Song of the Week #8 – “Weak Become Heroes” by The Streets

There are some songs in this world that can make you feel nostalgic for a time that you were not there for, for which you have no frame of reference. And there are very few albums in this world that capture the feeling of twentysomething ennui. Parklife (1994) by Blur gives it a fair shake, with songs like “Badhead” and “End of a Century”, but the end product is just too clean, too polished, too removed from that feeling. It’s a nasty feeling.

I’ve been in a reflective mood lately. It’s been a year since I graduated from university. I’m 23, and soon I’ll be 24. Just today I was reminded of something from my past, a song that I used to listen to over and over when I was 15 or 16. I won’t tell you what it was, because it’s too embarrassing, firstly, and secondly, because I want that memory to remain untainted. But there I am, listening to it, and I’m back in Triple Science listening to it on my shitty little Sony MP3 player, and there’s Josh trying to get me to divulge what I’m listening to as I awkwardly dodge the question, because the answer would be much too embarrassing to say so.

Alas.

There is a verse from “Weak Become Heroes” by The Streets that perfectly encapsulates this feeling of temporal disjuncture that becomes apparent as you enter your early-mid 20s.

Then the girl in the café taps me on the shoulder
I realise five years went by and I’m older
Memories smoulder, winter’s colder
But that same piano loops over and over and over.

Original Pirate Material (2002) is, in and of itself, a nostalgic album for me. My father purchased it in 2002 (because my Dad is fucking cool) and used to play it all the time in the car, which, thinking back, was probably very inappropriate listening for wee six-year-old me, but it left a mark on me. I still catch myself using and quoting snippets of Mike Skinner’s lyricism – in fact, my novel The Malcontent of Mars contains a (semi-conscious) reference to “Weak Become Heroes” in the tenth chapter:

“One more thing, Kowalski,” Mehmet said. “If I don’t see you again, it’s been fun.”

“Likewise,” Kowalski said. “A pleasure.”

Original Pirate Material still holds up stunningly. It is a dirty, grotty, messy album, literally recorded in Mike Skinner’s bedroom cupboard. It sounds homemade and cobbled-together – the hook from “Weak Become Heroes”, “We all smile, we all sing / Sing” has very obvious tape distortion. It’s a homebrewed, homegrown effort, not a big, glitzy, glamorous gangsta rap album, but a filthy, seedy album showcasing the pitfalls, tragedies and ebullience of being young. It’s an album that revels in regaling the listener with tales of drug abuse, clubbing and getting into fights, while also being frank about the earth-shattering lows of relationship breakdown and despair.

I’ve been struggling lately.

I find myself out of place in the world. For the last decade or so of my life, my main goal was to get a degree in philosophy. That’s what I wanted to achieve. And I wanted to write a novel, too. I have done both of those things, before I even turned 25. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m keeping busy. I’m currently working on Rollerskater and I’m excited about the places I’m taking it.

However…

I keep finding myself thinking back to university and to the missed opportunities, to the regrets that I have. Those three years went quickly, and I can’t say they were the happiest years of my life – I spent them, for the most part, with very little money, waiting for buses that never turned up on time, and constantly terrified I was going to fail out of university. But I also got a degree out of the deal and, more importantly, I made a lot of friends. But I find myself hung up on what could have been and what I could have done, and I worry that perhaps I “did it wrong”, and, unlike one of my essays, there is no undo button (or, rather like one of my essays: once it’s submitted, it can’t be revoked).

And that brings me back to “Weak Become Heroes”. “Weak Become Heroes” is a nostalgic track about rave culture in the late 90s and early 2000s. It’s simultaneously a heartfelt love-letter to Mike Skinner’s experiences, and a middle finger to the establishment who ultimately gutted that culture.

