Bluesday, February 2: Against Me!

Whenever I'm sad about feeling alone in a new city, I think about this quote by Laura Jane Grace in a Rolling Stone interview from 2012.

"The cliché is that you're a woman trapped in a man's body, but it's not that simple. It's a feeling of detachment from your body and from yourself. And it's shitty, man. It's really fucking shitty."

 

Though punk has its origins from across the pond in the mid 70's, there are definite similarities, structurally, to the blues; rock and roll's roots are the blues, Elvis became King because Chuck Berry was black, etc. etc. etc. Take any 12 bar blues, don't swing the eighth notes, speed it up, like quadruple time, play only power chords, add distortion to the guitar, a couple of snare hits on the offbeats, add lyrics about defying the system and doing whatever the fuck you wanna do, and voilà! You've got The Ramones - "I Wanna Be Sedated."

Against Me! came out with Transgender Dysphoria Blues in 2014, three years after announcing a new album, two years after Laura Jane Grace came out as trans, and one year after the most fucked up year of my life. It's true punk rock; she says everything that needs to be said in ten songs under three and a half minutes, and the entire album itself is less than 29 minutes long. Yet its effects are everlasting- it's the most personal release Against Me! has ever had- as Laura sheds all armour protecting the burdens of her repressed spirit and, literally, body, behind that gritty, raspy, unabashed voice. While super-politicized previous releases like Searching for a Former Clarity and As the Eternal Cowboy dealt with the woes of being "different" and rising up in a capitalist political system, Laura Jane explicitly and courageously talks about her struggles of transitioning, no metaphor, of being a woman in both an aggressively male-dominated punk scene and in this transphobic country. This is her every day life.

"You want them to see you like they see any other girl / They just see a faggot / They hold their breath not to catch the sick"

I remember listening to this song in the front room of my dusty Pilsen apartment, buried in snow and freezing cold. Acidic tears ran down my cheeks after the title track played. While I think it's inappropriate to compare being gay with being trans, I related to the... desolate loneliness... of her struggle. Though I didn't have gender dysphoria, I had dysphoria of the soul, feeling completely dissatisfied of a situation I thought would never change. Feeling stuck in mud, but eventually making pillows out of quicksand. At least it seemed like someone was holding me, sucking me down six feet under the dirt. It's like someone threw a blanket over my head after my heart had already stopped beating from hypothermia. It's feeling detached from your body, being completely unaware of your self, going through the motions just to fill up space. It's the most lonely feeling in the world.

Transgender Dysphoria Blues received crazy good critical acclaim in 2014, and rightfully so. Musically, it might not be the best Against Me! album ever released. But Laura Jane Grace lifted her veil of insecurity, revealing her true beauty, explaining to us all what it actually MEANS to be transgender, and doing it flawlessly. This is her. Finally.

It's nice to see her giggle, too: