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.