Happy New Year, I dropped an album

"But Phoenix," you say, "You're a writer! Why are you investing time and energy into music?"
"Wrong," say I, "all I have ever claimed to be was an artist."
It's not a very long album, and it's not a very good one, but it's about how much 2017 has sucked and also been full of nazis and if I put it off any longer to get better or write more songs, I'm going to lose all my motivation.
Release albums song by song like a fanfic 2k18.

The Tracks

Dark Lord Beethoven
Inspired by my then-girlfriend when I texted them in excitement about how I had just taught myself to play Fur Elise on the guitar by converting the piano music to guitar music. They were watching Dark Lord Funk and were more focused on that. I said, "But Beethoven!" to which they replied, "Dark Lord Beethoven?" and the rest is history.
Well, not quite. The obvious rationale for Dark Lord Beethoven was a critique of intellectual culture and the impression that it's uneducated, stupid people who are the problem and not our peers. Okay, 'obvious' may be the wrong word here. Moving on.

The Saga of 2017
The title song of the album. "This is a hopeless rage of writing a song 'cause it's all you can do." #relatable, I hope. A list of complaints about bad things that happened in 2017. I think it's catchy, as it keeps getting stuck in my head.

Battle Dance
A love song to the most useful martial art I've ever seen, and also the hardest to find a teacher for, pentjuk silat tanjung sari, or silat for short. It's literally designed for war, and you'll find that dance is more useful for learning it than other martial arts are. It's soft, and subtle, and doesn't look like much, and it will fuck. you. up.

Coming soon

A National Chastisement
A parody of the National Anthem, with some O Beautiful For Spacious Skies thrown in for good measure. I cannot yet play it fast enough for the tune to be recognizable, and there's only so much I can improve my own playing through the miracles of technology.

Good Things
A response to The Saga of 2017. I depressed myself, and also it's a heavily biased song, so I then went looking for good things that happened in 2017 to balance it out and cheer myself up. Not yet written. It's harder to make good things catchy.

More??

It Gets Better, In the Aftermath

Lately, what's been on in the car is the album For Your Entertainment by Adam Lambert. My favorite song on the album? Aftermath.
As soon as I read the lyrics to this song, I said to myself, "This is about coming out." It never says that explicitly, but if you're LGBTQ, you get it.
According to Wikipedia, Adam co-wrote the song (with whom it doesn't say). This makes sense. Adam is gay. If you were watching Glee tonight, you might have caught a glimpse of him in the latest It Gets Better video. Which is also an ad for Google Chrome. :) I chose to ignore that part.
Watching the video, you can see the titles of the various YouTube videos of the It Gets Better project. I am constantly amazed at the number of people who have put these videos up. Lady Gaga. President Obama. The people who work at Google and Facebook. And Adam. I must say I don't like his phrasing when he says "who I choose to sleep with". Of course, it's true. Who you sleep with is a choice. It just misleads what feels like most of the world into thinking that wanting it is a choice, that falling in love is a choice.
But back to Aftermath. Every word in it is about feeling overwhelmed, about feeling like the rest of the world sees only a mask, about moving forward, and mostly, not being alone. As far as I'm concerned, the very best cut is the version that you buy, but a not-half-bad YouTube of it is here. Or, if you prefer, a remix that won an O award.
"Don't be afraid of what's inside/ Wanna tell ya, you'll be all right/In the aftermath."
There are so many people out there just waiting to welcome you to the wonderful world of being LGBTQ. Just do a YouTube search on It Gets Better.

Born This Way

So, I'm going to be a fangirl or possibly just a flaming proud lezzie for a minute and tell you about Glee Tuesday night. It was called Born This Way and about loving yourself. They brought Kurt home to his old school (they just couldn't resist giving him more amazing outfits, I'm sure. At the other school, he had a uniform). Meanwhile, the closet lesbian, Santana, hooks up with the other gay guy, Dave, to pretend neither of them are. Kurt's prerequisite for coming home was that Dave would start a PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) group at school with him.
Everyone is told to make a shirt with a word or a phrase on it that sums up the part of them that they're most ashamed of, the thing that makes them different, and they'll sing/dance the title number by Lady Gaga. I've never listened to the original of this song before, only a different cover of it that has half the words removed. While most of the kids have shirts that say things like "Can't Sing" or "Brown Eyes" on them, the class idiot, Brittany, who's the only one who knows about Santana, gives her a shirt that says, "Lebanese". Santana says, "I'm Hispanic. Wait. Is this meant to say, 'Lesbian'?" Brittany replies, "Yeah. Isn't that what it says?" The funny thing about this is that Lebanese is mentioned in the song itself.
Kurt struts it on stage, singing the opening words in a shirt that says "Likes Boys" (I'd take a "Likes Girls"), the only shirt that's completely unashamed. Santana sits out, wearing her shirt
where no one can see her. The Trevor Project asked its Facebook fans whether they would buy or wear Kurt's shirt--I and 1,707 people 'liked' it.
And the song! It's amazing! I bought it and put it on single repeat. I'm up to a play count of 27 already. It's bouncy and it has a great message.
"A different lover is not a sin"
"No matter gay, straight, or bi/Lesbian, transgender life/I'm on the right
track, baby, I was born to survive"
"I'm beautiful in my way, 'cause God makes no mistakes"
"There's nothing wrong with loving who you are, she said, 'cause He made you
perfectly" (not in order)
A church near me holds a LGBT prom, which they've invited me to. If they play this song, I am so dancing on stage. I'm saying this out loud (well, you know what I mean) so that I can't chicken out.
Hey, look! Someone managed to post that scene. Watch! I'll admit Kurt looks a bit insane, and they cut my second quote above (it's in the version on iTunes, though) AND it's backwards and blurry, but it's worth it!

Related: I met a new friend on Facebook (become a fan) and started stalking her profile. Everything I read made me like her more. Now, her profile picture was Kurt and his boyfriend Blaine kissing.
Further down, I saw an event she attended that was about posting a same-sex kiss picture as your profile picture to protest one being marked as inappropriate content. I started looking at the pictures. My favorite? A picture that says at the top, "Jesus Loves You", and at the
bottom, pasted in, a picture of two guys kissing.
I cried. The next morning my glasses still had spots. It was captioned, "If you are a believer, I am not, but I leave this Christian image of a kiss and love." This has always been an issue for me, as I have always believed that I was, indeed, born this way.