Bedwetter And The Call to Self-Annihilation
“Do you think that if you were falling in space, you would slow down after a while, or go faster and faster?"
"Faster and faster. And for a long time you wouldn't feel anything. And then you'd burst into fire. Forever... And the angels wouldn't help you. Because they've all gone away.”
–Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
I could go inside a window and disappear
Just observe
Just overhear
If I was glass, I’d revert back to sand
Scattered through the sea
I could pass through your hands
– Bedwetter, ‘Haze of Interference’
0. Playback
when i was a child, i was terrified of the dark. i think every child is to various degrees: it’s one of the few aspects of human psychology i genuinely believe to be genetically hardcoded. i’ve struggled with insomnia more or less since birth, which means my younger self spent a lot of time in the dark, pinned to his bed by terror, seeing each flutter of the leaves beyond my window as the announcement of some terrible force come to devour me whole.
strange as it might be to admit, i miss that horror. i haven’t felt that kind of acute, stabbing fear since I was a child. all my fears now are grinding, cumulative: the sickening despair of living in a world increasingly insistent on regulating you outside of the boundaries of the human species. belief in the supernatural is necessarily a belief in the miraculous: that the laws of the world can be suspended, that the universe is in some way responsive to the minds of its inhabitants.
when i was a kid, i used to watch ‘angry review’ channels on youtube. i grew up ensconced within the Channel Awesome milieu: people like Todd in the Shadows, Phelous, Linkara, and, of course, Doug Walker himself. i spent more time with any one of the above than any actual friends, which were few and far between in my childhood. i first encountered a lot of pop culture this way, secondhand, cut down to a highlight reel and punctuated by yelp-y complaints by some nerd.
i remember once watching a review of the first Child’s Play movie, in which a doll haunted by the spirit of a dead criminal terrorizes a single mother and her young son. looking back, the films are deeply silly, self-conscious of their own camp absurdity. back then, they utterly terrified me. the films were a window opening onto something like the true nature of the world, which i had no words for but felt profoundly each moment that i was alive. it wasn’t the living doll itself that frightened me, but the black magic that animated it. what chucky embodied was the dark side of miracles. the universe was alive, and aware of humanity. it knew we were there. it cared about us. it wanted to hurt us.
a little while later i grew up, and not long after that i transitioned. embracing horror media was, for me, coterminous with replacing my supernatural fears for mundane ones. when the low-key fear of transphobic violence forms the backdrop to your every waking moment, the idea of being preyed upon by a vampire or a psychotic clown becomes almost charming. my fear of the dark went away. worse things happened in well-lit rooms than every occurred to me in the shadows.
i’ve started to love night walks. habitually being alone in the dark is a dangerous habit for any woman, let alone a trans one, but i’d sooner relinquish breath than stop. night is a magic time. the world assumes, i think, something closer to its truest form, when all of the illusions of daytime slide away. it holds a crystalline beauty. the boundaries of reality are once more porous. things creep in from the other side, and i watch them, and take notes. on these walks i like to listen to music. lately i’ve been listening to Bedwetter. I’d like to tell you about him now.
Bedwetter is the side project of musician Travis Miller, better known as Lil Ugly Mane. I don’t know much about Miller’s life and I confess I don’t really want to. it’s not out of any ill feelings towards him— the few things i know about him make him out to be a perfectly nice dude. my deliberate ignorance is due to the fact that i want his art to stand alone in my mind, without needing to be slotted into a biography. i’ve loved everything LUM has released since ‘Oblivion Access’ in 2015, but even lacking this context Bedwetter’s sole release would still stand alone as one of the most affecting albums I’ve ever heard.
Bedwetter’s 2017 release ‘Vol 1: Flick Your Tongue Against Your Teeth And Describe The Present’ is 28 minutes and 9 tracks long. 4 of these tracks (‘Man Wearing A Helmet’, ‘Stoop Lights’, ‘Branch’, and ‘Haze of Interference’) contain lyrics. the rest are a blend of ambient music and instrumental hip hop tracks. the soundscape here is overwhelmingly cold: washed-out vocal samples played just quiet enough to be barely audible, grainy humming synths, the odd plucking of an acoustic guitar. even the more uplifting of the ambient tracks, like ‘Fondly Eulogizing Sleep’ or ‘This in Not My Stomach’ have this profound sense of melancholy about them, like a polaroid snapshot of a long-since-obliterated present.
