It wouldn't even take a gun to my head to get me to call Rilo Kiley my favorite band ever, and though there's slightly more competition for the title, I would also call Jenny Lewis one of my favorite contemporary songwriters. As she herself once expressed in song, "Sometimes when you're on, you're really fucking on," and during Rilo Kiley's creative peak, circa 2001-2004, she was really fucking on. Honestly, Rilo Kiley deserves to be revered as indie rock royalty the way certain male-fronted bands of the same period are, and the songwriting duo of Lewis and Blake Sennett deserves to be placed in the hall of fame of volatile but fruitful musical partnerships alongside the likes of Lennon/McCartney and Buckingham/Nicks. I'm only slightly exaggerating. They were that good (and I still hold onto a sliver of hope they'll one day make their triumphant return).
At a time when indie rock felt even more like a boys' club than it does now (a realization she grapples with on her solo song, "Just One of the Guys"), Jenny Lewis's perspective was a unique one. Like many of her twenty-something contemporaries in the early 21st century, she struggled with feelings of self-doubt, anxiety, and aimlessness, but these were intensified by her constant battle as a woman to be heard and respected in a sea of men. Four tracks into Rilo Kiley's 2001 debut, Take Offs and Landings, her voice heavy with weariness, she sings what has come to be one of her signature lines: "I'm a modern girl, but I fold in half so easily when I put myself in the picture of success." She'd spend much of the rest of the band's life further navigating the weight of this confession, learning how to survive as a "modern girl" constantly caught between the insurmountable pressure of society and the irresistible allure of self-sabotage. Considering I'm still just as mired in this uphill battle as I was when I first discovered the band, no other lyricist ever has been or ever will be more relatable.
Although Charli XCX writes and sings songs about partying, hooking up, and getting fucked up, which, as a cautious introvert who largely prefers solitude, are activities I have never related to, I've recently realized she arrives at these themes from a similar place. The reasons why Charli can't stop engaging in such activities are achingly familiar: rather than allowing her creeping fears and uncertainties to consume her, she smothers them with the adrenaline rush that accompanies impulsive risk-taking, unable to stop herself even as she acknowledges that such methods do more harm than good. If Jenny Lewis is the indie queen of commemorating her insecurity-fueled fuck-ups in song, then Charli XCX is the pop princess equivalent.
Self-destruction runs rampant through much of Charli's music, but one of her most recent singles, "No Angel," perhaps brings it most sharply into focus. Here, Charli casts herself as the bad girlfriend desperately begging for a second (or third or fourth or tenth or twentieth) chance to prove her commitment. The problem is she can't stop getting in her own way. "I party, get naughty," she admits before the situation shortly escalates even further: "I'm sorry that you caught me fucking in the hotel." On one hand, she recognizes the wrongness of her actions and is "always telling myself I'll never do this again." On the other, though, the capability to change simply is not there. Acting out has become a compulsion, a habit ingrained so deeply that it now defines her entire sense of self. Past behavior has cemented her identity as a fuck-up, and since she can't envision a version of herself who isn't fatally flawed in this way, the only path forward is to maintain the self-sabotaging status quo.
The self-aware angle of the song strongly recalls Jenny Lewis, as disparate as her music may initially seem from Charli's. In the second verse, Charli sings matter-of-factly, "It's the truth/I'm bad news," mirroring Rilo Kiley's "Portions for Foxes," where Lewis insistently wails, "It's bad news/Baby, I'm bad news." But there's a deeper connection here, too. "No Angel" isn't simply a song about a girl who knows she's behaving badly but keeps doing it anyway. It's just as much about a girl who desperately wants to be good but doesn't know how. There's an innate desire for redemption threaded throughout the entire song - "Promise I'll try, promise I'll try/I'm no angel, but I can learn" - but it's never quite realized. By the end, this desire has morphed into something beyond the relationship itself. It's less about wanting to be better for a lover and more about wanting to be better for oneself - but what does "better" really entail, and where does one even begin when a lifetime's worth of baggage trails persistently behind?
