MR COBRA by Lucy Liyou

MR COBRA, a semi-autobiographical solo theater-music album/piece by Lucy Liyou, combines free-jazz, korean folk opera, musique-concrète, 2000s era pop, text-to-speech recordings, film, comedy, and drag-inspired performance techniques to confront and dematerialize the boundaries of their transition, and reconsider her transition and personhood as inevitably intertwined with public spectatorship. (Christofer Medina)

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My friends have told me a number of things about MR COBRA that I love. Cleo said this was music that made her never want to have sex again. Ari said this was yassified Scott Walker. Cecily said the album was “very scary.”

In essence, MR COBRA is a semi-autobiographical theater-music piece, a revisionist retelling of a time back in high school when I fell in love with a predator. But I always thought of this as a record about shame. 

I know I didn’t come out to myself “late” in the grand scheme of things, but I felt really ashamed by my refusal to recognize so many signs that I ignored and didn’t ignore at the same time. And with shame came this pursuit of trying to know when I really “realized” I was trans. Yet, somehow, there was shame with that as well. Specifically, shame in thinking that trauma could make my transness legible. And shame in finding that legibility inaccurate and so satisfying at the same time.

But this all makes me laugh, too. Sometimes, because I’m uncomfortable. But sometimes, because I want people to laugh at me and with me, to make this moment in my life feel like a gross, important, and unimportant spectacle. 

That’s not to say I only laugh. I look back at this time with so much anger and deep disappointment in myself. Why did being called “my girl” by this freakish man in his 40s make me realize that I truly was and could be a girl? Why do I still look for that realization in others? When will this search end?

A few years ago, I remember talking to a friend who said, “You never fully become what you know you are. You never find a point where you think, “I made it. I’m now a girl.” That thought-loop stops when you die. You stop transitioning when you die.” To me, this was her way of saying that transness doesn’t have a beginning or true end.

But I think MR COBRA is me searching anyway. Not because I necessarily believe these points exist, but because sometimes I feel like this search reminds me that I am still breathing, kicking, and screaming. Being in this fascist country reminds me every day that this world wants women like me numb and dead. And so why not just laugh, moan, scratch, and implode? Why not make death wait its turn? I’m still busy. Super busy. I just have too much that I still want to “know.” (Lucy Liyou)

박승원
Park Seung-Won

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