Although I was born in 2002, the 2010s were the first real decade of my life. I came of consciousness under drastically changing technology, watching the library at my school become a computer lab, and then watching the computer lab turn into a cart of laptops. I saw the rise and fall of digital cameras. I’ve been through two of the most pivotal presidential cycles in American history. I’ve watched memes and trends rise and fall. The most interesting aspect of the past ten years, though, has been the pop-cultural shifts. For example, songs on the radio in the early 2010s, like all of those borderline-pop-punky-indie-poppy songs such as *checks smudged writing on palm* “We are Young” by Fun, “Counting Stars” by OneRepublic, and that one song about Khloe Kardashian wouldn’t get a moment of radio play on today’s radio. And like I’ve said time and time again, Katy Perry stopped being relevant the moment it stopped being cool to name-drop Radiohead. The media-emergent internet ruled the charts in the latter half of the 2010s. Stars from Shawn Mendes to Lil Nas X came into the collective pop culture consciousness through short-form video sites -- Vine and TikTok respectively. Brockhampton became a thing through forums. The Goth Boy Clique became a thing via Soundcloud. Cardi B became a thing due to her charismatic Instagram livestreams. Lizzo became a thing, once again due to the viral nature of short-form video. Pop stars were appearing basically out of nowhere -- and there wasn’t a record deal in sight. There didn’t need to be. Tierra Whack and Doja Cat went viral off music videos. Mason Ramsey yodeled at Coachella just months after a shitpost of him singing to a crowd of confused onlookers at Walmart went viral. The internet is beautiful, and it’s changing how media is produced. Think about the last time you watched an artist premiere on a late night show. I’m not an avid TV-watcher, but I’m pretty sure those things are all for dad-rock bands like The Strokes and Weezer. The YouTube algorithm is putting artists out there, and teenagers on TikTok and Instagram are telling the world which artists they want. Anyway, things are changing. And this article is just a glimpse into how they’ve changed for me over the past decade... or at least seven-ish years of it. 2013: Random Access Memories -- Daft Punk For the first three years of the 2010s, I was still in elementary school and not a very musical person at all. I listened to One Direction (although I didn’t tell anyone) and occasionally snuck onto Coldplay Radio on Pandora (and also didn’t tell anyone). But that’s it. Forgive me, I was ten. If I had to assign an album to this hazy, distant time period, I would probably say Coldplay’s Parachutes or Radiohead’s Pablo Honey. If you’ve read my article on how the French house scene changed how I listen to music, you’ll know that a certain album Daft Punk album flipped my perceptions of music upside down. If you couldn’t guess already, that album was Random Access Memories. Random Access Memories is relatively tame, but experimental, and filled with features by musical legends. It gave me tiny pieces of all different types of music -- pure electronic, rock, emotional ballads, whatever “Motherboard” is, disco, Animal Collective, yacht rock(?), Julian Casablancas, an eight minute monologue by pioneer EDM producer Giorgio Moroder -- all types of stuff! Every song on the album was in a completely different genre or inspired by a completely different time period of music, and thanks to those affectionately-dubbed robots, I got to choose what I liked and take it with me. With my overactive imagination, this album became a story -- “Motherboard” was the story of Earth’s decay and destruction due to human pollution, “Get Lucky” was a party on another planet after Earth was destroyed, “Doin’ It Right” was the end of that party when all of the characters were going home, and “Beyond” was the backstory of a lonely astronaut who came from Earth before its destruction. The whole thing was a giant narrative about outer space, and I loved it. Within a few weeks, I was a self-declared superfan of electronic dance music, especially French House. I kept up with everyone on the Ed Banger label, listened to the Cassius remixes of every song, including the ones I’d never heard the original versions of yet, watched every single one of the Flat Eric videos (he still has a special place in my heart), and valiantly defended Daft Punk when my mom wanted to read that infamous TMZ article that showed them without their robot helmets on. My mom still read the article anyway. To this day, I still wish I had the level of emotion I had back then. No honorable mentions that aren’t other Daft Punk albums. Again, RIP Avicii and Philippe Zdar. <3 2014: s/t -- Franz Ferdinand When I was twelve, loneliness was the standard. I’d sit by myself on the bus ride home from school, go to town on Fridays with people I didn’t really like too much, and sit through family dinners without much to say. I was alone, at least in my twelve year old mind. It's hard to know how to get through something when you've never been through it before, and even worse when you feel embarrassed for needing help. 2014 was the year I realized that music is a friend, and a great one at that. After recognizing “40’” from a Pandora playlist