music enjoyer moment: sky ferreira taking her sunglasses off

A little guy named Mick Jagger once sang "you can't always get what you want," and in that song he was specifically referring to the Sky Ferreira album that has been in the works since 2014. This album, allegedly called Masochism, has been in limbo for so long that there is now a #FreeSkyFerreira movement where Sky Ferreira stans do things like bombard Capitol Records' social media posts with pleas for Masochism's sweet release. Patience is a virtue but I never said I was a virtuous woman.

In 2013, my heart was a baseball and Night Time, My Time was a bat swung at just the right time. I wasn't even a Tumblr girl, which is where a lot of the energy around Ms. Ferreira's platinum blonde, iron-deficient, leather-jacket-and-ripped-tights aesthetic came from. I was just 23 in New York City with boy problems and a cheap whiskey headache, sending out special Spotify playlists to crushes willy-nilly, Sky's "Boys" coming in somewhere in the second half: I knew it was you all along / You put my faith back in boys. Someone should have arrested me.

So I have a long fire burning for Sky Ferreira, like a tomb of the unknown soldier kind of thing, and when I saw people saying not nice things about her 2022 single "Don't Forget," I got sooo mad, and I await this new album eagerly. In the meantime, a music enjoyer moment: Sky Ferreira playing Letterman in November 2013, singing "You're Not The One," a song that answers the question "What if early '80s U2 started playing late '80s hair metal?" She wears her sunglasses almost the entire time. She looks cool, as you are supposed to when you are a rock star, on stage, wearing sunglasses. A blonde in sunglasses is a weapon of mass destruction.

But wait, get this: she doesn't keep the sunglasses on the whole time. At 3:15 in the video, she whips 'em off for the last chorus, revealing a pair of stunningly melancholy peepers and transforming from a cartoon drawing of a cool chick into Sky Ferreira. This is the moment in a television show where the studio audience would go wooooOOOOOO! In this moment, Sky understands that being cool only gets ya so far, and at a certain point, you must drop the facade and be vulnerable. Which then just makes you cooler in the end! I've always thought this sunglasses moment embodies everything Sky Ferreira is: in a world where you can get your heart broken so hard that everything becomes not sad but embarrassing, the act of letting your guard down is a little radical.