Our Back-to-School Playlist

Jenine Cannell

Taylor Swift on tour! The summer headline. Of her second stadium “Eras Tour”, Swift says it’s a “journey through all of my musical eras.” As I contemplate the many, many times I’ve heard her songs fervently sung (in the wrong key) by my three daughters on repeat, I  reminisce about the time I surprised them with tickets to theirs and Swift’s first stadium tour, “Reputation.”

London, 23 June 2018. As our black cab approached Wembley Stadium, my daughters enthusiastically questioned our whereabouts. Hoards of people excitedly walked towards an entrance. My reveal sent screeches of joy through our car as their little bodies squirmed, still buckled in their seats, to see all the glittered Swifties marching towards the massive venue. We walked along with thousands of other fans, singing, smiling, unable to contain our elation. The night was a spectacular success: the music, the sets, the gigantic cobra floating through the audience. I watched my 8, 8, and 9 year olds in complete wonder. They belted the lyrics and jumped at every new song. How did they know every single word? I took in the magic of my girls, knowing that this experience and these songs will forever be mused over as they become adults.

“Look What You Made Me Do” hit me the most that night. I’d heard the words, but I’d never listened. The beat was strong, hard, angry, unapologetic, and stuck with me in the years that followed as I worked through, and untangled, feelings of my past. It was a departure from her more cloying tunes and arrived to me at a  moment when I was abandoning the facade of my self-imposed ideal of perfect motherhood.

Music holds a certain power over me. It can alter my mood, and the beats serve as the guides and storytellers of my life. Every major shift is matched with a song. “Look What You Made Me Do” is the theme song for the beginning of freedom from my cage of what a good mother should be. I used this song to claw my way to the life I desired, against the restraints of single, stay-at-home motherhood. When my life choices were met with disapproval, and self-doubt, I listened to this anthem. Its speech-like lyrics, hard underbeat, and loud declarations of resentment squashed urges to revert to a normalcy I’d never subscribed to. I replayed her lyrics over and over to remind myself I had not yet fallen into the abyss of a woman who loses herself forever in service to her family. “I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time. Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time” became my mantra. I’d survived many attempts by others trying to break me into becoming what they wanted, but I’d not allow it again. “Look What You Made Me Do” was part of the soundtrack to grab my future, as a woman, take charge of my destiny, and step out of the subservient life I had fallen into and did not want.

I don’t like your little games

Don’t like your tilted stage

The role you made me play of the fool

No, I don’t like you

The fights with the father of my children about my “selfishness” for traveling, and going out, the games he played, the rules imposed on me he didn’t have to follow, belittling my job as a mother, all led the stronger me to “rise up from the dead” and make decisions about what I wanted. I wanted an exciting life full of adventure with my daughters, so I planned a 15 month trip around the world with them for the following year, listening to this song. I moved to New York to return to school singing her words. To every email I received chastising my choices, calling me a bad mother for thinking about and taking care of myself, I screamed, “I’m sorry. The old <Jenine> can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, ‘cause she’s dead.” I killed the parts of me that were stuck, needy of his approval. This song was the backdrop of me proving to myself I was a good mother because I didn’t renounce the essence of who I am. “Look what you made me do.”

Vanessa Carlson

I did not realize that last summer would be my last real summer.

Last summer I could get away with living in the cushy bubble of not holding down a full-time job, while having the impending mix of anxiety and excitement about returning to college in the fall. Last summer I could return  to my ocean-bordering hometown and relish in the warm sand against refreshing sea water whenever my heart desired.

I turned 23 between last summer and now, and am very much in a quarter-life crisis fueled by the fear of my teenage angst running away faster than I ever ran sneaking out of my house.

If you also find yourself feeling mentally like a teenager, while being physically in the body of a twenty-something, soon-to-be college graduate, I have an album for you.

Pure Heroine by the New Zealand pop artist Lorde will forever bring me back to the era of first dates over frozen yogurt, selfies, and the word “swag” being in the caption of every Instagram picture worth liking. Released on the 27th of September, the album made its debut just after the summer of 2013, and just in time for my eighth grade school year to start. At the juvenile age of just 16 years old, the New Zealand based singer and songwriter published the 15-song, Grammy-winning masterpiece that is anything but childish. Savoring the sinking nostalgia that accompanies coming of age, the crushing notion of we will never be this young again is still felt deeply in real time with every note.

