10 Songs That Describe 10 Aspects of Adulthood

These songs aren’t explicitly about being an adult, nor are they about growing up (well, mostly).

These songs embody adulthood, they are it.

They are compromise and small aspirations.

They’re not doing what you want to now, in order to, maybe later, for a little while, get a chance to do the thing you want without the reminder of all your responsibilities stifling your enjoyment.

They’re appreciating the small things, and being crushed by the big things.

They’re knowing how cold the world is, and continuing to try anyway.

They’re fluorescent, flat, caffeine lights. Speeds so fast you feel like you were drunk. They are the hustle and the paying of bills.

“H-U-S-T-L-E” 

Murs

An adult does what they have to do for money.

In economically disadvantaged neghborhoods in America, adulthood starts young. In other words, as Prodigy of Mobb Deep said, “I’m only 19 but my mind is older”

A lotta people wanna knock what we do on my block

But we do what we do cause we ain’t got a lot

I’ve never been poor the way poor kids are poor: generational poverty. I’ve been 26 without a job, grocery shopping on a nervous budget, borrowing your friends car, worried about making rent, and constantly stressed, poor.

I haven’t been no food in the cupboard and no parents around poor. I didn’t grow up in poverty and that’s a huge difference.

So the doc got me on prescription strength Zoloft

So I can deal with the stress and I won’t go off

While I am the kind of person who was 19 but their mind was younger, I can say that once your money (read: survival) is completely your responsibility, you’re an adult.

Cheap dirt hustles, no glorious tales,

but it did keep my black ass from going to jail

Murs “H-U-S-T-L-E” is all about the mature realization that 1) I need money, 2)  I want it legally, and 3) I don’t have traditionally marketable skills.

Murs gives us 5 examples of how he legally hustled as a young man, from flipping incense bottles and reselling soda at school to collecting aluminum cans, re-selling candy bars and helping women load their groceries into the car for tips.

These are hustles those in the hood are familiar with. These are hustles that are not cool, that take a swallowing of pride, that require a true adult outlook on the world: working hard for money doing something you don’t want to do.

“Bills“

LunchMoney Lewis

Nowadays, anyone saying “I got bills” on record is usually talking about how much money they have, as in, “I have a lot of dollar bills”.

In contrast, LuchmoneyLewis’ “Bills” is the joyous celebration of adult responsibility. 

Adulthood is often dull and aggravatingly repetitive.

In these ways, paying bills is very much “a part of adulthood”. But there are moments when doing your duties as an adult can feel triumphant.

When paying your bills and having some money left over feels good. When you can grocery shop and not worry as much about every dollar. Moments of content calmness. “Bills” can’t be described as calm, but it’s a celebration of those moments.

These are small victories. And being an adult is about celebrating the small victories, because often, they’re the only ones we get.

While the verses of “Bills” are a steady litany of daily complaints: stubbing your toe, car not starting, making a risky charge at the store, Lewis is humble bragging when he says,

“I got mouths, I gotta feed, so I go to work work work everyday”.

People depend on him and he has a job.

He comes through for them by working hard.

That’s a lot to brag about.

“Everybody Knows”

Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen was probably born an adult.

From his sub-woofer baritone, to his strict employment of meter, it makes sense he’d be somewhere on this list.

And right from the jump, “Everybody Knows” is too grown up for its own good. It’s bitter and biting and relentless. Take the first stanza:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows that the war is over

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That’s how it goes

Everybody knows

This passage resonates with adults in a way it never could with youth.

You need to go through a few presidents you actually voted for to realize how often the good guys really lose. You need to live a few weeks check-to-check before you see how easy it is for the poor to stay poor. And not only all that bad stuff, but the older you get the more you realize…everybody knows. This isn’t some secret.

When Nina Simone says that “everybody knows about Mississippi, goddamn” she is generally singing about the horror of racism, but very specifically, about the fact that everyone in America knows about Mississippi and Mississippi keeps getting to be Mississippi.

Adults are well aware “the fight was fixed”, we’re just too busy trying to survive to do anything about it.

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking

Everybody knows the captain lied

“Everybody Knows” is smarter than the institutionalized, its anger is a thorough, steady burn, the way Sean Penn was once asked why he keeps helping on the ground in Haiti. His response, “pure rage”.

From the low-growl of Cohen’s voice, to the ominous, stabbing pizzicato synths, “Everybody Knows” lyrics’ are as unresolved as its chorus is musically, which just switches to a major, upbeat chord progression while the chant, “everybody knows, that’s how it goes” haunts us, becoming more damning and indicting with every repetition.

“Lazy Afternoon”

The Roots

Not doing anything. It’s the pinnacle of adulthood pleasures.

“Lazy Afternoon” by The Roots understands this in its stoned soul.

