How Belle & Sebastian taught me what it is to be cool
Greetings, dear readers. This is a long one, so I apologize.
I spent a good chunk of this past weekend trying to figure out how I was going to format this blog. I have a tendency to get very lost in my thoughts, so between thinking about what kind of sauce I wanted to buy next at Trader Joe’s (I decided on their version of the Goddess dressing, and I am not disappointed. It’s delicious!) and pondering if my cat, Biscuit, needs a cat-brother or sister (still debating whether there are more pros or cons to this one), I decided I wouldn’t pigeon-hole every single one of my posts into the same format.
This is very typical of my thought-process. Waste a ton of time coming up with solutions, and then decide at the last minute to go in the complete opposite direction. Classic Annie.
Anyways, I hope my format of no format isn’t too hard to follow. If I want to share a recipe with you that I have tried and loved (or tried and hated! That’s probably more entertaining), I’m going to do so. If I want to share a video that I am proud of working on, then that’s what I’ll be blogging about. You get the idea, yes? Great. Moving on.
Anyways, today’s topic is how Belle & Sebastian, the Scottish indie favorite, made me realize what it is to be cool. I’ll begin with some background.
(Imagine the “thinking about a time where something important happened” transition in bad made-for-TV movies where reality wobbles into a memory.)
The scene begins in 2005 or so, a time when the Kardashians were a couple of years away from taking over reality TV, Destiny’s Child broke up, and George W. Bush was our nation’s fearless leader. I was a 13 or 14-year old dance major at a competitive arts school, and was definitely not one of the cool kids. It was my first experience with mean girls (thanks for calling me a giraffe, ladies! Really original material about someone being tall for their age), my first experience at not understanding something at school (goodbye, dreams of anything math-related), and the first time I felt seriously inadequate.
I had my feelings hurt a lot during these years. I was a ballet dancer in a predominantly modern-oriented program, and was intimidated by just about everyone. It didn’t help that I was isolated even farther by being one of only 30 or so of the so-called “bright minds of tomorrow” in the Gifted program, of which only 4 or 5 of us were dance majors.
Being in Gifted was a problem when it came to making friends in the dance program, but otherwise it was a Godsend. I made some wonderful friends, quite of few that I still share close friendships with today. With the Gifted kids, I could be who I really was– the “crazy friend”, as one of my best friends’ moms described me not too long ago at a dinner party. To this well-meaning mother, this meant I was that one friend who was usually in trouble with her parents, was into “weird” (AKA not mainstream) things that her daughter hadn’t ever heard of, and had the tendency to do or say things that most wouldn’t dare for fear of embarrassment.
I was kind of a total weirdo, but that was okay with me. In fact, it still is today.
Here’s the story (this is where the “a-ha!” moment came in to play):
There was a girl at school with a made-up name (I kid you not, she told everyone she told her mom she wanted to be called this and apparently her mom went through with it), and she was effortlessly cool. She was the breed of cool that I could have only dreamed of at that age. Constantly ahead of the trend, she shopped at thrift stores, wore black eyeliner, and didn’t give two damns about what people thought of her. I wanted to be exactly like her. She ended up dating my middle school dream boy (which was my first experience with rejection! How fun), was talented in more areas than I could count, and listened to music we all imagined was made up because our 7th-grade minds were incapable of comprehending the band names she’d carelessly throw around.
I vividly remember this one time in particular where we were hanging out with a mutual friend and walked to Starbucks for frappuccinos (it was 2005, don’t judge me). The college-aged, handsome and bearded barista boy was in awe of made-up-name girl’s t-shirt, a screen print of a Neutral Milk Hotel logo.
“You’re much too young to know who they are,” he said.
Made-up-name girl flipped her hair and shrugged it off in a way that said, “I’m cooler than you, barista boy, and I am 12.”
I knew at that moment I wanted to know exactly what she was listening to.
One band that she was really into was Belle & Sebastian, who I grew immediately fond to. A few songs off of their Dear Catastrophe Waitress album in particular were my favorites.
Flash forward to senior year of high school. Now as a transfer student to a private Catholic school where I was not preppy, wealthy, or involved in school sports, I was once again an outsider.
The summer before my senior year, the film (500) Days of Summer was released. If you haven’t seen the movie (which you really should– it’s wonderful), the character Summer (played by Zooey Deschanel) uses a Belle & Sebastian line as her senior quote. When I have bangs (as I did my senior year), I bear a pretty strong resemblance to Zooey Deschanel. For some reason, that made me feel really attached to her character. This character attachment resurged my interest in Belle & Sebastian, which had died down a bit due to my newfound loves for more out-there groups like Animal Collective. I wanted to be like Summer, despite her short-comings as a model girlfriend. I realized I identified Belle & Sebastian with being cool– something I seemed to be constantly falling short of.
And now to the final flash forward.
My senior year of college, my love for indie music got the best of me and I worked at the student-run radio station. By the end of my time there, I had been promoted to station manager where I got to run the station to my liking. In January, we were sent a copy of Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, the 9th studio album of Belle & Sebastian. To say I was excited was an understatement. Here I was, in charge of something that is traditionally where the “cool kids” hang out (according to every college movie ever, anyway), and Belle & Sebastian had once again stumbled into my existence. Had I finally made it? Was I cool?
We added the single “The Party Line” to rotation. For some reason, this run-in with the band was different. No longer did I feel insecure or intimidated. I’m not entirely sure what changed, but I felt like myself for the first time in a really long time. I was going through a pretty rough time at that point in my life and “The Party Line” made me want to dance and jump on the sofa in our station lounge. I was genuinely happy with who I was. I felt completely free for the first time in what felt like forever.
I didn’t have to try to be cool anymore. I realized then and there that being cool isn’t what it’s all about.
It’s about being yourself and owning it. The more you want to be like someone else, the farther you get from finding yourself and who you are truly supposed to be. You can strive for something as much as you want, but it’s never going to happen until you let it happen naturally. I am the only Annie Black that is exactly like me, so I might as well embrace it.
And for that, I owe it all to Belle & Sebastian.
Correction: I wasn’t kidding about being bad at math. I was 13 or 14 in 2005, not 12 or 13.
dededos
janainaart
areudirty
blakekathryn
stormborns
ellievsbear
