Triumphant individualism and disillusionment in Ethel Cain’s American Teenager
Under the surface of the defiant anthem lie darker truths about American culture and values
Hello all, I hope you’ve been well! No, this isn’t an April Fool’s prank, please count this as March’s post and I’ll be back before the end of the month. Life just creeps up on you sometimes!
Today I’m trying something a little different by writing about music. I love music and I especially love it when I find a song I want to listen to almost feverishly on repeat for days on end. Last September, this happened with American Teenager, a song off indie newcomer Ethel Cain (a stage name for writer and producer Hayden Silas Anhedönia)’s 2022 debut album Preacher’s Daughter. While repeatedly listening to the song back in September, I fell in love with the critique of American ideology that it seemed to carry within its catchy chorus, and was intrigued by the strong response it seemed to garner from people online. As I sit and write this, I have yet to listen to Preacher’s Daughter in its entirety. Maybe if you are a fan, you’ll find that I’m ill-equipped to analyze this song. How dare I talk about this when I don’t know what, say, Sun Bleached Flies is about? To those people I say, I promise you I’m not going in blind.
Preacher’s Daughter is a conceptual album, drawing on the artist’s own life, which follows the story of the fictional Ethel Cain (the titular preacher’s daughter) as she leaves her small town. The story follows her highs and lows, culminating just after her violent and untimely death. That’s about as much as I can say without getting into the nitty-gritty of it. American Teenager is the second song in the album, setting up the scene of the fictional Ethel’s life in her small town. However, even when viewed as a self contained narrative, it’s an interesting song that simultaneously seems to celebrate and criticize small-town America. Where the fictional Ethel seems confident in her declaration of not needing anything from anyone or in baiting someone into a fight, Ethel Cain the artist (aka Hayden Anhedönia) is there just below the surface weaving just enough oomph into the words that it starts to feel like the narrator is trying to convince themselves of the truth in the words. Perhaps, we begin to fear, they may not be true at all. In a 2022 statement, she said of the song,
“They make you think it’s all achievable and that if nothing else, you should at least die trying. What they don’t tell you is that you need your neighbor more than your country needs you. I wrote this song as an expression of my frustration with all the things the ‘American Teenager’ is supposed to be but never had any real chance of becoming.”
The idea of disillusionment is immediately present in the song’s first verse, as the fictional Ethel (who I will now only refer to as ‘Ethel’ to differentiate from ‘Cain’ or ‘Ethel Cain’, the artist) states she grew up “Putting too much faith in the make-believe and another high school football team”. The dreary atmosphere continues as she regales us with the story of a neighbor’s brother who joined the military and “...came home in a box”, setting up a critical view of the tragedy by finishing the verse stating, “Another red heart taken by the American dream”. The pre-chorus that follows is pensive, with soaring notes that almost feel like a plea to the heavens, but one that has the narrator devoid of heavenly presence. More on that later.
The chorus is the thesis of American Teenager, ground zero for the ideas that the verses support. “Say what you want, but say it like you mean it. With your fists for once…”, Ethel says, seeming to almost taunt an unknown person. It’s violence, simple and plain, bottled up rage. It’s violence that lies at the core of American life and politics. I do say politics because the words that follow (“...a long, cold war with your kids at the front”) reflect that, and are probably the song’s most direct criticism of America. Positioning these two lines one after the other creates an impression that the violence on home soil and the violence on the front lines of some distant war are mirrors, they can’t exist without one another.
When former president Barack Obama (or his team, rather) included this song in his 2022 end of year playlist, it was this specific line that people online pointed at in order to express their disbelief and outrage at the choice. Surely, the affable war criminal wasn’t nodding along sympathetically at Ethel Cain’s lament of young lives being lost in useless military conflict, after all he was responsible for the strife Cain (only 10 years old when Obama was sworn into office) would have seen and heard about while growing up. Cain responded, by the way. She took to Twitter (I refuse to call it by any other name) soon after the reveal, writing “Did not have a former president including my anti-war, anti-patriotism fake pop song on his end of year list on my 2022 bingo.” Funny how some things just come full circle, huh?
The chorus continues with the idea that Cain expressed in that quote earlier, of achieving or dying in the attempt. It’s individualism masking as triumph when Ethel says that “I do what I want, crying in the blеachers and I said it was fun. I don't need anything from anyone. It's just not my year. But I'm all good out here.” Feels very American, doesn’t it? It’s like the American Dream and hustle culture all rolled up into one: I don’t need others and my time hasn’t come yet but it will, I just have to keep trying. Ethel proclaims it proudly and triumphantly, but is it really something to be so proud of? Though we may try to be persuaded otherwise by our capitalist society, a lack of community isn’t an achievement, but a loss. Cain has a similar idea in the quote from the beginning, “What they don’t tell you is that you need your neighbor more than your country needs you.” This statement of hers directly opposes the loud proclamation of “I don’t need anything from anyone” her protagonist makes, leaving no doubt that this is very much a critique.
