In the age of the internet, our idea of the proverbial “self” has been irretrievably warped by the buzzwords we use to define ourselves. Are you a cottagecore-“Over the Garden Wall”-renaissance faire enthusiast or a Fiona Apple-“Fleabag”-tortured sad girl? Did you tie your hair with a bow in a coquette-Lana Del Rey-Sofia Coppola way or in a kidcore-JoJo Siwa-TikTok microtrend way? The answer to these questions can shift the meaning of the act itself, despite maintaining the original mechanics.
Any blank scene can be warped to fit a specific lens depending on the words attached to them. They can fill a new narrative without changing any physical aspects, only the perception surrounding them. An abandoned house in the middle of nowhere with peeling floral wallpaper might seem like a tired, lonely scene until the words “Ethel Cain Vinyl” are used to describe it. The same can be said of dirty old truck beds or barren bedroom walls save for a wooden crucifix or the American flag held up by girls in floor-length peasant gowns.
This Southern Gothic imagery is nothing new, but the way Ethel Cain incorporates it into the themes of her music transforms it into something with a life of its own. The artist writes about life in the American South through the fictionalized experience of a character named Ethel Cain — Hayden Silas Anhedönia’s stage name — on her debut album Preacher’s Daughter. Ethel, as you might have guessed, hails from a religious family in a small Southern town (much like Anhedönia) but runs away from it all only to be cannibalized by her boyfriend (unlike Anhedönia). It’s incredibly macabre, violent and complicated, and the visuals she uses to tell that story contribute to this specific corner of the Southern Gothic realm.
Anhedönia differentiates the “theatrical” Southern Gothic — thought up by people not from the South, a picture of “old, spooky churches, the witches in the swamp, alligators and snakes” — from the authentic “subtle” Southern Gothic. The real Southern Gothic still has spooky churches, but they’re bright and sunny, full of chattering worshippers in their Sunday best. The terror comes from the unspoken realities around them that haunt the narrative, not any cheap gimmicks thought up by people who have never felt a Southern summer and lost “sense of the passage of time.”
The authenticity behind her imagery and the aesthetic that fans have snowballed from it is the driving force behind its popularity. Anhedönia is not interested in painting a caricature of the South for people outside of it to be intrigued by; she’s constructing a complicated tapestry of the beauty and gore she grew up with in the American South. Her use of the Americana aesthetic, religious iconography and outdated technology in her music videos enlarge the idea of a small-town American dream with a critical lens toward how broken it really is. She places it in the context of her experience as a transgender woman in a deeply Baptist community and allows for a critique of that culture to shine alongside an appreciation for it. These communities revolve around conservative family values which keeps them tight-knit, which also tends to exclude or condemn those with identities falling outside that narrow scope of nuclear ideals. She’s careful not to veer into vilification or romanticization of the South, toeing a delicate line with expert precision.
Where these issues of pretense and exclusivity would be otherwise ignored by high-and-mighty city folk and small-town debutantes alike, Ethel Cain makes them take a second look. She shows those outside of the South that there’s more to it than their close-minded ideas may allow, reminding them that Queer people still exist in the South, and that not everyone outside of their metropolitan bubbles is a prejudiced person. She simultaneously urges Southerners to not forget that fact either nor be blinded by the urge to brush the truths they don’t want to acknowledge under the rug. They can have pride in the American flag, in cowboy boots and Friday night lights and sunny church Sundays, but they can’t forget the negatives of what those symbols represent only to focus on the good they see in hyper-nationalist or hyper-religious pride.
This nuance is exists in how Ethel Cain reforms the Americana aesthetic to align with her message. She doesn’t use the American flag next to crucifixions and shotguns to tout their infallibility. Rather, she does so within the context of the damage these images and their accompanying history have caused. This is a part of the history of the American South, and she’s not shying away from it. Cain makes her audience confront them head-on. Her song “American Teenager” both celebrates the Friday night football games in a small town high school and delivers a poignant denunciation of this hypermasculine culture feeding into the military-industrial complex (which makes it even more surprising that the song made it into Obama’s top six songs of 2022, but I digress). Anhedönia takes great care to ensure that she isn’t telling a one-sided story, nor speaking of these heavy themes like an aesthetic because “(they’re) not, (they’re) history.”
