The Commute 2021 Q3
Featuring albums from Billie Eilish, Lucy Dacus and Lil Nas X
I said this on Twitter, but this series isn’t going to continue into 2022. There is a multitude of reasons why, but I think the simplest answer is just that my listening habits have changed. When I started this series, I was working at a place that required a really long and tedious commute. As annoying as it was to lose an hour and a half of my day to walking and sitting on buses, it did give me ample time to listen to albums and really pay attention to them. Cut to August when I quit my job in order to move to another state for grad school and start my new job at a library. The commute is much shorter and more manageable, thus I have less time and fewer opportunities to really listen to albums or discographies. But in addition to that, my music listening habits have just changed a lot. I’ve started to listen to music more casually as I build my playlists and just cycle through my usual rotations. If I have a solid group of songs I can listen to over and over again, I’ll usually just not want to listen to new music unless it’s from an artist I’m invested in. Even more so if they have a discography I have to go through before giving the new album a proper listen. I actually kind of prefer this way of listening to music. It feels less like a job and more like a hobby, especially now that my previous hobby has now become my primary job in a way.
I dunno, I’m just in a really happy place right now. Where I spend more time going to school, hanging with friends, and doing the work I love rather than worrying about how my best list is going to look like at the end of the year. That doesn’t mean I’ll abandon this blog though. I still loved writing the reviews for star-crossed, Solar Power, and the Certified Lover Boy/DONDA piece. I think I’ll just stick to more of that, maybe a Diamond In The Rough if I feel like it (I wanted to make one for Imagine Dragons but I got swept up on schoolwork to make it in time). Plus, there were albums in Q3 that I had a lot to say about, but they were either too late or not big enough for a full review. So here are three albums I really loved and thought about over the past three months. Definitely recommend checking out all of these if you haven’t already.
Happier Than Ever by Billie Eilish
Content Warning: Heavy discussion of pedophilia and grooming, as well as references to depression and other sexual themes
How exactly do you follow up an album like WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?? Trick question; You don’t. Happier Than Ever is the sun to WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP’s moon. It’s a brighter, more stable, and comfortable album, but still harbors inner darkness that goes beyond the imposing imagery of Billie’s first album. It still carries teenage angst, but it digs deeper into that angst and finds something even heavier. Something that Billie never even knew was there but had always affected her worldview as she transitions from teenager to adult. Happier Than Ever is very quiet. Billie paints this image of a soft, vulnerable person who’s been through a lot, but is trying to move past it by essentially lying to the people around her, maybe even herself. Things are better, she thinks. She’s become a big star, she broke up with an abusive ex, she’s in a better place mentally than where she was when she made WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, and it feels like she has some control of her life. Except, she doesn’t. She’s famous and has tons of fans, but that comes with a loss of privacy she deeply valued in the past, made worse by the stalkers and weirdos who try to get closer to her and invade her personal life. She’s broken up with that abusive ex and loves to taunt him any chance she could get, but that comes with not just the realization that he damaged her in ways she could never have imagined, but how she still loves him in spite of all that. She’s in a better place mentally, but that just means she’s less self-destructive. The weight of all these things; the paparazzi, people online debating her body, realizing she had been a victim of grooming, having to carry out relationships in secret, and embracing a part of her sexual freedom that she knows will get the press and her fans buzzing with discourse, it’s overwhelming for her. Especially when you consider she’s only nineteen.
