😿Sad Songs are Sad (Shocking🙀)
content warning: brief mention of suicide
I've been in something of a funk recently.
This isn't really anything new for me but it seems that in recent years I've been exploring new depth to the "funks" I can get into. Recently this has been fueled by the fact that I spend a lot of time plugged into music.
I've always known that music can affect your mood but even with that knowledge
I'm not really immune prone to forgetting this fact, resulting
in me being dumbfounded when I find out that listening to sad music does in fact makes me sad.
While I could (and probably will) continue to moderate my consumption of music to better my emotional processing as well as introspect and reflect upon what brings me to do such things (listening to music that makes me sad), this is not what this blog post is for (primarily).
I'm gonna talk to you about some of my favourite sad songs.
Who better to start with than Quinn.
When I listen to this song I imagine a sort of video to go with it. A video with a sort of framey look to it, lots of skipping and stuttering frames, tons of cuts and shots lingering on images. Everytime I imagine it it's slightly different. Sometimes it's centered around some made up characters in my head and other times it's myself.
To me, it really speaks to this stuck feeling I've been in. The repition of the drums driving home that feeling of going through the motions day after day. Talking about wanting to improve yourself and the feelings about a relationship gone a bit sour. Specifically something about the way she expresses resentment over a situation that she recognizes as being at least more than a little her fault and that feeling of being abandoned or left behind really speaks to me. That feeling of being a fuckup and screwing up relationships but being so far along that the sadness seems to numb a bit, merely looming over the day to day as opposed to weighing down on every moment.
Oh god. I think I've silently cried into my bag on the bus to this song before 💀.
I honestly don't know what the meaning behind clairvoyant, at least not with the most clarity. Lamentations on another relationship going sour.
And less becomes more 'cause the weight is too heavy
I swim in the water that's breaking your levy
The way that you left me is alright, it's alright
If I argue the point then we yell and we fight
...
This is your life, there's no way to run from it
The doubt in your brain or the pain in your stomach
I only have but one complaint at the moment
Don't paint me black when I used to be golden
Every last bit of this song from the mixing, the effects on Quinn's voice, the guitar loop, and the reptition works so well together for me, but these lyrics in particular fucking break me. The desire to avoid conflict knowing (or at least thinking that I know) what the outcome would be and not wanting to be remembered poorly by someone I held and may still hold dear, again, speaks to me very deeply.
fun fact: I actually found this song from the snowblower cover of it so for the second song you're actually getting a double feature.
I thought that the cover art had trans Shinji and the runescape mv was really cute.
Also, I want you to know that I'm googling these emojis everytime I want to use them
there's no emoji keyboard on arch that I can access easily like on windows with
win+.
This song doesn't hit as hard as it used to for me. When I'm feeling small (in a bad way) and alone, the first minute gets close to hitting as hard as it once did.
Now this almost never fails to hit hard. This song is a lot more of
her just speaking her mind and on her life situation. And while I can't relate much
to the portions about music creation for example, but just about everything else
is really relatable to me. And again with that repition it's just so
It's hard to put it into words so this section is relatively short mb :p
here, have a cs frag set to it
Aaaaaaand a little palate cleanser from 2019, pre-covid era. Quinn's part on this is so unbelievably good, she did not have to go this hard on it. Gonna put the lyrics to her part here because they're that good.
Thinking about the better days when all the problems fade away
Fifty mil' that's all I want and I'ma go away
Goin' somewhere far away, spending all my better days
I see the you in me and that shouldn't be possible
Run into some obstacles and turn it into particles
Lil' angel shawty, she done played me like a cardinal
Dove right in my armory and stole right out my arsenal
You're playing with my head, you won't get away with that
I like to do what I want, if you're okay with that
I'm on a short leash, upside down just like a bat
My people watching, they plotting my aftermath
I'm feeling trapped in like I've got claustrophobia
Endless mazes, I'm trapped in my utopia
Looking for a fix I bought straight from Cambodia
Being left on seen is like my worst phobia
Oh yeah, it's time for Quannnic. Despite life imitates life probably being my most listened Quannnic song, aside from their collab with Lieu that they took down, I don't have much to say about this. The sound feels so full and the vocal so fraught with emotion yet somehow contained? I don't know if any of that makes sense but take this as a given for how I feel about the other Quannnic songs I'm discussing here. Kenopsia in general is just sad vibes all over the place.
