getting high on my own supply - 18. ugly
- "all the ugly people in the world should be shot" (october 2007)
- "mannequin" (february 2009)
the next song i recorded is called—and i wish i was making this up—"all the ugly people in the world should be shot". it begins with the line "all the ugly people in the world should be shot," continuing: "kill 'em all and leave everyone who's hot / we'll line 'em up and shoot 'em in the streets / their ugly blood will run by our pretty feet".
what's weird and telling in retrospect is that this first stanza doesn't really have...anything to do with the rest of the song (except as a kind of indirect way of characterizing the narrator). earlier in my youth i had loved a song by the punk band the vandals that started with the lyric "don't drink and drive / because you might spill your drink / before you get behind the wheel / just stop and think". starting the song with the disconnected stanza about killing ugly people makes me think about how we call the catchiest parts of songs hooks but that's a reference to the sharp jagged things that embed themselves into fish so they can be caught. in the vein of previous problematic faves like "WMD LUV", "all the ugly people in the world should be shot" is not about aesthetic genocide but instead a bit of early aughts short fiction magical realist riffing on the idea that a romantic partner could be returned or exchanged or replaced like a product (i had never been in love or anything like it). the song is clearly satirical but the fact that it's satire doesn't mean it's not also misogynistic and shallow (i remember being so pleased that the "box" in "glossy box" could refer to both a package from the store and a vagina).
when i was (taylor swift voice) 22, i wanted to be shallow, i needed to be shallow, i felt. that was the thing i had decided on near the end of college, that because i was quiet and shy and nerdy and not that good looking, i needed to complicate my personality type so that people (read: girls) would find me intriguing and want to get to know me, so i was going to lean into being as glib and mean funny as possible. in tallahassee, florida there are lots of swimming pools and an aphorism that i thought was clever and so liked to say (sometimes out loud, sometimes in writing, often in my head, as i imagined myself being interviewed about my work by some imaginary interlocutor) was "i'm like a swimming pool: shallow and deep".
the blog where i released these songs and wrote about the tv show the hills had recently been mentioned in a new york times review by virginia heffernan (who i had started talking to by commenting on her blog) of the show nashville, which was an attempt to apply the aesthetic of the hills to nashville (it was a failed attempt). this spotlight brought new readers, most of whom were people who were googling that week's episode and trying to find out what song played during a particular scene (eventually i would start listing these preemptively in the comments (not afraid to be servicey!)), but some of whom were there to genuinely engage with my work. one of them called himself "mike" and as it happened may or may not have been the writer and director mike white (there were no verified badges for wordpress.com commenters in 2007!), but in my mind he definitely was the real one because of course a celebrity was reading my blog, i had been in the new york times, like i was kind of a celebrity too?! he commented a few times on posts i wrote as that season of the hills went on but after reading the post where i shared this song, which i introduced like this:
in the player is a song called “all the ugly people in the world should be shot.” the original title was “disposable love” and that’s really what the song is about, but obviously “all the ugly people in the world should be shot” is a more attention grabbing title, so there. umberto eco has a new book about ugly people and why ugly people are more interesting than beautiful people. wait, i’ve heard this one, it’s cause they’ve got better personalities, right? no, eco says that ugliness is more interesting because there’s an infinite variation to ugliness while there’s an end limit to beauty (that golden section kind of bone structure, i guess?) ((and obviously the book is a load of complicated semiotics and shit but i am just going by the yahoo news interview here)). i disagree with eco, although i like his one-liner about how it’s less distracting to write about ugly people (“I was not disturbed by sexual desires.”). i do think that the sign of a truly progressive, radical cinema would involve all of the stars being really ugly, like not just quirky or strange or freaky but flat out mundane uggos like you see on line at the supermarket. i certainly wouldn’t want to watch that sort of thing (it makes my skin crawl just to think about it), but i would respect the statement.
(and really i’m just kidding, i love ugly people! at zoos, i wave and feed them pellets through the bars of their cages.)
he wrote a deeply hurt comment about how disappointed he was in me and then stopped reading and commenting forever and i was ultimately chastened by this and learned to be a better person. or at least that's how i've always remembered it, but the reality is that when i went back and looked at the actual posts, all he commented on that post was "you lost me on the ugly" and then a couple months later in my big post about the season finale, after having not commented any more in the intervening period, wrote "Just so you know, that hills parody with franco and mila kunis" (which you can watch here, credited to mike white, and which i had criticized on the blog as flat) "was something I came up with and was partly inspired by your blog just so you know. Great work with this blog – you are a real writer with a funny world view. Keep it up and stop discriminating against ugly people. Everyone is ugly/beautiful in the end. Peace!"
my comment in response, after some basking in the glow of the fact that a real celebrity read my blog, was "i will also try to work on my shallowness, though i can’t make any promises." i continued to be pretty shallow (i was 22), but i do think the dramatic way i've misremembered it all these years shows the impact it had on my self conception. before the end of this episode, as a chaser and maybe a sign that people can grow, i wanted to flash forward and pair this song with one i recorded a couple of years later called "mannequin". it takes on very similar themes (another magical realist story about the interrelation of love and commerce, this time about a man who has been magically turned into a mannequin and falls in love with a fashion model at the atelier but is unable to tell her because he's a mannequin and so is singing a song in his head to her). unlike "all the ugly people in the world should be shot", which just makes me cringe to listen to and which i debated rereleasing/writing about at all, this one i still feel warmly about. it's not like it's pete seeger or anything (it's a song about falling in love with a fashion model) but i feel like it's better in every way because of the change of the focus: instead of exploring these issues by talking about buying women, it puts the spotlight on me as a man someone whose ability to express love is constrained by the self and by society (i also like a lot of the internal rhymes, especially the old new borrowed blue run at the end). i will continue trying to work on my shallowness (a lifelong project), though i can't make any promises.