pop girl wellness check

I have two half-finished legitimate longform essays in my Drive; a dozen Indeed tabs open; TurboTax up my ass; and a churning dentata-adorned hole where my savings account should be. Let’s forget all that and kiki about this month’s pop halcyon. 

These bitches will not shut the fuck up about their Saturn returning, a term I became aware of in March of 2024 and would like to never hear again starting April 2024. Is my desire to stop fucking hearing about the Saturn fucking Return how it feels for y’all to speak to me? Reflecting. 

Anyway, the pop girls are thirty now and they’ve been to a lot of therapy, to… varying effect.

You grown bitches should be ashamed. Getting out-welled by a TWENTY ONE YEAR OLD CHILD STAR PISCES. Olivia is by far the most regular of the bunch in the fuuuuuucking faaaaabulous deluxe edition of the Grammy-losing sophomore slugger GUTS. All five deluxe tracks rip hard, and above all, she doesn’t say “therapy” “situationship” “crystals” or “you’ll never fuck somebody hotter, right?” in any of them.

“so american” is her first love song, and it is breathtakingly fun, like if sperm from “I Think He Knows,” “Cruel Summer,” and “London Boy” by Taylor Swift and “A Kiss” by THE DRIVER ERA got all mixed together and turkey basted into the B-52s. She earns wellness points in “stranger,” in which she sings “you are the best thing that I’ll ever keep so far out of my life.” Realizing an ex, and y’all’s love, was pretty epic actually, but that doesn’t mean it should continue, is a realization commensurate with four years of therapy, and something some of her elders will Never Fucking Learn.

She also exhibits a refusal to be gaslit/guilt-tripped in “girl i’ve always been.” The demo version is spunkier than the final album version, which feels overproduced in comparison, dampening the acoustic knee-slappiness of the bootleg iteration. But the bridge is still gold: “So don’t say that I been actin’ different / I’m nothin if I’m not consistent / you knew everything you’d be gettin / I told you right from the beginning.” Ironclad self concept, ladies! Dig it!

Ari does not lose points for homewrecking. Homewrecking demonstrates skill and rizz. She loses points for the maligned Cell Phone Face-ass “situationship” “therapy” and “me and my truth” lyrics, which famously suck, so I won’t be further dunking on them here. She recoups those points, though, in the sprinting “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)”, whose sound clearly finds exhilaration and forward motion in acquiescence to indefinite longing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about The Hole in all of us (not that one but yeah that one too) that can never be filled and will yearn as long as we are alive. This is an unbearable thought, so our desire repeatedly finds an object and makes The Hole take the shape of said object, thinking if we can obtain said object our desire will be sated. But The Hole is like a game of whack-a-mole where the house always wins, and after each desire is sated another pops up anew. You want career success, you get it, you want love. You want love, you get it, you want freedom. You want freedom, you get it, you want stability. You want to make a user friendly and beautiful personal website, you use code GIRLPROBLEMS on Squarespace, you get 420% off. 

Some religions’ solution is to completely vacate the self of desire. Call me horny, but this seems, uh, unrealistic to me. My solution is to turn the desire from a lack, a constant wish to be away from your current time and place, into itself something that fulfills in this moment. Live in, relish, and create out of the very experience of desire: make art about the longing, make playlists about the yearning, turn a crush into an aesthetic experience or a bond with a comrade in the trenches. Feel the dopamine coursing through your body and be grateful you can feel this exhilarated after your first breakup put every fiber of your body into a meat dehydrator and you thought you’d never experience pleasure again.

“we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” doesn’t go so far, but it’s subconsciously clearly exhilarated by the notion of indefinitely delayed gratification. It soars, it leaps. This quality pervades kindred songs about Our Prospect of Perpetual Longing: “Be Good” by Pom Pom Squad (which I have a tattoo of because I am cool) and “Green Light” by Lorde. They’re all swelling, lifting off the ground, as if they’re sprinting toward something or reaching out across the bay.

This ecstasy checks. Desire seeks its own extinction, since once you have something, you no longer desire it. You pull off the mask of your beloved and are face to face with The Hole once agayne. But as long as you desire something, you believe that once you get it, The Hole will close forever and you will truly be happy. So it’s exciting and propelling to think of a life of knowing the kingdom of heaven exists and is waiting for you, once you get to the green light, or once you come back to me when you are everything that I could need, or once your coworker finalizes his divorce. 

I don’t like this album. I like really don’t like this album. Perhaps the problem is that I am a big time Kacey fan (I have a “Follow Your Arrow” tattoo because I am cool) and I know all the words to her first three albums as well as every feature and cover she’s ever done. So I know the exceptional small-town philosophizing she’s capable of on songs like “Follow Your Arrow,” “Family is Family,” and “Slow Burn”, as well as the thoughtful and near-bodily experiences of love/lost on “Golden Hour,” “It Is What It Is,” and “Fine.” In her first albums Kacey has a remarkable gift for saying the existential in disarmingly plain language. “It is what it is, until it ain’t anymore.” “We’re all tens that want elevens.” “Lemonade keeps turning into lemons.” 

This album sounds like a grocery list. 

For example, in the title track she boasts that she’s found a “deeper well” but doesn’t bother to even begin to describe that well. On the second single she says of a moment in a good relationship “this is what dreams are made of” — but what? What is what dreams are made of? She sings “the cute way he mispronounces certain words.” WHICH WORDS? “Even though I feel excited I’m kinda sad we’re leaving” KINDA SAD???????? ON AN ALBUM FROM GRAMMY ALBUM OF THE YEAR AWARD WINNER WE’RE GETTING THE LYRIC “I’M KINDA SAD”? 

This could be a therapyspeak problem. Part of Wellness is to sit back and observe thoughts rather than follow them, sometimes resulting in observing that we have a thought rather than actually experiencing that thought. This album strikes me as such outlining emotions rather than coloring them in; Kacey is “kinda sad” to be leaving her house, and that’s that. She likes various things about her partner. That’s that. When you first start to try to become functional and well attached it can feel like the point is to anesthetize and feel total peace, resisting activation from external surroundings. This way of being sucks ass, and is what the kids call a dulled sparkle. The actual point is to ride the waves, knowing after this crest will come a trough and vice versa; not to sit like a lilypad on perfectly still water.

It could also be the perennial problem of total detachment from one’s creative source; Kacey is a southern girl quick with sharp witted commentary on small-town life, and this album reeks of L.A. 

Finally, it could be something my friends brought up about Ed Sheeran recently: some artists are simply better when they are smoking a lot of weed. 

Two nights before her album release FLETCHER went on the podcast of her ex girlfriend Shannon she’s written three albums about. They sat on Shannon’s bed (knees touching), discussed their relationship, slipped into their archival relationship voices and bits, and ranked songs FLETCHER had written about Shannon. (Content I paid five United States dollars to unlock on Patreon) FLETCHER engaged Shannon in taking a deep breath and ~setting an intention~ for the episode, then touched her hands and thigh at every opportunity. 

The next day FLETCHER’s Zane Lowe interview came out. In it she held her ever present fucking crystal to keep grounded and kept talking about her “center.” (He seemed… on speed, right?)

Last night the album came out, and this woman has been IN LOVE WITH A STRAIGHT WOMAN, APPARENTLY. Girl. YOU’RE GROWN! 

So, yeah, queen is literally never, ever, going to touch the earth. And thank god, because her writing is best when she doesn’t fucking try.

You know how it helps to let yourself go all the way to whatever insane emotion you’re thinking and sit with it before you regulate back to reality? Every good FLETCHER song is that first draft emotion. “Birthday Girl” is devastating. “Becky’s So Hot” is an adult acting like a middle schooler starting fights beneath the north stairwell and it should have hit #1. “Bitter” is, as I’ve said before and will again, lesbian “Free Bird.” Similarly, on this album “Doing Better” is apparently a “Blank Space”-style self-parody? Okay.

“Ego Talking” suffers from the IMAXy wall of overproduction that strangles this record, but the epic line “you’ll never fuck somebody hotter, right?” made me stop and crack up in the middle of the street. FLETCHER said on Zane Lowe of writing this one, “it’s not gonna be the highest version of myself. I need to let my ego take the mic.” And that ego gave her the most memorable lines on the album!

At my first FLETCHER show I famously reunited with an ex, inaugurating the most traumatic month of our lives. At the next I blacked out to the point that the venue almost called the ambulance on me, ruining my best friends’ weekend and the practice of pulling straight from the bottle. FLETCHER is a harbinger of flame and fire, destruction, decay, and desire in the sapphic community. She is my tether. But her utter derangement allows her to express, free of superegoic imposition, the rot undergirding the sapphic unconscious — for instance, The Implication of what my friend Isha said to me recently: “you think about your ex a lot.” 

Lately FLETCHER is obsessed with Healing, to which I say, sure, do whatever you want off the clock. But in her writing I would implore her to not grow up and be regular. I need her to be insane so there is someone more explicitly insane than me.