While the smash hit “Royals” is arguably the most well-known song off the album due to the amount of radio air time it has received over the years, my favorite song is “A World Alone.” The lyrics crescendo into the second verse with:

“All my fake friends and all of their noise/Complain about work/They’re studying business, I study the floor/And you haven’t stopped smoking all night/Maybe the internet raised us/Or maybe people are jerks.”

I relate to this indication of struggling to understand the pressures and disparities of being exposed to the real world as a teenager.

The closing track titled “Ribs” opens with the agonizing lines

The drink you spilt all over me/”Lover’s Split” left on repeat/My mom and dad let me stay home/It drives you crazy getting old

It is the realization and recognition of being in a moment you will never be in again, while yearning to stay there through time that is painfully limited. These lines are the embodiment of a carnal youth flirting with its maturing soul. The song speeds up as it flows through. This mechanism of sounding more and more out of breath is successful in quite literally speaking to the whim of a child playing outside until dusk… and then suddenly waking to school, a job, and a grown up life.

I relate to treating a finite number of summers as things to rush and push past in a crowded hallway, and later I’ve called to their memories through Pure Heroine.

Matthew Young

I am proud and pretentiously able to say, “I knew Awkwafina when she was a rapper.” Awkwafina hasn’t released that much music since her acting career exploded, but I love going back to when I was in Middle School and listening to “My Vag,” as recommended by my father who saw it in the local newspaper.

She has released two albums and two singles, all of which I highly recommend, but I am here to celebrate  “In Fina We Trust.” When it came out, it was really the yell of success that I  had been waiting for. It was amazing to see a female Asian artist  be recognized for her talent and personality.

“In Fina We Trust” is a celebration and a thank you to all of her fans. If you have followed her career and heard her music, then this album is a love letter that should be cherished too. As someone who has followed her music and acting career, I was delighted to hear it.  I  first heard it when I was learning to drive, so it has a very special place in my heart and in my life. I listened to this album while learning to drive, helping me to reduce my anxiety while driving on the freeway by myself for the first time.

The album is meant to be listened to in order;  it builds into a narrative of what it is to be an Asian celebrity in America. I think it really highlights how Awkwafina is an entertainer, able to interact with the audience in more than one way and carry a conversation. The music brings up topics of Asian representation, what it is to be in the media’s eye, existentialism, feeling big and feeling small, but also a reference to common, current pop culture and being “a youth” in today’s Americana. We hear it most abundantly in “The Fish (Intro),” where it is this dialogue between Awkwafina and a random person that mistakes them for a series of famous POC celebrities like Kimiko Glenn, Constance Wu, George Takei,  and Dora the Explorer.

I will say, it made me very sad to see the low ratings of the album when it was released, and I feel like that is in part because people didn't know she was a rapper before becoming an actress . There were many comments saying, “I hate when actors make songs,” or whatnot, but they didn’t know that Awkwafina made a name for herself in music, rapping about “taboo” things and making headlines far before her stunning acting debut. When I listen to this album, I wonder what it is like to be an Asian celebrity in today’s America and what it will be like in the future.

Taylor Syfan

I recommend that you watch Under the Tuscan Sun before the summer is over. This recommendation is concerned with relinquishing one’s fear of the middle-brow. In short, frankly, I recommend that you humble yourself. Here’s why: The magnetism of subversive low-brow culture and intellectual high-brow culture has become debilitatingly fierce. In fact, I struggle to think of a generation in history that has committed itself as unabashedly to high-brow culture, in particular, as the current generation has. It is difficult to even discern the line between high-brow and low-brow anymore; I’m thinking of Balenciaga Ikea bag purses, or Julia Fox’s nonsense relationship to blue jeans, or Marni’s collaboration with Carhartt.

The most tolerated regions of the taste spectrum are the bookends. The extremes. Low-low and high-high. Thus, we, as individuals, fear the middle-brow, the purest distillation of our culture’s most ubiquitous, unobtrusive, and universally accessible elements. Engaging with middle-brow makes us feel as though we, too, are ubiquitous. It convinces us that our highest intellect–the most intelligent thought we can conceive of, the most tasteful palette we can utilize–is nothing more than universally accessible. This abhorrence for mediocrity makes us cynical. It makes us skeptical of our own inclinations. We become an army of pompous contrarians.

