This piece was originally published as part of the Indieheads forums’ annual Album of the Year write-up series, where users write about their favorite albums from the year that passed, on December 14, 2019. In this piece, Co-Editor Nat talks about their personal link to local Boston-area musician Ezra Furman‘s thunderous Twelve Nudes and how it resonated with her experience living as a nonbinary transgender person.
Background
To say Ezra Furman’s history is extensive is an understatement. For the sake of brevity, Furman’s career began in 2006 with Ezra Furman and the Harpoons, a four-piece that put out four albums before breaking up in 2011. Ezra, however, hasn’t stopped making music since, putting out five solo albums blending rock, art pop, folk, and punk while living in Boston, and then Oakland, before returning to the Boston area again.
Most relevant to this particular album are what I believe to be a few things. First, the most obvious is… *gestures vaguely at the world around us*. Second was the release of Furman’s seventh album Transangelic Exodus in 2018, which saw the musician take a more conceptual approach than previous albums in response to said… *vague gesturing again*, which spilled over into the album I’ll be talking about in a bit. And third, Furman came out as transgender through Twitter in 2018 (and goes by he/she/him/her pronouns).
Twelve Nudes, Furman’s fifth solo album, came shortly after Transangelic Exodus. Announced with the lead single “Calm Down aka I Should Not Be Alone,” with the singles “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend” (a song of “transgender longing”) and “Evening Prayer aka Justice” following, Twelve Nudes was produced by John Congleton and released by Bella Union on August 30th, 2019. In a press release for the album, Ezra compares the new record with Transangelic Exodus, calling the latter “an angry and fearful and pent-up reaction to events too… But it was a carefully written and recorded version. I knew I wanted I make [Twelve Nudes] quickly and not spend time thinking how to play the songs.”
There’s an innate duality to being a tender-hearted transgender queer in a world where so much is pitted against you: the tenderness and compassion you feel for those central parts of your identity have to get messy, vicious, in order to survive. You have to fight back. You have to scream to drown out the noise of hatred. You have to snarl, show your fangs. You have to fight back. You have to fight back, otherwise you’ll get eradicated in your inaction.
It’s only fitting, then, that in the year where I both embraced my transgender identity more than ever and learned how I’d need to fight for myself even harder than I knew I needed to, I’d connect with the works of Ezra Furman — whose music has embodied the dichotomy between tenderness and righteously redirected anger for eight albums — even more than I had before. It’s also equally fitting, then, that Furman would put out what she calls “her punk album” this year: Twelve Nudes. Twelve Nudes is both a supremely angry album and a supremely vulnerable one in how it shows its anger. Such is the nature of rage: in showing what makes you angry, you’re revealing the deepest parts of your agitations and what vulnerabilities those anxieties are guarding. With several punk songs buffeting more subdued tracks like the doo-wop-inspired “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend” and the pop-rock “In America,” Twelve Nudes relentlessly speaks to Furman’s concerns and preoccupations in even the most livid, feral moments, always transparent about what larger subjects of gender and faith and sexuality provoke such passion. That kind of unshielding ties into the album’s title itself, positioning each of these tracks as a reflective portrait of vulnerability. In Twelve Nudes’ press release, Furman makes mention of how “Anne [Carson] had these visions, or meditations, to deal with the intense pain in her life, which she calls ‘nudes’, and similarly these songs are meditations on pain and recognising what’s there if you go digging around in your anger and fear and anxiety.”
It’s that kind of vulnerability that made talking about this album in a straightforward analytical approach that I’m used to doing so difficult. Each time I would start to write in that mode, it didn’t feel like I was doing the album justice or meeting it on its own terms. Each time I put that degree of distance between myself and the music, my writing came off as clinical and detached in dealing with something so raw and impassioned. I knew something had to change in order to write about Twelve Nudes.
