The Courtney Barnett song that lifted from ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
For her rambling, stream-of-consciousness lyrics delivered through distinctively direct vocals, Courtney Barnett has become the indie rock-infused voice of a generation. She inserts intimate and specific details of her own experiences and anxieties into every track so that each one almost feels like we’re reading a diary entry. Though her words are deeply personal and intimate, they’re also endlessly relatable.
By channelling her own feelings and fears into guitar-driven soundscapes, Barnett has reflected the experiences of so many other women. Despite their specificities and quirks, her songs often mirror the universal anxieties of modern life, though perhaps nowhere more than in ‘Nameless, Faceless’.
On her second studio album, Tell Me How You Really Feel, Barnett does exactly as the title suggests. In turn, as she tells us how she really feels, she also puts into words those feelings many of us are unable to express. On the album’s lead single, ‘Nameless, Faceless’, Barnett channelled the loneliness and fear felt by so many women worldwide.
“I wanna walk through the park in the dark, men are scared that women will laugh at them, I wanna walk through the park in the dark, women are scared that men will kill them,” Barnett declares in the song’s powerful chorus. It’s a line half-borrowed from Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, but a sentiment that’s just as pertinent today.
Barnett didn’t actually first read the line “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them; women are afraid that men will kill them” in Atwood’s text. Instead, she unknowingly stumbled across it in an article, as she recalled to Pitchfork: “I actually lifted it from an article, not knowing it was her quote. I didn’t know who she was until I saw The Handmaid’s Tale, and I didn’t make the connection until I was getting the album credits together.”
Despite not knowing the quote’s origin at the time, Barnett was struck by the meaning of Atwood’s words. She said: “I’d seen it a couple times in things I was reading, and I remember being like, ‘That is the strongest point.’ Because it’s so dumbed-down, it’s kind of funny – the way it flips is funny – even though it’s not a funny thing at all.” It’s precisely the quality that makes Barnett’s poetic writing so strong, juxtaposing witty mundanities and clever writing with hard-hitting topics and concerns.
Barnett matched this feeling in her instrumentals, explaining, “It was a hard song to fit together, because the music was this combination of three songs I was working on, and the lyrics came later. Instrumentally it’s so silly, it’s got such a poppy verse. But, in a way, that makes sense with the quote itself.”
Combining Attwood’s sentiment with her own experiences of misogyny, joking lines like “He said, ‘I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and spit out better words than you’”, and unfortunate mundanities like “I hold my keys between my fingers,” Barnett forged ‘Nameless, Faceless’, a devastating yet defiant statement about the fear women feel each day.
