It is almost four years since Mercedess was last here, with her brand of lo-fi, minimal R&B accompanied by a whispery, sultry vocal that immediately identifies her.
I’ve never quite understood what the ‘selfie’ is all about but then again I am one of the 0.1 % or whatever it is of people that don’t possess a mobile phone so I wouldn’t, would I?
The last time I had one of those I carried it around in a suitcase and unveiled an aerial as long as the Artemis rocket to ‘make contact.’
Mercedess (Mercedes Botoft) is one of Gen X, Y or Z, so understands these things but on her new single, ‘The Perfect Selfie’ she throws light on and questions the pressures she comes under to ‘fit in’ and to deal out perfection to her chums every time she uses that goddamned thing, including by taking that flawless image that never is.
“I’ve been trying to take that perfect selfie for days/’cause I need some attention.”
She makes the point in the press photo, one that might have come out of ‘The Ring’.
Her main target is the quest for perfection that everyone is subjected to whenever you take an image of yourself. How do you take that perfect image when ‘perfect’ is never good enough? ‘Self staging’ is apparently the phrase that describes it. Upstaging is perhaps more appropriate.
But no matter how many times you ‘stage’ yourself, you might never get that perfect shot. Beauty after all is in the eye of the beholder and today the beholder is also the image maker. That sounds like something out of a sermon in the Bible, doesn’t it?
There are those of older generations that probably consider this stuff to be nonsense, but it is the way most youngsters behave these days, just as they walk into lampposts while staring at their phones.
So Mercedess has every right to challenge these societal norms that have enveloped her generation without a fight so far. Indeed it is refreshing just to hear her doing it.
There is a line, repeated towards the end, that I don’t get: “Don’t forget me/just because I’m quiet doesn’t mean I am quiet”.
The only way I can interpret it is that she feels she has much more to offer and in many ways than she ever can do by endlessly taking these images and sticking them on Snapchat or TikTok or whatever. She can’t shine like the star she could be if she was able to dump that phone.
Musically it is an interesting little (two and a half minutes) construction that is based on a mournful acoustic guitar motif with an intriguing bridge that is comparatively experimental in nature.
The song is from a forthcoming album, her second, called ‘I’d love to be a star, but I’m tired as fuck’.
That seemed at first like merely an attention grabbing title, but seen within the context of this track and her desire to escape feelings of insecurity and anxiety that have drained her it starts to make sense.
This new single and the forthcoming album are released independently through Virgin Records Nordics.
(Continues after the Spotify link).
Find her on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Mercedessmusic/
Instagram: https://instagram.com/mercedeeesssss?utm_medium=copy_link