When we engage with middle-brow media, like “Under the Tuscan Sun,” we humble ourselves. We allow ourselves to be reminded that “it’s just not that serious.” We may even consider that our aversion to the infamous phrase “live, laugh, love” could be an echo of our aversion to living, laughing, and loving at all. (Living, laughing, loving… How foolishly obvious!)

Consider Diane Lane sheltering from a midnight thunder storm, all her windows flying open around her, her fresh blowout whipping in the wind around her softly lit face, as implausible and fantastic as a Celine Dion music video. Consider a pregnant Sandra Oh, living in her chic San Francisco apartment with her foxy lesbian partner a la “The L Word.” Consider impromptu Italian excursions in vintage convertibles, kittens found under beach chairs on the Amalfi coast, chiseled perfume-ad male models masquerading as guy-next-door love interests, women in chic black gowns dancing under the moonlight in ancient fountains. These are the indulgent little joys of “Under the Tuscan Sun.”

If you do decide to live, laugh, love your way through this film, you may still find something ‘more’ hiding in there for you, you classy, cultured, brilliant beast, you! Challenge yourself to take a shot (of fine italian limoncello!) every time the film references Federico Fellini’s 1973 semi-autobiographical comedy masterpiece “Amarcord,” a veritable high-brow piece of Cinema-with-a-capital-C history. If you don’t find yourself quite drunk by the end of the film then, well, I’m sorry to say… your good taste and superior intellect simply pales in comparison to mine.

Nivita Chaliki

first:

Wander the streets. Lower the volume of your music when you pass by someone laughing with their head thrown back. Increase it again when you walk out from a building’s shadow and squint into bright, warm sunlight. Look through the reflections on passing windows into cafes, searching for a place to rest. Find one, reach your hand out to the door, and retract it after a few moments. You don’t know what to do with yourself.

second:

Walk up to the girl in the ticket booth exactly seven minutes before showtime and ask her for a ticket to Aftersun. Laugh to expel anxiety, and then laugh again when she joins you. Smile when she hands you a ticket and tells you which theater to go to, and how. Thank her when she says, “Enjoy the movie!” and just barely stop yourself from saying, “You, too!” like a fool. Squeeze your eyes shut in embarrassment and walk up the steps to theater number two

Sit alone in the theater, feeling simultaneously small like you could dissipate and no one would be wiser about it, and big like you’re taking up too much space and your arms press into your sides in an effort to minimize yourself.

Watch Aftersun.

Watch the grainy film memories, watch a person unravel, a father, watch and hear the ocean, feel it overtake you, watch a person, a father, become grainy film memory.

Think of your own father. Think of being an adult, realize you are an adult. Think of all the things you used to release as a kid, and think of all the things you hide now, all of your innards that you’ve kept private even when they become too much for you to carry.

Feel like you’re intruding on the characters. Like you’re reading the protagonist’s, the daughter’s, diary while she watches you do so. Watch them dance to a song that soundtracked the most depressing and the most uplifting moments in your life and others, watch it soundtrack the same for the characters in the film, and feel something form in your chest, right below where the romantic in you thinks your heart is.

It’s difficult because it feels like you’re being held in place while your eyes blink rapidly enough to expel dry tears, and it’s difficult because you can’t look away and you wish this would never end. This sensation. It’s liminal, watching a movie in theaters, alone, with nothing around you but space and time. You could bring your fingers up to where the projector beam shoots out from the window top center, and no one would say a thing when the shape of your chipped nails shows up on screen. You could cry and let out the thing forming in your chest, and no one would be a voyeur to it.

You’re the voyeur here. Feel like one, but feel it like a form of awe, because any movie that is so personal it makes you an intruder, is a movie well-done.

Sit in the theater after the credits roll, because you can’t leave. You can’t sit up in your seat, gather your things, put on your jacket, and leave. You feel compelled. The music that plays over the scrolling white names and words, is the kind of music that roots you where you are and refuses to release its hold. It’s the kind of music that whooshes past your ears as you’re pulled back into the liminal conscious in

third:

Walk out of the theater slowly, forty two steps per minute, because any faster would disturb the fog around you, and right now your goal is to stay in the fog.

Wander the streets. Feel the sun on your face when you reach each street corner, squint into traffic as you cross the street. Contemplate what it would be like to enter into a forest right now, to go to the beach and lay down in the sand, to go back to your childhood home and find all of the old home videos your parents stored somewhere uncharted. Instead, walk all the way up to the gallery side of town and walk up the steps to the High Line.

