star girl
I was in a band for about two months when I was sixteen. It wasn’t really anything serious— we were an unnamed four piece of varying ages sitting in our bassist’s basement with no original songs, and we spent most of our time debating what to cover, compelled by suburban ennui to do at least something with ourselves. Everyone lived with their parents. Only our guitarist could drive. I wish I could say that it was something that came together from creativity and a genuine passion for music, but mostly it happened because we were the ones always in the backseats of everyone’s cars, meaning we figured out each other’s preferences based on whatever songs someone sang along to. I was appointed singer, much to the dismay of our guitarist, and from there it filled up naturally. Guitar. Bass. Drums. Different bassist, because our original one moved.
Maybe it could’ve worked out. Maybe we could’ve actually been something— we certainly were good with technique, even if the passion and chemistry was lacking. What it came down to, though, is that some of us had a shared understanding and the rest of us didn’t. And you think you can work around that sort of thing, but you really can’t. Not the way we were divided.
“What about wet and tired/I’m your used whore?” our guitarist poses. It’s sometime in February. We’re in the basement again, trying to come up with something original.
“Are you fucking kidding me? No.” I wasn’t going to budge on that. At that point in my life— most of my teenage years, actually— I was engaged in a dangerous dance of everyone thinking I was older than I was, which came with all the perks (nobody thought twice about offering me cigarettes, alcohol, sex, or drugs) and downsides (relentless sexualization, assumed emotional maturity, etcetera) that you could imagine.
“Right. But it would’ve been fine if you wrote it, because everything has to go your way,” he says, with all the pomp and condescending wisdom of a man who’s almost a decade older.
“She’s sixteen, dipshit. It’s weird as fuck to call her a whore,” our drummer says. She’s three years older than me. I used to babysit her little brother when she and her mother were both at work.
“Well, she’ll be calling herself a whore— I’m not saying shit,” our guitarist argues.
Deep breath. Don’t get angry. I learned real quick that nobody listens to you if you’re anything more than perfectly rational, and I refuse to be ignored. “Even besides that, I’m not gonna give them ammo for sexualizing me— and if I do, it’ll be on my terms and it’s certainly not gonna be something that sounds like a Nine Inch Nails discard lyric.”
“I thought you liked Nine Inch Nails.” Now he’s just being childish.
“I do, man, but come on. That’s like Worst Rap Battles Of History levels of wordplay. I think we can definitely like, rework it into something better, at the very least. Preferably something that doesn’t give people a reason to argue that I should have my autonomy taken away.”
“Nobody would do that.” The drummer and I made eye contact, a shared exhaustion held between us.
“I think we live very different lives,” I said, keeping my voice calm.
“Nobody would try to do that. Right?” The rest of the band was silent. “Right?” Our bassist, with all the enthusiasm and energy of a cadaver, plucked out a slow and distorted version of Cream’s Sunshine Of Your Love. Our drummer tapped out the beat on the hi-hats, and we eventually shuffled our way into a sludgy rendition. Out of spite, I sang it in Spanish, intentionally making it harder for him to harmonize with me.
There was no point in trying to explain it to him. It’s the type of thing that’s very difficult to understand unless you’ve lived through it.
Let me start here. I, in all my sixteen year old naivety, was operating under the hope that we could make it big, which comes with a set of hurdles— obsession with the lives of the band, a lack of privacy, old childhood photos and problematic tweets and videos of early performances resurfacing, immense pressure, relentless schedules. I had a half-formed plan to log into my mother’s Facebook and remove any potentially embarrassing photos, to go through people’s phones and delete any videos of me doing something strange. Only once there was actually a chance for us, though. I’ve never liked hitching all my plans to one horse.
I knew it then and I know it now. It’s different for women. I grew up watching the horrifically public downfall of Britney Spears through supermarket tabloids, and figured out pretty fast that her male peers were never treated that way— they could cut off all their hair or go drinking or gain weight or fuck someone and they were never criminalized for doing it the way that Spears was. That was something else I picked up on, too. The men were “Timberlake” and “DiCaprio” and “Bale”; the women were “Britney” and “Angelina” and “Gwenyth”.
Here’s how it would’ve gone down if our little basement project got big. I would’ve gotten called a slut a hundred times over. Adult men would’ve had websites counting down to my eighteenth birthday. There would be photos of me leaving clubs, of hanging out with my friends, of me enjoying myself, all of them with bullshit plastered over them— messy, negligent, amateurish. Almost worse, there would be bad puns involved. Headlines would declare if I looked good enough, if I was too fat or too thin or too pale or too tan or too much of anything. I would be referred to by strangers with my first name almost always.
And of course, our male guitarist would be “the main artistic force” of the band. He would be a genius. He would be credited as the only reason we got big— his “talent” and “incredible” and “revolutionary playing” would be the thing that drove us to stardom. Our drummer would be forgotten, lost in the obscurity of the upstage. Our bassist— also male— would be the secret heartthrob of the group, but not be considered anything more than sex appeal by anyone more prominent than the fans. Sure, some posts might have floated around about how underappreciated they both are, but the critics would’ve hardly cared and the tabloids would’ve cared even less.
I knew it then. I know it now. Their eyes would’ve been on me, waiting for me to fuck up, and their hearts would all be set on him.
When I was deemed old enough to have an email— nine or so, I think— me and my friends would exchange addresses and send all the things we thought our parents might’ve disapproved of through it. It was faster than letters. Easier to hide, too. Besides, you couldn’t put YouTube links in a written note, and God knows that we were transfixed by everything our parents didn’t like. My dad told me about Nine Inch Nails, and we subsequently passed around videos of Trent Reznor like they were made of gold. Of course, this was a massive bragging point for me in one of the games we played— someone would start with my daddy lifted up our car, and then someone would say oh yeah? Well my daddy lifted up our house, and then someone else would say that’s nothing because my daddy can pick up all the telephone poles in the city. They weren’t lies to us yet. We hadn’t quite made the full jump into reality, and we still believed that a father was like the strongest superhero to exist— for all we were concerned, our dads could lift houses. But I always won that game, because I would just say my daddy gave me a Nine Inch Nails CD or my daddy lets me listen to Sleater-Kinney in the car or my daddy put on Cibo Matto, and everyone would want to come over and I would have won. Our dads might’ve been capable of anything, but they were never capable of understanding us, not like the way all those righteously angry musicians did.
As we got older and more into woman-fronted bands, my father’s relevance faded out as the female lead singers' relevance faded in. We emulated their cockiness, the way they made fun of masculinity, their makeup, the way they dressed. Eyeliner, red lipstick if our mothers let us, tight jeans or doll-like dresses. Outfits were sent over email, song lyrics, pictures of celebrities. One day, my friend sent me a screenshot of a Courtney Love interview.
“You’ve got to be prepared for the names they are going to call you compared to your male peers,” it reads. “Males you may have written for or with or inspired who may be copying you— stealing your moves, stealing your ‘bits’ or obsessions. You will be a floozy and a slattern. He will be virile and a ladies’ man. You will be a freak show, a retching wretch, a sloppy drunk. He will be charismatic, vainglorious, a ferocious drunk and Dionysian. You will be indiscriminate and desperate. He will be generous, tortured and driven. You will be so frail you may break at a mere wisp of wind. He will be alienated and aggressive. You will be greedy and a control freak too, but mostly you will be ‘primal’, ‘primitive’, or ‘instinctive’. If not, then you will be ‘contrived’. He will be in command, a cocksman, big-dicked, a genius maneuvering his instrument with superhuman technique soul magic. He will be neutral and a perfectionist, he will rarely, if ever, be ‘primal’ in the way that you, the female, will always be ‘primitive’. You will be ‘blonde ambition’ or a tiny child or a whore. He will be channeling secrets and battling cosmic demons. Then in my case, sometimes half the lyrics, less or more, are yours, and you’re still ‘primal’ and he’s still ‘tortured and a genius’.”
I sent back a link to a lyric video of Sleater-Kinney’s Call the Doctor and an uploaded picture of a supermarket tabloid I had taken the day before on the shitty little camera I got for a birthday. In this way, we came to a perfect understanding— as long as they had the power to, the men would always rather fuck you over than support you, and when they did support you, everyone would be so far up their asses calling them the next great feminists that you wouldn’t actually get any positive attention at all.
The guitarist drove me home that night. We didn’t talk, just listened to the radio— one of those classic rock grunge fusion stations that only play the same fifteen songs, an eternal world of Foo Fighters and Bryan Adams. I watched his keychain in the ignition, the dangling Pikachu charm and the piece of embossed leather reading “FEMINIST”. I knew it before, but I understood it then— we weren’t ever going to leave the basement.
A month later, our drummer overdosed and shortly after, our bassist got arrested for drug possession. The band naturally dissolved. I made rules for myself, in the possibility that I’d want to get back into music again— don’t get yourself into a situation with someone who doesn’t have your back, don’t trust that someone will get it, and when it gets hot in the kitchen, you’re going to be on your own, whether you like it or not.
Ultimately, if you’re good enough, the world will wait for you. Are you good enough? Will you turn into black hole, collapse under the pressure, or are you going to be a star?
Everyone wants to be a star, you know. I’m not sure we have a choice. It seems like you’re either collected or a mess, and I don’t think we get to make that choice for ourselves. I know Britney didn’t. I know dozens of other women didn’t. So how are you going to do it, of all people?
How are you going to live through this?
star girl
ugh i love this holly
u r so incredible w words grhahhhh