Another reason today’s teens will regret their youth

Posted on 30. Dec, 2009 by Simon in Music

Imagine the songs Owl City would write if married to this

Alright, I’ll bite. Who the fuck is Owl City?

When I first heard my friend’s little brother listening to Fireflies, then the subsequent 400 times I heard it on the radio, I assumed Owl City was a girl. Then I learned from someone it was a dude singing. Suddenly I was more confused than when I found out my crush on Taylor Hanson made me bi-curious.

I suppose musically, there’s nothing eminently hatable about Owl City. Adam Young records sugary Postal Service-ish electro-pop, most noticeably in his attempts to steal Ben Gibbards vocal chords. I remember in the early years of the Aughts, somebody in my student newspaper described the Postal Services’ debut album Let Go as “emotronica”.

I don’t know if that writer coined the phrase, but it certainly made sense at the time. Compared to Gibbard however, Owl City’s lyrics make the Postal Service seem like a death-metal outfit. For example, here is the second verse from Young’s song Vanilla Twilight:

I’ll watch the night turn light blue, but it’s not the same without you,
Because it takes two to whisper quietly,
the silence isn’t so bad, till I look at my hands and feel sad,
cause the spaces between my fingers are right where yours fit perfectly.

Excuse me, but I have to go punch myself in the genitals now. It frightens me that these are the words teenagers are crying themselves to sleep with these days. When I was a tween through high school the consensus popular band of the time was led by a guy whose incredible self-loathing led him to marry Courtney Love and blow himself away with a shotgun.

In fact, I’m pretty sure if Nirvana had written a song about Fireflies teaching you how to foxtrot however, it would have almost certainly ended with at least some angry screaming.

Excuse me while I go shake my cane at the local high school.