here it is: a piece of writing so raw and so real and so trans that i got fired from the fader over it
read the profile that cis men everywhere are calling "Too Trans For Publication"
A note from the author on why you are reading this in a google doc and not on the cover of the fader like it deserves:
3 weeks ago i felt myself in someone else's music for the first time ever. her work unlocked so many emotions that the fader fired me & a record label is scared of me. i poured thirty years of trans trauma into this that i never said out loud even to myself & almost no one will take thirty minutes to read it. maybe u will
at first i thought i wanted more money for this than the 30 pieces of silver alex ross thought a lifetime of pain was worth. but i realized i don’t want any money because it is not about me. i just want the world to see how fucking amazing claire rousay’s art is. She is ambient & & free jazz & thrill jockey but she is also lil peep & grimes & frank ocean & burial & kitty & terry allen & doug sahm & sophie & I think there’s even some haunted mound in there too. but for trans girls. i never knew i needed this music until i heard it.
so please, i am begging yall: especially the trans girls. please run her shit up. please buy her album. that is what i wanted to communicate with putting her on the cover. i wanted to make this other trans girl the money she fucking deserves so she can live the life she deserves and be the freest artist she possibly can.
there is a lot of me in this piece. but it is not for my benefit. it is literally my retirement match from music journalism, trying to put this girl over into the history books and shatter the indie buzz ceiling she has been trapped in since 2021. because no trans writer had ever interviewed her until me. i repeat: i am the only trans girl writer who has interviewed a major trans girl artist. The cis men on her team and the cis men at the fader should realize that is an opportunity, not a risk. our lives are risks and they don’t even realize it and yall don’t either.
for the past couple weeks so many people have been trying to tell me what my intentions are, or who i am. and most of you have no right to do that, because you are not trans women, and you have not had your brain rewired by estrogen. this is the first time my voice has ever felt like my own.
this is the only piece of writing that has ever actually felt like me. in years of writing and millions of useless words hacked to bits by cis editors who did not even get what i was trying to say, because they do not get what i have experienced. And cis people do not want you to read it because they are so scared of what trans girls will say if we don’t hold back for once, like we are all always holding back, because if we don’t hold back, you will kill us.
but you kill us anyway, like you have been killing me slowly for years and then all at once for the past few weeks when i dared to speak up for the first time ever. i am done suffering in silence, and i am not holding back anymore, even if it means my own credibility is gone and my career is over. I will not go back to the carnival freak shows that they made us work in a hundred years ago even if it means that you think i am a freak. I will not be a victorian housewife dragged off to the asylum just because she makes some people a little too uncomfortable.
She made me realize that i have to write like she makes music. i can’t make divisions between things anymore. and you will see that this piece is totally different for me, a totally new style, and i cannot go back to the old cis style that was forced upon me. i will not go back. even if a trans artist who changed my life hates me because of how my words have been manipulated and misconstrued by cis people. maybe throwing this piece to the wind is the only way to ensure someone somewhere reads my actual words and hears my actual voice, and not a cis man’s mistranslation of them.
and to the subject of this piece: i’m really fucking sorry. i just wanted to be able to say thank you for showing me the power of my own voice, in a way i never even knew was possible. you did not do anything, you just existed, and showed me that i can just exist too. i will owe you for that forever on a deep trans girl level even if i got too emotional and was too much. And when someone introduces you to billy woods and that changes the course of your life, you would owe them a weird life debt too.
I’m especially sorry i could not give you the coverage you deserved that your cis-owned record label wanted you to deliver on. But i am no longer writing about trans shit or rap music or cultures that risk their very existence every day, just to create wallpaper for the phallic obelisks of zionist advertisers owned by cis fucking straight fucking white fucking men on the board of sweetgreen whose hearts would explode like a medieval peasant if they actually listened to any of the baile funk i have written about for their publication. So I am sacrificing myself to get you more promo than the people you paid to get you promo.
The cis men behind places like the fader can take their limp dick wilted salad money and get their hands off of this real shit, that comes from a place of life and death. They do not deserve to see inside our rooms. They do not deserve to own us, our thoughts, our trauma, our pain, and I am done serving my head on a silver platter to all of you just so you acknowledge I exist. Because if I cut my own head off, I do not exist anymore, but it was not me who cut my head off. It was the fucking world that made me do it, that either kills trans women to shut us up, or makes us kill ourselves to do the same. I know that you know this shit is a game and it is rigged and another “emerging artist” profile edited by a cis person, even if it is by a trans writer, does not mean shit.
