Notes on "Barbarism" by Katie Alice Greer

 

"We all have our ego, our outer face that we give to the world, our message of, ‘This is what I’m doing with my life; this is who I am; and I’ve got my shit together.’ But then there’s always the stuff bubbling under the surface that’s a little less finalized, but more true to what your full self wants. And a lot of this work, for me, was trying to get in touch with that, to strip away the conscious, awake person and hear what your dreams are saying." -Katie Alice Greer

Katie Alice Greer is the former lead singer of Priests, a Washington, D.C.-based punk rock band that formed in 2017. The Seduction Of Kansas, their final album, was released in 2019. After a grueling schedule of near-constant touring with Priests for two years, Greer suddenly found herself at a crossroads with the band's dissolution. So in early 2020 she decided to pick up sticks and move to LA... two weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic-driven lockdowns began. And as someone used to performing live, being unable to do so for an extended period of time, trapped in her little apartment and essentially shutting out the world, was an incredibly isolating experience. But it also served to inspire Greer to focus on creating new music, something that would be hers and hers alone, with no collaborators, no other voices in the chorus. Something purely her own. Barbarism is the final result. 

This is Greer’s debut solo album, after three prior EPs (Freaky 57, 3 Colors, No One Else On Earth) of disparate music that found no other home. Greer wrote, performed, produced and mixed this glimpse inside her naked mind all alone. And all of those conflicting emotions of trying to live through the existential uncertainty of the pandemic, as well as the simultaneous exhilaration and terror of suddenly finding herself alone and unmoored without the support structure of her band, are distilled and captured in the 42 minutes of Barbarism. Each track is a kind of sonic sculpture, a collage of dissonant notes that somehow find a sublime sense of cohesion under Greer's fevered administration.

FITS/My Love Cannot Be

Nervous. Anxious. “Now I’m an undertaker, and I never wanted to be.” Surveillance state as spectator sport. Obvious, yes. But also angry. Frustrated. But there's a glimmer of hope within that one can hold onto like a life preserver while lost at sea. “Aren’t we the ones we were waiting for us to be?” June Jordan used the phrase "we are the ones we have been waiting for" in her Poem For South African Women that she presented before the United Nations in 1978. This line from Greer must be a deliberate reflection of that powerful statement, recontextualized for a more general, post-modern audience. There's a sense here of being overwhelmed, by the news, by social media, by everything. Noise. Chaos. Cacophony. A dance club in Orwell’s Oceania. 

Talking In My Sleep (Intro) 

Fake Nostalgia. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen most days. Fake nostalgia for a simpler time. Longing for a sense of certainty that was never mine.” Beautiful noise. Layered vocals. Overlapping. Different thoughts crowded together in a small room. Repeat the chorus. Searching for meaning. Finding nothing. Maybe ennui. But that’s always there. We delude ourselves into thinking that things were better in the past, but we don’t remember the past as it truly was. Pop culture has warped our perception. Our memories are lying to us, our brains trying to comfort us with delusions while the world around us, the here and now, is falling apart. 

Dreamt I Talked To Horses 

“I’m not asking for World War IV.” “You keep yourself locked up, it shows. And like a cancer it’ll grow. Tumor’s coming out now, if you let your guard down.” Getting stoned and time traveling? Utopia? Must have been some good shit. I find the song delightfully disorienting. Concern. Worry. Bizarre and uncomfortable imagery. I’ll take it. This whole record seems to be conjuring images of a world trapped in the grips of some sort of dystopian nightmare. 

Flag Wave, Part 1 

Noise. Love noise. Now strumming guitar and explosions. Chaotic and beautiful. Singing in falsetto. Overlapped with other vocals. None of it makes sense. It all cancels itself out. Like chanting giving way to synth distortion and melody. Repeated sound like a stapler or hole punch. Nervous percussion. Like a death march. More noise, like a typewriter. Clack, clack, clack. Typing out our collective obituary, maybe? Fuzz. Static. Slowly being consumed. 

