Many girls run away to New York to become DJs, and many of them seem to fall so effortlessly into these splintered pockets and crevices within nightlife that see them, that celebrate them, and make them feel a little less alone in the world. My experience has been unlike that. Working as a DJ in the city these past three years has pushed me further into myself than I have ever been, so deep inside the most tender and pregnable edges of my own design that my only resolve has been to write my way out. This is what's brought me to making music, again, not out of hubris but self-preservation.
"sen•si•tive," by definition, is a quickness in detecting or responding to slight changes, signals, or influences. In many ways, it's the impulse I've lived on by the skin of my teeth, 5 AM night after 5 AM night running ragged from the club kids and the coke fiends and the shadowy men following me home under the M train bridge. My sensitivity has not only protected me but isolated me from all other influences and substances, in that sense, so that I could find the wind in me to write lyrics, to discipline myself in rhythm and learn how to self-produce. My sensitivity is something that, when I started writing about I had longed to suppress; today when I listen to this song I can see its power. I am sensitive, and for good reason.
"I'm a bad bitch but I'm crying again" was a line circling around me as I grappled with my own dread around being perceived. It was gaining access to places like Paul's Casablanca or The Met or The Box only to be met by The Eyes, the same ones that plagued me on the subway or on the internet or in the corner of the bodega off Metropolitan and Lorimer. The Eyes would tell me all the things that people would never say to my face, and I internalized it. And I've turned into something I can say back to them.
These days I do feel like I'm more misunderstood than ever, even more than when I was an angry teenager making songs in my bedroom or a misanthropic houseparty dweller searching for clout in the last days before the pandemic. I feel like the stakes are all gone now. I feel like my brain is rotting on Tik Tok. I feel like Black women are so viscerally hated in a way I could have never fathomed as a child; it scares me but it fuels me. I feel like music might have lost its power to bring us together. I feel like we are fighting to survive in a world that died four years ago. I'm sensitive to it all, yet I am numb to the totality. Feelings are just that.
I'm no longer afraid of not being seen, or celebrated, in any of the ways I used to long for. Perhaps I've run out of feelings. Perhaps in my solitude I've, at last, outrun all the fear.
It's quite a liberating state of being.
"sen•si•tive" is now streaming on all platforms via DEADDHOTTRECORDS.
