Music Listening
A memoir about music.
Content Warning: This piece contains mentions of drinking, self-harm, and suicidal ideation as well as explicit descriptions of mental illness.
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This article details the many trials and tribulations I faced during sophomore year, as told through my ever-evolving music taste. A collection of the songs and artists featured here can be found in my Spotify playlist, “The Tech | Music Listening” [https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6VfZm5ZOx0t35UGsyCmNw5?si=556f973a7c1f4a16].
I turn on my phone and look at the time. It’s 10:09 a.m.
The scene outside the window is grey, cloudy, drab. Silence but for the choked-up whirring of my old table fan, a maddening level of electrical hum, and the occasional groaning creak coming from the depths of the building itself. (It’s a dull brutalist beast, the Student Center; I’d be wallowing in the misery of my existence, too, if I were it. I am, but for different reasons entirely.)
Thirty minutes pass, and I’ve barely done anything. This column is 90 words in, I’ve written two emails, and the world is sitting completely still. The most productive thing I’ve done all day is break in the smoky silver couch I’m glued to—and it’s probably older than me, so I actually can’t even claim that as a win.
I sink into the sofa, propped up only by the unfortunate fact of my physicality; I wish I could keep sinking into the cushions and not have to come back out.
Instead, I do the next best thing—I turn my brain off and turn the volume up. Now playing: “Dead Girls” by Penelope Scott. Baroque punk, they call her music; “pov: indie” as Spotify markets it; I have it listed in my mental library for getting into the killing-yourself kind of mood. (I don’t have any associated songs grouped together in an actual playlist for obvious reasons.)
“I, your name, do solemnly swear / Not to off myself, think about offing myself / Or continue thinking about offing myself / Without reaching out for help after listening to this song,” Penelope Scott says in a spoken opener over a video game-esque synth track. The resigned percussive beat of a song about teen suicide keeps me regulated, in a kind of self-hating way.
It’s kind of calming; my thoughts just minutes prior to a tornado, are now all lined up like some ephemeral attention command. (“Atten-SHUN!” the brain conductor calls out, as a deep depression made manifest swaggers into the mind palace to the beat of the song.) The briefing: a scissor blade or a pencil sharpener?
(I get a text from a friend I’m supposed to have lunch within an hour; she asks to reschedule for another day. Fine—I suppose Penelope Scott stays on for a little bit longer.)
As the track ends and the music shuffles into other songs by Penelope Scott, I start to think about the way my musical interests were shepherded by and, in some ways, kind of stirred up the chaos of my sophomore year.
I started listening to artists like Penelope Scott sometime in October and November of the fall semester as I fell into my sophomore slump. Olivia Rodrigo had released Guts just a month prior, and the alt-pop teen exhilaration that bubbled in me throughout September blew up right in my face as my mental health, my social life, and my will to live all shattered into a million pieces. I was a wreck. My top songs at the time were “Cigarette Ahegao” (literally about the sophomore slump), “American Healthcare” (about the broken healthcare system), and “Dead Girls” (see: the beginning of this column).
It was hard to track how I obsessed over “Look What You Made Me Do” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” (Taylor Swift) in-between bouts of screaming, “I’m a perfect all-American b*tch!” (“All-American Bitch,” Olivia Rodrigo) just weeks before, when I was running on a turbulent high. The first couple weeks of the school year were indescribably intense, filled with love and rage; my musical tastes followed this as I tried to drown out the personal issues gnawing away at my insides with songs about intimacy, betrayal, and conviction.
Other songs that marked the start of my second year at MIT include a collection of Chappell Roan and The Orion Experience queer erotica, Kenya Grace’s lost-in-thought synth ballads, and some carryover pieces of The Cranberries from a persisting summer obsession. Noticeable here was an undercurrent of feminine indie-pop that took over my Spotify playlist (everything from Beach Bunny to Al Olender). (I also listened to the punk masterpiece “American Idiot” proper for the first time; we’ll get back to that later.)
Glitzy pop and the more experimental corners of the queer-fem indie scene began to intoxicate me as the first third of my sophomore fall came to a close.
At this time, artists like Boy Jr. and Medusa (both of whom I saw live at an intimate barside show in Somerville some months later) fuelled an ever-soaring psyche. (“Babe, you can see that I’m danger...”) Sleep was scarce as I stretched myself far too thin in the next couple of weeks. (“Teetering off of the stage, yeah...”) In retrospect, maybe Medusa was really trying to warn me about myself each time “Kinda Outta Luck” made its way into the queue. (“Sparkling in sequins, say hey-yeah...”)
Because then I went into freefall.