If there is a God, she is a manic trans bitch 4 weeks into estrogen shots, because how else could you create literal worlds out of thin air in a week. That is not “mania” as cis people experience it. That is hustle. That is grind. That is vision. That is poetry and fucking real rap shit and every song you have ever listened to that says fuck your friends get money: I am saying fuck my friends and I am getting money because trans women are never allowed to do that. I am not delusional. I am confident. And trans women are not allowed to be confident without being killed so let me being one of the fucking first to run it up and run shit and make them fuck with US, not just me, because they have no choice.
And if you think I have been having a breakdown, and not a million breakthroughs all at once, it is because cis experience is sepia-soaked Kansas, the scolding and unempathetic voice in your head is the Wicked Witch, and I am goddamn fucking Dorothy sent here straight from hell live in Technicolor to drop the whole goddamn house on your head until you develop a brain and a heart and a little fucking courage. If you are cis, you can sit down, clean your fucking ears out, and experience this shit for the first time in your life. And then you can use the privilege and platform you deny that you have to not just help me, but to help all of us, instead of being scared to check in or hit RT or send an email, when we have to face death every day whether or not we are scared. And you can take 30 minutes of your day to read 30 years of trauma that no one has ever bothered to tell you because you talked over them when they did.
I am forcing you all to fucking listen on some Queen of Comedy shit. This is what happens when you make a crazy trans girl with nothing to lose—because she already lost the little you thought she deserved—go Joker Mode.
For the first time: I choose me. And I am now keeping my heart just like 3 Stacks, so this is the last time you get my heart for free.
claire rousay is rawdogging it and so am i:
TOO TRANS FOR PUBLICATION. BANNED FROM TV. LIVE AND UNCUT AND RAWER THAN EVER.
Also please buy Sentiment in stores April 19th. So we can prove the cis establishment wrong.
–-
When I slunk into the pews of the deceptively non-denominational church on that fateful first day of Big Ears, as I so often did during my sheltered youth, I wasn’t expecting to undergo an actual conversion experience. But it couldn’t have been anything else: we were in a place of worship, and claire rousay first discovered how sound could speak beyond words as a penitent teenager dutifully playing in church praise bands. The place where I found myself wasn’t a red dirt road outside Damascus listening to Brooks & Dunn, or even twiddling my thumbs through Sunday service. It was a Thursday afternoon in my born-again hometown of Knoxville, where a replica of a girl’s bedroom gave me a glimpse inside the long hallways of my mind that I had always kept myself from wandering down.
When claire takes off her well-worn Doc Martens, I almost wonder if an apostle is going to emerge from the green room and start washing her feet. But then she hunches over a laptop, and it reminds me of all the times I’ve made my own back pain worse by writing in bed—despite the easily accessible chair smothered in forgotten laundry only a few inches away—because of my depressive desire to feel held in some kind of womb, like a baby in your arms, or the young Jesus Christ on the first Christmas ever wrapped in swaddling clothes. As much as any ASMR-inducing installation piece or sensory-tingling Apichatpong Weerasethakul film that I watched an .mp4 rip of on VLC player in the darkness with my headphones clung tight, claire’s reality-warping performance makes me think about the YG tour where he had a model home on stage with the DJ booth in the window, or the Ecco2K Boiler Room set where candles melt as he plays elegant classical music, or Frank Ocean building a stairway to heaven.
Or maybe it was the free concert Skillet played at Reed Arena when I was in middle school, where my friends whispered about how if you snuck a little peak during the opening prayer, you would see God’s own laser show; or all the warped U2 cassette tapes that accidentally got devout Christians into post-punk guitar effects and made shoegaze concerts a form of worship service; or hearing the murmuring rumble of Peter Gabriel’s score for The Last Temptation of the Christ after a lifetime of only listening to Gregorian chants; or all the Low songs that most of the cool kids who have reviewed their albums probably don’t know are full of imperceptible references to the Mormon faith the band shares with my mother; or the bizarre decade where Moby went to Bible Study; or what it felt like when I first heard Brandon Flowers, the Bruce Springsteen of the Mormon Corridor, sing of a dark and handsome man who doesn’t look a thing like Jesus. Or maybe even a little bit what it must have felt like to be peaking in Venata, Oregon on the evening of August 27th, 1972, when “Dark Star” unexpectedly lurched like an involuntarily fidgeting limb into “El Paso,” while the sun overhead turned to a whiter shade of pale and the sky dipped from a heady golden hue to the deep endless black of eternal darkness.
