I've been a visual artist my entire life and my "talent" is drawing. But after 20 years I've decided to try out music, mostly as an outlet. Musical influences such as the boyband Brockhampton and the singer SOPHIE have themes of reevaluating and grappling with oneself, and turning essentially what's poetry into something more tangible as complete music and I felt this was an appropriate reflection of myself as a person and to be my presentation for the class.
Bell Hook's The Will to Change touched upon men "who are still working their way back to the open-hearted, emotionally expressive selves they once were before they were told to silence their longings and close their hearts" (16). As the western world has normalized more and more of the European standards of what men and women "should do", the rippling effects of this have spread on to most people of color including the (East) Asian men that live in this western world; bottling up feelings and exhibiting machismo or living a life of social exile without hope of empathy, most of the time alone.
I am a Chinese genderqueer person, finally comfortable with being nonconforming to the gender binary of the western society I have grown up in and normalized myself in. There is more to identity itself than two polar opposite sides-- There is the in-between lost to the ages only to make a shy return. Being a Chinese-American person who still dreams to create cartoons, Disney's Mulan is obviously a connected film that will follow me til death; Mulan's journey started out masking herself as a man until revealing herself to be a woman in disguise and eventually resolving to prove herself through her actions unrestricted by the trivialities of the constructed gender binary and that any one person could be the role of the hero, that a hero has never had a set identity that affects their role. The thumbnail for the track is of the iconic musical number in the film when Mulan sings about the themes of self-reflection, regret, and her own struggling identity. In Brockhampton's Tape, which is recreated in the production of my track, all members' parts are sheer self-reflection that seem to be dipping into the lower points of their respective self-esteems. SOPHIE's Faceshopping, structurally, is a sandwich of hardcore industrial sounds crunching lyrics relating to reforming the mask we wear in this age of social media curation without escape any time soon which is then bridged in the mid-section by ethereal vocals where SOPHIE, amidst all this doom of losing yourself within the confines of a digital, internal mental jail, has a moment of fleeting beauty and yearning only to be swung back by the the loud echoes of returning back to our own loss of self again, a digital ouroboros we subject ourselves to.
SOPHIEOil of Every
Pearl's Un-Insides
Brockhampton
Iridescence
Resources:
Bell Hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004)
https://genius.com/Brockhampton-tape-lyrics
https://genius.com/Sophie-faceshopping-lyrics
Mulan, dir. Tony Brancroft, Barry Cook (1998)
No comments:
Post a Comment