Millennial Habits

What a few popular videos and songs reveal about the partiers that love them

Above is Tove Lo’s new music video for her hit song “Habits.” The video shows the singer waking up on a couch among other sleeping figures and going back to her apartment, where we watch her get ready to go out again. For most of the video, she is alone, until a phone call puts her into contact with a few friends. They go to a bar, and she spends another night drinking, doing what seems to be pot, and kissing men and women. A synthetic beat cuts the scenes between hard drinking, laughing, and hardcore making out. The more intoxicated she becomes, the more she laughs. She then goes into a secluded room in the bar with a male friend; there is an immediate cut to her, alone in that same secluded room, crying.

However, if we are listening, we know before she starts partying at all that her intention is to forget that she is lonely and troubled:

Gotta stay high all my life
To forget I’m missin you
Staying in my play pretend
Where the fun ain’t got no end
Ooh-Ohh
Can’t go home alone again
Need someone to numb the pain

For many millennials (defined here as people born between the late 80s and late 90s), this video is familiar. In particular, college-age millennials are a substantial audience for the video, considering many university students have a large stake in the party scene we see depicted in it. So it isn’t surprising that the video’s popularity in the US exploded only a few months after the video was published (in April of this year), though the Sweden-based singer had before been unheard of. Currently, combined with its remix featured on the same channel, the video has over 154 million views and that number is constantly growing. The song quickly made it to US radio, where it plays as often as Nicki Minaj and One Direction. I think this is because many of us know exactly how she feels; many of us know her story, whether because we see traces of it in ourselves or in our peers.

The video is problematic in that it reveals a common thread among the more privileged of millennials: a majority of sexual health literature states that 60-75% of college students (who make up the lion’s share of the party scene) will experience at least one hookup, the culture of which is mixed with alcohol, emotional detachment, and even minor drug use. While this is not a huge majority and the range is due to the variance in studies that have observed trends in college student behavior, the number does prove as a significant trend that accounts for the experiences of many millennials.

It is important to note that the many that I am speaking of have varied experiences that are real, and to a certain extent, unquantifiable. However, by looking at some of the music that portrays party culture (sometimes from inside its walls), maybe we can come to some conclusions about the things that millennials are thinking as they’re getting ready to go out, pre-gaming with friends or putting on their makeup like Tove Lo does. Interestingly, the singer authenticated the video’s raw quality, telling interviewers she attached a camera to her belly, called a few friends to be in the video, and from there everything happened as it happened. It looks as raw as it claims to be, and the video speaks to millennials because it looks exactly like our Friday and Saturday nights–even its sadness is familiar. And “Habits” isn’t the only example of a song that speaks to this.

Recently, Sia, an artist who has worked in the music industry for decades and yet has flown relatively under the radar, made her way into mainstream music through collaborations with more famous artists and a song contract with the Hunger Games franchise. This summer, Sia’s “Chandelier” broke onto the scene in similar fashion to Tove Lo’s “Habits,” at this point in time garnering over 352 million youtube hits, and the lyric video another 23 million. Those numbers still have not peaked.

The lyrics narrate the weekend of a hard partier who’s deeply troubled by alcoholism and loneliness and yet thinks:

I’m the one “for a good time call”
Phone’s blowin’ up, ringin’ my doorbell
I feel the love, feel the love
1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, drink
1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, drink
1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, drink
Throw ’em back ’til I lose count
I’m gonna swing from the chandelier, from the chandelier
I’m gonna live like tomorrow doesn’t exist, like it doesn’t exist

Again, we know there is a problem. Entirely unconcerned for her well-being, she drinks to lose herself. So what kind of love is it that she feels when friends call? She feels like she is wanted, which is the one feeling that she can run to because it quells (if only for a little) how much pain she is in. So she fulfills her role as the partier that knows how to have fun, if only to take it a step too far. While Sia’s song is more about an addiction to alcohol, and how the nature of that addiction involves burying deeper problems, it’s clear that the song’s instant popularity among a young audience comes from our own need to drown our sorrows.

Club music–the kind of music that usually however lacking in complexity is first and foremost appealing to the senses–is used to express in Sia’s song the deep-seated loneliness of the culture that surrounds its synth and beat. And we responded to the song because in our own language, it admits to the existence of a sadness that lurks under the surface; we responded as if to say, yes–we know we all feel empty when we wake up Saturday morning, sometimes lying next to someone we regret we spent the night with. But we’ll see you Saturday night, same time, same place, because we need to drown this sadness.

But what’s problematic about this message is actually how millennials consume it. Let me explain why with a final music video, which is far more explicit in its rendering of the problem.

