What redeems it: Okay, at first glance, there's not much redemptive about a teen boy reading bad poetry over an acoustic guitar melody -- I'll grant you that.
And "A Year From Now" is probably not meant to be ironic...but if we take it that way, it becomes a unique and interesting study of (adolescent?) emotion.
The song is spoken by a teenage boy -- not quite the squeaky-voiced teen of the Simpsons, but close enough for the acne problems and obsession with popularity to be obvious -- and is in the form of a letter.
It starts with "complete and total adoration; my gift to you, my heart, was yours."
And you wonder if you should hit the stop button now and walk away.
If you don't, you end up listening to one side of a half-generic, half-detailed account of a relationship gone wrong. The more you hear, the more even the details and metaphors fit into "typical teen angst" genre:
In ten weeks you shaped it,
In one night you murdered it.
Torn from my chest and laid at your feet,
That first step you took was the worst.
Since then you've walked a thousand miles in silence and short remark,
Wow, "short remark," you're thinking. And groaning. Go ahead, take a second and be disgusted.
But be disgusted not just by the awkward phrasing that teens think signifies "poetry"; be disgusted by the cliched "torn from my chest and laid at your feet." Be disgusted by the verb "murdered" applied to a body part, and the fact that "my heart" is the subject.
Be disgusted by the melodrama of feeling torn apart and murdered by a ten-week relationship falling apart.
Be disgusted by yourself -- because you know you were like this, too. We all were.
The melodrama builds through the middle of the under-three-minute song:
Remember when we talked about where we'd be a year from now?
Remember when you held my hand like you'd never let it go?
Remember, cause that's all you can do.
We'll never make another memory,
We'll never make another memory.
I wish I'd have died in your arms the last time we were together,
So I wouldn't have to wake without you today.
The rebuke of "remember, cause that's all you can do" serves both to cut the treacle and to highlight the angry impotence of a broken-up-with teenager. These situations are somehow never mutual for teens: one always ends up with a broken, bleeding, "murdered" heart. Right around this line is where my sympathy kicks in a bit -- not because the teen is right about being better off dead that "wak[ing] without you today," but because he's not right about it. And he doesn't know he's not right.
He keeps on the angry vein for awhile, and makes less and less sense as he goes on.
This time I thought things were real.
You said they were, what happened?
You were a priority, was I an option?
I let you see a side of me that I don't share with anyone.
Promises are just words unless they are fulfilled.
You knew from the beginning all I had to offer you was my heart,
I'm sorry that wasn't enough.
The last line in this section is delivered with the sarcasm one would expect of a bitter teenager; if he's sorry, it's that you're a douchebag, not that his heart wasn't enough. Obviously, it was, but you were too much of an idiot to see that.
But there's a reminder, here, I think, of the legitimacy of teen angst: He'd shared a side of himself he didn't share with anyone. Whoever he's reading the letter to was the first to hear these thoughts, or share these kinds of moments, with the reader -- the first. And that's something. Not anything to die for, but something.
By the end, the reader agrees that "we'll go our own ways, and hopefully you'll remember the things I've told you." Other than the smidge of condescension, this seems like a decent enough ending to a bad break-up. He's not begging, despite his obvious pain. He's not going to force the issue any farther, or manipulate to get his way. That's something.
This song, in other words, doesn't work as a song, in exactly the way teenagers don't work as people. Neither one makes a lot of sense, both get angry too quickly and are too sensitive to slights, both are too intense for their own good.
But that's the brilliance of the song.
In listening to this song the first time, I found myself laughing -- not at any of the foibles of the song itself, but at my own experiences as a teenager, and especially as a teen writer. I was too intense. I was angry. I was overly sensitive. And (for those reasons) I was a bad writer.
The song offered me a chance, in other words, to react to my own teenagerhood, and that's something that no other not-from-my-teen-years song has done in quite the same way.
There's also an interesting question that occurred to me even as I first listened to the narration: Whose letter is it? Is it fake? Was it written by a band member to an ex-girlfriend? Or was it written to a band member by an ex-girlfriend?
Using a letter written to the band by a girl torn up by a break-up would be a brutal, Machievellian thing to do -- but interesting. Using the band to get the message of hurt out to a girl who's hurt him is also interesting, not just on a song-level, but in terms of how the members view the band and its purpose in relation to its fans and its members. The support system implied in that is a study in itself, I think.
I choose not to find out, if it's possible to, where the letter came from. I suspect I like the questions better than I'd like the answers.
3.64 Gamma Phi Betas
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