Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl - Broken Social Scene
Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me
By Julianna
In the Perks of Being a Wallflower, Charlie, the main character, is surmounted by the impossibility of surviving high school. On his first day, he was already counting down the days to graduation. In a lot of ways, the book and film adaptation were the antitheses to many of the high school movies that glamorized the formative four years and being in your teens.
One specific scene that stuck with me was when Charlie was ignored by his middle school friend, Susan on their first day of high school.
“Susan was very fun to be around. She liked movies, and her brother Frank made her tapes of this great music that she shared with us. But over the summer he had her braces taken off, and she got a little taller and prettier and grew breasts. Now, she acts a lot dumber in the hallways, especially when boys are around. And I think it’s sad because Susan doesn’t look as happy.”
This resonated with me because I spent my first year of high school very confused (internally). I didn’t understand why people were acting differently than they did in the eighth grade. I repeatedly listened to Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl”, which validated and articulated many of my feelings while navigating high school.
“Used to be one of the rotten ones / and I liked you for that.”
The transition from middle school to high school made me a very jaded person. But it was paradoxical. I so badly wanted to experience high school like it was shown in the media I consumed growing up, but at the same time, I despised the boys and girls who gave into the toxic high school competitions and patterns. Everyone’s personality, to me, suddenly became flat.
I wanted to revert to a time when the very typical things important to a high schooler didn’t matter anymore.
“Anthems”, along with other media (Lorde’s Pure Heroine, Rookie Mag, the Perks of Being a Wallflower, etc.) made me feel like I wasn’t alone. At 15, I wasn’t the best at articulating or expressing my feelings. “Anthems” spoke for me.
“Anthems” is off the Canadian band Broken Social Scene’s 2003 album, You Forgot It In People, a classic in the indiesphere of the 2000s. The Canadian indie music scene at the time was very unique. You had bands like Broken Social Scene, Metric, Arcade Fire, and Teagan and Sara heavily influencing 2000s indie, giving nods to our upper neighbor’s contributions to our airwaves.
The song has recently and rightfully gotten its viral moment on Tiktok, partially because of its cover by Singaporean artist Yeule for the movie I Saw the TV Glow.
The repetitive, somber, lo-fi indie rock track takes us through the mind of a seventeen year old girl, for a seventeen year old girl. The hypnotic, almost robotic nature of the song is not unlike the routine feeling of being a teenager everyday. The song’s thesis, which repeats the four lines: “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me” 15 times, is an ode to the endless amount of time we spend in our rooms as teenagers daydreaming and letting the days pass by.
I love this song for so many reasons, especially how whimsical Emily Haines makes the song feel toward the end. And it’s one of those songs that change in meaning as you get older.
When I was younger, I thought the song was about that jaded seventeen-year-old who despised seventeen-year-olds who caved into the social pressures of high school. In many ways, this song can be about that. But upon reading forums and deep dives about the song, many suggest the narrator is singing to her past self, missing the person she was at seventeen. This narrative cuts even deeper.
It’s a song for the time in your life when you’re reckoning who you are and who you’re supposed to be; when you realize your jadedness was just naivety, and your rebellion was what was holding you back from growth. But sometimes it’s just nice to reminisce.
“Now you’re all gone, got your makeup on, and you’re not coming back.”