Feminist Playlist Week 5

The last you'll hear from me, probably, because I only blog like 5 times a year and I've done that thus far this month.

March has a 5th week, more of a half week, so you get 3 more songs (and maybe a bonus)

Day 29 -Meg Mac - Give Me My Name Back

Mac says she recorded this song both as a feminist anthem but also for anyone who has suffered emotional and physical abuse. The patriarchy encourages people, especially men, to brush off emotion, to "toughen up" but its BS. Vulnerability, connection, hope, and love are how we heal. Speaking its name, as well. She also says its for Indigenous people who have lost their home.

Recognizing the pain, the loss, and working toward repairing is a feminist project.

The Interrupters - Take Back the Power

We're going to end this with a rally call. We're gonna take back our power, not just for us, but everyone who cannot speak.

Golden - K Pop Demon Hunters (EJAE, Audrey Nuna, Rei Ami)

This song is about the vulnerability, the pain, and the abuse Rumi experiences, and overcoming it. Taking back her power. Finding ourselves torn between two worlds and making our community.

Being a woman is a powerful, wonderful thing. Finding community with others is a gift. It allows us to shine. It allows us to take back our power. It allows us to go up.

You and I are golden

Bonus - What It Sounds Like

Golden is not my favorite song on KPDH; it is actually mid on the list for me. I'm a hardcore "Free" girlie (and Soda Pop. I really hate how much I love Soda Pop. Maybe there is nothing in my head but froth and fun)

But What It Sounds Like is also my favorite. I cry every time I hear this song. When I saw it in the theaters, I sobbed so much. And I wasn't the only one.

adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy says that the only way we get through this is community. The only way we can frame community is by not making it about us, but about each other. And some of that requires healing. Heal thyself. Healing our own wounds so we can heal others. Strong work. Ancestral work.

Repairing work. And that's what the song, and the movie, are about.

Women's History Month may be over but the work lives on.

"Get up and let the jagged edges meet the light instead" kills me every time

You're not alone.

(yeah I cried re-listening to it)

Check out the month's playlist here

Other Stuff

I updated my website. It needs some work because I forgot I have some chapters in academic texts but the bulk is there.

I've been listening to Arirang non-stop. Watched the documentary. It was very interesting. So I'm not BTS Army, but I found the tension in the documentary interesting. How do you both occupy the space as a legend, an artist, and the flagship for a label? Because BTS very much is the money maker for Hybe. (To be fair, I think BTS would be the money maker for most labels, but they are the biggest group in BigHit Entertainment, which is under the umbrella of Hybe, who also has New Jeans and Seventeen.)

We got to see Hybe shape the album so as to bring in as much money as possible and some of the resistance the other members, especially Namjoon (RM) had toward it. It reminded me of a conversation in a writing group once, about how Western structure, especially that made clear and popular via Save the Cat can be entirely limiting, but if you want to sell your writing, you need to follow the rules of trad pub, and Save the Cat.

Hybe very much had a hand in this album, but I think the artists did, too. Body to Body, one of the hotly debated songs, is about finding connection, in this case, through the physical. Threaded throughout is Arirang, a Korean song that RM tells us is a song about yearning, and the memory of loss. A song about needing connection intertwined with a Korean anthem about the memory of loss. It is a beautiful piece in conversation with itself and what it means to stand at this crossroads, for them as artists and as a group.

Overall, the documentary left me sad. There's a sense of loss and recovery and how what is recovered is never the same. The memory of it can be more powerful than the reality.

Our lives are not so much threatened as is our perception, Emerson once wrote in "Experience." He adds, "Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.”

"Experience" is an essay about loss, explicitly about the death of his son, which should have changed him but didn't. We all have moments where we think our lives should be forever altered, but, in fact, most of it continues onward in its tedious way, crammed with daily tasks. Our place was never lost but it doesn't feel like our place again. It has become unknown.

Then life becomes a task of knowing again. A constant epistemological investigation. But relying on how others see us doesn't aid us in that task. What I saw in the documentary is seven men trying to see themselves again and not knowing how.

Clearly, at some point they did, because Arirang is a gesture toward finding that place (and a bit over-produced. Jin's voice is not Taehyung's voice and I should be able to hear the difference more clearly, even outside my headphones). Its misses are because it cannot find its groove. It cannot find where it once belonged and trying to navigate any finding is a difficult, sometimes dull, project, and does not thrive in an environment of time constraints and profit margins. Arirang gives us something uneven, an honesty about where they stand, on so many crossroads.

Reading

I finished the Jess Armstrong books, the last is Devil in Oxford, which was ok. I found the mystery to be more annoying than anything. She was less wishy-washy in her romance, which was fine, but I pegged the killer from chapter one. Boo.

After several weeks of good reads, I fear a slump is coming. That could also be end of tax-season exhaustion.

On the other hand, I have started Tal's sequel. Where is the outline? Great question, can't find it. So I'll be doing that again. I'm also taking my edit notes and finalizing Tal for her September indie publishing debut.

I've agonized over what to do with her for years and finally found my answer. But that's a tale for another day.

Until then, stay safe, find yourself on a river, and keep reading.