I see these things all at once in claire’s recitation of her own catechism, and I hear so many more. It was all the secret combinations and special handshakes and magic underwear that the kids at school claimed would allow me to create my own worlds, something I was scared to ask my parents about until I read the words to “If You Could Hie To Kolob,” a Mormon hymn that’s literally about quantum mechanics: “Methinks the spirit whispers, no man has found pure space / Nor seen the outside curtain, where nothing has a place.” But maybe a woman was always the one needed to perceive pure space with her own eyes and only for herself. claire rousay effortlessly pulls back the veil that has shrouded my life since my allegedly pre-mortal existence, when it was decided for me what role I should play based on the body I had been assigned at the great baby-making factory in the sky; she probably thought she was just drawing the blinds. In my mouth, I can even taste a little of the peppermint that my mom used to give me as motivation to make it through sacrament meeting, sucking every grain of sugar one by one like sands in an hourglass, so as to make the candy last longer and the painful hour feel shorter. I flicked the dissolving mint behind my tongue to make room for the WonderBread carcass, which Catholics claim transitions into the body of Christ once you add saliva.
With a singular ability to shock people into being themselves, it’s almost like claire rousay forcibly feminizes the world around her, like that burst of flavor in a dry mouth, every object exploding with potential energy as radios and tape recorders and even her dying phone find new life as musical instruments. Wielding the whole entire world in her hands, she’s in conflict with an enraptured audience yet also coexisting alongside them, like how Philip K. Dick claimed to see Ancient Rome laid atop of California in the 1970s. All at once, I have my own personal exegesis, as a new way of existing opens up before me: I imagine this is probably close to what Bladee felt when he got struck by lightning. Suddenly, my transness doesn’t seem like an inconvenience anymore, but a source of strength and maybe even an advantage, a raw form of energy that bursts like a West Texas oil well when you stab the cold needle into your leg.
There’s something quietly radical about the fearlessness claire demonstrates: not just in how she follows sounds without question, but in how she invites us into her holiest of holies without even explaining what it is. Take it or leave it, as I write to you now. A Playboy spread and Arthur Russell poster are anointed on the walls behind her like a personal canon of patron saints. As claire terraforms the reality around us, adult men are reduced to blubbering children under the bright house lights of the afternoon sun. While each of her varied layers offer equally real resonance to cis listeners, as a trans woman, the claire rousay experience is the most Real Trans Shit I have ever witnessed in my life: pushing back against the walls of whatever box the world has placed you in, whether gender identity or a genre category, always pulling your hood down in the hopes you’ll dissolve into yourself. Is it an art installation, an environmental experience, a worship service, or a voice memo from a new friend? It’s all of them and nothing, a contradiction that constantly mutates into thrilling new shapes.
More than emo, claire rousay is actually punk as fuck, looking at every broken thing as an opportunity to build something new, kicking rocks until a gem turns up. She is an experimental composer on prestigious stages, but a SoundCloud producer waiting to be let out of the closet, showing her whole heart while hiding her face in a hoodie, forcing the messiness of her private life to co-exist with public space. For an indie darling, she moves a lot like a rapper; the 2021 loosies compilation Collection is like claire rousay’s Slime Season. She pays her bills in-between official albums with a monthly ambient mixtape for her Bandcamp subscribers, which arrives in your inbox like a hand-written letter from a digital pen pal. She’s a generational genius that exists on her own wavelength, but she still lives in the real world, where the flow of creative expression is constantly interrupted by the struggle to pay bills.
Every sound offers more than a potential canvas, but a possible opportunity to hustle and get ahead, which is a way I have begun to realize only trans girls think: everything is everything else, and if it’s not, it can be. Your whole life was studying for where you are right now, but even if it wasn’t, you can jerryrig whatever information you were handed when no one was watching and make it into something totally your own, because that is the only way to ever make a sense of self when it is not directly assigned to you at the start of class. This is why until seeing claire rousay, the most I have ever felt my own experience of trans femininity in media is Milla Jovovich’s performance in the Resident Evil movies of all places, because there was not my experience anywhere that I looked, just me alone begging God to tell me which of the many faces in my collection was true.
Later that night, after the revelations of the light have been drowned out by a cloudy drizzle, we met in a bar haunted by the ghosts of my old life. The lines of our interview begin to immediately blur in a way that feels uncomfortably vulnerable to reveal in the view of cis onlookers, whether in that bar or in this publication, because it’s a synchronicity that only trans girls can really understand, one of those things we tend to keep in the family. It’s an unclassifiable connection that comes with being the only two people like you in the room, a bond you feel almost immediately without even speaking, much like the bleeding heart of claire’s compositions. Is this an interview subject, my new bestie, my long-lost half-sister, or just the kind of woman I always wanted to be? Or maybe all of the above, the more sensitive Peep to my aggressively bricky Tracy, the other side of the equation with whom I was always destined to found Goth Girl Clique, and maybe the only person whom I have ever immediately connected like wi-fi on a Samsung, in an alienated world where everyone wants to FaceTime with everyone else but you.
