round 1

(7) flaming lips, “she don’t use jelly”
slid by
(10) placebo, “pure morning”
262-233
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 9.

Maybe We Just Needed a Break, Already: linda michel-cassidy on "She Don't Use Jelly"

The Flaming Lips were around in various lineups, as bands tend to be, for a solid decade before their one and only Billboard hit, "She Don't Use Jelly" hit the charts in February of 1995, peaking at #55. The song came out two years prior, in their sixth album, Transmissions From the Satellite Heart, the single only breaching the surface of popular culture's collective consciousness when it appeared on Beavis and Butthead. Produced by MTV, the cartoon-meets-music criticism show, in a roundabout potty-humor way, brought a lot of lesser-known bands into the public sphere. Jelly was boosted further when it appeared (prepare yourself, reader) on the televised teen melodrama Beverly Hills 90210, during which the purported teen heartthrob, Steve, played by a pre-Sharknado Ian Ziering, uttered the important verdict, "I don't usually like alternative music but those guys rock."
I saw The Lips in the late 1980s, I believe in LA, maybe with the Butthole Surfers, or maybe with X. Going was not my idea, but I probably had a good time [1]. I had friends in music-adjacent jobs, managers, entertainment lawyers, critics, a DJ I would eventually marry, and would happily take any tickets I was offered. That I don't recall the concert says more about me than the band.
Amidst the undiscernible angsty and scrimpish sea of grunge, The Flaming Lips were and continue to be a maximalist fantasia. By 1995, under the direction of Wayne Coyne, they brought extravagance and joy into a moment when much of music considered forward-thinking denied the possibility of whimsy. Coyne, adept across media, later went on to make art films, installations, and now lives in a compound that's a sort of Matthew Barney-meets-the human heart exhibit you can walk through-meets-Earthship art project, but with brighter colors. This is not to say there wasn't levity afoot, as proven by the likes of chartmates Boys II Men and Hootie and the Blowfish. But, you know, there's the good lite, and there's the bad. The Lips' "She Don't Use Jelly" fell right into the great chasm between misery and pop. Grunge was starting to look like anti-effort, and pop was moving towards stylistically and technically manufactured confection. The Lips offered an alternative without bruises, and accessibility without pablum.
There has been much talk about the meaning of the lyrics of Jelly. Opinions range from: they mean nothing­­—they're just for fun, to: sex, masturbation, and drugs. Many specific and lengthy Reddit posts elaborate what sex and which drugs, apparently written by boys who know little of either. Coyne answers differently every time he is interviewed. Going into this, I did have questions, but found Coyne's cheery art-speaky non-answers savvy and enough. Which say: relax, engage, it is whatever you think it is.
Let us begin.

I know a girl who thinks of ghosts
She'll make ya breakfast
She'll make ya toast
But she don't use butter
And she don't use cheese
She don't use jelly
Or any of these
She uses Vaseline
Vaseline
Vaseline

Obviously, it's the word "Vaseline" that got the Reddit boys going on their lengthy discourse about personal lubricants. Here and there, they offer some conjecture around the fact that Vaseline is chemically similar to some butter substitutes. The top of the stanza has some basic rhymes, and when we get further down, it is likely that Vaseline's main import is to set up later rhymes. No one ever talks about the first line, "I know a girl who thinks of ghosts," which I find charming, and unlike the rest of the stanza. The series vibes like a modern-day limerick: catchy, maybe a little bawdy. Possibly more about sound than anything else.

And I know a guy who goes to shows
When he's at home and he blows his nose
He don't use tissues or his sleeve
He don't use napkins or any of these
He uses magazines
Magazines
Magazines
Magazines

In a variety of maneuvers, the Reddit boys link the above stanza to cocaine (blow) and masturbation (blow, again, and they are positive the magazines are porn). A stretch? Perhaps.

I know a girl who reminds me of Cher
She's always changing
The color of her hair
She don't use nothing
That ya buy at the store
She likes her hair to be real orange
She uses tangerines
Tangerines
Tangerines
Tangerines
Tangerines
Tangerines

Bypassing the battle over whether hair can be dyed with fruit, let's look at these rhymes. In my opinion, the song exists as a vehicle for Vaseline, magazines, and tangerines. That is its job, and it does it well. These stanzas are little character studies encased in goofy, slant, and straight-up direct rhymes. It feels like productive play to me, calling up Edward Lear's nonsense poems. Maybe a runcible spoon is a spork, and maybe it isn't.
     In stanza #3, we have a bit of curious going on. The first four lines rhyme ABAB directly (depending on how you pronounce "Cher") and then #5 and 6 rhyme very slantily as orchestrated:

That ya buy at the stORE
She likes her hair to be real OR(ange) 

