TV Girl

At the start of my second semester of freshman year I broke up with my high school girlfriend over FaceTime in my dorm room on a Sunday after dinner. It came out of nowhere, for her and for me, I made the decision on instinct and in the long run it proved correct, just poorly executed. The night of the break up I remember heading to my friend's dorm where everyone was gathered with a giant jug of sangria, I got drunk and bawled my eyes out in front of a room of ten people. I was sad about the relationship being over and also because I knew I'd hurt someone I cared about. I thought I got over it quickly but the grief would roll in when I returned home for summer. In the meantime I tried to enjoy spring in New York.

My classes were stacked on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the course work was light so my weeks were wide open. I spent the days wandering the city, walking up-and-down Manhattan and across bridges into Brooklyn and Queens. At night I went out out drinking at shitty Brooklyn bars that didn't card and smoked weed along the banks of the East River. There was one time a few of us posted up on a stoop in Alphabet City to smoke a bowl pack when suddenly there was a guy in a leather jacket at the bottom of the stairs. My buddy looked up from the nug he was breaking apart and asked if he wanted some, the guy responded by turning on his flashlight and flashing his badge. After going through our drug bag looking for coke, he turned and told us to "go do that somewhere else" which we agreed to before sprinting back to the dorms.

I also started flirting and hooking up with a girl from my financial accounting class. It was a weird fling, the sort I imagine most people have in college at some point. What I remember most is how at the beginning she kept insisting I was gay, something I hadn't really considered before but was pretty sure I wasn't. One night a couple of friends and I went out to this gay bar in the West Village to surprise our writing professor (he kept dropping hints during class that he liked to go there). We met up with him and took a photo. On the way out a guy said I had a nice beard and when I told him I was leaving he said "oh that's too bad because I wanted to kiss you" so I obliged. It was wet and rough and I didn't like the tast much, so I reported back to this girl that I wasn't attracted to men.

In the background of all this there was TV Girl, specifically their albums French Exit and Who Really Cares. I'm not sure how I found them but once I did they never left my earbuds. I listened so much and so obsessively that my brain still floods with images whenever I hear something off those records: the RFK bridge rising above Astoria Park on a sunny afternoon, flowers covered in mid-day shade stacked in front of the Key Foods on Avenue A, an empty subway platform in Bushwick in the wee hours of the morning. Synecdochical fragments etched deep in my memory.

For the unaware, TV Girl is an indie band from San Diego that makes a kind of retro-fueled blend of sampledelica, lo-fi beats and hypnagogic pop. All of their songs are about love, usually of the unrequited variety, about fucking and getting fucked over. Lead singer Brad Petering is kind of a jerk, my buddy interviewed him once and confirmed as much, but you also get a pretty good sense from his lyrics which all have a snide and self-effacing "nice guys finish last" quality to them. That and the ubiquitous vocal samples ripped from 50s and 60s era television programs are the two most grating aspects of the band, but they also wouldn't be who they are without them. If you can stomach the cringe and kitsch, there's some genuinely catchy music on those first two records. My favorite TV Girl tracks tend to be of the softer variety, the ones that floats along like an early-morning dream, where the impact of what's been done or said the night before has yet to fully land. "Till You Tell Me To Leave" is a great example of this, it's Petering at his most relatable, sitting across from his ex and demanding she own up to the split, the descending chimes of a synth mirroring reality as it comes crashing down. "The Getaway" is another good one, a melancholy groove about the endless cycle of coming together and drifting apart, the whistling melody at its center communicating a resigned acceptance of the inevitable.

Last year at my family's Christmas Eve dinner I asked my thirteen year-old cousins who their favorite artists were and one of them said TV Girl. I was pretty surprised, but soon realized that TikTok's time-smoothing algorithm had been good to the band. They have one song ("Lovers Rock") with well over a billion streams on Spotify and another ("Not Allowed") pushing the same mark. They've also made joint albums with Faye-Webster-lookalike Jordana and vaporwave prince George Clanton, both of which are among those artist's most successful releases to-date. Honestly the success makes sense, TV Girl is well positioned to take advantage of our current culture of endless recycling. Their music is anachronistic while also vaguely nostalgic, it sounds like it's from the past but a non-specific one that's also never too far from our present. They make it so that anyone can listen and think back to simpler times, be that your first year of college or just last summer. Any memory fits, even if you're barely old enough to have ones to cherish.

Reflecting on the period of my life when I found TV Girl, I understand why I gravitated to them so much. The world as I knew it was changing, what felt familiar was falling away and I was trying hard to hold on while knowing I couldn't. In the process of loss there is a need to romantacize the past, we prepare ourselves for what's next by exhausting the resonance of what was. I could put on TV Girl, think back to the way things had been, and color it all with a tint of wistfulness that gave meaning to my confusion, even if it was falsely implanted. What's funny is how their songs hold real meaning for me now, they have a real attachment to my memories whereas before it was just a simulacrum. This is often how music works, songs act as outlets for feelings that are borne from events which have nothing to do with them, but then, through the process of listening and relistening, the song and the moment merge, until we can't see one without the other. TV Girl will forever be attached to that freshman spring, it's a bit embarassing to admit but ultimately I'm glad to have the time capsule, to be able to look back and remember so exactly who I was.