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February 23, 2021
Tracy Clark-Flory's Playlist for Her Memoir "Want Me"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Tracy Clark-Flory's memoir Want Me is a smart, funny, and incredibly insightful coming-of-age story.
The San Francisco Chronicle wrote of the book:
"Luminous, funny, big-hearted... this is a book of insight, both cultural and personal. It is majestic to behold."
In her words, here is Tracy Clark-Flory's Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Want Me:
I came of age in the nineties alongside fizzy declarations of "girl power" and exhortations to “break the glass ceiling.” It was also a time of sexualized pop culture, from Girls Gone Wild infomercials to MTV Spring Break specials. I emerged with a sense that sexual empowerment meant being both like men and wanted by them—and I set out to become an expert in both, first as a young woman coming of age and then as a journalist covering the sex beat. My memoir, Want Me: A Sex Writer’s Journey into the Heart of Desire, follows me down that path as I report on everything from adult film sets to orgasmic meditation retreats, and reckon with the disappointments of channeling my own wanting through men.
While writing Want Me, I often looked for inspiration from the music that defined various periods in my life. Some of those songs, like the ones below, viscerally transported me back to key moments of feeling and discovery. They were the soundtrack to my writing—and maybe now to your reading—this book.
“#1 Crush” by Garbage
I write in Want Me about my tweenage Leonardo DiCaprio obsession, which led me to run a high-circulation daily fan newsletter where I recounted tabloid gossip and previewed TV appearances in screaming all-caps (“EMERGENCY NEWSLETTER!!!!!!!!!!!! Leo on Inside Edition????????”). My devotion was sparked by Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet, a flashy re-imagining of the classic that introduced me to DiCaprio in his most perfect state: peeking through a forelock of golden hair with a cigarette dangling from his lips, while scrawling love poems in a notebook. The film’s soundtrack perfectly captures the moody intensity of teenage obsession, but Garbage’s “#1 Crush” does so especially with its creeping beat and melodramatic lyrics. It instantly brings me back to those early awakenings of longing and lust, before my attention shifted to what boys wanted from me.
“Too Close” by Next
Here is a song all about a guy getting an erection on the dance floor (“Baby when we're grinding/I get so excited/…You’re making it hard for me”). That is to say, here is a song perfectly made for pubescent teens living for the school dance. At my middle school, there was little in the way of stiff-armed slow dances. I wrote in my 7th grade diary ([sic] here on out), “Freaking is a kind of dancing—it’s were the guy puts his leg in-between yours and his arms around you waist and your arms around his neck. And you kinda move back + forth. It really fun.” For me, this song encapsulates not only the thrill of school dances, but also my teenage fascination with boys’ bodies, and the possibilities of their bodies responding to mine. As RL croons toward the end, “You’re making me want you.”
“Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” by Backstreet Boys
As I headed into high school, I gave up on my Leo crush in favor of AJ McLean, “the Backstreet Boy with tattoos, questionable facial hair, and crotch-thrusting dance moves,” as I write in Want Me. (One of those tattoos was a “69” around his navel.) AJ, who was known for humping the floor during concerts to the delighted screams of hundreds of teenage girls, was the designated “bad boy” of the bunch. He felt to me like a safe, vicarious route for expressing my own emerging sexuality. This isn’t the group’s sexiest song—but, man, did I run down my VHS taped copy of the accompanying music video just to hear AJ deliver this line: “Oh my god, we’re back againnn.”
“Genie in a Bottle” by Christina Aguilera
Ooof, revisiting these lyrics, it’s no wonder I belted them so intensely while watching MTV’s TRL after school:
"I feel like I've been locked in tight/For a century of lonely nights/Waiting for someone to release me/…My mind is saying let's go/But my heart is saying no/…I’m a genie in a bottle, baby/Come, come, come in and let me out.”
The sense of suppression, the conflicted desire, the wish for a man to set you free. Not to overanalyze, but I can’t help but think of the developmental psychologist Deborah Tolman who writes of adolescent girls’ “dilemma of desire,” in which their sexual feelings come up against the social and material dangers associated with their sexuality. During these years, the traditional virgin-slut dichotomy was starting to loosen for girls, leading to new sexual possibilities as well as pressures and contradictions. This song spoke to my own teenage attempts at navigating that shifting terrain—and maybe to Aguilera’s as well. In a few years, she would introduce her alter ego Xtina while singing about wanting to get “dirrty.”
“Midnight In a Perfect World” by DJ Shadow
This song is first love. It’s cutting class just to make out on a park bench with my high school boyfriend, who had great taste in music and a pair of oversize headphones always slung around his neck.
“Like a Boy" by Ciara
In my 20s, I wanted to be able to “have sex like a man," not exactly appreciating how this was guided by a distorted stereotype. I longed for a sense of sexual power that seemed to belong to men—whether it was around entitlement to pleasure or the freedom to explore. I grasped for that power through trying to be desired by men, and trying to be like them. As Ciara sings, “Wish we could switch up the roles” and “Sometimes I wish I could act like a boy.”
“Gimme More” by Britney Spears
As I write in my book of my marginally adult 20something life: I “routinely paired… Kraft dinners with cheap chardonnay followed by a solo dance party,” which often "turned very quickly into strip routines.” Britney Spears, and this song in particular, was emblematic of this period of privately performing in front of my mirror, while imagining myself reflected through any number of straight men’s eyes.
“S&M” by Rihanna
I write in Want Me about how my mom’s terminal cancer diagnosis led to my experimenting with rough sex in an attempt to physically surface my all-pervasive emotional pain. Just a few months later, Rihanna released her single “S&M,” in which she sang that “chains and whips excite me.” We were still years away from Lady Gaga singing about liking it “rough” and the release of Fifty Shades of Grey. As I write in the book, “We were on the verge of a massive mainstream cultural shift around BDSM, as well as countless think pieces about a purported, though never reliably documented, ‘rise in rough sex,' but I’d already felt the rumblings of it in my immediate surrounds.”
“thank u, next” by Ariana Grande
This song perfectly channels my feelings in looking back on my 20s: “Thought I'd end up with Sean/But he wasn't a match/Wrote some songs about Ricky/Now I listen and laugh/Even almost got married/And for Pete, I'm so thankful/Wish I could say ‘thank you’ to Malcolm/‘Cause he was an angel.” It’s playful, loving, and filled with gratitude, but all without looking longing toward the past.
"WAP" by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion
“Swipe your nose like a credit card” is one of the most delightful lyrics I’ve encountered in my entire life. Clover Hope, author of The Motherlode: 100+ Women Who Made Hip-Hop, writes that this Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion song wasn’t just a “perfectly crafted duet about the slipperiness of their vaginas,” but “about women making music for women’s enjoyment, reclaiming the object gaze and the vision of sexuality that men had monopolized.” This kind of reclamation has been subject to decades of feminist debate, but all I feel when listening to this song is: Yes.
Tracy Clark-Flory is a senior staff writer at Jezebel. Her work has been published in Cosmopolitan, Elle, Esquire, Marie Claire, Salon, The Guardian, Women's Health, and the yearly Best Sex Writing anthology. Prior to Jezebel, she was a senior staff writer at Salon. She has appeared on 20/20, MSNBC and NPR. Tracy lives in San Francisco with her family.
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