These questions heavily inform two of my all-time favorite Rilo Kiley songs, "The Good That Won't Come Out" and "The Absence of God." On the former, Lewis knows she's a good person at heart, yet only the bad parts of her - "all the stupid lies I hide behind" - outwardly manifest. "Let's get together and talk about the modern age," she intones drolly, indicating just how little substance such interactions hold, "All of our friends were gathered there with their pets, just talking shit." (These lines are paralleled in the first verse of "Portions for Foxes" when she admits, "I keep on talking trash, but I never say anything"). Meanwhile, however, the layers of unvoiced goodness build up, threatening to calcify her from the inside out: "Eventually, my mouth will just turn to dust if I don't tell you quick." (In "Portions for Foxes," too, self-censorship begets violence: "There's blood in my mouth because I've been biting my tongue all week.") On the latter track, released two years later, her outlook is similar but perhaps even bleaker. Now, she's less convinced there's any goodness inside her at all and desperately appeals to a friend to help her find it: "Mike, I'll teach you how to swim if you turn the bad in me into good again."
It makes sense that when one has fucked up enough times in one's life, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate oneself from one's mistakes in order to attempt (or even see the need for) self-improvement. Failure becomes the norm, and one either subconsciously submits to it or actively chooses it because it's the only way one knows how to express oneself, a crutch for deeper, more complex feelings one's too afraid to expose. From that viewpoint, the only viable solution is to accept one's fuckedupness, a theme driven home by both songs. On "The Good That Won't Come Out," Lewis sings, "I think I'll go out and embarrass myself by getting drunk and falling down in the street/You say I choose sadness, that it never once has chosen me." But there's still a veil of denial attached to this admission; her self-destructive nature is something others point out but she only grudgingly accepts with a mumbled "Maybe you're right." By "The Absence of God," though, she's more ready to take accountability: "I say there's trouble when everything is fine/The need to destroy things creeps up on me every time."
Charli XCX's songs are all about accountability. She never shies away from the fact that she parties hard, and almost the entirety of Pop 2 centers on this fact. There are plenty of fun party bangers, but more interesting is the core of sadness that so frequently pulsates beneath their shiny, joyfully chaotic surfaces. She moodily details her every failed relationship, all of which seem to meet their deaths at her own hands. On opener "Backseat," she eases into this realization, admitting with a shrug, "I know I'm wrong/What a mistake/I'll never change." By closer "Track 10," the situation is looking a little more grave, as she catalogs her flaws ("Every time you get too close, I run away/Every time you say the words, I don't know what to say"), voices a desire to be better ("Really wish that I could change"), and finally owns up to her fear that maybe she never will ("I blame it on your love/Every time I fuck it up/I can't help it, I can't stop"). Even her heavily processed vocals, which sound like a robot in the midst of breaking down, can operate as a metaphor for this repeated tendency to self-destruct at the slightest indication of normalcy or real happiness.
Of course, the cure for all of this is more partying, which just maintains the vicious circle of self-sabotage. "I go to parties with strangers so I can figure it out/Run through a city at midnight to feel like a star/I want it all even if it's fake," she sings on "Backseat," an avoidance technique that is mirrored more simply in "Out of My Head" with the brief couplet, "Party with my tears/Swaying with my fears." For Charli (or her avatar), partying is more than just partying. It's a band-aid for her sadness, a sadness which, ironically, is only further exacerbated by her excessive partying. This is where things tip over the edge into dangerous territory, and she knows it. But instead of immediately pulling back, she instead observes herself as an outsider, powerless to intervene, as she careens out of control, taking bigger and bigger risks.
I can't help but relate all of this to Lorde's Melodrama, an album which also leans heavily on the theme of extreme partying as a means of numbing, yes, the aftereffects of a bad break-up but also, more importantly, those less palatable aspects of oneself that feel too vast and messy to even attempt to sort out. That partying is serving as a substitute for a deeper reckoning with one's most deeply-rooted flaws is clear across many of its songs and summarized neatly in its closing track, "Perfect Places." "Every night, I live and die/Feel the party to my bones," Lorde sings, again emphasizing the cyclical nature of these bad habits. Later, she asks her party companion, "Are you lost enough?/Have another drink, get lost in us." This, too, highlights one of Melodrama's recurring themes, that its protagonist's self-destructive tendencies are not only damaging her but seeping outward, totaling everything and everyone in its path. On "Homemade Dynamite," this culminates in what might very well be an actual brush with death, which Lorde notes apathetically: "Might get your friend to drive, but he can hardly see/We'll end up painted on the road, red and chrome, all the broken glass sparkling/I guess we're partying."
Then, of course, there's "Liability," a song entirely centered on its narrator's realization that she decimates all that she touches, from romance ("Says he made the big mistake of dancing in my storm/Says it was poison") to friendship ("They say, 'You're a little much for me/You're a liability'"), all building up to a final confession: "I understand/I'm a liability/Get you wild, make you leave/I'm a little much for everyone." In reaction, she metaphorically absconds, "disappear[ing] into the sun," which suggests that in her mind she's broken past repair (see verse two: "I am a toy that people enjoy till all of the tricks don't work anymore/Then they are bored of me"). To avoid hurting anyone else, then, the only conceivable option is to stay far, far away.
