2024 will be the year when the real sovereign of sad girl music gets his well-deserved recognition. Lundagård’s student life columnist Erik Lindberg on why it is time for sad girl music’s Hall of Fame to make room for Bruce Springsteen.
“I’ve gaslighted myself into a depression with sad girl music,” says one of my correctional colleagues jokingly, referring to the playlist constantly humming in our kitchen: Lana Del Rey, Lorde, SZA, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish—a parade of the uncrowned queens of sad girl music.
But maybe that it soon joins further than regent to the ranks of melancholic monarchs. In any case, Sydsvenskan’s head of culture Ida Ölmedal thinks so, as in the podcast Dig away Skåne predicts that 2024 girl music will be – tympanic membrane – Bruce Springsteen.
Ida Ölmedal is on track. Because Bruce Springsteen makes the best sad girl music. I understand that some people are instinctively upset when I bring an old man into the holy temple of girl music – but give me a chance to explain why he belongs there.
Sad girl musical main character is “the melancholic young woman who desires more than what life has to offer” and is “characterized by her spiritual pain over the state of affairs”, writes Izabella Rosengren in a reportage in Göteborgs-Posten. That character is a standing feature in Springsteen’s song catalog. Take “Racing in the Street”, for example: She sits on the porch of her daddy’s house/But all her pretty dreams are torn/She stares off alone into the night/With the eyes of one who hates for just being born.
What brings out Springsteen’s inner sad girl the most, however, is his troubled relationship with his father. Douglas Springsteen was a quiet, erratic, alcoholic, violent thug, who later in life was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. But he was also the role model Bruce modeled his persona following when he stepped on stage. In his memoirs, Bruce describes the moment he stands at his father’s deathbed. He remembers how his father’s feet, red and yellow with psoriasis, stick out from under the white hospital sheet. “They are my enemy’s feet, and my hero’s,” he writes.
After 40 years in therapy, Bruce has reconciled with his father, but the horror figure that haunted him all his life is immortalized in songs like “My Father’s House”, “Independence Day” and “Adam Raised a Cain”. Bruce Springsteen is the king of daddy issues. If that doesn’t justify the epithet sad girl, I don’t know what does.
Ultimately, sad girl music is regarding rawness and authenticity. About connecting with your audience without filtering out the wistful and personal. Here, Bruce Springsteen is unbeatable, just as Ina Lundström noted in her summer talk last year: “When a song romanticises one’s own everyday dullness, then it’s as if it’s not just us mortals who hear the music, but as if the artist also hears us . This is why Bruce Springsteen is the world’s best live performer. No musician is better at seeing and hearing his audience.”
Next time my correcompis feels like gaslighting herself into a depression, so I advise her to turn to the rock n’ roll troubadour from New Jersey. It is exactly as Lana Del Rey herself states in “American”: ”Springsteen is the king, don’t you think?”/ I was like, ”Hell yeah, that guy can sing”.
