If you’ve ever worked in the back of a restaurant (doing
dishes, slicing tomatoes, whatever)
you probably know that one of the biggest perks is getting to listen to the
radio. At my place of employment, the music played in the dining room is either
jazz melodies of famous 90s pop songs or easy listening that even a grandmother
can rock out to (the best song I ever heard was a female on acoustic guitar
doing “Here Comes the Sun,” but that was a rarity.) But in the back of house,
all bets are off.
For most of summer, the music in the back came from a
busted radio. Country, pop and rap stations came in really clear, but beyond
that, it was kind of staticy and janky. I was coming off a break-up when I
started back up at this restaurant back in May. It was my first adult break-up
(it involved graduate school, “what I want to do with my life,” and “going
different places.”) Even though the reasons behind it were perfectly understandable
on a heady, I-see-your-point kind of way, essentially, I was pretty broken up
about it.
Luckily for me, the summer of 2012 was the Summer of
Break-Up songs. So at work, I received lots of advice from pop songs. Gotye
reminded me that she’s just somebody I used to know, even if it was an “ache I
still remember” and warned me that “you can addicted to a certain kind of
sadness.” I always (somewhat embarrassingly) belted out the part that said, “I
don’t even need your love, but you treat me like a stranger and that feels so
rough.” It’s comforting somehow that the people of the world of pop were on my
side. Maroon 5 told me that “all those
fairytales are full of shit” and that “if happy ever did exist, I would still
be holding you like this” while Wiz Khalifa reminded me, “Man, fuck that shit.”
I also got really into Drake this summer, and Andre 3000’s advice on “The Real
Her” also provided a hilarious comfort: “Please be careful. Bitches got the
rabies.”
Indeed, sir Andre. Indeed. So I was pretty much on my way
to demonizing every woman, ever when Taylor Swift, out of nowhere, came out
with her decidedly un-country sounding “We Are Never Ever Ever Getting Back
Together.” The idea of a person being so done
with a relationship that they wrote a song with the chorus “We are never
ever, ever, ever getting back together” and even titling it that made me pause.
Didn’t everyone have the recovery phase after a relationship? I mean, how can
you be so over a relationship in this way?
Given that Taylor Swift is notorious for writing songs
that are about real things in her life (see: Dear John, about John Mayer,
Innocent, about Kanye West’s “Imma let you finish!” and pretty much every other
song she ever wrote) I took pause. Do men and women look at relationships
fundamentally different? For every Maroon 5 and Gotye, hanging onto past
relationships, unsure of what the hell to do with the whole thing and the
emotions behind them, are there Taylor Swifts, gleefully over their
relationships, throwing the past behind them with the greatest force they can
muster? Are these two sides of the same
equation? If Gotye’s ex could write a song, would it be Taylor Swift’s “We Are
Never Ever, Ever, Getting Back Together” (like, ever)?
According to an article in Men's Health,
men handle break-ups a lot worse than women. Why? The article says because men
have fewer friends, idolize the dating game, mask their pain with alcohol or
trying to appear awesome after a break-up and hate to start over. Even though
those reasons make men sound like a bunch of idealistic assholes with a fifth
of Jack in one hand and a weight in the other, it sounds true enough to me. The
more I’ve looked at pop songs, the more I’ve seen a decided difference between
the way women write break-up songs and the way men do.
Consider Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats.” She takes
a Louisville Slugger to the poor dude’s car, destroys the interior AND the
exterior and, in the music video, has a telekinetic vandalism spree across a
city. Whereas in rough contemporary Jake Owen’s “Alone With You,” dealing with
a girl who may or may not be cheating on him, depending on whether or not they
actually are together (he seems to think they are? I guess?) he can’t stand the
fact that she only gets physical when she’s drunk. He doesn’t want to be alone
with her, but he can’t seem to stop himself. He says, “Don’t say you love me
because I know you’re going to love me and leave.” Underwood would have him set
fire to her house.
Consider the year 2000, a year picked pretty much just
because I wanted to talk about No Doubt. In the year 2000, they released the
song “Ex-Girlfriend,” in which she says “I kind of always knew I’d end up your
ex-girlfriend. I hope I hold a special place with the rest of them.” In the
music video, an actual ex-boyfriend of singer Gwen Staffani (played by the
bassist of the band) and a couple cronies are peeing in a men’s bathroom when
Staffini comes in dressed as a man and beats them all up. Catharsis? It
certainly seems like it. Meanwhile, in the same year, Pink’s “There You Go”
said “There you go talkin’ bout you miss me so, that you love me, so I let you
go.” You let him go because he loved you?
What the heck? Alice Deejay asked that year “Do you think you’re better off
alone?” and Britney Spears told us, “Oops, I did it again. I played with your
heart, got lost in the game.” Girl power! Toni Braxton told the girl who is
currently dating her old boyfriend that it was her who broke up with him, after
all, and she couldn’t possibly care that he’s dating someone new because “He
Wasn’t Man Enough.” Meanwhile, 98 Degrees released a song called “Give Me Just
One More Night,” Backstreet Boys wanted to know the meaning of being lonely and
English boy band BBMak said they wouldn’t do anything until “you’re back here,
baby.”
