FROM THE BLOG

Wanted: Storyteller

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