A/S/L is a story about three teenagers who decide that they’re going to make the greatest video game in the world, and who don’t do that. One’s teenage years are the time in one’s life when music is the most emotionally unmediated and vital. My own teenage years were also the time in my life when, plugged in via Internet Relay Chat to the ZZT game-making community of 1998, I was taught most of what I know today about music.
ZZT stands for Zoo of Zero Tolerance, Tim “Epic” Sweeney’s own teenage creation which contained a strikingly powerful editing program through which you could Make Your Own Games. ZZT is the analogue of the novel’s CraftQ game-making community, which was full of people who, in my dazzled eyes in that Clinton-era heyday of 1998, were much cooler than anything I knew in suburban North Texas. I spent years there, a whole counterlife; many of my adult friendships grow directly from this. It’s where I learned about David Bowie and the secret history of the Beach Boys; the first time I ever heard the Smiley Smile massacre edit of “Wind Chimes,” it was from a friend who one day, based on a dream, drew a picture of me as a girl. In this place were so many starting points. Here, in all their immodesty, are some.
Battle Scene – Black Mages
What better way to start than steeped in the thrilling churn of Final Fantasy’s battle system, courtesy of the great Nobuo Uematsu, royal composer of Squaresoft in its 1990s salad days? One imagines my three teens—Abraxa, Lilith, Sash—listening to this while they code and write dialogue and design maps, drawing secret conclusions about their value in the world.
This Will Be Our Year – The Zombies
A song about friendship marbled with sadness: “It took a long time to come.” So many of my own friendships came through ZZT and feel like this sometimes. There are two close friends in particular from the ZZT days that I talk to almost constantly via our secret Friend Slack, the chat agent that most resembles the book’s IRC sequences. In the course of writing this playlist, I held a UK launch event for the Dead Ink edition of this book: two ZZTers showed up, people I’ve known for over two decades; they sat in the front row along with trans women I know, my coworker, my student, my agent. It was an overwhelming blend of all these spaces of my life, which I think is also something like the characters in the book feel as their teenage years overtake them. This song has the energy that knits the world together.
Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through – Jim Steinman
Jim Steinman is A LOT, and his extremely sinister High Control Creative Friendship with Meat Loaf fascinated me during much of the writing of this book and served at least a little bit as the model for how Sash runs her CraftQ company in the 1990s chapters. This song also makes me think of the part of the novel when the time has shifted and 2016s-era Abraxa arrives battered in Jersey City, trying to find what she’s lost: “I treasure your love / I never want to lose it / You’ve been through the fires of hell / You know you’ve got the ashes to prove it.” So many trans women are like this; I’m so in awe of us.
I Can Do It With a Broken Heart – Taylor Swift
A song about being a trans woman in a professional workplace setting. There’s this Dodie Bellamy image, I think in The Letters of Mina Harker, describing what it’s like to be a woman: without reference to the text, I remember it as walking around like a bunch of leaking water balloons, every moment threatening to slosh over. And yes, that feels like professional womanhood to me some days. Imagine this playing, with increasing volume, during any scene in the 2016-era chapters of the book where Lilith and the cis characters are speaking: lights, camera, bitch, smile!
All I Want to Do – Beach Boys
Brian Wilson singing his heart out in this strange proto-shoegaze track from 1971: “All I want to do is always be good to you, to help you with whatever I can and protect you in whatever you do.” This is a beautiful and innocent sentiment; I want to believe that this is what these characters, bad at is though they may be, want too.
Isn’t It a Pity – George Harrison
And yet! George Harrison’s lavish farewell to the Beatles and ode to being in the soup with other people, from his first solo album, the great meditation on impermanence. (Nina Simone’s cover is also legendary —I worried about including her maybe ad libbed, trancey monologue about how we’re all “programmed” for selfishness being confusing, but perhaps it fits the novel’s mood of tech paranoia better?)
