a few things about m83

M83 came out with their album "Saturdays=Youth" last year, and it was widely hailed by many of the more legitimate music blogs I read as one of the best albums of the year. I tend to not listen to electronic music much, and M83 leans enough in that direction that I never bought the album.

I have heard, however, two songs from it - admittedly the two songs that it's probably most well known for - "We Own the Sky" and "Graveyard Girl." As a song alone, I like "Graveyard Girl" a little better than "We Own the Sky," but the video for "We Own the Sky" is bizarre and wonderful. It is full of hipster children cavorting in a meadow, and the colors are lovely. I'm pretty sure it will make you smile. Here it is:

See it here!

My original point was to write about "Graveyard Girl," but I got distracted trying to find a video for it, because we haven't figured out a way to upload mp3's yet, and put up the video for "We Own the Sky" because it is awesome. But. I heard "Graveyard Girl" quite a while ago, and liked it immediately. This was partially because it's an lively, pretty song and I like its beats and all the strange twisting little melodies that run through it. Ben could probably describe it better than I can, musically. The other reason I liked it was the monologue that runs through the middle, which is as follows, spoken in the increasingly urgent voice of a teenage girl:

"I'm going to jump the walls and run. I wonder if they'll miss me. I won't miss them. The cemetery is my home; I want to be a part of it, invisible even to the night. Then I'll read poetry to the stones. Maybe someday I can be one of them, wise and silent, waiting for someone to love me, waiting for someone to kiss me. I'm fifteen years old and I feel it's already too late to live. Don't you?"

I immediately loved this when I first heard it. Then I listened to it again and realized that it was cliched, melodramatic, "emo"...then I listened to it again and realized that was why I loved it. It's evocative writing, but it's not amazing. It's something that a fifteen-year-old would write, trying to express ideas that were too big for her to put into words, and I understand that feeling. And I understand the feeling in that last sentence, "I'm fifteen years old and I feel it's already too late to live." It's pretty melodramatic, yes, but there's this sense sometimes that I think everyone gets, of being stuck in a situation or place that seems hopeless or stagnant, with an unimportant life ahead of you, no chance to "live." Apart from liking the sound of the song, that's the reason I like "Graveyard Girl" - I think it rings true for a fifteen-year-old girl. Here's a video that I haven't watched all of, so you don't have to either if you don't want to.

Love, Sarah