due to my dad playing it for me in the car a year earlier, I became absolutely obsessed with this album and Franz Ferdinand in general. Ask anyone who knew me back then. I used to wear a Franz Ferdinand t-shirt with a bright red flannel over it, paired with my favorite dark blue skinny jeans and pilgrim steppers I called combat boots, every other day of seventh grade. The t shirt itself was much too tight and barely fit me, but I thought I looked like one of those trendy concert-going girls circa 2004 whenever I wore it. To this day, I have no idea why I and everyone around me thought it was okay for me to wear the exact same outfit four days a week. Anyway, enough of that tangent. Although the social habits of middle schoolers fascinate me, this article is about music. The song from Franz Ferdinand’s Franz Ferdinand that I became the most obsessed with, by far, was “The Dark of the Matinee.” I remember one very specific day where I was in Asbury, NJ for my younger brother’s football game. My mom, my sister, and I went to an art-deco themed restaurant for lunch and I could imagine the members of Franz Ferdinand there so vividly that I kept one earbud in, “The Dark of the Matinee” playing on repeat. The music video for the song was the best part -- despite the majority of the band members being in their thirties, they were portrayed as regular kids sitting in boring science classes and doodling on their desks -- just like me! In my overactive imagination, Franz Ferdinand were art-deco spies who would sweep me up in their songs and treat me like their new best friend. In reality, they were the furthest thing from art-deco, coming from early 2000s Glasgow. But evidence has shown that they sure do know how to be kind. Thanks to them, seventh grade wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Honorable Mentions: Manners by Passion Pit, Is This It by the Strokes, Nighttiming by Coconut Records 2015: Good News For People Who Love Bad News -- Modest Mouse 2015 is still distinctly split into three parts in my head -- the seventh grade part, the summer, and the eighth grade part. The seventh grade part was defined by overwhelming feelings of sadness and anger, the summer was filled to the brim with fun experiences with good friends, and the eighth grade part consisted of an existential crisis and an odd obsession with narwhals. I’m not kidding. Good News For People Who Love Bad News was the spark of optimistic pessimism that told me things are changing, but in a good way. I wasn’t going to be offered kids’ menus at restaurants anymore. I was too old to go to Giggleberry. Don’t even ask what that is. From then on, I was going to have to apply to high schools, and then to colleges, and then spend the rest of my life working some boring job in some boring place. A trip to Portland, Maine in August of 2015 changed my whole negative perspective and flipped it upside down into something beautiful that I like to call ‘cautious optimism.’ I’m not really sure how, though. I was there for the wedding of a cousin I’d never met and only went to a cryptozoology ‘museum’ and an old lighthouse, and the trip somehow changed my entire worldview. I just remember arriving in Portland a stereotypical negative teenager and coming out more appreciative of my family, the world, social differences, and even my own culture. Teenagers are impressionable, I guess, might be the takeaway.
Anyway, being as edgy and whimsical and dreaming of wanderlust as I was, this album was my best friend for the whole year. It taught me to be patient, because my life was waiting on the horizon just ahead of me. For the next year, I was just stuck in middle school. And that was okay.
Honorable Mentions: Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action by Franz Ferdinand, AM by Arctic Monkeys, Sam’s Town by the Killers 2016: Weezer (White Album) -- Weezer & Turn On the Bright Lights -- Interpol I was a Weezer stan in eighth grade, and Weezer’s White Album guided me through the ups and downs of my final year of middle school, along with the tumultuous summer that came after it. I’m trying to find what I found so charming about it -- my perspective on Weezer had changed so much since I was fourteen, scouring their Reddit forums for any semblance of fan content. Maybe it was how ‘teenage’ they sounded. If you didn’t tell me Weezer were all approaching their fifties by the time I discovered them, I probably would have thought Rivers Cuomo was a teenager, sitting bored in his science class, doodling on his desk -- just like me! The summer of 2016 was a summer of monumental change that I never could have prepared myself for. The first strike was realizing that I was leaving my old friends and old school behind. The second strike was now-twicollaborator Nick McCarthy (did I mention you can find him on the Friends Page?) leaving Franz Ferdinand. The only good change that happened that summer was the introduction of Pokemon Go-- I mean, creating the very blog you’re reading this on -- Twilight Collective. It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly four years since I typed the first words of my intro post -- I could make myself sound a billion times more interesting, but I guess I'll just do this. From there, the changes set in. And I got into Interpol. To be completely fair, I’m pretty sure