Devil in a White Tee
Media Round-Up
The Power of the Dog - Did you see how many Oscars that got nominated for? What a convenient opportunity to read all about how it engages with the classed and racial elements inherent to masculinity: https://thespool.net/reviews/movies/film-feature-racial-class-masculinity-power-of-the-dog/
Querelle - Probably weird that this is my first Fassbinder but I loved it. Surreal with so much to dig into. I might end up writing something on how Gunther Kaufman is positioned and used because I might love it but also maybe not.
By The Time I Get To Phoenix - The more I listen to this album the more it enchants me. There’s just something very fucking harrowing about it and I am descending more and more into being a Noise PersonTM
Parallel Mothers - It is Incredible to see Almodovar with some fire in his belly, and Penelope Cruz is giving an all-time performance! Interesting racial and class politics that I may write about later.
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Devil in a White Tee
I'm not a fucking role model (I know this)
I'm a 19 year old fucking emotional coaster with pipe dreams
Goblin is a lot of things. It’s Tyler the Creator’s first studio album. It’s overlong. It’s raw. It’s edgelordy. It’s misogynistic. It’s also his album that fascinates me the most. There’s an intensity to the anger that running through it that compels me and is something I want to talk about more broadly.
OXYGEN
Goddamn, I love bitches
Especially when they only suck dick and wash dishes (What?)
Cook and clean and grant my wishes
There are real fucked up lines in Goblin, and often the people who bear the brunt of this lyrical aggression are women, with repeated descriptions of (sometimes) sexual violence which are at points extremely graphic. I don’t really want to defend that, but I do want to talk about where it comes from. I think these lines function as a twisted parody of the very normative heterosexual standards that queer people are constantly subject to. What’s important to remember here is that normative heterosexuality isn’t less violent than Tyler’s proclamations. There’s a real danger in fixating on the loud and being numb to the ongoing lethal thrum of the normal. This was something made abundantly obvious when Theresa “architect of the hostile environment policies which made it nigh impossible for queer asylum seekers to remain in the UK” May, banned Tyler from entering the country in part because of his homophobia. Beyond that, it's 'normal' for young trans people to be thrown out of their homes. It's 'normal' for queer kids to repeatedly be at the receiving end of 'corrective' control and outright violence as long as it happens within the privacy of the home (and/or the prison). Works like this can bring the oft-hidden violences out into the light - even though Goblin is haphazard in its delivery of the critique.
What the fuck I look like? Saying I'm sorry
To a bunch of fucking fags that can't potentially harm me?
The posturing also comes through in how the album engages with queerness. We still don’t really know the specifics of Tyler’s sexuality - and why should we? He could be gay, he could be bi, but so aggressively trying to say you are exclusively into women and detached from the 'faggots' is such a specific energy, which even without his subsequent coming out(s) is not exactly giving heterosexual. This isn't to say every homophobe is secretly queer, but the particularities of Tyler's expression here make the posturing so transparent. (And why I'd argue for this as his gayest album!) What also makes this funny is that I knew niggas who even after IGOR would swear up and down that the queerness was just some kind of performance art!
Satan's getting jealous of the wolves, the demons say they preferring us
The ball is probably dropped the worst in “Tron Cat”, where he unleashes ALL his venom in ways I’m not especially interested in writing out here, you’ll just have to trust me on that one or listen for yourself. His clear lyrical talent and the modicum of self-awareness from the therapist character/general framing isn't enough to absolve this track of its sins as a laundry list of violent misogynistic fantasies. Even when (correctly) not taken at face value, it still grossly instrumentalises women and the violence they regularly face.
Don't wanna seem like a punk pussy that simps over punk pussy
See when I'm with my friends I just put on a front
But in the back of my top, I'm writing songs about we
I think the grim parts of this album also bother me less because I only sat down and listened to Goblin in full after IGOR came out. So it was (even) easier to recognise that this was just a stupid kid who had been hurt badly lashing out at anyone he could. That doesn't make the things he says here not fucked up, you can absolutely parody normative heterosexuality without playing into particular hateful rhetoric, but not taking these lyrics at face value elucidates what they really are - posturing.
