he’s gained weight and feeling down, we still have like a whole scene of him half naked and squirming around on the bed and idk it’s just odd to me)

Oh also kind of a side note but dealing with Blaine being one of the guys and Kurt being one of the girls. I know Kurt does seem like the type to prefer the company of girls over boys and that’s okay. But in that Brittany + Klaine skit I rewatched the other day, Chris did have a little line like “Oh it’s so nice being here in ____. Even if I do have to room with the girls”. So I wonder if that was yet another point of contention between Chris and the writers 

And I wouldn’t say that Blaine wanted Kurt to be weak. And Blaine doesn’t need to be the strongest one in the relationship. He just liked taking care of Kurt. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, anyone who tries to slap a masculine and feminine label on Kurt or Blaine is thinking too small. They don’t fit in your little minuscule stereotypical boxes, sorry not sorry. You’re so right about them just simplifying all the complexities that make Kurt and Blaine such unique and interesting characters, and a dynamic couple 

Second anon - Yeah at the very end of that person’s blog description was like “Not Blaine/Klaine friendly” so that means I should’ve been taking everything they said with a grain of salt. I mean I’m sure some of what I just said above seems to agree with some of their points on Blaine and Kurt and masculinity, just not to a debilitating Blaine bashing degree lol 

But yeah saying Blaine forced Kurt into anything is just a reach. And I mean that all across the board. But saying he forced him to be the “beta” is just stupid because the whole idea of alphas and betas etc in the first place is insane. But ugh. Idk what that other person was on to make such wild claims about Blaine, but I think we should just let it rest lmao. I think we’ve said it all

[sterek-is-my-blackpearl]

Maybe problematic opinion but one I need to get off my chest:

Being on the hellsite makes me really hate being part of the lgbt community and honestly really makes me hate the Land the G part of the community. Every part of my identity has been “discussed”, invalidated and gatekept from the the community (specifically by the L and the G).

Bisexuals face biphobia from the L and the G community because they’re not seen as being “gay enough” and when we’re with the opposite gender, we’re accused of being “heterosexual”. Sitcoms with gay characters often make a nasty joke of calling bisexual characters “confused gays” or “closeted gays who aren’t ready to fully come out yet”. You can make an argument that it’s just shitty writing from straight producers but I’ve read and seen enough biphobia FROM this community to make the assumption that those jokes are not far from reality. Recently there’s been push back for non-lesbian, but especially bisexual women, for using terms like femme and butch when that hasn’t been a problem before. It blows my fucking mind that it’s 2019 and bisexual (and trans) people still have to fight for their identities to be validated even though they have been there fighting since the fucking beginning (especially when it was TRANS women who started the whole fucking lgbt rights movement!!)

Asexuals are the laughing stock of the lgbt community on here and as someone who has struggled with that part of my identity my whole fucking life, it breaks my fucking heart. Everyone saying “asexuals are oppressed for not wanting sex” suddenly forgot that rape is a thing huh? How these people feel so broken and wrong that they force themselves to do shit that they don’t want to, or are forced to do things that they don’t want. Also, the fact that someone’s identity should be validated by the amount of violence they face is a bit fucked up don’t you think? In that case, why is the trans community still facing so much shit from the rest of the community and are constantly invalidated and ignored??? I’ve reflected for the past two years over my ace-ness and have realized just how much of my self-esteem issues come from it. From feeling broken, like something was wrong with me, and in this hypersexualized society we put a lot of self worth in these little deadlines of sexuality. If you haven’t lost your virginity by age 18 your a fucking loser and if you still a virgin after 25 there’s something wrong with you! I mean there’s a fucking movie called the 40-year-old virgin making fun of that shit!! You don’t think that fucks with someone’s sense of self worth??? Fuck off with that shit! No one in this community has the power to gatekeep which indenting gets to be the part of the community and which one doesn’t. In theory, anyone who doesn’t conform to the heteronormative lifestyle is able to be a part of the community.

Because of everything I mentioned before I decided to simplify my identity and just say I’m queer. That way no one gets to be like “ummm actually” but this fucking site has “discoursed” that identity as well!!! Like fucking hell man! I get the people who are uncomfortable with being called queer! I have no problem with that! I won’t call you queer if you don’t want to! I respect that so I fucking EXPECT that YOU respect that I DO WANT to be called queer. Because that is my identity. You, especially if you’re fucking young and don’t know your fucking history, don’t get to ERASE queer history because you don’t like the word. The queer community has fought too hard to your modern rights to get kicked out from the community because it is used by the straights as a slur. That’s a fucking spit in the face. It’s like you never heard the chant: We’re here, We’re QUEER, Get used to it! The world queer has been reclaimed and has become a political identity since the fucking 80’s! It was/is used as a slur but everything has!! When I was in high school people would say: “that’s gay’” as something negative! They still do that shit today!! Why aren’t people calling that the g-slur? Why aren’t people censoring that shit too? Why aren’t we writing gay as g*y? Why do you get to invalidate My identity but I can’t do the same because then I’m homophobic?? Nah fam. That ain’t it. Respect queers because they fought for our rights and faced a government that would rather see us die than protect us. Put respect on the name, cuz it has been earned.

