Stevie Washington & The Angry Youth
"Something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you . . . Something at eight a.m., something in the library, something in the river. Everything and nothing." ––Bukowski
I’ve been listening to Mac Miller’s Swimming lately— particularly the track “Self Care.” In it, Miller talks about the amazement he feels being stuck in the oblivion, supposedly having all the time in the world. However, you feel the conflict between desires not only in the lyrics, but in the song’s beat switch about halfway through, going from lush yet fast and hard to smooth and subdued. The whole album has this feeling to it, and it makes it nothing short of outstanding yet heartbreaking. But that feeling and contrast sticks with me as time moves forward.
The internet paints coping with isolation in black and white terms; If you’re not posting your own TED Talk about productivity, then you’re standing on a soap box— chastising those people and preaching self care advocacy or politically charged proclamations about refusing to work. I’ve talked to people through the magic of virtuality and it seems like many of them live in a sort of purgatory. They embark on home improvement projects, they make hip-hop beats, they paint more, they make podcasts, they do 50 push-ups a day and lift weights, etc. On the other hand, they can’t sleep. Some feel their health slowly slipping. Some of them have just lost a real sense of motivation. Sure they put the effort in but at the end of the day some of them can’t help but surrender to the mundanity.
Normality has been disrupted, as it is every so often. Then again, the Western World’s idea of normality is an illusion that’s been exposed by the 24/7 news and opinion cycle brought to us by social media. Most of this isn’t necessarily new, the emperor is just wearing less and less clothing.
Anyways, on a lighter note, now is as good a time as any to expand your horizons. If you’re bored and looking for some new things to check out, here are some gems I’ve been revisiting and discovering.
The Young Ones (BBC Two, 1982-’84)
Anarchic, sardonic and sarcastic, “The Young Ones” followed the lives of four young psychopaths who attend school at Scumbag College, living together in squalor in off-campus housing and reeking havoc on their landlord. “The Young One’s” can be seen as a precursor to [adult swim] or even Comedy Central programming. In America, the show was re-ran on MTV, and FOX even tried making an American version with former Simpsons showrunner David Mirkin (Mirkin later co-created “Get A Life” with Chris Elliott, and cites The Young Ones as an influence). Combining slapstick, dark comedy, puppetry and musical guests like Motörhead and The Damned, the show was ahead of its time in just how diverse, plain weird and over the top it could be, and that’s saying a lot considering the BBC also gave us Monty Python. The first episode literally ends with everyone dying after an airplane crashes on their house. The show is so chaotic that even Rick, one of the four roommates, doesn’t even have a consistent major or field of study. In some episodes he’s a sociology major, and in others he studies domestic sciences. The Young Ones” lack of law and order feels more relevant now than it probably ever has been. It’s the epitome of radical action and anti-authoritarianism, with enough absurdity to almost match the insanity of the real world as we now know it.
Megg, Mogg & Owl
If you’ve seen the Netflix animated series “BoJack Horseman”, or perhaps the second and third seasons of the [adult swim] series “Moral Orel”, then chances are you’ll get a handle on “Megg, Mogg & Owl”. Written & drawn by Tasmanian cartoonist Simon Hanselmann, it follows the day-to-day life a human sized owl, a witch named Megg, and her cat boyfriend Mogg. However, despite its fantastical sounding premise, it subverts any real fantasy tropes in favor of touching upon things like anxiety, drug usage and sexuality, while maintaining a certain wit within its writing. It comes off as a mixture of filmmaker Todd Solondz’ work and Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell”, with a bit of Regular Show thrown in for measure.
Part of what makes everything work is that you can either see yourself or someone you know in each of the characters. Take Megg and Owl. Megg is clinically depressed and debaucherous and easily distracted. A recent storyline regarding the ongoing COVID-19 crisis shows Megg being more concerned about the delayed shipment of the new Animal Crossing game she ordered. When she finally does get it, she spends two days shuttered in a shed playing it non-stop, even as chaos reigns just outside. Owl is a straight man who’s just trying to keep his head afloat. In the same aforementioned storyline, he tries to prepare everyone for the oncoming affects of the virus, but is dragged down by their colleagues, such as the mentally unstable and over sexed hedonist Werewolf Jones, moving into their house. Eventually, despite his best efforts, he comes down with the virus.
