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(CW: brief suicide mention) Music bloggers when park that car drop that phone sleep on the floor dream about me park tha
There was a point when most of my friends started wearing makeup for real. Gone was the bright face paint and greasy play palettes, the tips of our fingers shimmering blue, replaced by attempts at winged eyeliner. One of my closest friends was someone else when we were 13 and she was in a hoodie and her glasses. Now she wakes up hundreds of miles away and I watch the street we used to play on become a green and grey smear through the train window. And you’re not coming back.
Can’t you come back?
Some tracks just feel seminal. Like the first time you listened to them, you graduated to some previously unknown measure of cool. Examples: Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Androgynous by the Replacements, whatever the first track you heard from Sound of Silver by LCD Soundsystem was. Of course, at a certain point you do stop being 14, but this perception of the world is nice while it lasts. Let me put it this way: it’s the shift from leaving Ribs on repeat to actually having Lover’s Spit left on repeat, from listening to Beabadoobee sing about sitting at home crying to Pavement wishing she was Stephen Malkmus to finding yourself lying on the floor staring up at the ceiling and praying to God you were the lead singer of Pavement, going from Give Yourself a Try to Disorder. From the cave wall straight to the source of the light.
And this is how it starts: six seconds of banjo over a quiet guitar. An occasional drum. Used to be one of the rotten ones, fuzzing in over the soundscape, and I liked you for that. 74332991249 dead!!!!!!!! 3814394723984723984 injured!!!!!!
The pitch correction, that inhuman distortion of the doubletracking on the vocals makes it sound unnerving in its repetition. It is more rote recitation than it is singing. By layering the vocals this way, filtering one of the tracks through that odd pitch correction, the recognisable, simple, human vocals are undercut—the song becomes not just the recollection of a time passed, but the sense of watching a memory distorting all fleshlike and warm in your hands into something colder, more removed, even as you try to keep your grip on it. The two vocal lines, two threads of time wrestling with one another: past and present twining and untwining with violent force, the lost child you once were trying to push themselves forward and over the voice you now sing with.
I like how boring it is textually. What really happens in it? Someone bleaches their teeth, there’s someone’s smiling flash, and beneath it all there’s only the inanity of halfhearted gossip you can’t be bothered to speak loud enough to be heard. Being a teenager, by and large, is boring. By the time that hallowed 90 second stretch kicks in—the line between command and description muddied beyond recognition—the spell has been cast. It becomes almost frantic, those ceaseless drums and repetition, this resuscitation of teenage ritual, summoning forth nights aching with immaturity and adrenaline that barely any of us lived. And there, at the end of it all, the very same words that the song started with. Memory twists back on itself and leaves you right where you started. A door opens and you disappear through it, reliving the days of talking trash under your breath, but you only ever wake up where you began.
park that car drop that phone sleep on the floor dream about me is an incantation.
park that car drop that phone sleep on the floor dream about me is a call to prayer.
park that car drop that phone sleep on the floor dream about me is the only good reason to not kill yourself.
park that car drop that phone sleep on the floor dream about me is the sense your adolescence has flown by too fast, that you blinked and suddenly adulthood became dog teeth grazing your heels as you fight to outpace it.
park that car drop that phone sleep on the floor dream about me is the world that truly exists, the one that lives and breathes removed from some of the other seventeen year old girls who inhabit music, those halfbaked phantoms worrying about his brother finding out and on the covers of Cross Bay Boulevard.
park that car drop that phone sleep on the floor dream about me is, when you are a lonely 15 year old growing into a lonely 16 year old growing into a lonely 17 year old, a hand to hold. It is an escape.
In less than two minutes, invoking cars parked and phones dropped, Anthems becomes its own world expanding into memories imagined and real, illfated nights spinning out from the violins, lost friends crawling to the fore in the cluttered backing vocals, dreams about lovers prayed for and received or not received twinkling in the banjos, years and years converging on what amounts to 90 seconds— and then the drums cut out. All that’s left is that bassline, those sparse and glittering instruments slipping into the background, a banjo, your heart lying bloodied in your hands.
