TRACK ONE: FIONA APPLE, “FETCH THE BOLT CUTTERS”
The truth is, Fiona Apple has already rendered any playlist efforts superfluous. You, girl child of a bad dad, already know this. You probably encountered Fiona Apple in middle school, the same year you found out your dad was cheating on his wife when he sent you the text on accident; in his defense, sexting was a relatively new phenomenon.
And maybe you were wary, then, of Fiona Apple’s gaunt and pretty hollowness, and maybe you were not yet ready to resonate with a person so visibly damaged. But you were always going to find your way to her. Fiona Apple is a magnet for children made girls like you. Another way to say magnet is gravity. Another way to say gravity is that the sun will explode.
If, some moments into the track, maybe when Fiona Apple singsongs, I took it like a kid, you feel you would rather disengage with this playlist and turn instead to Fiona Apple’s entire discography—by all means, go there. It is a long and dark and unnerving tunnel, and Fiona Apple holds out her pale hand: you can take it now.
It is up for debate whether Fiona Apple makes what is called music. It may be more like Fiona Apple wrangles the dissonant frequencies of rage-paralysis into some semblance of rhythmic tessellation. When the dogs begin barking in an uncanny approximation of the already-antisynchronous drums at the end of “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” you’ll hear what Fiona Apple means by music.
You may also hear the dogs of your childhood, one engineering German Shepherd, ex-police—her name was Eta, and she pulled the clothesline post out into the street one time because it wasn’t set in concrete—and one cinch-chained Rottweiler called Hey Baby. A pair of locked-up dogs that escaped and killed the neighbor’s dog, a tiny white Shih Tzu, right in the front yard, vicious and quick. The neighbor’s dog, torn open and puff-white and squeals gone guttural: this is a dream you still sometimes wake from.
TRACK TWO: PIXIES, “WHERE IS MY MIND?”
If you’re still here, it’s because your head has collapsed. You have just spent several hours or days with your bad dad for some contrived ceremony of familial obligation. Your dad is a narcissist. And/or a drunk, and/or an addict, and/or an impulsive toddler in the meat-tenderized shape of a human pork cutlet. Which is to say, he has never had to learn how to be considerate, even of you. He has only had to learn how to withstand and administer aggression. You can see the ugly bind that created him, the relay race of violence in which he was surely handed the baton just as roughly as he tried to hand it to you. You even see the fragile small self he once had to protect, too inept to move differently in the world. Your ability to recognize the conditions of his existence has made you somewhat of an empath. At times, you hate this about yourself.
This is one of those times, and because you have traveled some distance to spend your precious quantities of life, and because your body is now a tuning fork of molecular disintegration, because you have the sensation of being a kitten in a microwave, because you remember so viscerally the old readiness to die—you feel that you have lost your mind.
It was a holiday/funeral/court date/hospitalization. Now that you have spent this time with your dad, you have to wonder what ancient societal forces oblige us to stay in relationships with bad dads. You wonder how to identify the badness-threshold that warrants cutting him out of your life. You’re not going to make a scene, though. You’re not deranged.
For a deranged year—part and parcel of the psychosis that is adolescence—you thought your dad was the good parent. Not good at parenting, just magnetic, really alive, a dynamic jokester with an insatiable appetite. Fun.
The first time your dad got you drunk-drunk (not Christmas drunk or football game drunk, but really), you rolled around on the dirty floor of a taxi convinced that you could speak the driver’s language. You found this out from your dad the next day, when he told you the funny story of yourself. You squinted into the glow of his approval, sick-sick.
TRACK THREE: SHE KEEPS BEES, “VULTURE”
Or, the first time he got you drunk-drunk, you locked yourself in the bathroom, giddy with the power of closing the door on him, until he picked the lock.
Or, he taught you the best defensive move in basketball, to stay on the floor and hold onto somebody’s shorts when they went up for a layup. He taught you how to win even if you were losing: change the game.
Or, he let you ride loose in the bed of his pick-up. He let you serve his friends beers. He taught you a language for cheating at cards, and the two of you were unbeatable at parties. He let you stay up as late as you wanted when he watched you, TV all night, candy on the couch.
