Dance Yourself Clean
Brat Summer never has to end
It’s Saturday evening in Berlin and I have just completed one of my primary comfort activities, which is making soup while listening to BRAT for the umpteenth time this week.
I have been listening to BRAT almost nonstop since Tuesday - on the way to work, on the way back from work, at the gym, at night when I couldn’t sleep. Any association that existed with the Harris campaign was immediately neutralized for me when she lost, and it once again started to feel like what it is - dance music of a very high order. And it is, as has been written, an album that calls back to the type of music that was very popular when I was in my 20s. Lyrical melancholy, scuzzy-sparkly production, full body euphoria.
It was that first MIA album that hit when I was at University of Michigan and sounded like nothing else on the planet, and which was quite possibly the only thing I listened to for a full year. It was the summer I was 24 and all the cool kids were talking about Animal Collective all the time, and I saw them in Prospect Park. It was LCD Soundsystem the whole damn decade, but especially This Is Happening, which came out right after I moved to Los Angeles and which I used to scream-sing in the car on my commute home from my miserable entertainment job. I did this so many times that I still associate specific parts of specific songs with specific spots on Beverly Boulevard. And when I moved back to the city at 28, I would head home from a night out blasting Body Talk on my headphones and marveling for the millionth at how glorious and sad life is.
So right now it is Charli XCX in Berlin, during a week that has been sad and enraging but also perhaps slightly less of those things than I was anticipating, at least right at this moment. In a month? Six months? Two years? Who knows, and I’m definitely not doing the social media news cycle panic thing this time around. You don’t know what’s going to happen until it does. But a lot of bad things will likely happen to a lot of people who didn’t ask for it. A lot of bad things have already been happening.
I am a deeply cynical person when it comes to politics, and I have spent most of the last year or two feeling like the world is going inexorably sidewise. This isn’t to say that I don’t think politics are worth participating in. I am genuinely fascinated by the machinations of history and society and culture how those things are reflected in politics, and have been since I was in school. I always vote, even when I despair somewhat at the choices, and I have been in and out of various forms of activism at various times. I canvassed for Obama in 2008, and I was indeed all atingle with hope when he won. I don’t feel hopeless now, though I certainly don’t feel great.
But I don’t think I have ever believed that American society and especially American government is “good” in any sense.
I come from a very political, social justice-y, left-leaning sort of family; I had the sort of parents who responded very candidly to my questions about a series of spectacularly gruesome police brutality cases that rocked NYC when I was in middle school. The first U.S. election I was fully cognizant of was the infamous one in 2000. I went to a public Manhattan high school full of brainiacs who had Very Serious Opinions about politics - a place where everyone was wildly accelerated in math, and one of the most popular senior electives was called “Prejudice and Persecution,” taught by a wild-haired old Jewish man who used to show us Spike Lee movies in class. When I was sixteen I took a bus down to D.C. with a bunch of my classmates to protest Bush’s inauguration. It was cold, rainy, and uncomfortable, and it felt very exciting and purposeful to boo and hiss with a bunch of other sixteen-year-olds as the motorcade passed by (were there any adults present on this trip? We must have been chaperoned, but I truly do not recall.)
Then we all went back to school and a few months later, on a beautiful late summer day, two planes hit the World Trade Center just blocks from that high school, so close that we could feel the ground shake and see the wall of dust barreling towards us as the first tower fell. I walked up the West Side Highway with my best friend alongside people covered in ash. Cell service was out all over the city so I’d had to call my parents from a stranger’s house in TriBeCa to let them know I was’t dead. This was my first big lesson on how the rest of the world is actually right there, and it was the first and biggest bubble (safety, predictability, the the literal and metaphorical glass-and-steel fortress I was raised in) to burst.
I think it is sometimes hard for non-New Yorkers to grasp how 9/11 was not a thing that happened to “America,” but a personal and community catastrophe. It was strangers crying on the bus, it was making sandwiches for first responders, it was getting turned away from blood drives because there were too many people donating blood. It was fliers of missing people on the walk to school, a 100-day fire that burned down the street, it was my dad being out of a job for a year because of the fallout for his industry. It was either the text or immediate subtext of every single conversation you had with anyone for a year, a chasm we were stepping over while going about our normal lives. People came together in ways I have not seen since, but they also lost it. I have enough stories about that fucked up year to fill a much longer essay than this.
