Songs of Teen Angst

I’m older then probably most people who write for Vocal (I could be wrong), I was a teen in the 80’s. I’ve always liked rock music, but it got harder as I got older. In junior high I was into bands like Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, and Twisted Sister, but when I got into high school I got into harder bands Metallica, Megadeth, Testament. Now I still like all those bands, but I’ve gotten into others like Jinjer and Nightwish.

A lot of the songs back then were angry. The rock genre as a whole is one of the few genres of music that actually has songs that bring out the full gambit of emotions and have lyrics for almost every occasion (maybe I’ll write an article on this?).

Some of the anxty songs I listened to back then were:

Metallica - Fade to Black. This song is about suicide, but it wasn’t meant to be a pro-suicide song, but an anti-suicide song. It’s about someone who’s so depressed they feel so full of dread that killing themselves is the only way to fix it. I was never suicidal, but like most people you do have times when you’re sad, and songs like this reach out to you, not to make you think killing yourself is a good thing, but to show the darkness that is in us and sadness is a darkness. So, listening to songs like this helped me get through the sadness by thinking if they could write a song like this, they must have been going through something themselves. Songs like this made me feel closer to the band at a time of grief, or depression I had at the time.

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Scorpions - Still Loving You. This song is about someone who lost love, but they hope to gain it back. In my last year of high school my girlfriend at the time and I broke up. It wasn’t anything we did wrong, but she was leaving out of state for college and thought it was for the best. I sent her a tape with just this song on it, nothing else. It didn’t work, but it did tell her how I felt and ultimately made me feel better.

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Twisted Sister - The Price. I love this song, it's about the price it takes to chase your dreams. That price could be family, friends, money or all of the above. If you make it, skies the limit, if you don’t failure and letting down the people around you. So, is it worth the price to keep going after your dreams? Or should you stop and embrace the people you love in front of you?

The chorus says it all:

“Oh, it's the price we gotta pay

And all the games we gotta play

Makes me wonder if it's worth it to carry on

'Cause it's a game we gotta lose

Though it's a life we gotta choose

And the price is our own life until it's done”

Obviously for them it worked out.

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Ozzy - Crazy Train. It was about the cold war in the 80’s. How things were going off the rails, and we could all be killed. Nuclear war was a fear back then, even more so than now, I think. I didn’t really get the meaning of the song until years later. I thought it was about a person who felt they were losing control. My parents argued all the time and I felt like I was losing control because I couldn’t help with their problems. So, to me our family was on the crazy train.

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There were probably more anxty songs I listened to but these were the ones that touched me the most. They got me through the hard times of my teen life. I still listen to some of these songs in tough times. I now have other songs that I listen to as well. Music can be very therapeutic, but it can also help you in good times as well as bad.