Mental Illness, the Jukebox Musical
Or: My Spotify Wrapped Is a Horrifying Glimpse into the Harrowing Abyss That Is My Brain and I Cannot Keep It To Myself or My Psyche Will Collapse
Oh hello! Listen now that Real Housewives of New York is over IDK what to do with this Substack. My brain has no ideas! As Bethenny Frankel would say, #THISISACRISIS!!! I thought maybe I’d pivot to a Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Substack but here’s what: I got 30 mins into the pilot and was like “Thanks I hate it.” I do not know why do not ask me! Yes I do, it’s because as a person with religious trauma I found it sort of triggering and that manifested in only being able to come up with jokes that were of the “LOL Mormons amirite!” and not only is that hacky but it is also a recipe for someone getting mad and digging through my tweets from 2009 which are surely all offensive and then where does that leave me? Facing up to the consequences of my actions?! LOL no thanks!
The situation isn’t helped by this sojorun I am on in Los Angeles. My assumption is that when I depart on Sunday *sobs to death* and go back to the Middle West where it is terrible outside for the next 400 years or however long it is until May, I will probably find something about which to yell into this thing each week. But here it’s sunny and warm every day and I’ve been going hiking and beaching and journaling while crying under my friends’ beautifully autumnal pomegranate tree and be real, if that was your life would you give a fuck about doing absolutely anything productive with your time? Bitch quit lying!
I’m so desperate for ideas that I just logged into this online ~*writer’s confab*~ Substack is hosting, thinking maybe the ~*energy*~ of my fellow Substackers would ~*inspire*~ and the very first comment to appear was from someone who writes “a curated selection of literature reviews, musings on the world within us and around us, and an invitation to go beyond the script, whatever that may mean for you :))” and LOLOLOLOLOL bitch wat?! If this little meet-up isn’t for people who write dumb-bitch shit inspired by the ravages of mental illness then I’m fucking leaving😤
But I already had my laptop out, and my coffee ready, and, most importantly, my Beats by Dre tuned to the ~*humiliatingly pathetic*~ songs that comprise my Spotify Wrapped 2020, and what I found there was so fucking mortifying that it seemed like fate. I mean, nobody cares about anyone’s Spotify Wrapped, it’s like looking at someone’s vacation photos or hearing about their dreams. But my shit is so unhinged that keeping it to myself would be an act of self-harm! We are only as sick as our secrets!
So, please rest your eyes in a compassionate gaze upon the totems of mental illness that are the things I listened to most in this back-alley abortion of an annus terribilis.
Coming in at #5 we have the French pop duo I am constantly trying to turn everyone on to and absolutely no one will listen, which either means they’re terrible, I’m insufferable, or everyone I know is the kind of unsophisticated corncob that won’t watch a foreign film because of the subtitles but also watches TV with captions on I fucking hate literally everyone I know.
Anyway, they are called Madame (Emilie) Monsieur (Jean-Karl) because they are married to each other (bad idea but okay!). She writes lyrics and sings, he writes arrangements and plays the instruments, and I have been a fan since BEFORE they went on Eurovision and got famous so you can sucez ma bite de l’arrière.
There’s nothing particularly embarrassing about this song on its face, except for the very weird video that is shots of a VERY PREGNANT Madame and Monsieur and their rapper friend Black M STANDING UP IN A BOAT AND DANCING on the Seine (unsafe! you are with child! what happens if you fall in and ingest a bunch of disgusting urban river water and it umbilical cords to your fetus?! That’s the kind of thing you get the electric chair for in some of these United States, Madame!).
But the reason I like this song is definitely embarrassing and it is because it is one of my favorite things, which is a celebrity origin story. I am a sucker for that shit! Mainly because as a child I thought actors and musicians were magical beings that lived inside the TV and stereo, respectively (I mean literally, I actually thought this, imagine the look on my mother’s face when she realized she had given birth to THEE dumbest bitch) and when I found out they were just, like, humans who go to work every day like my mom except they get rich and do cool shit instead of being an inadequately compensated secretary in a hospital A/V department and then coming home and hurling fish sticks into the oven with the accumulated rage of a woman stymied by premature motherhood, I was like “WAIT WAT YOU MEAN I TOO CAN ESCAPE THE TERRORS OF AN UNHAPPY HOME AND BE POPULAR AND WELL LIKED FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE WOWOWOWOW!”
Instead I fucked around and had a series of mental breakdowns in various American media and entertainment capitals, but the memory of that dream is still there and it makes me feel alive for the .57 seconds per year it does not make me cry myself to sleep at night HAHAHAHAHAHA oh failure what mirth!!!
