"summer after senior year" by Sarah Kang ft. Michael Carreon
DV:
As half of a web site that has a complicated relationship with nostalgia, and also as someone fully into middle age at this point, I'm fascinated by how my relationship to the idea of freedom has changed as I've gotten older. Was there a time in my life when the summer after senior year of high school felt like the most free I'd ever been? I don't actually think so - but there was a time when I thought that about having been in college itself, and then a time when I felt it about the year I was waiting tables and cooking and getting high, and then a time when I felt it about having lived around the corner from a music venue and spending nights filling garbage bags with four loko cans, and then and then. Maybe someday that wheel will stop turning! But I listen to Sarah Kang sing, "But we'll never be as free/ As the summer after senior year" and this feels like a particularly aged reaction but I want to say, "Just give it a couple years." You were always freer than you thought, and freedom works on a sliding scale, and maybe it's better to not romanticize a time when you didn't have money or needed to get your kicks by driving a little too fast. There are better things, freer things, just around the corner. It does sound catchy as hell though, which is a credit to Kang. For a moment there I was back listening to Radiohead on a cassette tape adapter plugged into a walkman, driving around the south side of Chicago trying to find something to do, and then I remembered that unloading trucks at a toy store for minimum wage really fucking sucked.
MG:
Wow, this song is awful! Setting aside any memories I might share as a counterpoint to "Summer After Senior Year" what, I ask you Sarah Kang and Michael Carreon, what the fuck is up with all the references to money and banking? This song opens with the line "never thought about taxes" and also works in $5, 401ks, and the, I believe false, admission that the writer "never stepped foot inside of a bank." This song is as much about these ideas as it is about how free it is to drive down the interstate with the wind in your hair and the radio turned up loud. And I find that on the bad side of weird, way too weird to be catchy. Anyway, I turned 25 in 2010, so I am almost a decade older than the song's narrator, but we're both in our 30s at this point. I had, in fact, set foot in a bank before graduating high school! I got my first job in the summer between my junior and senior year and, you won't believe this, I needed a bank account to cash my paychecks (if I didn't want to pay a vig to the payday loan store, but you better believe there were weeks where I did that, too!) I thought about taxes a lot because if I had precisely $10.21 and a tube of lipstick cost $8.49, would I have enough to pay the tax on that tube of lipstick (or would I steal it?) I agree that $5 was about the cost of a school lunch, but my parents paid for that and when they didn't, the school district gave me a peanut butter sandwich for free. I will concede that I did not know anything about a 401k -- embarrassingly, but honestly, I still don't know anything about a 401k.
I think these song lyrics were AI generated. They are almost like real song lyrics, almost.
Challenged myself to make a purple graphic using Sarah Kang's lyrics. The song I ended up using was Once In a Moon, which I paired with Eunha as the model.
[Verse 1]
I think about that summer day when I went on my first date
We danced in an empty parking lot to a song I since forgot
And the first time I held his hand I thought this boy could be a man
We must’ve been watching a movie, I think it was Toy Story 3
[Chorus]
As long as you remember me
And all the ways I used to be
A part of me will always be 18
And time keeps ticking on, it’s true
She’ll…