Or perhaps none of the above, and this is all in my own head, as it’s always been. For better or worse, any illusion of journalistic objectivity immediately melts away, just like her music dissolves song and sound, self and spectator, sacred and profane. I vibed with claire’s work before I met her, but I didn’t actually stan her work until I realized how much of our lives had rhymed in parallel without even realizing the other existed—the same way I have often felt about some instances of surreal proximity in my own life to Lil Peep, and the same way I still feel about finding my own voice over the slow creep of a decade while watching Yung Lean grow into his own.
At some point, just like claire refuses to confine herself to one box in recording or performance, I am forced to accept the inherent liminality of a relationship that immediately feels way too deep, just like I had to learn to reframe the inherent in-betweenness of trans experience as a strength that allows me to bridge entire worlds. claire and I have known each other forever, but we’ve also known each other for no time at all. In spite of her unique talent for making strangers reveal their deepest intimacies, I have a feeling this isn’t a normal conversation for her either. Something shifts into focus, as tends to happen when the estrogen starts to really hit, when she later tells me that she doesn’t remember ever being interviewed by a trans writer before, just like I’d never spent this much time in my hometown being myself, with someone else actually like me. I get the sense that for both of us, the world you imagine when you listen to music in your room with your eyes closed has often been the only space where we could control the terms of our own perception.
I also slowly realize that, in the way that trans girls only ever really get shit done when we do it ourselves, the only reason claire and I are even talking to each other is because of claire and I: she posted online about going to Big Ears, I replied that I wanted to interview her, and she immediately saw the rare opportunity of getting to talk in person to a journalist who actually looks like you. They do not realize how trans girls are literally constantly bending the limits of reality to our will and forcing culture to develop, even when that culture might not want to admit that a trans woman is the one doing the developing: from Wendy Carlos’ puppeteering of the entire concept of electronic music from the wood-paneled apartment where she hid her face like the real-life Phantom of the Paradise, or the fact that “Eastbound And Down” from Smokey and the Bandit was written by a closested trans woman, or that the hair-metal hype theme to ‘80s IDF agitpop Iron Eagle was performed by a closeted trans woman, or that there are definitely edgy SoundCloud rappers you know and love who are hiding behind a mask of face tattoos to convince you that estrogen wouldn’t actually save their life.
And that’s without considering the amount of slightly deranged, hyper-fixated trans girls online who do not actually know, but feel on an absolutely certain level — that deeply innate and unconscious sixth sense they know as clocking, the ability to immediately pick up when someone is lowkey putting down something you also tried to pretend you were not actually putting down the whole time, even though you were always hoping someone might notice it and pick it up and force you to confront the issue in a way you would never do yourself — that Kurt Cobain was definitely maybe one of the dolls, or who started referring to Michael Cimino with she/her pronouns without batting an eye. Personally, my money has always been on Todd Rundgren and Shaun Ryder: a catalogue of eggy as fuck Happy Mondays lyrics could be its own monograph. When I came out on the website formerly known as Twitter, to disarm thrusting myself into a virtual panopticon with total sincerity, I paired a picture of myself which I now hate with “I’m literally dropping hints that I’m trans.” We’re always already dropping hints. Trans girls are not artificial, or science-fictional, or cyberpunk, or postmodern: we are literally a natural resource waiting to be tapped into, who are capable of moving mountains with our minds that most people just naturally accept as part of the God-given horizon.
I know this both because of witnessing someone like claire, in how she hypes herself up into an alternate dimension during her performances like a restless spirit intent on possessing a Pentacostal preacher’s wife, but also in hearing her in the lab getting under the hood of her production workflow, and seeing how willing this girl is to push against any limit and bend anything that has even a little bit of give. But also because of the mountains that I have already moved myself in my own life, and that I will continue to move the rest of my life, and that I am currently moving with every word of this piece that effortlessly falls into place in ways that you can only see once you have trusted the vision and made it through the other side to look back over your shoulder and survey the remains of what came before. We are not dolls, but action figures, who one day woke up from the Matrix in a hot sweat and learned how to move our own limbs. It has always seemed to me a little on-the-nose that Barbies, the most female-coded of any plastic object ever created, literally cannot physically stand up on their own, in the way that every kind of doll ever marketed toward the male gender and every hyper-detailed “Adult Collectible” wrestling figurine that stares down at me from over my bed has been autonomous and articulate and capable of infinite poses.
