Mis-Shapes
Mis-Shapes
Later that year I wheeled my suitcase through a door held open by a valet and entered a sunlit art deco lobby, feeling a rush of stupid, obvious happiness. Garish mistletoe everywhere. Donald Fagen’s “Walk Between Raindrops” began playing in my head, always cued up for Miami: a classic Walgreens Song I’d written about on my last visit. I checked in and began my cherished work-trip routine.
First there was a deep breath in the hotel room, an assessment of the vibes and the cleaning products: lovely here, fresh, not lemon scented. Then I ate an eight-dollar piece of candy from the minibar (Good and Plenty) while standing at the window (courtyard view, a pool, pink-and-white-striped umbrella tops). Instead of working in the room, which I had learned could invite a creeping loneliness, I took my laptop down to the restaurant.
It was early so I spent a couple hours down there at a poolside table. Got a big fancy salad and dug deep on Miami’s Myspace: Who seemed intriguing, who had that whiff of a wannabe? Whose captions were the most witty, informed, hip to the shifting tides of 2005? Who appeared most often in top 8s? I made a list of names, tried to memorize their profile pictures, and looked up the bars and parties I’d seen mentioned, sketching out a route. Then I went back upstairs to shower, smudged on some eyeliner, grabbed my backpack of supplies—screening questionnaires, a Polaroid, hand sanitizer—and hailed a cab.
I had a problem in Miami. After the mojito explosion, our alcohol clients had demanded we add the city to our roster, but the trendsetter density turned out to be painfully low. The cool people all knew each other, and worse, they were starting to know me. Half of them were on the panel already, which meant they saw my name in their inbox once a month when I sent them surveys, called me at the office when their check didn’t arrive in two seconds. Sure enough, I’d barely arrived at my first destination when I felt an arm around my shoulders.
“Hey mami!” Jesse Jams, he called himself. A DJ, eternally clad in a suit with pants as skinny as his tie, one of the first trendsetters I’d recruited in Miami.
“Hey,” I said, suppressing my irritation. I was supposed to fade into the scenery like a wildlife photographer. I turned my back to him and surveyed the place: mostly generic, only cool tonight because of the DJ, who looked like the female version of Jesse. I spotted two others in the crowd currently on the panel.
“It’s early,” Jesse reassured me. “I have someone I want you to meet later, total trendsetter. You’re going to Poplife later, right?”
Poplife was more of the same, hipsters dancing to Britpop and electroclash. I decided to come clean with him. “Can I buy you a drink, Jesse Jams?”
“Girl,” he said. “You know I’m Jack and Coke.”
I brought him to a quiet corner table near the back, the kind of spot where people would be making out in a few hours, and gave him a leveling look. “How many people will you know at Poplife?”
He seemed to think it was a trick question. “Everyone?”
“You see how that’s a problem for me, right? I need to diversify.”
“Uh, good luck with that. Don’t trendsetters tend to know each other?”
“Not necessarily. Say the Miami panel all becomes ironically obsessed with Michael Bolton, or whatever—I might report this to my clients like it’s an actual trend, and suddenly they’re paying Michael Bolton to shill rum when all that happened is you and your friends got high one night watching VH1 Classic, you know?”
He laughed gleefully. “Not rum though. Michael Bolton should sell champagne, like a champagne that’s cheap, but like pretending to be fancy, you know? ‘How am I supposed to live without this smooth mouthfeel.’ Write this down, girl!”
I smiled patiently. He was coked up already.
“Okay,” he said, focusing his eyes on his drink. “I know you already have the soul and hip-hop crowd. So like—maybe the industrial goths? There’s a warehouse party downtown tonight.”
“Those people don’t buy anything. Love them, but they’ve been wearing the same clothes for ten years.”
“True.”
“I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“Right?! You’re all, like, bringing me behind the curtain!”
“You’re welcome.”
Eventually I pried a couple good ideas out of him: edgy lesbians and techno ravers. But the lesbian bar he suggested was filled with thirtysomethings, none of whom had the slightest interest in becoming a trendsetter. At the rave, I acquired a headache and two decent panelists whose circles seemed unlikely to intersect with Jesse Jams’s. Enough to call it a night, but I cabbed over to Poplife anyway.