Put on your headphones and look up the Aftersun score album. Shuffle through them impatient until you find it—that music from the end, from throughout the film, that glued you immobile, glued you back together. Look out at the streets before you, watch people hold hands and laugh together.

Wander.

Natalia Berry

“With your makeup, your designer clothes, your hyper-feminine effect… you think that you’re letting everyone see that you’re a victim of machismo, of a chauvinist culture that—even with its little touches of sophistication, like the literary world! —punishes all things feminine… We can’t write except in drag. We convert ourselves into something absurd because the absurd is already living inside us.”

Lena Bactreau (84)

To me, summer is all about laying out on a beach somewhere in a skimpy bikini, watching your lover build sandcastles with ice-cold sangria in one hand and a book in the other. My drug of choice is almost always some strange uncomfortable novel with a twisty bent, but ideally , one that leaves me wondering, “Who the hell am I?” Mona by Pola Oloixarac will  leave you feeling like you need to rethink your entire life as a writer. Mona probes readers to question, what does it mean to gather the bones of your life, your identity even, and vomit them into art? Isn’t that just the most absurd and difficult thing in the world to achieve?

Mona follows an eponymous sardonic Peruvian writer based in California who is unexpectedly nominated for, quote, “the most important literary award in Europe.” She’s “struggling” in the way that most artists are—she’s trunked up on drugs, alcohol, horrendous men, and shit, her sophomore novel was dubbed “difficult” by her agent. Beside the constant threat of a looming stalker ex-boyfriend, all of those issues feel sort of boring to her. Desperate to escape the chaos and monotony of her “American Dream” gone awry, she travels to a bizarre gray village in Sweden close to the Arctic where the awards ceremony will be held. There she finds herself cooped up with a bevy of competitors—mostly male and very horny—from all around the world:each of which are more insufferable and sillier than the last. Some of them are relics of the past, bemoaning about the current state of the world, while others are plain sycophants or poets, for lack of a better word, finding meaning in the most trivial affairs. As we meet each character, without fail, all of the male authors from the ornery (sexist) Colombian writer Marco Guncio to the ominous “latest sensation in French literature” Philippe Laval to even Lena Bactreau, a bitter and hilarious award-winning children’s author, prove that Mona’s sour view of the entire publishing process is warranted.

In the book’s early chapters, Mona reflects on her status as a “woman of color” in the literary world. She’s debating the double edge of that label. Expectations will follow you no matter where you go. You need to be oh-so-grateful, talented, glamorous, sexy, yet a little insecure, and stay in your lane. This task is too much for even the most self-assured people. From this, Mona fantasizes that in death, she’d still be owned by the university, her benefactors. On page 11, Mona says, “The body of the deceased nonwhite Hispanic-Inca Latina of color would belong, of course, to the university.” Don’t most women artists feel this way? Especially those with an additional Other?

It should be noted that this is Oloixarac’s third translated novel, and many of the insecurities laid out in Mona and various other characters within her novels seem to reflect an intimate understanding of the problems of writers. I’m not saying this is autofiction, something Mona and Oloixarac would both chastise me for commenting on, but I’m saying Mona is a close-studied look into the warranted insecurities of femme authors of color from South America and beyond. Is there an overcorrection needed to support our art based on our identities, and should we use any means necessary to achieve that?

The thing about Mona, both the book and the character, is that they are actively participating in the turmoil around them, and they exploit it to their advantage. Reviews have said this book explores “a new kind of feminist,” but I think that’s too limiting. It follows a real bind you may find yourself in trying to “make it” in any creative industry as a non-white straight cis man. No matter how much you try, you seem to be the ones always getting fucked or perhaps swallowed right by the strange and distant past. This past can look like an  abusive boyfriend,  goofy aging writers, or perhaps something more sinister. Can you learn to enjoy that sinister shit? Can you crave destruction? Will it make you a better writer? Or just an asshole?Mona, at its heart, is a satire. It’s satirizing not the way writers write but how the establishment and those in it operate. And how by de-facto, big capital S, Society is functioning around us. As the insightful Alpine journalist Sven says towards the end of the novel, “Writers try to do something with what for the rest of humanity is just air.” That is to say, writers try to distill often what is a complex part of humanity into characters, and by doing so, they become characters themselves. I promise it’s not as heady as it seems. It’s actually funnier when you think about it. Mona actually brings me some comfort that in these dog days of summer, I’ll write something as critical and biting. Something that implicates me in the madness too. Something that implicates us all.