how phoebe gave me visions of the man to be obliterated (and made me understand why I was so sad)
A re-analysis of “phoebe bridgers and the music that blossomed my queerness”: phoebe implants images into my mind of the foreign entity who needed to be obliterated
one night i tell B that i can see myself from the perspective of another.
in my mind i can see him, this man:
dark flannel, jeans, walking along, moving through the world. i watch him: i am another, looking at me: and i realize that that i am nothing, or that i do not know who this person is. i do not know what i am looking at. who is this man?
i have this sense that in the mind of another, i am simply a piece of physical material, animated with energy from the snapping bonds of atp molecules, and when i look at this person — short hair, dark flannel, jeans — i see a stranger.
i do not know who this person is, and i have this sense that if i were to collapse dead right here next to B, and my body were an empty vessel here beside her, she would look down at me and she would see this man: this man i see from the perspective of another, and the idea of this utterly terrifies me.
to think that this man even exists at all: this terrifies me.
because if this man exists, then i do not exist. because this man is not me.
and so i am always thinking about this man.
never in my life, not even as an adolescent, have i had that kind of spiritual experience at a concert. wearing my phoebe bridgers astrology t-shirt and showing off my ghost tattoo (a reference to stranger in the alps), i was on the floor with the teens, hanging out in the back with the elder emos, and i was singing, dancing, screaming along to the lyrics. i sang, swayed, and smiled more at that show than at any show in my life. my phone stayed in my pocket on “do not disturb,” and i only looked at the screen three or four times. i didn’t take a single picture.
the performance absorbed me until i was falling in love with the same songs all over again. when lucy dacus was singing “true blue,” my soul disintegrated into little heart emojis that bounced around in my chest. and when phoebe bridgers played “revolution o” and “a letter to an old poet,” i was floating.
the energy, the joy, the love in the crowd for this beautiful music swept me into raptures. the sound of thousands of people singing along to the same songs i’d mostly listened to alone for so many hours made me feel like we were all there to praise, worship, commune. the music, sometimes with queer and satanic undertones, was giving us the kind of meaning that no organized religion ever could. true, at 16 i was baptized in the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost, but boygenius was the holy trinity that made me know what it really means to be born again.
at that show, i adored music more than ever. i was connecting with art in a way i never had before; surges of happiness and love rushed through me relentlessly until i was screeching “I WANNA BE EMACIATED” with all the fans around me while the boys (that’s their group gender) performed “me & my dog.”
