Crush As Method

Your monthly repost

This re-post is the precursor to last week’s essay. It came on like a rush while I was driving from Kansas City to St. Louis, the awful monotony of that routine interrupted by a new idea so exciting that I thought about it the whole way and then some. The crush is so explicitly embraced in indie pop and feminized indie rock from the 1980s through to The Softie’s 2024 release; but music writers by and large haven’t been taking it seriously as a concept (notwithstanding the Pelly article linked just there, and specifically I’m thinking about a wider monograph). What if a scholarly approach to popular music took crushes as seriously as the protagonists in these indie bops do?

Here I attempt to at least address that question by focusing on the crush as a scholarly method, one that can be applied to any performance in any genre, rather than belonging solely to the indie moment out of which it grows. It lays out a pipe dream of a book project, one I hope to return to sooner rather than later. I’m particularly happy with the material that I found on the origins of “crush” as a term, which comes out of women’s lives and literatures in colleges during the 19th century. As I write below, this is one of many reasons why I believe the crush to be an inherently gendered term, one that can therefore help us to understand more about desire, identity, and politics in a much more substantial way than it might initially imply.

Crush As Method

September 8, 2024

I am rapidly becoming interested in the idea of a crush as a methodological impulse, a way of continuing to approach the project of “music loving” (Guck 1996; Luong 2017) by acknowledging the connections between falling in love with music and falling in love with people. If it’s true, as I claim, that developing a crush on someone feels analogous to hearing your new favorite song for the first time, what can that resonance tell us about studying and writing about music?

For one, it might help in the necessary and ongoing project of embracing of feminist and femme perspectives in recent popular music scholarship by asserting fangirl practices as not only valid but astute (Bimm 2022; Ewens 2020; Haddon and Klein 2024). Following Jessica Hopper’s 2021 exhortation to “replace the word ‘fangirl’ with ‘expert’ and see what happens” (@jesshopp 2021), the figure of the fangirl connotes knowledge gleaned by infatuation, high intensity emotion, and in negative terms, passing fancy—in this way, the fangirl cuts directly to crush as method, as both fangirling and crushing invoke an obsessive intimacy disrespected under patriarchal capitalism. Where men’s musical connoisseurship has been organized around dispassionate analytical modes, fangirls understand love as a constituent aspect of study, the affect animating repeat exposure and deeper knowing. Consistently dismissed and derided by the dominance of masculine writing styles, record collections, and men themselves (as writers, academics, bosses), women’s musical interests have been castigated as superficial and overdetermined by emotional impulses. And what’s more impulsive than a crush?

Crushes, like fangirls, are therefore gendered insofar as they are the stuff of gossip, of frivolity, a fleeting fascination that may or may not translate into something durable. Apparently corroborating the longstanding patriarchal view that women are uniquely prey to the whims of emotion, the spike of feeling indexed by a crush continues to connote a lack of control over one’s affective state, perhaps even a guilty acquiescence to the tempting passions of life. Western masculinity conflates relationship-building with sexual conquest, constructing romance as a game to be won; a crush on the other hand proves that someone else is in control, implying that being pulled in by another may even be pleasurable. In this it is quintessentially feminized (i.e. passive) and therefore the subject of ridicule rather than celebration.

In addition to ephemeral, crushes are also promiscuous, unbound by established relationship genres. Crushes wander, in other words, over top of what and who we’re supposed to do. In this way, crushes threaten the dominant paradigms of U.S. culture, its patriarchal kinship structures, the heteronormative nuclear family unit, the compulsory monogamy that our culture recognizes as the one valid way to be in love, in relation at all.

M.A.S, writing in The Wellesley Magazine, 1893

Not only feminized, crushes are also immanently queer. Scholarship has traced the romantic connotations of the crush at least to the late 19th century, when it seems to have been used primarily in the context of college girls who developed affections for other women. Evolving from the verb “smashing,” the crush is “That most undesirable state of being,” a “morbid condition,” (Espey 1915, 169) understood as something to be stamped out: “With a prayer in her heart , the leader must take the girl into her confidence and try to teach her what love really is” (173). Having written a book called Big Feelings, I am enchanted by descriptions that characterize the crush’s threats to the social order through recourse to the language of emotions: “All her feelings are intense. She does know how to use or control them” (171).

Insofar as crushes have been feminized and denigrated, recuperating the crush can be seen as a feminist act. Rather than reject the crush by claiming that women are not actually disproportionately subject to the whims of feeling—that they have as much agency in their relationship pursuits as anyone (all of which is obviously true)—what if we embraced the crush by claiming that men are just as prey to the fluctuations of their hearts as anyone else? The difference then would be in how normative masculinity reacts to that fact, traditionally, through aggressive repression via denial or outburst. Such a forceful rejection only proves my point: crushes are a powerful experience of relationality and desire, a genre of feeling that patriarchal culture prefers us to disavow rather than consider in depth.

