This excerpt is reprinted with permission from NYU Press. It is adapted from Power in Listening: The Sounding Out! Reader.
Sometime in 2021, I opened the Spotify app, navigating my way to a recent playlist I had made featuring Arlo Parks, Brittany Howard, Hozier, Charlotte Day Wilson, Radiohead, and other artists known, at least in part, for their melancholic sounds and senses. Immediately, under the banner “You Might Like,” was a featured playlist titled “sad girl starter pack.”
As is common in the age of targeted ads, privacy agreements, and social media, I felt simultaneously exposed and validated. As someone who surveys the personalized “Daily Mixes” and “Discover Weekly” playlists, searching for new music daily, it seemed like the perfect addition to my growing playlist collection. Here were 75 songs, some by artists I knew and others I didn’t, that at first glance seemed tailored to my taste. But, the longer I stared at my screen, my excitement turned into skepticism.
Read more: “When You Listen to Music, You’re Never Alone”
Something was off. It, like many of Spotify’s mood-based playlists, claimed to be curated based on a sense, as opposed to a genre, decade, or other category marker. However, unlike the application’s popular mood-based playlists (e.g., “Feelin’ Good,” “All the Feels,” “Broken,” “Chill Vibes”), this playlist evoked both gender and affect, in its name alone. Clearly, it was meant to conjure, capture, and attract a specific version of both femininity and sadness through sound. But what was that version? And what did it, supposedly, sound like?
Since first pressing play on Charlotte Day Wilson’s “Work,” one of the featured tracks, Spotify’s “sad girl starter pack” has continued to haunt me. Early into 2023, Spotify launched a global music program titled GLOW, celebrating and promoting LGBTQIA+ artists and creators. This new digital music hub boasts “Sounds from the Community —playlists featuring artists who identify as LGBTQIA+—as well as a collection of playlists deemed “LGBTQIA+ Favorites.” Among this latter collection is none other than “sad girl starter pack,” which also happens to be the hub’s most-liked playlist, by far, with over 1.3 million likes. Seeing it there, I once again felt attacked, but from a different angle. To a queer woman who still loves listening to slow, sad songs, how could the same playlist that once raised questions about sadness, femininity, and sound manage to provoke new questions about queerness, too?
Algorithmic Sadness
In addition to being in the GLOW hub, the playlist’s new description also unmistakably invokes queerness. Two years ago, when the playlist was first released, the description read, “Is her favorite color sage green?” A nod at one of the trendy colors that defined late 2021 and 2022, the description feels playful, harmless, and more so a reference to an aesthetic than a gesture toward the rainbow of identities constituting queerness. Later on in 2022, the description remained somewhat obscure, but became more pointed: “Sapphic songs that defined your music taste as ‘yearning.’” The word “sapphic,” derived from the poet Sappho and often used to describe sexual and romantic attraction between women, clearly suggests queerness. And yet the playlist is not explicitly queer, at least not in an identitarian sense. That is, it does not feature exclusively queer artists like the playlists in GLOW’s “Sounds from the Community” section. It is also not exclusively feminine in that the included artists are not all women-identifying. In fact, as a personalized playlist—Spotify’s hybrid between an editorial and an algorithmic playlist—some of its songs change from user to user.
What seems to be the unifying theme of the playlist, then, is a soft, melancholic sense of yearning that is descriptive of both the music in the playlist and the audience clearly targeted by it. According to the packaging, marketing, and evolution of “sad girl starter pack,” that audience appears to be sad girls, women, and femmes, queer or not. But this collapsing of identities into a single sense, category, or even playlist can be a dangerous game.
Spotify: The Sad Girl’s Digital Domain
As a digital platform, Spotify clearly understands and capitalizes on the sociality and circulatory nature of music. The “Friend Activity” column on the desktop application allows speculation about our friends’ moods based on what they’re listening to; Spotify’s annually anticipated marketing campaign “Wrapped” is designed for sharing across social media platforms with ease; and the app’s “Blend” feature can create a personalized playlist combining up to ten friends’ music tastes. These features underscore something we—music lovers, listeners, and consumers—have always known: Listening is done in, for, and about community. Playlists, arguably Spotify’s defining feature, are thus powerful social tools of relation, no matter their curator. To some, they are epistolary, sent between crushes like vaguely opaque love letters. To others, they are time capsules, relatives of the cassette tape and CD mixtapes that conjure memories and stories. For still others, they are the sonic backdrops of study sessions, breakups, warm-ups, parties, and more. Regardless of how they’re perceived, playlists are inherently relational and deeply affective. It is no wonder then, that “sad girl starter pack” is as popular as it is. Not only does it implicate multiple communities in its title and description, it invites listeners from those communities and beyond to listen, feel, and—to use the language of the playlist—yearn together. But, as this chapter’s opening foreshadows, this rosy depiction of the playlist’s social potential, through affect, begins to unravel as we consider who is hailed by this playlist and how.
