Yung Lean & me

a philosophical fanfiction

Would you still read my letters if I got Heal Me Decompose Me tattooed in cursive on my lower back? Or would I be relegated to the status of yet another melodramatic, impulsive sadgirl-type? As a matter of fact, I am more interested in pain-free childbirth than tramp stamps, so it probably won’t ever happen. But I think about it monthly. Jonatan Leandoer has been with me in mysterious ways for over ten years now, almost exclusively through music as I don’t know much about his personal life and am not really looking to. I have enough on my plate with all the mundane data about female artists stored in my brain-computer. But Lean, it seems I have grown quite fond of you though there are no sexual urges or desires, you come to me as a long lost friend whom I once picked apples with in papa’s orchard (x).

So I have, once again, found myself circling back to old Nardwuar interviews, and specifically Yung Lean’s from 2014, in which upon being asked about the lyrics ‘got my b*lls licked by a Zooey Deschanel lookalike c*caine addict’, is tasked with explaining their meaning. He answers enthusiastically.

« I just think Zooey Deschanel is a beautiful woman. Just wanted to give some props to Zooey. Shout out to Zooey! » I know that he was just sixteen at the time and a normal teenage boy but this is just so funny to me. I imagine Zooey stumbling upon the interview or song and being puzzled.

The other night I got a new tattoo and I couldn’t feel anything. This is not meant as a brag, more so as a factual piece of information pertaining to how numb everything has felt for the past two weeks. Is this what maturing feels like? Or do I just have a higher pain tolerance threshold due to excruciating period pain that I’ve gotten used to since I was twelve?

I’m going away from home
Home is where I rest my head

I rest my head here on this tattoo table, as I did on my friends’ shoulders even on happy evenings, as I did on the sofa in the backstage of the club after my shift almost every night that I worked there. I’m not used to a city feeling like home, rather that people, a mindset which - as I’ve grown to find out - has as many drawbacks as it has advantages the minute you have to deal with being away from said people for extended periods of time.

As I am getting this tattoo, every Yung Lean songs that plays through the speakers makes me sob and wish I could crawl into the walls and hide there forever while refusing any silver platter opportunity that comes my way. Alas, although heavily sentimental, I to my core am not fully stupid and thus can still find the strength to fight these urges. So I cry and cry and cry and can only focus on being scared and maybe that is why the tattoo doesn’t feel painful. Bear with me as I revert back to my thirteen year old Tumblrista self - I wear black on the outside, cause black is how I feel on the inside.

And Yung Lean keeps singing like he knows the score of my sorrows. Wooden Girl hits hard and soft. I remember singing it out loud biking home from a night out in the slight warmth of a late summer morning. I remember listening to it on loop alone on a train taking me to Switzerland, thinking I might someday inspire someone to write a song for me with words just as sweet. I remember getting home drunk to the apartment I used to live in with one of my best friends, now emptied of her presence, humming rocking myself to sleep as I nod, guiltily - no, I don’t want to share you with the rest of the world. I want it to be you and me watching TV together every evening forever.

And it feels rather silly to equate my experiences of routine grief to his of a dark descent into drug addiction, because I am sober now, have been for almost two years, and probably - hopefully - will never live through was he has and what prompted him to write all of Stranger. But sometimes the dragon does rest in agony, and sometimes the dragon is a morbidly nostalgic 20-something woman too scared to either take any pills or to go to sleep.

Heavenly Kingdom with a lean girl ; Annabel Lee in a kingdom by the sea - in my heavenly southern kingdom by the sea I was the only girl among a dozen other only girls, crafted from sand and wooden ; we swam together, almost got sunburned in June and caught little colds in September. Dear God when I get to heaven, please let me bring my girls?

I wonder how Yung Lean feels about being Yung Lean. Does he know? He probably does, from a literal decade of people going up to him to tell him he changed their lives, but in spite of it all I doubt it is even possible to fully grasp the extent to which he’s embodied sadness and made it okay for at least two generations of teenagers and young adults. He looks happy now, from the rare pictures we see posted of him. I don’t entertain any kind of parasocial relationship with him, but I remember being shaken and worried after watching his documentary on YouTube, in the wake of Lil Peep’s death, both artists being close to my own age.

A deep, sincere sentiment of camaraderie and piqued interest overcomes me when stumbling on the lyrical work of a musical artist whose native tongue is not English. Obviously in the sense that, Oh we are one and the same, relying on modern English like our ancestors used to on Latin, a universal language bridging the gaps between cultures and allowing us to make friends on the internet and in various capitals, formatting our brains to a global generational pop culture database and even becoming the base to build new idioms from scratch to use daily. Even living in France I swirl in a constant happy stream of interlocked lols, gags, I can’ts, who is this DIVAs and Wait they dont love you like I love yous. Additionally! One of my many struggles as a (song)writer is wanting to use just too many words and getting lost in metaphorical antics. In his writing, more specifically in his earlier work, Lean often raps in an almost made-up kind of broken English, not necessarily grammatically incorrect, but heavily accented and holding unusual imagery.

