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Eminem talking about criticism. The Eminem Show (2002) | Kamikaze (2018)

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Here’s a little animatic I made.

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So, Should I Listen to Billie Jean or Not?

Michael Jackson is a musical legend that few compare to in talent. He was born into the music industry and raised to be a pop star at a very young age. He and his brothers made up the boy group Jackson 5, Michael began his solo career in the early 1970s when he was in his early 20s, and went on to produce insanely popular singles and records. He is so big in fact I feel ridiculous describing who Michael Jackson is. You have heard Thriller and Bad before right? Right. So let’s move on because I don’t wanna talk about Michael himself, I’m more interested in the problem he represents. Should I Listen to Billie Jean or Not? Should you separate the artist from the music or not?

There is this cloud that follows the Michael Jackson name around that has become difficult to ignore the older I get. There are allegations, we'll say, that have been brought up against Michael Jackson, allegations of child abuse that have merit to them, but nothing that has been officially proven in court. Yet victims have come forwarding claiming Michael was inappropriate with them, his own sister Latoya spoke out against him confirming the allegations. There have been documentaries that compile all the evidence against Michael, and when you sit through it looks pretty damning. I personally am inclined to believe Michael is guilty and should have been locked away for what he did. But that isn’t how it played out, every time a case was brought to court he was either found not guilty or it was settled out of court. The boys had to live on without justice while Beat It plays on the radio, and Michael passed away before the truth ever came out. What’s left is the music. So what do we do with it?

If it was someone like R Kelly the choice would be simple, I was never a fan of his music to begin with, there is video evidence for the abuse he inflicted and the women he basically kidnapped, case closed. I’ll never spend money on R Kelly. But with Michael the lines get blurred, and since he passed away I wouldn’t be supporting him financially by buying his music right? Right?

Personally I can't do it. If standing in solidarity means boycotting Jackson then I guess I can live without Billie Jean. I won't judge you for your stance on this issue, I can see both sides of this, but I don't want to extend the legacy of a potential monster. It isn’t worth it.

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Eminem’s Whole Life Story is Right There in his Music

Throughout this article I am going to link to every song I can think of that tells the more personal parts of Eminem’s story. Feel free to read about his rise to fame, or take a moment to listen to it.

Em was born October 17th 1972 and grew up as Marshall Bruce Mathers III, his bastard father gave him his name and then took off when Em was still very young. He was left to be raised by his mother Debbie, a single mother struggling with a drug addiction. The household was toxic and unstable. They moved around a million times before somewhat settling in Detroit. (Contrary to popular belief Em was not born in Michigan, he has Missouri southern roots.)

 It was in Detroit where he found his love for music and rap, it is also where he met his first love Kim. Kim and Em were teenagers when they first met, Kim had run away from home when Debbie invited her in. The relationship started from there, and was rocky ever since. They had their one and only child together in 1995. I’m sure we have all heard the name Hailie Jade by now, even if you aren’t an Eminem Stan. He struggled to raise a daughter while pursuing his dreams at the same time. He had to flip burgers by day, and do underground shows by night. He managed to release his first album 1996, it was titled Infinite. The album didn’t sell, well technically it sold 1,000 copies, with critics saying it sounded too much like Nas or the delivery was too soft. 1996 was a difficult period for Em, his album flopped, he was fired from the burger joint he was working at right before Christmas, and he had to move back in his mother’s trailer home, bringing his daughter and Kim with him. With the pressure building Eminem hit one of his lowest points, he downed a bottle of Tylenol and attempted suicide. 

It’s crazy the difference a year could make. In 1997 Em competed in the Rap Olympics, a rap competition the gains quite a bit of attention. He ended up coming in second place to the rapper Otherwize (who, never heard of him?). Otherwize won in a slimy way. During Em’s turn in the battle the man walk off stage and left Em to verse no one. After the whole ordeal he was crushed. A man came up to Em right before he was about to leave and asked for a demo, Em chucked it at him, still fuming from the loss. What are the odds that chance encounter would result in Em’s music being passed along to Dr.Dre?

