Do you remember this song? For those of you unwilling to press play, it’s “Gimme the Car” by the Violent Femmes and it reminds me—not in a nostalgia way, but in a visceral way—of everything I forgot about being a teenager. Which is a little funny, because I think that I think about when I was a teenager like every single day, but I have severely edited the memories, so that while I objectively remember being frothingly upset about everything ever always all the time, I kind of forgot…like, the bodily sensation of being so wound up and depressed and enrgaed about nonsense because you were basically the property of parents and nonsense was pretty much the only thing you could call your own. Also, the non-stop completely disabling sexual frustration. I usually remember being a teenager as this sort of dreamy state that is maybe more like a song by the Blow where it’s just isolated beautiful single-frame memories of being in a car driving down a highway instead of something that is basically like a hangover that lasts for ten years. I guess I kind of turned my own teenaged memories into “Dazed and Confused.” Oops!
I typically don’t really like the Violent Femmes, but they’re more spot-on than any YA I have read in possibly ever! Golly. This song, man. Yow.
