Crushes and Love Songs in Indie Rock
My infatuation with crushes in popular music is turning into a more sustained relationship, at least for now, a turn that’s making more and more sense to me as the outgrowth of a book on queer and feminist indie rock. Love songs—considered in the narrow, romantic, and courtship-oriented sense—generally represent some of the oldest and most consistent narrative organizational forms in U.S. popular music, with their most common characteristics arguably taking shape during the consolidation of rock and roll across the 1950s. But proceeding from this premise, two complications are immediately apparent: first, the kind of “love” in question is predominantly heteronormative and romantic, precluding other types of relationship entanglements, whether interpersonal or more broadly communal.
Second, as many scholars have established, the discursive and professional stakes involved in performing and recording love songs have differed across the gender binary. In a rockist framework, masculine romantic pursuits more or less follow Western constructions that conflate relationship-building with sexual conquest, constructing romance as a game to be won. In doing so, rock discourse bestows men with agency, allowing them to sing about love in various ways without perturbing the social construction of rock as an avant-garde and “serious” form of vernacular music. Love songs performed by women and queer artists, on the other hand, have been consistently used as evidence of feminized stereotypes, which invariably conform to qualities considered pejorative under conditions of patriarchal capitalism (namely, superficiality, vapidity, and the primacy of fleeting emotion as opposed to rational consideration).
As Norma Coates demonstrated in some twenty years ago, when rock n’ roll culture was consolidating into “rock”—that ubiquitous, white/male form of popular music that took shape across the 1960s—musicians, journalists, and other invested parties actively constructed a kind of taste hierarchy in order to shore up rock as an authentic and even avant-garde music. Borrowing from Modernism’s disdain for mass culture, rock successfully guarded against critiques that read popular music as so much crass commercialism by “displacing” its abject status onto a group with even less power than the young men rebelling against an older generation: women.
Taking aim at women and girls who loved rock music was both a natural move, given the patriarchal construction of both Western society and the music industry more specifically, but also a difficult one, given that early rock fans seemed to be listening to the same kinds of music (e.g., famously, The Beatles). Television helped solve this problem: where normative rock fans could listen to and enjoy a band like The Monkees for their impeccable pop arrangements, the centrality of television—and therefore derivative ventures like merchandizing, performative musicianship, and other spectacles—helped critics construct the figure of the “teenybopper” in the popular imagination, a rock fan who was essentially duped by her love of an idol. As Coates writes,
For rock and rock culture to be authentic, something had to be inauthentic. Television, television pop, and those who flocked to it were appropriate foils. Moreover, the exclusion of female teenyboppers from the discursive confines of rock authenticity gave rock an air of aesthetic exclusivity, justifying the examination of rock as “serious” art. Poking fun at teenyboppers deflected criticism or even acknowledgment of the same basic impulses toward hero worship of the fans of so-called “authentic” rock. (Coates 2003, 77)
The figure of the teenybopper (in today’s language, the “fan girl”) in particular established a paradigm across U.S. and U.K. popular music discourse wherein women and girls’ fandom was conflated with their romantic aspirations, suggesting that the only mode of critical appraisal available to them was infatuation, an irrational and unreliable obsession with a passing fad—in other words, a crush. Dangerously subjected to the whims of their emotions, women’s engagement with rock culture was welcomed insofar as their fandom provided revenue to the industry; but because men were the only ones capable of rational analytical thought, they were the ones who could participate in discourse.
Fem(me)inist Rock Music
Given that associations between women and crushes were used to reinforce their abject status in popular culture, many feminist responses in the rock idiom spectacularly disprove the stereotype by appropriating markers of rock’s authenticity read as masculine bravado/aggressiveness, or else by downplaying stereotypical femininity (and by extension, its associations with superficiality) in favor of a more authentic representation of one’s subjectivity. In the former category, we can think of Hole, Bikini Kill, and L7 (among many others); in the latter, Tracy Chapman, Patti Smith, and Liz Phair (among many others). In each case, whether through punishing polemic or nuanced exegesis, stereotypes reducing women to vapid infatuation were difficult or impossible to apply.
