Masochism in hearing - Mission of Burma

Masochism: –noun

1. Psychiatry . the condition in which sexual gratification depends on suffering, physical pain, and humiliation.

2. gratification gained from pain, deprivation, degradation, etc., inflicted or imposed on oneself, either as a result of one's own actions or the actions of others, especially the tendency to seek this form of gratification.

3. the act of turning one's destructive tendencies inward or upon oneself.

The lyrics of "Mica" are about a girl celebrating a kind of regression, relishing a rejection of the outside world for an internal one, a psychological breakdown where she could "sleep for days...[like] a mineral deposit, a ball of mica inside a rock." The story is told through dissonant "melody...complex [and] fragmentary," which reflects the emotional honesty and inner conflicts of the girl (Emancipation 300). The thesis is the normative expectations of the outside world, that one must manage "the whistles; the radio; the screams" (Mica); the antithesis is the girl's masochistic rejection of this notion, and the desire to regress into a fetal, catatonic state; the synthesis is co-opting nature as an example of removal, rage solidified into something beautiful and naturally occurring, like a mineral deposit; something she could "love" (Mica lines 9-11). There is irony in the girl rejecting the normative dissonance of the outside world, the "value of taste in the present," including "radio" which she equates to "whistles [and] screams" (Fetish 280; Mica lines 13-15). Hers is an existentialist response to an absurd world. By having her story presented in a post-punk song, which is itself dissonant, this demonstrates that dissonance is relative to itself.

"Masochism in hearing is not only defined by self surrender and pseudo-pleasure through identification with power. Underlying it is the knowledge that the security of shelter under the ruling condition is a provisional one, that it is only a respite, and that eventually everything must collapse. Even in self-surrender one is not good in his own eyes; in his enjoyment one feels that he is simultaneously betraying the possible and being betrayed by the existent. Regressive listening is always ready to degenerate in to rage. If one knows he is basically marking time, the rage is directed primarily against everything which could disavow the modernity of being with-it and up-to-date and reveal how little has in fact changed" (Adorno, Fetish Character).

First she says

Why mince modes?

If you feel like a patient why not dress like one?

Then she says

Why can’t I sleep

Between icy wet white sheets for three days

And sink down deeper than dreams

Oh, I’d love that

I’d be a mineral deposit

A ball of mica inside a rock

I’d be a mineral deposit

A ball of mica inside a rock

Then there’d be no whistles

No radios

No screams

What could I say to that?