My roommate came home yesterday and saw I was using my clip on fan. She made a comment about what the fan was clipped to. For the fan to be able to be placed anywhere, I figured out clipping it to a 5×7 plastic picture frame works. However the picture frame she was referencing was an image of a topless Miley Cyrus.
“You sure do like boobs.” She says.
And she’s right, I do enjoy boobs, however I don’t put just any nudity on the wall, and normally I would have hid that frame before she came home, out of respect. Even though I like boobs, there is more to this mild obsession with Miley Cyrus and a few other female empowered artists aside from body parts. I don’t just put up random tits on my wall, and in my car, they have to be attached, so to speak, to artists whose music and I enjoy as well. Over the past few years my taste in music has flourished to include a few main stream artists with top 40 hits under their belt onto my Spotify queue.
They are always 99% female, and they sing about how love didn’t work out, but they are stronger because of that experience. as well as living through the heartbreak, failure, and self doubt that comes along with it. Wow. Sounds like my life a few years ago. I can definitely relate, and ironically, they seem to have a knack for writing those sad lyrics in a catchy pop melody or, anthem if you will, that reminds me what it felt like being younger and making decisions while dealing with the mindset not knowing who I am yet, but wanting to fight for the right to choose whatever I stand for in my way. It doesn’t matter if it is someone else’s opinion or the rules of some collective group of people in power. Basically I’m referring to cops and the government. Damn the man, but also I do not give a shit about what the man or other people say or think of me either, and those ideals are prevalent in pretty much any song off of Miley’s Bangerz album.
I first heard “We Can’t Stop” while I was on a date in 2014. The girl I was with pulled me onto the dance floor at the bar on Hollywood Blvd whose name I can’t recall but which has probably been changed by now anyway. It was catchy and I wouldn’t say I immediately was a fan, but after that night, I would eventually listen to that song over and over again because not only did it have a positive memory attached to it, when I heard the lyrics, it reminded me of MY life. I was at a point where I had to do what I had to do, and I couldn’t be told otherwise. Sometimes people don’t understand or judge something simply because they haven’t been through it. Like they don’t go out at night but…
Can’t you see it’s we who own the night?
Can’t you see it’s we who ‘bout that life?
I was about that life for many years. My life. About a year later I left L.A. for Seattle. I needed to figure out some things about my life, and during the process I guess I did find out I am a sucker for “love” so I also got my heart broken as soon as I got there by a girl who was almost half my age. Exactly like a character in some song or just like an idiot would. I also think I told her we should get married like two months in, but I’m pretty sure I just said that as a tactic to try and get her to stick around a little longer.
Anyway, one night after we broke up I was driving to the grocery store and for some reason the radio was on. They were playing this really cool song that sounded familiar, but I knew I never heard it before. I needed to know what song this was, so I pulled out my phone and Shazamed it. The song was Style by Taylor Swift. Of course.
Of course it was Taylor Swift because she’s the next logical step from Miley and that’s the name I put my ex girlfriend’s phone number under. It was an inside joke, T.S. is calling I used to say but after I got home that night and downloaded the 1989 album it was starting to seem less like my ex and I were going to work it out, and more like I was on the road to becoming a Swiftie.
Taylor is a little different than Miley in regards to music and lyrics, but I can still relate. Taylor is the modest but crazy ex I dated once who I know is an artistic genius but who also is a drama queen who I prefer to just watch and listen to from afar. I like that Taylor writes her own music, but why are all of her lyrics about either living happily ever after, or destroying the life you have now and living in hell?
Where’s the middle ground? I guess that’s what my life was like for awhile, so it suited me. But as I matured emotionally, or just got older, Taylor grew out of her old Reputation and into the Folklore of American Grammy Award album winner and it does sounds new and brilliant and possibly her best album ever.
By the end of the summer of 2017 I was regularly listening to both Miley and Taylor, and now Halsey, Lorde, Haim and Lady Gaga. It seemed like all of a sudden only female pop artists were able to write songs and release albums that I HAD to listen to over and over again because of how good they were and how I deeply I felt every emotion they were singing about. Halsey’s “Bad At Love” sums up my dating and relationship issues with just the title of the song. I was like, yep…that’s me. Im good at a lot of things, but I suck at love and that’s alright. That’s what I needed to hear.
Then there came the time to move back to NJ where I would realize I was totally alone and addicted to the rush of feeling happiness. I tried to medicate it and it worked for awhile, but the songs I were hearing were all telling me that it was far from over yet. In fact, it felt like I was heading into the eye of the storm and I had no idea how long it would last and there was no one there to weather it with me.