Flume’s “Left Alone” is the most explicit example and hardest to take of the three, for which an unofficial music video cuts between hurt or despondent women and raunchy “Girls Gone Wild”-like partying. With the first factor, the attention is on the women’s faces; with the second, their faces are either covered because of kissing, masks, or dewy sex appeal for performance in front of a camera. Extreme sex appeal is mixed with extreme sadness– the woman whose lingerie-clad body is shrouded in black embodies both at once. The woman we watch through a black and white filter lays around in her apartment, and her problems are narrated through text on the screen: “I hated going back…Next morning wasn’t better… What has he done to me… I don’t know how to be alone… FUCK THIS” and then it cuts directly to more wild partying, linking her sadness to her intentions when she parties.

While the video is an unofficial one, and thus garners only about 700,000 views, its popularity could easily spike, considering the average views a Flume video gets is in the tens of millions, the number of views on the audio version of this song is about 2 million, and each remix has hundreds of thousands of views.

In short, the video is almost glamorizing how toxic and isolating party culture is. This song is an overt consumption of the message that “Habits” and “Chandelier”  portray of sad people who party.  And it is millennials, seeking likeness, who consume this message. We’ve turned to partying, but so also have we turned to images and messages that portray its toxic atmosphere.

To see this, we need only look as far as the original lyrics for “Left Alone,” which hold several meanings all at once: oral sex, falling-down drunkenness, and emotional turmoil:

Goin’ down but not for long
Got no love to be someone
Goin’ down, but that’s alright
All I want is to be left alone

What we hear is the narration of an unfulfilling sexual encounter, and perhaps even multiple ones, as later in the song the singer says “Hold them by the knees and vow,” as if his actions are methodical and his partners plenty. For both the singer and his partners, there is a world between their actions and how they feel:

Breathe in sorrow
Gonna watch you fake it now
Will I freak, can I calm down?
And I take it all at a loss
Breathe out sorrow
Gonna find them peaks and lows
Hold them by the knees and vow
I can’t always feel this proud
Breathe out sorrow
Oh I’ll tell you something more
What my brain is bleeding for
And it hurts my darling, but I breathe out sorrow

The singer narrates their story–how they both are isolated and made mute by the decorum and social script of hooking up and partying. However, the lines “Breathe in sorrow” and “Breathe out sorrow” are so vague, and so much of the lyrics are vague, that so also can their meaning be extended to be an omniscient narration or a command. But it is the narration itself that holds the appeal, and a deep sadness that holds the story together.

And this is the common denominator between the three videos: their narrator’s tragedy is played out on the party backdrop, amid alcohol and unfulfilling lovers who can’t love them enough or in the right way while they’re too ashamed to even love themselves. Whether or not “Left Alone” spikes in popularity like “Chandelier” and “Habits” has, we need to try to understand something about the generation these songs appeal to and why. If we know it makes us unhappy, why do we party even harder?

This is my theory, and feel free to have your own: however disturbing it may seem, some millennials have an obsession with how unfulfilling and sad party culture is. We have come to know the ache of the morning after, the ache of fleeting love and the pain of throwing everything away for a single night, and in a way, having that sadness anchors us.

These songs describe that sadness, but they also reveal it as the narrative we have fashioned for ourselves. We want to believe we are a generation that’s been “left alone,” but we are a generation that has come to need the kind of love that leaves an aching loneliness. What we want is a life with a compelling story. So it’s become our habit to drown the sorrows we think we should have and have the sex we think we should have. In the midst of this, of course, there is unexpected sadness and hardship–but such stories are sometimes buried underneath all the narratives that glorify them, and the truth is, maybe we don’t mean to want this sadness, but it makes our lives compelling and stimulates our very basic human need for attention from those around us. And wanting to be sad doesn’t change the fact that we might genuinely feel sad and unfulfilled.

Even to the degree that we, the “selfie” generation, are self-aware, we’ve made a tragic narrative of our lives. We create tragedy because we need the stimulus. Our tragedy is for consumption, in one way or another. It’s a hard thought, and it may be offensive, but I think it is important to consider the possibility that many millennials have made habits out of partying for the sake of the toxicity of its culture–that the loneliness it leaves in its wake is somehow fulfilling, because if we do not have an epic tragedy, how will we overcome? How will our lives be interesting or meaningful? Who will listen to our stories?

Sources:

SiaVEVO. “Chandelier” YouTube. Vevo, 6 May 2014. Video. 2 December 2014.

ToveLoVEVO. “Habits (Stay High)” YouTube. Vevo, 17 March 2014. 2 December 2014.

Wade, Lisa and Caroline Heldman. “Hook-Up Culture: Setting a New Research Agenda.” Sexuality Research and Social Policy Vol 7.4 (10 July 2010 pp 323-333. Web. 20 October 2014.

YoGirlNairi. “Flume – Left Alone feat. Chet Faker (Ta-ku Remix) Unofficial Video” YouTube. 21 April 2013. 2 December 2014.