when u were young: girlpants does your childhood

If you read the bios of our writers here at girl­pants, one of the things you’ll inevitably notice is that every single one of them spends an inor­di­nate amount of time dis­cussing the subject’s child­hood, gen­er­ally in fond if overly wacky terms. Mike was born under a bad sign in Death Valley; Ben had an idyllic child­hood, filled with boats; Joel matured into a rugged out­doorsman in the wilds of West Boca Raton, while somehow remaining per­pet­u­ally 13 years old (this part is true); Niina was raised by bears. Jason, well… we’re not sure he was ever a child.

Ok, so we roman­ti­cize our youth, but the truth is that child­hood is a splen­dif­erous and unique and unfor­get­table expe­ri­ence that you can never ever get back no matter how hard you try, and that makes us all depressed and makes us all have babies.

But hey, it’s also fun to rem­i­nisce about, so here’s a mix about child­hood from your friends at girl­pants. Some of these songs tackle child­hood themes directly, some in a more round­about fashion, and some simply remind us of our child­hoods, but you’ll find that all are killer tunes.

01. Can­nibal Ox — “A B-Boy’s Alpha”
First off, sorry for starting this mix with the line “My mother said, ‘You sucked my pussy when you came out / don’t ever talk back / I handed ya life and I’ll snatch it back.’” That’s down­right con­fronta­tional, and frankly not at all appro­priate for chil­dren. And it’s not even the most con­fronta­tional birthing image Can­nibal Ox were capable of deliv­ering on their first and thus far only studio record, a pretty remark­able set called The Cold Vein. Try this one on for size: “You were a still­born baby / mother didn’t want you, but you were still born.” Daaaaaaaaamn. But anyway, this song—it’s basi­cally a nar­ra­tive of two kids growing up in the ghetto, sur­rounded at all times by death and loss, honing their skills, and even­tu­ally arriving on the scene as a fully formed artistic pow­er­house. In some ways, it’s a striking lyrical accom­pa­ni­ment to the Neil Young song we’ll get to later on—just two kids trying to make it to adult­hood without their brains get­ting splat­tered all over the pave­ment. (Ben)

02. Looper — “The Tree­house”
Looper is a little-known side act fronted by the bassist of Belle and Sebas­tian which got its start in the late 90s with a low-key and intensely earnest first album. The band is much the same today; that is, little-known. In order to main­tain the jour­nal­istic integrity of this fine insti­tu­tion, I have to admit that this song does not remind me of my child­hood, but it does suc­ceed at invoking an image of a child­hood. I was never much for climbing trees, per­son­ally. I was more inter­ested in com­mu­ni­cating with them. No, not aloud, I’m not crazy. Tele­path­i­cally. (Jason)

03. Ous Mal — “Tähdet”
“Have you ever used the memory palace?” Bobby casu­ally asked me this the other day. I haven’t. So, Ous Mal is Olli and Iiris, who are both younger than me (shock) [Editor’s note: patently impos­sible!] and make tunes that are vir­tu­ally impos­sible to revisit. Boomkat calls it “highly enjoy­able Scan­di­na­vian lo-fi melod­i­cism,” I call it total Eerie, Indiana: the tracks seem to change each time I put on Viime Talvi. Employing sam­pling, field recording, col­lage, and live instru­men­ta­tion (every­thing is done analog), the duo con­struct melodies that seem to escape lis­tening, making you feel like nothing but those old mem­o­ries you try to inhabit. In “Tähdet,” I feel like I’m caught in a time-trap; it sounds like young sum­mers, like play­things, warm attics; it’s tele­vi­sion snow, it’s dirty brown hair; it’s dis­tant but oddly per­sonal. It reminds me to take better care of my mem­o­ries. (Joel)

04. Laila Kin­nunen — “Tanssi­laulu”
As you may know from my biog­raphy, my child­hood was spent in the bear-infested wilds of Fin­land. This song rep­re­sents the old Finnish clas­sics we always used to hear while wran­gling wood­land crea­tures, shocking city folk with our crude and for­ward ways, and binging on lenkki­makkara. Kin­nunen has the iconic Finnish voice—unadorned but playful, and easy on melody, and when I listen to this song without lis­tening to the lyrics as I imagine most of you might, I imagine it to be both melan­choly and mys­te­rious, which are qual­i­ties that embody the music I heard as a child. Kin­nunen, a super­star in her time, had a kind of whole­some sex­i­ness that 60s pop every­where must have had, but with a strange sense of timing and humor (for this last bit, you should also view the video for her inter­pre­ta­tion of “Hernando’s Hide­away”). (Niina)

