Indie Jeunesse

Michael Lista's pick for best lyrics of 2014? "Blue Boy" by Mac DeMarco:

Every generation gets the asshole musician it deserves. The baby boomers had too many to count, but let’s settle on the elliptical oracle of Bob Dylan that Pennebaker caught on film in 1965, whose mannered transcendentalism and moral pretensions, like his generation’s high-mindedness, would be made ridiculous by the Chevy ads and Christmas albums that were to follow. We, their children, have Mac DeMarco, Edmonton’s crudest emission since an oil pipeline. Drunken hipster nonpareil, this is the dude who once made an AIDS joke at Freddy Mercury’s expense—so ironic, bro! Over at Pitchfork, a cohort of aging, over-refreshed babies lapped it up.

So it came as a surprise when he titled his glorious 2014 record Salad Days after a line from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, headstone for the youthfully headstrong: “My salad days/ When I was green in judgment, cold in blood/ To say as I said then!” As Cleopatra apprehended the end of her youth, DeMarco realizes that the millennials’ skinny jeans—six years out from the financial crisis, and after so many PBRs—no longer fit. Future rock aficionados may look back on this record as the final, magnificent cresting wave of hipster, indie jeunesse. As DeMarco sings, over yacht rock for the yachtless generation: “Sweetheart, grow up.”

Check out the CBC page for other selections by authors, including Sean Michaels and Saleema Nawaz.