Teenage angst
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Angst, in contemporary connotative use in popular music, most often describes the intense frustration and other related emotions of teenagers and the mood of the music and art with which they identify. Heavy metal, punk rock, grunge, nu metal, emo, and virtually any alternative rock dramatically combining elements of discord, melancholy and excitement may be said to express angst. Angst was probably first discussed in relation to popular music in the mid- to late 1950s that was popular amongst the nuclear disarmament and antiwar protester subculture. Folk rock songs like Bob Dylan's 1963 Masters of War and A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall articulated the dread caused by the threat of nuclear war. A key text is Jeff Nuttall's book Bomb Culture (1968) which traced this pervasive theme in popular culture back to Hiroshima.
In the 1980s "teen angst" was expressed in music to a certain extent in the rise of punk, post punk, and alternative music with which it is currently more associated. It was used in reference to the grunge movement and the band Nirvana. Nirvana themselves seem to have been aware of this, as evidenced by the first line of "Serve the Servants" in which Kurt Cobain describes the success of writing songs dealing with the subject (Teenage angst has paid off well | Now I'm bored and old...). In addition, rock band Placebo released a single from their first album entitled Teenage Angst. Also, From First To Last's first full-length album quotes a line of dialogue from black comedy film Heathers, entitled Dear Diary, My Teen Angst Has A Body Count, and the same line appears in their single "Ride The Wings Of Pestilence". Another band that has done this is The Wombats in which their line (In their single "Kill the Director") is "And with the angst of a teenage band, here's another song about a gender I'll never understand." Another song to mention the term is Silverchair's song "Miss You Love", which says: "I love the way you love/But I hate the way I'm supposed to love you back/It's just a fad/Part of the, teen, teenage angst brigade".
another band that mentions angst is Rise Against with their song "Six Ways til Sunday" "You're the new revolution/The angst-filled adolescent/You fit the stereotype well"