“Megg, Mogg & Owl” is anti-cute, which is both intentional and unintentional. “I just write what I see and what I’ve experienced. I don’t deliberately set out to aggravate or shock,” Hanselmann says in an interview with The Guardian. “I don’t censor myself. You need to be honest. You need to not hold back. I hate twee art. I find it dishonest; a false, privileged construct. Life is not nice. Existence is sad and cruel.” You don’t intend to hurt anyone with the truth, but at the same time the truth sometimes hurts. Hanselmann work is as dark and graphic as it is because life is dark and graphic. The comic mirrors the real world in that even as shit around you gets more and more surreal, and you or the people you know reach their boiling point, there’s always something funny to be found beneath the surface— as morbid as it may be.
Drunk - Thundercat
Many of us may know Thundercat from his work with Kung-Fu Kenny himself on To Pimp a Butterfly, where he was an essential part of it’s sound and aesthetic. With Drunk, Thundercat proves himself to be a stand out act. While the sound of the ’80s is alive and well in songs like Taylor Swift’s “Welcome To New York,” Bruno Mars’ “24K Magic,” and Lady Gaga’s “Perfect Illusion,” it’s rare that you hear love letters to the ’70s. You don’t see the tributes to Earth, Wind, and Fire, The Bee Gees, or The Doobie Brothers. And that’s a shame because I feel like there is a lot of unexplored territory for the neo-funk/disco genre. Luckily this album covers at least some of it. With its artwork and sound, the LP presents itself as this love letter to the gritty visual aesthetics of ’70s blaxploitation cinema, and the lavender induced ear candies we know as disco, R&B and soul. It’s a roller coaster of emotion, shifting from sensual ballads about love, drugs, and life, to humorous tracks about weeaboos, tourists, and forgetting your wallet at the club. Drunk is a sincere tribute to pop-culture’s Soul Train era. A perfect album for a night of sex by the fireplace.
Undergrads (MTV, 2001)
I first discovered “Undergrads” on the Internet around 2008. Being that I was barely twelve at the time, I certainly wasn’t the target age bracket for the show. But the shows style and flow hooked me in. It looks like an underground graphic novel. The colors and outlines have a certain grime to them. A lot of the designs feel like something found in a Robert Crumb comic. It’s laws of physics are generally grounded in reality but it’s just cartoonish enough to embrace the animation medium. The shows humor and dialogue are heavily driven by a love of pop-culture— similar to Kevin Smith’s “Mallrats” or “Clerks”.
“Undergrads” is a relatively low concept show the series follows four lifelong friends— Nitz, Cal, Rocko and Gimpy— who try to stay in touch while attending different schools (in the same town) while also trying to navigate their new found independence. While it tackled evergreen topics relevant to college students, like making new friends, weight gain, and defining yourself in a new environment, the show’s aesthetic is a time capsule of late ‘90s-early 2000s culture. The theme song is by Good Charlotte. Many of the characters' wardrobes are ripped from the infamous “AM I EMO?” infographic that Seventeen magazine published in 1999. The show's soundtrack features the likes of such emo/pop-punk bands as the Alkaline Trio, Sunday’s Best, and The Juliana Theory.
One of the more unique aspects of “Undergrads”, at least for its time, was the characters relationship to technology. The show features video chat and instant messenger as a key element of how the four friends keep in contact with one another (with one of them, Gimpy, never leaving his room until the final episode). As people begin relying more and more on virtual means of interactions, the show seems ahead of its time in how it depicted new ways of communication.
“Undergrads” offers a great deal of substance for anyone who’s been to college, or really anyone who finds themselves in an unfamiliar environment. If you’re preparing to start your freshman year, it’s definitely a crash course. Beyond that, the stories and character interactions are fun and relatable, the visual style is unique, and the music and fashion make for fun trip down memory lane. It’s a form of comfort food, with a taste that brings you back to a simpler time— before things got crazy.