First, the title. The trope of the “sad girl” and the accompanying aesthetic are certainly not new. Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and Joni Mitchell paved the way through their sorrowful poetry, fiction, and music; it was only a matter of time before the twenty-first-century iteration of the “sad girl” emerged. In the new media age, however, she appeared through mediums likely unfathomable to artists of the previous century. In 2014, the artist Audrey Wollen used Instagram to present what she calls “Sad Girl Theory.” Through Tumblr, especially, the notion of the sad girl evolved into a collection of infinite subjective experiences projected online, yet still somehow cohered into a recognizable, shared aesthetic. A quick Google search turns up countless images featuring stereotypically feminine teenagers, often white, with mascara-stained faces, black Converse, dark clothing, and gloomy landscapes. Other recurring symbols include broken glass, rain-splattered windows, and Lana Del Rey. Interestingly, among a slew of visual markers of the “sad girl”—whether fashion, nature, or a certain style of portrait photography—is a white, female singer-songwriter best known for her tragic lyricism and melancholic tone. This intensifies the sense of the “sad girl” and her world.
For one, the sad girl aesthetic is not entirely visual. In fact, it seems to live in and be realized through the sonic domain more than the visual. When asked for examples of sad girls in an interview, Wollen names Lana Del Rey first. In another online article on twenty-first-century trends, the author asks a self-proclaimed sad girl how she came to identify with the aesthetic. “I had a lot of pent-up energy,” she replies, “so I began listening to music and discovered Lana Del Rey and Arctic Monkeys.” Again, a specific kind of music is named as a key component of the sad girl experience, and, as an aesthetic and trend determined by an affect, this makes sense. There is no question that music is an outlet for emotional expression. Scholars in psychology, neuroscience, sound studies, musicology, and beyond have researched and theorized the relationship between music and affect for centuries. Some scholars have even conducted studies on who listens to sad music and why, finding that “aesthetic appreciation and empathetic engagement play a role in the enjoyment of sad music.” Given that so many young women stumbled into their sad girlhood through Instagram, Tumblr, and other social media platforms whose success, in part, lies in their ability to lure consumers in with niche aesthetics and empathetic engagement, their love for sad music seems only natural.
White Femininity Repackaged
But what is that kind of music, and is Spotify’s “sad girl starter pack” consistent in terms of the sad girl’s music taste? Following the trail of breadcrumbs left by critics and purveyors of the sad girl aesthetic, “‘sad girls’ are alternative rock and indie women and femme artists that are vulnerable or raw in their craft; their music often features lyrics about heartbreak, loneliness and trauma paired with melancholic instrumentation.” The fact that the article’s author, an undergraduate university student, considers sad girls to be the musical artists themselves is telling. This subgenre of music, musicians, and their listeners all collectively constitute the sad girl aesthetic, and, if we turn to Spotify’s corresponding playlist, the algorithm seems to have gotten this right. The playlist in question is riddled with artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, Soccer Mommy, Leith Ross, and Lorde, all of whom could be called musical relatives of Lana Del Rey, and most of whom, with the exception of Mitski and a few others, are white. Surprisingly, though, Lana Del Rey herself seems to be missing, and bands with white male leads like the Arctic Monkeys, the 1975, and Radiohead somehow made the cut. And so the “sad girl” and her aesthetic take shape. Visually and sonically, she is soft and hyperfeminine, with the exception of a few male voices whose melodies are ethereal enough that they still stir up and embody a sort of feminine softness. She is, obviously, in touch with her sadness and not afraid to express it externally, through tears, black denim, and gut-wrenching lyrics. And, finally, as she has been in many, if not all, of her past lives, she is (often) white.
