Perfume Genius's second record, Put Your Back N 2 It, was released last week after some controversy surrounding the video advertisement, excerpted from the video for "Hood." YouTube and Google claimed was not “family-safe,” explaining that the two shirtless men hugging (Mike Hadreas a.k.a. Perfume Genius & porn star Arpad Miklos) gave an “overall feeling…of a more adult nature.” More than what? Nature becomes more adult. We learn that existence is to differ. Love is dark. We have 2 put our bax n2 it.

“The hands of God were bigger than Grandpa’s eyes / But still you broke the elastic on your waist […] The love you feel is strong / The love you feel is stronger / I will take the dark part / of your heart into my heart / I will take the dark part / of your heart into my heart”

—Perfume Genius “Dark Parts,” from new record, Put Your Back N 2 It, released last Tuesday on Matador

“The magical (such as it can really be called without lexical muse) ascendancy of night and of the dark, the fear of darkness also probably derive from the threat they pose to the organism/environment…darkness is not the mere absence of light; it has some positive quality. Whereas bright space disappears, giving way to the material concreteness of objects, darkness is ‘thick’; it directly touches a person, enfolds, penetrates, and even passes through him.”

—Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychaesthenia,” 1937 (collected in The Edge of Surrealism)

 “To exist is to differ…identity is a minimum and, hence, a type of difference, a very rare type at that, in the same way as rest is a type of movement and the circle is a type of ellipse. To begin with some primordial identity implies at the origin a prodigiously unlikely singularity, or else the obscure mystery of one simple being then dividing for no special reason.”

—Gabriel Tarde, Monadology and Sociology, 1895 

Artist: Perfume Genius Album: Put Your Back N 2 It

"Dark Parts" Studio Recording

Perfume Genius performs music from his record Put Your Back N 2 It at Zebulon in NYC and talks about writing uncensored love songs as a gay artist.

Interview with Perfume Genius and "Dark Parts" live performance

Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the lavalamp, gaslight, candlelight, campfire, torch, sometimes even the starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The form of the column strives to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” Each week you will find here some citational constellation, offered with astonishment and without comment, that can serve as an end in itself, dinner party fodder, or an occasion for further thought or writing. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."

Image (Silver Laced Polish Chicken): 4chan.