“Oh, No” (Regarding Panic Attacks, 2016-2021) by Tyson Motsenbocker, Thursday, February 15, 2024 (Trigger Warning: Anxiety)
I don’t know anyone who can’t understand if not relate to the title of today’s song, “Oh, No” (Regarding Panic Attacks, 2016-2021). I’ve talked about several of the tracks from Tyson Motsenbocker’s Milk Teeth, and I’ve yet to exhaust inspiration talking about the album. A lot of the source material I’m talking about comes from interviews cited in my posts for “Carlo Rossi” (Love In the Face of Great Danger,”“Wendy Darling,” and “Hide From the World.” Those pieces were based on two interviews, The Black Sheep Podcast “Tyson Motsenbocker” and Labeled Podcast’s “Oh, No.” These interviews give context for Milk Teeth, which feels esoteric at times. Motsenbocker explains in the Labeled interview that he included concrete images to balance the deeply personal stories behind the songs.
THREE IN THE MORNING. Furthermore parentheses explain songs that are especially vague. “Carlo Rossi”‘isn’t just about a bottle of cheap wine, but about falling in love at a volatile time. “All the Old Bars” (Whose Names Have Changed) paints a picture of getting stuck in a small town and false hope that things change. I often skip today’s song, “Oh, No” (Regarding Panic Attacks, 2016) when I listen to Milk Teeth. The tonal difference of the song makes changes from an anxious lullaby to a panic attack by the end of the song. Unlike every other track on the album, which can fade into the background at a coffee shop, the instrumental at the end of “Oh, No” demands to be listened to. But the biggest reason I often skip the first track is that the lyrics feel too real. While the rest of the album offers contributing clues to what may cause a panic attack at “three in the morning,” the cold tone of the piano and the lyrics place me in bed, awakened from a religious-fueled nightmare. At that time alone, my rational daytime brain lies dormant while the worries of what could happen keep me awake. I think about getting old and the lack of a financial safety net I’ve laid for myself. I think about the people that I love dying and being alone. I think about how climate change may kill us all or how another Trump presidency may end American democracy, and about how all the social structures in place, like social security, are crumbling.
LIKE GOD IS A BARTENDER. Sometimes when I’m doom-scrolling through Yahoo! News, my guilty pleasure collecting stories from a variety of sources I still have no idea how they are marketed to me, I read a headline from supposed financial experts Suze Orman or Dave Ramsey, shaming American young people about all the ways they are fucking up their finances. It always makes me thirsty for an overpriced latte. I know I need to make better choices. I know that I should be saving for retirement. But regarding those panic attacks between 2016-2021, I can’t speak for Tyson Motsenbocker or other millennials, but I think 2016 is probably a good year to pinpoint when our panic attacks started. Maybe we thought that the banking crisis of 2008 was just a minor setback. We were young and resilient. For me, seeing the rise of gun violence in the late ‘10s in America, the lack of any kind of safety net for the poor and middle class, the rise of racial and sexual minority hate crimes, and political attacks against the LGBTQ+ community fueled my anxiety. Then there was Covid, which was the hurricane that hit the already battered island. I’m sure that previous generations had things bad, too. And of course other generations dealt with all of the aforementioned events, but damn, 2016-2021, seems like a lot. Maybe 2022 and 2023 felt like a new normal. Obviously, Motsenbocker ended writing about panic attacks before the album was released in 2022. I’m sure there’s a better way to deal with the world, and maybe I’ll finally finish that BetterHelp application.
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