I. Sky Frawley Rolls With The Seasonal Winds
It’s November 30, 2019— the day after Thanksgiving— and locals from the area are packing into The Basement, a small venue located literally in the basement of an insurance building. Multi-colored lighting illuminates the room as opening performances such as Charlie Invictus, an indie-folk act, Coffee Nap, an artist who describes themselves as a “musical stew”, and Ringside Tonic, an emo band, warm up the audience. The man of the hour, however, is Sky Frawley. The event is a record release show for his EP, Sky Falling. It’s the second installment in what he calls “The Seasoned EPs”, a series of extended plays that each represent one of the four seasons. If all of this sounds like a typical DIY show… it is. But the variation in the line-up, and idea of changing seasons draws parallels to the changes and evolution found throughout not only Sky Frawley’s music, but also within his life. The release show, as well as the EP itself, is the amalgamation of over a decade of highs and lows.
Sky was born in Houston, TX, where he lived up until the age of 9. This city, along with Austin, is known for its bustling art scene, having been the birthplace of artists such as director Richard Linklater, rapper/producer Travis Scott and country singer Kenny Rogers. However, he left the city when he was only nine, before he had the opportunity to get any real exposure to it. “I wasn’t really too in tune with the arts & culture scene down there,” he tells me. “Maybe subconsciously.” Coming from a musical family, his grandfather was a Jazz drummer, and his father played the bass. However, it was his mother, who played the clarinet in her youth, who inspired him to follow suit.
When he was 11, his mother passed away. “When something tragic like that happens, children have various ways of coping. I turned to music as a coping mechanism, and I’ve been making music ever since.” He describes his initial listening tastes as “standard”, with Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and Pink Floyd topping his go-to list. As the years passed, his artistic horizons began expanding. “By my adolescence, I was listening to lots of Radiohead, Weezer, Beach Boys and Velvet Underground,” he says. “For some reason I was always drawn towards complex pop song structures with experimental twists in them.” The time he spent escaping into Guitar Hero inspired him to eventually pick up a real guitar.
While he started playing shows at 17, it wasn’t until two years later, when he released his debut EP, Big Boy Hours, that his presence in the Long Island music scene grew more prominent. His sound on that EP differs greatly from what is heard on Sky Falling. For one, it was entirely recorded and mixed on his phone. At the time he didn’t possess a computer or microphones of his own, so he had to make do with what he had. The end result is a lo-fi, minimalist effort. What it lacks in production value it has in charm, with such songs as Adults, a quick track about the pains of growing up, or Obama Gave Me a New Guitar, an admittedly apolitical song about a dream he had where the former President gifted him a brand new guitar. His “lost” debut LP, Death of a Rock & Roll Dream, has a similar style, though its ambition and scale is held back by the technical limitations. In recent years he’s gained access to proper equipment, finally being able to purchase a computer and mics.
Early on in his discography, you could hear a lot of people in his music: Kimya Dawson, Bishop Allen, Sorority Noise. Personally, I always thought it would work well on the soundtrack to a Sundance indie darling like “Juno”. Part of the simplicity of it was a result of technological limitations, having only had access to his phone as a recording device. However as time moved on, the stripped-back, anti-folk-esq style that dominated his early work has greatly changed. His more recent work shines with a certain confidence. His style bounces from a Jeff Rosenstock-ish, Mac DeMarco-ey fusion sound found on something like HAGS (Have a Great Summer), sophomore EP, to the shoegaze driven ambience of his latest work.
His lyricism, while still as uniquely loose and somewhat deadpan as it was before, hits a different chord when put against a more fully baked sound. Take the song “Iroquois.” The song's lyrics are abstract, almost stream-of-consciousness. In it, he paints a picture of New York before it became so industrialized, gentrified and Disney-fied. The lyrics on their own could fit into a sort of poetic spoken-word ballad free of instrumentals, but with just a rudimentary synth track and an acoustic backup, the song wouldn’t have the same force that it gives off, with its echoey reverend audio — as though it were recorded in a toaster, complete with smooth drums paired up with a catchy guitar track. It’s simple, yet it’s the details that make it work as well as it does.
Though he still performs certain choice cuts during live shows from time to time, Sky’s decided to put that past work behind him, in an attempt to reintroduce himself with a more developed and well-mixed sound. Big Boy Hours and Death of a Rock & Roll Dream have been removed and reconsolidated, buried under the label “Early Sky-‘16-‘17” on his Bandcamp page. He’s embraced the properly mixed and produced HAGS, spinning that into the aforementioned “seasons EPs”.
