On January 12th, The Radio Dept. (my favorite band consistently for 12 years) released a song called “Your True Name.” Last year, I changed my name as an act of self-love. As the meme goes: I refuse to believe this is a coincidence.
The spiritual reasons abound for why you’d take a new name, but mostly: something changes.
Name changes are commonplace in a variety of spiritual and cultural traditions. In Kabbalah, practitioners believed if a loved one was terminally ill, changing their name would trick the Angel of Death into passing them by. In this lore, Death is personified as a gullible, fallible being capable of making mistakes. To change your name, then, is to reshape fate.
Back to The Radio Dept. They are from Sweden, enigmatic in a myriad of ways, their furtive persona intensified by dream pop landscapes, phantasmally soulful synth, reverb vocal filters, and Johan Duncanson giving us a queer shoegaze icon we need. When I listen to Clinging to a Scheme, especially, I am back inside the body I’ve often dissociated from throughout my life. Music can heal. I try to explain to people I get drunk off music. “You get drunk and listen to music.” “No, I’m drunk off the music.”
Released prior to a 6 year hiatus, 2010’s Clinging to a Scheme featured crypto-philosophical soundbites from American youth culture, like one from the 1983 film STYLE WARS in their song “Never Follow Suit”:
Every time I get on a train
Almost every day I see my name
I’ll say:
“yeah,” y’know, “I was there, I bombed it”
It’s for me, it’s not for nobody else to see
I don’t care about nobody else seeing it
All these other people who don’t write
They’re excluded
I don’t care about them
The promise of youth unmistakably led Clinging to a Scheme. Fumbling around in your identity. Falling in love; unsure of your place in the world; asserting yourself; walking the rope of socio-political-familial affiliations of obligation or joy; losing friends; moving on; carrying chimeras of experience as the world, in a best case scenario, becomes yours to create.
In “Heaven’s on Fire,” The Radio Dept. installs another soundbite from Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore highlighting the idealism of the young, straining to place feelings of undirected discontentedness into a history, tradition:
People see rock and roll as, as youth culture, and when youth culture becomes monopolized by big business, what are the youth to do? Do you, do you have any idea?
I think we should destroy the bogus capitalist process that is destroying youth culture.
The Radio Dept. seems to be privy to the Nihilist gaze of grunge–after all, they are classified as post-rock. Moore’s quote is a prelude to an exuberant love song; we are left feeling energy that has a lot to offer, a poignant depiction of juvenescence.
Going back further in time to their 2003 album Lesser Matters, lyrics like “now that you’re away I’m jerking off every day to your memory”(“Your Father”) elevate the melancholy of loving someone into a repertoire of pleasurable remnants from wraiths who’ve walked through our lives. The rest of the song details being outed by a severe authority figure, ending a treasured relationship.
The first time I heard a song by The Radio Dept. was in Sofia Coppola’s 2006 Marie Antoinette. Coppola’s choice to include “Keen on Boys,” “Pulling Our Weight,” and “I Don’t Like it Like This” embellished the film with significant enchantment.
An egress from their colloquy on youthful affects in 2010’s Clinging to a Scheme, 2016’s Running Out of Love features commentary on fascism, war, ideology, despair.
In February of 2017 I saw them perform at Union Transfer in Philadelphia. They had just come out with their single “Smrt Fašizmu” (translated: Death to Fascism). My excitement: I’d been listening to this band for 11 years and we’d be under the same laser lights. At one point in 2007 “I Wanted You to Feel the Same” was my featured MySpace song.
Wearing my new The Radio Dept. shirt, which happened to say “Smrt Fašizmu” in 2017 (when the sentiment was palpably echoed everywhere), Martin Larrson, literally the most stoic person in the world, made eye contact with me, looked at my shirt and gave me a nod. Maybe it was because I bought merch, or, maybe it was political.
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I’ve had a handful of friends who have changed their names for gender identity, spiritual, or cultural reasons. Some of my favorite famous artists have changed their names or taken pseudonyms: Amiri Baraka, bell hooks, Winona Ryder, Tennessee Williams, George Sand (a very short list). A name represents a lineage, something you “belong” to. But what if, as I had to consider, I want to belong to myself?
In her recent article, “The Most Important Form of Self-care is Practicing Radical Compassion Towards Yourself,” Fariha Roisin asks important questions about how we move forward in our social moment:
In the past year, “trauma” and “triggering” were words that felt powerful to articulate. But what do you do after you announce such things? How do you move past the bolt of a trigger, from the examination of trauma? It’s so important to say — this hurts me, or this is what happened to me, but how do you heal from such things? Right now, I’m focused on that. I’m focused on how I can sublimate my grief and create a legacy of positivity. I want to be better, for myself, to myself, and begin creating fundamental structural changes that go beyond just survival. Because I’ve already survived, now — I really want to live.
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Since “Your True Name” was just released, my partner and I sat down and transcribed the lyrics. There was resonance.
Any time now they will force the door
Any time now, any time
And they call it delusive
But I always knew your name
They call it abusive
But I always knew your name
It’s hard to face: abusers can often be people we get close to, our intimates, people in our own family. It’s possible to become abusive ourselves if we don’t keep a close check on our behavior. It’s a moving on, deciding not to work against ourselves by only being those memories. They linger.
“Your True Name” is one of the peppiest, upbeat songs in The Radio Dept.’s catalog, which, combined with the lyrics, makes it a dissonant song, taking into account the closeness of the relationships we can have with people who abuse their power.
And they call it elusive
But I always knew your name
And they call you elusive
But I know you’ll never do me no harm
From our families we need care and love. From our intimates we hope and ask for respect. Femmes are inundated with messages of how our bodies are not our own. We never know how these narratives will play out: looking for clues someone might be an abuser, clues we also might deny, not trusting ourselves, affected by the past.
Pass the front line
Way beyond the cold
Biding time now, biding time
As expected, we will reach that shore
Any time now, any time
And they call you delusive
But I always need you near
And they call you abusive
But I always need you near
Even demanding respect is sometimes not enough to protect our bodies. We want to trust.
And they call you abusive
But I know you’ll never do me no harm
This is why the dissonance of the song has intentionality. Memories are fragmented; an attempt to anchor, to figure out who to be now.
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About a year ago I moved from a medium sized metropolitan area to an isolated, rural community for a career opportunity. I found out one of my friends was visiting and enthusiastically suggested we meet up for dinner. Only a few weeks prior, my name change became legally “official” and I had my new driver’s license with me. When we were carded at the bar for a drink I showed it to my friend, and said, “this picture is probably my favorite picture, government issued or not.”
She said, “I like it too. You look happy.”
