I can’t exactly describe why I related to so much of “The Joy of Sad Girl Music” by Laia Garcia-Furtado in Harper’s Bazaar recently, but I think it has something to do with how every band or singer described within was one of the pivotal touchstones of my college / grad school / 20’s / 30’s / everything. I may not have thought about Shirley Manson and Garbage’s epic lyrics recently, but I still feel them in the deep black recesses of my core: “I’m only happy when it rains.”
The article defines and contextualizes the history of “sad girl music” while at the same time implying that perhaps this is not the music of just the 1990’s or sad girls–but that it is the music of Girls Who Feel. This happens to be all girls, but many of us needed permission to feel deeply in the world we grew up in, where getting ahead meant becoming more “masculine” for lack of a better word.
Julian Baker, singer -songwriter of one of my favorite sad-girl songs “Faith Healer,” describes what happens around the time your membership to the Sad Girl Club starts for many of us:
“[T]he existential element that starts to appear when you grow up as a woman in this world and you are, because of your queerness or because of your nongender alignment—or because of just the fact that you’re not a man—deprived of certain opportunities and kept from certain spaces, and you start to really tangibly experience the inhumanity of the world. For me, experiencing that deprivation or exclusion makes you all the more sensitive to the ways that other people are deprived and excluded. And then if you allow yourself to be unguarded about that and feel the natural compassionate response—it is pain, right?” Baker continues. “Like, it’s regret and sadness. And that’s an okay thing to feel. Because if the pain is instructive, the sadness is instructive about how to make a more compassionate world.”
Read more, and get in your feels about it: “The Joy of Sad Girl Music”
Or, you could be a nerd like me and make a playlist…
Sad Girl Music from the 90’s (opens in Spotify)