love of life is irrational
how an uplifting sadgirl song works
This post is an examination of one song. It is not a big-scale culture wars screed, nor a fire and brimstone religious jeremiad, which are my usual concerns. I happen to be listening to this song over and over because it has an odd quality to it, and I wanted to write on that quality and why it helps me emotionally. That’s all.
In the distant past, I wrote that real sadgirl music, in my non-objective opinion, is music that realistically speaks to the experience of being severely unhappy as a long term state of being, even as the foundation of a worldview, rather than as the temporary result of an unpleasant situation like a breakup. “It gets better!” is not a real sadgirl music move, for the most part, because that seems like a bald lie. The sadgirl state of existence is permanent, or at least seems that way, because it’s a long term reality.
For sadgirl music to be uplifting, its joy needs to be as raw and desperate as its pain. I’m going to discuss an instance of uplifting sadgirl music.
All real sadgirl music can be helpful, if we’re thinking of health outcomes for a mentally unwell listener, in the sense that it makes her feel understood and less alone. For the same reasons, however, it can compound her pain by affirming its resultant cognitive distortions. (My grammar here is maybe misleadingly indirect; “She speaks in the third person so she can forget that she’s me,” as Emilie Autumn sez.) Any uplifting sadgirl music has to walk a thin and blurry line to work.
If the above sounds teenagey and pretentious, I’ll say again: Sadness is the most pretentious emotion. Dodging that with millennial irony is passé and not helpful. Real sadgirl music doesn’t generally deign to worry about the teenagey fear of cringe.
Kimberly Freeman, half of the band One-Eyed Doll, is likely my favourite sadgirl musician — not just for making cathartic music, as Emilie Autumn also does, but for making music that can actually crack me out of the containment of a pathologically low state. Maybe this is because Freeman’s lyrics give the vibe of someone who’s been through it, rather than someone who’s still in the thick of it, coming off as restrained and reflective. I don’t know any relevant biographical details to back up this sense I get, though.
One-Eyed Doll’s “Hole” is the ultimate uplifting song for me. It’s a song about grief, sure, but it’s about a permanent pain, and not about trying to neutralise it, but somehow loving existence from within it. It’s difficult to explain but I’ll do my best, because it’s one of few sadgirl songs that can actually help me feel better. Or maybe that “because” is too generous to myself, and I’m actually just writing about “Hole” because I personally need to dwell on the song since I’m going through it, whatever it is. Fortunately the DSM already contains my biography so I don’t need to think about emotional self-expression, yay!
Unfortunately, as with most of One-Eyed Doll’s music, “Hole” isn’t available through conventional means anymore. And I would never ever condone finding music through means other than Spotify or Apple Music! But it’s worth a listen or a thousand listens if you get the chance one way or another. Just sayin’.
Despite “Hole” opening with lyrics about personal loss, which would seem tob be a temporary grief, the sadgirl sense of long term pain comes in quickly:
There's a hole in my heart
Where your smile used to be
Your blue eyes have been gouged from my soul
There's now blood, there is rain
Where once flowers I did see
Now I bleed from this infected hole
She metaphorises loss as a permanent (as will be clear later) or at least long-lasting, open, infected wound. Her negative emotional state is projected outward, affecting her image of the world, selecting what she does or doesn’t see. This is something people often forget when reading highly descriptive novels or poems: the author is selecting which details to give, and those choices form much of the perspective the reader is inhabiting and witnessing the work’s world through. Our brains do that for us constantly as we go through our real-life experiences, so of course a focaliser or narrator in a work of literature will be doing it. Freeman states the point bluntly here. For her persona in this song, her emotional state determines what she can or cannot see.
“Hole” dropped early in One-Eyed Doll’s short career as a duo. I can imagine, had it been produced about 3 years later, this track would’ve incorporated their more complex bluesy influences, perhaps even keyboard or organ. But the near-primitiveness of “Hole” is what makes it so useful as a sadgirl pick-me-up, because when the chorus hits, it just hits, after the fairly quiet opening verse. Hard dichotomies of quiet/loud, as well as adult/childish, are significant parts of what keeps early One-Eyed Doll invigorating.
The chorus is in Greek: zoe mou, sas agapo. My life, I love you. It comes from a poem of Byron’s, “Maid of Athens, ere We Part.” The chorus and its accompanying wall of guitar come in with a steel chair immediately after the last line of the verse.
“Hole” doesn’t try to rationalise its joy. This is why it works as an uplifting sadgirl song. There is no build-up to its insistent life-loving; it makes no argument for why to love life instead of lingering on death. Freeman’s insistent, prayer-like refrain of “zoe mou, sas agapo,” is as desperate as her verse’s grief. Her joy is irrational, erupting with the intensity of massive willpower in non-logical opposition to her sorrow. I relate to the song’s implied experience of hanging onto one fragment of a poem as a lifeline, too. And half my prayers right now are pretty much this song, in a sense.
After the chorus’s many repetitions of Byron’s line, we go back to the first verse, showing the two persistent forces in conflict. Round 2 of chorus 1 then leads into round 2 of “zoe mou, sas agapo,” then comes the bridge:
Be the pills in my throat
Or the razor's black reign
Be the chain that holds me from my sin
Still I won't clot the wound
No I can't wash the stain
Of your sweet memory on my skin
In “Hole”’s bridge, Freeman affirms its sorrow’s permanence and complicates her control over the emotional situation (won’t? can’t?) before then returning to the chorus, and layering the chorus and bridge over one another until the song’s quiet end. The bridge’s lyrics are ambiguous; their addressee is the deceased or otherwise departed person from the verse, though, and Freeman clarifies: you can be my death, or you can hold me back from it, but either way, I “won’t” (be able to? try to?) “clot the wound.” It’s permanent.
Nevertheless, my life, I love you.
“Hole” works to uplift me precisely because it doesn’t resolve anything. The almost liturgical cry of “my life, I love you,” never tries to out-philosophise the verse’s gloom, and the bridge, well, bridges the two: okay, verse, I won’t resolve you, but the chorus will remain. There’s no “but…” before the chorus. It’s pain and love of life, not pain then love of life. The song’s love of life struggles and requires manyfold reaffirmations to oppose its pain, which is a rare portrayal of how piercing the gloom actually feels to me — rather than the false-seeming affirmation that the verse is just wrong and its raw, infected wound can be fixed up like new.
I don’t have a bigger point to make here. This post has no broad relevance, neither on the societal scale of the gender wars nor the cosmic scale of faith. “Hole” is a good, uplifting sadgirl song. Maybe it’ll help someone else too. That’s all.
Love of life is irrational and that’s okay.