Emily May’s book of essays Some Girls covers familiar territory for a 21st century writer–reflections on recurring financial catastrophe, writing’s purpose as it battles technofeudalism and what our artistic ancestors of the previous century can teach us.
In this freewheeling conversation taking place just a couple weeks after the book’s publication, May and Cornue take on many thorny subjects with humor and candor. They ponder the urgent questions of our time, including: “What would Guy Debord make of 2025?”, “How do we fight the normalization of AI?” and most importantly, “Why is there no 21st century equivalent to Rod Stewart?” So put on your favorite classic rock album, kick up your heels and enjoy!
Carmen: I first met you at the wedding of a mutual friend in Austin where you sang Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money” and that’s when I knew this woman appreciates the inherent poetry of dad rock! The book title, Some Girls, is a reference to the song by the Rolling Stones and you quote the lyric “American girls want everything in the world you could possibly imagine” in the prologue. Talk to me a bit about how music, but dad rock in particular, is an influence on your writing.
Emily: I love that you brought up Warren Zevon, because that's just so crucial to my DNA. I inherited my love of dad rock through my literal dad when I was a teenager and got over the top 40. I started listening to the classic rock station–shout out to 102.9 WMGK in Philadelphia! And I just felt like this entire world and entire history opened up to me, and for whatever reason, it resonated so completely with what I wanted life to be. Later, when I was in college, it was all about indie rock, and I got so into that, which is sort of antithetical to dad rock. But even then I would always gravitate back and remember that nobody is better than Led Zeppelin. Even to this day, when I'm like, “Society has evolved past the point of needing Eric Clapton,” I’ll hear the opening riff of “Layla” and that's like Genesis to me, you know?
Carmen: Everytime I hear that song, I imagine myself driving a convertible in the desert, and I’ve never looked hotter.
Emily: Totally! I feel like that whole genre represents this post-war cracking open of possibility and freedom. Then at the same time, I think back to Pink Floyd and what the English bands were doing was dealing with the aftermath of World War II. There's a lot of pathos in there, and a lot of desire for freedom from what came before. For me, that's just an absolutely irresistible combination.
Going back to Warren Zevon and a lot of other songwriters like him–I feel like that level of songwriting is a lost art. I think there are a lot of really talented songwriters today, but people would say that he was the “writers’ musician.” I love his use of language and metaphor, with lines like, “When California falls into the ocean, like the mystics and statistics say it will, I believe this hotel will be standing, until I pay my bill”. It's just so good! More modern songwriters I love are Mitski, and Jenny Lewis, who I think of as a modern-day Warren Zevon, with that sort of dark but playful LA-infused songwriting. Of course, Lana is in a similar vein. And I'm mentioning only women, because I think that they're presenting it to us in a new way, instead of just like a replica of dad rock. Although sometimes I do think, “Why don't we have a modern day Rod Stewart?” Where is he?
Carmen: It's tragic. We don't have that equivalent and like you, I’m a huge Rod fan. I love your answer, and it made me think about why I'm deeply drawn to dad rock. One reason is because the characters of dad rock are so invested in their own mythology. I love someone who self mythologizes and creates art around their own creative identity like Bob Dylan or Lana. There's a thread there that just really excites me, and I think it's also something I do in my own work.
Also I wanted to mention for the readers that Some Girls has a great Spotify playlist. The QR code is in the back of the book, so of course I started listening to it after my reading and discovered a new favorite Warren Zevon song: “The French Inhaler”.
Emily: Oh my god, I'm so glad. That song has such incredible, incredible lyrics. I just absolutely love that one.
Carmen: I love all the personal details in these essays that chart your life from childhood to the present day: witnessing friends plan hook-ups with boys over AIM in high school, working on a weed farm in Humboldt before moving to Portland, becoming a marketing copywriter for a tech start-up in Austin. Like most millennials, you’ve lived a life of financial survival and reinvention that’s taken you on many different journeys. What did you learn about yourself while writing these essays? Did it tweak or reformulate your sense of self?
Emily: I think it goes back to what we were just talking about with writers, or artists in general, the self mythologizing. I think that if anything, putting all these experiences together didn't reformulate my sense of self, as much as cemented it. From graduating college and thinking, “What's my life going to be like in this world?” and thinking I could control any of that, and then having it be dictated by all these economic forces instead. Of course, this happens in every life in a way. I feel like that's been my constant question, wondering “How am I gonna make money to live?” while still preserving my sense of being a person in the world who can explore and learn new things constantly. I want to live in a way where my sense of curiosity is not being decimated by the work day.