Michelle Zauner described it as “[encompassing] everything—all of these fragments of being a teenager” and I am inclined to agree. It’s such a blurry image of adolescence. It’s not the full picture because it can’t be. Too much time has passed, too much life has been lived to pull to the front anything other than these moments; the first five years of trying to get with the plan obscured by the next five years trying to be with your friends again. In many ways, all being lost is a foregone conclusion: the narrator asks for “you” to come back only once, slipping it in on the tail end of that first and you’re not coming back, like a half-remembered prayer—more muscle memory than beating devotion.
There is also the mere fact that some of us would never have the fragments or the full picture. Reasons general, physical, or mental get in the way. So, like so much of the lives unlived, we live it through our headphones instead. Waaaa!!!!!!
Anthems is a collection of images and a central idea, calling for itself to be unpacked by the obsessive and unwell, and since I heard my name: once upon a time, in a far off kingdom, there was someone who used to be (no longer! the golden age has passed and now only its ashes remain) one of the rotten ones (rotten? = doomed, insouciant, or just plain old gross? Furthermore, “rotten ones” - childish connotations = a group outgrown?) and I (finally! some focalisation for the starving art rock lovers!) liked (past tense!) you (unspecified relation = former self? perhaps an old friend, sat on a park bench like bookends? someone watched/admired from afar???) for that. (→ song becomes a dialogue? = undertones of Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine?=C.f. Homer’s Odyssey → I believe it was Ionesco who s
And on and on and on the song can unfurl. Tiktok singer-songwriters eat your heart out!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There is no concrete ground to hinge the narrative upon. What is there to show? What is there to tell? It’s all gone now anyway, and it’s not coming back. Can’t you come back?
Maybe this should be boring but to me it is just hypnotic.
Plus, in a world where Pitchfork, the very publication that made this album, decides there’s only a 2-point difference between You Forgot It In People and Harry’s House, lying in bed staring at the ceiling feeling like you’re going to die but refusing to pause Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl by Broken Social Scene constitutes praxis.
I think its enduring hold is so life affirming. Sometimes there are good songs and sometimes they survive. If we ever have another Golden Record, my suggestion is that the only thing we put on it should be this one song about 70 times. If the aliens don’t get it then the earth shattering scientific breakthroughs that their contact would bring wouldn’t have been worth it anyways just saying xoxo
The narrator surfaces one last time. Used to be one of the rotten ones and I liked you for that, again. Now you’re all gone, got your makeup on, and you’re not coming back. There is no new insight. How can there be? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
Where do we go from here? Even the album doesn’t move on, not really. Pitter Patter Goes My Broken Heart is what this album ends with and it feels telling that the track grows into the instrumental from Anthems. The album twists back around on itself, brings back what has already passed to close itself out. And so the whole album is imbued with a sense of loss. Or fucking is it????? Is it really imbued with that sense of loss, a permeating sense of nostalgia, or is it only so heartrendingly emblematic of times passed and ages lived that I can’t help but see it that way???????? Was it written to be a eulogy to memory and being young and stupid and the internet feeling small and exciting, or do I just want it to have been? Does it make a difference? Is there a difference? Where are we? When’s your curfew? Has your mom called yet? I’ve got school tomorrow. I’ll text you once I get home.
tunes for “soz for dying again everyone i’ve just been dead. thanks everyone who’s rocked up in the last few weeks. hopefully i’ll get back into doing this again if at least one thing could manage to not go horribly wrong. anyway here are some oldies but goldies xo”: xiu xiu — asleep, jon brion — row, big joanie — how could you love me?
song of all time !!! you know i'm always in awe of your writing but really truly just !!!!!!!!!!!!! this is so beautiful and so much, it's everything <3 thank u for sharing it
THIS IS EVERYTHING... SONG OF ALL TIME