“I Really Like You” by Carly Rae Jepsen
My dorm room is right next to the stairwell of Loomis, a residential hall at Colorado College and my neighbors play music with the bass turned all the way up but the volume down, so all I can ever hear is the rhythmic thump thump thump of some song I don’t want to hear. I enter my room to the gentle unce-unce-unce of techno vibrating the walls and place my shoes neatly by the door. My rug doesn’t have one of those sticky beige grips underneath it to keep it in place, so I shouldn’t be surprised when I slip and hit my face on my desk. My weak nose loves to bleed. I don’t have tissues in my room and don’t want to go get any, so I just sniff the blood back down into my throat until the bleeding stops.
It’s been a long day, like most days, and I’m miserable, like most days. I’ve got what my therapist calls “low frustration tolerance,” meaning I’m a massive baby who breaks down easily. I haven’t wiped the blood off of my face yet. It’s gross, but I’m suspicious that my nose is waiting until I’ve cleaned it to start flowing again.
I open Spotify. My mom is a singer-songwriter, so I’ve listened to years of complaints about how little Spotify pays artists. (They basically get a Jamba Juice bagel voucher and a pat on the back for every 100,000 plays.) The little green logo still makes me feel guilty.
But I need Spotify. I am a meticulous creator of playlists. It’s a convenient outlet for neuroticism, as I learned from my older sister. She was my first dance partner and still my favorite, even if the days of jumping on the bed to Spin Doctors’ “Two Princes” with our stuffed animals are gone. I hover over one of several “my day has been bad” playlists, ranging from the vaguely melancholy “misty mountain hops” (Sufjan Stevens, Nick Drake, etc.) to the aptly named “uh oh” (Radiohead, Julien Baker, Flatsound). It’s easy to fall down the deep, dark, spiral of indie doom. How much Elliott Smith can I listen to before I should call a doctor?
So instead of listening to Radiohead for three hours and not leaving my room for three days, I put on the playlist “let me live.” If you’ve never seen the music video for “I Really Like You” by Carly Rae Jepsen, do yourself a favor and look it up now. (It’s Tom Hanks lip-syncing the entire song.) It’s been a bad day, sure, but if I take off my pants and dance to some bubblegum pop, I think I can get through it.
“I Wanna Get Better” by Bleachers
Jack Antonoff, lead singer of Bleachers, has wiped his greasy little fingers all over mainstream pop music and I could not be happier about it. There is no better modern producer of pop. His song “I Wanna Get Better” is made for new beginnings—it’s upbeat and noisy and full of happy piano riffs, guitar solos, and encouragingly clichéd lyrics like “I didn’t know I was broken ‘til I wanted to change / I wanna get better.” The song is optimistic in a way I could not be (and probably would not want to be) on my own.
I play Bleachers on my way to my post-breakup haircut. My ex once told me he thought music was an emotional crutch. I don’t know if I agree, but even if it is, I’m going to need crutches until I stop breaking my own legs. I ask the hairdresser to give me bangs. He refuses, calling me “unstable.” This is a fair assessment. I only cut one inch off my hair, because I’m not confident enough to get a drastic haircut anyway.
Jack Antonoff also produced Lorde’s latest album. There is not a single song on that album that isn’t genius, and I will fight to the death defending that opinion. “Hard Feelings” is one of the best breakup songs made in the last 10 years. It’s a song you turn up too loud when you drive too fast at night. The song is punctuated by industrial noises that sort of sound like distorted recordings of metal corroding and crashing to the ground. It’s a breakdown song that breaks down with you. It’s accessible because it sounds like how I feel, but is satisfying instead of terrifying. It’s the difference between being pushed into the deep end and jumping in on your own. I play “I Wanna Get Better” again on my way back to campus and feel a shaky sort of better, one that makes me think better is an actual possibility and not just a word.
“We Built This City” by Starship
Pop music has a lot of feminine associations, so I avoided it at all costs growing up because my internalized misogyny won out over my desire to enjoy myself. I felt a strong desire to be “chill” in my early teens, which made me anything but chill. Chill was shoegaze on vinyl, not 2000s pop music on a CD I burned at age 8. It wasn’t until fairly recently that I realized I’m the least chill person I know. Unless what’s hip now is caffeine-induced hand tremors, bleeding nail beds and Final Fantasy, I will never be the kind of effortlessly cool girl I saw on Tumblr at age 13. But at least I’ve stopped lying to myself about it. Now I can lie to myself in ways that make me feel happier instead of inadequate!