All in all I’m very disappointed with the state of the community in recent years. Inside of the tumblr and out in the real world. I feel like everyone just wants to invalidate other identities and want to be considered the top dog. This is a fucking community not a fucking hierarchy. I as a “bisexual” (in the simplest of identities) don’t have the right to tell someone else they don’t “belong” just as someone who is gay or someone who is lesbian has no fucking right to invalidate someone else’s identity. I’m sorry. Maybe I’m letting a small subsection of the community get to me, but it has seem that lately that small subsection has been getting bigger and bigger and louder and louder.

[judedoyle]

It’s sort of a corny project, assembling songs by women and non-binary people at the end of every year. It’s a very dopey, dated, 1990s, Women Who Rock! version of feminism. I mean, I think there was a reason for that iteration of feminism — year-end lists are still dominated by men, and my favorite albums fall through the cracks just about every year for that very reason — but it begs the question of why you’d do it now, when it has been established fact for many decades that you do not have to be a man to make music.

The reason I do it is that it keeps me honest. This year’s list, for example, is all women; I don’t know of any albums by non-binary people that came out this year, though I’m sure there were some. But even within that narrower subset, I am blown away by how many kinds of songs by women there are — how wildly different women are in their voices and priorities and visions, how the word “woman” sums up so much but, somehow, doesn’t tell you anything at all. Making the list, I can start to feel like I’m assembling my own little pantheon, selecting a hall full of different archetypes or visions of what womanhood can be, so that listeners can wander through and pick the vision that best suits their needs or their own self-identification.

That task seemed particularly important this year. Trumpism insists so much on homogeneity — on the second-class status of all women, sure, but also, on the supremacy of whiteness, on heteronormativity, the importance of only admitting one specific Ivanka-esque type of woman to even exist as a person worthy of consideration. I wanted to select as many different versions of womanhood as I could, to show something about what “being a woman” could potentially mean.

Nor is this really a “best songs” list this year, if it ever was. I never agree with other writers’ year-end lists, and I can never put everything I love onto one cohesive mixtape; this started as twenty-four songs, and it could be thirty, or fifty, and still feel incomplete. There are songs I loved that are missing. What this is, I think, is a list of the songs that felt most like 2017; that reflected the mood and the predominant anxieties of the moment. They tend to fall into themes: Songs about fascism, about men, about grief, about God and magic. Putting them together is not just about lifting different women’s voices up, but about writing a kind of collective diary of one very strange year.

“2016,” Nadine Shah, Honeymoon Destination

Nadine Shah gets neglected, on the list of musicians I like, because she’s not showy. She just plugs away, making quietly excellent, sort-of-PJ-Harvey-ish songs for voice and guitar. This song starts out in that quiet, excellent mode, in an assortment of mundane details: She’s thirty, she’s depressed, she’s getting addicted to true crime TV, all her friends are on weird diets. Then history comes staggering into the frame — what is there left to inspire us with a fascist in the White House? — and suddenly, you’re aware that you’re hearing the voice of a biracial British Muslim woman living through Brexit and Trump, and that it is incredibly crucial. She pulls this trick a lot on Holiday Destination, angrily raking the state of the world through her songs, and though it’s sometimes incredibly on the nose, well, it deserves to be. This is that kind of year.

“Aryan Nation,” EMA, Exile In The Outer Ring

If Nadine Shah’s anger is elegant and British, EMA’s is scuzzy and loutish and American. I got to hear this album before its release, which makes me particularly fond of it, but I like to think I can still be objective. What stuns me about it is that it manages to pull off “populism,” as a stance, without ever overriding or ignoring identity. The narrator here is pulling away from the whiteness and ugliness of the United States under Trump — she’s “a refugee from the Aryan nation,” as she puts it — but she’s still located firmly among the 99%. “Tell me stories of famous men / I can’t see myself in them” is a demand that rings throughout the whole album, which mixes intimate songs about emotional abuse and misogynistic dude friends with big songs about downward mobility and class struggle, “identity” politics with politics-politics. In this song, the men standing outside the casino, the face of the elite, register as nearly demonic figures; they might be demons, I think, since “in their eyes are things that you and I will never know.” But their evil expands and takes on new facets, depending on who you are. There’s a double indictment: EMA’s Everyman can’t see herself in the nation’s “famous men” because they’re famous, but also because they’re male. Either way, she’s ready to burn it down.

“No Man Is Big Enough For My Arms,” Ibeyi, Ash

Oh, man. I love this song. I would probably love it for the title alone, to be honest. But I cannot escape the feeling that, were Leftist Asshole Twitter to get ahold of its existence, they would hate it more than seventeen Hamiltons combined. It’s an incredibly simple piece of music: Just the Diaz sisters singing the title phrase over clips of Michelle Obama’s speeches, and specifically her 2016 campaign speech about Trump’s history of assault and what our nation owes its girls. If the election had gone another way, or if the tone were valedictory, it absolutely wouldn’t work; it would probably represent the same corny, self-satisfied #centrism that I’m sure some podcast is accusing it of as we speak. But this isn’t a victory lap. As the mournfulness of the singing should make clear, it’s a funeral dirge: For a historic moment that passed into a historically racist backlash, for the vision of a better world that never came to pass, for a promise to our daughters that wasn’t kept. As much as Democrats loved the idea of “when they go low, we go high,” or Michelle Obama herself, that wasn’t the vision of women and girls that carried the day. We’ve all been brought low now.

