getting high on my own supply - 17. hillssongs pt. 1
"won't you please be friends" (november 2007)
at this point it becomes necessary to communicate that at the time of this song's recording in the fall of the year of our lord 2007, i thought that without a shadow of a doubt the most important cultural artifact in the entire fucking world was the MTV reality show the hills, which at the time was airing in its third season and at the peak of its popularity, after (at the time) innovative synergistic foreshadowing across the secondary texts of tabloids in the weeks leading up to the third season premiere supercharged the core onscreen drama of the dissolution of a female friendship with offscreen frisson.
there is an australian megachurch called hillsong known for courting celebrities, perhaps most famously another musical justin (bieber) during his rumspringa (it is also wreathed in crowns of scandal: see documentaries 1, 2). this episode's song, "won't you please be friends", is the first in an unfortunately not small series of what i'll call hillssongs, a dumb pun name that nevertheless touches the even dumber truth that for the years 2007-2009, the hills was basically my religion. that's not even really an exaggeration: i was an evangelist, it was my community and my source text, the event around which i organized every week. i thought and talked and wrote about it day and night, rejected any critique of it by outsiders i deemed untrustworthy or insufficiently open (richard lawson at gawker and alessandra stanley at the times were my enemies), and spent my days making works (songs, formal analysis, theories, fan fiction) in thrall to its power and glory.
i would eventually lose my faith and in retrospect i really wish that i had not spent some of the most artistically formative and productive years of my youth almost solely and with great intensity making fan content about a tv show about the lives of blonde women working in the culture industry in los angeles, a place i had never been and would not visit for another decade, but you couldn't have convinced me to do anything else at the time. as an artist (cough scorpio) i have always wanted to do exactly what specific thing i want to do at any given time and this is what i wanted to do then.
i don't really want to write much about the hills qua the hills (i already wrote way more about it than any person needs to in one or several lifetimes!!!), but to focus on the context of this series, in theory, being obsessed with a popular television show solved a lot of the (song)writing problems i'd been having. i did not have to write "writer's block" songs because there were always new things to say about the show! plus these songs were "relevant": there was a built-in audience who might find it interesting to listen songs about the show (since nobody else was making them!) as opposed to "normal" songs which had no market. the weekly release of episodes and need to comment in a timely fashion gave me a structure to force me to finish things and be consistently productive. over time, the subject matter also unblocked me emotionally: i felt like i could be more earnest through the veil of the projections than i could writing about real feelings.
in practice, this song, in which i perform a sort of jokey lounge act couples therapy for my two favorite television characters, still does not really have much of anything important or intelligent to say (global warming, the 2008 financial crisis, and xenophobia are used as punchlines for the more important issue of this friendship, "agit pop to agitate your heartbeats") regardless of whether it playfully situates heidi and lauren in the historical context of television friendships like ethyl and lucy and mary and rhoda and monica and rachel or makes a pun (that i am still proud of) of nielsen families (a childhood dream) and the cult classic harry nilsson album nilsson schmilsson. i thought i was such a visionary at the time and i don't think that now but i'm grateful this first record of my years of obsession with something stupid still exists (apparently before this i did a cover of "unwritten" by natasha bedingfield but i don't have a copy of it and i am also grateful for that).
