Run! Run! Run!

“Baby, you’d better take my advice.

A black cat crossed your path twice.

The moon came out next to the sun.

You opened an umbrella in a room.

You’d better run, run, run!”

- “Run Run Run,” The Who

The Aughts

I was a teen in the ‘00s. The aughts. Or “aughties.” Or Zips. Or Nothin’s. Any of the above will just about do, and will double as an expression of my self-regard during most of this stretch of time. I was an aught, living in the aughties. A transplant, an immigrant, an introvert, a chubster, a four-eyes, and someone completely sheltered inside a world of music.

My teen angst playlist was for me what is was for most of us. Sometimes a shield, sometimes an axe, and always indispensable.

Angst

I turned thirteen in 2004, and twenty in 2011. Born in ‘91, I’m just about old enough to be able to call myself a 90s kid and somewhat avoid disingenuousness, but truth be told, despite my adoration of Nickelodeon, Seinfeld and bright primary colors, I really ought to be calling myself an 00s kid. 2000s culture dominated my youth and young adulthood.

By ‘04, I was old enough to understand most of the usages of the word “angst.” That when a person called themself “angsty,” it meant that they were suffering from what Oxford calls “a feeling of persistent worry.” Probably about something trivial, but seemingly of desperate importance. Such as my own chubbiness.

In ‘04, me and my Canadian family were living in North Carolina. We’d been here for about a year. I spent my 7th grade trying to remember to call it “7th grade,” and not “Grade 7.” I hadn’t made very many friends. I learned quickly to avoid calling soda “pop,” to avoid saying the word “sorry,” since my long “o” would immediately be mocked--it still is, now that I think about it. What has it done to my personal relationships, knowing that my very apologies stand out as aberrant?

Fat Kid

I don’t know how my siblings coped with the transplantation. I know that I coped with it by overeating. Looking at photographs of this time it’s quite clear that I was by no means obese. You wouldn’t call me a fat kid; just a chubby kid. Round-cheeked, bit of a gut, pudgy fingers. Not even unhealthy. But I hated the way I looked. I hated my fat ass. I made overtures to thinning out: I played outside every day, played street basketball with my brothers. Games to 100. I ran, biked, walked. I tried to refrain from eating too much. But there wasn’t anything I could do. Genetics had determined that I was a kid who, confronted with stress, got fat.

And it made me angsty.

A Song About A Raccoon

At first I had nothing with which to ward off feelings of self-loathing. Nothing made me feel like I could transcend my disgust at my chubbiness. I was in that no-man’s land between the end of childhood imperviousness and a teen’s ability to use imagination to reach past insecurity. But around the age of thirteen, as ‘04 drew to a close and ‘05 began—freshman year of high school—I found music.

I specifically recall “Rocky Raccoon” by the Beatles as the first song I listened to with a sense of autonomy. A song that I myself had sought out, listened to, formed an opinion about. Why “Rocky Raccoon”? I have no idea. It’s not a great song. It has some personality to it, and a great tune, but after a run-through of the White Album, it’s not going to be one of the songs that sticks in your mind.

I was walking home from the park, listening to the CD on a walkman. It was summer, the street was as leafy and pretty as any street is in a southern state in July. The song hit my brain in that perfect way that a song seldom does after the age of 16. But why now?

I had taken piano lessons as a kid and more or less enjoyed them. Me and my siblings had spent many afternoons as children running and leaping about the house to Tchaikovsky’s rousing “Russian Dance” from the Nutcracker. I liked music, for sure. But what was it that caused me to go from “Rocky Raccoon,” to a headlong-dive into British Invasion bands that persisted through my entire teenage-hood?

Runner's High

I think about running. The idea of the runner’s high. The thing about running is that your body doesn’t want you to do it. When you have been running for a while on a day when you’re just not feeling it, your legs ache, your side hurts, each footfall is painful, your brain gets cloudy. You stop to take a breather. After walking for a bit, you start running again. Your brain, which has been doing everything it can to get you to stop doing this obviously bad thing, sees that you’ve overridden it and started back up. “Oh shit,” it says, “we’re doing this again?” And giving up its attempt to stop you, it takes the opposite approach: it dumps you full of painkilling neurochemicals. This is the runner’s high. You feel like a million bucks. Nothing hurts anymore. You can run forever, thinking about anything but your pain.

What’s great is that this is a resource that is built in. Your body, faced with pain it can’t stop, has a recourse. For thirteen year old Eric, the fat kid, British Invasion was my runner’s high. The thing that pumped my brain full of happy-chemicals and allowed me to run through my years of self-loathing in one piece.

The Who?

Specifically, it was The Who. I liked the look of that Union Jack. I liked that target logo. I like Pete Townshend's long, ridiculous nose. I loved this the stirring, simple music. I liked their early stuff. A Quick One While He’s Away. The Who Sell Out. All the singles and b-sides and outtakes. Before Townshend got full of himself and started trying too hard. When they were teenagers themselves, running from their own angst by indulging in it, delighting in it, turning it into song.

When I was at my biggest size, and avoided mirrors, I could put on “Run Run Run,” and feel like I was sprinting my way through a marathon, flouting danger, climbing my way to the front. When I experienced my first real episode of bullying, “My Generation” let the embarrassment and loneliness fade away. When I began to develop a concept of self, at that age when we begin to conceive of having a dynamic relationship with circumstance (as opposed to that feeling which defines childhood of being merely a feature of circumstance), “Baba O’Riley” made me feel like a lone wanderer through a teenage wasteland, destined to succeed by sheer force of effort.

Listening to those stirring, sweeping chords, I felt what all teenagers feel for the first time: a deep, disturbing, and thrilling sense of choice. A newfound freedom to be in control of myself. The resulting emotion is what Soren Kierkegaard called “angst.” Faced with indefinite possibility, with free will, with the ability to do wrong, to grasp for what we don’t need, to climb either out of despair, or claw our way further into it, we feel angst.

What makes the Teen Angst Playlist beautiful is that, like a runner’s high, it is the music we choose for ourselves that gives us the ability to get through the most painful time in our lives. It is the first playlist in a long series of playlists that doesn’t end until we leave the earth, until our walkmen are still, our stereos dead, our iPods out of juice, and guitar unplayed.

A Song For the Frozen Sea

I was a teen in the ‘00s. I’m about to turn 30 now, in the 20s. My playlists no longer contain The Who, but it doesn’t matter.

Franz Kafka said that a book needs to be the axe for the frozen sea within us. So does a song.

--

The Playlist

1. "Run Run Run" by The Who. Look at your frustration.

2. "Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones. Turn your frustration into art.

3. "Rocky Raccoon," by The Beatles. Take a quick break by thinking about this raccoon.

4. "You Really Got Me," by The Kinks. Hey, there's a cute person over there...

5. "Spanish Castle Magic," Jimi Hendrix. Never actually figured out what this one was about, but it makes you feel like a million bucks.

6. "The Time of the Season," by The Zombies. It's always the time of the season for loving when you have the libido of a young boy.

7. "The Weight," by The Band. Feel mysterious and intelligent.

8. "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," by Bob Dylan. Now be righteously, indignantly unaffected.

9. "Big Yellow Taxi," by Joni Mitchell. Now classily rage about destruction of the environment by evil people over the age of 30.

10. "Baba O'Riley," by The Who. Glory in the teenage wasteland!