Life don’t always sparkle, but it’s turning me to gold

 

In the pop world, some singers were meant to fade into obscurity — but others rise from the ashes and keep making anthems for girls and the women they’re growing up to be.

I used to be the kind of person who defined myself by the music I listened to. In a way, I still might be.

I was 10 or 11 when I started learning that music existed beyond the songs I heard on the radio or the videos I saw on MTV. I was at a now-defunct music store in my local mall called Radio City when I found an album that would change my life — an auburn-haired, pouty-lipped teenage girl brooded on the cover, a green heart drawn around her right eye. Mismatched, chaotic letters spelled out her name and the title: Skye Sweetnam, Noise from the Basement. I had never heard of her, and I didn’t know a single song of hers. I bought the CD anyway. 

Skye Sweetnam was the first artist I ever discovered for myself, and she ended up becoming a blueprint for my adolescence. Her best known song is a passive-aggressive crush anthem called “Tangled Up in Me,” but my favorites were the ones about empowerment and nonconformity, like “I Don’t Care,” “Sharada,” “Unpredictable,” and “Smoke and Mirrors.” Her lyrics — she wrote or co-wrote all the tracks — taught me not to change myself in a contrived effort to get people to like me or accept me. That the only mold I needed to fit into was the one that embodied the goals and standards I set for myself, and the one that would make me into the person I wanted to be.

It’s funny thinking about the way Skye means a lot to me, because her solo career pretty much fizzled out after her second album. Sometimes I imagine I’m the only one who still knows all the words to her songs, maybe the only one who ever did. The 2000s were a heyday for pop princesses who were destined to fade into obscurity and remember-whens. Even Brie Larson, before becoming an Oscar winner and Carol Danvers, released an album in 2005 titled Finally Out of P.E. — and nothing else after that. (Unless you count Envy Adams’ cover of “Black Sheep” in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.)

I grew out of this teenybopper Radio Disney phase as the years passed, morphing into the kind of teenager who took herself a little too seriously and put a lot of stock into her so-called indie cred. I wanted to be cool, and cool meant quoting The Strokes’ documentary In Transit word for word, crushing on Cavan McCarthy from Swim Deep, and rolling my eyes at Arctic Monkeys’ “Do I Wanna Know?” because Alex Turner had finally drunk the Kool-Aid. I followed The Like’s Tennessee Thomas on Instagram and read Alexa Chung’s It. I was always keeping up with new acts from London or Chicago or New York.

When I was diagnosed with depression in my 20s, my relationship with music changed. It took too much energy to always be ahead of the curve, to still care about having a “music taste.” My obsessive tendencies led to heavy-rotation playlists of songs that either drowned out the sadness or wallowed in it, mostly Mitski, Big Thief, and Paramore’s After Laughter. After a while, though, I realized that there was comfort in pop music — maybe because it reminded me of happier days when I didn’t know any better, or maybe because the sweet mindlessness of the songs and the emptiness I felt were both complementary and dissonant, earnest and ironic all at once.

Whatever it was, it helped me cope. I turned to the forgotten pop stars of my youth; I looked them up on Spotify and was relieved and happy to find that tracks I thought were long-lost had somehow survived beyond Limewire and were right there, ready to stream. Not only that: some of them, like Aly & AJ and The Veronicas, were making highly anticipated comebacks and releasing new music.

There was also a freedom to choosing pop music. I was letting myself like what I genuinely like and enjoy what makes me happy regardless of the way other people feel about it. (Especially now that my definition of happiness is more complicated, holding more weight and more tension.) I was making this decision on my own, no longer so conscious or worried about being cool or different or a dud — the way I learned from Skye Sweetnam all those years ago.

It was at this point that I found my way back to Katelyn Tarver. When I was 12, her songs “Wonderful Crazy” and “Something In Me” were just for taking up space in my MP3 player and singing along to when I was bored. They were inconsequential, ephemeral. But her new music was refreshing, and it blew me away. The tracks were exactly what I needed to get through this difficult, scary period in my life. It was like reuniting with an old friend, or having someone read my journals back to me out loud — hyper-aware of time passing by, convinced every bad feeling would stay forever, lamenting if I knew then what I know now. Like Katelyn herself wrote on Twitter: “Depressing but still hopeful? My brand?”

What speaks to me the most is a track called “Don’t Let It Change You,” which goes, Do you remember how we used to be? What the world was like at 23? I was that age myself when I first heard it, and it’s become a theme for navigating my 20s and learning when to take charge and when to let go. According to Katelyn, it’s about “hitting that point in life where you thought things would look a certain way, and they don’t, and learning how to deal with that.” She adds: “But sometimes you just have to cry over a bowl of pasta in public and let it happen.” I’ve never felt more understood.

(I also learned while writing this that she is a Scorpio, like me, and all the world makes sense again.)

Mitski gets me like she gets anyone, but it’s different with an artist that I’ve grown up with, one that has seen me through the awkwardness of puberty, the dramatics of high school, the uncertainties of college, and the mess of young adulthood, even if it was just on the fringes, in the murky recesses of my mind. I’ve been listening to Katelyn Tarver since she was 16, and I can practically map out how she has evolved — the way I can trace my own steps and see how I have evolved in the same 14 or so years that have passed.

Somehow we both made it, somehow we’re both still here — and I believe her completely when she says we’re right where we’re meant to be.

