The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Friday, February 22, 2019 — 5

A few months ago, a friend 
sent me a quote by Sandra 
Cisneros: “I’m married to my 
writing, and he can be brutal 
but he never strays.” Writing 
was my first love. When my 
friend sent me this, though, 
I hadn’t written anything in 
months. Every time I sat down 
to write, there seemed to be 
a block. It was visceral — I 
could feel it in my chest. It was 
something close to anxiety, a 
deep-rooted resistance to sit 
down and write.
I’d 
met 
this 
friend 
two 
summers ago at a 
writing workshop 
in New York City. 
I was still writing 
for 
fun 
then, 
unrestrained 
by 
the “right format” 
or “right structure” 
or “right way to say 
the 
thing 
you’re 
trying desperately 
to say, and you 
finally say it, but 
no, that’s the wrong way to say 
it. Change it.” She was writing 
for fun, too, but she also took 
herself seriously — something 
I didn’t do. I didn’t want to 
take myself seriously. I didn’t 
want to think about writing 
for 
publication 
or 
finding 
an agent or fighting to the 
death for an internship at the 
New Yorker. I loved writing, 
probably more than anything. 
I thought I was good at it. I 
had my style and my way of 
saying things and, generally, 
people liked it. My writing was 
creative 
and 
unrestrained. 
It came naturally to me. One 
day I’d publish a book and 
it’d do really well, but for the 
present, I’d just keep calling 
myself a writer until I became 
a real writer, and everything 

would fall into place.
I learned how to write 
for 
publication 
at 
the 
aforementioned 
workshop, 
and that’s where everything 
fell apart. I became consumed 
with readability, with concise 
sentences, 
with 
perfecting 
punctuation 
and 
structure 
and flow, with am I saying too 
much here? Writing became 
agonizing. A cycle had arisen. 
I couldn’t type a sentence 
without immediately erasing 
it, typing it again, erasing it 
again. I was obsessed with the 
“right” way to write. When I 

finished a piece, I’d ask myself: 
Would Harper’s or the New 
Yorker or the New York Times 
publish this? And if the answer 
was no (which it always was) 
I’d erase everything and start 
over again.
This was exhausting. My 
perfectionism took hold of 
my creativity — I couldn’t 
even journal anymore. I can’t 
remember when I stopped 
writing completely, but I did.
My 
friend 
is 
currently 
working 
on 
her 
creative 
writing 
thesis 
at 
Emory. 
She’s writing a collection of 
personal essays — our mutual 
favorite genre. I think of 
this often. I was inexplicably 
envious of her at first. I miss 
writing. I wish I could do that. 
But I can’t. It won’t be good 

enough.
After 
many 
repetitions, 
this 
thought 
had 
become 
something of a mantra. My 
pieces 
for 
the 
workshop 
classes were half-hearted, and 
I’d sweat before I sent them to 
my classmates. I was falling 
out of love with writing — in 
fact, I hated it.
On 
Sunday, 
I 
revisited 
journals that I keep on a 
bookshelf in my apartment 
but never touch. I re-read 
my 
uninhibited 
writing 
from months and years ago. 
I remembered, for the first 
time 
in 
a 
long 
time, 
how 
much 
writing means to 
me, how much of 
my identity and my 
head and my heart 
that it holds. I fell 
back in love with 
the thing I’d loved 
first. So I sat down 
and wrote like I 
hadn’t written in 
a very long time. 
There 
were 
no 
rules.
The 
notion 
of 
being in love with your art 
form resonates across genres. 
Falling out of love with your 
art form resonates, too. Many 
of my artist friends have 
dropped out of art school, 
many of my musician friends 
out of music school. When 
your art form becomes too 
restricted, too serious, too 
taught, you fall out of love 
with it. When you remember 
that your art form is you – that 
there are no rules, that there 
is nothing to be taught beyond 
what you can teach yourself 
through art – you fall back in 
love. And it’s beautiful.
It takes a lot to remind 
myself that I can still be 
married to my writing, but he 
doesn’t have to be brutal. And 
he’ll never stray.