“When the World Was At War We Kept Dancing,” Lana Del Rey, Lust for Life

If you told me, back in 2014, that I would be relying on Lana Del Rey for insights into the national psyche, I would have either laughed you out of the room or thrown myself out of a window to defeat your grim prophecy. Yet here we are, with a song by Lana Del Rey about American politics and the rise of fascism, and I kind of like it. Granted, her proposed solutions — they are, in order, “youth,” “truth,” and “dancing” — are all (intentionally?) vapid and Lana Del Rey-like. But the core question — is it the end of an era? Is it the end of America? — is one that’s haunted me all year. Welcome to 2017: Things are so bizarre and depressing that Lana Del Rey sounds normal.

“Let’s Generalize About Men,” Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Here’s the thing, guys: I fucking loved Al Franken.

I loved him early on. I had every crappy Al Franken book of “political humor” in high school. I listened to his radio show on Air America, even as Air America collapsed into a smoldering pile of debt and garbage. I was so thrilled to share a room with him at Netroots Nation that I texted my parents, and they texted back that they were proud of me, like it had taken some feat of exceptional skill and intelligence to be in the same room as the keynote speaker at an event. I teared up watching him talk about sexual assault in the military, how we were failing those women. And I know women who worked on his first Senate campaign. They loved Al Franken. I loved Al Franken. Al Franken could have been President, on the back of all the women who loved him.

Al Franken can roast in the pits of Hell.

The creators of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” almost certainly did not intend for this song to air the same week as the Weinstein allegations and the Shitty Media Men list. They had no control over how its lyrics — right now we’re angry and sad! It’s our right to get righteously mad at every member of the opposite sex! — would land in an environment where seemingly every famous man was publicly accused of sexual atrocity. Nevertheless, in a few short weeks, this song has become my chief emotional release valve for dealing with an endless wave of sexual trauma, and the one thing that can reliably make me laugh. This is probably the one song I’ve listened to most in 2017, and it’s not even from a “real” pop album.

I don’t know why this makes me laugh as hard as it does. I think it’s the deranged cheerfulness of the music, and how triumphant they all sound. They’re just listing lazy ’90s sitcom tropes about gender, but Gabrielle Ruiz puts so much mustard on the phrase “all men only want to have sex,” my God. And, in an age, when #notallmen routinely swing by to remind you of all the stuff they’re not doing, you have to admire the magnificent troll job of lyrics like “there are no exceptions / all three billion men are like this!”

Of course, you’re not meant to agree with them; there’s a whole trip through straight ladies’ condescending homophobia, just in case you missed the point. But when they finally get to the verse about all the other stuff that all men do —  all three point six billion men, and also, Al Franken — well. It is a song that is of its moment. That kicker would no doubt be less brutal, in a pre-Weinstein universe. But it’s funnier when you believe it could be true.

“Boyfriend,” Marika Hackman, I’m Not Your Man

The concept of this song — Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” from the girl’s point of view — is so simple, I can’t believe it hasn’t been done before. And maybe it has! But  it’s hard to believe it’s been done better, because this is, moment-for-moment, my favorite song of the year. It’s really just four jaunty minutes of Marika Hackman telling some poor schmuck about how excellently she fucked his girlfriend last night: “It’s fine ‘cause I am just a girl / it doesn’t count,” she sings, and it’s one of the most coolly vicious moments in any song this year. In another year, it might not even strike you as all that political. But in a year especially full of male sexual aggression and cluelessness, of Robert in “Cat Person” and the vanguard of the Left scoffing about “pats on the backside,” frogs using cuckolding metaphors and seemingly every single Hillary-hating talking head getting exposed for rubbing his penis on coworkers, “Boyfriend” feels like the snarl of rage that’s been bubbling under every conversation. I mean: Among other things, she is literally cucking this dude. It could be pretty gross. But I’ll allow it.

“Green Light,” Lorde, Melodrama

Sometimes you do need a fun, blockbuster pop song. Despite Lorde’s much-vaunted writing skills, several lyrics in this are just plain goofy: “We order different drinks at the same bars,” for example, is what everybody does at bars, including people who are on a date with each other. Later, she snarls that her ex is a “damn liar” for claiming to love the beach, a line which summons up a long history of passionate and incredibly specific anti-beach sentiments, and raises the serious possibility that she’s singing about Anakin Skywalker. But if you can get past the mental image of Lorde swinging through the club with Darth Vader, each of them taking sips from a single shared gin and tonic, there is a sense of propulsive longing to this song, a sense of being so excited you’re almost sad, like the twinge you feel on Christmas morning when you realize there’s nothing left to wait for. That sense of pre-emptive nostalgia defines many of the great moments on Melodrama; Lorde is both vibrating with joy over how new and full of potential her world seems to be, and sad that it won’t always feel like this. That feeling defines a lot of youth, too. Many songs aim for that epic sweep; Jack Antonoff has a retirement fund because of it, “Tonight, Tonight” and “1979” were the ones people played when I was young enough to actually feel it, but this year, that big, hopefully hopeless, Gatsby-invoking chorus was the closest to the real thing.

