Just A Biographical Essay Where I Talk About How Weird I Am

This is an essay that I wrote for a college application. Note to college admissions people: If you somehow get here by googling the essay from my application, please do not get the idea that I am plagiarizing from my own blog.

Looking back at this essay, this is actually so bad, haha. I can see why so many colleges rejected me. 
Also, I just realized that this is the first post on here where I talk about my own music. I totally forgot to post about that on here at all since I started making it. Here's my page: https://soundcloud.com/lylajeanx

I prefer things that are unconventional, experimental, or surreal across different styles of art - visual, storywriting, playwriting, poetry, and music - to catch my interest and inspire my own art. I appreciate works that defy my expectations about what art is supposed to be, and this is reflected in my personality. People see a 4’11 Asian girl who looks about 4 years younger than she really is, and while we’re taught not to judge, I have sadly experienced being misunderstood. People reveal, through their reactions, that they had preconceived ideas about my personality. I have been seen as too quiet, shy, unskilled, or having shallow tastes. However, I have a willingness to surprise people with my interests and what I am capable of creating.

My height has caused me physical and social disadvantages since I was a child and I feel that is where the judgment comes from. People don’t realize that shorter people need more space. When tall people stand in front of me, it’s not only unfair to me because it blocks my sight, but it is indicative of how some people just really don’t care, and fail to even notice that I’m there. When I reveal that I go to a top high school, or that I’m a senior, the consistent shock on people’s faces gets tiresome. But I want to continue to defy those stereotypes of what a person who has those characteristics is supposed to look like, particularly in my art and schoolwork.
An example of how I’ve tried is that I’ve recently been writing songs with personal lyrics, recording them with simple guitar, and sending them to friends. I wrote a little song called “Smart” that was inspired by when people were surprised at my true characteristics. One of the lyrics is “Wow, look at this girl, she does things not for her. Sure, I love to be praised. Not in this silly way.”

One experience in particular inspired those lyrics. Imagine going to church and seeing a 12 year old girl sitting in the tech booth at a Mac computer, controlling the sermon’s audio/visual aspects. That was me when I started volunteering at my church. It was easy for me, but few others knew the technology. In my early days, I remember someone walking past the booth and looking at me with a shocked, smiling face. I didn’t realize she reacted that way because she didn’t expect someone like me to know how to work a computer that well.

Writing music is strange because of my tastes. When I started discovering music at age 12, I refused to listen to anything that was popular or conventional. I wanted to find something unexpected, or shed light on lesser known artistry. Much later, I finally decided to learn guitar and write my own songs. But I was more interested in creating something experimental. Despite my still-developing skills, I wrote and recorded a rough demo “concept album” of songs from my dreams. My music almost sounds like “outsider music” akin to famous outsider artists Jandek or The Shaggs. I have always focused on experimental music, so I don’t know how to make something that’s normal. Since I have no formal musical training and barebones guitar chord vocabulary, people are surprised that I am not writing simpler songs.
This bias towards the experimental has translated to my interest in visual art and all other mediums. There is a way to be avant-garde in each form, and I am always pursuing it.

It has helped me become a better critic and analyst, too. I enjoy discussing and interpreting others’ art and giving thoughtful feedback. My experience doing policy debate, knowing to avoid ad hominem arguments, and giving useful feedback to lower-level debaters has helped. This in turn has been useful for school, because for art class I had to analyse the formal and conceptual elements of art, and in English class I have discussed the deeper meaning behind diction, rhetoric, or plot events. On the flipside, I analyze avant-garde art simply for enjoyment, in a similar manner, because it’s impossible to take something so provocative just at face value, or we lose the intended experience and leave without gaining anything.

But in the same manner, we cannot take a person at face value. We’ve all heard it - don’t judge a book by its cover - but many others and I still experience people’s subtle reveals of what they expected us to be, and it can be painful. People see my height and immediately form an opinion before I can express my individuality. The world may never change, but that’s what makes me want to change. I’m going to continue to defy expectations.

