2B — Thursday, February 13, 2020
b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

“Once upon a time, not long ago, I was 
a hoe,” sang rapper/singer/Internet meme 
Mariahlynn through our phone speaker, 
my two best friends and I singing along 
as we hurtled across Europe in a rickety 
passenger train. This was not the first 
time any of us had mimicked her risque 
lyrics in public. By the end of our trip 
to Vienna last year, we had memorized 
the entirety of “Once Upon a Time” and 
several other incredibly explicit songs. 
Sitting on that train, whisper-screaming 
lines like “But I fuck him though / And I 
don’ even care if his mother know,” I had 
a momentary thought — would songs like 
this have even existed 15 years ago? 
Sure, maybe from a male writer or 
singer, but not from a woman, at least 
not so brazenly. The reinvention of lust 
in music has turned what used to be 
unmentionable into a badge of pride for 
some female-identifying artists, as glitter 
and sweat and everything in between 
mixes to create the new sound of sex. 
This sound seems so commonplace now, 
with samples that would fit right in on 
PornHub, littering songs like the popular 
“Deepthroat” by CupcakKe. They are 
created by somewhat fringe artists, but the 
shock value of their work and its positive 
embrace of sexuality have catapulted this 
new idea of popstar sexuality into the 
spotlight. Though CupcakKe announced 
she was retiring in September 2019, in 
December she came back to announce 
she had not only lost 30 pounds, but also 
signed an $8 million deal with Sony Music 
Entertainment. That’s right, SONY.
The same company that boasts Beyonce, 
Michael Jackson and Prince in their ranks 
not only signed CupcakKe, but gave 
her millions of dollars, of which she is 
allegedly donating $60,000. If that’s not 
evidence of a major paradigm shift, I don’t 
know what is. In the age of the internet, 
anyone can cultivate their own audience, 
regardless 
of 
the 
content 
they 
are 
producing. For artists like CupcakKe, this 
independent following is what supported 
her brash acceptance of sex and its motifs 
in her music. But even for those who 
aren’t putting orgasm-like sounds in the 
first seconds of their singles, things are 
changing for the sex-positive artist. 
This change began in the late ‘90s and 
early aughts for artists like Peaches, whose 
2002 record The Teaches of Peaches 
includes titles such as the ultra-popular 
“Fuck the Pain Away.” Her early songs are 
a cacophony of machine-generated drums 

and cymbals, the artist’s languid talk-
singing detailing her sexual escapades 
in emotional and physical detail. It’s this 
nonchalant acknowledgement of female 
sexuality that marks the difference from 
previous artists, as the hidden secrets of 
‘70s songs like The Starland Vocal Band’s 
“Afternoon Delight” are now made clear 
for a listener to plainly understand.
These moments of heightened femme 
pleasure-seeking exist on a scale, ranging 
from the drawling lyrics of artists like 
Lana Del Rey to the intensely explicit 
Brooke Candy, but the fact that they exist 
at all in the mainstream is a wonder of its 
own. Del Rey sings “My pussy tastes like 
Pepsi-Cola / My eyes are wide like cherry 
pies,” and an audience of millions listens.
Del Rey in particular represents a niche 
of the sexualised pop-star that bridges 
the gap between traditional songwriting 
and the new world of increasingly 
devoted internet fanbases. Her fans love 
her because she is transparent about the 
harsh realities of hypersexuality, about 
the turmoil and violence of relationships 
with bad men and good men all the same. 
One could argue that Del Rey, real name 
Lizzie Grant, is a character immune 
to the flak of sharing her sexuality so 
plainly in the public eye. But I’d say that 
her presence in the mainstream media is 
that of an interloper from the internet age, 
where her flower-child inspired persona 
grew into what it is today.
The reason she can sing lyrics like “In 
the land of gods and monsters / I was 
an angel, lookin’ to get fucked hard,” 
is because of her fanbase, much like 
CupcakKe’s, yet she has hidden them in 

a traditionally pop format. If you don’t 
look closely, she could be singing about 
anything in a sexy voice, seemingly 
slurring her words in a stylized old-
Hollywood persona. As one of the initial 
female artists to bring the complexity of 
bold sexuality from an internet subgenre 
to top-40 stardom, Del Rey’s popularity 
signaled the introduction of newer, even 
more intense and honest artists than 
herself. 
This shift is in part due to these artists, 
as the audiences for their music become 
desensitized to the shock value and 
up-front crudeness of their lyrics, but it 
has also been influenced by the massive 
changes in the music industry at large. We 
no longer rely on sanitized, FCC-regulated 
radio to get our music — not even in the car 
or on a train — as my friends and I found 
that day on the way to Austria. Listeners 
are now able to choose what they want 
from their musicians, supporting artists 
that would not have made it to the ears 
of record executives, let alone the radio, 
because of their niche status or subjects. 
We are now able to directly support 
artists like Del Rey, CupcakKe, Peaches 
and Brooke Candy, at the same time 
proving the existence of an audience 
for them and furthering the presence of 
sex-positive music for femme, queer and 
other 
traditionally 
underrepresented 
demographics. The personalization of 
music in the last two decades has made 
it possible to bring what has always been 
private into the public eye, thus allowing 
the hushed existence of female lust and 
sexuality to enter the spotlight it so 
desperately needs.

