"I got a date on friday
Not gonna eat anything 'till then
I'm gonna' look so skinny
She'll wanna feel my bones against her skin
And I rehearse my pretense
I say hello without too much intent
She gonna' think I'm dreamy
She'll wanna show me off to all her friends"
-Mother Mother
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a very good bad thing isn't my favorite mother mother album sonically, (i haven't heard all of their albums yet but i've been working my way through them all recently) but god damn some of the lyrics on that album! i think that about every album of theirs but for some reason i feel like i need to talk about these specifically. there's something about how honest and blunt their lyrics are, like "no this isn't necessarily good or even okay but i'm gonna say it anyway." like
i got a date on friday
not gonna eat anything till then
i'm gonna look so skinny
she'll want to feel my bones against her skin - i go hungry
or have it out as a whole. the way he sings about his anger and hatred for himself. like he just loathes himself is so familiar to me, someone who struggles with similar thought patterns. the almost excitement he has to destroy himself, that it's gonna be like war, it's gonna get "ugly" and "messy" but then also blaming himself for allowing himself to continue the pattern. he keeps letting this bad tendency back in but doesn't stop him and describes himself as a "spectator of war." the specifics of how he's going to ruin everything he loves so he can't do it anymore. he'll make him an addict, he'll cut off his fingers and his tongue. he also mocks how he thinks of himself, because he says "can't play the rockstar," which belittles what he does and makes it clear he doesn't believe he is cool/good enough. the line about having sex with young girls adds to this like, "oh you think you're such a big rockstar, huh? you just say a bunch of bullshit and creep on girls"
also the softness in alone and sublime, the questioning of himself, that he both likes being alone and wonders if that's okay but also wants to be with people but struggles to do so
i wonder, did they make me right?
aren't i supposed to want to fight for love in life?
anyway basically i love mother mother and their lyrics so so much
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I got a date on Friday
Not gonna eat anything 'till then
I'm gonna' look so skinny
She'll wanna feel my bones against her skin
And I rehearse my pretense
I say hello without too much intent
She gonna' think I'm dreamy
She'll wanna show me off to all her friends
Yeah you know she would
(Yeah you know she would)
Yeah you know she would
I'm manifesting love and fate
I am man and I confess I'm fake
When I go hungry, I go nail and tooth
When I go hungry, I go hungry, I go hungry
For the truth
I didn't write no book on love
I picked up, then put it down
It didn't get me off the top
Yeah, ah
Yeah, ahh
In my design I will be funny
In my design she will have a laugh that can't pretend
In my design I will have money
I'll grab the tab and I'll tip sixty percent
I'm manifesting love and fate
I am a man so I must be insane
When I go hungry I go through the bowl
When I go hungry, I go hungry
I will eat my little ones
I thought I wrote the book on fun
Until I put it out to find I couldn't sell a single one
Yeah, Yeah
Yeah
I'm manifesting love and fate
I am a man and I confess I'm fake
When I go hungry I go nail and tooth
When I go hungry, I go hungry, I go hungry
For the truth
I didn't write no book on love
I picked it up, then put it down
It didn't get me off the top
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i used to be so good at writing strong, thoroughly-researched, thoroughly-edited essays.
as a kid in hs, my teacher literally came up to me, holding my 40 page essay on the intersection of the European witch hunts and capitalism/exploitation/gender roles (it was supposed to be 7 pages...whoops) and went like "this is literally a master's-degree level thesis. what are you doing?? you could literally use this as your final dissertation in a master's program, what the fuck."
NOW??? NOW?? you'd think I'd be oh so skilled. but alas. i can barely piece together two ideas. adhd skill-regression is so so real. im SOBBING
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at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"
like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.
"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."
... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.
and i'd still keep writing.
i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.
i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley
"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"
and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.
it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.
you create because you're greedy.
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