Alternative “folk” Horror: how singer songwriter Phoebe Bridgers opens new horizon for horror genre

*本原稿は2年前に筆者が作成したものです

Introduction

LA-based singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers has once said that she finds “a lot of joy” in “goth everything” and it makes her life easier, and since she grew up around it, she “gravitate[s] towards it” (Lauren, S 2021). In fact, her music often uses horrific themes in sad, sad lyrics. Although it’s not rare to find music that incorporates horror, Bridgers’ works seem that they are not intended to scare anyone. In this way, it’s important to investigate what kinds of horrific figures she uses, and what kinds of ideas she attempts to deliver with horror in her music because analyzing her works can open a new horizon of the horror genre.

Discussion

Phoebe Bridgers utilizes horrific themes to deliver sadness often mixed with black humor. This essay attempts to figure out what kind of horrific themes she uses as well as what ideas she delivers through them, by analyzing lyrics from some of her songs. In this essay, songs are chosen from two Bridgers’ solo LPs including “Stranger in the Alps” (2017) and “Punisher” (2020) and the supergroup to which Bridgers belongs, boygenius’s self-titled EP (2018). The reason I chose to include boygenius’s EP and didn’t include Better Oblivion Community Center (which is a band consists of Bridgers and Conor Oberst)’s LP is that although both of the records do not claim who wrote what, it seems convincing to regard the part of “Souvenir” (in “boygenius”) in which Bridgers sing was written by herself, judging from lyrical similarity to her other songs.

Death is a theme that underlies Bridgers’ works. She uses the theme to deliver depression and failed relationships. In Bridgers’ works, the theme of death appears in an almost “too personal” way (Edelstone, S 2017) as this essay is going to discuss. Jack Nuelle from the America Magazine writes that in her second LP “Punisher”, Bridgers’ “record serves as a plea to take note of death’s reality” along with the current reality of racial violence and the pandemic and that it “serves as a musical argument for the listeners to embrace the inevitability of death, not run away with it” (Nuelle, J 2020). This idea resonates with Bridgers’ statement in the interview with The Line of Best Fit (Maine, S 2017) in which she said, “I feel like a lot of my friends, especially artists, are consumed with this idea of the inevitability of death...I do think about time”. Looking into actual songs, in the first verse of “Funeral”, Bridgers describes a real-life experience of a memorial service for a friend who died of a drug overdose (Maritinez, Y 2018) and continues that she “can’t breathe” if she thinks about the death too much. She then introduces another friend she calls “when I bored myself to tears” and sings that “we talk until we think we might just kill ourselves, but then we laugh until it disappears”, using the word “kill” in more of a casual way compared to the seriousness of the first verse. After that, she falls into self-pity in the fourth verse, saying, “Wishing I was someone else, feeling sorry for myself” but realizes the fact that “someone's kid is dead”. In the chorus, she keeps singing about her being “so blue all the time” and she states that she is up until 4 a.m. and “doing nothing” in the outro of the song. Judging from her words in the chorus and the outro, “Funeral” is about depression accompanied by insomnia. Bridgers uses the almost traumatic experience of her to describe the claustrophobic and overwhelming breathlessness in her life while acknowledging the fact that she’s still alive and has a friend to share her emotions (and shows how easily the mood can change). These uses of death is interesting because her friend’s death is not only used to convey her suffering in the symptoms of depression but also to indicate that her circumstance is not the worst. The fact that the use of death can be a potential remedy to her circumstance is important because it demonstrates a whole new role the horror can play. In “Moon Song” and “I Know the End”, the common theme of a dead bird appears to deliver the pain of unrequited love or a one-sided relationship. Bridgers sings, “So I will wait for the next time you want me, like a dog with a bird at your door” after implying that she and a person is in a wrong relationship (and after she reveals that the person is married) in “Moon Song”. In the outro, the theme is brought up again; “when you saw the dead little bird, you started crying, but you know the killer doesn't understand”. In addition, the last song of the album “Punisher”, “I Know the End” revisits the theme by saying “I'm always pushing you away from me, but you come back with gravity. And when I call, you come home, a bird in your teeth” in a manner of sad break-up song. About “Moon Song”, Bridgers stated that “if you complain, then they’ll go away. So, you don’t complain and you just bottle it up and you’re like, “No, step on me again, please.” It’s that feeling, the wanting-to-be-stepped-on feeling” via Apple Music (Bridgers, P 2020). In this way, it is safe to say that the dog waiting for a person with the bird in its teeth can be a metaphor of Bridgers trying her best to give what she has to a person while the person doesn’t want what Bridgers offers because most owners of dogs don’t appreciate dead birds brought by their dogs. In contrast to Bridgers herself being in an offering position in the ill- established relationship, she becomes the one who “steps on” somebody in “I Know the End”, using the same motif of a bird in the teeth. In these two songs, the motif of the dead little bird is utilized effectively to represent how someone’s love looks worthless and almost disgusting for the one who receives it in an ill-established relationship.

