Her teacher lauded her for how clearly she spoke, how commanding her presence was. Vu traces her origin story as a musician and performer back to the time at Sherman Oaks Elementary when she was running for class president and gave a speech to her peers. It left her feeling unrooted, searching for solace in music and herself. They would eventually divorce, forcing Vu, the oldest of three, to bounce between Sherman Oaks, where her dad lived, and the Hollywood Hills, where her mom moved. Vu grew up in the San Fernando Valley to “creative-in-a-corporate-way” Gen X parents who encouraged her to pursue her artistic sensibilities. Literally, everyone inside is a baby and they just want to cry.” “I’m really good at performing maturity,” she says. It’s something she’s been doing onstage and off- for a long time. She delved into it with 2019’s conceptual dual EP “Nicole Kidman / Anne Hathaway,” which explored the way we perform in our day-to-day lives. Performance itself can conjure and mold identity - exchanging the former self for an alter ego or new persona entirely. “Like, how do I become something that I want to be? How does anyone become something that they want to be? I just am so not anything that I want right now. “I think that was the core of what I was feeling at the time,” she says.
The most clear example of this tendency toward leaving herself behind in favor of something new is “Maker,” a sweet and sad plea to a seemingly higher power to make her into anybody else, to forgive her for not being stronger or clever enough to know better. She attempts to banish versions of herself she doesn’t want to be anymore and will new ones into existence. In a swift 12 songs and 39 minutes, Vu grapples with what it takes to unmake and remake the self. Her first official release with electronic record label Ghostly International, “Public Storage” is a sonic manifestation of the push and pull of young adulthood and the many contradictions that come along with that: caring too much and not at all navigating the urge to self-deprecate versus having a God complex thinking about age constantly or resigning yourself to the idea that it doesn’t matter. native investigates, both intimately and at an arm’s length, in her debut full-length album, “Public Storage,” and on “Parking Lot,” her recently-released EP that functions as a kind of extended cut - a compilation of songs “that didn’t make it on the record and some live recordings.” (She will perform the new music for the first time on March 31 at the Moroccan Lounge.) The idea that youth is one of the few things in life that’s both terrible and cool at the same time is a central theme in Vu’s world right now. When I ask her how it went, she replies: “Being young is fun and weird.” Everybody operates on their own frequency, and you can never fully harmonize frequencies with any other person because everyone is so infinitely complex.” That night, she’d planned to go to HEAV3N, L.A.’s wild, stylish queer party where drag queen Violet Chachki was set to DJ. Up close, Vu looks like she still might be mistaken for someone too young to get into a proper club - she’s 21 - but then, between compulsive drags of her black Juul, she’ll say something like, “Every now and again, you remember that we are literally alone. She was wearing a black tee, a button-up and Doc Martens, with a grown-out shag haircut and no makeup.
When I arrived, Vu was catching up with a friend she ran into. The back patio is where you can find her a few times a week, among the crowd of fellow young caffeinated artists for whom this place is a magnet. Hana Vu texts me the Monday after I meet up with her at Cafecito Organico, a coffee shop in Silver Lake off Hoover Street. This story is part of Image issue 9, “Function” a sonic and visual reminder that there ain’t no party like an L.A.
(Nori Rasmussen-Martinez / For The Times)
0 kommentar(er)
