Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained.
Infosession is a song about career anxiety, corporate disillusionment, and the search for one’s purpose in life.
Infosession is the first song to appear in this album that uses a style that’s new to me. I honestly don’t even know if I can describe this style. It’s glitchy, ethereal, bitcrushy, and spacey. It was created by producer Ronin Op F, who is a video game music composer, electronic producer and Materia Collective member. His compositions include the “puzzle dev” soundtrack and the album “Signals from Shibuya”.
Ronin and I met through the music scene in the Bay Area, and became close friends. After working together in live performance contexts, in which he played violin, we decided to collaborate as vocalist and producer for a track whose fate we did not know yet. After a couple of iterations, we planted the seeds for what would eventually become Infosession.
As part of the first half of the album, Infosession is a story rooted in reality. It’s my reflection on and response to an external event. Is it based on one specific infosession I attended? Probably not, but it’s definitely an approximation of many. It’s an average of many career fairs and infosessions I’ve attended over the years while at UC Berkeley, for every kind of company from non-profits to startups to management consulting firms. The thoughts in these lyrics are also a fictionalized account of what versions of me might have been thinking sitting in a chair at each of those fairs.
My characterization of this general infosession might seem somewhat negative, and at points I do sound like I am criticizing all corporate life and people who choose that path. This isn’t an opinion I hold now, but this song was created earlier in the production cycle, which is one of the reasons it appears earlier in the track order. My feelings on people’s life decisions have since changed thanks to experiences I had later, some of which are detailed in the second half of the album. So if you will, interpret this as an experience of an unreliable narrator who is beginning to realize this path isn’t for them, but hasn’t yet cracked the surface of self-actualization. In fact, they’re asking those exact questions in this song: What is my purpose? Was it all worth it? They have just started on the path of being jaded, and she still believes all people should be like her. This is how they see the world.
The lines about Asian women have to do with the common pattern of Asian-Americans facing a bamboo ceiling. Despite Asian people being disproportionately represented in many industries such as law and software, they are underrepresented in upper management. For example, 33% of software engineers in Bay Area tech companies are of Asian descent but only 10% are corporate officers. This phenomenon is reinforced by the model minority stereotype that Asians are good at putting their heads down and doing hard work, but not at being creative or playing leadership roles. This myth can prevent Asian-Americans from climbing up the corporate and academic ladders.
I make a cynical observation that the infosession room is predominantly Asian women, who face both bamboo and glass ceilings. I question how many of them will make it to the great heights they’re being promised, and whether they’re sacrificing their own dreams to buy into this way of life. Am I right or wrong? Who knows. It’s also a restatement of my thesis: that I don’t think this path will yield the goals I want for myself.
To provide a stark contrast to that cynicism is Klopfenpop. Having played the role of producer on party hop and artist anthem, he features in this track as a vocalist. My instruction to him was: scummy white dudebro. He delivered a glib extollation of the snacks and benefits of “Small Biz Incorporated”, and closed it off with a not-so-subtle invitation into the pyramid scheme.
And thus concludes this Alter Ego: Explained. Honestly, after COVID, I would so go to another one of these.
LEX the Lexicon Artist combines Internet culture, fandom, punk ethos, and shock humor (not the mean kind) to create an over-the-top explosion of nerdy, dirty, funny raps.
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