‘The Deep Blue Okay’: Self Esteem’s feminist masterpiece that 2025 needed
When Self Esteem released her latest album in April this year, it was clear from the very first second that it was a reckoning to feminist ideology and all the struggles and storms that come with it. But although A Complicated Woman, on the face of it, seems like a record rooted in identity politics and dark introspection, there is an absolute joy which emerges from its midst. After all, this was meant as not just a reckoning of femininity, but a celebration of it.
However, this is far from saying that the album tries to find a resolution to the frequent messiness of womanhood or attempts to present it in a way that is somehow palatable to a conclusion. Instead, by the time A Complicated Woman reaches its end in the form of ‘The Deep Blue Okay’, it’s as if all caution has been thrown to the wind as we learn to accept life in all its ugly, unconventional, stubborn ways, making it exactly the feminist masterpiece that 2025 had been crying out for.
Indeed, simply going off the title of the song alone, there’s an unashamed embracing of just staying where you are, comfortably, not trying to be either too much or too little. Because that’s the thing—feminism is so deeply rooted in bettering oneself and never striving for second best, which is all well and good, but also exhausting. Sometimes being your unapologetic self in the middle of it all is more than enough.
The basic tenet is that most women are not perfect visions of beauty or productivity or male pleasure. Real life is indeed much more convoluted than that, and although in some ways it might be ideal to be settled with a home, partner, kids, and stable career before you reach the age of 30, in some ways, it can be seen as the easy way out.
What Self Esteem communicates through the essence of ‘The Deep Blue Okay’ is that there is simply too much colour and life in the world to box yourself into conformity before the peak of your years have even begun. “And I’m alone, at least for now/ ‘Cause I can never dumb myself down / I just know way too much, to ever fall in love / But the idea’s good, I see where you’re all coming from,” she sings in the chorus, wrestling with the idea of romance without ever coming to a neat conclusion.
In many ways, it’s the exact message that feminism needs in 2025 more than ever. At least in a musical sense, we’re saturated in a market of blonde bombshells, tiny bodies, and heterosexual romance that it feels almost against the rulebook to follow anything but that path. Yet from the sentiments of ‘The Deep Blue Okay’, with all its imagery of nudging out friends and crashing weddings, the figure of womanhood is freed from the shackles of having to constantly improve, and the focus is on just existing.
In a social and political climate that has placed women’s rights and places in the world largely under threat, it’s almost a knee-jerk reaction to think that feminism must focus all its fire on conquering the next mountain thrown at us. But as Self Esteem puts it herself, “But I know that at the top is where the next hill starts”, and eventually, the energy wears thin. Sometimes we need to stop, take stock, and be our messy selves. Raging against the light can wait another day, because, for now, we’re perfectly fine as we are.
