“Can we keep each other company?”
2015 has witnessed (or misidentified or overlooked or perpetrated, as some publications and police have) more violent deaths of transgender women (overwhelmingly, of color) than any other recorded year. Coming shortly after the Transgender Day of Remembrance, Elysia Crampton slows and repurposes Justin Bieber’s “Company” into a radical elegy for those victims. As on TMT favorite American Drift, Crampton’s work here is a decolonizing edit of contemporary US soundscapes, colliding huancayo folk and gunfire drums and Bieber’s blanket voice. Through Elysia’s transevangelista re-vision, Justin’s empty request becomes a rallying call to care for each other, admit bodily precarity, respect the planetary entanglement of marginalized subjectivities. “Can we keep each other company?” The prayerful universality of the pop star’s plea is given meaning where there was nothing before, his airy sighs taking on actual ghastly emotion within her implosive and drifting dirge (an ugly blend of outrage, exhaustion, lament). In its titling, “tie_me_justin_edit” suggests a transience, an incompleteness that at once undoes dominant fixations with fixity and sadly foils the finality of death. The witching hour release is memorial, social work, and disidentificatory resistance.
“tie_me_justin_edit” ends with mournful synth strings and the names of victims of anti-transgender violence in 2015, as sampled from the trained dis/com/passionate voices of news broadcasts: “Tamara Dominguez. Mya Hall. Keisha Jenkins. Elisha Walker. London Kiki Chanel. Amber Monroe. Kandis Capri. Ty Underwood. Ashton O’Hara. India Clarke. Shade Schuler.”
“Can we keep each other company?”
Can I live?
More about: Elysia Crampton
