Manifesting is Easy (for white cis het men under Patriarchy)
But Patriarchy hurts men too: on Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett (from The Airborne Toxic Event) and considerations on the story behind his most famous song: Sometime Around Midnight.
Last week I was in London for five days. The main reason being a concert by The Airborne Toxic Event I managed to get tickets for. I first met the band in 2013 when I produced an acoustic session they played at the Youtube Space in London back then and I became a genuine fan.
I spent the best part of my life working in the music industry, believing naively that in doing that I would have found kindred spirits amongst people who put their souls to music for a living.
Very few stood up the test of reality.
At the present I count three, and one passed away seven years ago. When that happened I was made acutely aware of how important is to let people know when they can still hear us that what they did mattered.
One of the other two is Mikel Jollett of The Airborne Toxic Event fame.
When I first met him in 2013 I was at a stage in life where I hadn’t seen and defined the framework under which we all live and the effect it has on all us. Capitalism, Patriarchy, Racism, Ableism, Classism… nah, we’re just individuals, how we fare in life is a reflection of what we do and how dedicated we can be. (that’s capitalistic individualism by the way…)
You can tell I hadn’t been taken off a notch by life yet, but I was about to.
The session I filmed with The Airborne Toxic Event was the last I ever did for the music project I had been producing for three years at that point, close as I ever got to have my own label where I could invite and ask artist to talk about life, death (and supermarkets) in the hope to see if we were made of the same matter, because hard as it had been for me to find anyone that looked, let alone felt like me, I still believed it was just a matter of trial and error. And I was set on finding my people.
Mikel had a gift, a talent for words. In hindsight it was a carefully curated skill, and the difference between gifts and work is the main thing that I’m going to focus on here.
Far from having anything to do with celebrity culture, my tendency to scan lyrics for kindred spirits came from the idea that songwriters were, in a way or another, pouring their souls out, it was a window beyond the world set upon chit chat, which I never excelled at. I always wanted to know what people felt and needed from deep down their stomachs, what made them tick, what was their thing to run towards when they leave entire lives behind for a life on a stage that resembles a bit too much an altar. Because recognition needs to be mutual, otherwise it’s just the aforementioned worship, and being raised catholic I had enough of that already.
But there was always a tendency to please. “Hey, I recognised some of what you say, can you see it reflected back in me? Can it feel less noisy if our words to describe the world overlap and create an echo? A resonance?” That kind of thing is what used to make me ask open questions: “bare your soul to me please.” Unchallenged. No come backs. Never a retort, of course.
Meeting Mikel back in 2013 meant a lot. It was the closure of a cycle, it made me feel like I did a tiny bit of difference if others could access his words and thoughts through the answers to my questions. Around 100.000 people got around that. My village was 600 people. It felt like a difference.
Did I wish that recognition sparked into Mikel as well? Sure. What is life about if not finding people whose tessellating tiles or voids resemble our shapes?
In his memoir, Hollywood Park, Mikel writes at some point about spending hours talking with Robert Smith in his hotel room (yep, of The Cure fame) at 2am, sitting down with David Bowie in a studio in SoHo using language so flourished it makes spines tingle. He describes feelings very similar to the ones I had for Mikel himself. He wanted to be seen, recognised, mentored. He wanted to become a musician even when he was “just” interviewing artists for a living. And he got personal, one on one time with them. I even recognise the dreaminess he writes about Bowie with:
He’s an idea, not a person. So I can’t just hug him and hold on tight, tell him I’m trying to understand something and I need his help. It’s like speaking to the Wind. What do you ask the Wind? [...] If there was a ring, I would kiss it. An altar, and I would kneel.
Mikel Jollett - Hollywood Park, 2020
And this is the first time it occurs to me. it doesn’t matter how similar our lens could be: if I ever thought, let alone said out loud or wrote something like this about a male artist, it wouldn’t be admiration. It would be despicable: I would simply be seen as a wannabe groupie.
And that right there, that was the first tessellating tile of the framework that suddenly felt different between myself and Mikel. But why? Why Mikel and I can think the same things, but they’d make us look so different to the world?
Misogyny.
He was a young man, looking up to men, working with men, in a system called patriarchy that’s so pervasive we think it’s natural. It’s natural for Mikel as a young man to be patted on the back and share beers at two in the morning in Robert Smith’s hotel room without it ever sounding demeaning, cheap, sluttish.
