escaping the bear cage

Adorned in bleach-stained sweatpants repping a college I never attended, my legs are crossed and cradling my laptop. As always, music is flowing from my phone to my headphones to drown out the noise of an overworked brain that is out of vacation days and reluctantly continuing its daily work. Next to my knee, my water bottle is snuggled up to a tub of Aquaphor, and other trinkets are haphazardly occupying the rest of the grey landscape of my comforter; a fork; my medications; a lighter; chargers for my various devices; a scrunchie; my reading glasses from CVS I use when my vision falters (I have been putting off scheduling an optometry appointment) anything and everything, really. My back is supported by a pillow pushed up against the wall and I make sure the surrounding few inches are clear of clutter for the working hours — I’m not a monster. I am a bear in a zoo.

The hours drone on, yet I still reside in the two square feet I designated for completing tasks. What those tasks are is irrelevant; the next day there’s always more to complete. No matter how hard I try to release the growl of a frustrated beast left in captivity, when I open my throat nothing but a raspy breath can escape. I try again the next day. (It doesn’t work then, either).

I slowly rise and enter the shower. I face the stream of warm water, letting it lovingly caress my face and clear the mixture of salt and wet mascara that had collected beneath my eyes. I drown my thoughts in the harmonious voice of another before turning towards the artificial rain and imagine slipping beneath the surface that doesn’t exist. The sound eminating from my speaker is likely slipping into my neighbor’s apartment but I don’t have the heart to care. The world beyond the shower curtain is barren and gray; suffering is an inherent piece of living, and waves of it pound relentlessly against the shores of twenty-somethings who were shorted five years of growing up. The self-sabatory melody I selected snaps me out of my reality when a delicately saccharine voice sang “baby you’re a vampire, you want blood and I promise, I’m a bad liar with a savior complex…” and as it fades away, I long for the place where I can no longer recognize the pain inextricably tied to self-awareness.

I have been trapped in my cage for days, weeks, and months; my isolationism has gotten the best of me. The fork next to my pillow on my bed — that’s weird, right? My desk is buried under scrap papers, empty cans, and makeup; it’s the only piece of furniture I have designed for sitting and yet I never sit there. I cannot function right, I am the bear who never gets up to walk past the eager children on the other side of the glass. I am sick of my own thoughts — they’ve been my only company for months (or at least, it feels like that).

I take strange, masochistic quests through my psyche while being held captive. I toss memories aside as I sort through them like the laundry I cleaned last week and still haven’t put away, searching for the root of my issues. I see my sister’s eyes filled with fear as I reassure her that dad won’t be like that in the morning, it’ll wear off by then; I see our car racing down the back roads driven by a tipsy man with two kids in the back seat; I see myself learning that my dad’s an alcoholic after being hospitalized for pancreatic issues, learning that he had been drunk every night since I was a toddler. I never wanted to admit that the quarrels I had with my father went deeper than petty teenage disagreements, but that became impossible. I was raised in an environment riddled with abusive behavior and taught that it was the way things are for kids of middle-class divorce. I lived a lie.

I’m a liar, who lies, cause I’m a liar — Phoebe Bridgers, “Kyoto.”

A used 2009 Subaru can only do so much for you on highways that all look the same in the dark as it groans in protest at the foot pressuring the pedal to kick up the speed. My sweaty (I’m always clammy when I drive, for some reason) hands no bigger than an eighth-graders loosely gripped the steering wheel, and for once I acquiested to my car, giving it a brief respite as I remembered I didn’t want to get to my destination in a timely manner.

Beginning in March of 2020, my entire life (up until that point, at least) collapsed inside itself, discarding any semblance of normalcy I once had. When I was forcefully ejected from my collegiate life in the wake of a global pandemic, I had no premonition that it would be the beginning of a very long streak of something that can only be described as bad luck. Upon returning home, I was dumped (as was my sister), I fell out of touch with two of my closest friends from my previous high-school life, and I became estranged from my recovering-alcoholic father who ended up selling the only place I identified “home” with before fleeing to Alabama with our pets.