Yet, another means of refuting such stereotypes involves the opposite maneuver: instead of refusing to perform the femininity expected by mainstream music discourse, some bands embrace it so thoroughly as to transform it. The first popular music genre that self-consciously championed crushes as explicit markers of femininity was the initial wave of indie pop that appeared in the U.K. in the early 1980s, which took explicit inspiration from those very 1960s bands that were used to help construct the figure of the teenybopper as abject within popular music. As Michael White summarizes, indie pop’s
earliest exponents (among them the bands Television Personalities, Marine Girls, Orange Juice and the Pastels) were spurred into action by the do-it-yourself spirit of punk, but were equally seduced by the optimism and tunefulness that characterized the pop music of their 1960s childhoods: the Byrds, Motown, Phil Spector, bubblegum.” (2016, xvi)
In consciously turning towards music that had no place in the indie scene of the 1980s, indie pop groups like Velocity Girl, Heavenly, and Tiger Trap aligned themselves with music semiotically coded as effeminate in order to revalue those ostensibly undesirable qualities. As I’ve suggested elsewhere (2025; in process) I understand this move to perform what Andi Schwartz has theorized as “soft femme” aesthetics (2020), which recuperate, interrogate, and valorize aspects of femininity dismissed and weaponized by patriarchal norms. In cultivating values like vulnerability, community, and emotionality, soft femme cultures expand femmeness beyond what one looks like to include how one acts in the world, insisting on the critical, life-giving importance of earnest and tender ways of relating to one another.
To cultivate and index these higher values, indie pop artists also embrace traditionally feminized/dismissed languages, icons, and musical gestures—as well as activities such as gossip and witchcraft—that help orient listeners to a shared sense of the world. By developing symbolic language and shared cultural referents, soft femme cultures attract fans with similar sensibilities, who use their fandom to participate in the project of actively shaping what femmeness looks and sounds like.
This orientation in indie music has been profoundly influential, if under-studied. Indie pop bands were forming as early as 1983; but well into the 90s, women in rock bands were exploring love songs as a means of interrogating gender, even amid the grunge/riot grrrl discourse that occluded much else in the press. Hence, this incredible passage from Jenn Pelly’s review of that dog.’s 1995 album Totally Crushed Out!:
When [Anna] Waronker first began writing songs, her self-imposed rule was “no love songs, no guitar solos.” But as that dog. progressed, she gave herself a new challenge: only love songs and guitar solos. “I had five broken hearts at one time,” she admitted then, “all broken in five different places.” Her own sensitivity horrified her.
that dog., Totally Crushed Out!, 1995
The move from “no love songs” to “only love songs” indexes something about feminist responses to the abjection of women and crushes in rock music, showing that a re-coding of crushes and other markers of femininity can be used to positively cohere communities that help each other heal, speaking back against prevailing logics in our media environments. On this view, Waronker doesn’t change course because her own sensitivity overwhelmed her, but rather because paying sustained attention to it shifted how she understood its significance. In the still pre-poptimist moment, sitting with romantic love constituted a polemical refusal to feel the way that rockist discourse told women to feel, a gendered form of shame for one’s own feelings that Kelly Oliver has theorized as “social melancholy” (2020). So while love songs appear in every genre of popular music, indie has a particular tradition of using crush narratives as metacommentaries on the politics of writing love songs as women playing rock music.
Not only crushes themselves, but also discourse about crushes—that is to say, gossip—becomes a central part of this cultural strategy, appearing as a frequent theme in zines like chickfactor, one of the only publications to unapologetically champion indie pop aesthetics. Building on Silvia Federici’s tracing of gossip’s history, Schwartz writes that “Undermining gossip has been a way to undermine women, femininity, and feminine modes of knowledge that pose a threat to masculine forms of control” (Soft Femme 3). Championing gossip and the crushes they concern is therefore less about the value of mindless pleasures than it is an argument for the world of queer epistemology underlying such ostensibly trivial activities.
