A Playlist For The Pathetic

by Alexandra Molotkow

Vulnerability is hard to accept in ourselves and hard to observe in other women. I want to be strong, but I am often a puddle. I cry in public all the time, out of joy and sadness and irritation and probably boredom, and always completely out of proportion to whatever is happening, just like an old-timey hysteric. I crush hard for all kinds of stupid reasons and it’s very humiliating. But I’d like to think of that excess feeling as, I dunno, a gift, and not as evidence of my inherent weakness. I don’t want to feel like my feelings are letting the team down. Feelings are powerful!

Jessica Hopper, in her essay on Lana Del Rey, wrote that she is “thrilled by the prospect of losing herself in this bad boy, finding form in his needs.” Lana radiates weakness — subordination is her strength. She sings as the girl sung about: the muse, the groupie, the wifey. Not so long ago these would have seemed like her only options, which is part of what makes the show so uncomfortable: too soon. But I think Lana is more about self-destruction than acquiescence. She validates the low emotions of many girls and women, people who are people before “the women they want to be.” We need icons to make us feel powerful, but also ones to redeem us when we fall way short of composure.

With that in mind, here is a collection of music by deep-feeling women who make their emotions look powerful, women who can be models for us in our pathetic times.

Dory Previn, “Lady With The Braid”

Dory Previn worked as a songwriter in Hollywood in the 1960s, writing lyrics to accompany the music her husband, André, composed. Then he dumped her for Mia Farrow. After that, Dory had a psychotic breakdown on an airplane: the voices in her head had told her that Sidney Poitier was coming to look after her on the flight, but he never showed up. (For more, listen to Karina Longworth’s excellent podcast, You Must Remember This, or read Previn’s fantastic memoir Midnight Baby.) She was hospitalized, not for the first time, but this time her doctors encouraged her to write free verse about her feelings. Since the worst thing that could have happened to her had happened — publicly — she was honest, and she had a talent for capturing thoughts no one else liked to explore.

Probably her second most famous song (after “Beware of Young Girls,” which is about Farrow), is “Lady With the Braid,” which is the finest, truest account of loneliness ever condensed into four minutes, and an unmerciful portrait of you, lonely. Dory understands the thought processes of desperate people — she knows how the brain eats itself — as well as the paradox of closeness without intimacy. She gets the Catch-22 of casual sex: you shouldn’t have it if you need it.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, “With You, Honey”

My mother loves Buffy Sainte-Marie (and so do I, thanks to her); my father, an otherwise wonderful man, thinks her voice sounds like “nails on a chalkboard,” which, to a dad, I guess it would.

Here she hits a certain pitch of attraction, and it sounds ugly and violent, because that’s how lust is! Screeching is probably the best way to express it.

Björk, “Crying”

Björk’s thing is the sort of tenderness so raw that it normally dies in articulation — she sings the thoughts you’re horrified to almost have almost said out loud. Though I personally have never almost said: “He’s exploring the taste of her arousal.”

We could do any number of Björk songs here, like “Possibly Maybe,” the song so emotionally naked she (reportedly) had to record it naked, or “History of Touches,” because Björk we’re so sorry you’re going through this. (But we still wish you hadn’t said that horrible thing.)

I chose “Crying.” I have definitely taken some meaningful walks to this song, although never without fear that the “you” in I can feeeeel yooooouuuuuu would somehow know I was listening to it about them. Usually, the “you” is a composite, because that’s the point of the song. It’s not even about the person. It’s about your precious longing.

Jean Carne, “Was That All It Was”

A song for Baby’s First One-Nighter. This song — sung by Jean Carne, an incredible vocalist and multi-instrumentalist who’d built a distinguished career in jazz by the time she recorded this — runs through all the sentiments you learn not to indulge after a one-night stand, and whether you, the listener, react with compassion or disgusted self-recognition is probably a test of character. Or don’t even react, just dance it off.