In the versions I found, a cymbal crash cuts off the "ange" of "orange, thus manhandling it into a rhyme. Besides dispelling the myth that nothing rhymes with orange, this move demands the listener relax and let the song roll on by. No need to get all literal [2]. Given how heavily rhymed the song is, and how colloquial some of the language is, The Lips also could have taken advantage of the varied regional pronunciation of "orange," [3] which includes (as a last pick, but still) the single-syllabic slide, "OARnge," the chosen pronunciation of my people. Did I call folks from different regions of the US to verify? You bet I did. Are there some small arguments going on in my house right now about the legitimacy of the rhyme? Of course, there are [4].
The Flaming Lips would go on to stranger, larger, and more experimental projects, such as their concept album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. "She Don't Use Jelly" was just a warm-up, and likely would not have even made the charts without the assistance of Beavis and Butt-head. Still, it landed, albeit belatedly, in a way that the band could broaden their audience, which afforded them the space to continue to experiment. The thing I like about The Flaming Lips is that they are never not reaching. They don't remind me of anything else, and if they do, it isn't music, but a book, or an immersive art installation, or some weird Dadaist play I might have seen in a basement of a not-yet-converted warehouse. While surely not their best work, "She Don't Use Jelly" sits on the short end of the Flaming Lips' ever-expanding cone of the splendiferous.
Soon, in the town that birthed The Lips, we'd have the Oklahoma City bombing, which, along with the O.J. Simpson trial, would dominate the national consciousness for most of the year. Maybe the music-listening world, even the "alternative" factions, wanted a loosening, some respite. Grunge was closing in on itself in many ways, and when it hit the mainstream, it lost some of its low-down charm (Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis Grunge Collection 1992, I'm looking at you). The YouTube comments—my favorite music criticism format—to mid-1990s to current videos of the song reminded me of the pleasure uncomplicated music gives us.

"This might be the least weird thing that the Flaming Lips put out, and that's saying          something." (tonecot89)

"I love how this song isn't about anything at all, it's just fun." (Justin Y.)

"great song but you can definitely buy tangerines at a store" (Norumbega Man)

Is "She Don't Use Jelly" a masterpiece? No, not even close. Is the performance transformative? It's fine. But does it hold up? It seems to, in that group feelgood kind of way, where everyone at the concert knows the words, and will rage on just the right beat (in the case of this song, the moment the cymbals slice "orange" in two). More importantly, it is its own thing. It doesn't remind me of anything else and it has room for the imagination. It is whatever the listener needs it to be.
Further evidence that The Flaming Lips just wanna have fun (but also might be clairvoyant) is their continuing use of giant bubbles. Wayne Coyne has, in the recent past, floated over the audience in one. In 2019, he got married in one. And now, as we navigate how to be together alone, The Lips held a concert where the band and an audience were each encased in individual personal bubbles. Is this tempting to me? Not at all, but I imagine it was lovely.

[1] I will not be answering any questions at this time.

[2] Yes, apocopated rhyme. I know.

[3] Have at it, regional dialect nerds: https://www.giantbomb.com/orange/3055-510/forums/is-orange-one-or-two-syllables-393183/

[4] And this comic, circa the same time. Hmmm. https://rhymeswithorange.com/about

Linda Michel-Cassidy lives on a houseboat near San Francisco. She is a multi-disciplinary visual artist, teaches, and is fond of experiments. True to form, she is wallowing in several projects. Writing at lmichelcassidy.com

a non-sense of ownership: jamison crabtree on & around “pure morning”

