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man. i have been avoiding listening to melanie martinez for years because i find her a bit la cringe. i know there's some other discourse and controversies surrounding her, but i simply do not want to learn about them because melanie martinez's life has nothing to do with mine.
anyway, i was just singing 'toxic,' and i realized that i was singing popular reality television tv show series the voice melanie martinez version of the song which i've always liked. i haven't listened to it since i was in middle school or high school, and i found out it via a probably not age appropriate black butler AMV. i remembered that i genuinely enjoy melanie martinez's voice, and some of the hooks of her song still repeat in my head sometimes while i'm doing things.
so i got on spotify and started playing some of the songs i remembered from crybaby. this is a message to say i didn't listen to all crybaby because i didn't like it lol. i thought it was very bad.
I unfortunately know more about Crybaby than I'd like to. in 2016 or 2017 or whatever, tumblr discourse surrounding melanie martinez was very crazy, and i decided to my own research into why she wrote and did the things she did. I found out about her character "Crybaby" and I don't think Melanie Martinez at the time was super articulate with getting her poiint across, but now I will give her a bit more grace...
I think she was implying that she wrote a lot of songs about mental illness and using slurs in a specific like 'slur way' (as in using them specifically to refer to mentally ill people rather the generic idea of crazy(such as her unreleased song Schizo)) because the character "Crybaby" was associated with "crazies." At the time, I thought her reasonings were flimsy, so I decided to stop listening to her, but nowadays in the days of schizocore and lain fans using schizo every 5 seconds I don't really give a shit. I mean I don't think her storytelling is good and I think Crybaby is a trash character and you don't need to wear DDLG shit on stage to get your point across (why does she do things like that?). It's just kind of cringe because she ended the interview going "they don't get it. they don't get it."
To continue, since I'm officially over all of that and tend to just do whatever I want now, ignoring whether or not I like a songwriters' thoughts on things, I.. can say.. that I think Crybaby is not good. To me. Some people might really like it. It's very 2015, and I can understand why middle school me enjoyed it very much.
I think the problem is that I find the hooks of the songs to be pretty good, but the lyricism to me is very bad. It's horrible. And the instrumentals themselves are just okay. There's interesting instruments and sounds being used but they're not arranged in a way I find pleasant.
My favorite song is Tag You're It. The voice filter she uses for the wolf is really horrible, and I hate the bridge of the song, the "eenie meenie miney moe" part, but it is my favorite as I feel like the song is mostly the hook being repeated over and over which, as I said, is my favorite part of her songs. I don't have to hear about her calling women sluts or singing about cannabis or cheating or divorce or whatever dark subject in the most tactless way possible.
I also like.. A lot of music from that time had a misogynistic edge to it, so I don't feel completely justified judging Melanie Martinez for the misogynistic weirdness in her songs. It's just.. "Hey mom, please wake up. Dad's with a slut and your son is smoking cannabis." Something about the way it was delivered and in that particular song just kind of made me cringe.
Like, perhaps it is because she's singing from the perspective of a child and she's calling a woman a "slut" and then calling weed "cannabis" in the same sentence. It feels really weird because like... I do listen to a lot of emo music which.. Just off the top of my head, Creepy Girls literally calls women "pin up dolls" and says "creepy girls are just my style" which is weird as shit, but.. the song is not super serious I guess and usually you're listening to it and dancing.
A lot of the emo and alt music I listen to that is kind of misogynistic just isn't really.. that serious. I mean I know serious misogynistic music exists, but that's not what I'm listening to (or it's not in English so I don't know).
I think the problem is that Melanie is trying so hard to play it straight that I just kind of roll my eyes. But as I said, this is a 2015 album so my reaction to it is to be expected... I wish it was as good as my memory said it was.
Lol. Sorry. It's been almost four months. Well. I've been meaning to make this page prettier, but I've been too busy, and I have been listening to music but it's kind of a pain to upload the image to neocities then write paragraphs about it. I'll convert this thing to PHP and figure out how to update from my phone at some point lol.
Anyway, Every Time You Go Somewhere is an album I really liked when I was 15- before I had lastfm. Or I was 16. Or 17. I'm not sure actually. I just know I was young and still listening to various trans artists singing about sad things (it's a genre). Mal Blum was my favorite at the time.
