The Devil Is A Woman

Life has been exhausting this past year. I think it goes without saying how the world we exist in is psychologically destroying us. I was also part of a mass layoff in June, but with a final day of December 1. Those six months were difficult for so many reasons. Now, I am working at a pre-funding startup. While I am getting to do work I love on something I believe in, the startup life is not the greatest for the Autistic mind, and having no paycheck exacerbates that quite a bit. It's all slowed down progress on Damned Praise's first LP, as I generally have no energy after work to do much, let alone do work on the same laptop.

I'm still writing new stuff, but as I've been wrapping up production on LP1, I've shifted away from writing heavier songs. I've been focusing on my acoustic guitar with the goal of playing some solo shows this year. To be honest, the heavier stuff I'm writing now is structured around so many layered melodies, harmonies, and leads, I don't think the songs hit the same when played solo. I've also been writing more political lyrics, and I think those often land much better when juxtaposed with a softer sound that has more space built in.

So, to shake off some dust and feel some sense of accomplishment, I decided to challenge myself to record and mix four of these songs over last weekend; just me, my acoustic guitar, and rough, quick passes at demo quality. It turned out better than I'd hoped. I'm really proud of these songs, and it's nice to have completed something. It's been a while.

By The Time You Read This...

I've never really cared much for writing songs about interpersonal drama (at least compared to the punk/emo scene at large). Whether it's an unfair presentation of one side of an issue, an immature swipe at someone who can't talk back, or just a shallow display of impulsive, reactionary emotion, it always felt simplistic and self-congratulatory. It's all too subjective, and if you're committed to growing as a person, you usually end up regretting it. There's also the consideration of the nebulous area of consent that songwriters so often ignore: Where does our role as storytellers, autobiographers, and narrators of shared cultural emotions/experiences end, and where does the agency of those in our lives begin?

Clearly, I do not think that favor needs to be extended to people, like my parents and childhood church leaders, whose behavior contributed to my C-PTSD. The actions of oppressors and abusers cannot be allowed to hide in bad faith by demanding respect they do not give to others.

If you ask anyone in the punk scene who has had even a modicum of success with a band, you will likely find someone scarred by the toxicity created by jealous competitors masquerading as friends and found family. The heavier sides of the music industry are incestuous, to put it mildly, with a persistent focus on the idea of "contributing to the scene". This can be a call for unity and collaboration, but it is instead often used by narcissists to shame others into behaving according to their desires. If anyone they deem "unworthy" steps out of line or gets something they are not perceived to deserve, they become pariahs - fodder for passive-aggressive manipulation and gossip.

Before Turnspit started, there were many people I considered friends who, it turns out, weren't. I opened my house to these people for parties. We liked and commented on each others' social media posts. We shared long drunken nights at bars joyfully learning about each others' lives and tastes. We shouted along to our favorite songs, arms draped around each other in sweaty moshpits. After Turnspit hit the most menial bar of local success - no longer just opening neighborhood dive bar shows - this changed on a dime. A little under a year after we'd started, we got tapped to open one show for The Lawrence Arms. This was a dream realized, to say the least, and yet, looking back, it was the beginning of a pattern of abuse that increasingly damaged me over the ensuing 4+ years.

So I decided to write a brief answer to all the exclusion, gaslighting, passive aggression, and all-around emotional violence visited on me, my bandmates, and so many people in so many other bands. This song is blunt, yet vague enough that it could be about dozens of people, with a runtime just about as long as these people deserve. There is no parsing what happened to learn anything. There is no reflection to be had. Just a big "Fuck you, asshole" to everyone who took the only place I felt safe in the world and made it dangerous and unlivable.

Lyrics

You know damn well why I don't like you.
You were mean to me.
You know it.
I know it.
But you're too chickenshit to own it.
You don't get to gaslight me
anymore.

Motherfucker.

So go feel sorry for yourself
somewhere else,
and please leave me the fuck alone.

Honey, I Was Right About the War (Smoke or Fire cover)

This song came out in 2010, and I started covering it in 2013. I keep hoping one of these days it'll seem quaint.

