LET ME PUT YOU ON #11: CELEBRATING 5 YEARS OF NORMAN FUCKING ROCKWELL/MOSTLY ACTUALLY OTHER MUSIC, ALBUMS, AND SONGS
Oh Yahna del Weh and Yahweh Goderman dont end America like that... plus a new GOAT has entered the chat
What can I write about Norman Fucking Rockwell that hasn’t been written before? I think it’s one of the best albums of the past decade, if not ever. It’s a no-skip— even “Bartender,” which I once contended was a flop before I grew the fuck up.
It’s a modern freaking classic. It cemented Lana’s status as a capital-S Songwriter (not that she didn’t have the chops before). Every sentence I try to wring out about this album feels pointless. It just is; you fuck with it, or you don’t. I’d go so far as to argue that if you’ve heard it, you fuck with it, and if you don’t for some reason, something might be irredeemably wrong with you. I’ll die on the hill that it’s a moral failing to not love this album.
I’ll admit my bias, though, as a longtime Lana fan. Not to be that bitch, but I was a fan before it was acceptable to be one. People shat all over her for being “unfeminist” (yawn) or “ —— OKAY OKAY OKAY scratch these last few sentences, I left this newsletter alone for a couple of weeks. I started this train of thought and left it for inertia to eat up, moth-style (because inertia’s always at my ass, and she’s always hungry. (Side note: Inertia would be a beautiful name for a baby girl. If I ever stopped popping my birth control and got myself knocked up I’d definitely name a baby girl Inertia, sorta kinda like how they created last names after professions during yore times— “Baker,” “Miller,” etc. — Inertia Park would be a fabulous name for a girl with a genetic predisposition to depression.))
So yeah, I gave NFR a re-listen, again. Fork found in kitchen. The shedding of character and pseudo-Sinatra schtick (vulnerability, BARF) post-Born to Die/Ultraviolence actually made Lana’s songwriting feel more expansive: the mundane refracting into a million sets of the infinite and divine vibes within each moment, and vice versa (BLECH, PTOO). I don’t think I’m making any sense. I’ve been holding off on writing this because I haven’t been able to make sense of it. But like that episode of South Park where Stan’s dad takes a record-breaking shit in some Swiss poop lab (“More Crap”), I just can’t hold it in anymore. So buckle up and get your wipes ready, babes.
I was reading Lispector again (FORK. FOUND. IN. KITCHEN.), Agua Viva this time because I was, uhh, mega-depressed, and it was the closest thing to a defibrillator that one of two patchwork-tat-they-them-run bookstores within a half-mile radius of my home had available. “I am making myself,” Lispector narrates. “I make myself until I reach the pit.” Later, she goes: “I can’t sum myself up because it’s impossible to add up a chair and two apples. I’m a chair and two apples. And I don’t add up.”
I was like, damn, pook. I’ve been trying to make myself make too much sense. I’d read that first line as if I were cosplaying a mechanic, just oiled-up for sport, going uh-huh, that’s definitely how it works. Pressuring myself into becoming a lean, mean Deleuze/Guattarian shawty without organs, as a philosophy major friend once quipped: functional, unreliant, inhuman. And then I read that second part and burst into tears. I’d been trying to square-peg-round-hole myself into an optimization-cel state, just trying to crack a code that definitely doesn’t exist. It’d felt like I’d unleashed a bajillion bugs into my empty veins and was just like, “Okay girls, let’s simulate some bloodflow.” As the maligned and martyred Kelly Bensimon of the Real Housewives of New York once famously said, it was fucking creepy. Well. Time to be a real girl again, I guess. And we’re going stream-of-consciousness mode this time, because I’ve been in no state to craft any sort of beefy thesis.
Back to NFR.
Lana posted a story a while back of her listening to Silver Jews’ “How to Rent a Room.” Real Susanators know I fucking ride for David Berman because he writes the world with a specific kind of levity and grace that I think should get him fucking ordained. Anyways, I think NFR was the turning point where she underwent a Bermanification— adulatory. She shat all over that gilded screenplay zhuzh and started going vignette mode. She wasn’t just playing in his wigs; she was exploring what the everyday could look like to her or anyone she knew, in iPads and hypothetical kids and borrowed tear-stained sweatshirts in the backseats of taxis. If anything, she was taking her own wigs off. The music wasn’t necessarily all confessional, but the scenes she drew up were decidedly real— as in, they could be happening right now: if not right here, then maybe just about anywhere else in the world. No matter how severe, the emotional scenes she drew up felt as regular and devastating as nature.
