Can I Have Your Attention?
On Clairo and writing
I just discovered Clairo. Like, just as in, July 12th(ish) when her latest album, Charm came out. I’m in the throes of Brat summer as much as the next gal, and have been a card carrying member of the Pink Pony Club since the beginning, but I recently noticed Clairo’s jazzy, singer-songwriter-y voice in the other, smaller corner of Instagram I often find myself in, where francophile influencers post pictures of their cottage gardens and their famers market hauls. The aspirational corner of Instagram.
Clairo talks about her relationship with the internet in a way I can relate to. She got a record deal after she posted a video of herself singing a song in her bedroom. “Then I had to change my relationship to the Internet, because now people were consuming me,” she said of that whirlwind time.
I write on the internet, here and for Pajiba, and it has changed my relationship to the Internet in a similar way. Here, I make the rules. The people who follow me only do so because they know me or they stumbled upon my writing and liked it. If some rando from the recesses of hell leaves a nasty comment or something (which has only happened once, every other response has been overwhelmingly lovely) I can just delete it. This isn’t journalism, it’s a blog. My blog—you’re consuming me when you read this. It’s very personal.
But Pajiba is not my blog. Recently, my editor reached out to check in, as the commenters had apparently been especially nasty in their responses to my articles. She assured me, as I have been assured repeatedly and have reassured those who have come in after me, that the people who go to the trouble to make an account and comment on articles are, like, 0.2 percent of the website’s readership, and that I should ignore them completely. She assured me I was doing a great job, and my articles were performing well despite the best efforts of my haters. I assured her that I rarely even read my articles once they’re posted, much less read the comments, because I made the mistake of doing so in the first month of my writing them and saw that someone called me “AI” and said I had “Wine mom energy,” and that was enough for me. “At least they’re talking about me!” I told her. I’m writing about stupid things celebrities say, but my job is to use my voice and opinion to add an angle to whatever that stupid thing was. So, less personal than a personal blog, but my identity is still wrapped up in it somewhat. I’m still part of what’s being consumed.
It’s hard though, as a writer, to ignore feedback. Most of the time I crave it. I come from an academic writing background, where I literally needed feedback to receive my degree, and not implementing said feedback could influence my experience of getting that degree. I’m not one of those writers who grew up typing late into the night, overcome by the muse. It was Dorothy Parker, a hero of mine, who said, “I hate writing, I love having written.” I’m the same. I need an assignment, or at least need to know someone somewhere is going to read it, or I don’t care.
Clairo, I think, shares this artistic instinct. “Music has always been the most important thing to me,” she explains. “I gravitated toward it and used it to feel. I wasn’t really making music of my own until seventh or eighth grade, when I started to write. But listening to music has always been more important to me than making it. Making music is very cathartic, and I like the things I’m making. But listening to music is always better.”
This is my exact philosophy about writing. Storytelling, or, more broadly, communication, or even more broadly, connection, has always been the most important thing to me. Talking, connecting, listening, watching, is how I learned to feel and, more broadly, how I learned to be. I didn’t really start writing, or storytelling, in a literal sense, until high school, when my proclivity for the language arts as opposed to science and math finally became too obvious to ignore. But most of my life leading up to that time, I was told I was a good writer. It just took me a while to figure out what that meant, or at least what it meant to me: expressing myself and using that as a means of connecting with people.
Like Clairo, reading and watching and consuming stories has always been more important to me than making it. “Reading is writing,” they told us in grad school, and I take that seriously. I’m never not reading or watching or listening. I’m watching a show right now while I write this. When I do write it is also cathartic, especially because I’m usually writing about myself and my experiences, but it’s just as cathartic to read or see or hear myself and my experiences mirrored to me in the work of others. That’s what I hope to accomplish with my work.
So much of both my and Clairo’s work is about love, ultimately. When I’m applying for writing jobs or promoting myself, I say I write about relationships and self-discovery and how those themes intersect with culture. In grad school I wrote about my romantic relationships with men, and the main thesis of everything I wrote was me shaking my fist at the sky and asking, “Why? Why does it have to be so hard?”
“This record has so much yearning, so much of me shaking the other person and being like, ‘Why not? Why can’t we?’ Growing up, I always looked at relationships that ended because of circumstances like ‘What are you doing? Just make it happen,’” Clairo says of Charm.
My favorite song on the album is “Sexy to Someone,” the premise of which is “needing someone to hold your gaze a moment longer than necessary, or touch your forearm, or buy you a drink with intention.” If you’re a loyal reader, I think you know how important those things are to me.
“It’s that thing where you’re, like, I don’t want to be hit on, and I don’t want you to cross the line with me—I just want to know that you think I’m hot, and then I can go home,” Clairo said of that feeling. This does a better job of getting at what I’m trying to get at in everything I write than I ever have: I just need you to notice me. I noticed you, after all.