There is so much gorgeousness in the world today coming out of some incredible ladies who are accomplished, driven, and express themselves with completely individual style. I want to take the Monday blues and bathe in inspiration – for both new looks AND life goals. Monday Muse will hopefully be the space where I can do that regularly.

There is a truth happening right now that we all need to embrace: Women are fucking killing it in pop music.  Not satisfied releasing a bunch of catchy fun dance hits (though those are great too!), women are taking a genre known for its light, sappy, cheesy, breezy, and palatable sound and twisting it to reflect more meaningful themes.  Not only are the topics of pop songs becoming more nuanced, but the song is often more surface: A single tune now exists not only within an album of music all based on the same set of events, but within a larger set of images (via videos and album art) as well as reflected in wholly different art forms (dance, fashion).  Beyoncé’s Lemonade is probably the album that comes to mind first when considering the massive movement of self-expression in pop – for good reason, as that album is one of the best ever written.  Not one of the best female albums, or pop albums, or whatever specificity you’re after – it’s one of the greatest albums ever made, hands down because it takes a shitty ass, painful topic that’s too often reduced to trite sound bites – infidelity – and examines it from every single angle imaginable, every perspective, every past precedent and future consequence.  

Taking your own individual circumstance (or set of circumstances) and creating as much art as you can out of it is not only freeing for the artist, it’s an incredible opportunity to relate to a larger audience.  Utilizing different modes of expression besides, in this case, music, increases the size of said audience even more.  I first really noted this sort of, “Let’s take what happened to me/what I’ve been through and put it through a blender of artistic forms” from today’s Monday Muse, Sia.  If you’re not sure who Sia is, you’ve probably heard her music before, and if you’re still not sure, you may remember her most from looking like this a lot.

Although she had been a songwriter for quite a long time before, Sia went into the realm of Massive Success after the release of her 2014 album 1000 Forms of Fear.  I can’t say enough about this album, but I’ll try to describe it as best I can.  It’s visceral and vulnerable, for sure, but there are also a few moments of cheekiness – a bit of a sly wink that can draw you in that, indeed, Ms. Sia is actually doing okay now.

Sia had been having quite the shitty time before writing this album: Drug use, poor mental health, different kinds of broken-heartedness, etc.  The album was the cathartic release of  all of it, and that idea of “release” is why this album is one of my all time favorite.  Sia fucking WAILS on songs, borderline screaming, and I can’t get enough.  Her voice is scratchy and at times desperate – she’s not prettifying anything,  not even close.  Although this is actually from the album that came after 1000 Forms of Fear, “I’m Alive” is probably the best example of this “clawing my way out of the depths” singing.

But it isn’t just the singing: If you’re even a tiny bit aware of her, you have an inkling of her “thing,” which is using all kinds of items (mostly wigs) to hide her face.  I remember that it was actually sort of difficult to find a photo of her with her face visible at that time.  Now, you can easily google her appearance, but that wasn’t so before.  As I said above, the album 1000 Forms of Fear is incredibly vulnerable; Sia apparently enjoyed the notion of being extremely famous and yet unrecognizable.

This is where the whole Why She’s a Monday Muse thing comes in.  I am obsessed with this concept.  I’m obsessed with the cheek of being everywhere, all the time, and yet invisible.  She recounted during one interview that she went into a Target (and anyone who loves Target is a-okay with me), “Chandelier” started playing, and . . . Nobody even remotely noticed her.  There’s something so unbelievably powerful about this, that you can, in fact, control your destiny, control your level of vulnerabilty, and yet still be honest.  

The word “vulnerabilty” is just pounding on the inside of my head right now: For women, vulnerability has so much to do with physical safety.  When we “put ourselves out there” in ANY way, whether it is artistically, intellectually, etc. – our success putting us in any kind of spotlight can, in fact, threaten our physical safety.  That, of course, doesn’t mean that I think women should just all stay at home and bake cookies – quite the opposite, duh.  But I think that there’s something downright fucking magical about this woman saying, “I am putting it all out there.  I am saying EVERYTHING, and I am going to save myself in doing so.  And you know what?  You still can’t have me.  You can’t even see me.”  That she was able to pull it off so well, for so long, is just incredible.  She had the best of both worlds, she conquered a common struggle for women everywhere: She was able to completely and totally exist as herself, every flaw included, and at the same time keep herself safe and whole in every way.

Aside from just the coolness of taking her appearance off the table, Sia used (and continues to use) multiple forms of art to almost literally take herself out of “herself” and put it on display.  Most of the time, we think of Maddie Ziegler, the (formerly) little girl dancer who played a version of Sia in the video for “Chandelier:”

Maddie – and she is pretty mind-blowing – is not the only person putting on the Sia wig.  Different dancers (or sometimes not even dancers) of various age and gender identities will don the wig and perform alongside Sia.  But I want to take a moment just giving a shout-out to Ziegler simply because Sia’s choice of her to play her goes back to that idea of vulnerability.

What I love about the choreography of many of Sia’s videos – aside from the fact that she actually bothered to make something artistic at all – is the childishness of it.  There’s certainly a sort of “connotation soup” when it comes to children, vulnerability, and innocence, not to mention the fact that drug use or any kind of severe issues in one’s life reduces us to that child-like need of help and assistance.  When our problems get severe, we want nothing more than someone to either fix it for us – sometimes waiting so long for someone to fix us that we end up even further into our own heads, forgetting that we’re actually, you know, adults who need to get our shit together at some point.  Anyway, the choregraphy contains a lot of movements that are choppy or silly, as well as having a lot of moments depicting the incredible freedom we can feel as kids – cartwheels or flips down a hallway – but of course, you’re still existing in the same, claustrophobic, dark, dank house in your head.  The freedom drugs or shopping sprees give us is pretty much an illusion.   

So, basically, even when Sia is not actually identifying herself, she’s . . . Identifying herself.  I was continually stirred watching her performances – they were always different, with varied choreography and sets and dancers – because there is and was something chilling about seeing The Person with her doppelgänger, dancing wildly around her and basically personifying her demons right in front of her, sometimes even mock screaming or teasing her.

I friggin’ love that photo.  It’s everything I adore about Sia and what she was trying to do.  We associate our Famous People with our demands as an audience; there’s almost always, on some level, an expectation of pleasing the hordes.  Don’t be too angry (scary bitch!), too happy (annoying!), too innocent (eye roll), too vulnerable (dangerous ) – and what are we left with?  Nothing even remotely resembling ourselves.  But Sia decided to take every side out of herself, put it on someone else, and put them right along side her.  And I can’t fucking get enough.  May she be our muse in search for that sweet spot between vulnerability and self-expression, amen.

I could talk about Sia for literally days, but if you’re not particularly familiar with her, you can check out literally any of her live appearances on various talk shows; around the 1000 Forms of Fear era in 2014, each performance was unique.  I have utterly no idea how her team managed to do it, but there it is.  If you don’t feel like doing that and need something NOW NOW NOW, here are some links:

• Sia Wikipedia
• “Chandelier” Video
• “Elastic Heart” Video (my favorite, it makes me weep, both the song and the vid)
• “Cheap Thrills” (because it’s a fun dance song if you don’t want to feel anything heavy today; I mean, it IS Monday)