Which
makes one wonder, was LFO’s “Girl on TV” a throwback to the days of chivalry, a
clever analysis of the current relationship landscape as depicted by pop music,
a metaphor for the often-advertised unattainability of the women of 2000? Or
was it just because he “met a fly girl and can’t relax.” Schooby doo-wop and Scooby
snacks. But the fly girl in question was indeed a movie star, a girl on TV, a
girl that, though he has met her in person, he couldn’t possibly even imagine
himself being with, because she is so often on TV. The protagonist of this song
wonders if his friends will even believe him. So does that mean men are left
wishing on falling stars, as lost as the terrible pop boy band LFO? Are we all
doomed to think it’s fly when girls stop by for the summer, but forced to see
them as though they might as well be on the other side of the silver screen?
Has there been some kind of gender swap in the dating
arena? Cinema, music and television would have me believe that thirty years
ago, even twenty, men were the ones saying goodbye in a hurry and women were
the ones mourning. I mean, consider Jewel’s entire career. Maybe the swap all
started when Dave Coulier famously dumped Alanis Morrisette, causing her to
write Jagged Little Pill, an anthem
for scorned lovers across the world. It seems like maybe from the moment she
snarled into the microphone, “Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?” on “You
Oughta Know,” the game was irrevocably changed.
And yet.
Swift’s
next single after “We Are Never Ever, Ever Getting Back Together” was a song
called “Begin Again,” a decidedly more country-sounding song. Given how much
the first single of her new as-yet-unreleased album made me think, I checked
out the new song. It describes that odd and awkward feeling of going on a first
date while still not completely over your ex. Swift said in an interview
recently that the new album is about the toxic relationships she’s gotten into
since the last album, so I think it’s safe (although not conclusive) to assume
the relationship she’s not quite over here is the one discussed in “We Are
Never, Ever, Ever Getting Back Together.” While the previous guy, we learn,
didn’t like her to wear high heels, didn’t think she was funny and didn’t
understand a song on the radio, Swift does seem to be having a lot of
difficulty getting past it.
Strangely, this comforted me in an odd way. Even though
it will probably never be as popular as “We Are Never Ever, Ever Getting Back
Together” was, it’s nice to know that even though Swift can write the guy off,
she’s still trying to get past it. For a few months there during the summer,
given all the pop music and all the relationships my male friends got into and
out of, I really started to think maybe there was something to the idea that
women have an easier time with break-ups than men do.
But, no.
Morrisette, while angry as hell on Jagged
Little Pill, is still not over the past. Underwood, while destroying the
car of her former boyfriend, is still hurting deeply. Staffani still
acknowledges that even though she suspected she would become this guy’s
ex-girlfriend, she should have thought about that before they kissed. And while “Girl on TV” was based on Jennifer
Love Hewitt and none of the guys from LFO dated her, she did appear in the
music video and John Mayer would later go on to write “Your Body is a Wonderland”
about her, presumably writing from experience, although Hewitt herself said of the song, "My body is more like a pawn shop."
The truth is, eventually, we all have a moment where
maybe we want to say the things Alanis does on “You Oughta Know” and we all
feel for a time that fairytales are full of shit like Maroon 5. Maybe we want
to get out our baseball bats or sing anthems about how done we are with something. Maybe we all want to tell the new
people dating our exes that our exes were terrible and they’re welcome to them,
the way Toni Braxton did. But songs are the venues for this, because songs get
to be larger than life. Songs get to destroy cars and interrupt exes at dinner
with their new boyfriend/girlfriend. They are not a road map for life.
Eventually, after a break-up, even if the girl or guy
becomes somebody you used to know, you come to the realization Swift does on
Begin Again: “What’s Past is Past.” Being a man, maybe statistically I have a
worse chance of seeing that right away. Maybe I’m more likely to turn into
another Maroon 5 song: This love has taken its toll on me. But even Adam Levine
got over the Jane who the songs on Songs
About Jane were about.
Hell, even Alanis Morrisette moved on and had a string of
relationships after Dave Coulier, even marrying a rapper named Mario “MC
Souleye” Treadway in 2010. If the scorned lover that all other scorned lovers
look to as a model can find love again, surely there is hope for the rest of
us.
In the meanwhile, left to my own devices, if I’m going to
listen to popular singles, I’d much rather listen to Fun.’s “Some Nights.”
Luckily, we got a new IPod dock at work, so my days of listening to pop music
radio are over. No more Gotyes or Swifts to mess with my head while I’m
scrapping pasta and black beans out of soup bowls.
What are we left with here, dear reader? Men and women DO
look at break-ups differently. But so what? This does not make one or the other
better or worse at break-ups. Just different. In the end, it’s still over. You
are never ever ever getting back together. Some nights you stay up cashing in
your bad luck, some nights you call it a draw. My advice? Call it a draw and
move on. Listen to songs about the destruction of cars or people getting beaten
up in bathrooms if you have to. Then you gotta act like Jay-Z and move on to
the next one.
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