In trying and failing to write about this album in the past several months, I realized that the notes I had written about pertinent songs and lyrics all revolved around three elements, each of which I feel is intrinsic to transness. And to write about Twelve Nudes in such a way, I knew I would have to do some real personal deep digging into how each of these three elements relates to the year I’ve had, and how my experience with each element informed my attachment to the album. To do anything else didn’t seem quite as cogent, and to call my subjective perspective the absolute in transgender experience would frankly be irresponsible. So what follows is my way of confronting all the feelings about what Twelve Nudes means to the year I had living and evolving as a trans person, because more than any album this year, I saw myself in so much of Twelve Nudes.
What follows are what I consider three primary components of my transness, and how I see Twelve Nudes reflected in each:
The Self
I find it can sometimes be difficult to explain to cisgender people what constitutes my Self as a trans person and how that sometimes feels entirely independent of my Body, sometimes even to a point where my Self feels outside the realm of biological possibility. My experience with being transgender is a hyperawareness of every aspect of my Self, my identity, the complex intersection of things that make me who I am. My mental illness and trauma and recent embrace of the Judaism my father was raised by and being outside the binary when it comes to being trans are just as formative and significant to who I am as the fact of me being a different gender than the one I was assigned.
I think I often connect with Ezra Furman’s music more than many other trans musicians because her music reflects a similar cross-section of Selves as goes on within me. The lingering aftereffects of unresolved trauma and the ways we reconfigure what those wounds have done to how we take action serves as the theme of the blown-out pysch-rock of “Trauma.” Judaic forms of prayer and communal responsibility and multifaceted identity recur across Twelve Nudes, in “Evening Prayer” and “Trauma” and the Israel-Palestine-focused “Rated R Crusaders” among others. “Calm Down” depicts the harrowing swirl of anxiety of two people beset by a world aflame, both of them unable to help the other while stricken by their own panic, in a way that feels frighteningly close to my difficulties communicating across shared fraught mental states.
Most often, though, trying to make sense of my Self while transgender and nonbinary often feels like trying to write into a blank space and finding I’ve written nothing in place of the blankness. I have trouble pinning down what, exactly, my ideal transition goals might be, finding they change day to day. I don’t have a single consistently discernible look or attire I stick with, and rarely — if ever — approach anything close to high femme. I truly don’t know if I’ll ever come to a solitary concrete conclusion about what my gender is or how I envision it. It often feels like a precise notion of gender is an elusive mythical creature I’ll be chasing after forever. I often feel like Ezra’s way of describing a gender journey as a “Transition From Nowhere to Nowhere” is what fits me most. My sense of my own gender and the expectations that came with it was such a non-entity before that it felt like I was being pressured and made to be aware of it at all times. But what takes its place is still unknown to me. Maybe it always will be.
Yet, I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel a profound twinge of self-recognition whenever I hear “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend.” Its nakedly stripped-back presentation and purely sentimental nature among the more enraged punk songs on the album are enough to resonate with my saccharine side, but the succinctness with which Furman expresses her titular desire cuts right to my heart. Since coming out as nonbinary, what I’ve had trouble most in reconciling about my Self is identifying as a woman in at least some capacity, constantly feeling like I didn’t feel that about myself enough for it to be true. This year, after fighting back against a series of identity-based panic attacks and dysphoria caused by internalized transphobia any time someone referred to me as “she,” I finally began feeling more in touch with my femininity than ever after starting hormone replacement therapy. I’m starting to come to terms with feeling deeply that I am a woman, in at least some vague sense. That’s why the simplicity in how Furman puts it — “I wanna be your girlfriend” — is so empowering for me. I need to believe it in the simplest way before I can live with it. Furman cooing it over and over in the chorus stays with me, her wants becoming my mantra, what I repeat to myself to see my Self in this way. If I say what I believe about myself enough times, I can will myself into existence, I can will myself into existence, I can will myself into existence. Maybe I can. Maybe I can make my interior perception of my Self into an actual flesh and blood being.
