I was going to call this list my ten favourite albums, but I felt they needed context, because how I feel about them is laden with caveats. Then, I realised the better story is in the caveats themselves. I have a lot of complex feelings about my music taste – there’s defiance, nostalgia and shame mixed in with a simple love for bangers.
I was also going to make this one post, but I found myself with too much material, so I will split it into two (or more) posts.
Before we get into this, I’d like to just thank you for coming to read this, and invite you to subscribe below if you would like my new posts linked straight to your email.
So, rather than I “here’s why I like these albums from a purely artistic and musical perspective”, here’s “the albums I have loved throughout my life and what they meant to me then and how I feel now”.
- Girls Aloud – Sound of the Underground: The writer’s sincere beginnings
It’s 2003. I am ten years old, converting from a dedication to tomboyishness to a full and firm embrace of girliness. I am obsessed with watching Lizzie McGuire on TG4 and reading The Babysitter’s Club. Due to the constant plots with “cute boys” I am programmed into having lots of crushes. This onset of adolescence also encourages me, suddenly, to get into music. I poll my acquaintances, and Girls Aloud is a band that is having a moment.
I save up my euros and treat myself, eventually, to Sound of the Underground. Despite a glaring lack of experience in this area, I am transfixed by the depictions of “disco-dancin’ with the lights down low” and life getting “cold, it happened many years ago/when summer slipped away”. I had not even lived many years, but I certainly enjoyed angst even though I had yet to experience it. I had also been to London, so I felt I knew a thing or two about the Underground, thank you very much.
This ability to relate in strange, somewhat literal ways to songs exemplifies being that age, where experience is limited but you are still feeling very big things. Take “I’m With You’ from Avril Lavigne’s debut album. There’s a lyric “Isn’t anyone trying to find me/Won’t somebody come take me home/It’s a damn cold night/I’m trying to figure out this life/Won’t you take me by the hand, take me somewhere new” that hit me so incredibly hard, on a very literal level. We had found my cat, Scout, dead on the side of the road around that time, and in my mind the lyrics sounded like how I imagined her final moments. In retrospect it doesn’t really apply (she didn’t have hands, she wasn’t trying to “figure out this life” as much as she was trying to cross a busy road) but that was the first time a lyric penetrated in that way.
‘No Good Advice’ was Girls Aloud’s second single from SOTU, and it, alongside ‘Life Got Cold’, heralded my emo days to come. “I don’t need no bedtime prayer, cos frankly I don’t even care” snarled my idol, Nicola Roberts. As a child who regularly prayed, and felt a kind of compulsion to do so or risk inviting death to anyone I forgot to pray for, this attitude was intoxicating. So began a lifelong admiration for rebellion, tempered by my constant fears that doing so will cause me strife or loss. Unlike Nicola, frankly, I care a lot. But it feels amazing to pretend that I don’t.
On all car journeys, I petitioned for SOTU to be slid into the CD slot. What followed was 53 minutes of audio bliss, apart from one bit in “Some Kind of Miracle” where they sing “But my reaction is chemical/Somethin’ kinda sexual” where I would try to think of something to say loudly to my parents to drown out the bad word.
‘You Freak Me Out’ was another favourite of mine from the album, mostly because I loved the “woo”s. “WOO/You freak me out/I’ve got to scream/I’ve got to shou-ooh-ou-ooh-out” the ladies whooped multiple times. “My feet don’t fit in your sensible shoes/But you just won’t quit til you’ve killed my groove” helped to foster a healthy annoyance at my parents for not offering me more pocket money. Zero consideration for the potential ramifications that this might have on my groove, they forbade belly tops in perpetuity, pierced ears until I was twelve, and a mobile phone until I was 14.
A rebelliousness, albeit a purely internal one, is born.
- Green Day – American Idiot: The writer gives up impressing men with her music taste
I’m walking past my brother’s room. ‘Holiday’ is blaring (‘blaring’ in my household meant audible from more than two metres away). My likely-embellished memory has me stopped in my tracks, slowly walking in, and saying suavely to him, “What…is this?” like a music executive in a film.
It’s American Idiot, by Green Day (“Green…Day? What is a ‘green day’?” I ask my brother. “I think it’s to do with when you smoke a lot of weed” he replies, faux-knowledgably. “Ah yes, weed” I faux-knowledgably respond). I am baffled as to why the song is called ‘Holiday’ as there is no mention of the seaside, or taking a ferry to France. It is my first exposure to music with a message, let alone an ambiguous message. A bit older now, it is a bit mad to think that the messaging on American Idiot could ever have seemed subtle to anyone, but I was probably about 11 years old, and not entirely sure what a government is. So it felt very grown-up to sing along to “Pulverise the Eiffel Towers/Who criticise your gov!-ern!-ment!” I wasn’t sure whose side I was supposed to be on, the Eiffel Towers (plural?) or the government. But it sounded very cool.
Hitting me at 11, this album, and the rest of Green Day’s discography, gave me enough to chew on until I was about 14. It also gave me the first lesson in boys and music.
I don’t blame my brother for this, as younger siblings’ admiration can feel mortifying to a teenager, but I immediately embraced and became obsessed with this album that he, supreme commander of cool, had deemed cool. This very quickly soured him on the album. I chalked it up to a sibling thing and perhaps a response to the sheer inescapability of my obsessions in our household.
At school, my Green Day obsession gave me a cool factor with the proto-mosher boys in my class. I traded CDs with my crush, then his best friend seemed interested so I immediately transferred my affections to him. We proceeded to “go out”. At twelve, this meant hanging out once over summer, kissing chastely on the lips exactly once until a devastating breakup in first year of secondary school (I would remain a “fridget” until I was 16).
Suddenly, this boy sneered at the music that I liked. Green Day, System of a Down… these had all been cool bands to him until we broke up. Then it went global: as girls all over the world began embracing pop rock and then emo music, all the non-emo (read: straight) mosher boys began to shit all over this genre.
I learned that lesson early and I learned it well – that music’s coolness to men will sharply decline if it appeals to women. So even as the long-haired boys in big hoodies sneered at the things I liked, deeming Green Day to be posers, I’m proud that from the start I always knew that the real posturing was from the boys who were afraid to like what the girls liked.
Don’t get me wrong, I still engaged in a lot of not-like-other-girlsing. I still tried to impress boys with my music taste and other interest, and to shit on things that were too girly. But I held a suspicion from then on, however privately, that male approval was capricious.
- Taylor Swift – Fearless: The writer leans in to inciting disgust from men
I’m glad to have had my experience with Green Day, System of a Down and even Dead Kennedys proving to me that boys will pretend to hate anything if they know that a girl loves it. I’m glad to have had this experience before I was introduced to Taylor Swift when watching YouTube at a friend’s house. As ‘You Belong With Me’ got stuck in my head and my teenage heart, I had thankfully already discarded the notion of a guilty pleasure. Here was an artist who wore her heartbreak and shame on her sleeve and turned it into success.
It felt a bit punk to me to openly adore this singer that seemed to get under boys’ skin – or at least certainly more genuinely punk than pretending to hate something I liked. Of course, in a way I was still feeling some type of response to how my male classmates felt about her, but it felt refreshing to acknowledge that response and feel exhilarated by it, rather than limited.
It was actually another mosher girl in my year, who had impressed me on the first day of secondary school with her thick curly hair and Ramones hoodie, who played us those first few Taylor hits on YouTube. In 2024, she and I actually attended the Eras tour together. In our teen years, she never felt her punk cred was diminished by her Taylor fandom, and she inspired me to be the same.
Taylor is also one of the few interests that I think my sister and I developed independently of one another. It’s as if we both woke up one day as Taylor Swift fans. Fearless is one of the last CDs that I remember playing over and over again. She’s the first artist where albums felt like incredibly good value (please note this is how it stood back then – I think her current modus operandi of releasing twenty thousand different variations of albums is predatory of her more parasocially obsessed fans).
When me and my sister got our hands on a new Taylor album, there would be two or three standout tracks immediately and the rest would be kind of a shrug for me. But next time I listened, there would be two or three more standouts. The album would open slowly to me, petal by petal, month by month, giving my teenage self a lot of mileage for the €15 I (or, more likely, my sister) had spent on the CD.
Fearless has the same charm as her first album, but it is already more mature. You see the constraints of the country dreamgirl already starting to wear thin as her anger and pain pushes through the upbeat songs. You get the sense that she is not a straightforward girl. She is wealthy, pretty, talented, but there is something warped. There’s a running theme, beginning with ‘Change’, and continued in subsequent albums (‘Long Live’, ‘Look What You Made Me Do’, ‘Anti-Hero’ and most notably in ‘Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me’) where Taylor seems to see herself as an underdog, fighting for acceptance, or even trying to accept that she is seen as a villain.
Rather than spin into a big tangent here about her most recent egregious attempt at “clapping back” at her “haters”, I’ll let Laura Snapes of the Guardian do it better.
All I’ll say is this – as an artist who’s made her career writing songs about her life, and often about how (specific) people made her feel, why can’t she let other artists do the same? And on that note, why does she dedicate an entire track on TTPD to shitting on a music journalist from back in her Nashville days? It is difficult for us to see her as the victim of bullying when she blows up every perceived slight to be a public spectacle, causing her fandom to relentlessly attack her enemy-of-the-hour.
She’s the biggest popstar in the world and she feels like she’s ‘a monster on the hill’. Perhaps she would feel less monstrous if she didn’t go on a rampage whenever she feels slighted. She thinks ‘Actually Romantic’ is coming off like a witty brush-off, a “why are you so obsessed with me?”, but it’s a lot more like Mr Burns calling to release the hounds.
To be clear, I don’t believe that Taylor is deliberately leveraging the sympathy of her audience to relate to a fake underdog image. I think Taylor has always felt out of step, wrong, off, disliked. Every time she is criticised, her reaction seems outsized because, to us, she is blatantly doing absolutely fine. But to her, every criticism makes her feel as if her deepest fear has been realised: that she was never really loved, or part of the gang, or accepted. I find the lyrics in ‘mirrorball’ to be incredibly telling and poignant: ‘I’ve never been a natural/All I do is try, try, try.’ This is what I find compelling about her.
I think this is what has always resonated for her fans. Taylor can make all the money in the world, but she has this feeling of wrongness and otherness that will always rear its head despite her successes. It’s like the feeling in primary school when you’ve finally been able to buy the cool runners that the other girls have, but when you wear them, the girls say they’re now out of style, or you’re try-hard, or you’re wearing them wrong.
These days, I find it hard to like her as much as I used to, because I find her selective mobilisation of her fanbase to be weird and vindictive. But I will always feel for her, and I think she is always going to write songs that resonate for me.
Despite my complicated feelings about her, I grew up with Taylor and her music. I look back with pride, not shame, at how I took an ex-boyfriend to task at the age of 17, sending him Taylor songs that I felt were relevant to our situation. That’s objectively quite embarrassing, and I did cringe in the immediate years following that, but today I’m glad I was emboldened to share my feelings, and not compelled to be cool to win him back.
Taylor taught me a lesson which still resonates today: it’s not embarrassing to try to be understood, as long as you act in complete sincerity.
Big thanks to my sister, for (A) going through these obsessions with me way back then and (B) proofreading this for me!
Next post: Cora learns to cry, and navigates her twenties – with the help of Neutral Milk Hotel, The Smiths and Frightened Rabbit.
