Farewell Jill Sobule, Sage Who Saved Me From the Suburbs
We listened every night. The 'top nine at nine'—those songs that were broadcast 'from the top of the Empire State Building,' as Z100's tag phrase boasted—meant something to two likeminded oddballs growing up in the New York suburbs. Our parents had relatively strict ideas about how much MTV should be watched after school, and this was before high-speed internet was a phrase we could even comprehend. So these after-dinner transmissions were essential temperature checks on the culture beyond our manicured town. Out there, in the wider world, it was the era of grunge (Nirvana, Hole), emo imports like the Cranberries and home-grown varieties like the Smashing Pumpkins, and also—the singer we were hoping would make it onto the countdown—Jill Sobule.
Sobule died late last week, tragically, in a house fire in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, where she was staying with friends. She was only 66—impossibly young, given that she seemed on a different plane of maturity when I first encountered her on the airwaves as an adolescent. If you knew of Jill Sobule, it was probably because of her improbable 1995 hit, 'I Kissed a Girl,' celebrated as one of the first openly gay anthems. 'Hit' is maybe a bit of of an overstatement, given that it only ever reached the mid-'60s on the Billboard Top 100, but it nonetheless made an impact for a time—though it was overshadowed, annoyingly, by the less-substantial Katy Perry single of the same name in 2008.
Sobule's version told, in perfect, three-minute miniature, the story of two disaffected would-be wives, killing time with conversation and flirtation:
Jenny came over and told me 'bout Brad
'He's such a hairy behemoth,' she said
'Dumb as a box of hammers
But he's such a handsome guy'
And I opened up and I told her 'bout Larry
And yesterday how he asked me to marry
And I'm not giving him an answer yet
I think I can do better …
Funnily enough, the song didn't resonate with my friend and I because of its tongue-in-cheek questioning of heterosexual norms—or at least, not exactly. Ironically, we have bucked the demographic trends of our generation: We both married men in our 20s; four kids for me, five for her. And yet there was something in 'I Kissed a Girl' that spoke to us straight from the speakers of our Casio stereos: I think I can do better. The perfectly mown lawns, lacrosse sticks and tennis rackets, low-rise jeans and summer nose jobs, traffic jams of SUVs, bar mitzvahs every weekend—this wasn't it, was it? The commuter town where we live in was a 55-minute train ride to Grand Central and most households seemed to have one parent at home (guess which one). What were these women doing all day long?
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