I had a Miley picture in a frame next to my dresser as a reminder. It was of her brushing her teeth, which I needed to be reminded of at that point in my life. Then it was a framed picture of her above my bedroom licking a mirror, then four more popped up all over the apartment, and more followed.
At one point I believe I had something like 50-75 picture frames with Taylor, Halsey, Madonna, Lorde, Miley and Gaga adorning my living room, and every couple nights I would find myself at the Walmart picking up printer ink again to print more pictures to frame. I will never be able to have every picture of every thing even though that information is a google search away. I would start looking for one thing and had downloaded forty eight other images I found along the way.
My favorite was the middle finger collection of pictures I amassed during that time. I moved out of that apartment, but I left those pictures in the frames, right there on the wall on purpose. I’m sure they probably threw them out and thought I was saying to fuck off, but what I really did was create an art piece.
Again, I go into the night misunderstood and unsatisfied, but I had my muses. All of them were packed up in an eleven by eleven inch crate and I would take them with me when I went to California and had to turn around almost immediately after getting to L.A. I would put them up in hotel rooms I stayed in as a sign of comfort and to make the place feel like my own. For the next few years, it was just me and Miley, Taylor, Stefanie, Ashley and Ella. (Those last three are the real names of Gaga, Halsey and Lorde, respectively.)
I’m sure you’re probably thinking, Christian, having framed pictures of twenty something pop stars hanging on every wall isn’t that unhealthy, its just really weird and totally a huge red flag to probably every woman I would meet. But I don’t care, and also I don’t want to meet a woman that wants to date. No way am I ready for that bullshit and I don’t know if I ever will be.
I’m sure a therapist would earn their money dissecting this little nugget of obsessive compulsory and possibly a blockage in my emotional and mental state of mind and tell me I am using the pop stars to fill the void of a girlfriend or woman in my life. And they would also maybe say the loss of my Mom three years ago was the catalyst to this blatant cry for help and understanding by the female species, but I’m not trying to attract any women at all. That’s why I’m walking around in a Billie Eilish t-shirt, at the age of 46. I just like her music and I’ve been wearing band t-shirts since I was 14, so why would I stop now?
So, the deal with me and Miley and Me is pretty simple. She will never break up with me, or tell me she is in love with my best friend. As far as I’m concerned, these muses only exist to keep me alive and inspired which I do feel often, especially now as I am finally finished writing the blog I have been wanting to write for over a year and half, but just couldn’t put it into words that made sense, and didn’t make me look like an dorky idiot creep who has an obsession with twenty something celebrities.
I do think I have issues towards dating and love and maybe I’m closed off to women, but I don’t need any of those to survive. OK, maybe love helps, but it also hurts, and I realized I can mimic that feeling by putting on a song that I love, and imagining that it’s me they are singing about.
Alison Wonderland came out with a new album last week. Her last album helped me through the loss of my Mother so when I put on Forever, I cried when I heard it. I haven’t cried in two years, but I also haven’t felt much emotion in that time either. It didn’t make me sad, it validated my life and it seemed to understand exactly what I’m going though right now. I posted a picture of the album cover on Instagram one night last week at like 1:30am when nobody really gives a shit what you post. In my opinion it is her best album yet, so I hashtagged best album ever #loner, #forever, #alisonwonderland etc. etc.
A few hours I get a notification. Your post received seven likes. Big deal, right? Seven likes is not very good if internet points actually had monetary value, but one of those seven insta-likes was from the artist herself, Alison Wonderland.
I have never tagged a celebrity in a picture and woke up to find out the celebrity was looking at my Instagram and liked a post. I don’t think it means anything long term and it’ll probably never happen again, but it does feel good to be understood and acknowledged for once, even if it comes from an outside source I’ll probably never meet in real life. Maybe it’s better this way.
I can hear her voice any time I want to, and it might give me chills or make me smile, or I might sing along, but I could also just ball my eyes out after the first verse of the first song and that would be alright too. At least I’m feeling something instead of the numbness from the past three years.
I don’t care how old I get or how strange it may seem to anyone, I’m going to continue listening to music that makes me feel like it’s ok to be who I am. Taylor gets me, and Miley does too, but I only get emotional for lyrics that hit close to home. Its funny how home has become a state of mind, rather than a physical dwelling, and its amazing that these lyrics to that song I heard are so simple and so revealing at the same time. Its almost like magic.
Lyrics to Forever: