High Fidelity and the Delicate Art of Breakup Playlists
Collage by Andy.
Growing up, I idolized Rob Gordon from High Fidelity, which perhaps explains more about my subsequent love life than is ideal. Rob had many bad qualities, but by the time I learned to name them, it was too late. I had already built my whole personality around having a soundtrack for love and devastation.
In my defense, I was a painfully shy kid, and I loved the way that Rob used music to communicate when ordinary, lesser language was insufficient. I watched the movie so many times that to this day, his instructions for making a mixtape are committed to memory:
“The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick it off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you gotta take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you gotta cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.”
By the time I started falling in love, it wasn’t compilation tapes anymore, but CD-R mixes decorated with Sharpie hearts and lyrics written around the circumference—which then eventually made way for the charming ephemera of Spotify playlists and Youtube links.
Still, I remembered Rob’s advice as I chose the opening songs for the first playlist I made for the first boy who made me want to make playlists. These were the songs that would christen our drive up the California coast on our first weekend away together, and the songs we would kiss to late in the car, stealing one more lungful of romance before going back to a world made suddenly airless by its absence.
Those songs marked the beginning of things that we couldn’t yet give language to. They held the thrill of learning what he liked, and the secret to making him bob his head and smile at me across the room. And they were a way of letting myself be known, too—little by little, song by song. Because if what we put on our playlists doesn’t fling open the windows to the soul, what will?
I fell in love with the music he listened to almost as much as I fell in love with him. I was wooed by the way he danced in the car to the new Daft Punk album. I laid in bed and touched his skin while The XX and Phoenix shuffled tinnily from his college laptop, our musical tastes tangled along with our limbs.
Hulu rebooted High Fidelity last year, the remake perfectly timed to catch those of us who grew up with the early-2000s staple at almost the exact age of its jaded and endearingly pretentious main character—as if to check in on how we compare all these years later. It’s as much an occasion to reflect upon the state of our own love lives and record collections (and the various ways in which they’ve collided) as it is a retelling of the story.
High Fidelity is a movie about a man reckoning with his inability to grow up by painstakingly rehashing his breakups, ostensibly seeking closure but often demanding unearned absolution. Rob’s mixtape speech, however, comes at a new beginning, as a new man. You can hear the restless excitement of new romance in his voice, his fingers itching at the buttons of his cassette deck. Though he draws similarities between breaking up and creating a mixtape, they are positioned at opposite ends of a continuum. There are songs for heartbreak, sure, but mixtapes are only for lovers.
In the Hulu show, Rob (played this time by Zoë Kravitz) sees music in a fundamentally different way than movie Rob does. Movie Rob’s relationship to music is powerful, but it’s also cynical. He wonders, “Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?” TV Rob’s tone is more reverent, as if she internalized that sentiment at some point but ripped all the disenchantment out of it. She believes in music precisely because it is so intimately connected to misery, but also to love. Music isn’t just a salve for bitterness or loss, it is how she connects with (and clings to) other people.
This, to me, is the show’s most interesting departure from the movie. It makes TV-Rob less a direct analogue to her curmudgeonly predecessor and more like those of us who grew up watching him.
Instead of a mixtape to celebrate new beginnings, TV Rob makes her ex a playlist after their breakup. She obsesses over the tracklist for days and keeps it hidden from her friends. She knows it is probably not a good idea, but she can’t help herself. It is part catharsis, part hail-Mary—a desperate attempt to find the secret, unsaid thing that will grant her a second chance.
Like TV Rob, when my partner and I broke up, the music didn’t stop. It continued long after everything else ended—the strained phone calls, the brittle texts, the coffee shop post-mortems to pick through the confounding wreckage of what had until recently been a fairly stable structure. Every few weeks, I’d jolt awake to his name on my phone and find a new EP from an artist we’d ‘discovered’ together, or a bootlegged live recording of my favorite band, or something that he just thought I might like. I’d respond in kind with a cover of a song he loved by a band I loved, or something equally serendipitous. Something that connected us too cosmically to be ignored. We had no pets together, certainly no children—we didn’t even share an apartment. But we shared those songs.
Technology, I think, was at least partly responsible for the length of time we spent in each other’s head(phone)s. When movie Rob Gordon made a mixtape, he had to find a way to physically deliver it to the object of his affections. He had to want to see them enough to make that effort. That was part of the point—to see each other again.
I didn’t want to see the boy who broke my heart anymore, but I did anyway. I saw what he was listening to on Spotify and some of it was still the stuff I’d recommended to him. He saw the selections from the breakup playlist that I had made for myself—‘Landslide’ playing on repeat for hours washed down with wine—soaked cuts from Elliot Smith and The National and sometimes the same bands we used to make out to, just to twist the knife in my own tender belly. We were always just a tap on the goldfish bowl away from one another. Just a copy-and-paste away from remembering what it was like to really know someone. The urge to still share just one single thing was so strong, and the process of disconnecting so arduous and futile, that we simply agreed to keep that small door cracked open.
TV Rob’s playlist rules are a little different from movie Rob’s. She concedes that first and foremost, it has to be entertaining, but given the delicate nature of sharing heartbreak through other people’s songs, she has some additional pointers: “You get to say what you want to say without actually saying it. It can’t be too obvious, but it can’t be too obscure either.”
Her strategy echoes the methodology I arrived at over many months of painstakingly (and painfully) curating Spotify playlists for my ex. You want to kick things off with a song that means what you also mean, but not too precisely; you don’t want to give away too much more than you already have. Then you’ll want to up the stakes a bit. Some of the songs should be brand new to your partner. They should be breezy and unladen, almost as if you’ve forgotten the meaning that once existed between you. Some of them should, at least theoretically, be about someone else, about moving on. They should include details about a romance that could not possibly be interpreted as the one you shared together.
A friend of mine kept a shared YouTube playlist with her long-distance boyfriend. They exchanged songs in place of kisses until one day he ended things over the phone while they were both driving home from work on their respective coasts. It was sad but amicable, and they agreed to make a clean break of things. But the next week, she noticed a new song on their playlist.
We spent hours decoding the lyrics, which were melodramatic and cruel in their unintelligibility. We wondered if “mistake” referred to the relationship or the ending of it. She wondered if he’d ever really loved her, and which side of the evidence pool this electronic pop ballad fell into.
In these songs for the fallout, there can be none of the young wonder that flavors a relationship’s early musical exchanges, though there is often the same blind hopefulness that melody and poetry will succeed where language and reason have not. Every song is a haggard ambassador carrying with them fragments of meaning primed to be mined for clues, chosen for some combination of nostalgia and their ability to either apologize or accuse.
After days of deliberation, Rob sends her playlist to her ex late at night after a few drinks. He never responds.
Songs were the very last way my partner and I clung to each other, and in that way, they were both mean and generous. In the new Haim single he sent me, I heard not only the stubborn echoes of love and lust that broke my heart anew, but also the Skype call from Germany when I’d asked what he was listening to and he turned ‘The Wire’ up until I could hear it crackling disjointedly over the thousand miles of ocean and continents from his bedroom into mine. Along with the Bibio remix I sent was beamed the memory of a grainy iPhone video of him clumsily covering ‘haikuesque’ in his underwear from his childhood home. Somewhere in TOPS’ new album, I heard a bus trundling through a remote area in Patagonia where we’d shared a single pair of gas station earbuds and I fell asleep on his shoulder, listening to ‘Way To Be Loved’. I knew he’d been thinking about that day when he’d sent it to me, too. For the first time in months, I knew for sure what he was thinking, and that felt like breathing again.
One day there was finally nothing left to say, and the playlists stopped (though I still have them sitting in my Spotify account, I think). I still hear songs I know he’d like and I take strange comfort in understanding what gives him joy, even though I no longer feel the same urge to relay it to him. I imagine he probably hears those songs, too.
There’s a scene in the show where Rob reluctantly goes on a first date. She’s clearly not going to give the guy a chance and, sure enough, she almost sneaks out after half a drink—only coming back because she realizes she’s left her phone at the bar. But she begins to open up when Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’ comes on and she connects with her date over a shared love for the song. As she starts to deliver a lengthy treatise on her opinion about Rumors, you can see the beginnings of romance flicker on his face. It is a tiny, perfect story about the way that we tie songs to relationships. And how, once we do, a little piece of any love and any heartbreak, they move through is stitched into the chorus forever.
I bought my copy of Rumors because it was left on top of the used stack at Amoeba and that felt like a sign. I didn’t really like Fleetwood Mac when I met my ex, but I do now. Listening to that record is less painful than looking through old photos or reading our text messages. It reminds me of cooking eggs and oatmeal in his little studio apartment, eating cross-legged on the bed in our underwear. But it also reminds me of the ways that dating him changed me, made me listen for a good bass line, showed me how to like things that I can never go without again.
It’s possible that someday, we will both have something to say and not say to each other again. I have a high school sweetheart with whom friendship has gradually come to mean Spotify recommendations texted sporadically and usually without comment. It’s not romantic, but it is very sweet. It’s music as residual love, the kind that remains knotted in your body when you’ve known someone very well. Known their tastes, the things they like and don’t like, and can’t un-know them.
In both tellings of High Fidelity, Rob posits that when searching for love, what’s most important is “what you like, not what you *are* like” and I think that’s a little bit true. But what’s also true is that those things aren’t as separable as they sound. There are few things more intimate than the shared joy of loving things together, and few things more miraculous than the way that love jumps from things to people. It is so often the case that those things, and the love they hold, remain long after the people leave our lives, acting as tiny, inadequate bottles for an enormous tide of memories and feelings that suddenly need to be bottled up. Trading them back and forth becomes an act of tremendous generosity, and sometimes, the only way to hold the intimacy that existed between you and turn it into something new. ◆
Misha Scott is a video editor by trade. She spends most of her spare time running an online publication for music and creative writing called Hullabaloo, but she is still getting used to calling herself a 'writer' in bios. Her work can also be found in Gold Flake Paint, Jr Hi Magazine, and Five 2 One. She has an on-again-off-again relationship with Twitter.