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To me, Rilo Kiley are inextricable from the proto-social media era-my early days on Livejournal and Myspace and AOL Instant Messenger, when I was first learning the ins and outs of crafting a persona online. Because to be a girl is to be seen, even in the moments when you wish you could disappear.
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"I've become just like a terrible mess," Lewis sang in a wilted lilt, "tracing the lines in my face for something more beautiful than is there." She seemed to subtly say something that my friends and I knew but couldn't quite articulate yet, that the deck was stacked differently if you were a girl. It had an air of weariness, disillusionment, and above all things an awareness of being looked at. But her brand of melancholy seemed a little different than the boys'. She was a comfortingly mortal combination of vulnerable and strong, usually within the same song (like the band’s great ode to carrying on in the face of depression, “A Better Son/Daughter”). I remember thinking Lewis was like the older, wiser, elegantly jaded older sister I didn't have-a kind of indie rock Dorothy Parker. I knew guys who liked Rilo Kiley, but I knew a lot more girls who loved them. I've tried in recent years to make sense of the impact that this record had on me (as well as some of my peers Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield has its cover inked on her arm, another friend of mine is currently considering a tattoo of one of Lewis's lyrics), and the only explanation I can come up with is maddeningly simple: It was the first record I loved on which a woman sings in vivid detail about being sad. And though the band was fronted by not one but two former child actors, Blake Sennett and Jenny Lewis, it was clear to anybody listening that Lewis was the star. In the early 2000s, Rilo Kiley were outliers: They were technically considered "emo," but their bright, twangy songs didn't sound like any of the other emo bands I knew they were part of Omaha's booming Saddle Creek scene but hailed proudly from L.A. Then, when I was about 15, Rilo Kiley's The Execution of All Things came into my life. There was a much-discussed legend-the Iliad of Long Island emo-that the lead singer from one of our favorite bands had stolen the girlfriend of the singer in another one of our favorite bands, so every song that both of these bands wrote was about the same, elusively mute girl.
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(When five of my best guy friends started a band, they asked me to be its official photographer, even though I took guitar lessons and studied music theory and had never so much as touched an SLR.) In the emo scene, boy sadness was accepted, normalized, and aestheticized the girls' perspective was absent. Although I knew quite a few girls who listened to emo, it was implicitly understood that this was music made by boys. Like goth before it, this music reflected back the operatic extremes of our teen angst, but its gender politics left something to be desired. Like a lot of turn-of-the-century emo kids, I started out on Pinkerton but soon hit the harder stuff: Brand New, Saves the Day, Thrice, the Get Up Kids, Taking Back Sunday-power chords, primal yells, and bruised, brooding male hearts. From my early-to-mid adolescence, I listened almost exclusively to music made by sad boys. When I was growing up, it felt like this was true in music, too.
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If you’re not happy, at least learn how to fake it.
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Well into the 21st century-in the professional sphere as on the street-too many people expect women to be warmly smiling Stepford Wives emanating sunbeams from their every pore. But, as the unimaginative cat-caller’s refrain of smile for me, baby too frequently reminds us, society would still prefer women to lacquer on a happy face. No one's default facial expression is a smile when staring at a computer screen anyone who has ever opened PhotoBooth by accident and been unexpectedly greeted with their cow-eyed "I am on the internet" face knows this to be true. A few months ago, an unfamiliar man working in my office came up to me and said, "Why don't you give us a smile, honey?" What I gave him instead was a confused look, followed by a belated, radioactive death-scowl directed at the back of his head as he silently walked by a few of my male colleagues on his way to the door.