Murder has served as means to describe a failed relationship and set a dark tone in her second LP, “Punisher”. “Killer” starts out with this fascinating, yet frightening line; “sometimes I think I’m a killer”. Then she sings that she scared herself “by talking about Dahmer on your couch”. In number of interviews on “Killer”, Bridgers has mentioned her weird obsession with murderers. In an interview with Jedd Ferris of the Washington Post, she said, “I thought something was wrong with me. I was going down YouTube wormholes of interviews [with serial killers], and Dahmer was the most disturbing to me, because he didn’t seem insane” (Ferris, J 2018). However, in the following lines she turns her back to her thoughts on being a killer, singing that she “can’t sleep next to a body, even harmless in death” and that she’d miss her partner. In the chorus, she poses a question, singing, “Can the killer in me tame the fire in you? Or is there nothing left to do for us?”. “Killer” is a brilliant example of the use of a horrific figure in Bridgers’ works because she successfully describes her obsessive and painful desire to be closer with her partner by utilizing vivid and unique imagination instead of using another cliché in today’s pop songs. Bridgers thinks about killing her partner who doesn’t seem to have much interest in her so that she can be closer with the person (this resonates with Dahmer’s motivation). However, she turns it down, resulting in no change in their relationship. Chorus explores the future of the relationship and Bridgers wonders if her passion to be closer with the partner can arouse his/her passion as well. The song ends with a line “And there’s nothing I can do”, possibly showing the inevitable death of the relationship, which is a common theme of Bridgers’ works as discussed above. “Halloween” also discusses Bridgers’ dark obsession with murder. “Halloween” itself describes “dead relationships and how they suck around any holiday”, as Bridgers says in an interview with Stereogum (Leas, R 2020), setting a horrific tone for her second LP. In the second verse, she sings, “They killed a fan down by the stadium, was only visiting, they beat him to death”. The line seems to have no relationship with the very theme of the song, and Bridgers confirms that she decided to include this since she was unhappy with the original lyrics on the same interview. She further mentions, “Fans killing each other. It’s always been this obsession of mine — well, I guess, murders, in general, are such a dark obsession but that one specifically. It’s so dark, that most people just want to have a hot dog and watch a game but people are so worked up that they can kill someone who doesn’t agree with them”. “Garden Song” sets another example of Bridgers’ imagination about murder. In the first verse of the song, she jokingly sings “And when your skinhead neighbor goes missing, I'll plant a garden in the yard, then”, implying that she has an intention to murder a “skinhead neighbor”. On her Twitter, she confirmed that she “had a crush on someone who lives next to a nazi and used to joke about just killing him and burying him in the garden. Originally it had this whole thing about making out on top of the unmarked grave but it was Very Stupid” (Bridgers, P 2020 [Twitter] 11 November). While “Killer” was first released in 2015 as a title track for her EP, “Halloween” and “garden Song” were released in 2020, meaning that Bridgers’ obsession with murder has continued to influence her music. However, although “Killer” utilized the theme of murder in brilliant way to deliver the desperation to maintain the relationship, the other two songs released later remained a little bit disappointing in terms of utilization of the theme since they only used the theme to set the horrific and dark tone in the album.