As a trans girl, I am only able to write this piece in the way that I know how to write it, in the same way that I figured out how to make a self, in the same way that claire has only ever been following the tune of her own compass and dealt with the questioning and the categorization later. I need to be able to move not just like water, but like sound waves, where even the valleys are part of a continuous journey that feeds back into the peaks. We made it move because no one else would move it for us. At my lowest moments, I was still tending to seeds that I did not realize I was cultivating, because I was too dissociated to see the potential for the further connections that can develop from genuinely sincere relationships.
The whole weekend starts to dissolve together and I start to feel that as much as she needs to make everything to be the fullest version of herself, claire also sees the potential value in throwing shit at the wall, and her entire process finds not just pleasure but the potential for ecstasy and actual enlightenment in even the most unhappy of accidents. As trans girls, we are uniquely equipped to take a major gamble on the viability of a long-term vision that no one else can see but us, until we have literally remade our own bodies because it is that important to force you to see the actualized potential of who we always have been inside, like how every sculpture is just marble falling away to reveal the shape that was always there: “My brain was designed in my frame before I was ever born,” as Houston rapper Point Blank once put it while effortlessly flowing alongside DJ Screw in the 1990s: an artist who may not have been transgender, but whose entire practice is literally forcing one thing to become another, pitch-shifting and gender-bending and mutating voices and revealing deeper layers of lived experience that were only a few twists of the knob or strokes of the crossfader away.
Without even realizing it or consciously working together, claire and I both have been chopping and screwing not just our own interior emotional worlds, redecorating and renovating the bedrooms in our mind’s eye, but the material industries around us, in the way that all trans girls have to just innately do in order to survive. We are like Marines who did not exactly realize what we were signing up for at the recruitment table, but you are in the thick of it now and it’s fucked up beyond all recognition so the only choice is to hold the faith, stay the course, trust the process, and keep following the image of the future you cling to like a mantra, because now is the only time you have ever been able to see that something will exist beyond tomorrow, because at least the real you will finally be forreal, and everyone will be forced to deal with the unrestrained and uncensored power of your abilities, because you will be so intensely yourself in such an unquestionable way that they have no choice but to fuck with you, because you offer them something that literally no one else can.
For better or worse, this exact profile of claire rousay is something literally no one else could write but me, which means it is an opportunity only I can deliver. The more me you are, the more you offer something to yourself and others that no one else has to give, which opens a thousand doors you never even realized were closed in the first place. The only reason claire ever recorded an EP with Chinese rapper Bloodz Boi, bridging not only whole cultures and languages but genres and genders to boot, is because they fucked with each other and put it out into the universe and made it happen together instead of by themselves, just like this profile is as much a collaboration as my own experience of only one layer of the vast endlessness of a person who offers so much more than just a thirty-minute window of formalized pleasantries about what the words “emo” and “ambient” mean when you put them together on a baseball cap. You adapt and you improvise, as I am right now as I figure out how the fuck to distill a life-changing experience into a piece of gun-for-hire cultural journalism without hacking my actual soul into pieces. At least the little bits of flesh might make for interesting samples.
Maybe it's just because we're in Tennessee, but claire and I don't even talk about being trans that much until catching up after the festival, because trans girl magic is deeper than music, not unlike the work of an artist that feels constrained by the word itself. Instead of our identities, we had mostly talked about the SoundCloud rappers we both hold shrines for in our hearts, bound together as the kind of girls who proudly scream every word of “Beamer Boy” at karaoke. claire’s holy trinity of tenderly tragic sad boys are three manifestations of the same form in one: Elliott Smith, Sparklehorse, and Lil Peep. Even before she said it, I could sense Peep’s spirit watching over claire’s new album Sentiment—the last time I can remember a new album becoming such an immediate fixture in my life was during another transitional moment, when Come Over When You’re Sober, Vol. 1 dropped during my first week living in the New York I now feel ready to leave.
When you lose your religion, it's never really gone, always hanging over you like a ghostly reverb. claire is still piously worshipful of the things she loves most, from musique concrete composers I've never heard of to SoundCloud rappers I used to listen to in my dorm room, ashamed to admit that the self-loathing of $uicideBoy$ was somehow the music that spoke most directly to the autoimmune disease of dysphoria raging inside of me. All of claire’s influences live on inside of her too, even the ones her true believers don’t see. “When I’m playing on stage, I see my mom’s hands playing the piano when I was a little kid,” she tells me. On the wall adjacent to claire’s musical heroes are the icons she once prayed to: at one point in our conversation, she sighs and says “I love Jesus,” as if her former Lord and Savior were an adolescent crush. I’m still not entirely sure if she was joking.