“Say You Do,” Tei Shi, Crawl Space

This is another record that got under-rated as the result of being simple, pretty and specific in its ambitions when the context demanded Big Statements. There’s nothing wrong with big statements, and this list is full of them. But this is four perfect minutes, no wasted space, no false steps, and it makes me happy every time I listen to it. Granted, it’s aiming for that same cheesy ‘90s mom-jams vibe that a lot of people aim for these days; viewed through a certain lens, this is basically a HAIM song. But HAIM actually released an album this year, and none of the songs were as good as this one. The whole album is like this; intentionally lovely, boundary-pushing without being self-indulgent, excellently crafted. It’s skated just under the radar, maybe precisely because of those qualities. But crises pass, and craft keeps standing.

“Frontline,” Kelela, Take Me Apart

Even simple, blockbuster pop songs are not always as simple as they seem. It was only when putting this list together that I realized all the songs I’d classified as “just fun” were about the same thing. They’re all about women contesting men’s narratives. You don’t know me like you say you do, Tei Shi insists; you’ll always deny that we’re going in circles, Kelela says here; even Lorde, God bless her, is incredibly clear on the fact that her ex does not like the beach, despite recent statements to the contrary. (Is systemic corruption at play? Is Lorde’s ex in the pocket of the powerful beach lobby? Only time will tell!) I don’t think I got the appeal of ‘90s R&B nostalgia before now; here, especially in the pre-chorus, it’s simultaneously sexy and meticulous, propulsive but airbrushed at the same time. But within that is Kelela herself, who has been gradually moving to the forefront of her own songs for years now, becoming a persona rather than just another instrument: Coming up with the Sun around me… now I’m up and I won’t be taken down, she sings. The fact that the defiance is intimate makes it no less political. I believe her.

“Deadly Valentine,” Charlotte Gainsbourg, Rest

It’s hard to come up with an elevator pitch for this one. It’s the Stranger Things soundtrack, but also a French disco, but also Charlotte Gainsbourg singing about her sister’s suicide. Any one of those elements could undermine the other, but somehow, they don’t. This year has been full of albums about grief — reasonable, given that it feels like most of us are grieving something — but the opulence of Gainsbourg’s, the way it calls on the musical history of the family to dramatize the loss of one of its members, stands out. I get so caught up in the catchiness of this one, so blinded by all the disco lights, that I can almost miss Gainsbourg mourning in the background (“I’m my own shadow / you are my little hurricane”). Which, I think, is the point.

“Los Ageless,” Saint Vincent, MASSEDUCTION

Annie Clark is a very cool musician. One of the last great cool musicians, maybe. Cool has been on the way out, though, in this century; what you find sexy and mysterious, I might just see as repressed and withholding. Clark does not like it when her audience gets too close. She doesn’t do “raw.” The emotion in her songs gets refracted through intellect, through reference, through character, through irony; often, and especially on her last album, she seems to be playing a parody of herself, as if she can only be a pop star by putting scare quotes around her own personality. This is often very appealing; it’s why people point to her as an heir to David Bowie or David Byrne (or, presumably, other celebrity Davids). It can also be frustrating, when you want to make a direct connection and she doesn’t let you. I don’t know why MASSEDUCTION is different; maybe the breakups Clark has been through have worn down her defenses, maybe working with living schmaltz factory Jack Antonoff has thawed the ice a bit. But this chorus is huge: Big, melodramatic, honest, painful. It’s not something I knew she could do.  

“Jukai,” Jhene Aiko, Trip

I TOLD YOU PEOPLE ABOUT JHENE AIKO AND YOU WOULDN’T LISTEN.

Sorry! I was super into Jhene Aiko in 2014, the first year I made this list. I talked about her all the time and people looked at me like I was an idiot. Back then, she just sort of floated around, appearing on dudes’ songs. It took a while for her own aesthetic to take shape. She had vague, New-Agey ideas about spirituality; she talked a lot about weed; she made regrettable puns. (How regrettable? Her first album is called Souled Out, featuring a song called “Lyin’ King,” so, you tell me.) Even when her aesthetic finally did take hold, her label kept making incredibly cash-grabby statements about how there’d never been a Frank Ocean for the female demographic. So that was how people saw her, I think — just a stoner riding a trendy vibe. Someone you could write off.

If I told you, in 2014, that Jhene Aiko would be turning in a 22-song conceptual exploration of her brother’s death and her own substance abuse, and that it would begin with a song about Aiko entering the “Sea of Trees,” which is a common place for Japanese people to commit suicide, and that you would be hearing Jhene Aiko seriously sing lines like “I envy the dead,” and that critics would love it, I do not think you would have believed me. But here we are, with the harrowing, serious Jhene Aiko statement about death and grief that the world didn’t know it needed. Women shouldn’t have to bring themselves to their knees to be taken seriously. So the best thing to know, about Jhene Aiko, is that this was always there.

“Wildwood,” Tori Amos, Native Invader

The Tori Amos “return to form,” if you ask me, occurred way back in 2011, with Night of Hunters. But, at least since the 2014 critical re-evaluation that accompanied Unrepentant Geraldines, it’s widely agreed that she’s all the way back on her game. So if I tell you that Native Invader is great, that several songs are as good as anything she’s ever done, that’s not surprising. If I tell you that she’s still doing concept albums, but that it’s started working— this album is, in no particular order, about climate change, the Dakota access pipeline, her mother falling severely ill, and the Native American ancestors on her mother’s side of the family; in typical Tori Amos fashion, the endangered bodies of the planet and her mother and her ancestors get all tangled up together, until, by the final song, they seem like the same being — maybe that doesn’t surprise you, either. But this might: I finally get what she’s doing with the ‘70s soft-rock thing.

