The Songs of the Decade: "American Teenager" / "People, I've been sad"
On sadness, America, and two more of the decade's best songs so far
For our second pair of songs among my ten favorite tracks of the 2020s so far, we have two artists whose respective projects have seen them grapple with questions of alienation and faith, putting into words the sort of existential angst and sadness that often seems unspeakable until it isn’t.
Here’s the full playlist of the 100 Best Songs of the 2020s (So Far).
In case you missed any of our prior newsletters for this series so far:
Top 10 (all by me): “TLC Cagematch” / “Casual” | “American Teenager” / “People, I’ve been sad” | “Silk Chiffon” / “anything” | “Hard Drive” / “Somewhere Near Marseilles” | “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” / “Welcome to My Island”
Guests: “Starburned and Unkissed” by Gian Balangue | 3 K-Pop Songs by Justin Nava | “Huwag Muna Tayong Umuwi” / “The Loneliest Time” by Emil Hofileña | “My Love Mine All Mine” by Ashley Ranich | “Billions” by Niki Colet | “party 4 u” / “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” by Currie McKinley
8. Ethel Cain - “American Teenager”
For as long as America has existed, American art has been preoccupied with defining what America precisely is. Granted, this is true of most nations—especially those that, like the United States at its inception, were borne of the colonial imagination more than anything else—but the global ubiquity of American pop culture means most of the world is likewise privy to the identity crisis that lies at its center. To talk about America, then, is to talk about it as both country and concept, and the history of the former, one might argue, could best be told through the ways in which it has fallen short of millions of different iterations of the latter.
Nowhere is this more readily apparent than in a survey of American popular music across the decades. In the 1940s, Woody Guthrie spoke of America in terms of shared physical spaces, from California to the New York island. Two decades later, Simon and Garfunkel left Michigan for New Jersey in search of it, and in doing so acknowledged the disconnect between the geographical America and that of the national imagination. Don McLean saw it as a car-crash collage of symbols and icons—pink carnations and pick-up trucks, Chevys and levees, the Day the Music Died—while Bruce Springsteen sang of its more everyday and systemic tragedies: Dead men’s towns, refineries, and penitentiaries. In these songs and more, America is somehow simultaneously here and elsewhere, somehow simultaneously more and less than the sum of its parts.
Ethel Cain’s “American Teenager” builds on this rich tradition by liberally ransacking it for parts and recasting them in the image of Cain’s unique project. Opening with a haze of swirling, distorted guitar—a sample of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing”, itself a portrayal of small-town American striving—the song slowly reveals its version of America as one steeped in impression and memory: Football teams, Sunday morning services, parents and children. These motifs, normally associated with shared community and family values, are juxtaposed with recurring refrains asserting inherited grief (A long cold war / With your kids at the front) and an independence (I don’t need anything from anyone) that curdles into resignation and isolation.
It’s just not my year, but I’m all good out here.
This pervasive feeling of alienation is nestled between reminders of the caprices of life and the suddenness of death. The song is bookended by tragedy, opening with a neighbor’s brother arriving home in a box as a casualty of war and ending with a reference to NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt, whose death in a last-lap accident represented a sort of reckoning for the sport. Both are forever woven in the fabric of the American project, and Cain here echoes both McLean and Springsteen in her assertion that the myth of America is built on bloodshed.
Another red heart taken by the American Dream.
Surrounded by the burnt-out skeletons of a nation collapsing into itself, Cain finally cannot look to anyone else but God. In the context of Preacher’s Daughter, a concept album based on Cain’s real-life upbringing as the child of a deacon, “Ethel Cain” plays the titular role, grappling with her faith in private even as she does her best to lead the town’s congregation in Sunday mass. Through this role, Cain casts her bleak Americana as a spiritual crisis, where a servant of the Lord cries upward to a Heaven that might no longer be listening:
Jesus, if You’re there / Why do I feel alone in this room with You?
Loneliness, senseless death, and a silent God: That is Ethel Cain’s America. These days, she isn’t too far off from mine.
7. Rahim Redcar (Christine and the Queens) - “People, I’ve been sad”
“We can talk about your problems too, you know,” a friend of mine recently told me, as we were in the deep waters of a late-night conversation where I was mostly content to listen to her recount her latest adventures and epiphanies. I knew it was an earnest invitation and one I wanted to accept as a bid towards connection, but I nonetheless whiffed in that moment, searching myself for words and coming up empty.
I don’t have a lot going on, I replied (not dishonestly), but what I meant to say was: I’ve been sad, but I don’t know why.
It is easier to admit this here, perhaps because I am admitting it to no one in particular, or perhaps because this medium allows me to cloak the unbearable nakedness of the admission in pretty words and literary glad-rags. A few months ago, that same friend asked me via text what I needed for her to allow me to take up space; even earlier, another posed the same question, only in person and more forcefully. Both times, I answered in intricate and elusive sentences, terrified at what they would say if I told them the truth: I wish I knew.
After all, to make space for me is to do so for the sadness of which I am an unwilling steward, and one of the few things I know with certainty about it is its enormity. What right do I have to burden them with a problem even I, who am already so intimately acquainted with it, cannot even begin to solve? How can I ask them to sit with me and it, when I can’t even explain what it is?
Rahim Redcar gets it. On “People, I’ve been sad”, released under his previous project Christine and the Queens, Redcar weaves across verses, metaphors, and even languages (English and his native French), grasping for some way to provide us listeners with some insight to his titular sadness. He sings around the feeling without ever breaching it, describing it in either short, declarative bursts (It’s true that, people, I’ve been sad / It’s true that, people, I’ve been gone) that traffic in “as-you-know” tautologies or dense, descriptive recursions and repetitions (Vexed adolescence because of one thousand dead thistles / Walking barefoot on glass and now everything feels more intense*) that make the emotion visceral without really illuminating its source.
Perhaps the assertion of the song, then, seems to be that the source of sadness is secondary and perhaps even irrelevant when compared to the connection brought about simply by its admission. To trust that I’ve been sad is a complete sentence in the ears of a friend is to be generous and vulnerable, its own kind of blind faith that you could fall without aim and still be caught—that you could still be worth catching. It is worth reminding myself every now and again that it’s worth a try.
You know the feeling, Redcar repeats as the song fades out. Perhaps that’s the only explanation a true friend needs when confronted with the inexplicable sadness of another: If you know, you know.
*translation of the original French from Genius
We’ll be resuming the series next week with a quartet of write-ups—two from me, and two from another one of our esteemed guests—each of which, by some quirk of scheduling, will be about different but no less beautiful stages of love. Till then, subscribe above or drop a comment below if you want to chat music or loneliness; this newsletter has space for both.