Scampir

So for a Variety of reasons I have not really been able to celebrate Pride in the way I wanted to this year. A lot of regular non-celebratory life events happening such that I couldn't go to events this year, mostly. Which isn't the end of the world but did feel like a bit of a bummer to realize.

And while there's no problem with June not being a winner every year, I still wanted to try to do something. So have this short curated playlist I put together for myself. Did a lil writeup of each song for funsies. Links to the playlist and each individual song are included.

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1. Morbid Obsessions by We Are the Union

• Banger trans ska anthem
• This single was the lead singer's coming out announcement, which is how I found out about the band.
• The music video fucking rocks. There's a lot about it I love, enough to write a whole separate post about how it utilizes the allegory of zombies/undeath for transness. But it's silly, sincere, and full of defiant joy
• There is something nice about the fact that my vocal range overlaps with hers. Two audibly trans singers belting out together, declaring ourselves to the world with our own voices.
• Til the day I die I will tear up as I scream that last refrain with her. If I get one liiiife I'm gonna do what I waaaant

2. When You Were Young by The Killers

• So I know this is a song about a girl pining for a boy but what if instead you simply became the beautiful boy
• Most of my affinity for this song is from just liking it as a piece of music, the chord progression and guitar refrain, the arc of the melody. This is just the exact genre of song I like. But I can't listen to this song without thinking about how, yeah. I am both, I was both, and now I'm just the boy
• I think I'm doing a pretty good job of it

3. Know Your Name by Mary Lambert

• While being queer is not a choice I specifically remember the moment I chose to embrace my attraction to women instead of ignoring it
• The 2016 election results had just come in, and in the wake of disbelief and rage and redoubled solidarity for my queer siblings, I looked my own attraction dead in the face and swore to never ignore or downplay it ever again
• It's been complicated since my gender realization, but that's how I came into my bisexuality and that was my first stepping stone into my own queerness
• Anyway this song rocks, the music video and lyrics are cute as hell¹. I still remember how important Mary Lambert was to me as a pop artist who sung openly about liking girls, even though the musical landscape for wlw artists is so much different now. Girlkissers are feasting.

4. Salt by Bad Suns

• I'm pretty sure this was the first song I ever heard that was explicitly about transness. I proceeded to obsess about it for the next [checks music video] 9 years
• Even though Morbid Obsessions has displaced it as my favorite trans song, and I have a much more cohesive relationship to my past, I can't overstate how formative it was for me. I still feel like it really captures transition as a confused early trans person surrounded by cis people and having to figure it out as you go. Seriously just look at the lyrics and the visual language, it just. Nails it (CWs for allusions to self harm, transphobia, and depiction of assault)

5. Born This Way by Lady Gaga

• Okay look, I know this may be a cheesy pick and I have conflicted feelings about "born this way" talking points irl But. C'mon. I still love the song. It came up on shuffle the day I got my first HRT prescription, and now this latest surprise shuffle appearance from two days ago is why I'm making this playlist at all. I gotta.
• Some notes on the "orient" lyric: So I know these days there's a rereleased version that edits out the use of an outdated term for Asians. I think by and large it's a good thing - there are certain songs I flinch from for similar reasons² and broadly speaking I hate the use of it for me and my ethnicity.
• That said. Just look at my username, I clearly feel some level of identification with the term. There are some uses that don't hurt quite the same way. I'll hear the line and remember screaming it with all the other Asian kids at the summer camp dances in middle school and smile.

6. Pink Pony Club by Chappell Roan

• Like so many other queers I went mildly insane about this girl and her album. Anyway
• A lot of the connection here is identification with the speaker. I might not be a bi girl anymore but my mom's thinking the exact same things. I'm acutely aware of how queerness can force you to leave or complicate ties with a home that didn't make room for you, with a root culture that sometimes feels like it doesn't want you there. But also with the joy that coming into your queerness and connecting with community can bring and how that drive for life will bring you to choose to embrace it over and over and over
• It's there in the music video, the slight power fantasy where her drag show dancing slowly transforms the bar around her, the spotlight that starts following her around the space, the awed biker who slowly pulls out a single to hand to her before eventually she's just at the gay bar with the leather daddies and the queens and god I feel such relief and affection and love and homecoming at those shots
• But also the dive bar is still there. It's still a part of her. The final shot is just her breathing heavy at the mic in the stage once her performance is done. You don't know which bar she's in. Schrödinger's bar. It's both at once, always, unless you truly finally leave forever³