Or, he let you ride along when he delivered papers, four in the morning and free-roaming in the box truck with his friend Lonnie and the milk crate full of Playboys he sat on while he sleeved the news, fingers inked and eyes yellow. Lonnie taught you a joke that required a McDonald’s cup of water and expert control of your embouchure: you had to spit water into the cup with varying degrees of forcefulness, like pissing. The joke was how to tell the age of a woman from outside of her bathroom stall. The joke, you started to understand after performing it a few times, was about something else.
If you learned to gain entry into the coveted sanctum of a man’s friendship-adjacent approval by making a mean joke at somebody’s expense, you probably listened to a lot of male vocalists in your teens and only fell in love with voices like Jessica Larrabee’s later.
You might think that the correct song choice for Track Four is Modest Mouse’s “The Good Times Are Killing Me,” but you might only be able to handle so much cheerful falsetto turned deadpan confessional. Also, frankly, that song lacks a certain necessary ugliness.
TRACK FOUR: MODEST MOUSE, “I CAME AS A RAT”
If you learned to be funny from your bad dad, you learned to be mean. Fat-ass was cheap; the real currency was the unexpected. She’s built like a weeble-wobble, for example, or, where’s her dog collar. To be fair, those were about his mother, not women on the street. His favorite joke about you was to shake his head and say, You know, you coulda been a boy. It was 50/50, goddamnit.
One time when your dad unstuck the scum on the hand soap pump, it exploded wet-pearl into his palm. His eyes lit up. Can you believe that’s all it took for me to get stuck with you, he said, flicking the wet slug of goop into the sink. When it finally hit you, you died laughing. The real currency was a joke tailored perfectly for its mark.
You might be partial to Isaac Brock, lead singer of Modest Mouse, because he straddles some theoretical line between the intellectual superiority of the indie hipster boys you dated, whose misogyny was subtle and whose vulnerability was valorized, and the vulgar rough grunge boys you dated, who put the beat in wife beater, the threat of their childhood neglect ever-present in low-slung sweatpants and the blue vein rivulets pulsing over their muscled forearms. I repeat, the line is theoretical.
ALTERNATE TRACK FOUR: SANTIGOLD, “DISPARATE YOUTH”
Or, your high school boyfriends dated you to get close to your dad’s motorcycle, a faithfully refurbed 1979 Honda CB, black and gold body panels, the four-way exhaust header rounding its way over the engine block, curvaceous, obnoxious. Your high school boyfriends wanted to fuck that thing more than they wanted to fuck you. You folded your grasshopper thighs into the shape of chrome pipes. You beckoned with shine and rugged promise.
These songs do not quite feel good, and that is half the point. This is about holding the feel-bad in a shape you can handle.
ALTERNATE TRACK FOUR: SILVERSUN PICKUPS, “LAZY EYE”
Or, you want Smashing Pumpkins nostalgia, but you don’t want exactly the sense-memory of sitting in the bathroom for three hours with your headphones on, waiting for the dually rumble of your dad’s truck peeling out to signal that the fight is over. You just want the general vibe. You just want the fourth dimension to open up for a little while. (It opens up here at about minute two and forty-five seconds.)
Or—if your dad didn’t leave, and instead put his fist through the bathroom door, then the windshield of his truck, then the skin of his hand into a cinder block retaining wall—take a detour to track seven and come back.
TRACK FIVE: RADIOHEAD, “15 STEP”
The fifteen steps in the song’s title refer, according to some Reddit sleuths, to the number of steps you walk to the noose when you are getting hanged. Fifteen steps, and then the sheer drop. The Reddit sleuths don’t mean any of you; they mean the fourth-person singular impersonal pronoun. You, on the other hand, are going to live. Like much of the Radiohead catalog, “15 Step” marries mildly horrific lyrical inanity with gloriously all-consuming atmospheric feedback. This is also the formula for jokes.
Back when you were seven, you began to split time between your parents: you remember the brief and magical window of your dad’s existence, opening, every other weekend. Of course, upon discovering his renewed interest in you, you hoped they would get back together. In your defense, you occasionally woke up to find your dad in the house, putting butter on toast for you. In your defense, you caught in your peripheral vision his slightly flexed hand on your mom’s thigh. Your mom’s muffled giggle in the middle of the night was a comfort that put you, happy, back to sleep.
