44. Colleen Green - “Pay Attention”
This song is like my spirit animal. It’s an anthem for anyone who loathes small talk with an intense and deep seated passion. Everything about it, the pointlessness, the emptiness, the higher cognition being wasted on nothing more than walking itself in circles, barely scraping the surface, coddling itself with its own boredom. It’s a song stuffed with introverted greatness, full of gems like “Small talk at The Smell / Talk so small, You’d need a microscope to discern much at all, and just as well” or “Nothing in common / I can’t even remember what I’m interested in / My concentration weakening / That’s reverting back to myself again.”
Its an introvert lashing out at extroverts in the most introverted way imaginable - through a song written in private, addressed to no one and everyone all at once. It’s retreating back into your thoughts, in order to express your thoughts, and seeing everything through the veil of yourself, though not because of some narcissistic pleasure, but because yourself is the only thing that you can seem to make any sense of (which is saying something, because yourself rarely seems to make any sense at all). It’s a recognition that the only interactions worth participating in are the ones that dig further, burrowing deep down below the surface until they get to something familiar, something below all the layers of self-preservation that resonates and resembles your own mind and existence.
It’s the soft chewy inside of the individual, the real person, the vulnerable one - full of beliefs, hopes, fears, dreams, passions and aspirations. It’s getting past all the bullshit and fakeness that litters society, past the plastic facades of coolness and the calm demeanor of apathy, and into the soul. Because its not that introverts hate people - introverts love people, but people that resemble themselves - full people, three dimensional people with their strengths and weaknesses laid bare, revealing a uniqueness which makes them an individual worthy of the name. The only problem is that these people are completely outnumbered in a society that’s full of card board cutouts, people who forsake their uniqueness to hide behind fake facades and perpetuate the empty slogans and regurgitated catchphrases endemic of the social scene. Its this continuously spouted nonsense, the willful emptiness and vapidness of humanity that draws introverts into themselves, away from something fake and into something real. They’re not scared, they’re just bored and annoyed with life. They don’t just want to wade ankle deep in the waters of interaction, pretending that this is all there is to life. They know that there’s more because they’ve experience more, and they want to dive into it, sharing it, discovering everything that it holds, and discovering themselves in the process.
