I originally intended this as 8 bit music but ended up having a bit too much fun with Reaktor’s Razor which is incidentally an excellent vocoder.
Part of a series of musical error 404s I made up for my entertainment. Recorded and written in an hour. A rule I have no intention of breaking. But you can get there by going to pages on my site and imagining pages that don’t exist.
A tune for the winter. For those shivering along with me, hope this warms you a little.
For those in the heat, hope the wintery-ness of it all cools you right down.
Here’s a summary of Snegurochka found in some old…surprisingly legible notes.
As you can hear, I have combined both story versions.
I’m still not sure what Snegorochka means to me as a song other than a little ditty about losing oneself in a joyous,delirious moment. Perhaps this is what it is. There…who said Twisted Tales was about dark things. Or maybe delirium isn’t such a good thing, but maybe…this is a little respite in the world we live in where I get a sense that world events are spinning out of control.
Enjoy it. Tell friends. More in a bit!
Love
Yunyu
Lots to report but first…another Error 404 feature. This was due last week, then there was too much on. So here it is…one day late (technically on time if we consider international clocks)
Here’s a double feature of Error 404. There was a challenge laid down that I never actually EVER did metal. I’m not sure if this qualifies as a legit attempt…but points for trying eh? Also, I don’t think my throat likes metal too much.
Again since it’s part of my error 404 page a random refresh on a page that does not exist on yunyu.com.au aka yunyu.com.au/thispagenothere will/might play this version to u.
Here is Error 404 metal in English (Russian)
AND Russian. Special tks to my little brother Zhihao for translating it to Russian and teaching it to me. I only hope I’m intelligible. Here’s to possibly badly pronounced Russian.
Note: Domovoi is a Russian poltergeist of sorts. I thought it made sense to feature local monsters with every translation rather than try and translate the kraken.
It’s been a busy month. The joys of freelance composing is that one minute you could be lounging about biting your nails and being anxious about people getting back to you about jobs, then in another instant ,a few things that you say yes to suddenly reappear with deadlines from hell.
I no complain. It’s joyous. But after a few all nighters and working through weekends since late last month, I’m sitting in the sunshine a bit to catch my breath before plunging back in….tonight. The forecast is that I’m probably going to be swamped until the end of the year. This is a great thing. For now, right this instant… this is me furiously catching up on blog posts, promised releases etc etc. Gotta air that composer brain a bit.
This month’s highlights? One of the scores I had to write was particularly watery and bendy. So I got it into my head that maybe I should sample instruments immersed in water and write the entire score with whatever I can pull out of the water — so to speak.
I’ve been having a little bit of fun investigating underwater recording. (hydrophones) . Here’s a DIY method, (recommends condoms) but I ended up using balloons…I believe it’s the same effect. I recommend the ones used for animal balloons. Normal shaped ones aren’t a particularly good fit. (so to speak)
The director (Luke Marsden) is a helluva good sport and was coerced into helping with recording. Welcome to low budget film making. Here’s a wok scraped underwater recorded with SM58 underwater.
It did occur to me after that maybe there was some risk of electrocution after the fact. Ah well! For Music and SCIENCE! (I did double bag the mic)
Few other projects I’ve been working on too with differing levels of insane sound and music experiments. I love it and can’t wait to tell all BUT I’ve been sworn to varying levels of secrecy so that’s all I can report. At least for now. Single release of Twisted Tales end of this wk. Expect something wintery. The land of OZ has been freezing over a bit.
Error 404 started a bit as a practice thing for me. Also, directors I’m working with started asking me what sort of genres I like to write. Hmm…I wondered that myself given that I never saw myself belonging to any kind of genre. Also I figured there was a better way to answer that sort of question — by making multiple genres out of the same song.
If you conjure an error 404 on my site you are likely to report a different version of the same error 404 song playing each time since I pretty much have that on random. As mentioned, it might not even be in English. Because…
ok in this case Why can’t we have ALL of the languages.
