FKA twigs

the Twigs moniker makes me think of a high-fiber breakfast cereal. I was daydreaming about possibilities for collabs and it turns out there is already someone out there going by the name DJ Activia.

well...i like one song.

I apologize; perhaps I was being somewhat snarky because that is a thing that's happened to me multiple times and at this point it confuses me more than anything. I didn't mean to upset you, and I'm sorry. Once again, I really wish I liked this album more than I did because no album is worth the total swath of alienation that it has apparently become for me.

I am not upset, so there is no need to feel bad on my account!

(However, I would also like to say that I do find it irritating - not upsetting, just merely irritating in a petty way - when people imply emotions, such as "upset" to my words, when those emotions are not actually not there, and I am being super-calm and rational and in fact using set theory to explain myself! But the irritation springs from the perceived gendering here.)

I am generally not a lyrics person but the line "when I trust you, we can do it with the lights on" has been resonating through my mind since I first heard the album.

^^

See, this is one of those albums where I actually want to ask the str8 male listener (if there are any so brave as to discuss this with a ~feminazi~ like me): when you listen to the lyrics of these songs, are you identifying with the subject or the object here?

(I hate to ask because the problem is, when talking about female artists, there is a tendency in male listeners to reduce female artists to sex and nothing but sex and sexual appeal, erasing aesthetics, intellectual content, politics, etc etc. However, given how much of this album is very specifically about sex and sexuality and desire, it's weird not to talk about the lyrics, even if most male writers addressing this album have been doing it very badly, or in ways that are gross / overtly racist.)

Do you hear yourself as the "you" in twigs' songs? Are you the object being desired? Do you hear this as a sexy girl singing what she'd like to do to you? Or are you identifying with the subject in this song, are you listening to these songs and feeling yourself relating to the desire she expresses, and wanting to be the "little spoon"? When you hear a line like "my thighs are apart for when you're ready to breathe in", are you hearing those thighs as *your* thighs, alive with longing for an inaccessible partner that you're gagging for? Or are you the "you" in the song who has to choose to breathe in, and get between those thighs?

I mean, I had a whole thread asking whether people heard themselves as the "you" in the song or the "I" in the song, but this really is one of those songs where I am curious how people hear that.

i identify w/ the object, the 'you' being sung to

I am identifying with the "you" in most cases here, but some of these lines are things I can see myself saying to someone else (such as the one I quoted).

i do not identify as the object or the subject, i appreciate it as really beautiful lyricism an artist is writing about an unknown 3rd person

I feel like a voyeur when listening to these songs

See, this is one of those albums where I actually want to ask the str8 male listener (if there are any so brave as to discuss this with a ~feminazi~ like me): when you listen to the lyrics of these songs, are you identifying with the subject or the object here?

is it alright if it's neither? i picture it as her singing about just someone and not all these songs are written in the first person

(btw are we really still using "feminazi" here?)

wow did frogbs just word police on branwell

this could get good

How about you guys not do this, and just stick to the subject of the question I asked, huh?

We got some "you" answers, some "3rd person" answers, so this is interesting.

I always tend to take the perspective of the singer (whether male or female, in character or otherwise) in the same way I would a narrator.

Do you hear this as a sexy girl singing what she'd like to do to you?

Genuinely a bit weirded out by the prospect of any adult male listening to these songs in this way.

Why?

http://i.imgur.com/txEGwOo.jpg

it's "dreams time"

Genuinely a bit weirded out by the prospect of any adult male listening to these songs in this way.

I kinda half understand why you'd say this. But then again, I do sometimes identify with the "you" in these songs, in that way. (is it wrong if I identify with the "you" in songs when it's Miguel singing what he'd like to do to a "you"? How about being the "you" when it's the Jesus and Mary Chain offering to be "your" plastic toy, or Interpol offering to be "prey for the female"?)

I find that switch back and forth between being the "I" doing the desiring and the "you" being desired, in songs like this, where the song seems to be a sexual invitation, really quite interesting.

(And I just checked the lyric sheets to see the perspective. Most songs have an I and a You, but several songs have an I, a You and a She. (I thought Video Girl was third person, but there's an I, a you and a she in the titular video.) But most of them are first/second person. She might not always be the narrator of the song, but all of these songs are sung from the subject position of a narrator.)

is it weird bc of assumptions about how women listen to music, versus how men listen to music? it seems normal to me to respond to a second person address as being directed at 'you.' this doesn't mean that there's some longing emotional subtext to that identification (tho there might be), just that when addressed as 'you' it makes sense to think it's actually talking about 'you.' especially if your gender/sexual identities are compatible w/ the singer.