Three Narrative Modes
In the contemporary indie rock/post-poptimist moment, the embrace of soft femme aesthetics and shared vocabularies coming out of indie pop are reappearing in prominent and significant ways, including self-conscious explorations of romance. Following up on my work in Big Feelings, I’m writing a chapter that digs more explicitly into romance, exploring crush narratives in indie music as femmeinist critiques. So far, the categories I’m thinking with, and which I see turning up consistently, include:
1. Queer Love Songs: Love songs that undermine heteronormativity.
In one sense, these are “straightforward” because they’re love songs. In another sense, they function as subtle critiques of heteronormativity insofar as they assert space in a traditionally straight genre for relationships and expressions of love that have been rendered “out of place.” Jay Som’s “Lipstick Stains” and boygenius’s “Emily I’m Sorry” are great examples, as they make their feelings and the objects towards which they are projected clear in the narrative. But Snail Mail’s “Heat Wave” and Soccer Mommy’s “Cool” also count; we might call these latter examples “lowercase q” queer, in that they intentionally probe the space of possibility held open by ambiguity, by refusing to clarify one way or the other what’s going on, exactly. In Snail Mail’s case, the pronouns are withheld (the song is just about “you”), whereas with Soccer Mommy (and like Bikini Kill), it’s never quite clear whether Sophie Allison’s narrator is in romantic/sexual/platonic love with Mary. This also happens with The Softies, of whom Pelly writes “Their entwined dynamic was so tightly woven that songs about their platonic friendship still sound like romance.” The point is that the refusal to define leaves open the potential that all possibilities are or may yet be true, that in real life the lines between friend love and girlfriend love blur easily and often. The point is that there’s something romantic about friendship, and something platonic in romance, if we know how to attend to it, if we come from communities that value the variegated weaves of intimacy.
2. Expansive Love Songs: Love songs for non-people.
So called because they pine for a love object that isn’t the traditional figure of a single person, expansive love songs show us that all songs are ultimately about desire in one way or another. Indigo De Souza’s “Hold U” for example is addressed not to an individual but to a community of people, emphasizing love for a group that understands and takes care of one another, come what may. Similarly, Black Belt Eagle Scout’s entire body of work can be read as a love song to queer, Indigenous, feminist communities, as well as the land that helps KP to feel, in their words, like “110% of myself.” In expanding love outside of the confines of two-person intimacy and monogamy-based kinship systems, expansive love songs proceed from the priorities of queer communities to both challenge and liberate Western understandings of the word.
3. Rejected Love Songs: Refuse or mourn love, often in ways that hide a larger social critique.
Of course, these can be understood as breakup narratives, where the narrator has been rejected, and which are plentiful across all genres of popular music. But more interestingly, this category also refers to the increasingly common clarification that indie musicians are making to inform listeners that what they are hearing is “Not a Love Song.” These statements testify to a need, a preemptive guard against an assumption that one knows is coming, because the songs are written by women and/or queer artists, and because of the seemingly ancient stereotypes that reduce the artistry of these communities to one single, emotionally-driven quest for love. Embedded within such disclaimers is also a narrative strategy: What may pass on the surface for a normal, harmless love song often hides a more substantive critique, using the language of love for purposes other than performative pining.
Each of these modes takes something about the traditional rock and roll love song and manipulates it towards queer and feminist purposes. Taking the object of each song’s desire as a starting point, paying attention to how love functions can help us to understand how awareness on the part of women and queer indie rock artists—about the ways that their attachments to music and people alike have been trivialized—informs strategies of self-conscious revaluation, strategies that can seem on the surface like acquiescence to a stereotype, but whose indie pop hooks belie a deeper engagement with musical and social discourse. Taken together, the concept’s history as well as its manifestations across popular music reveal the crush as a gendered mode of attachment that clues us in to something important about how desire structures worlds.
Cited
-Coates, Norma. 2003. “Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques: Girls and Women and Rock Culture in the 1960s and early 1970s.” Journal of Popular Music Studies vol. 15, no. 1 (June): 65–94.
-DiPiero, Dan. 2025. Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl. University of Michigan Press.
-DiPiero, Dan. In Process. “‘Be Sweet’: Reflections on the Indie/Pop Nexus.” In The Oxford Handbook of Pop Music Studies, edited by Eric Weisbard (in process).
-Oliver, Kelly. 2020. “Shame, Depression, and Social Melancholy.” Sophia vol. 59, no. 1: 31–38.
-Schwartz, Andi. 2020. “Soft Femme Theory: Femme Internet Aesthetics and the Politics of ‘Softness.’” Social Media + Society vol. 6, no. 4 (October-December): 1–10.
-Schwartz, Andi. Soft Femme 3. zine.
-White, Michael. 2016. Popkiss: The Life and Afterlife of Sarah Records. Bloomsbury.
