Since the much-publicized assassination of God, to which we were all accessories, one of the big running threads on the anthropocene’s message boards has been the seemingly hardwired hunger humans harbor for the practicie of ritual, with or without the agreed-upon perception of its supernatural ordinance. 

In America, the institution of work, the most poisonous force in the societal mix, is largely comprised of rituals meant to conceal the brutal power plays, Foucauldian perversity, and crushing futility of most of what we would only do for money. 

I hate work-based rituals prescribed by HR and middle management, but I’ve developed one of my own. I invite you to give it a try. 

Since 2010, when I quit a very strange job as one of the tiny favor-trading syndicate of professional power-users in charge of rigging the pre-Reddit social-sharing site Digg – act like you knew, fool – I have, whenever I’m on my way to quit a job, listened to the original soundtrack for Sofia Coppola’s gauzy, stylishly and sexily unsettling 1999 Jeffrey Eugenides adaptation The Virgin Suicides, which consists of music that marked an artistic and creative breakout moment for the French synth-pop group Air.

This album came out a few years before the takeover of “poptimism” in music criticism, a school of thought based on the notion that, because fusty patriciain white guys refused to take Backstreet Boys and Avril Lavegne seriously as artists, the duty of any right-thinking critic was to threat their new albums like the second coming of “Ode to Joy.” 

There is now next-to-zero stigma around parsing every bashful belch from Carly Rae Jepsen with talmudic rigor, or, indeed, listening to Disney-type kiddie fare to the exclusion of anything else. If anything, now, largely as a result of poptimism, you’ll find yourself on the fringes without your gold-embossed Swiftie-acceptance card, largely thanks to the all-pervasive dominance of poptimism over music criticism between Y2K and now. The war is over, and the rockists got smoked by the poptimists.

But Air, in a way that perhaps can only be understood in a pre-poptimist context, and perhaps only in full by those of us whose French DNA howls at night for critical adulation, wanted to be taken seriously. 

They’d rode in on the “electronica” wave of ‘90s kitsch, in a decade that was creatively stagnated by its preening self-awareness and its self-soothing through janky ‘70s nostalgia, itself largely a ‘50s-throwback reaction to the absolute bummer of a return to earth’s atmosphere the WW2 crew experienced during the ‘70s. 

Air didn’t want to be a White Town or Aqua-style only-in-the-’90s novelty act, or worse, the “How Bizarre” guy. They wanted to make something that would be received in the way then associated with art-rock quasi-song cycle-type albums from Radiohead, Spiritualized, or, if not that, then at least their fellow revolutionary OST-dignifier Barry “Cinematic Soul” Adamson.

With The Virgin Suicides, they easily pulled off everything they promised, making their pop skills and artsy gravitas undeniable. What they lacked in Stereolab’s pseudo-anarchic (yet highly controlled) bursts of creativity, or the hip-hop instincts of Boards of Canada, they made up for in the arch pop clasiscism and deft subtley that make this enveloping collage of whirling, paradoxical emotion run.

With the exception of jam band music, which is a way for cynical stoners to make an extremely lazy living scamming more credulous stoners for their allowances, every genre of music has its unique vocabulary for anger, sadness, love, and the whole vibrant rainbow of human misery. It ranges from hypnotic bleeps to “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”-isms to the ominous intensity of the unforgettable “Dead Bodies,” before it falls silent with a pitch-shifted remembrance and the now-disembodied line, “Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.”

The whole thing is exquisitely, beautifully, singularly sad. And it’s also dead-sexy and scary-smart, especially compared to what it might have been in less French hands.

Air’s soundtrack for The Virgin Suicides showcases almost the entire palette of this more subtle side of Mororoder-dervivative synth-pop (not the dance-club Daft Punk side, although there’s some embedded funk in certain tracks if you’re open to hearing it), weaving devastating dialogue highlights into an ambtiously adventurous yet practically seamless slab that sounds as good, if not better, without the film as it does with it.

Mostly, it’s focused on stylish lite-decadence as a smokescreen for searing grief, which makes it a brilliant booster for a stylish, subtle, vaguely self-satisfied, and yet deeply, almost unbearably grief-stricken story of five popular, privileged, impossibly pretty suburban girls who – fucking spoiler dead ahead, y’all – all kill themselves under a crowd of familial micro-managing and an unbearable connection with the sense of lost possibilities for liberation that led form the thrilling chaos of the ‘60s to the shit sandwich of everything since. It’s a profound personal statement from Coppola and Air that captures the melancholy of both the mid-’70s and the late-’90s in a way that was forever out of its time in terms of how cool and sexy its sadness can sound up to today, or at least the last time I quit a job, which was recently.

