Everything Was Already Embarrassing
Sky Ferreira spent years making songs that were too good and too strange to fit anywhere convenient. Everything Is Embarrassing, Lost in My Bedroom, Sad Dream—the kind of pop that keeps slipping sideways just when it’s about to settle into something classifiable. She’d been trying to break through since she was a teenager, watching label politics and shifting tastes complicate what should have been a straightforward ascent for someone who could actually write a hook.
In September 2013, she and her boyfriend Zachary Cole Smith—frontman of the indie rock band DIIV—were arrested after a traffic stop turned up various substances. The corners of the internet that care about such things immediately invoked Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, which is probably twenty years too early to be a useful comparison and slightly disrespectful to everyone involved. But I understand the impulse. There’s a specific kind of chaos that reads as authenticity in a pop landscape built on precision management, and Ferreira had always seemed genuinely chaotic rather than strategically so—unlike, say, Miley Cyrus at that particular moment in 2013, whose every apparent unraveling felt workshopped in a conference room somewhere.
Around the same time, photographer Alasdair McLellan shot her topless for the autumn issue of British GQ Style. The timing gave the whole thing a certain coherence—arrested one week, on the magazine cover the next. Whatever rockstar mythology the music alone wasn’t quite generating, the calendar was handling.
She was set to play the Pitchfork Music Festival in Paris that October, on a bill with Hot Chip, The Knife, and Panda Bear—a lineup that said something specific about how she was being positioned. Not quite pop, not quite experimental, but welcome in rooms where both happened. That felt right for her. The music always had one foot in each direction, which is a difficult place to stand and also possibly the only interesting place to be.