Here are words I’m sure you’ve all heard before: “impostor syndrome.” It was first observed in successful professional women, but it’s significantly more widespread than that: people of all stripes doubt themselves, and live in fear of being exposed as frauds. Maya Angelou had it, Neil Armstrong had it, and I have it too. (This marks the first and only time I will ever belong in the same sentence as Maya Angelou or Neil Armstrong.)
I have trouble thinking of myself as a music critic. I’ve written about music, as an amateur and then as a professional, for almost seven years, and yet I still don’t feel like I’ve earned the title. Robert Christgau is a music critic. Tom Breihan is a music critic. I’m just a guy who writes self-indulgent essays and somehow lucked into a platform. The day may come when I don’t think of myself as a hack, but it won’t come for a while.
Even worse, I sometimes feel like I have impostor syndrome about having impostor syndrome. After all, if I truly didn’t believe I could say anything worthwhile, it would be awfully selfish of me to subject the readers to all this, wouldn’t it? If I didn’t think I was any good at this, I’d resign and go work at Starbucks or something. Do I truly struggle with self-worth, or am I what Orson Welles accused Woody Allen of being: an arrogant coward making a spectacle of the war between his narcissism and his self-loathing?
Chastity Belt, a dreamy indie rock band from Seattle, grapples with impostor syndrome on their new song “Fake,” but they don’t offer any answers. In fact, they suggest that there is no answer to something with such deep roots. “I don’t care,” lead singer Julia Shapiro sighs in the final verse. “It’s not going anywhere.” That final verse ends in the same way as the first: with Shapiro singing, simply and frankly, “I’m a fake.”
While the music is awash in a golden-hour glow, the lyrics portray this impostor syndrome as an airless, claustrophobic feeling: talking in a quiet room just to make noise, with “words that just hang in the air/and stories that aren’t going anywhere.” Who among us can’t relate to that? There are few things more deflating than killing the vibe and realizing that you may not be the kind of person you’d like to think you are.
There may not be a direct solution to this problem. There is no video game boss monster you can beat in order to acquire the Golden Girdle of Healthy Self-Esteem. But “Fake”’s music video offers a strategy of some kind. The four members of Chastity Belt gallivant and fool around in downtown Seattle, decked out in their finest clown regalia. In memes, clowns are used to signify foolishness and futility: whether you’re painting your face or putting on a red wig, to be a clown is to resign yourself to a doomed, stupid endeavor, long past the point where it makes any sense to do so. It could have been a bleak joke at the expense of people who think they’ll ever be truly satisfied with themselves–but hell, they look like they’re having a great time in the video, don’t they? Maybe the key to fighting impostor syndrome is not to fight it at all, but to accept it and achieve things in spite of it.