 We all know the rest right? Hi, My Name Is  floods the airwaves and the public consciousness, the Slim Shady persona is born, The Slim Shady LP sells millions, Kim and Em get married and then divorced, The Marshall Mathers LP comes out, sell millions, forms a rap group with a few of his closest friends called D12, is critically acclaimed but politically demonized, Em stars in 8 mile, it wins a fucking Oscar, the best album ever made comes out and it’s called the Eminem Show, goes on tour after tour after tour, gets Encore comes out and it eh, Eminem gets married to Kim once again, they push out a greatest hits album, and it all comes to a screeching halt.

2006 was the next lowest point in Em’s life. On April 5th, three months after he got remarried to Kim, he was filing for divorce. 6 days later on April 11th, Eminem’s best friend of many years, a member of the aforementioned group D12, someone he was inspired by and looked up to, someone he loved like a brother, was shot and killed. 

This sent Em into a depression that lasted for years. He retreated from the music scene entirely, spiraled further into drug addiction, something he has been dealing with for a while at this point, and disappeared from the public eye. During this time his health was deteriorating, he put on bit of weight, started to struggle with insomnia, and grew dependent on prescription drugs. The few glimpse the media could get of Em during this time were still exploited.

In late 2007 Eminem overdosed on the equivalent of 4 bags of heroin. The doctors told him if he would have gotten to the emergency room two hours later he would have died. He decided it was time to get into a recovery program. After trial and error Em got clean in 4/20/2008, and began dipping his toes back into music. His first album back was titled Relapse and it received a lukewarm reception. It was a very playful and experimental album, a sound his fans with used to, but he came back swinging with Recovery. 

Again, I think we know this part. Put out Recovery and it returned him to the world stage, had record breaking hits like Love The Way You Lie and Not Afraid, released the sequel to the Marshall Mathers LP, released a collaborative album titled ShadyXV to promote Shady Records, toured (rarely because it was a trigger for him), dropped Revival which received mixed reactions, released Kamikaze with no warning as a huge fuck you to the critics of Revival, and finally released Music to Be Murdered By just this year. And that brings us up to date.

There are a million little details that I am missing, but to be fair his career has lasted longer than I have been alive. I think that plays into why I’m so obse-ssed with him, he as music for anything I could be going through or feeling. He is and will always be my goto. When I’m fed up with my own life I can fall completely into his world instead.

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How Do You See Music?

I am not a poet, I can’t sing, I can’t create a song to save my life, but I got the chance to interview someone who can. His name is Bryce Rickman, and I stumbled across one of his poems late one night while surfing Tumblr. I loved the poem and decided to take a look at his page, @pleasurewizard ,and found some of his music and spoken word. Musicians always fascinated me, they had a way of seeing and hearing things that I could never understand. I took a shot in the dark and asked if I could interview him about it and he was kind enough to agree. 

“My name is Bryce Rickman.

I play in a band called Priora, I don't really have a stage name for my own stuff. 

 I'm from southeast Michigan, in a small town near Ann Arbor. 

 My career presently is doing bindery in a print shop, but I do graphic design and photography on the side.

To me, music is both a passion and a hobby. I love music, I love making it, I love the process of bringing layers of sound together into a complete piece. I could see myself doing it as a job, but as it is right now, I do it for the enjoyment of creating.   

I've been creating since I was a little kid, I always loved art, and my passion for creating has a spilled over into new endeavors over time, but for as long as I can remember I've been making things. 

 My process for writing music typically starts with just kind of noodling around. I generally come up with a progression or riff I like, in the case of the band and we will build off of it from there, generally with the other guitarist in the band laying out the skeleton of the song (structure, rhythm elements, and basic sampled drums.), and then myself adding kind of the melodic movement. In the case of my own stuff, a similar starting point, I'll come up with a riff I like, generally with my midi keyboard, and then add layers under or over it, and try to give a sense of building towards something and giving all the elements of the music space to stand out. 

In the case of my own music, I am very heavily inspired and influenced by Nine Inch Nails, because of how they incorporate so many moving parts that sometimes clash, but can also create really interesting implied chord movements, as well as their use of pivot and borrowed chords. In a general sense, I'm trying to create a feeling with music. I'm trying to tell a story without words, or build a world in the mind's eye, but also just play with sound. Try to include elements that might not normally fit together. My apologies if this was pretty rambling, my musical process is less structured and more feeling based, it's less about writing with intention and forcing music to be something and more about trying to make the song be what it wants to be.

https://pleasurewizard.tumblr.com/post/632278404767612928/bobshwick-the-sudden-silence-i-wrote-this-with

  My process with writing poetry often comes from inspiration. I'll be doing something and I'll hear a line in my head, and a lot of times I'll end up losing it because I can't stop and write at that moment, but it's ultimately about trying to put a feeling into words, to describe a situation in simple terms that mean something to me. To dress up a feeling, with colorful or musical language. I'm incredibly neurotic about my use of language. I actively think about the placement of words in a sentence as they relate to other words, and how hard and soft consonants relate to vowel sounds. I want language to dance out of my mouth or across a page. I believe Herman Melville took a similar approach to writing. 