In addition to early 2000s pop, I am a notorious lover of bad ‘80s music. Not good-bad ‘80s music like Blondie, but bands like A Flock of Seagulls or Eurythmics, bands that leaned hard on the Juno-6 synthesizer to mass produce electro-pop bangers. Despite the fact that Starship’s song, “We Built This City” has been repeatedly voted one of the worst songs of all time, they’re probably still my favorite ‘80s band. The gated reverb in the hit song is the cure for any and all mental ailments. I know that I’m falling into the trap of the song, the easy satisfaction. Maybe music shouldn’t be an escape. But it isn’t always an escape; sometimes it’s a mood enhancer, a unifier, even a tool. (I once played an entire Foreigner album to get a guy to leave my room.)
Despite my strong insistence that pop music is real music, I still feel embarrassed about the volume at which I blast it. I’m working on it, though. Throughout high school I learned that fun things were not cool, so I only listened to Wham! in secret. It was like I was cheating on Julian Casablancas with George Michael. It feels strange to pretend that I don’t get hyped over Cher sometimes just because it’s cooler to love Nico. When I play “Believe,” for four and a half minutes, I can forget the ice bath of malaise I live in and shake off reality. Maybe it’s harmful to lie and tell myself pop can make everything okay. But if the truth will set me free, I’ll stay dancing in my go-go cage of a life.
“Dancing on My Own” by Robyn
I lie belly-down on my bedroom floor. I’m in one of those moods where I feel bad and want to make other people feel worse, so I’ve turned my phone off and put it in my closet to keep myself from digging up the past or acknowledging the present. I close my eyes and think about people reading this article and laughing at me and my melodrama.
I stare at myself in the streaky Target mirror resting against my wall and verbally self-flagellate a little longer until I’ve convinced myself I am both a) a terrible, histrionic Teen Girl Writer™ and b) a fugazi pile of bird shit roughly molded into the shape of a human. I don’t want to make it sound like pop music literally cures my depression. Pop music isn’t fixing my problems, it’s just helping me forget about them for a little. The world is a dark place, and happy-go-lucky music gives me a way to laugh it off.
Once I’ve gotten myself adequately worked up, I fetch my phone from beside my hamper and type out a text to my editor calling the whole thing a bust, but switch my phone back off before I hit send. I put my hand on my heart to count the beats (heartmath, my therapist calls it) and try to empty my mind.
My mind is hard to calm, so I press play and let Robyn’s soprano clear my brain as I wriggle-dance on the floor like the back half of a bisected earthworm. It’s a start. And tomorrow when I wake up with the weight of my problems sitting on my chest like a small, sadistic gargoyle, I will try to start again. Lying on the ground, I wonder if there really is some sort of higher being watching over me. If there is, the cruel bastard is laughing their ass off.
“Issues” by Julia Michaels
I call all the conflicting voices in my head “the collective.” This sounds crazier than it actually is. I sometimes picture my brain as a very crowded car with a locked steering wheel. It makes sense, then, that generally pleasing music like pop can calm the collective. If I let one person control the aux, then the rest of the collective will freak—but if I just turn on the radio, no one can complain. Obviously there’s music the collective would rather listen to, but if the collective can’t decide between Erik Satie and Yoko Ono, all hell breaks loose. So we settle for something made to shut us up and sing along to (this is the collective speaking.) Life is a series of middle grounds and compromises—this is what my mind does to get through the day sometimes. It pleases the whole crowd. Our minds don’t need to be going a hundred miles per hour all the time, right?
Julia Michaels isn’t on the cover of FADER for “Issues,” but the song is simple and appealing. Everyone has “issues” and the song is a reminder of that. But not a reminder in the “Hey, you’ll never be satisfied” way, but in this cutesy, girly-ass song way where problems are solved in four minutes. It’s a comfort in knowing carefree joy exists somewhere, even if in a silly song. It’s sort of like musical novocaine. Sure, it’ll wear off and hurt, but for now I can’t feel the pain.
But also, when I can finally ignore the collective, I can actually … feel things. Dancing like a fool makes me focus on my body and how I feel instead of letting my thoughts attack me. Lead with the body and it feels a little easier. And what better music to listen to? Nobody can fully resist something made for dancing. When the song ends and the collective starts up again, it’s a little quieter. All the passengers have a song stuck in their head.
“Run Away With Me” by Carly Rae Jepsen
It takes a stupid amount of energy to hate something that was literally made to be loved. As for my escapist approach to music, it doesn’t feel dishonest to dodge reality and expectation with pop songs. It feels human. I’m doing my best, and I have to let that be enough. So if bubblegum pop is a mindless lie, then just let me live in my synth-filled unreality.