To think, I'd ever give a shit.

I have a bone to pick with Jane Austen. I like her books, and I think she does excellent and charming satire. However, there’s something the matter with Mr. Darcy—specifically, that the canonization of Pride and Prejudice means that precocious girls in middle school read about him, and advance into adolescence with the weirdly optimistic notion that assholes might suddenly stop being assholes because they fall in love. These kinds of girls usually as cynical and self-righteous as any Austen heroine (of course, many have a pleasantly acidic center consisting of a lack of confidence and self-esteem), but they (and maybe I’m including myself in this), are oddly moved by any narrative featuring such a charmed transformation. I’m talking about Tristan and Jess on Gilmore Girls, and lots of John Hughes movies, and Buffy, and Ten Things I Hate About You (which, I and many of my friends can still quote from at the drop of a hat).

But what can we do about this? Not very much. We can fall in love with bad guys and wonder if they’ll change because we love them (unlikely), or we can recognize the pattern and keep ourselves from liking anyone at all (which is just as harmful and certainly not a step towards becoming truly independent and unencumbered adults). Or maybe, we can listen to more pop music (in my mind, always helpful).

The Manhattan Love Suicides have a pleasant tongue-in-cheek name, and a debut that was just released on Magic Marker. They are low-fi and vaguely twee, and their single “Things You’ve Never Done” is the perfect antithesis to any Austen-related angst. It has a poppy guitar riff, heavy drums and syncopated handclaps (yes). They lyrics tell the story of deciding to leave “this dirty town”, and at the same time, leaving a guy who is apt to walk away. The characterization is exactly that of a Mr. Darcy or Petruchio—“I’ve told you once, I’ve told you thousand times/ This ain’t no play and you don’t need to learn the lines/ The things you’ve said to me have overstepped their mark/ I guess it’s true your bite is much worse than your bark/ They could write a feature on the things you’ve never done/ Ten inch headlines on the front page of the Sun.” The singer goes on, a grounding description of the kind of relationship we tend to romanticize—the one based on witty but horrible rhythmic banter verging on verbal abuse. As the song ends, with more handclaps and a distorted guitar, she sings, “You really blew it/ and I say screw it”, and, ostensibly, packs up for someplace better. This is the antithesis of Heavenly’s desperate “kiss him ‘til he’s obsessed”, and I think we could all use a little more of the getting up and walking away from the things that upset us.