sadgrllzzz - Tumblr blog

[sadgrllzzz]

My Experience with Electra Heart

When I was 11 years old, I discovered Marina and the Diamonds. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was playing in a tent outdoors with my sister, and we were listening to music we liked on YouTube. I eventually ended up clicking on the youtube thumbnail for "Primadonna Girl," off of the Electra Heart album. As soon as the first few seconds of the song played, I was instantly hooked. The line, "Primadonna girl, yeah, all I ever wanted was the world," was the gateway to my obsession with Marina and the Diamonds. I loved her Electra Heart album and so many of the songs on it, but also adored the other album the band had released, titled "The Family Jewels." Marina's lyrics about depression, sadness, and feeling hopeless really resonated with me, and I deeply connected to the upbeat music with disheartening lyrics.

After I became a fan of her music, I began to express my interests online on websites like Instagram and Tumblr. The sad girl community was at large during this time, so I experienced a lot of it first hand. At this time, I had no idea that Electra Heart was a character, and the content I saw regarding Marina's work online didn't give me any clues about it, because they were all posted by kids just like me who had no idea about the real intention of the work either! Being in this community introduced me to other artists, such as Lana Del Rey, who I began listening to and still adore to this day.

I think the difference between the two artists does have to do with how they go about creating their art. I feel like Marina's insistence on performing as a character in her Electra Heart era really held her back as an artist later on developmentally. I don't understand the point of doing a character album if the next album released by Marina and the Diamonds had almost the exact same feel and lyricism. The difference between Lana and Marina is that by staying true to herself, Lana was more easily able to evolve and grow in positive ways as an artist. I see the direct opposite of that effect with Marina's body of work.

Now that I'm an adult, I do realize the intention behind Marina's work. However, does this really change the impact of the Electra Heart album for me? No. Everything regarding her fanbase and how the music was perceived and consumed would not change whatsoever if she hadn't had the intention of being ironic. I do not tend to go back to Marina's music at all, yet I still find enjoyment in going back to some old Lana, and I adore her 2014 "Ultraviolence," album to this very day.

Marina's intentions regarding the direction of the album did not have much relevance on how her work was consumed and obsessed over online. Although many find this effect of the sad girl online community plainly harmful, I would argue that this is a double edged sword. There are way worse things in the world than posting fan content of and celebrating the dark themes in an artist's music. What I ultimately take from the situation is that the community uplifted a lot of teens in their darkest times, and the way that others choose to cope isn't really my business, despite the fact that there can be negative effects from the space as well.

[sadgrllzzz]

Within her writing, "Social Media Sadness: Sad Girl Culture and Radical Ways of Feeling Bad” Fredrika Thelandersson picks apart what it means to be a sad girl, and what purpose being in this online community could bring someone. She aims to theorize why social media sadness has become so popularized online, creating a culture of sad girls.

“By sharing their own views of sadness on this platform, it becomes possible for Tumblr sad girls to explore their feelings together, and potentially provide support for one another by validating each other’s experiences. The glorification of sadness found among the sad girls here sometimes borders on the encouragement of self-destructive behavior. But, paradoxically, the fact that these experiences are shared within the virtual space intervenes in the glorified isolation and presents the possibility of a supportive collective.” 

In regards to Marina’s community, she created this group of people expressing their own sadness through her work, but unintentionally. There are negative aspects of the misunderstanding of Electra Heart’s character, but this means there are also positive ones as well. The positivity from the online community formed around the Electra Heart album are able to support one another through their sadness, uplifting one another. Expressions of pain like this can lead to more positive emotions, because expressing your negative feelings and working through them is an amazing way to cope with how you’re feeling. A community online like this may not be such a terrible thing, despite the negative affective posts that they create and spread. These young people going through pain are able to support one another through these painful emotional experiences, and cope through the music and media they relate to in this manner, such as Electra Heart. The community around Marina did largely misunderstand her intentions, but the original intent may not matter in regards to the positive things that can come from using sad art like this to cope with similar real life feelings.