Lyrics

Eight years ago, on a summer night
on the streets of LA was our first fight.
Turned out to be the first of many more.

The country was all in uprise
with who to blame and who to fight
and who to kill and bomb to settle the score.

You said, "My love, in times like these
you don't dare question the President,"
and I raised my voice to the girl I most adored.

I said, "I know it's hard for you to see,
but I will not blindly follow one who blindly leads,
no matter what the cause."

Three thousand dead in NYC
and so many more across the sea.
No one can tell me what for.

Now, I'm not one to say, "I told you so,"
but time has passed, and now we know
that, honey, I was right about the war.

A rich man's chess game is called a war,
and the pawns they use are named "the poor."
And no one ever wins.

So I say for shame on anyone
who orders young men to shoot a gun
for these gods you all kill and die so easily for.

I know the end is coming soon -
not for the earth, just me and you
and every other soul that shares this world.

Kill a million men, but ideas will still endure.
People were not meant to kill for sport.
Goddamnit, I was right about the war.

The Devil is a Woman

Recently, I started reading James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds' The Department of Truth. It's essentially about two organizations competing to control reality via memetic tulpas, using the conceit to explore conspiracy theories and the culture surrounding them. It's a captivating, beautifully illustrated, and astute look at world history through the eyes of some of the most terrible conspiracist ideas out there, from blood libel to the harassment of the parents of school shooting victims.

In the first issue, a mysterious "Woman in the Red Dress" is introduced as an antagonist (presumably, I haven't finished the story). She is implied to be either a metaphorical or literal version of the devil. At one point, reference to the "Whore of Babylon" is made.

This got me thinking about the trope of the feminine and the satanic being oft-combined in popular culture. Whether it's the concept of succubi, the gender-fucked versions of biblical devils in Neil Gaiman's work, or films like Bedazzled, the association goes back to the Garden of Eden, and forms a recursive rhetorical tautology wherein the feminine is evil, so evil is feminine.

From there, my mind drifted to Umberto Eco's fascism checklist (Ur-Fascism), notably for the way it paints machismo as a prototypical facet of any fascist movement, and how fascists must portray their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak." It's interesting how much of it parallels tools of abusers, like DARVO, but I digress. The fourteen-item list of the historical hallmarks of fascist movements could be used to describe Evangelical Christianity, even if we could somehow divorce the cult conceptually from its ties to American White nationalism.

The lyrics below started as a poem that poured out of me in the ensuing half-hour - a satirical screed from the point of view of these people analyzing the hypocrisy, fear, hatred, and selfish violence at the core of a philosophy they insist is rooted in compassion. I then set it to music using tropes from protest songs in the mid-20th century folk tradition to really lean into the irony.

Lyrics

The Devil is a woman,
and God is a man. 
A whispering serpent. 
An almighty hand. 

The Devil is a woman,
but God’s still a man:
the head of the table -
the fire, the pan.

The Devil is a stranger
here at our door, 
pleading for mercy -
a coward, a whore.

The Devil - compassion -
speaks scripture in tongues.
Weakness as strength
and all these stones unflung.

The Devil is a woman
born as a man -
a beast that eats children,
a curse on the land.

The Devil’s the idle,
the sick, and the poor
yearning to breathe free,
but these are our shores.

The Devil is a woman,
and God is undone.
The wicked are winning.
We must overcome.

The Devil is weak -
an unstoppable threat -
and we’ll never stop
until the Devil is dead

The Devil is a woman,
and God is our fear,
wrapped up in vengeance,
a grin to both ears.

Our God is not graceful,
forgiving, or meek, 
but a wrath that we visit
on all the lost sheep.

The Devil is God,
and God is a gun
skinned in a flag.
It’s futile to run.

The Devil is mercy,
and that cannot stand,
for our God’s a White-skinned
American man.

The Devil is a woman,
and God is undone
The wicked are winning.
We must overcome.

