Lykke Li has always been adept at creating “despair you can dance to,” but so sad so sexy takes that ability to new heights with the sort of lament that truly acknowledges just how firmly ensconced we are in the twenty-first century–this meaning that pain and suffering are so blasé. For those of us who have already felt that way even long before Hot Topic came into our lives, this is actually a rather frightening prospect, and could very well have something to do with the recent uptake in suicides among the youth (and apparently the middle-aged, if Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain are any indication). It’s not necessarily a glamorization of sadness, so much as a touting of it as the norm that has become the most telling aspect of life post-2008 (blame the paradigm shift on the financial crisis or something).
That said, the dramatic and melancholic “hard rain” commences Li’s fourth album (kismetly also released the same day as Lily Allen’s fourth album). Setting the tone for the watery imagery that pervades so sad so sexy, we come to realize that the only thing that falls harder than rain are the tears of a woman scorned, maligned or otherwise treated disposably. Which is precisely why Li likens anyone’s love of a hard rain with the one-upping offer, “If you like the feeling of a hard rain falling/I have a seafull, I can give you an ocean.” Flooded with the emotions that come with having to struggle too much to make things work in that anomaly called monogamy, she bemoans, “We shouldn’t have to work so hard to break this wave in our way.” Then, of course, speaking of waves, there is the vortex-like swimming pool that punctuates the narrative of “deep end.”
With a dreary and nihilistic iPhone-directed video to match, the song takes us on an odyssey of pleasure and pain as only a relationship can, with Li trying her best to fight back the waves of emotional involvement as she sings, “I’m in it/I was only gonna touch ya, now I’m in it/I’m in it, swimming in it/I wasn’t gonna love you, now I’m so fucking deep in it.” Ah yes, as we all know, the pool of love can often be laced with some rather gnarly chlorine. Toxic when taken in too strong a dose, but still, what girl among us hasn’t said, “I think I feel another wave, another wave/I’m diving in, I’m diving in it anyway”?
Changing tack slightly toward the phase of the relationship that isn’t quite the end so much as the beginning of the end, “two nights” featuring Aminé (of “Caroline” fame) details Li’s fraught nights of waiting for her lover to come home from a night out, her internal monologue resignedly noting, “Two nights in a row, where’d you go?/I’ve been smokin’/Two nights in a row, now I know that it’s broken/You’ve been dancin’ with somebody/On the streets with somebody.” It’s yet another song that somehow makes you think of Uffie’s “Drugs.” Or maybe it’s just a tale as old as time, this narrative of the forlorn woman waiting at home while her bored-with-her-pussy boyfriend goes out to seek greener pubic hairs–so to speak.
Fittingly, this transitions into “last piece,” one of the most woeful of homages to sadness on the album as Li grapples with the aftermath of it being over, telling her ex and any subsequent would-be suitor, “Just let me keep the last piece of my heart/Before you tear it all apart.” Ah, but of course he tears it all apart, for even though she wants to make it work (as perhaps all women do because there’s nothing worse to a female than misappropriated time management with her youth), he instead, “take(s) a step back when all [she] want(s) is to hold [him].” But you can’t hold a man for too long, it makes him either as enraged or resigned as a caged animal. And, on that note, we segue into “jaguars in the air,” possibly the least enjoyable track on the record but a thematic necessity to tie everything together. Briefly seeing a spike of optimism for a romance that can live on forever so long as the two join forces in the common aim of avoiding reality, Li feels there might be hope for their happily ever after, once again turning to oceanic imagery to paint the picture, “On an island, we ride the wave/It’s so blue, I can’t look away/Vacation forever, baby/I know we gon’ make it someday.” Like wild animals–jaguars in the air, if you will–Li believes that because, “Baby you and me we’re dreamers, we could tear down the sky,” that maybe, just maybe, their respective dreams can coalesce into one. Unfortunately, when a man is a “dreamer,” he tends to prefer living out these dreams with as many different women as possible.
Maybe, deep down, Li realizes this as “jaguars in the air” becomes “sex money feelings die”–a.k.a. the timeline of life. In fact, it is often when we come to terms with the revelation that this is the pattern–forever chasing money and love ultimately always out of our reach–that the abnegation of all feelings in general can occur. Echoing Tove Lo’s “Habits (Stay High),” Li remarks, “I don’t wanna think about, think about you/Drink up, drink up, I’m so fucked up, all I want is you.” Alas, we can rarely get what we want, can we?
That’s why it’s “so sad so sexy” to “cry diamonds like a river inside” as Li does while describing lying there one last time with the man who will soon become a stranger on the album’s eponymous track.
“better alone” eases us into the final act of the album, as Li starts to come to grips with the idea of acceptance–accepting that she’s “better alone than lonely here with you,” as she puts it. For it’s true, there is no worse feeling than being with someone just for the sake of not having to deal with the stigma of being a single woman. Li also addresses the challenges of being the one who has the courage to take the horse out back and shoot it, essentially. For that’s what it is to break up with someone, and often, “Nobody wants to be the one to walk away.” Li seems to find the strength to do so even if it makes her a “bad woman,” as the second to last track is called.
It is at this point that Li does another 180, deciding that, no, maybe she doesn’t want it to have to end and start all over again. She pleas with her loved one, “It’s a sad story but it’s still our story/Such a sad story, I know/You can say you don’t love me, but don’t walk away from me/We need each other more than we know.” Who knows if he feels the same, or finds the excuse, “I’m a bad woman, but I’m still your woman,” to be viable enough. It would appear, however, that many a female, musician or otherwise, is feeling the compunction of being a so-called bad woman. One supposes that’s what it is to be under the continuous thumb of the patriarchy and their unique gift for making you feel like a pezzo di merda for being overly “expressive.”
Concluding with the expectedly evocative of picturesqueness “utopia” (the video for which takes a page from Kesha’s “Learn to Let Go“), the song is applicable to both the love that Li has for her son and the man who fathered him, producer Jeff Bhasker (a go-to in Kanye’s arsenal, in addition to producing four of the songs on so sad so sexy).
So maybe, for as sexy as sadness is styled to be in the modern era, Li can’t help her unbridled jubilation for an impossibly complex dynamic, one that makes her cry sure, but one that is more well-suited to her needs than any other. Thus, for the girl who once declared, “Sadness is a blessing,” that sentiment has grown slightly hollow on so sad so sexy. But that doesn’t mean trap music wasn’t still in need of her…penetration.
