"Just another dead fag to you . . ."

In a couple of weeks, I'll be giving a talk called "'Rhythm is My Bitch': Kevin Aviance, Matthew Shepard, and the Embodied Music of Hate, Violence, and Healing."  As the talk is intended to discuss the musical negotiation of trauma, it is framed through my personal experience of Shepard's murder.  Specifically, it spins off of this disturbing, yet oddly liberating music video for Kevin Aviance's cover of Nitzer Ebb's "Join in the Chant:"

Because the talk is so personal, I've been thinking a lot lately about other music that has been important to me in dealing with the threat of violence toward people expressing sexual or gender difference.  This has been particularly potent today, as I gave my castrati lecture to my Intro to Music class.  That's, perhaps, another post entirely.

At any rate, tonight I remembered Tori Amos's "Taxi Ride" from her album Scarlet's Walk, with its repeated statement: "Just another dead fag to you, that's all.  Just another light missing on this long taxi ride."  As usual, in this song, Amos conflates a personal experience with a powerful political message.  

But what struck me upon listening to the song tonight was the change in the repeat of the line from " . . . taxi ride" to " . . . taxi line."  I long ago gave up trying to read any sort of cohesive "meaning" in Amos's lyrics--her poetic art consists of obscure references and esoteric juxtapositions.  Yet this change gave me chills that I could quite clearly identify.  The album is, in a lot of ways, a creepy Americana.  It evokes traveling . . . in this case, traveling across a country that is "home," yet rendered foreign via regressive social and political trends so extreme that they make the familiar incomprehensible.  "Taxi Ride" fits this notion quite well.  But the change from "ride" to "line" transfers a personal image to a communal, yet anonymous one.  Most of us have experienced taxi lines.  They are innocuous enough, but they do serve as unexpected symbols of common experience (traveling) confronting individual experience (to where are the other people traveling?).

As a survivor of a seemingly random and anonymous act of violence, this subtle change really haunts me.  It makes me think about the nature of "community," particularly within a culture that continually (maybe increasingly) accepts violence as a means to resolve differences.  To put it bluntly and in terms of my own experience, as much as we might try to approach every interaction from an open and accepting perspective, you never know who's carrying a gun under their coat.  

Here's a live performance of the Tori Song: