You didn’t miss anything—check out 644 in the nothing, 645 keep me waiting, 646 stay here forever, and 647 the way things are.
It’s hard to know how to start this week’s issue. Writing about anything besides the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade this week feels rather empty, but I also recognize that music can be an excellent escape from the actual hellscape that we live in. The intersections of this work and the decision have been heartening: Olivia Rodrigo and Lily Allen dedicated “Fuck You” to the five conservative Supreme Court justices at Glastonbury, Phoebe Bridgers led a “fuck the Supreme Court” chant at the same festival, Rage Against the Machine is donating ticket sales to reproductive rights organizations in Wisconsin and Illinois, Lizzo and Live Nation are donating one million dollars to Planned Parenthood. Music has always been and will always be political, either a challenge of or submission to the status quo.
MUNA’s music is deeply and explicitly engaged in the queer experience, also called into question by this decision. It’s been interesting watching them navigate the formation of an audience that shares their values through the themes in their work. I think even five years ago mainstream artists were afraid of alienating potential fans by being open with their identities and beliefs. Now, it’s almost suspicious to see an artist who isn’t actively engaged in politics, who doesn’t use their platform to lift up the issues they care about. Part of that shift is attributable to the polarization of politics in the United States of late, but another part is due to the strange peak of the rise of celebrity culture we find ourselves in, which has almost come full circle: we expect our heroes to be multi-dimensional in a public-facing way, to have and share well-formed opinions on everything.
The capacity for fans to identify with their chosen idols is more powerful than I imagined; I worked the Brandi Carlile show last week and have never seen so many lesbians convened in one place. She’s a vocal champion for gay rights and while most of her music doesn’t necessarily center around that fight, she offers representation in the folk rock scene—notoriously straight, white, and cis-male—where there is otherwise very little. I see similar cohesions of identity in every crowd I’m in; Phoebe Bridgers attracts bisexuals, Lucy Dacus attracts queer people with religious trauma, Kacey Musgraves attracts people typically excluded from country music narratives.
All this to say, MUNA isn’t worried about offending potential fans with their vibrant and loud queer anthems. The song on this playlist is a single from the album that was released on Friday, MUNA (2022), along with this music video:
Maggie Rogers has also gotten more brazen with each successive release. She was vocal about the meaning behind her latest song “Want Want,” stating that it’s about sex, pleasure, and sensuality. She’s selling condoms as merch for her upcoming album Surrender (2022); I also sort of hope she shoots them into the audience via t-shirt gun or confetti machine while she’s on tour. She’s long been an advocate for women’s rights and this new era feels like a natural extension of the more subtle undertones in her previous work.
Ethel Cain is a trans pop artist from the American South. Her writing covers themes of substance abuse, poverty, domestic violence, war, and religion. The image that she’s cultivated around her music is cohesive and sharp: a preacher’s daughter, witchy and prideful. I’ve never heard an artist so empowered by their roots in their past, so devoted to world-building at the site of their trauma. I’m interested to see how long she can work with this hyper-specific material, how much she can pull out of that experience. I respect and admire her dedication to her various identities, the way that they both inform and are informed by her work. In “American Teenager” she nods to the dystopian reality of modern America:
Grew up under yellow light on the street
Putting too much faith in the make believe
And another high school football team
The neighbor's brother came home in a box
But he wanted to go so maybe it was his fault
Another red heart taken by the American dream
We need music like this right now, that speaks to the cognitive dissonance of modern politics, of war and regression. I’m trying to take comfort in the art that is born of times like this, art that carries meaning beyond its lyrical content. In the context of the current social landscape, Ethel Cain is doing important work, documenting the resistance in a way that lasts. I’m holding onto that power.
"I think even five years ago mainstream artists were afraid of alienating potential fans by being open with their identities and beliefs." No doubt the number of people who have both come out and political in their shows or music have increased significantly in the last 5 years, but don't forget Boy George, Elton John, David Bowie, Melissa Etheridge, and K.D. Laing to name a few big ones. Many others came out perhaps unwillingly, but then embraced it.