Part of the reason that I perceive language as musical is synesthesia. If you don't know what that is, it's a cross wiring of the senses (hearing color, or tasting sound) so that influences how I perceive language as more colorful or musical. Words are an individual color in my mind and I need to fit those colors together through the way that I arrange words. It's largely an unconscious process that I don't need to think about, but when I'm aware of it, it is a process I need to complete to feel comfortable.  I hear music in a similar way to writing poetry. I have a form of synesthesia involving music as well. I think about/ hear music in terms of the color and shape of the sounds. I can listen to a song and tell you what color that chorus is or what shapes appear in the verse. It's a hard thing to describe but music appears to me in my head as kind of nebulous shapes on a black backdrop, with layers of lines or shapes appearing over that and they change as a song progresses in both form and color. This is again, a largely unconscious process. I can actively think about it, but often don't need to.

 Another part of it is, that I try to listen to every part of a song. I'm fascinated by trying to dissect a song by all it's constituent parts, and that helps me learn to hear patterns or pick out notes or interesting movements or time changes or key changes. I think people often listen to music 80% for the words 15% for the beat and 5% for the music. 

I'm a largely self taught musician, I've only recently taken some lessons after playing guitar for 8 years. I think that it's important to understand the rules of music, but I also see immense value in breaking the rules, or never having learned the rules at all.

 Ultimately though I see music as an incredibly important and powerful thing and that goes for any form of creation. Creation for creation's sake is the most powerful learning tool that anybody who makes anything has. Make a thousand terrible things so that you can learn to make that one incredible thing, and keep creating, keep learning, and keep seeking inspiration. Spread your interests far, and gather as much information and experience as you can in order to fully utilize all of it in the process of the creation of new ideas, new art, and new music. Music is supposed to communicate something, whether that's the nebulousness of feeling and emotion, or a particular message through lyrics, communication is the basis for it. I think music is more important now to society than ever. It's a last bastion of communication in a world where communication has largely ceased.”

I decided to highlight some of the quotes that especially stuck out to me. Go check out Bryce’s stuff on his page and on his sound cloud https://soundcloud.com/bobshwick  https://pleasurewizard.tumblr.com Bryce Rickman @pleasurewizard on instagram.

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Reblog or your mom will die in 928 seconds.

I love my mom.

I am risking nothing

I AM SORRY FOLLOWERS, I LOVE MY MOMMY

Will not risk.

sorry followers :(

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The Musical Theater Scene Scares Me

We all love Hamilton, can we agree on that? The Heathers was incredible, Be More Chill was pretty good, and The Mean Girls musical happened. But something I don’t think we talk about enough is the culture around Musical Theater. You can find some of the most creative and talented people on this planet are obsessed with musicals, or the most oddly pretentious and possessive people get attached to them. I always wondered why that was. Back in high school the theater kids weren't outcast in any way shape or form. They were all known throughout the school as being loud, over the top kids with good hearts. But one thing that always stuck out to me was the level of importance and pride they would have over there roles in the yearly musical. It was a world they knew about and you didn’t, songs they could sing that you wouldn’t understand cause you never saw the show. A club they were in and you were not. Maybe that’s just anecdotal but I see it all the time online.People gate-keep on everything but musically theater especially. Little cliques have formed around each of these musically and I have seen people attacking each other online or not know specifics on certain little things in a story, or being a newer fan, or only liking a few songs. It’s draining. 

Enough with the negatives, look at all the positives. It has inspired so many people to create. Everywhere you turn you see either animatics, little animations, fan art, fun tiktoks, make up looks, or whatever inspired by these songs. Young artists have built up followings off the art they have made for their favorite musicals. 

