After thoroughly losing my mind over WAP, I thought I’d get to a piece that’s been rattling around in my head for the past few weeks.
Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION is five years old now. It is an album that has anchored the second half of the last decade, something that I have repeatedly gone back to and pulled up something new each time.
But I didn’t just want to write one big piece about the album—its effects on my life have taken place over years, in bits and bobs, big ways and small. These might be jumping off points for future essays or reviews, so I wanted to try and say what I needed and pull back before going too deep.
So here’s a set of mini-essays, arranged in track-by-track order (I’ll be going by the official US track listing so this won’t get too long (lol).).
As always, Enjoy.
1. Run Away With Me
Self-evidently amazing song, one of the best pop songs of the last decade, swooningly romantic, big hook, big heart, big emotions, etc etc etc do you really need me to keep going because when that sax hits my heart just skips a beat and I can literally feel my body levitating for a sec when it begins and—breathe.
A song can be good, but the environment in which it is experienced for the very first time can change everything.
My first exposure to the new album was through the middling lead single, “I Really Like You”, which was an attempt to capture that singular magic of “Call Me Maybe”. Except magic that singular can’t actually be consciously replicated, even (especially) with a painfully self-aware cutesy video featuring Tom Hanks. Jepsen’s breakthrough single rode in at a specific moment, got things right at the exact time it was needed, and things moved on from there. So, it was not a great song, but I still counted myself as a fan—Kiss was in constant rotation in the three years (!!!) between albums. I felt like taking a chance on this. Maybe it would be good?
So I got it and it sat on my hard drive, and then my iPod, for a few days, simply because I had forgotten about it. When I finally decided to put it on, I was in my car, driving a long and winding road in West Austin, right near sunset, moments before it would dip below the horizon.
I hit play as I turn a corner, and the sun is painting the sky in that indescribably beautiful array of colors (okay, maybe that’s a cheat, but to attempt to recall the real moment in its crystalline realness robs it of its poetic energy), and I knew that I was experiencing something truly special.
Music, as an art form, is simultaneously the most abstract, the most concretely and clearly emotional, and the most capable of offering transcendence. And it can do this through its purely sonic elements, which convey so much feeling by simply trusting you to listen. The words here heighten the intensity, illustrate that primal yearning for a pure and escapist love, literally and figuratively.
That’s how I felt about it then, and I still feel that way about it now.
2. Emotion
There’s this thing I’ve noticed in pop albums, where it begins with a big statement song, and then the second track feels like a real “down to business” sort of song. And it’s not limited to music—I get that sensation in fantasy novels, when things pop off huge and then pare things back to the expected level needed for the plot to happen at the normal intensity.
It might be something completely nonsensical that only I notice, but maybe it’s true? I consciously channeled it in my own music, starting my own album with a 10 minute suite that ended in a crashing punk anthem before moving into a straight ahead rock song to keep things moving.
3. I Really Like You
Let’s talk about “Call Me Maybe” a little more, shall we?
That song killed my cynicism and detachment about pop music. It would take a bit longer to truly burn it all away, but at that point, trapped in my own little hell of treating music as the most serious endeavor in my life and being almost pathologically unable to enjoy something that could be considered pop in any way, hearing “Call Me Maybe”, a song full of guileless romance and direct feeling, started to make me realize that I needed to actually lighten up. If I loved that kind of music—and make no mistake, I truly did, “Kiss from a Rose” and “Heart of Glass” are my favorite songs of all time—I should actually not be so cynical and mean about it. I should actually allow myself to feel things when I listen to music, rather than just absorb it as an intellectual exercise.
And, if you can believe it, that actually made some of the less conventional stuff I listened to more enjoyable because I wasn’t simply thinking about it in terms of taking it apart and intellectualizing it for Takes!
4. Gimme Love
I am not really a live music person. I saw CRJ live on the Gimme Love Tour and it was a religious experience. Hearing that sax open the concert made my heart stop, and then I was reborn into some sort of new person.
