Artistry in the Age of the Anonymous Troll

I sit at the edge of my bed with my guitar, humming a melody over a chord progression of minor notes, I hum my way through a verse and chorus, until I begin to notice words popping out in front of me, a few minutes later, there is a new song half written on the pages of my notebook. I call up my producer and writing partner (who also happens to be my boyfriend), he tells me to come into the studio that day and I pack up a bag with my notebook and a toy for the dog to chew on while we are recording. By the end of the night we have the skeleton for a new song that I’m really excited about. I always feel a rush when my days in the studio end and we listen through what we made in the hours leading up, it feels like magic that that morning, this song had yet to exist. I go home hopeful that this one will be great. The next morning I sit down with a coffee and an American Spirit and log on to my Substack, I have a direct message that is so lengthy I have to endlessly scroll to reach the end of it, someone, god knows who, wants me to know how pathetic it is that I am still trying to be a musician when I clearly spend all of my energy blatantly ripping off, other, more popular artists. A notification pings when I receive a text message, it’s the engineer sending me a rough version of the song we recorded the day prior, I plug my headphones in to listen to the bounce, and my face swells in anger. I hate it. It’s terrible, I can’t believe I wasted an entire day working on this utter piece of shit.

I was twenty-one years old when a well known music publication reviewed my recently released debut album, the article was an eloquently presented tear down of not only my music, but my character as a woman, it was so life shattering that still, now, nearly 10 years later, I hesitated to scrape it up out of the tomb of the internet to quote it here. Someone had, in only two paragraphs or less, skewed my self worth and my worth as an artist for the rest of my life, and this wasn’t some anonymous, mentally unwell teenager hiding behind a computer screen, this was a well educated professional journalist who knew exactly what she was doing. For the rest of my life since, I still haven’t been able to shake the feeling that she was most likely, completely right.

In the years following this event, I managed to steer pretty clear of negative comments and interactions with journalists and people online, I released a couple of albums and for the most part people have been supportive and respectful to me in comments or over direct messages, and it goes without saying that I made a permanent effort to ignore, at all costs, the ever present scrolls of reddit forums questioning the quality and validity of my music and of me as a person because let’s be honest, nothing kind has ever been written on a reddit forum. But to my surprise and utter shock, recently, there has been an eerily large and noticeable spike in the volume of people vehemently despising me online. I write this with a smirk on my face, because in a way I find some irony in the fact that someone is spending their work break asking Chat GPT to scroll several paragraphs to the prompt “write how unoriginal Alexandra Savior is”. Without fail, each time I am confronted with this kind of calculated and devious heckling, it always comes from a completely undetectable source. When the messages have been particularly violent, I’ve been able to find people through their emails, but, then what am I going to do? Call so and so’s boss in Manchester, England to inform them that their balding employee likes to anonymously message young women online that he’s going to gang rape them in a parking lot because he thinks their music sounds like Lana Del Rey? What good will that do? This person is clearly unwell.

I have noticed within the rise of these anonymous online bullies, that without fail, almost every one of these comments has to do directly, or indirectly, with me being a woman somehow. Comparisons to other female artists based off of my haircut rather than the content of my work, constant comments on my appearance, threats to harm me with sexual violence, declarations that the music I have written was almost surely actually written by a man, people telling me to come forward about the sexual harrasment I’ve suffered, to then theorize that my silence is only proof that I am not in fact a victim, the list goes on. It feels like every morning that I log onto social media, I’m confronted with another malignant manifesto from an angered insel hiding behind a profile picture of an anime character. Has it always been this way for women? Am I crazy to wonder if this uptick in misogyny has something to do with the fact that our president is an openly woman-hating-pussy grabbing-accused rapist? I rifle through the bottomless pit of anger and frustration before me, ignoring the self doubt that inevitably ensues when confronted with these comments. I ask myself, why do we hate women? What do these people want out of this interaction? And, how do I keep making art, knowing that this many people feel this way?

Most people would say that this kind of abuse is an inevitable aspect of being an artist who releases music into the world, which is easy to say when you’re not on the receiving end of it. I don’t think it is possible to understand, or truly prepare yourself for how scrutiny can affect you, and I’ve found it personally very difficult not to be hurt by these ill intended correspondences. Not only do they inevitably cast a shadow of self doubt over me and my work, but, these words are very clearly hindering my own capability to feel safe within being vulnerable, which I have always channeled as the main source of my creativity. I want to write music that connects with people, and now, I find that I am warping my words to reveal lyrics whose job is not to express vulnerability, but to mask the reality of how I am really feeling. I have always hated this kind of songwriting, I find this type of lyricism incredibly egocentric and belittling to the listener, when the voice of a song is attempting to outsmart it’s subject, wielding deception to protect their own dignity, it fails to do what I believe music should do, unite people. So I find myself back in the recording studio, attempting to re-record and undo the parts I wrote instinctually the day before, because, what if people think it sounds like another fringe-sporting lady singer? And what if that guitar tone is too similar to the fucking Arctic Monkeys? lol. Until finally, I’ve erased and undone so much of what poured out of me instinctually, that the product sounds more like a Frankenstein-ed version of the message I was originally trying to send, the message that I feel too, just like you. So I am stuck now in a maze of self contempt, dodging the inevitability of other people’s criticisms, knowing that no matter where I go, these kind of disparaging interactions are sure to follow, if not only in my head. I do not want my sensitive nature to calcify at the hands of bullies, I want to be open so that the people who commit time to listen to my music know that, somewhere, someone feels the same way that they do. So, all I can really do without coming off as a defensive, enraged, insecure woman of the internet, is to lay down and take it, and try my best not to let it seep into my work, when all I really want is to respond with “go fuck yourself Gregg from Manchester” and “lets hear YOUR album you pussy bitch @unodos1877656545667788”. ha.

All jokes aside, when I first discovered songwriting, I made the decision to center my universe around words, words mean so much to me and the art that I make, I piece them together like a collage, to convey how I see the world, and my connection to them is one of the most meaningful things I have found in life. I’ve committed my life to the idea that words have meaning, and now, years down the line, I am suddenly expected to tell myself that words do in fact have meaning, unless they are being used against you? How can that be right? How can any of this be right?

“Artistry in The Age of the Anonymous Troll”

love, A