An introduction to my sick attachment to pop culture

(Nick, I apologize. This is not even remotely the topic I chose for BLOG WARS. But you've known me long enough to realize I have the attention span of a 3-year-old and am not so great at following rules.)

Let me take you back, back to a year we called 2000. Turn on the radio in 2000, and you were smack dab in the middle of the teeny-bop and crap rock boom when "artists" like pre-breakdown Britney Spears and pre-rehab Creed ruled the charts. It was a year of monumental artistic achievements like Will Smith's "Willenium" and Lou Bega's "A Little Bit of Mambo." I was 15 years old and listening to mostly punk rock and its various wussy incarnations. I spent most of my time listening to bands like The Vandals or the much wussier New Found Glory and causing innocent mayhem with my two best friends. At some point, we formed a band called The Seemonkeys (after a teacher walked by the three of us sitting in the hallway and called us the "see no" monkeys. You can see already how painfully clever we were). The band's artistic vision was to be a combination of Blink 182 and Josie and the Pussycats, which mostly meant that we wanted to play music with minimal difficulty and lots of sex and fart jokes, but also to look pretty doing it. Sure, we didn't actually own instruments and couldn't actually play them if we did, but we wrote several songs full of entendre and swear words and had a fan club who gave us money to support our shows that never happened.

Also in the year 2000, No Doubt released “Return of Saturn” named for the astrological theory of Saturn’s return: your 29th year, the year you become a productive adult. What sort of stake did I, in my mid-teens have in that sort of album? Not much, except that I religiously listened to “Tragic Kingdom” and not so secretly wanted to be exactly like Gwen Stefani. I didn’t take to it immediately. I think I, like most No Doubt fans (I assume other fans felt the same, the album wasn‘t nearly as popular as the band‘s previous…or maybe even latter. But who exactly were No Doubt fans? I imagine them all as teenage girls, but that’s only because I was a teenage girl. The wonderful/horrible thing about adolescence is that you don’t notice any demographics outside your own. I’m not sure if at 15 I even noticed anyone other than myself and the occasional cute skater boy) expected “Tragic Kingdom 2.” What I got was a different Gwen-slowed down, smoothed out musically, and lyrically introspective, conflicted, and maybe a little depressing. There were no girl power anthems like “Just a Girl” or songs about Disneyland. Instead, Gwen had turned into a pop-rock Sylvia Plath, singing about the perceived dichotomies of womanhood: can you be a badass independent lady and still want to get married? Can you be pretty without using it as a shield? Can you admire other women without turning into a jealous bitch? Why do the good girls always want the bad boys? She begged the questions I wasn’t prepared to ask at 15.

I can’t pinpoint the moment I returned to the album, or the moment it clicked in my consciousness, but I’m sure it was some time post-high school, post-9/11, likely around the first time a boy put a dent in my heart, but well before my Saturn return. I started to feel the relevance of lyrics like:

If you bore me then I'm comfortable
If you interest me I'm scared
My attraction paralyzes me
No courage to show my true colors that exist
But I want to be the real thing
But if you catch my eye can't be authentic
The one's I loath are the one's that know me the best

The sort of anxiety you can only feel when relationships start to last and be meaningful. Holding hands at the football game is easy, bearing your soul is excruciating. And the closer you get to knowing the real you, the harder you are to share. Or:

Now all those simple things are simply too complicated for my life
How'd I get so faithful to my freedom?
A selfish kind of life

The contradiction all women face growing into adulthood. If the Saturn return theory is right, I still haven’t made it to functional adulthood. Maybe the key word there is functional. I’m past the age of thinking I know everything, but not quite to an age where I can prove I know anything. For a woman, that moment in time is particularly difficult because it‘s one more gap in a life defined by gaps. At 15, I would have told you I was a fiercely independent woman who never needed a man for anything and would be a dynamo in any field I so chose to rule. At 25, I will tell I am a fiercely independent woman who realizes aspirations take work and worries that I’m not up to the challenge, and worries even more that the hours and dedication will ruin any chance of love or children or all those things I can’t ever be sure I want. At 25, I struggle more with my identity than I ever have. At 25, I take the time to contemplate where my relationships go wrong. At 25, this album is indispensable for me.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about how music/film/books/what have you sort of trace the course of our lives and I’ve also been thinking a lot about what it means to be a 25 year old female college grad with a blank slate of a future. Expect to read more on both.