It reminds me of this one quote that I always remember from James Agee, who's mentioned in Some Girls. He said, “I hate any job on Earth as a job and a hindrance and a semi suicide.” The first time I read that, I was probably just about to leave college, and it really resonated. That's something I constantly struggle with, because I feel like the pursuit of accruing capital is stealing my life, and it steals all of our lives. Our system is a zero-sum game: you have to completely give your life over to work just to keep your head above water, because it's so easy to slip under. That's something I’m constantly looking for a way out of and haven't found it yet. But maybe the pursuit of it is worth enough. I feel like that's probably specific to our age group: the tail end of thinking you could have any experience in the world that didn't involve constantly working and giving yourself over to your boss and career. I could be wrong. I don't know. I work with a lot of Gen Zers who are all in on the corporate landscape in a crazy way to me.
Carmen: As someone with a French background who majored in it in college, I was very drawn to your essay “Under the Paving Stones, the Beach!” I’m also a lover of the Situationists and how they critiqued consumerism with playful, absurdist language. I’ve returned to Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle in recent years as it feels more relevant now than ever. What do you think Debord and the Situationists would make of the present moment? What do you think we can learn from them?
Emily: I think I traveled the Adbusters to Situationist pipeline, but I really discovered them through the Greil Marcus book, Lipstick Traces, which is featured in Some Girls too. I remember checking that out from my college library and pushing my homework aside to read it. I discovered Debord and all of those slogans on anti-consumerism through that book. I was so primed for that: I was an environmental studies major, so I was fully on board with reversing everything about our hyper-consumerist way of life. Looking at May 1968 now feels so idealistic–these students coming together in Paris and elsewhere, believing that their protests could change the world. Forty years later, I was a senior in college and thought “we have to commemorate the 40 year anniversary of May 1968!” So I printed out some of their slogans at the library, and then put them up on some bulletin board in Burlington, Vermont. I thought, “Maybe somebody will be inspired by this.”
As far as the spectacle goes, I feel like unfortunately, the message of the Situationists has been subverted for evil ends. Because I think nobody understands the power of sloganeering to perpetuate the spectacle like Donald Trump. And I feel like that is all his presidency is, day in and day out. He knows how to create chaos and put on a spectacle in a way that is going to enrage the people who are against him and cater to the people who love him. Nobody has figured that out like he has.
Carmen: God, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, fascists are very good at working with the spectacle and social media has only made that more obvious. It was like that in the 30s, and it's like that now.
Emily: Yes, exactly. I think fascist messaging is very easy to telegraph through imagery, sound bites, and all of the modes of communication that we are addicted to now. I think democracy is a long form art, because reality has to be understood in a nuanced way. And the spectacle is always going to feed off of an image or a quick sound bite without context. And I think that's the world that we're living in now.
Carmen: I think people find some kind of emotional security through that kind of messaging that is so linear, so black and white. Messengers that paint themselves as victims and someone else as their oppressor. When it's never that person, it’s the person buying the ad space to enrage them.
Emily: Yeah and simply blaming someone is easy. It's an easy story for people to understand and it feels good for them to believe. It doesn't feel good to believe the nuances of for example, “Public transit will make your life easier in five to six years, but there’s going to be some construction which may inconvenience you.” People aren’t going to buy in, and that's a relatively low stakes example. People like to be told, here’s a quick fix, from a bigger highway to “These are the bad guys and we sent them away.” Okay, but what does that lead to?
Carmen: Like me, you are constantly referencing other writers, films and music in a kaleidoscopic way that is very Debordian. The first sentence of Some Girls states this directly, “Artists often speak about books and paintings and plays and songs as being inside them–as if they could be cracked in the right place and the art would crawl out, slowly at first and then quickly, fully formed.” If someone were to crack you open, what would they see as your most formative artistic influences?
Emily: I'm glad you brought up your own work here, because we really share that. I remember the first time I ever heard you read on Instagram Live during the pandemic, and I loved your use of very evocative images: Hollywood, Steve McQueen-type characters, and then all those shades of Lana. So I do feel like there's an overlap there, for sure. For me it's hard to know the difference between influences and things I just love. Like I’ve loved Miss Piggy since I was three years old, is she an influence?
Carmen: I would hope so!
Emily: You’re right, some of it you just soak up. Reading Rolling Stone in 2001 has to be a major influence. Watching “Kids in the Hall” on Comedy Central in 2004 and other 90s sketch comedy was an influence. But the two larger than life figures that are a kind of North Stars to me are Allen Ginsberg and Joni Mitchell. I think what I love about Allen Ginsberg is not only the power of his language and fearlessness, but also the irony that's often worked into his poetry. Even when he's deadly serious, they're still these little one-off funny lines that I just absolutely love. And Joni Mitchell is just the paragon. She’s an absolute titan who is completely in touch with her own womanhood and channeling that into absolute power as an amazingly talented songwriter, musician, vocalist, everything. I think she was a new type of woman in her time and we’re all part of her legacy.
Carmen: Let me ask a real quick follow up question: what’s your favorite Ginsberg poem or book and your favorite Joni album?
Emily: I love Reality Sandwiches. I bought it at this bookstore in Berkeley when I was first out there after college, and I would just carry that around with me. I brought it to Thailand and everywhere that I lived and travelled to. I love “My Alba”: “stayed on the market/ youth of my twenties/ fainted in offices/ wept on typewriters.” That is truly my forefather, as someone who spent my 20s crying on my computer and sometimes still cries at work. For Joni, I would say Blue is my favorite album of hers. Just all bangers from back to front.
