Cindy Lee

A month or two ago, a reasonably underground artist by the name of Cindy Lee put out a new album called Diamond Jubilee. There was not necessarily a lot of hype ahead of this album’s release; I might have been vaguely aware of previous Cindy Lee records but was pretty sure it was the name of a half-polished up-and-coming singer-songwriter in the vein of, oh, Mitski, I suppose. Those records were actually released by Patrick Flegel, formerly of the Calgary punk band Women, who I remember mostly for their having broken up after an on-stage intra-band fist fight. What I didn’t know is that years later, Matt Flegel—Patrick’s brother and bandmate—told BBC 6 the fight had been between Patrick and the other men in Women. This is a deliriously loaded image, of course.

(Patrick) Flegel posted Diamond Jubilee as a free download on their bootleg Geocities page, with a pay-what-you-want suggested donation of $30 CAD, sent via Paypal to a Proton email address. They also listed the entire 32-song, two-hour album as one long, unbroken Youtube video. It’s not streaming anywhere else; technically speaking, it’s not for sale anywhere. It would be easy, I guess, to think of this as some canny attention-getting scheme, but, at least until April, Cindy Lee wasn’t well known enough for an apophatic marketing strategy to work. "I think everyone should take their music off streaming platforms," they said in an interview last year. "Not even strike, just take it off." Diamond Jubilee's unusual release doesn't scan as protest against abysmal streaming rates and the bloated mechanisms of even the indie music industry, if we still want to call it that. It seems more like a method of retaining control and ownership, and the product of an unwillingness to give oneself away—not a strike, just another way of doing things. 

It didn’t really work. Diamond Jubliee was released on March 29. Less than a week later, it was being passed around rapidly; two people whose taste and good sense I trust texted me the Youtube link within a day of one another. A week or so after that, Pitchfork ran Andy Cush’s glowing, deeply felt, and penetrating review of the album, which posted with a 9.1 score, the highest of any record since Fiona Apple’s 10 in 2020, and the highest by a non-major-label artist since Yves Tumor’s 9.1 in 2018 (don’t quote me on the latter). Coming as it did in the long wake of Pitchfork’s winter layoffs and absorption into GQ, Diamond Jubilee was received as a throwback to an era in which a Pitchfork review could break a band (something that never stopped being true but did stop being remarkable). Andy’s review led to a whole bunch of writing, some good, some boring, all of it as wrapped up in the narrative Flegel had tried very hard not to write. “Cindy Lee Might Be The Future of Music” (the future of music!) GQ butted in. 

It seemed to me like a very strange reaction for music that sounds the way Diamond Jubilee sounds, which is: like a lot of respectably (but not breathlessly) reviewed indie rock albums of the past few decades. For as long as I’ve been paying attention to underground music, there’s been a fetish for records that sound like they were made on mid-level gear in the mid-60s, sometime between Beatles for Sale and Help! If you grew up paying attention to indie rock, a lot of Diamond Jubilee sounds familiar: girly harmonies, a heavily atmospheric soundstage that seems to have been covered with a plastic bag, minimal drumming, McCartneyish bass kept high in the mix, crinkling guitars, reverb thick enough to inhale. Occasionally, Flegel sings like Marc Bolan stuck in the bottom of a well and plays like the rest of T. Rex feeding their fey glam through an Apple IIe. There are long tone exercises that slowly coalesce into softly twirling ballads. It sounds like it could have come out at any point in the 21st century, despite the ways it both invokes and evokes music that was made in the middle of the 20th. If you’ve read anything about this album, and I assume you have, you’ve heard it called “hypnagogic pop,” named for the liminal state between sleep and waking life that was most famously practiced by Tucker Carlson guest Ariel Pink. 

