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<\/p>\n Graphic by Marina Kozak (Photos via Getty Images)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Everyone is \u201cdissociating.\u201d Over the past few years, it\u2019s become an open-source cultural term, ripe for applying (or misapplying) to all kinds of circumstances where people feel the need to turn off and tune out. One woman I know is currently dissociating via a series of increasingly eccentric hobbies\u2014bead necklaces, candle making, metal-detecting. She\u2019s hardly alone. A go-to pose on Instagram is the \u201cdissociative pout,\u201d where you assume the blankest expression you can muster. The cultural critic Rayne Fisher-Quann, who coined the term<\/a>, also gave a name to the larger aesthetic\u2014\u201clobotomy-chic\u201d\u2014and trawling TikTok or Twitter you can find countless riffs on the idea, from fake Claire\u2019s ads advertising \u201cself-care\u201d lobotomies to Doomer memes about the hopelessness of escaping late capitalism. Lack of affect is the new affect.<\/p>\n So what\u2019s happening? The easy answer is: everything. A pandemic, school shootings, the climate crisis, looming recession, the collapse of democracies and the existing world order\u2014the response that many have to all of this is to crawl inside a safer space, to find refuge from the chaos. The world is teeming with threats to our physical, psychological, and emotional well-being, and in order to feel safe and secure, we\u2019ve had to get a bit more resourceful than usual. Enter dissociation, the response at the root of so much trauma.<\/p>\n Anytime a cultural phenomenon spreads this far, you can be sure those neurons are firing in music, too. And sure enough, once I started looking for it, I realized I\u2019d been hearing this hollowness across genres and styles, from British post-punk to West Coast street rap.<\/p>\n There are many ways to communicate spiritual shell shock in song form. For Mitski<\/a>, volcanic emotions are forever at war with chilly clarity, with chilly clarity forever getting the last, suffocating word. Although she has the lung capacity to unleash operatic wails, she often chooses to sing about abject emotional states clearly and vacantly, like someone demonstrating the proper workings of a life vest. On \u201cFireworks,\u201d from her 2016 album Puberty 2<\/em><\/a>, she sang wistfully about dissociation:<\/p>\n One morning, this sadness will fossilize<\/em> It\u2019s a vision of complete stupefaction, and there\u2019s no mistaking the dreaminess in her voice when she ponders it; on her latest record, 2022\u2019s Laurel Hell<\/em><\/a>, she seems to have achieved this dream. \u201cHere\u2019s my hand\/There\u2019s the itch\/But I\u2019m not supposed to scratch,\u201d she sings on \u201cLove Me More,\u201d and her music has increasingly come to feel like a dramatization of this detached dynamic. She lets her voice quaver occasionally before smoothing it, giving the sensation of barely smothered dread, of bad feelings gulped down hard.<\/p>\n The chorus to Laurel Hell<\/em>\u2019s \u201cStay Soft\u201d\u2014\u201cYou stay soft, get beaten\/Only natural to harden up\u201d\u2014suggests a motive for this kind of behavior: self-preservation. If your voice constantly betrays your inner self to the outside world, leaving you frightened and exposed, then one natural reaction would be to turn your voice into its own kind of mask, advising everybody to look elsewhere.<\/p>\n All singing, of course, is a mask. Even the most trembling and overheated vocal takes are usually the result of at least a little advance planning. But dry, dispassionate singing asks you to notice the mask, to ponder that there will always be emotional truths that will be hidden from you.<\/p>\n If you prefer your blank detachment with top notes of mordant, self-defeating wit and a bone-dry finish, Florence Shaw is your woman. \u201cI just want to put something positive into the world, but it\u2019s hard because I\u2019m so full of poisonous rage,\u201d drones the singer for the London post-punk band Dry Cleaning<\/a> on \u201cEvery Day Carry.\u201d Imagine reciting this line into a mirror, testing out inflections\u2014anguished, pleading, terrified. And then listen to how Shaw delivers it, speak-singing like someone you\u2019ve just rescued from the site of a natural disaster. She doesn\u2019t sound defeated or depressed, because those are scrutable emotional states. She simply sounds absent, her voice a sign at the door reading \u201cNo one\u2019s here.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n She does this all throughout Dry Cleaning\u2019s 2021 debut album, New Long Leg<\/em>, performing her lack of feeling as if it were a lead instrument. The approach reminds me of the BuzzFeed essay \u201cThe Smartest Women I Know All Are Dissociating<\/a>,\u201d which went viral in 2019, inspired in part by Phoebe Waller-Bridge\u2019s Fleabag<\/em> character. Shaw\u2019s voice sounds for all the world like one of Waller-Bridge\u2019s monologues set to music, minus the glamorous self-destruction. She\u2019s like an anti-David Lee Roth, committed to sucking the color out of the surroundings, and her presentation is so oddly compelling that the antsy guitars backing her seem to exist to serve her anhedonic persona. The closest her singing comes to a lilt is in the line \u201cbrain replaced by something\u201d\u2014the music of her phrasing suggests she\u2019s never heard a more enticing prospect in her life.<\/p>\n If you prefer your numb remove to be of the more saucer-eyed variety, listen to Cate Le Bon<\/a>. On her 2022 album Pompeii<\/em><\/a>, the Welsh singer-songwriter sounds Zen, impenetrable, the surface of her singing egg-shell smooth. \u201cI quit the earth\/I\u2019m out of my mind,\u201d she croons on \u201cModeration\u201d\u2014presenting the desperate sentiment with the patient distance of someone teaching a song to preschoolers. On the title track, she sings about literally fossilizing her emotions: \u201cDid you see me putting pain in a stone?\u201d The surface of her music is shiny, chitinous, insectoid, recalling another masterpiece of dissociation, David Bowie\u2019s Low<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n<\/div>\n Le Bon puts an eerie emphasis on her elocution, which is an excellent social-distancing measure to avoid communicable emotion. When we emphasize consonants, it\u2019s usually to put up a bland facade, like when a customer service representative leans into the \u201cs\u201d and \u201ct\u201d sounds of \u201cI certainly understand your frustration.\u201d<\/p>\n The singer-songwriters Caitlin Pasko<\/a> and Wendy Eisenberg<\/a> both enunciate carefully, scattering fricatives and plosives in their wake like little land mines. \u201cYou know you are a horrible person\/I shouldn\u2019t have to explain it to you,\u201d sings Caitlin Pasko on \u201cHorrible Person,\u201d and the pointed calm of her delivery is even harsher than the lyric itself. Mitski weaponizes elocution, too, inflicting this instrument of cruelty only on herself. \u201cFury, pure and silver\/You grip it tight inside,\u201d she sings on \u201cStay Soft,\u201d mouthing the words \u201cgrip it tight\u201d with exacting precision, as if each finely placed plosive might help arrest internal free fall.<\/p>\n
\nAnd I will forget how to cry<\/em>
\nI\u2019ll keep going to work, and you won\u2019t see a change<\/em>
\nSave, perhaps, a slight gray in my eye<\/em>
\nI will go jogging routinely<\/em>
\nCalmly and rhythmically run<\/em>
\nAnd when I find that a knife\u2019s sticking out of my side<\/em>
\nI\u2019ll pull it out without questioning why<\/em><\/p>\n