wearing your cologne
I don't think Billie Eilish's music is good, per se, but every time I hear one of her songs on the radio I feel this thing that I realized, the other night, is my fifteen year old self trying to claw her way up my throat to say "what is this I like this where is this album, I need it."
It's hard to say whether or not I would have been embarrassed by this feeling at the time-- I was embarrassed by basically every feeling then so, probably-- but I'm certain I would have had it. When I was twenty-six and writing my first book I listened to a lot of Lorde because she reminded me, viscerally, of what it was like to be a teenager, but if I'd made music as a teenager, it would have sounded way, way more like Billie Eilish. Whispery, moody, equal parts bored and clever; self-consciously seductive, self-consciously everything. Trying so hard to act like the adult grown men seemed to think I was. I'm the baaaaad guy / duh.
Like I said, it's not that I think this music is good. Or that I think it's bad. That's not what this is about. I just wish I'd had it at fifteen. I wish I'd had Billie Eilish wearing weird enormous outfits that obscured her body, being petulant and talented and female and young and obsessed with her own self and its strangeness. I wonder what it would be like if the words I'd inscribed on my heart at that age weren't written by men who I'd later discover were serially abusing girls like me.
I don't think it would have changed everything; I don't think it would have solved all my problems or anything like that. But it would have been different. And I just-- I can feel, when I hear those songs, my younger self reaching out to them, to this thing she never heard, but knows to crave all the same.
-
That's three Tinyletters in a row on music and musicians. What does it mean? Who knows! But I like the idea that completely without meaning to I wrote you a little trilogy of thoughts about a thing.
What I do know is that tonight I'm getting on an airplane and going on vacation (with a USB keyboard in tow so I can write if I want to but won't have my laptop to lug / worry about / be distracted by, thank you to local genius Jade Chang for this extremely perfect advice). I am taking the apps off my phone and putting an out of office on my email and trying to empty my brain completely, in the hope that when I get back I will feel a little less hopeless and exhausted than I have these last few weeks.
On that note, here's an anecdote from Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer. This story is about putting out a daily paper, but it mimics with disheartening accuracy what writing for the internet feels like recently:
Sorry this ends on such a dark weird note!!! Your friend Zan is burnt the fuck out. I'll be more cheerful next time we talk, I promise.