Sound Words: Sky Ferreira's Sweet Soft Kiss Off
“Eyes, stuck in perma-popped-bubblegum marvel”
I have a slight problem with sugar.
Which is to say I love sugar.
I love sugar in ways bizarre and unhealthy. In ways that manifest in holes in my teeth, and hunger and longing in my eyes. In ways that find me wandering into candy stores, lotion shops, soda fountains, dizzy late night streets! wondering why they aren't more magnificent!?
Maybe it's just me, but I can't help but feel like Sky Ferreira has this same problem.
The album Night Time, My Time is a delirious confection of dream-swirled devotional hymns to the church of sugar!
The ultimate mecca temple of delight. Life lurches around hyped up and near-vomit induction as the blood rush pulses double time through your veins. Eyes, stuck in perma-popped-bubblegum marvel, explode in a dazzle attack of burst pixie sticks.
The practiced reverence that is only understood in the sort of sweet and winsome cloying worship of youth. Love, boys, time, your stupid confusing fucking heart--are all finite. But reflected in the poured syrup of stained glass all of your own foibles seem forgivable. Seem immortal. Seem blessed under a larger scheme that you have no power to command.
The faith of sugar twists you up in its dreamsicle nightmare, flipping from fun dip to acid tongue stain that no amount of make-out session will wash off. Not the horror burn of seeing your life surround you strewn in torn candy wrappers. Losing sleep to grenadine. Losing days to chocolate bars. A thousand different shades of soda bottles pitch-shifting in the wind of pure sugar snow.
And yet we addicts still willingly shove fistfuls of money into the collection plate and take our reward in sparkling moments of firsts: that first air snapping pop-rock on the roof of your mouth, that first burst of fruit juice ooze against your tongue, that first kiss, every first kiss. Is sugar
too dangerous? Bodies fading as they leave the temple lost and shuttering in the oncoming coma swell . . . perhaps it is why these holy places don't exist in real life. Why all these shops that tantalize the eyes, all the sounds drizzling across the ears, stop before they reach the heart. The attack would be too sweet. We would be powerless to stop it.
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