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In the dazzling mid-morning sun of the Internet’s lifetime, the sparkle and pop of digital handhelds froze ephemera into eternity on pioneer photo-sharing sites MySpace and Tumblr. Outsiders in the real world could build a home for themselves and their friends in the rule-barren digital world, their eyes and how they saw the world making a paradise all of their own. Early internet rockstar-personas could make timeless worlds rich in rhinestoned-cult-reverence and woven to freeze an ephemeral heavenly moment, gooey and dripping with tutti-frutti star-shaped glitter, dreamer-believers’ shimmering sweat and zenith-looking middle-fingers against the status quo. Salty Atlantic coast-smooched and Coney Island-cotton-candy-sugared projects by indie-darling Shauna Dean Cokeland trade in the glossy sheen of early 2020s Instagram and Tiktok for MySpace and Tumblr’s early, grimy days. Cokeland’s process is firmly seated in the golden days of spontaneous indie sleaze – born out of and flourishing during a moment that could not have imagined a music culture that delightfully demonized sin and crucified imperfection. Slightly ironic, the indie sleaze subculture has gathered a nostalgic following on these heavily policed social platforms and thus unfortunately, cellophane-glossy copycats of indie sleaze icons have flooded into the pop-sphere in the last few years. Shauna stands far apart from this crowd.
The Gen-Z newcomer has an affinity for this messy and dreamy glitter-drunk era, and found a safe space in the non-airbrushed and confessional world that indie sleaze calls home. The growing pains of her early teenage projects and the unwavering, unflinching honesty of her lyrics glimmer with indie sleaze’s blood. Over Cokeland’s artist’s lifetime she has moved from hand-picked-shell-crown-wearing acoustic May Jailer to peroxide-won Barbie-pink fishnet-wrapped scene queens who chased their fantasies and paid reverence to their ids.
A cast-adrift teen at the turning of the 2010s to 2020s, Cokeland, living in a tiny Maryland beach town loudly rippling with young tourists during the summer months and eerily silent every other day, and taking solace in her bedroom and notebook, found empowerment in the shimmering digital archive of photographs and burnt CDs collected by all kinds of party girls. During Britney, Lindsay and Paris’ 2000s, of course. The vulnerable artists her child-self chose to soundtrack her best, and dark days with (among them Ke$ha, Eminem and Spears herself) held stretchy, plastic friendship-bracelet-ed hands with the glamorous, feminine duchesses making Hollywood’s iconoclastic contemporary party scene in Shauna’s burgeoning songs. (Each handcrafted with the songwriter’s pen, organic instruments and glittery handling of Garage Band.)
Of the Moët rosé-drenched second inspiration – a guest-list – Cokeland sampled from in her personal style and sounds of her first covers and highly-anticipated original “Moving In Place.” Posting to Tiktok in the 2020s’ morning light, Cokeland’s rhinestone-butterfly-emblazoned baby tanks, baby-blue low-rise denim and Malibu Barbie stilettos, pink-bedazzled basses, sticky-lipgloss-glossy synths and diaristic lyrics, won over 500K fans. What strikes Cokeland’s listener on her pioneering “Moving In Place” is its rawness – each musical inspiration perfectly recreated with bare-bones and organic instruments; sheer testimony to Shauna’s taste and ability to master those tools she wants to play with in her discography. Shauna giddily confesses to interviewers leading up to and in the ebullient aftermath of the song’s release that this first original track announces her sparkling, bubble-gum-pink childhood wish to become the next global superstar. An unbridled earnestness that hooks the songwriter’s fellow dreamers, and a striving for world-class glamour that embodies the feelings of many Gen-Z wallflower-children.
Cokeland drives, bursting with raspberry-fuchsia self-liberation, a ripped-off-sunroof-ed car through Southern 1920s-Art-Deco streets as the main plot of the single’s self-and-best-friend-produced music video. Of which, Cokeland premiered and crafted as if it were the late 1990s (when Britney Spears self-directed – kept unbeknownst to journalists – her first single’s music video, “Baby One More Time”). Dreamy, hazy seashells and crashing waves – organic or 3-dimensional digital – bejewel the music video’s frame, one part picked up childhood relics and one part fantasy of Hollywood’s coastal paradise. Platinum guitar strings drive the single, forming the structure of a glitter-grimy party anthem in the vein of Ke$ha’s early demos. 2000s R&B-inflected pop influences the rhythm, as Shauna’s raw and raspy bubble-gum-vocals, dressed up in silvery digital effect in the song’s second half, imitate early 2000s pop-girl rap.
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Cokeland found her next place of inspiration and self-discovery in the still-inky digital archive of snap-shotted aughts and early 2010s MySpace pages lovingly laboured over by, and the cult-magazine photoshoots and interviews starring tiara-crowned reigning “scene queens.” This second Cokeland phase is how the Maryland singer-songwriter came across this rock-princess-obsessed writer’s radar for the first time. Flourishing as models, designers, artists and – said with pride and admiration – groupies, in a glittering scene and at a time as hedonistic as rock’s 1970s holy days, scene queens hand-crafted a fantasy world.
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Of cotton-candy-pink furriness and heart- and skull-shaped bling, sticky, raven-black eyeliner and bespoke-spiked leather, and oversized cutesy-horror cartoons. Teen girls and young women like Audrey Kitching, Hanna Beth and Zui Suicide wrote fairytales for themselves, an escape from the cruelty they faced in the real world, and their artistry moulded 2000s emo-rock. Along with the young women thus discussed, Shauna Dean Cokeland is shaping culture and taking back her power. Creating Tiktoks teaching her – predominantly young female – audience about and how to join protests of the Israel-Palestine conflict; fighting misogynist cries of her weakness at performing rock and slut-shaming; and layering on sparkly fishnets, tutus, ribbon-ripped tank tops and chunky, bubble-gum Converses. Since spring Shauna has been working on and premiering demos with a scene queen-sound and -lyrical bend, transitioning her acoustic guitar-approach to a glamour-punk-approach, begging to be backed by raucous drumming, rose gold-shimmering bass and booming effect and augmented by a butterfly-decaled amp.
Lyrically, the singer-songwriter moved into familial issues, fame’s consequences, confronting traumas and artistry as a healing process. In addition to producing a parody of jingo-hero Toby Keith’s nationalist, pro-war “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” that flashes like a neon billboard America’s history of war crime and violence against the nation’s own people (all proceeds donated to Gaza charities), Shauna has shone on two co-headlining tours. Spring break’s “this tour saved my life” with Nashville’s Brye, and this July’s east coast tour with Massachusetts’ Jesse Detor. Her debut album “cokeland county” is soon to drop – and if you were not there to give Lindsay Lohan’s punk-princess Rumors the flowers that it rightfully deserves, this is not a release that you should miss.
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