By the time December rolled around, my internal attachment to my hometown had been entirely severed from myself. Not only that, but I dread the holidays as is. As many children of divorce can attest to, the magic of pre-divorce holidays are forever tainted by the division of a family, and they are never quite the same after the fact. During my drive home, I would be sitting myself down like a child about to enter a funeral and delineate the appropriate behavior for the upcoming week. Don’t speak unless spoken to, answer politely when asked a question, smile and nod when the family is speaking. The only way I could tolerate this rule-setting session was if I had a badass soundtrack to supplement it, and for that I chose the sophomore album Punisher from my top artist of the year, Phoebe Bridgers.

By this time, I was addicted to hearing the painfully delicate pointed accusations and truths about Phoebe and her experiences — many of which I shared with her. The native Californian has been open about her relationship with trauma, and has shared how she channels her emotions into her fantastical tales of the painful realities of life through her processing. Her tradition of incorporating painful events into her music was carried on during the creation of Punisher, and for a dreaded journey back to a home filled with hurt, I knew it would provide me with ample opportunities to validate my frustrations with my situation. As the opening song began and my tires transferred from city roads to US-23, the soothing tone comparable to a muted drumbeat filled my car and massaged my mind. “Garden Song,” The second track on the album, is a prime example of Phoebe’s songwriting talents, as she effortlessly juxtaposes the innocence-drenched dreams one has for themselves when they’re young and the harsh reality of them not always coming to fruition.

Phoebe’s lyrics hit listeners with an aggressive self-aware directness:“you couldn’t have, you couldn’t have/stuck your tongue, down the throat of somebody/who loves you more/so I will wait for the next time, you want me/like a dog, with a bird at your door,” she softly sings with hints of anger — whether she’s angry with herself or the other is unclear — slipping through as she winces through the words she’s pleading at her lover. Phoebe writes music about emotions deep within the human psyche to create a unique form of catharsis for her listeners that is initiated after just a track or two of her fairy tales for the clinically cynical. It was exactly what I needed to carry me through my drive home. With only my left hand on the wheel, I felt myself emptying and becoming a shell of myself — I yearned for the validation of another regarding my complicated feelings towards my family.

“Kyoto,” the third track on the album, did just that. “Kyoto” is an alt-punk-rock song that centers around Phoebe’s relationship with her father, which has been historically sour. In an interview with Pitchfork, Phoebe opened up about her healing process, specifically pointing towards the support group Al-Anon, a community for those affected by someone else’s alcoholism, for helping her through it. “I’m dealing with a lot of that specific relationship pattern,” Phoebe began, “My dad’s an alcoholic, I’ve dated a lot of alcoholics, I am friends with a lot of addicts. These are relationships I need to learn how to deal with because they are not going away. I need to grapple with my own control issues” (Moreland). To represent the tumultuous experience of having an alcoholic father, Phoebe featured flaring trumpets and an intense belt of the line “I’m going to kill you/if you don’t beat me to it” rather than gravitate towards her usual, soft-spoken lyrics that cut like knives. As I drove on, “Kyoto” engendered a feeling of security within me, which rose from the tips of my toes up to the fingers lightly resting on the rubbery plastic of my steering wheel; they were buzzing with excitement. The hum of an orchestra buzzed through the air in tandem with my fingers, and they begin to pluck at the strings to trigger the tugging in my heart as Phoebe went on: “It cost a dollar a minute/to tell me you’re getting sober and you wrote me a letter/but I don’t have to read it.” As she finished out the track with the repeating line “I’m a liar,” I felt empowered. A twenty-something just like me was serenading me with hyper-specific details that still managed to invoke my own memories to tell me dads are supposed to be shitty; they will write letters, they will tell you this is the time everything is different, and they will fall into the patterns they carved into you as you grew alongside them. You may tell them you forgive them, or that it’s possible in the future, but becoming a liar isn’t always the worst thing in the world; Phoebe seems to wear that badge with pride.

