A Musical Survival Guide for Misfit Teens

"Like a question without answer / I can't get rid of my anger / My mind is not normal / I know but take it easy on me."

- BEWARE (Grr) by Stray Kids, 2018

If there's one thing that's been getting me through my teenage years, it's music. I'm nearing the end of my teens now, so this music is not my nostalgia; it's my yesterday, my today, and my tomorrow. Music still is a driving force in my day to day life, fueling not just my anger or sadness, but my motivation. My recovery. Music is powerful like that, it can make you feel so many things - and sometimes, instead of forcing yourself to feel happy all the time, you just need to stew in your emotions for a bit. Really feel them, deep in your soul, accept and make peace with the feeling rather than trying to fight it - and then, you'll find it's easier to let it go.

Finding songs that shared my anger, loneliness, pain, it made me feel less alone in the mess I was in. Like someone could hear me, someone could understand; is that not all we want, as a jaded teenager? It's hard for parents to understand - they're often directly involved, grew up in a completely different environment, or more often these days than not, part of the problem. Friends, truly good friends, are just as hard to find and rely on. But music? Music was everywhere. Music could listen. Music could vent. Music could scream for you, yell for you, growl for you, and carry your pain along with it.

BEWARE, also known as Grrr Law of Total Madness in Korean (Grrr 총량의 법칙) is a perfect example of the kind of song that let you feel like your anger was justified. That you didn't have to tame it, explain it, or even understand it; sometimes we're just angry, adults don't get it, and so, we bark.

The chorus goes "Don’t talk to me / Whoever I see, I bark, I bite, I rip apart / Don’t talk to me / I’m frustrated, so frustrated." combined with fierce, angry dance moves to further express the frustration. The song plays around with a lot of monster or beast imagery, personifying those intense negative emotions as something more dangerous.

"We growling, we growling / We’re turning into a monster again."

Of course, no teen angst anthem is complete without the condemnation of adults; in Han's ferocious rap verse, we get this gem: "Adults who don’t understand think I’m a delinquent / They try but they tire me out / I burn them up and eventually, they fail," highlighting the weight of adults expectations and views as a kid.

It's not just the lyrics that made this song such a head-banger during my most angst-ridden times. The song itself is full of earworm-like noises that almost feel like all the buzzing thoughts and comments around you, the rap is so aggressive it's cathartic, and the whole feel of the song is so dark and gritty it's like you ran away to some dingy old shed to burn your schoolbooks in a fire and yell about society. I've definitely blasted this in my headphones after getting into fights with my family more than once. Ah, memories.

I couldn't bring up masters of teen angst themselves Stray Kids without mentioning a few of their other most hard-hitting songs, but don't worry - the playlist has other artists on it as well, trust me. You'll quickly see why Stray Kids take such a prominent place on this list with their pre-debut title track Hellevator, to this day one of my favourite songs of all time. Why? It's dark, it's angsty, but it's liberating, with uplifting notes at the end. I've always been a sucker for sad or angry songs that end on a positive, a drive to succeed; such songs kept that spark going when it was dampened by the harsh realities of the world.

Hellevator sets the scene of an ongoing struggle from the get-go; a haunting melody with vocalist Seungmin's melancholy voice singing "My life was rock bottom, an edge of a cliff / I’m walking in a dark tunnel / Cruel and fearful days / I’m enduring through alone," which also ends up being the pre-chorus later on. It then flips a switch to Changbin's fast, gravelly rapping - a beautiful contrast to the soft vocals, showing the mixture of not just sadness but also frustration, both sides of that hopeless feeling. The song is equally led by rap as it is vocals, with the addition of an addicting dance break, making it never boring to listen to. I still listen to it all the time - I could definitely say it's a song that became a part of me, and now I offer it to you.

"People tell me this kind of suffering / Is just a passing storm / That if I want to succeed, even though I’m afraid / I need to set up a trap called failure / As I bit on the bait that is pain / I’m wandering / As I put away my tired wings of passion."

They rap and sing about loneliness, distant hopes and dreams, how society dooms them to fail - all real feelings derived from real experiences on their journey to become singers. It's so raw it resonated with many people, teens and adults alike, kick-starting their popularity with half the members still teens before debuting months later with another angsty anthem, District 9.

