By Sawyer Lyons
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I remember where I fell in love: a chilly high school morning, riding in the backseat of my Dad’s Honda Civic, listening to the queue Spotify had handpicked from its ‘2000’s Alternative’ radio. I was a naïve music addict, still trying to shuffle my way through albums and albums of songs in hopes of finding some vibe of my own, something different. At a Southeastern, all-boys, required-shirt-and-tie, secondary school, musical diversity didn’t reverberate very far. Either musical tastes fell in line with pop culture infused rap and hip hop of Travis Scott and Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West, or into slow acoustic jams mixed with indifferentiable country songs. While I have come to appreciate that musical diversity for what it is (except the country, of course), I never felt like that was my music, that, whenever those songs would come on at dances, my sing-along, awkward movements on the dancefloor were true, only a desperate attempt to find some social acceptance through music.
The ‘2000’s Alternative’ was the closest I had ever come to finding my own vibe, but I cringed through it, like a post-traumatic flashback to the crimped bangs, skater shoes, and surpluses of neon eyeliner of ‘The Noughties.’ I say that as if my own musical upbringing was not undeserving of cringe and shame as well. Before coming across ‘2000’s Alternative,’ I had recently sworn off my vow of musical celibacy, brought on by a traumatic elementary school ‘musical enrichment’ course, and stumbled upon the music of Daft Punk and Calvin Harris. This was the electronica phase, a shameful but necessary step in the upbringing of my musical taste. But as with all things, I grew tired of the music, found its disproportions of bass lines and grinding unts unts unts’s to meaningful songwriting more and more unappealing, and moved on in a new search for a new, and better, identity.
Somehow, through influences of friends and my father, I found myself in the realm of Alternative Rock and Roll. I enjoyed it, having found a couple songs here and there that I would keep in my playlists, mixing them in with the plethora of upbeat and downbeat pop songs, but nothing truly made me squeal with excitement to listen to. Then on that car ride, the last song ended and the next song came on, “Perhaps Vampires is A Bit Strong,” by the Arctic Monkeys. Right then, with its quiet, clean guitar scale, followed by beating drum lines, bumping bass, and an aggressively seductive guitar riff of overdrive and delay, I fell in love.
This wasn’t my first exposure to the Arctic Monkeys. Their most recent (and most pop culture) album was already in my playlists after being introduced to me by an old ‘lover’ from 8thgrade, and while I listened to that album dearly, I never felt a true connection to it. Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, however, was my call to arms, the divine revelation, the call to the Holy Land of music. Lyrics balanced the poetic with the vulgar, guitars spoke with overdriven riffs and clean melodies, and basses reverberated through my ribcage and my heart. The Artic Monkeys only continued to evolve and interwind themselves in my life; just as WPSIATWIN made me want to pick up a guitar (which is how I actually began playing guitar), blow an amp out, grow my hair long, greasy, and unkept, and rip a cig.
The album was the first album released by the boys in Sheffield, built up through years of touring bars in their area and distributing free music on CDs to their audiences, most of which wound up on the internet, where it spread like wildfire. When the band signed a record label, and released their first two singles, “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor,” and “When the Sun Goes Down,” they both topped British charts. In 2006, the album finally released, and set the new British record for the fastest albums sales in its opening week, with 360,000 sales, catapulting a band of four 20-year-olds across the British Isles.
Soon I knew every Arctic Monkeys album, song, and lyric by heart. Each album became a marker of a specific mood for whatever events and emotions were transpiring. Their sophomore album, Favorite Worst Nightmare, cleaned up that angsty garage rock and roll into something more clean around the edges, with songs echoing the loud guitars of the past, like a symbol that you can grow and not let go of your past, but all the while experimenting with slow emotional ballads to balance out the screaming amplifiers. The Junior effort, Humbug, followed it, and discarded all that rock and roll past for dark guitar riffs blended with smooth bass and subtle synth makes the lost love or the emotional mystery of the hour disappear in the lyrical haze, a genre Alex Turner dubbed, with his new baritone voice and eye-covering, moody black locks, “Full Moon Music.” One album removed, AM returned to this genre of moody rock and roll, but in a more pop oriented way, driving way for success in the United States, and while I am thankful for this album’s cultural penetration, it lacks the sheer lyrical prowess that the other albums flaunted, flaunting instead some moody love songs and even moodier guitar licks.
