If You're Sad, Stop Listening to Boygenius & Mitski: The Dumper-Dumpee Sad Girl Music Dichotomy

Not Strong Enough - Boygenius

I was at Ringtone last summer when I bumped into a former friend. It was one of my rarer occasions of inebriation (blame the common culprit Long Island Iced Tea), so when they decided to talk things out with me I only recall a stilted hour-long conversation which ended with me so frustrated at their repeated attempts to lie that I yelled, “If you don’t treat people with candor, how can you ever expect to be loved?”

I think that some credit should be due for using big words like “candor” when I was running on what was probably 0.02% Blood Alcohol Content. (Don’t worry, the dissolution of this friendship was more a matter of simple incompatibility and indifference than anything else — the final disagreement was about fatshaming DJ Khalid, of all topics — and so the emotional impact of the fallout was rather limited).

This particular friend had introduced me to Phoebe Bridgers and the entire genre of hazy indie-pop music. I liked the music enough to go to her concert in February, the first time I returned home to Singapore. That particular evening ended with her softly humming, "Emily…I'm sorry I just….make it up…as I go along…", pale hair shimmering in the white spotlight.

In “the record”, Boygenius are at both their most boy and their most genius. It’s all very tongue-in-cheek. The songs evoke the careless abandon that comes with boyhood - the mistakes easily forgiven and forgotten in the haze of being a child, and the blurred lines of misplaced mischief. Irresponsibility is absolved like mommy mopping up your spilled milk.

Let’s take “Emily I’m Sorry”. Phoebe apologises:

Emily, I'm sorry, I just

Make it up as I go along

Emily, I'm sorry, baby

You know how I get when I'm wrong

Phoebe’s apology is an olive branch. But what steadily grows stronger is the recognition that, come on, she’s not sorry at all. When you apologise to someone, you don’t try to flirt away your actions or thought process. Simply put, the boys are being glib.

She continues:

Just take me back to Montreal

I’ll get a real job, you’ll go back to school

We can burn out in the freezing cold

And just get lost

None of her pillowtalk promises are remotely convincing. What is a “real job”? The issue is all of these assurances are so vague and idealistic — in fact, intentionally so — that they ring hollow when put to the test.

With songs like “Cool About It” and “Not Strong Enough”, Boygenius translates this sentiment particularly well. Read:

I don’t know why I am

The way I am

Not strong enough to be your man

I lied, I am

Just lowering your expectations

“I don’t know why I am / the way I am” is, on the surface-level, an expression of futility, but it is one that connotes a jarring lack of effort to introspect — or, alternatively, a lack of willingness to share this introspection with the lover.

This is only reinforced by the fact that she cheekily lies for the end of “lowering [your] expectations”. There’s a fear of vulnerability that the speaker hides behind veneer after veneer of words that, frankly, don’t mean anything.

This fear of vulnerability is perhaps brought across the strongest in “Cool About It”. Here, the speaker takes the position of someone so lovelorn they not only hide how they feel, but attempt to fully eradicate these feelings and be (titularly) cool about it.

I'm trying to be cool about it

Feelin' like an absolute fool about it

Wishin' you were kind enough to be cruel about it

Tellin' myself I can always do without it

Knowin' that it probably isn't true

Cool About It is unique insofar as it takes the perspective of the Dumpee instead of the Dumper — but overall, “the record” is a hundred percent Dumper Music. Dumper Music, as I define it, is music for people who are so fraught with stagnancy that they cannot even begin to be clear about how they truly feel, and so they embroil themselves in these situations where they will never be hurt. Restless. Unsettled. Think Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. More examples of artists that make Dumper Music are Big Thief (“Paul” illustrates this concept particularly well), Cigarettes After Sex, The 1975, Phoebe Bridgers herself.

Maybe it’s just the general zeitgeist I get being 20 in the 20s, but I feel like the Roaring 20’s are an era of endless issues. Daddy issues, Vogue issues, commitment issues, the entire repertoire. One of my friends put it rather eloquently — “your 20s are the decade by which you would, consistently, put yourself and your goals and life first.” Of course, there are clear limitations to what she means by this and also a cap to how much being self-centred is even acceptable.

But the point is: your 20s are the years by which you are most unencumbered, and so simultaneously the most selfish and self-conscious. Most of us are big fat Dumpers right now.

