Liminal Electroclash Spa

On Sunday we give our baby—who, at nearly twenty months old, will not officially be a baby much longer—his most profound bath of the week, the one in which his hair is washed. Normally bathtime is my partner’s purview, but this week I decide to stay because we are talking about music.

I’m trying to explain who Bonnie “Prince” Billy is, a task I’m not really excelling at because I’ve never listened to his music. I give a plot summary of the Kelly Reichardt film Old Joy, in which he stars. We play his most listened-to song on Apple Music. Finding that it kind of actively deflects our attention, we try the second-most listened-to song, which my partner describes as “Michael Stipe-esque” (derogatory).

We agree that we like it when an artist is in on the bit, and while Bonnie “Prince” Billy may be in on his bit, we don’t know the music well enough to recognize a bit or if he is in on it. Father John Misty comes up as someone I like because he is in on his bit, or exclusively comprised of bit. My partner tells me I like FJM because he’s so L.A. I just like a few songs, I protest. I’ve never been able to get into an album. But I really love “Date Night.”

My partner calls the twinkling synthetics that comprise the first two seconds of the song reminiscent of electroclash, a genre of music we both loved in its 2000s heyday. Perhaps, as he argues, the project of this newsletter has given me permission to once again love rock music as much, and as publicly, as I ever did. I am not endorsing this thesis but I’m not not endorsing this thesis. Certain it is uncontroversial to say that I’ve always loved guitar porn. Big wide riffs. Cosmic solos. Soaring musical spans big enough to hold an entire train of thought. But there was a period in my life, say from 2003 - 2009—the exact span of my life in New York—when the music I filled my life with was dark and hard and came out of computers.

My first electroclash song was “Seventeen” by Ladytron. A younger boy put it on a hail mary pass of a mix CD he sent me when I was a freshman in college.

The summer after senior year, before I moved to New York, this boy—a rising junior—gutsily made out with me at the end of parties. We’d be standing in some front yard at dawn and he would just go for it, shocking me, delighting me. Abundant boy energy fell off him in sheaves. He had soft curly hair and black-frame glasses and was shorter than me and wore Umbros shorts and Adidas slides with white tube socks. I had an inappropriate nickname for him and a boyfriend who was already away at college.

This boy kissing me felt so fundamentally absurd, such an inappropriate and frankly bold reach made in the company of my friends, all of whom knew my boyfriend and the obvious longevity of our relationship. He knew my boyfriend and the obvious longevity of our relationship. His kisses were unashamed and unafraid. Nothing that had ever happened to me before. Him kissing me—I thought I was just letting it happen, but of course I hitched my mouth wide open and curled my tongue up in his and felt every texture—was the most grounding experience of my life that summer, when my childhood became unsteady under me and I did not know who I would become.

I moved to New York, where my boyfriend also lived. The younger boy sent me the mix—two CDs and a handwritten tracklist diegesis that ran to more than ten double-sided pages torn from a notebook, folded into quarters—and spent evenings talking to me about it on the phone. The music was seductive and came from computers. (Except for T. Rex. There was a lot of T. Rex.)

The first song on was “Glass Danse” by The Faint.

I climbed up into my window over 14th Street, felt my body take on a silhouette in the light from the Irving Place marquee. I felt young and pretty and desired. I learned I could have it both: my settled partnership and my freewheeling other life. My secret life, but none of it was secret.

The next year, 2004, I had a different boyfriend, who knew a glamorous French family that lived in a huge apartment in SoHo. At dinner we observed their effortlessly cool thirteen-year-old son asking his parents for permission to attend some kind of gathering with the members of Fischerspooner. I had “Emerge” on my hard drive, trace of some eldritch Limewire search. I remember thinking—of course he knows the people in that band. When I was his age the only adults I knew were other parents, and I was steadily pursuing my first male friend, trying to will him into reality.

My college boyfriend made me mix CDs too, burnt onto special blanks he bought at some cool store in L.A., where he was from, which came with art printed right on the disk. Our courtship was dreamier than any cinema romance. The CD with “Eau D’Bedroom Dancing” by Le Tigre on it came folded into a drawing he’d done of a samurai weeping in a tree. (I was still with the first boyfriend at the time, but not for long.)

Later that year, after we moved in together, we saw Le Tigre perform in a common room at the NYU Student Center, a charmless corporate space where we also saw Sufjan Stevensplay. When I found out a year later that he’d made basically the identical mix CD for a girl he’d taken to her senior prom while I was figuring out how to break up with my high school boyfriend, I didn’t feel jealous. Just a hazy appreciation. Respect for the hedge.

In 2005 we studied abroad together at the University of Edinburgh. I flew to London with my parents and took the train to York, where we spent a few days before continuing on to Scotland, where my boyfriend and I were reunited. In York I read Lynch on Lynch and decided David Lynch was the greatest artist of our time, a transformation from the juvenile terror of him I developed as a child who hid behind the couch to clandestinely watch Twin Peaks and then, later, was rented Fire Walk With Me when she requested a “fun scary movie” to watch at a sleepover. Lynch’s films began reorganizing my life.