Then, of course, there's "Liability," a song entirely centered on its narrator's realization that she decimates all that she touches, from romance ("Says he made the big mistake of dancing in my storm/Says it was poison") to friendship ("They say, 'You're a little much for me/You're a liability'"), all building up to a final confession: "I understand/I'm a liability/Get you wild, make you leave/I'm a little much for everyone." In reaction, she metaphorically absconds, "disappear[ing] into the sun," which suggests that in her mind she's broken past repair (see verse two: "I am a toy that people enjoy till all of the tricks don't work anymore/Then they are bored of me"). To avoid hurting anyone else, then, the only conceivable option is to stay far, far away.
There's an additional layer underlying these narratives that I haven't even touched concerning the societal stereotype of a "good girl" and the ways in which women are villainized for not fully adhering to it. To comprehensively unpack this would take its own essay, but to me it seems like all three women, through song, attempt to rebel against such expectations while simultaneously trying to shape a new definition for what goodness means to them personally. Charli XCX engages with this in an especially direct way. On "Secret (Shh)" - which she didn't actually have a hand in writing but delivers with such conviction she may as well have - she juxtaposes what is expected of her ("Good girls shouldn't party/We do what we're supposed to do") against her desire to tear up the rule book and burn the pages ("But I don't want to follow that no more"). She also has an unreleased track, appropriately titled "Good Girls," that centers on the refrain, "Good girls don't do that type of stuff," meaning party, the implication being that all girls can and do "do that type of stuff" and shouldn't be shamed or ashamed. The question of how much is too much is ultimately up to Charli (or Jenny or Lorde) to decide; the point is that it's an individual threshold and not one in which society should have any say.
Taken collectively, there's a lot of bleakness here and not much resolution, but that's why these songs are so relatable. For us twenty-something-year-old women, like Charli XCX and Lorde now are, like Jenny Lewis once was, it's almost impossible to see beyond the present moment into a future where things are neater and make more sense. Instead, we stumble around in the dark, making too many mistakes along the way to count but also experiencing moments of immense awe and euphoria. We feel more fully alive than ever, which means every emotion is experienced tenfold, even (especially) the more volatile ones. But it isn't necessarily going to be this way forever. Jenny Lewis still writes about her fair share of self-doubt, but now it's often filtered through a past tense lens. On "Acid Tongue," the title track on her second solo album, she recounts her past experiences like stories told around a campfire: "I've been down to Dixie and dropped acid on my tongue/Tripped upon the land till enough was enough/I was a little bit lighter and adventure on my sleeve/I was a little drunk and looking for company."
More recently, she employs a similar device in "Head Underwater," where she pours out a breathless litany of past failures and insecurities with the benefit of hindsight: "I put my head underwater, baby/I threw my clothes away in the trash . . . I never thought I would ever be here/Looking out on my life as if there was no bad there." Again, the familiar good/bad dichotomy persists, but Lewis's prognosis of her own placement on this scale is rosier now. These newer songs establish her as the older, wiser former wild child, almost a big sister figure, who's been through the ringer and lived to tell the tale. Her emotional distance from these countless misadventures is hard-earned, but it offers a beacon of light to all the party girls who still teeter on the edge of a cliff every night then wake up every morning wondering if their countless flirtations with danger negate the innate goodness they feel glowing like a firefly at their cores. According to Lewis, the answer is usually no, it does not, or in her own words, "There's a little bit of magic/Everybody has it."
More recently, she employs a similar device in "Head Underwater," where she pours out a breathless litany of past failures and insecurities with the benefit of hindsight: "I put my head underwater, baby/I threw my clothes away in the trash . . . I never thought I would ever be here/Looking out on my life as if there was no bad there." Again, the familiar good/bad dichotomy persists, but Lewis's prognosis of her own placement on this scale is rosier now. These newer songs establish her as the older, wiser former wild child, almost a big sister figure, who's been through the ringer and lived to tell the tale. Her emotional distance from these countless misadventures is hard-earned, but it offers a beacon of light to all the party girls who still teeter on the edge of a cliff every night then wake up every morning wondering if their countless flirtations with danger negate the innate goodness they feel glowing like a firefly at their cores. According to Lewis, the answer is usually no, it does not, or in her own words, "There's a little bit of magic/Everybody has it."
