Having moved to a new Minneapolis apartment the day before, with the heat index at 100, I almost didn’t drive to St. Charles, Iowa for the Hinterland music festival this past August. But my friend Claire reminded us of the transience of youth and the importance of saying yes. So, with our outfits giving more ‘practical camp counselor’ than ‘music festival’, we threw our bags in Chloe’s Subaru and set off to Iowa.
We danced to Chappell Roan, drank copious amounts of water, and settled onto the hill, grateful for each inch the sun set. Eventually, it was time for the headliner: Noah Kahan.
“Yeah Man, I’ll Sign Your Zoloft”
Twenty-eight years old with brooding lyrics and the conversational demeanor of a well-meaning frat boy, Noah Kahan has become famous for the way he’s distilling a sense of pain and place and transmitting it to the masses through lyrical dexterity. With lines such as, “Two bodies riddled with scars from our preteens / Intertwine in a car’s dirty backseat / Stare at a drive-in screen”, and, “There’s a murder of crows in the low light off Boston / And I see your face in each one”, Kahan sings not of the glamour, but the grit, of growing up and falling in and out of love, a portrayal of heartbreak much more Bob Dylan than Taylor Swift.
Kahan’s self-deprecation and humor took the stage with him. He cracked jokes to the crowd about how it was funny that he was headlining- “Usually the headliner is someone hype,” he quipped. During the performance, someone tossed their Zoloft up onto the stage. “Yeah man, I’ll sign your Zoloft,” Kahan said. “What dose are you on? Let me guess”. We have become a generation that has traded pill bottles for bras in terms of what we throw at celebrities.
However, what the zeitgeist has recently dubbed “sad girl music” is nothing new. Angst is as old as humanity, and art inspired by sadness and pain is a cultural constant. What is new is its pop-culture omnipresence. Spotify’s most streamed album of 2024 was Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poet’s Department”, replete with lyrics such as “You don’t get to tell me about sad”, and “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday”. Billie Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft”, the second most streamed, opens with the lyrics, “And I still cry / Cry / And you know why”.
Why is Billie Eilish crying? And why is Swift, the world’s biggest pop star, making a point of lyrically gatekeeping sadness? Why sing about being sad when you could sing about having fun?
The Factors at Play
The musical landscape reflects our generational culture. As Ella Schmidt writes in the CommonWealth Beacon, we’re depressed, anxious, otherwise mentally ill. We’re having less sex, driving less, attending fewer parties, drinking fewer drinks. We’re eschewing, what in previous generations, hallmarked fun; forgoing some of the risks indelible in the prototypical definition of youth.
And although we are struggling with our mental states, we are willing and able to talk about it. A September 2022 survey conducted by Harmony Healthcare IT found that 42% of Gen Z have a diagnosed mental health condition, and 18% go to therapy. 87% of us feel comfortable talking about mental health with others, and 63% feel comfortable talking about our mental health with others. Our generational openness to frank conversations makes its way into our music- it’s not uncommon to hear a pop song that mentions therapy itself, like these Olivia Rodrigo, Maggie Rogers, and Sabrina Carpenter tunes.
There are pressing concerns to address here- the mental health crisis is real and raging, and will require systemic change in our modes of relating to one another and the world to address.
But I’m here to make the case that, although we may have exchanged crying at the club for crying in the gym, Gen Z knows how to have fun. And our moody music is a part of that fun.
Angst & Joy
My favorite memory from college was gathering together with my friends to jam. Lily and Julia would play guitar, Gabby would play cajon, and we would sing lots of songs, particularly the Indigo Girls “Closer to Fine” as college approached its end. I once, (or twice) stood on a chair at a dinner party and sang the entirety of Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (Ten Minute Version)”. Gabby was the drummer in an indie punk-rock band called Baker Miller Pink, and we’d spend nights out dancing while they played. The catharsis in the communal experience of emotional music is profound and often joyful; sadness and happiness are never as opposed as we assume. As Joni Mitchell sings in “People’s Parties”, “Laughing and crying, you know it’s the same release”.
I believe Gen Z deserves some credit for the risks we are taking: emotional vulnerability and honesty, in our art and our relationships with one another. I felt camaraderie as I stood with the crowd at Hinterland in the cooling night, pretending to remember more lyrics than I did. Here was a slice of our generation, caked in dirt and dried sweat, belting lines like, “I’m still angry at my parents for what their parents did to them / But it’s a start”, and “Doc told me to travel, but there’s Covid on the plane”.
We are coming of age in a burning, pandemic-ravaged world, overflowing with work to do. Our maladies are a mirror of the Earth’s state. Healing ourselves is our first step in healing the world; living a full life means finding the place where grief and joy sing together, and dancing there.
That place may look like your bedroom at 3 am, a mirror ball refracting color on a crowded floor, scrubbing dishes in the kitchen’s yellow light. It might be shotgun in your sister’s car, a gazebo in the park, or the fluorescent-lit dorm bathroom. It may sound like singing about self-doubt out on the hills of Iowa with good friends and total strangers while your shoulders’ sunburn cools, poised on the edge of whatever happens next. If angst is the party, sign me up.

Lola
January 21, 2025 at 8:57 pm
Beautifully written and oh so prescient.
Joe
January 22, 2025 at 3:17 am
an eloquent description of the truth!!!