Pop Song by Larissa Pham
A mixtape of our past selves and the beautiful brutality of youth.
A Pop Song from my youth typically makes me think of anything by NSYNC or Backstreet Boys; I am a millennial, after all; maybe it makes you think of another band or song; either way, The idea of the Pop Song in Larissa Pham’s collection of essays isn’t entirely referencing Pop as a genre but more of a feeling. While reading, I thought less about the boybands of my youth and more about the songs on a mixtape from a boy I liked or someone my age with tastes far superior to mine, who shopped at Urban Outfitters and worked after school at the mall. I would play these songs on repeat; even now, more than 15 years later, if I hear these songs in the grocery store or in a Spotify playlist, I’m immediately transported to my teens, clad in my black paint-splattered Converse shoes and whoever I was crushing on during that particular time. These songs were the soundtrack to my high school and early college years when I would spend my lunches in the empty art room sitting side by side with a friend, sharing earbuds and telling each other our elaborate plans and places we would go after high school.Â
Pham has perfectly captured the experience of youth. She is clearly writing as a woman in her late 20s and early 30s. However, she has perfectly rendered a still image of herself as a girl in her late teens and early 20s exploring herself and the possibilities for her college life, of trying to discover who you are as a person of color and as a sexual being. I read a few reviews where readers took issue with the overly youthful naivety of Pham, and they aren’t entirely wrong. Looking back at my early 20s as someone in their 30s, I’m frankly annoyed with myself, but isn’t that also the gift of hindsight? Our youth is rarely as beautiful as we remember. We frame the still images of moments we’ve imprinted in our memories. Still, we forget the moments that didn’t make it onto the hallowed walls of our own memory museum.
Pop Song feels like a burned CD, the one possibly lingering in your glove compartment that you can’t even play in your car because it no longer has a CD player, but you keep it as some sort of reminder, a playlist of moments that for Pham hold trauma and pain, but also love. Within the essays, Pham draws upon her personal paintings, photography, and the visual artists that play a role in her lived experiences. Like the artist Agnes Martin in the first essay titled ‘Blue’ or my favorite essay in the collection ‘Body of Work,’ which begins with a printed photo of photographer Nan Goldin’s 'Heart-Shaped Bruise,' the image is secretive and intimate. Pham finds a connection between girlhood and sexual adulthood.
The collection revolves around art, but especially photography, through traditional film and phones to capture moments quickly, meant to be shared, sent, posted, a quick gaze of the self. Larissa writes about taking photos of herself nude as a way to account for her physical self or to send to someone else the images used as evidence of pain, love, living, and seeing. The collection seems to revolve around one particular relationship in which Pham and her then-boyfriend start an Instagram account just for the two of them to post photos of everyday moments, the things they see, the stuff of life that moves them and catches their attention. Even when they are apart, they can have this space to connect, to see the world through each other's eyes. Images as bearing witness to our lives. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking that she longs to be close to this person after the breakup and posts a photo that he never likes or comments on.
In ‘Body of Work,’ Nan Goldin’s 'Heart-Shaped Bruise' is our introduction to Pham photographing her bruises and other bodily traumas and emotional pain. She writes about how those bruises fade and act as reminders of our physical selves. The things that happen to us physically fade but still become part of us, similar to events in life. A need to document moments in life before they disappear, to know they happened to her.
I photograph all my wounds—skinned knees, shaving cuts, any accident that excavates bright red blood. Bruses, too have found their way onto my camera roll, captured from the moment I first notice their purpling presence and tracked until I’ve grown tired of them.
What begins as a musing on the coquettish image of a faceless leg in sheer black tights with a bruise shaped like a heart evolves to the traumas of the body, of what it means to live inside a body, especially a female body. Nan Goldin appears later in the essay in reference to another documentation of a bruise four years after the photo 'Heart-Shaped Bruise' was taken, an image of herself a month after being battered by her then-boyfriend, nearly losing an eye. The evolution from a faceless girl to an adult woman with traumas demands you look and see the woman in front of you; Goldin herself uses this image as a reminder.Â
Our wounds do follow us, even when we think we’ve abandoned them.
'Body of Work' is by far the highlight of this collection; Pham picks up many different threads and perfectly weaves them together. Between photography, painting, phone camera rolls, bondage, youth, saints, the body in pain, the pleasure attained by pain, and Leslie Jamison's essay ‘Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,’ Pham collected many incredible topics and artists and tied them together seamlessly.
Pop Song is like listening to a playlist of songs from the memory of a moment you thought would never end but also knew couldn’t last. Of developing your tastes via Tumblr and other DIY artistic expressions. Of pinning artwork on your dorm room wall. This collection is perfect for anyone who wants to be reminded of their past selves to know they are still that person, maybe just a bit different, with hindsight. This is a perfect gift for a recent high school or college grad. With this collection of essays, Pham has demystified the universal experience of the younger self, something we can all use to better understand as we look back at the blur of youth.
*All artists in the referenced images are written about in Pop Song.
Hey Larissa, this was really cool and I dig your writing style....I think I'll try to find this book.
New subscriber.
Finally got to sit down and read this one and wowwowow, Katie!! Definitely adding Pop Song to my tbr, it sounds like it would be a good one to dig through alongside some thoughts I've been chewing on recently about youth and identity :)