Phoebe’s self-awareness about her own healing process resonates with her fans grappling with similar issues. She has not denied the fact that she has been subjected to emotionally traumatic events, which is not uncommon for women her age — or women in general. According to the American Psychology Association women are twice as likely to develop PTSD from traumatic events than men. Even so, many women don’t seek treatment or are unable to be treated. Her public statements about her trauma are empowering to women struggling with the idea of seeking help, because it is demonstrative of how women are still able to be successful on a large-scale level even with the weight of their past on their shoulders. The idea of sharing personal trauma through song as a form of quasi-empowerment is not new to the indie space — in fact, it’s an aspect of indie that is appealing to many artists looking to do just that. As indie music is representative of the artist’s independence from a record label (which has fallen from the modern definition; now the term connotes the sound and style of the genre rather than the affiliation with larger agencies), many individuals have been able to share their stories with thousands of people in the indie community, fostering growth and healing among all. Phoebe is not the only female artist sharing her experiences with trauma via ethereal music, though; fellow band members Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker share similar gut-wrenching narratives and Japanese-American rock artist Mitski have become major names in the indie industry. The rise in popularity of female artists who deliver stomach-stabbing lyrics about the very real pain that emotional trauma brings to ones’ daily life points to a cultural shift within the indie space, which has been predominantly male and heterosexual (like most other artistic spheres), exciting audiences craving the artistic representation of women experiencing the brunt of emotional trauma that has been occurring inside and outside of the community for centuries.

The indie community has long been perceived as a space for people considered “progressive” who are unbothered by mainstream trends. Indie music, especially in its early stages, brought forth the idea of personal freedom, but “women, and most marginalized groups for that matter, were hardly allowed into indie spaces’’ (“A Call for Indie”). Many victims of sexual abuse within the indie community were silenced in the early days of the genre, and it is just recently that these stories are being heard. It is for this reason that the choice by Phoebe, Lucy, Julien, and Mitski (and other female artists like them) to create a musical experience depicting the depth of emotional scars is that much more admirable: the space has been so male-orientated and fixated on the male experience, which historically and presently conceals emerging patterns of abuse, that only now are women even able to take the risk of sharing their stories via music. Although the male dominance in mainstream spaces has been acknowledged for a while now, “the performative liberalism in [indie spaces] only serves to mask the fact that the indie genre has historically been and still is male-dominated, thus warranting the same degree of reckoning and accountability as any other male-dominated space” (“A Call for Indie”). In the wake of the call — from listeners and artists — to make the indie space one that is actually inclusive, not just advertised as such, women like Phoebe, Julien, and Lucy (known as the powerhouse band boygenius) were provided with the perfect opportunity to set fire to the old indie standards and pave the way for a new, modern indie community.

The three women are known individually for their enthralling singing cadences, and when they join together, their ethereal tones intricately intertwine to harmoniously describe the trials and tribulations of being a woman in this world. Because of this, boygenius has quickly become a symbol of strength and hope for women in indie. The self-titled EP released in 2018 was a fresh breath of air for young women who had become habituated to male-dominance in all facets of their lives. The beauty of boygenius comes from the varying background vocals between songs provided by each of the three equally talented artists; each singer has such a bountiful sound that no matter who is the lead singer on a song, the accompanying vocals provide just as much substance. Not only are the vocals euphonic beyond the scope of words, but each track delivers a blunt, but truthful, reality of life as a twenty-something trying to make it in the world that appears to be in shambles.

I stumbled upon boygenius after a friend of mine led me down the indie rabbit hole — I had already incorporated Phoebe, Lucy, and Julien as individual artists into my listening habits, so an EP featuring all three was a dream come true. Fans just like myself gravitated towards the EP, and the reason for their affinity is almost universally shared, as well: the directness that boygenius integrates into their music. boygenius provides a refreshing nugget of realism amidst songs pushed out by labels to be successful radio singles. A play on the immense entitlement men feel they have in the world, boygenius sent shockwaves through the indie community, with many young women, just like Phoebe, Julien, and Lucy, hoping this was a sign of a new era in indie music. “Me & My Dog,” the second track off the EP, typifies the sound of the new era of indie, specifically through the heart-wrenching lyrics written by Phoebe herself.