Turn On the Bright Lights screwed up my world-view in my freshman year of high school. Suddenly, I was living in a cramped New York City apartment that smelled faintly of ramen noodles, with one yellow-tinted ceiling light and thin walls that let all of the traffic, and all of the negative energy of the city -- Yes, Alli, I definitely fantasized about this strange, hopeless life at 2 AM in your guest bedroom after the Saint Motel concert. It made me feel like all of the negative energy in New York was on my shoulders, despite the fact that I lived over an hour away in a town with a population of a whopping 16,000 people. And the fact that I was a high school freshman and watching the rain in the backseat of my mom’s car on the way to my guitar lessons. I was fourteen, it was the mid-2010s, and sad was cool. I'll give myself that. However, as clumsy and misguided as my introduction to high school was, it turned out to be more insightful than harmful. 2017 explains why. Honorable Mentions: Room On Fire by the Strokes, Death of a Bachelor by Panic! at the Disco, Too Much Information by Maxïmo Park 2017: A Certain Trigger -- Maxïmo Park A Certain Trigger is probably the only album on this list that accurately reflects the entire year -- my obsession started with a VideoStar music video made to “Postcard of a Painting” in January, and I ended up seeing Maximo Park in November after basically begging them to come to Philadelphia. But we’ll get to that. The first thing I have to mention about 2017 is that I had a classic rock phase smack-dab in the middle of it and wanted to meet Jim Morrison's ghost. I bought Beatles merch. The Kinks were my favorite band for a good month, unfortunately. Tangent aside, back to Maximo Park. I’m not really sure who A Certain Trigger is meant to be for -- on one hand, it’s a monument to teenage clumsiness, but at the same time, one can almost imagine Maximo Park’s Paul Smith as a college professor or a museum director. Something about this band makes me want to study, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Anyway, this album perfectly mixes those two conflicting energies -- if Paul Smith is a college professor, he’s the cool English teacher who acts more like a student than someone above them hierarchically. Being fifteen, I took this album in the clumsy teenager direction -- still adjusting to the new and unfamiliar world I was in, still writing like a middle schooler, and pretending to be much cooler outside of school than I actually was. If there’s one thing I want you to know about me from this era, it’s that I wore purple highlight basically every day of 2017. And I didn’t blend it. It just sat on my face all day in bold purple streaks until one day in my history class my friend physically reached over the table and blended it for me. That’s quite clumsy, if you ask me. I traveled outside of the United States for the first time in 2017, too, and I listened to “Limassol” the entire time on a ferry that went between Athens, Mykonos, Santorini, and, well, Limassol. I also attended my first Model UN conference and ended up having feelings for someone for the first time in a long time. Unrelated to this album, but I listened to Metronomy’s “Night Owl” the entire way home. The golden, shining star of 2017 was seeing Maximo Park live at the Foundry in Philadelphia, with an audience of about 75-or-so people. They announced during the concert that they’d probably never come back, so we all assumed that this was a one-time deal. Most of the concert was spent on requests due to the small audience size.The Temple Law students standing next to me adopted me into their group for the night and we pretty much harassed the band on social media prior to their set to please, please play “Graffiti” -- although all I wanted to hear was “Midnight on the Hill.” They played “Graffiti.” My new friends and I went completely bonkers. After that, Paul Smith talked a bit about the Sixers game he had attended the night before, and the true spirit of Philadelphia possessed the audience. People offered him gifts -- bracelets, a stray checkered Van, even a Joel Embiid jersey presumably off someone’s own back. Smith reluctantly accepted the gifts -- even the Pura Vida bracelet off my wrist. I really have no idea what got into that crowd that night. I think that’s just what being in a room of Maximo Park stans does to a Maximo Park stan. With that, 2017 was over. As Paul Smith himself would say: “and that’s enough.” Honorable Mentions: Metronomy’s entire discography, LA Woman by the Doors, the Kinks’ entire discography, sadly 2018: Contra - Vampire Weekend & Writer’s Block - Peter, Bjorn, & John 2018 had an amazing start. I joined my school’s squash team. I met my favorite band. I interviewed a lot of really cool people and made a lot of really cool friends. I traveled alone for the first time and now I’d consider moving to Japan. The Eagles won the Super Bowl. I took the most bomb history class of all time. I went to a lot of sweet sixteens and made some great memories with my awesome new friend group. The Sixers still had Dario Saric (enjoy sunny Phoenix, angel). I fell in love with the Norwegian curling team. I spent a day wandering around Philadelphia looking at murals. I wrote some of my favorite things that I’ve written so far. Things were