Two Boys From New Orleans Taught Me Something About Darkness

Let me tell you what $uicideboy$ sound like if you've never heard them, and then let me tell you why the description will be inadequate.

They sound like a basement. Like New Orleans humidity and Memphis lo-fi and something recorded at a volume and a speed that suggests nobody involved was entirely certain they'd be alive to hear the playback. They sound like Ruby da Cherry and $crim decided the distance between what they were actually feeling and what music was allowed to say was an unacceptable distance, and closed it, without asking the industry's permission or yours. They sound like dread given a beat. Like grief that refused to be processed into something more palatable before it was allowed out of the room.

They sound, if I'm being precise about it, like honesty at a volume most people have agreed not to use in public.

I have been a fan for years.

I am not going to apologize for that.

Here is what I know about art that comes from the underground, from the places the mainstream has decided are too much, too dark, too raw, too honest about the parts of human experience that polite culture has collectively agreed to manage into something quieter:

It finds the people who needed it.

Not casually. Not as background listening, not as a phase, not as the temporary flirtation with darkness that a certain strain of cultural criticism likes to diagnose in people who listen to difficult music. It finds them the way all genuine art finds its people, at the precise frequency of a specific and unspoken truth, and the finding is, to use the word I keep returning to across everything I write, a recognition.

Oh, you think, the first time something finds you like that.

So it's not just me.

$uicideboy$ are not a horror act, technically. They are not sitting down to write about the uncanny or the abject or the body as a site of contested ownership. They are sitting down, as far as I can tell, to tell the truth about what it feels like to be inside a life that is trying to kill you, from the inside and the outside both, and to tell it with the full, unmanaged volume of people who have decided that the sanitized version is a lie and the lie is more dangerous than the truth.

This is, if you've read anything else on this site, what I believe about horror.

The full, unmanaged volume.

The truth that costs something.

The refusal to file the edges off so it's easier for someone else to hold.

$uicideboy$ don't file edges. They add them.

What their music does, at its best, is what the best dark literature does: it externalizes the internal.

The dread that lives in the base of your skull without a fixed address gets a beat, a flow, a two-minute and forty-second container that holds it in a form you can return to. The grief that has been running on emergency protocols finds a room that was built for it. The part of you that has been performing fine for so long that fine has started to feel like your actual face gets handed something that knows it isn't.

This is the transaction. This is what darkness-as-art offers that the inspirational alternative doesn't. Not a fix. Not a framework. Not the carefully managed acknowledgment that hard things exist, followed immediately by the pivot to resilience and growth and the earned epiphany.

Just: here is the thing. Here it is at full size. Here is someone else who looked at it directly.

There is a comfort in the monster.

You know exactly what it wants.

Ruby and $crim are from New Orleans, which matters because New Orleans is a city with a serious and deeply embedded relationship with death, with the Gothic, with the tradition of making art from the materials of grief and darkness and the knowledge that everything is temporary and the temporary is worth something precisely because it ends. Second line parades and jazz funerals and a geography that sits below sea level and survives anyway, or mostly survives, or survives in the ways that count. The city knows about dread and joy as simultaneous experiences. The city has been making that music for a long time.

$uicideboy$ are in that lineage.

They are also something new inside it, something that belongs to a generation that grew up with the internet and its particular variety of darkness, the connectivity that was supposed to save everyone and the specific, documented way it didn't, the overexposure and the isolation and the cultural acceleration that made everything feel simultaneously too fast and too meaningless.

They made music for that feeling.

The music found the people who had that feeling.

The people were many.

I write horror. I write about the body as a site of violence, about grief that doesn't resolve into wisdom on schedule, about the dread that moves in and redecorates before the threat has even arrived. I write in the lyric essay form and the catalog poem form and the personal essay form about the gap between what the body holds and what the chart records, between what is said and what is meant, between the face we wear and what's behind it.

None of this is easy content. None of it is optimized for the reader who came for confirmation that everything is fine and the world is manageable and the darkness, if it exists, exists at a safe and aesthetic distance.

I am not interested in that reader. With love. But no.

What I am interested in is the reader who is holding something the available vocabulary won't contain. The reader for whom the well-lit version of the story is a lie, or is insufficient, or leaves out the part that is actually true. The reader who picked up a $uicideboy$ track at 2 a.m. on a bad night and felt, for the first time in however long, that the thing they were carrying had been seen.

That reader knows something that the comfortable reader doesn't.

They know that the darkness isn't the problem.

The problem is being alone in it.

"Kill yourself" is not, in $uicideboy$'s hands, what the surface reading suggests.

It is, if you follow the actual body of work, an instruction to kill the performed self. The self that is managing. The self that is filing the edges off and delivering the acceptable version and showing up for the assessment with the right answers. The self that has been wearing its own face wrong, to borrow a phrase, for years.

This is not a clinical reading. It is a literary one. And it is the reading that their audience, the ones who found the music at the frequency of recognition, have consistently offered. The music is about survival by way of radical honesty about what survival costs. About looking at the darkest version of your own interior and saying: yes, this is real, and I am going to say so in public at full volume, and if that makes you uncomfortable the discomfort is information.

The discomfort is information.

I have written this sentence in other essays, in other forms, about other art.

It keeps being true.

Here is what $uicideboy$ and literary horror have in common, the thing that makes both of them find the same people, the thing that makes someone who writes about the taxonomy of silences and the cartography of a nervous system and the language of consent forms also have STOP STARING AT THE SHADOWS in her regular rotation:

They both refuse the comfortable lie.

They both understand that the audience is owed honesty before they are owed comfort. That the real service, the thing that actually helps, is not the management of difficult feelings into acceptable form, but the full, precise, unmanaged rendering of what the difficult feelings actually are.

They both trust the darkness to be survivable.

Not safe. Survivable.

There is a difference and it matters enormously.

I draw inspiration from their music the way I draw inspiration from Shirley Jackson and Carmen Maria Machado and every other artist who decided the truth was more important than the palatability of the truth. Not in the sense of imitation, not in the sense of direct influence on form, but in the sense of permission.

The permission to go to the place where the real thing is.

The permission to not clean it up before you take it out in public.

The permission to trust that the audience who needs it will find it at the right frequency, and that they will feel, when they find it, that particular and irreplaceable thing:

Oh.

So it's not just me.

Art that tells the truth about darkness is not dark art.

It is honest art.

The darkness is just where the honesty lives, because that's where most of us put the things we can't say in the light.

$uicideboy$ go in after it.

So do I.

Different tools. Same address.

The truth.

At full volume.

Unmanaged.

Yours.