Now, I’m not a raver. I’ve never taken MDMA. I’ve never even set foot in a nightclub. But what I feel resonates so strongly with me about this track is that it is a personal narrative of Skinner’s own experiences of becoming a young adult, and is tinged with the sadness and personal doubt that develops around the age of 23, when you finally accept that, yes, your adolescence is behind you, and the realities of adulthood and capitalism begin to set in. There’s a nostalgia here, a feeling that something ephemeral and fleeting has passed through the hands like vapour. And that is a feeling I can relate to.

I suppose everyone feels this way after leaving university, or, indeed, leaving adolescence itself – there was so much more I could have done, so many more people I could have spoken to, so many books I could have read, so many events I passed up on going to. Yeah, it’s less FOMO and more FIHAMO (Fear I Have Already Missed Out). It’s not like I was one of the cool folks either. I was a bookish loner, for the most part. But I still have this dreadful yearning, and this terrible understanding that I can never go back – that that chapter of my life is done, finito, and that looking back constantly will, like Lot’s wife, only kill me faster.

As Mike Skinner describes himself sitting in the café, reminiscing, and realising that five years have passed, I myself realise that it has been four years since I moved into student halls, held myself back from crying as my parents said their goodbyes, and drove away, leaving me to fend for myself for the first time in my life. And in that same verse, he describes the constants:

The road shines and the rain washes away
Same Chinese take-away selling shit in a tray
It’s dark all ’round, I walk down
Same sights, same sounds, new beats, though
Solid concrete under my feet, no surprises, no treats

It’s as though he’s looking for something to grasp on to, some familiarities. The weight of change can be almost too much to bear. It’s easier to retreat, to look for those handholds. One of those things, for me, is music. And Original Pirate Material is one of them. It’s been a presence in my life since 2002. And there’s geography, too – my hometown hasn’t changed much in the last four years, for better or worse. Still as Tory as ever.

But nostalgia is but one piece of the puzzle. A few hundred years ago, nostalgia was medically recognised as an illness, most often exhibited by soldiers who went to foreign lands to fight, and became so exhausted that they would be unable to function without going home. Today, we might diagnose these men with any number of things, from combat-induced post-traumatic stress disorder to simple homesickness, but the point remains: Nostalgia was, and is, a sickness. Or rather, a symptom of sickness. There’s nothing wrong with sentimentality, with fond memories, but when you find yourself mired in it, that’s when it becomes pathological. That’s when it does real harm to your wellbeing.

“Weak Become Heroes” ends with Skinner acknowledging:

My life’s been up and down since I walked from that crowd.

He follows this with a few dedications (to acid house DJs like Paul Oakenfold) and disses (to the 1994 Criminal Justice Bill), followed by a final dedication: “To all the heroes I met along the way.” Because, ultimately, that is what “Weak Become Heroes” is: It’s a celebration of those moments and experiences, of that difficult and painful transition from adolescence to adulthood. It hurts to grow up. It hurts even more to get old.

I’m 23, going on 24, the same age as Mike Skinner when he put out Original Pirate Material. I feel, more than ever, that I understand the emotions behind this song, in a way I simply never have before. Ignoring the gulf of time between me now at 24 and Mike Skinner at 24 in 2002, about how different the political and cultural landscape is between now and then, about the anxieties we are dealing with in our present day with the climate crisis and the resurgence of fascism vs Skinner’s Blair and Bush-era experiences, there’s a universal constant between us, and that is that it is shit to be in your early 20s, unfairly thrust into worlds and experiences beyond your comprehension, to be filled with self-doubt about your identity, about your place in the world.

I have no idea what I’m doing, really. I’ve been writing fiction because it’s one of the only things that helps me make sense of this world from which I feel so dislocated. I hope that one day there is another transformation, and I come to that same, blissful, bleary-eyed conclusion to which Skinner comes at the end of his song: That the past is the past, and there are good days and there are bad, and that life is a rich and complex tapestry, but it’s once you come to accept that nothing makes sense and nobody knows what’s going on that you cherish those moments, however fleeting, when the world seems made for you.

I hope for the return of those days someday soon.