This song is about suicide and regret. 2 things that I unfortunately relate to. I'm in a much better place now with regard to the former, having not thought about it unprompted in a quite a while. Rest assured that if you know and like me that I won't be resigning any time soon, nor will I be considering it.
Thoughts about the latter flare-up more and more these days.
So many things that I
hadn't done or weren't able to do. Dysphoria, relationship troubles, anxieties about the
future, unpacking troubles of the past, and general pressures endemic to living life
all piling up and feeding into one another. It's hard not to accidentally find
yourself dwelling on the past when you have to think about what's been done in order
to be better equipped to move forward.
Give yourself a break
It’s not always your fault
I was trying not to make it harder on you
Feel like dying whenever I'm not around you
Left me crying, now it's whatever I want to
I know you're lying when you tell me that you're fine
I know you're not
I know you're not
I know you're not
I know you’re not
It's a track towards the end of Kenopsia and this part from Kmoe is just so uplifting. I've never really felt seen when people would just say "You're valid!" and stuff like that on the internet just kind of directed at whatever trans person might come into contact with it. I appreciate the gesture but for me personally, it never really spoke to me that much. Even in-person it takes a lot or more rather it takes some very specific things and catching me kind of offguard in order for that kind of thing to break through to me.
So when I tell you that this part hit me like nothing else. It felt (and at times still does feel) like a cold shower after a day(s) of rotting in bed during the dead heat of summer after not having seen anyone for a week(+).
or in short:
Honestly, I feel like this is as good a place as any to leave off of.
I'm hot and sticky and a little tiny bit sad and dysphoric so I'll return with some
Jane Remover a little while later.
Even if I tried to persist through this, my analysis would suffer more than it
already has.
🚨🔥🗣️Jane Remover double bonus feature!!!‼️❣️💯
feat.
Dysphoria and thwarted belonging:
Dysphoria and thwarted belonging but kind of fun in a teen movie sense:
Honestly the headers that I assigned to both of these are the most accurate things to my thoughts on the songs that I could have put. My poor analysis be damned, I kind of got it in 1 this time around. But to elaborate a bit further.
For me, Movies for Guys really captures how it feels to not belong, and how this is exacerbated at times by being a trans person. The chaotic and frantic energy of the song and the heavy distortion really drives home how scary it can feel. Everything is flying out of your hands, you have control but you don't know what to do and/or you don't have enough control. Anything that you try to do just doesn't come out right. Not being femme enough, thinking about just doing masc things cos it'll fit in the eyes of others at least and fuck it I'm so bad at being femme I might as well just give up, too many masc interests, hobby equivalent only liking movies for guys, but then who am I really pleasing by doing this when I'm just miserable or putting up a front as a result. It's so much all at once and it's all so exhausting. "It's either say nothing or say the wrong thing" is how I feel a lot of the time despite having such good supporting friends. Thinking all of these awful stressful things and a lot of them not even being true.
In the end I get so drained and apathetic to all of it. I stop trying to be happy directly. I just want my friends to be happy and maybe then they'll let me in. They'll let me tag along and I can soak up some of the juice and feel good in return.
Then you take the remote
I'll get kicked out the house
'Cause you said this movie's just for guys
I don't really wanna be someone that gets in your way
But I won't let it slide past my face, what you said yesterday
I don't really wanna be someone that gets in your way
Guess your way, but I guess you'll always have your way
I don't really wanna be someone that gets in your way
But I won't let it slide past my face, what you said yesterday
I don't really wanna be someone that gets in your way
Guess your way, but I guess you'll always have your way
I don't really wanna—
This probably, definitely, isn't the intended reading of this but that's how I feel about it.
