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lyrics

Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained.

Posturing is a song about fakeness, social media facades, and people who don’t walk their talk.

“Posturing” is the closest we’ll get to an emotional successor of Luthor from Raging Ego. If “Famous” is ambition personified, then “Posturing” is anger personified.

Typically my memory for how I began writing a song is pretty good, but I don’t quite remember exactly when or how I started writing Posturing. Possibly because I was blinded with ((ANGER)). What I do know about Posturing is the emotion that drove it to completion. It was this weird cocktail mix of rage, envy, frustration, and unrestrained self-indulgence. I had a lot of overwhelmingly negative and mean things to get out of my system, and I wanted to concentrate all of it in one go, create an ugly creature, and endow it with sentience.

The speaker-creature in Posturing has grown jaded of a constant stream of fakeness on social media, but hasn’t figured out how to deal with those feelings, and more importantly, hasn’t yet learned that what other people do on social media is none of their business. They decry the talk-but-no-action people they see online and claim that they let their feet do the walking - but they also talk A LOT and make baseless claims. The creature is a big fucking hypocrite, but they are at least self-aware and acknowledge that they also do not know “what we’re doing” - the meaning of which is up to interpretation. What can be faked on social media? Success? Wokeness? Living a happy and authentic life? Nobody knows; we can’t really assume what’s going on in the lives of other people beyond what we see on the surface. The creature expresses that frustration and screams for liberation and understanding.

This was the first song in the production cycle that had a big melodic hook that was heavily pitch-corrected for effect. I wanted it to throw back to Kanye in his song Heartless. I also wrote this song for the stage specifically: the call-and-response bridge was designed as a back-and-forth yell-fest with the audience.

I think this track really embodies a darker and uglier side of what an Alter Ego could be. I do see Famous and Posturing as kind of a two-in-one, because both songs are written from the perspective of the emotional component-turned-alter-ego. Both are extreme reactions to some aspect of artistry and public life, with Famous presenting a positive and glamorous view, and Posturing presenting a negative and cynical one. Famous desires the attention while Posturing scorns the attention that others receive. Put the two together, and you get two contradicting sides of the same hypocritical person.

The beat was created by Liz Grove, producer of the project Danger Grove. Liz and I have maintained a connection where she sends me beats that haven’t been assigned to Danger Grove or any other vocalist. By doing this, we’ve made two songs together - Narcissist and Expectations (feat. Shubzilla). Among the beats Liz sent me in 2019 were beats titled ShitBeat8 and ShitBeat25. Despite the name, I took a liking to ShitBeat25, and asked her if I could use it. She confirmed, but later discovered that the original ShitBeat25 project was no longer accessible. So, she took the time to reproduce the beat completely

And thus concludes this Alter Ego explained. Despite what the creature said, I feel like I know what I was doing in this one.

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from Alter Ego Explained, released July 3, 2020

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LEX the Lexicon Artist New York, New York

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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