Record Collecting for Girls: Unleashing Your Inner Music Nerd, One Album at a Time

by Courtney E. Smith

  In his controversial biography of the Smiths, Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance, Johnny Rogan recounts stories of Moz hiding at his mother's house after doing something dastardly, such as canceling another Smiths tour or firing a manager. When the people at Rough Trade would call to talk to him about it, she'd refuse to put him on the phone, enabling him to avoid receiving any scoldings or taking any responsibility for the bad spot he'd put his band in. Yes, even after becoming a pop star, he still hid behind his mother's apron strings. That is a special sort of spineless. At one point when the Smiths were between managers, Moz went so far as to put his mother in charge of accounting for the band, despite her utter lack of credentials. She was, very simply, one of the only people he trusted to manage his day-to-day affairs and still let him get his own way as often as possible. You can see how he would be a nightmare to be in a band with, let alone date.

  As Smiths fanatic Mark Simpson says of Moz's relationship with his mother in his book Saint Morrissey: "Romantic love can be an eternal disappointment after true maternal love." For the men who feel that way, the resentment toward romantic love that Morrissey writes about is an absolute truth. They do believe that "Pretty Girls Make Graves" is as truthful about women as "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" is about their ever-unhappy relationship status. You will never be as wonderful as their beloved mother, and they will always disappoint you. You will both end up with broken hearts.

  There are dozens of bands who raise my eyebrows. Some of them are bands I dearly love but still see as red flags. The National has perfected lyrics about a certain kind of urban angst that I find lovely, but I have trepidations about dating boys who think they're genius. There is no chance I want to date someone whose idea of culture is Asbury Park, New Jersey, but there are still some amazing Bruce Springsteen albums. I like LCD Soundsystem, but I'm already over guys of a certain age who still want to go out every night and wonder why all the hipsters look so young. I'm into Prince for dance parties, but I can't take you seriously if your idea of romance is "I Wanna Be Your Lover." But I'm willing to allow for the possibility that any of these guys could be a catch. Smiths fans, however? You can forget it. I will never be your girlfriend.

  THE SMITHS SYNDROME PLAYLIST

  THE SMITHS, "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now"

  JESUS LIZARD, "Mouth Breather"

  THE SMITHS, "Suffer Little Children"

  THE SMITHS, "Cemetry Gates"

  THE SMITHS, "Reel Around the Fountain"

  DAVID BOWIE, "Ziggy Stardust"

  THE CURE, "A Night Like This"

  THE SMITHS, "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out"

  THE SMITHS, "Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want"

  MAZZY STAR, "Fade into You"

  THE SMITHS, "Pretty Girls Make Graves"

  THE SMITHS, "Girlfriend in a Coma"

  NEW YORK DOLLS, "Personality Crisis"

  THE SMITHS, "How Soon Is Now?"

  LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, "I Can Change"

  PRINCE, "I Wanna Be Your Lover"

  INTERLUDE

  give it to me for free

  FREE IS THE best price for most music. Rarely am I willing to buy a full album without having heard all or most of it in advance, unless I truly love the band and would follow them anywhere. I expect most bands to have phoned it in and try to collect my $9 to $25 on the strength of two to four songs. It's a musical bait and switch, and I'm not willing to chance it. Conveniently, many artists make their full albums available online to stream before they're released. NPR, AOL Spinner, and MySpace have become weekly must-visits for me to listen to what's new.

  In the summer of 2010, NPR changed everything I thought about Arcade Fire. I cannot stand Arcade Fire. As a general rule, I consider them overhyped and self-important and find their verbal and musical bombast obnoxious. I am not only not a fan, I actively dislike every aspect of this band. When their album The Suburbs was released, the buzz was, as always, out of control. The album was immediately awarded Pitchfork's Best New Music. It was written up by every press outlet in my Twitter feed, and no accolade was left undeclared. I don't care how many music and culture writers expound on their genius, these people are all wrong. Nothing they say is going to make me give my money to a band whose music I am certain I do not like. However, I noticed when The Suburbs was released, it was available as a free stream on several websites before its release, including NPR. This album is the kind of slam-dunk cultural event that a music fan must hear to be part of the conversation, right?

