[Editor’s note: This is the final week of Hate Reads Season 1! Enjoyyyyy]
What if you combined three talented musicians into an insufferable cultural symbol? That is the premise of the band boygenius, currently on hiatus from making music for the nation’s premiere non-practicing bisexuals.
The only thing you need to know about boygenius is that there is a blonde one, a tall one, and a short one. If you see them together at an event, they are either dressed like their mom coordinated them for Sunday School or like they are about to work a shift at Olive Garden (with all due respect to Olive Garden waiters — the lifeblood of this great nation). I saw a picture the other day of three Calico critters sitting around an upright cigarette and staring at it. Someone had captioned it “boygenius coded,” and they are correct. The cigarette, of course, represents the ambient “queerdom” that overlays boygenius’s public persona without actually coalescing into anything that feels true or subversive.
It is widely speculated that a 2021 Instagram post from Lindsey Jordan, aka Snail Mail, that said, “women who write about women solely for profit post a pic of your boyfriend tag! go!” was about boygenius member Phoebe Bridgers. (Bridgers posted a photo with her then-boyfriend Paul Mescal shortly after.) Last year, a post was passed around the web allegedly from the phoebebridgers community on Reddit chastising bisexual and straight women and their boyfriends for taking up space at boygenius concerts. That post is crazy and probably fake but also entirely believable because of how defensive people are about their right to pop “representation,” even when their identity is the most constructed part about them. And unlike Taylor fans, who are equally crazy, or that one Timothée Chalamet lady, there were never really enough normal boygenius fans to counteract the “run me over with your Jeep” vibes.
I liked boygenius’s record when it came out, but at a certain point, listening to Emily I’m Sorry felt like participating in a fanfic version of Phoebe Bridgers, one she has written about herself. When I want chocolate ice cream, I buy chocolate ice cream. When I want vanilla, I buy vanilla. When I want strawberry, I buy strawberry. I don’t buy Neapolitan. Neapolitan is for people that don’t know what they want. It’s for showing your B cups onstage in 2023. It is fundamentally less satisfying than its individual parts.
Look, I can recite nearly all of the lyrics to Kyoto. I think Lucy Dacus has one of the best covers to Dancing in the Dark. Julien Baker…exists. But when I think of boygenius, my mind becomes a void. Into that void, steps three shadowy women, and they are making out, and then they float off like vapor. And I don’t miss them.
—Jimmy Neutron
This ice cream metaphor is the best explanation that I didn't know I needed. That band turns me OFF. I never understand anything Phoebe B mumbles, and mumbling times three does not make it better. I want better for us.
Generally on board here but 👎to small cup sizes catching unnecessary strays