Weekly Roundup: Floating Like A Lilo Edition

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZP2SqUpgec

Arrogant and unpleasant disclaimer: sit this one out, or skip to the end, unless you're at least 1 SD+. I don't feel like reading comments from people who will be moving their lips to read the next 2300 words. Sorry about that.

Of all the expensive delicacies out there, from white pearl albino caviar to the "Stingray Burger" at the National Corvette Museum, surely the most indulgent would be the intellectual notion that there is a universal human experience, capable of being accessed by any sufficiently broad-minded person. Our distant ancestors would have scoffed at the notion; virtually all ancient languages make no distinction between "people" and "our people", the implication being that others are inherently different and probably worse besides. The Romans did not seek to understand the Vandals. Even among the Greek city-states there was always this simmering notion of cultural incompatibility, accompanied by the baggage of equal parts disdain and fear.

Not until the Enlightenment did the intellectual class start to get the notion Amberthat the similarities across races and cultures were greater than the differences. By the middle of the Twentieth Century this had morphed into a sort of outsider worship; I'm thinking in particular of the Western fascination with Indian and Chinese thought and dogma as exemplified by the "guru" fetish and a blossoming interest in Zen. (The late Jeff Cooper, in one of his Commentaries, despaired that young men in the Seventies and Eighties had utterly abandoned the study of Roman and Greek culture in favor of Eastern mysticism and obscurity, thus becoming incompetent at understanding two cultures instead of at least being masters in their own.)

From that outsider worship fifty years ago, we have now degraded to a sort of infantile volunteer tribalism, a perverse figure-ground approach in which power, relevance, and even safety are derived by calculating one's distance from the untouchable (in the Dalit sense, not the exalted one) state of white Christian American "cis-straight" male. Everything in our society, from hiring decisions to quality of medical care, is now determined via this calculus. The comedian Dave Chappelle just released a comedy special in which he discusses a confrontation he had with a white man at a nightclub. The white man threatened to call the police on Chappelle; the implication here, to anyone sufficiently versed in the identity catechism, is that such a call would be tantamount to attempted murder, since police are killing unarmed Black men at the feverish, breakneck rate of one in 1.3 million annually. This makes the white man a clear villain, and absolutely deserving of some mob justice, real or virtual --- until Chappelle notes that the white man was gay. At that point, every person who does any business in modern society finds themselves doing back-of-the-envelope perceived-privilege calculations. Who's more oppressed here?

In this way, we have leached all meaning from action, which can then only be truly understood in the context of the societal value accorded to each different type of person. If I call the police on you, is that bad? Fifty years ago, we would say "It depends on what you've done." Now, we say that it depends on what you are. Sometimes it is good to burn a Federal building. Sometimes it is treason to walk past one. It all depends on who you are.

This new morality would confuse the living hell out of Pascal or Sartre, but it would have sat perfectly well with any illiterate cave-dweller of prehistoric times. So in a sense it is more authentic, truer, than any outdated notions regarding a "brotherhood of Man" or any of the goofy stuff in our country's thoroughly irrelevant founding documents. You ignore it at your peril.

All of this is a long-winded way for me to say: I'm not sure I'm allowed to listen to, comment or, or apply critical thinking to the topic at hand, namely: two of the greatest pop records to be released in years, maybe decades. Why? Simple: they are the product of a relationship between two young British lesbians.

Let's go.

This is a story of Amber and Marika, both British women in their early twenties. Amber Bain is the artist who performs as The Japanese House, for various reasons related to residual shyness and an overabundance of precocious wit. Marika Hackman performs as, well, Marika Hackman, although in her latest album she is careful to point out that she is inhabiting a character known as "Marika Hackman", for much the same reasons that the Philip Roth in Operation Shylock is not quite the real Philip Roth and the Jack Baruth you read here and elsewhere is not precisely the person who tucks his son into bed each evening. (I don't really do that, for one thing; we are not a family in which people touch or show noticeable affection to each other.)

Amber and Marika began a relationship in 2015, around the same time that both artists released their debut recordings. At first, Marika was the star, with her ethereal We Slept At Last. Amber... well, she wasn't even using her name. People thought she was a side project of another artist who called himself "The 1975". The two girls toured and traveled separately and alone, falling in and out of love, through a disappointing second record for Marika and a series of EPs for The Japanese House. And then, after four years, there was a breakup.

Any twentieth-century intellectual would recognize the idea of a Universal Human Thing here. Your humble author is not a 23-year-old British lesbian, but he has done most of his best work (if any of it has been good) while in the grip of sorrow. Joy, like Dilaudid, blanks the mind, it dulls the reasoning, it kills the artistic impulse. There is an iron band between misery and creativity. Suicidal ideation led Yeats to write "The Second Coming", while relentless good humor just gets you another Foo Fighters record. So I am not surprised that Amber and Marika were driven by sorrow to create two astounding albums in the aftermath: Good At Falling and Any Human Friend, respectively.

To my knowledge, neither Amber nor Marika have indicated who broke up with whom, or why --- but even a 49-year-old white straight-dude dinosaur like me can figure it out by listening to the music. Marika's breakout track from Any Human Friend is the rollicking "the one", seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MguqCajpVm0

Strip away the various flourishes, and it's about a woman who truly desires other women, in the strong and insistent way we experience as men, but can't get anyone to return the feeling.