In this story, your dad’s dogs ate the neighbor’s dog entirely, save tufts of white fur in the crabgrass and one paw. Because the neighbor was the type to report things like this to the police, and because the county sheriff was at the house when your mom arrived to pick you up, that one uneaten dog paw marked the end of the split time. Also, it turned out, your dad had taken a lot of your mom’s money, ha, ha, ha. It took several years for you to connect the leather jacket he bought for his girlfriend Deanna with the early mornings he spent buttering bread in your mom’s kitchen. By the time you connected it, he had married, not Deanna, but two women down the line, somebody with a J-C-E-K-M-F-A-N-H name, like yours.
Like everybody, you wake from a falling dream. The sheer drop works on you—it is not up to you to wake or die—and this is a consolation.
The song “15 Step” works on you because it is fast-glitch and pitch-shifted, and it is in 5/4 time—one of the peculiar time signatures that overrides a brain’s internal metronome. Thom Yorke and Company know about lobotomy, also called particle acceleration. Ed O’Brien puts his pedalboard through an autoharp. Thirty seconds from the end of the song, a key change moves you unexpectedly, diagonally, somewhere galactic.
It’s funny: you used to think it was your mom that made you hate women.
TRACK SIX: TIERRA WHACK, “PRETTY UGLY”
You thought your mom, in her stupidity, just lay down in the road to get run over. She locked herself into her room to cry about it, your dad’s first or maybe third wedding—they run together—and you felt angry. How could she still believe him? It felt good to roam and break some things in the house. You shattered a small glass hummingbird figurine on the floor. You smashed several picture frames. She was quiet on the other side of the door, listening to the way you were different from her.
Before the wedding, your dad gave you his favorite pocketknife, showing you with great care how it folded in on itself.
Tierra Whack is a master puppeteer of her own voice. This song is one minute long. For that long, you can believe yourself invulnerable to your dad’s small kindnesses.
You had everything cleaned up before your mom unlocked herself. The two of you never talked about it. After your dad’s wedding, he drunkenly told you he couldn’t wait to have a family.
TRACK SEVEN: TYLER, THE CREATOR, “WHO DAT BOY”
Not all angst is created equal. Tyler’s dad was a no-show. Tyler’s frequencies: insatiable, flippant, crude, desperate for attention, provocateur—and still, genius? He does a parody of expectation, of the over-signification of his Blackness, his man-ness, his rapper-ness, his violence. You can’t always tell when he’s not serious. His early mixtapes include rape-murder fantasies.
When, as a freshman in high school, a boy turned his computer to you and showed you a shock video—boys killing a cat in a microwave—you knew how to play dead. You didn’t give anything away. This is what your body had learned to do with the friction feeling. What’s fascinating about Tyler is his hyperactive rage: it seems unavailable to you.
The first time you watched Veep all the way through, a shit-bag character named Danny joked that he had hit the jackpot: he was sleeping with a girl whose dad messed with her enough that she was willing to do anything, but not so much that she couldn’t come. It pinned your chest to the moth board, wriggling, hollowed-out, splayed. You knew that joke was written by a man. You didn’t want to be funny anymore.
Now, in his thirties, Tyler basically conducts orchestra music around his rap. He hates his own voice, and he refuses to drop the evasive front about his sexuality—he both comes out and dissembles/denies/jokes it off, again and again—but he has released entire albums about his unrequited love for men and women. Tyler represents possibility, is what I mean.
If you still sometimes hate women, skip to track ten.
TRACK TEN: SONIC YOUTH, “THE DIAMOND SEA”
When this song starts, you might remember suddenly that you had a thing for Kim Gordon back in high school, before you were quite ready to acknowledge the parameters of “a thing for Kim Gordon,” while your dad was still regularly calling women dykes if he thought them ugly, by which he meant masculine or sometimes old, by which he meant unfuckable. He would make the joke to you, under his breath as they passed by like you were in on it, like you, too, were evaluating women for their fuckability—a strange undoing of his own gender fascism to which he simply hadn’t given any thought, because he did not think about you.
