Gwen Stefani is Our Own Fault
Gwen Stefani is dead. Long live Gwen Stefani.
I didn’t have older sisters, I just had VH1. And no one taught me how to be cool like Gwen Stefani did. She dominated VH1 Top 20 Countdown. I watched “Behind the Music: No Doubt” every time it was on after it aired in 2000. In 2005, when I was 15, I found out the guy I liked had a crush on another girl. When I saw this picture was under her heroes section on MySpace, I thought “Damn, I can’t argue with him.”
Though No Doubt was considered mainstream by the time “Rock Steady” came out in 2001 and its members were mostly white and suburban, save for bassist Tony Kanal, there was something accessibly counter culture about them—and specifically Gwen. She was a woman being unapologetically feminine and flawed. The band had minor success before Gwen joined the band with songs written by her brother, Eric. Once Eric left the band to become an animator on a then fledgling show called ”The Simpsons,” Gwen’s songwriting transformed the band’s image from a ska band with the put-upon man at the front to a pop rock band with ska tendencies that paraded the female experience, warts and all.
PRE-GWEN LYRICS BY ERIC STEFANI
If you would stop barking, she might let you out
At last she opens the back gate, you're released
You're now free to roam you've been waiting
For this moment for sometime and now you must go
Into the fields where there is laughter
There is peace and you're comfortable
Try to hold on now before she calls you home
- Doghouse
GWEN LYRICS
The moment that I step outside
So many reasons for me to run and hide
I can't do the little things I hold so dear
'Cause it's all those little things that I fear-Just a Girl
It’s interesting to note that both Stefani’s here are begging to “get out,” but one is begging that he won’t have to be confined to a relationship with a woman, while the other is wishing she can go about her day without being harassed. It’s that distinction that made Gwen so cool to young girls like me at the time. We were used to Eric’s POV, but to have this feminist viewpoint broadcast on VH1 was counter culture simply by its existence.
The other thing that made Gwen so cool was that she wasn’t afraid of being uncool. She had braces. She told Rolling Stone how much she loved “Sound of Music. And she fucking longed. Perhaps the uncoolest thing about Gwen in the late ‘90s was the thing that I secretly loved: she wasn’t afraid to admit a man had left her heartsick. When we all realized that man was bassist Tony Kanal, it was empowering to watch her tell him directly how much he broke her heart. It’s emo music if the subject of the song was right there next to you every night when you played it. It was Fleetwood Mac with less spite and cocaine.
As we die, both you and I
With my head in my hands, I sit and cry
- Don’t Speak
As a preteen, I had only seen that you could be a hopeless romantic or an eternally single feminist, and never the two shall meet. Gwen was someone who put men in their place, but also wondered why they didn’t like her?! Hey, me too! Gwen was the first person I had seen in media that offered the idea that women could be complex people.
Gwen being Italian was also a win for me. Reno was so white growing up (and still) that me being Italian—nevermind also Pakistani—was exotic. In second grade, the pure white kids introduced me to the new Italian kid who had started school because they thought we could talk about our dads in the mafia and bleed pasta sauce together or something. Being Italian was seen as my own little counter culture, and when Gwen sprung on the scene, despite her looking nothing like my family, I was glad that one of us was considered hot and cool.
My favorite era of Gwen was when No Doubt’s “Return of Saturn” came out. There’s a specific, forlorn quality in those lyrics that is so juicy. It’s sexy how desperate it is (Can you tell I love emo music?). Bathwater is my #1 No Doubt song and it’s because it blends their ska roots1 with rock, jealousy and pity.
You and your museum of lovers
The precious collection you've housed in your covers
My simpleness threatened by my own admission
And the bags are much too heavy
In my insecure condition
My pregnant mind is fat full with envy again
But I still love to wash in your old bathwater-Bathwater
“Simple Kind of Life” off that album gets so much flack for being this plea for traditional life, but I saw it more as a pure wanting for someone to love you that much that they’d wife you up. And that you’d love someone so much that you’d wish to get Juno’d. It was aching. Real, with no forethought. Everything a preteen is.
I always thought I'd be a mom
Sometimes I wish for a mistake
The longer that I wait the more selfish that I get
You seem like you’d be a good dad
-Simple Kind of Life
“Simple Kind of Life” is, at its core, a desire for ease. To quote me, a person who was good at Twitter:
Before this, we VH1 little sisters were “Breathe” by Faith Hill or “Independent Women Part 1” by Destiny’s Child. Gwen gave us both sides. In an industry that so quickly defines you as “one thing,” Gwen dared to have two things. And as a woman in the early 2000s, that was a lot more things than we had ever endowed women with before.
