I've always liked Juliana Hatfield (seriously)...and now I know why... Check out some excerpts from
Juliana's blog explaining some of the songs on her new album entitled "
How to Walk Away" which is due out June 10th on her own
Ye Old Records. This is some pretty deep shit served up right here...Top 40 SUCKS.
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"You Are The Camera" was my attempt to explore the vanity, artifice, shallowness, meanness/selfishness/coldness/heartlessness/dis-honesty of the entertainment business and to admit my own guilt, shame, and embarrassment at being part of this system that exploits women/people and their art.
To let one’s music be sold involves some necessary amount of fakery, illusion, and collusion in the sales/marketing/whoring process, even if it’s just the makeup on your face..."
"...The fact that I still want and need and court an audience — to be appreciated and acknowledged by total strangers — seems, to me, a failing, a weakness, a character flaw. I consider the fact that I submit myself and my work over and over again to the judgment of random people — when I have such a low opinion of humanity (myself included) in general — to be seriously twisted. It doesn’t make any sense. Why do I care what any of you thinks? Why does anyone care what I think? A woman my age should be comfortable enough in her skin — mature enough, sensible enough — to eschew the random and sometimes uninformed and unintelligent opinions of those whom she doesn’t know well, and care about, and trust.
But so many of us need to be mirrored in others. We need to be reflected back at ourselves to feel we have any idea of who the hell we are."
(In explaining the song..."I look right you and see myself")"Some of us are filmed by the television cameras and the magazine photographers and the rest of us watch the tv and look at the magazines and it numbs us, in a pleasant way, like an anti-anxiety pill.
I believe that television — and cable tv in particular (and now the internet, and all the other technologies which weren’t such a presence when I wrote the song) — is ruining our country. Ruining us. Some people actually think that what is on tv is real. It’s wired into their brains. With so many reality shows, they get the "reality" on these shows mixed up with real reality, and it leads to identity confusion. And dimwittedness. And conformity. And greed (people want what they see on tv). And it moves to the streets, the malls, schools, to the culture, as a uniformity of experience, language, dress, style, thought, desire...
...Almost every kind of rebellion — tattoos, drugs and drug abuse, porn/sex — has been commodified and nullified by overexposure to the world by cameras.
You know what would be radical? Subversive? Brave? If LC went a whole day and night of her life without makeup.
Judging by what I see all over the place — countrywide — young women seem to want to look like Heidi Montag. (By the way, I hate the fact that I know Heidi Montag’s name; that I know who she is; that she takes up any space at all in my consciousness. And the fact that I actually enjoy watching The Hills proves that television — and cable tv in particular — has ruined my brain. And I don’t even have cable in my home but, still, the damage gets/got done — see how dangerous and insidious it is? I’ve watched The Hills when I could’ve been reading a book or painting a painting or trying to find a cure for cancer.)..."
(Here it comes...do I hear the fat lady singing?)
..."I used to want to try to "be myself" in photos, with no special trickery or heavy makeup or flattering lighting or smiles, but now I can see that trying to present myself as "myself" is futile and pointless, because there is no "self" that the camera can capture. It’s what’s inside that makes us who we are."
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