Joni, Kate, and Bjork

This is an essay that I wrote for a college application. I kinda wrote this in one night and didn't edit it so it's not really that good. Note to college admissions people: If you somehow get here by googling the essay from my application, please do not get the idea that I am plagiarizing from my own blog.

“Little pigs, French hens, a family of bears. Blind mice, musketeers, the Fates. Parts of an atom, laws of thought, a guideline for composition. Omne trium perfectum? Create your own group of threes, and describe why and how they fit together.
—Inspired by Zilin Cui, Class of 2018”

My group of threes is some of the most influential and interesting singer-songwriters of our time: Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, and Bjork. They have similarities in their talents and classic boundary-breaking albums, but also in how they are disregarded by popular culture despite deserving so much more recognition.

Joni Mitchell is a Canadian singer-songwriter who started out as a painter, but started releasing folk music in the 1960s inspired by her tragic early life. Mitchell’s music is always deeply confessional, and the songs paint a very detailed and specific picture with their lyrics. Her 1971 album Blue was monumental because of its stark confessional lyrics and multi-octave vocals. Lesser-known is Mitchell’s experimental period, starting in 1975, when she began to include many different styles in her folk-based music. Her early folk songs have become hits and covered many times, but her more innovative eras are very often forgotten.

Kate Bush is an English singer-songwriter who debuted with the unexpected hit single “Wuthering Heights”, inspired by the book of the same name, at the very young age of 18 in 1978. Her music is always extremely literate and theatrical, and gradually got more experimental over time; the most extreme example being 1982’s The Dreaming, which is my favorite album. Bush writes about controversial, uncommon, or intense subjects in her music such as war, homosexuality, death, and birth. Her music is celebrated by millions across the world, but is vastly underrated; Bush has never won any Grammy awards, and is an unrecognizable name to most people.

Bjork is an Icelandic singer-songwriter who joined the music business at age 11, but it wasn’t until she released Debut in 1993 that she became very culturally significant. The title was ironic, but perhaps it meant a reinvention of herself, as the music was like nothing she’d done before; for the album, and all her subsequent records, she focused on electronics and dance music and avoided using any guitar, which was something almost unheard of for pop artists at the time. She gradually got more experimental with each successive album. Her groundbreaking 90s albums helped to bring electronic and experimental music into the mainstream culture. The albums that came after that were built on huge concepts such as 2003’s Medulla which is almost entirely a capella. However, like Kate Bush, Bjork has yet to win any Grammy awards. Bjork is close to being the artist with the most Grammy nominations without a single win.

All 3 women are extremely influential on other artists, especially those who are female or experimental. Their innovations paved the way for many more famous artists to come. However, none of them have become household names; ask any American teenager about any of the 3 artists, and it’s unlikely that they’ve heard of them, and practically impossible that they would be able to name a song or album.

Also, all 3 artists have experimental eras that casual fans tend to overlook, which is disappointing because it’s their best work. The Hissing of Summer Lawns is easily Joni’s best because of its extremely intelligent and political song subjects and jazz-inflected instrumentation that was ahead of its time, i.e. including “world” music and synthesizers in pop music before it was popular. Yet, most fans see the album as “too difficult to get into”, or ignore it completely in favor of her accessible folk albums. The Dreaming is arguably Kate’s best album, because of its incredible uniqueness, even to this day, and its abundant variety and depth in songwriting. However, many, especially critics, dismiss it as a “she’s gone mad” album and instead just a chaotic “warm-up” for the more popular Hounds of Love that would follow 3 years later. Bjork has been increasingly experimental with every album since Vespertine, but most casual fans will dismiss anything past that as too weird or niche, which is a shame, because I believe Medulla and Vulnicura are her most innovative, conceptually complex, and emotionally convicting works.

Sadly, it is likely that misogyny plays a role in society and critics’ failures to recognize these talented women’s art and where the true gems are. Each of them gets dismissed for some petty reason: Joni is too folksy, too cutesy, or too feminine. Kate’s voice is too high and annoying. Bjork “sings like a dead animal” because of her accent that she can’t help. But I bet if it was a man that had those same qualities, and released the same songs, they would be the most famous artists of all time, and every song, no matter how seemingly experimental/hard-to-approach, would be a classic.