This is a track from the 1995 album Washing Machine, which you listened to even when you were not listening to it, having, through obliterating repetition, burned its circuitry into your brain. Kim Gordon doesn’t whisper-sing on this track, and so this track isn’t really about the lyrics—which are, anyway, just an obligatory word order predetermined by the lullaby thud of the guitar. This track is nineteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds long, and if it is about anything, it is about Kim Gordon unlacing a bass line for an eternity beneath the escalating lead guitars that, at minute five and nine seconds, loosen a corset you didn’t know you were wearing.
Go into the tunnel of this song. “The Diamond Sea” undoes itself. It returns, it goes out again, and this is the tide: fission, fusion, the metronome click.
If what you need as this track ends is to stay inside the left-right, left-right thrash of guitar string slowed down to three quarter speed and an aural derangement of linear time, follow track list B into infinity: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, a select noisecrush or two from Dinosaur Jr., and a smooth and gently optimistic Unknown Mortal Orchestra bridge to the ever-dark yet lovely Jeff Buckley, and back again.
But if you are angry, move on to track eleven.
TRACK ELEVEN: YEAH YEAH YEAHS, “HEADS WILL ROLL”
This song doesn’t have shit to do with your dad. It is a horror-laden, up-tempo zombie-bounce in which Karen O, rock god of sex-pain scream invocation, demands that you dance ’til you’re dead, off with your head. The transition between tracks is rocky. It feels good to get yelled at by Karen O. You might want her to hurt you. You might want her to bite you. You might feel her teeth, right now. Play this track as many times in a row as it takes for the good sting of her slapping you in the face to wear off.
This song doesn’t have anything to do with the year and a half that your dad was obsessed with you, suddenly, and verging on the delusional, having discovered in middle age that he might have forged some relationship with you—you, the product of what had previously been conceived of as a half-handful of jizz but now, in his mind, took the shape of something sacred. He texted you. He left you long voicemails at one or two or three in the morning, drunk/hopped-up/high, rambling chaotically about an alternate version of a life the two of you might have lived. He repented, probably. He said, what if we raise our kids together. He’d had you young. (He’d hardly had you at all.) He was desperate—though for what, you were not sure.
TRACK TWELVE: M.I.A., “PAPER PLANES”
Your dad was angling for money. It was short term and long term, and he had already begun to conceive of you, in your early twenties, as the kind of adult from which he might be able to get something. Or, if not from you, then through you. Access to your mother. The same old game.
Or, your dad was finally making good money, and he called you for the first time in six years when you landed in the emergency room after being hit by a drunk driver and the hospital erroneously tried to run his insurance. He called not to see if you were okay, but to let you know that he was disappointed in you for being a fuck-up generally and for taking so long to get through college. You muted yourself so he could not hear you cry.
Or, your mom called you drunk-teary shouting, How could you get married without telling me, and this is how you found out that your dad posted a series of photos on Facebook captioned so happy to see my little girl get married, and this is how you talked your mom through the convoluted revelation that your dad did not have a daughter she didn’t know about, but that he had established a bizarre and parasitic relationship with a woman your age—whom he had tried to date—and whom he now thought of as his daughter. On the phone, your mom threw you across the room. She screamed like roadkill.
Or, your stepmom called you: Your dad woke up in bed next to his dead wife. Some months later, when your stepmom called to tell you that your dad’s wife’s tox report had come back fentanyl, he had already moved in with another woman. Because you are an empath, you called him, several months after that, to remind him to tell his other kid happy birthday.
Or, your dad got out of jail after driving his truck through the front of your mom’s house in an attempt to kill her, and she took him back.
M.I.A. named her first album for her dad. He told her to change it. She did not.
Anger can be a good ripple. It doesn’t make you anything like him.
In your early twenties, you still couldn’t put a single female vocalist into your top ten. What you could not really care for—at least publicly—was the high tenderness, or the bratty angst, or the howling sincerity of women.
And then Amy Winehouse died.
