2007

I moved to New York in the summer of 2007. Paris Hilton was on the cover of the Post as inmate 9818783. I saw that cover so many times on the way to the 6 train, I had the number memorized.

It was also the summer Lindsay Lohan crashed her Mercedes and looked like Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa in a gray American Apparel hoodie we all had. That summer they put an ankle monitor on her and she became a lesbian and I moved into an apartment on St Mark’s and 3rd.

I shared a bathroom with an Irish actor named Brett (who I called Bread because he looked corn fed and bulky), and some guy in his 80s who was either dead and rotting away or just never left his place. And when I say place I mean a room with a bunk bed and a sink I used to piss in because I didn’t want to go to the bathrooms down the hall. There was never any toilet paper. You couldn’t really stand without hitting your head against something. And it smelled like shit. My rent was $985 a month. 14 St Mark’s Place. My super was Ukrainian. He always yelled at me for leaving my mini heater on.

That year Britney Spears shaved her head and apologized to no one for being a person in trouble. Though they called her a person having a breakdown. A person out of control. A person who would, in October of 2007, release Blackout, probably the most important record by a pop star since Madonna’s Erotica (1992), and only equaled by Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence (2014) in the years since.

What I remember about New York in 2007 is that you could go to a bar, do blow, fuck a stranger in a bathroom, show up to work the next day and there’d be no tweets, no photos, no shame, no cancel culture, no person who really had to know about anything you did at all.

It was the last year of its kind. In 2008 I got my first iPhone. The next year I graduated from poetry school. Everyone tweeted into the void. But twitter was weird then. No one had to be sure of anything. No one had to tweet about politics or perform how virtuous they were. And you could just be a teenage girl in your bedroom writing coded bullshit about some crush.

Even then they didn’t leave the party girls alone. I remember puking to Britney’s “Gimme More” at a Halloween party where I was the pale blue dot. I would listen to “Piece of Me” on the A train going to my shitty internship at Columbia University Press and wonder what it must be like to feel so misunderstood (I’d find out in my own way just six years later when my first book Begging for It came out—and every book since then, to be honest. Boo hoo.).

I danced to “Radar” alone in my apartment. I did laundry to “Break the Ice” on repeat. I read the reviews. Everyone trashed Blackout. Too icy. Too dark. She was “too fat” to be sexy. She wasn’t young anymore. And it’s only all these years later that the critics have come around but to be honest, what that time taught me, even just as a consumer, is that the critics rarely matter and that the audience doesn’t either. At all. You should always make what you want.

I could only imagine what putting out that record must have been like for her. Every time she went to a convenience store we knew what she was eating and drinking and what kind of cigarettes she smoked. Every time she wore a wig we’d know the accent she was using, the name of her bodyguards, the people she was calling and yeah, Gawker had it all up within hours. We all read it. And the strange surveillance of the new millennium, our obsession and policing, was well evident and fully underway.

Little did we know we’d all get a piece of it in some way even if we weren’t Britney Spears. Warhol called the everyone being famous for 15 minutes social media reality we live in, but he must have also imagined all the little personal downfalls that would come with it too. Again—boo hoo.

My favorite song on Blackout is “Why Should I Be Sad.” I’d listen to it on the Metro North to Sarah Lawrence and then back to the city, late at night, when Grand Central was empty and church-like around midnight, around 1, sometimes even on an empty 5 train when you could actually hear the conductor announce the stops and know where you were.

I loved that song because to me it was about finding hope in misery. In flippancy. In performing being alright even when you’re not. Sometimes that’s what it takes, I think. Nobody wants anything real anyway. Real shit isn’t PC and it isn’t virtuous and it doesn’t look like what you imagined at all. I bet she found that out making that record. I love it so much. It’s engrained in New York for me. And especially in the fall. I’m going to play it right now.