Now for Your Clothes. I've seriously considered creating an AMV for this song.
Caring about someone, thinking about them all the time, doing stuff for their sake. It's such a rosey eyed (?) and naive approach to things that it hurts. It's straight out of a teen movie where the character is destined for a harsh wakeup call but I still relate to it. The song and the movies I'm talking about are pretty explicitly romantic most of the time but I do this with my friends too and it's just so frustrating.
I get so selfish in this regard and feel indignant or mad in their place when things don't go their way.
Times like these, I try not to get upset
All I do is think about you and this is the thanks I get?
Time passed with a slap to the back of my head
And now you're walking down the aisle with someone you never met
I just need this song in a teen movie or some kind of edit with those vibes.
Also an additional thing I feel with this song is that I have so many friends that are so pretty and I want to be more like them so bad. So when I hear Jane singing about how she wishes she were in her crush's clothes, that's what I think of. Wanting to be more like someone. Wanting to be in their clothes. I guess that's where the dysphoria comes in for me.
<19-05-2024-update>
I originally found myl7feisfallingapart through the cover and still listen to both, oftentimes back to back. I love the dreamy sound of the cover but something about the original's production feels so much more visceral and appropriate for the emotion of the song.
I don't know how to put it in any other way than this feels like ugly crying in song form. Just getting out that feeling of hurt and ocassionally saying something coherent.
There's a lot of luvlxckdown songs that I used to listen to that got me in my feels but white lies and your fake smile are all-timers for me. I usually listened to them in the order that I put them here on the site and had my own interpretation/narrative separate from what was probably intended by luvlxckdown.
your fake smile is all about miscommunication. Doing things out of love for someone who doesn't love you back and being stuck at a loss trying to salvage a relationship that never was in the first place. Sure the other person might have been somewhat complicit in leading you on but at the end you're faced with what is undeniably the consequences of your own actions. A one-sided growth of a connection that left you and the one you cared about hurting.
white lies is about letting go. Letting the person move on from you, telling the white lie that you're fine. Still wanting to hold on in spite of everything that happened but knowing that you don't have the power to bring it back on your own. Ultimately it lies with the other person. Someone who you can't even bring yourself to plead with because you feel like you don't deserve to. Because that's unfair to them.
what a mess lol
</19-05-2024-update>
so what did we (I) learn?
Sad songs are sad
and make you sad
and make you mad
and make you feel alright
in the end given that you make the effort to do some emotional processing that the
sad from the sad song prompted you to do.
I see sadness and the desire to linger on things as symptoms of some emotional processing work left undone. I guess the biggest problem is delving into this in moderation.
But the thing is that you have to do the work. It's a lot of work to experience a hard emotion that you buried away, confront how it makes you feel, think about what it makes you think of, the origins of the emotion, the nature of the emotion, what it makes you want to do, and how those stand in relation to the other parts of your life and where you want to be emotionally and otherwise. And it doesn't even end there. You have to think of ways to handle these effects, understand yourself, and even change for the better. No small task and one that takes a while to do. Sticking to it and reinforcing the good thought patterns.
It's so easy to just zone out to the music and feel the emotions drain away your energy without doing anything to change things. But making the effort is important.
Now surely, hopefully, I will remember this the next time I'm in a funk and decide against purely emotion-focused coping strategies and opt for more problem-focused coping strategies in the future.
What a fucked up first blogpost for a neocities with the
videogames,
fps,
aiming,
anime, and
programming
tags.
Join me next time when I get my shit together lol.
updates:
- 19/05/2024: fixed embeds and spelling. added to parts that I didn't flesh out properly and 2 more songs