The music kept up its accompaniment. A fairy graced the cover of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ One Hot Minute (the image on the disk showed six children in number plus the faerie (09/12/95)), which for her harked back to her own story centred on one and how that one went through a merger of souls with a human. It was a little curious that it managed to account for her siblings, with herself, perhaps, being the faerie in her mind…
I like pleasure spiked with pain
And music is my aeroplane
It's my aeroplane
Songbird sweet and sour Jane
And music is my aeroplane
It's my aeroplane – RHCP, “AeroPlane”
Now if only she had encountered “Stretch”, which turned out to be the missing keystone in that puzzle, which included “One Hot Minute” itself (it was perhaps her favourite RHCP track extant, plus she was a biker for life and would only have a bike to commute once she left home, so she’d identify), “Falling into Grace”, “Transcending”, the concept of the “Walkabout”, and “One Big Mob”, which managed to express the concept of the universal connecting consciousness, and how it began in a mind. Marid’s best friend Joe let her have the CD on a borrow. He and his girlfriend had let her stay with them for a few days when the heat was too much. Paul W. did the same at one point, taking her up island.
Imagine me taught by tragedy
Release is peace
I heard a little girl
And what she said
Was something beautiful
To give... your love
No matter what
is what she said
CHORUS :
I love all of you
Hurt by the cold
So hard and lonely too
When you don't know yourself – RHCP, “My Friends”
This was also the time of Spacehog’s Resident Alien (10/24/95), which would turn up in the feedback cyclically more than once, and struck with the immortal anthem “In The Meantime”, the greatest capture of the God patched universal love consciousness sensibility in a song there ever was. (Along with “Shipwrecked”, “Cruel to Be Kind” “Starside” “Only A Few” and, as it would turn out…no, we’ll save that one for later.)
Poe’s Hello came out in October alongside Billy’s “Mellon Collie” (10/17/95 –Spacehog’s was actually released on the same date) even though she didn’t know it. Poe was one of the ones she found while she was alone in the world. It put her in the caste she expected, that of the underground untouchable reacting from the point of rebellion, again from the perspective she could not heed. She was unable to avoid “Angry Johnny” on alternative radio, which basically wanted to kill John; (a sort of curious reversal perhaps, if "Mysterious Ways"' "Johnny" really was a tease invoking Oscar Wilde's 'Salome"). She had a wiggy feeling the moment she heard it, but it wasn’t until listening to the album entire she began to feel something was up. Poe opened with the title track “Hello”.
“Angry Johnny”, now that was a twist. Here was her father claiming he was Elijah and John the Baptist, as per the scripture (Jesus himself said Elijah and John were one and the same, so maybe she just got it from the Bible.) Elijah’s Biblical arch-enemy was a foreign queen incorporated by marriage, Jezebel. So when “Jezebel”, cast into hell, is replying to “Johnny” that she is going to destroy him that may as well be a stand in for John the Baptist. In other words at the exact time she felt her father had put her under, a woman comes “online” as the archenemy of who her father claims to be, saying she wants to kill him for it. But of course it did not end there; it had…context, and plenty of it.
Starting with “Hello” of course, which opened with an image/phrase that reached into her own conception of the Mother Spirit becoming “trails of stars” through a medium, coupled with fathers that were “black holes”, combined with “her” extermination and banishment to the underworld, disappearance from the data trail, and the memory of the pain. Hello focused on abusive relationships (male perpetrator), captured by “That Day” (combined with the absurdity of what was her mother); what killed about “That Day” was the closing epithet:
Oh yeah, something else:
I hope one day you have the guts to call up your father
And tell him how he hurt you
And how he made you hurt another
'Cause it makes me sad
The truth was she never did tell him, and she knew just which “other” she had hurt.
“Dolphin” portrayed the analogy of the universal unconscious sea, capturing exactly what she’d set out to do by subsuming herself into one aspect of the reflection she saw in the universal, the psychic funhouse mirror, swimming underwater to survive when the bridge had broken. The shock of awakening into a new consciousness was captured with “Another World”, where an alternate voice (Poe on distortion) cried out,
Stop everything!
This must be the end of the world!
This might be heaven or hell
Poe countered with:
Or it may just be another world
Or it may just be another world
Another world another time another place, don’t you worry, my baby
Yes indeed. This was compounded by “Beautiful Girl”, and “Fly Away”. She had disappeared and yet she had not. It captured how everything that had transpired had been invisible to everyone present in the room, how it was supremely significant and yet of no apparent consequence whatsoever.
In the summer of that year Björk had released Post (06/13/95). With Björk she would never know for sure. Here it was “I Miss You” (“but I haven’t met you yet”), “Cover Me” (“I’m going to prove the impossible really exists”), that “Isobel” was married to no one but herself (as she now was), “Army of Me” (“you’re on your own now, we won’t save you, your rescue squad is too exhausted”) and “You’ve Been Flirting Again” (for the one who’d sing “can’t help that I’m a flirt” (11/06/95)).
Also in the summer of 1995 Jane Siberry had released Maria (08/29/95). The women were now officially in play, though again this was an instance where she would never know for sure, perhaps at the level of commonalities in the universal unconscious or synchronicity or both. This was an album she did not find initially that had a timeless quality, and as such there was no sense of whether or not the touchstones it elicited in her were the same, much broader than her own scope. For her there were elements of cognition on this album that only developed with time, some almost being prophetic. The women would not hesitate to lecture, took sides, but when she encountered “Oh My, My” it was healing because it approached the cycle she felt she’d undergone in a context other than damnation vs. salvation. This did not happen now however. It happened “after”. If you read forward past the Chapter “October”, you will know what is meant. 1996 would prove just as “interesting”.
“My headphones: they saved my life” – “Headphones”, Björk, Post