Songs to Soundtrack Your Wasted Youth

Being wasted is more a state-of-mind than a state of intoxication. It’s that apathy that settles into the nerve-endings of young people; it’s the fire bursting underneath the burning cinders of consciousness and being smothered by morally-inept decisions, laziness, and the constant struggle with identity. Allen Ginsberg wrote in his poem "Howl" that he saw the best minds of his generation "destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked."

Our generation of youth can be destroyed by superficiality, decadence, disinterest, and being out of touch with reality. Wasted could have so many definitions these days, from not caring to caring too much, to not feeling to feeling too much, to simple letting every ounce of you be put into something of little worth so that you can play on the same level as the cool kids. From beatniks to flappers to the PYT’s, this feeling of wasting your youngest years is not uncommon and it will exist until the world ends. So you might as well keep twerking.

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2. "No Waves" - FIDLAR

Skate-punk Angelenos FIDLAR musically personify the "wasted youth" culture; their name stands for "Fuck It Dog, Life’s A Risk." In between tattooing fans at their Pabst-fueled pukefest shows where every limb feels wrenched out with rebellious joy like a naked Barbie doll and prank posting each other’s numbers on social media, FIDLAR makes music that feels like that perpetual pins-and-needle state of pendulous ecstasy and anxiety that comes with youth. Or rather, the veins being tapped as a penetrating needle pokes into an ever-coursing youthful bloodstream and infuses the body with glossy shards of vacant vitality.

3. “Let The Youth Go Mad”- Broke Ft. MØ

While "Let The Youth Go Mad" is a nerve-crunching wobble-warning electronic dance groove, the song is catapulted by the grimy, grey-toned video that accompanies it. An attractive young man sits in his undies in what looks like a shitty studio apartment. He chain smokes amongst dozen of empty booze bottles, freaks out while eating ramen, has a house littered with stains and cigarette butts, masturbates violently, and starts a fight over some girl. At the end, he smashes up the mess within his abode, probably as a representation of the mess within his heart and he fake kills himself with a finger gun. The whole time the words “fuck you let the youth go mad” are screamed over the whole ordeal both justifying and frightening us into ecstatic submission.

4. "Teenage Girls" - Bleeding Knees Club

Teenage girls rule the young wastezoid’s world. In the haze of hormonal hour, it’s easy to flagrantly fail your geometry quiz because the lip-glossed nymph next to you chewed childishly throughout on a pink eraser nub, her saliva shining the metal that separated it from the gnawed on pencil. After school, you sneak out of the house on your skateboard—her skin is as pink and supple as her math class snack. You get back home and realize you have a paper due the next day, but failing history is totally worth it because you can still smell her strawberry-scented lips from when they accidentally brushed your neck as she hugged you goodbye.

5. "Youth Speed Trouble Cigarettes" - Cassius

"Youth Speed Trouble Cigarettes" is like Cassius’ blood-churning electro-mantra to every generation of the wasted youth. It starts with the atom-popping growth-spurt. The limbs begin to feel a rush of adrenaline as the moon blossoms to fullness and there is an ache throughout the bones for expansion and release. Once the pressure of curiosity becomes too much to bear, the bones crackle and sputter and the only thing comfortable is to pick up speed. It becomes hard to stay in one place, to be stable, to be one thing, to follow the rules that society puts on youth. Then comes trouble, which is the gateway drug to vice. Once the chemical rush of youth is felt, the only thing left is an artificial chemical rush, the same one that has been making generations of teenage movie stars look rebellious and "cool." And so the cycle continues.

6. "17" - Sky Ferreira

17 is the new forever. A few days ago, pale-skinned pre-Raphaelite waifette Sky Ferriera finally turned 21-years-old, but the spooky sprite spent most of her teenage youth wafting through bars on a cloud of golden light, her youth seeping through the dregs of drunkenness with a glow so everlasting it seemed vampiric. "17" comes off as autobiographical, a loss of innocence simultaneously studied and sordid. With haunted eyes that permeate through the melody of the song and pierce our hearts with cold recognition, Ferreira’s story is the essential Lolita scarytale, a beautiful girl who is pulled into the underworld of adulthood and made to live with a skeleton’s closet of "dirty little secrets."

7. "She Owns The Streets" - The Raveonettes

"Is it valium? Is it all drugs? Or is it everyday fun?" Doowop-y darkwave Danish duo cover all the D’s of youth wasted in wonderment on "She Owns The Streets": dancing, drugs, and decadence. With drunken swirls of distorted sound, the song swoons about a delirious danseuse who all the "boring" people fear and call the cops on. A rebel in bohemian revelry, the song’s heroine embodies fearless freedom that usually disappears when the sullen scars of predestined sanity rip open during adulthood. Or when you need to start paying bills. Same thing.

