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..................number1 ....................of50
“American Teenager” by Ethel Cain
DV:
Really the only question was whether it’d be this or “Sun Bleached Flies” in the top spot, and then the video interpolated the intro to that song - including lyric of the year “God loves you, but not enough to save you” - and it was a simple choice. But it’s not just that, of course. It’s the way “American Teenager” is a microcosm, an intensely compressed synecdoche for the complicated world Ethel Cain is building, hitting all her notes at once like the arena-sized rock song it is. I’ve seen so many comparisons to Springsteen, and okay, but coming out of the bridge there’s a guitar bit straight out of “Don’t Stop Believin” which is a more telling reference. I’ve never seen Springsteen live - who can afford it? - but there are probably dozens of Journey cover bands roaming this country’s local festivals and I’ve definitely run into them before. “American Teenager” could slot right into a county fair setlist and at first no one would blink an eye: this is a bildungsroman that sits alongside the best that classic rock can offer, a tale of small town drama and exhilaration and of the confusion and desperation of youth. And of course it’s a tragedy by implication, coming early on an album about its protagonist’s murder. But it’s also a pop song that sounds tailor-made for radio and arena play, if only Ethel Cain didn’t decide to set the scene by implying American soldiers deserve to die if they choose to go to war. Or question whether Jesus existed when she drank too much whiskey. There’s this push and pull woven throughout the song, this tension between the layers she’s weaving together, a perverse dedication to never being just one thing when three or more could apply. This is about loneliness and getting too drunk and how the young always bear the brunt of violence, wherever it happens, and it also throws a sly “I do it for my daddy and I do it for Dale“ into its climax. The video tosses in references to Christina’s World and American Football; they fit just as neatly, half silly but half serious. I went to four concerts this year, and Ethel Cain was two of them. This feels right - if everything she does is overwhelming, is too much all at once, why shouldn’t she be half of where I spent my time? More than once, I thought she was the only artist who actually mattered.
MG:
In many ways, “American Teenager” is not representative of Ethel Cain; the cheerful, colorful swirl of pop is not one of her true interests, it’s more something she can do than something she loves. The rest of Preacher’s Daughter, her dimly lit, creeping debut album, takes place entirely within the confines of her imagination, there’s no need for cultural criticism in her murderous fantasia and in that way, “American Teenager” serves to ground her made-up world as one born out of the surreality we all inhabit. There is no Ethel, no Willoughby, no Hayden without the context of a country that sends its kids to fight wars the vast majority of the population don’t understand. On “American Teenager,” Ethel simply tells it like it is, like it felt at the dawn of this century, when I was a high schooler, and like it probably still feels today because nothing in the intervening two decades has slowed the churn of war, prison, and persistent, untreated mental illness that fosters the environment where a girl runs away from home and is murdered by a cannibalistic serial killer and all the sex work, condemned buildings, and fraught relationships with God in between.
The sky is still blue, the football field still green, the street lights are still yellow, and the hearts are still red in “American Teenager,” but already the kids are coming home in boxes, the brown sludge of denial and decay are creeping in at the edges and taking over. If it’s not that box with a dead kid instead, maybe it’s the brown liquor which touches our narrator directly -- she’s drunk at the pep rally, again. She can dress up her song with a major key and big, chunky chords, but Ethel Cain can’t resist collapsing in honesty: It’s just not my year, she laments. There’s no room for happiness in this world, the closest thing she can approximate is crying under the bleachers and insisting she liked it, refusing to let her sadness be sad, bundling up whatever she’s got and announcing “damn, I’m doing it well/ For me.” This is the closest she gets to exaltation, her best effort at resolving all the pain and suffering at the center of her world. She’s dead, right on schedule, by the dawn of the third act. “American Teenager” doesn’t just betray the hopelessness at the center of the Ethel Cain universe, it’s the crux of all that darkness, the Oz that begs us to remember “there’s no place like home.” If you know, you know, as the kids say. If you were lucky enough to get a taste of that Freezer Bride wafer, you chewed on its implications all year.