Flag Wave, Part 2 

Echoing percussion faded in from part one. The vocals are so close. Pressing against your ear. “There’s something inside of me that won’t let me be.” An organic (if that is the correct word for something that sounds so delightfully artificial) progression from part one. The melody changes form wildly while retaining recognizable elements. The vocals are clear and concise, in sharp contrast to part one. Deliberate clarity. Captivated. A piano pounding out a single note. A slow marching beat. “How much do you want me to see? For how much will I have capacity?” An electronic howl as an accent to her vocals. Fascinated. You understand the consequences, but you can’t look away. This reminds me of the consequences of knowledge in a Lovecraft story. Knowledge is madness. Ignorance is bliss. But you need to know. You have no choice but to know. Even if the knowing will destroy you.

No Man

Chopping. Like scissors cutting hair, or one of those big paper cutters your grade school teacher would use in class to chop up construction paper. How intimidating were those damned things? I used to have a recurring nightmare when I was in first grade that involved my awful teacher Mrs. Harris lining up the students before class was dismissed and chopping off our left hands one by one. Then she'd drop the hands in a big garbage bag and just send us home with these bleeding stumps like this was all perfectly normal. Of course it was a nightmare, so something as bizarre and sinister as a school teacher chopping off the hands of small children and collecting them in a garbage bag,,, for reasons... wouldn't really feel out of place. 

Greer's voice is presented as an instrument. Instruments. Processed vocals. A multitude. “They say that no man is an island. But I’m no man. I’m no man.” Discordant. Inhuman. Isolation. Femininity as isolation? The note gets louder, more forceful. Fuzzy words, pitched down. Sinister bent. It’s a horror movie. But who is the monster? Madness manifested in a dissonant melody. There’s a garbled voice in the background. Words I can barely make out. They remind me of something. I’ve heard the words before. Nervous tension. “I know in my bones I am entitled to something.” Aggressive percussive noise. Rhythmic fear. Feedback. Silence. Majesty. 

It’s PORN! Dorothea Lasky’s brilliant poem! That’s what the voice is quoting! I believe the audio half-buried in the song may be from an actual reading of the poem performed by Lasky herself.

“I just remember the first time I read that poem, I was floored because it was so explicit and funny and sad – it just felt like so many daggers cutting through a lot of stuff. I didn’t know why I felt so drawn to trying to incorporate that song onto the record, but I just felt really emotionally compelled to do it.” -Katie Alice Greer

I watch porn

Cause I’ll never be in love

Except with you dear reader

Who thinks I surrender

But who’s to say this stanza is not porn

Calculated and hurtful

All my friends say I’m free

And yes, maybe I am

But are you free

No, you’ll never be

I’ve got you in my grasp

I’ve got you right here in my room

Once again

"That’s what I’ve always wanted poems to do. I want them to be attractive and entertaining and seemingly simple, using language and imagery that people can easily understand. But once you’re in the poem you’re trapped. It locks the door and tells you what it wants to say. I don’t think the persona in “Porn” wants to hurt the reader — it just knows that porn is something that will make everyone listen, and even if they’re disgusted by it, they’re still fascinated by the scene. So it’s a way to seduce the reader into an intimate place. That’s all a demon wants. It wants to be heard like any other restless spirit." -Dorothea Lasky

The lurid imagery draws you in, the usage of “fuck” and “cock”, the titillating descriptions. But this acts as the bait in a trap, exposing you to something darker, more raw, and the mirror turns to reveal your reflection. You are made to confront yourself. Seduction as prelude to entrapment. Lasky likes to refer to "the demon" in regards to her work. The demon wants to be heard, and so it presents itself as seductive, simple and seemingly to understand. It beguiles the reader with lurid imagery and once you're ensnared it reveals some deeper truth. "It just knows that porn is something that will make everyone listen". 

The title immediately grabs your attention. The carnal language keeps your eyes glued to the text, and before you're finished you've found yourself confronted with something unexpected. The darkness creeps in, seduction becomes revulsion, and once it's all over, there's no release. No catharsis. Are you free? No, you'll never be. You came for a cheap thrill, and now you're trapped. Pornography is inherently shallow, a cheap form of instant gratification. PORN uses the surface trappings of pornography to forge a deeper connection with the reader. What we perceive as shallow reveals unseen depths. 

"The poem is an immortal space. Maybe it’s a kind of hell because that feeling is trapped forever, and who you were in that moment is trapped forever, but that’s what poets want. We want immortality — to speak to the future as present beings. We’re trying to trap ourselves in the moment for a future reader." -Dorothea Lasky

And Greer conjuring the text of PORN in No Man like some sort of half-remembered dream is a riveting choice. No man is an island. But she is no man. She is isolated. And she wants to be heard. She feels she’s entitled to something. Your attention? Your time? ”Nah, girl. Now you’re free.” Is she free? As she says, perhaps, but you are not. You’re trapped now, and you will listen to what she has to say. 

This feels, in a broader sense, like what Greer is attempting to convey with Barbarism in general. She’s a restless spirit that wants to be heard. She lures you in and confronts you with visions of paranoia, fear, rage, destruction and pain, uncomfortable truths of our world, heightened and distorted through this funhouse mirror of a record. The demon seduces you with such lurid promise, and once you're inside she locks the door behind you and holds you captive, laying herself bare until you finally realize that her fantasies and her fears, her dreams and her nightmares, are all yours as well. Greer's specific experiences are hers alone, but the abundant, often stunning feelings associated with them are universal. She draws you in with this exuberant, melodic madness, and before you realize it, you're being challenged by the words and thoughts of a bewitching young artist who refuses to be ignored. 

Barbarism is an empathy machine. It’s brilliant. So vulnerable and beautiful. It almost feels like I shouldn’t be listening to these private thoughts, like I’ve found somebody’s diary and I’m reading it out loud to myself. Clearly this album represents Greer working through a lot of her own issues, and it feels like a form of therapy. There are no tangible answers on display, but sometimes just vocalizing one’s fears and anxieties is cathartic and a helpful step. Sharing your fears is the first step to overcoming them.

Barbarism

We close with the title track. Have we made a breakthrough? Piercing vocal delivery, words like weapons. I could listen to profound nonsense like that all fucking day. 

Friedrich Engels supposedly once stated “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads: either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism”. The truth of the matter is Engels likely never actually made this particular statement and this is a case of misattribution on the part of Rosa Luxemburg when she published her anti-war pamphlet The Crisis Of German Social Democracy in 1915. This actually appears to be an adaptation of a passage from The Erfurt Program, written by Karl Kautsky & Eduard Bernstein and published in 1891 as the official program of The German Social Democratic Party. Kautsky would go on to expand his thoughts in a full-length book entitled The Erfurt Program: A Discussion of Fundamentals, which was published a year later in 1892.

The full passage from Chapter 4 of the book reads: "If indeed the socialist commonwealth were an impossibility, then mankind would be cut off from all further economic development.  In that event modern society would decay, as did the Roman empire nearly two thousand years ago, and finally relapse into barbarism. As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism."

Greer took her album’s title from this quote (either Kautsky or "Engels", the distinction is unimportant), and that alone is a pretty damning condemnation of where our society seems to be heading. But Greer personally seems to be a much more optimistic person than her record suggests, at least as of now, since she may have exorcised some of her own demons in the process of creating Barbarism, an unabashedly weird album that I think is absolutely fantastic. It's an intense (and intensely personal) listen, and definitely not for everybody. But if you're able to tune into this album's peculiar frequency, you may lose yourself within its wondrous depths for a while. Barbarism, at its core, is a form of holistic Oneirology, a long look inward that scrutinizes the workings of the subconscious mind as it processes the often overwhelming stimuli of a world that sometimes feels like a vast organism that's slowly going insane. 

(You can listen to the discussion that includes Barbarism and vote in the poll [until it closes on October 7th] by following this link. Cheers! -Dustin)