🎶🎶 CONTEST: YOUR CURRENTLY FAVOURITE SONG! 🎶🎶 // 🎶🎶 CONCURSO: TU CANCIÓN FAVORITA ACTUALMENTE 🎶🎶 || By @right.like
My favorite song is the beautiful Bernadette, by Chris Corner under the pseudonym IAMX.
I’m not that fond of the video, but the song itself is breathtaking.
Part of my love for this song is nostalgia. I discovered the song back in the summer between my seventh and eighth grade years in school. I was twelve years old. Later this summer, my life would be subjected to extremely unwelcome and, in my eyes, sudden, changes. My parents would start arguing, the arguments wouldn't stop, they would divorce, and the way I see both of them would change drastically. I lost almost all respect for my mother, thought it’s been regained over the years. Long story short, when I first listened to Bernadette I was a much more naive and optimistic person with an easier life.
Part of my love for this song is the show I associate it with. Back when I was 12, I was a huge fan of Gravity Falls. It was my first “fandom experience”, you could say. I had a puppy-love crush on Bill Cipher, who had only made two appearances in the show back then (He appeared in a grand total of seven episodes once the show was over, if I remember correctly, but he was definitely a presence felt throughout the entire series). 12-year-old me was watching speedpaints of the character, admiring all the different art styles and swooning over the finished products. One such speedpaint used this song as background music. I loved the song as soon as I first heard it.
Part of my love for this song is a guilty pleasure of mine: an odd fascination with “yandere”-type lovers. If you’re lucky enough to have avoided animesque fandoms and terms for this long, I’ll explain it for you: A “yandere”, literally “crazy love”, is what you call a fictional character who kills people because they believe it benefits their lover or the stability of the relationship. A common example is the yandere killing the victim’s close family and friends, out of fear that the victim prefer these platonic relationships to the romantic relationship that may or may not really exist between them and the yandere. The yandere often feels the victim is a wonderful amazing person, and wants what’s best for them, but has horrible ways of going about it. Some people think yanderes are hot. I personally don’t, but there is an odd pleasant feeling that's not sexual in nature that I get from them (Don’t worry about me, I know fiction from reality. If anyone kills anyone I’ll be the first to call the cops). I always interpreted this song as being from the point of view of a yandere. “We are alone, nowhere to run”? “Bernadette, you are my liberty”? “Family and friends becoming ghosts to dream of”? This is almost even more explicit in the German version of the song (Chris Corner is bilingual)- when directly translated back to English, the line “but you have answers” becomes the German equivalent of "but you can cry quietly”.
And of course, there’s just how beautiful the song is. After listening to it so many times, I’ve caught many of the nuances that just make it all the better.
Speed round: other songs I like and why!
• Paradichlorobenzene and its counterpart Antichlorobenzene, two complex songs that claim in their own lyrics to be meaningless. Lots of symbolism here, like the stray cat thrown in the water both songs mention.
• Birdhouse in Your Soul by They Might Be Giants, a nostalgic piece about the comfort brought by a nightlight. Complete with TMBG’s unique humor- “I’m your only friend- I’m not your only friend but I’m a little glowing friend- but really I’m not actually your friend, but I am…”
• Solitary Hide and Seek Envy by Denpol-P. I can relate to the lyrics so closely it’s almost scary. It doesn’t take much filling in the blanks to see the song as the story of a little girl with self-esteem issues, divorced parents, and unhealthy coping mechanisms (like resorting to fictional worlds cough gravity falls cough when the real world won’t do).
• Do songs from musicals count? There are a lot of musical songs I love, but just judging off the quality of the song itself and not its relations to its musical, my favorite song from a musical is Wait For It, from the Broadway hit Hamilton. The song is beautiful, and the lyrics are poetic. “Death doesn't discriminate between the sinners and the saints, it takes and it takes and it takes, and we keep living anyway, we rise and we fall and we make our mistakes, and if there's a reason I’m still alive when everyone who loves me has died, I’m willing to wait for it”. (Other Hamilton songs I love are Guns and Ships, What’d I Miss, The Room Where It Happens, Helpless/Satisfied, and of course My Shot. Songs from other musicals I like are Meant To Be Yours and Candy Store from Heathers, and Sincerely Me from Dear Evan Hansen.)
• Don’t Touch Me by Creep-P/Eyeris. This song was inspired by both the composer’s personal experiences, and a bit by the fourth episode of the series Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared. The song is haunting, and it’s my favorite English use of a Vocaloid.
• Who We Are by Imagine Dragons, entirely because of nostalgia for the same period Bernadetteee makes me nostalgic for. A multi animatorr fan project dedicated to Gravity Fallss used this song, and I fell in love.
So, Peace
