06/06/21 - Getting Vaccinated While Listening to Olivia Rodrigo
06/06/21 - Getting Vaccinated While Listening to Olivia Rodrigo
It's brutal out here!
The extinction-level threat of climate change destabilizes the idea of seasons, and cycles of nature stagger down the year like sickly men. Still, we try to feel for shifts in temperature, like it all still makes sense, and orient ourselves accordingly. It doesn’t feel like summer. I pulled up to Marikina Sports Center a couple of weeks ago when a light drizzle came down, meek dark clouds gathering like nervous friends all coming out of shitty depressive spells.
Two or so years have passed since my last Pride event. My brain didn’t want to accept the sight of empty bleachers and a barren field and so I filled the vista—horror vacui style—with my favorite thing about Pride: people in love. Queer couples! Holding hands! Exercising the ability to be in public and knowing they won’t be accosted, save for the one lone Bible-thumping doom prophet outside the gates who’s guaranteed to get clowned on by a drag queen in glittering angel wings. The idea of salvation is also destabilized.
I’m here for my first shot. Sinovac. The sight of tents, monobloc chairs, and volunteers putting on their best brave faces take the place of food stalls, rainbow merch, and progressive Christians giving out apologetic free hugs (another pre-COVID pleasure that quietly died). I took a Friday leave for this and decided to give SOUR a shot while waiting in line. I saw it floating around in the internet aether, old-ass millennial friends extolling this thing not for them, and I kept putting a listen off—I’m a late-twenty-something with late-twenty-something office hours, and I wanted to experience the fullness of SOUR’s truths without worrying about deadlines. Let’s get jabbed and rocked sideways.
SOUR opens with “brutal,” a balled fist of a track about doom and time slipping away. Building upon the grand songwriting tradition of how much it fucking sucks to be a teenager, “brutal” recognizes the blurred line between adolescent woe and the ambient death of the last few years. “I’m insecure I think / that I’ll die before I drink” is cognizant of capitalism’s terrors the way pop punk “I hate this town” anthems weren’t.
Charli XCX’s how i’m feeling now has been called the quintessential pandemic record, the way it speaks to the experience of being alone with one’s thoughts, and how these thoughts scatter into places both joyous and dark. (Not for nothing, the title tracks on both SOUR and how i’m feeling now are lowercased, as if to frame their personal experiences as smaller components of a greater crisis.) SOUR’s approach is different—Olivia Rodrigo treats a breakup as the emotional locus around which other emotions, heartbreak-related or otherwise, can orbit.
The song “driver’s license,” whether it means to or not, speaks to the dull anguish of passing old, deserted hangouts. There was love here and then there wasn’t. It may as well be nothing but drywall. It’s weird to drive now, to watch the road say that your surroundings are loosening up, and watch people gather like nothing happened, and we do our little errands like we haven’t cried over triggers that didn’t exist in 2019.
What’s next? Build everything again from the ground up? I’m thinking of my friends who, over a long period of isolation, acquainted themselves with aspects of their queerness they haven’t before, and now find themselves wanting a specific flavor of community, but don’t know where to find it.
I’ve seen a lot of the jokes about the absurdity of prehistoric millennials emoting to SOUR. I mean… these jokes are fucking hilarious actually—we’re old, and more people my age have to accept this. How do we know we’re old? We say shit like “the kids are alright,” which they are. You have to understand, our melodramas grew in more hateful fields. Short skirts, t-shirts, etcetera. The comparisons that “good 4 u” draws to “Misery Business” are interesting, because “Misery Business” was super internally misogynistic (and intoxicating for it), but “good 4 u” trains its reticle on the real target. Like, “yo, you got with this girl who makes me insecure, I don’t have beef with her, this pain is on your conscience. I like the way Apa (you can find his Substack here!) described “good 4 u” to me, as “‘Misery Business’ course-corrected the way Hayley [Williams] would have wanted.”
SOUR is an album that constantly does its damnedest to catch itself. It’s precarious, painstakingly summoning the better angels of its nature so it doesn’t succumb to its own venue. “deja vu” is also lyrically and emotionally deft for that reason, the way it accuses the guy for plagiarising shared moments, instead of the blaming the girl for enjoying them.
The only track I don’t like from SOUR is “hope ur ok,” which sounds more like forced forgiveness, as if the song worked the muscle of being kind just to make sure it hadn’t atrophied. Speaking for myself (and I know I backpedal on this regularly), I want to stay furious. The genius of Olivia Rodrigo’s lyricism (even though SOUR is kind of bogged down by too many piano ballads and not enough straight-up rock numbers) is that it doesn’t say that something beautiful is gone—it asserts that the beautiful thing was, with all hostility, ripped away.
I felt fine after the jab. Then I got home and felt my bones get a couple stones heavier, felt my senses get steamrolled, and ended the day with dreamless sleep.
[some media I consumed the past couple of weeks]
Escape from the Bloodkeep! Another D&D campaign courtesy of Dimension 20. All evil alignment players.
Sainthood by Tegan and Sara. Been a while since I listened to this masterpiece.
Y’know what’s wild? This music video turns a decade old this year.
I’m Not Scared to Reenter Society. I’m Just Not Sure I Want To. (My feelings about this article are mixed. How about you?)
Randall Park and Adrian Tomine Are Going to Do Shortcomings Right—Or Not at All (fuck yes)
MUST-WATCHED VIDEO ESSAY BY HBOMBERGUY ON THE ANTI-VAX MOVEMENT
Living in a World Without Stars. (Pretty good article, even if the closing paragraph is kinda this lame statement about like… art being outside of capitalism, when it’s not.)
Cooking Backwards, an article about the undertaking of archiving family recipes.
Happy Pride, y’all. Missing everyone.