Taco stacks end music11/24/2023 It would also become cults, killers, sexual violence, religious trauma and cannibalism. That same week, she had the breakthrough that would birth Ethel Cain. On her 20th birthday, she came out publicly as trans on Facebook and soon legally changed her name to Hayden Silas Anhedönia (that is, the inability to feel pleasure). “I couldn’t look in the mirror for six months,” she said. In 2017, while on acid, Cain shaved her head and tried to commit to life as a man. Under the names Atlas and White Silas, she experimented with brooding, explicit electronic music that matched her mind state. Instead, she fell into a depressive black hole of goth clubs, hard drugs and gender confusion. When Cain graduated from high school, having found some real-world liberation in the theater program of a local community college, she moved to Tallahassee with hopes of attending Florida State University for film school. As a teenager sneaking time on Twitter and Tumblr, she began living as nonbinary. Increasingly alienated and defiant amid her conservative surroundings, she found solace and inspiration in pop music fandom online after hearing a Florence + the Machine song in the credits of a movie. The only vision I had into the real world was this violent, graphic media, full of drugs and murder,” she said, tracing her enduring fascination with the seedy and brutal underbelly of the idyllic and local. Mostly walled off from secular culture, Cain listened to Christian music or Gregorian chants and sang in the church choir, but she also immersed herself in her grandparents’ collection of scary movies and true crime on television when she could. The oldest of four children, she was home-schooled by her born-again mother, a “very artsy-fartsy” child in a town “full of rednecks.” Her father was a truck driver who now works at the lumber mill. NONE OF THIS felt possible in Perry, Cain explained the next day, in the coziness of her home cocoon and over Taco Bell at the local creek. “For this first record, I’ll play Miss Alt-Pop Star and I’ll parade myself around and do photo shoots and whatnot, and then I’ll end up like Enya or Joanna Newsom, where I come out of my little hidey-hole every five years to drop an album,” she said. Ideally, Cain will hoard influence and cachet until she can successfully disappear into her elaborately plotted work. Her artistic aims, though, are grand, in line with recent iconoclasts like Tyler, the Creator and Lana Del Rey, who balance the resource-heavy spectacles of pop heavyweights with the no-sacrifices creative control of indie outsiders. “Down here I can just be a local girl, and I love that.” “That’s why I love Alabama: Nobody in this Waffle House knows who I am, nobody at Walmart knows who I am,” she said. The glare of cosmopolitan attention, she knows, could threaten Ethel Cain’s very essence. She felt strangled by the strictures of her Southern Baptist upbringing, with her own three baptisms failing to take and a community that treated her like a “satanic witch.”īut she also clung to the culture, turning the lows of Americana and fantasies of freedom into a caustic and self-aware Southern Gothic persona that she describes as “a mixture of my favorite final girls in horror movies and Billy Graham.” Instead, emboldened by a shriveling monoculture and an influential generation of internet-first auteurs who molded culture in their image via persistence and vision, Cain is intent on bringing the industry to her world.īorn and raised in Perry, Fla., a tiny city on the Big Bend of the panhandle named for a Confederate general, Cain views her youth as both picturesque and tortured. “I don’t want any career that requires me to be there.” “Oh God, I will never be caught dead living in either of those cities,” she said over nighttime eggs at the nearby Waffle House. In her slight Southern lilt, Cain expressed nothing but shellshocked disdain for cities like New York and Los Angeles, where most in her enviable position end up. Before rural Alabama, she rented an abandoned church in a random Indiana town of fewer than 2,000 people. Cain also insists on living in the middle of nowhere, the better to drive her truck around barefoot and hang out in empty fields and graveyards or under dilapidated bridges.
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