Lately, I’ve been trying to make myself cry.
For reasons that are still somewhat unknown to even me and are probably not sane or healthy, I’ve kept a log in my notes app of every time I’ve cried in 2024 (I think I got the idea from someone I follow on social media who did something similar. I don’t remember who, but if I did I’d give more specific credit). It’s an interesting way to look back on my recent history and get a bit of a sense of how I was doing in any given span of time, though it’s not an exact science. Sometimes I’ll look back at the log and realize that the month where I cried six times (four of them in one week) was nowhere near as rough as the one where I only cried once—all that sorrow sloshing around inside me, dammed up, nowhere to go.
I haven’t properly cried in over a month and it’s starting to worry me. For some people this might not ring any alarms. I don’t understand those people—the ones who’ll shrug as they tell you they haven’t cried in years. Going too long without crying throws me off my equilibrium. One of my friends who’s more into astrology than I am would probably tell me that this is because I’m a water sign, even though Scorpios aren’t known to get as weepy as those born under Cancer or Pisces. I’ve always been a crier, and I need to cry somewhat regularly just to remind myself that I still can. It doesn’t have to be in a negative context: tears of joy, tears of wonder—they count just as much. Crying from laughing too hard, however, does not count. It’s easy for me to tear up from laughing and it’s not the same kind of release. Like I said, this isn’t an exact science. I know it when I feel it. And right now it feels like a drought.
I’ve been listening to Crush Songs, Karen O’s first solo album, which turned 10 this week. Following the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ abrasive and contentious Mosquito, Karen released Crush Songs as a collection of short, home-recorded acoustic demos of songs she’d written for Yeah Yeah Yeahs records around 2007. Crush Songs feels like a b-sides compilation, but they don’t sound like Yeah Yeah Yeahs tracks. Karen was always the face, voice, and heart of her band, but this is the first project that sounds like it’s hers and hers alone. It’s sparse and has none of the brash, fiery hallmarks of her work with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs—except for maybe their self-titled EP from 2001. Crush Songs isn’t upbeat or grimy in the same way, but it’s rickety and bare-bones, with Karen’s vocals mixed whisper-close; you can hear each crack and gasp and sigh. The nearest the two projects get sonically is toward the end of Crush Songs, when Karen’s talk-singing on “Native Korean Rock” evokes the shy, uneasy abandon of “Our Time.” No one understands, she launches into the sung-through section of “Native Korean Rock,” Can’t throw punches, kid, when you’re sitting on your hands!
I associate Crush Songs with the winter of 2021 and 2022, a time in which I hardly listened to it at all. I associate that time with a lot of other music as well—mostly music that I actually did listen to a lot then: the first two Injury Reserve mixtapes, some Black Midi live demos, Jeff Rosenstock’s Worry, Los Campesinos!’s Hello Sadness, lots of Slaughter Beach, Dog. As is often the case, I did not know what the significance of that time period would be while I was living through it. I was living with my parents a year and a half out of college, working as a nanny and a tutor, applying to graduate school, and still in denial about my massive crush on a guy who lived across the country. Unbeknownst to me, I was just weeks out from receiving a grad school admission offer, weeks out from booking a plane ticket to meet said crush in person for the first time and see if we should give this long-distance thing a shot.
In the months leading up to these two monumental life changes, I spent a lot of time alone, which, at the time, I didn’t know how to appreciate. I spent a lot of my alone time lying face-up on the hardwood floor of my childhood bedroom in the soft glow of a pink strawberry-shaped lamp, the hiss from the old radiator in the corner seeping into all the songs I played. I should’ve been listening to Crush Songs. Not instead of the music I had on steady rotation, but in addition to it. Crush Songs feels like a winter album to me, the tape fuzz comes in like the sudden heat of coming inside after walking home in the sub-freezing weather, comforting in a way that’s so soft it almost becomes harsh and heavy.
Time away / I really need my fix ‘cause you got me so sick / I know that I’m burning for you
I rewatched Meet Me In The Bathroom on 9/11 for the second year in a row. I guess it’s a tradition now. I started watching The Last Waltz each year on Thanksgiving, in part because some of my favorite music writers (Hanif Abdurraqib, Steven Hyden) do the same thing. I’m trying to make Meet Me In The Bathroom 9/11’s The Last Waltz.
I won’t say much about my Meet Me In The Bathroom rewatch, mostly because I’ve been trying to write a longer piece about the bands of that particular scene and the specific weirdness of growing up in post-9/11 New York. I will say that it made me relate to James Murphy more than I’d like to admit (I too have all but threatened to end my shit over receiving one too many irritating emails. Then again, I too am an art school Brooklynite in a little jacket and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s. And the unremembered 90s. And the somewhat-remembered 00s.) Mostly, it made me miss my city and it reaffirmed my belief that Karen O is one of the coolest people to ever walk its streets. And even she left eventually.
After watching Meet Me In The Bathroom, I sat on my balcony and read Pitchfork’s 5-10-15-20 profile of Karen O from 2014. She talks about PJ Harvey’s influence on the songs she and Nick Zinner wrote at his Williamsburg apartment the night before 9/11, as well as the influence of the Rid of Me demos on Crush Songs in particular: “It’s such a different animal, but very voyeuristic as well.” The act of just having a crush feels almost intrinsically voyeuristic, a series of attempts to live in the third-person, scrambling to figure out how to see yourself through the other person’s eyes. When I think back to that one winter, I knew I had it bad because I felt like I was always spying on myself. I think of the night that a blizzard hit New York and I stayed awake till the sky grew pale. I sent him a photo of the view of the snow-covered houses from my bedroom window, from one coast to another. It felt either too corny or too risky at the time, but I did it anyway. A view from my bedroom window felt almost as intimate as a view into it. Sometimes I’d peer into the windows of the people who lived across the street and try to see what they were watching on TV. Spy on me, spy with me, it’s all the same.
When I got to the end of the profile where Karen talks about how the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ third record It’s Blitz! pretty much took over her entire life, elevating the band to a wider audience than they’d ever had before while causing Karen to question whether her and her bandmates were outgrowing their personas and their music, I thought, maybe this will be the thing that finally makes me break my crying dry spell. Maybe it’ll unlock all my own concerns about whether my decision to prioritize my creative work and try to spin it into a career are worth it, and I’ll have some big cathartic release.
That didn’t happen. The moment passed. I gave up and went to bed.
Oof. What a great last graph.