SONGS TO HEAR BEFORE YOU DIE #7: Modern Girl – Sleater-Kinney
Reflecting on the feminist anthem that brought me to terms with being a modern girl.
SONGS TO HEAR BEFORE YOU DIE is a series of personal essays about Really Really Good Songs. Each essay will focus on one song, why it’s Really Really Good, and my relationship to it. This one is on the more personal (and political) side. Entering my feminist criticism era or something. Also, it’s long and messy and I’d like to rewrite a more focused version at some point. Heads up for some discussion of eating disorders.
NOVEMBER 2023. OBERLIN, OHIO – It is my freshman year of college and after identifying and living as a transgender man for two years, I am considering the possibility that I’m a lesbian.
I’m not sure where it started. Maybe it was seeing Bottoms, the first lesbian film that resonated with me, at the Apollo in September. Maybe it was reading Stone Butch Blues in the first week of classes while I had COVID. Or maybe it was seeing the fucking Barbie movie in July. I’ve been getting into lesbian musicians — Big Thief/Adrianne Lenker, Sleater-Kinney. I’m in a relationship with a butch woman, who only stopped identifying as a lesbian because of me. We’ve had a lot of similar experiences growing up gender nonconforming. We share a lot of the same anger.
My favorite songs on The Woods are “The Fox” and “Jumpers.” I don’t get why “Modern Girl” is Sleater-Kinney’s most popular song. It’s too quiet, too radio-friendly. I like them at their harshest.
Sometimes I do this thing where when I’m walking around on campus to get something out of me, listening to whatever’s on my current rotation, I’ll search and queue up songs I haven’t heard in a while, just to bring back a certain memory or see if my feelings on it have changed. It is a cool, cloudy, wet day, and the spongy ground is caking my disintegrating black Vans, and I feel strange, untethered. I queue up “Modern Girl.”
And the opening guitar riff feels like today — vaguely melancholic, hungry for change in a period of stagnation, on the precipice of something. By the time the track hits that distorted third verse, when the screeching harmonica kicks up, when Carrie Brownstein proclaims anger makes me a modern girl, I feel something shift. I’m angry, too.
In 2005’s The Woods, Sleater-Kinney is more deliberate in their rage than in their previous work, and “Modern Girl” is the ultimate example of this. It’s the mellowest and most stripped-down track on the record, which is largely on the more explosive side, especially thanks to Corin Tucker’s usual position as lead vocalist. The song’s deceptively pretty, simple melody, sung by the more understated Brownstein, masks something deeper — and darker.
In the beginning, “Modern Girl” reads as the affirmations of the typical young woman, resigned to a simple life with simple expectations contingent on validation (mainly of the male variety) and commodification:
My baby loves me, I’m so happy
Happy makes me a modern girl
Took my money and bought a TV
TV brings me closer to the world
Not only is being loved romantically the key to the speaker’s happiness and personal fulfillment, but it defines her identity as a woman. In other words, she is expected to be happy, and that happiness should come from a lover — most likely a man. And TV “brings her closer to the world” in that it presents a commodified reality in which women look and act in an acceptable, palatable way — an image for her to adhere to. Not to mention the infantilizing use of “girl” over “woman,” another way women are conditioned to undermine themselves. This is followed by a chorus that captures the obsession of the modern woman with creating an image of the self where everything is clean, easy, and, most importantly, beautiful. “My whole life,” Brownstein sings sweetly and wistfully, “was like a picture of a sunny day.”
The entire song, in its three verses and choruses, follows this format: the speaker’s baby loves her, something makes her a modern girl, she takes her money to buy something, her whole life was/looks like/is a picture of a sunny day. But with each verse, the speaker’s dissatisfaction and disillusionment make themselves clearer. The second verse touches on several aspects of modern woman with the more-than-double entendre of “hunger.” There’s the obvious physical hunger that comes with restricting your diet to maintain a desirable thinness; there’s the consumerist hunger for products women are expected to buy and use; and then there’s the hunger for a life larger than those constrictive parameters, a world that isn’t so unbearably fucking small. The speaker buys a donut, and the hole is “the size of this entire world.”
“Modern Girl” combusts in the third verse, where the spark of the harmonica lights a stick of dynamite and the distortion is turned up, Janet Weiss’s propulsive drums come in, and the vocal track is blown out. Brownstein breaks from the melody to shout “I’m so angry!” The speaker snaps when she can’t buy anything more with her money, when material goods can no longer fill the gaping hole of her life. But then the drums exit, and though the rest of the noise doesn’t die back down, and Brownstein’s vocals are still emphatic, she’s resigned to the same definitive refrain. “My whole life,” she proclaims with a defeated finality, “is like a picture of a sunny day.”
In the end, the modern girl is characterized by her anger. And what isn’t there to be angry about? I could go on a book-length tirade, but there’s nothing I can say about the barbed wire fence of femininity that hasn’t been said before. It would just amount to blanket pop-feminist platitudes. And who am I to speak for every woman?
