Moth meet flame | The joke is on me | Murkage | The Door
By Hannah Golightly
The joke is on me. The universe has gone wild at heart. I just got sent an unsolicited track to review by some group called Murkage that I’ve never heard of. OK, I’m game, I’ll give it a play, I thought. The optimistic part of me told me to prepare to listen to something amazing (good to know that the jaded part garnered from years surrounded by seven nights a week of crappy bands in Liverpool is losing it’s grip)… what I wasn’t prepared for was to be completely offended.
First of all, I have to wonder who the hell thought to send me this tune called ‘The Door’? I don’t know anyone called Coralie. I’d remember if I did because it’s such a pretty name… so the mystery continues. It surely couldn’t have come from anyone I know because they’d be a fool to hand the likes of this music into my feminist hands for reviewing. Maybe the joke is on them.
At first, I liked the video, all dark and intriguing. At first, I liked the crisp cold minimalist modern production… the promise of danger, the way it plays it cool, knowing you’re gonna follow to find out where this song goes and all the swagger of that. Pulsing bassy beats linger in the air while crisp snare drums snipe right through them, puncturing them before they have time to drop. Menace. Sex. Then the whole thing starts to look and sound like some wet dream nightmare and I feel like I’m being let in on someone’s sexual fantasy-land and it sure as hell ain’t mine. Shall I blame Odd Future? Or is this thing bigger than that? Is this what happens when porn goes mainstream? It winds up in your music collection. All fishnets a-writhing to the sounds of words intoning a menu of soulless nameless sexual acts with a stranger in stark unsexy detail? Lyrics such as “pussy on tap” make me wonder what life is like inside the mind of a 16-year-old boy. Only, the rapper is much older than that (chronologically at least). The psychology of it all is curious to me. So is the psychology involved in sending a woman a song that attempts to impress its audience with how much pussy on tap the rapper can supposedly get. It then goes on to say something about how he’s “gonna smash that cunt…” I can’t claim to have fully understood what this song is about and I’m pretty sure there was some mention of the Futsie index in there somewhere… but clearly my mind is closed to any important political messages they may have tried to communicate, having been offended by the misogyny of this piece of work. Yeah… I think Murkage’s Futsie reference was some ‘clever’ pun related to meat markets so, I’ll stick with my original take on this filth.
The thing that offends me the most about this song and Murkage in general is that it sounds fucking awesome. It’s hard not to be taken in by its sonic charms in spite of its grotesque lyrical and visual content, especially as a mid-90s Prodigy fan who likes a bit of Odd Future’s production style now and again. Maybe it’s the bad boy problem that all women face at one time or another… it’s bad for you, you know it, but you’re seduced by it anyway. The feminist in me wants to go to one of Murkage’s gigs, listen to them play, then blag my way backstage under false pretences of potential blowjobs and then go and punch these fuckers in the face. Just like lyrics like theirs do women when we listen.
Moth meet flame. The joke is on me.
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