Superstar by Lauryn Hill
This is my favorite play-in-the-car-with-the-windows-rolled-down song. I don’t know anything technical about music, so I can really only describe the sound as groovy. It makes me want to dance like Steve Harvey in this gif:
And I usually do! This song makes me feel free and summer-y and nostalgic for a decade I didn’t live through. When Lauryn sings, “Come on baby, light my fire,” the words echo. Someone come light my motherfucking fire. This line captures that young-person-lust for awe and inspiration and passion. I know someone who always says, “You gotta do what makes you feel on fire.” And sometimes it’s hard to find out what the hell it is that lights our fire. While Superstar tells a more specific story about artistry and originality, this lyric always reminds me to nurture the fire within me, and to surround myself with people who add fuel to my fire (in a good way).
Of course, Superstar is really beautiful because of its specifics. Lauryn sings about people “with prosperity and no concept of reality” co-opting Hip-Hop, a genre and lifestyle about subversion and authenticity and Black genius. Superstar opens with the lines “Hip-Hop started out in the heart/ Now everybody trying to chart.” Lauryn is also rapping about her own success, about how she’s the real superstar (it’s an especially meaningful feat to be a prolific female rapper). This song is both a celebration of Lauryn’s superstardom, and resistance to the appropriation of an art form that started as an underground movement by and for Black people in the Bronx.
Woo! by Remi Wolf
I like this song because it is disco-y and makes me feel electric. It also has some lyrics buried in the funk that make me go damn. “Love, where does it go? And do you wake up without any control?” Love is really fucking scary, and the vulnerability it comes packaged with might threaten your sense of security. Especially if you are a control freak like me. These words resonate with me. BUT I also want to say that I am working on building trust, rather than equating love with loss of control. Why do I need to be in control anyway? Why can’t I just be care-fucking-free? Anyway, here’s a quote from my beloved adrienne maree brown that helps balance the super real feelings Remi Wolf is expressing: “What if, instead, we started from trust, and we kept returning to trust, measuring intimacy by how much it made us trust ourselves and trust those we hold close to us?”
Note: I also like this song because, prior to this moment, I misheard the lyric “And I knew I couldn’t hear it/ When you talked about your feelings” as “I knew I couldn’t give you/ What you learned about in feeling school” and I thought feeling school must be a funny way to refer to therapy.
Comme Des Garçons (Like the Boys) by Rina Sawayama
There are two main reasons I enjoy this song:
1) It reminds me of Gaby, who (if you didn’t know) was the President of French Club, of Oswaldo, who lives in Reno, and of Ruby, who is very sexy (elevates my vision when I put her on the cover*).
2) It is about being “like the boys” without sending the message that we should aspire to be like boys. Instead, it recognizes that society encourages boys to be confident while girls are often labeled as self-obsessed or vapid if they practice self love. This song shows us that girls should be confident: “Girl, it’s okay/ You should never be ashamed to have it all.” Society may not be encouraging us to be confident, but other girls are!
*I don’t own a magazine, but if I did, I would put Ruby on the cover.
scatterbrain 