Nick Drake's Sincerity

This is an essay that I wrote (and reused) for a few college applications. There was a word limit, so the wording is a bit awkward in a lot of this, hehe. Note to college admissions people: If you somehow get here by googling the essay from my application, please do not get the idea that I am plagiarizing from my own blog.

"Using a favorite quotation from an essay or book you have read in the last three years as a starting point, tell us about an event or experience that helped you define one of your values or changed how you approach the world. Please write the quotation, title and author at the beginning of your essay."

“Actually in the down periods you might not write the songs, but you write them about being down. Pink Moon is about emerging out of the depression and looking back down into the abyss.” - Paul Wheeler, about Nick Drake, from Remembered For A While

I read a biography on singer-songwriter Nick Drake with 2 others. Both were songwriters, and inspired me to write songs and seriously consider being a musician. We would interpret Nick’s lyrics; how he wrote about human subjects using nature metaphors, and conveyed emotion despite cryptic language, inspired my lyrics. For example, for songs like “Come Into The Garden”, the meaning is not quite clear and you have to match every line to an interpretation; I think the song is about suicide. Nick committed suicide two years after his last album.

The book analyzed Drake’s songwriting technique, and how he used simplicity to build songs around single concepts, which intrigued me. I don’t write songs that are straightforwardly understandable. I pick stories or emotions from my past or present, and think of the ways I want to express it. It’s almost like writing an essay; I make sure to cover every facet of my emotions. But I make my lyrics cryptic and vague in a profound way, so people can find their own meaning in it instead of being forced.

As Nick’s friend Paul Wheeler said, Pink Moon is about emerging out of depression and looking back. To me, it’s a perfect album because it’s not overly depressing. People describe it as depressing, but that’s not right. Some parts are joyful in a laidback, sentimental way. “From The Morning” is about taking beautiful things from the morning and placing them in the night. The album is about looking at past failures and losses of love, and seeing them with new maturity and acceptance of personal darkness. “From The Morning” is such a forward-facing song, even in its melody, and is a perfect closer. An entirely depressing and broken album would not be as influential or artful.

Nick recorded the songs for the unfinished album that would have come after Pink Moon while he was in a dark period, right before he died. You can hear the brokenness and deterioration in his voice. As he sings “I’m growing old and I wanna go home” on “Black Eyed Dog”, he does sound older far beyond his years. The songs don’t have the same effect as Pink Moon because he struggled to be coherent; “Rider On The Wheel”, for example, is bittersweet and devoid of meaning. But these songs are interesting in a completely different way. When you’re in the middle of a dark period, there’s a sincerity that you can’t recapture.

This idea that some emotional moments can’t be recaptured goes for all my art, even my drawings. I have some old art that should be technically worse because I’m always improving; but sometimes they have haunting qualities, due to what I was feeling at that moment, that I can’t recapture. I see this pattern of early art having an untouchableness in a lot of artists. It interests me that they may think their old art is bad because they’re not in that emotional state anymore, but it’s actually just amazing in a different way.

But like Nick, sometimes I write songs about past situations instead of what I’m feeling at the moment. Sometimes, the song can even come out more emotionally convicting when I’m looking at the situation through a new lens. Writing about my past mistakes makes me enlightened because I realize how I’ve changed and how everything shifted for the better. It even tells me that in the future, things might not be so bad, because I can look at the past and see how the now is easier.

The Way My Favorite Ambient/Electronica Albums Make Me Feel (warning: kinda edgy and pretentious)

I guess my music discovery story is a bit backwards because when I started looking for my own music to listen to (instead of only listening to the radio or something, like I did before), which happened in the later half of 2014, I was first interested in the most obscure and experimental stuff I could find - rather than starting with more popular and accessible stuff. And funnily enough, in the following years, I gradually got into more accessible and popular bands. But back to my fascination with experimental music, ambient music was the first genre I really explored. It amazed me that this was a new genre that I'd never heard of before, and that the sounds could be so varied. It could either be something grand you can get lost in, or something subtle that leaves you thinking about its meaning.

