The Alternative Number Ones: The Juliana Hatfield Three’s “My Sister”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

Juliana Hatfield never had a sister. This blew my fucking mind. I couldn't comprehend it. I was sure that the music journalists of America were all lying to me, that there was some vast Kafka-esque conspiracy to erase Juliana Hatfield's very real sister from existence. It was already amazing enough that someone had gotten on the radio with this great, weird, conflicted song about all the feelings that can come with having a sister -- love, anger, envy, longing, guilt, the weird dissonance that comes with knowing someone better than anyone else in the world but not really knowing them at all. And then someone was going to tell me that this sister was not real? It was too much. Everything that I knew was a lie.

But the music journalists of America were not lying -- not about that one thing, anyway. Juliana Hatfield, a person with no sister, had written an elegantly devastating song about the idea of having a sister, and she made it sound so real and lived-in that I believed every word. I have a sister, but she's nine years younger than me, while the sister of "My Sister" is presumably older than the narrator. When "My Sister" was on the radio, my sister was four, so I didn't have any real point of reference for Hatfield's song, either. Maybe that's the magic of "My Sister" -- just a whole lot of people with no big sisters imagining what it might be like to have one.