#self-ish is better than the normal album because it has cotards solution and the normal album doesnt have cotards solution.

[therehearsal2022]

I WANNA MAKE MY MURDER LOOK LIKE A SUICIDE! I WANNA GO ANONYMOUS TO IDENTIFY!

[sleepymarmot]

I hate sex! *CROWD BOOING*

Alright, here are my thoughts on the new single. Which took so long to write down that between me listening to the song for the first time before the video was even available and me putting this post into the queue, the author did an entire AMA and made some of these thoughts outdated lol

First of all, I think this was one of the songs I heard on that one public livestream I was lucky to catch a few months ago. I distinctly remember hearing something that must have been the “Newsfeeds, groupies, critics, analytics” part and thinking “Oh that’s bitter, can’t wait to know the full context”. Or maybe he’s been working on multiple songs of this kind, dunno. 

My first listen was on the Spotify app, and people have been saying that the sound quality on it was off. My ear’s not good enough to compare, though the Youtube music video version does sound better to me for some reason... What’s weird that when I listened for the first time, and later after a few hours, I felt underwhelmed by the vocals, then I didn’t, then I did again, and pretty sure it fluctuates from listen to listen? My ears work in mysterious ways.

Now here’s a thing I found interesting and kind of surprising. I’m not familiar enough with the music videos to count the ratio, but from what I’ve gathered, this is about distancing himself from his image associated with Self-Ish specifically. (The line “Guess I’m just selfish” doesn’t sound accidental. [Edit: according to the AMA it is an accident which is hilarious.] ) But... wasn’t Self-Ish itself, too, about alienation from the past self everyone knows you as? Some of the lyrics even seem to specifically call back to the ones from Self-Ish: the reference to the age 27 (“-Ish”), the idea of one of the selves confronting and killing another ( “...Cotard...” and “...Capgras...”). Is this another turn of the spiral of self-rejection? Is it what “I would dance on his grave, but the music I play seems to say take me instead” means — the very celebration of outliving an outdated self is fossilized into another (just like at the end of the video, the screens now also show W. W. pelting himself with tomatoes — which took me embarrassingly long to notice)? It’s just a very weird idea to me that fans of this album specifically would want him to forever remain the same when the big finale of it was finally becoming ready to move on. 

Re: criticism of fandom. While I very much sympathize... Is it so surprising that songs talking about not being normal and not fitting in attract an audience who relates to that, and indeed acts on its social awkwardness by being cringy and/or inappropriate? Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Make good art about not being normal, get even less normal people as fans. Though I guess this applies more to clumsy social interactions than to obliviously taking lines out of context which I assume has been happening on the Third Hellsite?

It’s always kind of awkward when an artist is being negative about their fanbase and/or previous work, though, isn’t it? First of all you feel guilty and defensive about liking what is now “the wrong thing”. (Yes I am clutching my chest every time W. W. says something negative about Cotard’s Solution.) Then you feel supportive of the artist — but by doing so, aren’t you casting judgement on the “bad fans” and therefore presumptiously placing yourself in an opposition to them as a “good fan” while in reality you might also be part of the problem? I must admit I’m easily annoyed even by harmlessly immature things, and I clearly haven’t seen the worst of fan behavior because I intentionally avoid places where it’s likely to happen.

(Also thinking: the pressure to perform femininity as gender nonconformity for him as a man is obviously different from the pressure to perform femininity as gender conformity that women are subjected to, but it brings to the surface what femininity really is. It is a performance, an extra level of adornment. Expecting it of a person means not accepting them in their natural state.)

On another note, it’s very funny how this song could easily have been called for example Human After All but instead W. W. chose a title that’s provocative and completely misleading about the song’s content and tone. Also amusingly misleading in a similar way but opposite direction: releasing a song with the lyrics like “I’d rather leave” and “career suicide” as a first single for an upcoming album.

The music video is very good and elevates the whole thing to a new level. Hope to see more of this kind. As the people familiar with this blog might guess, the premise of an artist in a room where his past work is projected onto the walls is my sort of thing lol. (Are all of these the videos he took down, or is there only a partial overlap?) Full disclosure: I’m extremely inobservant and it took several times before I actually saw what was going on in it. I. e. the Will in black and white from the apartment is the one throwing the tomatoes (which he has gathered in the apartment) and the Will in black behind the camera is the third one. I conflated the two black-clad ones instead at first.