“Soma,” Smashing Pumpkins
“Spin the Bottle,” The Juliana Hatfield Three
I listened to Q101 a lot in high school, because it was the “alternative station.” And, because I didn’t have any disposable income, my musical tastes relied pretty heavily on whatever the middle-aged programmers thought kids with shaved heads and eyeliner should be listening to. In 1993, it was Smashing Pumpkins. I have heard the song “Today” easily one hundred thousand times, and I know “Soma” is a weird choice, but what can I say? I like sad and soothing shit. I come for the angst, but I stay for the drear. I got Siamese Dream at a record store called Second Hand Tunes where you could get used tapes for three bucks. I picked up the Juliana Hatfield Three’s Become What You Are the same day, mostly because I was obsessed with Reality Bites (and with the idea that my very own brooding, misanthropic urban cowboy was out there with some obscure novel jammed into his jeans pocket, just waiting for me to save him), but they didn’t have a copy of the soundtrack, so getting her record was the next best thing. Yes, asshole, I mostly wanted that soundtrack for Lisa Loeb’s song “Stay (I Missed You),” but it doesn’t take away from how good “Spin the Bottle” is, and honestly, it doesn’t even matter, because I could listen to either over and over in the hope that I would go to sleep one night and magically wake up in a complicated situationship with Troy Dyer.
“Waltzing Back,” The Cranberries
Sometimes I get super tender when I think about how dumb and naive my child self was, and I wish I could go back and hug her while also reminding her to tuck in her shirt. I often think about how I was really into grunge especially because it seemed accessible to me, a person on welfare, because the whole premise was that you could dress like a grandpa who looks like shit and everyone would think you were cool and “alternative” instead of just dirty. I saved up a bunch of odds-and-ends money until I had enough to get a few things from the Salvation Army, because while I was fully grunge in my heart, on the outside I was dressed like a woman setting up for a church luncheon, as most of the available offerings for fat women at clothing stores were of the choir-rehearsal-on-Wednesday-night variety. I studied my copies of Sassy and decided that I needed some threadbare cardigans and at least one buffalo-plaid flannel shirt. I walked to the Salvation Army one day after school with the Cranberries blasting through the foamy headphones of my Walkman. I discovered there that even if you thumb through every rack of clothing until your eyes water and your throat closes from the dust, and the lady at the register jokingly threatens to physically remove you from the premises because it’s time for her to go home and start dinner, unless you are looking for a shapeless sack to attend a christening in, there will be no suitable cool clothes that fit you.
“Breakdown,” Mariah Carey ft. Bone Thugs-n-Harmony
Easily in the top five Best Breakup Songs of All Time.
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There was this Chicagoland chain in the late ’90s called Dr. Wax that had three locations, one of which was smack in the middle of downtown Evanston, within spitting distance of both a two-story Barnes & Noble (remember when they were also trying to be a record store?) and a Borders (pour out some of your overpriced coffee from the ~café~ in honor of that revolutionary scan-the-barcode-on-a-CD-and-listen-to-thirty-seconds-of-each-song feature). Dr. Wax was this indie record store that was dusty, covered in posters, crammed with crates full of vinyl and a diverse offering of new and used CDs, and manned by semi-hostile music nerds who scoffed openly at your bad taste when you approached the counter with your tacky Top 40 albums. It was as if your friend’s parents had let them open a very specific record store in their cluttered basement. I remember when High Fidelity first came out and I saw it in the theater. I was like, HOLY SHIT, I KNOW THESE FUCKING GUYS.
I used to hang out at the Dr. Wax on Berwyn, under the train, and just listen to the dudes behind the counter arguing with each other about groups I’d never heard of, then parroting their opinions and presenting them as my own to my dumb-ass friends who definitely didn’t care. I hung out there often enough that they started recommending new things for me to listen to (Massive Attack, Stereolab, OutKast) to expand my limited horizons, and I got comfortable enough to share my embarrassing requests with them (“Could you guys order the new Harry Connick Jr. for me, please?”) while they tried to not make fun of me.
If you’d asked me what my dream job was back then, “disgruntled music store employee” would have been at the top of the list. Nothing was more glamorous to me than the idea of tearing open boxes of new releases before anyone else got to hear them, or having the power to subject an entire store full of patrons who were trying to just stop by and get the new Kenny Lattimore on the way home from work to my very eclectic music tastes. All I ever wanted—shit, all I still ever want—is a cool-T-shirt-appropriate job where I can eat snacks and sit around talking shit with my friends all day while hiding all the good CDs behind the counter for myself. I wouldn’t even care what corny music you came in to buy as long as you don’t care that I am softly crying to Patti Smith’s Gone Again as it plays in perpetuity.