By the end of the weekend, I’ve spilt far too many of my guts to this poor girl who thought she was just here for one little interview. But I’ve spent my whole life trying to keep my worlds apart, and maybe I need to follow claire’s lead and just let them collide. After three days of witnessing how claire rousay turns every sound she hears into a chance to make the world her own, I feel better about being a trans woman than I have in the last three years since I began the long and winding road of my transition, and now my own identity feels like an opportunity for infinite creation. And not because of anything she knew she was doing: it’s because she so clearly existed without overthinking in the way I have always longed for that I finally decided I had to exist like that too.
I feel myself giving fewer fucks than ever before, moving as instinctively as claire seemed to while breaking the fourth wall of her own performance to leave the stage and go smoke a cigarette outside, and then breaking another wall by making music out of the recording of her smoking a cigarette outside. She takes a chance on the potential of unrealized sounds, and it makes me believe I can finally take a chance on myself and all of my unrealized dreams and schemes, just by doing little more than soaking up the vibes of a paradigm-shifting artist who is also chill as fuck. All my life I just wanted to be able to vibe in the moment without retracting into my own skull, and it turns out when you are truly yourself you can vibe harder than ever. Every word is exactly what it needs to be even when it’s wrong, just like every accident in claire’s set provides an opportunity for evolution. In a workshop at Big Ears about her Ableton process, claire quips that she first learned the program by “rawdogging” it, an off-color but on-point encapsulation of her entire approach to art and life. Somehow, just by watching this girl pressing buttons on a laptop that looks like mine, I now feel capable of rawdogging it too.
Like a trace of echo on a sound fading from view, claire keeps disappearing before we can say goodbye, in the way you only do with someone who you know you’re destined to run into again. Two weeks later, I’m furiously typing the bones of this profile into the Notes app on my iPhone, like the many voice memos claire has repurposed into songs that praise herself instead of a deity, singing her own body electric in the way I’m trying to finally sing mine. I feel more like a rapper mid-freestyle or a musician mid-jam, or maybe even a preacher caught up in the fire and brimstone, than a proper journalist, and I’m realizing that I just need to let myself be an artist, because it’s too painful to write the words lately for so little in return, and I just want to finally exist in the moment for myself instead of repackaging my cries for help as coherent takes.
I need my memories to benefit my life, to be spoken with my own voice, like the repurposed conversation I’m eavesdropping on, listening in through the walls of a room that could equally belong to Candy, or Marvin, or claire. I wonder what Mark Fisher would have thought about her music—if only he could still exist alongside the ghosts of his life in communion, rather than having joined them—and if he would have been friends with Mari too, and if he’s looking at the same moon as SOPHIE, and if the McDonald’s that Burial was listening to his iPod in is the the same McDonald’s where I agonize myself over whether or not a musician I’m profiling hates me for blowing up her phone too much, like I’m blowing everyone up too much these days, like I’m blowing up the spot where I have grown far too comfortable in the atrophy, tending to the bedsores on my brain, when the Eureka type beat realization hits that maybe keeping it together was the wrong approach and instead I just need to fall apart. I hope Mimi Parker has come down from the celestial kingdom to commune with K-Punk in the terrestrial or telestial plane—I can never remember which one it is that civilians go to. And I pray that even though I have forsaken what was sold to me as the truth, that my life will be more than outer darkness, and that my mind will not be tortured for time and all eternity by the lifelong monologue of self-loathing I have just begun to forget.
When you’ve spent all your life in your head, it can hurt to finally feel the full weight of your body for the first time like I do now. I only send voice memos these days because even texts take too long when you’ve spent so much of your life asleep, and written words are easier to misunderstand than the voice on the phone. And also because the girls who let me drown them first thing in the morning with my babbling brooks of uncut consciousness don’t seem to think my voice is a burden in the way that the boys always did. Like Future once said, sometimes I don’t feel like rapping, sometimes I feel I wanna sing, and that’s what I want to do right now. I’m listening to claire’s latest monthly ambient mixtape, and the first sound I hear is a fragment of our conversation that I’d already forgotten, as the voice I don’t really care for but am too lazy to do anything about is flipped into a piece of beautiful music by my new favorite artist who also feels like an old friend that I don’t actually know at all.
To be made aware that my drunken rambling concretely exists to another person is a startling experience of not just hearing myself, but actually seeing myself, for one of the first times I can ever remember. As I wonder how claire will perceive herself through my eyes when she reads this profile, the streets of Brooklyn bleed into a noisy bar in Knoxville, which fades into the dusty San Antonio sidewalks that claire once roamed, wielding her Tascam like a divining rod, while I was somewhere not too many miles away in flat-ass College Station, crying about the same afflictions, thinking no one had ever wanted to be someone else so badly before. The screen dissolves to reveal a sad girl rotting in her bed, dimly lit by a faint computer glow while Goth Boi Clique soundtracks her estrogen shot—it could be one of us, or someone who snuck in when we left the door open.
