Girl Interrupted Playlist

[Maggie Szydlowski]

Thisis a topic that I think about almost every day and have wanted to write about for a long time. This is because it disproportionately affects the music I listen to on a regular basis, which makes it difficult to write about at all.

These memes were popular, easy to make and relatable among the demographic - often using a collection of carefully curated images to convey a certain vibe, aesthetic, or archetype that people would be familiar with. In the same way, the Sad Girl Starter Pack on Spotify gives you an idea of what it means to be a sad girl, but in the musical sense.

By now you're certainly thinking, "But any and all genres of music can AND do talk about all of these things!" And I'm not denying that fact, but there are several ways that it feels different this time around.

Ten years ago, those of us who were on tumblr remember that it had its own era of sad girl music and culture. It was a ridiculous cesspool of black and white gifs, blogs that promoted themselves by saying "follow for more soft goth", the Marina & The Diamonds, Halsey, Lana Del Rey gifs and lyrics being all over everyone's dashboard, the blatant promotion of eating disorders, the crooning Arctic Monkeys and The Neighbourhood and The 1975 pictures and quotes, I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous this was to the psyche of a teenage girl at the time. But we ate it up, as the kids say.

Thousands of videos of women pouring their hearts out or edits from Fleabag or fall foliage to a live version of Fiona Apple's Paper Bag, a song that hadn't been popular for decades until it blew up on Tiktok.

A sound on Tiktok that seems to never go away especially this fall is the "How I love being a woman!" clip from "Anne with an E" edited into "Would That I" by Hozier, a musician from Bray, Ireland who is known for his 2014 hit "Take Me To Church." I could write a whole separate post about how badly the internet has misconstrued this man's music, but I digress for now.

Decades old No Surprises by Radiohead is another one that has gotten significant use and attention on Tiktok, particularly the clever edit that transitions from a doorbell ringing to the opening of the song.

Out of sheer boredom and without telling her, I began to concoct an incomprehensible chart of what I believed to be the progression of sad/deep/dark music by Women in US (or adjacent) popular music to try to gather my thoughts. Note that neither helped and only stressed me out more.

Even in what I read and listen to and consume, I find myself asking, where is FKA Twigs? Kelela? Sza? Could we also argue that much of Erykah Badu or India Arie's music is quite melancholy? Frank Ocean?

Naturally, there is a bit of "representation" (term I take issue with, by the way, but we don't need to get into that now) wherein we have people like Mitski, Japanese Breakfast, Beabadoobee, Mazzy Star, Jay Som, and again, probably more that I'm missing, who have achieved success in their work as women of color. But the whole thing is making me feel like there is a lot more to be said regarding the correlation between the sadness and the demographic of the artists that Spotify is often suggesting next to each other.

Something my mom suggested, and that I don't know why this wasn't glaringly obvious to me at first, is that it's all just derivative of the blues as a genre, not necessarily in the musical style, but in the lyrical content and aesthetics.

One of the few places and mediums where Black female artists had some agency and voice, and are revered to this day, I thought of Ida Cox, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Mamie Smith. I also thought about Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nina Simone. When working on a unit with my students about women and the blues, I recall an article by Hazel Carby that we used that asserted the representations of feminism, sexuality, and power in women's blues along with an empowered presence.

Carby's article specifically addresses black female sexuality, speaking out against injustice and sexual violence, and the different experiences between black men and women at the time. I still find it useful for analysis, because the lyrical examples that she incorporates could be argued to serve as something as a starting point for some of the "Sad girl" lyricism and aesthetics that we are seeing even today. Although the conversations, topics, and references are specific to the experience of these black female blues artists, the fact that they were singing about pain, sadness, infidelity, sex, mistreatment, in the early 1900's is not something to be ignored. This is coupled with the fact that I feel confident that many of these artists' influences and inspirations can be traced back to the likes of Simone, Smith, Rainey, and Cox.