In plenty of Amos’ late-00s work, maybe all the way back to “Crazy” on Scarlet’s Walk, she’s tried to signify “sexiness” with what sounds like smooth tunes for dudes with heavy mustaches and ladies with feathered hair. Given that Amos gained her initial fan base by running on wild, primal intensity (this is either a song or a scene from The Exorcist; I’m honestly still not sure) her fixation on suddenly sounding mellow was bizarre and frustrating. “Crazy” worked fine, but “Sleeps With Butterflies” almost derailed her whole fucking career.

Yet here we are, with another sexy-’70s Tori Amos song. It’s mellow; it’s smooth. There are bongos on it. And yet, I know what it’s doing now. This is an album about aging and death; the death of wild nature, the all-too-possible death of her mother, the impending adulthood of her now-17-year-old daughter, and the fact that Amos, within the foreseeable future, will become part of her family’s oldest living generation. The point of the ’70s sounds, I think, isn’t that Amos believes they’re current; it’s that they are part of Amos’ youth, echoes of the songs she fell in love with as a teenager. These songs are to Tori Amos as Tori Amos records are to me — something precious from a world that has ended, a little bit of being young that she gets to carry around. “Wildwood” summons up a wild, healing, erotic relationship with Nature (don’t @ me) but also sounds as if it’s mourning that communion, and the woods, which may not be there for her own grandchildren; it sounds, like the Lorde song, as if it is about both happiness and the inevitable end of happiness, nostalgic for something that is happening right now.

“Om Rama,” Alice Coltrane, World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane

When you talk about Tori Amos, you’re always talking about God. Her worldview is deeply pagan, not in the New-Age sense, but in an earned way; when she sings to the woods as a living creature, asking it to heal her, you know she’s serious.

That was my second-favorite album of 2017. This is my favorite. I don’t know how I found it; I think it just got introduced into my Spotify feed through some algorithm. And I’m not even sure if it qualifies; sure, it was released this year, but all the actual music was recorded decades ago. It wasn’t even intended for mass release. This is Alice Coltrane’s attempt at writing devotional music for her ashram; it was meant to be heard by the ashram, and no-one else.

Yet I am hard-pressed to think of anything else like it: A female composer, from the 20th century, wrestling to communicate her own experience of God. There’s so much going on in here; traditional chanting, gospel music, ’90s synths that sound like the Twin Peaks soundtrack, what we used to call “soundscapes.” You float from one texture to another, one worldview to another, linked only by Coltrane’s own sense of the divine. It’s incredibly intimate; maybe too intimate, since you’re very aware that the state of Alice Coltrane’s soul was not intended for people outside her own religious community to pass comment on. But it’s also incredibly beautiful, a synthesis that somehow goes beyond what “God” sounds like in Western music (choirs, mostly) or Eastern appropriation, and becomes its own, new sublime.

“Tabula Rasa,” Bjork, Utopia

Here is an unexpected thing about having a baby: Bjork makes me cry now. I’d always listened to her, given that she belonged to that sacred constellation of ‘90s “alternative” ladies that makes up about 80% of my personal value system. But I tended to view her with respect, rather than love; she struck me as a cerebral artist, technically brilliant but not too intimate. Then I found myself breastfeeding at 3 AM, listening to “All is Full of Love” and crying, or singing “Hyperballad” to the baby in the bath, and I realized the emotion had always been in there. I just hadn’t felt it yet.

Utopia adds a few entries to the list of “improbable words Bjork has trilled on a record,” including “Kafkaesque” and “patriarchy.” But she’s serious about the patriarchy thing. This record is, like the title says, her utopia — her matriarchal island, where nature can still hold sway, where mothers are never defeated in their ability to protect their daughters, where, after all the dirt and awfulness of the year, we might be able to get clean. She’s less singing than she is invoking it into being.

Some of the details on this song are small, petty, specific: A bad divorce, a father who led two lives. But the whole thing centers, as stories of matriarchy always do, around a mother and her daughter. When Bjork finally starts witching out, singing her preferred solution into being — “Tabula rasa for my children / not repeating the fuck-ups of the fathers” — it’s hard to imagine a better hope to take into the new year.

