I was fourteen years old when this decade began. So, if my math checks out, that will make me twenty-four as it ends. Such is the story of my 2010s. From a high school Freshmen to a college graduate, one year removed. From state-enforced curfews to self-imposed ones. From the benign anxieties of a confused teenager to the overwhelming anxieties of a confused adult. They call them my formative years. According to some individuals much older and supposedly wiser than me, this is a decade I’ll remember fondly. And I suspect, because memories can be a powerful thing, that I’ll remember the music of this decade fondly too. This list is roughly the soundtrack to my young adult life. These are the songs I danced to at senior prom, heard through the thin walls of college dormitories, jammed to on my way to work and dwelled on during some fragile moments alone. One day, I’m told, these will be the only songs that carry emotional resonance, the only songs I truly understand. Somehow, I doubt that’s true. But if it is, at least my retirement community will be bumping.
10. Lorde – Melodrama (2017)
The great George Costanza once said, “I know less about women than anyone in the world.” This statement is incontrovertibly false, because I know less. This is not due to a lack of curiosity, which I have in spades. My brain is just incapable of generating a thought that a female brain would. If you were to draw a Venn diagram comparing every thought I’ve ever had and every thought every woman has ever had since the beginning of time, it would look like John Lennon’s glasses. Yet somehow, this hasn’t stopped me from accruing a large network of female friends.
A few years ago, while chilling at the house of one of these female friends, I spilled water on myself. I suppose it’s possible that someone spilled water on me, but I’m rarely involved in messes that aren’t at least partially my fault. My friend was gracious enough to throw my soggy wardrobe in her dryer and lend me a set of her pajamas for the wait. Keep in mind, this friend is at least six inches shorter than me, not overweight and has, well, the curvatures of the female form. But cross my heart and hope to die, that chick’s PJs fit my chunky body like a glove, and I haven’t been more comfortable since. This is an uncanny sensation. Clothing intended for someone else feels like it was intended for me. Something must be off. Either my friend wears her pajamas too baggy or I, for all these years, have been wearing my pajamas too baggy, and need to adjust.
This is precisely the same feeling I had when I first listened to Lorde’s Melodrama—an album made specifically for angsty young women who drink Starbucks, that somehow speaks to me on a profound level. My subconscious couldn’t handle this response and so, just like the pajama dilemma, I was left with two choices: write off the experience as an anomaly or identify the error of my ways and fix it. I chose the latter. And as a result, my pajamas are just a tad tighter than they used to be, and my music choices, a tad more Melodramatic.
9. Arctic Monkeys – AM (2013)
I only dormed for two semesters in college. Incidentally, it’s the only time I spent with a roommate since age nine. For the sake of this anecdote, we’ll call this roommate Joey, since that was actually his name. Joey was a tall, lanky guy with fire-red hair and a freckled complexion (I seem to recall him describing himself as a ginger, but I don’t recall it sounding self-deprecating). He was an aspiring filmmaker, because aren’t we all? When we met, he was hanging a Pulp Fiction poster up in our room. I liked that movie, so I liked him. But that was when I thought a Pulp Fiction poster in your bedroom made you interesting. Now I know a Pulp Fiction poster in your bedroom only means you think you’re interesting. These are the hard lessons of higher education.
As the semester rolled on, Joey and I didn’t always get along. And I suppose that was no one’s fault. He was a west-coast city kid, I was an east-coast suburbanite. He was vocally liberal, I was quietly conservative. He knew how to party, I knew how to sleep. He thought Kevin Hart was funny, I had taste in comedy. This is starting to sound like the lyrics of an Avril Lavigne song, and for that I deeply apologize.
I don’t think about Joey all that much, except when I listen to Arctic Monkeys’ AM, at which point I magically teleport back to that cramped dorm room in Boston and recoil. In that repressed memory is Joey, belting out the lyrics to “Do I Wanna Know?,” “R U Mine?” and “Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High,” as he seemed to do every morning for about four months straight. And there I am, awoken from my brief slumber at an hour I rarely wished to see. The fact that I can still listen to this record is surprising. The fact that I still LOVE this record is a testament to the power of forgiveness and the resilience of the human spirit.
8. Taylor Swift – 1989 (2014)
The four worst months of my life were in the fall of 2014. Let me be abundantly clear, that statement is not a reflection of how bad my life was between September and December of 2014, but a reflection of how good my life was before and after. In that time, I did not attend any funerals nor experience a devasting breakup. I did not suffer any financial hardship, nor lose my home in a fiery blaze. I did not sustain any bodily injuries, nor contract any life-threatening illness. I don’t even recall a tummy-ache. All I did was drop out of school and get a job at Target. The phrase “check your privilege” was solely invented for me. The truth is, everyone should work retail as early in their lives as possible because you have to learn how bad it is before you have no choice. In that way, I’m happy I popped my retail cherry when I did, because it forced me to do everything in my power to avoid that fate. But hindsight is 20/20 my friends, and in the moment, I was not seeing things so clearly.