So what makes musicals so different that it has inspired these kind of reactions? My theory is that this form of storytelling is like no other. Music is a powerful thing and if you can get you song to connect with an audience and tell a story then people will connect with the story just as passionately. Since these songs tend to be dramatic and over the top, liking musical theater has been something that has been made fun of in the past which is why I can see people getting defensive and protective over it. So I  guess I don’t blame musical theater kids, this is not an attack against you, if anything it is an attack against gatekeeping in general. Blast Dear Evan Hansen, keep making art, and stay weird. 

P.S Rent sucks.

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(Adox) IN CELEBRATION OF 117 fiNALLY GETTING ANIMATED, I DECIDED TO MAKE A BAKUGOU FANSONG! 

Lyrics:

you’re an exile/ a cause without a rebel/ scream to let it all out but your/ feet won’t reach the pedals/

a voice without a reason/ only calls your name/ It’s never hunting season/ but you’re runnin’ with wolves again/

You’re about to blow/ you’re about to set on fire/ you’re about to show/

how the blood tastes; stuck on your tongue/ you’re in first place, the sparks got caught in your lungs/ how the mud takes; when you always look up/ how the earth feels, when you are the sun/how the earth feels, when you are the sun/

You’re so hostile/ a cause without a rebel/ stuck inside your guilt/ stuck beside a pebble/

you never need a reason/ ‘cause he’s the one to blame/ otherwise it’s treason/ to hang your head in shame/

you’re about to blow/ you’re usin’ up all of your ire/ you’re about to show/

how you’re muzzled; how it’s all covered up/ you’re in trouble, it’s never ever enough/ how you’re flying, until you come crashing down/ how the earth feels, now that you’re stuck on the ground/ how the earth feels, now that you’re stuck on the ground/

your punch is like a bomb/ your wick’s inside/ you try to patch it up/ but the jabs still fly/

your heart is like a drum/ your eyes, they’re like blood/ you try to patch it up/ but you’re a rebel with a cause/ a rebel with a cause/

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He’s so proud of his answer

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What’s in a Song?

I am musically illiterate. I know none of the technical terminology and honestly half the time I can’t tell what instrument is being played, but I know what kind of sound I find appealing. This is my attempt to describe what I hear in a song. 

The song I am choosing to dissect is Stepping Stones by Eminem. Now this isn’t one of his more complicated songs, or his better known ones, but it’s one I enjoy quite a bit. When it comes to Eminem I have a deeply unhealthy  obsession with him and his music, so I know the general backstory to this song.  The lyrics take the listener through the rise and fall of D12, the rap group Eminem was in with some of his childhood friends. He raps about how the group peaked in 2002 and were doing great globally until everything fell apart when Proof was murdered in 2006. Proof was one of the more prominent members and the group and Em’s very close friend. When he died Eminem sort of spiraled, dealing with addiction and depression and didn't know what to do with D12. No one’s solo career ever ended up taking off and the group couldn’t survive without Proof. The core message of the song is Em loves D12 and everyone who was once in it, and he will always support his friends, but D12 is over. 

The tone and flow of the song is works well with its message. The beat sounds like thunder at points. I hear a lot of kick drums and snare, those are the only beats I can clearly pin down. The track has the intensity of running if that makes any sense. Em sounds firm yet apologetic nope, guilty. He has a line that he delivers as if this has been weighing him down for a while now. The line is 

“And by the time your reign is over, you'll hardly be missed You start thinkin' of all the artists you gift, all the carnage you left Is this the kinda karma you get For turnin' your fuckin' back on Bizzy, Kuniva and Swift? A Freudian slip, subconsciously, I honestly wished I ain't feel so much guilt and y'all didn't harbor resentment But it's hard to pretend that y'all ain't got none of this”

There are also moments on the track where he’s singing, and in my experience, I could be wrong, Em tends to sing when it’s something deeply personal to him. Example include Hailie’s Song, which was a song to his daughter, Difficult, a tribute to Proof, Going Through Changes, a song about recovering from addiction, and many others. There are exceptions but that’s the theme I’ve picked up on. 

I can’t forget to mention the rhyme scheme on this song. Something that I love about Em is that he doesn’t just piece words together, he can string together entire phrases that rhyme. A great example of this is 

“Bacardi in hand, never thought the party would end One minute you're bodyin' shit, but then your audience splits You can already sense the climate is startin' to shift To these kids you no longer exist”

I will go on forever if I don’t stop now. I love the storytelling, I love the beat, I love the flow and rhyme scheme, and I all works so well together. Give it a listen, it a song that doesn’t get enough attention and I feel they are missing out.