The other thing you’ve probably read is that Cindy Lee is Flegel’s “drag persona.” This appears to be language they’ve used to describe it, and while I support their right to self-identify, I have to confess that I don’t understand the use of the term here. On stage, Flegel is, respectfully, gorgeous. They know how to wear a shiny go-go dress, they can whisk a perfect cat-eye, they look at ease and peaceful in a fur coat. There is none of the exaggeration and bombast we associate with drag; Flegel presents Cindy Lee as a femme of high taste, which means their beauty is present and obvious and a shade past natural, the same way most beautiful women present themselves. The writer Stephanie Brown, taking a note from Judith Butler’s very famous argument that gender is a performance, suggests that women who enact femininity are actively producing their gender in a way that masculine men are not. Masculinity, she writes, is “coterminous with the male anatomical body,” meaning simply that a dude doesn’t really have to do anything to look like an acceptable dude. Conversely, you can’t simply be feminine. A man who lets himself go will naturally grow a beard; he’ll become more manly. A woman who lets herself go will grow hair on her legs and under her arms and maybe on her upper lip; she’ll become more manly. When women do the things that make them appear feminine, and thus "normal" for their gender—plucking eyebrows, carefully applying mascara, sticking with a skincare routine, pairing a necklace to a purse, wearing clothes that make you feel good but won’t get you sent home from work—they are producing femininity. Drag, Brown writes, is “overproduction," a surplus whose presence reminds us that being a woman means the face you present to the world is not your natural self. Which is really true of everyone, regardless of gender. This is why drag terrifies people. 

So what is Flegel overproducing? Cindy Lee, as a project, is inseparable from glamor. There is the glamor of Flegel’s stage clothing—the vintage dresses, the careful makeup, the beehive. And there is the glamor we project from the present onto the music of the past they're often working with—the way we tend to think of the world as it’s presented in the music of The Ronettes (as opposed to what we know about Ronnie Spector’s actual life). Thanks to the patina of its production, Diamond Jubilee sometimes sounds like it’s coming to us from down the hallway, like it's being played in an older sister’s bedroom. Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds wrote frequently about the idea of hauntological music, artists whose work was mired in a projected, non-existent past. Cindy Lee's music very much qualifies, but it's not only lost in time. It's lost in space, as well, stuck somewhere between indie rock's retro visions of mid-century pop and the genuine article. And it's lost in the gaps between an idealized version of femininity and the reality of being a woman or femme or in some way feminine.

Accordingly, Diamond Jubilee is an album of middle distances. Everything feels just out of reach—not just beauty or womanhood, but ordered time. Listen to the end of "Dreams of You," how the triumphant march of cello and guitar seems to lose track of the present and stray momentarily off course. Flegel never seems to be standing near the listener, and even when their voice is tracked a bit more cleanly, their steely delivery creates an emotional distance. When I listen to Diamond Jubilee, Flegel feels no nearer to me than Norma-Jean Wofford does when I watch her shimmy along to the Bo Diddley beat in 1965, chunking her rhythm guitar without missing a step. If the album is hauntological, we're only ever seeing Cindy Lee through a web of ghosts.

With distance comes ambiguity. Sometimes, when I listen to Diamond Jubilee, it sounds to me like James Brown has stepped aside to let Lyn Collins sing “The Boss.” At other times, the same moment sounds like Danger Mouse—inert, bland, retro to the point of cliché. Sometimes the same moment sounds like Clinic, a mash of time and space and reverb. Listening to music is about so many things—history, thought, novelty, literature—but it’s mostly about vibes. For me, the view changes, but the vibe through which I see it stays the same. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard music that makes me feel precisely the way Diamond Jubilee does. It reminds me of the memory of a thousand albums that were made to convince people to sashay, none of which I can identify for you. It’s an album that was made for women drifting in shimmering miniskirts and men who keep saying "I can't quite put my finger on it."

Most of the hypnagogic pop and vaporwave artists of the last decade were playing with the frissons of nostalgia, or were using the genre’s aesthetic structure to support an otherwise-cumbersome love of unfashionable styles. Their visions of the past were essentially innocent and welcoming, presented as a refuge from the modern day and an embrace of a kind of knowing naïveté that gave the listener permission to wander the ’80s mall of the soul. It felt good. And it was supposed to. The sinister undercurrent in that music was a projection back from the present, where we’re all too familiar with the rot on the other side of the zanily patterned wall. 