  I knew damn well that I wasn't buying this album, but I never want to be the ignorant jerk who rags on a band without actually listening to them. I like to be informed about what I'm hating, because it's the intellectually honest thing to do. So I began streaming it. Only fifteen minutes into the album, I had to admit that this was actually pretty good. To my great surprise, I didn't hate it. At thirty minutes in, I realized I was going to buy a copy of this album because what I'd heard deserved further consideration. I kept listening to the full more-than-sixty-minute-long album. That's a really long run time for an album in general and an extremely long time for me to spend with a band that fifty minutes earlier I'd been absolutely certain could break up without my shedding a tear. I'm not ready to say this will be the turning point in my relationship to the Arcade Fire's music, but now I know I like this album and I want to listen to it more. This was all quite shocking. No amount of publicity or press was going to get me to buy this album, but they got my money—and a second chance—by giving it to me for free first. It was no great surprise to anyone, but they ended up with the top-selling album in the country that week. You win this round, Arcade Fire, but we will tussle again.

  ARE WE BREAKING UP?

  THEY SAY YOU want most what you can't have. When the curtain goes down on another failed relationship, I often find the old saying to be true. I've been waiting my entire adult life for a guy to play Blur's "To the End" at some point in the course of our breakup. It's the loveliest end-of-the-affair song ever written, with that Hammond organ running up and down the scales, matched by a bit of vibraphone and the elegant-but-tragic good-bye tenor of the lyrics. Of course, to even have a breakup song requires a long, drawn-out event, and to have this particular song played implies it's the sort of ending in which neither of you want to part but you both know it's for the best.

  Then, amazingly, this actually happened. And it sucked. I'd imagined it happening as part of a noble good-bye, the sort of good-bye that is bittersweet and the product of circumstances beyond anyone's control, like terminal illness or a cross-country move to accept a dream job. Instead it came from someone I didn't want to break up with at all—perfectly fitting, given the song lyrics. A guy who we'll call Mark e-mailed me a YouTube link to that particular song during a drunken back-and-forth after I'd issued the pronouncement that we were ending things. We had only been dating for five months, but we'd been friends for more than three years and already knew each other well. Throughout much of our relationship I had been on the fence about getting involved with him, but after he hit me with that song, I wondered if he was, in fact, the ideal guy for me.

  In return I sent him an e-mail with the dramatic breakup song that I insisted better spoke to our parting (it didn't): "Ciao!" by Lush with Jarvis Cocker. It's a call-and-response duet that outlines all the ways two people can be happy to be finished with each other, from both the male and female perspective, and it's full of spite. It was meant to be an extra twist of the knife because he loved Jarvis's band Pulp and had, on occasion, done a fantastic karaoke version of them to impress me. I had been listening to the song on repeat in an effort to wrap my head around our relationship's implosion, but it's too over the top to be anyone's breakup song.

  From our dueling song selections that night, which was nothing short of a musical YouTube battle taking the place of a real fight, I could see that we were in different emotional places about this breakup. He was sad, while I was still angry. It was going to
be a long march through the stages of grief to pull myself away from this relationship, and I wasn't ready for "To the End" yet. I was still too annoyed-bordering-on-angry to be sad, and listening to a very sad song like this made me realize that I would eventually come to the final stage of grief—acceptance—and I'd get over him. But I didn't want to get over him yet; I wasn't done fighting and listening to angry songs. How was he already on to the sad song, bordering on acceptance?