7. Immaterial by SOPHIE

• I didn't listen to SOPHIE until after she passed. A lot of people have already written about what she means to them, so all in going to say is I'm glad I found this song as a fleeting point of connection
• The music's good. It's just good. It's such a well rendered shot of trans joy, much like Morbid Obsessions I'm screaming with her by the end and fully convinced of my own limitless possibility
• There's a core component of transness that this song captures, to the point that I've referenced it in response to a passage from Susan Stryker's Transgender History⁴. It's about the liminality of transness, the kind of unreality that comes with being trans in a cisgender world. My gender is real, my body is real, but also I am still trying to project a persona beyond my body, and I'm a boy who wasn't real until I built him. Yknow, that sort of thing

8. Cut to the Feeling by Carly Rae Jepsen

• I know she's been a proper musician for a long time now but I'm so so glad i eventually listened to her music seriously after her Friday debut because holy shit. The opening feels like a bit of a comedown after SOPHIE's hyperpop but it so quickly builds right back up
• Jepsen described the song as "cinematic" and she's right, it really does feel fucking epic. I don't listen to a lot of CRJ but this here is pop this girl sounds so over the moon in love and purest bubbly joy. I feel like every crush I've ever had
• This is here because the gays love CRJ but more directly because the first time I heard this song was from a lipsync of a guy doing a routine with over the top rainbow wigs and maximum flamboyance⁵. I encountered it three times in the wild, first as a source of queer joy, but then by the 3rd when I'd freshly come out to myself as a man, I saw the dancer again in his muscled body and beard and chest hair and suddenly realized that oh, now I was attracted to men in a gay way. I could do that now.
• And having that moment of realization while set to the soaring exultant chorus of this song felt fucking cosmic. This song is forever associated with my second proper gay awakening and tbh I'm lucky for it

9. THATS WHAT I WANT by Lil Nas X

• I'm still listening to the full Montero album on the regular because fuck that dude can write. I'm still not over seeing how much artistic range he has after having only known him for the catchy meme songs
• I know I'm dating like 3 partners rn but whenever this song comes on I'm single for the whole runtime. That's the power of music right there
• As with like Several of the songs on this playlist, half the appeal is in the music video. Lil Nas X as a literal shooting star, the raw sex appeal of him and his man, and also like. The unique heartbreak of being the downlow lover, of being good enough to want but not good enough to make a life with, not compared to a nice (white) wife with a picket fence and baby.
• But that's alright. He's still got his heart and his want and someday somebody out there will treat him right. It's a big gay world out there y'know

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1. For the longest time I mistook the one line as "and I've got a heart that wants you hard" which I still think is better so the misread has stuck. Kiss girls you won't regret it

2. I'm sorry Mr. Springsteen, I know the way you're using that lyric, but it hits different when you're a yellow man yourself.

3. And frankly, I think I would lose an equally large part of myself if I left forever. Shoutouts to my Asian queer communities for helping me have both.

4. "The current fascination with transgender also probably has something to do with new ideas about how representation works in the age of digital media. Back in the analog era, a representation...was commonly assumed to point to some real thing, the same way a photograph was an image produced by light bouncing off a physical object and causing a chemical change on a piece of paper...A person's social and psychological gender was commonly assumed to point to that person's biological sex in exactly the same way: gender was considered a representation of a physical sex. But a digital image or sound is something else entirely...It doesn't point to some "real" thing in quite the same way, and it might in fact be a complete fabrication built up pixel by pixel...but a fabrication that nevertheless exists as an image or a sound as real as any other. Transgender gender representation works similarly...For the generation that's grown up amid the turn-of-the-century digital media...transgender often just makes sense intuitively as a possible way of being, even to people who do not feel transgender themselves. "Self" doesn't map onto the biological body in quite the way it seemed to in the last century, and being trans simply isn't as big a deal as it used to be in many contexts." [Immaterial, by SOPHIE, bass-boosted]

5. https://www.instagram.com/mkik808/reel/BkDqDQXh4pe/