[immaculate-benediction-batch]

"IT'S ALL FINE" - QUEERBAITING IN BBC'S SHERLOCK... By J. Elizabeth The stage is set. The curtain rises. We are ready to begin. Series four of BBC’s Sherlock, that is. We are only a few weeks away from the promised land. After three years, not including last year’s special "The Abominable Bride," we will finally see our favorite consulting detective back in action. The fandom is certainly in need of some beekeepers because we are abuzz right now. As we celebrate this award winning, international hit show, it’s only fair we talk about its flaws. And there are flaws, let’s not kid ourselves. From how it handles female characters to its lack of people of color, it could be better, despite the best intentions from the showrunners. The flaw I’d like to talk about now is the excessive amounts of queerbaiting. What is queerbaiting? Well, it’s a term used by queer fans of media to call out TV shows/movies/comics/etc that intentionally insert queer subtext or "add homoerotic tension between two characters to attract more liberal and queer viewers with the indication of them not ever getting together for real in the show/book/movie." So how does Sherlock do this? Let’s talk about the obvious "jokes" first. In the very first episode, Sherlock Holmes mistakes John Watson’s questions about his relationship status to be a come on, or that’s how mainstream audiences are supposed to perceive it, anyway. And I laughed when I first saw it four years ago before I realized what it was I was laughing at: the absurdness of a gay relationship between iconic literary characters. John having to defend his "not gay"-ness becomes a running joke that appears in literally every one of the nine episodes. And every time, Sherlock, the man who John himself has stated has to have the last word, never corrects anyone’s assumptions about them. In that very first conversation over dinner where John questions his sexuality, Sherlock says women are not his area and that he doesn’t have a boyfriend. The whole thing is written to keep his sexuality ambiguous. If it were just jokes, that would be one really crappy thing, to poke fun at homosexual relationships in that way. But there are genuinely stark, emotional moments that cannot be a joke, and if they are, that is exceedingly cruel. For example, in the original canon, Irene Adler was Holme’s one exception to his disinterest in women. In the BBC version, Adler is a lesbian dominatrix. She has a conversation with John in which she accuses him of being jealous of Sherlock’s attention on her. John, once again, defends himself by exclaiming “I’m not actually gay.” Irene responds with “Well, I am. But look at us both.” John doesn’t respond to that. Is that a joke? I’d like to note that John repeatedly says he’s not gay. Which he’s probably not but, guess what, gay and straight aren’t the only sexualities. Later on in the series, John flips his lid when he finds a woman, Janine, in 221B after he’s moved out to be with his wife, Mary. This is a very funny moment, because John and I had the same expression at seeing Sherlock kiss a woman. This funny moment gets a little harder to laugh at later on, before John knows it’s a sham, when he sees Sherlock propose to Janine. He looks so happy for him! I can’t get into all the nuanced exchange of looks or phrasing or how they costume Sherlock’s parents the same way Sherlock and John dress (whoops, I guess that one snuck in there), but there are overt references to a perceived relationship by characters within the world. Mrs. Hudson believed them a couple for years, and she is the Queen of the Foreshadow. But I don’t have time to mention how Sherlock pasted John’s head on the body of the Vitruvian man, or how he literally brought himself back to life after being shot by Mary to save John, or how he was reading John’s blog post on how they first met when he O.D.’d on the plane ride to his inevitable death (I did it again, dang). Of course, how we perceive acting or costume choices are objective. The Kuleshov effect proves that. So it makes sense that if a bunch of queer people were watching this show, they’d see parts of themselves in it. And guess what, a lot of queer people are watching this show. Queer women, to be more precise. A show as massively popular as Sherlock attracts a very diverse audience. But if you look at the hardcore fandom, a vast majority are women and/or queer identifying people. What results in all these queer people being attracted (or baited) to this show is a space for them to exist without the social constraints of being out in normal life. What fandom has done for me, personally, has given me a space to think in terms of queerness as if was not something strange about me but the norm in that environment. It rewired my thinking and helped lessen my own heteronormative behavior in my art and life. This space is full of artists and writers who are exercising their craft where they feel safe to do so. This space is full of academics who study media and LGBTQA+ issues within it. And that is a beautiful, amazing thing. So it hurts all the more when the showrunners, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss (the latter being a married gay man) dismiss the queer side of the fandom. Sometime after the 2016 San Diego Comic Con, Moffat and Gatiss did an interview that directly addressed the perceived relationship between John and Sherlock. It wasn’t pretty. Moffat, clearly passionate about the topic, and frustrated at the way his words have been twisted, “It is infuriating frankly, to be talking about a serious subject and to have Twitter run around and say oh that means Sherlock is gay. Very explicitly it does not. We are taking a serious subject and trivializing it beyond endurance.” - With an Accent Trivializing it. I wish to express to Moffat that this level of representation of a bisexual character is far from trivial to me. I get a distinct feeling that the creators see the John and Sherlock pairing fans as straight, young girls who want to fetishize male queerness. I can’t help but wonder if the creators would be more accepting and less harsh to fans if we were queer men instead of queer women. Mark Gatiss goes on to say: “Don’t blame us for things that aren’t there. It is infuriating. We get pilloried for these things as if our show [...] has to have the shoulders to bear every single issue and every single campaign point. You can’t do that. It’s our show, they’re our characters, they do what we want them to do, and we don’t have to represent absolutely everything in that ninety minutes.” Gatiss is correct in saying they don’t have to represent absolutely everything. He’s right that they don’t have to bear every issue on their shoulders. I believe that’s what every other show would say as well. But because of that, everybody is saying “We shouldn’t have to be the only ones to tackle these issues,” and nobody is actually doing anything about it. Sherlock has a real opportunity here to have its own chapter in queer media history, but why should they bear that weight on their shoulders, right? Even if they go with the flow and stay safely in the status quo of straight relationships, I’d be able to handle that if they didn’t talk to fans who wish otherwise so harshly. Also, is anyone going to remind them that John Watson and Sherlock Holmes aren’t really their characters? They’re writing and producing high quality fanfiction, but they’re men, so it’s not trivializing when they do it. Moffat says the whole pairing is making a serious topic into “something extremely silly.” My sexuality is not silly. Wanting to see a major television and literary character portrayed with the same sexuality as me is not silly. Maybe they’re right. Maybe everything we see isn’t actually there. Maybe they were all just gay jokes. Maybe we’re the assholes for blowing these jokes out of proportion. Then again, maybe this is some next level form of gaslighting, telling us we’re a bunch of wackadoos for interpreting this little exchange at John’s wedding... as anything but a happy look between best friends at one’s wedding. Look at these guys, totally thrilled about all the life decisions that led them to this point. No pain or regret here. You don’t even have to make it canon, just don’t talk to us like we’re stupid, teenage girls insulting you with our enjoyment of your show. Enjoying it so much, in fact, we are dying to see a part of ourselves validated in that world. And even if this was some elaborate ruse and they really are planning on making this pairing canon, this treatment of the queer and/or female fans isn’t justified. You can't talk down to us like that for the sake of a storyline reveal. It’s much more likely this is just a textbook case of queerbaiting. I hope I’m wrong and Sherlock ends up on the right side of queer media history, but that interview made that hard to believe. Sherlock will end up in queer media history, though. That much is certain, and the fandom can take credit for that. It’s up to The Powers That Be to choose which context it will be discussed in. Regardless, series 4 is coming and no matter what happens, no matter what Moffat and Gatiss say, this is our show too. Not just theirs. Nothing can take away the art we’ve created, the stories we’ve written, or the friendships we’ve made. No matter what happens, your identity is valid. Let this be an inspiration to all you future creators out there, to bear on your shoulders the issues others are afraid to. To challenge the way stories are told. To challenge whose stories get told. Be inspired to do more. To do better. One day, you and I both will be leading the industry, will be the future rulers of media, and... http://www.thefangirlinitiative.com/2016/12/its-all-fine-queerbaiting-in-bbcs.html?m=1#comment-form

