lyrically speaking “bedroom community” is the only song i ever needed to write. plastic death was an attempt to turn an hour+ long extrapolation of bedroom community into my own personal Red Book
that “dadadadada” verse was a placeholder. originally it went:
her surroundings defined her identity,
children brought up by corporations and objects
start to become commodities"
but i scrapped it 1. because i couldn’t figure out how to make it fit the rhythm and 2. because i think overt sloganeering like that tends to go against the strengths of music. that line still is a part of the song to me though & is baked into the rest of the writing.
kate/k/kay (who hardcore fans know from the yoshi’s island demos) was the part of me that was most connected to emotion and pain (she was the one to experience it all and as such is passionate but inarticulate) and she came out through the music though always filtered into a brand. the repressed shadow self duplicated, hollowed out, and worn as armor. & now every time i open my mouth it’s a press release.
i wrote a self-fulfilling prophecy & ian cohen was right to clock that it was autobiographical though it isn’t exactly subtle. i originally planned a music video where i would play every character in the story, shot with an omniscient camera perspective meant to evoke the Sims. in retrospect it’s obvious that even though i’d have said i was writing about a social issue that the struggle represented there is completely internal. were that girl in me to die *i* would be the one to dig through her notebooks for emo poetry so we can all perform a bit of social critique for a minute before we get back to our lives of being stepped on again and again & doing nothing meaningful about it
anonymous asked:
actually very interesting to me to hear you say that plastic death expands on what was already present in bedroom community. up till now, i haven't really tried to look at the lyrics in plastic death, because from what you said on this blog it seemed very reference-dense and that intimidated me so i just enjoyed what i could get from the sound and the surface level of what i heard. but that makes me want to take another look at it
it is reference dense lol! it pulls from postmodern philosophy & esoteric literature all in the name of being above all else, extremely difficult to understand. the points being made are not that complicated but it’s written so as to let the listener discover meaning in it rather than being told by me what it means. i don’t even consider myself the number one authority on it. maybe in ten years i will. i just started to understand the first glass beach album this year.
plastic death & tfgba are about a lot of the same stuff though. tfgba is a sort of key to plastic death. but my intent with plastic death was that “not understanding it” IS understanding it
i think it’s the best poetry i’ve ever written in my life, the lyrics are the one part of plastic death i have no regrets about