The quaternary album to precede the hit AM, Suck It and See (believe it or not, not a reference to oral sexual activity) was the album of melancholy springtime, with butterfly guitar chords that you would expect coming from a teenage strumming out of an acoustic under his girlfriend’s window. The Arctic Monkeys had pinned down every emotional peak and trough of my angsty teenage years with such style and grace that I pinned them to my playlists, pinned them on my clothes, let their style dominate my music taste. The Artic Monkeys made me want to be a rock and roll star.
And then Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino came out.
From Metacritic, popcornwarlord puts into words what emotions many fans initially felt,
“…the lyrics are nonsense as Alex turner himself says on one song that he's talking [shit] he [quite] literally talks [shit] over the entire album…”
Popcornwarlord echoes many more formal reviewers as well, like Jon Dolan from Rolling Stone, who declared the album worthy of two out of five stars. And when I listened to it, I agreed; the guitars were supplanted by keyboards, raging drums by elevator music, and the rock and roll stars by space rock astronauts. I was heartbroken; my guitar-blasting, long-hair-slicked-back-having, awkward-swagger-stage-acting band was gone, replaced by something more artistic, experimental, and alien, like a lunar freak from the titular casino on the album’s cover. Disappointed, I listened to their past discography over and over, lamenting the lost Sheffield teenagers writing about club bouncing through Britain, until I was over saturated with the prepubescent voices and rocking guitar licks. So, I gave the album another listen, fully this time, without stopping.
Let Thomas Smith of NME describe this second listen:
“The album’s title is a fitting one: this record feels a lot like gazing into the night sky. At first, it’s completely overwhelming – you’ll be trying to connect the scattered dots on this initially impenetrable listen, and maybe even despairing when it doesn’t all come together. But when the constellations show through, you’ll realize that it’s a product of searingly intelligent design.”
In an interview, Alex said this album was most like the first album in its observational and passionate lyrics; I didn’t believe him, so I ran through the lyrics and the instruments like a historian running through some newly discovered archaeological evidence, fact checking, criticizing, pinpointing the significance behind it all. In the same way that the Monkeys had shaped my childhood, Turner spins out a magic tail of growing up under the influence of The Strokes, shaped by their music to form their own messy hair, guitar raving band, almost verbatim for how the Monkeys had shaped my developing identity from a pop culture mess to a musically independent kid looking to find his own voice in the world. I never tried anything but playing guitar, but this album pushed me to try fiddling around with piano and lyric writing, and, although I wasn’t very good at it, it broadened my entire perspective of music in the little to the point where in a collegiate and upcoming professional world, I crave music like a drug.
The album is a confessional to growing up, to stop the chasing the limelight that was AMand become authentic, an artist rather than a greasy Elvis figure for the teenage girls, mulling. Turner ripped away the guitar, ripped away his past to write this album; in exchange, the piano took over, the soul took over and wrote what it saw in the world, an honest, poetic description of consumerism, of growing up, of friendship and relationship. The band turns its head from the directness and catchiness of songs like “Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?” to songs like “The World’s First Ever Monster Truck Flip,” where meaning is hidden behind Turner’s grand imaginary lunar hotel. The Arctic Monkeys wrote an album without thinking of the fans, without thinking of anything but what they wanted to make, and that’s the message that sticks with me throughout listening to the album: Uniqueness over popularity; meticulous meaning before preplanned, pop culture production; spilling of the soul instead of catchy, cash-grabs. Regardless of the redundant sound of the album (a constant criticism of the albums ever since the Suck It and See era, and a valid one at that), Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino is an ode to change and finding your place in the world, and even thought the music verges on being too spacey or too jazzy, in the historical context of the Arctic Monkeys, it’s one of the best, strangest, and most daringly original yet.
