Julia Fox - "Down The Drain" (Nadine's Version)

Listen Here.

From the mouth of The Mother-In-Chef:

Contrary to what you might have been led to believe by alleged experts, who claim to understand women’s voices while never having bled a woman’s blood, "Down the Drain" does not at all mimic the aggressive full-body phenomenon of a Charli XCX track, or even what we have come to know as “hyperpop.” It's not even that much of a rager or a raver, and there’s not a lot of pastiche to write home about, which is the secret to its oddly ethereal magic: the first sound we hear is Julia's gasp: coming up for air, or bringing life into this world, or climaxing, or maybe all three.

 

Julia Fox is Witch House meets Lilith Fair, or Eartheater's cover of Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch”. I think her and Sematary would really fuck with each other's energy: American Desolation could be the name of an art exhibit of paintings Julia scrawled with her own blood, and maybe a little of yours too. Haunted Mound is the place she used to hang out with Jack, once upon a time in a Midwest that doesn't actually exist. She is the burning McDonald's in the parking lot at the end of the world. She is the titular witch, and her home is parked right alongside the edge of town, next to where the darkness used to live. Julia is neither riot nor girl, but a pure fucking fire and brimstone sermon of a woman.

Hold up, let a bitch chop & screw this shit real quick. I need to hear that ethereal voice slowed down so I can really simmer in it: that's what I'm realizing I love about hearing women's voices in slowed down and not at all slopped up, because men's already sound all warped and twisted in reality. When I screw a woman's voice, it's not about the pitch-shift or the timbre, it's about the change in temporality, which allows me to soak in the layered textures of female sonic reality, when men so often demand I fast-forward through such a profoundly visceral lived experience that can only be felt to be believed. 

The difference between Julia and many of her cultural classmates is that she has given birth fairly recently, which is some shit I ironically feel as a trans woman even more deeply than cis women might. Because I was never granted the gift of a uterus, so I made a fucking womb of my own, even while God and the world alike denied me one: it is these very words I am writing to you now, in addition to my whole fucking life. Maybe I will take that power and harness it into remaking the entire art world, much like Julia Fox made every grubby man her bitch, just like she makes every lane she steps into her fully her own, because visionary women have the power to actually reveal the true face of our current reality, while still seeing realities that have yet to come to pass.

She’s served as the dutiful muse to men hailed as genius, who could not think even half as large as she can who do not break the literal formal and material limits she so easily bursts every time she sets foot outside her home, and who also possess one measly little ball compared to her full bulging pair. It’s time to let her be a mother, and give back not to the world but to herself, by creating a flesh-and-blood legacy she can hold in her hands. And since I cannot, I must let my legacy be the blood I have shed on behalf of these beautiful and powerful women who speak so defiantly in public and let me know that maybe I can do the same. These women in the public eye who have given me such strength—and who gave me life on a deeper level than sometimes my own mother—have often been made to feel like they have no strength of their own, in spite of how clearly I see it. My own feeling of worthlessness is not what hurts: it is the feeling that these women who actually brought me into this world, after they made it for themselves and for me, are made to feel like they did not actually do that. They tore themselves in two to bring you into this world, and you still insist they did not suffer for it.

Same, girl. The only spikes I want to see are the ones on the fits Julia pulls, which function as self-defense at the same time as they articulate her own emotional experience through textiles, which then become the very fabric of reality. There are no boners to stab her with, because she stabbed you first: actual IRL man repeller, and not just a URL brand name by some rich bitch who never lived that shit or made art from her own blood cells. 

Women make art from our own bodies every goddamn day. But none of us thought to hustle like that and put ourselves in the gallery itself—not just our selfies—until Julia showed us the way: that we can be the canvas we paint upon, not just the canvas of a man, or the image he paints, or the sculpture he wrecks so carelessly. If you break it first, he can never buy it; if you sell your soul on your own terms, you will always have the upper-hand, because you will have the bag, and Satan will be left standing with a palm full of pixie dust. 

This is how much women love and give selflessly: we constantly hurt ourselves to spare others even deeper existential hurt beyond temporary flesh wounds, and then we make art out of our own flesh and our own wounds alike. Andy Warhol turned the exploitation of others into his art, by becoming the boss of a Factory; Julia Fox exploits herself, like only a true mother can, by turning her body itself into the Factory, of which she is both boss and worker, and therefore on equal ground with the entire world.

I also love that the name of Julia Fox’s debut single is the name of her memoir and she premiered it at the book release party. That’s a bitch who knows how to promote herself. That's a real hustler in the way only women have to be. If Julia Fox got into wrestling, the game would be so over. And it will be.