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It’s 3 am

It’s 3 am, or it’s getting there, and I can’t sleep. I mean I could If I would power down my laptop and throw my phone across the room, but it’s one of those nights where I don’t want to start the next day yet. Tomorrow is full of responsibilities, 3 am is just for me. It’s too late and too early to do anything yet. I find myself drifting towards music during these hours, but songs with a very specific feeling. I can come up with a playlist to explain what I mean. 

The first song I would put on it is a song called Dreams by NF. I love lyric heavy songs, especially those that are telling a story or describing a feeling and this one does both. The song is about moving on from an old relationship and finally getting to the point where there’s no more anger towards the person. I stumbled upon this song when me and my closest friend weren’t speaking to each other and all the lyrics reminded me of our uncomfortable situation. Lyrics like 

“But I appreciate the memories we had I know you've been callin', sorry I never call back I know I've been distant, you know I never meant that You can tell the family how I'm doing if they ask I'm just doing me” 

always pull me back to that lonely time. Maybe that’s why it’s on the playlist, 3am is a lonely feeling.

The next song I would add is Hostage by Billie Eilish. Hostage is on Billie’s EP titled Don’t Smile At Me, and is one of the first songs I’ve heard from her. It’s about an unhealthy, one-sided, and obsessive relationship. Thankfully I don’t relate to the intended message of the song, but the feeling of being a hostage is something I’m familiar with. I guess everyone in 2020 knows the feeling, but something about being awake at 3am forces you to think about all the things you’d rather be doing. Her voice is so haunting in this song, and it every song she’s ever done. God I love her.

Next would have to be Swan Song by Lana Del Rey. A common theme that comes up in many of Lana’s songs is the idea of running away, being free, and hopeless romances. This song is no exception. I gravitate towards Lana’s music when I’m feeling trapped. She has such an aura of freedom around her, something I wish I could replicate in my own life. 

Bittersweet Tragedy by Melanie Martinez is another song that takes me back to a very specific point in my life. I was dealing with mixed signals, messy feelings and poor communication. This song captures the frustration I was feeling perfectly and the line 

“And I'm done with your bittersweet, bittersweet tragedy It's no fun when I'm sitting all alone You're right in front of me (you're right in front of me)” 

particularly stung. This person and I have moved past the complicated situation we were in before to a place that I wouldn't change for the world. Now the song takes on this kind of irony when I listen to it, instead of it fueling my frustration it just reminds me of the person I’m missing at 3am. 

I might just be adding this song because I’ve been on a Nirvana binge recently, but it fits the theme. I can’t get over the song Dumb by Nirvana. I wouldn’t know how to describe it, there are very few lyrics compared to the other songs on this list, and the instrumentals aren’t particularly complicated but something about the feeling it invokes reminds me of 3 am. It’s tired, it’s draining, and it’s painful. The song is in the vocals for me.

All of these songs share this same kind of sound, but not in the most obvious sense. They are all sort of self reflective, melancholic, and lonely. It’s 3:21 am right now and that pretty much sums up the feeling.

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I Wish I Was Around For Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged Show

I’d say in general I’m not a fan of live performances. I mean I’ve never had the chance to go to one so what do it know, but it aways seemed like a hassle. Standing around for three hours straight surrounded by loud and sweaty fans who are shouting over all the songs. All that to catch a glimpse of your idol from a 50 yard distance. Yeah not for me. At least that’s what I would have said last year. Ever since covid I would happily attend an outdoor concert in the middle of a hurricane as long as I was surround to by other human beings. The more I’ve been trapped inside the more I long for one of these live shows. One show in particular that I wish by some miracle I was at is Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged show. 

The whole vibe on the show was toned down and a bit calming. The audience was very well behaved which I’m thankful for. It was almost as if a small group of friends were sitting in a basement listening to their friend put on a show with his guitar. This is not the discount the rest of the band, it was the instrumentals that made a lot of the songs for me. Take Nirvana’s cover of The Man Who Sold The World by David Bowie, there is a long outro of just instrumentals that I would usually skip for most songs. This time around I couldn’t, I just stared blankly at the ceiling as it played unable to turn it off. 