The issue with this is that being a Dumper is inherently isolating. Let’s take a look at the big picture. The “loneliness epidemic” is a term that has been floating around the cultural consciousness a lot recently. More than 1 in 4 young adults (aged 19-29) feel “very or fairly lonely” according to a Meta-Gallup survey. This NYTimes Opinion video “The Lifespan of Loneliness” gives us anecdotes about how people across all ages and stages of life are stuck in this sort of suffocating isolation. My theory is that in a world where connection is so easy — a phone call, a follow request, a text — the lack thereof is so much harder to accept. This is both because you have the capacity to do something and yet you do not, and because other people have the exact same dilemma. Ergo, you’re now stuck in an impasse — or what we all call the IDGAF war.

I briefly mentioned the concept of winning the IDGAF war in my January reading round-up. To define it clearer for those amongst us that are less chronically online, it is when you refuse to show your true feelings — or, more egregiously, to feel your true feelings — for people or things, for fear of rejection or the shame of feeling disproportionately for someone else (this doesn’t have to be romantic).

But what one must recognise is that withholding emotion where it’s due is not the answer. Creating “scarcity and value” by pretending you do not care is, realistically, not going to make the person like you any more. The plain truth is: winning the DGAF war too much honestly just culminates in an entirely dispassionate existence that’s wasted trying to salvage some falsified sense of dignity or awkwardness (“feeling like an absolute fool about it”) over any sincere attempt at connection.

Of course, it could be perceived that being someone who always Wins the IDGAF War is useful because being sensitive or caring too much is, obviously, damaging.

This is where Dumpee Music comes in (think Mitski, SZA, Cavetown, even Lucy Dacus). Dumpee Music takes the other extreme and strips it all naked.

From First Love / Late Spring by Mitski:

One word from you and I would
Jump off of this
Ledge I'm on
Baby

Tell me "don't"
So I can
Crawl back in

Or, worse, from “I Don’t Smoke”:

So if you need to be mean, be mean to me

I can take it and put it inside of me

If your hands need to break more than trinkets in your room

You can lean on my arm as you break my heart

The pendulum swings the other way into Pathetic Territory. Dumpee Music is about devotion to the wrong cause, and a staunch commitment to compromising oneself for the sake of someone who doesn’t care about them. Taking the night shift — the harder, more exhausting, life-draining job — simply to never see a person again, or being at the behest of someone who is indifferent to whether you live or die.

But but but, the ironic thing about Dumpee Music is that even with all this vulnerability and raw soul-shattering emotion, it’s still not a proper bid for human connection. What’s the point of laying these confessions all out for everyone to see, when it does not matter at all to the person in question? Is this desperation fair? Are you feelings even honest or are they symptomatic of something else within you?

The trick with the Dumper-Dumpee dichotomy is that it might seem like a winner-loser sort of situation. But for all intents and purposes, this is a false dichotomy.

If one group of people are hopelessly devoted to people who don’t reciprocate their feelings, and another group avoid all genuine human contact for fear of being hurt (there’s something to said here about attachment styles), there is one salient point of commonality: both these groups of people are and will be utterly alone.

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So, what to do?

First and foremost, we just have to stop being so afraid of coming off as the person who cares more. There’s this phenomenal poem that I have on my wall that encapsulates why pretty well:

The aforementioned NYTimes Opinion video ends off with the 70~year old lady confessing, “If I can get myself to pick up the phone and call somebody, somebody else will say ‘I’m feeling the exact same way. And then — poof — you’re part of the human race again.”

I’m a huge proponent of telling your parents “I love you” for no reason. Linking arms with your friends. Making small talk with the barista, even though it might nearly kill you with embarrassment. Initiating and making attempts at human connection is a mortifying ordeal, but you just got to put yourself into the mindset that it is not just necessary but in fact the only way to give and receive love.

Secondly, to solve the Dumpee conundrum, there’s a dire, burning need to internalise Joan Didion’s essay on self respect. It’s a life-changing couple of pages that I cannot recommend more other than the deeply, deeply racist bits. Here are a few select quotes that ring in my head every now and then:

Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of mortal nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues

It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

That’s all I have for the Gazette this week. I’m not perfect at this thing either, but I read somewhere once that if you take away someone’s belief system, you should replace it with another. Since I am now telling you not to listen to Mitski and Phoebe Bridgers, I will now recommend for you to listen to Misogynistic Rap Music (think Drake, 21 Savage, Fetty Wap etc) when you’re sad. Trap Queen can and will snap anyone out of it.

Man, I swear I love her how she work that damn pole
Hit the strip club, we be letting bands go
Everybody hating, we just call them fans though
In love with the money, I ain't never letting go