“The valentines I never knew
The Friday night charades of youth
Were spent on one more beautiful
At seventeen I learned the truth.”—Janis Ian, “At Seventeen,” from her LP Between the Lines (1975)
From a distance of 35 years later, I recall going, just after freshman year in high school, to my local Korvettes, where you could pick up music for what, these days, seems like—well, a song.
On this particular early-summer day, my purchases consisted of the Doobie Brothers’ Stampede and Janis Ian’s Between the Lines. That embodied pretty well, I think, my schizophrenic musical sensibility—one part that wanted to lose myself in the electricity and sheer fun of rock ‘n’ roll, and the other that desired something more reflective.
An Internet reference site of varying degrees of accuracy indicates that on this date in 1975, the single from Janis Ian’s album, “At Seventeen,” was released; other sites can only pin the date down to “mid-June” 1975. Whatever the case might be, it’s a certainty that, by summer’s end, the song had struck a huge chord with hundreds of thousands of listeners like myself.
Eventually, it hit #3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Seemingly everybody knew this extraordinary story of how the onetime singer-composer of “Society’s Child” had become a hit at 15, a has-been at 17, and now, the pop comeback story of the year. (Heck, even the nun that ran my school’s library—not remotely anything like a fan of pop music—knew about her.)
In her autobiography, Society’s Child, Ian recalls the genesis of the song: idly picking up a New York Times Magazine article about a debutante, finding the line “I learned the truth at eighteen,” substituting the word “seventeen” for the last word in the quote because it scanned better, and coming up with the lyrics while plucking out the melody on a samba beat.
Yet the song was so personal and painful for her that not only did it take her several weeks to complete, but she was certain she’d never be able to play it in public: “I was sure no one else felt that way. Everyone else was more popular, more socially adept, than I’d ever been.”
What made the song such a hit (and no, I’m not talking here about clever promotion, though that came into it, too)? Another way of approaching the question is to ask, “What’s the subject of the song?”
To ask the question is, itself, a minefield. “The pain and awkwardness of adolescence” might be one answer, but that theme has been done to death (see Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams, for instance).
To confine it further—that it’s about the pain and awkwardness of the proverbial female ugly-duckling—is reductive, even though Ian refers to herself as “ugly duckling girls like me.” But another issue comes into play here: the potential for clichéd, bathetic treatment of a generations-old dilemma.
What helps rescue the song from this, I think, is the absolute disparity between its soft production values—the singer-songwriter’s alluring voice, accompanied by her gentle horn arrangements—with lyrics that begin with the most direct, unflinching, brutal application to herself (“I learned the truth at seventeen/That love was meant for beauty queens”).
By the song’s end, Ian had radiated beyond herself to a larger group of misfits (“those of us with ravaged faces”), to whom she offered emotional salve (“It was long ago and far away/The world was younger than today”) for surviving the most artificial society ever concocted by the mind of man: the American high school. (The case of Phoebe Prince, the Irish-born teen driven to suicide by cyberbullying at South Hadley (Mass.) High School, illustrates the viciousness that still exists in adolescence.)
The song “Society’s Child” became a cause celebre because of its then-daring theme of interracial dating, but, as important as it was in the history of pop music's treatment of serious social issues, it does not, at this distance, speak as universally as “At Seventeen.”
People can still relate to the arbitrariness of the “games,” “charades”—in short, the role-playing—involved with fitting into the cliques and expectations imposed by a social structure of other youngsters, all trying to hide their own insecurities in a desperate quest for elementary acceptance and love in a time of wrenching personal change.
Even conformity—especially conformity—imposes a price, Ian observes. After all this time, going over the lyrics again, I was pulled up short by the lines about “debentures of quality and dubious integrity” and “in dull surprise when payment due.”
For the last three decades, we as a society lost track of the concept of debt, until it all came crashing down in this recession. In a tough-minded fashion belied by the soothing textures of the song, Ian assures us that, in the most fundamental social relations, emotional debt exacts a price on those who bargain away their loss of selves.
Eventually, it hit #3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Seemingly everybody knew this extraordinary story of how the onetime singer-composer of “Society’s Child” had become a hit at 15, a has-been at 17, and now, the pop comeback story of the year. (Heck, even the nun that ran my school’s library—not remotely anything like a fan of pop music—knew about her.)
In her autobiography, Society’s Child, Ian recalls the genesis of the song: idly picking up a New York Times Magazine article about a debutante, finding the line “I learned the truth at eighteen,” substituting the word “seventeen” for the last word in the quote because it scanned better, and coming up with the lyrics while plucking out the melody on a samba beat.
Yet the song was so personal and painful for her that not only did it take her several weeks to complete, but she was certain she’d never be able to play it in public: “I was sure no one else felt that way. Everyone else was more popular, more socially adept, than I’d ever been.”
What made the song such a hit (and no, I’m not talking here about clever promotion, though that came into it, too)? Another way of approaching the question is to ask, “What’s the subject of the song?”
To ask the question is, itself, a minefield. “The pain and awkwardness of adolescence” might be one answer, but that theme has been done to death (see Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams, for instance).
To confine it further—that it’s about the pain and awkwardness of the proverbial female ugly-duckling—is reductive, even though Ian refers to herself as “ugly duckling girls like me.” But another issue comes into play here: the potential for clichéd, bathetic treatment of a generations-old dilemma.
What helps rescue the song from this, I think, is the absolute disparity between its soft production values—the singer-songwriter’s alluring voice, accompanied by her gentle horn arrangements—with lyrics that begin with the most direct, unflinching, brutal application to herself (“I learned the truth at seventeen/That love was meant for beauty queens”).
By the song’s end, Ian had radiated beyond herself to a larger group of misfits (“those of us with ravaged faces”), to whom she offered emotional salve (“It was long ago and far away/The world was younger than today”) for surviving the most artificial society ever concocted by the mind of man: the American high school. (The case of Phoebe Prince, the Irish-born teen driven to suicide by cyberbullying at South Hadley (Mass.) High School, illustrates the viciousness that still exists in adolescence.)
The song “Society’s Child” became a cause celebre because of its then-daring theme of interracial dating, but, as important as it was in the history of pop music's treatment of serious social issues, it does not, at this distance, speak as universally as “At Seventeen.”
People can still relate to the arbitrariness of the “games,” “charades”—in short, the role-playing—involved with fitting into the cliques and expectations imposed by a social structure of other youngsters, all trying to hide their own insecurities in a desperate quest for elementary acceptance and love in a time of wrenching personal change.
Even conformity—especially conformity—imposes a price, Ian observes. After all this time, going over the lyrics again, I was pulled up short by the lines about “debentures of quality and dubious integrity” and “in dull surprise when payment due.”
For the last three decades, we as a society lost track of the concept of debt, until it all came crashing down in this recession. In a tough-minded fashion belied by the soothing textures of the song, Ian assures us that, in the most fundamental social relations, emotional debt exacts a price on those who bargain away their loss of selves.
One thing I was surprised to learn about Ian is that, in recent years, besides writing music, she has also taken up creating science-fiction. The English teacher who taught a semester's course on this genre preferred the term "alternative futures," and perhaps that's what Ian sees in it--a way to imagine a world far less painful, far more tolerant of imperfections and differences than ours.
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