The feeling of suffocation that comes upon the Exzenya in her Captivity is like the cold damp chains in some forgotten basement. She draws on her psychology education to come up with this nightmare of control and its ability to break the person you are. She is 55 and a global businesswoman and being a grandmother, she is not holding anything back- pouring raw and human vulnerability into this dark pop song. This instability that is reflected in her voice makes her voice tremble and quiver. It evoked in me something that is in my own life a dark side of dependency. It is a ghost story, achingly acute, utterly unrestricted.
This music attacks you in these wild riots, and which are like disjointed thoughts in a wall, bolted together, to create this damp, cramped feeling that nearly crawls your skin. They are sparse and stripped down in the instrumentation, which in a way contributes to the isolation being even bigger. These are these few layers that introduce the creepy, windy tones of the track at the beginning, and it brought to mind the scenes of a movie folk horror--those whispered passages in the music of Billie Eilish, or the airy and ethereal voice of Aurora. This is not refined and smooth. It is carefully crude and gritty. She sings in such a low note, without any auto-tune to fall back on and all this emotional burden is thrown. It's pure and piercing.
These subjects burrow into the baffling, horrifying realm of Stockholm Syndrome a place where to be victimized and to be an accessory begin to shift into one another as abuse gradually distorts devotion to the point where the thought of leaving becomes unthinkable, life-threatening. Exzenya uses the theory of trauma and the study of behavior to understand how isolation can ruin your identity and leave you wondering how many freedoms can you truly possess in the relationship that has become controlling and coercive. I heard this at 12 in the night wearing my earphones, and I felt it--that pain of addiction, my hearbeat running as the song dissolved the boundaries between giving up and staying alive. It is a disturbing thought of the psychological hold power has on us.
It is a song off her Story of My Life project, and it is indeed this brave blueprint of re-invention. It is self-financed, human-focused and it is finding its way into audiences across the globe in an authenticity that is totally out of age and industry convention. Exzenya does not only sing here. She is revealing a nakedness and making vulnerability a strength that lingers on even after the song is over. I was left with my breathless and sat there contemplating my own freedoms, my own relationships. It is a very strong, disturbing work, which makes you sit down and think about it, possibly listen to it again. It is evidence that music can do that and heal us making us face the horror we occasionally live in.
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