I’m no nature freak myself. My folks are Seoul suckers. Roads regularly run ten lanes wide there and it feels like the streetlights never turn off and the minimum speed limit is one million. I feel like Christina from Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World here in Ridgewood, waiting for the fucking M train. Twice now in my big grown life I’ve cowered in my room and asked a friend to come over and handle a bug situation. But god damnnnn there is something really magical and gorgeous about the way nature can be written about, as if even I can relate to it, as if I’m flapping my wings or something instead of spasming in amber.
Even though she wrote about nature a lot, I fucked heavyy with Marianne Moore in college. It wasn’t the nature, though; if you showed me Emerson or Whitman, I’d have said, “Miss me with that gay shit,” the type where some navel-gazing heifer can look at a waterfall and just say something like, See, that really fucking rocks, and I definitely rock too, in a similar vein to that. Moore wasn’t one to be all “me me me;” she was stark in her language and pretty freaking clinical if anything, making her word choice all the more fierceee.
Detached, maybe.
Now onto Manning Fireworks. I thought it’d be my Album of the Year (we’ll get there). I mean, j’adore MJ— for real. When each single dropped, you’d have thought it was fucking Christmas over and over again. A friend of mine once said she’d “never seen such glazing” (facts). Another friend texted me on album release day, right after midnight: “Happy Manning Fireworks. I feel like it’s your birthday.”
Unfortunately, I can’t talk about MJ Lenderman without referencing the “dudes rock” canon that plagues “online left spaces” (BAAAAAARFFFFF) and the general L train vicinity (CRICKETS). People talk about him like they’re Make-A-Wish Children who just can’t die until they have an underage brewski with their GOAT. It’s X (le app formerly known as Twitter) stan culture, bro-ified. And I could fall into microtrend pastiche and say some stupid shit like “I actually understand him in a nicher (WET BARF SOUNDS) and more esoteric (GRAPHIC RETCHING AND CHUNKS HITTING THE TOILET BOWL SOUNDS) way than the rest of you because I’m just a girl (GUNSHOT GUNSHOT GUNSHOT),” and include a painting of a lamb being crucified or something else vaguely religious to signify my emotional resonance with the text— yeah, again MISS ME WITH THAT GAY SHIT. And I don’t care to get into the “male loneliness” thing either. This is MY newsletter.
I mentioned Moore earlier because that detached, matter-of-fact aspect is very Lenderman to me. He writes so chill and hilarious about the everyday in a way that obviously belies the knife-in-gut aspect of each punchline. I get it. I love it. I default to humor most of the time because sincerity terrifies me in the same way that pregnancy would: the thought of actually being responsible for something beating and urgent inside me. I want to flush it.
He’s the “he's just like me fr” in my head. And cope aside, his music is stunning. But I thought about why I love him so much a little differently today when I listened to what I think is my top contender for Album of the Year — drum roll, please —
I’ve listened through it four times and counting. It’s on replay now. That’s over eight hours of the past twenty-four. I hadn’t listened until yesterday.
Cindy Lee is Patrick Flegel’s solo drag project, his self-avowed “diva fantasy,” releasing music that sounds like a radio transmission from a torn-down bar or a portal into the before-or-afterlife via the Ronettes or something. It’s chilling. It stopped me in my tracks for two hours; I couldn’t think or piss or eat or anything. I just sat there and tore through my menthol Juul pod.
The agency in Flegel’s going Diva Mode straight up made me reflect on a broification I’ve been undergoing for the past few years. I haven’t meant to; it’s just like carcinisation, how a bunch of animals can’t help but evolve into crabs all the way down the line. No one just woke up and thought, I think I’ll try a shell.
It’s really beautiful. The concept of a “diva fantasy” makes me smile, but also makes me want to cry a little bit. It’s all the same armor. I lay on a thick mug on and arch my back at the bar the same way I dap guys up after sex. I thought it’d be safer if I girled out a little less: that embracing being a girl, or a woman, or however you want to put it — no matter what age, both words feel like they sit on opposite ends of a sliding scale from sheer victim to self-aware tragic figure — would basically entail letting myself be fucked as an open wound. I’d figured that’s what I’d done in the past and that I could change course this time. It doesn’t feel any better, acting sewn up. Maybe I’ve got to unpack this in a HIPAA-sheltered setting. I don’t know.
I love Manning Fireworks because I instinctively get it. But I love Diamond Jubilee because it makes me want to crawl into my own guts and compress into a tiny little pearl or something. It makes me feel trapped in a way I have to reckon with: like, oh shit, I should probably take my hand off the stove. And I guess that’s something. Not bad for a bitch who could theoretically birth Inertia Park in nineish months if I forget to hit CVS next week.
ANYWAYS!
Diamond Jubilee - Cindy Lee. YAKWTFGO. And while we’re at it, my favorite non-single track from Manning Fireworks: “On My Knees” (pause).
UNTIL NEXT TIME<3
XOXOX
lovedddd