Carmen: Yeah, it's one of the few genuinely perfect albums.
Emily: Yes, I feel like you get everything there because you have a little carefree joy in “Carey”. Then you have the ultimate despair and jadedness in “The Last Time I Saw Richard”. She just does it all!
Carmen: We’re both writers living in a world seemingly hell bent on replacing us. I don’t know about you, but I think a lot about how late capitalism is making it impossible to be a writer or artist in general and how that’s by design. This is something you touch upon in the essay “Are You There Richard Linklater? It’s Me, Emily” which closes out Some Girls. How do you reckon with late capitalism and the financial crisis we’ve found ourselves in as a writer and artist?
Emily: This is something that I’m always thinking about. I think for anyone who’s ever attempted to make some sort of life in the arts, they’re going to come up against this. I think what we’re seeing right now is more explicit in our society’s resentment of artists and writers. Obviously during the Reagan era there was a lot of censorship around art that was challenging the Christian heteronormative patriarchy we’re still living under. I think artists are a constant thorn in the side of that, questioning the status quo. With the advent of AI, it’s become more clear that the only thing they want is the raw skill set of artists so the 1% can profit off it. There have been a lot of deeply sick instances of this: the first that comes to mind is the appropriation of Miyazaki’s animation style. Like when the White House Twitter account used it to illustrate forced deportations. I think that’s meant to strike us in the heart and say, “Your art means nothing. Humanity means nothing.”
The irony is that as artists, it’s so easy to feel like what you do has no value. We’re our first bullies! No one can tell me my art is useless or bad, better than I can! We all live in that space of self-doubt, and that’s what makes us real people. Rebecca Solnit said, “Total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots.”
Going back to AI and late capitalism and how art is being further commodified and stripped of value, I recently had the thought that if you can think and read and write, in 20 years, we’re gonna be wizards. When the power goes out and the AI stops working and no one knows how to create anymore, we’ll still have that superpower. Or at least that’s how I’m choosing to cope as an artist and writer in this extremely dark moment. Like we can’t stop, we can’t let our abilities erode. I’m not going to stop creating and I know you won’t either. I hope none of us will stop believing in the ultimate power of writing and making art and thinking critically.
Carmen: Never! I think one of the hardest things about the AI conversation is it seems so self-evident and obvious: we’re literally defending the ability to think critically and the value of human consciousness and lived experience in creating art. You would think that’s such a basic principle of human existence for thousands of years, that you wouldn’t have to so violently defend it, but here we are! I also live in San Francisco, where I encounter dystopian pro-AI advertising daily, so this conversation is especially fraught for me as a creative. Just the amount of gaslighting around this technology makes me feel crazy.
Emily: I know. Speaking of the seventh circle of LinkedIn hell, there’s this AI prompt that transforms you into an action figure surrounded by your favorite accessories for your professional personal brand. You’ll have your little action figure next to a Starbucks cup and a Macbook. Just seeing that I keep thinking, “This took so much water to make and for what? Your little LinkedIn post and your basic branded accessories that you think are unique?” I just bristle at that. It seems like a harmless little trend, but the implications are terrible. These little seemingly innocent examples are priming us for its normalization.
Carmen: Right, the normalization is super disturbing. They’re forcing this narrative that “this is the future.” Well who’s crafted that? We didn’t! Especially with no barriers in place from our governments. We’ve seen what unregulated social media has done to society over the past decade. They’ve already started to pass some AI regulations in the EU, but we need that here. Given our current administration being so deeply in bed with big tech, that's gonna be an uphill battle. I also think the American one percent’s love of AI is deeply rooted in anti-intellectualism because now they can create art without a voice, without politics, without socio-historical context. They want bad, sanitized art that doesn’t speak to the realities of the human condition.
Emily: Especially when the technology moves faster than the law. That ethos of “move fast and break things” is so toxic and we’re all living with the consequences of that mentality.
Carmen: Let’s try to end on an up note after all that. My final question is a simple one, or so I hope! What are you itching to write about next?
Emily: One of the things I want to do is a very analog project–I have this illustrated zine about being 18, driving around listening to dad rock for the first time in southeast Pennsylvania. Pulling that thread of discovering this whole cool world at that age, and that being the gateway to all these other portals. Reading Rolling Stone and discovering Lou Reed, Brian Eno, Television, just going down that rabbit hole. Reading that Tom Verlaine of Television was into Baudelaire and thinking, “Ok, let’s check that out.” I’d like to expand on the zine and turn it into a full length piece, as a love letter to my influences and that very exploratory time of life.
Having spent around a decade on the essays in Some Girls, it’s nice to feel like this project is done. It’s nice to have a breather in this moment, but I know the next thing is around the corner. I know I’ll find a new obsession to write about.