Class rage goes to the movies

From Knives Out to Parasite, the past year’s most talked-about cinema explores every intricacy of the gap between rich and poor and, in some instances, turns it on its head.

It’s been quite a year for Bong Joon-ho’s Palme d’Or-winning Parasite. It has garnered a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Best Ensemble Cast, and recently won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.

It has been the first South Korean feature to reach such heights, connecting with worldwide viewers on a scale that’s unmatched and unprecedented. In his acceptance speech, the director posited that if more people were willing to watch movies in languages they can’t understand and put a little more effort into reading subtitles, they would open themselves up to amazing storytelling and filmmaking. Parasite, for its part, has certainly earned all the accolades. There’s a complexity and a twist to it that makes it hard to describe and a joy to watch when you go in not knowing anything about it, but it’s also plain in its stark depiction of class dynamics — which could be what makes it so resonant, even to “very local” (Bong’s words) Western sensibilities.

Interestingly, the line that divides the well-to-do and the rest of us who struggle financially has also been explored in other favorite movies from the past year, unveiling a possible pattern in what makes today’s audiences tick. This discussion was arguably brought to the table and anchored by Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, released last November and another awards season frontrunner.

The whodunit opens, like murder mysteries are wont to do, with a body: bestselling mystery author Harlan Thrombey’s (Christopher Plummer) throat has been slit in his gothic mansion. Initial investigation reveals he did it himself, but it’s hardly case closed. With his fortune and property up in the air, Harlan’s surviving family reveal themselves to be despicable and unpleasant in several different ways — daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), for instance, built her own business “from the ground up,” conveniently leaving out the hefty loan from her father, son Walt (Michael Shannon) refuses to give up control of the family’s publishing house and has raised a teenage neo-Nazi, and grandson Ransom (Chris Evans) is spoiled and jobless.

When the Thrombeys — who have been swimming in privilege and privilege-blindness — find themselves threatened with the possibility of losing their wealth, they prove themselves each willing to do whatever it takes to protect their own interests. Caught in the middle is Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s nurse and friend, who is an immigrant and not exactly living in comfort. What she does have, however, is a pure heart, integrity, and fearlessness when it comes to standing up for what’s right.

Similarly, there’s bold and brash horror-comedy Ready or Not, in which Grace (Samara Weaving) marries into the Le Domas family, whose wealth comes from their board game empire. On the night of her wedding, she has to play a game with them as an initiation of sorts and ends up drawing Hide and Seek, which apparently now means they have to hunt her and kill her in ritual sacrifice to the Devil. But Grace is not so willing to die just for them to carry on with their elitism and their affluence, so she fights back and bursts their bubble (and maybe their insides) in the process.

Both Knives Out and Ready or Not depict the rich as the clear antagonist; the chaotic evil to Marta’s lawful good and Grace’s chaotic good. They’re both disruptive and subversive to a system that favors the upper class, and while this makes them far-fetched, it’s no less fun to watch some rich snobs get their comeuppance.

Mikhail Red’s Dead Kids, which premiered on Netflix in December, takes a more realistic approach. A group of misfits carry out a plan to kidnap the biggest jerk in school, motivated by revenge and the cool P30 million they’ll be receiving as ransom. The least well-off is Sta. Maria (Kelvin Miranda), who struggles to pay rent and couldn’t get a scholarship to the expensive university of his dreams. When they discuss what to do with the money, his co-conspirators talk about cars, and he only wants to get away from the big city and return to the province.

The movie comments on the drug war and how unfair society is and uses status symbols like Yeezys and AirPods to illustrate class differences, but perhaps lacks the tension and doesn’t simmer enough in the consequence for either the would-be kidnappers, the self-absorbed victim, or the corrupt cops to leave an impression or get a message across.

Parasite itself was criticized for its “failed revolution,” as the Kim family’s ruse of monopolizing the Park family’s payroll through taking different jobs without the latter knowing they’re related to each other — a scheme that would have made their lives infinitely more comfortable, if only it were sustainable — did not lead them to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, after all. But it’s a criticism that doesn’t really have merit when you consider how the turn(s) of events flow into one another and toward an ending that’s not only justified and believable, but also equal parts hopeful and wistful. It highlights that “work hard for a better life” is bullshit, and for the lower class, there’s always, always more to lose.

The main difference is that the Parks aren’t cruel. Kim Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) observes that they’re actually quite nice despite their wealth, and his wife Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin) is quick to interject that they’re nice because they’re rich, because they can afford to be. What the Parks are, instead, is stuck-up and blissfully ignorant, and this cultivates a resentment in the Kim family that festers and boils over as the action continues to rise — which is the most radical, true-to-life part of all.

Filipinos are used to narratives that lay out the class hierarchy for us, but it’s mostly on teleseryes and in movies that depict being rich as something aspirational. But with billionaires amassing collective net worths higher than those of the rest of the world combined, more and more people have become uncomfortable with the mere idea of wealth, even for themselves.

Cinema has always reflected the times, and these days, people are driven by their anger against and frustration with a system that puts certain races, genders, and classes first and leaves them powerless. It’s refreshing and thrilling to see that filmmakers are pushing back on the status quo, and that the general public is actually here to listen. In telling, hearing, and sharing these stories, we can find ways to revolt and lay the groundwork for change — or at least see what change could be.