So that all that doesn’t disappear into the Kraken-verse. I’ll feature a 404 here every fortnight. (You can use the link below or simply hit refresh until it decides to load the little western ditty.
Recorded and mixed in an hour (that’s the challenge). Here be my little tribute to Ennio Morricone by inserting a kidnapping scene at the end. Because what’s a western if no one gets eaten by a land kraken right?
Also, the last release of Twisted Tales was here. Next one end of this month.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaHwkAkCqGM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaHwkAkCqGM
Hola all.
Just returned from Singapore from family and world and all broadcast is just about re-assembled. (more about that in another post) Has it been another month already? Sometimes I feel like goblins are stealing time with a timey wimey device.
Scheherazade comes from 1001 Arabian nights. Actually she’s responsible for the 1001 Arabian nights having told all 1001 tales in the 1001 Arabian nights.
Scheherazade was a beautiful woman married off to a king. Now the king had a horrible habit of killing off a wife every night. The rationale for this was that the woman would remain faithful to him and wouldn’t have time to cheat on him . Talk about insecurities.
TL; DR, King was cheated on, now kills every new wife.
The story goes that Scheherazade staves off her impending death by telling stories to her king every night and leaving it on a cliffhanger. Actually, she gets her sister, Dunyazabe to visit her every night and to ask her to tell a story every night (on the pretext that Scheherazade is dying the next day) Scheherazade then finishes the cliffhanger early and then set up another new story, ending it again at dawn on a other cliffhanger — which then buys her one more day of life.
For all intents and purposes, Scheherazade is probably the founder of network TV’s series format as we know it. (1001 Arabian Nights was probably 40 Seasons and 6 movies.)
Long story short, the king falls in love with Scheherazade after a long 1001 nights as he realises that he has met his equal. That’s just probably his perspective. This is the behaviour of an insecure baboon.
Scheherazade will spend the rest of her life sleeping with her almost murderer and outwitting said baboon at probably everything else.
My Scheherazade is actually me imagining a race of storytellers who manage to live forever because people remember their stories. They never die because they are never forgotten.
This twist… unlike a lot of other twists is a personal one. My Scheherazade reference is my maternal Grandmother (Ah Ma or Nan to some of you.) , who had passed many years before. I wrote it when she got sick with dementia and passed on, so consider this a very belated eulogy.
Ah Ma was a woman of many talents and one of which was storytelling. I think I fell in love with storytelling and the arts through her. According to mum, Ah Ma came up with my name.
Which pretty much dooms me to music or the arts. Yun（韻） means Music/ Rhythm. Yu (毓）is an old Chinese character which loosely means “Mother of” or in some context “Maker of beauty”. As you can guess, it’s hard to translate these things. (see footnote)
That’s Mother of Music to you peeps, or beautiful rhythms if you be feeling whimsical. These days Mother of Music feels like a much more comfortable title to wear
— hey, magnificent titles forcibly given at birth take awhile for me to grow into. 🙂
My Ah Ma = Bad Ass.
I loved my horror even as a child, and Ah Ma had a knack of putting freeze sticks through your spines, even in the eternal summers of Singapore. She had a particular gift of making my brothers and me say “Stop it Ah Ma! I’m not going to be able to sleep from this.” (阿嬷不要讲了，我今晚不用睡了啦！！）
I can tell you that this is quite the achievement because I became quite the jaded horror fan at a very young age. My parents never censored the media for me and I was babysat with old classics like “The Exorcist” and “The Shining” and that’s just the English movies. There’s the creepy old Malay Pontianak classics, or the thick compendium of movies adapted from Liao Zhai (Chinese horror anthology)
Sometimes Ah Ma would tell stories about the Japanese in World War 2， about the cruelty of the Japanese invaders to the Chinese nationals at that time, that was hard for her to speak of but she did at times and those were tales of true horror. Then she’d tell about her life playing semi pro in basketball teams. As I said, she was pretty formidable. She was a teacher, a linguist and a lyre bird for accents. She spoke and wrote functional English (quite rare for her time, unless you were Peranakan), a wide variety of Chinese dialects, then Malay. I remember my aunts telling me that her accents for each of these was pretty spot on, so they always thought she was one of them — so she was local wherever she went.