On loving your art form

Eva Hendricks, the lead singer of Charly 
Bliss, tells me over the phone that she 
recently went out to do karaoke — I tell 
her I already know, because I watched her 
performance of the Spice Girls’s “Wannabe” 
over Instagram live. It was around the same 
time as the release of lead single “Capacity” 
from Charly Bliss’s forthcoming album 
Young Enough. Hendricks goes on to say 
that she hates karaoke and, as a side note, 
that she doesn’t remember broadcasting 
herself.
“I am someone 
who hates karaoke 
— not only do I hate 
it, I am, like, afraid 
of it,” Hendricks 
said.
“My 
sister-
in-law, Kathy, is 
obsessed 
with 
karaoke. The same 
day that ‘Capacity’ 
came out, she got 
a huge promotion 
at work.” There 
was 
only 
one 
way to celebrate, 
according 
to 
Hendrick’s sister-
in-law: karaoke.
Between 
singing lead vocals 
and hating karaoke, there is a friction. 
Both in musical style and as a performer, 
Hendricks commands and pushes forth. 
Her voice, elastic, resonant and feminine, 
is matched by her brio. On Guppy, Charly 
Bliss’s debut album, she shrieks, she coos, 
she belts. On stage, Hendricks moves like 
she’s working something out from the very 
depths of her spirit, like those lyrics she 
and bandmates Spencer Fox, Dan Shure 
and Sam Hendricks have been singing for 
years bear original and new weights. In 
a word? Dynamic. Hearing that karaoke 
isn’t her forte, then, maybe isn’t a surprise. 
Maybe there’s not enough at stake with a 
prerecorded track you didn’t write yourself.
“I must say it is a really great way to 
celebrate and really like, I’m someone 
who loves dancing so much, but I’m not 
someone who would go to (she pauses for 
emphasis) the club. I don’t even know what 
that would look like for me,” Hendricks 
said. She says all of this with good humor 
and tacit acknowledgement of her own 

contradictions. Sociable, fun and energetic, 
yes, but on her own terms.
“I went to NYU and my first night 
living in New York, my friends and I paid 
a $20 cover to go to a shitty, gross club,” 
Hendricks said. “We accepted shots from 
a stranger and danced on a table and that 
was the last time I ever went to (she pauses 
briefly, again, for emphasis) a club. But, that 
being said, if you’re someone who loves to 
dance, and you don’t like to go to the club, 
really, the only time I get to dance is if 
someone in my life gets married, and so like, 
I think that the great thing about karaoke is 
that you can kind of go nuts and satisfy that 
craving without being surrounded by scary 
strangers.”
“Or 
getting 
married,” 
I 
suggest.
She 
laughs. 
“Yeah, or being 
like, 
please 
somebody 
get 
married, I need to 
have a cathartic 
freak out in front of 
all of my relatives.”
The portrait of 
Hendricks 
that 
Guppy paints isn’t 
that far from the 
person I’m talking 
to over the phone. 
Guppy is a sketch 
of maturation and 
the many, many 
attempts it takes to get what you want 
from the world, especially in love. Striving 
(and failing) like this on the record takes 
countless forms: giving yourself over to 
something without heed, settling for less, 
internalizing conflict so you can try to fix it 
instead of letting it fester. And, through all 
of it, realizing that sometimes life can seem 
like blow after blow. Hendricks knows that 
part of life is taking what the world gives 
you and cobbling it into something that 
resembles your desires. Using karaoke as 
an outlet for dancing as well as singing fits 
right into the scheme.
Hendricks recognizes the difficulty in 
answering that vast question: How do I 
get what I want in the constraints of my 
life? Songs like “Scare U” approach writing 
these answers directly: “I don’t wanna 
scare you / I don’t wanna share you.” A 
few others, like “Westermarck,” are drawn 
from Hendricks’s own experience: “From 
across your room I saw / Second cousins 
kissing on the lawn / We will never speak 

