PATRIARCHY ‘The Unself’
There's banging on the wall. Or maybe it's just my beating heart. Or a church tower clock alarming about the midnight. Soon I hear a voice on the other side of the line. It sounds familiar yet I've never seen her in flesh. I imagine her lazily lying on a couch in her living room, pale-scattered hair falling in gracious curls on her breasts that are poorly cled under a white crop-top. She might be watching those trashy American TV-ads, the style that she embraced for "Patriarchy's BOTTOM OF THE POPS" to celebrate the release of the remix album Reverse Circumcision a year ago.
We talk about patriarchy as well as how she manages to torture and own this word by calling her project Patriarchy. We talk for an hour and I wish it never ends, but while Actually is about to continue with her day, I am about to crash. "There's a new album on the way. It's called The Unself," I hear her voice already somewhere far as I try to follow it with my eyes wide shut.
Patriarchy’s Asking For It (2019)
Actually Huizenga - a never-aging vampire from LA with an admirable proficiency in music and cinema - has been around the Internet since 2006. However, her first assault on the word patriarchy appeared only in 2018 with the music video for "Sweet Piece of Meat" from the debut album Asking For It. While the name implies a hackneyed reasoning for sexual assault, Huizenga shapeshifts from a witch to a vampire to the one owning the phallus if that is what makes one in power. At times it sounds spooky like Type O Negative's gothic metal about Little Miss Scare-All, at other times it chills to the bone as Huizenga's cry "F___CK" in "Grind Your Bones" shifts from passion to pain.
Three years after the release of Asking For It, Patriarchy's sophomore piece The Unself touches upon the "issues of projected love and dangerous fantasies" that every single mortal hides from self and the public eye. Escorted by her two right hands - The Drummer and The Guitarist - Huizenga invites to experience The Unself in an undisturbed order and setting while indulging in carnal pleasures either with self, another human being, or Huizenga's "shadow self". She is about "to show you how pleasurable the acceptance of human pain really can be *everywhere*". In other words, The Unself negates the idealized concept of love is not that different from suffering.
It's an upside down world where a good boy helps you out of your clothes just to get into your closet. It's about the man for you because that's what he claims is best for you. It's about loving someone to the point where your jaw gets locked and you start choking on your words as they thrust harder to take more. You are left breathless and unsure and that's when you are given control until you (never) learn that you are controlled. It's about the unself, crossing the line between the being and the thing. Plaything, fun thing, sex doll, mannequin.
It slaps hard - harder than any man ever could. Nine Inch Nails or Depeche Mode - ambiance of both that seeps through the body-breaking rhythms and metal-cold drum-machine heartbeats - have always spoken to me from the patriarchal stance putting me in the submissive position. Patriarchy in Huizenga's hands grants me a possibility to have it both ways - me and you, top and bottom, dominant and submissive, powerful and powerless. Clenching my jaws I release the pain thrice - for Patriarchy, The Guitarist, and The Drummer I shouldn't fuck.
It might have been a dream, but The Unself is real.
