Premiere: Jessie Hyde shatters past expectations with new song, ‘Perpetuate’
The singer-songwriter learns to get go of archaic beliefs.
Most generations cycle in much the same way. Sooner or later, we all must confront the past’s stranglehold on our lives, archaic traditions that seek to destroy our sense of worth, and emerge as our own person. Out of San Francisco, singer-songwriter Jessie Hyde inches closer to acceptance of particular constraints put upon women, namely equating one’s value to being in a relationship. With “Perpetuate,” premiering today on B-Sides & Badlands, she sheds such notions as a butterfly surfacing from a cocoon, wings vibrant and rich, spread wide for the sky overhead. “Got drunk on the power within / Buzzing through my pores,” she slings her words through piano and synth static.
Her words have been aching to break free, clawing at her lungs and into her throat, and she finally feels immense strength swelling up inside of her. “The world is sending the message / You’re powerful, and you’re free…” she leaves the listener empowered, as her voice fades and only the sweet warble of birds lingers. Hyde’s sense of peace permeates her entire journey, from harboring resentment to learning to let go, and her frankness consumes everything that came before. Her march through life’s muck, a necessary journey, sets up a future totally free from the past’s dangerous nature.
On the song, she offers over email, “Forgiving my mother and all the women before her who taught me ⏤ consciously or unconsciously ⏤ that finding a man was connected to my worth. All these beliefs now live in my shadow,” she says. “I spent so much energy and power in my life going after men. Now I’m trying to redirect all that power back into myself.”
“Momma, you never really taught me / To put myself on my own throne / My shadow eats the pieces of the women before me,” she sings. Her pointed metaphors penetrate decades and decades of silence, simply perpetuate a system’s sexism without comprehend its deeper, and perhaps more hurtful, implications. But in the here and now, Hyde confronts it all and cuts it from her form. She is powerful and capable of forging her own rules.
“Perpetuate” is the latest chapter off her debut EP, UNSUPERVISED, out everywhere June 2.
Listen below:
