Meg Myers and the Cost of Being an Artist

Meg Myers’ newest video, “Numb,” took me by surprise. It starts out static, Meg reduced to merely one among several office drones sitting in low-top cubicles in the “white collar sweatshop,” engaged in mindless behavior that makes somebody else rich. Repeated close-ups on a photocopier make a nice touch. She appears to set us up for a message about mind-deadening work. I expected it so thoroughly that the first hand touching her made me jump.

To date, most of Myers’ songs have been about love, sex, and heartbreak. In some ways, this track resembles “Nowhere Man,” the Beatles’ first non-love song, which opened new vistas for their songwriting, but also for their musical composition. Like that song, “Numb” has introspective themes of identity, asking: Who am I when everyone else isn’t looking? The video, directed by Clara Aranovich, overlaps these themes. But, I suspect, it does something beyond even that.

That first startling hand proves an abrupt turning point in the video. Like the first gun in Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” the first hand intrudes on our expectations, transforming our experience, coloring everything that comes after. Once the first hand has entered the picture, other hands begin forcing themselves into the camera range, and with it our awareness. By the chorus, she peaks at eleven people simultaneously adjusting her hair, clothes, arms, and face.

Bob Boilen at NPR talks about this video as a commentary on “innocent touching” and imposition on female bodies. That definitely looms large. But Boilen casually mentions, then walks away from, something equally momentous. This is Myers’ first single since she broke with Atlantic Records, the label that released her first two EPS and her first LP. I’d wondered why she hadn’t released an album in almost three years. Betcha she’s been wrangling in court.

Myers has a few DJs and dedicated fans who evangelize her music. I’ve shilled her work to anyone who will listen for half a decade. But she’s never made a mainstream breakthrough, partly because she refuses to release a radio-friendly single if she doesn’t believe in it completely. Record labels are notorious for their interfering ways, demanding something commercially successful. They’re corporations, after all. The battle between art and commerce is as old as art.

Watching this video, I can’t help noticing the people touching Myers don’t just fondle her face, hair, and clothing. These forms of “innocent touching” are among the most common impositions people make on women, the kind that progress from rudeness to aggression to harassment. But they go further: they start positioning her arms. These people don’t just want to touch Meg, they want to control her, and her floppy, marionette-like movements represent that control fantasy.

By placing the video’s first act in a workplace, and the second at home, director Aranovich says something about the two environments where people, especially men, attempt to control women. Bosses define women’s workplace actions; and remember, music for Myers isn’t a hobby, it’s her job. Then women come home, where fathers, boyfriends, husbands, kids make demands. These demands, like workplace comportment demands, are individually small. But it doesn’t take long before they add up.

Work and home are the two most common places where women, where humans really, find meaning. And when these places deny us meaning, we start shuffling through life, Muppet-like, miming the behaviors others expect of us, without investing our souls. That’s one definition of “numb,” that feeling of disconnection between our bodies and our spirits, especially when be become too tired to rage silently against the injustice. We become robots in our own meaningless lives.

This problem is compounded for artists, because outsiders think they have controlling interest. I can’t help remembering D.A. Pennebaker’s movie Don't Look Back, which followed Bob Dylan’s 1966 British tour. Almost everyone Dylan met, including fans, label executives, politicians, and other musicians, wanted their fingers in his pie, until he began lashing out. One wonders when Myers will snap at fans like me who got pissy because she cut her hair.

Or has she already?

Myers’ latest video definitely hits women’s issues squarely. Though I, and other men, have endured “innocent touching,” rarely do men experience it to the constant, degrading degree inflicted on women. Yet I see a second, equally prominent theme, distinct to musicians and other creative professionals. People who make their living baring their souls, like Myers, must face micromanaging from outsiders who “mean well.” Innocent touching doesn’t just degrade artists, it attempts to steer their souls.