By Lily Partridge
Words to Live For: Teya Logos and the 6 Billion Majority of Oppressed Lives.
Teya Logos is an artist doubtful to break any major headlines, make any big albums, have any chance at being well-known in a majority of people’s lives. Why is this, do we think? The nature of her music, while unusual, is certainly not anything past things that have become mainstream before. There are huge numbers of artists who create songs that push past the boundaries of tolerable noise, use strong sampling and synthesizers, and they can get popular, so why not Teya Logos?
It’s really possible to state in one sentence. She is a theory-reading, Marxist-Leninist, transgender woman from the Phillipines, and all of these things she does not hold back on making clear in her music.
It’s sort of an explosion of words and ideas isn’t it? It strikes the mind with all sorts of thoughts and contradictions. Things like, ‘Well Sartre was a Marxist wasn’t he? If he can get popular how should that keep her from getting there too?’, or ‘100gecs is ½ a transgender artist, and they’ve reached huge success, why couldn’t the same happen for Teya Logos?’
Well, the difference between Teya Logos and Sartre is that one is a young transgender woman from a the colnized Phillipines, and the other is white man from a country that borders the Phillipines’ colonizer. The difference between Teya Logos and 100gecs is that 100gecs made a song called ‘Stupid Horse’ which is about the singer betting all of their money on a losing horse at a racetrack and becoming bankrupt, and Teya Logos made a song called ‘N.Y.P.D.’ where the picture on the album cover is a toilet bowl.
I’d like to note that I don’t mean this comparison to say 100gecs should be less respected than other artists, simply that their music is focused on a different kind of medium, and in the public sphere, Teya Logos’ music just cannot compete. It is apparent in her music and remixes that you should understand messages of decolonization and anti-authoritarianism, and if you don’t already, this music will use the words to try and convince you.
Where Teya Logos’ music is now, though, requires an understanding of the conditions that brought her to believe in the ideas she holds. Her music, which speaks most often to ideas of decolonization, is about a realization of how to think about yourself and your own body when living as a colonized person, while highlighting the perspectives of colonizers who have brought global history to its current point. She made a post on Instagram on July 20, 2021, for the birthday of Frantz Fanon, author of “The Wretched of the Earth”, an extremely powerful book about the context and creation of colonies, and the power colonized peoples have to decolonize themselves and reclaim their culture, in which she writes that Fanon was “a big reason why i learned to love myself as a filipino and most importantly my people.” Fanon’s writings helped Teya Logos come to an understanding about herself as not a colonial object but a person with power in her own life, and she seeks to spread this idea as intensely as she can.
This intensity is a vital component to her music. It leaves no questions and does not pull any punches. Most notably her song “FUCK THE WEST (KLUB ANTHEM FOR THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH)” draws directly from Fanon’s book, sampling a reading of the line “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples.” The same song uses samples from the documentary Hearts and Minds, which sought to chronicle to United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. In particular, she samples a quote from an American war general, William Westmoreland, who claims “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as the Westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient.” Teya Logos then immediately follows this sample with another from the same documentary, that of the mournful cries of a Vietnamese child, who is kneeled over a grave and a picture of man. The idea here is unmistakable, and it is clearly remarked over and over again with her samples. It is an acknowledgement of the colonial process of the past centuries, and a refusal to play the game of the colonizers any longer. Teya Logos music, without any doubt, promotes violence against colonizers, for the purpose of freeing oppressed peoples from their grasp.
And this is not unique only to this song, Teya Logos incorporates this idea into her work as much as she can. In a mix she made for an event being held by Club Matryoshka, a virtual club inside of the video game Minecraft, she begins with the same sample from William Westmoreland to set the idea, and then brings in numerous more samples to say the same thing as before, even so directly as to include another Fanon line, “Decolonization is always violent”. Not only is this message consistent, but she spreads it far and wide. She includes it in the live sets she does for musical events and fundraisers, which really shows not just how important the message is to her, but also how much she understands that the community she shares it with should be a place that is ready and willing to accept it.
Teya Logos’ music came to this point in part through a recognition of her identity as a transgender person as well. On January 30, 2021, the day of the death of SOPHIE, a monumental figure in the realm of queer electronic music, she made an Instagram post in mourning and celebration of her life, where she says “thank u for giving me infinite guidance and inspiration to my transness and art. u were the soundtrack to some of my brightest moments. i dont know where id b without u showing me that my transness can be so unapologetically proud and different and still shine so brightly in this world.” Not only did Teya Logos find a way to break from a negative self-perception based on their ethnicity, but through SOPHIE was able to do the same through their gender.
These moments result in where her music is now. In the community of transfeminine and queer electronic music creators she has found ways to celebrate all aspects of her identity in a way that is unreproduceable. This will never get her famous, like I said before, since it is too distasteful for likely far too many people, but her music is not for that kind of reception. It is made to be powerful, inspirational, and, perhaps most importantly, a banger at clubs.