The last mixtape I got wasn’t even a tape; it was a CD from a dude I was dating who didn’t bother to do anything cool, like decorate the dull side with some abstract doodlings or write all the track names on the insert so I could stare at his handwriting in a totally not-creepy way while I was alone in my apartment waiting for him to call me. The night he gave it to me, I went to Cara’s house and she poured Absolut into pint glasses full of limes, and we sat on her couch parsing every single track choice. This is what passes for an acceptable Saturday night activity for two women who were definitely thirty-plus years old at the time. The mix kicked off with the song “You” by Raheem DeVaughn, and I remember Cara turning to me with this grave look on her face and saying, “Oh, girl, this is true love.” It ended up not being shit. But at least I was provided a soundtrack to grieve to.
B SIDE
“Explain It to Me,” Liz Phair
You don’t get to be from the Chicago suburbs circa 1993 and not be a fan of Liz Phair. I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules, I just abide by them. You could plug in almost any song from either Exile in Guyville or Whip-Smart (ahem, “Shane” is the best track on that album, in my opinion, even though people will argue that “Supernova” is, because they are morons), and I will know enough of the words from memory to be impressive, if you have low standards for things that impress you. I don’t know shit about the Stones, so I definitely don’t understand the correlation between this album and their Exile on Main Street, because, honestly? I don’t have to! It’s clear at this point that I live for a downtempo jam, and this is one of her best. I still have my well-loved, scratched-up Exile CD, and it skips when she sings “piece it together / it’s like weather,” which reminds me every single time that I don’t really understand what the lyrics to this song mean.
“Undenied,” Portishead
I did not understand Portishead when they first came out. Everybody loved that “Sour Times” video, but I didn’t feel like I was cool enough to understand it. I’m still not cool enough for a lot of things; for example, I have not made more than one attempt to suffer through Breaking Bad. During my one miserable year in college, I was sustained mostly by soap operas, ice-cream sandwiches, and a copy of Braveheart on VHS, but also the occasional care packages sent by my friends. That year, my only joy came from Delia’s catalogs and boxes of CDs my friends in cooler college towns sent me. My friend Jon sent me new music every week and one week he sent me, at the behest of his girlfriend, a jewel case wrapped in paper with a bunch of stamps taped to it, and inside, miraculously unharmed, was the second Portishead record. I will listen to anything that has been recommended by exotic women who don’t shower or wear bras, so I spent a week not going to class and weeping silently as Beth Gibbons sang directly to my pain. I was taking Prozac, really leaning in to being a clinically depressed person, and a moody trip-hop beat was the perfect soundtrack f
or my moping.
“Mixed Bizness,” Beck
Beck—yes, that Beck!—made a banging R&B album in the late ’90s, and if I was going to make you a mix, I would definitely want you to know that I know that.
“Swan Dive,” Ani DiFranco
I got my first-ever tattoo as an homage to Ani DiFranco. She was on the cover of Spin magazine (remember that?!) in August 1997, in a black leather bustier with a shock of teal and seafoam-green hair sprouting from the top of her head and a thorny, vine-looking thing inked a couple inches below her clavicle. I, an already devoted fan who’d meticulously written out the lyrics to “Not a Pretty Girl” in my journal years before, painstakingly removed the cover with a razor and affixed it to the cork board over my bed in my college dorm room. While I was home for spring break, my friend Ylang and I, realizing that we were both certified eighteen-year-old ADULTS, decided to go get tattoos. Actually, she decided to get her belly button pierced at a tattoo parlor, and since that wasn’t exactly my thing, I decided that while I waited I was going to get something exciting and dangerous tattooed on my body. I’m pretty sure I had less than fifty bucks in my pocket because I rarely ever have more than that, even now, and I looked at all the flash on the walls and was really surprised at how expensive tattoos were? Like, even the small, boring ones were hundreds of dollars! I had a check in my pocket from the government that was probably allocated for textbooks, but instead of that, I deposited it into an ATM down the street from the tattoo shop and said a silent prayer to the money gods so that they would do that magic thing where some of your money is available right away. Voilà! I was able to withdraw two hundred dollars! I did it quickly, before the machine could change its mind, and picked a tribal design off the wall because there was no way in hell that wasn’t going to be in fashion twenty years later! When the artist asked where I wanted it, I panicked and said, “Where Ani has hers!” and he looked at me like I was nuts, because, seriously, who the fuck is Ani to this fifty-year-old biker tattoo artist with a beard to his navel. I pointed to my breastplate and he asked me to unbutton my shirt the same way you’d ask for a glass of water, which I was somehow too stupid to have anticipated. Then he shaved my sternum with a bar of soap and a cheap disposable razor, while I lay back in a chair completely horrified by my hairy chest. He had to basically lay on top of me to get the tattoo where I wanted it, and I clenched my teeth while taking shallow sips of air in an attempt not to rattle him. I went back to school proudly sporting a healing, oozing wound in the dead center of my chest. I received a care package my friend Anna sent with some SARK books and Ani’s new CD inside, and I listened to “Swan Dive” on a loop while tenderly applying A+D ointment to my peeling sub-neck area for a week.