From Lana to CupcakKe, the crucial 
reinvention of pop-star sexuality

CLARA SCOTT
Daily Arts Writer

B-SIDE: MUSIC

TUNECORE

B-SIDE: BOOKS

Doing nothing for 
as long as possible

EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer

Not long after I sat down 
to 
write 
about 
Ottessa 
Moshfegh’s third novel, “My 
Year Of Rest And Relaxation,” 
I got an email notification 
from the campus health center 
informing me that I had mono. 
I wasn’t surprised, exactly: 
when I went in for tests, I 
figured I had the flu but with 
an abnormally prolonged and 
intense sore throat. As it turns 
out, I somehow have something 
worse than the flu: a disease 
that stays latent in a person 
for months, slowly taking out a 
tide of fever and fatigue. 
I was mortified about this, 
obviously, but I was also a bit 
relieved. I had something to 
call the feelings that were 
amassing in my body and a 
satisfactory 
explanation 
for 
everything. I could send emails 
to my professors and safely 
take a few days off to “recover,” 
which is to say sit around and 
do nothing. In the meantime 
I would get sympathetic coos 
from friends and housemates 
who would wander into the 
room and see me in my pathetic 
state curled up in a blanket. 
The unnamed protagonist 
in 
Moshfegh’s 
novel, 
who 
tries to sleep off her malaise 
for 
a 
year, 
doesn’t 
have 
anything to call it — the word 
“depression” doesn’t make a 
single appearance in the book 
— but she does give her vague 
feelings a shape. She gives 
herself a year of nothing, an 
allotted time for her to change. 
Moshfegh writes: “I thought 
life would be more tolerable 
if my brain were slower to 
condemn the world around 
me.” She wants to detach, to 
not care. And so she goes to a 
disreputable psychiatrist and 
gets prescribed all manner 

of anti-anxiety medications, 
sleep aids and sedatives, and 
self-medicates herself into a 
stupor 
somewhere 
between 
wakefulness and sleep.
The novel manages to be 
engaging despite this premise. 
There’s still a whiff of agency 
and rebellion in this dramatic 
act of refusal, a sense in which 
the 
protagonist 
is 
taking 
control of her life (or at least 
attempting to) by refusing to 
live it. Given what the rest 

of her world looks like — an 
unsatisfying job at a gallery, 
a 
humiliating 
on-again-off-
again relationship with an 
older 
Wall 
Street 
type, 
a 
single friend with whom she 
has a codependent, resentful 

relationship. It’s additionally 
implied that the protagonist is 
trying to undo her memories of 
her emotionally cold parents, 
both of whom died a few 
months before the plot of the 
novel started. In this light, her 
decision to just try to remove 
herself totally has its merits 
and even comes across as 
eminently reasonable given the 
circumstances. The excessive, 
self-destructive rest she goes 
through 
is 
both 
a 
coping 
mechanism and a way (in her 
mind) of shaping herself into 
someone better, without the 
baggage of her previous life. 
There’s a sense in which her 
self-administered care is a way 
of forgetting, of purging, of 
becoming clean and pure. 
It’s clear that the scheme 
isn’t going to work, at least not 
in the way the narrator thinks 
it will. Moshfegh knows that 
you can’t rest yourself into 
wholeness, or even wellness, 
really. Even in my case, where 
I’m resting off an affliction 
of the body rather than of the 
spirit, I understand that rest 
can only do so much. When I 
return to class next week, I 
will have a degree of the same 
fatigue and aches, and I will 
still have more to do. This 
is the fundamental problem 
with rest, relaxation, so-called 
“self-care” and a good portion 
of “wellness” — that in the 
end you have to return to your 
life. It’s possible, in the end, 
that rest is only ever its own 
reward, something Moshfegh 
seems to understand: there’s 
a 
particular 
pleasure 
the 
protagonist feels throughout 
her voided months, somewhere 
between active and passive, 
sadistic and masochistic. The 
ambiguity of this desire forms 
the dramatic tension of this 
book. For now I can have long 
languid hours to stew in my 
dizzy mind, which feels to me 
the point.

The seven sins and the swag bags

Greed
Leonardo 
DiCaprio, 
Tom 
Hanks, 
Saoirse 
Ronan, 
Margot 
Robbie 
and 
Quentin Tarantino: some of the biggest 
stars of the principal categories of the 2020 
Oscars who left without a golden man. 
However, these stars did not exactly leave 
empty-handed. In 2001, The Academy 
began administering swag bags for all of 
the nominees in the leading categories: 
Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting 
Roles and Best Director. Recognized by 
their luxurious gifts and expensive cost, 
the bags were soon investigated by IRS, 
and The Academy officially put an end to 
the superfluous gifts. 
This is when Distinctive Assets stepped 
in. 
Unaffiliated with the Oscars, it is now 
Distinctive Assets who sponsors these 
swag bags for the top nominees. Those 
who accept are subject to an income tax, 
and in recent years the refusal of the swag 
bag has occurred. But the 2020 Oscar 
swag bags entail the most luxurious items 
of them all — how could anyone resist? 

Pride 
A tried-and-true initiation to “thank 
you” speeches usually follows along the 
lines of being so “humbled” to have been 
chosen. That they are undeserving. Small 
hints of hesitation may be disclosed, but 
all is forgotten when the gift bag arrives. 
The winners may take more pleasure 
with their goodies while the losers find 
solace on their 12-day “Scenic Eclipse” 
cruise, during their secluded getaway in 
a Spanish lighthouse or perhaps during 
one of their cosmetic treatments, worth 
around $25,000 in itself. 
How embarrassing it must be for 
Margot Robbie, Scarlett Johansson and 
Charlize Theron (all included in Forbes’ 
List 
of 
Highest-Paid 
Actresses 
this 
year) to be snubbed for their incredible 
performances. Money couldn’t buy them 

an Oscar, but it could buy stays at Wellness 
Resorts and phone calls with a Life Coach 
to help them push forward. 

Gluttony 
Though 
the 
nominees 
may 
be 
Hollywood 
stars 
leading 
entirely 
different lives to that of average citizens 
like us, all of us are connected by our 
universal appreciation for comfort food. 
Is there anyone in need of more comfort 
following the Oscars than the forgotten 
nominees? While there are McDonalds in 
Hollywood, what better way to welcome 
a win or cope with a loss than with Mad 
Mac Macarons, dinner for two at Flora’s 
Field Kitchen in Cabo, Mexico, a guided 
tasting of Coda’s Signature Chocolate 
edibles and more. 

Sloth 
Distinctive Assets ensure the nominees 
feel rewarded. Guaranteed relaxation is 
tacked on to the luxuries in the swag bags, 
persuading the stars to take a break. To 
let loose and enjoy themselves. After all, 
life is hard for millionaires. 

Lust 
The swag bag has all one could ever 
need to partake in rather than merely 
lustful activities. Romantic getaways, 
gold-infused bath bombs, trips to a 
destination spa, everything condoning 
pleasure and indulgence, sealed with a 
red ribbon and placed into the hands of 
the biggest faces in film today. 

Wrath 
Distinctive Assets knows just the route 
to take to prevent stars from speaking 
out. Dilute their anger with gifts, let 
them know they will get to take a prize 
home. Smother them with jokes about 
the lack of women nominations for Best 
Director and rather repetitive jokes 
about the lack of representation present 
in the nominations and the audience, 
preventing them from insisting that those 
with power do something about it. Find 
the fury and diminish it with hydrogen-
infused water and a brain-wave sensing 

meditation headband. Turn their anger 
into gratitude. Turn their wrath into 
acceptance. 

Envy 
Envy, our final sin, does not belong to 
the argued perpetrator. 
The final sin belongs to us. 
While the Oscars swag bags may not be 
the most moral signifiers of achievement 
for our beloved Hollywood stars, is it 

not our own envy that drives us to make 
these claims of dubious intent? These 
accusations are reeking with jealousy. I 
enviously type away, framing these stars 
and their acknowledgments, deeming 
them unworthy of such acclaim due to my 
own insecurity that my own achievements 
and impacts will never equate. But these 
celebrities are doing their job. A job we 
liken to worth, notability and success. A 
job we label as impressive, a necessary 
asset to the functioning of our society. 
Are we not the engine driving such award 
shows to take place? 
We are greedy for quality films, prideful 
in our original opinions, gluttonous for 
movie snacks, lazy as we stream from 
our beds, lustful in our engagement with 
the indecent scenes, angry when our top 
pick doesn’t win, and we. Are. Envious. 
Jealous in our recognition that we have 
such small odds of being on that stage. 
That we will never be gifted anything as 
salivating. 
Perhaps we are the most sinful of all.

The 2020 Oscar swag 
bags entail the most 
luxurious items of them 
all — how could anyone 
resist?

Ottessa Moshfegh via WATERSTONES

I was mortified 
about this, 
obviously, but 
I was also a bit 
relieved. I had 
something to call 
the feelings that 
were amassing 
in my body and 
a satisfactory 
explanation for 
everything

This is the 
fundamental 
problem with 
rest, relaxation, 
so-called “self-
care” and a 
good portion of 
“wellness” — that 
in the end you 
have to return to 
your life

B-SIDE: COMMUNITY CULTURE

LILLY PEARCE
For The Daily