(“Time to give in to the kindness of strangers—”)
My mental health abruptly, inexplicably went up in a ball of roaring flame mid-semester. Now playing: “paranoia party” by Frances Forever.
I hated myself, and I hated everyone around me. Now playing: “abcdefu” by GAYLE.
I operated almost purely out of spite; I wasn’t going to let them cast me off a failure. (To past Ellie: who is this “them” you were so hellbent on defying?) Now playing: “i think i want to be alone” by mazie.
It was nothing but dread and despair.
“Cigarette Ahegao” eventually became my most-played song of 2023 after coming across it in the back quarter of the year. Penelope Scott, in particular, was (and still is) my go-to for triggering a depressive sinkhole. Day in and day out, I played her music with crap Apple earphones, and the volume turned way too high—
Then I hear the distinctive opening beats of “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” and I’m snapped out of my self-reflective spiral. It’s nearing 2:00 p.m. I look out the window: still grey and cloudy, but brighter and livelier. The trees sway in the wind.
By this time, it was mid-November, and I was ready for a change of pace.
I was brought back to the real world by a person who soon became very special to me. (See: Dear Ex-Girlfriend, another column from “An Ellie For Your Thoughts.”) She introduced me to what it was like to be goth—I did not look back. My playlists went from titles like “Monstarrr,” “H8R,” and “Brittle, Baby!” to “Mary On A Cross,” “Six Candles,” and “Bitch, Please!”
Everything was still too much to handle, but I found an outlet for myself. I was especially fond of gothic rock. For a few months, I felt a kind of stability I hadn’t been able to grasp since the semester began. To be honest, listening to gothic rock was in itself an immense, musically overwhelming stressor, but I needed that kind of suffocation.
I still found space for whimsy in this era. Some of my favorite goth songs were “Bats” and “Lesbian Vampyres From Outer Space” from the goth band Scary Bitches.
Goth music, to me, represented a kind of audacious resilience. Dark and brooding themes accompanied by lyrics centered around personal durability and adaptability really resonated with me. I needed the ability to look at the grim reaper eye-to-eye hole and go, “You don’t bother me.” Groups like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Lebanon Hanover, and Sisters of Mercy gave me that.
At the same time, I was beginning to develop a taste for rap. I had despised the genre in its entirety in the past; for years, I considered it flavorless nonsense. But a breakthrough in some slam pop songs that incorporated elements of hip-hop lyricism made me more receptive, and I started to edge into the genre through female artists like Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion.
Over the next few months, I would slowly begin to delve into more niche aspects of the rap genre—although for some time, I still kept to pop-styled female artists. By December, I was keeping myself afloat through boss bitch songs like “Area Codes” (Kaliii) and “Princess Diana” (Ice Spice feat. Nicki Minaj). It wasn’t until April that I embraced more masculine figures in the scene: “C’est La Vie” (Yung Gravy feat. bbno$ and Rich Brian) and “edamame” (bbno$ feat. Rich Brian) were my gateway drugs, skyrocketing into the top two most-played positions in my Spotify that month. (I still prefer to keep to more underground artists in my rap selections.)
I had ended December visiting Maryland to see family, and that went about as well as one would expect... except miles, miles worse. I flew out a few days after New Year’s from DC to Las Vegas. I spent the next few days there in a cold hotel. Sparing the details, I crawled back to Boston battered and bruised; my mental health once again was spiraling out of control.
So, in January, I needed another transformation. I had already gotten hooked on a few punk rock standouts like “Teenagers” (My Chemical Romance) and “The Middle” (Jimmy Eat World); it was easier to digest than the dark overtones of goth music, which is a deeply hard pill to swallow, and I pretty quickly identified with the self-deterministic ethic that punk centers on. While goth was about embracing the darkness, staring death in the face, and daring it to do its worst—punk was about rejecting the darkness, punching death in the gut, and telling it to go f**k itself.
Mid-January, I still clung to the goth moniker; my aesthetic and sentiment were rapidly turning the tide.
An alarm rings, and I’m back to the present.
It’s now 6 a.m. the next day—I had spent the last dozen-and-a-half hours in a deep pit of depression; I had nothing scheduled for the day, nothing that could make me put on the face I wear around others to pretend like everything’s okay.
I look out the window. The sky is smoky. Many of the buildings on the horizon are hazy with morning fog. I take a swig of the rum sitting next to me. It hits hard. I take another swig.
My mind is racing, my fingers rushing across the keyboard. I shuffle through an array of Green Day songs as the seconds tick by. I’m back on a high, another casualty of my unfettered mood, volleying back and forth from the lowest lows to the highest highs.
I walk on the tiled floor barefoot to get something from the other side of the room. I couldn’t care less. I’ve done this dance before.
