Where the People Are
Back in February, Amanda Petrusich at the New Yorker sat down to ask Hayley Williams, the 34-year-old lead singer of the rock band Paramore, about life as a working musician. I enjoyed the entire interview, but there was one question in particular that stayed with me, and which I wrote down for further mulling. The question seems to flow organically out of a brief moment in the interview when Petrusich’s one-year-old daughter wanders into the room where they’re working. She introduces Williams (and us) to the baby, and then tells her to “say bye-bye.” “Sorry,” Petrusich adds, but Williams isn’t having it: “That’s how work should be. It should be part of your life, not everything,” the rockstar says. This launches Petrusich into her next line of inquiry:
“For me, the last couple of years––both living through the pandemic, and then becoming a parent––made me think, O.K., where exactly does real life happen? I’d imagine this is something touring musicians struggle with all the time: Is this real life, out on the road, performing with my band? Or is my real life like when I’m home hanging with my friends, feeding the cat? Or are they somehow both my real life?”
Where exactly does real life happen? The words landed almost immediately for me as a revelation. Petrusich is wondering, in a concrete and almost sociological sense, about the ways work and life boundaries changed during the pandemic, “because our boundaries either dissolved completely or got incredibly permeable,” she adds. (The work/life binary, born out of the OG patriarchal binaries: public/private; male/female.) But Petrusich’s wondering (is this real life? Is this?) also provides a framework for considering broader power dynamics of longing and belonging that structure our lives in these, the roaring 20s.
This past month I’ve been working on an essay about (among other things) wannabes. When I first started teaching high school in the early 2010s, less than a decade out from my own high school days, conventional wisdom on the sociology of gender still flowed out of books like Rosalind Wiseman’s condescending tome, Queen Bees and Wannabes (2002). The book had notoriously informed Tina Fey’s 2004 mega-hit, Mean Girls, with its shrewd characterization of the power dynamics to be found within so-called ‘girl culture.’ If the goal of the book was to shed light on the pandemic of bullying, exclusion, and cruelty among young people (and was that its goal?), it had the additional side effect of reifying simplistic categories. “Here are the different roles your daughter might play,” Wiseman writes in a kind of primer for parents called “The Queen Bee and her Court.” The court (ah, who doesn’t love an analogy that elides monarchy and “nature”) includes everyone from the “Sidekick” to the “Floater” to the “Target.” Buried somewhere in the middle is the “Pleaser/Wannabe/Messenger.” “She can easily be dropped if she’s seen as trying too hard to fit in,” Wiseman writes. (At my Connecticut public school, we called it “getting ditched.”) “What does she gain by being a Pleaser? The feeling that she belongs.”
The idea that a parent (let’s be real: a mother) might use this guide to 1) ID her daughter on the social hierarchy, and 2) guide her –– out? through? –– is so adorably quaint, like those miniature paintings from the 18th century. Mean Girls, to its credit, did not reflect this hopeful vision of parenthood; all of the adults in that film, played by our favorite SNL comedians of that era, were memorably idiotic, whether because they embraced and enabled their children’s debauched imitations of adulthood, or because they were utterly clueless. Gee, I wonder where these fresh-out-of-puberty humans learned to see one another as commodities with fixed and quantifiable values? Couldn’t be the larger capitalist structure into which their parents and teachers were either actively or passively acculturating them? No, no, we try not to mention those structures in this kind of book; we might scare off our market!
But back to where does real life happen, the question that eventually broke open my thinking about wannabes. For real life of course has to do with an internal feeling, and internally, when you’re a wannabe, you do not feel real. Not yet. What will make you real is the thing you desire: to be where the cool kids are.
It won’t be too hard for me to argue that the most iconic (and gendered) wannabe story of the millennial era is The Little Mermaid. Disney released its live-action remake last month, highly anticipated and commented on for its choice to cast Halle Bailey, who is Black, as Ariel. I enjoyed Theresa Okokon’s take on it, which she narrated for my local NPR, but since I haven’t seen the film myself, I can’t comment yet on its resonance with the original. Instead, I’ll take a moment to remember the lessons of the 1989 animated version, the Wannabe’s Tale of my childhood canon.
“I wanna be where the people are,” Ariel sings. Somehow, even as an underwater princess whose muscular, trident-wielding king-dad could probably protect her from most if not all sea predators, Ariel wants “more” (hold that note as the chords modulate up, up, up). That’s how it starts, for the wannabe. Wanting more. Having, in fact, a lot –– a beautiful voice, the ability to swim all day, and friends, a bunch of crustaceans and mollusks, willing to put on a show for you –– and still wanting more. Sensing, knowing, that you were born in the wrong neighborhood, the wrong body, the wrong life. That your real life is “on land.”