05. Neil Young — “Pow­derfinger”
Now, you might think I chose this song simply because it includes the words “mama,” “daddy,” and “brother.” But no! Well… kind of, yes. But really, I think this song is one of the best at cap­turing the exact moment when a boy tran­si­tions into man­hood and leaves the friv­o­lity of child­hood behind (“daddy’s gone, my brother’s out hunting in the moun­tains / Big John’s been drinking since the river took Emmy-Lou / so the Powers That Be left me here to do the thinkin’ / and I just turned twenty-two / I was won­derin’ what to do”), even if this par­tic­ular man­child dies in the tran­si­tion (“raised my rifle to my eye / never stopped to wonder why / then I saw black / and my face splashed in the sky”). Internet scholars var­i­ously claim that this song is set in the tur­moil of the Amer­ican War of Inde­pen­dence, the Amer­ican Civil War, or, most likely, Canada’s Red River Rebel­lion of 1869, but in the end it really doesn’t matter what the set­ting is. It’s all about the char­acter. (Ben)

06. Bob Dylan — “Just Like a Woman”
After Ben care­lessly left a bag of blow on his desk and I stole it and snorted it, I got to thinking. Child­hood, as any good anthro­pol­o­gist will tell you, isn’t just a period in your devel­op­ment. It’s a stance, a set of rela­tion­ships between you and the world. You can snuff it out, or you can try to smuggle it into adult­hood, but I think most of the time we just ama­teur­ishly pave it over. By that def­i­n­i­tion Dylan’s hood classic is also a classic of child­hood, of the way its wounds per­sist, suf­fo­cating you and those who would love you. This live cut, which switches the studio version’s can­tina waltz for a lonely stumble home, seems fit­ting to the sen­ti­ment. (Mike)

07. Zookeeper — “I Live in the Mess You Are”
Babies pop­u­late Chris Simpson’s songs. They’re prac­ti­cally every­where. Take “Delivery Room” from his Belle City Pop! ep (it’s about a delivery room and the babies in it). Or “I Was Born in Omaha” from his Start Here–days in The Gloria Record (also about dem babes, ‘cept here he’s being one). While “I Live in the Mess You Are” don’t got a baby in it, it’s totally about child­hood. With an opening alarm clock ring, Simpson (fig­ured as St. Francis) leads a drowsy, dow-eyed children’s chorus and ram­shackle, anthro­po­mor­phic baby rhi­noc­eros circus trope in a street parade through sunny-side-up won­der­ment. It’s some imag­i­na­tive heartachery that would make a Windsor McCay dream look like a funeral. I don’t have to jus­tify it; Simpson has always been one of my favs, and he’s always taking me back to those moony names and faces peeking in the past from my own growings-up. (Joel)

08. The Mo-dettes — “White Mice”
“White Mice” is a bril­liant song from The Story So Far…, the Mo-dettes’ classic album. I have included 80s girlpunk on this list for two rea­sons: first, because I’m told my ma was in her heyday a bit of a punk rocker, and I believe this has gone on to genet­i­cally influ­ence some of the choices in my life (some!) (I don’t include most!). And the second reason is that I often used to joyride in my first and only car, a baby blue 1990 Civic hatch­back, blasting sweet-ass punk rock and remem­bering freedom. I con­sider six­teen to be pretty much a kid, so y’know. All talk about punk aside, this song itself is a lower-key exer­cise in mes­mer­iza­tion. It opens with a rolling drum­beat copied many times over, including on that jangle you might remember called “Young Folks” from a coupla years ago. The lyrics are hilarious—“don’t be stupid don’t be limp, / no girl likes to love a wimp”—and in gen­eral it has a singsong quality that I asso­ciate with songs I really loved as a kid. Also, the hand­clap parts are inter­ac­tive, which all chil­dren enthu­si­as­ti­cally respond to, so feel free to play this for your junior. (Niina)

09. Alsace Lor­raine — “You Are Like Charles Lind­bergh to Me”
I came of age right on the cusp of mp3s, but for a few years I would actu­ally go to record stores and try and build up my laugh­ably meager vinyl col­lec­tion. I picked up Alsace Lorraine’s Through Small Win­dows because of the cover—some oddly shaped girl standing on a bal­cony, staring into the dis­tance. I couldn’t tell you exactly why it appealed to me, but I brought it to the counter and the almost clas­si­cally aloof record store clerk started jab­bering about how much he liked it. For a couple of min­utes I got to nod along like I knew who he was talking about, and was afforded a glimpse into some of the music dork social­iza­tion mech­a­nisms that prob­ably don’t matter as much with, uh, cool blogs like girl­pants around. It turns out Alsace Lor­raine was a great blind buy. Wispy twee pop in the vein of St. Eti­enne, but modest enough to feel like your per­sonal little secret. This first track trades pre­cisely in that kind of home­grown fun­craft. It cel­e­brates those goofy teenage rela­tion­ships that are really like rebuilt child­hood worlds unto them­selves, made up of sum­mers, inside jokes and odd totemic fig­ures like Charles Lind­bergh. You could prob­ably draw a line from this to the xx’s VCR, and it’s a peren­nial theme that Alsace Lor­raine just did right for me. (Mike)

