There were a couple weeks in the summer of 2023 when everyone was obsessively watching old Bryan Adams videos on Youtube. Many discovered that videos for three different songs from the Reckless album all featured 80s babe Lysette Anthony. In “Summer of ’69” she’s the girl ’standing on your mother’s porch” who Adams nostalgically dwells upon years later to his therapist. In “Heaven” Anthony’s character storms off from an abusive boyfriend straight into a Bryan Adams concert where she’s instantly mesmerized by his performance. Adams notices her out of a crowd of thousands and becomes transfixed himself, but she disappears before he can find her after the show. In “Run to You” Adams attempts to lure in Anthony with his guitar in the middle of some kind of snow storm. She runs to him with everything she’s got, but just before they are able to beat the elements and finally unite the song and video ends.
The trilogy hit people hard. It seemed to be saying that our most cherished fantasies and desires will always be just out of reach no matter how close we seem to be getting. People couldn’t tell what could be realistically achieved anymore. But did it even matter? Were we all programmed to endlessly yearn for them either way?
But what am I doing here? This wasn’t 1985. It was 2 thousand and 23, and despite the eternal greatness of Bryan Adams’s high pitch rock rasp and Lysette Anthony’s beauty and on-screen charisma, these songs didn’t know what a ChatGPT or a NikolaJokic was, and thus could never truly represent what the current year stood for. And no matter how much people wanted to fully immerse themselves in the general themes and minute details of the pop culture from 38 years ago, they had to accept things were probably actually best summed up this year by indie rock supergroup boygenius.
Boygenius is a trio comprised of singer-songwriters Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, and 2020 skeleton-outfit-of-the-year winner Phoebe Bridgers. All successful solo artists in their own right, they joined forces this year to release a critically and commercially successful record called The Record and go on an equally successfully tour called The Tour.
Their biggest hit was a song called “Not Strong Enough” which is possibly a song about playing off Sheryl Crow’s “Strong Enough” which is a song about hoping to find a partner who’s strong enough to handle your shit even if it’s a delusion. But in the case of boygenius they are the one who does not consider themselves strong enough to handle their partner’s shit. It could also just be a song about self-frustration, reckoning with our own powerlessness over ourselves, inevitably leading, through three part harmony and melodic counterpoint, to the question – Why am I the way I am?
The funny thing was everyone in 2023 was stronger than they’d ever been before. Boygenius, for example, were stronger than their initial 2018 collaboration, when they first teamed up to spite musical journalists who tried to pit them against each other as dismissively labeled ‘fellow female musicians.’
Even if you were an already massively successful solo act, you got more massively successful, making billions off your tour, dating a Super Bowl champion tight end, and being honored as Time’s Person of the Year.
In all aspects of pop culture, people got stronger. In 2023 your Nuclear physicist screenplay could finally become a blockbuster summer smash. If you had a quirky existentialist take on a popular children’s toy line, that movie could also now set box office records. Even the second season of high-intensity restaurant drama, The Bear, was stronger than the very strong first season.
Non-famous people got stronger too. No matter how many years you’d been toiling away as an adjunct college English instructor, this was finally the year you were promoted to FULL TIME. You could also suddenly publish multiple books of local poetry. You could even after 6 years and over a dozen failed attempts at last find and photograph the elusive Elegant Trogon in the wooded canyons of southern Arizona.
How did people get so strong? Alot of it probably hadta do with everyone really upping their self-care game. After years of politics, plagues, and addiction to deeply absorbing other people’s thoughts on the internet, people were like I gotta get up and move my legs around a bit and start trying to fully optimize myself.
They upgraded their squeaky-ass camping cots to thousand dollar Nectar mattresses, their crotch ripped jeans to surprisingly classy Hagar dress pants from Target, and their plastic spoons to metal silverware which could not so easily snap in two scooping into a pint of Ben&Jerry’s. They finally got their cavities filled; they got new Air Jordans and Amazon recommended backpacks and Dustbusters. They reached down deep, clenched their fists, and got Mountain Bluebird photos printed and custom framed at Mike’s Camera and then hung up them up on their office wall.
And people got literally stronger. They hired personal trainers, started hitting the East Boulder Rec Center at least three times a week and loading up on Muscle Milk and 30 grams of protein protein bars, and their muscles started to increase in size.
