Brickley’s novel focuses on a specific cultural era that begins around the time of the September 11 attacks (9/11) and ends with the 2008 financial crisis and the election of United States President Barack Obama. While the novel references a diversity of eras in American pop music, it also tracks subtle shifts in cultural attitudes, allowing protagonist Percy Marks’s aesthetic tastes to draw a line from No Doubt’s “Total Hate ‘95” to OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” to Panda Bear’s “Comfy in Nautica.” It is contextually important to consider how the social events that serve as the background for the beginning of the novel influence Percy’s choices and aesthetic sensibilities.

At the start of the novel, Percy and her friends are still living through the end of the album era, relying on CD wallets to store their favorite albums. The opening years of the 2000s carried over cultural trends from the 1990s, allowing teen pop acts like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys to maintain their positions at the top of the record charts. However, it was also around this time that the Internet became increasingly accessible to the general public, allowing for the rise of file-sharing networks like Napster, where users could easily download individual song tracks for free instead of having to buy albums. Percy uses Napster in Chapter 8 and discovers the Nina Simone cover of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” for the first time. Through events like the Y2K phenomenon, American culture expected that cyberspace concerns would be the focus of history for the next 10 years, but that expectation was upended by the September 11 attacks.

The September 11 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center pierced the myth of Western progress and invulnerability. The optimism that American life would only move forward with the rise of the Internet shifted into national grief, which precipitated the patriotic anger used to justify the American-led War on Terror; this development was followed by anti-interventionist resentment against the second Bush administration. In the novel, these attitudes are evident in the response to the single Joe and Percy write together, “Bay Window,” which many rightly interpret as a song about their experience of 9/11.

Instead of becoming the default space for life in the new millennium, the Internet became an alternative space for people to escape the angst and paranoia that marked American society in the wake of the attacks. This was especially true for American youth, as 2003 marked the emergence of the first social media websites, such as the long-defunct Myspace and Friendster. Myspace in particular became a major hub for independent artists to upload music, gain popularity, and achieve success. In the novel, Percy turns to the Myspace page of Joe’s band, Caroline, to look for updates on their new album. Myspace is also the website that she uses for her job as an intelligence specialist, when she seeks out trendsetters whose aesthetic tastes align with hers. Outside of the Internet, Percy finds comfort in such emerging outsider spaces as Poplife, which gathers fans of Britpop together. Historically, these venues provided a balm for the angst-ridden mood that pervaded the decade.

Brickley uses the year 2008 as a bookend to signal that the anxieties of the United States have shifted away from 9/11 to focus instead on the financial crisis. This particular time frame is notable because it marks the end of the Bush administration, ushering in the beginning of President Barack Obama’s tenure in 2009. Although the novel ends before it can show the impact of Obama’s administration on Percy and Joe’s lives, it is the anxiety over the economy that forces Percy to abandon her marketing job and reconcile with Joe, whose livelihood as a musician is much more volatile than her own. Her decision to prioritize personal relationships over corporate assimilation points to the disillusionment with the status quo that Bush’s United States had engendered since the start of the millennium. The novel leaves the success of Percy and Joe’s partnership open to interpretation. Effectively, the novel shows how Percy moves along with the times, growing out of the dark feelings that mark one era of upheaval in order to survive the next with grit and anticipation.