Arctic Monkeys 'Favourite Worst Nightmare' Was My Purgatory Between Being Young and Grown-Up

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Arctic Monkeys 'Favourite Worst Nightmare' Was My Purgatory Between Being Young and Grown-Up

Their sophomore records turns ten years old this month and speaks to a specific adolescent growing pain.

I am both mortified by and gentle to visions of my 18 year-old self. Shrouded in simply feeling too much to see what good was around me back then, I was often emotionally destructive. Retreating felt better than being present; drinking and smoking went down easier than talking ever could. Depression is extremely hard, especially when you don't even know yet that you're in it. Each day was a task to get through and, running in tandem with that, I had to learn how to be grown-up—to be a grown-up. I was on vacation in England reuniting with my dearest friend who went to university in Durham when the Arctic Monkeys' sophomore Favourite Worst Nightmare was released. I remember listening to it while I was on a coach bus from Luton, which smelled like urine and cologne, bound for a suburban London train station. My train from Durham caught fire somewhere around Peterborough so we all had to disembark and take what felt like a lifetime of transit to get back to London. Absolutely grumpy, combative, and love sick (which I will get to), I found solace listening to Favourite Worst Nightmare on the ride back, letting it stretch out parts of my brain that needed it most. It has been ten years this month since the Arctic Monkeys released Favourite Worst Nightmare, a mere year and a bit after their tumultuous, cyclonic debut Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not. The Sheffield band's first record was heralded as a savior of sorts; bringing the public and music nerds alike so-called real tunes. Alex Turner was barely out of his teens when publications named him the voice of a generation, which, in his defense of that lofty classification, he is a spectacular writer. Turner knows how to turn a barbed phrase toward his characters in a way that very few can. On the album's opening track "Brainstorm", Turner—over Jamie Cook's frantic guitars and Nick O'Malley's looming bassline—launches a visceral attack at a pompous lad snarkily dismissing him with "Brian, top marks for not trying/ So kind of you to bless us with your effortlessness" and "well, see you later, innovator." But he also softens, something of which we saw on their debut (with the likes of "Mardy Bum") but was further explored on the sophomore with "Do Me a Favour" or "505." Their debut was the urgency of youth, emphasizing the friction of defiance and sneer that comes with it. But what the Arctic Monkeys excelled at on Favourite Worst Nightmare is writing the deep angst one feels when they are in-between being a teenager and a proper adult: a purgatory of self-discovery that renders one either still or ready to be explosively damaging. It's a sadness, almost, about leaving behind a carefree youthfulness and confronting adulthood.

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On their hit "Fluorescent Adolescent", the lyrics in the chorus go: "The best you ever had is just a memory and those dreams/ But as daft as they seem, as daft as they seemed/ My love, when you dream them up." The song is actually about a middle-aged woman finding her way through a new set of obstacles regarding fucking and, more heartbreakingly, making a real connection. While they capture the essence, in a sense, Turner and these extremely typical 20 somethings certainly had no actual concept about what a fade away like that feels like as a woman. Our relevance is based largely on an attractiveness, fuckability, and aloofness that won't trigger a signal of commitment. Imagine being told your feelings are less than and inferior and that you're only worth what your body can do.