It took him some time to get there, but Sky Frawley is finally in a place artistically where he feels more defined— both personally and musically. When he’s not making music, he works in food service, even as the COVID-19 pandemic continues onward into its apex. His latest EP, Spring Sky, is set to release on April 24th and his latest singles, “Pink Star Burst” and “Spring Quarantine”, are available to download/stream now. I decided to hop on a Skype call with him to talk about his top five singles, as well as how he’s holding out during this current crisis.
* * *
What are you up to these days?
Not much. Staying inside, for the most part, aside from working at my essential job. It’s a lot of hours, but it keeps me busy. I can’t really complain.
I know you work in food delivery for two different restaurants, one being a small business, and the other being part of a corporate chain. How has it been working there during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic?
I mean, nobody’s allowed to sit in restaurants anymore. It’s all takeout, it’s all online. We’d seen this shift before this even started when UberEats, DoorDash and GrubHub became huge. Now that social distancing and being quarantined is a thing, people are just placing their orders online for food. But this is a new thing for people. The first week it was the slowest I’d ever seen at any of my jobs –– small business, big corporation, doesn’t matter –– it was dead everywhere. But people ran out of groceries and all of a sudden it’s like, “We can still order this online.” It is essential, but I think grocery stores are more essential nowadays than just restaurants. But, I mean, a lot of people don’t know how to cook, so…
Did you grow up around music? Did anyone in your house play music or was interested in music?
I came from a family of musicians. My Grandfather was a jazz drummer. My father was also a drummer, and did percussion with a band when I was younger. My mother was a concertmaster clarinetist at least through high school. I grew up in a house with a record player, and I still have memories of her putting on vinyls of classical music, the Beatles, and Stevie Wonder growing up. It was her that inspired me to pick up the clarinet as my first instrument in the 4th grade, and pushed me to take piano lessons a year later. I was 11 when she passed, and when something tragic like that happens, children have various ways of coping. I turned to music as a coping mechanism, and I’ve been making music ever since.
As this health crisis goes onward, a lot of people are getting more sentimental. We see people take to Instagram and post photos from the past decade. Jumping on that trend, do you remember the first real gig you played? As in, where you were performing your own material or material you helped write?
Yeah. The first real gig where I played original music was a solo gig at Crazy Beans in Miller Place in 2014. It was mainly covers, but there were several originals towards the end. It was a 3 hour gig, so it was all instrumental covers and whatnot back then, with few exceptions. There were a couple original instrumentals too, and even an original joke song “You can’t tuna fish”. By the end we had a makeshift ensemble and I think we busted out a cover of “Holland, 1945”. It was an awesome night. Eventually I found my voice, but that wouldn’t be for at least a year or so.
For anyone who would want to get into your work, what are some of the singles they could listen to? And could you go a little bit into the process of making them?
“Spring Quarantine,” “I Don’t Want To Be A Hipster Anymore,” “Pink Star Burst,” and “Iroquois,” and “Summer Slam.” With “Spring Quarantine,” that was a very spontaneous one. It just started off as a little chord progression. Then I was hanging out with Taylor Baldwin, my good friend and musical associate who co-wrote “None of The Above” on Sky Falling, and he layered on a cool bass track. Then by the end of that day, I turned it into a full-fledged song. It’s got a very dark subject matter, regarding what’s going on in the world right now with the pandemic and everything. That one came very fast though. But it was great to see the song go very quick from start to finish. That hasn’t happened with a lot of my songs in the past.
“I Don’t Wanna Be a Hipster Anymore” is very bossa-nova-ey. It’s probably my favorite in the Sky Frawley back catalog. I studied guitar under the New Jersey jazz guitarist Nat Janoff. We did Skype lessons, which is becoming a big thing now. He introduced me to the sounds of João Gilberto, Antônio Carlos Jobim, and just standards like The Girl From Ipanema One Note Samba. The lyrics are a social commentary on pretentiousness that I'd seen in the music scene at the time, and kind of in myself. Musicians can get very judgy at times. When I was, like, 19, and I had just discovered things like Velvet Underground or Neutral Milk Hotel, In The Court of the Crimson King. A lot of these classic albums where people go “Woah! This is REAL music.” I mean it’s not everywhere, but it’s there. At some point I think I’m going to revisit that one— I might see what I can do with it three years later.