I think she collected many stories this way and she shared many tales of heros and heroines that continue to define my identity this day.
Ah Ma managed Grandad’s business, did the accounts, looked after the kids ( later gran kids) cooked the annual corporate dinners from home (which sometimes meant managing no less than an assortment of 40-60+ dishes and feeding up to just under 100 grown men at once — all from her kitchen and without formal training as a cook or a restaurant manager.
I remember her beating me at badminton in her late 70s (embarrassing) . I remember her kindness and then I remember her fierce intellect.
Sometimes I think if Ah Ma had been born in my parent’s time or after where opportunities were just a little more equal for women, and at a time where the economy more or less worked, she might have been quite the bad ass .
Above all, I remembered her as the confidante and wonderful storyteller. She had a way of bringing you into the story worlds with nothing but the props of her voice. She was and will forever be, my Scheherazade.
Ah Ma suffered from dementia in her later years. It’s a cruel thing, for anyone to watch. For someone who was so self aware, highly intellectual and defiantly independent I think her moments of lucidity were perhaps the most hard to bear for her and those who loved her. Most of all, I hated watching her lose bits of her memories and her stories. I hated that she had to wait so long for her end when there was no cure in sight.
In a sense, Scheherazade is a little bit of a personal fantasy epic. In my fantasies every time I sing this song, I could rescue her, just like her stories defined and rescued me. Ah Ma lives like the Scheherazades and she remembers everything again. That, maybe somewhere on other planes, she’s having adventures of her own and is well and whole. I’d like to think that because we remember her stories, she lives on, like we will, in stories.
So this is for the ones we love. Here’s to the storytellers. Past and present. Here’s to remembering the stories.
Footnote:
1. For those who do not speak any Chinese , Chinese is a pitch based and picture based language (yeah we still run on hieroglyphics) . So spelling my name with phonetics is actually data corruption at the highest level.
So please don’t go telling peeps that anything with Yun = Music. Because YUN as a phonetic pronounciation without pitch and the original Chinese wording it could mean clouds (云）, transport （运）, (faint)晕 etc, there are a myriad of characters spelled “Yun” , introduce similar levels of complicated monstrocities for “YU” — and that’s just the mandarin pronunciation.
I won’t lead you down the labyrinth of what it sounds like in the Southern Chinese languages which results in my name having a different phonetic spelling, which have more pitches, because that’s a little bit confusing and cruel 😀 )
Also…can’t talk about Ah Ma and have the blog post in only English so here it is in my mother tongue.
