Emmy The Great Goes on a Tinder Odyssey

Emmy The Great photographed by Myles Standish. If the word of 2013 was selfie, Tinder was the app that best put it to use. In case you've been hiding in a hollowed out tree trunk, or are in a RELATIONSHIP—puke—Tinder is a new dating app that allows people to judge each other's photos in one simple left or right swiping motion. If you like someone's appearance, you swipe to the left. If they like yours, you’re matched. The idea being if they didn't like yours, you have no way of knowing, so nobody gets hurt.

Tinder was an apt invention for this year, because over the course of 2013 we became more addicted to our phones than ever before. It makes sense that the next new moment in dating would take the form of a glorified game of Hot or Not which you can play on your device at any time—at the bus stop, watching TV, at work, in the ladies room—you name it. Like Candy Crush, but with actual crushes. Pandering to our increasing expectation of convenience, you can choose only to meet people within a certain mile radius. Cue a sudden spike in 4G usage around the Millionaire's Rows of the world. It's fitting that I downloaded Tinder the same month that I downloaded the Domino's Pizza app: Tinder is an easy way of ordering a date on your phone, which cuts through the tricky, crusty first bite and gets right to the… okay I give up, the analogy's over. But yes, it is easy and opportune.

For musicians, Tinder is both attractive and a bummer. It's attractive in the sense that you can arrive in a new town and sweep its population for single people, but an audience member turning on their phones to see a photo of you trying to look sexy in a mirror? That’s truly the obliteration of a musician’s mystique. We’ve reached a new nadir. Personally, I downloaded the Tinder app not because I was single, or because I love hooking up on tour, but roughly for the same reasons a playground bully gets up in the morning—I wanted to laugh at other people, sometimes in groups. Also, underneath it all, I wanted to be a part of something that everyone else was talking about, because deep in every bully's heart is a sadface emoji.

I first discovered Tinder around August. My little brother, a gifted dater of women, texted me to tell me he'd met a girl on an app. Within minutes, I was Googling it, convinced it was a salacious sex app and I must intervene before he got an STD. Within another few minutes, I joined. Because I was near West Hollywood at the time, my app immediately uncovered a treasure trove of douchebags. A sideways-cap-wearing, pectoral-flexing extravagance of douchebags, lightly seasoned with spelling mistakes and misplaced self-belief. It added up to one fun afternoon.

I became popular at parties. People would gather around my iPhone and I'd show them how to flick through the local douchebag inventory. We'd make split, group decisions. Dom had a picture of a car crash as his profile picture: Keep Him! Brett had too many photos of himself with his female friends: Lose Him! Throughout this process, I kept myself anonymous, basically a troll, with a fake name (Chris), and a fake picture (two baby sloths). I would have been happy to just do this for a month and then delete the app, but I started getting curious. I was traveling a lot for work and subsequently I was spending a lot of time staring at my phone. One day I found myself scrolling through the people who'd matched with fake, baby sloth me, and I started writing.

Scientifically speaking, most of the guys who are willing to go an extra step with two baby sloths are going to be romantically incompatible with the majority of human women. I started most of my conversations by asking people why they’d matched with me, seeing as the only thing I'd revealed was that I was female. No one replied to that, but I think the deciding factor was always, “I was female.” I tried to open a couple of conversations with “I love you.” I tried various greetings like “Hi',” “Hello,” and “Namaste.” One night I got drunk with my roommate and we asked a guy if he liked bubble tea. He replied “ASL?” which I soon found out means “Age, sex, location.” That was gross, so I blocked him.

Around October, I noticed an increase in quality for my local searches. As people caught on, normal singletons were outnumbering the douchbags and married sex-addicts. I also noticed that it came up in more conversations, and whenever someone I knew said they had a date, you could bet it’d be a Tinder date. As it became more mainstream, my ways of playing with it increased. A couple of times my friends made me change my search terms so we could look for their ex-boyfriend's profiles. On a trip to New York to shoot a video, I browsed within a mile radius whilst sitting next to my director of photography, and matched with him. Later that day, when I lost him and his phone number, we used Tinder messaging to communicate.

On the app, which is linked to Facebook, you can see if people have mutual friends with you. This is how I ended up talking to a guy in London who’s friends with a lot of my friends. It turned out he used to be a music producer and had been to an early show of mine in a now-defunct London club. When Noisey asked me to write this article, he was game enough to take me on my only Tinder date. I asked him what a Tinder date was like and he said, “It's like a normal date, but you spend the first 20 minutes talking about Tinder.” He's a seasoned user of dating websites and finds it another fun way of meeting people. He was nice and we had a lot of friends in common, but something about the situation felt weird. Like, too convenient. I realized that although Tinder cuts through a lot of the dancing around that leads from meeting someone to asking them on a date, it also foregoes the part where you kind of know them before you start dating. I sat down with this guy that I'd been sharing the odd short form text message with and realized I knew nothing about him, so I had to ask questions. That was not the Domino's 20-minutes-to-satisfaction guarantee I’d been hoping for.

I've messed around with Tinder over four months in four cities now, and the joke feels over. My brother ended up in a longterm thing thanks to the app and deleted his account. I also deleted it, but mainly because I couldn't bring myself to actually use it. As well as it being too vague a way of communicating, it feels a wrong to be a recording artist and be on Tinder. How am I suppose to ask people to buy my records, if they have easy access to dumb profile pictures (Thumbs ups! I'm in a pub!) and my sketchy messaging skills (from nought to not cool in three seconds). Twice I've tried announcing on stage that I'm on Tinder, and the looks of confusion beamed back at me always make me say, “JUST KIDDING!” and then start singing real quick.

Let me leave you with this: I recently interviewed an indie frontman about his Tinder experiences. He met a girl on it in Madrid and invited her to his show. When he finally saw her at the end, he was trashed enough to invite her to the next show in Barcelona, but when she arrived there, she looked and acted nothing like he remembered. In his own words, he “pumped” her anyway. There's no fucking winners in that story. Let's meet each other IRL sometimes, yeah? Plus, all the weirdos are gone, and I'm still a sloth.

Emma-Lee Moss makes music as Emmy The Great and we can confirm that she is a brilliant date and we kinda wanna have her babies. She's on Twitter - @emmy_the_great.

For more from Emma-Lee—like that time she ran around with King Krule, that time she tried to be A$AP Rocky's girlfriend, and that time she compared seapunk to Sailor Moon—click here.