ARTS&CULTURE
A Reason to Love the Internet Today the kritique and mystique of @kardashian_kolloqium By Antonia Huth ILLUSTRATED BY Solveig Asplund
to make a statement about her own musical reinvention. “STFU!” was released as the lead single for her debut album SAWAYAMA as an intentional upset for her fans. In a video about the creation of the album, she describes her desire to surprise people with a new sound. She wanted to catch them off guard without apologizing for it. Dragging my heels through the late January street slush, I was caught off guard just as she intended. I couldn’t tell if I liked the song yet, brash as it was, but I knew that it unspooled something inside me. Something that had been held, quiet and tense, for far too long. Fuck this world, it's dying 'Cause you people keep on lying Power gets, power drips on down By the time SAWAYAMA was released, only three months after I first listened to “STFU!” on a frigid Providence sidewalk, the world had been inescapably twisted by the coronavirus pandemic. All of my intentions for the semester had fallen to the wayside as I scrambled to say goodbye to friends I’d come to love, packed my newly-reinvented life into boxes, and drove the long 12 hours back to my hometown. 2020 buckled into itself, collapsing into a cramped new reality the size of my childhood bedroom. SAWAYAMA, when I finally got around to listening to it (one month after its release and two months after the beginning of quarantine), was explosive, vivid, painful—a shifting landscape of genres and themes that crawled into my skull and played on repeat. I could untangle a thousand tiny threads tying me to SAWAYAMA. It’s awash with lyrical turns of phrase that echo my own thoughts and careening guitar riffs that sweep me under. Watching interviews and reading song lyrics only made the album more meaningful as I replayed it for the fourth, fifth, tenth time. I found an examination of myself in her songs. In the ritual of re-listening, I found a sense of recognition. A reflection that smiles back in the mirror. I'm gonna take the throne this time All the words all mine, all mine SAWAYAMA spans topics from intergenerational trauma to forgotten friendships, mashing together genres from stadium rock to nu-metal to early-2000s pop. Some critics are quick to accuse the album of lacking cohesion, of pinballing too quickly from one sound or idea to another. I can’t comment on the musical (in)consistencies; I can’t be bothered. I don’t need an album to sound the same throughout, I need it to make mefeel something, which SAWAYAMA does without fail. But I would argue with critics about thematic cohesion. I believe the incredibly varied themes of 6 post–
SAWAYAMA come together to form a single conclusion: personal identity is created with other people. Across thirteen tracks, Rina sings about the forces that inform her identity, from her family and culture to her anxieties and frustrations. The album is a self-portrait of Rina not just as an individual, but as a product of the places, people, and ideas that have influenced her. It would be easy to say that I connect with this album because I am a gay, part-Japanese woman and Rina is a pansexual woman singing about her own Japanese background. But I think that SAWAYAMA speaks to me not because of these similarities, but because of its meditation on identity. In such an isolating time, it felt revolutionary to think of personal identity as something collaborative. Finding or solidifying your sense of self is done in collaboration with the people you love, at times in response to people you hate, in acts of creation, in acts of self-preservation—it is a constantly shifting amalgamation of all these things and more. But it is never, never done alone. You're changing my, changing my, changing my, changing my mind, yeah I'm shedding, I'm shedding, I'm shedding, I'm shedding my snakeskin I ended up abandoning my New Year’s resolution. 2020 didn’t end up being a year for bitchiness or relearning anger. Instead, it became a time for deep and unwavering investment in other people. In their safety, their health, their happiness. It was a time to become buoyant and determined, to reach out to the people I love and commit to staying afloat together. Even if I was no longer trying, 2020 did teach me to embrace anger, the kind that mobilizes you, sets you on fire. It brought new disappointments, new despairs, new hopes, and new commitments. A year that made us all grapple with ourselves in unexpected ways. A year that made it clearer than ever that there’s nothing more sacred than our connections with other people, even as those connections are challenged, or translated into some alien medium, or pushed to their limits. One day, when it’s safe to return to the vibrant and wild crush of togetherness, I will still have learned from my freshman year. I will not abandon myself in search of approval from others. But I won’t lead with anger, either. I won’t be a bitch. I will have made new resolutions. I will reckon with new fears, invent new selves. But for the first time, I will recognize that the act of reinventing myself is— and has always been—collaborative. Or, as Rina Sawayama puts it: Hand me a pen and I'll rewrite the pain When you're ready, we'll turn the page together
The Instagram post shows an image of Kris Jenner, matriarch and momager, standing with arms on hips, wearing stripes, a beret, red suspenders, and classic (except for the burgundy lipstick) mime makeup. Above her, a title reads: “‘Life on a Stage or Staged Life? The Chicken or the Egg Dilemma of Reality and Unreality on Keeping Up With the Kardashians’ Calabasas University Press (2018).” The poster, @kardashian_kolloquium (note the “k” in “kolloquium”) writes in the caption: “The visibly genuine affinity @krisjenner has for clowns and mimes I somehow find to be very illustrative of this fairly abstract concept.” I have stumbled across the post by chance and some successful algorithm-targeting on the part of my digital overlords. Though my interest is piqued, I’m puzzled. What, I ask myself, is this? According to the account’s bio, this is: “A Kompendium of notes/ reflections/theories [brain emoji] [peach emoji] Researched by @mjcorey Works Cited: Hulu, E Network, et al.” The best description I can come up with is a series of academic theses in various stages of planning, ranging from mere titles to elaborations so long they surpass Instagram’s caption wordlimit and must be continued in the comments. The topic of the theses, of course, is in the Instagram’s title. As of November 2, the account has 10,000 followers, a milestone celebrated in the caption of a video clip taken from an early season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians (KUWTK), in which Scott Disick is out day-drinking in Las Vegas and slurring his words. The subtitles read: “Yello! Wouldn’t mind a little drink here. Not talking to you, Balzac.” As @mjcorey, the sole owner and author of the page and a self-proclaimed millennial cat-lover, lesbian, writer, and psychotherapist from Brooklyn, deftly points out: “Either he said ‘ball-sack,’ and Hulu closed captioning interpreted it as the French novelist whose stylistic fusion of romanticism and realism anticipated literary modernism—or Scott really did inexplicably call that unsuspecting strange ‘Balzac.’ Either way, an absurdist win.” As a long time KUWTK-watcher (I’m still unsure if I wish to identify as a fan), as well as a Modern Culture and Media concentrator and borderlineGen-Z member of Ivy League academia, I could not be more smack in the middle of @kardashian_ kolloquium’s target audience. Any MCM student at Brown can tell you that the world carries meaning even in the most inconspicuous places. In the words of French semiotician Roland Barthes, “the cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comicstrip character[s]”—and by the Kardashians. As one might suspect, finding @kardashian_kolloquium was the moment I had prepared for all my life. The Kardashian-Jenner family and their realityTV show KUWTK, now in its twentieth and last season, are a touchy subject. This is surprising if one considers that all the Kardashian women appear to be, are a group of women capitalizing on their beauty and lifestyle via mass media—a description that applies to an entire industry of model-it-girls, influencers, and YouTubers. It is all the more astonishing in light of their immense following online and the fact that