again.”
“The thing about pop music is that, I 
think it’s actually the hardest music to write 
because it has to sound deceptively simple,” 
Hendricks said. “Writing in a way that 
sounds effortless and comes across as being 
effortless is really difficult.” Hendricks gets 
at a point for which many pop songwriters, 
especially those that are women, are 
harangued: the supposed “mindlessness” 
of lyrics about love. There is often an 
implicit sexism in this criticism, one that 
tries to pick on women as overemotional, 
sentimental and fickle. Sure, love is a well 
explored topic in art and music, but does 
anyone ever really get tired of finding the 
right song for that loving moment?
“When people criticize artists like Taylor 
Swift, like oh it’s just crap, she’s writing 
about her relationships,” Hendricks said, 
“It is actually so difficult to write lyrics that 
are communicative and evocative and feel 
as though, oh my God, this person must 
have read my diary because I have felt 
exactly this way before.”
Part of what makes Guppy such a strong 
album are the band’s efforts to write lyrics 
that are just that expressive. “DQ” is a track 
that combines the worry of wasted youth 
with that dirty, shameful jealousy that 
spikes when somebody steals the attention 
of a lover: “I laughed when your dog died, / 
It is cruel, but it’s true, / Take me back, kiss 
my soft side, / Does he love me most now 
that his dog is toast?”
At the same time, the members of Charly 
Bliss aren’t just writing songs that express 
things directly. The opening track on 
Guppy, “Percolator,” is a clear parody of the 
“overemotional songwriter” trope: “I cry 
all the time, I think that it’s cool / I’m in 
touch with my feelings.” What Hendricks 
does on this track, and a couple others, is 
a classic method to kill a feeling: Act it out 
with exaggeration. The sensation becomes 
small, almost comical in comparison to the 
set of new clothes you just dressed it in.
“I think that’s because pop music makes 
me feel strong,” Hendricks said. “It makes 
me feel invincible, and I kind of needed 
that shield in order to write lyrics that felt 
so vulnerable ... I think in a way, and I don’t 
think I realized this when we were writing 
(Young Enough), but a lot of the songs that 
are filled with darkest content are the ones 
that sound like bangers on the album.”
Pop music and conjured invincibility go 
hand in hand. Take Robyn’s “Dancing On 
My Own” or “Call Your Girlfriend.” Take 
Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love” or, to take a 
turn, the entirety of Lemonade. Take Amy 

Winehouse’s “Rehab,” Bruce Springsteen’s 
“Born to Run,” Leonard Cohen’s now-
standard “Hallelujah.” I’ll even be generous 
and include The 1975’s “It’s Not Living (If 
It’s Not With You).” Pop music doesn’t 
have to mean “synth,” “dance,” “club” or 
“femininity,” as audiences often assume. 
Think pop as in popular, for the people, 
accessible. The mission of a pop song, under 
this definition, is to get to that just-read-
my-diary feeling without being so broad 
that the song collapses under the weight of 
itself.
It is easy, though, to 
get caught in the mire of 
feeling, and never work 
it out. “I am someone 
who loves young adult 
TV, 
so 
that 
means 
that I love difficult 
relationships, you know, 
Buffy and Angel, the 
‘Twilight’ series, ‘The 
OC,’” Hendricks said. “I 
love all that stuff, and I 
think I really believed 
in a way, at a certain 
moment in my life, 
that means it’s worth 
fighting for, if it’s so 
hard and this person 
is really pushing you. 
And it can mean that, it 
also can just mean that 
you and another person 
really love each other 
a lot but are just never 
going to be able to give 
the other person what 
they need.”
Her comment turns 
my attention to my own relationships — how 
they come together, then apart. There are 
times that feel meaningful, but are nothing 
more than an intersection of two lives over 
one summer. Other times that lead to “just 
being friends,” and then feeling like a toy 
when they tease you for wanting more. And 
then, those times where it’s attraction, but 
neither is scratching the other in the right 
places to make it go anywhere.
“I think on Guppy,” Hendricks said. 
“I felt so frustrated about that, whereas 
on this album, you know what, that’s not 
the worst experience you can have with 
another person. That’s sweet, something 
that everyone goes through, there’s a 
universality to that experience. And it 
doesn’t have to be horrible, and you can 
kind of look back on it and laugh and be 
like I remember what it felt like. And in 

