Ready to free your inner teenager with Troye Sivan?

By Harold Sánchez

“Ijust wanna go wild

 I just wanna fuck shit up and just ride

 In your car tonight

 In your bed tonight”

Who hasn’t felt nostalgic about their teenage self? About that stage in our life we’d go through unworried, when our parents provided for all our necessities. That phase in which many of us were rebel, mostly because of immaturity.

In A Dream cover. Photo: Google

Troye Sivan is no different to any of us. As a human being, he had his teenage years when maybe he was careless and wild. That’s how he expresses it on his song Rager Teenager, part of his new album In A Dream.

The melody is a very soft one with a touch of synth pop (a particular characteristic of his music) and it was released along with a homemade music video directed by himself where, in a single shot, we see him simple, with no makeup or any paraphernalia, singing the song in a bathtub, accompanied only by some paper birds with which he plays as a carefree boy towards the end of the video. There are some distorting effects in some parts. They would symbolize that desire to alter reality and the present time. At the same time, it would connote the internal anguish caused by the sadness and nostalgia for something impossible to get back. In spite of what he wants to express, Troy appears serene during the whole record, just as many human beings do every day.

“Where you been hanging out lately?” begin the lyrics, which show us a boy who longs to go back to his adolescence, or at least bring it back to life for a moment. Who hasn’t felt that way? Who, at any point, hasn’t felt the urge to wake up that teenager who lies within us? It doesn’t matter how mature we are, we always carry inside the child we used to be – that includes the teen, too – and in moments of stress and depression we feel like letting them out. Maybe it’s because our insecurities leave us vulnerable, or due to the fact that we want to feel free, such as when we didn’t have worries or our parents would solve everything.

In another part of the song we hear: “I just wanna sing loud. I just wanna lose myself in the crowd, in your arms tonight or in his arms tonight”. Now, he brings up the love part. Perhaps, he had a teenage love and experienced a relationship. There’s also a connection to a refence mentioned already in his song Seventeen, from his previous album, where he narrates, in a subtle way, how he lost his virginity at 17 with a man older than him, a man he hooked up with exclusively to have sex.

All of us have our stories of teenage mischievousness. The awakening of our sexuality impulses us to look for adventures even secretly, many of which we remember with laughter, sometimes with nostalgia, and there are some others we don’t even want to think of.

The experiences from our teenage years leave a mark on us somehow. With every moment, our character is built. That’s why our inner teenager is indivisible from our existence. It will always be. We will recall them every once in a while, and we will maybe want to bring them back, it’s then when tunes like Rager Teenager will help us, at least, make it in our imagination.

Watch Rager Teenager music video here