Here is a list of my favorite instrumental albums that are genres related to ambient (electronica, noise, some even jazz, etc.), and scenarios I thought of that go with the feel of the music, to exercise my creative writing skills a bit too. I realize that some of these descriptions have turned out a little disturbing, extremely specific, and/or just weird, but I think it's just my nature to do that. (I realized recently that I have a hard time coming up with any story ideas that are not weird or disturbing.) I also realized that I listen to a lot more ambient music than I thought I did, so it turned out really long.

Some of these are more famous but most of them are my obscure favorites, so the other purpose of this post is to shed light on some fantastic records that have sadly gotten very little recognition - so please check out any of these that sound interesting! Most of these are on Spotify so look for them there if you have it, but I've also included relevant links on other websites.

And here's my ambient music playlist if you're interested: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0JbhILQAPDATcUrYQUiop6?si=j8ynGuz4StmTpjlo3MITTA 

Honorable mention: Alog - Unemployed: It doesn't have an overall theme or mood, at least not one that I can put into words, because everything here is so different. Every song is its own painting. It defies genre. It's not quite electronic, but not quite organic. They've invented their own instruments and recorded and mixed things in such extremely unconventional ways that you have no clue how this music was made, which is rare in our day and age when you'd think that all music-making methods have been exhausted. But everything still fits together. It's definitely at least one of my top 20 albums ever, and favorite by Alog (who definitely deserve more fans for how original and crazy they are).

Now for the actual list:

