For the second paper for our class I wrote about the musical performance by Mary Lambert. Sitting in the audience, I had all of these negative views, thinking we were preparing to sit in for a Christian rock band, little did I know how moved I would be by her words. She mirrored so many women before her by incorporating humor with dark conversation. Mary’s songs really focus on women’s need for validation, sex appeal, self-worth, self-harm and finally self-love.
She first caught my attention during her song Body Love when she said, “I only know how to exist when I am wanted” (2018). This is something that I think speaks true to so many women in our society. As a woman today, we are expected in so many ways to be perfect, to be a size 2, to have our hair done, our nails done, to remove hair from our bodies, to constantly critique ourselves and improve ourselves because our self-worth is dependent on how wanted we are. We struggle with being intelligent while realizing that the more intelligent we are the less we are wanted by men and so tend to dumb ourselves down to decrease the associated intimidation. We are struggling constantly to fit into the cookie cutter mold presented by our society in order to be desirable, to succeed, and to receive approval.
In her song Body love she also focuses on death, and self-harm. “We flirt with death every time we etch a new tally mark into our skin, I don’t want to split my wrist to reveal a battlefield too, but the time has come for us to reclaim our bodies” (2018). Her use of tallying marks onto her skin to reveal a battlefield were truly moving. Self-harm is something that is never easy to discuss, yet she does it through the beautiful use of poetry. The way that she speaks during her poetry reminds me of Reverend Lee’s sermons. She uses pauses making you think, making you realize the accuracy of her metaphors.
Lastly Mary Lambert moves onto the topic of self-love. She tells you to love your body the way your mother loved your baby feet. Mary starts us off in the song Body Love with the negative things we think and feel about our bodies and ends the song with how we need to love ourselves; how we are reborn (2018). She uses metaphor after metaphor preaching how we need to stop hating ourselves and start loving our bodies.
Mary Lambert is truly a modern-day feminist. She has taken taboo issues in our culture and normalized them. She has taken cutting and made it something not to be ashamed of, but something to grow from, to be reborn from. She has taken self-hate and turned it to self-love. Mary understands what it is like to be a woman in our society, to constantly crave validation, to take our pain out on ourselves. She took this validation we crave so desperately and said that “we did good” (2018). She uses humor to make us laugh so we don’t cry.
For this paper I connected what Mary does to what so many women have done before her, use comedy to get her point across. So many women are called “bitchy” for being assertive and it almost feels like we have to fall back on comedy to get our point across. Unfortunately, this is still a reality for women but Mary is still getting her point across and that is what matters.
Lambert, Mary. 2018. “Mary Lambert Concert.”
-Chelsea Cullen