On the Meaning of Success and Its Unlikeliness (in the BiTCU)

*wheels out large old projector, it hums to life as power courses through it*

*in a faux German accent not dissimilar to Dr. Greta Pinder-Schloss in The Addams Family (1991)*

As a follow up to the novel and almost subversive “delusional positivity anthem” for self-love that was Some Character Development, the final entry into the Success Is Unlikely era—Heard It In A Dream—covers more prototypical subject matter for a boyband: the end of a romantic* relationship and his corresponding heartache. Yet this does not prevent it from being any less impactful or emotionally significant.

Observe:

I heard a song last night and it reminded me of you But I heard it in a dream, so I had to write it The sun breaks, poems fade Too distracted by the ways in which you wouldn't like it

Here we see a preoccupation over the relationship and its ending, as manifested by the fact it is being dreamed about. This could bring to mind notions of Freudian dream analysis, but of course, Freud was largely full of shite. Nevertheless, as a cognitive process, dreams are a way for the brain to process information and thus we can see a purpose of wish-fulfillment. Part of this wish fulfillment, as we see at the start of the song, is concerned with the maintenance of a relationship that Is no longer active. Indeed, there is an effort to bridge the world of the dream to reality with the act of writing the song down upon waking up.

Yet even as the fantasy is premised on the continued existence of the relationship, it is nevertheless fundamentally compromised. It is not only a compromised because of the fact the fantasy exist separate from reality //The sun breaks, poems fade.//, but also fails within itself.

Even the fantasy itself cannot help but contain the fissures and disunity in the relationship, from the dance floor to the fact that the song heard in the dream that reminded the dreamer of the romantic* other, is a song they would not actually like. Thus we have a dialectic where the relationship is now defined and constituted by its negation. The relationship has not in fact ended via the absence of presence, but has instead been redefined through the presence of absence, creating the conditions for the dream(ing) to begin with.

💔

Being part of the Success Is Unlikely era, Heard It In A Dream is about success, but also about failure. There is failure in the fact the relationship ended, but there is also success in moving on from a relationship that has run its course. There is also potential success in the failure to move on before sufficiently processing the resulting emotions, no matter how long it may take. (Heard It In A Dream provides an interesting contrast to Left Right Good Night in the sense the relationship in LRGN was more outright abusive/toxic, whereas Heard It In A Dream has relationship that just didn't seem to work out. The contrasts!!) Thus we have yet another dialectic: failure is success, success is failure. This is something that queer theory has articulated by saying there is success in failing to live up to heteronormative, amatonormative, cisnormative (neuronormativity, chrononormativity [time, life course, age, development], etc.) standards of living. Success is a fluid concept and can change at any given moment; it isn't just one thing. Success being unlikely, or just outright failure, isn't itself a totally negative thing, but can be equally positive, creative, and generative.

This is where, despite the fact heartbreak is far from an unusual topic for a boyband to sing about, the dirtbag enters the scene: This is an embodiment of grit, perseverance, of getting up when you fall down that isn't along the lines of the hustle and grind, of productivity; the kind that doesn't try to push through burnout or exhaustion by conquering or subduing it, but by letting it in, tender yet hesitant. It accepts the vulnerability of life instead of constantly guarding against it. It is based on weary mindfulness rather than paranoid vigilance. How unlikely can success really be if you aren't trying to ceaselessly calculate it; if the parameters of success are always shifting and reshaping? And who's to say success is truly unlikely if success can arrive in places that appear to be full of failure?