That’s what makes this album so powerful for me. Is it as musically daring and relentlessly catchy as WWAFAWDWG? No, but it’s not trying to be. As the opening track of “Getting Older” implies, it’s a coming-of-age moment for Billie that feels tainted. She wants to enjoy this transition into adulthood like other girls her age, but she’s already been through too much. The whole album is learning to adapt to this unique moment of growing up and learning to live with it. There’s a strange mix of maturity and immaturity on the album. The aesthetic of the album embraces a lot of old-school imagery, particularly standards of beauty and excellence that young girls in those times strived to achieve, but it still keeps a lot of Billie’s messiness in the process. She’s still playful, still mischievous, but she carries herself out with more elegance and embrace of the more provocative parts of her life. There are secret hookups on “Billie Bossa Nova” and a tempting sensuality in songs like “Oxytocin” that are fun in the moment, but both of them still have their moments where the audience might feel like it’s a bad idea. Just who exactly is Billie meeting in those hotels with discreet names? Why does the production of “Oxytocin” feel so unstable and aggressive? Should we even be listening to this 19-year old describe her sex life in such vivid detail? With the rumors of who Billie’s boyfriend is over this past year, who knows how old the people she’s sleeping with even are? And how much of that plays into her past of being groomed as a teenager?
Those moments of playful sexuality mostly happen in the first half of the album, but it’s when her body becomes everybody’s business when the album seems to shift gears. Including the “Not My Responsibility” interlude from her live shows is a brilliant addition, as it sets the stage for the hazed-out blurriness of “OverHeated” and reacting to the way her body is perceived by strangers. It’s uncomfortable for her, but also a bit liberating. She’ll snicker at some of the flirting while also resenting the way her body is being depicted by people who don’t have her best interest in mind. Thus, when it leads into the heartbreaking reflections of teenagers dating adults on “Your Power”, makes the song hit harder than it did the first time around. It’s the moment of realization for Billie that for as much resentment she has for the older men who prey on young women and throw the blame on them when the line is crossed, a lot of that resentment comes from Billie’s own experiences with an older partner when she was in her teenage years. If that rumored boyfriend is anything to go by, she hasn’t really defeated that demon even now. But that’s just it, right? It’d be so easy to denounce this kind of relationship, but when Billie herself participates in it, she has to reassess whose fault even is it? Is it his for abusing his power as an older person and taking advantage of the naive desperation of a younger woman? Or is it her own fault for playing into it and letting them abuse his power? It makes Billie rethink her own power in the relationship, especially since reportedly she stayed with her ex because of how concerned she was over his mental health. She held on to this idea that they were on equal footing because he had the same internal struggle with depression that she did. And yet, feeling the need to stay with him for the sake of HIS mental health over hers is the imbalance that Billie now realizes was there all along. Of course it was the older guy’s fault. He’s the one with the power. Billie never had that power to begin with. That realization is kind of hard to swallow. That’s likely what leads to the breakdown on “NDA”. Everything happening to her gets overwhelming and she finds herself in the middle of a storm, blaming every shitty event that’s happened these past two years on herself. So to make herself feel better, she starts lashing out at people on “Therefore I Am” and targeting her ex specifically on the title track.
“Happier Than Ever” is the most important song on the album and everyone recognizes it as such. A lot of people get caught up in the instrumental shift halfway through that turns the soft, quiet plucking of harps into a cavalcade of hard rock guitars and drums, but the reason that works so well is because it’s the one moment on the album Billie can truly claim that she’s happier than ever. She finds out that her ex’s life is a mess after they broke up, and even tries to get back with her out of some misguided hope that she’d forgive him. The first half is Billie simply learning to move on without him, but the second half is the explosion of catharsis where she truly cements the end of their relationship. Finding the power within herself to tell him off and let out every bit of trauma and distress that this guy left her. For as much as Billie lies to herself on this album, this moment of catharsis is the moment where all of those lies lead into one universal truth. Things suck. Not everything about her fame is ideal. But at least she’s not with him.
