Deep Cuts

by Holly Brickley

“I was just thinking about the Erykah Badu song,” I said. “It could be about being a solo artist, in a way. Shedding that baggage of needing other people.” “I love that idea. But doesn’t she make it all about finding a guy, in the end?” I had to confirm this later, finding the song online that night in my sparsely furnished room. Nomi was right. The problem with your baggage, the song seemed to say, is that no man will want you. It wasn’t Erykah’s fault—this was normal for the time, the clear undercurrent of every empowerment message in the mainstream. I found it deeply disappointing even as I related to an awful seed of truth inside it: that all my attempts to grow, to find creative independence and purpose, were at least partly in service of becoming more lovable. Screw that, I thought, closing my laptop. I was a New Yorker now.

She stood up from the deep chair and I noticed she straightened her legs a bit slowly. How awful, to get old. As if it wasn’t bad enough being young. At least our knees responded to our commands.

You’re obsessive about inconsequential things, like song lyrics, and dismissive of things that matter, like food and sleep and other people’s feelings.

“Boys are less afraid of being wrong,” I said. It was a line from My So-Called Life—she wouldn’t remember, though we’d watched that episode together in high school: the sensitive redhead observing the boys in her classroom as they shouted dumb guesses at the teacher. This was why men got to run the world, even as it became slowly obvious they were terrible at it. But who was molding all these chickenshit daughters?

My own past was indecipherable to me, like some invisible forearm had smeared the ink before it finished drying.

She’d made quick work of two fundamental truths about hipsters: that they had all been miserable kids, the boys too sensitive and the girls too willful for the social systems of the late twentieth century; and that nobody wanted to admit they were one of them. “I think what bothers me,” Hannah said, “is that we found our place, and then we immediately went and turned that place into basically another version of high school. Only we get to be the kings this time. Like, it’s a little…embarrassing?”

trendsetter? As I packed up my screeners, the DJ started playing Pulp’s “Mis-Shapes,” and I felt Hannah’s hand on my wrist. Her eyes were wide, entreating. I nodded to show that I understood: the song was about the outcasts she’d just described.

Indie sleaze is remembered as an attitude—a fuck-it-all embrace of grimy fun—as well as a musical moment defined by the party-friendly indie acts of the aughts: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, M.I.A., CSS. This is accurate but incomplete, omitting the massive amounts of ’80s and ’90s Britpop those kids consumed every night like so many cans of caffeinated malt liquor. History always forgets that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

“I wrote the bridge,” I said. She shook her head, a look of awe on her face. “Damn. ‘Bay Window’ is basically my favorite song ever. Did all that really happen?” I nodded. “Down to the black beans.” “Amazing. That is the best ‘fuck you’ in the history of ‘fuck yous.’ Like, okay, you don’t want to kiss me? I’m gonna make you sing about this mistake for the rest of your life, dude. You’re going to be singing about this at the fucking Troubadour in a fucking decade, dude.”

The Why: always the golden question. If marketers could understand why kids liked Arcade Fire, they figured, they wouldn’t have to pay for the rights to an Arcade Fire song in their ads; they could commission their own knockoff version for similar effect. They wouldn’t have to buy up small-batch distilleries; they could capture the essence of Arcade Fire in a brand, slap the label on a bottle of generic rotgut, and stick it on the shelf next to Grey Goose. The Why was where the real money was.

The night it posted, Zoe and Melissa banged on my bedroom door with a bottle of tequila and a rented High Fidelity DVD to cheer me up, but I felt oddly fine. There was justice in that 2.3, proof that labels couldn’t turn shit into money through force alone, which pleased me even though that shit had my name on it.

Halfway through our four-dollar plates of noodles I asked, spontaneously, if she wanted to make some extra cash as a trendsetter—like many journalists she’d been hustling to amass a following online; I’d been enjoying how well the snitty comments she used to make in the margins of my stories translated into the language of social media—then remembered with a wave of horror that she was well into her thirties now, far too old for the panel.