Rare Pearl

Rage. That’s what I hear when I play Janis Joplin songs. Rage and pain. Hence the stunning power of his voice. A talent that is regurgitated from the insides deeply wounded by the cruel rejection of a society that creates standards that are impossible for many beings.

Fuck, Janis Joplin breaks my heart.

The facial scars resulting from teen acne, in reality scarred her soul. Add it to her rebellious and unmanageable hair, and to some of her facial and body features, and she was far from those ridiculous standards.

Being herself in her own flesh was the reason for the cruel rejection she suffered during her teens, and I can just imagine the frustration and deep pain knowing that all those supposed imperfections did not define her. But she knew that those things did define what the eyes of others thought and said about her, with the most heartbreaking cruelty.

Then, there were the luxuries, the fame, the fanatical admiration that, although it fed her most battered ego, did not define her internally either, although it did define what the eyes of the audience admired about her.

No. She knew that it wasn’t her voice that defined her as a human being either, and that’s why she decided that those few who did know who she was behind her scars and behind her celebrity, would call her Pearl.

But soul scars rarely ever heal. And a wounded person’s need for acceptance rarely heals an ego marred by cruelty and pain. She couldn’t escape the deep suffering of her past and she couldn’t conceive of a future without the raucous adulation that, in one way or another, punished the bullies of years past.

She was chained to a cruel past and a sycophantic future, while in the present, she tried to drown her suffering and her loneliness between empty sex, strong drugs and colossal amounts of alcohol.

Her eyes pierce the soul. A look that silently begs for acceptance. Her voice tears the soul. A voice that invades spaces and bodies, paralyzing everything with a power that only pain and anger can deliver.

There is a lot to say about Janis Joplin. She was and she will be unique forever. I don’t know if what I write here is true, but it is what her genius and figure transmit to me and it is what my own soul as an artist intuits.

Rare Pearl is a tribute to Janis. An exceptional individual, different, disruptive. To the exceptionally strong and deeply wounded woman who hid between the anonymous girl and the rockstar with the paralyzing voice.