The Devil is weak,
an unstoppable threat,
and we’ll never stop
until these devils are dead.

Blood and Stone (The American Nuclear Family as a Failed State)

It's been almost three years since I've spoken with anyone in my family.

The reasons for this would seem readily apparent (no pun intended). Namely, that the Evangelical cult they raised me in utterly broke me, but it goes much deeper than that. My family was also made up a delightful combination of enmeshed, narcissistic, and authoritative family dynamics, with me as a blend of The Scapegoat and The Lost Child. This is still the case. I was conditioned to crave a sense of authoritative community with no concept of boundaries, but one wherein I still felt invisible and blamed. I was not able to break free of these patterns without shutting my family out of my life.

I spent the majority of my life in a codependent relationship with people who taught me that the platonic ideal of love not only included, but required contempt for who I was. Like Sisyphus, I tried in vain for decades to get them to engage honestly with me, to see my experience as valid, and to essentially be the people they see themselves as. To listen to my pleas for them to accept reality. To confront their biases. To learn. To grow. To stop hurting me.

In the meanwhile, the negative effects on my sense of self turned malignant and metastasized. As healing often requires moving on from coping mechanism after coping mechanism, I had to become even more of a frayed, exposed nerve - confronting desperation, loneliness, self-loathing, anxiety, and rage in order to surface for air. Our last conversation wasn't the reason for the estrangement; it was merely the final straw. As one of my favorite aphorisms says: The final straw is rarely the biggest one, it's just the last one. My healing journey had brought me to a point where I could proceed no further with them still in my life, and it had given me the confidence to do what I needed to do. Life isn't an interminably miserable slog anymore, and I now look forward to the possibilities of continual growth out excitement rather than necessity.

But you know what? It still fucking hurts. It is a hurt that goes down to the deepest crevices of who I am that I do not have a family. That the people who were supposed to love and support me and teach me how to love and support myself were, and still are, patently unable to do so. But having them in my life in even the tiniest of ways hurts more, and that's just the shit hand some of us are dealt. I'm playing it the best I can.

Our society is built around family, and moving through it means constant reminders of what I don't have. People seldom react well when you tell them. Some pressure you to contact your family, trying to convince you that your parents, who they have never met, still deserve you in their life. Some know the hurt. Some just feel awkward because they don't know how to respond.

Studies have shown that, in cases where an adult child estranges from a parent, the majority of adult children say they have explicitly explained why the estrangement is happening. The majority of parents say they were never told, instead trying to solve the problem by doubling down on the emotional manipulation and abuse that created it. Whether you are the estranged family member, the one cutting off contact, or a friend trying to understand and help, the following links may be of interest to you:

https://wehavekids.com/family-relationships/adult-child-estranged-reasons
https://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing-reasons.html
https://www.standalone.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/HiddenVoices.FinalReport.pdf
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/tech-support/202305/no-adult-childparent-estrangement-isnt-a-fad

Lyrics

I don't know why you thought I was lying
when I said, if nothing changed, I couldn't stay.
So I walked away,
but I didn't want to.

And I hope you'd be proud of where I am now,
though, I guess, that'd mean stepping aside.
And the last thing you'd ever do
is make room.

You always said you gave me blood,
but all I ever got was stone.
What good is love
if all it ever does is go?

Don't know what you were thinking when you taught me
that love meant always fighting to be heard,
and, well into adulthood,
being treated like you weren't.

How long can you stand with those who hurt me
before I resign myself to who you are?
I am not obliged
to believe those lies
you tell yourself.

You always said you gave me blood,
but all I ever got was stone.
What good is love
if all it ever does is hurt so much?

You never take responsibility
for the things that you claim to believe -
the things you don't take so seriously
when they'd require you to change.

I don't think these days much about dying
(well, at least not by my own hand anymore),
since I stopped talking to you
and your little god, too.

You always said you gave me blood,
but all I ever got was stone.
What good is love
if all it ever does is leave you all alone?

You always said you gave me blood,
but all I ever got was stone.
What good is love
if all it ever does is go?