I think San Cristobal is the star of the album. It's also the first song in the album. I really like the concept of the song. I think it's kind of boring that it's about love, but also I still really love it. "I saw my fortune scrawled up against the wall.. In a crowded market place, in a town I can't recall." It just sounds so magical. I really love it. There's a few other lines like that in the song that captures this.. the mental instability of reaching out for hope in things that don't really matter. Something sparks some strange hope in you. Suddenly, your reality has shifted over something simple. A shitty crystal ball or the writing someone left at the back of a bathroom stall.
Anyway, all of the songs are really pleasant to listen to. It's an album I've been falling back on when I don't want to listen to anything too loud or too emotional. They all have emotion but there's this sense of detachment. I really like it.
I also wanted to provide thoughts on Mal Blum. It's really interesting going back to an artist after they go on testosterone. Mal Blum's has a much deeper voice now, and as a result, their music has a completely different vibe. I wonder how they feel about it. I wonder if they've written about it. Their aren't many musicians I know who've gone on testosterone (only one other I know actually).
It's kind of like.. I'm so happy for them, but also I'm thinking about how the voice I treasured so much as a teen I'll never hear produce new sounds. Their voice was kind of similar to mine. It wasn't too high or too deep. It gave me hope that I could sing songs and make random tunes on my guitar too. Do you think that if a popular artist's voice changed, many people would grieve it?
favorite song: hell and you / perfect wife
Amigo the Devil is an interesting musician that I admittedly don't know much about.. Not completely sure how I found him. Probably in my attempts to find increasingly more morbid music to write serial killers to, he popped up. Some might find his music to be completely innapropriate. In this album, there's a song about Jeffrey Dahmer, an abused wife, a man stalking a woman and murdering her, etc. While I could discuss the ethics of writing music like this, I am not going to because I love it so much.
It evokes the spirit of a southern gothic with it's folk sound. There's this instrument used sometimes.. A banjo I think? It's so delightful to listen to. Amigo the Devil's voice has this sound of desperation at times that really makes you think "I can understand this awful person singing this song." There's wonderful lines. Hell and You is a delightful song that I love writing toxic couples too. But I love every song in this album. I've been listening to the album nonstop for days.
I get tired of one song, I listen to another. I listened to Hell and You nonstop then Perfect Wife then The Weight and now Dahmer Goes to Hollywood. Choosing a favorite song for this was rather difficult because it's constantly changing. It's just top tier. I highly recommend if you love morbid and/or variants of indie folk.
This year I challenged myself to listen to every single I Monster album on spotify. I was successful and ended up listening to them multiple times. It's a surprise they didn't end up on my spotify wrapped. Neveroddoreven, their most critically acclaimed album, in my opinion is their best. Every song on it is a banger and there's enough variance in the album that I don't get tired of hearing it.
While Who Is She is the most popular song from the album, I don't have the strongest feelings regarding it. Perhaps because I've heard it too many times in other places. I really enjoy "These Are Our Children" and "Heaven" which is probably pretty predictable knowing my music tastes. I'm currently listening to certain tracks to remember the others exactly as it has been a while since I listened. While you may worry that this has tainted my opinions of the albums, do not worry. I definitely remember thinking "These are great but Neveroddoreven is definitely the best." I'll talk about the others in due time.
Moenie and Kitchi is an album I've been listening to for years. Gregory and the Hawk has been at the top of my Spotify Wrapped multiple times, and while the music isn't always from this album, I do love Moenie and Kitchi dearly. The album art is lovely- I remember being young and trying to redraw it over and over myself.
It's an indie folk album that reminds me of sitting at my granny's house peacefully in the garden. My favorite song from the album is Oats We Sow though I also love "Doubtful" and frequently listen to "Stone Wall Stone Fence."" I struggle to call any particular song in the album weak as I feel a calm nice feeling listening to all of them. I don't think I've ever gotten to a song and thought "I really don't want to hear this one."
Even the name brings to mind a story of two characters who play together or perhaps even love each other. It's just.. so sweet. Never change Gregory and the Hawk.
