friday five.
re: Rilo Kiley, free speech, film fest buzz, working painters, & more. <3
It was the early 2000s and most of the music I was in love with was decidedly boy music. I was into indie, punk, and hardcore, and the bands were full of dudes and the shows were full of dudes and the lyrics were sometimes sexist, but I sang along anyway and pretended they were romantic. At that point, nothing had stirred my soul like the gritty, grainy noise of the music that never got played on the radio. It was fine if Saves the Day wanted to talk about digging out the eyes of the girl who didn’t love them back, I mean did you hear that fucking breakdown? And sure, Bright Eyes lyrics felt like every sad boy male “genius” book I read and movie I watched, but the music the music!
So please understand that it’s not an overstatement to say that Rilo Kiley was a fucking revelation. Jenny Diane Lewis (Rilo’s frontwoman) came into my life when I was around 18 years old, and she sounded like the other bands on Saddle Creek Records except instead of a guy in a plaid shirt, she was a girl in the cutest fucking romper, and she was singing directly to my heart. “I’m a modern girl/but I fold in half so easily,” went immediately on my MySpace profile, which later changed to, “You say I choose sadness/that it never once has chosen me,” and then later to, “I say there’s trouble/when everything is fine/the need to destroy things/creeps up on me every time.”
Our girl was full of feminine ennui and damaged depression, and millions of millennial women finally felt seen. She also spoke to our more romantic parts, and everytime I was in love, there was a Rilo song to help me feel it even deeper (“and it just feels good/when you’re waking up/it just feels good/when you’re next to me….”). And though she’s not usually heralded for it, Jenny was political with her lyrics — climate change is a regular theme, and there’s a whole song that is overtly critical of George W. Bush and the Iraq War. Rilo was different from bands like Bikini Kill or Gossip, who, though absolutely incredible and indispensable, were also kind of hard to just sing along to. Riot grrrl and its adjacent projects were so important, but Rilo was a little twee, a little indie, a little rock n’ roll, and when you sang along you really got to sing along. Jenny belts out her lines, almost show-tune-like in its bigness. I loved (and love) belting it out with Jenny Lewis, and I loved that I usually did it alongside my friends. I sang Rilo with my best friend from high school, the college queers I’d go on to form a band with (named in honor of a Rilo song), the women in my master’s program with whom I bonded right away over our shared love of all of Jenny’s projects.
Nearly 25 years since first discovering them, I got to see Rilo Kiley perform again, with two of those same friends. We came together for a long-overdue reunion and filled up an outdoor venue in Michigan with hundreds of fellow elder millennials, many of whom also seemed to be having friend-meetups to bask in the feeling of nostalgia, to remember what it felt like to have our whole lives ahead of us. There’s something a little sad about listening to music from your early 20s, to remember that sense of possibility, to know for certain you’ll simply never again have access to hope in such a pure, unfettered form. Rilo was a soundtrack to first love, and first love can only happen once. Rilo was a soundtrack to riding the el at 1am on a Chicago autumn night against the orange-hum glow of those city lights, against the confidence and terror of really figuring out who you want to be for the first time in your newly-adult life. What could compete with the precious newness of self-discovery in one’s early 20s?
So yes, it’s a little sad, but mostly Sunday night was joyous; holy, even. For better or worse, I had my phone out for a lot of the show, dancing and present, but also recording. One video you won’t find, though, is from when they played “With Arms Outstretched.” As the title suggests, the song references a particular position of the body, and you can bet the whole crowd responded in kind. I put my phone down, I did as the lyrics said.
Do you know what happens when a giant mass of people have their arms outstretched to the sky, palms up and voices in unison?....
God happens.
Here’s a thing I think is important: we have to find ways to fight against and denounce authoritarian control without invoking the constitution.
