heartbroke audio: Emily from LA, by James Subudhi

16Jun09

Got this audio in the mail the other day. Nothing by way of link or artist info, but it’s a fine piece.

I had a federal work-study job in college, one of three jobs that year. In the afternoons I was an administrative assistant. I navigated students through the culture of the administration.

This girl walks into the office one afternoon. She’s wearing her amber hair loosely in a bun, a spaghetti strap white linen dress flowing flawlessly with at her knees, flapping sandals, and thick, large black sunglasses, the type girls wear hide their ugliness behind them. She looks like a honeybee.

Her name is Emily. She’s from L.A. She’s new to the city. She slowly lifts her sunglasses up, resting them on top of her hair. She’s gorgeous, a crush against my will. She’s completely lost. Doesn’t know how or where to register for classes.

It was a beautiful day and she was a beautiful girl, so I tell her and her sister (I am guessing she was around as chaperon), I’ll walk them to the building where Emily can register.

We talk. Her father is an investment banker. He has put her up with an apartment in midtown with her chaperon. She’s here to go to school part-time. Why? Her mother has just had cosmetic surgery. She wants to understand the biology of beauty. That’s as far as we get.

A few years later, I wrote Emily from L.A., sitting on the steps of my trailer watching the sheep.  With what I knew I imagined that her family life was decadent, gaudy, and fake on the outside, ugly, depressing, and real on the inside.

I wrote Emily from L.A. to smear the makeup capitalism wears. I wrote it to mock the process of accumulating wealth. I wrote to disempower the rich by using their language against them. I wrote it to show the audience that rich folks are just as unpatriotic as everyone else. I wrote it to pock wholes in the American Dream so that listeners can hear the depression, disappointment, suffering, and exploitation echo inside of it. Ask Cornelius Vanderbilt. She and her family were rich bystanders in the drive by imagination of lower class boy who’d watched his family suffer under the oppression of racism and classism.

You say “well the emperor has been naked for a while.” Of course I know making fun of the rich is nothin’ new. So it goes. What’s might be coincidentally fresh about this song is that it is apt for these economic times. I wrote the song for you to listen to not consume.
As you listen, you might think I am jealous of her wealth. Part of me probably is…education don’t get you outa debt but does she know why her mom had cosmetic surgery?

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