山魯佐德 （Scheherazade)
首先介紹《一千零一夜》.這是阿拉伯民間故事集，是以包運連環的方式開始的。山魯佐德是這《一千零一夜》故事的創作人，也是故事中的主角。相傳薩珊王朝國王因發現前任妻子不貞，將其殺之。此後，這國王每日便新娶一女，翌日便殺。當然，國王如此特殊的癖好也傳遍全國， 沒人敢嫁入這豪門。負責國王婚事的維齊爾也因此將招滅頂之災。他的女兒山魯佐德為了救父，自願嫁給國王。聰明的她每夜便用講述故事的方式吸引國王， 每當故事講到最精彩的時候，天也剛好亮了。
（我覺得山魯佐德應該是現代的連續劇“吊味”方式的創始者。）
國王吊了胃口，為了聽故事，也不忍殺，暫且容她不死， 命她故事隔夜再續。就這樣，山魯佐德講了一千零一夜，靠著故事延續性命。 日子久了，國王終於愛上了山魯佐德，免了她的死罪。 國王故事裡覺得和山魯佐德“合拍” “登對”這詞應該是國王的一面之辭吧，本人認為這位才女為了救父而終生糟蹋這堆又鈍又臭的牛屎上才是其中的真實故事。
我這首歌裡改編的山魯佐德 （Scheherazade)是一族用講述故事的方式得到永生的人, 她們都叫山魯佐德。她們的身軀很特殊，只要有人記得她們的故事，她們便可遠不病，不痛，不死。
我心目中的山魯佐德 （Scheherazade）是我外婆 （阿嬤）。她已病逝多年，這也算是非常遲來的追悼詞吧。
我記憶中阿嬤特別會講故事。文筆也非常好。據我媽說，我這名字是她取的。 YUN ”韻“是韻律的”韻， YU ”毓“是”鐘靈毓秀“ 的”毓“，”毓“本身有”孕育“ 的意思。 兩者加起來剛好有孕育音樂的意思。所以我好像沒的選－－ 當上了音樂家也是命中注定的。
阿嬤的幽默感真的好別緻。
我小時特愛聽鬼故事（騙你的 －－ 現在也特愛聽）， 父母也沒限制我年幼不能看鬼片。後來鬼片看多了，膩了，膽子也大了， 很難嚇著。可是阿嬤講的鬼故事卻能讓我們不寒而栗，雞皮疙瘩。有時還嚇得我們姐弟四人自舉白旗，求她口下留人， 不讓她說下去。當然我們隨之也會挨到阿嬤的笑罵 ”要聽又要怕，今晚不睡我打的呀！！”
其實， 我覺得阿嬤講什麼故事都讲的绘声绘色。她常說起她在學校的一些零碎趣事， 以前還是灌籃高手， 得過獎的，她教過書。又通曉多種方言，又會馬來話， 也會英文。雖然通曉多語言的本領在東南亞見多不怪， 不過聽我阿姨們說，阿嬤不但話會講，口音也學的很像，去到哪裡都被當地人當成自己人。她人生經歷豐富故事也多。阿嬤也會偶爾講起日戰的生活，講起日本人當時對華人的殘暴，肆虐，我記憶中的那些故事，比任何恐怖片都可怕。我記得中學讀亞洲史的時候我最愛找阿嬤講當時的故事，因為她故事講了，我那厭人的歷史課本也就可以少看了。
（ 其實我對歷史故事樂此不倦，不過本人覺得歷史課本往往無謂的詰屈聱牙，讓人看了頭痛欲裂－－ 還好中學時有了一個非常好的歷史老師， 才沒對歷史課文從此反感）
我心中的阿嬤很是能幹。阿公的生意多事都由她親手經營。當時生意人家中請客是常事，一請便不下百人。我阿姨們常說阿嬤能一人煮上一個滿漢全席。一人煮百人菜，其中的管理技巧應是到了神乎其數的地步. 在我們比較男女平等的年代，她說不成是精英一個，只恨生不逢時，懷才而不遇。
阿嬤晚年得了老人癡呆症。對任何人來說，這是非常殘忍的病。阿嬤生前非常獨立，這病對她和他身邊的人是莫大的打擊。最可恨的是她以病魔糾纏了好久好久， 可悲的是目睹她最終把自己的故事也忘了。
山魯佐德 （Scheherazade)是我的個人幻想作品。 。我常有那麼一個空想，阿嬤和山魯佐德一樣，能在千千萬萬的故事里永遠長存，永遠健全。只要有人記得阿嬤的故事，那阿嬤的精神就永遠健在。阿嬤的故事畢竟影響了我的人生觀，讓我一生受益不淺。這首歌是為阿嬤而寫的。也順便獻給愛講故事的同道中人 －－ 因為發人深省，提倡文化意識，激發奮鬥感的故事，往往就是一個人走在人生道路上的盞盞深海明燈。
So I did this awhile back. A silly little ditty to celebrate the fact that I SOMETIMES…can’t post links properly.
Or that you cannot type.
Error 404 — a celebration of Errors. Mine and/or yours.
You find it playing everytime you land on a dud link on my site.
So sometime this/last year I discovered I did like the idea of testing little musical possibilities in 45 minute bursts.
Enter the multi-genre, multi-lingual remixes of my error 404. The self imposed rule means I have to write and record each song variant in a 45 min block.
It’s a great way for me to flex my cross-genre muscles and break a single song format.
Is it a remix?
Is it a cover of my own stuff? Who knows?
My energies are best devoted to wondering about important things. Like…if blackholes like the taste of Goldfish…and when they come chomping I’ll know what to feed it.
I won’t tell you how many versions there are but every month I’ll feature a new version on here. (for all my/our entertainment). Also…bring a babelfish. It’s not all in English.
I will tell you, however, that error 404s have been used as a means to collect monsters.
According to the current lyrics, 404 looks like the chicken and tastes like the kraken. I’ll leave you to figure out if all versions report the same 404. 🙂 After all, 404 has many monster faces…and occupy many realities.
I’ll feature some 404s in a bit. Meanwhile, go to yunyu.com.au/thispagedoesnotexist and hit REFRESH.
404 has many musical faces.
I’m probably asking for it but break my website GENTLY and don’t bring on the apocalypse.
ps: in the event that you actually do…bring on the apocalypse. Feed it sushi….it most likely works
yunyu.com.au/thispagedoesnotexist
Last month, at the release of Wanted: Storyteller, I covered how all stories are essentially propaganda. Now this is my theory on how it all works. (evil version)
You simply take her tale and pervert it. Write her weak. write her stupid.Say it enough, she will believe it. Once she believes, it is fact. She will teach it to others — like a virus.
Take a culture , make a stereotype, mock said stereotype. Write them weak. Write them stupid Instant skinning via story. Say it enough, and there are many who will believe. Once they believe, it is then a fact. They will teach it to others — like a virus.
Abuse a class of people, invade a country or countries. Take everything they have. Tell stories where they are weak, Mock them. Make stereotypes, write them stupid, write them lazy. Say it enough, and there are many who will believe. Say it enough, the invaded will believe and will teach it to others….Like a virus.
My song Red is about the stealing of skins — the stealing of stories, the stealing of powers.
Red is Red Riding Hood.In case, like me, you have sometimes missed glaring pop culture stuff 😀
http://yunyu.bandcamp.com/track/red
The tale has its theoretical origins in China (Grandaunt tiger) , Africa (wolf and the kids) and various European regions. The popular version I refer to is about a girl who is sent off by her mother to run a little errand — deliver food to her ailing grandmother.
On the way she meets a genetically modified wolf that speaks human. She talks too much, now wolf knows her address and has beaten her to grandma’s house.
Wolf eats grandma. Bad bad wolf.
What happens next is interesting. Older versions suggest that rape happens. Red is told to climb naked into bed with wolf. Eventually, she outwits the wolf by pretending she needs the bathroom and ends up tying wolf to a tree (or filling its belly with stones). Leaving it to die.
Red rescues herself.
Something quite disturbing happens in the newer tales. Storytellers in Germany introduce a woodsman who comes in to kill the wolf. Woodsman has no backstory, he just appears. If I didn’t know any better I’d say he travelled by teleportation and was sent there by Robot Hitler from the future.
—if you are going to get ridiculous with storytelling with ZERO context, you might as well not be shy about it. Maybe we should include Rainbow crapping unicorns into the stories, or Godzilla. I like Godzilla.
So, just like that, Red got downgraded from self rescuing heroine to non playing character aka. Damsel in Distress. Other times, according to Charles Perrault, she simply dies from her wolf encounter.
All too easy to skin a story and pervert it no? The sad thing is that this damsel in distress version is the one more commonly told today.
In my obsessive read of fairytales, there is a recurring theme that happens in many tales — the stealing of skins.
The story usually goes like this, man finds woman frolicking in lake/sea, steals her magic robes which either give her the ability to fly (common in Chinese/ Russian/ Japanese folktales)or swim (see selkie )
Woman with no robe is left behind by her companions (usually sisters who fly or swim away). Man takes woman home. By all descriptions, she is raped. Stories told insist that she falls in love with her rapist. One day woman， who usually has had a few kids by then, finds skin, puts it on and escapes home to the skies or sea. It is said to be a sad love story when the woman leaves. Man pines for her forever.
Nevermind her opinion. Objects have no feelings.
The disturbing bit about the tales are that the stealing of the skin is a romantic gesture. The male is usually depicted as kind but lonely person. Woman, according to the storyteller, is happy to be a sex slave.
I have no words….except
Stories are powerful things. In this instance, rape is romanticised. The successful fight for freedom is regarded as a tragedy. Insisting that things are so only hides the wounds of a story, wounds fester in secret, we continue to feel what we feel. Now we feel too scared to share the wounds because no stories of self rescue tell us we can get ourselves out. No stories justify our rage. Women continue to be afraid to report rapes and violence and are ashamed, and shamed for it.
The stealing of skins, the stealing of powers that come with it, the stealing of stories.
You can extend this methodology to any culture the mainstream media wants to negate. Take any culture’s skin(story), pervert it, tell THEM what it is. Make them ashamed for trying to be strong. Make them ashamed for being them. Make them pay for trying to exert themselves. Make their rage foolish and trivial.
Negate them.
Take this methodology to any class of people you want to negate. The poor, the artists or dare I say…the scientists. Tell them to get off welfare, tell them to make immediately profitable inventions, art. Make them blame themselves. Make them attack each other. Twist their tales. Write them lazy, write them stupid. Blame them if they have nothing left to give. Make them ashamed to call the game unfair.
The wolves at our door have their goons and their dogs.
Today, at the release of RED I’m going to steal one back for us, the ones who bear the mark of the Twisted Tales.I will play their game and add a further mutation to Red Riding Hood’s tale.
What if Red was the wolf? What if it was the Woodsman that took her wolfskin and stopped her from accessing her powers? What if the Woodsman was the one that killed her grandmother who was also wolf.
More excitingly, What if Red found her wolfskin today?
I know what I’d do if I was her.
I’m not returning to the woods, the skies or the sea.
I’d be coming straight for the Woodsman’s JUGULAR, then I’d free up a few more wolf skins because I’m sure this serial arsehole has a collection.
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Then I’ll write rainbow crapping unicorns into the story. Because RAINBOWS!!
Buy the RED single from TWISTED TALES here:
RED has a teaser that lives here:
https://yunyu.bandcamp.com/track/red
Red is about the stealing of skins, the stealing of stories. In this Twisted Tale. Red Riding Hood avenges her grandmother who is also part wolf. The woodsman killed her grandmother and stole her wolf skin. He also stole Red’s wolf skin when she came to visit grandma.
Tonight she finds it. Tonight there will be blood.
If you had missed the little sneak peak..Shot/Directed/ Edited by the very talented Raj Muneshwar .It is here.
The lyric video if you want to sing along 🙂
If you missed the last release from Twisted Tales, Wanted: Storyteller, which features depression, madness, advertising and big pharma drugs. It’s here
Broadcasting from Twisted Tales – A teaser for the coming Single RED.
Directed and edited by: Raj Muneshwar
Music and Sound by yours truly.
Till then
Your Royal Madness
Yunyu
On this album reboot:- I picked Wanted: Storyteller.
