![]() Case in point: Writing the song from a cabin on Gull Lake near Kalamazoo, Mich., he cast his gaze on a VHS tape he’d rented the night before, a movie starring Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick. But he’s also frank that not all the lyrical pieces of the puzzle fit together. In the song, the girlfriend dies by suicide - there’s a line about how she took “a week’s worth of Valium and slept.” If he could do it over again, he’d cut that line, because it didn’t happen in real life. It just felt cathartic to release the lyric into the world as a way to half-admit my participation, because I struggled to process it.” And growing up in a very conservative Reform Christian home, I struggled with guilt. She’d been seeing someone else, so none of us knew who the father was. The girl I was dating got pregnant, and she told me after the fact that she’d had an abortion. I mean, at the time I was going through a crisis. “As a songwriter, you kind of go where the muse takes you, and I found a phrase - ‘stop a baby’s breath, and a shoe full of rice’ - that grounded the song. “I didn’t set out to write a song about abortion,” he said. They struck platinum in 1997 with their first studio album, “Villains,” which sold more than 3 million copies, powered mostly by their abortion-centered song, “The Freshmen.” I asked him why he penned a song about a topic that for decades seldom had anyone touched. I reached out to Brian Vander Ark, songwriter and lead vocalist for The Verve Pipe, a post-grunge band from East Lansing, Mich., that formed in 1991. They signaled a shift to a more expressive, more vulnerable emotional register and swerved away from masculinity as something daring and aggressive, successful and domineering. But granting that, it’s also true that these songs aimed to remake masculinity. On the one hand, this self-pity is, well, pathetic - men making abortion about them and whining about having to cede power. If you trace the thematic patterns in popular music from this time, you can see a constellation of songs - including “Pennyroyal Tea” (Nirvana, 1993), “The Freshmen” (The Verve Pipe, 1997), “Brick” (Ben Folds Five, 1997), “Retrospect for Life” (Common, 1997), “Slide” (Goo Goo Dolls, 1998), and “What It’s Like” (Everlast, 1998) - that touch on a particularly unlikely topic: abortion. In fact, it’s become something of a running joke among millennials to dramatize their adult-aged realization that their generation-defining music was bleak as hell - and that it papered over cultural conflicts and psychic wounds with ebullience. Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” took us, blithely unaware, on a speed-snorting bender, and “Jumper” wistfully wrestled with homophobia and suicidal ideation. The Cranberries’ “Zombie” subtly deplored terrorism in Northern Ireland. TLC’s “Waterfalls” hinted at the AIDS epidemic. In Martina McBride’s “ Independence Day,” what seems like a frothy celebration of American patriotism actually masks a harrowing story, told through the eyes of a child whose mother burned her father alive to escape domestic violence. Fraught topics were handled with a lyrical obliqueness. The music scene of the 1990s in many ways defies definition - it’s just too heterogeneous - but lyrics from this era do share a common feature: a tendency toward misdirection.
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