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I made a mixtape/Spotify playlist for the new year; it’s got Ol’ Dirty Bastard and The Bangles and Blood Brothers and CeCe Peniston and Siouxsie and the Banshees and Sleigh Bells and it’ll make you breathe fire, in a loving way.
You should all make playlists for your new year too and then give them to us (in the comments or at liz@nogoodforme.com).
(dragon pic stolen from here)
The weekend is nigh and it is time to put your eyeliner on right, brush off your fancy boots and throw some weight around. But honestly, sometimes getting ready is much more fun than actually going out itself, because things are more fun when you are master of your own beauty and in control of your own soundtrack. These songs currently get played when I am “going into my girl cave,” as a former dear beloved beau of mine used to say, soaking in that primal experience of femininity and surrounding myself with hairspray, or something like that. I don’t know, it’s his weird phrase — I’m just putting together a dance-y fun playlist for it.
Charlotte Gainsbourg, “Terrible Angels”
Charlotte Gainsbourg, number-one girl crush with probably my favorite speaking voice in the world! Here, her soft, vulnerable, gentle voice sounds like it is taking over a big Goldfrapp song. It makes me want to run around, shouting “BALENCIAGA!” while pumping my fist in the air.
Joke! I wouldn’t do that. Unless I was really wasted at a fashion show.
Oh my god, you guys! On December 1, Figment‘s going to publish the sequel to Girl by Blake Nelson (aka the literary world’s most sartorially inspiring work of fiction, according to Kat). It’s called Dream School and it follows Andrea Marr to college and those tan lines on the cover are weird but, hey, we’re into it. We’re so excited.
Like many a woman born in the late ’70s/early ’80s, my first Girl exposure came via the excerpts that ran in Sassy magazine prior to the book’s publication – I can still see the illustration that accompanied the passage where Andrea runs into Todd Sparrow and Carla at the mall while Christmas-shopping for her brother. The book came out in September 1994 but I remember reading it in the dead of that winter – in my room, under the covers, in a dreamy/melancholic/post-Kurt kinda state of mind. My So-Called Life hit the air around the same time and as a result I always see Andrea as Angela; is that true for you too? Todd looks like this beautiful stoner boy in my gym class who was like the nice/non-aggro version of John Bender; Cybil looks like a girl at my junior-year bus stop who later joined the circus. Anyway: I’m happy Dream School will be out in winter and I look forward to hiding under the covers again, nearly two decades later.
So! Inspired by this great new Tumblr called Here We Girl Again and its Cybil mixtape post, I made a collaborative Spotify playlist that’s full of songs that remind of me of Andrea Marr (and Cybil, and Todd, and Girl in general). Now I want you all to subscribe and add lots of Girl-reminiscent songs: songs you think Andrea Marr would love or should love, songs that would form the soundtrack of the perfect Girl movie that lives only in your head. I keep trying to find a song that sonically/psychically resembles “We Are All Prostitutes” by Sins of Our Fathers but I’m still at a loss, so help me out with that. This mix could use a little more rowdiness and snarl.
I agree with Kat so much, about how Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen make for really wonderful “love icons.” But the other day I realized what I really want is for the world to be full of dudes who are just like Tom Petty. Can we make that happen, please? Can all dudes just start being exactly like Tom Petty in the late-’70s/early-’80s, unapologetically romantic in a chill kind of way, weirdly sexy and prone to wry smiling, smart-alecky and sardonic but ultimately soooooo super-earnest? I love gold-hearted stoner wise guys from Northern Florida, especially those with a penchant for jangly pop-rock. If only there were millions more of them.
Or better yet, dudes could all be a beautiful hybrid of Tom Petty and Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen and Joey Ramone and Ludacris and all the other guys I included on my “it’s cool when dudes are like this” playlist on Spotify. So, boys, if you’re listening, go ahead and subscribe and start embodying all those archetypes, and then let’s go on lots of dates.
P.S. I’d really love for a lady-loving dude to make the male equivalent of this mix, an “it’s cool when girls are like this” sort of thing. Do it and email it to me and I’ll love you forever.
It was conceived while flying over a lightning storm in Kansas last Wednesday, so now you all should go conceive some babies to it. Or not! Subscribe for these musics and more:
Blergh, Monday, late August, and when will this summer be over with? Perfect for a small group of songs featuring soothing, hypnotic voices and languid, lazy vibes, I’d say. I am drinking mint tea and sitting on a patio and listening to these songs and it all works. You should try it, too.
I know that a widow’s peak is like a hair thing, but I like to think of this Brooklyn band more like “widow speak” because they have this melancholy and reserve. It’s kind of beautiful that they’re covering Chris Isaak’s song here, and they do it almost too perfectly. I like their Mazzy Star-like feel, with a soft, sad girl singing and folk-y type guitars and drum backing it. I usually hate comparing one band to another, but in Mazzy Star/Hope Sandoval’s case, they never put out records except once in a navy-blue moon, so if you’re jonesing for that vibe, then this is for you. Their new self-titled record is really lovely for late summer as well.
I have to be honest and admit that I totally checked this out based on the record cover. I mean, how can you resist? Look at that eyeliner and all the lovely pink roses! This song has a similar Nancy Sinatra-type feel to the cover, with a kind of world-weary yet lush feel. I do like it so, and the cover, too, maybe enough to make it my fall eye makeup concept inspiration.
