Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,17
still early enough in the day to get a one-dollar sausage biscuit, while listening to this incredibly soothing song. I failed gym again that summer. Senior year, I had to take two gym classes so they would let me graduate. I got very good at badminton.
“I Miss You,” Aaron Hall
“I’ll Do Anything/I’m Sorry,” Ginuwine
“Beauty,” Dru Hill
“Hey Now,” Carl Thomas
There is a specific breed of crying-ass, begging-ass, I’m-sorry-ass, you’re-so-beautiful-ass ’90s R&B songs that at first blush sound like they are intended for sensuous lovemaking, but if you actually stop and listen to the lyrics, it’s like, “Hold up, wait, you cheated on me with who?” Or it’s six real minutes of a dude in either a torn-off shirt or an oversize cashmere turtleneck (sorry, there’s no in between!) crooning super hard and laying it on real thick about how beautiful you are and that is 100 percent the type of R&B song that got me through my elderly teens.
“Softer, Softest,” Hole
I was obsessed with Hole mostly because I was obsessed with Sassy magazine, and Courtney Love was, like, queen of the alternative girls, and I very much wanted to be an alternative girl, down to the steel-toed Doc Martens I saved my babysitting money to buy and then wore every single day because I could not afford multiple pairs of shoes. Picture me, lumbering through the halls of my high school between classes trying not to be noticed, wearing your grandfather’s cardigan and shoes literally the size of cinder blocks, humming “your milk turns to cry” under my breath. There was a certain type of girl in the ’90s that I dreamed of channeling, chief among them Veronica Sawyer and Vickie Miner and Daria Morgendorffer. They all seemed like the kind of girls Hole made music for. So I listened to Hole a lot, even though 99 percent of the lyrics were confusing as fuck to me back then. Who am I kidding? They still are! I’m putting this track at the beginning of the mix, so you know that I’m sweet but also kind of scary, which I hear some people find sexy. (I am actually not the least bit scary, which is why I let Courtney Love scream on my behalf.)
“Mad Lucas,” The Breeders
I still fuck with the Breeders, heavy. Last Splash came out and one of my rich friends—you know, the kind whose parents could afford a dual-cassette-deck boombox—dubbed me a copy of it. I was like, “HOLY SHIT, WHAT THE FUCK AM I LISTENING TO?” I don’t know, I was kind of a square, so in hindsight I probably said, “This sounds neat!” But you get it. It’s a little surf rock, a tiny bit alt-country, sometimes straight-up grunge, and it was like magic to my ears. I know everyone loves “Cannonball,” and believe me, I do, too. But if I’m going to make you a tape, I’m going to make you a tape that has a truly bonkers surf-rock slow jam that you probably could bone to on it.
“I’ll Back You Up,” Dave Matthews Band
Once upon a time, I lived in a crack house. It wasn’t so much a crack house as it was a rooming house that a lot of people who enjoyed smoking crack cocaine lived in, but “crack house” rolls off the tongue better, so I’ll just call it that. It was a decent-looking house on a well-kept street in a nice part of town, and if you looked at it from the outside, you’d have no idea that behind those imitation wood blinds operated a literal den of iniquity, and you know what? It was fine! I had a bed and I could afford it! Which is honestly a low bar, but what do you really care when you’re twenty-two? One day, I came home to find that someone had broken the lock to my room, and, haha, joke’s on them, because unless you want a bunch of cried-on journals and a keytar, you’re going to be incredibly disappointed with my belongings. I pushed open the splintered door and found a crackhead in my room sitting on the floor, riffling through a bunch of grunge CDs. I don’t know what the appropriate response should have been (screaming, maybe? outrage?), but I just burst out laughing. A genuine, hearty, throat-opening laugh. I couldn’t believe it.