This is an album about the perversion of fairytales after all, so this gives it an idea of what is coming. There are a lot of women in this album, then again, fairytales were once known as old wives tales, so that makes sense. Stories of wisdom and wit from mothers to daughters. There are men here too, just not so many. Maybe I just resonated with the female characters better. When the north winds visit my lair with the muses, the girls always told the loudest tales. So, like any good weaver of tales, many more of their stories get into my web. Storyteller is a good taster of things to come, but I’d like to warn that my album is sonically quite diverse and the tales are a little dark and slippery. Stick around if you are feeling brave.
Just expect no comfort.
I had a dream about all the fairytale characters having some kind of class action suit on the Storyteller for some really badly changed tales. Red Riding Hood went from rescuing herself in the earlier versions to getting rescued by a woodcutter with no backstory. It seems that even the damsels that don’t need rescuing are forcibly rescued. Then there’s the happily ever afters, that’s pissing every damsel off if they existed on some plane.
I remember always questioning happy ever afters. It always seemed like lazy storytelling. What happens with life? What happens when we close the books and the characters are allowed to go wondering on their own in the night and on our shelves (or in our devices?)
Then I remember the morals. I get fed a lot of folktales. Some morals I can understand, they tell little children not to go wandering about in the night, or the bogeyman or Hantu Tektek (it’s a big boobed Malay ghost with a portal in her nipples/boobs…very terrifying) takes you. I never got those about beauty and how it had anything to do with kindness.
Then I always wondered what happened to the ugly ones, or the beauties that get old. Do they always become the evil crones? Why do they always become the evil crones? My theory was that if you wanted to keep one gender stupid, it always made good sense to kill their stories and destroy the experienced, and the smart which invariably comes with age and a little wisdom. Keep those that do comply and the ones that don’t? Kill them, break them, burn them as witches, for those too hard to kill make them the Baba Yagas of a world that does not want them.
Which is always a little sad because any society that sets out to destroy and invalidate one aspect of their pool of knowledge will always invariably stunt some aspect of themselves. Maybe that’s why the world’s a little broken these days eh?
If we look under the hood a little, we must know that stories always functioned, in one form or another, as propoganda. This started with the Brothers Grimm, when they strolled Europe through collecting folktales and appropriating them as being uniquely German (not true). Charles Perrault took to inserting christian morals to propogate his Christian ideals. Does not take much to see that stories will mutate with these varied agends. See how you should never trust a storyteller? (One should also extend this distrust to poets?)
Perhaps it’s easy to congratulate ourselves. We’ve come quite a way for gender equality, or have we? Female bodies are still open for comment and control (breastfeeding in public gives some people hives, abortion is frowned upon, women who choose not to breed are still invalidated), women still fight for equal wages, then there’s the notion of cutting into ourselves to fit beauty standards that simply cannot happen naturally.
We laugh at rib breaking corsets and toe mutating Chinese foot binding, but we haven’t progressed much if we are still subjecting ourselves to impossible perfections. If anything we have now graduated to slicing into ourselves and injecting poison into our faces. Yay progress.
Gender inequality is a knife that cuts into both genders. Part of telling women that they need to be rescued is that men are forced into standards just as unrealistic and stressful. The demands of strength and capability where men have to be protector on all aspects all the time would be hard to bear, and in a world where socio-economic developments are fast changing and not always for the better, it’s a hard gig for many males. Rising male suicides that correlate with rising unemployment rates corroborate with this observation. There is something very wrong twitching in the wires of our media landscapes and the stories we tell ourselves. The gender rules we have written for ourselves are choking all of us, and there are many silently dying or are fast becoming the living dead, living lives we never want for ourselves.
This song is pretty self explanatory and is a snapshot of the perverse standards from a female centric standpoint. Maybe one day, we will get to kill the storyteller and name their words poison.
Till then, nothing wrong with a little dream about the storyteller getting skewered in my mind.
If you like it BUY a copy.. I’m hungry. FEED my delusions.
https://yunyu.bandcamp.com/track/wanted-storyteller
Next Single due on a FULL MOON. BECAUSE It has wolves.
Your Royal Madness
Yunyu