Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl — Broken Social Scene
#365Songs: May 5th
Shh… don’t tell anyone, but I was a server at the Cheesecake Factory in Cambridge, MA after I quit my first publishing job after college. Amongst other awful aspects to that job, the “restaurant” played Top 40 pop music from open to close — all the cloying boy bands and Britney Spears-types that seemed to dominate radio back then. An unforgivable era in music (perhaps the worst in modern history), unless you spent your post-shift nights digging through Napster. Hours and hours of sleepless nights, downloading and discovering, falling into the rabbit hole of sounds that have fueled my life for hours a day since then.
One of those bands was Broken Social Scene. A true Canadian supergroup, the path from BSS leads to Stars, Metric, Do Make Say Think, Feist, Apostle of Hustle, KC Accidental — bands that captured my attention for years, that led me into other genres like post-rock, dream pop, shoegaze, post-punk, and yes, some serious mo’fu’ing twee. I love these bands (still) but I was most deeply obsessed with the early Broken Social Scene albums. It was era-defining music.
Broken Social Scene’s 2002 album, You Forgot It in People, is basically a masterpiece, the collective at their finest — made up of all the names in all those bands that went on to build their own legacies. From open to close, it doesn’t miss.
I appreciate Pitchfork’s setup for what is otherwise a flawless review: “Case in point: Broken Social Scene. No one wants to admit that they like a band that goes around calling themselves this — a band who, judging from their artwork, stands around all day looking pensive, crouching, and feeling the music in dramatic grayscale, a band that finds its home on Arts & Crafts/Paper Bag Records, who puts the message “break all codes” above their own barcode, and who dedicates their album to their “families, friends and loves.” I already had them pegged! How could they not be the most unimaginative, bleak, whiny emo bastards in the whole pile?”
I can’t even imagine the countless number of listeners who have avoided this band for those exact reasons. But the sound is immersive, it’s chaotic, track after track is anthemic, memorable, a future influence on two decades of like-minded bands.
I have no validation for this comment, but I’m going to confidently argue that Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl is the most covered indie song of the past two decades. (Lover’s Spit is a close second, another perfect song don’t argue with me it will not end well for you.)
In 2018, NPR named Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl one of the best female-driven songs of the 21st Century. They wrote, “As vast as the instrumental landscape reveals itself to be, building from isolated banjo strums to a crescendo of violins and percussion, it’s Emily Haines’ careful dictation that gives the self-reflective poem about adolescence its everlasting allure. Haines’ breathy whispers capture what it means to grow up, trying to embrace the joy of designing your own makeover while honoring the kid you used to be, without dramatizing the delivery. In that, this song has directly influenced the sneakily simplistic indie rock of today.”
Looking back at our younger selves can be complicated, a process of reconciling who we are with who we thought we’d become — wondering what happened to that spirit, and energy, that goes missing in so many as we get older. There’s just no song in the modern era that captures the nostalgia for our former selves quite like this one. Metric’s Emily Haines, who continues to release great dance-y music every few years, was the angsty fuel behind the lyrical character — an older woman looking back at her younger years haunted by her unrealized dreams. Layered with heavy vocal effects and floating violins, banjo plucks, and a repetition that builds more and more desperate to get that time back, to be that teen again, to start this whole adult life all over again.
Haines recently said, “A song that’s definitely achieved that thing that we all want a song to do — which is [to] outlive us all and welcome everybody in its own way with a life of its own.”
And it’s done just that.
A quick aside: I have no desire to be seventeen again. To regret is to live in a past you can’t change at the expense of the future you can still influence. Or something like that.
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