That fall in Scotland my boyfriend and I watched a Spanish bootleg of Twin Peaks together in my tiny dorm room with its slant roof. We had a tendency to sleep until two in the afternoon. The sun went down around three. I’d heard of Goldfrapp before but we were in her element there, suffering Scottish medical emergencies that sent us to the free clinic. Everyone thought my face was swollen because my gentle Angeleno dreamboat had beaten me up rather. But I just needed an emergency root canal. I was in so much pain that I couldn’t stop crying. An officious male nurse in a white double-breasted jacket handed me a tissue and said “Here’s for your snottings.” We finished Twin Peaks with me in the gentle float of the codeine I took every day until I could get back to see an endodentist in the states. I still think “Lovely Head” is scary.

Dark mornings, dark nights listening to every Ladytron song. “Startup Chime” was the sound of walking out Robertsons Close, Arthur’s Seat coming into view, passing into that city of bridges and stairways. In my memory this is when I watched Olivier Assayas’s Demonlover with my mother, but maybe that’s wrong.

Those years that boyfriend and I lived together with our dear and long-suffering friend, we woke up to the same song every day, first “The Sea” by Morcheeba, then “Love and Communication” by Cat Power. I still can’t really listen to either. Or I listen to them just fine. I just can’t stay here in this life when I do. Their opening bars wake me into that old self.

The next fall was my last in college. In September 2006 my boyfriend and I went to see Ladytron at Webster Hall. The opener was a band I’d never heard of: Cansei de Ser Sexy, CSS for short. They broke out of the beep boop dialectic, there were guitars, exclamations in Portuguese, unrestrained and joyous. The music had a loose, silly quality that centered a hedonistic femme libido. It has always been hard for me to let go and move my body at concerts, but that night I jumped up and down. My boyfriend tugged me out of the theater before the final encore was over.

“There was an afterparty,” I said. “The lead singer invited the whole audience.”

“Lisa, if we had stayed, I would have fallen in love with that lead singer,” he told me. “I would have changed my life for her.”

Maybe he still will!

I saw Ladytron and CSS again after that. The year after, I dragged my sister to see Ladytron open for The Chemical Brothers at McCarren Pool, a venue and a crowd that suited them not at all, and several years later my first husband and I drove to Pomono to see CSS play The Glass House. Nothing ever lived up to that first night, “Art Bitch” a spell conjuring my future.

How did I find music those days? On the internet? At Other Music, the late record store that carried the albums of the great obsession of my New York years, my friend Jon Ernsberger? Somehow I’ve always found it. Somehow it has always found me.

By 2007 I was into Metric—I heard them on the soundtrack of a different Assayas movie—I went to see them with a friend I can’t remember in the prized leather jacket my mother bought me in the south of France that summer, in the brand-new haircut I’d gotten as a dare to myself.

A band I’d never heard of opened for Metric, a spectacle of strobe lights on a slight, writhing woman who looked exactly as I wanted to when I was fourteen years old, an ominously tall man bent over a soundboard behind her. A fight broke out in the pit, the only real pit of my life. Someone threw a punch. I leapt back, blood on my jacket.

After that I might as well have left. After that, Metric was nothing. The blood on my jacket became a story I told about taking the punch to my own face. That violence was everything I had ever wanted. Billy Corgan could never. This was Crystal Castles.

I’m not surprised that there was terrible cruelty behind Crystal Castles, that the frontwoman I once watched perform on crutches, guzzling red wine from the bottle, her face and body a map of abjection, was being hurt to create the sound. I wouldn’t have gone to the shows if I’d known. But I didn’t know. I felt free in that sound of pain and suffering. “Courtship Dating” touched some blank sorrow in me aligned exactly with the freedom of being twenty-two, a child playacting adult, a girl in a city who went to Cosmic Cantina at one in the morning, drunk and alone, to get drunker on sangria and eat a California-style burrito as incomprehensible as the sounds that tracked me.

I was in it, swimming along. Swum along. The music felt like it belonged to me, like it was telling me something about myself, like if I just kept listening, I would find something out. And I did.

I could be the person I felt like inside, jagged and angular, less soft, less round, less girl. I might have within me a capacity for cruelty and duplicitousness, the ability to be hard and cold and pleasurable. I might be devious. I might be unknown. I might be someone else. There was another track, running right alongside me, that I could step into, as easily as crossing Third Avenue. I could see it when I listened to the music.

I might leave my life, easily as falling asleep, and wake up in another.

Postscript: Wikipedia informs me that Die Antwoord is an electroclash band. If this is true, maybe my entanglement with the genre didn’t end in 2009, when I left New York for Los Angeles. Around 2012, I was so into Die Antwoord that I researched the milieu of white South African culture their music parodies/celebrates/troubles, had a reasonable thesis about zef I articulated to baffled listeners, traveled to other cities to present papers about the band at academic conferences, and attempted to learn Afrikaans to become a better Die Antwoord scholar. I was deadly serious about Die Antwoord. Once I saw Ninja at Trader Joe’s. But that’s a story for another time.

Alice Glass, late of Crystal Castles, just released a Smashing Pumpkins cover.