“You can’t have it both ways,” he told me.
I’d spent three hours listening to my friend repeat arguments about pronouns and gender that Dave Chapelle used in a set a few years earlier. We were on my friend’s porch, about two months into the Covid pandemic. It was the first time that I’d met with anyone since before the pandemic had begun. So, when he decided to share his issues about other people’s genders with me, I was ready to listen, although he’d already revealed his biases a decade prior when I used the Placebo test on him.
I grew up in Virginia. It’s where I performed femininity and where I learned how people who didn’t hide their feelings were treated. He didn’t know that I’ve felt female since I was eight (uncoincidentally, the same age that I committed my first suicide attempt). And he definitely didn’t know that twenty-two years later, I still felt the same way.
I had supportive female friends who would give me dresses, go to thrift stores with me, and help me with my makeup, but it always felt like they were humoring something they didn’t understand. Given the time period, I’m incredibly appreciative of their openness.
But as supportive as they were, unconsciously, they kept trying to place me in dangerous situations. The first time I wore a dress in public, my friends convinced me to wander around a biker-friendly pool hall across town. I just wanted to go drink coffee with them in a diner I liked. I wanted to exist in public and to feel good about it for a little while.
Now that I’m 40, I have language and a community of thinkers to help me understand and to express those feelings that previously been inarticulable.  For the three years that I regularly performed femininity in the public sphere (1997-2000 in Richmond, Virginia), I didn’t know anyone else who’d openly felt the need to explore their gender identity. I felt isolated; I couldn’t find a community.
The location and time didn’t help: Virginia was a state in which the Alcoholic Beverage Control board could revoke the license of any bar or restaurant that had “become a meeting place and rendezvous for users of narcotics, drunks, homosexuals, prostitutes, pimps, panderers, gamblers or habitual law violators.” One of the bars in my old neighborhood was shut down after police received a complaint that a bartender had served “a man dressed as a woman” a drink. Anal sex was a criminal act in Virginia until 2014. In Stafford county, it’s still legal for a man to beat his wife on the courthouse steps as long as he does so before 8pm
Mentioning Placebo became an easy way for me to gauge a person’s attitudes towards gender and sexuality. Their music didn’t fit a pop structure. “Pure Morning” employs repetition and variation to create the melody, rather than relying on an expected song structure. The band’s frontman, Brian Molko, explains his decision to perform femininity as rooted in both an aesthetic and a political choice. He had a specific goal: “We were trying to challenge the homophobia that we’d witnessed in the music scene. Basically, I wanted anybody who was slightly homophobic in the audience to look at me and go, ‘ooh, she’s hot. I’d like to fuck her’, before realising that ‘her’ name was Brian, and then have to ask themselves a few questions about, shall we say, the fluidity of sexuality itself.”
In the first few years I lived in Richmond, I only met one transwoman in the public sphere. Each morning she’d walk up and down Grace Street, selling flowers out of a very unstable, very heavy cart. Despite the fact that she’d seen me while I was performing femininity, we never talked about gender. The difficulties she had with her flower cart was the most pressing issue to her. When she’d try to take the cart across an intersection, it’d occasionally topple, spilling dirty plastic buckets and scattering flowers that would be run over by traffic before she could retrieve them. I’d grab the cart by holding onto the top of the plywood rails and help her across the busy intersections outside of our apartment building.
She liked to talk about her collection of pulp romance novels that she kept in our building’s basement; I liked listening to her excitement and knowledge about a genre that my grandmother had only spoken to me about. I stopped talking with her after she’d expressed some of her heavily racist views to me. I also stopped helping her. I regret both of those things now.
We learn from each other. By not engaging with her, I’d lost my opportunity to help her. By not continuing to talk with her, there was no way to help her explore her relationship with race.
But that was how I dealt with things at the time. I’d ridiculously believed that ostracization would somehow result in racists and bigots re-examining their values. Richmond’s activist community in the 90s had taught me that this would be the solution to fixing the problems in the world.
It doesn’t. My feelings about gender had been inarticulable for so much of my life: the culture I grew up in did its best to teach me how unimportant I was if I didn’t conform to its expectations. My feelings were something I was told to hide. But the existence of Placebo contradicted that: watching them, listening to them, I felt beautiful. I didn’t feel alone.
If I mention Placebo to someone who has a passing familiarity with the band, and they comment on the band’s gender-fluid appearance as a gimmick or as something that will make them uncomfortable, it’s a strong indicator that I will also make them uncomfortable. That’s how my friend responded—when I pushed for his thoughts on their work, he only seemed to be passingly familiar with two songs: “Every Me and Every You” (from the Cruel Intentions soundtrack) and “Pure Morning” (from The Chumscruber soundtrack, and a Daria episode).
It’s important to point out that there is absolutely nothing wrong about finding out about things from popular culture. Finding out about things is good, as long as you’re scrutinizing your sources. But to convince yourself that the strength of your opinion somehow reflects your familiarity with a body of work, is harmful.