5. All That
There’s a performance of this song on Youtube, live in studio, featuring Dev Hynes. Beautiful ballad, maybe not the most distinctive thing in the world, but what really gets me about this video is her pants. They just look so damn funny.
6. Boy Problems
Nothing deep to say here. The only piece of new information I have to offer here is that I have a massive innocent non-binary gay-girl crush on Carly Rae Jepsen and that she looks super cute in the video for this particular song.
7. Making the Most of the Night
Did you know that there’s a demo of this song performed by Sia available on Youtube? I listened to it and had a miniature revelation.
There’s a feeling I get from some artists, especially those who perform their own music and write songs for others. This was most acutely felt when I saw Waitress on stage (music by Sara Bareilles).
Some songwriters have such a command over their music that it’s impossible to not to hear them, even when other people perform the songs. That’s a simple function of someone knowing what kind of melodies they perform and how to form them. Not the easiest trick in the world, but also not an incredibly complex thing.
The real trick is something else: knowing all of the little things in how music is not only composed, but performed. The particular lilt in a melodic line, which intervals to emphasize, how the voice sounds when certain words are sung, the way a song rises and falls over its duration. Sara Bareilles has that concept down so concretely that it was impossible *not* to hear her voice singing every single song in that damn musical (which is great btw, check out the cast recording, or actually check out this album, which is Sara Bareilles singing selections from the musical—I prefer the album to the cast recording (which you already knew)). Having that kind of command over your own voice—in so many respects—is damn difficult, and to pull it off is a feat worthy of admiration.
All of this is to say that once I heard the demo, it was no longer a CRJ song because Sia has that kind of command, and impressing it on a voice so distinctive is another feat in itself.
8. Your Type
When I had my revelations about gender, they were small and strange until they suddenly became overwhelming, confusing, and terrifying.
Many tiny events and ideas happened at an inconsistent pace—hey, I feel strange; why am I not at home in my body; is there something different about me beyond my sexuality—and then became a single, very loud, very insistent, and very scary question: Am I actually a boy? Which is a tough question to deal with when you’re totally unequipped to even define or describe what the hell you’re feeling.
This whole album, as well as my own little swooning crush on CRJ, helped me put this question in a different light: do I desire to be with someone, or do I desire to be them? And I know that question feels a little Trans Cliche, but it only achieved that status by being something so self-evidently true that it became a cliche. Adoring femininity and wanting to inhabit in a way that wasn’t simply feeling pretty but still essentially male were two very different and distinct things that told me a lot about how I conceived of my identity.
And this song, this song beautifully illustrated something that I didn’t realize I’d felt since high school, and could truly recognize if I just tilted my head a little bit: pining for boys (which I was definitely doing, but wasn’t able to actually publicly voice that affection because I’d tried to come out as bisexual once and was gaslit back into the closet (another story entirely, which is a running theme)), and wishing I could be what they wanted—namely, a girl. Unfortunately, I was not that. “I’m not the type of girl for you/and I’m not going to pretend/that I’m the type of girl you call more than a friend.”
But wouldn’t it be great if I could be haha just kidding but am I
Posing the question as simply as, “Am I a girl?” meant that I could provide an easy answer: no. But that easy answer leaves out a lot of nuance, and since that time, I’ve come to learn that sort of nuance has been a great help in filling in the cracks and crevices of how I conceive of my existence as a non-binary individual.
9. Let’s Get Lost
This song shares a story conceit identical to the Uncle Tupelo song “The Long Cut”. But where “Let’s Get Lost” is about the experience of meeting someone new and taking the chance of being emotionally and romantically vulnerable* via drawing out a car ride , “The Long Cut” is about attempting to save a failing relationship via the same method.
Now that we’ve talked about that, let’s talk about “Anodyne”, and the sensation of a song backfilling a memory into completeness.
In March of 2008, I very literally and very suddenly ran away from home, and began my life with the woman who would become my wife just two months later. Things were tense between me and my family, to say the least. This event was basically a multi-year existential crisis coming to a head, and it ended in me finally finding some agency in my life.