10. God Help the Girl — “The Psy­chi­a­trist is In”
Imagine Dylan’s little girl in her second act. She gets her shit together, set­tles down and for some unknown reason is flashing her kind, smiling eyes at you. Oh, she’s quite sym­pa­thetic. She was a case when she was young too, and can help. Of course, the offer to ‘listen to your sto­ries’ is at once more child­ishly sly and “adult” than most psy­chi­atry is capable of. Those slightly swaying, deco­rous bongos, that hon­eyed voice; Dan Bejar once said “nothing does the body good like another body,” and that’s basi­cally the therapy Catherine Ireton is proposing here. Sort of like the twee ver­sion of “fuck the pain away,” after it’s cooled into a sheepish kind of sad bas­tardism? I guess this is growing up. (Mike)

11. Nedelle — “Our Little Selves”
Nedelle could be seven (she has a song called “Tell Me a Story” that begins with a carefully-described puppy dog tongue, and it’s obvious that her rhyme schemes are lifted from Grover). Or, she could (prob­ably) be a reg­ular adult who sings about the joys of being a kid. Her song “Our Little Selves,” on 2005’s From the Lion’s Mouth, makes this theme absolutely trans­parent, as she announces “sound the bell / our little selves are enough.” It’s a simple image, but it’s Nedelle ability to bring this simple image to life with fable and anec­dote (sto­ry­bookisms that really flourish in her latest record The Lock­smith Cometh) that ani­mates From the Lion’s Mouth. It’s an album that, for anyone with a sappy side, is drenched with tiny rem­i­nis­cences. And what more is child­hood than that ever-present, self-mythologizing nos­talgia? Little, I say. (Joel)

12. Chad Van­Gaalen — “TMNT Mask”
When­ever I hear this song—which is prob­ably just about get­ting stoned and sit­ting next to the river—I inevitably think of 13-year-old Jason Taylor, pro­tag­o­nist of David Mitchell’s excel­lent coming-of-age novel Black Swan Green. Jason is a melan­cholic kid of a cer­tain sort—the kind who writes and pub­lishes poetry at the age of 13, and who will later grow up to be an inter­na­tion­ally acclaimed nov­elist. The kind who avoids the other kids his age and goes to sit by the lake in the quiet winter evening, skate around the frozen expanse, watch his ghostly shadow skating on the oppo­site side. VanGaalen’s music here evokes pretty much every bleep and bloop and hor­ribly arti­fi­cial drum machine beat of the book’s Thatch­erian time period while mar­rying it to a dis­tinctly augh­ties aes­thetic. The song’s only con­ces­sion to child­hood as such is the men­tion of a “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle mask / sunken to the rocks, plastic face half-buried” in the riverbed, as melan­choly an image as they come. (Ben)

13. Finally Punk — “5 Yr Old Angst”
This is a rather lit­eral choice, as the song is a temper tantrum set to music, including childish angry growls and a refrain of “I wanna go out­side!” that per­fectly encap­su­lates the frus­tra­tion of any person whose minute-to-minute activ­i­ties are con­trolled by their par­ents. Beyond that, though, this is a band that seems to play just to make noise and doesn’t mind punc­tu­ating a song with a piercing shriek or two: the adult equiv­a­lent of a kid banging cym­bals together and screaming words to a half-remembered song. It might say some­thing that, as much as I appre­ciate the notion of obnox­ious noise as a form of music, even I can only take this band in small doses. (Jason)

14. M.A. Num­minen — “A Propo­si­tion Is…”
M.A. Num­minen is a revered Finnish eccen­tric who makes up for his dis­tinct lack of singing ability with his awe­somely capa­cious ran­dom­ness. His voice is a snarl at best, some­times cracking, some­times wan­dering off key, but it’s all in your face. And this song simul­ta­ne­ously dis­cusses Wittgen­stein and brings to mind the mul­tiple albums that Num­minen cut for chil­dren in the 1990s—awe­some x2. Sure it’s all stan­dard rock n’ roll riffs, wanky solos, and reck­less piano mashing, but more than one child­hood memory I have becomes in rec­ol­lec­tion accom­pa­nied by these very dulcet tones; here is hoping that you love Num­minen, too. If not, then con­sider it an edi­fi­ca­tion in phi­los­ophy. (Niina)

15. Pony­tail — “7 Souls”
Pony­tail is a frankly ridicu­lous band that does not per­form in order to com­mu­ni­cate a mes­sage or even to use real words. I like a lot of bands where the vocals are wielded like just another instru­ment rather than to add meaning through lyrics, but these guys take it to an extreme. So why did I pick this song? About a minute and twenty sec­onds into this track is exactly what get­ting out of school on the last day before summer vaca­tion should sound like. (Jason)

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