Name: REM - Hope by Felix Jackson
Duration: 3 min 9 s
Description: I've loved this album since I was 13, when my sister Anna used to play it plenty. This is dedicated to her

Yes I do - and the coming few recordings are very much geared around this. Love you the mostest.

Forever following patterns, forever forging rhythms. To hold a moment in the stilness of forever. (Thanks Louseee for the pic of my quiet dj hands)

Forever - New Year @SkyTerrace

I've loved this album since I was 13, when my sister Anna used to play it plenty. This is dedicated to her

REM - Hope

A rough cover of Leonard Cohen's Bird on the Wire

new cover of Bird on the Wire

Cover of Martha Wainwright - Far Away

Cover of Anthony (now Anohni) and the Johnsons' Bird Gerhl.

Cover Of Antony And The Johnsons - Bird Gerhl


I wrote the section under the line in 2016, before I realised I was nonbinary. 

What this gets to in a roundabout way, was that I had always been beguiled by singing in a male romantic voice and role. 

What is the Danger Zone? This messy little picture I drew?
It's referenced at the end of the song The Live You Save - it is where the young woman ends up if she doesn't toe a line and stay chaste.
The Danger Zone is also a zone I was unconsciously approaching by crossing into a male role, before I acknowledged I was queer, and certainly years before I acknowledged the masculine side of my identity. 
 


‐-----------------2016:

The project (The Danger Zone: Internalise/Exorcise) involves covering selected sexist songs. It has 3 aims:

1) To express this aesthetic of the authoritative romantic male voice singing about a woman in all these belittling and interesting ways.*
2) To draw attention to it, satirise it by delivering the exact same lyrics in a woman's voice and through my own resistance to the songs' messages.
3) Speak to women with love, affirmingly, beyond the songs' original intended messages.

These are good songs. Catchy. Songs I also want to sing just as songs. Most of them are formative and/or familiar.

The word 'exorcised' is not quite right because this complex of feelings can be expressed, and constantly balanced, and perspective can be gained - but the internal fights that were embedded can never be just removed. The songs do create an external version that I can look at.

* re aim (1): As a kid a female friend and I even wrote, sang and recorded a song where we fully occupied the lovelorn male persona. That we did this demonstrates how this desirous/denouncing male voice in music has / has been given huge aesthetic, emotive, creative potency. It's driving, fascinating, fascinated. And I'm taking it for me. I think I've always wanted to. Back then, being those intense little boy-girls at 10 enabled us to do that.

REM - Hope

Felix Jackson

Recent comments

Felix Jackson

Annajane

Annajane

Related tracks