So for a very long time, it was a raw blankness that seemed to be just there. I’d go about my life in its wake, but I couldn’t actually find a way to process it, and its presence would just drag me down into its little world, full of painful repression and control.
Late in 2008, I began broadening my musical horizons beyond just the stuff I heard on the radio and MTV by reading Pitchfork and AV Club reviews (wow what a different time), which led me to Uncle Tupelo. Their final album, Anodyne, is a masterpiece, but its title track was some sort of catalyst.
As that slide guitar wells up from the silence, I could feel myself somehow back in Mississippi, at the sparsely attended funeral for my paternal grandmother, disgusted by how little anyone cared—my grandfather’s, by contrast, was held in a crowded cathedral, filled with people who’d been touched by his service.
My mother looking me in the eye, as I was having a nervous breakdown, on the verge of suicide, trying to tell her of my fear and terror of just figuring shit out, and telling me to stop crying, buck up, and go to work.
Every time that she’d told me that I never thought for myself, which after years of therapy is finally being undone, to the point where I can say that I am truly in control of myself and actually believe it.
Every shout, every veiled insult, every single slap and dismissive remark, joined to Jay Farrar’s voice singing “No sign of reconciliation/Quarter past the end”.
All those years of shame and guilt and sadness, all wrapped up so neatly in four minutes and fifty-one seconds, able to be looked at, ripped apart, burned to ash, and repurposed into myself for a better future.
10. LA Hallucinations
Los Angeles. West coast. West. Western.
Hey, have I ever talked about how the two best filmic critiques on the American Western film genre are Unforgiven and Blazing Saddles, and also that they are kinda about the same thing?
I’m not kidding. This will definitely be a much longer piece when I have the time to sit down and take notes on both films, but both are fundamentally about the lies of the American West, and the Western Film in particular. Stories about stories—what it means when they’re false, and more tragically, what it means when they’re true. The worlds they inhabit are built on artifice: tall tales and received wisdom from eras of Hollywood past. Saddles’ artifice is quite literal—Rock Ridge, and by extension the world of the film, spills out beyond the confines of its fiction, but the ugly truths of its racism persist.
William Munny shows us the tragedy of those stories, shows us how pointless and dirty death is. It was never a noble place, that was just fake outlaws telling tall tales to make money. His attempt to live apart from the myth proves impossible, but the myth is one of brutality and nihilism.
Obviously, they arrive at some of the same points in a wildly divergent manner, but look: Saddles and Unforgiven are talking about the same thing, and we should really start looking at them in terms of their similarities.
11. Warm Blood
OK, I’ve gone deep enough, here’s another tenuous connection so I can talk about something else: this is a song about carnal desire, about being horny.
NOW I can FINALLY talk about “WAP” and “Girls”, both of which feature Cardi B! A much less tenuous connection. Plus, her performances on both songs are incredibly bawdy and full of clever and boneheadedly amazing bits of wordplay, so there we go. I win!
“Girls” is bizarre. Never have I seen a song debut so pre-cancelled. Absolutely dead on arrival. A #discourse topic that burned incredibly hot and fast, and fizzled out in less than a month. Comparisons with the queer-tourism classic “I Kissed A Girl” (which, now that I think about it, is not so much offensive as tiring and cliche) when it shared more in common with Demi Lovato’s “Cool for the Summer” (which, wow very horny) and holy shit do you remember Avril Lavigne’s “Hello Kitty” which would have been actually pretty ok if not for that video that managed to combine weeaboo nonsense with mid-00’s era Gwen Stefani japanese girls as an accessory schtick???!!! It’s a song about casually munching your gal pal’s box but she just had to do that!!!
Breathe in. Breathe out. Anyway, “Girls”.
It’s definitely not a bad song—on the contrary, it’s actually really good! A fizzy, sweet, brazenly sexual, and FUN song. But the fact that it had a lot of men who were probably heterosexual on the writing and production credits painted it as less earnest in its declarations, which, along with some other bits and pieces of its lyrics (Rita Ora’s 50/50 line is particularly tiring because that’s literally an assumption that heterosexuals have about how bisexuality works!!!), somehow guaranteed it to a grisly fate as a piece of pop-music detritus. This weird reaction to what should have been a frivolous celebration of flexible sexuality instead became a flashpoint in some sort of culture war that even I couldn’t discern (and I’m a brain poisoned internet leftist, I should know about obscure culture war stuff).
Cardi B’s verse on “Girls”, however, basically defines her approach to sex and sexuality: raw, filthy, and startlingly frank while also being clever, funny, and ridiculously horny as opposed to simply sexy. There’s a willingness to be dirty and crude, but there’s a distinct lack of self-consciousness or apology in what she does. Yes, she will have your bitch down with the scissor, and yes, she wants to get plowed by huge dongs, and no, she will be proud of wanting it.
And that’s what I find so refreshing about WAP: she (and Megan, goodt lordt can’t forget Megan simply spitting fire every time she’s on the mic) raps about what she wants. And though this is (presumably) a heterosexual song, I think it fits in this line of sexually charged songs by way of doing them all one better by simply stating desire and structuring the cleverness and rapping around that. It’s not coy or cutesy like “Hello Kitty”, nor is it leery and admittedly male-gazey like “Girls”. It is startlingly direct in its aims, and its celebration of female sexuality is something to be uplifted and taken seriously. There’s no need to be coyly horny anymore—you can actually just wear it proudly without euphemism if you’re clever enough to make it sound good.
(Also from a reading of the lyrics Megan and Cardi are NOT dominant in any shape or form they are definitely bossy bottoms which also puts Lady Gaga’s “Teeth” into this conversation. That’s a good song too go listen)
12. When I Needed You
Figuring out what to write about at the end was tough. This album closer is forgettable fluff—not terrible, not amazingly bad, not good either. Just sort of a song that goes on and on until it fades out. Just sorta peters out. Nothing distinctive, nothing amazing, nothing mysterious.
But let me give you this corny saying I have that would most likely annoy Neil DeGrasse Tyson: “Death is the final mystery. Everything else is math problems.”
The age we’re currently living in makes it impossible to not entertain apocalyptic thinking. We stand on the edge of the abyss, and as much as we want to deny it, whatever point of no return existed was passed a long time ago. Our lives have moved from prevention to mitigation. That’s terrifying and disheartening.
But still, I live in the present moment. Try to find some sort of hope, or at least something to center me in the present and refocus my existence as one of service, love, and beauty. The world may be falling apart around me and those I love, but even that is no reason to give in to despair and allow it to slowly kill me.
Dahr Jamail, a journalist and climate activist, has written extensively on not only the topic of climate change, but the psychological effects of it, and how to fight back against the darkness that we increasingly find ourselves drowning in. He speaks of a life of purpose, of finding the thing that allows you to live with clarity and intention, a calling that arises not from the external and spiritual, but the internal and practical. His writing engages directly with the violence committed against the planet and its effects on both the land and its peoples around the world, but also goes out of his way to engage in an intensely personal emotional level—he knows that we must find ourselves and our own deep purpose amidst this crisis if we want to survive.
Instead of going at even longer length and trying to explain his words, I’ll instead just drop the final line from his short but powerful book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning In the Path of Climate Disruption: “When I orient myself around the question ‘what are my obligations,’ the deeper question immediately arises: ‘From this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?’”
My period of climate grief lasted for years before I knew what to call it, and it cast its shadow over me during my gender grief. Those two things deserve their own, longer piece, so I’ll leave them alone for now. But processing those emotions, earnestly engaging with why I felt them and what they meant, gave me the courage and clarity to truly dedicate myself to writing, but more generally, a creative and artistic life. I want to express myself, give of myself to the world, share that magic in some little way with other people, and this massive article here is one way I’m doing that.
Even if this newsletter never actually grows beyond the tiny community it’s cultivated so far, I can live happily with that reality. It at least reminds me that someone out there is reading my writing and absorbing what little energy I’m putting into the world.
Thank you.