"Shoulders too broad for a girl." Addressing herself or someone like her in the second person, she goes down the roster of gender crimes: "You've got no cunt in your strut/ You've got no ass to shake," she sings in what must be the year's most biting couplet. "Your tells are so obvious," she shouts on the title track to Transgender Dysphoria Blues. Pink belongs to the first generation of musicians in a while whose work barely exists as physical artifacts can a song that can't be discovered on a battered old record preserve a legacy any more than another selfie in the cloud? -Douglas Wolkįrom her first words on her first album since she told the world she was a woman, Laura Jane Grace sings like she's unbottling years and years of stress. The key line might be one that switches from the first verse to the second, "when I was only 45." You can think of that 45 as middle age, but it might be more fruitful to think of it as the speed of a seven-inch single. But it's also surprisingly rich in subtext: this is a song about eradicating oneself from digital as well as corporeal memory, and Pink's lyrics keep slipping into the pervasive language of marketing.
Ariel Pink's got a reputation for sonic anachronism, but it's still kind of wonderful that his most affecting song to date is aHoward Jones-style early-'80s new wave ballad whose lyric includes the terms "iCloud", "selfie" and "Find My iPhone." Sung from the perspective of a father who's telling his children that he has no physical images of his existence to leave them, it has a cute conceit and a melody that swoops and dives like a Polaroid caught in an updraft.
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