[sadgrllzzz]

In Alice Hines’ “Taxonomy of a Sad Girl,” she tries to explain the grassroots of the sad girl movement, and theorizes why the community had become so large in online spaces at the time. She analyzes our history as a species, writing,  “Channeling depression into beauty through creative practice isn't new. It's an age-old coping mechanism that social media merely makes accessible. Meanwhile, many of the most famous works of literature aestheticize sadness, from Romeo and Juliet to the poetry of Emily Dickinson to Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides. In that novel from 1993, a family of suburban teen girls commit group suicide, a tragic and alluring spectacle to the boys next door who narrate the story. In many ways, the book (and its Sofia Coppola film adaptation) is a proto-Sad Girl text, written decades before smart phones made voyeurism inescapable. So why do Eugenides and Coppola get to explore the artful edge of suicide when teen girls on the Internet who do so are considered superficial and narcissistic?”

She makes an incredibly valid point in regards to the situation with Marina and Electra Heart. Just because the community adores her extreme lyrics about depression and suicidal thoughts, does that make their posts regarding her work harmful? The community is trying to express their pain through media they enjoy and relate to. There is chances for the behaviors being posted about to be romanticized and glorified, which is dangerous. However, it can be argued that the harm done here is far outweighed by the good being done for teens who have created their own supportive community for themselves based on their common musical interests and feelings of sadness. 

Blaze

0 notes

[sadgrllzzz]

Shravanti Shankar, a psychology student at Barnard University recently published an article within Psychoanalytic Study of the Child vol. 6, titled, “The Romanticization of Mental Illness and Adolescent Identity Formation: Marina and the Diamonds Electra Heart.” Within her article, she compares themes of young people forming their identities not only in general, but especially in online spaces. Within the article, Shankar uses the Electra Heart album as a case study, citing the music’s lyrics and the ways in which young fans were interacting with the source material online. Shankar addresses this, writing “the point stands that adolescents who were listening to the album did not grasp that Diamandis was satirizing Electra Heart. Instead, they idolized her, allowing her to shape their identities.” It seems like young adolescents who seem to be suffering from their mental illnesses may not be the best at detecting sarcasm and cultural mockery. They saw a figure who they felt understood their pain, and held her up on a pedestal. Marina’s artistry and her intentions behind the album were largely forgotten by younger fans

[sadgrllzzz]

In the above drawing posted by Marina Niguera, Lana Del Rey embraces a crying Electra Heart, as she quotes one of Del Rey’s popular songs, “This is What Makes Us Girls.” off her “Born to Die Album.”  Over ten years later, the image circulates around the internet as a humorous nostalgic meme of sorts due to how silly the crossover is.

To see if the impact of Marina’s music as the ironic character of electra heart is different than her peers who perform as themselves, let’s compare Electra Heart to another popular sad girl musician of the time, Lana Del Rey. Lana was a figurehead of the sad girl movement, shooting into mainstream sad girl stardom upon the release of her debut album, “Born to Die,” and even more so in 2014 when she released her sophomore album, “Ultraviolence.”

Inferring from the popular and well known crossover fanart, the fandoms of both Lana Del Rey and Marina and the Diamonds overlapped heavily. It was common for the fanbases to imagine a friendship between the two singers, as they sang about very similar subject matter. It’s obvious that fans of the two musicians are relating to them in very similar ways based on how they create fan media of them interacting with one another.

[sadgrllzzz]

How do fans of Electra Heart perceive her character?

Photos centering around Electra Heart’s aesthetic posted by Marina’s fans on tumblr often focus on the character of Electra Heart’s simultaneous beauty and misery. The collage photo above posted onto tumblr centers around glamor shots of Marina as Electra Heart, slightly sexual in nature. Lyrics from the Electra Heart album  centering around intense sadness juxtaposed against the supposed perfect beauty that comes with being a young girl. The simultaneous feelings of despair and ethereal youthful thin beauty is flagship within the sad girl community.

