Have you exploded? Do you know what it feels like? Do you like it? Are you scattered now, across the room and the air and every piece of static? Can you even get close? I can. Everything’s chaos. Everything’s in the air, floating around. Everything’s in space and in the stars and it’s all in the walls of my teenage bedroom and my college dorm and my first apartment. It’s all happening at the same time and never and it doesn’t make any sense. And it’s hard to get to a place of understanding, a place of sitting in my dorm and bedroom and my mother’s lap all at once. But I can. And I can show you how.
I am a fan of niche music genres—unhinged classical, yearning, songs that played in my dad’s apartment in 2011. I have always searched for the feeling of falling away from my life and from my body, and have found that niche genres will bring me exactly where I want to go. There are countless playlists in my Spotify — songs that changed my life, songs I would show to aliens, songs that make me relive middle school (that last one is brought out only in my darkest moments). My interest in dedicated playlists waxes and wanes, but the pull toward songs that explode is never-ending. I’m speaking of songs that build into chaos, sure, but also ones that become completely unhinged within half a second. Songs that make me jump and reach for the volume button and wonder if I’ve accidentally changed the song to something completely different, like it’s my fault. Think Night Shift, think Happier Than Ever. But think beyond those, to a niche genre that spreads across time and space into somewhere else. That’s where I want to go—somewhere else. Doesn't everyone?
Bubbles by Hippo Campus is the first on a playlist called “songs that explode” and has held the first spot since my junior year of high school. It was a big year—the tumultuous and cult-like nature of a high school musical program, a flip flop back to bisexual from lesbian, a satire essay about “killing my mom” that almost earned a wellness check. Don’t you just hate your mom? Typical teenage chaos that piles up and up. You need somewhere else to go within the walls of a bedroom the previous inhabitants died in. Anyone would; there was an energy.
Bubbles begins with palatable pitter-patter and some lyrics about being broken or unfixable that are somewhat vague and poetic.Any overdramatic teen would feel right at home in the lyrics—especially if you hadn’t gotten the lead in the musical and couldn’t recreate the magic of that risky satire piece in any other writing. You, too, would surrender into melancholy without protest.
Exactly halfway through the song, it is chaos. It is startling every time. Everything breaks down and reshapes and spins and dissolves at the same time. The lyrics are almost unintelligible and buried under distortion, but they are still frighteningly unambiguous —I don’t love you and I’m fucking sorry. It is a soundtrack for the overly-hormonal. Let go, explode, be angry at your mean friends. Nothing matters, it’s all just chaos and noise and distortion and anger anyway. Any teenager would let their eyes close and imagine themselves careening into space and rapidly circling the Earth like an angry cartoon, traveling forward in time to when they’re living in New York with adult friends, becoming the actualized version of themselves for a minute, floating around in space and watching as the teenager grew more and more angry and let their face move and twitch as the music pleased. Any teenager would do that. It is a gift to not be in the bedroom that someone died in, not in high school, not on Earth, but in space and time and nowhere and everywhere. It’s okay, be mad at your friends. Leave this plane, let go. But only until the distorted voice stops letting you do so. Then back to palatable pitter-patter to bide time until it’s all over.
And then it’s not over. And then it’s the middle of college, and you’re battling a situationship post-grad fear and you’re trying to feel good about yourself despite receiving the fifth “you’re going to hate me” cancellation text of the month, so you put on Me and Your Mama to try to feed into a fake superiority complex to help soften the blow. Fuck them. I’m hot and better without them. And then the song starts and you begin to sway from the consolation vodka-soda and harmonizing repetitive vocals. And then you let yourself be comforted by it, by the guitar and power until you dissolve from a puddle of tears and Sobieski into something else. Until you ascend into nothing. You feel your head tilt upward and let your eyes close, and you’re in that place again. Not in your college dorm, not on the floor staring at your Target mirror leaned against the stark white walls. You’re exactly where you need to be. You are a beauty that exists outside of this world, outside of the confounds of space and time. You’re eternal and nothing and everything and tomorrow when you get a text asking to hang out somewhere hidden, you won’t respond. You will have healed after this journey. And then the chaos ends, and you’re sitting on the floor with your eyes open, and you get a text saying “are u free tomorrow night?” and you respond “maybe…why?” and hate yourself for it. And then you sway with the wavy synth and drum beat and wait for it all to be over.
And then it’s not over. And then it’s a day before college graduation, and “songs that explode” is queued up. Half a bottle of wine deep, grieving the loss of the college bubble, struggling to decide which tokens to leave behind in a dark green dumpster. Different Kind of World by Maggie Rogers plays through noise-canceling headphones and drowns out the sounds of twenty-person liberal arts parties outside.
One last song, it begins. There’s a slight whine to Rogers’s voice, one that feels like a genuine response to the state of the world, as she puts it. One that’s tired and overwhelmed and ready for something to change for the better. Her voice overlays a soft guitar and some oohs and hums in the background, and there’s one final when we’re ridin’ all together, I’m a different kind of girl.
You find yourself hugging your own arms, finding comfort in being a different kind of girl in a different kind of world. Then there’s a buzzing from an electric guitar as a sign of something big coming, and then it happens.
It explodes and you go somewhere else again. Soft guitar and humming becomes drum banging and sizzling guitar. There is no time, no graduation, no party outside, no old writing class essays in my hand. There is only noise and chaos. You are nothing, just part of the chaos—just scattered across the universe. And then you are brought back down to Earth from somewhere else by the same gentle acoustic guitar. And then you stare at the trash bags filled with old essays from your writing class and you wait for the moment your youth is over.
And then it’s not over. And then you’re out of college, living in an apartment with your friends. And you’re happy, and you’re with someone who never cancels on you, and you just wrote something funny, and you no longer want to kill your mom. You decide to put on some music after a particularly exciting night out, and you feel pulled to songs that explode. You press play, and Bubbles by Hippo Campus begins, and you laugh a little at the sad lyrics, thinking about how small your teenage issues really were. And then it explodes, and you go somewhere else, and you see your teenage self looking in the mirror at you. You are unburdened by time and space and get to stare at yourself as the actualized version of yourself that you looked for as a teen. You get to tell her that she can be mad at her friends and explode and let go and that one day she’ll be a grown woman in the city and in love and in the middle of a new piece of writing. And then you get to come back to Earth from space and nothingness and the explosion and go about your day. You get to come back together from being scattered. It’s a skill. And then you get to share it with everyone else.
Written by Lindsey Cate Madden
Photography by Mia Scagnelli, @miascagnelli_photography
Talent: Justine Checo, @justiyxd
Production Manager, Creative Director: Sophia Querrazzi
PA: Mark Bluemle