What Flegel is doing with Cindy Lee is more radical. They’re spinning up the vision of beauty and luxury and sophistication that every feminist since Betty Friedan and everyone else since Mad Men has known was built on bullshit, and they’re bringing it just close enough to show it off while keeping it completely out of reach. Diamond Jubilee knows that the past isn’t innocent, and it knows that the images that past shoots off still have the power to compel anyway. It presents a world that never existed but is undeniably alluring. It invokes an image of femininity that it knows it can’t reach, because nobody else has, either. If Flegel presented themself as simply a trans woman, the project would lose its dramatic tension. We would receive her as a retro-ish gal using the cold-soul smirk of Lana Del Rey’s 20th century to haunt the speed-vixen cheek of Amy Winehouse’s 20th century. By framing the project as drag, though, Flegel creates more distance, which in turn deepens the illusion. You know things aren’t what they seem. But you don’t care, do you? 

It's difficult to admit that you desire beauty. It's more difficult to imagine it for yourself. It's magical to have a vision in your head of what you might become if you were ever to get it. But it's impossible to forget the effects of your own history, even as you unlearn them.

I’ve kept my distance long enough. When I listen to Diamond Jubilee, I feel at ease with being a trans woman in a way that I usually don’t. Typically, I am haunted by the idea that, no matter how my transition develops, and no matter who I become, I will always have the 37 years I lived as a man somewhere within me. And I wonder if that means that I’ll never feel at home. A doctor told me that as I feminize my voice, it will never actually change and become fully natural. It will feel like speaking a second language fluently. I’m conscious of the fact that people who emigrate to a country and learn a new language sometimes forget how to speak the old one. But they’re still aware that they once spoke it, and that it came to them effortlessly. 

The scrim through which we see Diamond Jubilee, the deep distance that increases the displaced, haunted feeling of the album, is also simply what dysphoria feels like to me. Natural, fluent womanhood being spoken in an adjacent room with no door. I don’t know if Flegel experiences dysphoria—I don’t know if they even consider themself trans, and not all trans people go through dysphoria anyway—but when I sit with the album’s simultaneous existential heartbreak and willingness to sway pleasantly through that heartbreak, I feel not necessarily empowered or inspired or like I’ll make it through to the other side, but instead like the entire experience might be something more like a dream. I feel like I can lie down and let my breath slow in the space between the reality of myself today and the beautiful vision of who I might become.

Italo Calvino writes, “If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint light in the distance.” “We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire,” Rebecca Solnit answers. Then she wonders “if you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed.” 

Being transgender means being in a between state whose borders you never really reach. I will always dance with a person whose face I can’t quite see. 

I didn't like Diamond Jubilee for a while. Over the last decade, I’ve become tired of the idealization of the 1960s, of girl groups, of Brian Wilson, of garage bands, of feedback, of little false starts, of glory days. I am tired of watching people hunt for the many little moments that are meant to signify a song or an artist’s authenticity, and thus their own. It’s never been clear to me how the belief in a moment in which music was purer, or realer, is any different from a belief in a time when American life was purer, or simpler. 

But chasing my own delusions has brought me closer to myself. They aren’t rooted in the same things, but they perform the same function. I am constantly in search of a lost record from the 1990s, something loud but melodic, edgy but playful, cute but serious, girlish and powerful. I tell myself that if I can find that record and play it enough, it will coax from within me a secret clove-smoking woman who went to Lollapalooza in 1994. I have played so many records that meet this description. It’s still 2024, and I still didn’t see Velocity Girl in high school. I usually don’t know that it’s unrealistic to expect myself to have had experiences it is impossible for me to have had.

It took me a long time to find a way in to Diamond Jubilee. It unnerved me. It still does. Flegel’s voice sometimes stretches into a Maybelle Carter hoot, and sometimes it coos. I hear some affectless male post-punk singing every now and then. Mostly it sits somewhere between male and female, which is where it sounds richest and most natural. Flegel’s voice is the clearest articulation we have of Cindy Lee, the closest we get to experiencing Cindy Lee as a real person. The portrait is still blurry. But what I could see was disconcerting—it is still disconcerting—it is becoming a pleasure to be disconcerted—by how poised Cindy Lee is in this transitional world. They seem perfectly composed.

Merci beaucoup to Jeremy for asking me to write abt this record and asking kind and thoughtful questions about my experience. Merci beaucoup to Nate for also sending me the album and listening to me talk about being a trans music critic.

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