pop! goes my heart

from the desk of the tortured neighbors apartment

After sharing it here, I posted part of this essay on Hozier and TikTok trends on my tumblr, and while there are some interesting conversations happening in the notes of it, there were also two different sets of tags in reblogs that made me laugh out loud:

Both absolutely miss the point in totally opposite ways, representing the perfect enjoyment vs. understanding, either/or school of thought that the Let People Enjoy Things crowd and stan culture are governed by. Enjoyment and entertainment become paramount, and any attempt at critically engaging with a work, or attempting to understand it beyond the surface threatens that feel-good experience.

That’s why one reader finds it absurd to dance to a song that isn’t explicitly happy, while one scoffs at the attempt to work out a deeper meaning than what’s reflected on surface level.

But couldn’t understanding the underlying emotion behind the song contribute to what makes it such a bop? Who said you’re only allowed to dance to happy songs anyway?

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When I lived alone, I wasn’t a very good neighbor.

I felt a freedom in living alone–it was the first and only time I’d ever done it after growing up in my parents house, always having roommates in college, moving back in with my mom post-college, and then moving in with my sister mid-pandemic because neither of us wanted to live alone anymore. I could play a two hour long podcast on my single bluetooth speaker, cranking the volume up loud enough to hear it no matter where in my apartment I was, and no one in my home would be disturbed, annoyed or distracted by it. I did it with podcasts, movies, music–occasionally a YouTube video of a full Brandi Carlile concert–and I usually sang along or yelled at the TV without holding back.

It was such a part of my day to day that I started making specific playlists for common parts of my routine or routine moods I found myself in. My post-therapy reflection had a playlist. Puttering around in the morning had a playlist. Snacking after work, using my tarot deck, masturbating, smoking. They all had one.

One of those playlists was called pop! goes my heart (yes that is a Music & Lyrics reference) and it’s what I’d put on, crank up and dance to every time I was feeling like shit. They were dance pop songs, but they weren’t happy. They were often full of lyrics about miserable relationships, the pain of being misunderstood, the learned desperation that comes as a symptom of living in a world that’s isolating and abusive.

Depressing things that were not happening at the club unlike what was going down in early aughts pop music, but things that felt cathartic to scream along to as I jumped around my apartment, waving my arms around to the beat, my voice quaking from emotion and overuse. These were moments when I didn’t feel the need to cry, but where whatever I was feeling was too big to live inside me. I didn’t want to shake it off, I wanted to scream it out.

I’d kind of forgotten about that playlist until seeing those two sets of tags, which reminded me how good it feels to dance without pretending to be happy about it, and how a great fucking pop song can be full of grief or bitterness or discontentment.

My tastes have changed ever so slightly since making pop! goes my heart, but if I was to remake it today, these are the songs I’d start with:

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