In one hand, Cain holds a deep love of the South and continues to live there because of it. In the other hand, she carries the weight of the pain and heartache that makes up the region’s “dark and terrifying” history. This is the authentic Southern Gothic whose insidiousness lies in a past that continues to haunt the present while refusing to be named aloud. Anhedönia describes the South as “this weird, secretive place where everyone gathers for lunch on Sunday mornings after church” and then “everyone goes home and they are deeply disturbed.” The pretense creates a sense of unease which transforms an otherwise cheerful image into something more stirring. The knowledge of what surrounds the image, the unspoken blood and gore that it took to attain such peace for this nuclear group of people, changes how it should be interpreted.
A major part of that stirring image is the glaring wooden crucifix right at the center. Southern values tend to revolve around Christian values, and those tend to have a very rigid confine of what constitutes “goodness.” Anhedönia explores a complicated relationship with this culture that revolves around faith through Ethel Cain. She has said that she sees the South as “covered in crosses” and, as a piece of the South herself, Anhedönia covers herself in crosses to symbolize the symbiotic relationship. The physical reminder of the South’s religious identity, the affirmation that she herself is a part of Southern identity despite not fitting the image of the perfect Southern Belle, is an irrevocable, complicated link between these entities of Christianity and the South. In her music videos, Ethel Cain surrounds herself with images of Christ as she references the presence of God in her songs. She feels God around her in “American Teenager” but she must also come to face the devil in “Ptolemaea.” One cannot exist without the other; there’s a macabre, larger than life twisting of divinity. It’s a grapple between the desire to believe in something and the refusal to fall into the culture of unquestioning religious zeal that so often arises in her region — one that carries a strict intolerance to anything outside the conventional ideas of “purity” or “holiness.”
“Sun Bleached Flies” is a song that directly criticizes the passive ways in which Southern mothers allow a patriarchal religion to prevent them from taking meaningful action. It’s what prevents Ethel Cain’s mother from truly being able to mourn her. At the core of these themes — and Ethel’s story as a whole — is rebellion against the deeply ingrained ideas of what the South can and cannot be, what the confines of the Southern Christian zeal can cost its inhabitants. There is the desire to maintain a relationship with the community-oriented upbringing that the church provides while tearing down the parts of the South that are stuck in the past, however that is made to happen.
That brings us to the term “Ethel Cain Vinyl.” If Anhedönia has been so careful not to aestheticize her particular brand of Southern Gothic — to ensure her message is not misconstrued or muddled by internet hordes — then how did this term become so easy to roll off the tongue? How did the image of it become so clear in the collective mind? Has the meaning been muddled like she feared it would?
Not exactly.
In the internet sphere, to describe something as “Ethel Cain Vinyl” is to assign a deeper, more critically fond meaning to an otherwise cut-and-dry picture of the South. It’s helped fans who might have had trouble finding beauty in their “shitty small towns” to do just that, providing a warmer lens for already critical residents of the South to enjoy it. It turns the mundane drive-thrus and the empty park benches into something worth experiencing rather than the same thing that every other droll town in America puts up with. It’s made celebrating the spirit of Southern fashion separate from whatever others might perceive its wearer’s ideology to be. Above all, there is a refusal to ignore the gore surrounding the idea of the South, a push to not only acknowledge the darkness of a perfect pretense but to call out its hypocrisy and aim to break its generations-long cycle. Being “Ethel Cain Vinyl” means a complex look beneath the surface of Southern identity, and everyone should be willing to make that dive.
Summer Managing Arts Editor Mina Tobya can be reached at mtobya@umich.edu.
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