As a feminized and anti-normative mode—not to mention a romantic one—all the foregoing makes crushes deeply compelling to me as a methodological provocation. Against our culture’s associations with superficiality and unseriousness, what if the crush is actually love’s truest expression, the rush of feeling that clues us into something about the world we really want? What if embracing the crush could teach us about love and music in ways that extant methods can’t? What if crushes are rigorous in a different way than those constructed by masculine paradigms, tapping into our wildest desires and our deepest needs? Though it’s true that a crush’s overwhelming sensations may dissipate as quickly as they bloom, they only have the power to do so because they speak immediately to something true in ourselves, something that our rational minds haven’t yet had time to reflect on and potentially dismiss. In other words, who and what we fall in love with says a lot about who we are, and that’s as true for individuals as it is for society. That argument alone justifies a turn to crush as method.

But “crush” contains multitudes: in verb form, it is as possible to be crushed by something as it is to crush on someone. What we are crushed by can also tell us a lot about who we are and what we desire, dreaming relief from the conditions animating our yearning for something more. When I first started researching the crush, I could hardly find any sources that thought about the romantic crush in a sustained way. On the other hand, I found plentiful results in which the word appeared to describe how we are flattened under the weight of something: scholarship across the humanities shows how unions, dreams, political revolution, morale, and happiness itself—not to mention people—have all been crushed by capitalism, by patriarchy and white supremacy, in short, by the operations of power in our world. And this is where the second premise of the crush as method returns: learning to listen with desire, we might be better situated to hear what songs themselves yearn for, the expressions of love that bespeak a crushing lack.

I’m very seriously contemplating taking up the crush in my next project; but rather than exploring the cultural politics of the crush in and of itself, I want to follow my own musical crushes in order to listen to them anew. In the same way that my favorite songs reveal something about who I am, all music discloses in its sounding a range of desires and longings, a capacious array of crushes that clues us in to what matters. In other words, if desire is born from a lack, thinking with desire can help us understand the structural conditions producing that need in the first place. Music that dreams of stability amid chronic precarity, clean water amid ecological collapse, affirmative relationships amid the “tragedy of heterosexuality” (Ward 2020), freedom amid white supremacy, community amid neoliberal isolationism—all these songs are just as much about yearning and infatuation as any romantic ode. In this way, all songs are always already love songs.

Let me rephrase this slightly. Following the idea of musical listening as a crushing relationship, I believe that 1) that love songs can tell us more about the world than they often let on, and 2) all songs are love songs. That we don’t recognize them as such says more about our paucity of language around the many hues in which love can appear than it does about any actually meaningful insights gleaned from categorizing American music by longstanding tropes. A love song isn’t necessarily a song about a romantic relationship but could be understood as any song that renders feelings of care. Making this claim would be bolstered by a theorization of non-normative modes of love, including love for one’s friends, love for one’s community, love for the earth, banal love, patient love, and more.

I’m working on sorting out my own feelings here, but for the moment am enamored with the idea of a project that treats love songs seriously, using the crush as method. Let me try this out.

Crush: The Love Song as Social Critique introduces critical theoretical ideas for a general audience using U.S. popular music as a gateway drug. It follows the music I’ve loved into fundamental concepts like biopolitics, too-late capitalism, and popular misogyny. It argues that all songs are love songs insofar as they articulate desire and care for a world other than the one we’ve been given. Diagnosing that world is the job of critical theory; helping us get by in the meanwhile is the job of both love and music.

Cited

@jesshopp. 2021. “Replace the word ‘fangirl’ with ‘expert’ and see what happens 💚💚💚.” Twitter post, June 16.

Bimm, Morgan. 2022. “Girl Music of the Indie Rock Persuasion: Amplifying Indie Through 2000s Girl Culture.” PhD Dissertation, York university.

Espey, Clara Ewing. 1915. Leaders of girls. Abingdon Press.

Ewens, Hannah. 2020. Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture. University of Texas Press.

Guck, Marion A. 1996. “Music Loving, Or the Relationship with the Piece.” Music Theory Online vol. 2, no. 2.

Haddon, Mimi and Bethany Klein, eds. “Special Issue: Gender and Popular Music Knowledge.” Popular Music and Society vol. 47, no. 2.

Luong, Vivian. 2017. “Rethinking Music Loving.” Music Theory Online vol. 23, no. 2.

Newman, Sally. 2012. “‘The freshman malady’: rethinking the ontology of the ‘crush.’” Rethinking History vol. 16, no. 2 (June): 279–301.

Ward, Jane. 2020. The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. New York University Press

Wilk, Rona M. 2004. “‘What's a Crush?’ Study of Crushes and Romantic Friendships at Barnard College, 1900-1920.” OAH Magazine (July).