To feel like you already understand something is the foundation of ignorance. I’d tried to get my friend to listen to the same b-sides from “Without You I’m Nothing” that the person who introduced them to me had recommended. Although I didn’t understand the drastic shifts in style from the glam-bleep of “Leeloo,” the Monk-like song “Aardvark,” and the elevator music sound of “Mars Landing Party,” I’d come to love them after years of returning to them. At the time, the track that was most important to me was “Pure Morning.”  
I tried for a week to help him talk about the music itself: my friend was (and is) a talented musician, and he’s helped me learn to appreciate music that I hadn’t had an ear for. He’s helped me learn to appreciate a lot of things I’ve taken for granted, especially with sound. But no matter what I tried, he’d return to his same critique: Placebo were those guys who dressed weird to get famous.
People raised in heteronormative, segregated environments tend to take gender for granted. Female and male-bodied folks take pride in their experiences and the challenges that they’ve overcome. They should; they absolutely should. But it’s hard being a person. While some folks want to make a hierarchy of traumas, doing so is highly subjective and I’m not sure how it serves to help anyone.
Although people with these beliefs can’t define what is “male” or “female” in non-contradictory terms, they sincerely believe (like Justice Stewart said in Ohio, when judging whether or not the 1964 French film The Lovers violated obscenity laws) that even if they can’t explain their feelings about gender, they know it when they see it.
The woman who introduced me to Placebo didn’t see me as female, and she was everything I wanted to be. I’d been a criminal for most of late teens, but she had the legitimacy of having been arrested. She drank wine out of the bottle, despite owning all of the proper glassware (something that taught me to pay more attention to the action of something than its appearance). Passing a bottle of wine back and forth is comfortable, intimate, especially if its unnecessary. Her focus wasn’t on drinking wine. It was on creating and sharing an experience.
Plus, she was a musician; she knew of bands outside of what was played on MTV at 6am (which was how I’d been learning about bands). Although she wasn’t comfortable going out with me if I was wearing a dress or makeup, she was incredibly kind. Because Placebo’s lead singer wore dresses and makeup, she thought I’d like them. She lent me the album “Without You I’m Nothing,” and she was right. This band with a beautiful, androgynous lead singer was unlike anything I’d seen or heard. I hadn’t found Queer Theory, or a language to start communicating my relationship with gender. So when I first saw the band’s vocalist, Brian Molko, in the video for “Pure Morning,” I realized that I wasn’t simply weird and ugly.
I lack the language to explain how those b-sides make me feel, but I can try to use a comparison to explain it. In Vegas, I saw James Turrell’s installation, AKHOB. The entire experience is strange: it’s designed for an audience of 1-4 people at a time. Viewers enter an outer chamber and put little white booties over their feet. Next, they’re guided up a set of stairs and into a tube-like sterile hallway. You can hear the soft clicks of the lights cycling through different colors. Despite being on the Las Vegas strip, there’s no casino noise. Only: Click. Click. Click. At the end of the hallway, there’s another room, supposedly identical to the room where the viewer enters, that’s filled with light. But the light projected into this room effectively creates snow blindness in the viewer. The viewer starts in one room only to stare into its copy, blinded by a changing field of color.
For thirty minutes, I stared into the massive ganzfeld as the colors shifted in varied, surprising rhythms.  I couldn’t get my bearings without turning around. Gradual shifts from yellow to green made me feel emotions can only quantified in the abstract terms language gives us: surprised, joyful. Quick shifts from bright, vibrant shades to deeply red, saturated shades chilled me.
It was a different type of narrative than I’d ever seen before. Color took on the role of character; the replacement of one character with the next became plot. AKHOB’s a new type of story: one that hinges on feeling and engagement. One that’s provided without a moralistic message or a goal to comply with the audience’s expectations (as a side note—how many of the expectations that make up each of our individual tastes are shaped by something natural rather than by a social influence?).
Being in a carefully choreographed color field, understanding a new way of approaching something: that’s how I felt listening to the songs I’d recommended to my friend. Even if I couldn’t appreciate them as well when I first heard them.
It takes effort to explore complexity. Accepting that a pre-established belief might be an oversimplification of something complex is difficult. My favorite texts teach me how to read them. Representation played a large part of the reason I responded to “Pure Morning.” The song itself is both simple and complex. The guitar loop drones through most of the track, which emphasizes the pattern of speech used for the language. Like many musicians, Placebo’s lyrics hinge on the performance of them.
Take the opening line: “A friend in need’s a friend indeed”. This 3rd century proverb opens on a note of ambiguity: the listener chooses what the phrase means. Does it mean that a friend who needs something will behave in a friendlier matter than one who isn’t in need? Or does it mean that someone in need can be taken advantage of? Does its meaning change as it’s repeated in each pair of lines?
The second line adds a lyrical element to the song: “a friend with weed is better” that doesn’t clarify the meaning. But the meaning of the lyrics isn’t the focus of the song; it’s about the wide category of music. Each pair of lines is linked to the next by an additional end rhyme. The word “better” from the first pair of lyrics is then rhymed with “leather” in the next pair.  However, the use of a three-rhyme structure in each pair of lines (“need,” “indeed,” and “weed”) combined with another set of rhymes that connect each verse (“…better / a friend with breasts and all the rest / a friend who’s dressed in leather”), creates the rhythm of the lyrics.
