N F A Z E D T H E S C R A W L T T 2 4
the scrawl
BALLIOL COLLEGE
Edited by Imogen Forrest and Rosie Field
Greetings Scrawlies and welcome to ‘Unfazed’,
At long last the much anticipated Scrawl for Trinity 2024 drops. At this rate my dear readers you’ll be lucky to get the next issue before you graduate. Speaking of graduation, it seems some of you understandably took the view that your exams were more important than submitting to Oxford’s premier second-rate-college-publication, but hey we’re here now. Better late than never!
Much like the rest of you study bugs, Immy was hard at work with prelims as such this issue has more Rosie-influence, hence the more grunge vibe. There’s almost a need to disclaim that this wasn’t intended to capitalise of ‘brat’ summer although perhaps there may have been some subliminal influence at play... Ms XCX infiltrating the collective consciousness even back in May when we announced the theme...
The title ‘Unfazed’ is intended to capture the chaotic, contradictory delirium of Oxford term time. We wanted to explore the jarring contrast between day and night life in the city, as well as the juxtaposition between the Unis prestige verses sometimes unglamorous student life.We do so hope that you enjoy reading.
Yours faithfully, Rosie and Immy
When it gets dark
Wendy Dang
Some lint has been caught underneath my white collar.
The blind, they can bow before the great green dollar. You gracious and greedy, mouth-breathing cunts suckle like monkeys while mother, she hunts.
Ah!
You're Fleas and Mice!
All that is naughty and nothing that's nice.
Oh and something, something, something, something, something, something about Michelangelo.
And pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of tedium. and-- 'thank you so much sir I'll take my steak medium'.
My father spent his days counting cards, I've spent mine lining up golf balls to shoot out the shard
'Your kingdom is browned by shineless sands'
'Take this badge off me It's out of my h--' 'oh thank you so much sir I'll take it with brown sauce to go'.
Michelangelo would roll if he hadn't decomposed.
Fuck!
Fleas and Mice!
All that is naughty and nothing that's nice.
My father, he spent his days counting cards, I've spent mine shooting golf balls out the shard.
Gracious and greedy, what could that portend?
Groping like eels under the Thames. My collar is white. And so are my friends.
The batsman he bats, the huntsman he hunts. The troubadour plays and the punter he punts. the juggler juggles, the swordsman he swallows. the sufferer jumps and the philistine follows the real man cries in somebody's arms the thief somehow sets off every alarm the cat caller calls, the cat doesn't hear the wolf whistler whistles in somebody's ear the fisherman casts his line in the lake: the heart of a rabbit, the mind of a snake. The recipe calls for one cup of flour, measured in seconds, minutes and hours.
The wheel it turns and never stops turning the teacher is axed, the students keep learning. The world is on fire: I'll turn on the fan it's found in a fountain and sold in a can. the wizard, so kind, with fingers of steel feeds me the fries from my happy meal the reader reads well; the reader reads long the heartbeat it beats to the beat of a song
na Dean Cokeland
ShaUna Dean Cokeland
Shauna Dean
Shauna Dean Cokeland (SDC) is a Maryland folk punk singer who is due at any moment to blow up. She has all the making of a mainstay artist, not only are her lyrics immense but she has a really strong aesthetic identity- a mix of McBling, Scene and Tumblr teen or in her own words ‘trailer park couture’. I first found her music through Instagram reels probably? All I’m certain of is that I heard her song ‘Moving In Place’ and I’ve been a fan ever since. ‘Moving in Place’ has this poetic bittersweet nostalgia that instantly pulled me in, conjuring up the super-8 footage of memory. I find myself sixteen years old, sitting on orange dirt at the edge of a quarry filled with copper-blue water. There’s a fire of scrap wood, I’m drinking cherry aid and vodka from the 4L bottle. The sun sets as I talk to a friend, listening to Plastic Hearts and Pink Moon- this isn’t one day or memory, but a composite of so many multiple summers. It’s not just this relatability that brings me to ‘Moving in Place’ over and over, but also this really heart-breaking self awareness Cokeland brings in her lyrics.
By self-awareness I don’t mean a boring self-deprecation or cynicism, but instead a unique ability to adopt a third person perspective, inhabiting multiple places in times and different perspectives (both of herself and her persona). There’s a contradiction she finds in both femininity and in fame- seeing yourself as an object and still experiencing yourself as subject (‘I know what I'm for and I know what I want’). In her work talks of her rise to stardom as an inevitability that will happen, something that’s already happened , a pipe dream fantasy, and also reflects on the pitfalls of the success she has actually had. It’s so clever and Gen Z, Baudrillard meets Britney- like she knows all the
trappings of fame, sees them as inescapable and loves them for it. As I mention she seems to take a similar approach to her hyper-femininity and relationships to men. Her song ‘Andrew’ is about a young woman being taking advantage of by an older man, who acts as a God constructing her reality (‘You're only a symptom of my mania," you tell me’), but the whole thing is told in a first person mixing present and past tense. In this way her lyricism captures a sense of depersonalisation but with a really sharp satirical edge that allows it to keep from being too somber.
On the 26th of September a remix of her song ‘Last Best Pop Stars’ dropped in collaboration with Penelope Scott. Scott, like Cokeland, got her start on TikTok during the pandemic. In November 2020 her song ‘Rät’ about disillusionment with techno capitalism went fairly viral, but ‘Cigarette Ahegao’ was the first of hers I remember actively seeking out to re-listen to. It’s this fun upbeat techno song about growing up during a mental health epidemic, and feeling helpless to save your friends or yourself- cheery stuff! I feel this pairing makes sense, in that they both found success at the same time talking about loosely similar subject matter, and have quite lo-fi sounds. Their musical styles are not the most obvious combination; Cokeland being known for acoustic guitar songs with simple production and strong country and emo influence, in contrasts to Scott who’s more produced and electronic, albeit still rather crunchy. I suppose while both ‘lo-fi’ Scott seems to be adding filters to a clean mic sound, whereas Cokeland’s early demos as ‘Crystal Organza’ in my estimation were probably just recorded on her phone.
I found the remix growing on me the more I listened to it. The synth instrumentation did work for me as a subversion of the original, and I thought it was interesting to hear Cokeland being pulled towards a different genre, and also being given a more full sound with the addition of multiple instruments rather than just guitar and vocals. There are times where the distorted vocals and fast tempo make the mix pull more hyper pop which is a direction I’d love to see Cokeland dabble in (I feel her persona has some Poppy in it? Maybe that’s a stretch?). As I mentioned before, Cokeland often stacks together different temporalities and perspectives; the remix by changing the tone of the track I think changes which of these readings is most prominent. The original could be read as a ‘beatdown high school kid’s escapist delusion. She ‘feel[s] for’ Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears’ draw to LA (not the first thing that come to mind when I think about sympathising with those poor girlies, the last thing they needed was LA) and claims to ‘make this place jump like a frog on acid’, a notably youthful smilie. The remix’s more produced quality by contrast gives a sense coming from a more mature and developed position suggesting a more honest narration. In this way the remix can be seen as reflecting the stage of early success SDC has now reached, by contrast to how young she was when she first wrote the song. In this way although the lyrics and performance have remained the same, the instrumentation and addition of Scott’s vocals could be seen as an attempt to change our impression of the songs narrator and put greater emphasis the camp-ness of the piece.
Unfazed Tudor pret thoughts...
Black coffee tilted to the side ever so slightly reveals a reflection of my eye peering through the moon-shaped gap between the liquid’s parting lips.
But when I see this glowing crescent and desire the full moon dark coffee spills out; scalding my loins with fortitude. And though at last I can see it all: the bright full moon at the bottom my bone China mug I’m left thirsty and burnt.
Always mourning the taste from before; A glimpse, a half of what I desired. No more.
Anti-Personhood
Sometimes I’m infinite
And I own the world
The spirit of Reckless success
Sometimes the old spectres
Escape the houses walls
And come settle in my Brittle bones
I want an exorcism
On this body we share
But the old priests
Don’t believe me and my fears
What am I?
The husk of inhabitance?
A fracture gateway to An unseen world?
I bleed red but I don’t believe it
There is apparently a soul
But its not something I can touch
Still, my own body
And mind
Deny my fetish for Non-existence (anti-personhood)
I'm sorry, Divine whispers
Press into my brain
Like a tumour.
Faces in trees, Creatures in harsh shadowed corners, Psychedelic projections on the sky, And a coward author
Why deny me?
Why show me these visions, Stir me to feeling
And leave me confused and alone
To claim these realities
As imagination And drive me to the fringe
There's no peace to Be found in a
In a skeleton, in a soul
Only an inheritance of doubt.
Forgive me, forgive me, For challenging you so I cannot know, The scope, the conscious
Forget me, Forgive me, Leave me be, Or annihilate me please.
Non-existence, anti-personhood.
Balliol Blue?