I recently heard a talented friend perform “Part of Your World” at karaoke, which inspired me to perform it for my 5-year-old niece last week (she loved it). It’s a gorgeous song, filled with longing. I couldn’t help but notice, however, an element of dramatic irony, one I’d missed as a child singing along to the original Jodi Benson recording. It arrives during the bridge:
What would I give if I could live
Out of these waters
What would I pay to spend a day
Warm on the sand
Here, of course, she is foreshadowing the way her desperation will render her vulnerable to an extremely fucked up deal with Ursula: her voice, in exchange for life on land. At this point it’s just an innocent hypothetical, though she might’ve done well to ask herself: What would I give? What would I pay? What, in other words, about my real life am I willing to destroy so that this other imagined life can come into being?
Betcha on land they understand
Bet they don't reprimand their daughters…
Aha –– now, we see the dream’s roots; now, we know it is less a dream than an escapist fantasy. Up there they don’t have the problems we have down here, Ariel imagines. Liberation. An exit ticket out of patriarchy, out of the underworld and into the LIGHT.
We intuited the meaning of “reprimand,” knew it described the power our parents and teachers held over us, the “power over” that seemed the birthright of fathers, mothers, and sons, but rarely ever daughters. Of course Ariel wants this. And we wanted it for her, even as we knew, we knew, she would not find a world without controlling adults up above.
Bright young women, sick of swimmin’,
Ready to stand…
It’s a gendered class allegory fit for the late Reagan-Thatcher era. Losers are content to swim “under the sea”; winners stand, dignified, fulfilled. They’ll do anything –– the options are work hard or sell your soul, which one sounds easier? –– to join the ranks of the human.
Where does real life happen? I would suggest that for many of us raised on The Little Mermaid, real life happens in someone else’s life, in someone else’s body, and on someone else’s terms. When we finally manage to work hard enough, or make our Faustian bargain, or both, we find ourselves washed up on the shores of a new land, voiceless and wobbly. Naked. No wonder it takes no time at all to become reliant on a boyfriend (preferably one with a boat).
So yes, I was a bit curious to know where a rockstar like Hayley Williams (whose iconic jewel-toned hair actually has major Ariel vibes) believes “real life” happens. “So much of what we do when we travel and play shows doesn’t feel human, because people only see a kind of 2-D version,” she tells Petrusich. “They see this projection that you’re putting out.” So the idols themselves, the ones with legs, don’t even feel real. They’ve made something real, but out on stage, their art gets fed through the machinery of other people’s desires. “If you’re singing in a song museum / without a drop to drink,” Matt Berninger of The National grumble-sings on their new album (to be clear, I love it); the stars, the cultural royalty, can barely tolerate the curated, commodified version of their art that they must pretend to enjoy selling.
The same disillusionment with success, with life on land, materializes in a story called “Returning,” from Ling Ma’s superb 2022 story collection, Bliss Montage. Her narrator is a writer with a successful first novel, perhaps like Ma herself. “On the book-promotion circuit, I felt like the executor of a modest estate, interpreting and acting upon the intentions of the deceased, reanimating her process of writing, retracing her thoughts, presenting publicly on her behalf,” explains the narrator. “Because I bore her resemblance.” The persona, the “2-D version,” is part and parcel of the commodity, and the commodity, its value, must be preserved in the climate-controlled museum, where wannabes far and wide may come to nourish their dreams.
Those of us raised to be wannabes may not have had a choice in the matter. We were being set up: for consumerism, and, a few years down the road, for virtual reality. For total alienation from our desires. Even with a collection of twenty thingamabobs, we were told, “who cares / no big deal.” It wasn’t what we had that made us less real; it was our positionality, which was always under. It was our place in the immutable hierarchy, enshrined in pop sociology books and movies alike.
But our condition is no less unbearable than that of the queens and kings, the ones with the record deals and the book deals and the legs. Maybe the pandemic blurred the lines between work and home, persona and person. Maybe it put everyone inside a living nightmare and required that we dream for our lives. Either way, life is unbearable. But it’s funny: I don’t even remember the parts of The Little Mermaid that take place on land. It’s only the early songs that stuck with me, though I’ve got vague images of Prince Eric’s chef, whose specialty is, of course, le poisson –– red flag, Ariel!
It’s possible that I’ve understood the movie all along. Here is a girl who already has everything: because she has a voice, and because she uses it to turn desire into music.
***
My essay on wannabes and art in Nicole Flattery’s new novel Nothing Special is forthcoming at The Rumpus.