  Musical selections during a breakup mirror the Kübler-Ross model stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. In both music and Kübler-Ross, you can skip some stages entirely, jump around out of order, or have to repeat them over and over again before you reach acceptance. The musical stages of getting through grief are a little bit different and look more like this:

  ANGRY—including: vindictiveness, songs that involve a woman screaming, and any song with themes of emasculation

  SAD—including: sad bastard, bittersweet, any song that makes you reminisce over love that's now dead, and any song that makes you curl up into a ball and cry

  BEGGING—including: asking for one more day, wishing for another chance, and anything that makes you feel like you've utterly given up on having any sort of pride

  KISS-OFF—including: gleeful songs about freedom, independent-woman anthems, and anything expressing a "thank God that's over" sentiment

  ANGRY

  Very few of my breakups have inspired loud, repeated playing of Björk's "Army of Me." I save such truly pissed-off songs for egregious-dumping situations: the cheaters, the users, the guys who hid from me their love of the Smiths. Just the same, even mundane breakups have their angry moments, if only for the injustice of having spent time—sometimes a significant amount of time—getting to know someone, only to find that person is utterly wrong for you.

  The end of a relationship tends to bring out a more irrational side of me, and I know I'm not alone in this. I'll admit to some seriously crazy behavior when I'm in the midst of breakup, but I have never ever let anyone, not even my closest girlfriends, who know how to talk sense into me when I'm veering off the rails of the crazy train, see how truly nutty I become during a breakup. There are so few times in life when you can allow yourself to become unhinged, and I find that putting on a few pissed-off songs helps me abate the impulse to compulsively check and comment on my ex's Facebook status or send inappropriate, annoying e-mails about every little feeling I might experience.

  In those times, I've been known to turn to music that makes that bitter Lush song seem like Celine Dion. I absolutely require that all of the angry songs be exclusively from female artists. I don't want to listen to a man when I'm full of inner turmoil about why a breakup is happening, what it says about me, if I'm a terrible girlfriend, if I'm just not girlfriend material at all, and a million other stupid and insecure thoughts. When I'm alone, behind closed doors, I put on my headphones and I spew lyrical venom. At a high volume. I'm particularly fond of songs about how unsatisfying a guy was as a lover (see Lily Allen's "Not Big" and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Bang"). It doesn't matter if there's truth in that sentiment, because we all know it's the cruelest thing you can say to a guy. And if you broke my heart, I'm aiming to at least knock your ego down a notch or two. I want to listen to songs where girls sound legitimately pissed off. Perennial favorites include Fiona Apple, Hole, and Sleater-Kinney. They don't even have to be pissed off about relationships—any sort of rage will do.

  These songs express the things I never say out loud, both because it is ungracious to be a bad sport when departing a relationship and because there is a social stigma that goes with being an angry woman. I get my anger out through repeated yell-alongs to my favorite tracks so that when it's time to talk to the guy I'm breaking up with, I can maintain my composure. In fact, I want to be so detached that the guy starts to doubt I ever liked him. I want to win the battle of who could care less. I may feel like I've lost all control of the situation on the inside, but they don't need to know—that's between me and my iPod.

  Female anger is not unprecedented in pop culture, but musically, an angry woman was something you rarely heard before the 1990s. Some '70s punks, like Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, had combative tracks about the injustices of being a girl, and Heart did a few outraged songs about jerky guys before they became a hair band. In the '80s you might happen across the odd pissed-off song from Pat Benatar or Debbie Harry on the radio, but they were the exception and not the rule. Overwhelmingly, being sad was the only marketable breakup emotion available to women in music. You could be Nancy Sinatra and talk about your boots walking all over your latest failed relationship, as long as you didn't roar above a pout.

  Then, in the 1990s, someone finally realized there was an audience for pissed-off, ranting songs by women. Unbridled female rage in music started out as an underground thing, with riot grrrl bands like Bikini Kill, Babes in Toyland, and Bratmobile, but by the middle of the decade, angry women were mainstream. Pissed-off hit songs from Poe, Alanis Morissette, Garbage, PJ Harvey, Björk, Tracy Bonham, Hole, L7, the Cranberries, Veruca Salt, and even No Doubt were constantly on the radio. It was becoming socially acceptable to call guys out on their deplorable behavior. These women were singing with fervor and not shying away from the dark undertones of fury. This acceptance of angry girls came in the midst of my formative dating years and informed my ideas about acceptable levels of female rage—namely, that it was allowed publicly. I'm still timid about letting my rage flag fly for ex-boyfriends to see, but I certainly feel a bit freer to spew some venom their way instead of playing the brokenhearted Kewpie doll whose feelings have the depth of a baby's pool. Unfortunately, that moment has been muted in music, and now we're back to the Britney Spears–ification of music: You can pout sexily when you're vexed if you dress in revealing clothes, but please don't ruin the fantasy by expressing anything as unattractive as anger.