That screensaver of a teenage dream that never ended for me—because it never even began at all—hangs for a moment, until it’s 4AM again, and I’m writing the most lucid thoughts of my life at a time in the yawning night that I usually only spend with Lil Peep leaks, or a sludgy chopped & screwed version of Hinder’s “Lips of Angel” I made my freshman year of college that I only just now rediscovered an an old hard-drive, or a chiptune version of the faithless kiss and careless whisper of Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia,” or the human wall of sound that is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I trigger myself with the YouTube algorithm, excavating memories I don’t remember ever burying just to see if I still feel.
I am pouring my heart out in a way I never have in my life, just so I can hustle the fuck out of thirty years of suffering that I have never said out loud, even to myself, in the fully exposed view of the entire fucking world, so at the very least I can maybe leverage heartache that already happened to me, that I have had no choice but to accept, into one big all-in play that might make an actual material difference in the lives of girls like me, who so often feel forced to pimp out our pain with a gun held to our own heads, threatening suicide if we are not given permission to exist by the surveillance state of public perception, hoping you will manifest a wish to go home that can only be granted by the trembling Dorothy inside yourself. At the very least, I know that if I fling enough of my own messy shit at the wall, it will to cling to someone or something more than all my years of holding it all back, trying to get a little suck from a vine that was already rotten before I even got my turn, uprooting the whole fucking trunk of it all to scream my secrets into a hole in the dirt in the hopes that at least Mother Earth will hear them and start fucking cooking with the fossil fuels brewed by a dinosaur heart that died before you could ever conceivably be born.
I am contained by the cocoon of a room that has held me for just over five years, feeling more certain than ever that it will finally be time to emerge, once and for all, fully rested and never to return to this deep Rip Van Winkle slumber. I am sharpening the sword of my pen more precisely than I ever have before, because now I know I must be more exacting when I choose to use it. Maybe if I let the words marinate until their flavors deepen, this total stranger who I think might have been my twin flame that I ate in the womb—or maybe it was the other way around, I couldn’t tell because of all the amniotic fluid that was in the way—can see that there is maybe something to be gained from the inherently tenuous business arrangement of what is basically a blind date with an overenthusiastic nerd who only knows you from behind a screen, who you don’t know at all even if they’ve already held your voice inside their head.
Maybe by acknowledging the strange ways in which we all already know each other, the connections that were set in motion by forces we cannot think big enough to see beyond, and by working together as intentional collaborators to build something shared on the foundation of really fucking with each other, we can see on all sides of the culture industry that it is not a total sunken cost to let someone into the secret garden that no one has ever known they could even see. That maybe if we all invite each other in, it is a little easier to tend to the overgrown soil, to till the toughened clay to keep its brittle armadillo armor from growing too hard, to remind ourselves that even the most barren fields can become fertile again with a little bit of patience and special attention, as long as we allow ourselves to be rebranded into the mule and the plow, rather than two human beings engaged in a slightly parasitic pre-arrangement that we both pray will be more mutually beneficial than it is uncomfortable. To remember that every sound can become a song, that every silent prayer can become a shout of praise, that every native tongue can become unfamiliar once again, as it was the first time you spoke it, when the words were still too big to fit in your mouth.
I feel five steps ahead writing this piece, like I now feel five steps ahead in living my life, sneaking around the Maginot Line of doubtful men who did not know what divine events they were putting into motion when they sent me to interview an emerging musician in a place I had never been able to emerge as myself, the same men who mistake the desperation of a soul jolted awake from thirty years of sleep paralysis with unfounded and overnight mania, because they do not know what it feels like to have to scream in someone’s face and still not be seen or even heard. I feel like one of claire’s many half-broken audio recorders, a discarded stray of a Deseret thrift store castaway, a maudit of an object that only an eyes honed by a lifetime spent on love’s battlefield could see the unvarnished potential of, like a prospector digging for petroleum born from the bones of beasts none of us have ever actually seen other than in the movies, or Moses tapping water from the stone like Leandoer would once do, extracting Fiji & Arizona from the hard Swedish tundra that everyone else had always seen as frozen ground, too difficult to ever possibly bear the many fruits that have now sprung from it.
