With the nostalgic atmosphere created by reflecting back on growing up with yellow lights on the street, Ethel Cain’s American Teenager transports you with the very first line of the first verse to Cain’s own teenage years, spent in the southern states of America. The record is a leading single from Hayden Anhedönia’s (known by her fictitious artist name, Ethel Cain) album,  Preacher’s Daughter, which grapples with themes of religious and generational trauma, cannibalism, and gendered violence through a fictional narrative over the course of each song. To me, American Teenager creates magic with the dream-pop, alternative, heartland rock instrumentation and vocals, which makes it stand out from the rest of the album. With mentions of the make-believe, high-school American football teams, and the swell of the pre-chorus with ‘And I feel it there/ in the middle of the night’, Cain creates a sense of illusive ethereality, which is then jarringly juxtaposed with the sorrow of death – the song speaks of a man who is enlisted in the army at a young age, and whose body is subsequently brought back home after he dies overseas. ‘Another red heart taken by the American Dream’, sings Anhedönia, thereby critiquing the unrealistic notion of the American Dream, and the idea that in chasing glory which is achievable only through either luck or well-established social standing, it is perfectly and unfortunately acceptable to lose everything in the process. 

The song makes you think about political and social propaganda, and how easy it is as humans to fall for false promises of glory, success, betterment, and happiness when they have been starved of it by hungry power structure which exist solely to extract profit. By creating a dramatic irony with its relatively upbeat rhythm and melancholy lyrics, American Teenager critiques the harsh realities of believing in the American Dream, and the effect it has had specifically on the younger generations of America. The idea of the futility of believing in an idealisation of society and cult-like nationalism is also explored in Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, though the phrase ‘American dream’ did not exist in the 1920s. In any case, what we can glean from the repetitive exploration of such a theme is that the American people still find it to be relevant to their experience. Political songwriting like Cain’s thus serves as a necessary tool to highlight prevalent power structures and the state of the world. It highlights beauty, while simultaneously bringing to attention the ugly bits of the various forms of idealisation which we may overlook. Ultimately, music remains a mirror facing the world as well as human nature through presenting a painting of our own perspectives which we often get accustomed to, to the extent that we forget to pay attention to them – and music is that ever extended rope that allows us to climb up to them anew.           

Image Credits: Lars Holmberg on flickr.