Dodie, or “dodie” as she stylizes it, is a 25 year old singer-songwriter from Essex. She has released three EPs and has nearly three million monthly listeners on Spotify. The singer began her career on YouTube, where she posted covers and plenty of original songs.

Her debut album, Build A Problem, is being released this year and the song that I’ve had on repeat this week is a single off the album! The track is titled “Cool Girl” and it was first released on dodie’s second YouTube channel as a demo. The track was originally a part of a lockdown-inspired project, in which dodie recorded and posted many demos in April, also known as ALOSIA (A Lot of Songs in April). “Cool Girl” was one of my favorites.

The song touches on the issue that many girls face, in which they push parts of themselves down to be appealing to whoever they’re romantically interested in. She leaves the time they don’t speak to each other “on the side with the nights you didn’t call me back”, pretending that it doesn’t bother her so she appears chill and laid back. In reality, it upsets her. But, she feels like she has to come off as this cool, unique girl who isn’t obsessive or overdramatic like “other” girls. In the pre-chorus, dodie sings about how she “swore I wouldn’t play the age-old game” and invest in a toxic and unhealthy relationship, but she has seen other girls “ask all your lovers away”. In these lines, dodie shows that her idea of being a good partner is pushing down her own needs and wants to make her partner comfortable. She falsely assumes that having boundaries and standards for how she is treated in a relationship makes her annoying or needy. Not only that, but she also demonstrates a bit of internalized misogyny as she judges other women for how they act in their relationships.

The chorus of the song is what really gets me. It’s a simple hook, just the words “cool girl will be different, I’ll be quiet, oh so easy” repeated, but it holds so much weight to it. The idea that women should be non-confrontational and have no real identity outside of their relationship with their partner is illustrated here. Dodie is singing about the struggle of dealing with that societal ideal, about how frustratingly easy it is to submit to it and suppress who you are for someone else. She furthers this idea in the second verse with the line ‘how much of a tongue can I bite until we notice blood / I spit to the left, carry on, just smile and say you’re good”. She feels like she has to bite her tongue and pretend everything is okay to please other people.

The song doesn’t end with some grand conclusion where dodie realizes how dumb of a societal standard the “cool girl” persona is, and I actually really like that about it. It doesn’t end with dodie changing her ways or defying the standard, it ends in the quiet repetition of the devastatingly defeated chorus lines. In a way, this symbolizes that this feeling never goes away. Despite all the uplifting girl-power campaigns we see in magazines and online nowadays, the notion is still there and it lives in the back of every woman’s mind.