Madam Bandit strikes a particularly intimate tone in “Happiness.” It has a spare beat, minimal guitar and hushed synths with the focus on her journal entry style lyrics. In the music video we see her putting on makeup and then removing it in time with the arc of the story of the lyrics as she goes from the true self to the artificial appearance and back to embracing an expanded, genuine self. The songwriter had apparently grown up in a strict religious community with its dictates on behavior and appearance and left it and in doing so there’s the risk of feeling alone and disconnected from the world you knew. But the song works beyond the specific context because it’s one about personal liberation and we all go through our own paths to self-discovery and psychological liberation in life if we’re fortunate enough to come to the realization that we don’t need to conform to strict standards if we don’t want to and we can find out place in the world and we don’t have to tie our own sense of self and ability to experience happiness to fitting in with a strict religious community’s mores or those of the mainstream society marketed to us endlessly in mass media and culture. Madam Bandit’s poignantly haunting song reflects the fragility and vulnerability of the uncertainty and insecurity one can feel before attaining the self-knowledge and experience to know there’s much more to the world and to life than where and how you were raised and how you’ve enculturated yourself to conform to arbitrary standards not that many people care about either and often actively or at least passively dislike. Watch the video for “Happiness” on YouTube and follow Madam Bandit at the links below.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
You must be logged in to post a comment.