it’s difficult to establish what, exactly, this release is. in length, it straddles the line between album and EP. the rap tracks vary wildly in tone and content, alternating between confessional storytelling (‘Man With A Helmet’), musings on the nature of being (‘Branch’), and detached/furious self-loathing (‘Stoop Lights’, ‘Haze of Interference’). it reads more like autobiography than album. it’s not Miller’s first foray into absolute darkness. OA was a meditation on death, decay, and despair, and track-for-track is probably a gloomier listen overall, but the suffering on display there was more detached, less personal. in horror terms, it’s the difference between someone like Thomas Ligotti and Joel Lane or Dennis Cooper: the atrocity is smaller, in real terms, but also more intimate. the world is exchanged for the self, and we can’t look away.
from this point on i’ll be discussing a few individual tracks. i’d recommend listening to each before reading my analysis below– my writing can’t do justice to the experience of going in blind and experiencing what this project has to show you on its own.
1. ‘Man With A Helmet’
the first vocal track, after the short intro ‘John.’ MWAH is the most narrative track on the album, placing us in a clear setting– a child, alone in the suburbs at night, taken by an individual or individuals unknown. in the first section, Miller’s rapping is clinical, detached. we stand outside the child as he’s taken, clinging onto little talismans of innocence: a holographic X-Men comic, blue Superman pajamas, ultimately insufficient to keep out the horror that surrounds and permeates him. we’re lead up just to the moment that the child is removed from the trunk and taken down to the kidnappers’ hiding place– then, our perspective shifts.
Bluish glow of television flickers in a stairwell
Led into a lair, he got sick from how the air smells
He's with his parents in his brain, this is their hell
He felt the worry in his bones, he don't fare well
Against these monsters in this crypt, in this hidden jail
All this time passed, I'm still scared that I'm there still
Miller’s vocals break up at the final line, the first time his performance has shifted from the unflappable delivery that characterizes the first half of the track. he sounds confused, agonized, desperate. it’s genuinely devastating. the narrative stops here, just as the narrator enters the room. we never leave it. but how could we? after all this time, the narrator hasn’t, either.
throughout my life, i’ve been 5150’ed for suicide attempts several times. if you’ve never experienced it, i hope you never do. from the moment you’re strapped down in an ambulance, you surrender all autonomy. your body becomes an object, your own narrative of your existence something to be mistrusted and disbelieved. you are utterly subject to the whims of unaccountable individuals who are devoted to ‘helping’ you– even if that entails constant monitoring, even if that entails being held down and drugged without your consent. there is no privacy. the windows in these facilities are typically frosted, so there’s no way of seeing the outside world beyond the vaguest impressions of color and light. the memory of the things i experienced in these places are embedded into my body. to this day, an unexpected knock on my door can send me into a spiral of panic, and being woken up by someone else makes my heart pound so rapidly i feel as if i’m about to vomit.
trauma distorts time. even now there are moments where, upon waking, i can’t remember if i’m there or here– if the intervening years of my life have just been a long delusion. i am a record skipping. the same phrases of music repeat over and over. occasionally the world around me loses coherency and substance. i become convinced that what i am experiencing is an elaborate performance, that the ‘real world’ is something above, outside, beyond my material life, and if i can just leave i can finally be free of myself.
All these fucking years I just don't remember
All this fucking time I just don't remember
Did I lose my mind? I just don't remember
Did I die, am I lying? I just don't remember
(repeats)
sufferers of PTSD and CPTSD frequently suffer from large gaps in our memory. most of my childhood is obscure to me: there are individual memories, drifting in a vast blank sea, divorced from position and context. i struggle to differentiate things i remember from my youth and things i dreamed, things other people have told me i experienced. the foundational building-blocks of my self are obscure to me. it becomes increasingly difficult to trust my own recounting of events. what does someone do when they can no longer comprehend why they are who they are?
2. Stoop Lights
I don't got hate for myself
I got nothing to say to me
I spend every day with me
I'm tired, I need an escape
It's hard to relate to me
the next track skips us forward in the timeline. ‘Stoop Lights’ is, textually, about alcoholism and drug abuse. more broadly, though, it’s about dissociation, the things that drive us to attempt to escape ourselves. the opening lines of this track hit extremely hard for me. self-hatred is not a single emotion, but a complex of them, a kind of internal ecosystem that reinforces and feeds off itself. the vivid flareups of the outraged death-drive are counterbalanced by a more insidious mode of self-destruction: the low-key, omnipresent exhaustion, the continual disappointment of waking up inside the same body, trapped within the same skull.
immortality has always horrified me, conceptually. despite my flirtations with self-annihilation, death frightens me just about as much as any other human being who’s ever been burdened with the cognizance of their own finitude. it’s not out of some love of death that i reject the notion of eternal life: it’s the horror of the idea of living forever as yourself, of being the same thing forever, of receiving the world only through the same sense-inputs, constructed into an internal model of the universe by the same neural shortcuts. concrete existence necessarily implies solitude. we live in one skull only. the existence of other consciousnesses will always be obscure to us. the state of being human is to only ever touch the outermost surfaces of others. to be genuinely immortal is to pace the boundaries of a single mind like a caged tiger until time itself unwinds. it would be a loneliness more profound than any i could imagine.