HEAT
Kill people, burn shit, fuck school
I'm fucking radical, nigga, I'm fucking radical
As a kid, I really loved Digimon Data Squad. With more distance, I realise there was one part of it that I aggressively attached to and still can't get out of my head. The characters in the series worked for a government agency that dealt with any friction/disturbances between the Real World and the Digital World (etc etc you know the drill). In the leading trio, two of them used devices to summon and digivolve their digital companions, but Marcus was different. He would jump up and punch whatever antagonist they faced with his own fists to set off the summoning/digivolving. I think there’s just something about that which stuck with me, the idea that you and your fists could make a real tangible impact, that if you just got angry enough and acted on it, the world would fundamentally change. Of course (as the show elaborates on) things are rarely that simple.
This is hell, you don't ever gotta fight fair
This is the anger that you see in the eyes of Chiron (Ashton Sanders) when he smashes the table over someone’s back in Moonlight. It’s not just anger at his classmate who tormented him. It’s a deep rage at the series of systems and ideas which led to him getting harassed for years. When the outburst happens there is often a collective amnesia from the people around you. All those little daggers which you remember precisely are reduced to papercuts, while you’re laying on the floor bleeding out.
My only problem is death
Fuck heaven, I ain't showing no religion respect
I was never the kind of misogynistic, loudly homophobic etc that you see in this album, I was much too self-righteous for that. But I can still feel echoes of the emotion behind it. The feeling that the world has wronged you and someone has to pay. That if you can hit out hard enough something will have to change, that your fire can’t just blow out on the wind. The problem is that once a wildfire starts it’s hard to exactly control its direction. You can feel this in “Window” where Tyler ends up killing all the friends that he had been talking about loving and wanting to protect. Now everything around you is burnt to ashes while systems that fucked you only get a cough or two from the fumes.
FUEL
And I'm not even human, I'm a body-shaped demon
With some semen in my sack, and some problems in the back
At points in the past, it has felt like all that anger was venom coursing through my veins, ready to strike at any moment. A knife unsheathed, a gun loaded and ready for any confrontation. We aren’t built to hold all that. That constant state of pre-empting combat and being ready to fight at any moment cannot be sustained, no matter how necessary it feels and no matter how essential it is for survival as a marginalised person. So your options are to find a way to redirect the anger or cease being a person at all.
Love? I don't get none, that's why I'm so hostile to the kids that get some
I think that’s why the conversation between Nicola (Jane Horrocks) and her mother (Alison Steadman) at the end of LIFE IS SWEET hits so hard, because it’s like, wow, I feel that anger which just will not end, and you don’t know where to put it, so you turn it inward. “I didn’t ask to be born” Nicola, the black sheep of the family shouts. There it is, the feeling that if there is no one external that you can punish for the feelings anymore, it must be you that is the embodiment of evil, the rotted despicable waste of a thing. That shit gets wound tight, with only brief moments of relief, until the pressure rips you apart.
Fuck the fame and all the hype, G
I just wanna know if my father would ever like me
James Baldwin’s novels are full of people destroyed by this process. From start to finish Another Country is stacked with characters whose built up internal pressure causes them to be miserable and burn the people they love the most. As much as I don’t find Giovanni’s Room especially compelling, it does capture the brutal misery of a seething resentment held within. Go Tell it on the Mountain is also full of repression, resentment and sadness held close to the chest. All of these characters are maligned by systems of oppression in one way or another, and those meld with the interpersonal to stoke their unspeakable internal flames.
“Something in Rufus which could not break shook him like a rag doll and splashed salt water all over his face and filled his throat and his nostrils with anguish. He knew the pain would never stop. He could never go down into the city again. He dropped his head as though someone had struck him and looked down at the water. It was cold and the water would be cold. He was black and the water was black.” - Another Country
ASHES
I’m generally not angry in that way anymore, but sometimes I miss it. You don’t have to take in how depressing shit gets when you’re running from fight to fight. It feels more simple and honest. I don't know if I can ever really get that back, or if I’d even want to. But for now, I guess I’ve gotta brush the soot off my clothes and keep moving.
I’m less online lately, but whsiper on the winds and maybe you’ll fine me! Always appreciate your support whether that’s verbal, financial (ko-fi.com/tayowrites) or whatever else.