“How so?”
“Corrupted her with my music and my friends—”
“Stoners and delinquents,” Ginny adds, parroting our mom.
“Got her to follow me to Cal State instead of one of the fancy schools she got into. Then convinced her to become my band manager instead of going to med school. There were a million reasons. She said Ginny’s loyalty to me sank her like a lead weight.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is Ginny chose me, which meant it was my job to take care of her, and I failed. In the worst way a person can.” I cut my eyes away. “Ah.” I clear my throat. “Kudos, Doc. You got me to talk.”
Dr. Xavier’s penetrating gaze remains on me until I look at her again. I don’t like the way she tilts her head. “May I ask you something?”
I shift on the couch. “I have a feeling you’ll do it either way.”
“Right now, at this moment, what’s the thing you want most in the world?”
What an easy question. “I want my sister back.”
Still, that impenetrable stare. “And are you coming to terms with the fact that what you want is impossible?”
I stay quiet. Ginny only cuddles closer.
Chapter 13
Excerpt from TheCultureBreakdown.com article, titled “Why Future Saints Front Woman Hannah Cortland Is the Internet’s Newest Obsession” (April 25, 2024)
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; theseventies, 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.
Chapter 14
Hannah
Saturday, April 27, 2024
The walls are so thin in San Francisco’s historic Bellmore Hall that we can hear the clamor of the crowd even with the door shut. Ripper, Kenny, and I are in the greenroom, waiting for Bowie to tell us it’s time. I’m bouncing my leg, tapping my fingers against a suspi-ciously stained armchair, before I realize I’m subconsciously playing the noise coming through the wall, as if the chatter of our fans is a song I can drum to.
“We’re trending again,” Kenny says, scrolling his phone. “They made us a meme. Look.” Kenny holds out his phone, and even though I don’t want to look, I do. There I am next to Kenny and Rip at the LA show, captured in a GIF nosediving off the stage, the lyrics “And I’m wasted” from “Family Fruit” superimposed over my head. As I watch, the little me on-screen rewinds and falls all over again.
“Stupid TikTok.” I press my head back against the chair, stains forgotten. “I miss the good old days when you could humiliate yourself in private. A few hundred people at a time, max.”
“Apparently there’s a ‘Hannah Cortland aesthetic’ too,’” Kenny says.
I crack an eye.
“A what?”
He shows me a picture of a girl with messy hair in an oversize black sweatshirt, the hood pulled low over her head, dark eyeliner smudging her eyes. She’s giving the camera a dead-eyed stare and holding up both middle fingers. A thick assortment of bracelets wraps her wrists.