Because that’s also the insult added to injury: when I worked at Warner Music the only girls in A&R (the department in record labels that worked the closest to artists and bands) were assistants, never promoted higher than that, and they all were pretty enough to come out of a model catalogue. There was method. There was a very specific role and look required, and the fact I wanted to talk and ask and be considered as a person from my barely femme presenting size 18 was just not something that could elicit more than disgust. Disgust because girls in music are kept around to be eye candy and to be fucked. If you’re eye candy you will be sexually harassed sooner or later. If you’re not you’ll be bullied because of how insulting it is for a man to encounter a female shape he doesn’t immediately want to fuck. It’s like you’re there to trick them, to shame them with your existence by simple logistics association. And at the time I didn’t even have the perception that my accent (Immigrant), my looks (Arab), and my unusual ways (Autism) were even part of the game.
As an autistic person my modus operandi has developed since childhood in: observe the world, extrapolate the rule, play by that rule. But because I was born at a time deluded by the idea that equality had already happened as long as women could be part of the workforce entirely (thank you second wave white feminism), I naively believed the face value of that rule.
It’s a lie. It has never worked. I can testify to that, over and over.
The conflict comes because I understand what Mikel is saying, I recognise at least 80% of the experiences he writes about in Hollywood Park and that helps me contextualise even more the songs he wrote under The Airborne Toxic Event. And yet there are very different consequences for him and for me.
Sometime Around Midnight is likely the song you know Mikel for, and in Hollywood Park he shares enough context to understand the relationship it spurred from.
As a stand alone song it follows an untold rule where a male singer songwriter will be the beaten down protagonist, the fool for love wrapped around the finger of the girl, the femme fatale, the cruel mistress whom he sees with someone else one night and then
“You just have to see her, You know that she'll break you in two”
And I can attest to the ways this kind of song speaks of feelings of powerlessness at best, rejection at worst, and that is easily a universal feeling. On the surface, I challenge you to listen to Sometime Around Midnight and not want to give Mikel a hug. “Who’s that bad girl who broke your heart?”. The next part of that sentence is usually uttered by girls listening to the song and goes something like “I would never”.
And that’s the fuck up.
That’s the kind of pervasive message that if we were to go into it would have us discuss what truly foments the "not like the other girls to pick me” pipeline of intrasexual female competition. Again, not women’s supposed jealousy, but patriarchy pitting us against each other for the slot to be the good girl, not the bad one that breaks hearts (and is then stripped of respect under the evolving labels from “bitch” to “slut”)
But in reality the story is not exactly like it’s told in Sometime Around Midnight, a song that’s been played around fifty million times on Spotify alone at the time of writing. In Hollywood Park, Mikel talks about Amber, the on-again-off-again girlfriend that song is about, but most importantly, he’s got the intellectual honesty and self reflection ability to discuss relationships at large and how he’s been made aware he has an attachment disorder that makes him push away people he’s in relationships with as soon as things seem to become serious. He writes about the first time he pushes Amber away, how he’s talked to her about his attachment issues and when he tries to break things off (and he’s good with words, which means he’s good at hurting people with them too) she attempts to soothe him, but no. He kicks her out only to be under her window two days later and she takes him back. He does not recount how many times this happens but this clearly goes on for a good while. Then one time, when they are “off-again”, he does actually see her in a bar with someone else, and the jealousy stirs enough that he locks himself in his house for 3 days straight and after 72 hours of labour Sometime Around Midnight is born.
But if you only know the story from the song, the narrative is… different. It could be that there’s over a decade between writing the song and self reflecting in Hollywood Park, but what surprises me is that Mikel shows he knows. He knew about his attachment issues, he told Amber about them, he had done part of this self reflection then and he still writes a song that makes it sound like this girl broke his heart, like that bitch “will break him in two”.
Mind, other than the lyrics there’s only Mikel’s recount of this story, yet even through that bias the picture is already less sympathetic to the poor heartbroken guy he pictures himself as in the song and the vixen that toys with his heart. However, surprisingly, there’s no further reflection, no apology coming for the way he immortalised this girl in what is now his most popular song.
