Oh Transcendental Youth We're Really In It Now

By Jericho Z

Or as I like to call it, Trans Youth. The album cover is painted mainly in blues: sketchy drawings of demon faces in the night sky, stars, the moon, and people flying toward it all, lifted up on clouds. All of them blue. It’s that kind of album. / I am trans. On occasion, I think of killing myself. I’m used to it. I’ve had the blood on my hands. / Sometimes you do something horrible and drastic, JD says, on an outdoor stage or bar or concert hall. / This is a song about Judas, who did a terrible thing and killed himself and it’s pretty sad so you have to cry for him. / Being trans is a little like being suicidal. But I am not Judas. Being trans is like daydreaming of shoving my girl self off a skyscraper, or more violent ends than that. / Trans Youth is a sad album, because it is about sad people. John Darnielle knew what that meant. He was one, as a child in an abusive home, as a young adult grappling with addiction, lost in himself, and later in life, as a nurse, caring for people afflicted with all kinds of awful, sad things. / Everyone in Trans Youth is alive and alive and alive. Everyone in Trans Youth is struggling with this state of being, but they are alive, at least in the three minutes they exist in song. You see, this is a great victory. / Transcendental means to relate to the mind, to not only escape but to escape to something good. To leave behind your body, its tiredness, your ugly flesh. So much is carried in the body, most of it not good. Physicality means vulnerability means permanence, you drag it forward day by day and it trails behind you picking up dirt and scrapes and things to be sad about. / At the height of my suicidality I have mostly felt tired, felt like there was nothing left, no more space on my body. Like a chewed up popsicle stick. An overplayed song. / Amy, AKA Spent Gladiator 1, is the first song on the album / I like to think I believe in trans joy but instead I mostly end up trans everything else. / The most transgender song in Transcendental Youth is White Cedar, wherein the narrator exudes this immensely collected patience, wise not in the old-professor ancient-grandmother kind of wise but a wise which here I mean clarity, clarity after a breakdown or after emerging from a depressive episode where everything feels like it is choking you and it is loud and all your memories bleed into each other until all of it is a brown muddle and you have just lost a week, a month, half a year of your life but you are still here, for the first time in who knows how long taking a breath and finally feeling the air hit your lungs. And the White Cedar narrator says I’ll be reborn, someday, someday / if I wait long enough and with the faith of someone who has played tug of war with their lifeline held in the hand of God and found that He did not let go, says you can’t tell me what my spirit tells me isn’t true, can you? / Trans Youth is an album about almost slipping away from the world and that is why it is a sad album and Trans Youth is about that not happening, at least not today / I love my friends but am frequently lonely and being trans sometimes feels like being in a very large building where there is no one and just space, and being trans and retreating frequently into my closet is like being in a panopticon prison where the wall facing the outside is glass and I watch the people on the street and wonder when the warden goes to sleep, if the warden goes to sleep at all / I am familiar with the concept of living for other people but very soon I think, it will be just me and the liner notes of Trans Youth say this is an album of people living for themselves not out of any love for themselves because overall they are not always the greatest people sometimes they are Judas Iscariot and sometimes people just find them strange too strange or too sad to bear or hopeless and it is hard to love someone you feel you cannot help, I know, but it doesn’t matter and Amy the first song on the album says just stay alive, whatever you need to do. Just stay alive / If I am reading this to you, if you are reading this, I am still here. / And you see, this is a great victory.