Pom Pom Squad: Death of a Cheerleader

Check out our exclusive interview with the Head Cheerleader, frontman Mia Berrin below. 

While making music can be therapeutic, how did you reconcile with yourself that making music isn’t the same as therapy when writing “Crying”?

I mean, I think there's a lot of myths about mental health and art. I grew up always hearing artists are tortured and every great artist had some kind of mental illness. For a long time, I just internalized this idea that making art or making music was how you took care of your mental illness and exorcise that demon. As I started to learn more about mental health, therapy, and medication, and all of the things that are actual self-care in a more tangible way. I remember I was really scared of taking medication because the other thing you always hear is it kills your creativity and it changes who you are, how you behave. 

I've found that being medicated and taking care of myself properly is actually what helps me make the things that I make even better because I have the energy to do it. Something about "Crying" was getting to take that idea on, but coming at it with a sense of humor and coming at it from a sort of melodramatic, ironic perspective.

The director of the “Crying” video says it’s “a love letter to the all-consuming act of crying, as well as a confrontation with isolation." Would you say when you weren’t confronting your depression that isolation crept in?

I mean, I think when you're trapped in your head like that you have the kind of anxiety that makes it hard to connect with other people because I'm so caught behind what's going on here that no information can get out to connect with another human being, you know? I think it's extremely isolating. I think when you don't have enough energy for yourself it's hard to maintain relationships or have enough energy for other people.

So, now that COVID restrictions are lifting a bit, can you tell us a little bit about what you have planned for live performances? I'm sure you miss it.

Yeah, I definitely miss it. Performing has been such a big part of my identity for the past, like five, six years since I started playing in the band. I thought it was a huge shift in lifestyle. It was just like a shift in everything, obviously. It's super weird, I think, also being right on the edge of all these opportunities and going to travel and going on tour, kind of just like a punch in the face a little bit. But yeah, we're planning on touring with a band called Bully in August, and then we're going on tour with a band called Nada Surf later in the year. Just super, super exciting. That's the plan right now.

What was it about Film Noirs and the 50s/60s aesthetic that resonated with you enough to want to emulate them in your music video for “Crying”?

I mean, I think the thing that appealed to me about that aesthetic is the 50s and 60s, I think, for a lot of people for some reason it’s like an idealized time or it's kind of looked at us like the heteronormative, the heterosexual, “Oh, all the nice American neighborhoods and nice whatever.” It's creepy, the idea of that kind of idealized society pushing out any other social or cultural problems, you know, and just kind of taking what you find pretty about it. I don't know. I liked the idea of exploiting the creepiness of that aesthetic. I was thinking a lot about like David Lynch and suburbia and just queering these like idealized worlds or these sort of prim, proper perfect landscapes and replacing them with my body and my music and, you know, inserting that perspective.

That's really cool. Do you feel like you're becoming the pop culture icon that you wanted to connect with when you were younger?

Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, speaking of like feeling isolated, it's like I went to school, not in the south, but in the semi-south and, growing up, especially in predominantly white communities, my mom and my sister and I all got treated in a way that was my first introduction to my first light bulb of, "Huh, we're different than other people; we're marginalized." You grow up in pop culture and you're kind of looking for yourself in anything. I feel like I couldn't see a life for a gay girl of color who liked rock music. There's no model for that. So when I found Riot Girl punk, it was really meaningful to me, in that it was the first time I saw women making music or women being angry, but Riot Girl severely failed women of color.

It was all these white women making zines about how secretly racist they were and how guilty they felt about how severely racist they were. I definitely needed to see someone who had a different perspective and was coming at it from a different place. Someone who could talk about feminism, racism, homophobia, candidly and progressively. I want to be able to be that person. I resent the idea that every artist of color has to be the perfect representation of all people of color or that I have to be a mouthpiece for any kind of social or political anything. But I think one, I can't shut my mouth, so that's part of it. And two, I think normalizing that someone like me can make the kind of music I make. Someone like me can dress the way I dress. You can be femme and queer and make punk music and make orchestral arrangements. I think for so long, I've been trying to collage other pieces of media that fit all sides of myself, and now I want to make my own media that incorporates all sides of myself.

You talk about how this single is an unmasking for you, what were you hiding from prior?