Softly introducing the storyline, Phoebe delicately describes a day she shared with an unnamed partner that was enjoyable besides the fact that they neglected to eat and stayed up all night. She continues to explicate their relationship on her own, until suddenly, the three women chime in to harmonize “I never said I’d be alright/just thought I could hold myself together/and I couldn’t breathe I went outside/don’t know why I thought it’d be any better/I’m fine now, it doesn’t matter.” The intensity that electrifies these lines brings new life to the song and is deeply relatable to anyone who has attempted to uphold their normal life in the wake of being abandoned by someone special. Even though these lyrics already emphasize the idiosyncraticity of the hurt brought on by continuing life without the aid of a long-term emotional supporter. The pain depicted in these early lines reaches its climax over a minute later when Phoebe firmly declares in her specifically light-sounding but deep-cutting voice “I wanna be emaciated/I wanna hear one song without thinking of you/I wish I was on a spaceship/just me and my dog and an impossible view.” In a time of deep distress, all she can do is cease taking care of herself — so much so she becomes frail — because the pain of remembrance is never stronger than when a melody rings inside the skull, searching for the memories associated with it. The impossibility of her situation is self-recognized — even Phoebe is cognizant of the impracticability of her desires — but that doesn’t eradicate the profundity of them; instead, it drives the hurt deeper, since wrestling with the inherent impossibility of future happiness is often greater than the loss of existing memories.

Emotional hard-hitters such as “Me & My Dog” populate the EP boygenius, and since their initial release, fans have been craving a sequel. No official information has been released to imply boygenius 2 is in the works, but fans continue to hold out hope in Twitter replies. Twitter for indie artists is a much different sphere compared to the mainstream artists that use the social media platform to merely announce new material. Scrolling through even some of the more humanized pop star accounts, it is apparent that there is a wall placed between the fans and the artist, ensuring that the fans don’t see too much of what’s behind the glass, which is far from the case in the indie sphere. Indie artists have a habit of interacting with their fans in very natural ways — just as any other user would — generating a trusting, open relationship between the artist and their supporters.

Of the three boygenius members, Phoebe is the most active Twitter user. Her tweets go beyond the scope of her music, allowing fans to see a more light-hearted piece of her personality outside of her gut-wrenching ballads. In one tweet from February 2021, she shares “you’re telling me edward is a hundred and something year old vampire genius and his favorite song is clair de fucking lune,” referencing the Twitter-favorite film Twilight. When the internet was buzzing with the news that Gamestop and AMC stocks were on the rise, she tweeted a picture of her and Maggie Rogers (a fellow artist she released a cover of “Iris” by The Goo Goo Dolls with after Joe Biden’s victory in November) following a popular joke format at the time. One of the most unique incidents of Phoebe’s tweeting was in November of 2020 when she replied to a fan asking about what her lyrics mean saying: “comment a lyric and I’ll tell you exactly what it means,” and she held up her end of the bargain. The prolific explanations gained thousands of likes on Twitter, enlightening fans with the origins behind the words that had come to represent moments in their own lives.

Phoebe’s openness online is not where her brilliance ends, though. Punisher earned her four Grammy nominations, and the nominations are well-deserved. Punisher opens with an eerie interlude called “DVD Menu,” setting the tone for the songs to come. The combination of autobiographical and fictional narratives culminate to the final track in the album “I Know The End;” a slow-building depiction of the demise of the world as we know it, ending in a nihilistic acceptance of the end of all we know and an intense punk-rock guitar solo accompanied by loud, breathy screams of agony (and catharsis). Right out of the gates, Phoebe shows the hope of changing one’s living patterns in contrast with an awareness of self in the line“when I get back I’ll lay around/then I’ll get back and lay back down/romanticize the quiet life/there’s no place like my room,” which stings the listener as they hear her acknowledge how she operates in her angelic, wispy voice. The story goes on, describing a desolate swing set housing a conversation with someone she inadvertently pushes away, but “when I call, you come home/a bird in your teeth.” Phoebe utters these lines with a sense of dejection, some may even call it pity, hardly enunciating the final syllable in “teeth.” This references another song on the album, “Moon Song,” where she describes herself as an animal leaving their owner a dead creature as a token of their love. The ability for Phoebe to intertwine narratives that are not necessarily cohesive, but fit together as such, is what makes Punisher a standout album (think Taylor Swift’s popular storytelling albums folklore and evermore). Exemplifying her impressive self-awareness, Phoebe directly addresses what she already knows to be true: “but I have to go/I know I know I know/when the sirens sound you’ll hide under the floor/but I’m not gonna go down with my hometown in a tornado/I’m gonna chase it, I know I know, I know/I gotta go now, I know I know, I know,” her voice hesitating before her final assertion, faltering just slightly. The flexibility of her voice shows her specialized ability to represent feelings phonetically — just because she knows she will go while they will stay, it doesn’t mean the final goodbye stings any less.

