Pop music is road music. Insane fucker speed demon music. It should make your body feel like it’s being ripped apart in all directions while you grit your teeth and widen your eyes to pop out of your skull while your muscles tense into a glowing, vibrating mass that gets pulverized by a motorcycle that can’t be stopped. It should make you feel like the cover of Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell”—a mythic rider, back arched in half, bulging out his skin, glowing with intensity, hitting the highway “like a battering ram / on a silver black phantom bike”, as Meat Loaf sang through tears of raging love. All 43 million people who purchased this record saw on the cover a blood-red sky and a desperate body at its breaking point—carried by a machine more powerful than the human form—and reached for music that could take them to that feeling.
***
Everyone I talk to says they’re tired all the time. I’m absolutely exhausted. “Running on fumes” is a common turn of phrase. The corner store has two new fridges full of energy drinks I’ve never seen before, with labels that either look like industrial gas canisters or psychedelic nightmares. At the points when I feel busiest and most consumed by the pace of life, I slip into periods of extreme executive dysfunction, sitting catatonic on my bed or floor in the worst posture imaginable, playing the algorithmic slot machine for hours to find something on YouTube or Instagram that will placate my restless mind and deliver it just enough dopamine to move on to the next image, but not enough to break my gaze and return to my own body. I joke that I smoke so much weed to carry me through time, and I consider what I use my life as a vessel for. I wonder what vehicle carries the vessel.
"I feel my best when I ride my bike like a maniac, blasting music out of my backpack speakers, carrying a million bags on my handlebars on my way to work or gigs."
I feel my best when I ride my bike like a maniac, blasting music out of my backpack speakers, carrying a million bags on my handlebars on my way to work or gigs. I routinely ride with no hands while on my phone, switching between songs like “Ride Till I Die” by Inepsy or “Crash” by Charli XCX—anything heavy and loud and thrilling that will keep me awake and take the BPM of my heart to superhuman levels—pop in its purest form. I joke that this is how I’m going to die, which is usually received with nervous laughter or no comment. I have an overwhelming fear of an accident that might lead to concussion, because I can’t bear the thought of needing to rest my brain. I can’t imagine moving into the future with anything less than peak performance.
At the peak of summer, I bike across town after a work party where we watch The Triplets of Belleville. At each subsequent party in a night blurring into a weekend blurring into a year, I find myself haunted by the physicality of the characters. All of the bodies are rendered in grotesque caricature verging on body horror, with brittle limbs pushing past thin skin as they struggle not to collapse under top-heavy torsos. Nothing is in proportion, and almost every character looks like they are in physical pain from just existing.
"Nothing is in proportion, and almost every character looks like they are in physical pain from just existing."
***
The Triplets of Belleville is about a cyclist. In an early sequence we see him trudging up an impossibly steep cobblestone hill in the rain, with each turn of the bike’s crank coming down at a pained pace from his bulging calves like heavy wet sand. He is kept in metronomic time by his loving grandmother—the model of superhuman performance—pushing a tricycle up the same hill on legs that look like mismatched toothpicks, stoic as she puffs on a musical whistle that forms the soundtrack for her grandson’s practice. They get home and his teetering frame looks like it’s about to collapse and explode. The grandmother, focused and serene, sucks his muscles with a vacuum, cracks his back with a lawnmower, and uses a tuning fork to repair the rickety spokes of his wheel. She places him on a stationary bike and puts on cheerful accordion music to set him off, like he’s pulling energy for his pursuit from the sound of the record, carrying him through time.
The cyclist is abruptly kidnapped and carried overseas by nameless henchmen, forced to compete in a death race for the amusement of cash-wielding betting businessmen. The cyclists are placed on a platform fashioned with stationary bikes in front on a projector screen. Staring at videos of an endless road, each of their faces hangs slack-jawed in terror and exhaustion, living corpses fighting for each breath. When one falls off his bike, twitching on the floor, a henchman puts him out of his misery on full display. The others continue, looking forward at the screen that keeps them focused, alive another breath as long as they keep their wheels in motion. They are saved by the grandmother and the titular triplets, a gang of sisters and pop singers from another time, who now look worn to the bone and create music wherever they go. They release the platform from the stage with crowbars, turn it into a vehicle powered by the bikes, and escape out of the city onto an open road with no particular direction. One of the singers hops on the vacant bike, helping to turn the crank alongside the haggard cyclists. They ride, slowly, but not painfully, like bats out of hell together.
***
Towards the end of the year I start to feel present in my body for the first time in a while. I take a dance class and the instructor leads the warmup with a reminder that you shouldn’t try to conserve old energy when you’re tired; it has to be released to make room for the energy coming in, which you can generate from the sources around you. That same week, I crash my bike careening around a corner to music that makes me want to move faster, each turn of the crank a thrilling beat in my skull.