My brainiac public high school was full of the striving kids of immigrant parents, many of whom were Muslim, and I thought it was deranged that anyone would think that this thing was somehow their fault; it had happened to them too. I hated the phrase “attack on America” immediately; I saw all those people frothing for revenge from a thousand miles away and thought they should fuck off and leave us alone. I hated all the flags, and all the stupid slogans, and George W. Bush’s stupid and inarticulate face.
A couple of months after 9/11, once we were allowed back in the building again, I remember standing in front of a television mounted in my high school lobby that was often turned to the news, watching buildings blow up in Kabul. It was afternoon in New York but night in Afghanistan and the explosions were very orange against the black sky, and I felt both numb and slightly insane.
It has been largely forgotten, and was deliberately ignored at the time, that a huge portion of New York City (though of course not everyone) immediately and viciously opposed the ensuing wars. There were marches, which I also joined. The wars happened anyway. Operation Enduring Freedom. The Freedom Tower. Freedom Fries.
It took many years before I could watch buildings blow up or collapse in movies without feeling the blood rush in my ears.
I spent a lot of that year being freaked out and angry but I also disassociated from a lot of it, and hard. I’m a big compartmentalizer, and I was taking three APs and the SATs were on the horizon, so there was plenty of stuff to bury my feelings in. I got drunk in the park with my friends, and we learned which bars didn’t card. I began to develop an eating disorder that lasted on-and-off for a very long time.
But I also, in the next years, discovered that I really, really, really love to dance. Hip-Hop and R&B, and later soul nights and the kind of mournfully ecstatic electronic I already mentioned. The city kids may have had trauma, but we also got peak Jay-Z. High school house parties, Ann Arbor frat parties, the A-list clubs of the mid aughts, crusty bars on the Lower East Side, cocaine in the bathroom at Santos Party House the summer it opened. I drank a lot of tequila and ran around being very free and very stupid with people I’m still very dear friends with, and feeling very, very alive, in the particular way you can only feel alive if you’re slightly obliterated in a mass of people and the music is very loud. New York City, and Lower Manhattan specifically, was a really great place to get obliterated and dance. I felt invincible again. I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite that invincible since, but I feel pretty fucking good when I listen to “Von dutch.”
To this day I feel a sort of knee-jerk distain for nationalistic propaganda or really any propaganda at all, even when it’s on behalf of a cause I basically support. It’s lazy language and decontextualized imagery, regurgitated to the point where it loses all meaning, and it all too often involves the cooption of people’s lives and stories without their input or consent. History is so much more enormous than any person, but it’s individual people who have to live their lives through it, before it becomes history and a meaning is assigned.
There was an endless, endless amount of propaganda during the Bush years, along with the beginnings of the unapologetic lying and hypocrisy and hyperpolarization that has consumed our politics. It was a very cynical time. This was the world as I understood it from 16 to 24, which is when you learn to really understand the world.
I’m less angry than I have been in a decade, though that may well change. Maybe it’s just the exhausted comedown, maybe because I don’t think this is as far from the status quo as it’s made out to be. Maybe it’s because I have the enormous privilege of being an ocean away in Berlin for the foreseeable future, where abortion is a non-issue and I go to the doctor for free. But at least right now, this doesn’t change the fact that I may well want to move back in a few years. I’m not remotely sure Europe is on a better path, and this last trip home reminded me that a lot of the people I want to be around as I get old - or who I want to be there for as they get old - live on the other side of the ocean.
I love America very, very much, not because it is good or because I am a patriot, but because it is home, and I have been increasingly conscious of this since I left. Even the people there whom I find absolutely abhorrent are abhorrent in a way I understand, and I think that clarity about America and its people and systems is part of why I feel relatively calm. Its language is my language, and its music and movies and TV shows and stories have shaped my mind and tastes and creative self, and give my life meaning. A lot of those stories exist because of the particular way that the best things about America are in constant tension with, and inseparable from, the very worst ones.
Look at you! You read all the way to the end! You must have really been enjoying yourself.
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