My job at Target was as a member of the “in-stocks” team, which involved walking around the store with a barcode scanner, counting the number of socks on the sock rack or tampons on the tampon shelf and inputting that number into the system. 99% of the time, the number in the system was already correct, which meant I spent the majority of my days confirming the data of a fully automated system in hopes of finding the rare inconsistency, thereby increasing the daily revenue of the store by, maybe, one ten-thousandth of a percent. If your retail job doesn’t involve the occasional existential crisis, you’re doing it wrong. At some point in my very short tenure, the higher-ups at Target deemed me to be “good” at this job. Again, I don’t how one could be “bad” at counting—assuming they’ve completed the first-grade math curriculum and possess all ten fingers and toes—but I wasn’t one of those people. So, as reward for my competence, I was assigned to the electronics section.
I’m sure most Target veterans would tell you that electronics is the worst section to work. And that can sometimes be true—less co-workers to goof off with, more customers asking insanely specific questions (like the time I spent 20 minutes helping a senile old man find the director’s cut of 2014’s Hercules, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) and, of course, the music. Target, for some godforsaken reason, still sells CDs, which means the same five songs from the same five pop albums play all day, every day in the electronics section. To some Targeters, this endless rotation is as close as they’ll come to contemplating suicide. But I got lucky. In October 2014, Taylor Swift released 1989. And let me tell you, counting HDMI cords never sounded so sublime.
7. Kanye West – The Life of Pablo (2016)
Earlier this year, my buddy Alex and I went to Phoenix, Arizona. I don’t know why. I mean, besides the obvious reasons. We’re young and supposed to embrace adventure; there was snow on the ground in Connecticut and it doesn’t snow in the desert; Alex had time off of work and I was (and still am) on a two-year sabbatical from employment. I guess the idea of a vacation made sense on paper, but there wasn’t anything aside from a few golf courses and spring training games that made Phoenix an obvious destination. No matter, Alex won the coin toss and that was his decision.
On the first day of the trip, Alex and I decided to put our youth to good use and hit the downtown scene, i.e. a Norm MacDonald show at a local comedy club. I drove, Alex drank. If you were watching us stroll through the hard Phoenix streets, you’d think it was the other way around. Because Alex, heavily intoxicated, walked with statuesque posture. And I, sober as can be, was limping, having just sprained my ankle on the curb. The next day, the lovely lady at the CVS walk-in clinic ordered me to stay off the foot. So, what did I do? Like any sane human, I walked rim of the Grand Canyon.
Please understand, I am nary a sucker for tourist traps and would love nothing more than to play devil’s advocate on this. But not even I, in all my hot-takery, can deny the breathtaking majesty of the Grand Canyon. Photographs can’t possibly do it justice because, when you’re looking over the edge, it already looks like a photograph. Then you stare a bit longer and realize your eyes just lack the depth perception to comprehend the scope of this hole in the ground. Assuming you’re not bothered by negligent parents taking selfies as their kids play hopscotch by the edge of the cliff, it’s a top ten life experience. Highly recommend. Just know that it’s a four-hour drive from Phoenix, so leave early and download some podcasts for the trip. Alex and I did neither. Instead, we left too late, engaged in some idle chit-chat and, once we ran out of “Would You Rather” questions, flipped on Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo. Since that day, I have never felt more American.
6. Katy Perry – Teenage Dream (2010)
The year is 2010. The location is the small gymnasium at Plainville High School. I believe the date is Friday, October 22, but please don’t ask me to testify on that in court. The event in question is the Annual Homecoming Dance and, my, what a magical evening. Cool kids gathered around the punchbowl, bashful kids clinging to the walls, tipsy teachers making room for the holy ghost and the music of Katy Perry blaring through the outdated PA system. “Teenage Dream” and “California Gurls” to get the party started, “E.T.”, just as the smuggled booze starts taking effect, “Peacock”, left off the playlist for obvious reasons, and “Firework” to bring the overly-hormonal evening home.
I am, of course, assuming all of this. Because I did not attend the 2010 Plainville High School Homecoming Dance, as I failed to do in 2009 and would eventually fail to do in 2011 and 2012. Instead, I spent the evening with a small group of friends in an event we called “Homestaying.” This is not a joke. Rather than doll ourselves up and discover new things about the human anatomy on the dance floor, my clique elected to sit in my living room and play board games. And I don’t think any one of us looked back. I suspected that, one day, I would regret the decision, perhaps out of a perverse sense of existential dread. But that day has yet to come, and I think that’s because my Friday night plans have remained the same ever since. And besides, who needs to grind up against some girl to the decade’s greatest collection of pop songs when you can just listen to the album at home?
