Another Diva Devoured By The Abyss

Something happened a few days ago (or rather a response to something) that I still have not gotten over. I’m mostly writing about it to make sense of my disappointment.

FKA twigs was supposed to have a few shows across Europe and her Prague show, probably the most important one, was cancelled last minute. This is significant because her time in Prague is what inspired her latest project EUSEXUA1 so people were understandably stoked to attend those shows2.

When they were cancelled because of a mistake her team had made, people were outraged. She had every right to defend herself because it wasn’t her fault. Instead she posted this to her Discord server: Screenshot from twigs' Discord server with the content: nobody artist on this planet has my skill set opera wushu aerial director producer pop singer song writer designer actor visual artist creative director dancer fashion icon dog mum and my own twiglets are gonna try and turn on mother? why because of two very unfortunate rescheduled shows and some mainstream attention. we should be celebrating right now. you should be out there supporting me and being proud to be part of this fandom. you are winning and you can’t even see it. too busy in a parasocial nightmare. wake up.

She went into full Swiftie mode (or Nicki Minaj coke rant mode actually) painting herself as the being to worship. How dare you be upset that “mother” is not going to be playing your show? All of this self-aggrandizing meltdown and for what?

I would expect her to lash out on people for being verbally cruel to her. I would expect her to use big words and be rude herself, but not this. Not this. I’m so disappointed because I thought she was a nice person. This says more about her character than her agreeable attitude towards creating a deepfake of herself.

I may not agree with her on most of her stances and look over her opinion of “AI” and deepfakes, or maybe her appearance on the Man Enough podcast, but this is where I draw the line. I loved how mysterious she used to be, always focusing on her art in interviews and very rarely doing interviews to begin with. Now she’s building a parasocial army, calls her fans parasocial for criticizing her tour management and at the same time asks them to worship her.

I really love her art, but here we are, losing yet another great pop girl to an oxygen deficiency induced by smoking too much shredded plastic. To close this off, here is a meme that came to mind as I read the above screenshot: we should all know less about each other If it weren’t for social media/digitalization, I wouldn’t have known about this side of her. And maybe it would’ve been better that way.

  1. If you’re interested, read this great review of the album by my friend visionaryhussy. ↩︎

  2. I found out a little too late about the shows. In hindsight, that was good, lol. ↩︎