With “Pink Star Bust,” it’s one of the most rewarding tracks I’ve ever worked on. It’s got a really big sound –– like shouting into a canyon. Shout outs [to] Zach Marino for the early mixing with the guitars. The amount of tracks on it since then doubled. That track takes big inspiration from bands like Slowdive, Ride, and Jesus and The Mary Chain.
“Iroquois” took awhile to finish. It probably took the longest. It features drumming by Max Hanks from Young Steve. The lyrics don’t make much sense literally, but it just paints a picture of a simpler time, when New York wasn’t inhabited by industrialization and all this modern technology. The land belonged to everybody. There were natural resources everywhere, and fires outside, people telling stories. I did a project on Crazy House in elementary, which is why he has a reference in the song, even though he wasn’t an Iroquois tribesman.
“Summer Slam” started off as a silly idea for a song where there would be a lyrical mantra. Then it turned into the closing track for the first EP I made, HAGS. Max killed with the drums on that track. It’s one of my favorite songs to perform live because the lyrics are so easy to remember.
There’s a lot of shoegaze qualities to a lot of the newer singles you’ve done. They have a more subdued and somber tone, which is fitting considering the current timeline. What led you to write some of the newer songs for this season's concept series of EPs? How have you evolved since the early stuff like HAGS?
Back then I was basically still a kid — had just left home, had no car, going job to job. I recorded literally everything I came up with into Voice Memos and GarageBand on my phone. Over the past couple years my life has become more stabilized. Now I’m supporting myself with relatively steady and now “essential” jobs, I’m more patient, and I’ve matured a bit. And I think that’s definitely reflected in the new songs, which are longer, more layered, and have more of a focus on the entire process of making a song. More of a focus on the recording process, production, mixing and mastering, that stuff. That way once the Seasons EPs are all finished I’ll have more skills to bring to the table for future projects.
What was your inspiration for the Seasoned EPs? Where did that idea come from?
The concept for the Seasons EPs was something I'd wanted to do for a while. I played a lot of Vivaldi as a bassoonist back in the day, and this is kind of like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons but for lo-fi indie songwriting.
I noticed there isn’t much from your early stuff on that list. Having known you for the past few years, I know a lot has changed for and within you since then. What do you think of your early stuff looking back?
Back then I was just getting into the habit of writing songs, trying to put together a full length. The early stuff was very minimal and the production quality was limited to say the least. The later stuff is definitely more mature. You can still find the older stuff under “Early Sky” on my Bandcamp for now, but I definitely like the new stuff way better.
What do you see yourself doing as a musician in the future? Where would you like to see yourself?
I’d love to start teaching. I’ve been thinking about going back to school for music education for awhile now. That way I can keep writing music, but have a bit more stability in my life. Being a songwriter is not an easy living, and far from a stable thing. Look at so many of the greatest songwriters of our times: Elliott Smith, Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake, Townes Van Zandt, Ian Curtis; the list could go on and on. To think they created such beautiful and inspirational works but lived such tortured and short lives. Makes me think “Gee, I sure don’t wanna end up like them”.
Do you see similarities in the ways this has affected you as an artist and as a person?
I mean as a person it’s affected me so as an artist it’s affected me. I can’t go to shows anymore. There are touring musicians stranded on the road. My own family is afraid to let anyone in and out of the house because of what’s going on, and I don’t blame them.
Has the COVID-19 crisis caused you to do a retrospection on your past work at all?
Nah, I don’t really dwell on the past that much.
What do you think this crisis revealed about people and the current system we operate under?
I think it shows that people respond to fear. People when they see things in the news they get very scared. That’s what I’ve seen.
The economy is currently at a worse place than the Great Depression, we are currently in the midst of an election season, and the healthcare system is overwhelmed by the onslaught of patients. What do you feel needs to change in light of all of this? Will anything?
Everybody wants democratic socialism and a universal health care system when there’s a pandemic happening but before then nobody wanted it. Look at Bernie Sanders’ campaigns in 2016 and 2020. Look at what Obama was trying to do with the Medicaid stuff. A lot of people were not a fan of that. But now all of a sudden the healthcare system doesn't have a big enough capacity for everybody. That's basically the reason that this is going on. If we had more health care capacity then things would be more normalized. I think nature is trying to show us that radical change is necessary right now, with this coronavirus. That is to say, if it wasn’t created in a lab somewhere, which… who knows? I don’t. But something’s gotta be done. I think people can be pretty resilient. People will overcome it, eventually. It's just going to take time, like everything. Patience is everything.