The following verse explores the narrator’s relationship with religion within the environment they grew up in. This relationship is fraught, it intertwines with the narrator’s experiences with alcohol. “Sunday morning. Hands over my knees in a room full of faces”, she says. “I'm sorry if I sound off, but I was probably wasted and didn't feel so good…” Our troubled teen narrator turns pensive as she reflects on performing while being drunk (“Head full of whiskey but I always deliver…”), though it’s unclear whether it’s more of an abstract performance of everyday life. Ethel doesn’t seem particularly repentant of this fact, but instead pleads with the heavens to let her get through this moment (“Jesus, if you're listening let me handle my liquor…”) before ultimately turning to metaphysical reflection (“And Jesus, if you're there why do I feel alone in this room with you?”). A listener may imagine the narrator as a lonely youth somewhere in the Bible Belt, who desperately wishes to fall in line with their town’s beliefs and way of life as an attempt to find meaning in their own, but the echoing loneliness of this verse and the references to possible substance abuse may indicate an inability to achieve this. The narrator feels alone where they were promised solace. Maybe they don’t believe in Jesus but were still taught that He could help in moments of difficulty so they still call out to him. There is an oxymoron in saying “... alone in this room with you”, but perhaps that is simply the complicated nature of faith.
The pre chorus repeats, with only slight variations that still communicate deep loneliness. We hear the chorus again and the image of this town and its people, this narrator and their struggles, takes better root in our mind. An outro follows, repeating the chorus’ beats but with variations that seal the song’s ideas in the listener’s mind. Where the original chorus has the lines “I do what I want, crying in the bleachers and I said it was fun. I don't need anything from anyone. It's just not my year, but I'm all good out here”, the narrator instead says that “I do it for my daddy and I do it for Dale. I'm doing what I want and damn, I'm doing it well. For me, for me…”. These mentions reference the community Ethel belongs to (‘Dale’ is a reference to another song on the album but humor me regardless). Still, the song ends with a return to triumphant individualism when the narrator says “I do what I want and damn, I’m doing it well. For me, for me…” because they proudly proclaim that they’re only doing it for themselves.
While there’s pride to be taken in independence, in being able to stand up for yourself and do the things you want, there’s a lonely underside to it as well. I believe Cain acknowledges this because Ethel seems to want to convince herself that this individualism brings her happiness.
In the 2014 book The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies, Heike Paul cites Irvin G. Wyllie’s The Self Made Man and the idea that “The legendary hero of America is the self made man.” Paul examines said myth, how its principles are often exclusionary towards women (often only seen as “pretty consumers”) and other minorities, eventually concluding that,
“By claiming that self-making also contributes to the greater common good, hegemonic versions of this powerful myth – or fairy tale – of social mobility still very successfully obscure its role in legitimizing and perpetuating immense structural social inequalities.”
Language is important here. Paul uses words like ‘fairy tale’ and ‘myth’ to describe what may be seen as American hallmarks and ever-present goals. Our narrator, at the end of the day, is terribly lonely and their proclamations are just words scattered in the wind. They wish to be a self made individual, as befits an American, but are left only with the myth. Perhaps the myth is all that remains of the American Dream.
Maybe that is all that ever was.
A few months ago, this song briefly trended on tiktok. Users made compilations of American media: famous pop culture moments, movies, tv shows and ads, edited in a rapid flurry of images that barely lingered as American Teenager played. These posts were often tagged with a peculiar identifier: #corecore. For those who’ve spent as much time on TikTok or thinking about its niches as I have, you may be familiar with the practice of using the ‘-core’ suffix to indicate an aesthetic or subcategory of content. In this case, we take a look at ‘corecore’ and understand it to be an aesthetic of aesthetic itself. Now, we could get into a much deeper discussion of aesthetics as it’s studied in academia and you could witness me trying to remember what I learned in that ‘Art Philosophy’ class I once took in undergrad. Or you could take my word as a chronically online person and believe me when I tell you that ‘corecore’ is simply the aesthetic of being. There’s a neutral sort of mundanity to the presentation ‘corecore’ and I find it fascinating that users saw it fit to pair American Teenager with these images, especially since so many posts were also tagged with ‘mecore’ (or, following the previously established rules, the aesthetic of who you are). What is it that caused so many people to identify with the combination of this song and recognizable media? There is an element of nostalgia, of course. Cain’s guitar riffs have an 80s Americana flair to them, something that feels like a very conscious stylistic choice on her part. Perhaps, in their disillusionment with the present world, users took something that harkened back to the music of their parents’ youth, combined it with images from tv, movies and internet videos recognizable to them and found comfort in this nostalgia soup.
Big and empty, just like the land that surrounds it, small town America and its people are characterized in media by having nothing to do and the yearning that comes with this. The remoteness means that a youth’s rebellious cry may be easily lost in the wilderness, trampled by family and custom; a reality which breeds desperation. A desperation to leave, to be different, to feel something and to be someone. Ethel Cain’s American Teenager captures this idea excellently. Through simple but evocative lyrics, she manages to craft a story that is representative of American goals and ideas, but also observantly critical of them. The story of American Teenager may have been conceived as part of a larger narrative, but also tells a story of its own as it captures a snapshot of the narrator in a quintessentially Americana life that has resonated with people even beyond its originally intended audience. Perhaps it’s simply a sign of the current times, that we find ourselves suspended between the romanticization of our average lives and the acknowledgement of the darkness that lies under our society’s apparent mundanity. Either way, the song is a banger and I highly recommend you give it a listen if you haven’t already.
As always, I love you if you read this far and I’ll see you in the next one!
It is always a good day when the Crafty Librarian posts!