The track held—and still holds—a far broader resonance. Paraphrasing the Monkeys a bit but: do you remember when you were a rascal and when all of the boys were electric? What you could be remembering are the more recent offerings of the night prior. While the song depicts the mediocre choices one has to take home to feel something, that is not solely symptomatic of someone who has moved beyond their youth. That sizzle of instantaneous intimacy begins to fade even when you're young and confused and you're going through those motions while the house lights are going up at 2 AM. It's what kept me and my friends and acquaintances who were really just Going Out-specific friends motivated enough to think that fumbling around in the dark would lead us to our heart's truest desires. It wouldn't be a Monkeys record unless Turner's vocals were acting like figurative fists, trying to start a fight with anyone who comes through. The difference on Favourite Worst Nightmare is that the fights are almost always with an idea of a person than a person themself and those are harder ones to shake off. Their songs always drifted to the darker side—like on WPSIMTWIN's "When The Sun Goes Down" about a sex worker and her awful client who becomes a symbol for male power. That darkness appears again on "Balaclava", which tells the story of crime, a theft, the identity of which is literally covered because of the cloth over the character's face. That symbolism of power is still present but there is no major character, more like faceless ones that leave the impression of a bigger story to be told. A part of growing up means confronting and recognizing truths and filling in important gaps in one's knowledge. This means looking outside and around oneself. When you're at the precarious ages of 18 to early-ish 20s, that is often very hard because, if we think teenagers are self-centered little assholes most of the time, it's far worse when you're playing at being a full-blown adult.

When I was listening to Favourite Worst Nightmare at the time, I was also reconciling that my father was a criminal; a man who preferred dealing cocaine and ruining the lives of people I would never meet over spending time with his daughters. Lyrics like "And it's wrong, wrong, wrong, but we'll do it anyway 'cause we love a bit of trouble" and "Well, you'll be able to boast/Of the day of the most flawless heist of all time" from "Balaclava" really stung because I felt robbed by him. He was an abusive person, likely still is—we haven't spoken in a decade. With so much of his true self hidden from me by my mother for so long, the enormity of what it meant to be peripheral to his criminal life and, at times, certainly integral to his perception of being a good person really fucking hurt. He never paid for the things he did—men like that rarely do.

Parallel to these harder, caustic songs are impeccably innocent ones to get lost in. The record's tenderest moments are "Only Ones Who Know" and "505." These tracks serve as first drafts for the softer pop work that would appear on Suck It and See and Turner's later contributions in 2011 to the Submarine official soundtrack. B-side track "Baby, I'm Yours", a Barbara Lewis cover, from Leave Before the Lights Come On also gave us a glimpse at Turner and the band's gentler side. The realities of "Fluorescent Adolescent" being a more normalized result of a night out are balanced with "Only Ones Who Know," a track that held more personal and relevant resonance for me after I met Tom, the person with whom I would have a transatlantic romance of sorts. I replayed meeting him in my head the entire ride back to London. He was sweet, kind, had decent taste in music, and I completely fell for him. I was mostly silent and heartsick, automatically playing back "Only Ones Who Know", slipping into a euphoric place; listening to Jamie Cook's velvety strumming while Turner sang, "In a foreign place/ the saving grace was the feeling/ That it was her heart that he was stealing." When I got back home to Canada, I made him a mixtape and mailed it to him with "Only Ones Who Know" as the first track. In-between the figurative growing pains of being young but not young enough and older but not old at all, having a genuine crush was so welcoming. We sent each other Facebook messages the entire summer—back when it was more an email service than a chatroom—detailing the mundanity of our jobs before fall semester at university started up. It was extraordinarily simple but it was entirely ours. We were truly the only ones who knew about whatever it was we were feeling; whatever it was I felt too hard or what he wished he was brave enough to have done while I was there. Or what I wished I was brave enough to say to him. That song, and those moments, were a mental balm to my otherwise burnt out brain. As far as sophomore records go, which I will always have a soft spot for, Favourite Worst Nightmare speaks loudly to who the Arctic Monkeys were to become as a band, as songwriters, and in the zeitgeist of the later 2000s. British rock music was edging its way out of post-punk indie and garage into a new world of buzzy electronics but this record held its ground—and still does. Growing pains of youth, of experience, are necessary in becoming whatever it means to be a grown-up. The Monkeys address a lot of that on Favourite Worst Nightmare by not being speakers for a generation but instead of that specific period between teen and adult. By moving in and out of dark tunes, sweet love lost and found again, confrontations, hyper thoughts, and positing futures they are wary of having, they speak to how one resolves leaving one life behind for a new one.

Sarah MacDonald is an Assistant Editor at Noisey Canada. Follow her on Twitter.