District 9 is an absolute powerhouse of a song. It's a cry out to the struggling youth, a call to rally together in the face of society and adulthood's prying eyes. Much like BEWARE, it's full of aggressive earworms, even more aggressive dancing, and a heavy beat to punch a wall to. Once again they set the scene right from the first verse, with "Talk talk, people talk too much / What what, saying nonsense / All the nagging and cursing, please stop / Whether I do well or not, I’ll take care of myself," already lashing out defensively, like most teens do.

"They say, you’re different from us so please leave / Fine but know this / Being different isn’t being wrong / Soon, the time will come when people will get jealous / Our place is a district where a small light shines greatly on / Starting with Stay and in the end, it’ll be everyone’s refuge."

What makes this song so impactful apart from the heavy rock influences and powerful performance is how the lyrics don't just speak up against the system, but they also speak for the underdogs just like them. It's as much about rebellion as it is about a safe haven; as Hyunjin raps in the first verse "Give me an answer, a clear answer, please / If you can’t then please stop interfering / This is our jungle / In here, we move according to our own rules / My district, District 9."

I remember this song hitting me so hard when it first released that I practically injected it into my bloodstream; I was looping it all day, at home and at school, it was my ringtone, and I learned all the lyrics so I could rap and sing to it all the time. Honestly, every song on this album, I am: NOT, hit a very certain chord - it's definitely worth listening to if you liked the sound of the title and clicked with the lyrics.

I could write a whole article on Stray Kids songs that fit this theme alone, but I'll wrap up by mentioning a few runners up songs I was going to put on this list by them: Voices, a melancholy banger about the harsh voices in your head, Chronosaurus, a song that personifies time itself as a monster that you're constantly running away from, Awaken, an emo-rock song about inner turmoil and self-frustration, Mixtape: Gone Days, the bright and pop-y personification of the "okay boomer" movement that's a lot more understanding than it seems at first, Side Effects, which is basically just Frustration: The Musical, Young Wings and 19, two deep songs about growing up too fast, and last but certainly not least, M.I.A, a song to their previous, happier selves, now missing in action.

Sing To Me by MISSIO and Death Stranding: Timefall is a very gloomy, dread-ridden song that would stay on repeat during some of my longer lasting depressive episodes. It's a song about losing yourself completely, as the artist sings to themself and describes them like a whole different person: "Talking to the mirror like I've seen him somewhere before / Said I looked familiar did we meet the other night? / Somebody once told me that there's two sides to life, what's yours?"

It's eerily beautiful, and I could honestly quote the entire song's lyrics back at you as it really captures a very specific kind of darkness that's hard to describe. It's almost like hearing your own cry out for help echo against the walls of your head, begging to be let out, which is how it often feels as a struggling teenager.

"I prayed, I prayed, God sent me right to voicemail / It's like, all day, my vanity is for sale / Take it away, my head is in my own hell."

Overall this song was perfect for when I felt like needing to succumb to the void my heart would try and crawl into. Just long enough to wrap myself in blankets and disappear for a while, let the feeling seep into my bones and linger before I get up off the ground again and keep fighting. At least with this song, I wasn't as lonely in my misery.

Now this one is one that will stay with me long into adulthood. Zombie by DAY6 is a slow build-up song about being stuck in a mundane life; living but not feeling alive. Especially with the whole global pandemic going on, I think everyone's been at a point in time where everything felt the same, meaningless, empty. Like nothing they did mattered. It's captured so, so beautifully in this song - the song starts out quiet, then increasingly stronger as the emotions grow more overwhelming and makes you want to either cry or scream or both.

The lyrics of the pre-chorus changes as the song progresses, from a casual acceptance; "When we live a life / Always dreamin' for a dream to come true / So I live this life / Wanting something I can't see / And something I can't reach / Or something that could not exist," you get the feeling of longing for a distant dream, but in the second pre-chorus, it changes to "Yeah, this is my life / Always dreamin' for a dream to come true / This meaningless life / Wanting something I can't see / And something I can't reach / Or something that could not exist," with higher notes to accentuate the growing frustration of being stuck in time.

The entire chorus itself can only be described as haunting.