"You never get nothin' by bein' an angel child. You'd better change your ways and get real wild. I'm gonna tell you something, I wouldn't tell you a lie. Wild women are the only kind that really get by 'cause wild women don't worry, wild women don't have the blues." Ida Cox, Wild Women Don't Have The Blues

I would say that, to an extent, I have done the work. I took the gender studies 101 class that had only one guy in it. I read (or tried to read) Judith Butler. I read Leslie Feinberg, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, bell hooks (The latter 3 were not assigned in that gender studies class, but rather I read them on my own volition). I spent nearly a decade on Tumblr learning the key terms and memorizing Marina and the Diamonds lyrics. I figured \u201CIntersectional\u201D feminism was better than \u201Cliberal\u201D or \u201Cradical\u201D feminism. I ate up Beyonc\u00E9 self titled when it dropped.

When I started my graduate program many years later, I was faced with the issue of what to make my focus of study and whether or not to make \u201CMusic and Gender\u201D one of my interests. This was something I often discussed with my colleagues \u2014 and something that surprised me was how many of us were just completely uninterested in taking that angle.

This is not to say we hated women or gender studies, but after being in the program for a while and reading some very rudimentary theory, it just felt\u2026. weird. From the musicological angle, it seemed like everyone was too busy being deeply worried about Clara Schumann and her life. From the ethnomusicological angle (which was really an anthropological angle), it felt like there were more interesting ways to group people and practices. In both cases, it felt like both groups of scholars\u2019 analysis was decades behind what some 16 year old on twitter has already written a 22 part thread on in 2018.

So in this case, it\u2019s true that much of my analysis of women and music and gender has come from social media and my own readings. Whether or not that will be helpful or to my detriment in this case? Only time will tell.

\u201CHunger hurts, and I want him so bad, oh it kills 'Cause I know I'm a mess he don't wanna clean up I got to fold 'cause these hands are too shaky to hold hunger hurts, but starving works when it costs too much to love.\u201D Fiona Apple, Paper Bag

When I was still a teaching assistant, an activity that I did with some of my students in my classes was discussing the music that they listen to and their own personal taste, their perceptions of style, genre, and sound in general. Methods of listening to music, instances in which they would be listening to music. I found this particularly effective for a number of reasons: One, it got them talking (as is expected in a \u201Cdiscussion section\u201D). Two, it got them talking about themselves, which would help me as the instructor. If one of my sections has made it clear to me that they really really Really like Kanye West, that might impact how I approach topics with them in the future. Third, it makes them think critically about themselves in their current position in life and how their environment and upbringing affects their listening habits.

I recall specifically using a passage from Daniel Levitin\u2019s \u201CThis Is Your Brain On Music\u201D to get some discussion going on music and upbringing \u2014 how the music your caregivers listened to affects your own taste. The passage I used, however, disappeared completely from my Goodnotes 5 app with only my notes remaining!

Why is this? Listen guys, I have nothing against male musicians. PLENTY of them are very talented and great people, I\u2019m sure. My dad had me listening to Santana, Rush, Yes, Earth Wind & Fire, Michael Jackson, Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, The Beatles, just like everybody else, okay?

Not only would she pick me up from Pre-K blasting Janet Jackson\u2019s Control and Rhythm Nation, but as I got older, she started explaining the songs to me. The stories were appealing! \u201CBills Bills Bills\u201D by Destiny\u2019s Child was a big one \u2014 she told me it\u2019s about a guy who is broke and can\u2019t pay his OR your bills. One time she fully sat me down just to make me watch Madonna\u2019s \u201CMaterial Girl\u201D and Cyndi Lauper\u2019s \u201CGirls Just Wanna Have Fun\u201D and then made me share my thoughts.

But then as I reached adulthood, I began to feel weird about my taste. I didn\u2019t know who Bob Dylan was until 2014, and then hadn\u2019t heard a song of his that wasn\u2019t \u201CBlowin\u2019 in the Wind\u201D until 2022. I also didn\u2019t know who Radiohead was until a solid 2021. Pink Floyd, Nirvana, The Beach Boys, Springsteen. The names kept piling up in both my academic and non-academic readings and circles. To this day, I\u2019m still catching up on the \u201Cquintessential\u201D artists that everyone else knows and loves. But in my defense, I was in too deep. They had gotten to me.

\\\"I wanna stay inside all day, I want the world to go away, I want blood, guts and chocolate cake, I wanna be a real fake . . . Feeling super, super, super suicidal.\\\" Marina + The Diamonds, Teen Idle

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