8. "Creep In A T-Shirt" - Portugal. The Man

With their sinister psychedelic sound, Portugal. The Man glaze hearts with the persuasive teenage apathy that is almost punk rock in its slacker appeal. Only an irresponsible youth could make not caring and not giving a fuck look so damn cool. Rebels without a cause always don the iconic t-shirt with the capped sleeves over tattoos and cigarettes burns. "Creep in a T-Shirt” is like James Dean if he had been born in the ‘00s and managed to live in modern society’s perpetual state of emotional detachment. When everyone becomes a rebel, when the counterculture becomes obsolete, and everyone is wasting away in egotistical pity over their alienesque inability to relate, mostly to themselves, they just crawl home and get in bed, alone.

9. "Youth" - Daughter

If you’re still reading, you’re the lucky ones. Elena Tonra sings in her smoky-sweet voice to a generation of lost souls who are “setting fire” to their insides for fun and “heaving through corrupted lungs.” The sadly angelic nature of her indie-folk makes it seem like she is almost mourning the emotional passing of these wayward youth. When she breaks into the chorus singing “We are the reckless, we are the wild youth, changing visions of our futures,” it’s almost like an elegy or somber words carved out onto the marble of a tombstone instead of a celebration of youthful freedom. At the end we find out she’s in love, because love breaks the fresh-hearted resilience of even the most poetic and earnest souls, wasting us away to a shadow of our former glory.

10. "I Need Fun In My Life" - The Drums

Jonny Pierce’s despondent drone and the sleepy swagger of The Drums' "I Need Fun In My Life" perfectly represents the sort of apathetic confusion that plagues us when we’re young. It’s when you discover that the balance between action and inaction is precarious. You can’t evolve without introspection; you can’t be introspective without evolution. And you can’t go out dancing every night if you plan on having any sort of a life outside of perpetual drunkenness. Pierce’s lyrics recognize this conundrum. He’s spent too much time "thinking" and too much time "doing." He needs fun in his life and life in his fun. Where does he find his answers? In trite sayings, just like most malleable young minds: a bumper sticker that says "The less you own the more freedom you have," which is what slackers who were pretending to be Zen said thousands of years ago to feel some sort of temporary satisfaction in their decisions.

11. "A.D.H.D" - Kendrick Lamar

"Got a high tolerance when your age don’t exist." A few decades ago, public use of drugs wasn’t a "cool" thing. It wasn’t even a thing. But the youth of today were born in an age without age. Access to everything has given them no restrictions or hard-and-fast rules. Compton-born Kendrick Lamar knows what drives his Generation Y into buzzed-out complacency. It doesn’t help that a lot of kids his age, crack babies born in the ‘80s, were raised on a diet of digital media and Adderall to cure their alleged attention deficit hyperactive disorder. Now they just pop Adderall to get through the night without drowning in "cough syrup like its water."

12. "Teen Idle" - Marina and the Diamonds

"I killed the teen dream. Deal with it!" This line from ‘90s black comedy cult sensation Jawbreaker echoes through our heads when we listen to Marina Diamandis warble melodically through her blonde-wigged, cotton-candied lipstick façade. For Diamandis’ sophomore album, she became Electra Heart, a ruthless "bubblegum bitch" teenage drama queen while feeling "super, super suicidal" because of her loss of innocence while still living the extravagantly "wasted years" and "wasted youth." Her glitter-manicured hands are pristine, but there’s a Swarovski-encrusted machete in her heart ready to rip waste any motherfucker that turns her "pretty lies" into the "ugly truth," which of course, as we learned from Jawbreaker, is inevitable.

13. "Teenagers in Heat" - Holy Ghost!

"I promise I’ll remember forever." Syrupy sweet synth-pop is like the ‘80s version of slacker rock. The artificial buzz has a Peter Pan quality to it and regardless of modern gloss—synthpop is that sound that will never grow up. NYC duo Holy Ghost! have capitalized on that feeling of perpetual youth in their jumpy bratpack-era jam that was produced by LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy. Considering the song came from the talented tweaking of three grown men, the song is an adorable example of arrested development that never grows old.

14. "Misspent Youth" - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

The drowsy instrumentals in "Misspent Youth" give us a foolish bravery, or a beautiful stupidity. We are pulled by the anchor of our emotions as they pull us down into the deep waters of our pain. That’s where we start grabbing at every bad decision to keep us afloat. The rush of “driving drunk in Daddy’s car” or “trading sex for drugs.” If you wake up with your head dangling over the edge of the precipice of destiny, the smeared mascara around your eyes dampens at the thought that you have no reason how or why you woke up alive. It’s not depression because that pain is what your helps you survive.

