The Teen Idle Debacle
Ariel Rivera
It feels like nearly every year, a New York-based TikTok trend forecaster is Paul Revere’ing the upcoming Indie Sleaze revival they predict will happen—“The hipsters are coming! The hipsters are coming!” Usually, I just scoff and scroll past—after all, the Indie Sleaze revival has already come and gone. We’re more in some pseudo 2016, irony-ladened, Post Trump nightmare yet again. But then something strange happened.
I was sitting outside on my patio reading Sunrise on the Reaping, with my music on shuffle, when suddenly I felt a Kindred-esque flashback to middle school. Scoring this swoosh in time were my middle school holy trinity: Lana Del Rey, Marina and the Diamonds, and Lorde. The unusually chilly weather paired with The Hunger Games’ atmosphere and Lana Del Rey crooning her sad words in my ear was dizzying.
It made me wonder: Why did I ever let these women go? Aside from Lana, who is usually my top artist each year, I rarely revisit the tortured songstresses of my youth, the women who practically raised me. Judging on the divisive reaction to Lorde and Marina’s newer music, I’m not alone in this. Why do we turn our backs on artists we onced loved? Where does the divide begin, and why do we expect our favorites to remain frozen in a moment, permanently stranded on their triangle of sadness?
Marina and the Diamonds “Primadonna” music video | Image Credit: Youtube
Marina’s newest song Butterfly released to mixed reviews with most agreeing with Staged Haze’s critique of the song calling it “a fun, but trite lead single.” Butterfly isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it sounds like a B-side track from a better Marina album. It lacks grit and personality—harking back to Staged Haze’s review, it’s a “betrayal bop, but sung with grace rather than heavy anger”—and because of this absence of character, it cannot be aestheticized by an audience. No painted-on cheek hearts, no teen idles feeling super, super, super suicidal, it’s as straightfoward as a song can be, there is no substance for an audience to daydream over.
This is the same case for Lorde’s holistic third album, Solar Power. Preceded by Melodrama, which to many is a modern pop bible that perfectly captures the messiness of your twenties, Solar Power feels like Lorde documenting her eat, pray, love moment that she experienced when she returned to New Zealand. It’s a beach bag embroidered with ‘Sunlight is nature’s remedy’ in album form. Solar Power is Lorde reaching enlightenment and finding inner peace in the tranquil waves of her hometown. It’s gotten some reappraisal as time has gone by, but is still widely regarded as her weakest endeavor. It’s an unapologetically carefree album, a stark departure from the anxiety ridden, lovelorn, party-addicted persona of Melodrama’s narrator. But what else can Lorde do? She grew out of that stage of her life, acknowledged her flaws and found ways to heal. She transitioned into a new phase, much like Marina did with Butterfly, but here’s where we find the divide between artist and fan. While the artist moves on, the fan remains stagnant, fanning the embers of their pitiful fire, stuck on their shipwrecked island with just their music and their sadness.
Lorde in her “Solar Power” music video | Image Credit: Consequence.net
We got outgrown to put it quite frankly, fans who listened to these artists and obsessed over every melancholic melody at twelve are searching for that same feeling at twenty-one and who else do they turn to, but their original favorites who taught them their sadness was okay. What they discover, however, is that that artist is no longer the lost twenty-one year old they once were. There is a sense of betrayal here, the person you thought shared your sadness is no longer writing songs that feel like they came from your head. They’ve grown, they’ve healed, they’ve moved on from misery but you have not.
Not only have they moved on, they have already completed their healing journey and are fully into the next stage of their life. No documentation of how they did this, no three verses and a bridge to enlightenment, they returned in a new era with a new look and persona that doesn’t match the one in your head. Whereas in their older music, there was a sense of glamour to their dejection, the new stuff feels stale to you. You wanted them sadder.
Lana Del Rey | Credit: Marie Claire
This is a theme that Lana Del Rey has explored multiple times now seemingly trying to shake off her sad girl image, or present herself as the evolving person she is. “You took my sadness out of context” she states on Mariner’s Apartment Complex, a song that touches upon the idealization of sadness that others place upon her. This same topic is explored in other songs like Fishtail and Get Free, and yet the idealized version of Lana her modern fans praise is the 2012 Born To Die coquette fantasy Lana, that at thirty-nine, she just simply has outgrown.
I am now twenty-one, just a year older than Lorde was when Melodrama released. When I relistened to the album the other day, the lyrics revealed truths in me that did not exist when I was fourteen, truths about how lost and dizzying this middle age between youth and adulthood can be, about how a good time in favor of catching your breath is not always wise, and how self-doubt and hatred is the oldest and most relatable form of torture on Earth. Maybe these women didn’t document the steps of the transitional period because it simply is just something you take one day at a time. Maybe one day you wake up and notice you haven’t felt nauseous in days, you start pacing less until you can remain still enough to appreciate the little things around you. The wind flipping the pages of your book, the sun calmly bronzing your skin, the music from your youth turning into words and not motifs. Until you can outgrow yourself completely.
Strike Out,
Ariel Rivera
Editor: Bruno Montenegro
Ariel Rivera is a junior at Florida International University, majoring in Media Communications with a minor in English Studies. As a writer, Rivera is passionate about expanding on pop culture topics that may seem frivolous at first glance, but which, through his unique point of view, become pillars of discussion. A self-described crazy film nerd, Rivera enjoys watching and reviewing movies in his free time, as well as reading and lounging with his dog, Neo.