[caveartfair]

Black Cinema Pioneer Arthur Jafa’s New Film Dissects the Problems of “Whiteness”

Still from Arthur Jafa, The White Album, 2018. © Arthur Jafa, 2018. Commissioned by the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York/Rome.

Arthur Jafa’s new work of black cinema is sardonically titled The White Album (2018)—a name that conjures mid-century masterworks of whiteness by both Joan Didion and the Beatles. The artist and filmmaker achieves a rarity: He makes whiteness—not white people, though it’s worth keeping in mind who is marshalling the sum total of its privileges—strange to itself. He does this by casting whiteness as the contemporary star performer in a race regime wreaking havoc on us and itself. The roughly half-hour collage of appropriated music videos, CCTV and cellphone footage, viral clips, and documentary snippets—all edited into a kind of essay-film, to considerable narrative effect—presents whiteness as the enfant terrible in a wild, mercurial collection of bad dreams about race and power.

In the film, which is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) through March 24th, the moving images marshalled by Jafa are not mainstream, but they are familiar. Whiteness sings about love and dances to Bon Jovi’s white working-class stadium rock anthem, “Livin’ on a Prayer.” It plucks a few strings of an electric guitar; loads and unloads an automatic weapon with grim ambition; plays goth. In one mordant scene, whiteness pleads with itself, in a plaintive Southern twang, to live up to, if not the letter, the spirit of the law it wrote: “I ain’t never heard a black person go around acting superior because of the color of their skin. If anything they do the opposite.…I ain’t saying black people can’t hate, I ain’t saying black people can’t be angry. But hell if they do hate, it’s a hate that hate produce, it’s a anger that anger produce from white supremacy, a culture and system of white supremacy. So yeah, black people are angry—some of ’em, not all of ’em. The point is face your fear, face your greed, so that we can fuckin’ have a more peaceful country, a more peaceful world.”

Still from Arthur Jafa, The White Album, 2018. © Arthur Jafa, 2018. Commissioned by the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York/Rome.

A few sequences later, a woman, speaking on behalf of polite white society, explains why, in the name of white fear and resentment, white people should be excused. “Let me start by saying that I am the farthest person from being racist.…I think white people have the hardest time nowadays,” she says, whitewashing reality. A biblical confrontation: Whiteness tries to mount a pale horse, but is violently kicked off. In another clip, it gets out of a black car, pulls up its pants, and enters Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In a scene that recalls Martine Syms’s Notes on Gesture (2015) and Rashaad Newsome’s work of pure performance, Shade Compositions (2005–ongoing), whiteness, accused of acting black, earnestly tries to rebuke the rules of race: “I wanna know how the fuck you act a color?” asks a young white girl. “Like, oh, you wake up one day and like hmm, let’s see? I’m gonna be purple. Hoe! You can’t act a color! You can be a color but you can’t act a color.”

“Whiteness is the devil’s work, I think,” explains Jafa. “I’m for the abolition of whiteness, but oftentimes, people conflate or confuse it with being anti-white. It’s not that at all, it’s just in the same way I’m for the abolition of the patriarchy, or homophobia and heteronormativity, I’m for the abolition of systematic whiteness.” The White Album, according to Jafa, is also a way of trying to reconcile his complicated relationship to white people.

