#aaaaaaaarrrrggghhh

[thisiskatsblog]

Making this a separate post so as not to hijack yours but thanks for answering this question about Matilda @dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram and for putting to words a few things I had trouble pinning down.

My feelings about Matilda are more conflicted – I don’t hate it at all, I really love parts of it as they resonate strongly with some of my personal experiences growing up in a very conservative environment and finding my voice and family in creating my own space for it, and there’s some great lines in the song about the importance of found family. But then there are also elements of it that completely run counter to some other experiences I’ve had with abusive situations, both first hand and from working with others on a professional level. And then indeed there are the parts that sit very uncomfortably, if you read the song from a generalised perspective as a song about surviving abuse.

I think part of the problem is that the song is, in fact, a covert message to someone in particular that he knows but whom he says (in an interview the link of which I am having trouble finding for a minute)  he somehow couldn’t speak to directly, and to whom - interestingly - he didn’t even play the song to before putting it out. Personally I think some of the narrowness of the experience described and some of the more confusing contradictions may come from this being about a particular person’s situation.  

Framing it as a song about surviving abuse in general, and then packaging it in the imagery of a children’s book, does not make the song any easier to read and I would agree that it contributes to painting an idealised picture of what it can look like to extract oneself from a situation of abuse - a picture that may be comforting (to me in some senses it really is because some of my experiences are like that - and I know I’m privileged in that), and a picture people may like to adopt from an idealistic point of view, but which may indeed not realistically apply to most situations of abuse, and which is not necessarily helpful to people currently in such a situation.

Whichever way you read it, as a general song about surviving abuse or as a covert message to a friend, I would agree that the line “I know they won’t hurt you anymore as long as you can let them go” is the line that sits most uncomfortably, because letting go comes at a price, always, and it would seem to me, only the person in that particular situation can put everything in the balance and weigh up the harm against the benefits of letting go. It raises so many questions I’d like to ask H. What do you know more than the person you’re writing this for? Why is your perspective on this so important? Do you realize that saying “as long as you can let them go” IS victim blaming – is indeed saying that “if you could only just let go, you’d stop getting hurt” - and how do you think that is fair to say?  

What frustrates me most about it, is that I think H would know better. He himself is in a situation that some would consider abusive – the music industry in general is abusive as we know, H himself has started opening up about how he feels about parts of the contracts he signed as a young person under very unequal power relations, the cleanliness clauses, and there’s of course the closeting he can still not talk about - all of that. H himself is deliberately choosing to not let certain things go (his dream of being a big popstar, his big label) and staying in that situation. And he surely knows that there’s a significant part of his following that spends their days sighing about how awful it all is and that would like to see him break free of those restrictions. Yet, his assessment of his own situation is clearly that it’s in his interest to stay in it, and stay closeted (for now). At least that’s the story I’m telling myself about H’s situation. So yeah, highly interesting that he does think he has the better insight into someone else’s abusive situation. 

Back to reading Matilda as a story H is telling about the unidentified friends’ situation - there are actually lines that do display a level of self-awareness and understanding of his limited insight into the other person’s situation  “it’s none of my business” and  “I know that time won’t change your mind”. In the interview he also says something about how he wanted to write something from that person’s perspective, not his own, but it IS very much his own perspective he is offering. It’s so strange, he didn’t pick up the phone, he didn’t play the song to the person. And I am having trouble understanding the immediate turn it then takes from “I know time won’t change your mind” to “in other words, I know that they won’t hurt you anymore as long as you can let them go”. There is a lot we are missing here to make his choices about this song understandable to me.

In short - I would agree with the assessment made another post that “With Harry (…) most of his songs are about something very specific that he’s not telling us.”  I think that’s very true of this song and he’s shared some of what that specificity is and there’s a lot he is not telling us. And I think that some of the frustrations I have with this song relate to the fact that it is written about a very specific situation in which Harry feels he cannot offer concrete support to the person, cannot call them on the phone, or even play the song to them, but his views are still important - which is all very possible, but that, sadly, framing it as a general song about surviving abuse, it perpetuates some harmful misconceptions, and offers no support at all but instead blames the person for not letting go. I’m trying to reconcile that with what he says about this being a song about self care and “not feeling guilty”, and I’m really having difficulty.  

If anything, I’d recommend H to pick up the phone and call his friend, really.