The way that members of Marina's community seem to take her lyrics and create aesthetic images out of them make it feel like they fully embrace the messages in her songs, and connect with them deeply. The plastering of these lyrics over aesthetic boards coupled with photos of Marina leads one to believe that the messages shown are accepted by the fans wholeheartedly, without that sense of irony originally intended by the artist. It's no wonder the community of Electra Heart fans grew so vast, as encountering these types of posts without context, and then viewing the source material would cause this cycle to repeat over and over.

i want blood, guts and angel cake, i’m gonna puke it anyway. ♡

[sadgrllzzz]

Marina's Viewpoint: Popjustice Interview

First off, let's get an idea on how Marina herself views her own art as Electra Heart, in her own words. In an interview with Popjustice in 2018, Marina reflects on her art in 2012 and what it meant for her personally to make that record. She states, “I think a lot of people will think Electra Heart is an alter ego or something but she’s not, it’s kind of basically a vehicle to portray part of the American dream, with elements of Greek tragedy and that’s all going to be coming out through the visuals… Electra Heart is the antithesis of everything that I stand for. And the point of introducing her and building a whole concept around her is that she stands for the corrupt side of American ideology, and basically that’s the corruption of yourself.” 

According to Marina, the character of Electra is completely opposite of herself, and she further implies that her satire is leaning towards being political, criticizing misogyny and the state of american life and politics. If one didn't know this already, the way that Electra Heart is portrayed by fans online would have you thinking the complete opposite of Marina's original intentions regarding the project.

[sadgrllzzz]

"Teen Idle"

One of the most iconic tracks off Electra Heart, and the track with the darkest lyrics by far. The character of Electra laments about losing her teenage years to her depression, when she should have been hitting stereotypical coming of age milestones, such as winning prom queen. The explicit nature of the lyrics are notable and one of the reasons why the song became such an anthem in the sad girl online sphere. Fans of the song really related to it on a personal level.

"Yeah, I wish I'd been, I wish I'd been, a teen, teen idle Wish I'd been a prom queen, fighting for the title Instead of being sixteen and burning up a bible Feeling super, super, super suicidal!"

[sadgrllzzz]

Electra Heart: Character of a Sad Girl

It has always been a stereotype that teenagers feel intense emotions, especially sadness, giving them a reputation of being, “moody.” Coming into cultural prominence in the early 2010s, a music based online fandom calling themselves, “Sad Girls,” or “The Sad Girls Club.” The community surrounding these musicians was infamous for being a very young fanbase. The sad girl community comes together to share with one another in their negative feelings, bonding over the emotions they all share. It seems like they find comfort in their numbers, and the emotions they all share. 

 The “Sad Girl,” online movement prominently features female figures who are not afraid to act out on their negative emotions, and is beautiful because of her sadness, not just in spite of it. It is difficult to simply define the sad girl, because she takes many forms and can be defined in different ways for different people. Many may know the most mainstream figureheads of the Sad Girl community, such as Lana Del Rey, Melanie Martinez, and Marina Diamandis. 

Marina Diamandis is the headliner for past band “Marina and the Diamonds.” Her character, “Electra Heart,” is the star of their album of the same name. Released in 2012, Electra Heart embodies sadness in both her character and her musical stylings. She focuses on the female perspective when portraying her exaggerated character, and is able to connect with her audience’s deep rooted inner feelings. As Marina plays a character within this monumental sad girl album, this raises the question of the effectiveness of irony within this era of sad girls on tumblr. Is it possible to effectively criticize the broader culture through the character of a sad girl? While Marina and her team certainly knew that she was being ironic, it is unclear if her fans always understood the message she was trying to put out. Personally, I was a very young fan of Marina during her Electra Heart era. From firsthand experience, I can definitely say that her sense of irony was lost on me. Although her music as Electra Heart is satire, is the impact of her art aligning with her goals? Does embodiment of a sad girl character achieve goals of making cultural change and connecting with people in positive and meaningful ways? Many of her fans seem to have idolized the character and music in its entirety. Just because it is ironic and has intentional meaning behind the music, does not mean the impact of her work is any different from that of her peers making similar styles of music, not playing a character.