Sold out I've given up my soul now I thought that I could be unique Fuck it I am just so weak ... I'm not the one you want I fucked it up with the saddest songs I'm not the one you want But leave it on Leave it on ... Bow down Vanilla and I'm proud now They're saying I'm a god sent gift And all you fuckers want my dick Love me more Rub me 'til my ego is raw (That's not what we came here for!) I've got BDE I think it's a venereal disease I'm not the one you want I fucked it up with the saddest songs I'm not the one you want But leave it on Leave it on

"BDE", by the way, is the rather ridiculous new-meme social concept of "Big Dick Energy". In another track, called "conventional ride", she gripes at a girlfriend who only wants to receive oral sex, not give it:

I've been this girl before Some fantasy you'd love to adore Impossible to sustain, it's ingrained Four hands, two mouths Is that not enough, the feminine touch? Could it be that you need a conventional ride? Conventional ride A conventional ride Conventional ride XX, our sex is best I-M-H-O, but you seem depressed We got to sleep straight away, that's okay But I'm close to done with playing the nun Are you having fun?

Now, let's flick over to Amber, who sings in the furious "We Talk All The Time":

We don't fuck anymore But we talk all the time so it's fine Can somebody tell me what I want? 'Cause I keep changing my mind I can see a progression And I guess it's happening A different direction And I guess it's happening

Another track, the luminous and car-stereo-limit-exposing "Worms", says that

I'm so much better I don't have to be on my own There's so much pressure not to be alone You're sharing a house, you're sharing a life You're sharing a home There's so much pressure not to be alone

So yeah, it's obvious that Amber was what they call a "pillow princess" and she dumped Marika for being too aggressive about, you know, the sexual part of being a lesbian. If the lyrics didn't tell you, the music would: Marika plays a Stratocaster from the hips forward and struts before the camera, while Amber is happier laying a sonic assault one piece at a time via sequencer. (She can play a guitar, however. Good tone. Strong finger pressure. Holds the instrument like a dead fish. The anti-Slash.) Marika is "butch"; Amber is "fem", but it's not in the way they look, which is eerily identical. It's in the way they act.

Which album is better? Amber's. By a long shot. She deserves the sobriquet Eliot gave to Pound: il miglior fabbro. Where Any Human Friend is uneven, angry, emotional, Good At Falling simply stacks picture-perfect tracks one above another. The two albums share much, from their cutesy kerning and lowercase in the tracks (something that goes wrong in Ambers somethingfartoogoodtoofeel which will strike any callous boy of my generation as "SOMETHING FART...") to the affectation of simultaneously demanding and rejecting sexual attention by appearing topless in deliberately unglamorous album art (Marika poses topless with her breasts obscured by a piglet on the cover of her record, while Amber frees the nipple all the way in the followup EP, chewing cotton wool). But while Any Human Friend is simply the best pop record you would hear in almost any year after 1985, Good At Falling is better, more significant than that, largely due to a single gut-wrenching artistic decision.

This is the video for "Lilo":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J88UF4HxHhw

A "lilo" is a personal flotation device, by the way; even your Anglophile, Savile-Row-wearing author didn't know that. "Lilo" is the story of meeting someone, from the moment you hear about her to the moment you realize you have to walk away from her or lose everything you are. The lyrics are alternately trite, perceptive, eternal; the music is simple but produced with enough care to make the late Walter Becker shed a tear. But it is the video that elevates "Lilo" from mere art to pure art, because the character of Marika Hackman is played by... Marika Hackman. They re-enact every aspect of their relationship: the early joy, the quiet contentment, the secret desire... the turning away, the distancing, the longing, the regret.

By the end of the video, they are dressed identically, barbered identically, bare-faced in makeup-free androgyny. Amber rests her head on Marika's shoulder as Marika looks into the distance, looking every bit like someone who hates the same person she loves. They watch a car burn together; the fact that it's a Volvo 240 would be too on-the-nose for an American artist but the British don't have the same cultural Portlandia associations with that car, to them it's more of how we would see a mid-Nineties Accord.

I have to admit that I suffer from an overwhelming feeling of desire while watching the video --- and I bet John Mayer would as well, if he knew about it. To break up with someone, to indulge endlessly in my own self-loathing and narcissism after the fact? I do it all the time, and most of my readers know about whom, and Mayer does it as well, most notably with "Split Screen Sadness" and "Moving On And Getting Over". But to get the woman you loved and let go to APPEAR IN A VIDEO, PLAYING HERSELF, SO YOU CAN EXPERIENCE THE WHOLE THING ALL OVER AGAIN AND SHARE IT WITH EVERYONE?

My God, I haven't been this envious of someone since Randy Whatshisname got Flight Cranks for his Haro FST in 1987!

And this is why I continue to believe in the universal human experience, despite our segregated theology, despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the chorus of voices that would scream at me about even listening to music that is so obviously Not For Old White Cis Males should this column ever make it into the Cheetos-stained hands of the Twitterati, despite the astounding dimensions of the gap between my experience and that of an Amber Bain or Marika Hackman. I believe in it because when I watch "Lilo", I can see myself in every frame. I can see a particular woman in every frame, as well. I know how Amber felt, because I've felt that way. And it doesn't matter that we wouldn't understand eachother at all were we to meet somehow, it doesn't matter what she's suffered or what I've seen. These things are deeper, stronger, more gravitational than any of that. I do not believe that universality is the measure of art, even though to do so would be to strike a death blow into the heart of the modern non-representational trash that is used for money laundering and oligarch gratification around the world. But I believe that universality is certainly one measure of art.

And these feelings, these songs, are universal.

How glad I am to have them, and to share them with you.

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For Hagerty this week, I did a Viper test, considered the magic unto the third generation, and wrote about a Marquis that never was.