Album Review: June Jones / Pop Music For Normal Women

Throughout her third solo album, Pop Music for Normal Women, Naarm-based singer-songwriter June Jones steers away from the warm, naturalistic rhythms and images of her previous record, Leafcutter, veering instead towards the virtual world, and the artificial – towards the neon-lit highways of contemporary pop music. Leaning into this cyber-space aesthetic, Jones employs gaming as a motif that evokes the ways that online video games not only function as sources of fantasy and escape, but also of meaningful projections of identity – illuminating the ways that ‘gaming’ resonates as metaphor for the imaginative subversiveness required to achieve self-actualisation.

This idea is immediately implicit in Gamer, the first song on the album, where the chorus is a sly interpolation of Beck’s Loser: “I’m a gamer, baby / So why don’t you kill me? Never really figured out which one was the real me.” There is a resigned expectation of antagonism here, but this melancholy is accompanied by a lack of self-reproach. Instead, a sense of ambivalent acceptance is attached to the sentiment, implying that arriving at an authentic sense of self is no simple task for anyone. Towards the song’s conclusion, over a gently-bubbling drum and bass foundation, Jones repeats the word ‘gamer’ half a dozen times until the latent ‘gay’ sound, smuggled portmanteau-style within the first syllable, is brought to the forefront of its meaning – highlighting the polysemic potentialities of not only selfhood, but language, too.

The commitment to continuance – to playing again, to the search for belonging – is represented throughout the record as being in conflict with not only external voices, but also internalised shame. “I’m sick of being perceived,” Jones sings on Goblin Mode, painting a fun-house portrait of total social withdrawal. Furthermore, on album highlight Motorcycle, Jones seems to suggest that when our unruly bodies refuse to behave, the desire for oblivion – sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything – may feel so intense that being a machine can seem preferable to being a human being: “Every day I wake up and wish I was a Kawasaki motorcycle… a lime green machine,” she sings.

Nonetheless, Jones finds beauty in the liminal and the divergent. In response to potential feelings of dysmorphia, she sings that “Being a hoodie girl is beautiful to me” (Hoodie Girl), and she presents neurodivergence as a source of community, rather than alienation, wondering, “Does your brain work like this, too?” and singing, “so long to missing out on love from all my fellow freaks” (My Crew). It is this inclusive reimagining of hegemonic value systems, communicated with sincere vulnerability, that elevates the album’s best moments beyond mere experimentation with pop music, or tongue-in-cheek provocation – playfully appropriating the populist form to expose normality as fiction.