Molko’s pronunciation of each word allows him to rhyme “crawlin’ / dawnin’ / mornin’” in a way that accentuates consonance. In the chorus, Molko emphasizes the phoneme “in;” this allows him to take a phrase like “skin crawling” and to create a phonetic association with “morning.” As he stretches syllables and elides the ends of words, the lyrics become another type of instrument. I don’t feel the need to understand the lyrics, but I like to think about the possibilities they reveal. 
The lyrics are easier to feel than they are to comprehend. They serve the music of the song more than they act as a specific message to the listener. The video for the song echoes this violation of traditional expectation, while connecting to a broader history of music. The rhymes aren’t surprising, but the total effect of rhyme and consonance creates a unique rhythm that I hadn’t heard in other music.
When I sing along to Placebo, I find it difficult to pay attention to the words. In the same way that the structure of 14 Hours polarizes audiences in its attempts to express something new, the meaning of Placebo’s lyrics seemed like one of the least important elements of their songs. It gave me a new way to listen. When I sing along to Placebo, I’m more focused on the experiences of feeling and musicality than I am on trying to make sense of the lyrics. I wail. I mispronounce words. I focus on the sound; in the same way that a wail communicates pain or grief, the vocalized sounds in “Pure Morning” express a feeling to me rather than a message.   
Maybe it’s a coincidence that the video was filmed about block away from the alley where Bob Dylan filmed the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” promo. That video infamously showed Dylan holding a stack of cards with some lyrics to the song as he drops one card after the other. The cards that Dylan presents to the audience include multiple errors (or, interpretations, depending on your relationship with authorial intent)—a card that reads “20 dollars” is presented for the lyrics “11 dollars,” and cards like “pawking metaws” playfully rewrite a common word in a way that’s comprehensible, but different. It’s also a promotional clip that became credited as the first music video; classification’s confusing.
Whether or not it fits the authorial intent, I think of “Pure Morning” as “Pure Mourning.” The associations between the phoneme “more,” the time of day “morning,” and the act of grieving give me something to try and put together; something that almost makes sense but not quite.
The video isn’t interested in presenting a traditional narrative. It includes narrative elements like character, plot, and setting, but they’re not included to tell a traditional story. In the same way Turrell’s narrative of light taught me a new way to feel through a story, the “Pure Morning” video does the same thing.
When the video opens, Molko’s standing on a ledge of the Brettenham House in Westminster, London. He’s looking down as if he’s going to jump. There’s no background for the situation: the audience enters in media res as Molko stands there. Below him, a crowd has interrupted their daily routine to watch from the street.
They can only be awaiting one of two outcomes: he jumps or he doesn’t. They want to see a death or a rescue, and then to continue on with their day. Steve Hewitt and Stefan Olsdal, Molko’s bandmates at the time, are being handcuffed and detained by the police on the street. They’re shown pressed against the hood of a car.
There’s nothing that establishes any connections between characters. The police arresting Olsdal and Hewitt appear to be rough, unempathetic. However, this is paired with a panicked, worried looking officer trying to run through the hallways of the building to rescue Molko. The cop running through the halls appears empathetic and worried, while the police on the street use an unnecessary degree of force.
There’s no resolution. The video’s drama comes from a loosely connected collection of noir-ish, stylized images. Instead of relying on characters and elements of plot, the aesthetic choices become the primary source of story. Audiences who dwell on questions like “why is the band being arrested” and “what’s their connection to the man on the ledge” and “how does a person walk down the side of the building” and “did they arrest him” won’t be satisfied. In order to enjoy the video, an audience has to be open to a new way of interpreting a story.
The action is quite dramatic! However, as Molko begins to step off the ledge, he breaks the audience’s expectations. He doesn’t fall. No arms magically reach out through a window to pull him back. Instead, he bucks the audience’s expectations by safely, miraculously, and casually Jesus-walking his way down the side of the building.
In interviews, Molko’s credited the 1951 film 14 Hours as an inspiration for the “Pure Morning” video. 14 Hours opens in silence. Wordlessly, a man accepts a room service order. As the server turns to make change, the man climbs out through a window. The title references the amount of time one of the characters, Robert Cosick, spends on the ledge outside of the window, trying to will himself to jump.
Even though the character spends a large part of the picture speaking with a deceptive beat cop, his mother, his father, and his ex-girlfriend, his motivations are never revealed to the audience. The film hops around to the perspectives of various witnesses. Grace Kelly plays a character waiting in a lawyer’s office, watching Cosick while she waits to finalize divorce paperwork. A man in the street uses the spectacle of a potential suicide as an opportunity to pick up a young woman. A police officer uses Cosick as stepping stone to advance his career.
The film focuses on the reaction of the city; Cosick’s a catalyst to explore the many, many different ways people respond to public trauma. It’s a different way of telling a story that forgoes the notion of a main character. In a traditional narrative, the focus of the plot would center on revealing Cosick’s motivations for suicide. There would be a moral or some sense of closure.
But that’s not important to this film. To provide a reason would be disingenuous: a simplification of a decision that’s informed by multiple experiences over an extended period of time. The negative reviews on Amazon highlight the polarizing nature of the film. For instance, Chris writes “ok so I watched this movie with my grandma and it was so boring / I wouldn’t want to watch it again / I don’t know why people are giving it could reviews / I didn’t like it / its just this man on the ledge of a hotel and he keeps saying he’s going to jump / but doesn’t and / ………..yeah / I didnt like it”