I'm in the bowels of war
But I feel no stress when I let it pour
But it all come back when I can't run back
Anything that even happened the night before
one of the reasons people abuse drugs is to chase these temporary escapes from their own psyche. in chemically altering the way your brain processes the world and itself, you can, briefly, stand adjacent to your own consciousness. you can, it seems for an instant, become someone else. but this promise is always faulty. always a poisoned chalice. you always return to sobriety, quicker each time. the self returns with a vengeance, crueler and more unforgiving for having been abandoned. In VALIS, the first of Philip K. Dick’s pseudoautobiographical trilogy recounting his theophany, he writes: “There is no doorway to God through dope. That is a lie peddled by the unscrupulous.”
Peekin' at my own dead body through splayed hands
As I grunt and I drool like a caveman
Fucked up, I'm a fool
With a room with a view of a wasteland
every addiction, promising the solar aspect of the escape from the self, inevitably shows its umbral face. everyone who has ever been unable to remember what they did after a night out has inevitably experienced this bifurcation of the self. the alcoholic is like one possessed by themselves. you are disgusted by this person who claims also to be you. the higher self is exiled: you operate on base instincts, a creature entirely of the body even as your addiction destroys it. you wanted to become an angel. instead you have opened your body to demons, or perhaps simply revealed the demon that was already there.
the imagery of the electric light is present throughout this song, and the release in general. Miller evokes Memories (that) fade and float into air/like dust casting shadows in sodium vapor, and during the chorus of the song we sit and watch the stoop lights flicker/stoop lights flicker ‘cuz my eyes half closed. recently i’ve discovered a profound kind of beauty in the outdoor electric light. Illumination is the backdrop for all human activity, the rumbling sub-bass which centers our lives. for most of civilization, our only options have been sun, moon, and flame. the mass construction of streetlamps marks the first true attempt to colonize the darkness en masse. the edge of a streetlight’s cone marks the place where civilization ends, where the pretenses of humanity give way to the obscure possibility of the night.
3. Branch
I got a feeling that this life is just a tangent
Just an idea getting lost amongst the branches of an old tree
I think it's obvious we're damaged
The map's impossible to navigate
We're stranded in these cold streets
(repeats)
“Every human activity is a tack for killing time.”
-Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against The Human Race
4. Haze of Interference
What's underneath? I think I'm on the way out
Take my pulse, spit directly in my mouth
Count the cracks that's in the pavement in a bathroom in a basement
I'm probably just a devil's form of laughs and entertainment
the final non-instrumental track on the album, and the one where Miller’s rapping spirals the closest to an outright loss of control. if we view this album as the progression of a life, then ‘Haze of Interference’ marks the present– out of the debilitating confusion of childhood trauma, out of the all-consuming dissociative fugue of addiction. there’s no pretense of separation, as in ‘Branch’: this is Miller confronting the horror of living with mental illness without any pretense of veiling or universality.
On a carpet of the 50 states, part of me disintegrates
The only thing I'm left with is the part I can't articulate
You never thought about you only
You never had to worry about which part of you to show me
one of the most difficult things about being mentally ill is the inability to truly convey your experience to another person. this is the problem with pain more broadly, and perhaps consciousness altogether: the incommunicability of it. you can say: ‘i’m afraid.’ ‘i’m depressed.’ ‘i want to hurt myself.’ ‘i want to die.’ all of these things may be true. all of these are insufficient to describe what it’s like living in the guts of it, the manner in which the entire world seems to become an instrument of suffering. describing his own experience with radical despair, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa said: “It’s as if someone were using my own life to beat me with.”
it becomes increasingly difficult to establish a notion of a concrete self. who is the ‘real’ version of me? is it the professional mask i adopt in order to interact with the world? is it the sufferer perpetually in the state of utmost despair, who rages and weeps at the whole universe? is it the innocent locked somewhere deep inside me, enraptured by the image of snowfall against the night sky and the sound of animals moving in the undergrowth? at moments each of these has felt most ‘authentic’, and the actions and thoughts of the others seemed like hollow self-delusion. every interaction of others is a construction of the self: dredging up from the mire of my personality those traits and characteristics I judge as most likely to convince them to like me, or to treat me fairly. Pessoa had his ‘heteronyms’, a collection of noms de plume that grew large and elaborate enough as to become individuals all their own. Miller has his own constellation of aliases: Travis Miller, Bedwetter, Little Ugly Mane, Shawn Kemp, Lyle Ugleman, Dreamo, Vudmurk Stormy Guy. in attempting to be human, we collect masks: masks facing outward and inward both, to convince others and ourselves both of who we ‘really’ are.
