Dead Eyes | Bitch Stick | Top to Bottom | Transcript

Frances Gregory: Hi, I'm Frances from Bitch Stick, and I'm here with The Other Team to talk about Dead Eyes from Top to Bottom.

[Song playing] Lyrics: Stay or go both feel pretty shitty / But I’ll blame myself before I blame this city / I’ve got to be open to love or I’ll be left behind / But there’s only one kind of love I seem to find / And it goes change me baby change me / I know how you love to hate me / Change me baby change me / Then you can say that you saved me

FG: Okay. So the first couple of lines, ‘stay or go both feel pretty shitty, but I‘ll blame myself before I blame this city,’ it's about when you go through a traumatic experience, you just kind of constantly have this, at least I did, this sick, sad feeling inside and you start to feel like it's just a part of you, so instead of looking at your relationships and looking at your surroundings and thinking like I could move or I could change things, you kind of just feel like it's something that's inherently wrong with you that you're gonna take everywhere.

And then ‘I've gotta be open to love but I'll be left behind,’ or ‘I've got to be open to love or I'll be left behind,’ this idea that the fear of love and relationships and intimacy after trauma is also conflicted with the fear of missing out on what you see as life benchmarks that everyone's supposed to do. I'm supposed to fall in love because that would make me a whole person, and I was supposed to be capable of falling in love, and I was supposed to be capable of intimacy, and I'll be left behind in life and my friends will have it and I don't have it because I'm broken.

And then ‘there's only one kind of love that I seem to find / change me, baby change me / you know how you love to hate me,’ which is...I saw myself as a problem to be fixed. I saw myself as something that wasn't worth love or that wasn't good as it was, and so the people I felt the most intimate with are the people that mirrored that back to me because it confirmed my reality. I was like, I hate me and you hate me, which means you understand me. You seeing me. And I feel like a lot of love is about wanting to see and be seen, and so having my self-hate reflected back to me by dating people who saw me as like a project or a problem, the way I saw myself as a project or a problem made me feel less alone in a weird way, in a very sick way, and then ‘you could say that you saved me,’ it's like that's what you get out of it. You get to satisfy your complex and...yeah

[Song playing] Lyrics: Lay down now / I can’t get up / He says you like it rough / Probably should’ve been so scared / But I was never really there / If I remember in the morning / I’ll tell myself I’m tough / Besides / There’s no reason to be scared if you were never really there (repeated twice)

FG: The chorus is really...I really just say it like it is. So I guess the kind of coping mechanism that I got very good at, especially when it came to sex, I was like...I had a lot of experiences that instilled in me that saying no wasn't safe, so I just stopped saying no and got really good at disconnecting from my body, so that's the whole idea of I was never really there. And sometimes that was through drugs and booze, and sometimes that was through just convincing myself that I could just endure things and that I'm tough, and this is the best option and the safest thing for me to do is just to let things happen and pretend that they're not happening, or sometimes hope that the other person would notice, you know what I mean? So yeah, that's what I mean by I was never really there. I wasn't there because I wasn't an active participant in any real way. I wasn't vocal about my needs, I didn't know what they were, I wasn't worried, I wasn't even thinking about what they were, I wasn't…y’know?

[Song playing] Lyrics: I hate that bitch she ruined my life / But I look in the mirror and I think damn she looks nice / I better keep it up for when they turn on the lights / Another morning alone I can’t wait for the night / When I say fuck me baby fuck me / Remember you said I was lovely / Fuck me baby fuck me / Cause I know you don’t know how to love me

FG: Okay, so ‘I hate that bitch,’ obviously, the bitch is me. I'm the bitch. ‘She ruined my life,’ so I started to feel like I was letting all of these things happen to me, and I guess in a way that I was... I don't know, but I started to feel like I was responsible for everything, like I ruined my own life. I was weak. I never learned how to fight hard enough. The ways that I was protecting myself, we're actually just hurting me more, the ways that I was asking for help, we're actually just hurting me more, so I started to feel like I didn't have almost any right to ask for help anymore, because I did it all to myself, I made this whole mess myself, which is not true, and if you feel the way about yourself, it's not true.

‘But I look in the mirror and I think, damn, she looks nice,’ I obviously, am a pretty girl, so I definitely grew up with and still have a lot of external validation about my physical appearance and about how that is something about me that is valuable, which is a huge privilege and makes life easier for me in a lot of ways, and also is a problem because it's something that I kind of cling to to give me value and worth when I feel like I have nothing else, so there were points in my life when I thought I’m fucked, and I'm so broken and I’m so sad and so scared all the time, but people think I'm pretty. People wanna fuck me. So I must, that's what I got, so that's what I'm gonna hold on to.

‘I better keep it up for when they turn on the lights / another morning alone and I can't wait for the night / when I say fuck me baby fuck me / remember you said, I was lovely,’ like remember? You love me. You think I'm great, remember? You care about me because you wanna fuck me because I'm pretty... Right. And that's, y’know, I went through phases where I was...I really clung to that. I was like, I'm beautiful, if you want to have sex with me, I'm having sex with everyone, I don't know how to say no to anyone. And then I go through phases where I'm like, I can’t have sex at all. I can't touch anyone. Nobody touch me, nobody look at me, so it kind of...It swings both ways, and I've learned in therapy and just in life that both of those responses are completely natural and that people experience both of them, people experience one of them, and that both are just different ways to cope and it’s normal.

And then, ‘fuck me baby fuck me cause I know you don't know how to love me,’ it's like I've given up on...I've given up on the idea of somebody really loving me, and now, it's interesting because before I had given up on the idea of someone loving me the way that I imagined love was supposed to be, and it was this heartbreaking horrible pill to swallow, I was like, I'm gonna be alone because I am unlovable, and I felt like I was unlovable because I was not enough, and now it's like I've kind of instead of giving up on that idea of being loved like that, I've almost released that idea of being loved, I've let go of it, I don't need it. I have so many other different kinds of love, like I love myself, my friend's fucking love me and I love them, I have so much real...My family, so much real love in my life, that validation or that high that comes from that quintessential romantic love or sexual validation that I thought I needed after so much awful experiences, I've instead of giving up on it, I just kind of released it and I've...I think I'll be okay. Yeah, and then it goes back into the chorus.

[Song playing] Lyrics: Lay down now / I can’t get up / He says you like it rough / Probably should’ve been so scared / But I was never really there / If I remember in the morning / I’ll tell myself I’m tough / Besides / There’s no reason to be scared if you were never really there (repeated twice)

FG: That was our song. We're called Bitch Stick. Our next show is July 21st at the Bovine. I hope you can come. That song is on Spotify, Apple music, I think Bandcamp, YouTube. I actually played it, my niece wanted to hear it and they don't have Spotify or whatever, so I played it for her on YouTube and she went, ‘huh, zero views,’ *laughs* and I was like ‘thanks bb, you’re right’ and she was like ‘interesting,’ but yeah, so I'm Frances from Bitch Stick, and that was Dead Eyes from Top to Bottom.