Twee Your Mind: How Tiger Trap Taught Me That Tenderness Is Punk
NPR Music's Turning the Tables is a project envisioned to challenge sexist and exclusionary conversations about musical greatness. Up until now we have focused on overturning conventional, patriarchal best-of lists and histories of popular music. But this time, it's personal. For 2021, we're digging into our own relationships to the records we love, asking: How do we know as listeners when a piece of music is important to us? How do we break free of institutional pressures on our taste while still taking the lessons of history into account? What does it mean to make a truly personal canon? The essays in this series will excavate our unique relationships with the albums we love, from unimpeachable classics by major stars to subcultural gamechangers and personal revelations. Because the way that certain music comes to hold a central place in our lives isn't just a reflection of how we develop our taste, but how we come to our perspective on the world.
Before I learned to start hating myself, I learned to love music. obsession, a fiery burst of autonomous artistic interest, what I now view as an early expression of fandom. I adored those five resolute British women in impossibly high platform shoes, so much larger than life that, and so, my hair done up in Baby Spice pigtails, peace sign extended, smiling ear to ear, I posed. Baby was always my favorite.
