Bending Time with Lucy Dacus’ Home Video

Margaret Schnabel

If you’d asked me earlier this year what the key to understanding contemporary indie music was, my answer would’ve been simple: the internet. The indie scene is increasingly stuffed with early-career musicians whose adulthoods---and thus musical careers---have been indelibly shaped by the onset of the internet age. They announce album releases through pithy tweets. They play on Jimmy Kimmel Live or NPR’s TinyDesk series from their own bedrooms (and bathrooms). Their songs embody the kind of personal confession that could only have come from an internet culture in which we curate, stage, and perform those spectres called our “selves” with sharp and unending precision.

But Lucy Dacus’ Home Video, released this June by Matador Records, is insistently analog---right down to its promotional tactics. “When you get a VHS tape in the mail from @lucydacus,” The Alternative tweeted on February 26th, “you find a VHS player and you watch it asap!!!” In the attached video, a disembodied hand pushes the tape into place. The opening bars of Dacus’ single “Thumbs” filter through, made fuzzier and somehow more ethereal by the player’s lo-fi speakers.

The more I learned about the 26-year-old Richmond native’s third album, the more it seemed destined to throw a wrench in my neat internet-centric thesis. The album’s lyrics draw heavily upon Dacus’ childhood journals, prompting critics to declare it “a nostalgic record,” “an exploration of [Dacus’] early memories,” and ”a musical reckoning with her past”. The music video of “Hot & Heavy,” the album’s opener, features Dacus towing around a camcorder and watching grainy home videos on the screen of Richmond’s historic Byrd theater.

But Home Video is most interesting to me when it strains against its own impulses to look backwards---when Dacus’ future and past eddy around, tugged this way and that by the current of the song.  “How will I know / If history repeats itself?” she sings on “First Time,” a rollicking, pop-y track studded with euphoric synths and guitar.

Sometimes a past moment is especially sticky---as in the outro of “Please Stay,” an ode to a suicidal friend that pulses insistently in the (especially crucial) present moment: “But please stay / But please stay / But please stay / But please stay.” “The sense of clarity in situations like that is so profound,” Dacus remarked in an interview with Pitchfork; “like the only thing that matters is that you’re here.” Here, present-tense. The song also stretches and amplifies the possibilities for its addressee’s future: “Change your name / Change your mind / Change your ways / Give them time,” Dacus urges.

Indeed, the one-dimensional, syrupy sheen of “nostalgia” doesn’t do justice to the active probing, excavating, and refashioning that Home Video undertakes. In “Hot & Heavy,” the album’s opener, Dacus’ present-moment embodied experience slips into memory:

Being back here makes me hot in the face,
Hot blood in my pulsing veins
Heavy memories weighing on my brain
Hot and heavy in the basement of your parents’ place

Here, as elsewhere throughout the album, Dacus playfully co-opts antiquated diction: “hot and heavy,”  “goin’ out,” “locking lips.” It’s the linguistic equivalent of an oversized grandpa sweater: cute, when worn on someone whose veneer of cool protects them from giving the impression that they ever really meant it. The song is a wistful reflection on one of Dacus’ friends and a story of personal transformation: “I thought I was writing this song about a friend of mine who used to be super reserved and is now very lively,” Dacus told Pitchfork, “[But] then I felt like I was writing about myself from the perspective of someone I had dated---like watching myself go through the process of learning about the world and being less closed off. Then I realized I was both characters.”

The song’s coming-of-age themes meld well with a straightforward chronological narrative---but, Dacus suggests, there was more to its protagonist at every point in time than others were willing to see. “You were always stronger than people suspected,” she observes: “Underestimated and overprotected.” Perhaps, Dacus suggests, it’s the familiar hometown-return script that enables these judgments---this retroactive seeing---to take place.

In “Thumbs,” which recounts a tense meetup between Dacus, her friend, and her friend’s abusive father, time and sequence pose a problem to Dacus’ conception of the world:

I love your eyes
And he has them
But you have his
‘Cause he was first

When Dacus lands on a solution, it’s a violent, retributive fantasy, situated outside of lived time altogether: “I imagine my thumbs on the irises / Pressing in until they burst.” The song’s confessional bubble is similarly “burst” by Dacus’ clever punning: “Bound to him by blood, but baby, it’s all relative.” It’s as though we can feel her winking at us, gazing sideways at her audience as she self-consciously excavates the moment for her art.

In all of the above senses, Home Video subtly collapses and meddles with time in a way that may in fact be especially characteristic of the internet age. Modern technology has enabled us to bend and squeeze time to our will: we get groceries, books, and bike shorts delivered at the click of a button; we scroll through an acquaintance’s Facebook timeline to watch years of their life unravel in mere minutes. When we face an uncomfortable emotion in the present moment, escape into a timeless, spaceless world is only a social media app away.

Even Dacus’ VHS tape is, in the end, a digital advertising strategy: no matter how analog the object, it will be shared and propagated over social media. It also begs the question: whose nostalgia, and for what? Dacus was born in 1995; by the early 2000s, when she (and her fans) would have been old enough to remember listening to music, analog audio and video equipment were on their way out. Instead, the strategy taps into music critics’ nostalgia---and our culture’s broader fascination with all things old.

What I took away from Home Video was a lesson in how to use nostalgia generously; to look back at our mistakes and old embarrassments with a gentle eye and the knowledge that it did, after all, pass---that, as Dacus sings in “First Time,” “You can’t feel it for the first time a second time.” Home Video is an especially beautiful way to learn to shed our pandemic time-warp goggles---our nostalgia for a pre-lockdown past and insistent fixation on a future that will be brighter, lighter, anything other than this.