“Makin’ Happy,” Crystal Waters
I love house music. I live for a house remix. I have dated *counts fingers* six-ish deep house DJs (some of them would argue about my generous use of the word “dated,” hence the -ish). There is no clear picture of my musical history that doesn’t include some kind of club bops. You can’t grow up Chicago-adjacent and not have a deep appreciation for house music. It’s against the rules. I wasn’t old enough to really party, but my sister would give me tapes of all the good shit (Dajae singing “Brighter Days,” and Cajmere’s “The Percolator,”) and then I would get whatever I could from Saturday late-night mixes on the radio. I was obsessed with Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless),” just like everybody else when it came out. I got the cassingle (A side: radio edit, club mix; B side: seven-plus-minute Basement Boys mix, instrumental), and wore that shit OUT. Then I saved up and bought her full album, which in the old days was a fucking commitment. Nine dollars for an entire album was an investment. This was pre–Columbia House for me, which meant that I had to be really careful when purchasing an entire album, because it’s not like I was going to get a bunch of new ones anytime soon if it sucked. So I had to be sure it was worth it. I went to Rose Records (there’s a futon store there now, RIP) with my mom and got Surprise and knew that I was going to be listening to it for weeks, which I dutifully did. “Makin’ Happy” is a fucking jam, which I probably only discovered because every time she caught me in front of the TV, my mom was like, “I know you’re not watching a SHOW after you begged me for that TAPE!” and chased me out of the living room and into the warm embrace of my busted Aiwa boombox, but that’s fine.
“Ecstasy,” PJ Harvey
Rid of Me changed something in me. Yes, I tend toward the hyperbolic, but Polly Jean thrashing on her guitar while caterwauling about sex in this super-raw way seriously cracked something open inside my most shame-filled places. There was a time when the most glamorous thing to my tiny brain was the prospect of having someone worthy of the title “lover,” someone sweaty and elusive who would make me feel things that warranted a song being written in their honor, and PJ is mostly to blame for that. I listened to a lot of the Beatles’ later work and other shit that made me feel like I wanted to be on drugs, but PJ and Tori made me long for someone to put their tongue in my mouth while I had many very deep thoughts about it. Imagine being that stupid. Remind me to tell you about the time I thought I was going to be a spoken-word poet and at my first open mic said “rim shot” without realizing that it could be interpreted as referring to butt stuff. The entire audience laughed hysterically at my Feelings Poem. It dawned on me too late why it was funny, and then, because I am a humorless toddler, I stopped reciting the poem and tried to explain to the crowd that I meant it in the music way, and then they started snapping to get me to leave the stage, but I didn’t know that was a thing, so I talked for four more excruciating minutes until I died.
“On the Bound,” Fiona Apple
Umm, Fiona has exactly zero bad songs. I could totally make a case for just strapping you down and forcing you to listen to Tidal over and over until you’re inconsolable, but as much as I love that album, When the Pawn … is the one that, for me, has the most necessary and heartbreaking shit on it. I do not knock on Fiona’s door when I’m trying to have an upbeat good time; I am coming to her with the shattered pieces of my heart in my hands, setting the pointy shards at her feet, and lying very still until she stomps on them with her words. The urgency with which she growls “you’re all I need” is so visceral and great, and I have never spoken to anything that wasn’t shaped like a burrito with such fervor in my life.
“Brown Skin Lady,” Black Star
When I first started listening to rap music, I was deeply invested in West Coast rappers, mostly because the music was so aggressive that it made me feel tough by association, and also because I looked like a young Ice Cube. He, DJ Quik, and Too $hort (“What’s my favorite word? Bitch!”) provided the bulk of the soundtrack to my aggro tweens. I used to walk around rapping “I hope you know I’d rather be dope than use it” to myself, but what do those words mean to an eleven-year-old girl in the rough part of the suburbs? No one had offered me dope. And I myself was most certainly not the other kind of dope. I always felt like a voyeur listening to NWA, or anything else that referenced crack cocaine and guns, but then De La Soul came along, and I was like, “Ooh! Okay! They’re rapping about roller skates!” I wore hemp necklaces and a velvet choker almost every single day: backpack hip-hop was made for me, especially because that peace-and-love shit really resonated and, deep down, I was terrified of doing crime. “Brown Skin Lady” is maybe the first time I’d ever heard anyone earnestly and unabashedly rapping about a beautiful woman and not feeling good enough to approach her, and I am a sucker for that kind of naked vulnerability. Also, I think this ushered in my “smooth jazz with vegetarian dudes spitting rhymes over it” phase, and I haven’t left it.
“It’s Oh So Quiet,” Björk
The video for this is maybe the most impactful thing I watched during my years as a sensitive teen. Okay, fine, this and My So-Called Life. They both still hold up.
Wow, No Thank You. Page 5