Anniversary Blurb: Boys & Girls in America
Who doesn’t love a good 12 year anniversary? It’s not the nice, round decade marker, but the hour hand has made it all the way around the clock, which seems as good a time as any to reevaluate.
The Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls in America was released on Oct. 3, 2006, and was one of the best rock albums of the decade. I say this as someone who too regularly bemoans the marginalization of rock-n-roll in popular culture, so feel free to take my opinions with a grain of salt — but I am correct. The album is a bar rock concept album about three sad people named Holly, Gideon, and Charlemagne, but even more than that, it’s an album centered around the complicated, emotional experience that is youth. The first track, “Stuck Between Stations,” opens with the lines that give the album its title: “There are nights when I think Sal Paradise was right / Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.” I understand that referencing On the Road in the lyrics of any song is pretentious at best, but “Stuck Between Stations” rules as an ode to the disaffected and sometimes tragic nature of youth.
The other songs on the album to which I find myself most regularly returning are “First Night” and “You Can Make Him Like You.” “First Night” is a softer, piano-driven meditation on the troubles of Charlemagne, Gideon, and Holly, the three main boys and girls of America. It falls near the middle of the album and provides a moment of rest within the neurotic energy coursing throughout the entirety of the song list. “You Can Make Him Like You” is probably my favorite song on Boys and Girls in America and it’s a short — but not sweet — glimpse into the melancholy possibilities of being at once inadequate and invincible. “There’s always other boys / There’s always other boyfriends / There’s always other boys / And you can make him like you.” The song is upbeat but not optimistic, and I love it so much. Every song on the album is a little bit like that. They seem to say, Sometimes it’s great to be alive and sometimes it’s scary and not fun, but maybe rock-n-roll can save us.
My brother maybe made a good point when he remarked that it’s a good thing Tinder didn’t exist when this album came out, since a certain kind of indie boy would certainly overuse lyrics from the album in his Tinder bio. On the other hand, how many indie boys actually listen to music that involves both drums and electric guitars? In this case, we’ll never know! But Boys and Girls in America continues to rock on, so I’ll catch all of you contemplating the nature of what it is to be young at the bar down the street.
