Kesseteens

There is a certain type of teenager who spends their puberty suffocating in small town livingrooms. Gagging on plush upholstery, poisoning themselves with edible oil products and gently lulling themselves into a stupor every day after school watching MTV and dreaming that the outrageous coolness behind the screen can become tangible. This record is for them.

It’s for those who open the doors made of cheap particle board you can kick your boot through - doors painted identically to look like a sitcom set - and step out onto the immaculate beigy-white curb to the sudden dawning realisation that the world they live in is incredibly boring. They’re gagging with their impotence; they long to assuage their vague, amorphous guilt at not being dead, and to become someone, anyone, to prove that life is worth living.

They pass the houses and lawns, all aspiring to the same level of forced sanity, and feel their brains about to burst with the inanity of it all. And if the brain didn’t explode from the pressure the heart would, and if the heart didn’t explode the crotch would. They walk the family dog down those banal streets, stopping at every other lamppost, yanking at the leash when Rover sniffs too long at his buddies’ piss, and they long to scream but don’t dare, knowing that someone would call the police and while it might briefly be amusing it wouldn’t be worth the trouble afterwards.

Slowly but surely over the next months, the liquor gets depleted from the parents’ stash and creatively mingled with the contents of the medicine cabinet. Slowly but surely, the parents, in despair, renovate the entire basement into a sound-proofed teenage Ikea palace where son or daughter can bash their heads against the wall without disturbing anyone. Slowly but surely, the exploding pieces of the teenager’s brain fly out of their head, meet and meld with those few like-minded souls at their school. They shed their mothy-drab brandname clothes, discover a taste for pink feather boas and lipgloss. They leave the house after dark and come home in the pearly dawn looking like luminescent butterflies against the formal rows of cars, hedges and blind-eyed houses.

When the good-morning kisses have been given and they’ve all fluttered to their pillows and closed their still-mascared eyes, this is the music buzzing in their brains; this is the music they’ll hear in their dreams.

Miss Rose

Berlin 2005