Greedy pills, hoes on my ball sack / They don’t know how to act
High-tech watch, high-tech locked / Broken Skies, Fantastic Fox

The amount of references to penises and balls in teen Lean’s rhymes is honestly baffling and quite endearing. On Hurt, he whispers the crassest of metaphors, barely making any sense, sprinkling through some very Americanized cultural elements like a gimmick. I’m aware this is how most rappers write, but he does it in such a playful manner, almost as if he was in English class with a poem due and trying to fit as many concepts with limited vocabulary available. I can’t find the original interview, but I think Bladee actually already talked about the idea of feeling more freedom to write in English, his second language, because it felt like more of an instrument than actual words, and melodic experimentations trumped understandable meaning. Honestly, Bladee is also such a spiritual freak I am certain that his lyrics are very clear and meaningfully framed in his mind palace, even if to mere mortals they sometimes sound like a bunch of unrelated words woven together. Not exaggerating in the slightest, I think the pair of them might be some of the greatest songwriters of our generation, two true poets.

Thinking about Sadboys and Drain Gang left me reflective. On top of the lyrical aspect, Yung Lean is weirdly a big part of how I relate to the few male friends in my life, as well as of my own relationship to gender. I’ll explain. Almost all the guys I've ever been friends with are or were at some point, Yung Lean fans. There’s a lot of space for maneuvering here, given that his career spans over more than a decade, so some of them have been listening since 2014, others were more recent recruits. But the common thread here is that I’ve always been able to feed into a conversation with young-ish males by bringing up Lean - a feat not to be taken lightly. Same goes for when an innocent bystander, unknowing of the fact that I only listen to Lana Del Rey and Fiona Apple for most of my waking hours, hands me the aux saying, Hey you’re a DJ pick the music, I think, What could I even play I don’t understand how your mind works and we have nothing in common, before remembering and feverishly pressing play on Red Bottom Sky. Safe at last.

And I’ll say it, listening to Oreomilkshake gives me a rush of gender euphoria. I’d stream the same tracks if I was a man with my same personality traits. Hell, this is exactly the kind of music I’d make as a male musician. Lean’s early aesthetic is a perfectly displayed performance of young masculinity. It sounds like such a caricature that I think everyone knows he was mostly pretending and putting on a bad boy rapper persona and maybe that’s why he gets a free pass and is now loved by queer women. Catch me in a hotel with your mother and her cousin […] Fucking your bitch and pissing on the floor. So anthropologically interesting and honestly hilarious to me. It’s like this flawless nonchalant parody rap, the confident preciseness of his flow making every stupid sentence the catchiest one you’ve ever heard. And I’ll diagnose him from a distance with actually being the least nonchalant guy ever and doing the most to put on a facade. He is a Cancer, after all.

More recent albums Poison Ivy and Starz are particularly striking to me as they are a brilliant representation of how well-rounded Yung Lean is, handling all aspects of his projects as extensions of his artistic vision. The music videos and visuals from those eras are gorgeous. Friday the 13th and Boylife in EU’s video clips have insane set design and costumes, making me wonder if Lean has plans of ever putting together a movie or opera. He showcases the kind of artistry I strive to achieve with my own work. Making beautiful use of budget and ideas creating fantasy worlds that almost don’t fit the somber aesthetic of his lyrics, yet at the same time both visions interact and complete each other perfectly, securing him a spot as an artist with always unexpected creative outputs.

I think Lean and Twigs are a match made in heaven, and Bliss one of both of their loveliest collaborations. Once again, the music video deserves a special mention, romantic and gritty, as heartbreaking as it is hopeful, guided by a more upbeat instrumental than Yung Lean got us used to, foreshadowing future features such as the 360 remix with Charli and Robyn (a misunderstood track! One of my favorites on the Brat remix album!).
We got that mansion, castle. Got that pets, family. Got that drinks, action.
We got that lights, camera, action. It sounds straight off the 2-syllable section of rhymebrain.com. It is perfect. Lights, camera, accíon, I’ll do it on my own. Yung Lean x Lana when?

I’ll end on that note. I plan on making a Yung Lean tribute mix but haven’t gotten around to it yet, as I need more remixes to craft the perfect set, so this is what you’re getting in the meantime. If any of you make music and want to send me reworks of his songs, my mailbox is open.
As fo you, Jonatan, thank you for your service.

P.S. : And if I say my favorite song off Unknown Memory is Ghosttown… then what… Something about his robotic flow, literally struggling to chase after the beat at some points on the track, the distorted vocals giving it an unsettling goth flair… and you know what, I’ll get behind the Travis Scott feature on this one. I’m with Sadboys in Stockholm. Damn, I wish I was too.
STOCKTOWN GHOST TOWN SBE !

This took me so long to write I forgot that I was sad. Phew! Merry Christmas, everybody ❅.⊹₊ ⋆❆‧⋆☃︎