I Want to Be (2024) accompanying text
The notion of being yourself is complicated by the world surrounding you. I grew up in a culture where it was always encouraged to be yourself at all costs. While it was never explained to me, by parents or otherwise, what being yourself actually means, I never felt like it was for me. For some people being themselves seemed effortless and like something that was rewarded with admiration; for others being themselves was not encouraged in the slightest unless being ostracized and called things like fag were to be considered encouragement. As somebody who throughout their life has been generally unpopular and disliked by a significant number of individuals who is also fortunate to be able to cultivate certain close relationships with others I tend to fall somewhere between these two camps.
Musicians and artists tend to be admired for being themselves. However when one even briefly examines the culture of success in music and who typically obtains it, one of two conclusions can be reached. Certain kinds of people are more valuable, or success is not related to being yourself. Indeed, many people have to engage in acts that some would consider to be part of "being somebody that they are not" in order to create value for themselves as artists, musicians, or any other kind of worker. It is generally known and accepted that most individuals have to contrive certain parts of their personality in order to work.
Transgendered individuals often have to contrive certain parts of their personality in order to be in community with others, whether these others are transgendered or not. Many fail or refuse to realize that, similarly to virtually any other industry, working in music requires navigating precarious spaces controlled by homophobic, racist, sexist, zionist and transphobic oligarchs. In spaces that tend to center around community, such oligarchic positions are assumed by supposed members of the community who, in classic colonial fashion, can stake their claim on the most resources possible at the expense of others.
Notions of identity are constructed by an individual's relationship to others. One may think that a "man" is somebody born with certain body parts, thus establishing the relationship between being a man and having a "male body" as a one-to-one immutable construct. This is obviously complicated by the existence of transgender individuals, something many people are unwilling to accept. One can also look at the views of somebody like Winston Churchill, a highly revered figure in western cultures, who justified the brutal starvation and genocide of, among others, Indian peoples, with his belief that British colonialism was a favor unto less civilized societies. It is of course easy for anyone who intentionally cultivates empathy in their lives that this is not true, and that slaying people en masse is never a favorable act. What interests me about this notion is the fact that the perceived inferiority of the colonized subjects cannot be overcome within this paradigm. The superiority of the British person is conveyed as a plain truth, as clear as the blueness (or in many cases greyness) of the sky.
People have the ability to change. Transgendered people may even transition their own gender, overcoming the constantly and publically reinforced boundaries between genders. Many transgendered people may even transition, and then join in on the fun of enforcing these boundaries. As a trans person myself, I am interested in the power structures that hold people we considered to be marginalized down, rather than transitioning in order to be a part of the structures myself. However as a worker in an industry I recognize the importance of navigating these structures as to not be completely consumed by them. What you hear in this record is a result of this careful act of balancing. This is not a story of self-realization, rather a portrait of unbecoming; a failed act of reconciliation with a ruthless and unbending system of power. Enjoy!