Obsessions with horrific geographies are also a common theme in Bridgers’ works. They do not remain silent as mere landscapes, but instead, Bridgers utilizes them to describe human nature. Though Bridgers’ debut LP is named “Stranger in the Alps”, many of her songs in the record describe her walking through urban streets. She says, “I feel like my only comfort is walking around” and further claims that as an L.A. resident, she is obsessed with nature, by saying “The [album] title was really striking to me. I’ve never been to the Alps, but I’m obsessed with winter, nature, forests. It's really ironic that I live in urban sprawl, but it makes me appreciate it a lot more I think” (Maine, S 2017). On the contrary to her obsession with nature, many of her songs use images of urban geographies often correlated with death. A hospital is the most common geography that appears in Bridgers’ works. In “Killer”, she sings that she’s “sick and tired”, using too much energy to give all the affection she has to a partner. Further, she sings, “When a machine keeps me alive, and I'm losing all my hair. I hope you kiss my rotten head and pull the plug”. An annotation from Genius (Killer, Genius) suggests that Bridgers is referring to euthanasia and asking her partner to feel the same desire of possession towards her, as well as wanting to die while her death can hurt her partner. In these lines, a hospital is used as an imaginary location in which Bridgers holds an almost obsessive desire for her partner to feel the same way she feels about him/her. The use of hospital is effective because it inevitably brings listeners to understand how serious her feeling is, by giving off the smell of death. “Halloween” is another example of how Bridgers utilizes a hospital in her lyrics. She goes, “I hate living by the hospital, the sirens go all night. I used to joke that if they woke you up, somebody better be dying”. These lines show a lot about Bridgers’ songwriting in which she writes about sad things, yet she often mixes black humor with it. She hates sirens waking her up at night and they make her think about death happening at that very moment. She talks out loud and makes jokes about it so that she can somehow manage to avoid unbearable sadness and fear. This reminds us of some people trying to laugh when they go through hard times to mitigate sadness and pain, and it’s worth pointing out that Bridgers describes this human nature only in two short sentences with the theme of a hospital. Even in “Souvenir”, which is a song of the band boygenius, Bridgers expresses her obsession with a hospital. She goes, “Always managed to move in right next to cemeteries. And never far from a hospital. I don't know what that tells you about me”. The lines may imply how close Bridgers and death are, reminding us of the theme of the inevitability of death which appeared in her other works. Genius annotation (Souvenir, Genius) suggests that Bridgers might be in constant danger of getting hurt, including self-harm, and living near a hospital takes minimum efforts to get rescued, but it doesn’t seem persuasive because according to her interview with The Line of Best Fit, she said she doesn’t have “death anxiety” (Maine, S 2017) and even if she meant suicide or self-harm, it’s irrational to have any thoughts about being rescued in that particular situation.

Apocalypse and the invasion of aliens may open a new horizon for Bridgers to deliver her songs to larger crowds with universal ideas. “I Know the End” sets a different type of horrific theme compared to previous ones such as death and murderers. Bridgers sings about driving to “northern California where [her] grandparents used to live” (Leas, R 2020). She also stated that “I guess I always pictured that during the apocalypse, I would escape to an endless drive up north” on the Apple Music (Bridgers, P 2020). Further, she sings, “Windows down, scream along to some America First rap country song”. On Genius interview, she said she would listen to pop-country radio to stay awake while driving, and one time she noticed how “white” and racist those country songs were and how she remembers all the lyrics of them (Phoebe Bridgers "I Know The End" Official Lyrics & Meaning | Verified, Genius, 2020). This line reflects today’s racial conflict in the US, along with her consciousness as a white American that might be bothering her. Then she continues, “Over the coast, everyone's convinced It's a government drone or an alien spaceship”. In the same interview, Bridgers said one day she saw a launch of Space X that nobody talked about. She said that she was “very disappointed that it wasn’t aliens”. Bridgers ends the song with these lines, “The billboard said "The End Is Near"...Yeah, I guess the end is here”, confirming that the world is ending. As a whole, “I Know the End” seems to be about Bridgers’ desire to experience apocalypse. Her statements about imaging herself driving up to north and aliens certainly approve that idea. However, it’s also likely that she’s making another black humor to avoid getting depressed about today’s failed world since Bridgers seems to describe how apocalyptic today’s world is by singing about racial conflict with the reference to former president Trump’s slogan. The use of apocalypse and the alien invasion can open new doors for Bridgers because while death and murder mostly affect a small number of people, thus the songwriting results in the delivery of personal emotion, these themes can affect millions of people, therefore potentially enable her to deliver social and universal ideas in the future.

Conclusion

Bridgers have mainly used four horrific themes in her songs: death, murder, obsession with places such as a hospital and grave, and the apocalypse. Each sets a different tone and atmosphere in her works, but she never fails to deliver sadness with a detailed observation of human nature. Throughout her works, horrific figures are not intended to scare the audience. Bridgers turns these themes to encapsulate sadness in everyday life and by singing it with some humor, tries to avoid or mitigate the pain of unbearable reality. In this way, horror can work as a kind of a remedy, and it is certainly important from the perspective of the development of the horror genre.

Bibliography

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