You Are Not Here To Conform
Listening to Marina's 2021 album, Ancient Dreams In A Modern Land, in the context of.... *gestures broadly* all this.
Our ancestors had to fight to survive
Just so we could have a chance of a life
We’re not here so we can blow it all
We could bear witness to the rise and the fall
Those are the lyrics that open Marina’s superb 2021 release, Ancient Dreams In A Modern Land. Those aren’t the lyrics that inspired this post, but they’re the perfect note to start on.
Listening to this album when it came out in 2021, the energy it gave me was something along these lines.
Like, I was gonna paint myself with stripes and free all the animals in the zoo. I thought everyone else would, too. I was PUMPED. And then the years kept coming, and they didn’t stop coming (thank you, Smash Mouth, for the gift of time), and this morning, very suddenly, it hit me that this album was a hope for a better place that, almost immediately after its’ May 2021 release, had its’ face spit directly in, and the hits didn’t stop coming. The years did. The pain, confusion, and fear did not.
From the second I heard Marina’s first single, I was hooked. Her throaty, uniquely beautiful voice with a heavy Welsh accent that stretched from deep and dark to a beautiful soprano was fascinating enough, but Marina’s lyrics touched on so much from day one. On my personal favorite Marina song from her first major release, The Family Jewels, The Outsider, she sings:
These people are weird in here
And they’re giving me the fear
Just because you know my name
Doesn’t mean you know my game
I look myself in the face
And whisper “I’m in the wrong place”
Is there more to lose than gain
If I go on my own again
On my own again?
As a high schooler who had never felt in place, an undiagnosed autistic woman who had been passed over for assessments because I was a woman, I felt like the outsider. The music on that album was so simultaneously confident, brash, emotional, vulnerable, and, overall, fun, I hoped she’d never stop making music. She was, and continues to be, something new, without ever having to see her in like a Travelocity commercial. I did, and do, admire how she became so successful without seemingly selling out in that way. She is a creative first, and over time, she used that platform to become an activist.
The bold, nakedly critical and simultaneously tenuous and emotional Ancient Dreams In A Modern Land was a natural progression in her career. Few artists at the time were making explicitly political bodies of work, and to see someone I had admired since my youth making, essentially, protest songs was a balm on the burn of the past 5 years. I had that album on repeat from the day it dropped in May.
The message of that album was so clear to me. “We are growing up, we are getting organized, and we are taking this shit back from the men who ruined it.” Songs like Man’s World (“Mother nature’s dying, nobody’s keeping score, I don’t wanna live in a man’s world anymore,”), Purge the Poison (“Nothing’s hidden anymore, capitalism made us poor, god forgive America for every single war”), and New America (“Everything that made you great only made you bad, Made the people hate all the good they had, I know that you had big dreams, that you had big plans, But abuse won't make, won't make a free land”).
It was, very clearly, an album written during the pandemic. An album written at a terrifying, but also a hopeful time for so many Americans. I know myself and most of my friends felt things would finally change for the better. When it dropped in May 2021, it felt like a rallying cry. Someone had seen and felt what i’d seen and felt and they made music I loved in response. Those songs empowered those who heard them.
Thinking about those lyrics now, they’re all still true. They’re more true. And the situation is more dire.
In June of 2022, a year and about a month after the album dropped, Roe v. Wade was overturned. From there, my eyes were open.
We do need to purge the poison. We do need a new America. Especially here, in 2025, the message of the album rings stronger than ever, but the smidgen of hope, the cheek, the bits of joy almost hurt to hear. We thought things might change when hundreds of thousands of people died. They didn’t. They “somehow” (you know how) got worse. Those that are in need are dying. Money is being funneled into wars and billionaire’s pockets. Our health department is no longer allowed to talk to the American people. The government is offering to buy out non-loyalists.
This is a New America. America, however, is actively trying to bury the truth, and has not paid its’ dues. It is still fucking with the food chain and the farming. It has more blood on its’ hands than ever.
History does catch up on us all, and historically, evil people who place themselves directly in the spotlight will meet consequences. That’s all we can hope for. In the meantime, we need hope. We cannot survive this without hope. Find your community. As Marina says on Purge the Poison:
all my friends are witches
and we live in Hollywood
mystical bitches making our sisterhood
while society is falling, we are quietly reforming,
protecting the planet, healing our own damage
Most of us don’t live in Hollywood, but I do suggest you find some witches. Or whatever that means to you. Find your coven. And then pour some drinks, put on this album, and do what you need to do to protect each other.
Whether you’ve heard a Marina song or not, do yourself a favor and indulge in this album right now. We need that little thread of hope and power and balls to the wall energy that we had before fires and daily mass shootings and genocides. Aside from political songs, there are beautiful songs about growth, prioritizing yourself, respecting your own emotions, loving yourself, and being, overall, free. Our country is not free anymore, but we can still listen to whatever we want. Play it loud.
