My Favorite Album of All Time: Natural Born Losers
nicole dollanganger's land of soft hardcore
I first discovered Nicole Dollanganger in an article naming her “Grimes’ dark and dreamy protégé,” about two years. The photo they used captured her kneeling in a childhood bedroom, reading Playgirl, with Peter Steele of Type O Negative plastered on the cover. She’s doll-like, innocent, and horrifying. Children’s toys are littered throughout her pale pink room and candles with Jesus’ face on them are everywhere.
It wasn’t until recently that I started listening to Natural Born Losers.
I found "Angels of Porn II" first, rather accidentally, on Spotify. I was curious about the masked person on its pink cover. Within the first 30 seconds of the song, I was invested. The most beautifully high-pitched, angelic voice was singing about the horrors of eating disorders, depression, and femininity. The contrast between her child-like tone and dark lyrics reveals its own wronged, tormented world, and while it’s easy to be unnerved, it’s even easier to find her tragedy familiar.
I felt like all the horror movies I’d seen on TV had suddenly become empty and tacky because this was real, raw hell in the voice of a delicate, morbid girl.
"Angels of Porn II" is an anthem of teenage captivity. To be denounced a prisoner by your very mind, to be sick in too many ways to realize, yet having just enough capacity to understand you’re destined for something godless, probably hell. Letting each illness consume you until you’re reduced to a “crying daughter.” Starving and dying in one timeless bedroom. The death of your conscious, the formation of a real corrupt angel. You’re an angel of porn because heaven banished you and it’s hard to be good.
“Grow up weak or grow up tough” repeats in "Alligator Blood" as Dollanganger describes the termination of her adolescence. In the beginning, she’s drinking blood and making necklaces. Soon, an unnamed man holds her head and forces her to watch him slaughter alligators in the swamp she plays in. The alligator killer is likely a father figure, given the parental nature of his wording, encouraging her to “grow up.” The man even submerges her head “a little too long” in the swamp to make her unbreakable, his perfect survivor. Dollanganger ends with, “I fucked the soul of the south but it crucified me.”
In order to try to understand Nicole Dollanganger, you have to understand her “sickness of poacher’s pride” from "Poacher’s Pride." She mentions shooting and starving an angel, which is essentially her, calling herself a “pound of flesh.” Hell then eventually comes and claims her soulless form, as she watches the most innocent, deserving sides of herself suffer from her doing. The most twisted part being the lack of empathy or care she feels about watching her kill herself. Dollanganger even compares her body to Jesus Christ on a cross, and yet she remains a poacher of her angelic body, fallen ill to her sickness, always aware of her wrongdoings. She doesn’t even cry when she shoots herself, if anything she experiences pride as a killer of angels, a sickness that’ll bind her to hell.
"Mean" has some of my favorite lyrics. The song is a reminder of Dollanganger’s relationship with the men in her life, who assume she’s weaker than she knows she is. “I like it when it hurts like hell. There’s nothing you could do to me I wouldn’t do to myself.” Sometimes men believe she’ll hate them for what they do to her, but Nicole Dollanganger couldn’t ever hate anybody more than herself. Relating back to "Angels of Porn II" when she compares fingers being stuck down her throat to her own fingers forcing herself to purge, there’s a powerful, appalling union of sexual references and the experiences of an eating disorder. "Mean" feels like an eerie reminder. Never expect to hurt someone more than they love watching themselves toy with the pain of death. Never expect an angel to not be mean.
Throughout Natural Born Losers, Nicole Dollanganger reminds herself of the judgement she’ll one day experience. She’s coming to terms with the final price she’ll have to pay for all the sins she’s committed, the power of “your god” as she sings in "Executioner."
The attempted execution of Nicole Dollanganger is described like a warning from Dollanganger to herself. “Baby you have to pay in this way or another. Whether you can cry or not.” She hopes in the darkness of execution she’ll never see the man who eventually kills her.
"American Tradition" is a story of loss and failure. A man wants to become strong, successful, like his father. He’s playing dangerous games with her, games that end up killing Dollanganger. He doesn’t notice her death, and takes more pride in the arbitrary trophies and medals decorated throughout his room, still holding onto impossible dreams. Both Nicole Dollanganger and the man used to be great, a hockey player and a figure skater. Now they’re sleeping on floors, convincing themselves they’re still winners. While she’s in his arms, though, “it’s no good.” The air feels restless and unspokenly defeated. Her man wears a gold chain, like somehow he’s still gold.
The two of them are essences of American tradition, collasped legacies and once seemingly exceptional winners. The difference between Dollanganger and her hockey player man is that he’ll always lie to himself, pretending he’s still a champion. He’ll continue stalely decorating the same TV dinner rooms. He’ll wear the worn gold chain and leave all the trophies out for girls like Nicole Dollanganger to see. He’ll die convinced he’s a winner, and she’ll die a victim to his negligence.
In "You’re So Cool," trophies are replaced by guns. A cool person, one with eyes “like the Magic 8-Ball” tells her that when she’s good, she’s really good, but when she's bad, she’s so much better. Nicole Dollanganger carries both the good and the bad equally, but cool men like reminding her that they like her better bad. Near the end of the song, a man’s voice merges with Dollanganger’s, lowly singing with her.
Nobody can break her heart, it’s “made of blood and tar.” She can see the future when she’s with him. Finally, Nicole Dollanganger’s met another angel like herself. There’s no execution or starvation, just a life beyond. “And I see the future and there’s no death ‘cause you and I, we’re angels.” Nicole Dollanganger is undeathable.
Natural Born Losers is an invitation to understand a world of corrupted survival, to be naturally prone to and close with mental illness. It’s a community of neglected and beautifully tormented angels.