Throughout the 16 bars Black Thought doesn’t do anything. He takes a bath, gets dressed, drinks beer, smokes weed and listens to A Tribe Called Quest in his room, all while lackadaisically making plans for the night that we’re not sure he’ll keep based on the pace he’s set for his day.

And while that might perfectly describe most weekend afternoons for kids in their early 20s, it describes a welcome change of pace for an adult who has shit to do. 

Over the age of 30 every minute seems to be more accounted for, more planned out. Doing nothing has to be scheduled in advance.

To drive home this predictable repetition of adulthood, The Roots don’t write separate lyrics for the 3 verses of “Lazy”. They just repeat the same lyrics with a slightly different flow each time.

While Thought’s day might not exactly match your ideal adult afternoon, its core values are undeniable: taking joy in a day spent in the pursuit of small pleasures.

“Lazy Afternoon” is about the quiet time alone on a summer afternoon, simmering in the bath for a half an hour, laying around and lounging til around 2.

That’s something young people take for granted and adults have learned to appreciate.

“Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party“

Courtney Barnett

The name says it all, while never being said once itself in the entire song: nobody really cares if you don’t go…to the party, to the wedding, to the thing.

Yes, your friends and family love you.

But they’re adults and they know that adult things come up. Even if that adult thing that comes up is just being too exhausted from the work week.

Most importantly, the thing you’re not going to? It’s not about you.

Coutrney Barnett knows what most adults don’t: while you’re worrying about what other people think of you, all those other people are worrying the same thing, giving no time to actually think much about other people, or the energy to judge others as harshly as they judge themselves.

I wanna go out but I wanna stay home

While Barnett’s opus is decidedly teenaged, or at least young adult, in tone – both the edgy guitars and cracking vocal cords – it’s clear she has an old soul.

She’s the young adult who uses the term young adult.

She’s cool because she really doesn’t give a fuck. Not, Marshall Mathers super-angry-not-giving-a-fuck as a defense mechanism, but rather, a truly robust lack of concern only old men in a gym locker room are capable of.

I wear my heart on my sleeve
Gets harder in the winter, gotta be a fake or shiver
It takes a great deal out of me
Yes I like hearing your stories
But I’ve heard them all before

While Barnett knows you have to sacrifice comfort on the way to the party so you don’t have to carry a jacket all party long, she’d probably rather be at a panda endangerment event or sad, important films at historic theaters. Or whatever Courtney Barnett cares about.

The point is she’s probably not going to make it to your party this weekend.

And that, I can very much relate to. Mostly because no one I know is ever throwing one.

“I Don’t Want To Grow Up”

The Ramones

No one wants to not grow up more than people who already have.

This pop punk perfect anthem emobides the teen angst around the prospect of growing older, relating to the angsty teen in all of us in the process.

From their trapped pubescent vantage point, every path looks undesirable, and even worse, hopeless, tragic.

Adulthood: where the nightly news is so bad you want to punch the TV, where you drink away their free time and make fools of yourselves, push a broom and BOOM, one day it’s all over.

While teens might think that’s what adulthood is like, adults know that’s what it’s like, and they don’t feel too guilty about drunkenly headbanging to a song that makes them feel young again.

“I Know There’s An Answer”

The Beach Boys

You can’t change people, you can’t make them be better.

Part of becoming an adult is understanding this.

But still, at times, it feels like we should be able to. That we should all be capable of getting out of our own heads. That we should able to accept help without ego or complication.

While we relate to Wilson’s lamentations of social disconnect, we also relate to the “so many people” he points out.

“I Know There’s An Answer” sums up all this very adult struggle with the language of a child.

It’s so concise, so perfect, I’m pasting it in its entirety below with gif reactions to the realness.

P.S. Does any other pop album describe the complex emotions and modern existential crises of adult life as simply, as profoundly child-like, as Pet Sounds?

I know so many people who think they can do it alone

They isolate their heads and stay in their safety zones

Now what can you tell them?

And what can you say

that won’t make them defensive?

They come on like they’re peaceful

But inside they’re so uptight

They trip through their day

And waste all their thoughts at night

Now how can I come on

And tell them the way that they live could be better?

I know there’s an answer

I know now but I have to find it by myself

“Daysleeper”

R.E.M.

In adult life, there exists a color called “headache grey”.

Adult life brings with it intense, and intensely mundane, struggles.

Other people’s wants and desires pressing in on you, the pressures of making money, of doing what you need to survive while still trying to imagine, and pursue, a better life.

Michael Stipe doesn’t explore this notion through exposition, a very adult choice, but rather, by placing dull artifacts of night shift life alongside jabs of emotional insight that strike all the more intensely due to their proximity to the bland, workaday nouns.

First of all, whoever thought you could sing these words:

Receiving dept.

3 a.m.