An audience that wants an artist’s work to conform to their preexisting expectations will have trouble understanding anything new. Expectation becomes a filter. Chris’ review is accurate for him: he didn’t enjoy the movie because, for him, its importance hinged on a single dramatic action: whether or not Cosick would jump. All of the other elements: the people on the streets, the officers, the people watching from the surrounding office buildings don’t inform him about Cosick’s motivations, so he’s bored by them. Instead of trying to understand these shifts in perspective and how these separate stories involving strangers connect to each other, Chris was too distracted by his own expectations for plot.
It’s a type of tunnel vision. When an audience comes to something like a song, that song is a part of a longer conversation that stretches across the concept of music. In film, there’s the idea that popular movies will give the audience “the same thing that they’ve come to expect, but slightly different.” Instead of trying to understand something that’s complex, it’s easier to label and dismiss it. For instance, going online to label 14 Hours as bad rather than asking its fans, “what kept you from being bored?”
My friend considers me confused.
He hasn’t seen 14 Hours, though I’d be excited to hear his thoughts about it. But that word: confused. It’s been a very important thing that people besides my friend have felt the need to express to me. I think I understand why: when a person feels like they have personal ownership (a complex individual) over a collective identity (a simplification of people down to a trait intended to prime people for social action), they project themselves onto a generalized group.  It’s offensive for a stranger to hear me say “I feel female” because they project their expectations of gender onto me. While I differentiate between personal feelings and political identity, they see an outsider who’s threatening their property: their psychological ownership over their concept of gender.
For those folks, the outsider is a usurper. In 2019, a march against sexual assault passed me while I was sitting in a restaurant. Three of the activists were carrying signs addressing men and rape; they appeared to be in high school or possibly early college. As they walked by, these three folks stopped and stared at me.
I was wearing overalls. I had a beard. Then, through the glass, they started screaming “men are rapists” at me. Which, well, duh. There are photographs of me at 11 years old, standing awkwardly and naked on a dirty, deep-plush sixties carpet. That picture may or may not still be circulating through child pornography circles (I don’t want to know). An old TV would have been in the background. Hopefully the combination of the closed blinds and the flash-cube washed me out, completely, but I am very familiar with the fact that men have the capacity to rape.
And these folks were telling me who I was based off of my appearance. I looked like their idea of a rapist (a man). I was an enemy because I appeared to be one (given their prejudices), even if I wasn’t. The worst part is that I can’t even be angry at those three. They needed someone to express their anger at, and I was one of those folks. I sincerely believe that they were trying to help improve the world, but like so many of us, it’s difficult to figure out how we can do that.
My friend feels like he’s not transphobic. He feels like he understands other folks’ genders better than they, themselves do. The protesters were looking for conflict, hoping to make the world better. Everyone who reacts with anger over a generalized concept are responding similarly. The underlying beliefs may differ, but their ways of treating others hinges on a relationship with power and conflict. Regardless of the reasons, this type of behavior is an unfortunately common occurrence.
When Placebo opened for Weezer, Weezer’s fans threw coins at them throughout for the duration of their 40 minute set. There’s no other way to read this action: Weezer’s audience wanted to hurt someone. People who’d bought tickets to a concert preferred to be violent towards the people they’d paid to listen to rather than actually listening to them. The ways Placebo responded to ignorance and hatred helped me learn to deal with other people’s ignorance without spiraling into self-hate.
When the set ended, Placebo used the coins they’d been pelted with to buy drinks. Another example: during Placebo’s time on the Big Day Out tour, Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit (sic) took over the stage. He’d told them that he was going to introduce them, and they wanted to move immediately into their planned set. Durst’s feelings were hurt: instead of leaving the stage, he decided to use his influence to enrage the crowd by refusing to yield the stage and getting the crowd to chant “Placebo sucks.” Despite encounters like these, the band rarely speaks about the hostility and abuse they’ve received on tour. Whatever the reasons for these types of responses, it’s safe to say that those reasons extend beyond a reaction to music.
Despite capitalism’s focus on the concept of ownership, capitalist societies haven’t made a priority out of defining what this institution means. The earliest comprehensive study of the psychological sense of ownership isn’t even a century old: in 1931, Earnest Beaglehole started asking questions like “if a sense of property is natural, how is it displayed in the animal kingdom?”  By examining the behavior of insects, birds, rodents, carnivores, and apes, he highlighted the unnatural nature of ownership. Even activities, such as a crow’s tendency to grab reflective objects like foil, are done more for purpose than out of a sense of ownership. The crow does so with a specific purpose: to decorate their bower. While they’ll fight over food, fighting over inedible objects is a learned behavior.