Wild Ambitions – Yellow Magic Orchestra
Trivia: this is, as far as I know, Haroumi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s only direct songwriting collaboration within the extended Yellow Magic Orchestra corpus. It’s a strange creative pairing—it reminds me of Dennis Wilson and Mike Love bizarrely teaming up for “Only With You” on the Beach Boys’ underrated 1973 album Holland, recorded in Holland—which is part of the reason I selected it. One of the challenges of the book was honestly finding ways to connect Lilith and Abraxa, the two nodes of the core triangle who have the least capacity to affect one another. I wish I had done better with this in the book. I wish Hosono and Sakamoto had done more together too, this combination of Sakamoto’s stately grandiosity and Hosono’s ever-intent yearning.
Komm, Susser Tod – Arianne, from End of Evangelion
Many trans women have a relationship with this song, and maybe we should not! It’s about the shame the world would like you to feel, which plays during the scene where Shinji Ikari’s lavish guilt-feast over his ill treatment of Asuka Langley Soryu causes all humanity to be annihilated by a Third Impact of gentle angels who grant you your heart’s desire: no longer to be separate, no longer to recognize and respect the difference between you and other people. But what are we, without the power to recognize that?
Party Mindset – Andrew WK
Andrew WK has the capacity to party so hard that he transcends the need for ordinary human frailty, friends, and connection. The party is so intense that no gentle human stuff can stand in its path. “Don’t need no friends to get me by, I couldn’t figure out that scene / No means or ends to justify, just a one-man party machine.” There are many chapters of the book in which the character Abraxa lives underground and alone; this reminds me of them.
The Emperor’s New Clothes – Sinead O’Connor
This is my power song; to the extent that I am at least a little bit all my characters, Abraxa loves it too. The part that consistently breaks my heart is when Sinead talks about her relationship and how it contained rages, her meltdowns: “It seems years since you held the baby while I wrecked the bedroom / You said it was dangerous after Sunday, and I knew you loved me.” RIP.
Damballah – Exuma
A song about spiritual contact and destruction by water: like many of Exuma’s songs, feeling almost channeled, human lungs as nothing but radio. Much of the book involves Abraxa having an experience that is either magical or psychotic, depending on your preferred frame. This song, and maybe Exuma’s output generally, has the wide-eyed belief of a petitioner.
The Ship Song – Nick Cave
A song for the scene toward the very end of the book, after years have passed and much has happened, when two characters who have not been in physical space together throughout the book finally are, watching cars on the BQE in silence, counting to one thousand.
Words Drowned by Fireworks – Nobuo Uematsu
See previous description. Whose perceptions are these? In writing this book, I wanted to take pains to honor no one perspective over another, to have any perspective you enter the book following to potentially be the truest one. And yet there are moments we cannot access: words drowned.
You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio – Joni Mitchell
I think the characters in this novel are really mean to themselves in ways that make them worse. They shouldn’t be; really none of us should? As my friend Casey Plett likes to say, “Everyone’s doing a great job”: I believe that about a lot of people; I bet I believe that about you.
The middle third of this book features the two characters who I think are meanest to themselves in the most extravagant, self-isolating ways, and it’s really a lot! It was a lot to work on these parts of the book, revising and embroidering and rearranging, year after year, stuck with them castigating themselves, underground and in the dark.
And then I’d get to the scene that brings the book into its final phase—two trans women taking slutty selfies in the forest—and it just felt so nice for the whole next week, like everyone got a reprieve, got to take a breath. This song makes me feel like that. “If you’re driving into town with a dark cloud above you,” consider Joni! Joni has got you.
Tonight, Tonight – Billy Corgan
I want to close my list with Billy—perhaps the opposite of Joni? The Joni-Billy dialectic—because I guess thing song braids together a lot of the energies of A/S/L in one. How weary it is to be a teenager! All that “resolute urgency of now” that you feel when you are young and you are discovering your powers and you realize that you have friends who care about the same things you do. All the brutality of feeling that if you do not hold tight to your dream of making the greatest video game in the world, there is something you are failing to honor. But I don’t think we honor by holding tight. I believe we can change, that we’re not stuck in vain. I believe we are not the same, we’re different: I believe the knowledge of that can be as liberating as Billy Corgan’s weird voice makes it sound. I believe, reader, that we can be free.