(posted 01/24/24) hi im going to drunk post real quick: is there a valid trans reading of “say yes” by elliot smith or have i truly lost it
hypothetical question btw i’m literally right…
(posted 01/25/24) sober now… daxe and i had a couple beers and listened to figure 8 and either/or last night while i was trying to 100% super mario world for the millionth time (daxe hasn’t heard much elliott smith so i wanted to show him some) and this interpretation just came to me clear as day.
it’s about gender euphoria from the perspective of someone repressing their own trans feelings but who keeps getting a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel. “i’m in love with the world through the eyes of a girl who’s still around the morning after”…. were this written by a trans person people would think the metaphor was far too obvious! “we broke up a month ago, i grew up, i didn’t know i’d be around the morning after” - how often is transness treated as just some teenage phase to grow out of? there seems to be a real back and forth going on with this girl, and a deliberate mixing of the two perspectives… like two parts of one self. starting to realize i could interpret this narrative in every single line of the song lmao gonna be a bit more selective with the lines i pick out. “but now i feel changed around, and instead of falling down, i’m standing up the morning after” / “she’ll decide what she wants” / “i’ll probably be the last to know, no one says until it shows” like COME ON….
that final line in the b section is, in any interpretation of the song, about acceptance, not just from others but from yourself… “they want you or they don’t say yes” is a coherent sentence, but the separation of the phrase “say yes” comes across more as a plea. it’s possibly one of the happiest elliott smith songs but there is no question a devastatingly sad undercurrent that goes almost unspoken but seemingly everyone feels.
probably also worth noting that it is really not uncommon for male musicians to externalize their own anxieties through a female character, “she’s lost control” by joy division comes to mind for example. there’s probably some Jungian interpretation of that, the manifestation of the anima or something, and i would never in a million years try to say it speaks to the artists own gender feelings but i DO think it speaks to a desire to escape from oneself, with the wrongly gendered language making that explicitly clear. and there is an inherent queerness to that, to reject the cards you’ve been dealt, the shape you’ve been forced into, and take control of your own Self, your own mind, your own body, for the sake of being a happier person.