The Body
My experience with being transgender has made me more aware of my body than I imagine most cisgender people ever are. The way people see me, what they perceive my physical attributes to signify and mark, letting their assumptions carry their perception of what they believe I’m like beyond the parts of myself I bare. Being nonbinary only complicates that experience further. I worry more about whether people see me as not fitting into a gender binary, and spent more time than I’d like to admit putting off hormone replacement therapy because I feared it would make me look too feminine to others, not nonbinary enough.
The common narrative surrounding trans people, the one I had always heard growing up, was that they feel that there’s something wrong with their body. I think that might be why I had such a long, hard time coming to terms with my transness and reconciling that with my need to go on hormones. I never felt that my body was out of sync from my perception of my Self. Rather, I always felt society’s perception of my body was what was out of sync with how I saw myself. If anything, changing my body would bring me closer to how I saw myself in that I would willingly be making my body into my own mental image from the blank slate I felt I had previously. An autonomy of physical formation, if you will. My feelings about bodies and their relation to being transgender can best be summed up by Ivan Coyote’s quote about how the myth of “born in the wrong body” is “a handy narrative that puts all of the pressure and responsibility for change onto trans people and off of the rest of society,” saying that the reality is that trans people are rather “trapped in a world that makes very little space for bodies like mine.”
I think of this each time I hear Ezra sing, “Honey, I know I don’t have the body you want in a girlfriend,” thinking about that line’s connotation to societal expectations of normativity when it comes to gendered bodies. Of how, hopefully, the onus won’t be entirely on me to change what I am physically, and that the people I communicate with accommodate me. I think of the visceral sensation of this album, even compared to Furman’s other works, something feeling especially raw and carved from the flesh in these songs, something that makes corporeal the act of revealing oneself, as Furman mentioned in being inspired by Anne Carson. All stabbing guitar chords and punchy song structures puncturing the skin and cutting right to the blood and sinew. Twelve Nudes feels like an album to rattle your bones, to make you feel present in your body, to make you aware of what it is capable of, how it can possible to act on what your Self desires at any time, whether that be for your body’s own sake or to fight back against those who wish harm on the bodies of you and those like you. It’s no surprise, then, that Furman called Twelve Nudes “a ‘body’ more than a ‘mind’ record” in its press release, saying it was made to be “more animal than intellectual” when placed next to Transangelic Exodus.
A body, however, also means that the feeling of physical pain is inevitable. I think I’ve listened to “My Teeth Hurt” hundreds of times since the album’s release, each time drawing something new out of how it depicts the feeling of enervating, overwhelming pain. The kind that’s hidden to any onlookers, rooted deep down somewhere only you can sense, that you push down so frequently to prioritize others’ needs that it becomes your sense of normalcy. Though Furman in her live shows introduced the song by screaming that it was about “PAIN, PHYSICAL PAIN,” there’s a tremendous sense of the emotional duress that accompanies physical agony as well. I’ve done my fair share of swallowing my pain this year to fit the unreasonable demands of others, to the point where I’ve ignored my own chronic pain issues to the point of near-collapse or put off having my own piercing toothaches looked at. I’ve wondered if part of that comes from a lingering lack of self-esteem, of thinking of myself so little that I feel that “pleasure lets [me] down” and I have to “lean into the pain.” Ezra puts up an ardent defense for herself in the face of this physical suffering, yelling, “I refuse to call this living life and I refuse to die,” something that sticks with me whenever I become complacent to my pain. As I let the thundering clatter of the instrumental breakdowns on this song shake my bones — making me so aware of the sensation raging through my body — I wonder if I’ll make amends for myself to do the same, to hold myself to a higher standard, to be a better advocate for myself.
Of course, my experience with being trans means that pain comes another way too: the pain of living in a space with people so vehemently opposed to your own being.
The Rage
I don’t know if I would have ever possessed the fervor I have if the way the world treats trans people wasn’t the way it was. This, to me, has been the toughest thing about being so tender-hearted in my transness, of being kind and generous with others who squander those qualities for their own cruelty, of being open and vulnerable to those who would take advantage of that.
