ManicWorld Magazine

This Is Your Brain On Indie Rock

“If I could have it back
All the time that we wasted – I’d only waste it again” -Arcade Fire, The
Suburbs Continued

I spent my teenage years hyper-obsessed with youth, self-aware of my adolescence to the point of madness. Until one day I snapped. And suddenly, getting out of bed became an immense struggle. Everything just hurt.

Maybe it was the vibe of the era, the 2010s seemed over saturated with coming-of-age movies. It seemed like every Tumblr post was a document of a small-budget film that everyone was trying to imitate. I wasn’t sure if I was the only one with a script, or if everyone else had different scripts. Either way, it was not clear. The hyper-reality left me feeling confused like I was in rehearsal for a play that I could never get my lines right. Maybe it was a glitch in the matrix, or perhaps I’m just a bad actor, but most likely, it’s just that adolescence is a difficult time for everyone. My strategy to handle all the angst was to dissociate. To pretend I’m in a really surreal movie and to imagine any adult around me as a director simply trying to give me notes.

Around seventeen, I started heavy drinking and smoking weed. That was paired with all the random hookups I was having around the time. This was all to cope with the stress of looming adulthood. Grade twelve was a rough year for me. I wore these large oversized navy blue dress shirts every day in high school. They were to cover my self- harm scars. My mental health collapsed after one bad Mickie and joint, leaving my brain scattered like a Pollock painting. Smiling became difficult, and my once joyful face turned bitter as a schizoid.

There I was, an indie head who worshiped Arcade Fire and Brocken Social Scene just a little too much. Insisting that books like Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Murakami’s Norwegian Wood were peak literature. How pretentious of me.

What can I say? I’m a product of my environment, and that environment for me was the east end of Toronto that would shape my fragile gen-z mind. I came onto the scene at the right time, just old enough to enjoy the final years of millennial hipsterdom and young enough to recognize cursed content. I remember Toronto when thrifting was still a niche novelty, but also commuted in streetcars without air conditioning. In short, I used to be one of the rotten ones, like all the other kids who used big words and called things “mainstream” as a synonym for “lame”.

Toronto’s urbanism is interesting, as it began its gentrified process relatively early compared to other cities in North America. In the ’90s, a conservative government under the leadership of Mike Harris introduced harsh fiscal austerity in Ontario, which saw many city services and projected cuts. That coincidentally coincided with anxiety over language laws and a referendum in Quebec. The result saw many businesses, especially banks, insurance, and marketing, relocate their operations out of Montreal towards Toronto. The result was a major relocation in people and capital up the St Lawerence towards the Golden Horseshoe. In less than a decade, Toronto overtook Montreal as the premiere Canadian city. Only, because of budget restrictions, Toronto never built up the necessary infrastructure in housing and transit to accommodate the new demand. So, like a shy teenage boy, Toronto awkwardly grew up fast with many cheaply built condos popping up all over the cityscape. To top it all off, the 2008 recession came and then the election of two right-wing mayors (Doug Ford and John Tory) on a platform of fiscal conservatism, only escalated the situation.

I had trouble connecting with my peers. I couldn’t understand why my classmates weren’t neurotic about the future. Everything seemed so scary, and the speed at which things were going only seemed to accelerate. Every classroom assignment or hallway rumour just became faster and faster until my thoughts turned into a continuous race. I felt like everyone around me could cope with life so much better, in a way I could not. Others so effortlessly detached from the rapid stress that comes from being an adolescent, stress that compounds while existing in a big city like Toronto, Ontario.

They gave themselves permission for all the teen drama to just roll off their backs, and stand there with moxy and a little sneaky glare. I lost all of my baby fat in my checks and grew four inches in only a few months, a real fiery growth spurt. With the help of an Accutane prescription, my skin quickly cleared up of any redness, but left my face as dry as the Nevada desert. Suddenly, I transformed from a shy Asian kid to not even having to show my fake ID while picking booze. I grew up in a fairly white neighborhood, and most Caucasian folks can never guess your age correctly if you’re vaguely ethnic. All these big changes in a matter of months. And then, next thing you know, I stopped caring so much. 

Just like everyone around me, after lots of trial and error, I was able to imitate that ironic careless apathy. Effortless, my vibe and wardrobe started to look more like Keanu Reeves or Kurt Cobain. I let my hair grow out long for the first time. Suddenly, those large oversized navy blue dress shirts went unbuttoned and untucked, but the area of damaged scarred skin I had to hide from my classmates became larger and larger. Eventually, the little pocket knife that I used to hide to hurt myself got replaced with a DIY stick-and-poke tattoo kit. And just like my friends, all the little scars that we so desperately tried to hide were replaced by flowers and smelling faces all over our underaged bodies. My new affinity for style drew attention but also gave me cred to the mid-2010s fashion. It was a weird time to be a youth in Toronto when the hipster style was dying and becoming cheugy, but the new Gen-Z street styles had yet to be fully realized. As an astrologist would say, I was in the cusps between eras.

The next thing I knew I spent my free time after school editing in the film room and chilling out with the other burnouts in the park by the ravine we affectionally nicknamed, “smokers”. This strange piece of grassland next to a major road offered a transcended space, magically placed between the stresses of school and home life, suspended from any responsibilities. All those youthful memories now feel like a distant dream, like a bad trip. Memories that have been warped from all the drugs; washed off from my brain like the graffiti that used to decorate the exterior of the building. You just had to be there.