Yeah, it took mountains of credit card debt to make it all possible, but it seemed worth it to look at themselves hard in the mirror, flex their biceps, and growl victoriously as they could now lift heavier amounts of things than they could previously.
BUTTTTTTTTT there was a big but to the whole thing…
While everyone was getting stronger, a strange phenomenon was taking place, which many failed to make sense of and only boygenius could come close to summing up – no matter how strong people got, they could never feel strong enough.
For every accomplishment and feat of strength, there was a weird gloom that inevitably came along with it. Like even though people were finally getting paid more everything else in their life continued to cost alot more – rent, gas, a McDonald’s plain hamburger went from a buck to $3.99 like overnight. The mastercard statements were getting so out of hand, any kind of job promotion was unable to lead to any kind of greater standard of living, leaving people wondering what the hell they would’ve done without the higher pay.
For every great new bird sighted, people could only think about the ones they were missing, and how other people seemed to be getting them so much more easily. Golden-crowned Kinglets, Black-bellied Whistling Ducks, Yellow-crowned Night Herons, Lark Buntings, Bendire’s Thrashers and Philadelphia Vireos. 3 times going after that fucking Vireo in Black Canyon City, Arizona – spending hours going back and forth down a densely wooded stretch of the Agua Fria River with no success. It made them question their eyes and ears and maybe even whether the Gods just liked others more than them.
For all the attention a person gave to other people’s poetry, buying their books, writing articles and reviews, posting a local literary events calendar every day, going all out putting out local poet’s work and organizing offbeat release parties, they couldn’t help focusing on how little attention they were getting in return for themselves. They knew that kind of egotism wasn’t the right kind of thinking, but they’d notice all the readings, and panels, and workshops, and shout outs that everyone else seemed to be getting instead of them, and they’d automatically feel like shit about it. Even when they were invited to participate in something or someone complimented them it didn’t seem to count. Unless everyone was adoring you as some kind of literary God why bother. By the end of the year people just decided to quit any kind of community involvement and stopped responding to anyone’s messages anymore unless it was about stuffed animals with Sarah Lee.
For every deep clean, people wouldn’t take their rotten egg garbage out for sometimes weeks at a time, the photos on the wall wouldn’t stay level, 90s TV stars were drowning in their hot tubs, and no matter how much people worked out and ate better their fucking bellies didn’t… shrink… at… all.
And in this hour of need where was Suzanne Sommers, spokesperson for the ThighMaster?… on this year’s longgg celebrity not-alive-anymore list with Tina Turner and Sinead O’Conner and PeeWee Herman.
And, oh yeah, no one was attracted to people. No one was dating anybody. Everyone was alone. The entire globe was on a troubling trajectory to never having any love and/or future humans again ever. Okay, maybe someone was attracted to someone else, but no one could tell. And even if they could the idea of having someone trojan horse their way into their lives only to severely judge all the debt and vanity and Philadelphia Vireos and stubborn middle aged gut was just not preferable to indefinite reclusion with no one but the dog. Not strong enough to be your man, for sure.
My gods, how could you even write a year-in-review with all this not-strong-enoughness happening? By the final days of the year you could only just sit there paralyzed on your parents couch ‘staring at the ceiling fan,’ while they watched unapologetically formulaic Hallmark Christmas romances, and asking “Why Am I the Way I Am?”
And will anything really be different in 2024? And Why try to get stronger at all this coming year?
And chanting…
Always an Angel never a god
Always an Angel never a god
Always an Angel never a god
And when the ball dropped 12/31 going on 1/1 still no one had any clear answers. The year-in-review ended with no conclusion paragraph. Maybe you should just add your own positive hopeful ending. Just come up with something. Whatever makes sense. Whatever makes you happy. Like, in 2024 everyone will get even stronger and they will finally feel strong enough. Lie to me. I promise I’ll believe.
Or wait, wait, to better come full circle here, uh uh uh… I’ll uh… run to you… when the feeling’s right, i’m gonna stay all night, i’m gonna run to you, uh 2024…*
*Footnote
other good songs from 2023:
Beach House “Holiday House”
Dua Lipa “Dance the Night,”
Goth Babe “Alone in the Mountains”
Jenny Lewis “Psychos”
M83 “Amnesia”
Olivia Rodrigo “bad idea right?”
Slowdive “alife” and “kisses”
Jonathan Bluebird Montgomery 