I’ve seen some critics claim that this is where the album should have ended, and I strongly disagree with that. If the album ended on “Happier Than Ever”, that defeats the whole point of the album. Sure it would have been a mind-blowing finale, but catharsis doesn’t mean all of your problems go away. It just means you let them out and lessen the weight they have in your conscience. I actually think the album ending on “Male Fantasy” is necessary. Even if “Happier Than Ever” gave the impression that Billie hates her ex, she doesn’t. If anything, that love she still has for him is exactly why “Happier Than Ever” is such an angry song. Billie still craves the genuine love she felt with her ex, but the one chance she’s gotten so far was with someone who frankly should never have been in her life. It’s to the point where porn doesn’t even affect her anymore because she’s gotten a taste of real love and sex that had meaning to it. She misses it so much. But she knows, whenever she finds it again, it can’t be with him. Because he shouldn’t have been the one to show her what real love and sex was. In a way, even if this ending is bittersweet, it’s actually kind of uplifting. It shows growth in Billie in understanding her relationships while still knowing she has a lot to learn. Is it fucked up that she still has love and appreciation for someone who used her and took advantage of her age? Yes. But abuse trauma isn’t as easy as “They’re bad and forever bad”. Abuse victims see the person their abusers could be and latch on to that. But Billie’s source of growth is understanding she will never get that person back. There’s no point in going back to him, even if every instinct in her body tells her it’s the only love she’ll ever have. That’s just the nature of healing. The hurt will be there for as long as it wants to be there.
“Happier than ever” doesn’t mean things are better. It just means the past is over.
Home Video by Lucy Dacus
Something you can glean from my music taste and even a bit of my writing style is that I love art that looks back at the past and learns from it. You don’t have to fully move on from it, but you can always reflect on the emotions you felt in that time and how it’s translated to the way you’re feeling now. The way your relationships come to define you as you grow older. How your worst mistakes turn out to be the most important lessons in your life. Or maybe you could look forward to how things could have been, maybe if the cards were right and you had the chance to pull it off. It’s romanticized, sure! But that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?
I first listened to Home Video and thought, “Yeah, this is definitely one of the best albums of the year”. I loved the album front to back and was mesmerized by how personal and beautiful the writing was. I always feel wary of critical favorites cuz I’m never sure how much I can relate to it or find any personal attachment with it beyond technical skill. But Home Video really is that fucking good, and it tapped into a deeper side of myself in a way that reflects my own approach to relationships, as well as my tendency to romanticize my loneliness and yearning for something more. That’s not to say Home Video is naive in any way. Quite the opposite. It looks back at those relationships and wonders what went wrong. Lucy recognizes the moments when her vulnerability as a young woman created a memory that she’s free to laugh at now, but that doesn’t mean she can’t feel the lingering euphoria that resides in that memory. That’s the thing about reliving those old memories. The emotions are there, it’s just either romanticized or downplayed once everything in her life plays out. It’s fitting that the album starts with “Hot & Heavy”, where Lucy reminisces on the places she grew up, recognizing how many of those experiences and feelings are things she can never revisit. Because once you leave a former part of yourself, you can’t get it back. So you have the nostalgia of reliving those parts of your childhood, but perspective means it’ll never be the same. No matter how much you want it to be.
I’m most gripped by the way this album talks about romance. In particular, I love the contrast in Lucy’s relationships with the men she loved and the women she loved. On the surface, this album shows that Lucy was a little boy crazy. Or at the very least, she was always scared to be alone and latched on to the men who liked her. But it becomes increasingly obvious that the men she was with weren’t exactly model people. Her first boyfriend on “VBS” was emotionally broken, and his excessive nihilism caused Lucy to become disillusioned early and doubt her connection with God. “Partner In Crime” reflects on a relationship Lucy had with an older man when she was a teenager, and even if she deflects by saying she’s the one who lied about her age, that doesn’t change that her attempts to be more “adult” to impress him reflects the power imbalance between them. “Brando” relentlessly mocks an ex who revolved their entire relationship around his interests, and how Lucy only tolerated him out of a desperate need to have a partner at all. The common theme between all of these is looking to these men for guidance when really, they’re the last people she should have been looking up to. A lot of it has to do with her strong religious upbringing, where her conservative Christian beliefs were suddenly challenged by the fact that people around her frequently engaged in sin. “Cartwheel” is full of that anxiety, especially when she stops seeing her then best friend because she lost her virginity. It leads to the classic religious form of self-loathing whenever she does fall into those perceived “sins”, trying to justify herself rather than admitting that she’s trying to fit into a world that goes against what she was raised on. Especially as it relates to her queerness.