II. Kids Don’t Want Riffles, They Want More Nuanced Representation (and also Supreme)
In the fall of 2016, CBS premiered “The Great Indoors.” The sitcom, starring Joel McHale, detailed the life of a Bear Grylls-type who has to work with a group of new millennial hires after the magazine he works for goes fully digital. By any means, the show left little to no impact, having lasted only one season of 20 episodes. But even before it aired, there was something that stuck in the craw of many reporters and critics.
The show’s depiction of its millennial characters fell into a rather typical cycle. They were addicted to technology, overly sensitive and coddled by their families. David Sims from The Atlantic wrote that “The Great Indoors seems unwilling to paint a cord-cutting generation as anything but a band of entitled fools destined for their comeuppance.” For The Guardian, Brian Moylan wrote, “It’s the worldview of this youth bashing, status quo relishing nostalgia bait which is hard to get behind. Maybe if it was on Trump TV, where the rest of the audience supported its philosophy, it would be more successful.” During a pilot screening/Q&A with the cast and crew, a couple of young reporters practically snapped, voicing their frustrations at creator Mike Gibbons and co-star Stephen Fry.
This is far from the only time that young people have been depicted in such a light. The 2017 “Simpsons” episode “Caper Chase” took jabs at PC culture and protests on college campuses. Comedians such as Bill Maher have consistently made fun of the way that young people are always complaining, always whining. Maybe buzzwords like “SJW” and “snowflake” get tossed around.
Young adult representation in media has always been nuanced. For every “Superbad”, there’s a “13 Reasons Why”. Young people have always had a tough time getting some sort of break in being properly represented. Look at the film adaptation of “Hair”, or literally any eighties teen film. It will almost certainly be the case with millennials depicting gen Z and beyond. Nevertheless, it should be made clear that there isn’t anything wrong with making fun of young people; after all, they’re just jokes and the current generation could definitely stand to lighten up. But the problem isn’t that they’re offensive, hurtful or even insulting. Rather, the problem is that they’re just old. It’s a tired shtick. How many times can these jokes and depictions be made before they become hackneyed —if they haven’t already?
Apparently I’m not the only one who thought this. Throughout the past couple of years, films and TV shows such as “Love, Simon,” “Big Mouth,” “American Vandal” and, most daringly, “Eighth Grade,” have begun to take a different stance on how they portray young people. The shift in intelligence is almost night and day. They treat the audience with nuance. They make jokes about the current times, but they aren’t constantly berating their young characters. In short, the characters and audience are taken more seriously.
In 2018, social media is a big part in forming teenagers’ identities. One could argue that they live two different lives: one online, and one IRL. I’m not saying that’s a good or bad thing. It’s just how things are. But at the same time, it’s so hard to find media that presents this accurately. The second season of “American Vandal” has an emphasized focus on social media usage amongst teenagers. The season revolves around a group of teenagers who have been blackmailed into committing an assortment of pranks on their high school through a catfish they meet on Instagram. The show’s essence is summed up in one of the seasons closing lines: “We aren’t the worst generation. We’re just the most exposed.” This is a show that understands the correlation between identity and social media. For example, one of the characters, DeMarcus, a black man, constantly switches around how he talks depending on who he’s talking with (which is to say, he speaks with less slang with certain people, and more with others, a practice known as “code switching”). Another example is shown through the show’s depiction of social media and intimacy. When these characters are talking with their catfish, Brooke Wheeler, they confide with a great amount of insecurity. They do feel the toll of their pubescence. But at the same time, there’s nuance. They aren’t angst-ridden sad sacks. They do have moments of pride. They have moments of confusion.
Bo Burnham’s directorial debut, “Eighth Grade” takes its own approach to the topic. The film, which features the day to day hell that eighth grader Kayla faces as she approaches the final week of middle school, shows the way that technology plays a role in the lives of these young people. The film shows the characters on their phones, often ignoring the other person in the room (i.e. a scene in which Kayla and her dad are talking at the dinner table about the last week of school; another scene in which Kayla is trying to mingle with two popular girls.) But the film presents this in a way that doesn’t really draw that much of a judgement. It simply shows you more-or-less the reality, and lets the audience have their own experience. It’s putting a level of trust in the audience to reflect and think. It assumes that the viewer– presumably a young one– is capable of having such nuanced and complex thoughts.
