The Pitfalls of “Sad Girl” Media
For the past couple of months, Spotify has recommended to me a playlist called “sad girl starter pack.” Inside is a lineup of melancholic indie songs—artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Faye Webster, Elliott Smith, etc.—apparently fit for any sad girl. The appeal of such a playlist is easy enough to grasp. Almost everyone craves the comfort of sad music every once in a while, and Spotify HQ has curated countless playlists to meet this need: “sad hour,” “Sad Bops,” and “Sad Songs,” to name a few.
However, “sad girl starter pack” is a bit different. The sad-girl moniker was not coined by Spotify, but instead references a larger trend in labels and media consumption. While the term has existed since the 90s, it has recently surged in popularity, with social media posts and well-known magazines affectionately designating certain musicians, movies, and books as part of an unofficial sad-girl canon.
On one hand, there is a sense of solidarity in the way this label lifts up art depicting sadness, resentment, and yearning in a way that is particularly relatable to women. Most sad-girl artists are women themselves, who draw on their own experiences and observations to create art that is emotionally resonant. The label celebrates this, and is generally used as a compliment.
However, its categorization of art based on emotion—and a very simplistic depiction of emotion at that—can also be reductive. Mitski, a notorious sad-girl singer-songwriter, has frequently criticized this interpretation of her music. While she considers her art to be personal, she says that it requires skill and extensive work, not merely sharing her emotions. Only praising music for its sadness can neglect its artistic merit, and often reinforces gender stereotypes.
The flaws of sad-girl media are intensified through fan culture, particularly on the internet. Fan-worship creates a false and dehumanizing image of the artist as an endless well of sad emotions, not a multidimensional human being. Additionally, Mitski says that when fans constantly rave about how sad her music is, she feels pressure to only create within those parameters.
Online, sad-girl culture becomes less about consuming media on one’s own time, and more about adopting a shareable identity. This is clear through the nickname itself, which references sadness as a persona rather than an emotion. If a girl consumes the right media, if her life seems aesthetically pleasing, if she listens to the “sad girl starter pack,” then her sadness can be trendy. The playlist’s thumbnail features a photo of a beautiful woman lying on a bed, gazing wistfully offscreen, bathed in Pinterest-ready sunlight. She makes sadness look cool.
Ultimately, though, performing one’s sadness in this way does little to help process and understand it. If anything, sad-girl culture does the opposite, flattening both art and people. The sad girls of the world contain more depth than a list of their media consumption, particularly one curated by online trends, could ever reveal.