There’s a few other snippets in Hollywood Park that gave me the same feeling. Mikel seems very good at self reflection, aided by a finely honed ability with lexicon, yet he stops shy of the framework. To a degree it is a memoir and so I could understand the idea that the highest structure to discuss it’s just him and his life. And yet his life is defined by the systems he’s surrounded by. The reason why Hollywood Park reached a much wider audience than The Airborne Toxic Event fans is that it was cleverly marketed upon the fact that Mikel was born and raised in the Synanon cult and that system crucially affected his life. His narcissistic mother was politically involved in the 60s and 70s and he recognises the value of what he learnt of that system from her. His father was a recovering drug addict and ex convict, he must understand through that how unfair a system is the one that relies on prisons and where drugs are mainly a class problem.
Yet, he moves from rags to riches and he’s able to do some self reflection and criticism but the moral of the story is he pulled himself by his bootstraps and made his life happen. Except when you put the song and the story in the book next to each other you must read between the lines there’s some unreliable narrator at work. Is there a line in Sometime Around Midnight that makes us even remotely guess Mikel might have been unfair to this girl? Might have pushed her away? Might have pushed her boundaries like showing up at her window after kicking her away from his place and breaking up with her?
Nope. She’s watching him, he’s melancholic, reminiscing of their time together, and she’s the bitch.
And she leaves
With someone you don't know
But she makes sure you saw her
She looks right at you and bolts
Put it this way and she wants to make him jealous, she wants to make sure he saw her go home with another guy, she’s playing games and he’s a poor lovestruck man in her web. Again, “you just have to see her, you know she will' break you in two.”
I just went to see a gig, see The Airborne Toxic Event play again after 11 years, why couldn’t I just simply enjoy it and dance and sing and be grateful for the tingly feeling simple proximity with someone who could be one of my people used to bring?
On the way back home I began to read Hollywood Park, and that sense of recognition sparked still along with something else, the same as when you take a big inhale to say something when you instead just hold. When the beat doesn’t drop and something remains unresolved.
It’s the little things. The fact Mikel worked at Filter as a freelancer and “the editor likes my pieces and when a vacancy comes up, he offers me a job as the new managing editor”. The fact even Steven Chen (also a member of The Airborne Toxic Event) joined the band as he knew Mikel from Filter, being a writer himself. And so was Anna Bulbrook, the wonderful violinist that joined the bad as it started and was part of it until 2019, when she focused on founding Girlschool, a Los Angeles-based musical education community, aimed at empowering women-identified artists. Only Anna was an intern.
It’s the little things like writing love songs about women he pushed away that make our heart ache for him, sympathise with him, never them.
When you’re a kid it’s nice to have role models. When you grow into an adult you can be lucky as Mikel was, meet your heroes and have them see you as a younger version of themselves, to encourage you and give you nuggets of wisdom that you’ll hold as a northern star to grow into a better version of yourself because it’s closer to those heroes, coming from following their wisdom.
And as I started to write this I was hoping to make sense of that 80% of the world vision I thought I shared with Mikel, which I saw reflected and the recognition sparked like fireworks on the 5th of November. And then immediately I had to remind myself how it did not work the same for me when I did exactly the same, said exactly the same things from where I stand. From who I am. Mikel had mentors to learn from whereas someone like me has to learn from climbing up the pit where everyone that has executed a process to correct my value downwards looks down from the top, making sure I don’t rise above my station, because I could lower the value of those at the top in the process.
I thought Encouragement and Respect were the other end of the spectrum from where I sit at, inspiring Uneasiness and Disgust. I thought there was work I could do to move the slider and change the lens and I just needed to figure out how. Maybe I was too intense, maybe I was uncomfortable, maybe I shouldn’t have sounded so interested. But Mikel did and it worked. Tom Waits hears about his song writing and tells him “After a while, the Universe Conspires” to make it happen.
“The Universe Conspires” to make things happen for the best, if you’re the kind of person this system is built for. A White Cis Het Man. Or a combination of those as long as “Man” remains. Man as in someone the ones that built and uphold this system see as similar to them enough to know, if they bring them up the ladder of marginalisation (fuck class, fuck race, fuck sexuality at times), he will hold up the system for them because if not, he will have something to lose.
But Mikel grew up in a cult, removed from the arms of his mother at six months old, living in unquestionable poverty raising and killing rabbits for food. There is something so inspirational about rags to riches because without the survivors stories we might notice that framework that actually decides who can climb up from that pit, who will have hands reaching out to them because there is mirroring and recognition. And recognising words and thoughts comes a little bit easier when it also comes from someone that looks like you.