That’s the angle with this album that intrigues me the most. Her relationships on this album are strictly with boys, but when focusing on the girls in her music, there’s a different energy to them. She’s very protective of the girls on this album, especially when they get into certain relationships that may turn out to be harmful in the long run. I remember being gutted by how ugly things got on “Christine”, where she clearly loves and values an implied queer female friend (“We're coming home/From a sermon saying how bent and evil we are”) but resents her boyfriend for being seemingly abusive and uncaring for her. Even admitting at the very end that she will jeopardize her friendship and loudly object to them if they got married. Similar case with “Thumbs”, the most intense moment on the album where she accompanies a friend to visit her estranged father and Lucy fantasises about killing him for the way he traumatized her friend. The queerness in those songs is mostly subtext, but the album closer “Triple Dog Dare” is much more explicit about it. Lucy reflects on a close friend in high school that she fell in love with, but since neither of them were out at the time, things never materialized between them. Especially when her friend’s mother saw romantic potential between them and actively separated them to avoid it ever happening.
But “Triple Dog Dare” has a twist in that it’s the one song on the album that actively changes the memory. Throughout the album, the “home video” is meant to reflect Lucy Dacus revisiting her memories and watching the ways it shaped her. She wouldn’t make these mistakes or relive those emotions again, but she finds solace in accepting that they happened. “Triple Dog Dare” asks what if things were different? What if they did enact in their internalized queerness and ran away together? Forget the mom, forget the religious upbringing that forbids their love, forget losing touch with her, and never seeing what could have been. What if it did happen? Maybe they should have run away and live out the rest of their lives together. Even if they end up dead at sea, at least they didn’t have to look back and wonder, “What if?”. Except, all of that didn’t happen. And Lucy just lost touch with someone who probably deserved to be with her more than the other partners in her life. Nothing wrong with living in that fantasy though.
I wasn’t sure if I was overrating this album at first, but the more I listened to it, the more I fell in love with it. The more I thought about how I would watch my own “home videos” and what I would take away from them. In a way, I’ve kind of done that all my life. That’s probably why I connected with this album so much. I have my own religious upbringing and how that’s affected my own teenage angst. Plus the way I wrestle with my sexuality, my yearning for something more out of my relationships, and the lost potential that I wish ended differently. But I don’t reflect on them with sadness anymore. I find comfort in them, much like how Lucy finds comfort in her own past memories. That sticks with me.
MONTERO by Lil Nas X
There’s a lot to talk about with Lil Nas X. Honestly, I’m surprised I don’t have a fuller review I could make of MONTERO. I could easily go into the rollout to this album and how it’s the closest this era of pop music gets to the Big Name Popstar rollout that was huge in the early 2010s. Or the impact of Lil Nas X having one of the biggest hits of all time as a black gay man, and how his queerness is essential to his life no matter how many people claim it “can’t be a personality trait”. I could even be mean and analyze the way Lil Nas X’s marketing and promotion always frames him as the underdog and why even his most blatant corporate moves are excused by statements of, “Wow, he’s really good at marketing”.
But I feel like not enough of it has centered around the actual music. I guess I can’t blame them for that. Lil Nas X’s marketing revolves a lot around the controversy, the discourse, the reactions from everyone about his crazy antics. He takes after his idol Nicki Minaj in that way. The music itself deserves to be more part of the discussion though. Because I could go on and on about Lil Nas X’s place in queer culture and the impact he has on pop music as a whole, but there’s an unexplored nuance to this album that I wish more people were bringing up outside of the shocking moments. After all, most people weren’t even going to be sure if he had a legacy to build outside of “Old Town Road”. It’s weird bringing that song up again because it feels like such a relic of a different time. It started out as a goofy song about cowboys that inexplicably became the longest-running #1 hit of all time and now Lil Nas X makes completely different music. 7 EP hasn’t exactly lasted in people’s subconscious outside of “Old Town Road”, “Panini”, and maybe “Rodeo”, so most people weren’t sure if Lil Nas X even had a future in pop music. My biggest problem with 7 EP was its lack of a clear identity beyond throwing sounds at a wall and seeing what sticks. If Lil Nas X didn’t want to be a novelty the rest of his career, he had to prove he had the versatility and personality to really stick it out, but the EP didn’t really prove that. In all fairness though, I wouldn’t have tried to build a full project around “Old Town Road” either. You can’t capture that magic twice, so better to find new magic that’s more sustainable.