It was past midnight by now. “Laid” by James was playing, everyone pogoing during the chorus, their greasy mullets splaying in the spotlights like pineapple tops. I bought myself a real drink, then found Jesse Jams and made him point out everyone he didn’t know. This tactic yielded my favorite score of the night, a film student named Hannah who was making a documentary about Miami artists and was only here for the music.
“I hate scenesters,” she told me loudly over the noise, eyeing the crowd. “But I love dancing to Britpop, so.” She shrugged and sipped the drink I’d bought her. She was wearing a sack dress and a pair of Amy Winehouse–worthy dirty flats. “I come alone so I don’t have to talk to anyone.”
I scribbled this in her screener. The seats were all taken so I was writing against the wall. “And why do you love dancing to Britpop?” This was off script.
“What?”
I leaned toward her ear: “Why Britpop?”
“Well, it’s basically dance music, but it’s songs, you know? Great songs. With melodies and words and images that mean something. Why anyone would want to dance to oonce-oonce nnta-nnta is mystifying to me, but that’s what’s dominated clubs—that’s what it’s meant to go out dancing—for as long as I’ve known.” She gestured at the dance floor. “Until these assholes came along.”
“And why do you think they’re assholes?”
She sighed and leaned against the wall. “Oh, fuck me for saying that. They’re not. Just a bunch of nerds who’ve finally found their place. Let’s be honest, I’m one of them.”
I put my screener down and watched them with her. She’d made quick work of two fundamental truths about hipsters: that they had all been miserable kids, the boys too sensitive and the girls too willful for the social systems of the late twentieth century; and that nobody wanted to admit they were one of them.
“I think what bothers me,” Hannah said, “is that we found our place, and then we immediately went and turned that place into basically another version of high school. Only we get to be the kings this time. Like, it’s a little…embarrassing?”
I had her fill out the contact information page. These answers would raise my boss’s eyebrows, but was a little self-awareness too much to ask for in a trendsetter?
As I packed up my screeners, the DJ started playing Pulp’s “Mis-Shapes,” and I felt Hannah’s hand on my wrist. Her eyes were wide, entreating. I nodded to show that I understood: the song was about the outcasts she’d just described. But she didn’t let go. She was jerking her head to the dance floor.
I would’ve refused if she hadn’t been so damn cool in her interview. Hastily I stowed my backpack under a bench and followed her out into the throng of bodies.
Hannah committed hard right away, striking poses, commanding space; I did my best, but the first verse is mid-tempo, tricky. Then the pre-chorus arrived like a trampoline, sending us all bouncing in unison. Some girl grabbed me by both shoulders, shook me once, and sang loudly in my face about sweet revenge. I sang it back at her; we were intimates, co-conspirators. She slipped by me and I never saw her again. Next I felt Jesse Jams hug me from behind, and he folded me into a circle of people with their arms around each other. I pulled Hannah in too. It was deliriously fun, everyone scream-singing the lyrics, releasing buckets of pent-up angst into the sweaty air. A boy in a black mesh T-shirt locked eyes with me from across the circle, then walked over to me and rested an arm on my shoulder, caressed my cheek with his hand. “You’re gorgeous,” he shouted into my ear, then snapped his head around like a ballerina and marched back to his place in the circle.
Hannah was wrong, I decided, as I shouted along to the final chorus: I loved these people. I loved this city, its weirdos finally beating out its bimbos. I was glad they’d put themselves on top of their new world order.
In the cab ride back to my hotel I felt the song still pulsing inside me. I knew it was the first track on Different Class, Pulp’s ’90s masterpiece, and I knew it had inspired the name of a DJ team and club night in New York, but I hadn’t listened to it in years. There was an element of physical discomfort in how badly I wanted to hear it again as I rode the elevator up to my room. I dropped my backpack on the floor and found the song on YouTube and then played it three times in a row, dancing in front of the blackened window, not caring about my silhouette on display for all of Miami Beach. Then I let the album play and sat down to write.