A big problem I have with live shows is that a prefer the polished sound of a studio album, but Nirvana is an exception. Kurt’s vocals are rough and unpolished as a stylistic choice and it’s a powerful thing, especially live. His vocals during the cover of Where Did You Sleep Last Night is still my favorite cover to this day. This doesn’t even compare to their own songs that they preformed that night. The two standouts for me were Dumb and Polly, but I could be incredible biased because I’ve always loved these songs. In the song Dumb you can hear a sort of mental exhaustion through the vocals that I think really resonates with me in the year of our lord 2020. Polly on the other hand is a vicious song about the murder case of a little girl, and the fact the audience was excited for that dark song to play really speaks to how well it was written. 

This show was nearly 26 years ago now, and by the time this MTV Unplugged show was released on VHS and cassettes Kurt Cobain already took his own life. There’s an interesting Rolling Stone article that reflects on the time period and the performance from a first hand perspective I will never have, I recommend it. They were a band the captured the attention of a generation, and it was a show that immortalized an icon. 

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Melanie Martinez Should Never Change Her Brand

So if you don’t know Melanie Martinez, she’s a singer/song writer who really launch into the mainstream after her 2012 appearance on The Voice. She didn’t win, the good ones never do, but she did catch many people’s attention with her interesting look. Her hair is split right down the middle with one half bleached and one half black, she wore very preppy clothes, and topped the look off with a giant bow. 

Fast forward 7 years later and she has solidified her brand. She’s Cry Baby, a kid at heart with morbid ways of expressing herself. She traded in her preppy attire for what I would describe as puffy, frilly, and pink. Majority of her songs focus on some element of childhood, and she uses this as a lens to express her feelings in her adult life. Nothing better represents Martinez’s brand than her most recent album, K-12.

So the premise of K-12 is Martinez going through each grade level of school starting with kindergarten all the way to senior year of high school. Each song focuses on some element of school life starting with the first song titled Wheels on The Bus. I can only give my personal interpretation for all of these songs, but I'm sure it won’t be too far off from the general consensus. This song is a play on the classic nursery rhyme of the same name and it’s about children being left up to their own devices when the adults aren’t paying attention. This song is very upbeat and lighthearted vocally and instrumentally, but lyrically it’s a bit more mischievous (couldn’t think of the right word so that will have to do). With lyrics like “Now, I'ma light it up and pass it Puff‚ puff and pass it Don't be a dick and babysit, c'mon, just pass it over here” it reminds me of the side of growing up that the parents like to imagine doesn’t happen. The part where you get high with your friends in the school bathroom, or hookup with the kid who sits next to you just because he’s kinda cute. It happens all the time, but parents like to pretend their child is the exception. They are not. 7.8 out of 10.

Class Fight is up next. The song is about two girls fighting over the affections of some boy. There is a common theme that pops up in some of Melanie’s songs, and that is that her parents are awful. This song is no different. During this fight her dad is encouraging a hesitant Martinez to “go for the throat”. I can’t relate to this song in particular but I’m sure someone somewhere can. It’s less than three minutes long but it’s way too repetitive for me, in fact I just looked it up and the phrase “for the throat” came up 38 times. This song is usually one I skip. 6.5 out of 10.

Her next song is titled The Principal and its about a power hungry man who does not care about those he was suppose to protect. In the song she talks a bit about the state of the US with the opioid epidemic and the constant school shootings in the line “Killing kids all day and night, prescription pills and online fights”. In hindsight I should have already known this, but the song is about our president Donald Middle Name That I’m Forgetting Trump. This song was in my top 3 on the album before I even knew it was about Trump, and now I hear it from a different perspective. She’s frustrated and truly angry with this man, and she feels left behind. The post-chorus is just Martinez calling out asking where’s the principal. I never got that part before but now I have a whole new appreciation for this song. 8.2 out of 10.

Show and Tell is the next song and it has the interesting beat. It feels like a slow grandfather clock ticking. While I'm at it I might as well mention that I love the little effects she adds in backgrounds of her songs, like dogs growling, or kids cheering, it’s a nice touch. Okay back to Show and Tell. This song focuses on Martinez struggle with the constant spotlight that is on her, and how the paparazzi can make her feel like an object that is meant to be observed and toyed with. I love the beat on this song, it makes me feel like something is creeping up on me, I always expect some kind of beat drop but it never really comes. 7.9 out of 10.

