A toxic brew of equal parts misogyny and homophobia held them back. The Indigo Girls had a big moment with that album. As the song says, “It’s only life, after all.” All the pain, the confusion, the loneliness - I’d figure it out. As I’ve listened again, more than 30 years later, I realize that what these women were telling me was this: It was going to be OK. It became my companion in a lonely, strange and confusing time. I had a few of my other favorites, but for some reason, I kept reaching for that album. I could bring only one suitcase, and somehow “Indigo Girls” was one of a handful of CDs that made the cut. We moved half a world away, to Ghana, where I knew not one single soul. In 1990 my life was abruptly turned upside down. Then in the mid-1980s, I violently rejected their music in the early stirrings of adolescence, first for teeny-bopper crushes like George Michael and Terence Trent D’Arby, then graduated to the new stars of hip-hop (Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul) and finally to modern rock - R.E.M., the Sugarcubes and, above all, Jane’s Addiction, a Los Angeles postpunk band whose frontman, Perry Farrell, was angling to be my generation’s Jim Morrison. Like a lot of Gen Xers, I had my musical tastes formed, for better or worse, by the preferences of my boomer parents, a limited but rich aural diet of the LPs my parents happened to own - the astonishing cycle of Stevie Wonder albums from the early 1970s, “Blood on the Tracks,” Steely Dan, the Sugarhill Gang. The Indigo Girls first spoke to me in 1989, when their breakout self-titled album was released. It can also be a remembering of the exquisite pleasure of longing, of anticipation of the life you want so badly, of the self you will make of the materials you collect along the way.
But as I get older, I’ve come to see that nostalgia is not just about looking back at good times.
Nostalgia, it always seemed to me, required a sort of amnesia, a belief that things were somehow better in the gauzy past. But I’ve never had much use for nostalgia, especially for my chaotic childhood. Music is, pace Proust, the most reliable engine of nostalgia. It’s funny you should mention them, because I’ve been listening to them a lot lately.” Just about every person a decade or so on either side of 50 whom I told over the past couple of months - long before the “Barbie” bomb exploded - that I was writing a column about the Indigo Girls responded with something to the effect of, “I love the Indigo Girls. Long before I saw “Barbie,” the Indigo Girls, a staple of my angsty adolescence, had found their way back onto my regular playlists, pushing aside the hip-hop, modern rock and dance pop that usually feeds my earbuds. It has spoken to me throughout my life, like a novel you revisit.” “‘Closer to Fine’ is just one of those songs that meets you where you are, wherever you are. I asked Gerwig why the Indigo Girls were in “Barbie.” “The Indigo Girls were part of my growing up,” she told me in an email. The Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me,” a beautiful and supercringey song, was central to her directorial breakout film, “Lady Bird.” Gerwig’s music choices are always interesting, and she isn’t shy about embracing big feels, cringe be damned. And the Indigo Girls? We’re talking cringe squared.Īnd yet I wasn’t surprised that Greta Gerwig, the director of “Barbie,” decided to put that song at the heart of her movie. And if feminism is cringe, then lesbians are double cringe. But in these hardened times, it implies a kind of naïveté that so often gets coded as feminine, a silly belief that human beings, through sincere effort, might actually improve themselves and the world. Cringe is not exclusively female the musical “Hamilton,” written by a man, Lin-Manuel Miranda, is definitely cringe.
It implies a kind of pathetic attachment to hope, to sincerity, to possibility.
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