Pop music is road music. Insane fucker speed demon music. It should make your body feel like it’s being ripped apart in all directions while you grit your teeth and widen your eyes to pop out of your skull while your muscles tense into a glowing, vibrating mass that gets pulverized by a motorcycle that can’t be stopped. It should make you feel like the cover of Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell”—a mythic rider, back arched in half, bulging out his skin, glowing with intensity, hitting the highway “like a battering ram / on a silver black phantom bike”, as Meat Loaf sang through tears of raging love. All 43 million people who purchased this record saw on the cover a blood-red sky and a desperate body at its breaking point—carried by a machine more powerful than the human form—and reached for music that could take them to that feeling.
***
Everyone I talk to says they’re tired all the time. I’m absolutely exhausted. “Running on fumes” is a common turn of phrase. The corner store has two new fridges full of energy drinks I’ve never seen before, with labels that either look like industrial gas canisters or psychedelic nightmares. At the points when I feel busiest and most consumed by the pace of life, I slip into periods of extreme executive dysfunction, sitting catatonic on my bed or floor in the worst posture imaginable, playing the algorithmic slot machine for hours to find something on YouTube or Instagram that will placate my restless mind and deliver it just enough dopamine to move on to the next image, but not enough to break my gaze and return to my own body. I joke that I smoke so much weed to carry me through time, and I consider what I use my life as a vessel for. I wonder what vehicle carries the vessel.
"I feel my best when I ride my bike like a maniac, blasting music out of my backpack speakers, carrying a million bags on my handlebars on my way to work or gigs."
I feel my best when I ride my bike like a maniac, blasting music out of my backpack speakers, carrying a million bags on my handlebars on my way to work or gigs. I routinely ride with no hands while on my phone, switching between songs like “Ride Till I Die” by Inepsy or “Crash” by Charli XCX—anything heavy and loud and thrilling that will keep me awake and take the BPM of my heart to superhuman levels—pop in its purest form. I joke that this is how I’m going to die, which is usually received with nervous laughter or no comment. I have an overwhelming fear of an accident that might lead to concussion, because I can’t bear the thought of needing to rest my brain. I can’t imagine moving into the future with anything less than peak performance.
At the peak of summer, I bike across town after a work party where we watch The Triplets of Belleville. At each subsequent party in a night blurring into a weekend blurring into a year, I find myself haunted by the physicality of the characters. All of the bodies are rendered in grotesque caricature verging on body horror, with brittle limbs pushing past thin skin as they struggle not to collapse under top-heavy torsos. Nothing is in proportion, and almost every character looks like they are in physical pain from just existing.
"Nothing is in proportion, and almost every character looks like they are in physical pain from just existing."
***
The Triplets of Belleville is about a cyclist. In an early sequence we see him trudging up an impossibly steep cobblestone hill in the rain, with each turn of the bike’s crank coming down at a pained pace from his bulging calves like heavy wet sand. He is kept in metronomic time by his loving grandmother—the model of superhuman performance—pushing a tricycle up the same hill on legs that look like mismatched toothpicks, stoic as she puffs on a musical whistle that forms the soundtrack for her grandson’s practice. They get home and his teetering frame looks like it’s about to collapse and explode. The grandmother, focused and serene, sucks his muscles with a vacuum, cracks his back with a lawnmower, and uses a tuning fork to repair the rickety spokes of his wheel. She places him on a stationary bike and puts on cheerful accordion music to set him off, like he’s pulling energy for his pursuit from the sound of the record, carrying him through time.
The cyclist is abruptly kidnapped and carried overseas by nameless henchmen, forced to compete in a death race for the amusement of cash-wielding betting businessmen. The cyclists are placed on a platform fashioned with stationary bikes in front on a projector screen. Staring at videos of an endless road, each of their faces hangs slack-jawed in terror and exhaustion, living corpses fighting for each breath. When one falls off his bike, twitching on the floor, a henchman puts him out of his misery on full display. The others continue, looking forward at the screen that keeps them focused, alive another breath as long as they keep their wheels in motion. They are saved by the grandmother and the titular triplets, a gang of sisters and pop singers from another time, who now look worn to the bone and create music wherever they go. They release the platform from the stage with crowbars, turn it into a vehicle powered by the bikes, and escape out of the city onto an open road with no particular direction. One of the singers hops on the vacant bike, helping to turn the crank alongside the haggard cyclists. They ride, slowly, but not painfully, like bats out of hell together.
***
Towards the end of the year I start to feel present in my body for the first time in a while. I take a dance class and the instructor leads the warmup with a reminder that you shouldn’t try to conserve old energy when you’re tired; it has to be released to make room for the energy coming in, which you can generate from the sources around you. That same week, I crash my bike careening around a corner to music that makes me want to move faster, each turn of the crank a thrilling beat in my skull.