The video for “Lazy Girl” (directed by Josef Kraska) opens with Macy Rodman’s name shaking with cartoonish anxiety, a pop star’s brand selling its product. At first glance, the track might sound as if it’s a Saturday Night Live sketch, but as time goes by the surmised “joke” is never really revealed. Macy Rodman’s delivery of her anthem celebrating & fetishizing laziness is accompanied by Rodman’s & JX Cannon’s “ugly” production, a 2000’s pop tribute but for a world animated like Rocco’s Modern Life. Like every 2000’s pop diva, Rodman now has a song to her name complaining about a problem tormenting her, but to a “fun” beat, but the problem isn’t a boy (“Stuck On You” by Stacie Orrico comes to mind) or celebrity status (“Lucky” by Britney). The problem isn’t even necessarily named in the song, only the reactions and the anxieties, which at first let themselves be read as ‘white girl millenial problems’, but the specificity of the lyrics to a trans experience undercut this. They celebrate hidden aspects of transfemininity: necessary agoraphobia (as a way to combat harassment), rest as self care mistaken as slobbery, dissection by others. And isn’t 2015, the year where offending and getting offended became an art form, the perfect year to present obsessive tendencies as fashion accessories? The negativity is presented like a Facebook page: self-celebratory, wacky, suicidal at times, with-holding of information, and thus “Lazy Girl” functions as whatever you need it to be as a listener: a club track, a deeply personal poem, an app running in the background of your phone that sends you notifications every so often. The real irony is that Rodman, Cannon, & Kraska are anything but lazy.
• Macy Rodman: https://soundcloud.com/macyrodman
• JX Cannon: https://soundcloud.com/jxcannon
More about: Macy Rodman