Critique
Hi Sawyer,
Thank you for submitting this piece! Initially, I interpreted the purpose of your essay to be an extended ode to the Arctic Monkeys that was distinctly personal and individually meaningful. However, your writing veered into the “music review” territory about halfway through the piece, and it became difficult to determine what, exactly, you were going for.
Without having a clear roadmap of your essay, it was difficult to make sense of your piece’s component parts. For example, your lengthy exposition of the Arctic Monkeys’ journey from teenage band to indie rock mainstay was well-written, but this kind of in-depth information felt largely irrelevant because it was not clear how it could contribute to any larger goal of your piece. If the “thesis" of your essay had been that their style has evolved or that they are versatile, talented musicians, then it would be worthwhile to include this kind of explanatory information. However, if your goal is to emphasize the impact that the Arctic Monkeys have had onyou, then including this kind of factual, expository information is largely superfluous. Assuming you had this latter goal, I think it would be best to reconceptualize your approach and attempt to use the Arctic Monkeys as a gateway to understanding you. This would mean (1) cutting out everything about the Arctic Monkeys that is irrelevant to your personal journey in music, and (2) beefing up what their music means to you beyond the occasional aside about how it made you feel. How did the Arctic Monkeys help you understand yourself better?
For example, you say that “each album became a marker of a specific mood for whatever events and emotions were transpiring.” Did their albums match up with what was going on in your life? Were there any significant life moments defined by an Arctic Monkeys song? I really like the line, "The Arctic Monkeys had pinned down every emotional peak and trough of my angsty teenage years with such style and grace that I pinned them to my playlists, pinned them on my clothes, let their style dominate my music taste,” but I’d like you to expand on what those peaks and troughs are. There are a number of ways that you could go about incorporating their music into your own life story, i.e. formulating a bildungsroman that incorporates Arctic Monkeys’ lyrics, or describing how their music got you through a major life development.
Simply doing a review of the Arctic Monkeys or trying to make a case about why they’re great musicians is just fine, but I am not sure how feasible or worthwhile such an essay would be, given what you have so far. Both of these cases would require somewhat more explicit argumentation, which your essay lacks. In other words, you’re both halfway to a personal essay and halfway to a music review, and it’s up to you to decide which route to take. I would suggest going the personal essay route (which I personally find more compelling), but the choice is up to you.
Your prose, in general, is excellent. You have a strong, self-assured voice that strikes the tone of a professional reviewer, and you describe music very well (so much so, in fact, that I’d encourage you to consider writing conventional music reviews). However, I do have a couple of line-by-line suggestions:
"I remember where I fell in love: a chilly high school morning, riding in the backseat of my Dad’s Honda Civic, listening to the queue Spotify had handpicked from its ‘2000’s Alternative’ radio.” The conceit here is that you didn't fell in love with an actual person, but rather that you "fell in love" with the Arctic Monkeys. However, this opening paragraph set up an expectation for the work as a whole (i.e. that it would be a love story, or at least a personal one) that went unfulfilled and in fact made the rest of the work feel a bit underwhelming.
Their most recent (and most pop culture) album was already in my playlists after being introduced to me by an old ‘lover’ from 8th grade, and while I listened to that album dearly, I never felt a true connection to it. “Lover” has a specific connotation that I’m not sure fits well in the context of this line. It’s also not a word that we tend to use when referring to our own day-to-day, contemporary lives.
"From Metacritic, popcornwarlord puts into words what emotions many fans initially felt." Unless you’re trying to make a point that absolutely requires citing other people (e.g. if you’re asserting that an album was not received well, you’d cite reviews that indicate that that’s the case), I would avoid referencing other reviews. You’re making the point that Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino sounds a little our of step from the Arctic Monkeys’ older work, but that you later realized, upon a second listen, that it is a meaningful and innovatory album. Your experience alone is enough to make this point and doesn’t require the “support” of other reviewers. I would also avoid, unless it’s incredibly insightful or absolutely needed, to cite non-professional reviewers.
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