Here, I must admit: I am not the first person to make this assessment of the sad girl as a new-age version of a familiar white femininity, nor am I the first to point out Spotify’s acknowledgment and reinforcement of the trope through “sad girl starter pack.” The most popular critics of the sad girl, actually, are female writers for undergraduate publications—young women who, on average, were preteens or barely teenagers during the sad girl’s Tumblr boom. Regardless of whether or not the sad girl aesthetic drew them in, these young women are tired of what it stands for. Amber Levis, for example, writing for The Harvard Crimson’s magazine, asserts that “the Sad Girl beautifies her suffering, and represents a very white kind of beauty.” She continues, “While we can talk ad nauseam about the radical inclusivity of feminine pain, we don’t see this inclusivity reflected in all those aesthetic mood boards because it is typically whiteness that we categorize as aesthetic.” Levis underscores a tale of racial exclusivity older than any contemporary conception of aesthetics, let alone the mood boards, playlists, and sad girl tropes that keep such tales alive. Clearly, as Spotify’s “sad girl starter pack”—and its recent spinoff playlists, “Sad Girl Summer” and “sad girl country”—show, sadness sells. At least, the romanticized, commodified, and white- washed version of sadness packaged and circulated through these playlists does. But something is still missing, from former and current definitions of the sad girl trope, critical conversations about the “sad girl” music genre, and even existing critiques of “sad girl starter pack” and its whiteness: the question of queerness and its relation to this playlist and the “sad girl” herself.
Queer Yearning in Public
I return now to this infamous playlist’s curious and questionable description: “Sapphic songs that defined your taste as ‘yearning.’” Across all the articles and op-eds raising questions about “sad girl starter pack,” only Levis’s piece even mentions the description. She postulates, “Maybe the sapphic spin is a half-hearted attempt to move on from defining women by their relations with men.” Half-hearted, indeed—and if it is in fact a move away from defining women in relation to men, then it does so by appropriating a beloved term in queer culture dating back to ancient Greece: sapphic. In a 2022 Spotify subreddit thread, one user even commented, “It feels . . . appropriative for them to use sapphic in that way. There are a number of songs on this playlist that are literally by straight male artists right now.” This was in response to another user who, months prior, noted that there are plenty of queer artists whose music could be included on the playlist instead. It’s not just the playlist’s current description, either, that feigns queerness. The original cover photo, long since changed twice, is a photograph of two femme-presenting people, both white or white- passing, laying on a bed staring at each other. One of them is propped up on her arm, looking down at the other with a sad, longing look. Her right arm is outstretched and lightly grazing the other’s forearm. Her appearance is androgynous, too: her hair is closely buzzed, and she wears a solid white, high neck tank top, a staple in queer femme wardrobes. The other girl lays on her back, staring up at the other with a similarly morose expression. Her left arm is angled so her hand rests on the other’s forearm. The photograph is tender, quiet, and very queer. It feels like a snapshot of a moment we weren’t meant to see—two young girls sharing an intimate, possibly romantic, moment in bed. And yet the playlist did not, and still doesn’t, claim to be for or about the queer femme experience, but rather for and about the “sad girl.”
In another subreddit called “Actual Lesbians,” a user posted a screenshot of the playlist and its description with the caption “Anyone else think Spotify is weird for this or is it just me??” Over a hundred Redditors have since responded, almost all in resounding agreement, calling the playlist “curated rainbow capitalism” and a disservice to the “diverse library of sapphic music out there.” There is thus an undeniable tension between the playlist’s title and its description. Put differently, by implicating the contemporary sad girl in its title and the sapphic queer in its description, “sad girl starter pack” conflates the music taste and aesthetic of two communities that, despite any overlap, are undoubtedly distinct. Furthermore, in its depiction of these communities’ sonic aesthetic—through the title’s coded namesake, its first cover photo, and the artists featured—the playlist reaffirms a notion of femininity that is predominantly white, hyperfeminine, and wildly limited. The apparent tie between the two identities highlighted by the playlist and possibly one of its redeeming qualities among critics: yearning. The ultimate queer affect and a word often used to describe the “sad girl” trope, a deep sense of yearning seems to be what many women and femmes, queer or not, share.
Derived from a verb, yearning is more dynamic than sadness. It describes an intense feeling of longing for something or someone, as opposed to a static state of being. Yearning suggests the possibility of movement toward that something or someone missing. For the sad girl, it might propel her toward a sense of belonging among other young women. For the sapphic queer, yearning might let them continue seeking a kind of love that often seems just out of reach. Perhaps it is still too rosy or reparative to think that a feeling can do this much work. And, surely, it does not resolve or absolve the racial exclusivity of female tropes and depictions of queerness. Rather, my turn to yearning, and affect more generally, is merely a reminder of music’s ability to move us in meaningful ways. Music lets us feel together—our sadness, queerness, joy, femininity, yearning, and an infinite array of identities, experiences, and feelings beyond. And, as we do in today’s digital age, playlists like “sad girl starter pack” should encourage us to think critically about how and what we listen to.
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Lead Image: 24 std / Adobe Stock
