Frankie Cosmos' too dark

I've given myself the task of writing about one song a week for 2024 because, well, I think it'd be fun.

Frankie Cosmos' too dark

Happy birthday, Greta.

I will never understand how people can listen to music for nostalgia only, until you bring up Frankie Cosmos to me. To which I swallow, hard, and say, "Well, yes, she's the exception."

That's because, around the time I began taking art seriously, I began listening avidly to "Zentropy" and her Bandcamp-only album "affirms glinting", which encompassed my life. Greta Kline, Frankie Cosmos herself (well, not nowadays), had a similar fascination as mine at the time with micro-fiction. But she was, well, far better at it than I was. To the point I felt she was describing my life, sometimes to a painful degree. Look no further than the opening song of "Zentropy", "Art School": "Art school makes you wild, / real school makes you wanna get high, / high school makes you crazy, / high school made me cry."

Even as an old-ass man, I still find "Zentropy" compelling. For someone so young - we were both just 20 - she wrote what is somewhere close to my ideal in expression, that of pure candor, in storytelling, emotion...everything. Her songs are not her diary; they are the ultimate in expressing the complex emotions she was feeling at the time, cut into cubes, spread out like bird seed, discursive and confused, just as thoughts come to us in life. "Birthday Song": "'Cause I get all flushed and ugly, / wonder how ever will he love me, / I am so clumsy..." The song then lifts up, and she says "I think, how repulsive to you / it must be when I refuse / to do the things you want me to." She sings without anger, without sadness, uses no inflection, she tells, impassively as a storyteller, ending with a plea to her deceased dog, "Sometimes I just want you, Jo-Jo, / but I know that that is a no-no, / it's so impossible...", sung in flattened affect as if holding back such an unreasonable demand. It's a style of writing so close to mine: that touching and inspecting of thought, but not becoming thought, so as not to lose the earth of one's being entirely. It is a style that tries to find reason and beauty simultaneously in the world, and sometimes achieves it.

I still think "affirms glinting" is the greatest album I've heard from her, which is really weird since it's dwarfed by the size of her entire discography. But these are really beautiful songs, about the anxiety of tour and her general anxiety of being a person. Even as an old-ass man, I still sing them to myself. Years later. Not even needing to hear them again. I remember them by heart because they're perfect little slices of life. I also need to remember them, lest I go insane.

Part of what makes "affirms glinting" so special is the recording. It's just Greta and her guitar, and what sounds like lots of reverb, which may have been unintentional on her part. Nevertheless, her voice and her guitar dissolving into the void of the recording space - which could be someone's basement - is such a perfect fit for a character who seems to think so little of her own thoughts and yet affirms how important they are at the moment. Think of Arthur Russell's "World Of Echo" or Nick Drake's "Pink Moon", except shittier, more on the spot, more self-aware, and funnier.

I've been noting recently how artists have been writing their names in all-caps. Greta goes in the opposite direction: all song titles are in lowercase. "I'm not a rock star, and I have nothing to say," she seems to say. Oh, an artist after my heart.

We can go over the various little details and beauties of all ("schmuck in the room", "If you can't pinpoint the schmuck in the room, / it's you, it's you, it's youuuuu, / it's all for you") of ("being alive", "Being alive / matters quite a bit / even when you feel like shit") the ("the suckers corner", "there's suckers and there's jerks, / and temptation doesn't strike the suckers") songs ("am i wrong that you want me", "Am I wrong that you want me? / The questions that haunt meeeee... / Affirms glinting... / the love I was hinting...") but let's focus on "too dark", which is the dominant song playing in my brain in the last decade.

"I wish I had some control... / You embarrass me in folds." Setting the scene in two sentences, in total, eleven words.

I feel
all alone,
I don't want to know
how flustered you were.

is the second cube, seemingly set in a different time period. That movement from expressing her own pain ("I feel / all alone") to mild frustration is, well, it just feels like me.

I just want to hear
you say you were wrong;
how easily I
become not real,
like a bug you brush off your ear;
you are just dust...
I'm just dust...

Of note is where Frankie decides to cut lines, showing her indecisiveness in expressing her feelings and the pauses before knowing what to say. That "how easily I / become not real" is such a beautiful verse - the o's are hollow, the first "ea" has the tip of the tongue as high as the palate and the last "ea" is as low as the floor, highlighting the height of her anger to the low of her depression. Oh, and the "bug you brush off your ear" is a cute touch, but also a sad image.

If your love was strong as my shame,
I'd marry you and take your name,
but it's not, you'll never get it,
so I guess, I'll just forget it,
tooooooo dark...

I stand alone,
lucky and unknown,
do I belong? Do I belong? Do I belong?
No...

That's the lyric, "I stand alone, / lucky and unknown", that has reverberated throughout the last decade of my life and only gets stronger as time goes along. It's weird how often I'll be buying groceries, walking for leisure or photosynthesizing in the park and that "I stand alone, / lucky and unknown" will pop up in my head. It appears almost in joy.

Not to get too personal while writing this essay, though it's difficult to when I feel so intimate to the material: I think melancholy is something that shimmers in the dark. I have found that, as one leaps over the madness that is early adulthood, melancholy and despair are different things. Despair, as Spinoza reasoned, is irrational because it isn't an assessment of one's past and future, but the feeling over that assessment. Melancholy is the understanding of the things one cannot do because of one's present circumstances and nature. Even if we find we cannot do certain things, and even if we take a little sadness from our inability, we find it is far superior to know that we can't, and accept that we can't, than to stumble into our faults without knowing. Sadness and weakness are human, this we cannot deny, but we have the choice to fight through them, by, first, acknowledging them and putting them into song. That's the immense balance of "I stand alone, / lucky and unknown" - that while we are ugly ducks, we still take some pleasure in being alive in spite of being so ugly. For we are only earth, born shapeless and malformed, and we return back into earth, as swirling, falling dust, so we should take joy in earth, it is all we are and all we can have - terra terram accusat. But perhaps all of this type of thinking is "too dark".

The Orphean detail: "I drink bad coffee, / hope that you'll call me, / never look back, never look back, never look back."

I think a billion bands have written about the pain and loneliness of tour, but I think every one of them takes the perspective as the singer as an artist, where Frankie sung from the perspective as a person. I think, maybe until 2016's "Next Thing", she never really thought of herself as an artist or a musician and simply thought of herself as someone playing in her bedroom. Well, this would be fitting for her character, but I don't know about Greta.

The reality is that I hadn't pored through her whole discography because, even at that young age, I felt I was getting too much into her art. I had feelings there were other things to create than this intense, almost poetic micro-fiction, which led to my current James-ian, autodidactic, dense style of writing. The other reason is that, I felt little connection with the over-produced (in my opinion) "Next Thing" and "Vessel", and fell off from there. But I'll never criticize Frankie; the connection is too deep. I think she has a "Songs of Leonard Cohen" inside of her, if she freed and expanded the sense of her songs. But she herself is deserving of more freedom than her songs, because she is more than a musician, so whatever is in her future is up to her.