I only hope that with whatever this profile has become, that I can do the same for her as she did not even know she was doing for me, like a veteran wrestler working a retirement gimmick, forever putting over a talent who never got the due they deserved into the stratosphere of history books. Maybe I must fall from grace and sacrifice myself in some Mishima-esque offering, as a last-ditch five-alarm effort to to make the world see how it has become too accustomed to a stable diet of girls fed to the Sauron eye of public discourse, a constant stream of sacrificial lambs never recognized as such, to make the world that constantly watches me—always already lying in wait of the right moment in which I finally say the wrong thing—realize how comfortable it has grown feasting on my blood, whether or not I was the one who first decided I had to open up the vein, sticking my own palm into the meat grinder in the hopes I would find gilead's balm or win some other sacred prize, like a sword in the stone or a bird in the hand or a stigmata forever binding me to all the musicians I have ever written about, constantly caught up in some long-distance dance without exchanging one glance or wish or word, whether or not we had ever even opened our eyes long enough to lay them on each other, waiting to ask each other if we’re ever really going to be better than this, as Zac Efron once did, pounding away on his MIDI pad, cradling the tears in his eyes rather than fighting him, sampling the voice of a dead friend for an audience of guilty bystanders who do not even know the brief intonation of the audio interpolation is his most personal revelation, a secret so deeply private that it’s easier to shout it in front of a crowded theater than to say it to yourself, in the alleged sanctity of the fortress of solitude that is the closet you always prayed within, unsure if you ask God to keep you there, blinders on and vision blurred as a lamb chewing cud in a flock of marks for their personal salvation, or if he should throw you out with the bathwater into a world that constantly denies how much it hates you. For the first time, I do feel like we might actually be better than this, or at least better than we were.
Yet I know that if I trust the premonitions that the estrogen trip has allowed me to see, claire will understand, because she is also five steps ahead in the mutable organism of an ever-growing body of work that I feel uncomfortable even describing as music, just like I have felt uncomfortable with hanging a lifetime of my own baggage on to the the rough outlines she has been vulnerable enough to share with us, a weight she should not have to shoulder just because she has had the balls to cry in public in a way I am only just now learning how to do. It wouldn’t be fair for me to assess how claire completely reveals herself if I did not also offer the complete revelation of myself as an equal exchange and sign of respect as co-conspirators in the engineering our own images, a sacrificial offering to earn myself a higher place in the heaven I’m not sure still exists.
But even if I am no longer certain that my Heavenly Father is really there, I am certain that I don’t want any of us to ever feel alone again, as girls like claire and I have so often been left alone with only the music in our heads. She carries with her the memories of all the saints she’s loved and lost, many of the same saints I find myself praying to in a desperate moment when no one is around. I hold inside me the certain feeling that this is the last time I ever want to interview an artist instead of actually knowing them as a friend. I can’t have that voice in the back of my mind anymore, taking me out of the moment, telling me that a profound exchange between two vulnerable people might make for a compelling hook to ensnare the fickle attention of people who will never know either of us like we did within the first five minutes of knowing each other, when we found out that we both lowkey fucked with Haunted Mound, and that we both had all the deep cut Year0001 B-sides that the other needed to complete her otherwise exhaustive archive, and that we had probably torrented the same cracked version of VirtualDJ after hearing the same zip file of Chuck Person’s Eccojams, Volume 1. That even if we were listening to the same shitpost remixes of “Better Off Alone” at the same time afraid to want the same things from our lives, that neither of us are actually better off alone.
That we both knew without even a word what it was like to break through years of spiritual scar tissue, wearing identical suits of armor to the party that neither of us had intentionally coordinated. I feel not unlike a nun selling her possessions as she prepares to dedicate herself to a higher power, or a never-comfortable adolescent finally blooming into the most effortlessly bad bitch at the DIY show. Just like the proverbial egg-cracking that trans girls often speak of, claire rousay shattered the illusion I once clung to in my now-former life as a music journalist, which ends when you close the browser tab or turn the page, whichever one comes first. The belief I needed to be true, to keep my shifting sense of self from slipping through my fingers: that we’re ever really anything more than two girls on opposite sides of a tape recorder, listening to the same music with a different pair of headphones.
I forgot to do my shot yesterday, so I put on “Head” again, as I wipe down the tender pound of flesh with rubbing alcohol and try to remind myself which gauge of needle is which. Somewhere, the person who owns the voice currently inside my own head might be getting ready to do the same thing, maybe on stage in a bed of her own making, as these words I write from my cradle of filth strip me bare before a cacophony of souls. For a second I almost forget if that still small voice belongs to her, or to me, or to the Holy Ghost hanging in between us. Those kids who used to tease me because I had been cast in the part of a dutiful Mormon were right: I was always capable of creating a world of my own, more than only a bedroom. claire rousay was too. As the needle pierces through the veil of my skin, bringing my past lives into my present body, the last long-awaited piece of a puzzled self falls into its perfect place. Someone anonymous lingers in the document, watching me, as I hurry to close the final tab and escape the awareness of how often I’ve been seen.
this is really really good
Love Claire. Glad you wrote this.