• Phonophani - Genetic Engineering: You're in an old abandoned GMO lab and you're reliving the tragedy of what happened there. Sometimes you don't know what is real or what is virtual.
• Brian Eno - Ambient 4 / On Land: You're lost in a dark forest and surrounded by strange, disturbing, unidentifiable creatures. Their unique sounds make you feel sad and lonely.
• Biosphere - Substrata: You're alone in the arctic sea but there is a ghost of a man saying incomprehensible things to you, and he does not respond to anything you do.
• Phonophani - Animal Imagination: You're being abducted by aliens.
• Biosphere - Autour de la Lune: You're completely isolated in a ship in the middle of space but there are remnants of the people that used to be with you.
• Brian Eno - Ambient 1 / Music For Airports: You are in an airport. Just kidding. You are stuck inside a primitive old Windows computer but there is something strangely comforting and nostalgic about it.
• Svarte Greiner - Knive: It's the middle of the night and you're stuck in your isolated cabin in the middle of the woods trying to fall asleep, but you find yourself walking around instead. Eventually, you fall asleep on a pile of leaves. 
• Jherek Bischoff - Cistern: You're inside a giant empty tank for hours, and you start hearing music in the complete silence, and having hallucinations about various natural landscapes and characters.
• Sonic Youth / Jim O'Rourke - Invito Al Cielo (Syr 3): All you can hear from your house is construction noises, which you feel like you should be annoyed by, but you become enveloped and start hearing melodies in them. 
• Deathprod - Imaginary Songs From Tristan da Cunha: You're visiting the most isolated island in the entire world, and the natives will not talk to you. The sky is very dark and cloudy and it seems it will never let up. They start playing their extremely strange music that is unlike anything else you have heard before, and you're not sure how it makes you feel, but you record it on your vintage tape recorder, picking up other random sounds in the process. You fall asleep for the first time on the island, and have the most vivid and disturbing dream of your entire life. In the dream, demons and bats are flying all around your head, moving inside you, and constantly shrieking and screaming, and rumbling and vibrating when they are not. You wake up from the dream and see that you are actually performing on stage at a late night show in a theater, with bright spotlights in your face that obscure the faces of the audience members. The audience applauds and gives you a standing ovation.
• Osamu Sato - Objectless: You're working your job in a factory for hours upon end and the monotony is driving you insane. Sometimes you envision the happier times in your life and hear subtle pleasant music in the background. But you keep coming back to the monotony, and you have a headache that throbs and pulses like a beat and makes it hard to hear anything or anyone else. 
• Phonophani - Phonophani: You haven't left the house for months, and haven't talked to anyone the whole time. You've started to realize that your hearing has improved greatly after living in silence for a long time. There is no sound small enough for you to not hear. 
• Sonic Youth / Tim Barnes - Koncertas Stan Brakhage Prisiminimui (Syr 6): You're trapped in a dark facility full of horrifying mutated monsters... but sometimes something is oddly thrilling and pleasurable about it.
• Kim Hiorthøy - Hei: It's the time of your childhood again, when things were all fun and simple. 
• Phonophani - Kreken: You're exploring an ancient empty building that you've never been in before, with broken windows that let sunlight pour in everywhere. But everything feels wrong; things are upside-down, it's hard to walk, gravity has almost shifted somehow while you are there. It might be haunted. 
• Alog - Red Shift Swing: You're traveling with a time machine and every time you land in a new era you don't know what's going on. Sometimes there are people, sometimes they play music, sometimes you are alone and it is silent. 
• Alog - Miniatures: Your time machine broke and you don't know what year it is but you're stuck there, and it's rather loud and crowded there. But despite all the noise and disturbances, you're still determined to make music out of something, anything. 
• Alog - Amateur: It's a rainy day and you're bored at your house and you try to make music by scraping random stuff or throwing things at the wall or setting stuff on fire. It sounds good to you but you know everyone else would find it weird. 
• Lee Ranaldo - Ambient Loop For Vancouver: You're at a rest stop in the middle of the American country while on a long road trip. Wind chimes, breeze, and the rustling of the trees. You feel déjà vu every time you come to another rest stop. 
• Body/Head - The Switch: What being scared and cold in a pitch-black room feels like.
• Yellow Swans - Going Places: It is the last thing you hear before you ascend into the afterlife.
• Kim Myhr - All Your Limbs Singing: You're alone in the middle of nowhere in the desert but it's actually quite peaceful.
• Visible Cloaks - Reassemblage: Exploring various natural sceneries in virtual reality. They don't look quite real.
• Kim Myhr - You | Me: You're going out for a run near the lake in a downtown area, early enough in the morning that almost no one is there. There's something beautiful yet disturbing about being isolated in a place where you should not be. 
• Kikiyama - Yume Nikki Soundtrack: It sounds like how the game looks, but in a real dream that you're having instead of a pixelated image on your screen.
• Probably my favorite game ever, with a very unique and atmospheric soundtrack too. I could write for so long about how this game is amazing, but I think that's for its own post. The video I linked to has pictures for each track that show how the songs connect so well with the aesthetic of the game, if you don't want to play the whole thing (but you should). I also recommend the soundtrack of the 3D sequel (but not the game itself, I don't know if it's really worth your money - I paid for it twice to get it on two platforms - one of them didn't even work - and I have deep regrets...) Many Yume Nikki fangames have phenomenal soundtracks as well such as Yume 2kki.
• Facade Soundtrack: You are being held hostage. 
• This game is universally regarded as terrible and ugly but all joking aside, it has an unexpectedly high-quality avant-garde, minimalist, and atmospheric soundtrack that I legitimately recommend. Now why in the world does a game that takes place in an apartment, about a couple trying to fix their broken marriage, have such a creepy soundtrack? It's a hard question to answer, but if it says anything, I think it's that the game developers weren't just fooling around.
• Biosphere / Deathprod - Nordheim Transformed: You're having a dream about something that could never plausibly happen in real life, but it still feels incredibly real.
• Oval - Systemisch: Your parents put in their favorite CD that you've heard so many times already, and you're skeptical that it's going to work at all anymore because they don't bother making sure the CD doesn't get scratched - they just throw it around random places in the car and it got quite ruined over time. But when it starts playing, the songs have been so warped from their original form with the scratches on the CD that it's a completely new creation.
• Sondre Lerche / Kato Adland - The Sleepwalker Soundtrack: The power has been out in your house for days. You hate living in the darkness for so long with your family who hate talking to you, and circling around the same areas of the hallways, the garage, and the nearby lake, but you don't have the motivation to drive somewhere else. You keep having nightmares. You start to think you're being haunted.
• Side note: I watched the actual movie. It was bad.
• Sonic Youth - Silver Sessions For Jason Knuth: You're surrounded by loud machines. Airplanes. TVs that only pick up noise. Air conditioners. Giant fans. Washing machines. 
• Arve Henriksen - Chiaroscuro: Waking up early in the morning in the rainforest.
• Josh - Fear of People: For months, you isolate yourself in your house and close all the blinds, and only go outside at night to drive around aimlessly, sit in the grass and look at the stars, or walk through a graveyard. The TV and random old recordings you have of your friends are all that you've been listening to - not even music - and they have the ability to transport you to another time and place. Sometimes the feelings get so intense that you forget what music and melody sounds like, but sometimes there is a glimpse of hope, and you get a tune stuck in your head.