TRACK THIRTEEN: AMY WINEHOUSE, “A SONG FOR YOU”
By the time Amy records this song, she has almost completely stopped enunciating words. She is off the rails. Much like this playlist is just an approximation of a story about you, Amy Winehouse is approximating phrases: you the most important thing, we both alone, a friend of mine. Her notes, too, skim the melody, flitting up and sideways, bending even the vibrato-run flight path laid out in Donny Hathaway’s version of this song. At the end of the track, Amy Winehouse says that Donny Hathaway—Haffaway, she says with her North London mouth—is her Carleen Anderson. Muse, she means, or guiding light. He couldn’t contain himself, she says, he had somefing in him, you know.
Of all Amy Winehouse’s powers, what folds you under her wing is her unmatched rendering of lament into an instrument of flight sequence.
This is the hard part: It may be the case that you couldn’t move when it happened. Didn’t fly away. It was the bad-bad: your dad/uncle/cousin/grandpa/stepdad/Lonnie, left alone with you and putting that pin through your thorax.
It may be the case that it went on for a long time, many minutes, or years. It may be the case that you didn’t understand what was happening at first, and then in retrospect, you had understood all along. In this way, your brain was split in two.
This is not a story about you. Let me rephrase that: how somebody hurt you is not the story of you.
TRACK FOURTEEN: ANN PEEBLES, “RUN, RUN, RUN”
Enter Ann Peebles. Amy Winehouse learned her voice from Black women, and hair, too. Ann Peebles is on the rails, she is in the groove. Ann Peebles has accusation by the reins. This is soul.
Run, run, run, that’s all you do. The man refuses to settle, maybe for her, maybe for security. He is playing the same old game. Her voice is disappointment and fed-up threat, but it is also gentle reproach: baby, you have to let go of your stupid dreams. Ann Peebles is an empath, and still, she knows how to watch out for herself.
“Run, Run, Run” puts him in his place and, for those who can hear it, shouts its warning, proclaims its freedom. You have a lot to learn. Watch her sing and see the voice come out shining, big teeth and all.
TRACK FIFTEEN: MARGARET GLASPY, “SOMEBODY TO ANYBODY”
Margaret Glaspy’s voice comes out small sometimes, and you let yourself believe it. In this song, she pretends that she is alone, and it is a cathartic exercise in the grandeur of singularity. But you are in your thirties now, and you have already fallen in love with several men/women/people who were born, it seems, to laugh at your jokes, even if your jokes sometimes flirt with meanness, the groove too deep to smooth out. And finally, you are friends with other girls like you—women now, though you sometimes still say girls.
These things take a long time: the word woman, your compassion for them and for yourself. When you were in high school, you could never get into the soft femme vocalists because you had to eschew smallness and the moth-flutter of tentative ululation. You thought these women were weak, and you thought you had them figured out. Don’t worry: antidotes abound. Listen to this track two times. Let Margaret Glaspy give you the slip.
TRACK SIXTEEN: AMA, “TOKYO COWBOY”
“Tokyo Cowboy” is a song, in some sense, about emotional vulnerability as self-discovery. The rolling snare pumps like blood, and Ama’s voice is lift-off itself, her voice is two/four/seven voices at once, her voice is several planes of being, folded in on its own rage, the bird-body downbeat before the leap into flight, and flight.
Here is what you want to say to the girls: You will not solve your dad. You will not exorcize him entirely from your life, and still, he will not run it. You can feel some love or empathy for him, and it doesn’t make you stupid. Vulnerability is strength.
Girl child of a bad dad, you already know this.
TRACK SEVENTEEN, EIGHTEEN, NINETEEN, ETC.: FIONA APPLE, “HEAVY BALLOON”
Here, Fiona Apple transforms her body into fruit-bearing vines and rhizomes. People like us, she says, We play with a heavy balloon. We try to keep it from touching the ground. She stretches, she tendrils, she creeps. She does this in the key of B minor, and she does this to get out from under the weight, and she might do this to escape sexual assault. I’m telling you this like you don’t already know exactly how it works, like you have not been doing it this whole time.
Fiona Apple is a black hole. You are an exploding sun. Fiona Apple is a perpetual emotion machine. Grief as angst. Angst as vines. Vines as transmogrification, as rage, as hold still, as climb, as cut—yada, yada, you get it, tracks seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, whatever.
We have held the feel-bad in a shape we can withstand long enough, and we are ready to dance. I love you. Let’s get the fuck out of here.