1/30/21
Last night I dreamed a pop star died. I remember seeing social media posts about it in my dreams, lamenting a great loss. I found out one of my instagram mutuals dated this person, which I had no idea the connection before. Their posts mourned the loss of their ex-lover, “even though we separated she was a very special person to me, I cherish the time we spent together”. In my dream I felt sad because the icon who died had been cut off in their artistic prime, my dream self felt that pang of loss, that she never got to fully realize herself and all her glory. Even though the time on earth she shared so much with us, I knew that she had much more to share. The cold steel sword of fate severed the head of the hydra of chance*.
I woke up this morning, Saturday morning, and laid in my bed savoring the dream for a few moments. I thought about what I wanted to do today: yoga, work on my blog, make sure not to get too drunk later. I ripped the bedsheets and quilt off my body, sat up, swung my legs over the side of the bed, placed two feet on the cold hardwood floor of my bedroom, and walked across the room to get my phone where it was plugged in, charging overnight. My head still sat in my dream. I logged on to twitter, and the first thing I saw was a tweet, “rip sophie”. I felt unreal, half asleep, still in a dream. But it happened, Sophie died.
Sophie makes me think of 2016, when I was 19 years old and working at American Apparel. American Apparel was obsessed with maintaining the image of “cool”, apathetic, nonchalant, effortless yet meticulously curated was their brand. They had an image that they expected all workers and stores to emulate. Part of that iron-fisted control was their internet radio which they expected all their retail store fronts to blast, at all open hours.
At first I liked it, they played things like Ariel Pink (which, lol, another reminder of how much things have changed since then), Toro y Moi, Nikki & the Dove. After a few months of working there, listening to the same 300 songs on repeat over, and over, and over for hours, I felt I was being driven insane. American Apparel only had 300 songs they deemed acceptable for their customers’ ears. American Apparel hired cool, “creative”-type people as an attempt to leech their own individuality and spill it onto the brand. And we weren’t allowed to play our own music! I remember talking to my friend Josh, who was a year older than me and had worked for the store a year longer than I had. He liked to get nostalgic about the old American Apparel, before many of the dramatic financial hardships and clawing desperate attempts to cling on to relevancy in the midst of the retail apocalypse. Josh told me that they used to play cool music, cutting edge, explicit stuff. Not just gummy shallow knock-off Forever 21 soundtracks. Cool Music, Like Sophie. After hours one night, Josh played Sophie’s remix of GFOTY’s “Friday Night”. Clanging, bubbling, twisting, throbbing, blistering, oozing, immaculate electronic music spewed out of the speakers. “banging banging banging loads of guys/ unzip the trousers /wet surprise / in the bathroom /sucking dick/ thanks for coming / that was quick”, like mania and an alarm and a party and an orgasm at the same time. The sound waves permeated my ears, and I felt the energy in me. The exhaustion of my seven hour shift was gone. Sophie made me ready to party again.
We began to rebel… No managers worked Sunday, so we would press pause the corporate radio website, plug our iPhones into the aux cord, and play whatever we wanted. We chose Sophie, because it was upbeat, so we could pretend it was still on brand if some higher-up decided to shop on their day off, but it was abrasive and explicit enough that we hoped it would scare off some customers. If the store was slow, we could dance and gossip in peace. Sophie brought us solace, peace from nagging yuppies and pseudo-influencers shopping. Sophie made our mind-numbing work tasks alive and bright and challenging.
Sophie is gone now, and with her is that sense of immortality and bit of innocence we had partying. I can’t help but feel dancing is luxury afforded to people with freedom. It’s been (almost to the day) a year since I’ve been clubbing, in a dark room amidst a group of strangers, moving my body to pounding music. I don’t know if we’ll ever get it back. Sophie’s death is painful reminder of that. I wish we could all party and mourn her properly.
There is also something extra disturbing about those who die in freak accidents during a pandemic. One part of it is as if, we’re all so focused on not getting sick, on protecting ourselves from the virus, that we forget things just happen… We get caught up in the dumb absurdity of surviving in daily life that we forget it’s not a good idea to climb up an apartment building to look at the full moon or reach down to grab your credit card without putting your car in park first. God’s swift hand or utter meaningless randomness takes people we love from us. Another part is the Pandora’s box or whatever metaphysical rupture released the Plandemic continues to lash out on us. I know there is much, much more death in my life now than there was a year ago. Life has become more dismal, everyone is itching to get out of this world, and on to the next. Sophie has always been lightyears ahead of us, and we never deserved her. We were so vain that we didn’t treasure her while she was still of this earth. Only the good die young. It's okay to cry. I love you Sophie.
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*Bolaño came up with that image, I certainly didn’t