the critic has long been buried under years of academia and complicated jargon. she has been positioned as an unattainable, pretentious prick, incapable of creating anything of her own. and that she was. until now, as she has risen from the ashes of whitewashed intellectual boredom. this time she comes with new eyes and a profound insanity. she unearths what has been regurgitated to her— entranced with her own female rage, she can no longer shut the fuck up.
THE RETURN OF THE CRITIC
Kylie
Morrison
i always hate these types of all encompassing questions begging me to summarize my entire being in such limiting words when i do not even know who that being is myself. im saying this not in a dismal internal reflection kind of way, but like a “seriously? when will this surface level prompting end” kind of way. we will always lie on our resumés.
i guess my discomfort with this question is why i am starting this blog. i am a columbia university student, in my third year, with overbearing direction from everyone but myself on what to do with my life. “im a philosophy major… but im pre-law though. don’t worry! haha.” dreadful. the proposition of law school wouldn’t seem so bad if it wasn’t such a necessity— i gotta do it or else everyone in my entire extended and “nuclear” family drowns in a perpetual interstellar-type wave of disappointment and unmet expectations.
so i keep doing internships that pay me no money, and i keep listening to my peers talk about making well over $10,000 in their lucrative fin-tech summer jobs, and i keep running away to escape the dense air of responsibility in new york, and i keep going to class, and i keep reliving my private school trauma, and i keep reminding myself that failing is not an option, and i keep saying “yes” when i really wanna say “NO!”
i have quickly come to realize i have never done something for myself and just myself, other than think and consume copious amounts of media. so much media to the point where i have to apply it to my academic material in order to understand anything in this hellscape of higher education. heavy handedly, i sprinkle pop culture references into my philosophy papers and hope maybe i’ll get an a+ for uniquely connecting dubois and fanon to “eazy” (spoiler alert, i didn’t). but god knows i loved writing it.
you see, i was raised on “vulgarity” and “trash music.” i’ve been going to children’s birthday parties turn bashment since the fabric within my skull could facilitate any coherent patch of memory. and i could never see how that fit into the other aspect of my identity— the part built in a stifled world that rejected any outward show of “agressive” blackness and labelled it as incoherent, ghetto, not the real world, and only a cool thing condemned to 24 hours of digital existence on instagram stories. but i refuse to be ashamed to say hiphop and dancehall mean something to me, something more than the obvious auditory pleasure or performative proof that i’m cool and cultured. they’re lenses through which i see the world. and i have something to say about them! and i’m gonna force you to listen and take it seriously.
that’s who i am.
i am a collection of all the things i’ve watched, heard, and consumed with endless greed. i am not logical. i am proudly vulgar. my being is additive, constantly shaping and reshaping, and happily critiquing all the media that molds my brain like silly putty. and i imagine a day when my words and my thoughts on what brings me joy mean something to someone anywhere.
on repeat this week
top song of the week, updated weekly so you can live in my head like a parasite.
afrohouse heater that has forced me to think in the cold.
“In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.”
— Fanon