On “Lime Green Jheri Curl,” Proper. (FKA Great Wight) lead singer Erik Garlington tells a story about his white friends who “say the n-word more than me, and it’s okay cause they’re blacker than me.” The feeling of being accepted was enough for him to ignore, perhaps even accept, acts of racism from his friends, so long as he had friends to even call his own. The story ends with Garlington inviting them to his birthday party, except none of them showed up. He hasn’t celebrated a birthday since.
Proper.’s incredible sophomore album, I Spent the Winter Writing Songs About Getting Better, continues their streak as unapologetic, intersectional afropunks who refuse to compromise their solidarity for anyone — a point they reiterate throughout the album’s 47-minute runtime. In fact, by the time you reach the album’s midpoint interlude, “New Years Resolutions,” Proper. lay out a list of ultimatums for people who listen to their work. In unison, they chant, “If your feminism isn’t intersectional/ We don’t want it!/ If only cisgendered Black lives matter to you/ We don’t want it!/ If you’re only an ally on a keyboard/ We don’t want it!/ We don’t fucking want it!”
If it feels like Proper. are just proselytizing virtue signalers, let them tell you about their experiences as Black artists in white-dominated spaces, starting with why they changed their name to Proper. in the first place:
Or the things people have compared them to:
Proper. are more than justified in telling you for an entire album to stop being racist, but they don’t stop there. A crucial aspect of Proper.’s brand of punk is their emphasis on intersectionality, and there is a genius in the way they use common themes in emo music to give listeners an introduction to intersectional theory — a sort of Women, Race & Class, as told by leftist emos of color.
For me, the fullness of Proper.’s ideology can be found on three specific tracks: “Bragging Rights,” the aforementioned “Lime Green Jheri Curl,” and “Fucking Disgusting.” On the surface, these tracks discuss themes of self-determination, depression, and sex and intimacy; but dig a little deeper and you’ll find Proper. are using these prevalent topics in emo to explore something even more substantial.
Bragging Rights
The self-determined anthem from someone who doesn’t always feel confident enough to demonstrate self-determination is a staple in emo: small town/suburban kids hellbent on getting out of their shitty hometowns to play music with their best friends. But what Proper. do on “Bragging Rights” is take that premise and demonstrate what’s at stake for young Black kids in this position.
For Garlington, pursuing his art means a life of escaping the life Black people are compelled to under a capitalist system built on their enslavement. Garlington knows all too well how this country sees Black bodies: expendable, exploitable labor. He sings, “I have to work twice as hard to get half of what my white counterparts get/ So I’ll apply that to what I want/ Can’t do a 9-5 or join the military industrial complex.” If his life as a Black man is already seen as innately disgraceful, why not pursue the one thing that brings him solace and hope in this racist country?
But he doesn’t stop there. If he feels the way he does, existing in these spaces as a person of color, surely he isn’t alone. Later in the verse he sings, “There could be someone who looks just like me/ That needs to hear they’re not alone, or at least they don’t have to be.” I don’t know if I’ve ever heard an emo track that confronts these themes from this perspective, and this should not be the case. But hey, racism.
Lime Green Jheri Curl
A song that, ostensibly, is an anthem for adolescents struggling with self-acceptance — which it is — “Lime Green Jheri Curl” does something even more profound: it’s a journey through the psyche of a Black kid who can’t seem to fit in, and how his interactions with his family and peers drive him to depression and self-loathing. Emo has always worn its heart on its sleeve, candidly discussing issues like mental health, but Proper.’s place in this world allows them to expound on a component not often seen in the genre: generational racial self-loathing. This song hit me as a biracial Chicano who has spent most of his life in white spaces. My dad was a Chicano who resented being Chicano, which meant we weren’t taught to be proud of being Chicano. I grew up as a kid with brown skin with little to no pride or understanding of my culture.
Despite this, that didn’t stop my white friends from being the authority on how I should define myself. If they needed to prove they weren’t racist, I was their token of racial solidarity, but if they needed to make sure I was kept in my place, I wasn’t a “real Mexican.” This has an effect on a young brown kid who wants to simply be. We aren’t granted this privilege. Our lives under capitalism as people of color are spent performing for white people, whether it be through tokenizing ourselves or erasing ourselves entirely by way of assimilation. Consider Garlington’s story about his white friends, a group of people he lets get away with racism in order to be accepted. Earlier in the song, Garlington sings about how his alternative interests put him at odds with other Black kids: too white for the Black kids, too Black for the white kids. Garlington is having an identity crisis as a kid due to the racist construct of racial performance. No matter what he does, he will always be too Black for white society, too white for his Black peers.
He spends the first choruses asking, “Did I do something wrong?/ Am I broken?/ Am I an alien?/ Will I ever find where I belong?” It’s only when Garlington is able to realize that he’s internalized this racist construct that he can finally push back and begin his journey on the path of self-acceptance and self-love. Almost defiantly, he roars on the final chorus, “I am strong enough!/ I am smart enough!/ I am likable!/ I will forge my own path from now on!”
Fucking Disgusting
This isn’t a normal song about late-night yearning for physical affection: it’s a song about sexual liberation, sex work solidarity, and rejection of the gender binary. “Fucking Disgusting” spends its three verses deconstructing the patriarchal framework that defines our culture’s relationship to sex and intimacy. Verse one tackles sex as a male-centered act: “What do you call a guy who doesn’t give but expects to get head (you don’t!);” verse two focuses on destigmatizing sex work and the workers who make up the industry: “Doesn’t matter if you’ve been with two at the same time or if you do it for money/ A job’s a job, we all got bills to pay for/ All that matters is if there’s room for one more;” and verse three simply calls bullshit on the gender binary: “No concerns what you identify as/ If you identify at all/ Transitioning or not, my only concern is that you’ll stay for one more glass.”
“Fucking Disgusting” is a song that asks a simple question: Who is sex for? Its answer forces the listener to consider the perspectives of voices that have been ignored and rejected by a system marked by homophobia, transphobia, and the criminalization of sex work. The track asks its listener to simply check their blindspots, to evaluate the areas where they have been guilty of perpetuating harmful stigmas toward marginalized people.
However, the song never treads into moral superiority or a sense of self-righteousness. In fact, it’s a song of celebration and freedom. After Proper. make space for voices and identities rejected by mainstream society, they come together as a group, inviting everyone in for a rendition of the chorus of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” but within the context of the song, it redefines our conception of who the Dancing Queen is: it’s the trans woman, it’s the sex worker, it’s the non-binary person, and it’s everyone who exist in these beautiful, diverse spaces of gender and sexuality.
The passion and unabashed message of solidarity in Proper.’s brand of emo show they are a band set on rethinking what emo is and who it is for. If we just listen, maybe Proper. will show both emo and each of us how to be people who extend that same solidarity to those still oppressed and on the margins of American society. Like they tell us on “Curtain’s Down! Throw in the Towel!” “But if one person connects to just one thing I say/ Then that’s enough for me, cause we’re not just here to get paid.”
Sounds of Culture 
holy shit this is trash music who listens to this
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I disagree, but okay.
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