I feel like maybe accountability in a way or the way that I behaved being mentally ill. I think I used to sort of feel like everything was happening to me. I was just not a healthy person and when you're hurt, you hurt people. I was just like an emotional tornado and I didn't do anything in particular, but I was definitely hiding from myself, hiding from taking any responsibility for my actions.

So we talked about how you've kind of grown from this aspect of having no control over your emotions or being chaotic emotionally. How have you evolved with the lessons that you've learned down the road, even with Pom Pom Squad, how has the music changed with your own personal evolution?

I think the music has changed in that I've learned to trust myself a lot more. I think I was seeking approval for a lot of the early part of my career and waiting for somebody to tell me that I was good or waiting to be accepted by a certain group of musicians. I was looking to assimilate, I think, more than anything. 

I feel like part of my evolution has just been learning to contort myself to a standard less and focus more on what I want and what's meaningful to me. Especially being in quarantine, it forced me to not compare myself to other people simply in that there was nothing to compare to. Like no one else was doing shows at the beginning, people weren't releasing music. 

I think especially in New York, the scene being so small, it's just so easy to constantly be looking around, like who's getting what press who's getting what. I feel like one, I got older, two, I got on medication and three, you know, I just stopped looking around so much and realized there's kind of like no objective right or wrong way to be. It's only what I choose to believe, you know, it's all just like objective.

You talked about "Crying" specifically being an act of your ego and you talk about not learning or making mistakes constantly. How have you grown from this? And what steps did you take if there was anybody else that was in the same position as you?

I mean, it's not going to go away. You know what I mean? I think maybe accepting that has helped. I'm never going to be perfect. Like you're never going to not feel jealous. You're never going to not have insecurities or anger or jealousy or whatever. You know, I said jealousy twice, who cares. I think accepting that that exists inside you and accepting what you can take responsibility for and what you can't. I talked a little bit before about my mental health kind of believing like, "Oh, everything was happening to me and every bad thing that happened was happening to me." You know, and instead, being more clear or trying to get more clear in my mind about what can I take responsibility for and what was just me doing what I could with the information that I had at the time. Like what was me doing the best I could and what would I never do again? I think when you're operating on ego, it's like, you're kind of a whirlwind and nothing's going to stop you because ego goes unchecked. So being the quality control of my own head in and becoming self-aware in a positive light.

Even you saying "ego goes unchecked" is really something that resonates. I mean, it goes without saying, but it's kind of just something that feeds you, it kind of keeps going for a while but you have taken the steps to kind of walk away from that and now you're entering your new era. How do you think your new era will change things for Pom Pom Squad and what narratives are there now that there weren't prior to this era?

Something that exists in this era that really didn't before was joy and love and lightness. I think in the past, my music has been really heavy and grounded and angry and grit and, there are still those moments but I feel like even in the moments of anger and the moments of sadness, there's still just more whimsy and more light. I think part of the reason is that I wrote it about a love story. Within that love story was my journey of learning to accept myself as queer and be able to say that out loud, and as corny as it sounds, be proud of that.

So, you're building a world where Pom Pom Squad is the foundation of it. What does it look like? What are the rules and how are you building those rules and that imagery into fruition in your real life?

Another part of the writing of this record, I was so removed from reality. When I was working on the songs, I was also removed from my bandmates, removed from playing shows. So, the kind of world that I created with the music felt kind of like it existed out of any physical space. Like I was making it all on my laptop and I was using instruments that I wouldn't have been able to use or wouldn't have had access to if I was just in my practice space. I came up with the cover image first, which was like, I'm laying under, I'm laying in like a grave under this big fake world with fake sky and fake grass and these giant floral sculptures.

I think kind of in processing my journey with queerness, I realized that at a certain point that I was just not living my own life. Like the life that I had been living before was designed around male attention and heteronormative standards and just like, shit I didn't actually want or relate to. So, when I was kind of thinking of that image and writing the songs around that image, I was really interested in artificial things. I started filling my space around me with fake flowers and fake grass and after kind of manifesting this image, like using it to create my physical space and starting to carve out those textures and make sculptures. Aesthetically, there was a huge shift from what I did before was I played punk shows dressed as a cheerleader, you know what I mean? And that's already interesting in bringing a really femme sort of character into that space that's so traditionally male, like dudes, gritty, ripped t-shirts, safety bins, whatever the kind of like archetype of punk is. I think I went from kind of bringing a female character into a male space to bringing a new, weird world into a heteronormative world.