Chapter 13
If you’ve spent time online lately, odds are you’ve encountered a certain disheveled musician by the name of Hannah Cortland.
She and her oversize T-shirts, busted-up Vans, and throaty voice are every-where.
Not only are all the cool kids setting their angsty IG reels to her music, but it seems like each new concert performance turns into a trending event on TikTok.
Every day there are new memes on Twitter, Tumblr seems to have come back from the grave just to dissect her lyrics, and even a celeb or two has admitted to having an unrequited crush.
So why is the internet suddenly obsessed with the twenty-eight-year-old singer-songwriter?
Is it because she’s hot in a messy, depression-chic way that feels different from the FaceTuned Instagram faces we’ve come to associate with celebrities?
Is it because she and her band, the Future Saints, genuinely kick ass?
Because offstage, her antics are the stuff of paparazzi wet dreams?
Well, yes, to all of the above. But I think there’s something else going on, a deeper reason we find Cortland so compelling.
Hear me out: I think she’s the symbol we’ve been waiting for.
Every generation has artists who capture the zeitgeist. The fifties had Elvis; the sixties, Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin; the seventies, Stevie Nicks; the eighties, Michael Jackson and Madonna; and so on.
Enter Hannah Cortland, messy and tired, wearing her heart on her sleeve, less in an earnest way than in a way that suggests she has no more fucks left to give.
There’s a sense about her that she’s circling the end of something and hasn’t quite decided if she’s going to embrace it, go gentle into that good night, or rage.
She’s talented, but the talent’s not uncomplicated, accompanied by a host of problems like substance abuse and possible mental health challenges (not to speculate too strongly on another person’s brain).
Who better embodies this moment in time?
Cortland’s hit a nerve by tapping into a postpandemic zeitgeist of fatigue and unaddressed trauma, the seeming hopelessness of change thanks to gridlocked politics, our collective anxiety about future climate disasters, rage we don’t know where to place.
We can stare at the horizon of our own end, vividly picturing what it would look like to self-destruct.
Hannah’s performances embody this milieu.
And yet—and I’d argue this part is as important as the sadness and mortality salience—the human spirit is alive and well in her.
Her art is alive: searing, moving, brutal, honest. She represents us as we are in this moment: beleaguered by pain and exhaustion, unsure if we can save ourselves, but incapable of not trying, of not making art and meaning. Incapable of being done with hope.
I think we see ourselves in Hannah. And like Narcissus staring into the pond, we can’t stop looking.
Or, in a more generous reading, we can’t stop searching her performances, her lyrics, to understand how to understand ourselves.
To figure out what our next move should be: weary acceptance of a world slowly winding down or the exhausting work of reinvention.