This Song: Hollaback Girl

Gwen Stefani

This Song is a monthly feature of So Much Stuff, offering a snippet of association to who and where I was when it was a popular release or otherwise entered my radar.

View of Downtown SF from Oakland’s Middle Harbor Shoreline Park

I’m fine now, and have been for the past 20 years, but in the early spring of 2005 I was finishing up radiation treatment for stage one breast cancer and working as a stylist’s assistant at the GAP photo studio in the Dog Patch neighborhood of San Francisco. A job that mainly consisted of ironing and steaming out kids clothes eight hours a day, but also required a certain amount of organization and attention to detail, and I’d only gotten my foot in the door when someone I knew was filling in for a manager who was on vacation.

That studio was a pretty cliquey place, and my how-can-we-do-things-better work ethic was not especially welcomed or appreciated. Or maybe it was my sickly pallor and still bald head. Or my refusal to have even a small piece of the frequent birthday cakes because I was afraid to eat dairy or sugar or anything that had ever been associated with cancer.

Kind of an apt atmosphere for this song. (This sh-t is bananas.) But I did make a few friends there over time, and it was one of them—a woman whose son was on a hip-hop dance team—who I’d felt comfortable with enough to finally ask, What exactly is a hollaback girl?

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