We talk about ownership as if it’s natural, but ninety years after Beaglehole’s study, there doesn’t seem to be evidence to prove that it’s an innate feelings for humans. In a 1900 study CF Burk published on the collecting behaviors of children. Out of a sample of 1,214 Californian school children, she found that 90% of boys had already started a collection, and that 91% percent of girls had done the same thing. Less than 5% of the children in that sample claimed to have never started a collection of any kind.
Beaglehole makes the claim that “the idea of self is a human construction, an hypothesis, as it were (and, like all hypotheses, never complete but always subject to change), whereby, through the selective handling of environmental situations, the implicit underlying conational unity of the self is rendered relatively clear and explicit.” In explaining that the “self” is a fluid concept, he highlights how people can create their sense of self by collecting possessions their feeling of who they are.
This definitely held true for me: the books, and movies, and albums I loved were the blocks I used to create a sense of self. When I first saw the video for “Pure Morning,” (as ignorant I was from seeing one video for one song) I felt like the band was mine. At the time, I needed that feeling.
This sense of ownership prevented me from listening to people. Pretentiously, I believed that I already understood the “real” meaning for the band’s work. That my personal experiences allowed me to understand the “real” feeling that each song was supposed to inspire.
While my friends had clung onto Nirvana or Nine Inch Nails, I felt like I was copying their passion in order to fit it. I made Nirvana-inspired shirts for myself. I owned every halo that had been published before 1999 (the labelling of the Nine Inch Nails EPs and LPs are numbered, which makes them great for collecting).
Although I’d performed femininity from age 16 through 19 (in Richmond, Virginia during the mid-late 90s), I didn’t have a way to speak about my relationship with gender until my twenties. I knew my feelings: I had to deal with them every single day. I tried to share them, to connect with people, but those feelings proved themselves to be inarticulable. For years I introduced people to Placebo as a way of trying to explain something. All the while, I secretly believed that no one would understand their work like I did. Placebo’s music became a tool I felt I could use to communicate and validate all of my inarticulable feelings. 
But this sense of ownership closed off my world. I felt the need to pretend like I knew more than I did: to be safe, to exist. The conversations I had about the band either served as a sales pitch for the band, or a sales pitch to prove that my depth of knowledge was bigger than someone’s else. While I’d once centered my identity around my desire to be recognized as an expert on the band, my friend was doing the same thing. Instead of trying to own an appearance of knowing the band, he was trying to create the impression that he was a music expert. My only role in our conversation about Placebo (and in our later conversation about gender) was for me to participate in this image of himself. I was a sounding board: one to help him feel like he knew things that he didn’t.
What a weird thing for both of us to feel like we needed to do in order to feel comfortable with our positions in society. Ironically, this was the exact same complaint he had about respecting folks’ pronouns. He felt that gender isn’t something you feel, it’s something that’s ascribed to you. For him, having to use a pronoun that he didn’t choose makes him feel like he’s forced to participate in someone else’s sense of self. Even though gender wasn’t important to him, his need to understand the world was. Instead of asking me about what makes me feel female, or how I’d define the term, he dug into his stance. He needed things to make sense; to fit with what he’d been taught—what he believed was foundational to a person’s experience.
When I moved from Virginia to Tucson, I started avoiding the subject of gender. While I’d be honest if asked for my thoughts, people rarely did. On the occasions when someone would sincerely ask and I’d reply, “I’ve felt female for most of my life,” they’d assume I was joking or being contrarian. Or something else entirely; something that comforted them. It takes energy to perform, and experiences that are more tiring than my friend’s thoughts had already stripped me of my energy to be social, let alone to perform socially.
Silence became a way of protecting myself. My friend doesn’t know any of this, still, but it’s not for a lack of trying to talk to him. The fourth time we hung out, we were being slowly cooked by the metal patio tables and concrete benches and the heat from everyone crowded onto the patio. I was trying to prove how knowledgeable I was by naming bands that would evidence my worldly coolness-inity. He was doing the same.
When I finally saw Placebo perform in Washington DC, I’d realized how much harm my insecurity had caused me. One of my partner’s friends was a guy who was related to Jeffrey Dahmer (which he’d been relentlessly made fun of for most of his life). He didn’t want to stand with us for the show; it was something he wanted to experience alone. It was personal to him. He stood by himself.
And when I turned around midway through the performance, he was the first thing I saw. He was doing the nervous forward and backward step that was popular in goth clubs around the time. He was crying. His hands alternated between holding each other and stretching out. The music seemed to control his movements in a way that only he could understand. He was feeling something I hadn’t experienced; something I couldn’t relate to: something overwhelming.
But suddenly, I understood that I didn’t own the things that I’d used to construct a sense of self. It wasn’t an epiphany. I didn’t suddenly become a different person, but I did begin to ask question my feelings of ownership.
Despite my own experiences and the importance the band had on my life, I saw him there, feeling more deeply than I had the capacity to. My relationship with the band had been important to me, but it wasn’t a limited resource. I liked it because it made me feel less alone, but that never gave me the right to play the role of a gatekeeper.
