Coming of Age in Spiderland
I was recently relistening to one of my all-time favorite albums, Spiderland by Slint. This album has set up permanent residence in my skull, and there are probably very few days since I first heard it in high school that it hasn’t come across my mind. Reinterpreting and analyzing my feelings about the album have taught me a lot about what I value in art, since I have officially canonized it in my brain. I want to share here my most recent interpretation of the album: that it is a bildungsroman. That German word is just a fancy way of saying “coming-of-age story”. Coming-of-age is one of those universal, eternal themes like love and war. It is the process that every adolescent goes through where they begin to see the world “as it truly is”. In telling a tale of this human experience, the author gets to make claims as to what they believe the “true nature” of the world is, and it allows them to explore what it means to accept that reality. Let me give you a quick anecdote. Probably the ...