THE WEEK I played Tartufi's "Worst Email Ever" 23 times, I was noticing a theme of interpersonal wreckage. There's nothing like misfortune set to music to make things seem like they were destined to get that bad. So I played it while sitting in bed in the morning, half awake, head to knees, assessing the damages. I used it up, walking to bars and people's apartments with the headphones on. "Don't contact or approach me. I know just what you're up to," Simone Grudzen sang. "And you know that you say I'm such an asshole." Frustration and crossed wires flew through the headphones. I kept getting mad again. Meanwhile, there were blistering fights, underlying tensions, and bad horoscopes that predicted the worst. Which is pretty much what happened. Sometimes you can't say anything right and you can't shut up.

By day five, I'd stopped checking my own e-mail, but I was still playing the song. Rousing and danceable, it was like the best of the Cars and Cheap Trick, roughed up and dumped in a garage. Someone out there was miserable and wanted to be left alone. Yet Grudzen's delivery briefly convinced me over and over that being called an asshole is like rock and roll, though it rarely is offstage, as Grudzen probably knows to her regret, having taken the time to write the song.

The last time I saw Tartufi (Grudzen, Pam Jost, and Lynne Angel) play, however, two girls near the stage spent the entire set alternately making out and jumping up and down, and when Grudzen announced that Angel had written a new song, everyone cooed and screamed. Tartufi were made for such things.

I'm never as bad as I think I want to be, and I hardly ever tell anyone what's on my mind, which might be why I'm fixated on girls in songs who sheepishly confess their sins, who make other people cry and sigh, who are far worse than I've ever been. The other songs on the Tartufi album (it was recorded to two-track by someone named Smurph at Stanford's radio station, KZSU, and that's what it sounds like) are nice but drift away to other topics, including what sounds like a naughty childhood memory involving a handrail, but maybe I just have a dirty mind. That's all well and good, but I'm building a collection of bad girls who sow unhappiness in their path.

There's "Joanna" on the Infinite Xs' self-titled album on Chainsaw, in which Tamala Poljak urgently waits for a sign from a girl with no alibi and no regrets, a girl "as good as bad can get." She's the kind of lyric object of affection that makes you walk around the city wondering if she lives in your neighborhood.

Swerving downward, on the second Amos House Collection (Wishing Tree), Kleenex Girl Wonder's "Right into the Arms of the Queen" turns yet another girlfriend into the original sinner, memorialized in song. "Was she so evil and did she mislead you, out of the garden and onto the ark?" Graham Smith wonders. I'm deeply affronted, naturally, but it's catching up to "Worst Email Ever" on the hit list. "Does it make your heart beat faster as she tells you stories?" Smith asks, and I know he means "lies." But it sounds just fine to tell lies and get caught. It's better than saying nothing and no one noticing. "You make love so empty," he tells someone, his voice lifting at the end to plangent, slightly off-key sorrow. It's plaintive and helpless, like all the worst parts of getting caught under someone's spell. I feel something like envy for a girl being set up for a really big fall.

And then came the day a friend left Nikki and the Corvettes lounging around the house. The leader of the pack (a '60s girl group from 1980), Nikki Corvette is on the back of their self-titled album (rereleased a few years ago by Bomp!) chewing a lollipop still in its wrapper. She sings about "girls like me" and "boys, boys, boys," and she looks and sounds like a beautiful brat. I wonder where Nikki is today. The Corvettes sure didn't make it too far out of the driveway, so maybe you can't get away with that kind of behavior for very long.