there are some works of art that you experience once, you’re happy to have done so, and you have no desire to ever engage with them again. there are some works, though, that you’ll keep coming back to, and every time you do, it’s like peeling back another layer of a dense network of meanings, falling in love with them anew every time.
my favorite works tend to fall into the latter category, and indeed, i think there’s something enriching about this repeated engagement—i’ve talked about this before in my video about speedrunning Celeste, and most of the things i recommend on my website’s ‘further reading’ page i’ve read (or watched, or played, or listened to) over and over.
lately, nothing has filled that space for me more than Dessa’s 2010 studio album A Badly Broken Code.
i’ve been a Dessa fan for years; the way she blends rap and song over interesting instrumentations with clever lyrics really speaks to me. A Badly Broken Code, though, is a buried gem in her discography compared to her more recent work, and it took me years of being a fan to really break open what I find so brilliant about the album.
it’s an extremely cohesive album, blending intensely real struggles with supernatural metaphor to chart the cycles of abuse and neglect through generations. its ending leaves us, like Dessa herself on the album’s excellent art, battered, but hopeful.
to try to summarize the broad narrative arc of the album: we open with Children’s Work, a story of a neglected childhood in which our character is established as a caring, self-sacrificing figure. she leaves home (Poor Atlas, The Crow), finds herself unable to help a woman in need (Dixon’s Girl), and experiences disastrous, manipulative relationships (or perhaps just one relationship?) as she struggles to get her life together (Mineshaft II, The Chaconne, Matches to Paper Dolls). eventually, she breaks this cycle and asserts herself as not needing a relationship (Go Home) and tries to “rescue” someone else from their own trouble, but does more damage than help (Seamstress). she leaves her hometown in a bid for real independence (Dutch), but returns to start a music collective and label, Doomtree,1 and fights her way into the local scene despite sexist resistance (The Bullpen). after reflecting on the direction of her life while traveling (Momento Mori), she returns, celebrating the success and connection of her label (Crew) and uses her newfound influence to give support to a younger woman struggling with domestic abuse (Alibi).
the exact structure of this summary is extremely up for interpretation—unlike an album like Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter, it’s not at all clear that a chronological story is meant to be drawn from this work.
i think that, at least to some degree, the album is enhanced by reading it this way—Alibi, for example, hits way harder if this jaded woman offering rescue (“I don’t need to know, but there’s a set of my keys under your door”) has been through her own trouble, as in Mineshaft II, and grown past her failed attempts to help, as in Seamstress—but it’s far from the only reading.
even if the exact storyline is vague, though, the themes are clear: this is an album about dependence, about relationships, about cycles, and it treats these themes so brilliantly well, both in the overarching story and within individual tracks.
Seamstress is a gripping song if it’s the turning point to this woman’s story, where she tries to fix a man to make herself feel better about herself, but it’s also, on its own, a portrait in miniature of the whole disaster, the character clutching more and more desperately at the idea of fixing this “angel in a box beneath my bed” that the damage, and the tension, mount until that final collapsing, defeated lyric, “When I ran out of thread, I couldn’t let go, but that’s not sewing, that’s—that’s just poking holes”.
albums that are trying to be stories often fail on this point—the whole thing might be cohesive, but individual songs feel one-note. A Badly Broken Code is complexly layered in every moment, so that even if you’re not listening to it as one story—it took me a number of times listening to the album to even consider it that way—you’re still experiencing rich storytelling!
just the three minutes and forty seconds of Mineshaft II tell a whole story, Dessa opening by talking to her ten-year-old self (“Fifteen years from tonight, you have to make a decision”) in a way we don’t entirely understand until near the track’s end, when she reveals that the whole song has been, in fact, told directly to that self: “i came hoping some ghost of me would be here still, and here you are”, and she asks her to “trade, just for tonight—like I could borrow your heart and I could leave you mine”, to finally find the heart capable of the forgiveness that hers wasn’t anymore.
i could go on—each song on this album deserves paragraphs, the ominous foreshadowing of The Crow featuring so2 many3 of Dessa’s4 best5 lyrics6 in a narrative that also mirrors that of the album as a whole, the sad firmness of Dessa’s rejection in Go Home, the incredible strings on Matches to Paper Dolls—actually, the strings across this whole album are worth talking about.
Dessa’s rapper/singer split makes for an incredibly flexible base for different styles of instrumentation, and she’s experimented with many over the years, from her incredible performances with the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra to the piano-and-backing-vocals core of Parts of Speech to her recent, more electronic production on albums like Bury the Lede and her latest single Camelot.
A Badly Broken Code, though, features string instruments heavily—and unusual ones, at that. a harplike melody opens the album on Children’s Work, and bowed strings abound throughout the album, particularly bringing a tense emotional core to its middle section in The Chaconne, Matches to Paper Dolls, Go Home, and Seamstress. by the end of Seamstress they almost seem to break, only returning in the album’s final track.
i’m inclined to interpret these bowed strings, in particular, as representative of a sort of strained childhood innocence, struggling to stay together through the difficulty of the album’s middle part before finally breaking down completely in Seamstress. when the character returns in The Bullpen she’s missing that innocence, and it’s notably gone from Alibi, too.
she only regains it for a moment when, in Into the Spin, she seems to address the strings, which swell for the first thirty seconds, directly: “hey, hey”, she says, as to a child, the first words she speaks on the track.
returning to the album’s theme of cycles, Into the Spin reads to me as the character’s reflection on her own life, framing the entire album as autobiography, asking—or begging—that its events, unchangeable, somehow be reframed by their recording into something good, this time—connecting, at last, the emotionality of her younger self with the wisdom of the elder.
“And if we choose to fall / who’s to say it isn’t flight? / And if we choose to fall / Who’s to say?”, Dessa sings in the sparse closing section of Into the Spin, accompanied, this time in a comfortable harmony rather than tension, by those same bowed strings.
all in all, this album is incredibly rich, full of wonderful tidbits to tease out and interpret, with a base of songs that covers all kinds of different styles and emotions but never deviates from its incredible quality.
i hope that, if you came to this review not having listened to this album in full before, you’re inspired to do so and notice details of your own—i certainly didn’t cover everything—and if you have listened before, i hope these ideas can bring a new flavor to the next time you do!
and if you haven’t heard of Dessa at all and you’ve just read this because i sent it to you—well, the embedded links on this page are a great place to start, and i wish you a wonderful time exploring the work of one of my favorite artists!
- In fact, the name of the collective and label to which Dessa herself belongs. ↩︎
- “anger is just love, left out, gone to vinegar” ↩︎
- “you wake up a stranger to yourself and then you learn to live with her, sit in her clothing till you fill out her figure” ↩︎
- “death and romance, riddles of our lifetimes / tryna get a slow dance, middle of a knife fight” ↩︎
- “but you’re built to balance on two feet, so why you livin’ this last year from your knees?” ↩︎
- “you can be too careful, ignore all the scarecrows” ↩︎
Leave a Reply