It is a fact of my life that if your band either names your album after something related to adolescence, or mentions that an album was inspired/written about the age, I will be into it.

Beach House, Teen Dream

Okay so the actual cover is a bunch of zebras, which makes sense since the first track is called “Zebra.” But given the album’s title and my decision to use it as a lens through which to interpret the songs, I wish the cover looked more like this:

(This is a screen shot from The Virgin Suicides, because Tripp is maybe my favorite depiction of a Teen Dream ever.)

(Granted I think “Teen Dream” is a phrase that has multiple meanings, but can anyone argue that the best one is not that which refers to The Golden Boy? Let us proceed:)

There are so many things to think about when considering adolescence, but my favorite is the relationship between real life and fantasy life, and my favorite object specific to this relationship is the stereotypical Teen Dream. I LOVE THE TEEN DREAM. There will never be a time in my life, I imagine, when I am not outrageously attracted to The Golden Boy. Our conceptions and beliefs about what the Teen Dream is and should be have evolved, but the core principles remain, the most important being that he is the most terrifying and most comforting thing your 15 year old self has ever seen. He is sex and safety at the same time, and his seemingly slow motion walks down the hallways are your personal pornography. You know it’s silly, you know you’re idealizing, but you cannot stop, because he makes it all seem so easy – he makes your LIFE seem like it would be so easy, if only he’d do something as painfully epic as hold your hand.

Do I think this way now? No, obviously not, and that is why I love that I used to. Such sentiments and fantasies are fleeting, unique and attributive to the developmental phase in which more simultaneous biological, cognitive, and social changes occur than at any other stage of life. The steadfast presence of the Teen Dream is a product of the universality of our teenage emotions – we are all confused, but the Teen Dream is always there, a buoy of hard abs to grab onto. Recent pop-psych criticisms of Taylor Swift have lambasted her for her “romantic fantasy” lyrics, as though the naivete of her expectations both invalidates them and makes her an anti-feminist icon. But my god, if Taylor Swift isn’t the most touching, perfect example of our most gloriously base adolescent wishes, I don’t know who is. I am 99% certain her audience holds such a wide range of ages because of this – you feel it at 15 and remember feeling it for the rest of your life. Maybe you didn’t sit there, specifically, on the bleachers, staring longingly at the cheer section not only because you hated that they got what they wanted but because some horrible, shallow part of you wanted to BE them, just to see what it would be like – but you did spend time wishing for SOMETHING that you didn’t quite understand, something that made you feel desperate. You just had to, right? And then most of it went away, but not all of it.

I think I have more of that “not all of it” than most, because I feel unnaturally attached to this phase of life. Perhaps I feel like I did not live it out the way I wanted (though I think I did a pretty good job), or perhaps I just love the unique, confusing complexity of it. Whatever it is, I am obsessed, and so I love this album for both its absolutely astonishing display of pure sonic beauty and its representation of the interplay between fantasy and reality with respect to the Teen Dream.

Teen Dream is a deep haze of longing and the space that uncertainty creates around the person feeling it. This space plays out in the background of every song, lifting notes up to float on their own and creating a blurry landscape for seemingly simple melodies to unfurl onto. And unfurl they do, ever so slowly – I find myself unable to tell if the pace represents to me an insecurity of feeling or the exact opposite: a knowledge so deeply held that it can only be delivered in the most deliberate of fashions, slow and steady. Such is the 15 year old staring wistfully at the golden boy, that conflict of feeling, yes? There is a near-literal dreamlike quality to this album, but there is also the idea that it represents either a Teen Dream himself or someone’s interpretation of and feelings toward him. When listened to from this perspective the whole thing has the effect of making me want to cry, because it does what the mind alone cannot do: prove, in the purest, most painful of ways, that the Teen Dream is both the most perfect and most tragic of naive fantasies. In the end he is a construct, your projection of simple ideals and desire. When your fantasy is held up to the light of reality, oh is it ever transparent! And this is as it should be, for the Teen Dream, in the end, is merely a placeholder, the idea before the real thing. I hear this in every second of Teen Dream, the maturity that accompanies such a realization, and how, though you are moving away from the safety of objects, the knowledge that you are not so confused and eager as to need them anymore brings a new and deeper kind of comfort. And yet parts of the initial dream remain, floating – just as these songs do – in the ether of your imagination.

An astonishing, unforgettable album that sets up 2010 to be a most remarkable year. Hold tight, for Interpol is coming!!