But since you ask, let’s go back to 2010, the beginning of my ongoing Air-enhanced quitting streak…

When I was on the way to quit the Digg-rigging gig, which I did for a number of reasons that are no longer important enough to recall or get mad about, I was driving a 2000 Kia Spectra I’d bought with cash from a friend (never do this), which my other friends at the time nicknamed The Death Mobile. 

One of The Death Mobile’s power windows was broken, meaning I was taking on water from a fluke LA rainstorm. None of my CDs was depressing enough for the occasion except The Virgin Suicides. 

The habit stuck. I’ve never missed a chance to bump Air before and sometimes after quitting a job. And, friend, I’ve quit a few.

I listened to it on my way to quit the nightmarish marketing gig I held with a Chicago life coach during the year I’d driven The Death Mobile 2000 miles back to Chicago to ineptly attempt to save a doomed romantic relationship, one of the shittiest times in my life that the life coach in question had no answers for. 

I listened to it when I quit a bizarre administrative job I had when I moved back to LA in 2016. And the one a few years later where my boss broke down in tears with my announcement. A wave of my colleagues had quit as a bloc, immediately wiped their asses with the company’s non-compete agreements and went to work for a direct competitor. My boss asked if that’s what I was doing, and I told her, sincerely, that I’d never betray her like that.

I just love quitting. It’s the only thing I consistently love about work.

Whatever you’re doing, you can always quit. There will be, yes, consequences, often severe ones, but you’ll get to experience the joy of quitting.  

I listened to The Virgin Suicides, this time via Spotify, when I filed for divorce in 2021. I listened to it again more recently, in the surprisingly explosive process of quitting a job at which I don’t think I was intentionally being set up for humiliating failure, but if I was, it would look eerily similar. My boss took my work-issued laptop, gave me a eye-rolling, “Good luck,” and I got on the freeway back to Venice to the opening strains of “Playground Love” with nothing left to lose from that very brief candle.

Quit early. Quit often. Quit until you find something that makes you want to quit quitting, and do that until it’s time to quit and go outside.

If life has a purpose, it is self-evidently “to feel good.” It’s why plants grow toward the sun and why I persist in sticking my dick in crazy. If you’ve seriously watched butterflies move around, you know that, to the extent that life is a Darwinian struggle for survival, it’s one fully in service to play, never the other way around. 

Play is the enemy of shame and the terrorism of social conformity. It’s the literal opposite of “work.” It’s what we really, really want and are miserable when we are consistently and methodically denied.

Air’s The Virgin Suicides consists of the richy appropriate music from a movie about girls who quit everything, forever, all at once, for reasons that are as mysterious to everyone else in their placid suburban nightmare as they are obvious to the girls themselves, the director, and a wide swath of its viewers slogging through the pointless, tacky, analysis-paralyzed placeholder years between the suicde of Kurt Cobain and the moon-howling madness that followed 9/11.

The first time I heard the music was on a This American Life segment by David Foster Wallace, my generation’s most-discussed literary suicide. 

And quitting jobs is a sort of suicide – you foreclose on old possibilities in favor of new ones as yet unknown, often with a mix of sadness, bitterness, and exhilarating relief. 

I’m sure you could think of more appropriate music to quit to, but I’ve got mine, thanks.

In the increasingly likely event that I never break through as an artist or woodman or in some other capacity that feels like I’m getting paid to have fun, I will have a means of lending continuity to one of life’s most potentially fraught and fun recurring indignities. Rituals are a hedge against chaos, and no church, state, or corporation should have a monopoly on them.

Some exits are more dramatic and destructive than others. I didn’t listen to The Virgin Suicides during my actual suicide attempt, which might explain why it didn’t take. But if I understand one facet of human nature, it’s the urge to quit in style. As long as I’m here, I’ll likely quit many more jobs, with the evocative music of Air, a group that, since its heyday, has slowed to a sluggishness of productivity that would flummox Axl Rose and Dr. Dre, which makes each extant Air album a precious jewel of elegantly fussy and subtly moving computer pop.

Quitting is your most reliable weapon against the modern culture’s most insidious forces of oppression and control. You owe it to your memories to make it special.

Recommend If You Like is not owned or funded by a billionaire or even a millionaire. We do have a Patreon. If you can’t afford to become a patron, please sign up to our mailing list. It’s free and we’re asking here instead of a pop-up. Pop-ups are annoying.