But now, she’s too many things. And that’s kind of on us.
“The Voice”-hosting, Blake Shelton-marrying, Hallow-app partnering, face-freezing person we see today is the result of what happens when you’re afraid to be flawed and disappoint. It’s desperate in a different way. Instead of embracing that human faces age and mass popularity wanes, Gwen chose to stay a portrait of her heyday. Rather than acknowledge that identity changes as you get older, she has chosen to have no identity because she claims every identity. That way, no one can be upset, right?
I excused shreds of this with Sabrina Carpenter because, well, she is young. All of youth is sifting through costumes until we find one that isn’t a costume at all. What sucks about Gwen Stefani is that she gave millennial girls a glimpse of what it was like to be a successful, outspoken woman and then just traded it all in to be hot forever. She yelled “Fuck you, I’m a girl!” from the stage, then became the male gaze.
Switching cultures is not uncharted territory for her. Girl was always slipping into bindis, cornrows and Harajuku culture when she didn’t belong. And I get it: we all want to feel like we belong somewhere. But with Gwen it feels commodified. And it is. She is in a business that demands that your image pay your bills. I’m upset because she’s not “My Gwen” anymore. But I guess if she was, she wouldn’t be good at her job. As she said in an Allure interview where she claimed (more than once) to be Japanese, she says “A hit is what makes me tick. The more people I reach, the better." She is reaching people by being pleasing to everyone, claiming identities like Pokemon cards and using them to make a profit.
Right before Gwen married Blake Shelton in 2021, Kat Gillespie asked in a “Paper” interview what we were all wondering: So, you into Trump now…or?
Gwen definitely did a “…or” answer with this one:
"I can see how people would be curious, but I think it's pretty obvious who I am," she says. "I've been around forever. I started my band2 because we were really influenced by ska, which was a movement that happened in the late '70s, and it was really all about people coming together. The first song I ever wrote was a song called 'Different People,' which was on the Obama playlist, you know, a song about everyone being different and being the same and loving each other. The very first song I wrote."
I know she’s trying to tell us she’s not into Trump using the classic “my song was on Obama’s playlist” line, but she’ll never come out and say it because Trump supporters buy concert tickets, too.
Not sure if you’ve listened to Gwen’s latest, but it’s as close to AI without being AI. Of course it sounds like that because AI is just an amalgamation of the most commonly preferred shit without artistry. But we’ve proven that we as a culture need our popstars to be everything. They can’t age. They can’t make music that doesn’t keep up with the times. They can’t be corny. They can’t be too serious. To be everything is to be nothing, but it pays well to be nothing: Gwen is worth $160 million.
So I can be as mad as I want at her public persona, and claim it’s because I am sad for my little self watching VH1, but ultimately it’s complaints like mine that made her rich. She took all the notes and this is her final draft. Her art is everything we wanted. She asked us in 1995 and she is asking again: Are you happy now?
music.
This is good for anyone who had to be told by partners, friends and therapists that you don’t always have to solve everyone’s problems. Not that that’s me or anything.
I got to see HAIM at The Bellwether recently and damn, they still got it!
If this post was proof of anything, it’s that I could listen to forlorn rock songs the rest of my life.
This mix is sick.
I’m so stoked to see Ethan Tasch on my birthday!!! Speaking of…
We’re in wild times, yet I still insist on having a birthday. It is a delight that you’ve read this far or even at all. If you are thinking “I’d like to do something nice for Sam for her birthday,” I’d love if you let me know you liked the Substack, subscribe if you haven’t already, send it to a friend, or if you have the means became a paid subscriber <3 Or if you’re afraid of commitment like that (been there) you can always hit me with a lil Venmo.
Okay, I like ska. It’s fun, okay? Also, my first boyfriend was literally “Ska Kid” at my high school. Like, that’s what he was known as before I even knew him. He wore the pants and skanked and everything. I wrote a MySpace message to Aaron Barrett of Reel Big Fish asking if he would play an all-ages venue so that me and my boyfriend could go and skank together. Less than three <3.
She did not, in fact, start the band. Her brother did. She was asked to join years later.
This piece is echoing sentiments on something I’ve been working on and so it was such a delight to read and know other people are thinking about things the same way I am! Only you gave me even more to think about, so thank you for that! People pleasing is truly the death of the artist.