As I hope I’ve already implied, Placebo was never “my” band, regardless of my ridiculous feelings of ownership over their work. You’ve probably met someone who’s acted like I did: someone who collects every album, who feels a sense of comfort from listening to a band: a sense of comfort that they’ve never felt in their everyday lives. Someone who misinterprets all of that by wanting to make sure everyone can understand a band’s music the same way they do, to feel less alone and more important than they’d felt before discovering a band.
Because Placebo was so important to making me feel normal, I wanted to feel like I had the agency to judge who was a real fan and who wasn’t. After I saw him, I kept looking around: so many people moving in so many different ways.  It didn’t matter if they’d never explored their gender identities or had the same connection to the music that I had. It was beautiful: so many folks feeling so many different things. I wasn’t an authority; I was a part of a community that I hadn’t recognized.
In my friend’s case, I’ve tried to remember that we’re still part of the same community. The time period and the location where he’d had his formative experiences influenced him in ways he probably never noticed. He’d grown up in rural Ohio during the seventies, in a culture that embraced a biological approach to gender: a well-established notion (at the time) conflating gender and sex to represent the same concept (what good are two words that communicate exactly the same idea, without nuance?).
The biosocial theory of gender, which differentiates between a person’s biological sex and the gender roles they perform, didn’t begin to gain traction until the 1970’s. The SRY gene, responsible for the formation of sexual organs, wouldn’t be discovered until 1990. The 23rd pair of chromosomes in each cell isn’t limited to an XX or XY pairing. It’s so much broader than that: there are people born with XXX chromosomes or XXXXY chromosomes. There are people who have an XX chromosome and develop biologically-male sexual organs. There are so many different types of bodies and experiences conflated into the binary of biological sex.
As a male-bodied kid who embraced his masculinity, who was attracted to women, and who was taught to believe in the outdated biological approach to gender, he’d never had a need or even a reason to explore his relationship with the concept until it’d already been solidified in his mind.
Even if he had wanted to, what resources existed for a poor kid in rural Ohio exploring gender identity? There weren’t many performers playing queer roles. When a queer character would appear in a film or play, they were often presented in one of two ways: as a spectacle or as a villain, with very little in-between. Although audiences have been able to deeply analyze films like Rebecca, a producer’s primary goal is to make something that will appeal to an audience.
I received threats simply for wearing dresses, makeup, and stockings at my high school in the late nineties. I can’t imagine how much strength it’d take to be a male-bodied person performing femininity in a small town during the seventies. Although there were musicians like Jayne County who were performing at that point, there weren’t many openly trans rock ’n rollers. County’s music didn’t get much radio play and her various bands seemed to focus primarily on the experience of individual performances. Despite the fact that her band, Queen Elizabeth, was originally signed to the same label as David Bowie, the label never produced any of her work.
Queer artists weren’t given a popular platform, which resultantly meant that audiences weren’t given opportunities to be exposed to the many, many different ways of living. For a lot of folks growing up prior to the 1970s (and, unfortunately, after), there simply wasn’t exposure to anything that didn’t reinforce traditional sociopolitical roles. I want the world to be significantly kinder than it currently is, so when people say things that I find ignorant or offensive, I try to listen. When a person can reveal their prejudices openly without feeling attacked, they tend to start listening.
If there were universal experiences, then listening would be less important. But every person, every place, every moment is different. It’s work to learn about people’s lives, but it’s work worth doing. My friend’s comment: “you can’t have it both ways” has the ambiguity of the “Pure Morning” lyric “a friend in need’s a friend indeed.”
To him, the phrase meant that a person’s actions must match their essence. It’s inconceivable to him that I could feel female without performing to his conceptualization of the feminine. In other words: he doesn’t believe I can feel differently from how I act. Reconciling that I felt female while not intentionally performing gender isn’t something he’s capable of understanding yet.
I hope that he’ll recognize that a feeling shouldn’t always prompt an action. People do terrible things based of a feelings of righteousness. I prefer to see the statement as a reminder, though: if something’s complex, you can’t pretend like you understand it. Although I wanted him to ask himself “why am I ok memorizing names and nicknames but the idea of remembering a gender identity is offensive to me,” he wasn’t ready to explore that yet.  
And I think I understand some aspects of it: it can be a comfort to think of gender as simple. If it isn’t complex, there’s nothing to understand: bodies are reduced to two types. Anyone who doesn’t agree must be wrong (or politely: confused).
Instead of presuming that feelings and appearance are identical, it’d help him to understand that there’s nothing to own. From my perspective, when he said “you can’t have it both ways,” it made me see him as a friend in need. In a way, he’s right: I can’t have it both ways. I want to be able to share my feelings. I want to be understood. But ironically, he felt closer to me when I hid parts of my life from him. However, his statement is a statement of ownership that I can’t relate to. The world’s dynamic and complex, and its the context for everything happening on it.
What can be felt by a person extends far beyond the limited vocabulary we inherit. Society hinges on communication. Generalizing experiences, claiming ownership over an identity: neither of these things help us understand each other. Placebo helped me understand that I only had to keep listening: to embrace complexity for as long as I could bear it.

Jamison Crabtree needs a bio and a photo