So many shows on air nowadays try to force in the technological references in ways that are unrealistic. Whether it’s the film “The Internship” or the incels episode of “Law and Order: SVU”, or even this past season of “The Good Wife,” the height of their writer’s knowledge on the subject extends as far as the word “retweet.” “[American Vandal] is good because it doesn’t berate teens for the way social media takes up their lives,” Shailee Koranne wrote in an op-ed for VICE. “Rather, it carefully investigates how vulnerable young people are nowadays because of social media.”
But technology isn’t the only place where we see shows failing to represent young people. Sexuality is something that seems rather absent from young adult entertainment. Or at the very least, it’s usually the sugary sweet mush we see from John Green novels or the crude, over the top kind seen in American Pie rip-off movies. But that’s where “Big Mouth” comes in. The show, co-created by comedian Nick Kroll, displays a group of young teenagers as they navigate the trials and tribulations of puberty. Part social satire and part adult comedy, the show tackles sex in a rather cartoonish manner. Through magical realism, the characters are guided through their changing bodies by means of Hormone Monsters, otherworldly creatures who represents their innermost urges and desires.
What “Big Mouth” understandably lacks in realism (it’s a cartoon, after all), it completely makes up for in education and satire. For example, this past season, the show did an episode conveniently titled “The Planned Parenthood Episode.” In the episode, a series of sketches takes the reader through an instructional guide to the functions of Planned Parenthood. One segment functions as a Woody Allen-style flashback to the main character Nick’s parents meeting and consummating. Another one features his sister choosing which contraception is best for her with a “Bachelorette”-styled reality competition. There’s a rather somber moment in which main character Andrew’s mother gets an abortion following a night out clubbing. Another episode, this one from season one, takes a look at the way young people question their sexuality. In episode three, titled “Am I Gay?”, Andrew begins wondering if there is anything wrong with him after he gets an erection during a Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson movie trailer. The episode balances sex jokes (with anthropomorphic Vaginas and a gay musical number between the ghosts of Freddie Mercury, Socrates, and Antonin Scalia), while also incorporating emotional stakes. Andrew thinks he may be gay, and as a result, begins questioning if his gay muse is his best friend Nick.
Sexual development is nothing short of a painfully awkward and scary moment. “Big Mouth” shows the more awkward side, while “Eighth Grade” showed that and also a more brutal side to things. Towards the end of the film, as Kayla is riding home with an older love interest, she is subjected through a rather abrasive unwanted advance in his backseat. It’s within the scene that you can feel the raw toxic intimacy. Some may even flashback to similar ordeals in their own lives. This isn’t the first time that teenage sexual harassment or abuse has been shown in film. But it’s easily one of the most tasteful, empathetic one’s. There is a clear understanding of the way that sexuality isn’t just about being horny and fucking everything in sight. Adolescent sexuality can be a scary, uncertain, and even traumatic experience. Even with this film, this depiction could have gone so glaringly wrong. It could have been exploitive and cheap; a spiritual sibling to the Lifetime movie-grade garbage that is “13 Reasons Why”– a show that does literally the opposite of everything that the media mentioned here does; a show that proudly admitted to consulting a child mental health psychiatrist, only to then completely ignore them. Luckily, Bo Burnham is a little more culturally aware.
Through these shows, films— whatever it may be— young adult entertainment is seeing a new era. There isn’t anything wrong with more simplistic forms of teen entertainment, whether it be CW dramas or teen rom-coms. But there is certainly room for improvement and variety. The way that teenagers are depicted in media is a joke, both literally and figuratively. Now, more than ever, in a time when teenagers and young adults have many things to tackle, whether it’s mental health, stress, or political frustration, the least that the largely gen-X and baby boomer-dominated media can do is give the current generation their due, or at the very least, keep making their voices heard. And if not, then maybe it’s time for millennials to creatively step up.
Photos on “Sky Frawley Rolls with The Seasonal Winds: Crystal Lee Kraemer. /// Painting in header image on ‘Kid’s Don’t Want Riffles’: Keith Haring. /// Megg, Mogg & Owl comic by Simon Hanselmann.