collaborative storytelling that is equal parts critical and creative
Dear Alex Turner
Natalie Wilkinson
​
​
Dear Alex Turner,
As far as I know, you are an appendage to me. If you exist as something separate from me, it is only as the sounds and images loosely tied to your personage. Otherwise, when I write to you, I only really write to myself.
​
You used to have acne and long brown hair that seemed like thin, sweaty lint on your head. When you spoke it was impossible for me to understand on the first try, so thick was your Sheffield accent. I had to rewind and rewatch interviews before I could make out the words, and even then, your way of speaking was strange. I wanted to speak like that. You thought she were different, and you thought she were nice. It was a parallel language that was completely useless in the world I lived in, but somehow articulated the bitterness and reclusion I felt. Perhaps I would have found some other singer with a strange language like yours, but I found you when I needed something like you, and so I tucked you into myself. I decided you, Arctic Monkeys, almost everything you wrote or made, would be a home for myself to carry around in the world.
When I first heard you, my forehead had acne like yours, my hair, growing out from a “boyish” bob, was the length and texture of yours, and I felt the mixed desire of wanting to be you and wanting to be with you -- I thought your voice could lift me from my world, and I imagined myself doing what you did, pursuing the pretty girls and getting brokenhearted, lamenting the boundless space between me and them. When you look at me like that my darling what did you expect. You always wrote about troubled women breaking your heart, or being unattainable, or choosing the sexy asshole over you. A few of your songs were about never meeting the one woman you’re looking for. I’m beginning to think I imagined you all along. When I sang your lyrics in my head, I didn’t change the gender of the people you yearned for --in fact, perhaps one of my first experiences of unrequited longing for a girl happened via your songs. I certainly believed that someone existed who would just get me, and we would know it immediately, but it was always ambiguous who that person was. It wasn’t a boy though. Oddly enough, I thought that the feeling of aimless yearning was unique to me, so when I heard your lyrics, I felt confirmed that you and I were somehow deeply connected. We believed in a world where two people were meant to be together and they either met or lived their lives in constant failed searching and settled for people who were close enough. For the record, I don’t really believe that anymore. I’m beginning to believe that the people I have met are boundlessly, back-breakingly, more than enough. That is, the people who I am grateful to love and have loved blow my own sentimental fantasies out of the water. When I listen to your songs now, I detect a bit of irony in the story of the hapless search for “the one.”
I still feel attached to your music, because it represents a part of me that will never go away. It is the part of myself that clings tightly to judgement and isolation, believing that contempt for other people makes me more real. It is the part of me that can’t take my eyes off a white “popular girl” wearing Abercrombie with straightened hair, as much as I resent what she represents. All you people are vampires and all your stories are stale. I learned how to memorize your lyrics and use them as a sheath in my mind when I felt raw and afraid.
Needless to say, I reveled in my own isolation. Even while your lyrics rejected authority figures and phoniness, I was terrified of standing out, of getting in trouble, of disappointing my teachers or hurting other people. I grafted the world created by your lyrics onto my body, an organ made especially for releasing anger and resentment.
I felt viciously protective of your music. A huge part of my infatuation was the fact that I didn’t know anyone else who was as into you as I was. If I decided someone wasn’t deserving of your music, and they happened to like your songs, I scorned them.When someone I liked listened to your music, I felt deeply connected to them. I remember being literally irate for a few days after I saw you in concert in a neighboring town, and found out on Facebook that some people who knew only one or two of your songs had met you after the concert.
I’m fatigued as I write this. When AM came out, and more people started loving your music, too, I felt a part of myself was disintegrating, and I didn’t want it to. In spite of myself, I liked your new album. It was hard for me to let go of you for a while. The more you keep on looking the more it’s hard to take. Your voice was unlike anyone’s I’d ever heard -- soft and raspy, if whipped cream could be rough on the edges. I thought you deserved better than becoming another sold-out whacko star. I can’t tell if you’ve actually sold out or not, nor am I sure what that really means. All I know is that the acne-faced stringy guy who sang the songs I loved so much doesn’t exist, and I don’t think he ever did. Sometimes I genuinely wonder if I made you up inside my head.
Bye,
Natalie
Just now I watched a video of you singing with Miles Kane in 2016. You look as quaffed and pseudo-cool as ever, but I’m not bitter about it anymore. Good for you. I don’t like your newest album, but I’m keeping my old appendage in a Ziploc bag. I like to take it out and put it back on every once in a while.
A PLAYLIST OF FEELINGS (I now use the second person to refer not to Alex Turner, but the reader):
Yearning for someone you’ve never met to relieve you from the mess your life seems to be:
“The Bakery”
“Cornerstone”
“Baby I’m Yours”
“Love is a Laserquest”
Yearning for someone you in fact know quite well, but are on the outs with:
“Mardy Bum”
“Do Me a Favour”
“Suck It and See”
“My Mistakes Were Made For You”
“No Buses”
Overwhelmed with anger, feeling that your skin will start to tear at the weak points:
“This House is a Circus”
“Perhaps Vampires Is a Bit Strong But...”
“7”
Driving around where you live on an everyday errand, bouncing in your seat and feeling a sudden glee:
“Dancing Shoes”
“Fluorescent Adolescent”
“Secret Door”
“Black Treacle”
Reflecting bitterly on how people with prestige and popularity seem to have the least regard for others:
“When the Sun Goes Down”
“Da Frame 2R”
“Bigger Boys and Stolen Sweethearts
“Stickin to the Floor”
Walking around late at night on the sidewalk outside where you live, feeling slow, resigned to fate, and prepared to let go of your control over the outcome of your life:
“No Buses”
“Stuck on the Puzzle”
“A Certain Romance”
“That’s Where You’re Wrong”
“Mad Songs”