The Kids Aren’t Alright
"Just like the kidsI've been navigating my wayThrough the mind-numbing reality of a godless existenceWhich, at this point in my hollow and vapid lifeHas erased what little ambition I've got left"Toronto punk band PUP’s apathetic call to arms - Kids - is an honest assessment of life as a young adult in a world where the meaningfulness of seemingly everything serves only to drive us to a place of disinterested robotics - working through the machinations of life without ever actually enjoying it. Released in 2019, the song which only becomes more prescient as we consider a post-Covid 19 landscape, boldly and unashamedly picks out it’s own faults, shortcomings and psychopathic episodes in the confident and self-deprecating way encapsulated perfectly by the punk medium. In a world where vapid detachment seems an almost rite of passage for the youth of today - PUP does what a lot of individuals - including myself - find difficulty doing at a hollow juncture; voicing how they feel. In a genre where emotion and passion almost supersede instrumentation and rhythm itself, the Toronto natives have almost seemingly juxtaposed their preferred style of choice with lyrical content to great effect.
Lead singer Stefan Babcock perfectly encapsulates his mentality behind writing the song as such:
“I think that the world is probably gonna end pretty soon. Just in terms of environmental catastrophe and the way that we treat the planet, and especially recently politicians have chosen to prioritize military over sustainability. I don’t have a lot of faith in humanity, so I guess my fear is that we’re not going to figure out this environment thing. So if that’s the case, we’re probably one of the last generations, so who the fuck cares about anything.”
War, environmental tipping points and political machinations have all seemed to ramped up in recent years, with general increases in anxiety, paranoia and mistrust a natural response from the public. In times of great turmoil, it is often important to flip nihilism on its head - with constant reinforcement that if ultimately nothing matters, why not pursue your ambition? Confess your love? Live without borders?
Hitting a little closer to home than one would like to admit, PUPs dystopian view on the world synchronises perfectly with the name of the album of which Kids is a single - Morbid Stuff. But it isn’t all about the impending doom of environmental disaster (a la Megadeth’s Dawn Patrol), or about nuclear annihilation as Nena would have you sing in German in 99 Luftballons - sometimes the real problems are a lot simpler - yet also much more complex. Dr. Jennifer Melfi’s assertion that “depression is just rage turned inwards” in The Sopranos is an eye-opening concept and one that can be used to great effect in order to fully understand the twisted hedonist cycle occurring in Kids.
The world is going to shit, the planet is on fire, and the inequality of financial distribution is hampering younger generations and all-the-while snake-oil politicians and populist demagogues rally for change while ultimately only attempting to get yours. Shit sucks. And there’s nothing you can do about it except keep on with the keep-on. But where does that go? Where do those emotions, that anger, that fury and rage built up inside for so long for so many justifiable reasons find a refuge?
Inwards.
And at the end of the repeating cycle of futile hedonism where happiness levels are balanced and everything appears normal - something bursts under the surface. Maybe not with a bang - or with a whimper - but at some point, a switch is flicked. Except in opposition to the function of a light switch, this internal circuit breaker … well … breaks.
She said, "I feel like I've come untethered
In a room without walls
I'm driftin' on a dark and empty sea of nothin'
It doesn't feel bad, it feels like nothin' at all"
And when that light goes off the darkness doesn’t come in black as horror movies throughout the years would have you believe. It comes in gray. A mild, inoffensive, yet overwhelming grayness that consumes both your head and your heart on its way through your body and into those around you through a form of imperceptible osmosis - leaking out little by little over a period of time. It changes your relationships, it dampens your passions and it comes without warning. It leaves you believing you were the same person you once were, while covering up the path that led to ruin. That anger, with your situation, with your government, with your ecosystem - plants seeds that root deep into the heart of a person, strangling off all life and feeling while you go about your daily routine. And at the end of it, as humorously stated by the band in their first verse...
I've embraced the calamity / With a detachment and a passive disinterest / Livin' out the back of my '97 Camry/ Wonderin' how the hell I got myself into this.
As sung 21 years before the release of Morbid Stuff by follow pop-punkers The Offspring, THE KIDS AREN’T ALRIGHT. Lost in a sea of overwhelming pessimism, the seemingly ever-ticking clock of natural destruction and mistakes made by both past and present generations, kids too often stumble upon unhealthy detachment and passive disinterest in order to curb their feelings of futility and insignificance. Kids (of which I will consider myself), too often are left (by no fault of their own) outsourcing their happiness to other outlets, whether it be time-wasting activities or - in the case of the song - relationships.
I guess it doesn’t matter anyway / I don’t care about nothin’ but you.
That however - is no cure. While love seems a legitimate avenue to break out of a funk, emotional apathy is unconducive to a healthy relationship as PUPs lead singer ultimately learns with the song’s last lines :
” ...Nothin’ is workin’ / And everything’s bleedin’ oh oh-oh-oh.”
So where does that leave us? An inability to rely on oneself for personal happiness, coupled with seething anger to external and unfixable problems, which forces the painful and cold realities inwards - creating a vicious and depressive cycle that renders us unable to form meaningful bonds and leaves us unwilling to seek out apparent solutions; except for romantic relationships which obviously and unsurprisingly devolve because of a lack of understanding of oneself and what can be brought to a relationship.
21 years later and PUP have effectively psycho-analysed an entire generation of lost kids, who have been left to their own devices in order to navigate a world with no apparent higher being, no unbiased arbiters of justice and a dauntingly unlimited number of choices. A group of people unable to provide love for others because of a lack of love in themselves - all of that pure emotion replaced by a soulless, lifeless and hazy shade of grey. ‘
To quote Ving Rhames’ iconic character Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction: “nah man...I’m pretty fucking far from okay”. And same goes for the Kids.
Stream Morbid Stuff by PUP below: