new wave softgirls ✿✿✿
I can’t stop watching the TikTok videos on the Leikeli47 sound Girl Blunt, where it goes “This shit is a Girl Blunt, I only smoke girl blunts” and the freckled 20 year old on my iPhone screen vibes along, adding the caption “why is half of this joint lavender?” or “why is the skin pink?” or “have u set up crystals around the smoke circle?” before miming the catchy lyric. I’m struck by the videos not just because of the song, but because I didn’t know that all this stuff, these femme accoutrements, was an option?! I don’t actually smoke weed, but maybe I would if I knew that rolling with pink skins, dried lavender and the implication of magic was a way I could do it. Then, when I’m imagining these fairy girls having sleepover spliffs and bopping to Doja Cat, I’m struck by how Tumblr it all feels. I’ve maybe mentioned before - I was, and still remain til I die, a Tumblr girl. By that I don’t mean I was Tumblr famous (I fucking wish lol), I mean that I loved Tumblr (my friend Amie actually was both Myspace and Tumblr famous n to this day I am still a little in awe of her for it, despite her many many other real and wonderful and most importantly valid achievements). I loved Tumblr; the disposable camera pictures of manic pixie dream girls with bleach blonde hair, the underground blog posts of indie-famous musicians, the graphic creations lost to the ether, the proto-fourth-wave-feminism, the reams of teenagers discovering their sexuality online, the Litas, the idea of smoking after a gig, the bare legs, the shit tattoos, the make-up. Lavender scented girl blunts fit right in on Tumblr.
Of course, now, presently, currently, atm, we have a million subsidiaries of Tumblr girls (we should probs note - when I refer to girls here and hereafter, I’m referring to a state of mind, not a gender. Gender is all made up, and states of mind r the only real thing on this freaky freaky plane we call earth), a million spin-offs, a million descendants. E-girls and their shiny pink nose tips. The new rise of emo. CSM students. Femme stoners. Rollerskaters. Coffee shop creatives. Lana stans. And most importantly, for me and for u reading this newsletter - softgirls.
It all starts of course with the original softgirl, who transcends the new wave I’m about to discuss, who reigns supreme in the softgirl dreamworld - Laura Palmer. The star of a TV show for which she is dead the whole time. Blonde, mini kilt. Drug habit, charity work. Manic. Pixie. Dream. Girl. Soft and hard, kind and mean, heartbreaker and heartbroken. Neither without the other. Neither Without The Other™ is the crux of the softgirl - especially the new wave softgirl - philosophy, which is why it all starts with Laura Palmer. I saw a beautiful piece of art on Instagram the other day by Jennifer Mehigan, titled HARD LOOKS 4 SOFT GIRLS III. It’s a large, soft, neon pink, hot coral, ice blue and grey abstract painting set next to a black & white photograph of a woman choking a man in a wrestling ring, which is stuck to the wall with pink tape. The painting is set against the white wall, resting on the floor, which is pink. The hot coral colour shouts out at you as you look at it, tempered by its own soft edges. The neon pink feels playful, shimmying across the canvas in scribbles. The ice blue is striking but in a subtle way. The grey feels warm and soft, tying together the black & white photo and the colourful canvas. The photo is high contrast and feels hard compared to the macro abstractness of the painting. It’s almost shocking - when I first saw it I paused because something about the image truly said “softgirl” to me, and then I read the caption and was thrown back to Laura Palmer, the ultimate softgirl. HARD LOOKS 4 SOFT GIRLS. Hard 4 Soft. Neither 4 the Other. I’d already had this idea of the new wave softgirl, germinated when listening to Self Esteem’s Prioritse Pleasure (which we will get to, believe u me), but I wasn’t sure how to begin articulating it. It was still a chord progression, waiting to evolve into a riff. This image catalysed it. I could see the idea of the softgirl and the hardness that is, in fact, intrinsic to her softgirl status. And rly, if that isn’t the most apt depiction of a softgirl ever: describing a softgirl by being a softgirl.
I don’t wanna ham the metaphor up too much, but I rly feel that the ultimate softgirl symbol (the ultimate Tumblr symbol) itself epitomises this idea of the soft needing the hard to be truly new wave softgirl. The edge, u know. I’m talking about roses. Roses are the definitive softgirl symbol; if not for the reason I’m about to delve into then for the simple fact that they are beautiful. They are beautiful on fuzzy 35mm film, and when set on fire, and when grasped in your hands, and when strewn over a bed or the floor. They represent romance, and death, and love, and grief; all the rly powerful emotions. They die dramatically, like the iconic image of the wilted rose in Beauty & The Beast, shedding petal after petal before turning ghostly brown and shrivelling. I think what’s crucial, though, to this idea is the delicateness of the petals set against the dangerous, angry thorns that line the stem of the flower. The rose is beautiful and ethereal, and the thorns bring you sharply back down to earth. The thorns also defend the rose, spiking predators, or enemies as I like to think of them, and scratching wandering hands. Despite this, though, the rose remains soft. Its petals still spill open. Its centre unfolds. “At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete." - obviously The Great Gatsby. Every quote I love is from The Great Gatsby.
The point - even in that verging-on-the-precipice-of-cringe F. Scott Fitzgerald quote - is that the rose is truly beautiful not in spite of its thorn but precisely because the thorns exist. Blossoming and incarnation need each other to be falling in love; blossoming on its own is not love, and incarnation on its own is quite the opposite. The combination, though, blooms and lava, joy and pain, soft and hard - that is what makes love. That is what makes softgirls. New wave softgirls, they even understand how to express it.
Self Esteem’s recent song Prioritise Pleasure is a neon cacophony of feelings. It soars in its pop grandeur, as the lyrics sear through the angel harmonies. In true new wave softgirl form, though, it’s not actually the biting lyrics (All the fucked up shit I did thinking it would make me happy / Very little of it did, really / And it happened lately / As I willed a sunset to go quickly) that provide the hardness, the thorns, of this song. The lyrics are perfectly, devastatingly, proudly softgirl. It’s the bright, glittering pop sound of the music that makes Prioritise Pleasure hard. Unmovable. It subverts stereotypes in such a subtle way that you don’t even notice until you’re 3 minutes in and the glorious melody is singing SHAVE MY PUSSY (THAT’S JUST FOR ME). It’s the out-and-out poppiness that takes your breath away, not the shocking lyrics. Or more than the shocking lyrics, anyway. How fucking clever, to reclaim not just the poetry of expressing yourself but to reclaim the form of pop too. How fucking cool. All the years of pseudo-feminism, white male execs deciding who wears how much and when, and Self Esteem uses the very genre itself to flip it on its head. Even the name Self Esteem is both joyful and, if you look harder, sad. But it’s the joy in the inference that feels revolutionary; we all know that self esteem is a phrase usually used to discuss a lack of. Not here - not in this music. It’s not Riot Grrrl, we’re not trashing the stage this time. It’s soft - but it’s hard as fuck in its softness, see. The beauty is in the thorns. MY DAYDREAMING (THAT’S JUST FOR ME). We’re blossoming, and our incarnation is complete. <3