Amanda Fucking Palmer

When I first heard Amanda

I was a mess at just eighteen

And she seemed to have my anthem

For every little thing.

The times I spent as the perfect fit,

The good days and the bad

The madness that’s inside my head

The experiences I’ve had.

Quickly she became a friend

Blasting in the car

Telling me with every line

“It’s ok to go this far.”

Her talent goes beyond her songs

Because she keeps it real

And even when I’d rather not

She always makes me feel.

Because she doesn’t fit the mold,

The standard status quo,

She is often given less respect

Than so-called artists that we know.

But now that people say her name

Her music is forgotten.

They have no idea who the hell she is

Yet they speak like she is rotten.

They call her selfish, cold, and cruel

But they will not read a line

Of the poem she wrote about herself

That caused them all to whine.

If they only knew her like we do,

Those of us she’s saved,

They would have understood right off

And they would have never caved

Under pressure from the media fools

To blame us all for something

Even when our hands are clean

And the proof is next to nothing.

Wake up, goddamn it, look and see!

The art is dying quick!

Now they’re turning you against the good

For songs that make it sick.

Amanda Fucking Palmer is a remedy

For a cultural affliction

Yet you will not listen to her songs

Because you’re scared of this addiction.

She might make you look and see

That Taylor is a joke

And Justin Beiber is worse for kids

Than any line of coke.

Worst of all you might get the urge

To think all by yourself.

To not believe what you are told

By those who have the wealth.

So of course they have attacked her

Without reading all she said.

The public cannot be controlled

Unless the hope is dead.

So you take away good music,

Books of quality,

You crush the women who will survive

Without misogyny.

But here’s a little secret, kids,

You never liked her anyway.

So your opinion will not break her,

AFP is here to stay. 

Usually I don't share poems on this blog because I have a blog for that and this one is not one of my best but it was brought to my attention today by a very good friend and a fellow fan of Amanda Palmer's that a poem she wrote that was terribly misinterpreted by the media has received a great deal of negative attention. So I read the poem and I read the post Amanda had written to explain it afterward, something she usually doesn't do, and she had said in the post containing her explanation that in response to her poem people have been responding with hate poems and that some of them are really good and that was worth the backlash to her, that art was being created in response to her art. That logic is what sets Amanda apart from the talentless brats that currently rule the airwaves here in America, it's what makes people like me fucking love her, and so I wrote a poem of support for her that she will never see. But it doesn't matter. As human beings we have two real modes of operation: creation and destruction. Sure, we can all continue destroying one another over our many many differences the way we have been doing non-stop for over a decade OR we can create something, anything, from the emotions that I think everyone must have in response to the incredibly fucked up state our country is in right in. That is what Amanda was trying to do with the poem that is making her famous for all the wrong reasons. She was actually writing about herself, about the things inside her head. She was not asking for sympathy for the bomber at all. She was creating in the face of destruction. Maybe it was that that really scared the shit out of the folks at Fox News. :)

If you would like to read the poem you can follow this link:

http://amandapalmer.net/blog/20130421/

And if you want to read her explanation behind it, feel free to do so here:

http://amandapalmer.net/blog/20130423/

It is tempting to go into a full blown rant about the way that people allow the media to tell them what to think because they are too lazy to investigate anything on their own. This is something I have been bitching about for quite sometime and this incident is just the latest in a string of similar incidents that prove the honesty in this assessment. But I don't have the heart for that tonight. In the spirit of creating over destroying and because I long for the day when Amanda Palmer is well known for her amazing music instead of this, I want to tell you all a story about this amazingly insane chick who writes the songs that crazy chicks who do not fit the mold that is so prevalent in music can actually relate to....

The Tale of How I Came to Love Amanda Palmer:

I was barely eighteen the first time I heard The Dresden Dolls' self-titled album. At eighteen I had a big fucking chip on my shoulders and I was a much different person than I am today because of it. To put it bluntly, I had fucking issues. I mean, I still have issues but they were more intense. Anyway, it was obvious before the chorus to Good Day had even come up that this two-piece band fronted by a chick named Amanda Palmer was not like the crap that was already starting to take over music. She was different. She was unique. She was completely real and honest. And she was fucking nuts. Just...like...me. It was love at first song. 'Girl Anachronism' was the song I played when the depression and the out of control people in my life threatened to drive me batshit crazy and I needed to laugh about it, 'Missed Me' made me look back at my teenage years and some of the guys I had known with a smirk, 'Perfect Fit' described the way I felt my family saw me at that time, and 'Truce' was the song I listened to on repeat when memories of love I lost pissed me off. I could, in some way, relate to nearly every song on that CD and in the two years or so that followed when I decided to change the way I looked at life, the songs were there for that as well. 

Eventually things changed for me, at first for the better and then for the worst. And when they did I had The Dresden Dolls' CD 'Yes, Virginia' to take with me into the new territory of my life. At twenty, the theme song seemed to be this:

But then the carefree relationship I entered into that year turned dark and ugly later and because of the love I had for a child that wasn't mine, I put up with abuse when I am the sort of woman who, under different circumstances, would have had the bastard thrown in jail and out of my life the first time he put his hands on me. On many occasions when I was up alone at night wondering what the fuck I was going to do about the mess I had found myself in, I would put on my headphones and turn the volume up all the way on this song:

It started out for me as a song of self-loathing. Each word seemed to be forcing me to ask myself what the hell I was doing. But when I decided to walk away from the relationship for good it was also the song that helped me come to that because it made me realize that no matter how much it hurt to think of losing the child I claimed as my own, I was too strong, too smart, to knowingly allow myself to end up a story on the five o'clock news when that child's father finally took my life as he had come close to doing in the past. If I felt weak, like I might change my mind, I would again turn it up as loud as it would go and listen until the moment passed. 

Now I am again in the process of changing, hopefully for the best. I am growing more every day and I am trying harder and harder to be happy. But I will never completely be a happy bubbly person because my chemical imbalance, among other things, prevents it. So imagine the overwhelming thrill I felt when I heard one of Amanda's new songs today and I realized that again her music seems to mimic what I am looking for, what I need. I mean, just listen to this. The music is enough to pump up a corpse and the lyrics feed my twisted side:

Amanda is more than the latest victim of our media's obsession with lies and our society's obsession with believing anything they hear on television. She is truly an artist. From the lyrics she writes to the conceptual videos she comes up with, from her wardrobe to her strange thing with shaving off her eyebrows while never shaving her arm pits and always wearing sleeveless shirts, she is an artist who is real, a woman who is tough, someone who does her own damned thing while everyone around her is a copy of an imitation  That is what she deserves to be known for. It is what she should have been famous for years ago. Maybe now that her name is on everyone's lips her crazy-good new songs will actually make their way to mainstream music. Maybe by this time next year she will finally be bigger than Lady Gaga. If that doesn't happen, though, maybe when the bullshit blows over she will at least be known to more people who will appreciate the truth of who she is and what she does for music, that original sound that belongs only to Amanda Fucking Palmer.