Years later, the scene I had inhabited that night, and so many of my nights on the job, was christened “indie sleaze” by the internet. Entire Instagram accounts were devoted to remembering the era; I showed up in the flash-heavy photos occasionally, usually in the background with my giant backpack. Indie sleaze is remembered as an attitude—a fuck-it-all embrace of grimy fun—as well as a musical moment defined by the party-friendly indie acts of the aughts: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, M.I.A., CSS. This is accurate but incomplete, omitting the massive amounts of ’80s and ’90s Britpop those kids consumed every night like so many cans of caffeinated malt liquor. History always forgets that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. New Order was everywhere; “Age of Consent” seemed to play automatically upon entering a bar, and the Unknown Pleasures T-shirt was ubiquitous. There was Erasure on sunnier days. Orange Juice and Echobelly for the more informed. And above all, if you ask me, there was Pulp. “Common People” was the ultimate closer, a song so great it couldn’t be followed; “Mis-Shapes” and “Babies” were mid-set go-tos. It seems clear to me now that Jarvis Cocker, Pulp’s front man, created indie sleaze when we were all still teenagers—he came up with the whole damn thing, the attitude and the aesthetic and at least part of the sound, and then my generation acted like we invented it ten years later.
I didn’t write about indie sleaze that night in the Miami hotel room because it didn’t exist yet, at least not by that name. But I wrote about how Britpop was everything that year. I wrote that only the English could capture the ironic humor, style, and detachment necessary for a young person to survive the aughts in America. I described how it felt to be on a packed dance floor screaming along to “Mis-Shapes”—wailing, I said, like a lost animal who’d found its family—while realizing the loneliness that has characterized your life so far may in fact be optional. I went into the whole album, calling it the hipster manifesto of our time, On the Road for a generation who didn’t want to end up living in their parents’ basement like Kerouac. I wrote that it had taken a decade-old record to help us figure out what we wanted, and what we wanted was fun— real fun, which requires freedom, and belonging, and affordable housing, and peace from wartime. The Bush years were ending, I wrote; you could feel it on the dance floor.
It was a little much. But at four a.m., after two Heinekens from the hotel room minifridge, I did something Zoe had been telling me to do for months, something I swore I’d never do, mostly because the idea embarrassed me: I emailed a link to the post to Jesse Jams. By morning, he’d reposted it on a Myspace bulletin and on a dozen individual walls. By the next night, when I returned home to SF, Zoe greeted me with the announcement that she had seen it reposted on multiple bulletins, and underneath the original post were 468 comments.
I sat at my desk reading comments all night, giggling at my reflection in the window. A few of the comments showed actual insight. Some were from people who’d been at Poplife that night. Some took issue with something I’d said; others took issue with those who had taken issue. I loved them all. My audience!
The next day I got a few emails from people who’d seen the post: Nomi, with predictions that my blog could land me a book deal; my brother’s girlfriend in Indiana, whose hipster cousin had mass-emailed the link to her entire family; and, late in the day, Luke Skinner, with the subject line “Question.” It took a second for my brain to attach his name to a face, first the long-haired suburban kid playing “Here Comes Your Man” in Zoe’s garage, then a pair of kohl-rimmed eyes shooting daggers at Joe on the Brooklyn rooftop.
percy marks! saw your pulp piece, been wondering what you were up to, love it! hey so not sure if you’ve heard but i quit caroline. got my own band now. would you be willing to listen to a few of my songs, see if you have any thoughts? not sure if you know this but i heard some of joe’s original demos way back when, i know your feedback can really help.
I laughed out loud. Hey not sure if you’ve heard but I have a life, I wanted to write. Not sure if you know this but servicing the songs of Caroline and all its spin-off comma-splicers is not actually my reason for being on this earth! Not sure if you know this but Joe’s original demos were the work of a true raw talent whereas you are a pompous wannabe! God it felt good to ignore this email, to be so bolstered by success that I could laugh off a musician and really mean it.