100 Greatest Songs of the 20’s So Far #85 Ethel Cain – American Teenager

Released: 2022

Like everything and anything expressed within the phraseology of a dream, it never existed, or at least only for the very few, the ones who knew it was a distorted fantasy and not an aspiration. David Lynch was one of it’s great deconstructionists of course, a voyeur who knew that behind the curtain, the front porch or door number one a darkness lingered from which everyone’s existence was separated by the thinnest of membranes.

The dream in question is the American one, a gimmick that convinced enough to sweat blood to forge it’s bonds and then die having enriched the men who sold it. In this century it’s an archaic construct, but there are those who would continue with the charade to steal choice and autonomy from citizens left blindsided.

Ethel Cain’s debut album Preacher’s Daughter was at times caught between the hemispheres of religion, hyper consumerism and easy death, but American Teenager was a masterpiece, a Horse of Troy playing mascot at the tractor pull. Musically recalling Taylor Swift in her toothsome adolescence, it’s lyrics delved into the bowels of being shackled by freedom, a world of broken mirrors and constant mental displacement. The truth was that reality and the dream were one in the same, a never ending series of interlocking charades, all sound tracked by a fallen angel who’d kept receipts for all of us.