Still from Arthur Jafa, Dreams are Colder than Death, 2014. © Arthur Jafa, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York/Rome.

“I love white people,” he tells me, as a way of explaining the film’s inclusion of tender portraits of white people he indeed loves—like his dealer, Gavin Brown, who convinced Jafa to show his critically successful film, Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016), at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, a white-cube setting that brought a seriousness to the film it never would have had were it to have been merely uploaded to YouTube. “I think it’s important to just be straight about [whiteness], like, ‘Yo, this is a horrible thing,’” Jafa continues. “If I stood up and said ‘I’m for the abolition of mafias,’ nobody would blink.”

The White Album is Jafa’s fourth film scrutinizing America’s history of race, power, and violence, following Dreams Are Colder than Death and Apex (both 2013), as well as Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death. The latter—also on view at BAMPFA—is a seven-minute survey of black history, its great triumphs and colossal losses, soundtracked to a chopped-and-screwed rendition of Kanye West’s rap-gospel “Ultralight Beam.” It made Jafa, after nearly three decades of filmmaking, a star in the art world.

That late-career prominence was a real victory for what Jafa has championed: the non-commercial exploration of blackness, in what he calls “Black Cinema.” Other disciples include Kahlil Joseph, Malik Sayeed, Bradford Young,Terence Nance, and Ja’Tovia Gary, among others—all artists who have made movies that, according to Jafa, “replicate the power, beauty and alienation of black music.” They are largely experimental and ecstatic films, free of the Hollywood stereotypes, clichés, and traditional narrative structures found in the wayward, so-called New Black Film Renaissance that Jafa has chided over the years for its finite, mainstream appeal. (Case in point: Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, of which the artist was not a fan.) In this vein, Jafa says The White Album “is not finished and will change every few weeks.” It’s a gesture that captures how difficult it is to “put whiteness under the lens,” and shows that Jafa is less interested in tradition or the way things have previously been done in films (or museums). He is taken by the expansive, malleable possibilities of the digital video file that allows him to play endlessly with not just content, but form.

Still from Arthur Jafa, Love is the Message, 2016. © Arthur Jafa, 2018.Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York/Rome.

The rave reviews and attention Love Is the Message received, and the ongoing museum showings of it, created a tension for Jafa: “White people have said to me that they cried when they saw Love,” he says, “but after you have heard the hundredth white person say that, it makes you question: ‘Is that the measure? Was anybody transformed?’”

Jafa followed his breakout hit with akingdomcomethas (2018), a feature-length collection of found footage of preachers at the pulpit and their parishioners—both in moments of transcendence, in search of higher ground. The goal for Jafa was to make Love’s opposite, to almost consciously alienate certain audiences who have grown comfortable with being critiqued—though, it must be said, not to the point of action. “The whole idea,” he explains, “was that if you drive people out of it, nobody could say they got it.” The video work featured longer cuts—rather than what Jafa calls “the microwavable blackness” you see in Love’s rapid-fire tempo—and less editorializing. The artist’s voice—which made Love so emotional—so true, is largely left out, and because of that, at times, the plot and point of akingdomcomethas is lost.

Still from Arthur Jafa, APEX, 2013. © Arthur Jafa, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York/Rome.

What makes The White Album so effective, conversely, is that Jafa seems to have found a balance—between easily digestible race art and a lyrical stance that not only makes white audiences work harder, but also implicates them in maintaining white supremacy. He does this, in part, by splicing in flagrantly funny and heartbreaking moments in which black entertainers and everyday people laugh at and prepare for whiteness, showing how they have found a way out of no way, despite white supremacy’s best efforts—not only to survive, but to make what Jafa has described as “culture in free fall.”

In one cell-phone confessional video, a black man addresses white viewers: “You maaad. You big maaad.” He chuckles, then says: “I’m happpy. Leave me alone.” In another clip, Erykah Badu is seen in the studio freestyling a silly rap that powerfully alludes to the black body’s fierce instrumentality and astonishing ability to find music in mayhem. In perhaps The White Album’s most searing scene—and one that recalls the odious sequence in Love wherein a black father performs a police search of his young son to show him “what the police do to you”—we see a brother teasing his younger sibling. In both of these scenes, the boys are confused; the taunting is so incessant that they begin to cry. White audiences might share the boys’ confusion, finding the elder black mens’ behavior unnecessary. But their actions in the hard-to-watch footage can be seen as sober scrimmages—practice makes perfect!—against white supremacy, born out of protection and paranoia; tough love that is more harmful than helpful. It’s a prelude to the coming nightmare: they are showing the boys that often, black actions are met with white consequences; that whiteness will try to take everything from them but the burden; that what will inevitably happen is race-based criminalization and dehumanizing humiliation that, as citizens, they will face and take at work, at home, on the street, online, or at university, all in order to ensure a pyrrhic survival.

“In some ways, I guess I try to avoid declarations in the piece,” Jafa explains of The White Album. “You want to put things in relationship to each other—not so much force people to come to certain conclusions, but get people the evidence.…I’m trying to make a more complex embodiment of my relationship to these things, as opposed to just saying something that’s true or false about whiteness. I’m not interested in true or false, I’m interested in: this is how I’m feeling in relationship to it.” Though, he adds, society’s “positions around whiteness are ultimately unsustainable.”

from Artsy News