I never, as far as I'm aware, imagine that I am the narrator, subject or object of popular songs recorded by people I do not personally know. I do not believe this personality trait to be a function of my sexuality, but I guess self-awareness is limited.

i think katherine is bringing up some urgent and key responses here to the idea in this thread that if you don't like this it's because you are "x" when sometimes people just dont like shit they dont like. it is imo the dumbest aspect of conversations abt music on this board/the internet/among critics in general. i realize no one likes to be wrong, but branwell, hammering home the "oh i never said that, you are just terrible at interpreting my words" over and over is just a bad look.

xp when you read second person narrative fiction (like bright lights big city) do you have any more identification or intimacy re the text than reading 3rd person or 1st person?

bc i do. i think it's natural to identify harder w/ "you" than with "him/her"

i'll never hear "feel like making love" the same way again

hahaha

for what it's worth this is mostly third-person to me. partly because I don't feel strongly enough about it to relate that hard, most of the lyrics are things I would feel embarrassed saying, let alone being public on a lyrics sheet about saying, partly because the album seems to me like it's designed for listeners to occupy the sung-at role.

as for second-person narrative fiction suffice it to say I have many thoughts on this subject and they would all be pretty substantial derails, which I gather is a concern.

never even occurred to me that some people listen to songs as if they're being directed at themselves.
bizarre

well not like literally

for what it's worth this is mostly third-person to me. partly because I don't feel strongly enough about it to relate that hard, most of the lyrics are things I would feel embarrassed saying

^^

^this, like i'm reading a novel. the subject or characters may resonate with me but literally identifying as the subject/object, nope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6UAYGxiRwU

lot of x-posts now, but...

A lot of this stuff (re narrators, subjectivity vs vignettes) was brought up on this thread:

Do You Identify With Lyrics, And Ifso, How?

Personally, I don't think that relating to a narrator/object vs seeing a story externally is gendered, so much as it depends on the closeness of whether you can project/see yourself in that particular story or not. If it has become gendered, it's because of what subject positions are on offer.

I mean, obviously, I wonder, again and again, if it's harder for straight men to identify as the "I" of a song when it is a female narrator singing, because of the pressures of heteronormativity. Which is why I asked, when I had a large sample size of str8 dudes responding very positively to a female narrator as sexual subject, how they were viewing that subject in relation to themselves.

FWIW I usually view the "you" as another character within the song, usually a partly-unseen one.

Yeah, but Matt, why would you see it as weird if someone heard a song directed at a "you" and decided to imagine/project/relate to being a potential or symbolic "you" in regards to the sentiments of the song? Isn't that how art is supposed to work?

Because identifying or taking the perspective of the subject is more interesting - that's the perspective the singer has chosen to give us. If I'm listening to, say, Caught Out There I don't much care about the person being screamed at, much less about imagining myself in their place.

x-post now but...

partly because the album seems to me like it's designed for listeners to occupy the sung-at role.

Why have you made this assumption?

Because one of the things I like about these lyrics is the emotional flip of "am I supposed to relate to the 'I' here or the 'you' here?"

Like I can actually imagine really disliking these lyrics if I assumed that they were *intended* to be read just as some smutty come-on for het boys to get het-up over. (I haaaaated Madonna for many years in my teens, for the same reason. Wow, was I wrong when I went back and listened to the lyrics I had read that way.) But this album offers three subject positions to choose from, (the "you", the "I", a third person voyeur) and it's ambiguous which one "I" am supposed to take.

(And I think one of the reasons that Male Writers Talking About Twigs = such gross discourse is that they assume that it is *intended* as, and in fact, can only be read as "you, the male listener, is intended as the 'you', as the subject of sexy come-ons by the female singer." Which I think is a gross misreading of a rather ambiguous record.)

Sometimes songs or albums happen that way for me. I haven't been able to predict how for almost a decade now -- I've tried, and I'd probably be a better critic if I figured it out -- so it's not going to happen prompted by FKA fucking Twigs.

basically it's like the spinning dancer illusion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_Dancer) -- it's obviously working one way, and though I vaguely know there are others around who see it the other way I just can't fathom how.

(yes, I know that is possibly an unfortunate choice of metaphor, but the duck/rabbit illusion doesn't work like that for me and those are the only two I know about.)

And I think one of the reasons that Male Writers Talking About Twigs = such gross discourse is that they assume that it is *intended* as, and in fact, can only be read as "you, the male listener, is intended as the 'you', as the subject of sexy come-ons by the female singer." Which I think is a gross misreading of a rather ambiguous record.

I haven't read a single male critic taking this approach fwiw. That's not to deny their existence but that's slightly bizarre projection.

You can start with that gross "natural rhthym" Guardian article linked upthread?

(granted, I've read a lot more messageboard, Tumblr, twitter than I have "Proper Critic" but this is part of the discourse, too.)

I mean, if it's going on at all -- I really don't want to turn this into a shitting-on-reviewers session, but I have noticed it in places -- it's going on subtly. this is 2014, most writers have learned not to lead with "Britney Spears extends a honeyed thigh" anymore. (yes, I know that RS feature wasn't all like that, but still.)

FWIW I don't think twigs is directly singing songs on this album to me; I am imagining some isolated lyrics in scenarios where a fictional version of myself is being talked to by a fictional woman.

And here I thought I was the only person who wrote DJP fan fiction! :-P

lol

Seriously though, any identification going on with how I'm processing these songs is happening at a remove; sometimes I'm hearing these as self-contained stories I'm watching as a remove, whereas other lines pop out has something that taps into a memory/thought/feeling and become more personalized, if still at a remove from reality. I'm not sitting here thinking "ooh this gorgeous woman is singing sex songs to me"; especially given that I have never met twigs, I can't imagine ascribing that kind of intent to her (or really, anyone's) music.

I assume all artists are speaking directly to me. Ice Cube and I haven't spoken since he released "No Vaseline."

http://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/0_21_john_hinckley_450.jpg

btw with all the comparisons that have been drawn here and in reviews, i'm surprised that i don't see more (any?) mentions of Kelela.