where are the right fights, not in our grounds, not in our grounds

Big Mouth EP by zulfi, recorded in the isolation of the home I made in the Hopper Studio room.

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it’s so damn hard to remember if i was crazy in pakistan too but it feels like i’m breathing in glances far stranger than the ones hurled at me before. i pretend to find home in allen ginsberg’s marijuana addiction or david bowie’s androgyny but there seems still an angry unease. americans think i’m fucking absurd and the international kids whisper in their pretty, proud accents how i’m “so ridiculous.” i think i wore pinker hats in my dreams, played more juvenile games of friendship. i think i sang much more over my headphones, wishing no one could hear me. i would scream my songs or quickly rearrange the syntax of my jokes to make them sound more human. see, because writing a glorifying diary called the absurdist dreams feels much less cosy than reciting jokes out loud to a dude who smiles at every crass misstep. i wish i could talk in a language everyone could understand but only equally, with the same connotations, the same affinities. english is weird, a bit racist, mostly classist but above all, weird and convoluted and easy to manipulate into and through jargon.

i started working on music this past year the second i was left breathing in the endless abandon of college street. i’m almost half past 19 and everyone hoped, or was scared, that my Big Mouth was going to get me into trouble. in all the tuesday parties in attics or crypts, climbing through as-far-from-obscure trekking trails or smoking at ill-advised times, making ill-advised attempts at humor, falling in love with ill-advised bastards, my big mouth did get me into goliaths of trouble. but trouble is easy; no unease or jagged complexities to overcome, edges only to create and explode, discomfort first to be exploited. so after leaving enough parties surreptitiously, i finally found the person who wanted to head to the studio after woad’s or a night out at a subversive kid’s subversive party. i found the boy who screamed the words to his favourite song not because he wanted to make a stupid point but because he just wanted to. i found the boy who came to yale, proud and vindicated for his loudmouthery from pakistan, breathing in shots of glances, blurry streets and the mangled crowds of phenomenal parties. i’m going to get a tattoo of a still from lorde’s “green light” video, of the moment i relive with her every 3 am, every crazy wandering outside a bar. it’s that moment when she’s dancing with a pretty dress in a pretty street, maybe next to an actual bodega, with her dirty white shoes on and she’s listening to a song that’s making her go crazy, feel an insane ecstasy, shared by the tenenbaums or the kid from rushmore or my deranged eyes from 3rd grade or my best friend who no one understood, of an unfair but so, so innocent a wish from this unforgiving, insufficient world. i think we’re listening to different versions of the same song. a song about a weird intimacy and loathing, maybe advocacy, for oneself. today, i am playing mine. i hope you like it, or like me, or at the very least, that you’re like me.

Welcome to Big Mouth.