15. "Such a Bore" - Bass Drum Of Death

Bass Drum of Death’s John Barrett is a lo-fi garage rock god of awesome aloofness. Even under the fur-yanking wank of his caterwauling guitar, the Mississippi-native keeps his energy languid and low-key lascivious. However, "Such A Bore" bemoans the half-heartedness of that curse of cool. Barrett seems bored with his boredom, disinterested in his detachment. "I’d rather be sick and I’d rather be dead," he laments. His voice trails off into a fuzzy abyss as if he’s not totally committed to admitting to his lacking of emotional commitment to what he’s trying to say. There’s a golden-hued psych-rock towards in the middle of the song like some sort of epiphany is coming and then Barrett walks away from the revelation in what we can only imagine is a haze of cerulean smoke.

16. "Killed For Love" - Chromatics

There is no age group that can love as deeply, sincerely, and violently as the young. Ruth Radelet’s languid voice in "Killed For Love" belies a low-level misery that is inherent in everyone and that adulthood amplifies. Anyone can smother it with pills, drink, and fevered sleep, but the kind of insomnia that makes you put a pillow over your head is reserved for those in the throes of fading adolescence. That period between growing up and growing in, between juvenescence and maturescence is a heart-wrenching bloody affair that makes us simultaneously scared and proud that we can feel so deeply and understand so unfortunately the pointlessness of it all.

17. "Super Rich Kids" - Frank Ocean

From flappers to Facebook, Frank Ocean’s generation, Generation Y, is often pegged as the "Xany gnashing. Caddy smashing, bratty ass" generation, but when it comes to the gilded youth, nothing has really changed. It’s just that reality television shows and Twitter trendoids make poke-and-pull-out fame de rigueur, so comfortable corruption is commonplace, but no one is more fucked than the "super rich kids" Ocean sings about and who have been fucked for hundreds of years. Left to their own depraved devices, everything is a kind of drug and every moment a dazzling decay. Just ask Daisy Buchanan, darling.

18. "Bad Skin" - Hunx & His Punx

Pimple-faced punk rock isn’t new, but usually it’s because of some arbitrary cause. Tongue-out ‘60s-style titty tantalizers Hunx and His Punx are known for their quirky, jokey rebel rock, but this time around they’ve brought their dark humor to a song called “Bad Skin,” out July 23 on their album Street Punk. The track is pure fucked-up fun and exactly what every hormonal teen has dreamed about doing while gagging at their face in the mirror every morning. Frontman Seth Bogart has summed up that violent insecurity with a brash badboy tune that is all about the violence of vanity and how he’ll kill you with a knife because his skin is bad. It’s not clear whether he’s threatening to pop the pimple or just dagger-eye anyone trying to judge him, but John Waters would be proud.

19. "Bad Kids" - The Black Lips

Turn it on and tear it up. Atlanta-based garage-punk wild-out crew the Black Lips might not be kids anymore, but they’ll never lose their bad. At their lives show, “Bad Kids” becomes a chaotic crush of sweat-drenched bodies trying to out-raucous each other because the beatnik Bo Diddley guitar jangle makes you feel like a creep and the lyrics make you feel like burning shit down. The Black Lips succeed in making a deadbeat dad, a lack of a college education, and a pill habit seem like an acceptable future as long as you have 300 other slacker wastecases to drunkenly smash against in red-faced rebellion.

20. "You’re So Cool, I’m So Freaky" - Kate Nash

Punky piano-pop vixen Kate Nash is a product of the Myspace generation. Coming to age and to fame right at the helm of social media, Nash was basically bolstered to popularity by her enthusiastic young fans that saw in her what they couldn’t express themselves. Because though Nash’s songs seem simple on the surface-level, they go beyond serviceable to salient thanks to her ability to sweetly singsong the subtlest of human emotions. In "You’re So Cool, I’m So Freaky," Nash pinpoints both the feeling of youthful inadequacy when she sings "You’re so cool and I’m a waste of space," and the ever-developing bitterness and hatred that only time will unravel. "I don’t know how I feel, want to feel something real," Nash sings, punctuating the low-voiced sardonic words with a gloom-pop rhythm that emphasize the confusion behind being young and feeling both free and meaningless.

21. "Borrowed Time" - Parquet Courts

Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts knows how to play with the tempestuous medium of time. Throughout the 2:33 second song, he stops and starts with a precise post-punk accuracy that messes with our concept of linear understanding. This feeling has the same pop-and-lock affect of growing up with this idea of eternity and then a fun freeze-out when the burgeoning adult realizes that nothing really lasts forever. Savage shouts out his nostalgia for those days when he had the luxury of nothingness, of being up to his neck in "motivation neglect," of that "museless existence." The song is both urgent and a little luxuriously lazy and repetitive, but its supposed to be because that’s how life is. A cage of the same thing where your “captive to this borrowed time,” and meaningless moments seem wasted.

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