But I can talk about my barbed wire fence.
I’ve written about my relationship with gender before. I talked about it briefly in the last couple installments of this series, this past fall I wrote a longer piece on detransition and butch lesbianism that I published under a pseudonym in a small queer magazine, and I’ve been rotating in my brain a longer critical piece on transition and detransition. But I suppose it’s also particularly relevant here.
Growing up, going back to as early as I can remember, I had the sense that I was “bad at being a girl.” It was subtle at first, but it heightened with each year I spent in school and in team sports with other girls. I wasn’t the most stereotypical tomboy in the world; I liked video games and toilet humor and hated wearing dresses, but I also liked stuffed animals and occasionally wearing pink or whatever. I spent elementary school being aware that I was a Weird Girl but continuing to be a Weird Girl nonetheless, even as it became more and more uncomfortable.
As soon as I started middle school, this sense sharply intensified. I started dressing more femininely, having closer friendships with other girls (which all ended in tears, basically), and outwardly expressing interest in boys. Only one of my friends knew I was “not straight,” and she didn’t really know anyone in my group of friends because she was in the year above. She was also in the closet. I wore makeup and attempted to care about which brands were trendy. I wore a skirt to my seventh grade semi-formal, which was disastrous. After seeing a photo of myself from that night next to my very conventionally attractive, very thin friend, where I thought I looked unbearably fat and ugly, I basically developed overnight the eating disorder that would land me in the hospital a handful of months later. I just woke up the next day and stopped eating.
When I got out of the hospital, still extremely thin, I stepped up my femininity even more. I wore dresses to formal events, put more effort (and money) into doing makeup, occasionally shopped at Brandy Melville, took selfies and curated my Instagram feed obsessively, trying desperately to convey that I was cool and pretty and interesting and had a cool and pretty and interesting life. This, to me, was what Being A Real Normal Woman was. I modeled myself after the “aesthetic” influencer girls in my Instagram feed, vaguely alternative but still part of a specific trend. I tried to be friends with everyone in my grade, including girls who wouldn’t change with me in the locker rooms because they thought I was a lesbian.
It was all so dishonest. My female body felt like a cage that shrank more with each passing day. My entire life felt so much smaller when I was spending all this time on makeup and fashion and, more than anything, trying so goddamn hard to feel the way I thought women were supposed to feel. I wanted to tear my skin off and become someone easier.
Throughout high school, my gender identity and presentation fluctuated until I started fully identifying and living as a transgender man in my junior year. At the time, I thought of transitioning as a relief — freeing myself from being traditionally feminine. I didn’t have any masculine women in my life to relate to. I hated being perceived as a masculine woman — I remember begging my parents to help me get on HRT so I wouldn’t “look like a lesbian” anymore.
So I transitioned, medically and socially. And it was a relief for a while. I felt more attractive, or less unattractive. I had an easier time dating, finally getting the male validation I felt every other woman around me had such an easier time getting. I stopped worrying so much about being thin and dressing to look as thin as possible. I worried a little less about being gross, in a nebulous sense. But I was still performing.
This performance included mainly listening to and talking/writing about male musicians, especially the “male manipulator music” that became a meme in the early 2020s — think Car Seat Headrest, Radiohead, the Smiths, Joy Division, all those guys. I wanted to sing like Kurt Cobain or Julian Casablancas. I became self-conscious about liking Mitski and Phoebe Bridgers and Japanese Breakfast. I was also afraid of being misogynistic, so I would listen to female musicians in a very controlled sense. This all sounds completely insane because it was.
This thankfully changed when I got to college. I met this butch girl who’d also had the Weird Girl experience. She had formerly identified as transgender, but never medically transitioned. It turned out that we’d had many similar experiences and ideas. We got into a relationship while I was still identifying as a man. I’m not sure how this even started, but we got really into Big Thief, and from there I started listening more actively to women in music. Two of my friends got me into Sleater-Kinney, which was eye-opening. I hadn’t really listened to any women in punk before then — my only exposure was Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl” years earlier.
I thought more about why I had decided to transition. I knew, from the beginning, that I was trying to escape something. Trying to escape seemed natural and rational. I was not good at being a woman. I couldn’t have been a woman. It was rudimentary, childish logic for someone who thought of themselves as thinking deeply about gender and sexuality. I recognized that to be a woman wasn’t to be traditionally feminine, but I didn’t internalize that until I decided to detransition and embrace a butch lesbian identity where I wasn’t performing at all. And when I finally did, I got angry. I wasted so much time contorting myself into shapes that were impossible to maintain. I will never get the years I spent obsessing over my body and image back. Every day, I am so fucking angry. I was angry back then, too.
But you’d never know that from looking through my camera roll from those years. As far as Instagram was concerned, my whole life was a picture of a sunny day.