The philosophy book that helps to decode the lore of Ethel Cain
Ethel Cain allows you in as deep as you want to go. As Hayden Silas Anhedönia began crafting the world of her artistic character, it transpired into one that operates on a range of different levels.
Sure, you can just listen to the songs and enjoy them and have that be all. But if you want to, you can deep dive into a whole world of characters, storylines, lore and easter eggs.
If you want to, you can deep dive into a whole list of movies to watch as Anhedönia routinely shares her cinematic inspirations, including the image of David Lynch or dark horror movies like August Underground. You can also peek at a reading list, especially around the release of her complex project, Perverts, where she has let fans in on the process of crafting the release by sharing a series of books that inspired her.
Some of them were fiction, influencing the stories told on the release, such as Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff and his study of sociopaths, or Kier-La Janisse’s House of Psychotic Women, which led directly to her own track of the same name. But a lot of the time, it’s more intellectual than that. While the Ethel Cain discography can be one to just hit play on and enjoy, it can also be a whole philosophy course if you want it to be.
If there had to be one essential text on the Cain reading list, it would likely be Simulacra and Simulation, a 1981 philosophical treatise by Jean Baudrillard. In it, he argues that reality does not exist; it is simply a series of signs, symbols, and images that make up meaning.
Let me make it even simpler. Think of the favour of blue raspberry. We see fizzy drinks labelled with it all the time, but there is no blue raspberry; it does not exist. Instead, it’s simply the idea of a fruit flavour, or a simulacrum of how a real fruit tastes. Or think of Disneyland. Disneyland doesn’t exist. Instead, you’re walking around this place made up of countless other things that also don’t exist—characters and settings from fictional movies. In Baudrillard’s argument, that’s what the whole world is like.
Like with any philosophy, it’s a mind-boggler. It asks to abandon any solid hold we might have on the world to turn to theories instead, and clearly, that’s something Anhedönia loves doing as Preacher’s Daughter, really, is a whole simulacrum.
Ethel Cain does not exist, none of the characters sung of in that album exist, and that story did not happen. But still, it has a real-world impact and value, as those made-up things lead to emotions that real people can connect to. Or, in Anhedönia’s case, the character of Ethel Cain and her world connect closely to her lived experience. It is almost a fictional game she plays life events and emotions out through, considering Cain to be a kind of alternate ending for her own life.
Connecting this to Baudrillard’s theory, the idea of simulacrum is the idea that these made up things and the way we experience them, which is also made up in our minds, is reality, because it becomes far more real than anything else, because everything is littered with signs and symbols and meaning we have made up—following me? You’d be excused if you’re not.
Anhedönia took it further. While Baudrillard’s text was the core that inspired her, the release of Perverts saw her craft her own theory, writing out her own 12 pillars of the simulacrum that not only inspire the whole project but are laid out, one by one, on ‘Pulldrone’.
In her theory, there are Apathy, Disruption, Curiosity, Assimilation, Aggrandisation, Delineation, Perversion, Resentment, Separation, Degradation, Annihilation, and Desolation, drawn out as a kind of path of touchstones through which to try and experience what is real.
For the artist, learning about it all was less a brain-rattling confusion, and more a saving grace dose of clarity. “The concept of simulacrum just gripped me immediately because it merged into my already existing hatred of this rapidly developing cycle of life and reality as we know it flowing into the ether of the internet and back out again, the same but different somehow,” she explained.
“I found myself unable to experience life as it comes because I’m filtering it through the media I’ve consumed and considering it wrong when it doesn’t match.”
Wanting to escape that feedback loop, this theory was less of a way to do that, and more simply a way of understanding and accepting that it’s impossible, as she wrote, “All the while, I feel helpless to stop it. I do my drugs and I have my orgasms and I seek out my gods, and I started wondering if I came back from it all different each time. I hate change, but I need change, and all the while, change happened and continued to happen completely apathetic to my feelings towards it, because in the grand scheme of things, I am nothing.”
It’s a gloomy thought mixed with extreme introspection and intellectualisation, and as in the mind of Ethel Cain, it lands back here with theory: “Simulacrum became a spiritual vehicle for my own personal ouroboros”.
