Doomscrolling With A Soundtrack
Ethel Cain’s “American Teenager”, Paramore’s “The News”, SZA’s “Ghost in the Machine”, and the current state of the world.
As 2022 comes to a close, I find myself in a very reflective mood. A reflective mood that’s of the somber variety, might I add.
The nights are longer and colder and darker and if you’re anything like me, it’s easy for seasonal depression to creep in on you. It is truly so easy to slink away into your personal mind cave of hell where all of your brewing end-of-year existential crises live instead of facing another day where the sun sets at 4 PM. And if you are really anything like me, you distract yourself from your own problems by wrapping yourself in a nice warm blanket of doomscrolling, discourse, and anxiety for the future.
We really do have so much to be worried about going into the new year: the climate crisis, humanitarian crises the likes of which have never been seen before, global increases in antisemitism/homophobia/far-right radicalization, the ongoing pandemic, threats to abortion access, multiple wars with civilian casualties… etcetera, etcetera. You get it. Things are bad, generally speaking.
Of course, I may be a little bit biased, but I think the best people to make sense of everything are artists. Movies, music, books — any form that can take our complicated feelings on existing in this world (that frankly might not be around much longer) and put then in a neat little digestible package.
Musical art is in a unique position as it can contain and utilize both written and visual elements — think concept albums that tell a larger narrative story or music videos/visualizers that pair imagery chosen by the artist to go along with their songs. Music is very much based on emotion and is often the result of impactful moments in time or the artist’s life. And if we’re talking impactful moments in 2022, then boy, artists this year sure had a lot to work with.
With that, here are three songs that dropped this year that I find meaningful both sonically and lyrically for you to enjoy during your inevitable pre-2023 spiral.
“American Teenager” - Ethel Cain
One of my friends had been begging me to listen to Ethel Cain for the longest time. When I asked where I should start if I wanted to get into her music, my friend replied that “American Teenager” was my best bet. They were so right.
Often described as a folk-pop/country fusion that sounds like it’d be right at home within Taylor Swift’s Fearless record, “American Teenager” is the breakout single from Ethel Cain’s debut concept album Preacher’s Daughter, released earlier this year.
Despite its upbeat, dreamy tone, the song is very much a criticism of “all the things the ‘American Teenager’ is supposed to be but never had any real chance of becoming,” says Cain.
With lyrics like “The neighbor’s brother came home in a box / But he wanted to go so maybe it was his fault / Another red heart taken by the American dream”, Cain brings to mind images of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young teens heading off to fight for their country in the Iraq War, only to come home dead, having been failed by their country and the system that led us to war in the first place.
Just like the song itself, the glittery promise of the “American dream” is all a front for the darker underbelly of the reality what the “American dream” really entails. The same can be said for the rest of Cain’s album, Preacher’s Daughter — be warned, while I do highly recommend you give it a listen anyway because it’s one of the year’s best, it does not sound similar in the slightest to “American Teenager”. Ethel Cain is not your happy country-pop it girl. There’s a whole storyline here and it involves cannibalism. For real.
Anyway.
In the music video, Cain, dressed in a red and white cheerleading uniform (my high school’s colors, funnily enough) gives the American flag the finger. Later, a home video shows two children watching the events of 9/11 unfold on the news. “American Teenager” is unapologetically ingrained with the nostalgic imagery of the early 2000s, then it’s juxtaposed with Cain’s spiteful lyrics. They practically beg to be screamed aloud in field, fist pumping along: “Say what you want / But say it like you mean it with your fists for once / A long, cold war with your kids at the front”.
American Teenagers eventually become American adults. And American Teenagers, who were jaded by the unrealized fantasy of getting out from under the harsh stadium lights of their high school football fields and leaving their small towns for bigger and better things eventually become American adults. Speaking from experience, there is no worse fate than being an American adult and feeling like you’ve been lied to by everything and everyone you once looked up to.
Cain, who is 24, perfectly captures this feeling I’m sure is just as relevant to today’s American Teenagers as it was to American Teenagers in the early 00s. If this isn’t a doomscroll song, I don’t know what is. At least it’s super catchy so you can dance to it.
A hopeful resolution comes at the end of the song: “I’m doing what I want and damn, I’m doing it well”. At least I can say that much is true for my experience post-American Teenagerdom.
