This simple little song is one of Kimya Dawson’s finest because of how well it explores two of her favorite themes: the grotesque vulgarity of everyday American life and the pain of growing up. What’s more, Dawson skillfully combines rap-like wordplay with listener-dependent “insider” references to popular culture in a way that succeeds the way few other songs in the anti-folk movement have done.
Beginning in lines 3 and 4 (he … punched me / I lit his house on fire), Dawson introduces the trope of senseless, even absurdist, alcohol-fueled violence that runs throughout the song. The violence becomes grosser, in both senses of the word, in lines 8 and 9 before becoming truly revolting at the end of the first stanza. Like Kafka or Dalí before her, Dawson is interested in our own revulsion at the idea of our own bodies’ imminent destruction and at our own wastes. But Dawson links that revulsion directly to another nausea: the emptiness of suburban America and its citizens, who exist only as consumers and as surgically-enhanced robo-humans. Notably, the Mazda-driving, silicone-titted bimbo in the song is not a “you” but an “I.” Dawson is unafraid to engage in self-parody or self-accusation by making her first-person narrator the target of her own vitriol. In the next verse, the narrator’s persona is expanded to include not only the mall-visiting suburbanite but also the tattooed hipster who mistakes her own crassness for integrity: You said “You’re gross, my darling / I said “No, I’m rock ‘n’ roll.”
Like many other pop-culture purveyors who came of age in the post-modern 1980s (the Beastie Boys or Quentin Tarantino, for example), Dawson loads her best work with a steady stream of references to cultural artifacts whose capital comes from a nostalgic appreciation that she hopes her audience will share with her. "Beyond Thunderdome," Big Johnson shirts, "Sirens," Sunny D, and My Little Pony are cultural detritus, to be sure — no one would dare call them lasting or important phenomena. But Dawson finds value in her generation’s shared remembrance of these cast-off fads.
The third verse introduces another common device of Dawson’s: the in-joke. She performs songs like “The Beer” for audiences made up mainly of strangers; most people who buy her albums or attend her shows have never met her personally, and yet through the anecdotes she includes in her songs, her listeners are made to feel like her most intimate confessors. In the same way Dawson finds solidarity in an alienated generation’s pop-culture fetishes, she creates a bond with her listeners by inviting them to be a part of her own in-jokes. By obliquely referencing past events (whether real or fictitious), Dawson leaves our imaginations free to fill in the details. Why did she pee her pants — was she laughing too hard? Why did the guy she’s addressing “steal the groom’s cigar”? — was he a guest at the wedding of a man he despised? Dawson’s incomplete anecdotes have the feel of a conversation between friends so close that they need only mention one or two details of an incident to send each other into hysterics (the stolen cigar) or solemn silence (the sexual abuse mentioned in the next line).
In the song’s long final verse, Dawson’s subject matter veers from the grotesque and the comic to the dramatic and the tragic; shared laughter gives way to private tears. First the booze-fueled binge that runs throughout the song finally gives way to unconsciousness. Then, as cryptic as the accusations the narrator makes in lines 33 and 34 are, it’s clear that her bile has been redirected from herself to her addressee. The emotional climax of the song occurs in the next two lines, when the storyteller finally acknowledges her own childishness, distancing herself from it by calling him out as a life-long “teenager”; her only-half-ironic suggestion that he should “find some pretty sucker / And make that bitch your wife” is the ultimate indictment on the charge of irresponsibility. That accusation frees the singer to focus on the real pain and stupidity that come with growing up. Finally she breaks down in tears as she realizes she’s no longer “the girl [she] used to be.” It is that realization that frees her to speak encouragingly to herself through the voice of the silver-pink pony: “You’ve come a long, long way and you deserve to be really happy.” And in the end it seems like happiness is all she’s really been asking for. |