I found a release in Twelve Nudes that I haven’t in anything else this year, or — in fact — few albums other than the most brutally vocal trans hardcore releases to come in the past decade. As I listened to this album over and over after its release, I tried to figure out what made me gravitate toward it in this compulsive way, in a way that not even Transangelic Exodus did. In the process of writing this, I realized it gave a voice to that rage that I’ve learned to tap into this year. It told me that what I felt wasn’t an overreaction, that I wasn’t exaggerating my fears about the world in reaction to my transness. And it told me that it was okay to get mad, get loud, and fight back to those who harm me first.
The one-two punch of “Calm Down” and “Evening Prayer” to kick off the album always start the fires within me as soon as I hit play. It’s “Evening Prayer,” especially, that feels the most vital to the spirit of young, passionate activism and zealous anger, calling out for a “[translation] of love into action” for the fights I believe in. It’s been difficult for me, this year, to feel like I still have enough in me to put up with the sociopolitical fights that have been beating me down in the years since I first realized I was trans. I’ve felt like the people Ezra says are ready to “throw in the towel ‘bout the time that they turn twenty-three” after severe bouts of discouragement and depression. But the strained rallying cry Ezra puts out here, one where her voice sounds dangerously close to giving out completely by the second refrain, invigorates me. It becomes something truly transcendent in its rage, picking out the parts of my Self that are faltering and those that are undying, and screams them into a unified fury. It tells me that the strongest elements of my Rage are those that come from my Self, how the parts of my identity and beliefs that inform me make for the most focused retaliation I can give.
I also truly deeply love Ezra’s press release for “Evening Prayer” for how it puts the act of music itself as a means for stirring up all the frustration and pain into something that can unseat the most scab-like hateful structures:
There’s a need to keep that balance of remaining tender-hearted even when the Rage burns within, too. It often feels as if the feverous energy of anxiety and wrath might boil me down as Ezra sings about on “Thermometer,” driving me for the moment but untenable if unaddressed. It’s for this precise reason that the last stretch of “Calm Down” — where Ezra is yelling out instructions meant to calm someone down at the top of her voice, unable to provide that calming force because of the stresses still pressing on him — resonates. If I don’t take care of myself and have a handle on my own agitations, how can I be fully present when someone else needs me? When the situation calls for tenderness rather than anger? I think about Ezra’s more in-depth explanation about the line about translating love on action on “Evening Prayer” during her live show, where she said that she wanted to empower her listeners “to take that frustration and turn it into pure energy, which you then take out into the world for your own emotion of choice.” Sometimes, that emotion has to be compassion.
Conclusion: “Trans Powa!”
The synthesis of all these parts — The Self, The Body, The Rage — is one that I believe fuels the truest strength and force of will it takes to survive and thrive as a trans person. To hold strong convictions in all three, to me, is to have the tenacity to be ready to fight back against any resistance to your very existence, your being who you are and how it challenges hate and hegemony.
In this way, I see one of the most direct moments on Twelve Nudes as one of the most significant. The album’s shortest track “Blown” starts with a blast of audio fuzz and Ezra’s voice, distorted far more than anywhere else on the record, loudly declaring, “Trans powa!” That this moment comes right after the tenderness of “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend” seems to be no accident, the power Furman mentions coming from the boldness of that song’s honest vulnerability. That Furman doesn’t name what kind of power it is — of self, of body, of rage — also feels intentional. By calling it a power of generality, it could be any one of these elements, whichever the listener might need to feel empowered by in the moment. Or it could be the synthesis of all three, in that unique way only trans people see the intersection of The Self, The Body, and The Rage. The way trans people hold a power no one else does. The way trans people themselves are a power.
View the original post on Indieheads, with discussion from Nat and other commenters, here.
Ezra Furman’s Twelve Nudes is out now on Bella Union. Stream it below.
Odd Blue Fruit 