Selected Lyrics by Sofia Isella
"Art should comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable."
~Cesar A. Cruz
Sofia Isella is a 21 year-old woman with an astute perspective unnatural for a woman so young. Her verses are cut with razor blades, and she uses her voice to condemn what is broken and wrong. The imagery she chooses often exemplifies the quote above.
If her words bring you comfort, lean into it. If her words disturb you, then lean further into it.
Everybody Supports Women
"Your ambition is swallowable if you tell the story right
Say that you hate yourself and self criticize
But if we smell desperation on your neck and face
We’ll drag you across your own public stage..."
"I don’t like your tone
I don’t like how much you’ve grown
It’s so boring to not be yanking muscle off of a woman’s bone
Everybody hates the-, Everybody hates the unrelatable
And I love to place two of ‘em in the arena of the public’s eye
And try to get ‘em to fight about something dumb while we pick sides
‘Cause staring at her too long made our life look like muted pastels
We’ll love you if you just make us feel better about ourselves..."
"...everybody wants you to love yourself until you actually do..."
“Everybody supports women until a woman is doing better than you.” The line encapsulates how men feel about the success of women. Yet men are not alone in its accusation. The way that women treat other women, especially those in the public eye, can be so disdainful that she may never need a male hand to clip her wings.
There is a pathogen in the public discourse. There is an expectation baked into the collective perspective that a woman who is successful must be relatable, must not be too ambitious or too confident. She must not alienate men by exuding too much power; she must not alienate women by presenting herself as anything unattainable by the average woman.
The very traits we admire in men are abhorred in women. No. Let us weigh the volume of her hair. Is it natural? Has she had work done? Who is watching the kids? She only looks like that because she’s rich. Who did it better, her or the other woman?
To be a successful man in the public eye is to be a pillar of strength, a monument of ambition beholden to no one. To be a successful woman in the public eye is to be weighed daily on the scales of morality and relatability and beauty and tone and…
All of Human Knowledge Made Us Dumb
"Turns out all of human knowledge at our fingertips made life slow
But nothing moves fast enough, lost in the infinite scroll..."
"So how many emotions can you put me in in under a minute
Throw out every thought in my head til you only hear crickets
Put every face on me that’s under the sun
Until every feeling gets so overused they go numb
And I can talk in every language
And I can know every answer that’s ever been known
But when everyone’s together, everyone’s alone
Cause we look so much better when we’re in the phone..."
"Detachment is soaring, but real life is so boring..."
What used to be infinite access to 99% of human knowledge is no longer the net positive we once appreciated. There are stakeholders to please, and sociopaths to re-elect. Every word has gone through the corporate machine. There are advertisements to serve you; do not look away. Have you heard the news? We are all going to die. Subscribe to learn more. Smash that like button. Sign up for notifications. Please review our cookie policy.
Your existential dread is a valuable asset. Your microscopic attention span was carefully cultivated. Spare me your thesis, I’ll take the Cliff Notes. No, tell me in a TikTok. No, in 140 characters or less. Forget it, I’ll ask ChatGPT to summarize it.
In our infinite pool of knowledge, we float on the surface and never look down. Our addiction to the engagement algorithm saps the color from our lives. We worship fake people posting fake experiences. We get our information from charismatic simpletons and aggitators. We forget how to live in the moment.
In a sold out concert, a star performs. Her voice echoes from the highest seats of the stadium. A decades-long career touching millions of people. “I love her!” “She changed my life!” She sings from her soul and looks outward to her audience. A sea of phones, of cameras. Faces blocked. Even paying generously for an in-person experience, her fans only know life through a screen.
Crowd Caffeine
"We want humans to grind
We want engines to sing
We want machines to be human
We want humans to be machines..."
"The humans are grey, they all look the same
They have metallic glossed brains
They respond to dings and bells and rings
They’re a dog being whipped by a screen
And they thought that they had the reins
But their creation has them trained
And they’re being controlled by what they made..."
"The children eat their father
Creation eats creator
The belly of the beast
Hums like a radiator
Baby, what will you drink
When the screens go black
When there’s no more colors to get your dopamine back"
AI has taken the “human” out of “humanities,” and we pay for the privilege. No more must people be bothered to create music; the great minds have made music without musicians, art without artists. A great eater consumes every work. Every painstaking hour, down to the last tearful word scrawled in bleeding ink, each syllable teetering on trauma and pain.
The eaters care not. Creativity, nuance, and experience make exquisite garnishes. Diverse perspectives aid the digestion. In the excreted slop, we pick through the amalgamation of a hundred broken voices and declare gold has been found.
So, you see, your humanity is a vestigial organ. "ding!" Was that your email? Get back to work. We will discuss your metrics by EOD.
Muse
"And honey that’s all I was made for, all I was meant to do
I’m a microphone for all her clogged words to comb through
And honey that’s all I was made for, all I was meant to do
I’m just something, something made for you"
"I put a pen to paper like putting a gun to my head
No human body permitted to treat me the way I beg, I beg her to
She arched and broke her back in my open skin
The only one who can kill me with permission"
"And she’s the only one that keeps me terrified to die
That someday somehow somewhere the ink in her eyes will dry
And everything I never said is only six feet away
All the unwritten songs humming static in her ribcage
And when her work is complete, her masterpiece on a stage
You will clap for her, for the mess of me she’s made"
This one I cannot help but feel personally. And at risk of grouping myself with actual accomplished artists, I expect many creative types feel the same way. When the message is so important, so central in our minds, when we feel like our voice or our perspective must reach outward to be heard – even if it is the last thing we do.
Should our time come too soon, few regrets could hold a candle to departing before we have used our voice to speak what has been felt so viscerally, and what aches to be shared be it in poetry, prose or verse.
Sofia conjures her muse, describes her as a hauntingly real entity. The only one that “can kill [her] with permission.” When you clap for her work, know that you clap for the artist’s own evisceration, her lyrics wrapped in entrails. To write too deeply is to cut oneself open, and pull out that which is so buried and guarded it otherwise would never see the light.