St. Vincent makes what I call “elegant circus music,” a term I apply to this and maybe Fiona Apple’s later oeuvre: it’s very ornate, cerebral and kind of percolates with all kinds of odd flourishes. Some people have a hard time getting into St. Vincent for this reason, but if you’re in a kind of vintage-y mood, it absolutely works. (And she was our first nogoodforme interview, so I will always heart her for that.) Something about “Surgeon” feels like a bit of a change, though, particularly in the voice: it seems both stronger and more delicate and nuanced. The first part is this kind of 90s boutique-chic sound that is all smooth, but the second half is classic St. Vincent: doll-like, odd, unexpected.
Yesterday I got all Twitter-y because I was thinking about indie pop records from the 90s that I never listen to much anymore because I keep buying new computers and losing, like, whole generations of music when I do. (Because it’s such a bitch and takes forever to download, upload, blah blah blah, and man, why am I buying so many computers?) For some reason Tuscadero popped out at me, because I remembered moments of dancing to them in a bedroom in some apartment when I lived in Allston for some summer in the 90s, being scoffed at by punks who lived there, of course, because punks are really good at scoffing. I was just having a great “I’m a girl, wheeeee” moment, scoffing punks! Because there is something really irrepressibly tough yet girly about Tuscadero’s music still: it walks a nice line between twee cuteness, but with a bit more riot-like spirit. I got inspired me to “dig up” (download, cough cough) their old Teen Beat singles “Mt. Pleasant” and “Angel in a Half-Shirt.” And of course I went on a YouTube nostalgia video binge, and unearthed this video of them on some DC-area 90s cable access show, playing songs in their pajamas and being cute and kind of snarly at once. Snarly cuteness/cute snarliness is something that always intrigues me, then and now.
This is Tuscadero back in the day. It kind of looks like they were tasked with the Herculean project of being cute and snarly and are settling into an unsatisfying middle ground between the two:
And this is “Mt. Pleasant,” the song that I loved so, although it cracks me up that they’re all, “Running around drinking a broken forty!” But I hope it inspires a new favorite subgenre of music: if I could walk into a record store and see a section called “Music for Cute Snarly Bedroom Dancing While Drinking Broken Forties,” I would be psyched.
Friday night I slept for two hours in Brooklyn and then took a bus from New York to Massachusetts; on the way I read all the 20th-anniversary-of-Nevermind coverage in the August issue of Spin. Some of the pieces were sweet and thoughtful, but mostly it just left me cold and made me want to speak melodramatic sentences like “I don’t give a fuck about Nevermind anymore.” So now that I’m wide-awake and running on a full night’s sleep, I’m trying to figure out if that sentence might be true. Here’s what I know:
1. Nevermind is a good record; I like how it sounds just like the color green of the waves printed on the front of the CD. “Lounge Act” is one of my favorite Nirvana songs, but I hardly ever want to hear it nowadays. I think of “Breed” and “Drain You” and “On A Plain” quite fondly, but I never really want to play them anymore either. I always turn off “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “In Bloom” and “Lithium” whenever they come on the radio. If I’m going to listen to “Come As You Are,” I’ll listen to the version in the video below. “Polly” and “Stay Away” and “Something In The Way” are all songs I used to love, but I’d be all right with never hearing them again. “Endless, Nameless” is still scary and beautiful.
2. Really, so much of the problem is I can’t relate to people who are like, “Dude, the first time I heard ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ – I mean, whoa.” I remember the first time I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” – it was October of 1991, I was 13 and getting ready for school. MTV was on in my bedroom and Steve Isaacs was VJ-ing. He came on and was all, “The next video’s from this new band; it’s crazy! There’s cheerleaders wearing black!” So I was intrigued. And then I watched the video; it was weird and ugly and mildly exciting. The song didn’t get to me but I knew I was supposed to love it, so I pretended to. I pretended for two years, and it had no bearing on my quality of life whatsoever.
3. Then In Utero came out! One gray afternoon I walked to the gas station to buy a soda and “Heart Shaped Box” came on the hard-rock station; it sounded so creepy and perfect, and for the first time I thought it was cool that Kurt was mean.** I got In Utero and listened to it every morning before school. In the library Gina told me we were going to see Nirvana when they came to town in November, so we did. The show was the best show, I don’t even know how to talk about it anymore. Kurt was sick and sad but he was king-like, in his own quiet way: he’d light a cigarette and shake his hair out of his face or swing his smashed-up guitar like a baseball bat or grind his teeth in time with the drums, and everyone was in love with him, and we didn’t even know he’d be dead in five months. No one else is like that.
4. So I love In Utero so much more than Nevermind. Also I love Bleach and Incesticide more; I never get sick of those records. And there other albums from the same year that hold up so much better, like Achtung Baby by U2 and Out Of Time by R.E.M. And of course I understand why Nevermind is the more important record but it still grosses me out, all this overwrought nostalgia. By the time you get to that lame-o fashion spread at the end of the Spin feature, with the boring-sexy cheerleaders in their black knee socks and belly shirts, it’s pretty clear there’s nothing new to say about Nevermind. So let’s not say anything at all. Let’s just let it be dead, at long last.
RIP, Nevermind. I love you but I won’t miss you much.
*No I don’t. I intend to live forever like Voldemort.
**I bet he wasn’t actually mean.
***That Nirvana pic came from ohitsthe90s.tumblr.com.
It’s so good! I stole the idea from my friend Tim and his “Freshman Year [Of College]” playlist, which is also so good. My playlist has these musics and others. Sophomore/junior year lasted from 1992 to 1994.
NOGOODFORME.COM is Kat and Liz. We write about style, fashion, music, film, art, photography, pop culture, celebrities, and more: all the good stuff of life. Subscribe to our RSS newsfeed and our comments feed to keep up with our latest stuff!
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