And speaking of failure, my love for this song is probably 97% attributable to the fact that the pre-chorus DRAGS ME TO FILTH, in French. (My translation is rough and focused on meaning, not correctness and certainly not poetry leave! me! alone!):
Comment cesser? Commencer, c’est un bon début
How to succeed? Getting started is a good start.
Passer des terres inconnue en terrain connu
Then practice the shit you don’t know until you’re good at it.
Lolololol exfuckingcuse me Madame? First of all I don’t care for your tone! Second of all are you saying that the road to success is to simply ~*do things*~ and ~*work at them*~ instead of spending literal decades mourning the fact that no one ~*gets*~ you and that makes you feel like that dumb fat girly 8-year-old being ostracized on the playground in 1987 and you don’t have the wherewithal to be like “I bet nobody got Andy Kaufman for a long time either and he’s supposedly a genius so I’ma just do me!” because your parents never loved you and so instead you collapse inward and spend your adult life hoping and praying that someone will take pity and champion you in spite of yourself and then you wake up one day and lol bitch you’re 40 and you’ve done nothing with your life and have no one to blame but yourself and yet you still have the unmitigated temerity to be bitter about your failure to achieve your dreams?!?!
Well on behalf of me and my impostor syndrome FUCK YOU! Vraiment, how dare! The gall of this French bitch to be like “IDK, have you tried trying?” NON, Emilie, I haven’t and I shan’t FOH!
I will continue to self-flagellate while listening to this bop on repeat though, because it’s what I deserve🥰🥰🥰
The surging embarrassment that comes with #4 could power a small city.
Let’s start with the title, which is supposedly taken from the name of a painting in the room where the Portuguese musicians looped throughout the song were playing, which I suppose is as good a way as any to name a song unless the name of the painting in question is “Killers Who Are Partying” because A—What the fuck does that mean 2—It sounds like the name of some EDM song you’d hear at an illegal rave in Dubrovnik and iii.—IDK exactly what the polar opposite of some EDM song you’d hear at an illegal rave in Dubrovnik is but I’m pretty sure “live fado music looped and chip-chopped in Pro Tools” is at least a contender. So, you know, we’re already at a deficit before we click “play.”
But then we DO click play, and while at first the beautiful looped fado riff has us like “Now THIS is why she’s the Queen of Pop whompst would ever think of this!”, once the lyrics kick in we are… oh… oh my… my God…
Whew! This song is bad. I mean, the production is incredible (listen for the chirping birds during the bridge because they just left in the outdoor ambiance in which the fado was being played and recorded, it’s really wonderful!) but you truly won’t believe the opening lyrics please just click play for like 15 seconds and then never look me in the eye ever again.
Like, we get it, the world is fucking crumbling under the stomping boot of resurgent fascism and she will go down fighting for all the little guys (and if you’re sniggering at the very idea email me and I will give you an exhaustive accounting of just how much this bitch has done for people, starting with being one of only two people even willing to say the word AIDS in public [the other being Liz Taylor] while the Reagan Administration literally laughed about it in Congress, do not fucking try me I WILL rip your skull open and shit on your brain just before I succumb to death on this hill). But the EXECUTION is, just, wow these lyrics are… they’re just…
There is at least a moral here, which is that cyberbullying works, because people were so outraged by the lyric about Israel in this song that she changed it to Palestine in her live shows and if cyberbullying can make even MADONNA, one of the least self-aware people on Earth, be like “Oh shit wait you mean Israel is a tyrannical and terroristic state inflicting unconscionable harm on a people rendered nationless by a cowardly worldwide obsession with racism and Islamophobia and unnuanced Zionism?!?! Wow okay wowowow sorry wow okay wow” then you know you’ve hit on something. Be best!!!
In conclusion, I wish the whole song was in Portuguese instead of just the hook so I’d have no idea wtf she’s saying and could know a moment’s peace, but alas that is not the world in which we live and so I must walk out into the sea. Good day!
Coming in at #3 is a song I’ve already Substacked about so I won’t take too much of your time…
But in case you missed it this is one of a handful of songs I spent large swathes of 2020 crying to on a park bench near my former Chicago home while unmasked Lincoln Square yuppies grabbed their screeching children’s hands and quickly pulled them away from the obviously mentally ill man crying to French pop on a park bench! I had no idea I had spent this much of 2020 crying to French pop on a park bench but 2020 is nothing if not full of surprises!
I also developed a deep infatuation with this soft sensitive French boy and then read an interview with him in French Elle and he’s straight, and the extent to which that is par for the course for me is truly chilling. From the moment I exited the closet my type has inadvertently been “Straight but too sensitive to like sports,” and I have spent the entirety of my adult life getting gotcha’d by these gentlemen, many of whompst have used me as what my best friend calls a “gay barcalounger,” that is, a place to recline and luxuriate for a moment in the type of unthreatening homosexuality that is my brand and then garage-sale it for some other collector once the intrigue has worn off. (I see you, straight men, nearly all of you did this at one point in your 20s and you are all going to Guantanamo Bay if I’m ever in charge of the levers of government. Just say you wanna experiment with dick-sucking and go!)