good. Contra soundtracked it. There’s never really a lot to say when you’re having a good time. In the latter half of 2018, I had a severe case of writer’s block. I couldn’t write anything more -- I didn’t want to. I felt like my writing was falling behind. I had a garbage final field hockey season. My classes were exponentially more difficult than they were in sophomore year. The Sixers traded two of my favorite players. The Eagles sucked again. One of my best friends, the girl who made me love Philadelphia sports in the first place, left my school over the summer, and I felt like I was partially starting over. Junior year took the first half of 2018 out of me and made me feel bad for not being that happy anymore. But as always, I powered through with a smile on my face. I made TikToks in my bedroom before it wasn’t any fun to do TikTok anymore. I drove around Staten Island with my best friends. I churned out end-of-year emails, which in itself is an achievement, let alone while waiting to go tubing at a ski resort. I met some incredible people at a Model UN conference in New Brunswick (FLIPCOIN forever!) and got my class ring. Writer’s Block taught me that even though things weren’t nearly as good as they were in the first half of the year, I could still have fun while figuring out what I wanted to do as a writer and as a person. Coincidentally enough, PB&J frontman Peter Morén was one of our 2018 interviewees. Things were good. Honorable Mentions: Hot Fuss by the Killers, Miracle Mile by STRFKR, my entire Glasgow scene Daily Mix 2019: Give Up - The Postal Service & Dreams - The Whitest Boy Alive Despite the fact that most of Give Up is about breakups, goodbyes, and apocalyptic settings, if you spin it into folk punk ukulele covers, it’s about change for the better. Things are changing, and while that’s scary, it’s ultimately a good thing. College is the big upcoming change for me. I don’t know where I’ll be next year, who my friends will be, what I’ll study, or how I’ll feel about any of it. For that reason, appreciating the bittersweet final year of high school can make me feel more alone than ever. It seems like everyone is moving on, moving faster than you, going out with their new boyfriends and new best friends and eventually you feel like you can’t even have a basic conversation without being laughed at. However, Give Up reminds its listener that they’re brave, and they’re loved-- just for being strong. That’s where Dreams comes in. Dreams is an album for fantasizing about the future rather than dwelling on what currently is or what could have been, pretending you live a cozy life in an IKEA display apartment, and thinking about just how good things are going to be in the future. Although The Whitest Boy Alive broke up in 2014 and their members are nowhere to be found on the internet, their music continues to guide me through the home stretch of the decade. And if there’s anything Dreams encourages its listener to take with themselves, it’s that despite any current unpleasant circumstances, things are about to be good. While writing this article, I found out that The Whitest Boy Alive has scheduled a few tour dates, and will hopefully be coming back soon. That might be the message of Dreams, after all: just when you think things can’t get any worse, they suddenly, out of nowhere, get better. Honorable Mentions: Sound of Silver by LCD Soundsystem, The Crane Wife by the Decemberists, Currents by Tame Impala, s/t by Vampire Weekend, assorted songs by Beirut, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not by Arctic Monkeys, that really good postpunk revival playlist on my Spotify -------------------- The 2020s are coming. I saw a Queens of the Stone Age shirt in a Forever-21-esque fast fashion store in Greece over the summer, Julian Casablancas is being name-dropped in indie rock songs across the board, and things are changing, fast. Remember hoverboards? Remember Vine? The wonderful, inspiring, and sometimes existentially terrifying ever-changing nature of social media is making it hard to keep up. And I hate to break it to you, but many of our musical idols are going to retire, or settle down and have families, or drop off the face of the Earth. Remember Drake? Travis Scott? All of those old pop stars fighting for relevance who are going to end up on the Super Bowl halftime show in another decade’s time? Although the formative years of my music-listening career are coming to an end, there’s one more thing I have to say: Give change a chance. Listen to a new artist you discovered on TikTok. Don’t drag your date out of the building, embarrassed, when a K-Pop song comes on at prom. Be appreciative of how the music world is evolving. Make Spotify playlists for everyone you meet. Per Smash Mouth, stop calling it mumble rap. Dive into that scary-looking playlist of a genre you've never heard of. Ask your friends from other countries what they're into. Read forums. Find new artists from Instagram ads. Love things unapologetically. And most importantly, let yourself grow. I’ll see you all in 2020.
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About The AuthorLiah is a high school senior who plays guitar and loves the color yellow. She doesn't post much, but when she does, it's awesome. We promise.
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