Women in Music Word Vomit

So I had an assignment for school to pick two topics and just do a "word vomit" about them by writing as much as I possibly can about it (as preparation for an essay), and one of my topics was women in music since I have a LOT to say about that. And after I wrote this, I thought "Hey, I could put this on my inactive music blog that no one reads!"

Unfortunately, I ended up writing about my other topic for my actual essay, which is "How Much I Hate The Bachelor".

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Music is pretty much the main thing I think about these days. I spend all my free time listening to music (which is a big reason why I never really get into TV shows and movies, because I’m using up all my time for music). So bonding with people over music is really important and exciting for me. However, I almost always feel like I have to “promote” the genius of female singers to my friends. I know a few people who only listen to one, two, or zero female artists. (I know this one funny meme reaction picture I saw that could apply to this that’s just an interviewer guy going up to people on the street saying “For one dollar, name a woman” - I saw it on a reply of one post of a person naming all the best actors but they were inexplicably all male.) When I tell them that my music taste these days is mostly women (I actually used this website made by Spotify that tells you the gender of artists you listen to, and it said I listen to 91% women, while most other people commenting on the website said they had 99% men or something like that), they usually respond saying that they’re not sure why they don’t listen to a lot of women.

I think this might have to do with how they’re disparaged by the industry and always get the short end of the stick. Their art is not taken as seriously and their innovations are thought of as immature, but when men do similar things and stretch boundaries, they get praised for it. One comparison I’ve seen someone make is Kate Bush and David Bowie. Both were extremely innovative in the new things that they did with their music. But while David Bowie is a worldwide famous icon, Kate Bush is not much more than a “cult artist”, meaning very few are familiar with her work (especially beyond her hit songs), especially outside of her home of the UK. And it probably has to do with how Kate Bush is a woman and how her high-pitched voice (in earlier recordings) and dramatic vocal experimentation (in later recordings) is not taken seriously at all. I guess Bjork, another one of my favorites, is also included here. She is one of the most innovative and experimental singers to ever make it big, but people (especially Americans) only seem to know her for her “infamous” swan dress, which is not even the wackiest thing she has worn and was not even that bad! I think her refusal to make the kind of music that people expect women to make, and the femininity of her fashion are two big reasons why she mostly gets disregarded these days.

At my school we have a club called “The F Word” where we talk about feminism. I suggested we talk about women in the music industry so that ended up being the topic for one of our meetings. As a very vocal fan of women musicians, I was really excited about this meeting. We pointed out that most female representation on the top pop music charts were by the same few artists such as Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Rihanna, while men got represented by a big variety of names. I also played a game with my friend where we put our music libraries on shuffle, and 5 out of 10 songs that played from my phone were by women, to which my friend responded, “How equal”. At that meeting, I also jokingly said that all music made by men was boring, which almost everyone disagreed with me on. But for real, I do not understand how some music that boils down to “Mediocre white guys with guitars who can’t sing” gets so popular. That is another thing, too, how women are held to a much higher standard than men for vocal abilities. I can’t name a single popular woman in music who had rather limited vocal abilities except for maybe Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, but even she’s not that popular. But on the male side of things, you have lots of mediocre singers like Billy Corgan and Bob Dylan who just get a pass on vocals because the songwriting is good.