5. Chance the Rapper – Coloring Book (2016)
I didn’t play sports in high school. Nor was I a theater geek. Same goes for the debate team, student council, yearbook committee, HAM radio club, school choir and the group of kids who got detention a lot. That means when school let out at 2:10 in the afternoon, I rode the goddamn bus. Remember the bus? The Chinese finger-trap windows, the ne’er-do-wells doing drugs in the back row, the brown leather seats indistinguishable from the vomit that had just been hurled on them, the rattling engine underneath the bus driver’s seat that surely led to orgasm from time to time, the shocking lack of seatbelts. Man, good times.
Depending on your experience, high school can teach you many valuable lessons about the world. But none of those lessons, and I mean none of them, are learned on the bus. It’s just too much freaking fun. And for this short-term pleasure, we paid a catastrophic price: we grew up believing commutes were enjoyable. If local school districts had any sense, they’d make students feel the burden of a 30-minute bus ride. They’d make students scrape the ice off the bus windshield. They’d deduct the cost of gas from lunch money, adjusting for inflation. They’d force students to navigate their own way home, toggling between Waze, Apple and Google Maps for accurate traffic detection. They’d make the seats just narrow and stiff enough to cause lifelong back pain. They’d tell students to hitch a ride home if the emissions test had expired. They’d give the children beer to simulate the feeling of driving home after happy hour. They’d assign an oral presentation on the transportation department to figure out where the hell they’re getting all this money for construction. And they’d impose mandatory silence, so the only voices students hear would come from angry drivers, local morning zoo DJs and their own neurotic heads.
But school districts have no sense, so guys like me don’t experience a tortuous commute until age 21. That’s when I got my first big-boy job, a job that happened to be two hours away. Now, I’d be lying if I said those four hours in the car, five days a week for a year and half didn’t crush most of my soul. Of course, it did. But the album—pardon me, “mixtape”—I spent the most time with on those daily commutes was Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book. And had that record been any less joyful, any less optimistic, any less pleasurable on the ears or any less high on life, I’m not sure I would have a soul left to crush.
4. Jack White – Blunderbuss (2012)
I have this thing that makes me not like food. Ask me about it sometime, or just listen to a podcast I’m on, it’s bound to come up. I won’t expound on the details of the condition too much here, except to say it makes meals very complicated. No group lunches with co-workers, no restaurant-related dates, no Thanksgiving dinners—or at least, my involvement in these activities is greatly limited. Among those complicated meals was school lunch, which was always packed by Mom and consisted of only Nico-safe snack foods. Among the items: a water bottle, a bag of pretzel twists, a pouch of Scooby-Doo fruit snacks and, the item I was most commonly mocked for, a full sleeve of saltine crackers. In fact, the daily sleeve became sort of a running joke in high school, a meme if you will. Think of it as the Baby Yoda of its time—it was nerdy, easy to mock and girls pretended it was cute.
I digress. Beyond hearing Seven Nation Army chanted at sporting events, I didn’t know who Jack White was until March of 2012. He was performing songs from his new album Blunderbuss on Saturday Night Live. Of course, I was an avid SNL viewer, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to miss this very special episode, hosted by Lindsey Lohan. One of White’s songs went like this…
She’s got stickers on her locker/And the boy’s number’s there in magic marker/I’m hungry and the hunger will linger/I eat sixteen saltine crackers then I lick my fingers.
I don’t recall adjusting the volume, but I definitely perked up on the couch and, perhaps, leaned in closer to the television. The performance continued…
Who’s jealous who’s jealous who’s jealous who’s jealous of who?/If I get busy then I couldn’t care less what you do/But when I’m by myself I think of nothing else/Than if a boy just might be getting through and touching you.
Perving on girls and eating saltines. Jack White was performing for an audience of one that night, and that person was me. I just can’t figure out how he got access to my high school diary.
3. Adele – 21 (2011)
I’ve got nothing for this one—no witty anecdote, no clever observation, no random tangent. I don’t remember the first time I heard Adele, nor this album, nor any individual song on the album. I don’t recall any significant life events that featured “Rolling in the Deep” or “Set Fire to the Rain” or “Take it Out” playing in the background. In fact, I can’t identity anything about 21 that’s personally resonant or unique to my life experience. This album just is. And that’s an incredibly rare feat. Although her signature album only came out in 2011, it feels like Adele’s music has been an omnipresent force in my life since the beginning, and I suspect others feel the same. There’s a timeless quality to it. If you had to blindly guess the year 21 was released, you could say anything from 1962 to 2019 and no one would blame you. You’d listen to “Someone Like You” for the first time and assume it’s the thirtieth time. You don’t know the lyrics, but you know the vibe with great familiarity. It’s classic, it’s contemporary, it’s universal, it’s damn perfect pop music. Whether by choice or by chance, I’ll be listening to this record for the rest of my life. But that experience won’t be a sorry attempt at nostalgia. No matter my age, mood or circumstance, these songs will always feel appropriate, because they are a part of my being, and somehow always have been. I’m hard pressed to think of another musician—not named John, Paul, George or Ringo—who occupies the same space in our cultural consciousness. Just Adele, our One and Only.
2. Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)
In high school, I had this friend named Mike. I mean, he wasn’t a friend friend per se. But that’s high school. Everyone is friends until you graduate, and then no one is friends—no one except for the four people who attend your wedding, bail you out of jail, become godparents to your kids and, someday, attend your funeral. Think of it as Darwinism for your social life. It’s the natural order of things, and it’s better that way. My sophomore year (his junior), Mike’s father was forced to move for work, which forced Mike’s family to move from their home in Toronto, Canada to suburban New England, in the house directly across the street from mine. Which meant every day, we rode the bus.
Mike was a fascinating dude—well read, politically literate, interested in art, untroubled by teenage bullshit, familiar enough with narcotics. The type of dude you generally don’t meet until college, which is too late. He had this mole on the corner of his chin that made his face impossible to forget. With a mole like that, you’re either destined to become a famous person or destined to be mistaken for a famous person. Our forty-five-minute daily conversations were a mixed bag, but were usually dominated by Whose Line it Anyway?, Ron Paul or Bill O’Reilly. And I suppose, occasionally, we discussed music.
Now it’s important to note that Mike could play multiple instruments, dabbled in music composition and was a bassist in a heavy metal band. I was a member of the marching band, where I pretended to play trumpet, unconvincingly. But his level of knowledge and my lack thereof did not stop me from boldly making the following claim: “There are only two geniuses in the history of music: Mozart and Stevie Wonder.” Mike went apoplectic on me that afternoon. “Who are you to decide which musicians are geniuses and which aren’t!?” he shouted at me. I don’t remember what my counter argument was because, of course, it wasn’t sufficient. I didn’t know enough about Mozart or Stevie Wonder to claim either was a genius, nor did I know enough about any other musician to claim he or she was not. But I remained steadfast in my belief and defended it with ignorant vigor. Why? Because my dad told me so.
The Mozart/Wonder line was something Dad picked up decades ago—either from a college professor or a high school music teacher, I don’t remember which—and had relayed to me on several occasions throughout my childhood. I never thought about the substance of the claim (and I suspect Dad hadn’t either), but it sounded good. And besides, my father was never wrong about anything—not politics, not sports, not philosophy and certainly not music. Dad was an amateur musician himself, and that was a big part of my childhood. I grew up listening to him write music in the basement, watching him perform his original songs in church and, as we all know, religiously following American Idol with him by my side. So, his opinions became my opinions and his tastes became my tastes. I admit, it made me a bit of baby boomer wannabe. And that’s why I spent most of high school lecturing my millennial peers on the genius of Stevie Wonder while casting aspirations on today’s top 40 dreck. But I didn’t care, because my aim in life was not to be right. My aim in life was, and still is, to be more like my father.
A funny thing happened when I first listened to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. I heard something I hadn’t heard in a while. I heard James Brown and Michael Jackson and the Isley Brothers and Sly & the Family Stone—it was a member of a dying species, a soul record. And I realized it’s the exact type of album Dad would have listened to when he was in his teens and, therefore, the exact type of album he would have played for me. So, what did I do? I played it for him. And he liked it. Not as much as me, that would be impossible. But he tapped his foot and bobbed his head and strummed the occasional air guitar and did all the things you’d want someone to do when you play music for them. And then I experienced an overwhelming feeling of sadness, because I realized times had changed.
I’m in my mid-twenties and my relationship with my father is as strong as it’s ever been. I’m happy for that, because many people I know can’t say the same. But there’s no denying the relationship is drastically different than it was ten years ago. And it should be. I have to pay my own bills, I have to fix my own problems, I have to take responsibility for my own stupidity, I have to formulate my own opinions, I have to make my own decisions at the ballot box, I have to carve out my own identity and yes, that means I have to listen to my own albums. That’s growing up—when you stop mimicking your idols and start becoming an idol to them, or at least you try. So far, I’m not as good an idol as Dad was. But I’ll keep trying, in this coming decade and the rest.
1. Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010)
Seriously, how could it be anything else?
Albums That Just Missed the Cut
El Camino by The Black Keys, Pure Comedy by Father John Misty, You Want it Darker by Leonard Cohen, ANTI by Rihanna, Babel by Mumford and Sons, Unorthodox Jukebox by Bruno Mars, Sound and Color by Alabama Shakes, Blackstar by David Bowie, A Moon Shaped Pool by Radiohead and Watch the Throne by JAY-Z and Kanye West.
Smartest guy in the room, dumbest guy outside of it.
