Natsuko's Commentary on "Murder the Echeveria":
I just get a little frustrated sometimes, because every time I write lyrics in Amis or include some kind of easily identifiable indigenous element in my songs, 70-80% of responses mention dancing and celebrating, contentment with life, laughing away one’s troubles, and so on, even if the lyrics are dark and serious. It’s to the point where even if I’m candidly describing the pain of loss and grief, I’ll still get cheerful responses. I carry the skeletons of my people through my work and watch the audience consume their cries like a black hole, swallowing up all traces of sound. Like viewers in front of a blockbuster exploitation film, or a movie with a charming white male savior, or a popcorn flick about defying authority, emotions are stirred while people are in their seats, and once they leave the theater, their hearts can be at ease. Issues of gender, race, ethnicity, class, etc. all resolve themselves neatly. Everyone forgives, everyone departs. Everyone returns to their daily lives. But the real world is no less free of suffering, suffering which has seen no end, no resolution, no compensation, no atonement. Suffering that has yet to be directly faced, or even acknowledged. I continue to live in an endlessly broadcasting horror movie. I am blamed by outsiders for not performing enough, or performing too much, and I blame myself even more. The weed that looks like a flower lived well in its natural state. Only once forced to submit to the will of ruling powers and economic circumstance, once “she” has been pulled up by the roots and replanted in a plastic flower pot, does she attempt to fit this new appearance. But her captors just hold the pot in their hands and degrade her without end, because, after all, a weed cannot become a flower.
At the start of the film Nope, the flying, man-eating monster that is Hollywood and mainstream society throws down a nickel from the sky, killing the figure of the Black cowboy erased from Western film history. What do you want from me? What else will it take to satisfy you?
