Dead Girlfriends, “Stop Pretending”

If you balk at the name of this project, you might want to skip Brooks’s Andrea Dworkin-quoting explanation (“that’s how living in the patriarchy makes me feel every day”) which, while thoughtful, sort of has the effect of making a non-starter into a starter. Or else process it, and Brooks’s at-times-uncomfortably-sympathetic lyrics (from “On Fraternity,” it’s like you have to wear black in places like this/ in their opinion you were always kind of asking for it) in conjunction with Michelle Myers’ measured response: “I’m not trying to say anyone who responded to this song is somehow not a valid feminist. But you’ll have to forgive me if I’m uninterested in having a watery paraphrasing of the words I’ve been screaming for years gently sang back to me in a male voice.”