Short n’ Sweet.
I’ve always been an eclectic music listener. Part of why is my mother, who loves music, had us listening to Alanis Morissette, the Temptations, Adele, Biggie Smalls. I also have two older siblings who listened to all kinds of music and taught me and my younger siblings to do the same. I was able to rap to 50 Cent and Tupac before I understood basic math. I was the kind of kid who constantly had something playing in my headphones or on the speaker, but that something was always changing.
As a kid, my mom would wake us up by turning on the TV to some church channel (we were a religious family, but casually, without all of the fear of breaking the rules). My sisters or I would then get up and change the channel to VH1 or MTV, and we’d spend the rest of the morning getting ready to whatever music videos were popular at the time. These songs, too, were always changing, but we were willing to give almost anything a listen.
My eclectic music taste narrowed when I got to college because for a while I was part of a very intense (read: very unhealthy) church. I stopped listening to anything but Christian music because now I was terrified of breaking the rules and aware that there were many. Hip hop, one of my favorite genres, was especially unholy in this new context and so I let it go because I wanted to be as close as I could be to what I understood back then as God.
Long story short, I got out of that church, and I’m no longer religious for a lot of reasons (including because I’m queer and because I’m Black and because I’m a woman, all people groups religion broadly and Christianity specifically has been known to target and harm). I’m not against people who want something to believe in, I guess I just started to believe in other things (like art, like community, like something bigger than us that maybe is less readily understood).
Anyway, I started listening to music again, but I felt maybe weirded out by how systemically White that church had been and how White-washed my own relationship to culture had become because of it, so I didn’t really listen to every kind of music anymore. Some of it—a lot of it—I found too White and therefore unrelatable. I stuck to hip hop and R&B, genres that were made by people like me. I also stuck maybe just as closely to weird experimental indie stuff, stuff that might be kind of White but not in an oppressive, encourage you to assimilate sort of way. It was more White in having the audacity to be anything you want to be kind of a way, something helpful to me as an artist, who wants to be weird and audacious too.
These days, I’m maybe coming back around to listening to anything and everything. This might be in part because it’s been a long time since I was at that church and the older I get (newly ~thirty~), the more sure, maybe, I am of who I want to be. Feeling more sure of myself makes dancing to music I don’t readily relate to feel less like a big deal.
Part of my re-exposure to all kinds of music, including White pop music, is due to my recently being very taken by Peloton’s dance videos. I’ve been doing some of the low impact cardio ones, a very chill, relatively noncommittal way of getting my heart rate up. (I have come to realize that maybe I prefer chill exercise to the more highkey ways I used to move when I was younger.)
Following along with this Peloton video, I was moving my arms and stepping from side-to-side when Sabrina Carpenter’s “Good Graces” came on. I’d heard of Carpenter, knew she was popular, but realized, then, that I liked her music. “Good Graces” has an early 2000s vibe to it, which reminded me of the songs on MTV and VH1 that my sisters and I used to get ready to in the mornings. In another Peloton dance video, I found myself stepping back and forth, doing arm rolls, to Carpenter’s “Espresso.” From there, I listened to the rest of Short n’ Sweet, loved “Juno” and “Lie to Girls” and “Please Please Please,” which all have this sort of early 2000s whimsy to them while being more like 2020s music in the way that Carpenter gestures toward vulnerability while at the same time sits comfortably in her own freedom. There’s “Good Graces” (maybe one of my favorites), where Carpenter at once says This is cute this is great, and also, if you cross me, I’ll drop you in a second. There’s “Please Please Please,” where Carpenter says, again, I’m into you but if I grow to trust you, don’t you dare embarrass me. This effort to simultaneously be in love and respect yourself along the way is maybe a step forward from the songs that I and many others grew up listening to, songs that sort of centered being in love no matter the cost. I hear Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan and of course Black women hip hop artists who have been at this forever—balancing this yearning with self-respect in songs like Cardi B’s “Be Careful” and “Thru Your Phone”—and I can see us as women continuing to move forward, to acknowledge ourselves and advocate for ourselves, despite all that is happening structurally to keep us from agency.
It’s nice to listen to everything again or at least give anything a try. To encounter new music when jauntily dancing to get my heart rate up—to give an album a listen, no matter how far from me it seems on the surface. It is refreshing, maybe, to encounter anything new in this country that is growing increasingly closed-minded, to consider something different, play it once and then again.
Image: New York Times
