NEW SINGLE RELEASE – Jockstrap + Taylor Skye ‘Good Girl’
27 October 2023
The Vancouver-born artist demands our attention with her uncanny visuals for the music video and her how to guide for feeling uncomfortable and why it’s a state we should actively seek out.
Following two critically acclaimed albums as well as headline tours around the UK, Europe, and North America, the track is one off her upcoming third album, LATE SLAP, out 5th April 2024. Dana identifies Susan Sontag as an influence for both the song and LATE SLAP itself, referencing Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) in relation to her vision for the project: “It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration”. You can really feel the presence of Sontag’s ideas within the lyrics of the track as Dana fights against desensitisation and passivity: “I want to take my time / Plain to see the things that don’t / Make my morning bright” and warns us of the way overexposure to the Internet and social media can result in this passivity: “Stand too close / Face in your phone / It’s scrambling your mind / Tired of your zombie glow/ Soaking up your eyes”.
The track’s video presents a series of uncomfortable yet energetic scenes: Dana with her blacked-out eyes in a full bathtub fully dressed in garments of lace and wool, a foot with tights and high heels on submerging itself into murky waters, Dana filmed from behind, running as if chased, lit by an ominous red light. In the spirit of the song, whilst these actions appear uncomfortable or unnatural, they are also confident, bursting with intent and vigour, and still intriguing and enticing. Here we see and hear Dana “full of feelings” and with her arms wide, ready to embrace anything and everything,
Ultimately, to be alive is to be uncomfortable and to be uncomfortable is to be alive; the two states are inextricably linked and, as Sontag notes, “it is passivity that dulls feeling”. To feel anything is to feel alive, is to be uncomfortable.