Laura Nyro, “Captain For Dark Mornings”

There are people you read/listen to/watch etc. because they make you feel good about yourself, and there are people you read/listen to/watch because what they do is so complete that it makes you forget yourself. Laura Nyro does both, and I love her more than almost anyone alive or dead.

I was a little unsure when I first started listening to her, because I considered her the woman I least wanted to become: shrill, unsexy, sopping with feelings. She has an incredible voice but it’s also the voice of the nightmare shrew. I got over my weird, self-hating woman issues long before I realized that’s not who she was at all. Who she was — let this anecdote, from Michele Kort’s Nyro biography, Soul Picnic, say it:

“Laura had these dresses made — she had horrible taste — and one of them was like a ball gown with plaster of paris fruits sewn on, like bananas,” [David Geffen] says. “It was unbelievably heavy, and it was like a joke.” When Geffen arrived one day at her apartment to take her to an important business meeting, she was wearing that dress. “She looked, what can I tell you — yikes!” he says, laughing. I said to her, “Laura, you look terrible, put on a different dress.” And she said to me, “Listen, I’m going to tell you something and I want you to get this: When I looked in the mirror, just like when you looked in the mirror this morning, I thought I looked great or I wouldn’t have come out.”

What I love about Laura is that she makes everything so complicated. Her whims open into entire dimensions. She will shoot up two octaves over some guy because that’s how she felt about him for a week. It makes no difference where the feelings come from, because feelings are the substance of her world. She valourizes the most humiliating, predictably female traits, and she smoked a ton of weed.

It’s hard to know what Nyro track to leave here. “Eli’s Comin’” is the #1 song for when you’re crushed out and know it’s going to end terribly, but it makes you feel like your life is a musical, and we’re trying to stay real here. “Time and Love” is the #1 song for when you have become the “Lady with the Braid,” but it’s a comfort song is the problem — it’s supposed to get you out of the pit we’re hanging out in right now. Anyway, I want to encourage you to listen to New York Tendaberry, the album “Captain” is from, because it will make your sadness OK forever.

“Captain For Dark Mornings” is very proto-Del Rey, all about the desire to be smushed by your feelings (“I’ll be your woman if you’ll be my captain”) — hard to admit to, and very real.

Out of the blue one day, Laura Nyro told her husband at the time, a Vietnam veteran named David Bianchini, that she wanted him to “be her captain.” Back to Kort:

Bianchini responded, “Laura, I am your captain, don’t worry about that.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Nyro responded. “I want us to live on a boat and I want you to really be my captain.”

“What kind of boat?” He asked.

“A tugboat,” she replied.

…Binachini took his wife seriously and began searching the East Coast and New Orleans for such a craft. “They’re monstrous, you know — like ninety feet long, and you need a crew,” he says. “But it was hard not to try and please her. She was pretty convincing, and pretty difficult to argue with.”

Kate Bush, “L’Amour Looks Something Like You”

When I first heard this song, the earnestness made me so uncomfortable that it started to sound perverse. I developed all these weird velvet-gown-canopy-bed fantasies involving soft light and deep squeezing. New fetish: extreme intimacy.

Captain and Tennille, “The Way I Want To Touch You”

We spend our lives fighting so hard against suck that it feels amazing to just leap into the suck. This is what I have learned from music theatre: just fall forward. Life is 200% better on the other side. All the best things are a little embarrassing.

Chaka Khan, “I Know You, I Live You”

There is a whole subgenre of love song that turns out to actually be about stalking. In my mind, this is the best song of all time about stalking, and listening is a liberating experience for those of us who are not stalkers but probably share some basic thought architecture with stalkers and fear that we would become stalkers if we ever sustained a frontal lobe injury. It is a perfect exultation of amazing feelings you should totally not be having.

Patrice Rushen, “Haven’t You Heard”

This is basically the theme song for online dating, a naked display of optimism that seems to invite cruelty. But deep down we all want the same things, right? To hear Patrice Rushen come over supermarket speakers.