Hayden's the reason for the teardrops on my guitar

on art dismantling inhibiting...

Ladronka Park, circa 2020...because…idk… i think it’s a nice picture

Is art more effective than a didactic cold-blooded logical spiel? An essay, a video, a documentary, or a speech. Yes, they all can be done artfully, masterfully, but if they so explicitly cling onto the world of facticity, trying to explain to us the ‘truth’, are they seductive like art is? Art doesn’t care to explain, only cares to illustrate. This may just prove to be an exercise in irony.

When I tried to follow along Hayden singing ‘Thoroughfare’, shut in my room, speakers blaring in full blast, strumming the guitar and butchering the tune given that I was hella rusty, there was a strange uncanny feeling. Like I was some beast, a bull, a baboon or a donkey, who suddenly understood humanspeak, and moved by the lyrics and music, picked up the guitar and began to strum trying to sing along. It felt like in those videos where a husky begins to howl seeing a bunch of wolves doing the same on the telly, or when a toddler, excited in seeing people around them singing and dancing, joins in clapping, waving, happily babbling to be included. A loss of self-consciousness.

There is no self-consciousness in braying along. It is a mystical union with the universal consciousness. Ethel Cain’s ‘Thoroughfare’ is an epic rock ballad and it is grand. It’s a nine-plus minute song. So, slip sliding in and out of key and tempo in the sonic cocoon that folded upon itself swallowing the room felt like a mental sensory deprivation tank void of self-consciousness. Perhaps the third time playing along was when the mechanics of my body and the sonics in the atmosphere began to bleed into each other.

In the song, Ethel Cain’s (or Hayden’s) voice drones robustly mellow over the languid rhythm of the chords, the harmonica peak-a-boos, and the first chorus feints its movement - coming in as a refrain variation, subdued and diminutive in its scale. It primes your mind for the oncoming blitz and bliss. In the second verse, Hayden, she pulls the rhythmic carpet of chords from under you, replacing it with a faint ambient sound and intermittent trinkling arpeggios, she escalates the richness of her timbre, her voice reaching full-throatiness. She suspends you in expansive clouds of anticipation for the melodic drop, for the chorus.

It was then in that soundscape she’d crafted when she sang and slapped the words on me, the words that went:

“…and for the first time since I was a child, I could see a man who wasn’t angry…”

The words switched the tripwire and the waterworks began to flow. That the drums debuted the very next second only kicked the gates open further wide, securing the channel for this sentimental outpour. I say outpour, but it was a slim trickle really, steady and riverine, simply like emotions overflowing and correcting by dispensing off the excess. For, along with static on the skin, the mind flooded with memories of the time when there lay a latent anger in me. Some kind of rage that the world grooms into you. In everybody, I am sure, as their childhood dies and they have to reconcile the caring and uncaring world. Some make it past, some may be blessed to slip past it untouched, and other are consumed by it, either slowly or suddenly. It’s an iceberg too deep to dive into; heteronormative patriarchy, entitlement, the concept of dog eat dog, and the fact that we are all groomed to believe (subliminally if not explicitly) that we have to be better than them - our fellow men and women. The anger, especially among men, is stoked, fanned, preserved and pickled through the illusion of dignity denied, and that lack ferments into suffocating overleveraged pride, hyper-competition and paranoia. Like the world is against you. Like will to power is the only imperative, you either die (metaphorically or literally) or you dominate. Outwardly you could try to been the kindest, the chillest, or the most aloof, but your internal tectonics would still grate like shrieking metal. But all that’s a rabbit hole for another time.

By the time Hayden belted the chorus out, the second time around in all its rock ‘n’ roll glory, singing:

And you said, "Hey, do you wanna see thе west with me?
'Cause lovе's out there and I can't leave it be"
And I said, "Honey, love's never meant much to me
But I'll come with you if you're sure it's what you need

The lyric and the music built up the passion in me to palatial dimensions. It was not ugly crying, but I can’t confidently say there wasn’t a sob or two. After all, the volume was on blast and everything was bleeding into each other.

People asked me what I did for my birthday a while back. The answer downplayed itself for one, but for the rest it just blurted itself out - that I journaled, I cried and I slept. And that it felt fantastic. The admission in itself felt liberating too. I was scrawling the pen thoughtlessly on the paper, sipping coffee, with music playing through the headphones, and the tears appeared - surprise, surprise - during Ethel Cain’s ‘Thoroughfare’. A consciousness flashed. Letting it be felt that it had been a while since the weight had disappear, that when I thought about myself as a child I could actually identify. The misplaced grating anger had subsided. The shadow and I and in between the us the ghost of the child, could now share a laugh and look each other in the eye. The shadow’s demands are elementary, it demands understanding and affection from nobody else but you. It will tell you quite literally that nobody else will do.

Hayden Silas Anhedonia’s musical persona, Ethel Cain, and her fourth extended play (EP) and first studio album Preacher’s Daughter are works of art. They call the project a concept album, they call it Americana, folk, rock and they call it Southern Gothic. In fact, it can definitely sit on the canon of Southern Gothic; of music, yes most certainly, but also of lyric and literature, the songwriting is nonchalantly literary. The listeners and fans of Preacher’s Daughter know the haunting tragic tale it spins. It is a narrative-driven album, it is operatic and it is fantastic. The song, ‘Thoroughfare’, is the undeniable euphoric highpoint of the eponymous Ethel Cain’s journey, the emotional crescendo the latter act of the album opens with.

People acquainted with the project may understand the visceral reaction to the song, but they may differ in their own. But that’s art because subjectivity implies avenues ad infinitum, and there is always a lot to pick from. All I feel from it is obviously my psyche’s projection. There may be a common meeting point, the universal collective consciousness, between the art and you and I, but that’s an entangled equilibrium of different subjectivities. For some strange reason, it feels like art speaks to the world first and the individual second; the world as the absolute whole to which the soul is bared, and the individual as just a part of it all. For atop a cliff, the singer can look away and sing to the expanse, the wind, the abyss and the drop, you could still feel the passion and the point. But a didactic speech, even if it’s about the same themes - longing, sexuality, violence, trauma and death - a video essay explaining the Freudian and the Marxian sources of suffering cannot be made to the expanse, it has to be made looking into the eye of the audience. It has to corner them and objectify them as the listener, as the audience. It speaks to the individual as the unit, and it acts as if the unit precedes the whole, as if the unit comes first. It burdens your being, so that while your intellect listens the rest of your being keeps its guard up. Unless, of course, it’s a dramatic soliloquy, then you have the permission to talk the void, to the abyss, but then more likely than not your language will turn poetic.

All the content slop I have consumed, some even artistically effortful, the videos, the essays and bit-sized reels talking about culture and psychosexuality, about gender and sociology, or politics and economy, have arrested my attention, but only superficially so. I never have tried to replay them and recite the script along with the speaker. And I do love me some slop, especially the juicy quasi-academic-quasi-journalistic kind, I love some unhinged ranting and raving directed right at the camera, right at me. But I haven’t felt the visceral union of subjectivities, the provoking of the universal consciousness so to speak, the kind artists induce without even necessarily looking you in the eye. Art makes you do strange things, like go out on a limb and write a whole spiel about a song instead of just plugging it in your feed, stories and telling the world to listen to it. Seriously though, you should listen to it. Ethel Cain’s ‘Thoroughfare’. Maybe with a cup of coffee and your headphones on. It may provoke a sentimental mood.