Nurse’s Office  is the one song off the album that perfectly describes what my middle school experience was like. In the song Martinez wants to avoid the hell that is school by faking an illness and getting sent to the nurse’s office. It reminds me of all those uncomfortable years we all went through growing up. I remember faking a stomachache and going to the nurse’s office during gym class just to sit alone on a mat for 40 minutes and scroll through my phone. The feeling is real and this song captures it. This song sounds the way Alice and Wonderland looks and feels, there is no better way to describe it than that but hopefully when you listen to it you’ll know what I mean. 8.8 out of 10.

Do you remember all the bullshit you had to pretend to care about in middle school? Like when Stacy told Erica that Bethany wasn’t her friend anymore and omg how dare she do that? Or when someone makes fun of your socks for being too colorful, or calls you an attention whore for dying your hair red?  That’s what Drama Club is about, it’s about how words get misconstrued, things get blown up out of proportion, and if you don’t follow the script of life perfectly you asking for drama. Drama in middle school felt like the end of the world especially because half the time you couldn’t tell what even started it. It was tiring, it was senseless, it was frustrating, and I hate to admit but it was painful, and all on that comes through in the vocals. Thank fucking god  we outgrow that all that stuff. 8 out of 10.

Strawberry Shortcake talks about the pressure many girls feel when they are growing into their bodies. People stare, comment, compare, judge, grab, and hurt young girls all the time and blame them for being too tempting. I heard it from my own mother all the time growing up, she told me going out in cutoff shorts is why men will take advantage of me. In the lines “It's my fault, it's my fault 'cause I put icing on top Now, the boys want a taste of the strawberry shortcake That's my bad, that's my bad, no one told them not to grab” Melanie takes on an apologetic tone when talking about her own body. It is only towards the end of the song when she takes on a more confident tone and claims her body for her self. 8.1 out of 10.

The 8th song on the album is a short little song titled Lunchbox Friends. The song’s about fake/temporary friends that only want you around when it’s convenient. I love the chorus in this one because her voice was altered to be a lower and slightly distorted pitch. There’s not much to say about this song but it is remarkable high on my ranking for this album, 8.6 out of 10.

Orange Juice covers the very serious topic of eating disorders and uses orange juice as a metaphor for bulimia. The vocals are very soothing and the instrumentals relaxing. The song is gentle, and the lyrics are of Martinez trying to comfort a friend that is currently suffering from an eating disorder. It’s a powerful song without needing all the force or heavy beats from a traditional empowerment song. 8.5 out of 10. 

Detention is the one song off the album I always skip. The beat is almost tropical and the lyrics don’t have as focused of a message as the rest of the songs. It’s similar to Show and Tell in messaging,  it’s about dealing with fame and having to be on your best behavior to satisfy other people. But it’s always been the song I could do without. 5 out of 10.

Teacher’s Pet on the other hand is a song I have never skipped when it came up on shuffle. The song’s about a student-teacher affair, and how the student has to grapple with the fact that the relationship is wrong on paper but hiding the relationship makes her feel like a dirty secret. Melanie’s voice is sultry and the beat lurking and intimidating. This song doesn’t hit close to home for a lot of people but it does a great job placing you in the students shoes. 9 out of 10

High School Sweethearts is not only my absolute favorite song off the album but it’s one of my favorite songs ever. The beat and vocals starts very slow and romantic until they pick up pace as the song goes on and it becomes more more bouncy. Melanie is asking her sweetheart to treat her right in her own special and dark way. One line that sums this up best is “Step six If you can't put in work, I don't know what you think this fucking is Step seven, this one goes to eleven If you cheat, you will die, die”. It’s a fun song, it’s a sweet song (kinda), and I’m obsessed with it. 9.99 out of 10. 

We made it. The final song is call Recess. The song reminds me of what would play at end of a movie after the happy ending and when the credits are rolling. The song is about prioritizing yourself and your happiness and not letting others take advantage of you. It’s the perfect ending to the album and it’s a neat little song. 8 out of 10.

Final Ranking

13. Detention

12. Class Fight

11. Wheels On the Bus

10. Show and Tell

9./8. Drama Club/Recess

7. Strawberry Shortcake

6. The Principal

5. Orange Juice

4. Lunchbox Friends

3. Nurse’s Office 

2. Teacher’s Pet

1. High School Sweetheart