Whether it’s still the last vestiges of individualism he kept from the capitalist system or the survivor bias fallacy I am not sure, but I wish I could fill the gaps, ask him to recognise and name the structure one step above him that allowed for paths to open for him no matter how much class and poverty affected him. Because that’s what privilege is: you don’t have it easy, but you have chances others will never get to climb out of that pit. It’s the depth of that pit, it’s the aids to pull yourself up in the fact you look just enough like the people you look up to so they feel like it’s natural to lend you a hand, because if you look like them why wouldn’t you belong to the same level they do?
And if you don’t look like that because you come with any descriptor that sounds “other” to them, why would they choose something, someone that doesn’t feel as familiar as the guy who looks like he could walk in their steps?
Elevating marginalised individuals links to shame, because it takes a lot of self-assurance to think that bringing them up will not mean you are lowering yourself by being seen next to them.
And in my little naïve head, if we thought the same thoughts and wrote the same words, there couldn’t be that much distance between myself and Mikel.
And part of me is still glad to know my brain is not the only one going onto those wild goose chases. But I didn’t find the nuggets he did in recognition from those above me because too many steps separate us. Not just class like in Mikel’s case, but race, disability, and most problematically here: gender and the implication of dehumanisation that comes with it. Men respect men as people. Men at best own or use women. As wives, as unpaid workers for housework, as prostitutes, as muses even when there needs to be a carrot with a stick and so suddenly there’s beauty and inspiration, though be still careful about the line between the Madonna and Whore and how quickly a woman can be pushed over it without active choice in it.
I name the one system Mikel doesn’t speak about as Patriarchy because I am hoping that slivers of lenses I put together about the world can help us see the system. Because we can’t dismantle something we cannot see, let alone name.
It took me so long to see it and name it because aren’t we the same? If he could just do it, why couldn’t I?
This is the first time I have the ability to look critically at the work of someone I look up to, critically in the sense of analysing and challenging rather than judging and finding faults even though I appreciate for some those seem like the same thing, but I’m leaving the possibility open for the fact that people I look up to might not be more advanced on every level than me, no matter how much I wish I could learn by mentorship rather than pit climbing.
If I look around and see the scary rise of misogyny and alt-right pipelines from the Andrew Tates and Trumps, Mikel Jollett is a shining beacon of healthier masculinity and some level of awareness. Yet I can still feel the distance between the time he goes fishing with his brother Tony and nephew where it seems words are barely spoken, and the heart-rending chest-wrenching butterflies-in-the-stomach moment where in the presence of David Bowie he has to ask: “Do you feel lonely too?”. Mikel has the vocabulary to describe his emotions and feelings which I’d argue is the main thing the Patriarchy removes from men, and it feels like most of his time growing up was making choices to almost counterbalance an intelligence and care for the written word that I wouldn’t be surprised in certain circles would be considered “too feminine”.
When we say that the Patriarchy hurts men too, this is the case. When all the grand total of emotions categorised under masculine are one: Anger. And without even the ability to define clearly why. But it’s an emotion that works well to be directed against whoever is the convenient enemy the Trump of the moment wants to take down: women, immigrants, queers… Anger, without the language to understand why, is needed by any right wing government, because any right wing government’s ultimate ambition is Fascism, and mindless anger is a free Black Shirt militia available to the oppressor.
When I read the reviews of Hollywood Park I saw mainly women ecstatic to see a man who’s able to do self reflection and dare we name him sensitive, with the risk the other side (again, patriarchy) might want to take him down a notch for that?
Mikel gets it. He gets so much of it. He gets so close on so many facets of the systems of power. Remember this quote? This is Mikel’s.
And then he seems to stop one step shy of Patriarchy. And so for men like him “The Universe Conspires” without even a word of mention of the privileges afforded to someone who looks like him: a white, cis, het man. The incongruence between perception and reality comes when someone like me identifies in the words, in the feelings, in the narrator telling the story of his own misfortune as seen only from his eyes, but his eyes are entombed in a body and a world very different from mine.
Isn’t it consoling that such different extractions can still lead to universal recognition? “I feel alone, don’t you ever feel alone?”. But my answer to that question is compounded by all my levels of “other” and “different” I am from Mikel.
And yet I believe him. I believe in him. I will be devastated if something happens to him because how many like us are out there? and I already saw so few.
