The Teenage B-Side

Picture this: It’s 2014. You come home from school crying because no one understands you. You run to your bedroom, slam the door, lie down on your American Apparel grid-patterned sheets and open your Acer laptop. You browse Tumblr for a while, reblogging a picture of boxed water. Then you open your free version of Spotify, back when you could do things on the free version of Spotify, and play … what? Born to Die (The Paradise Edition)? The 1975’s self-titled? Badlands by Halsey? Okay, so maybe that was just my music taste in middle school. Fine, maybe this story is just about me! But there’s a reason I still know every single word to every one of these albums a whole 10 years later. This music was really important to me at a time in my life when not a lot of things made sense. 

Maybe it’s the embarrassing young adult fantasy series we obsessed over, the melodramatic teen shows that gave us something to look forward to or even some grainy Superwholock gifs. The media that reached us in this awkward, sinewy transition from kid to grown-up is media that stays with us even into the calmer years — still speaking, still listening. In the Teenage B-Side, Arts writers present what teen media spoke to them and made that weird era feel a little more normal.

Senior Music Editor Nina Smith can be reached at ninsmith@umich.edu.

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