White Offerings

Last night, a clip of Jade appeared, filmed so tenderly I was surprised we were allowed to see it. It was just… really loving camera work. (And the song clip! GUYS! I am so excited about the SOUND!) It has been a long time since we have seen Jade depicted through a lens of kindness—of anything but scorn and indifference at best and murder at worst. The Anointed video was astonishing for the same reason: it showed us a Jade who didn’t die, wasn’t substituted by a Murder Girl, a Jade who ended up on the same side of the narrative as Davey at the end, when they enter the Queer Matrix and presumably live happily ever after, with heteronormative expectations exorcised.

What I want to talk about today is white. By my count, Davey references the color white on six notable occasions (Girl’s Not Grey, The Great Disappointment, On A Friday, Fade to White, Down Here, and The Face Beneath the Waves). Some of these references pack more metaphoric punch than others; he also frequently references paleness, light, fading, and clean/dirty parallels that certainly intersect with his usage of white. I’m going to frame my exploration around the song Fade to White, which is one of the more impactful instances, for all that the word doesn’t appear in the lyrics themselves.

(Here’s the song clip released last night that I’ll be referencing.)

Heart Stops

I don’t even know how many times I listened to this song before I heard it. You know the line I mean. I was driving to work, listening to AFI, same as every other morning—and it just hit my ears in a different way than ever before. This a good 6 months after Burials came out. I nearly ran my car off the road. I rewound to listen again and again and again, making sure that Davey had said exactly what I thought he said. Then I pulled over and googled it.

Then I called Shan, foaming at the mouth, hyperventilating, etc. This smacks of comedic exaggeration but, actual reality, I was literally breathing so hard I was difficult to understand. After eleven years of devoutly shipping Javey—a ship that I believed had sunk back in 2006 when the first Decemberunderground promo pics appeared online—this was my moment of vindication. This was my “UFOs are real” moment. This was proof.

A lifetime of gay conspiracy theories yielded to gay conspiracy facts with the line “oh my pretty precious stone”.

Greater Than 84

The first time I listened to this song with my serial-killer-collage-level-crazy ears on, I became obsessed with finding out what significant event had happened in Davey’s life in 1985. So I began digging through Mendocino County news, and greater California news, and generally poured my finely honed research skills into finding out what might have impacted Davey when he was 10 years old.

Yes. I did this. With the crazed fangirl devotion I thought I outgrew a decade ago. It wasn’t until weeks (and a theory about Davey’s fascination with CA wildfires and people who set them–which kind of bears out under his fixation on arson in Pop Kids) later that I realized it was a reference to Orwell’s 1984: the future’s here, it’s 1985. Davey’s way of saying that he’s writing about his own dystopian future; that the worst he could imagine and the worst he could have feared is here, and he’s worried now that it’s immutable, that this is how it will be forever.