Graveyard Girl - M83
I have a terrible habit of dismissing things outright if they’re enjoyed by people I don’t respect. For example, my college roommate, who drove me out of my fucking mind, just loved M83. I never cared about them to begin with, because my taste in rock music hardened way earlier than I’d care to admit. After learning that he would vacillate between Saturdays=Youth and YouTube compilations of Bloodhound Gang singles, I dismissed them immediately, never to come back to them for any reason, ever, until Saturdays came up on shuffle. Graveyard Girl in particular tossed all my preconceived notions in the garbage.
The airy synthesizers are complemented by Anthony Gonzalez’s charming brogue, and it works so damn well. When I listen to this track, anything and everything in front of me at the moment is turned into the ending credits of a movie I paid too much to see at the Music Box. He describes a John Hughes-esque scenario, with a girl who pretends she’s dark and misunderstood—he even mentions Molly Ringwald, here, and a heart made of bubblegum. Whether or not you think that’s good poetry is completely up to you. It’s not Keats, but I like it.
What gets me the most about the track is Morgan Kibby’s monologue in the middle of the song, which is normally something I loathe in music, right up there with sirens, gunshots, and trembling motors, but it fits perfectly because she knows exactly how melodramatic she’s being about love, death, and wisdom. She shuts you up with her last lyric: “I’m fifteen years old, and I feel it’s already too late to live. Don’t you?” Right after is a gorgeous bridge, where shaking percussion interpolates the arpeggio beautifully, punctuated with a few bass plucks. It already sailed, and now effectively slows time to a grinding halt. It refrains with a beating drum, to where we were before, with Graveyard Girl. The song is tacky, and loves itself for it. It reminds us that, while so much drama of the teens is petty, redundant, and has no effect on the world outside of school, no matter how unsophisticated we are as adolescents, these feelings were once real.