It’s here that the song quickly shifts gears; the strumming of a guitar builds after the violins conclude their sendoff of the first half of the song, a drumbeat keeping rhythm as the strumming becomes more prominent. Phoebe sees herself driving up the coast as she sees the unfamiliar glare signaling the end of the world, hypothesized to be a “government drone, or an alien spaceship.” The song gains speed once more as brass instruments begin a fanfare, the tension reaching a peak as the end looms closer. She stumbles across a nonexistent billboard that says “the end is here.” When Phoebe turns around to find nothingness where the world once was, she nonchalantly declares “yeah, I guess the end is here.” The nonemotion she expresses at this point juxtaposes the dejection of leaving in the first half of the song, representing how some things are beyond our control, so they have to be accepted. The song rages on, the brass instruments and guitars playing off each other before a chorus of voices shouts “Ah,” and the excitement seems to fall as the syllable does, taking on a more ominous tone. For the last thirty seconds of the song, Phoebe lets out a gutteral, deep scream, and it eventually fades into a raspy, whispering yell. “I Know The End” is a story with a beginning, middle, and end, simultaneously representing the difficulty of knowing what reality consists of while still being displeased with the outcome and accepting that the world as we know it is destined to end, and there’s liberation in that fact. Still, sometimes the best way to express those emotions is with a primal scream.

“I Know The End” propelled me through the last twelve minutes of my dreaded drive home (I couldn’t help but listen to it twice). Although she, too, is struggling with the contradictory desires of comfort in what one has and the exhiliaration of new experiences, which assured me that my internal struggles with what I want are not abnormally difficult, but instead an inherent piece of the human experience. Hearing the freedom emitting from the screams of a twenty-six-year-old who was dealt a hand similar to my own was enlightening, as I was reassured that I had time to determine where I call home and why I deem that place worthy of it. Life is filled with too many overlapping, diverging aspirations, and at times, the only appropriate way to manage them all is to release one world-ending scream.

As of now, I am still a bear in the zoo. My bed remains cluttered and unmade; my clean laundry is still unfolded in the laundry basket. The energy that it takes to be in a cage for so long is growing larger by the day, but there are others who feel that way, too. They obsessively browse Twitter while listening to their daily horoscope from a podcast on Spotify and laugh when they find something stupid enough to distract them from reality, for a bit. We are all bears in zoos, but there’s relief in knowing that there are bears across the country wanting to get out of their cages, too. Bears of all shapes, sizes, ages, and experiences are all desperate to clamor out of their cages and re-enter the world to form new memories rather than fixate on old (and often, painful) ones, but knowing there’s a sleuth of bears sharing the same ruminations as myself brings mild relief. Just wait until we all unhinge our jaws and release one, world-ending growl to conclude our months behind bars.

Works Cited

“A Call for Indie Music’s Much-Needed Reckoning.” University Wire, Sep 21, 2020. ProQuest, https://proxy.lib.umich.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/wire-feeds/call-indie-music-s-much-needed-reckoning/docview/2444522036/se-2?accountid=14667.

Bridgers , Phoebe. “Kyoto.” Spotify, 18 June 2020, open.spotify.com/track/49UDOG8DoBajXTJSTqfRMg?si=prIUnxszRqShCqzs-aMR0Q.

Bridgers , Phoebe. “Moon Song.” Spotify, 18 June 2020, open.spotify.com/track/6sALLrBPX30ptG1HWH6vmW?si=aYq61KsFRJmfhkWZSre3aQ.

Bridgers, Phoebe. “I Know The End.” Spotify, 18 June 2020, open.spotify.com/track/3cr3oAP4bQFNjZBV7ElKaB?si=BIyJVvQ5SXefLipkU8oPjw.

Moreland, Quinn. “Phoebe Bridgers on the 10 Things That Influenced Her New Album, Punisher.” Pitchfork, pitchfork.com/features/moodboard/phoebe-bridgers-interview-10-things-that-influenced-new-album-punisher/.

Petrusich, Amanda, et al. “Phoebe Bridgers’s Frank, Anxious Music.” The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/25/phoebe-bridgers-frank-anxious-music.