Soccer Mommy and Big Feelings
After working on the idea for more than three years, I’m delighted that my first article on “Big Feelings” will be published later this year in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. Because I’ve already introduced the overall idea of Big Feelings in some capacity, this article focuses more on a particular case study: Soccer Mommy’s “Cool” (2018) and “Circle the Drain” (2020).
In the article, I first engage with affect theory, most specifically the idea of “feminist affect.” On a basic level, this is a term that helps to identify phenomena that feel feminist, even if we can’t point to a single indicator or proof-point as evidence that it is such. This is an important concept for Big Feelings insofar as a) the musicians I conditionally (cautiously) describe with this term tend to avoid or downplay discussions of (feminist) politics; and b) insofar as I maintain that their music is perceived by listeners as at the very least resonating with feminist orientations and ways of seeing the world. In simpler terms, one of the questions my article tries to interrogate is why Soccer Mommy’s music feels feminist to me and lots of other people, given both the lack of overtly political messaging in the music and Sophie Allison’s (let’s call it) coyness around the question of feminist politics.
Next, I try to substantiate my reading of Soccer Mommy as (affectively) feminist by tracing both the connections and differences between “Cool” and past feminist rock music, most specifically from the riot grrrl era. While “Cool” is clearly linked with riot grrrl themes (especially where the lyrics are concerned) it also departs from riot grrrl’s most polemical, insistent, or overtly political perspectives.
This departure (and yet its inescapable link to feminist rock music) is reinforced and emphasized by “Cool”‘s harmonic vocabulary, which I describe as emphasizing an ambivalent semiotics of feeling via its foregrounding of chord extensions long associated with feminine excess. Here I focus particularly on the major 7th tonality that is characteristic of “Cool” and a truly significant number of songs by Big Feelings artists, including Broken Social Scene, Yuck, Land of Talk, Fazerdaze, Pity Sex, Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy, Indigo De Souza, Phoebe Bridgers, Diet Cig, Bully, Title Fight, Wednesday, Big Thief, Bachelor, Girlpool, Great Grandpa, Slow Pulp, Wye Oak, and more.
One of the things that makes this list significant is that, as David Temperley has documented (2018), chord extensions like the major 7 (and especially the related #11) are rare in the standard vocabulary of what I describe as masculine-coded rock music. So: its emergence and relative ubiquity among a group of young women and queer rock musicians is a significant development that is worth paying attention to.
From “Cool”‘s harmonic construction, I turn to “Circle the Drain” in order to think through how its portrayal of 90s nostalgia departs from nostalgia’s (arguably) standard political function as a conservative wish for a simpler time, instead becoming a progressive wish for a different present: “Circle the Drain” portrays happiness and depression across different timespaces in order to indict the present moment, returning to the 90s not in order to escape into an idealized past, but in order to recapture a moment in which it was possible to avoid the present in which we now find ourselves. This present, I suggest, is statistically, affectively, disproportionately difficult for young people generally, but especially the marginalized women, queer, and otherwise disadvantaged groups for whom the crises of our present—climate change, systemic racism and police brutality, economic inequality, attacks on queer and trans youth—are most acute.
