While The Weeknd took to the Super Bowl stage on February 7th, it seemed that both my mind and social media feed were still somewhat fixated on a performance from the night before—Phoebe Bridgers’ “I Know the End” on Saturday Night Live.
Music fans and musicians alike posted about her performance with disdain for her “sad” sounding vocals and for smashing her guitar into an amp during a period of time marked by political unrest, racial injustice, wealth inequality, the climate crisis, and a global pandemic.
But that was the point. Her performance was timely, capturing the many emotions felt by a generation of young people feeling isolated and powerless.
Born and raised in Pasadena, Bridgers began her career when she was still a student at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. She released her first album, Stranger in the Alps, in 2017 and has collaborated with a variety of musicians including Fiona Apple, Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, The 1975, Kid Cudi, The National, and more. She even started her own record label, Saddest Factory Records, signing new on the rise artists like Claud. With a gentle, ghostly voice, she pours out deeply personal lyrics over haunting soundscapes and dreamy guitars. She sings of loneliness, heartbreak, and frustration with a sense of resignation and reflection. Her work has clearly resonated, with her 2020 album Punisher earning three Grammy nominations.
Her first performance on Saturday Night Live was of the Grammy-nominated song, “Kyoto.” She and her band donned her signature skeleton onesie to sing about the isolation she felt when visiting the Japanese city combined with the complicated feelings she harbors for her father. It is surprising how sweet she sounds as she sings, “I’m gonna kill you” over beachy guitars and faint, celebratory horns. Her silver hair gives her a ghostly glare paired with a youthful glow and natural-looking makeup.
But her second Saturday Night Live performance transported the audience to a variety of locales through lyrics and setting—to “somewhere in Germany” and Texan suburbs on a stage that mimicked the mountains and red fog on Punisher’s album cover. Shedding the skeleton onesie, she was instead draped in a ribcage of pearls over a long black dress. She transcended her softer performance from earlier in the evening, breaking the quiet stillness of the 1 a.m. (EST) air with intense guitar shredding and a cacophony of horns. She screamed into the night before smashing her guitar into a speaker on the stage, sparks flying.
Bridgers easily falls into the category of “sad girl/sad boy” music. Her gentle voice and affinity for horn-filled orchestrations are reminiscent of Sufjan Steven’s work on Carrie and Lowell and Illinois respectively. And her raw emotion with occasional visceral screaming, as well as her powerful rock guitar work feels similar to songs like “Brand New City” and “Townie” off of Mitski’s Lush and Bury Me at Makeout Creek.
But perhaps her strongest tie to this pseudogenre of music is the way her fans characterize her (and fellow artists Sufjan Stevens and Mitski, among others) online. Countless memes on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok use these artists for self-deprecating jokes about being on antidepressants, recovering from trauma, or badly needing therapy.
A shallow dive into the works of these artists clearly illustrates why. All three artists deal with themes of heartbreak, self-loathing, loneliness, and general angst despite being more distinct and unique upon a closer look. There are other artists that fit this trope as well—Fiona Apple, Rilo Kiley, Soccer Mommy, Lorde, SZA, Lucy Dacus, FKA Twigs, and Lana Del Rey—who have also been subject to similar comparisons since the mid-2010s on social media.
Independent Women at Penn State described the “sad girl” genre well:
“There’s not one specific sound, instrument, or age to indie sad girl music, and no female singers are specifically in or out of the genre. However, their songs must revolve around incredibly introspective and thoughtful lyrics with the guitar/whatever necessary backup they require to best express this mood. A touch of lighthearted angst doesn’t hurt, either.”
Joking about how one relates to the sad lyrics or feelings in their music is an easy way to be “in” on a joke—especially when they are ‘indie’ and on the rise, it signals that you have good taste (and are also sad). But it usually comes from a place of resonance, that their music struck a chord (pun intended) with them and they are hoping to find others to bond with.
It makes sense that everyone is pretty sad right now. Combine this with the regression many young millennials and Gen Z people are feeling after moving back to their hometowns and in with their parents. While these generations love to feel nostalgic for eras they have not lived through themselves, they have recently been nostalgic for the period of “2014 Tumblr” aestheticism of their pre-teen, teenage, or early adulthood years. One particularly striking aspect of this period was the romanticism of depression through black-and-white filtered photos and quotes from many sad-indie rock stars of the era.
But now, the depression one feels is the joke, a point of relation, and a way to cope. Part of the reason is that Bridgers herself has a sense of humor to her. Her Instagram account, up until this month, was under the name @fake_nudes. She constantly makes comparisons of her music to therapy herself and is extremely active on Twitter.
Bridgers’ fans even joked about the closing portion of her performance, that they wished to be smashed like the guitar in her hands.
But others felt her performance was no laughing matter.
Even rock musicians had qualms with her performance, with David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, and Nash calling the action “pathetic.” He mentioned that, even though others have smashed guitars before, it was, “still stupid.”
For one thing, Bridgers revealed that she didn’t even break anything. She mentioned that she wanted to break a guitar on stage, so the Saturday Night Live team built her a monitor that looked like it exploded on stage when hit.
And many genuine guitar-smashing moments are iconographic. Many likened the image of Bridgers to the cover of The Clash’s London Calling. Kurt Cobain, also known for his sad and angsty lyricism, used only cheap guitars and amps due to the fact that he always broke them. Male rock stars have broken—and fixed—many guitars over the years. It can even serve as a form of protest against the destruction of war and the environment. Rock has always been an act of rebellion and through their performances captured the dissatisfaction and frustration with the world.
The parallels were not lost on Bridgers as a rock artist. “People were saying it was derived and corny,” she said in an interview with CNN. “And I’m like ‘Well yeah, it’s derived and corny after the first time somebody did it. That’s the whole point.’”
It is a pity this discourse distracted the audience from her performance because it was a somewhat predictable move to fans. She was looking to take the audience aback. On Apple Music, Bridgers said, “I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting.” Her double-feature performance did just that—selling them her soft image at first and destroying it in the second. But rather than focus on the rest of the 5-minute song, it became all about criticizing its last thirty seconds.
Because as much as she is a rock artist, she told Rolling Stone that “I, for the most part, fucking hate Classic Rock.” She takes the aspects of it that she likes and leaves the rest. Smashing the guitar can serve as both an homage and an act of rebellion to one of the genres she has found a home in.
She also told Apple Music that Punisher captures “the idea of having these inner personal issues while there’s bigger turmoil in the world—like a diary about your crush during the apocalypse.”
While much of her music is personal, the political seeps through. After releasing a cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “7 O’clock/Silent Night,” she wrote, “Happy Holidays to everyone whose family has been literally or figuratively torn apart by Donald Trump. And to my racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, hypocritical family members, fuck you.”
Back in our parent’s homes, we long to “find a new place to be from.” It feels the “billboards” that pointed us to the traditional, American life are now gone. We all somehow “know the end is near.” She knows it, too. Bridgers smashing a guitar does not change that it is coming. But the anger, the sadness, and the rage she captures within the gesture of smashing her guitar in her performance just might help us cope.