Today, right now and right here, at 6 a.m. on Friday morning, I make a vow to take on the world.
I told myself that too, end-of-January.
I was trying on an array of different labels, finding myself and losing myself over and over again, and gradually losing touch with the world around me.
I turned that around when I embraced punk rock. Fast, loud, and aggressive. The rock-driven power ballads of the punk genre stank of revolution—and I was first on the train.
With punk, I wasn’t denying myself my humanity. (“I swallowed my pride, and I choked on my faith—”)
I was letting it consume me. (“I’ve given my heart and my soul—”)
Letting it fuel me. (“I’ve broken my fingers and lied through my teeth—”)
Instead of wallowing in my anger and my hate, I used it. (“The pillar of damage control—”)
I was going to take on the world. (“I’ve been to the edge, and I’ve thrown the bouquet—”)
I had stared death in the face. (“Of flowers left over from the grave—”)
Death can go f**k itself. (“I’ve sat in the waiting room wasting my time—”)
I write my own damn destiny. (“And waiting for judgment day—”)
(“I praise liberty / The freedom to obey / Is the song that strangles me / Well, don’t cross the line.”)
I developed my now-familiar aesthetic days before the start of spring semester classes: coal-black leather jacket, red newsboy cap to cover my wavy black-and-orange hair, black-and-red flannel wrapped around my waist, faded black cargo pants, and black-and-orange hiking boots.
The next few months, sophomore spring, became the most intense months of my life. Suffice it to say, the spring semester changed me, for better or for worse. My indoctrination into this sense of being meant that good days were truly phenomenal and bad days were absolutely abysmal. Punk music meant that I was throwing myself right into the worst parts of me: on occasion it would lead to the most memorable moments—days filled to the brim with work meetings and endless parties, shopping sprees that ate up most of my income, and a week-long bout of sleepless labor in hijacking another university’s newspaper for April Fool’s Day (see: MIT–Caltech Joke Issue)—and at times it pushed me off the edge into the deepest depressions. (See: March 13th. That’s a story for another day.)
In March, my three most-played songs were “Shoplifter” (Green Day), “Teenage Rebellion” (Sarah Barrios), and “American Idiot” (Green Day). Six of the other top 10 songs of that month were from my punk playlist. (The only one that wasn’t was “Stupid With Love,” from the Mean Girls soundtrack—I’m still a hopeless romantic, okay!) In April, my top songs were “Obsessed” (Olivia Rodrigo), “American Idiot” (Green Day), and “I Disagree” (Poppy). Green Day was my third most-played artist in April and my first in May.
At times, it felt like my emotions were literally pulled right from my playlists. Bears in Trees would call apathy “boring.” You’re right—I do want to feel alive, I would respond. Change to the next track and “Love the Subhuman Self”’s synth-metal sounds would fill me with relentless determination. Then I would hear Jimmy Eat World and calm right back down to a good sustained high, knowing that everything would be alright.
The songs I listened to both helped me come to terms with my story and urged me to burn it in hellfire. April and May saw the worst of this rapid, unchecked cycling. It was maddening. It’s difficult to encapsulate in writing what those two months were like for me. Each day was a different fight entirely, with my music straddling both sides of the war between me and myself.
On my good days, it was punk. On my bad ones, it was goth. At my worst, it was Penelope Scott.
Music, to me, is an outlet. Across the stress and strain of sophomore year, all of my trials and tribulations were—sometimes to a terrifying degree—mirrored and encapsulated by the songs I listened to. Music is a driving force of my mood, pushing me into a particular interpretation of myself, deeply attached to the sonic and lyrical themes of the specific song that comes up next in the queue. It is also derived from my mood and the songs I choose to define myself with in the future based on how well they capture me in the now.
Another alarm rings. It’s 9 a.m. now.
I look out the window to one towering building in particular that just hours earlier had been enshrouded in a sea of fog—its perch looking over the heart of Boston concealed to it by forces unknown—and see it bright as day. It can return to its solitary charge, sleeplessly watching over the city, once more.
The sky is still cloudy, but I can start to see patches of blue.
The playlist shuffles to the next track, and a reviving metallic riff reverberates through the room. I think to myself that the Student Center itself, which for the last day had played unwitting host to my internal madness, can hear it too.
The past 24 hours found me in a really deep, in parts painful, reflection of the past nine months. I took myself through a rollercoaster of a ride across these two semesters and dug up parts of myself that I had hoped to leave behind.
It’s alright, though. Because I’m going to take on the world.
I zip up my leather jacket and don my newsboy cap, plug in my earphones and turn up the punk rock song currently playing, and head out of the room.
“A Seven Nation Army couldn’t hold me back.”