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Pop Culture
Feb 28, 2023, 06:28AM

Trigger Warnings Are Weird

A 2011 Rolling Stone interview with pop star Elton John vs. 2023 BOMB Magazine interview with author LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs.

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Elton John: There’s about five years you have where you can do no wrong, and you work on adrenaline.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs: I kept many of them because there are no photos.

John: I haven’t. I sold them.

•••

Diggs: There is a separation of selves occurring and how to mark it becomes subjected (or erased) when the strategies attack and fade.

John: I don’t know. It was fun sometimes. I was never really that big a drinker until I started doing blow, and I drank just to come down off the blow.

•••

Diggs: Heroin, angel dust, and crack.

John: That wedding was the biggest Republi­can audience I’ve ever played to—Clarence Thomas was there—and they were probably the best audience of the year.

Diggs: Trigger warnings are weird. (laughter) I did not want to be sentimental.

John: I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. 

•••

Diggs: With resources and a research budget, an entire saga can be uncovered. It has to exist in this perceived loudness because several types of erasures have taken place.

John: We had a wardrobe, a little stereo set and a separate device so we could both listen with headphones.

Diggs: There is no sense of being linear because origin stories take on a kind of hopscotch grid.

John: Or the Ephesus amphitheater in Turkey, where Mary Magdalene fled after Jesus died.

•••

Diggs: All three of us had visceral revelations.

John: I think we both felt a little guilty.

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