🎵
Like many Canadian women of a certain age (20), I am an Avril devotee. The thing that I love so much about Avril is that she’s kind of insane and a lot of her songs don’t make sense (I really like to think about which Radiohead song she could possibly have been singing at the top of her lungs – fitter happier?). Her first album is obviously nothing but hits from start to finish, but the most underrated track is Nobody’s Fool. It’s like kind of a spoken-word style rap about the music industry, and it’s not technically “good” by any stretch of the word, but I laugh out loud every time I listen to it and sometimes also start tearing up for reasons I don’t understand. She sounds super serious and severe the whole time but she’s rapping lines like “I’m not the milk and cheerios in your spoon”. I play it every time I walk to the grocery store.
May 24, 2022
Related Recs
🎵
been binge listening to this song. Chills. I want an Olivia Rodrigo cover. Angry punching and dancing. Men being trash. Rage! Poetry! Jam band! Was I just a fool?
Feb 22, 2024
📀
the way i could write a world-changing 33 1/3 about this album!!! oh my goodness. (this is the kind of album you write after achieving meteoric pop success if you are a serious person, in case any inescapably famous singer-songwriters are taking notes.)
but for real -- this album is at once a perfectly-preserved late 90s time capsule (neurotic, stylish, a hint of a sneer, but real hope underwriting it all) and also secretly about us, right now, in the year of our lord 2024. it's fierce and smart and darkly hilarious. it's about going to therapy and getting your dad to go to therapy, and then feeling weird imagining the kind of dark shit your dad must be working through in therapy. it’s about trying to search for the divine while watching a bunch of idiot rich people get influenced into paying $2000 for like past life regression readings or whatever and feeling weird about the idea that they’re searching for the same divine you are, because if they’re looking for it too then it can’t possibly be the real thing, can it? it’s about being the bright young thing who wrote jagged little pill and suddenly finding all of your interpersonal relationships totally unworkable because everybody is too blinded by the brightness of the young thing who wrote jagged little pill to let you also be a human being. it’s about feeling so old already at 24 and looking back on your teenage self at a tender distance as if those days were a lifetime ago, as if you’re actually any wiser now. it’s about wondering if anything you will ever do is ever, ever going to be good enough. alanis’s lyrics here are biting and precocious and the songs are just so chatty (witness “front row” in which she layers four entire extra verses behind the chorus, effectively writing a whole bonus song because the situation is just too complicated to explain in four minutes) and they’re talking about all the same things we talk about now, in the same way we talk about them now, except without all the self-serious posturing so many of our contemporary songwriters fall prey to. (“the couch” is somehow both the most earnest and the least corny song anybody has ever written about therapy.) i know this album must have hit properly when it came out because it was the only thing my mom played in our house for the entire calendar year of 1999, but it feels so preternaturally tailor-made for the moment we’re in now that i can’t believe it hasn’t had one of those improbable tiktok renaissances or whatever that seem to keep happening. highly recommend a revisit or a first acquaintance if you haven’t made one.
Feb 6, 2024
🎵
Some really vulnerable and angst stuff from Gwen Stefani, queen of cultural appropriation and my young heart …. Very formative record. Inspiring, even
Feb 14, 2024
Top Recs from @rayne-fisher-quann
⭐
often when something noteworthy happens to me -- a negative sexual experience, an awkward date, a weird subway encounter -- i'll have the impulse to post about it on twitter. but then i think, what if i texted this to my friend instead? and then you can text it to your friend, maybe even one you haven't texted in a while, and they will probably be happy to hear from you directly and you will have strengthened a beautiful relationship. all tweets are spiritually corrosive and the spirit of your new interpersonal bond will persevere long after platforms are dead
Jan 26, 2024
📢
turns the whole day around
Jan 30, 2024
⭐
my job is being a writer which means i have a lot of free time and it also means that fun group events within my industry are rare. this opens up the wonderful world of being a GROUPIE -- a quasi-professional fan of the talents of others. i am not a comedian but through being a comedy groupie i have reaped the greatest benefit of the trade (funny friends) without ever having to set foot on an improv stage. i am not a musician but through being a music groupie i get to listen to my friends play beautiful songs and sometimes play with them for fun. i am not in fashion but being a fashion groupie means i get to hang out with impossibly stylish and knowledgeable women and sometimes try on beautiful clothes. being a master of none means you get to hang out with the masters of everything and it rocks. and all that is demanded of you is that you love and appreciate wonderful art -- DONT MIND IF I DO !
Feb 2, 2024