Lil Nas X found a winning formula on MONTERO. I dare say it’s the natural evolution of pop music from 2010-2020. Say whatever you will about this album, you can’t say there’s another one like it out there. It has this jumpy, anxious energy that thrives in its most euphoric moments but still dwells in its darker impulses. Back in the days of Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas, and Katy Perry, music was an escape from the looming threat of economic collapse, trying to find joy and security in the brief flashes of happiness and fun as they try to ignore their fears and sadness seeping from their personal lives. Lil Nas X can’t escape that darkness, cuz now the threat is more than just economic collapse. It’s defining himself to a world that’s hostile towards him, it’s grappling with his queer identity and how that hurts his relationships, it’s wrestling with depression and anxiety that often leads to darker thoughts of suicide, it’s a lot. And even though “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)”, “INDUSTRY BABY”, “THAT’S WHAT I WANT” and others mostly revel in Lil Nas X’s need to be outwardly queer, a majority of the album is actually quite sad and insecure. In fact, a lot of it lashes out at the people who doubted him. Whether that’d be people who dismissed him as a viral novelty or even people within his own family. His parents are a particularly touchy subject for him. He shows a lot of resentment for his dad for not believing in him while his relationship with his mom is rocky due to her drug addiction. Plus, those people who thought Lil Nas X was a viral fluke definitely got a lot of backlash from Lil Nas X as he finally does make it in the industry. Still, that fame and fortune weren’t exactly how he envisioned it when he was younger. If anything, it’s made him more paranoid of the people around him, especially as an out gay man who doesn’t hide his sexuality and makes it a focal point of his music.
That queer angst is actually really prevalent on MONTERO. Lil Nas X could have just made a whole bunch of gay yearning songs where every lyric was a variation of “I might bottom on the low, but I top shit”, but he didn’t. I’m glad he didn’t, actually. For as much as his dissenters want to claim Lil Nas X shoves his gayness down their throats, being gay is a quintessential part of him. There’s this really ignorant idea that queer people whose entire personality is being queer are annoying or shallow and not being their true selves. I don’t think these people understand that being queer isn’t just being loud and flamboyant. Sure, Lil Nas X loves being theatrical in his queer expression, but it colors the personal aspects of his life just as much as the performative aspects. Part of the whole point of “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” is how secretive and sexually liberating gay love can be, even if one person prefers to hide it rather than embrace it. But even something like “LOST IN THE CITADEL” or “AM I DREAMING” with Miley Cyrus confronts that being openly queer is actually really hard. Especially since they’re constantly being perceived and judged by other people. No one wants to know the real you because they’re more interested in the person they think you are. Which really doesn’t help Lil Nas X’s guilt over past mistakes. MONTERO is supposed to represent an escape from that. A place where you’re free to express yourself without worrying about what others think of you. Then again, Lil Nas X wouldn’t be Montero without those insecurities. So they’re still there, but at least Lil Nas X can express it to those willing to be on this planet with him.
I think this album is going to resonate with a lot of young queer people still figuring themselves out. Hell, I’m sure it’ll resonate with queer adults still figuring themselves out. It’s an album that puts Lil Nas X as a big, inspirational pop star, but he’s not the God or ruler of Montero. He’s just another young queer person coming of age and expressing themselves through their passion for music. Him lowering himself to his audience’s level to hold a hand out for them is what makes the album so memorable, even if it’s also very messy and unfocused at times. But like, who cares? These hooks are endlessly replayable. There’s plenty of memes and quotable moments to make you smile. And it gives people like me security in their identity as queer people that would have never existed twenty years ago. Hell, it wouldn’t have existed ten years ago. Not to this level of visibility at least.