  During my breakup with Mark, my songs of choice were obtusely angry: Berlin's "No More Words," Glasser's "Mirrorage," Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" (a first, I swear, and it felt so right). Kate Nash's "Dickhead" got a lot of play as well. And of course, there was Fiona Apple. Every breakup eventually leads to Fiona Apple. Which album I choose is directly related to the cause of the end of the affair. If it was something humiliating (like cheating or an unexpected dumping), I opt for When the Pawn ... If it's just the everyday disappointment of not getting along with someone, I tend to go with Extraordinary Machine. Breakups and rejections in my college years were often scored by repeated listens to Tidal. There are songs on that album that I might still pull out, but on the whole it's too melodramatic to resonate with me these days. If you put that album on, it will take you to a place when every heartbreak was a huge devastation. My Fiona Apple dirge of choice for breaking up with Mark was "O' Sailor." It encompasses a form of restrained, almost detached, anger that's more directed at love itself than at the man Apple writes the song about. She spends the verses of the song talking about herself, while the choruses are directed at him, and that suited my breakup with Mark well—I swear I spent as much time talking to myself about it as I did to him.

  SAD

  So many sad songs have been written in the history of music that you can easily find a hundred to suit the end of any relationship. While angry songs make me feel satisfied and proactive, like I'm shaking the bad feelings out, sad songs are reserved for when I'm feeling self-indulgent and want to wallow in my unhappiness. This is some of the ritual behavior I engage in during my sad-songs period. Some girls put on their headphones and go for a run or eat a pint of ice cream. Some girls go through all the stuff their ex gave them, sorting through what to keep and what to throw away. I usually find myself inspired to write a devastating breakup letter that recaps my feelings, either about our last fight or the relationship as a whole. If I'm moved to write the letter, I always send it. These letters have been known to bring men to their knees with their crushing logic and emotional depth. (O
kay, that has never really happened.) They have inspired some frank dialogue, though, which helps close the book on bad relationships for me. I always compose them while listening to incredibly sad songs, the songs that become representations of my feelings about ending things with these exes. While writing a possibly record-breaking eight-page letter to Mark, I listened to Bat for Lashes' "Moon and Moon" and El Perro del Mar's "Change of Heart" on repeat. Both are woeful songs about the breakups you don't want to have but can't avoid, so they were perfect for this situation.

  Over the years I've realized that I rely on the same artists and songs for the feeling-bummed segment of my grief parade. While every breakup is different, the feelings I have are the same and have been since the first time I fell in love. When I was fourteen, the Cure released Wish. It was the soundtrack (minus "Friday I'm in Love," obviously) to my heartbreaks throughout most of high school. Listening to that album now makes me feel the depression of unrequited love, the sting of rejection, and the very lowest of romantic disappointments, because it was the soundtrack to my first taste of those experiences. Even today, I cry when I listen to "A Letter to Elise." When I feel disgusted by love, I put on "The End." When I feel hopeless, I put on "Apart." Every song by the Cure is the most. Dramatic. Thing. Ever. Every emotion is exaggerated, every feeling overexamined, every rebuff turns the world upside down. It's the perfect reflection of the mind of a teenage girl. I bought this album on CD five or six times because I kept wearing it out from overuse. A few years ago I met Robert Smith while he was taping an episode of Unplugged with Korn (a career low for him). Meeting him was disconcerting, because he was this self-conscious, awkward person wearing loads of bad makeup—like the fourteen-year-old version of me—and I had absolutely no idea what to say to him. How do you thank someone for soundtracking the worst disappointments of your most awkward years?