Mikel gets 80% of life the way I see it, and the rest it’s because the rags to riches story wouldn’t seem as earned if we called by name the one system that has allowed him to climb. the P word.
But he’s a man who’s doing incredibly better on a moral and ethical level than the average white cis het man today, he has tried to get better, to understand himself and to understand how to fit in the world, and he certainly understood enough of the world, even if short of the helping hand Patriarchy had in his ascension.
Is it weird that verses are mere feathers in a pattern (Bowie’s words to Mikel, not mine) rather than prose to describe feelings, yet that pattern he describes fits me too at times?
It’s because every word in Hollywood Park and through his songs, and previous articles, tells the story of a man that sees, feels and has worked to learn how to describe the world and his feelings with the most accurate words. It’s because more than just welcoming what he shared, I appreciate the impact of how a quote from him can make thousands of people dance if not think, and the effect that a quote like the one about Billionaires had, by making the rounds enough to circle back to me through my essayist life rather than the music dreamer one. It’s because the potential in his hands to affect the larger system it’s clear that his casual approach to “The Universe Conspires” -rather than naming the system that makes the conspiracy work for a certain kind of man (white, cis, het)- seems reductionist, especially when it comes from the man that has enough facility with words to describe his own inner world and wisdom put in 280 characters and generating a quote that still gets shared and maybe, for some, is their first encounter with the very idea of anti-capitalism.
But then I go back and I can’t help but wonder if the benefit of the doubt is warranted or if it isn’t instead an insult to Mikel’s intelligence. Why is Patriarchy the one system that goes un-named, ignored, unchallenged when he can so perceptively name the rot of society under capitalism, under the fascism of Trump?
See, if I concede to the original reason I felt recognition towards Mikel at all, his clever way to understand and describe the world, then can I really think it’s by chance that the one system that goes unmentioned in his revelations, is exactly the one that requires self-serving benevolent sexism in the form of songs like Sometime Around Midnight to exist? The exemplificative “bad” girl that breaks the heart of the one kind of good man, sensitive enough to know better and be better than the worst examples that are so common place nowadays. And so along with “who’s that bad bitch that broke your heart” the next step of “I would never” is a soft but pervasive, repetitive encouragement that reminds femmes that, whereas men win by being part of a boy’s club that recognises new recruits as one that looks “just like them”, girls have instead centuries of media and poetry to remind them that, to be one of the good ones, they need to elevate themselves from their gender mates, they need to be “not like the other girls” to be special. To not be the kind of girl that would break his heart. To be the Madonna to whom Patriarchy promises protection, not the Whore men will dehumanise, use and discard, and to add insult to injury make it pass like it’s her fault and “she asked for it”.
Because any ruler in a system of power needs something lower to be in power of. In patriarchy, that becomes women.
When gender alone renders thoughts and words disgusting when in my mouth whilst Mikel can wax lyrical about the way he cares, is inspired and projects on David Bowie, does it matter that people like me identify with those words? those thoughts? even that pain? even if we have no set way to “pull our bootstraps” because no matter how hard we try there’s always something that “looks” wrong about us?
It’s because Mikel’s work with words is the results of time and effort that I don’t call it a gift, but his work could yield a return that the same work never yielded for the likes of me, and never could as the world currently stands because I don’t look, don’t sound, don’t come from the right place to inspire that recognition, because as much as words meant to me -and I expect to Mikel-, he can think his words matter just because everything else about him that carries those words to the world is the expected normal in a world set up by and for white, cis, het men.
Mikel has done more than I’ve come to expect from the average musician, and definitely more than I expect from the average man. I just wish he could contextualise out loud the recognition he felt from his heroes because in naming a system we can then take it down, and maybe words and thoughts can eventually become enough to feel like we belong and are the same kind of people despite the bodies we occupy if we tear down the systems of power around us that need an oppressed to exercise that power over.
But until we name them, until Mikel does, Hollywood Park is an “outstanding, lyrical, mesmerising, triumph” as named in its reviews. And despite the 80% of life and lens we share, I’m just an annoying, bitter, degendered feminist with, I’m sure, references to jealousy and envy in the mix. That’s what doesn’t work: I don’t believe Mikel’s success, anyone’s success takes away from anyone else’s. But I do think privilege is best put to work to reach out that hand towards the pit even to the ones who don’t look like you. Especially to them.
Who knows what kindred spirits you’re missing out on otherwise by following the rules of the system that has benefitted you… so far.
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