Anyway men are a scourge and my New Year’s resolution is to become a lesbian.
At #2 we have an act of terrorism.
I’ve written about this previously, too, but the Reader’s Digest version is that for reasons I no longer recall, I remembered this terribly wonderful song out of nowhere this summer and then trolled my Instagram followers with it for literally six consecutive weeks. (There’s an incomplete but nonetheless representative highlight on my IG if you want the full saga.)
And that’s all fine and good but I need you to face the cold, hard truth that I had to face last night when I opened my Spotify 2020 Top Exercises in Self-Harm or whatever it’s called: While I was spinning comedic gold by trolling my IG followers with this song from a washed-up Bush-era American Idol contestant multiple times a day for several weeks on end, I was also privately listening to this song in earnest so much during just the months of June and July that it is my second most-played song of the entire year.
Do you have ANY idea how mentally ill I am? LOCK! HIM! UP!!!
But please wait until I can have an opportunity to sue Spotify out of existence for calling me out like this. I don’t believe for a fucking MOMENT that the people at Spotify who put this together weren’t like “Oh wow, this is obviously the manifestation of a private struggle with insanity, just throw another terrible Madonna track in the #2 spot and let’s ~*lead with kindness*~ LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL JK DRAG THIS BITCH.”
This is why we need to dismantle capitalism.
And now, the pièce de resistance, the #1 slot. It’s an obscure piece, one you might not expect to be at #1 until you consider the possibility that my brain is an irretrievably shattered Ming vase fastened together with Scotch tape and filled with the screaming souls of a demon-possessed Victorian doll collection.
Theydies and gentlethems, my most-played song of 2020 is:
The recording of ocean waves I listen to at night when I am too riddled with anxiety to sleep.
Now I should stipulate: I ONLY use this when my brain is melting down so badly I can do nothing but lie awake in my bed staring at the ceiling while chewing on the insides of my cheeks until my teeth are but dusty nubs and my lungs have filled with the blood. I ONLY use these ocean waves when I am beyond all hope and consolation. When I’ve tried everything: breathing exercises, guided sleep meditations, over-the-counter sleeping pills, melatonin, masturbating while softly sobbing. When every possible aid and abetment to sleep has been exhausted and I lay on my back with my brain shrieking about the future, the past, the present, the afterlife, every possible way in which I am sure to end up dead, homeless, unloved, or in a camp operated by Vladimir Putin in the immediate future, every embarrassing moment I’ve ever had since the dawning of my first memory at the age of three, every argument I have ever had in my life and how it hurt my feelings, what I will say when I inevitably run into that bitch who fucked with me in the Target checkout line in 1996 and now I’m 67 years old and no longer care about dignity and it is long since time I light her ass up, and, of course, every night I have suddenly panicked about the precise whereabouts of my passport, birth certificate and pertinent financial records.
Do you see where I am going here? I have spent so many night in 2020 panicking about how I will survive if I am ever wrongly accused of a crime and sent to maximum security prison or the means by which I will successfully make a fucking scene at the funeral home when my brother inevitably attempts to finally win our sibling rivalry by forbidding me from coming to our mother’s funeral in 2033 or whether the reason that one dude never called after we did extremely good sex during the blizzard of 2011 is because he was awakened from his blissful post-coital slumber to the sound of me violently diarrheaing into his toilet at 4am and he just had the good manners to pretend to be comatose afterwards, that these last-resort ocean waves are my #1 most-listened to track on Spotify for 2020.
Have you ever, in all your days, been party to anything so unhinged? A follow-up query WHY HAVE YOU NOT DONE YOUR DUTY AND HAD ME 5150’d CALL A GODDAMN AMBULANCE.
So, as 2020 draws to a close, let us hope and pray that next year’s Spotify Wrapped is indicative of a more normal year—or at least a more normal level of horrifying. In the meantime, I will be self-reporting to my local psych ward. Please bring ice cream when you visit!
Do you have bad enough taste that you enjoyed this? Then you should:
Or, you could subject your similarly tasteless friends to this dreck and:
And if you want to TRULY be a bag of garbage, you could:
Especially because IT’S MY FKNG BIRTHDAY TOMORROW! *sobs*
Ok that will be all, thank you I love you please leave me alone please!!!
Mental Illness, the Jukebox Musical
I can't believe I've heard that Madonna song a few times now and never even noticed those terrible lyrics, hoo boy (please note I adore her)