Modern Qualifier 43 – Magdalena Bay, Nilufer Yanya, Ethel Cain, Alvvays

I nominated Ethel Cain’s “American Teenager” because we reached the end of the 2022 poll and its absence seemed glaringly apparent. It was one of my favs from last year, a hazy smear of an indie anthem blown out with JAMC drums and guitar spirals that are swept to the edges by big synth swells that fill out the spaces in the track like the dark gaps in memory. It’s a song that sits in the small genre of art that looks back at life in homefront America during the Bush era — see also, for instance, the Ben Fountain novel Billy Lynn’s Long Half Time Walk — that are struck by the oddity of ordinary day-to-day living as post-9/11 anxiety suffuses the air and the US undertakes a violent and increasingly directionless occupation of a Middle Eastern country half a world away. “The neighbor’s brother came home in a box/But he wanted to go so maybe it was his fault,” Cain sings, almost an aside amid her invocations of icons of family and faith, football players and fast cars. “Another red heart taken by the American dream.” But as well as being a song of national ennui, it’s also one of adolescent aimlessness, told simultaneously in the past and present tense; “it’s just not my year” murmurs Cain, hanging out, doing nothing while feeling everything, yet also looking back at that time wondering what the hell all that craziness was. She puts on a cheerleader’s outfit for the video*, which is shot to look like old tape, and the song has the manic and slightly unmoored fervor of a sports crowd or a prayer meeting. “I do it for my daddy and I do it for Dale [Earnhardt],” Cain swears, then falters: “Jesus if you’re there, why do I feel alone with you?” America is so much, too much to look at all at once, but this song is about the times when you see its entirety from out of the corner of your eye.
*It also has an Andrew Wyeth recreation, and I don’t know if that means anything or is just an Easter egg.