Staff cuts have socked up the overage

Directives are posted

No callbacks complaints

Everywhere is calm

I worked night shifts in college. The feeling of going home as the sun comes up, as the world walks past you, headed in the other direction, is this exact feeling:

Fluorescent flat caffeine lights

Its furious balancing

I’m the screen, the blinding light

I’m the screen, I work at night

I see today with a newsprint fray

My night is colored headache gray

Don’t wake me with so much

In “Daysleeper” Stipe has become the instrument of his job, everything’s become gray, he sleeps during the day, something that a good percentage of adults literally do, and many more do figuratively (burrrn, get woke sheeple!)

But seriously, “no callbacks, complaints” is the most positive thing that happens in this song.  It’s basically the highlight of this guy’s day (night), and as an adult, not being annoyed right now is really as good as it gets a lot of the time.

And “furious balancing”, using a lot of energy to go nowhere at all, to just keep even is exactly what living paycheck to paycheck feels like. 

Stipe makes the soul crushing imagery of the 3rd shift, beautiful, and gives us the gift of respite from our drudgery, through his exploration of it.

“(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding?”

Nick Lowe

“(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding?”, released in 1974, was a backlash to the backlash.

White backlash (portmanteau whitelash) or white rage^[1][2] (sometimes white rage backlash) is the negative response of some white people to the racial progress of other ethnic groups in rights and opportunities, their growing cultural parity, political self-determination or dominance.

Source

The hippies and the Civil Rights Movement claimed America in the 1960s.

Nixon and the Silent (read: white) Majority have been claiming it back ever since.

“(What’s So Funny ‘Bout)” can be read, in this way, as a literal, historical statement.

“Peace, love, and understanding” was the mantra of the hippies, and making fun of peace, love, and understanding was – and still is – the hobby de rigueur for the right when Lowe released this backlash backlash anthem, and ahead of its time, as Elvis Costello’s 1979 version is, arguably, better remembered.

But more broadly, “(WSF’B)PLAU?” is about about big, correct ideas being crushed by small, wrong minded people.

It’s very easy to make fun of hippies. Very enjoyable too.

But honestly, they’re right.

We know they’re right.

Peace and love is the answer but righteous anger just feels toooo good and someone hurt us really bad a long time ago and we haven’t really dealt with that.

Taken less socio-politically, the feeling of “(WSF’B)PLAU?” comes up in adult life all the time.

Why is it that, before we’ve had our coffee, we don’t want someone coming up to us with a smile on our face, cheerily inquiring as to how we’re doing?

Why are we, or at least many of us, adults irked by the always-happy colleague? 

Why do groups of guys often seem to shit on the nicest one?

Why do we initially distrust the overly kind stranger?

We mistrust kindness we don’t feel we’ve earned, because adult humans have their own self-interest at heart, and those self-interests are too often in direct competition with our own.

Tha’s an evolutionary advantage, and often, an overall good call.

But this very adult distrust, and sometimes downright dislike, for kindness (also called peace, love, and understanding) has been weaponized, and amplified, by a political party who drums up energy by exploiting this evolutionary adaptation (and the one about how we distrust people who look different than us) for their own gain, and to the detriment of their own supporters.

Turns out the opposite of peace, love, and understanding isn’t that funny either.

“Fast Car “

Tracy Chapman

All Tracy, as character in “Fast Car”, wants to do is move out of the shelter via her job at a convenience store.

Which she resorted to working at after having dropped out of school to take care of her dying, alcoholic dad.

When her mom left him due to his drinking.

She now repeats that cycle, as the verses get less and less aspirational, with a man who sees more of his friends than he does his kids, staying out late at the bars.

Her escape is remembering driving around in her boyfriend’s fast car.

Not driving around in her boyfriends’ car, thinking about when she used to.

Chapman elevates the daily struggle of adult life in America to excruciating poetry in her breakthrough hit: the narrowing scope of choices that age brings, one constricting decision after another, some you control, most you don’t.

If our lives aren’t exactly the protagonist’s in “Fast Car” it is through Chapman’s powerful depiction of that life that we can feel our own restrictions, the edges of ourselves where we want better, in one way or another, but are held back by forces greater than our own.

Listening to “Fast Car”, we feel strongly because Chapman writes strongly.

Everyone isn’t homeless, nor has an alcoholic father. But the craving for a stable, simple life – of a steady paycheck and a warm apartment – is the adult’s daydream, to the child’s wildest fantasies.

No More Songs

For the very same reasons these songs celebrate life – at times, simply by describing it – we are compelled to celebrate these songs. Songs that speak to the small heartbreak of paying rent each month and the quiet joy of doing absolutely nothing. Songs that acknowledge the grind, and make beautiful its struggle, not to romanticize it, but to help it be survived.