You're never getting better, you're addicted to the madness
You treat it like a muse, are you happy now, Travis?
the idea of the tortured artist is a kind of weaponized cliche, worse for the fact that so many of us buy into it. when i first began taking antidepressants, there was a fear in my mind that something would be taken from me; that, in alleviating my depression, I would be muffling up some integral portion of my own self. when most of your life has been spent in a period of acute mental illness, the illness can begin to seem indistinguishable from yourself. it shapes you. it makes you who you are. the idea of getting rid of it comes to feel as horrifying as losing a limb.
those of us who are inclined towards art can start to believe that joy is anathema to our practice. when you’ve produced art that emerges from profound suffering, especially if that art is well-received critically or commercially, attempting to alleviate that suffering can come to feel akin to strangling the goose that lays golden eggs. the society in which we exist commodifies every aspect of human experience, pain no less than any other. the fear of an endless downward spiral is one i imagine everyone struggling from depression has encountered: the idea that this is how life will be, from now on. worse– that it’s our own fault, that we build our own hell and then complain about the heat. this is the life we made. are we happy now?
None of this could happen, nothing will happen
The things that I believe could never, ever happen
I'm standing by a microphone, I'm yelling at a wall
Pick a thousand names, you're still nobody at all
i believe that all art, at its basest form, is a mode of communication. through the act of creating and receiving art, we attempt to transcend the isolation and disconnection that lies at the core of what it is to be a conscious being in an uncaring universe. this is why the idea of ‘AI Art’ is so repugnant to me at base: it is voice without speaker, text without writer.
artistic creation will never make me rich or famous. that option is closed off to 99% of all creatives, let alone trannies. every act of making is lonely, arduous, and unrewarding. i would say the only reason i do this is out of love, but even that seems like a euphemism. i don’t love writing. it is frustrating, lonely, often boring, inevitably disappointing. i do it because i have no other choice. making for me is as integral to my being as breathing or drinking. if i could not write some essential part of me would shrivel and decay.
Miller’s despair is all too familiar here. every one of us seeks some form of transcendence. we want to reach out and touch some integral part of what it is to be human, to capture in a prism some light off the face of the divine. god help us, there isn’t anyone among us who doesn’t want to be someone. the horror, then, is for there to be nowhere to go and no one worth being. to send our words and images and sounds out into the dark to disperse into the void. no matter how many aliases we adopt, we are no one.
5. Coda
after the release of Vol 1. Flick Your Tongue Against Your Teeth And Describe The Present, Miller didn’t put out another full-length album for four years. it wasn’t exactly radio silence— he featured on a couple tracks, put out a few singles under various aliases, but the period of inactivity was unusual for someone as typically prolific as Miller.
the release that emerged from this silence was a more-or-less comprehensive break from his previous sound. 2021’s volcanic bird enemy and the voiced concern sounds nothing like Bedwetter, nor much like any of the Lil Ugly Mane releases that preceded it. nihilistic despair and self-loathing has been substituted for surrealist lyrics, laid-back vocals, and a soundscape far closer to indie rock and trip-hop than experimental hip-hop and noise. it also happens to be fantastic.
it wouldn’t be accurate to call volcanic bird enemy a ‘happy’ album. it’s far from pollyannaish— the lyrics are infused with enough regret, despair, and bitterness to counterbalance the lighter tones of the sound. but the pain seems duller, here. further removed from the present moment. more liable to be turned into wry humor and ironic self-effacement than screaming autophagy. maybe ‘happy’ is too much to ask for, anyway. Miller on VBE&TVC sounds like someone who’s seen and felt some rough shit, but has passed the worst of it. wounds have scabbed and scarred over. there is, if not healing, reconciliation.
mental illness is a lifelong struggle. it’s chronic: it recurs. there’s no cure. like a comet, it orbits your life, drawing close and pulling away. but each time, if you continue to struggle, you become stronger. more knowledgeable. you can tether yourself more firmly against the gravity of the dark. i have survived things now that would have killed the me of five years ago. in the years to come, i will face worse things still. pain is inevitable, but serenity is possible. if my suffering can be alchemized into work as beautiful as Miller’s, I think I’ll be able to make peace with it.