ADDENDUM:
I don’t know where else put this in this section, but it seems “American Teenager” has resonated so far that it’s reached former President Barack Obama, who recently included the track on his list of favorite songs for 2022. Obama has always marketed himself as the “cool” and “in-touch” President, but I think Ethel Cain’s reaction to this rather out-of-left-field development adequately sums up the irony here.
“The News” - Paramore
Anyone who knows me personally knows that I’m a sucker for Paramore. I’ve written about my love for them before, after the release of their 5th album After Laughter.
Now, for their upcoming 2023 album This Is Why, Paramore is transitioning to a sound that’s more reminiscent of their “Misery Business” days. “The News” is the second single the band has released from the upcoming record, along with the title track.
Based on the lyrics, it seems that “This Is Why” came out of the band’s frustrations with the world during the traumatic year of 2020. “The News” is no different, but in this track, Hayley Williams and her bandmates Taylor York and Zac Farro lament their toxic relationship with what everyone who doomscrolls knows too well: you guessed it, the news.
Kicking right off with Williams declaring “War / A war / A war on the far side / On the other side of the planet”, Paramore has created — dare I say — a doomscroll anthem. The chorus sums it up pretty well: “Every second our collective heart breaks / All together every single head shakes / Shut your eyes but it won’t go away / Turn on, turn off the news”.
Sometimes the news can feel so paralyzing it’s like you’re hypnotized by it, eyes glued the screen by some unknowable force — or at least that’s how Paramore chooses to depict it in the song’s music video.
Williams lies in front of a glowing laptop screen, her eyes white and glazed over. Trapped in a hellish red room with only a couch, a door, and a TV set, Williams has no choice but to “turn on, turn off” the news. A distorted clone version of her later sits with the original Hayley on the couch, expressing just how neurotic social media and endless scrolling can make some of us feel: “But I worry, and I give money / And I feel useless behind this computer / And that’s just barely scratched the surface of my mind”.
Poised to perhaps bring back emo days of yore with an even greater sense of modern cynicism, Paramore might soon be gracing the news themselves a little more than they’d like. You, however, can be safe inside and listen to this song instead.
“Ghost in the Machine” — SZA ft. Phoebe Bridgers
I don’t have as much to say about this song as I do my other picks for this article, but I still think it fits the theme. Plus it’s just a good song in general.
SZA has certainly been making the rounds again lately, with her sophomore album SOS having just been released and TikTok latching onto a verse of hers from an SNL sketch. She’s also collabed with every sad queer girl’s favorite, Phoebe Bridgers, on the aforementioned SOS with the track “Ghost in the Machine”.
This song isn’t as overly devastation-driven as my other two picks, but the lyrics make it clear that SZA is craving authentic connection after it feels like the whole world has drifted apart. She asks “Can you distract me from all the disaster,” and later “Can you lead me to the ark? What’s the password?”. SZA just wants a reprieve from everything bad going on in the world right now, whether that’s through an actual, physical relationship with a partner, or some metaphysical version of escape.
SZA’s tone throughout the song is almost desperate, pleading for some humanity in her life. This also ties into the song’s title, which is most likely a reference to Ghost in the Shell (1995), a cyberpunk anime film and manga where human consciousness (the “ghost”) can be augmented with the help of cybernetics in addition to other body enhancements (the “shell”).
Here, however, we have “the machine”, which I think could represent a lot of things. To SZA, I think “the machine” in the context of this song is our selfish, hedonistic society that’s riddled with stagnance. It’s hard to break out of the machine when you’ve realized you’re a cog in it too late. And when the machine lacks humanity, empathy, and compassion, it’s even harder.
Talk about bleak. But Phoebe Bridgers is on the track, so you probably could’ve guessed that already.
Doomscrolling is something we’ve all fallen victim to at some point. If you find yourself stuck constantly swiping to refresh your feed of the same negative, depressing headlines, maybe these songs can at least pull you out of your phone and get you focused on something else.
They allow for more meaningful reflection on why things are bad and how we got here. Or maybe it’s not that deep and you just really like listening to these songs.
Happy New Year! I hope 2023 is slightly less bad than 2022. For you, for me, and for the rest of the world.
At the very least… we’ll always have good music.