a way like that was kind of really sweet, 
that we both really believed that. While 
also recognizing I’m so happy that I don’t 
believe that anymore. I’m at a place where 
I know that I deserve something different 
and that I want something different and 
that something different doesn’t feel boring 
or flat to me.”
That something different came sonically, 
too. “Capacity” begins with a slick beat 
and synthline, complete with other synth 
notes and a crescendoing bridge with the 
massive, soaring chords of 
a power ballad. “No matter 
what it was going to be a 
transitional record and we 
wanted to honor that. That 
being said, I think that the 
songs that are more rock 
leaning, I still feel that we 
really pushed ourselves, 
and they don’t to me they 
sound like they could have 
been on Guppy, which is 
important to us as well,” 
Hendricks said.
“With 
pushing 
ourselves to a new sound, 
it 
wasn’t 
necessarily 
something that we were 
totally conscious of, like 
oh, we were a rock band, 
and now we’re a pop 
band,” she continued. “I 
always talk about how 
special it is that the four 
of us are really close and 
we really value our time 
together.” She tells me 
about how she and her 
bandmates were listening 
to Lorde’s Melodrama, Superorganism’s 
debut album and Taylor Swift. “We did an 
interview recently where Spencer was like, 
‘We were inspired by our own pre-show 
playlist.’”
For what it’s worth, the freshness of 
Young Enough seems like just the right 
thing. Guppy was recorded twice, with 
a handful of those songs being five years 
old. So, naturally, outgrowing the things 
that don’t make sense anymore makes 
room for exciting, new things. “When we 
were writing Young Enough, it served as a 
really perfect barometer for how much I 
had changed from the past couple of years,” 
Hendricks said.

Eva Hendricks on karaoke, maturity and pop music

JACK BRANDON
Managing Arts Editor

MUSIC INTERVIEW

I 
have 
a 
Morgan 
Parker 
poem tacked above my bed. Last 
February I nailed a copy of “Let 
Me Handle My Business, Damn,” 
from Parker’s killer 2017 debut 
“There Are More Beautiful Things 
Than Beyoncé,” to my wall, where 
it has remained to this day, again 
finding me/you/us swimming in 
winter’s brine.
Morgan Parker is a poet of the 
powerful area between awareness 
and authority, a writer who will 
recompose the details around her, 
brilliantly, until she finds enough 
space to thrive. In “Let Me Handle 
My Business, Damn,” our speaker 
is “in the tub holding down / that 
on-sale Bordeaux pretending / 
to be well adjusted,” keeping it 
together while keeping it real, a 
gritty and generous situational 
awareness that casually grounds 
the declaration that comes next: 
“I am on that real / jazz shit 
sometimes I run the streets / 
sometimes they run me.” It finds 
raw glamour and rhythm without 
loftiness or idealism, and that’s 
exactly where its power lies.
Parker is able to generate 
command out of nearly any 
detail, granting phrases like “bad 
drugs bad wine mu shu pork” 
an emboldening, mantric sound 
before you even realize what the 
words are. This is tenacity: Morgan 
Parker can wring purpose and 
power from anything, rendering 
creativity and resilience one and 
the same. And she knows she’s got 
it — in a recent print interview, 
Poets & Writers asked Parker “You 
are a literary superhero — what 
is your name, your superpower, 
your kryptonite?” Her response: 
“Morgan Parker; Morgan Parker.”
In “Magical Negro,” her second 
collection of poems and third 
published work, Parker derives 
her superpower from the cultural 
legacy of Blackness and Black 
womanhood. 
The 
collection 

maintains the sensory creativity of 
“There Are More Beautiful Things 
Than Beyoncé,” but complicates it 
with historical and sociocultural 
texture. In an interview with 
Lumina, Parker explains that her 
previous collection “felt very full 
in terms of references and colors 
and places and people and songs,” 
whereas “(“Magical Negro”) felt 
full as in, like, a heavy book.”
Full and heavy it is. There are 
anthems in “Magical Negro,” 
but there are also histories, 
indictments and tributes. These 
poems are about pain, but they 
refuse to wallow — in fact, they 
use pain, picking it up and holding 
it in different contextual lights to 
illustrate what Publishers Weekly 
calls “a culture and community 
where irreplicable nuances are 
created in spite of, not because of, 
pain and trauma.”
“Magical Negro” crackles with 
the power of identity. In “When a 
Man I Love Jerks Off in My Bed 
Next to Me and Falls Asleep,” 
our speaker relays that “When 
I walk into the world and know 
/ I am a black girl, I understand 
/ I am a costume. I know the 
rules. / I like the pain because it 
makes me.” These poems locate a 
community’s tenacity of in spite of 
its trauma, an everyday superhero 
recomposition of pain into power 
through deadpan-statements like 
“There’s no way a black woman / 
killed herself, because everyone 
knows 
we 
can 
withstand 
/ 
inhuman amounts of pain” in “A 
Brief History of the Present,” a 
poem that ends with our speaker 
describing “tectonic plates clicking 
/ like a jaw, and — stubbornly, like 
history — my mouth / becoming 
their mouth speaking who I am.”
“Magical 
Negro” 
moves 
back and forth across time and 
form to galvanize this power. 
In one volume, Parker remixes 
the Confiteor into a satire of 
Brooklynite 
millennial 
culture 
(“Here is the bright young food 
co-op. / Here is the steeple.”), 

writes a tribute to Zora Neale 
Hurston (one of an excellent 
many to come out this month), 
and describes what it’s like to 
date White dudes named Matt 
(“Matt smokes unfiltered Pall 
Malls because Kurt / Vonnegut 
did.”). The February poem in 
this collection is “What I Am,” 
an anthem inspired by Terrance 
Hayes that finds the electricity in 
the everyday, in “waiting in line 
at Walgreens / for my pills and 
texting / a white man I hope will 
fuck me,” and in recognizing that 
“I play / my tarot only at night, my 
eyes fall, / I get mean, I fall in love, 
I deny this.”
The collection ends on a 
powerful reimagining of “It was 
summer now and the colored 
people came out into the sunshine, 
full blown with flowers,” an iconic 
line from Gertrude Stein’s “Three 
Lives.” But in “Magical Negro,” 
the procession is far from flowers 
and sunshine. It’s “descend(ing) 
from the boat two by two,” it’s 
“The gap in James Baldwin’s 
teeth speak(ing) to the gap in 
Malcolm X’s teeth,” it’s “Frederick 
Douglass’s side part kiss(ing) 
Nikki Giovanni’s Thug Life tattoo.” 
It’s a choir:
“The choir loses its way. The 
choir never returns home.
The choir sings funeral instead of 
wedding, singe funeral
instead of allegedly, sings funeral 
instead of help, sings
Black instead of grace, sings 
Black as knucklebone,
mercy, junebug, sea air. It is time 
for war.”

‘Magical Negro’ empowers

BOOK REVIEW
COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK

JENNA BARLAGE
Daily Arts Writer

‘Magical 
Negro’ 

Morgan Parker

Tin House

Feb. 5, 2019

The mission of a pop 
song ... is to get to that 
just-read-my-diary 
feeling without being 
so broad that the song 
collapses under the 
weight of itself.

“I’m at a place 
where I know 
that I deserve 
something 
different and 
that I want 
something 
different and 
that something 
different doesn’t 
feel boring or 
flat to me.”

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

VERITY STURM
Daily Book Review Editor

The notion of being in love 
with your art form resonates 
across genres. Falling out 
of love with your art form 
resonates, too.