"I feel like I became a zombie / Not alive, but I'm still walkin' / When the sunrise is upon me / I'll be waiting for the day to pass by, oh why? / I became a zombie / And there's nothing that can cure me / So tomorrow I know I'll be just the same / You'll see me wishin' to stop and close my eyes."

It's haunting because it's too real, like being read to dust by a complete stranger. This is the type of feeling we usually hide behind jokes and pained smiles, and now it's all out in the open, you'll be left with a vulnerable feeling like no other. Sometimes, though, it's nice to feel seen, so I welcome it.

Next we have Middle Finger by Bohnes - which is honestly everything you'd expect from a song a depressed Gen Z teen would be listening to. Cursing the system again, refusing to be held down, and of course, flipping the bird at anyone who tries to stop you. This song doesn't beat around the bush; it's straightforward, it's aggressive, and feels like the embodiment of justified rebellion.

"So I put my middle finger up / I'm done being your slave / My generation's had enough / And you should be afraid / Oh woah oh, not your prisoner / Oh woah oh, better listen when I say / I put my middle finger up / I'm done being your slave."

I absolutely love the energy from this song. It talks about being underestimated, the lyrics sounding almost like they're making fun of the fools who'd dare look down on them, like the first pre-chorus: "But I refuse to let you make me feel like I can't fly / Not only will I soar again, I'll own the fucking sky." It's rolling with the punches, it's gritting your teeth through the pain - that's the liveliness of teenagerhood. At least, it is for me.

The song also plays around with a lot of loud, intense imagery in the lyrics, making it feel larger than life, in a way. By effect, it makes the listener feel like they're part of something bigger, too, that they're more important than they're getting credit for. Definitely a great song to box to, because it gets you heated.

I couldn't finish this list without the song of my generation - parents by YUNGBLUD. This song is a direct call out to parents, specifically, the bad ones, and encompasses all the rage, the eventual acceptance, the gleeful acts of rebellion that feel like revenge.

The lyrics are quite crass in this one, but it's not without reason; teenagers are constantly told not to say this or not to act like that, so the deliberate explicitness of the words are like a cold slap in the face to that - it's like publicly breaking the rules because you've just been worn down so much you don't care about people pleasing anymore. At least, not in the moment.

"I was born in a messed up century / My favorite flavored sweets are raspberry amphetamines / I bought a car, Beretta age sixteen / I brush my teeth with bleach / 'Cause I ain't got time for cavities / My daddy put a gun to my head / Said if you kiss a boy, I'm gonna shoot you dead / So I tied him up with gaffer tape and I locked him in a shed / Then I went out to the garden and I fucked my best friend."

This song, to put it simply, is a parents worst nightmare. It's everything they hope they kids don't become and more. That's precisely why people flock to it - eventually you reach a point where everything you do is bad in their eyes, so you go out of your way to be a menace because if you're gonna go down for something, might as well make it big.

This is another song where every lyric is quote-worthy; from the first verse being a blatant "fuck you" to homophobia to the second verse pointing out the hypocrisy the older generation try so hard to keep under wraps, the song is loud and direct the whole way through. But what I have to highlight is the chorus, and how like District 9, it sets a scene of community for the misunderstood teens, the fuck-ups, the disappointment children, and tells us that it's fine to be exactly that because we're in it together, and more importantly, we'll get through this and live on anyway.

"'Cause my high hopes are getting low / Because these people are so old / The way they think about it all / If I tried, I would never know / My high hopes are getting low / But I know I'll never be alone / It's alright, we'll survive / 'Cause parents ain't always right."

Other songs worth mentioning that I physically restrained myself from venerating about but you should definitely listen to include Street Fight by Adam Jensen, Rob A Bank by Confetti, Young And Menace by Fall Out Boy, Sad Kid in a Black Hoodie by LIL PHAG ft Dr. Woke, Psychotic Kids by YUNGBLUD, Twisted by MISSIO, Emperor's New Clothes and basically the entire Death of a Bachelor album at this point by Panic! At The Disco.

And thus, I bring my Survival Guide for Misfit Teens to a close; if you're a misfit teen then good luck out there, kid. There's other people like you if you know how to look, and music that will listen to you as much as you listen to it. If you're an adult, you're either the cause of half of our problems, or a bystander to them. I hope this playlist gave you some insight on the struggles of the next generation.

Cheers to a better one.