Early in her novel,
Written on the Body, Jeannette Winterson writes: "You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I." Recently in a tarot reading I pulled the High Priestess: a reminder to stay open, porous to the cosmic messages of the world. The stars have always been the stars; we have always navigated the ocean by them, no matter what we called their constellations. In the same way we have always known love. It is profoundly unoriginal; it has existed for as long as we have been human.
But within each love develops a shared, private language — the shorthand of gestures and references that make up what it means to be intimate, to know another person. I have always thought playlists — which I have made for friends and lovers alike — to be an appropriate simulacra for the universal and specific experience that is falling in love and loving. Everyone hears the same songs, but everyone hears something a little different.
Pop Song is a book about getting closer, falling deeper, and running headlong into feeling — all things that I’ve felt and that I’m certain you have felt too. Please listen to this playlist in the order it’s displayed. Here are ten of my favorite tracks, imprinted with both that secret and present language.
1. Best to You by Blood Orange
If only I could be the best. I could be the best to you — for you. How else to start a playlist but with a declaration of longing?
2. Dead Oaks by Now, Now
This track conjures up that most close and private of acts: a call in the middle of the night that feels like you’re speaking into a tin can telephone.
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3. Pang by Caroline Polachek
While writing sections of
Pop Song, I listened to Polachek’s album on repeat. These four tracks — "Dead Oaks," "Pang," "hand crushed by a mallet" and "Rodent" — played in quick succession, convey that path of yearning which turns into a crashing, nearly self-destructive obsession we sometimes mistake for love.
4. hand crushed by a mallet by 100 gecs
5. Rodent by Burial
6. Ceremony by New Order
After the intensity of "Rodent" —
What would I do without you?/Don’t know what I’d do without you — in which the love object becomes essential, it’s time for a breath of fresh air. I’ve always loved New Order, and “Ceremony” feels like a beginning in the middle — kind of like September, when everything is crisp and new.
7. Just What I Needed by The Cars
This song, to me, is the ultimate quotation. Everyone knows it. Everyone’s heard it. A person I had a crush on who was much too old for me once put this on a mixtape for me. And in turn I put it on a playlist for a person I loved and still love — the
you I write toward in
Pop Song.
8. Supercut by Lorde
So much of our lives are self-mythology, and no one understands that better than Lorde. I’m a fan of all of
Melodrama, but "Supercut" captures that desperate narrativizing — trying to make sense of something as it’s happening, and as it’s ended — perfectly.
9. I Dare You by The xx
This is a love song.
10. Nights by Frank Ocean
This song is the story of a relationship; it’s also a narrative of events strung together by nights. It feels like a fitting end to a playlist inspired by a book that takes so much power from the night — where everything feels strange and possible and real, like a vase or a painting or a novel.
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Larissa Pham is an artist and writer in Brooklyn. Her essays and criticism have appeared in
The Nation, the
New York Times Book Review,
Bookforum, and elsewhere. She has received support from Jack Jones Literary Arts and the Bennington Writing Seminar. She is the author of
Fantasian, a novella, and the essay collection
Pop Song, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.
Pop Song is currently featured in our
Self Portraits sale.
Want more Larissa Pham? Check out our event with her, in conversation with Mary H. K. Choi: