I heard “American Pie” the other day for the first time in a while. What a song! Way long, thick with cultural references, it feels like the codex for the Boomer generation.
The Millennial version of this? Maybe the 10-minute version of “All Too Well.”
Way long, dense with personal references, Swift’s tune—just like with “American Pie” and the Baby Boomers—feels like it says something about my generation.
But if “American Pie” is Boomer nostalgia, soaked in an unironic longing for the past, then “All Too Well” is Millennial ennui, a Proustian dissection of a remembered past that seems more confounding the closer she looks at it.
Yes, the song is about a breakup. But it feels bigger than that—there’s a betrayal there, the broken promises of an older man (Jake Gyllenhaal, if fan theory is right).
And if there’s any near sentiment universal amongst Millennials—unpopular as I know it is to claim universal generational affiliation—it’s a sense of the betrayal of our preceding generations. It’s the coddled childhood that many of us had—the sports participation trophies and follow-your-dream career advice—that curdled in adulthood, when reality set out to prove that things are just not so hunky dory. When we realize, once the scales fall from our eyes, that too many of the adults in our life, who we looked up to, don’t seem as concerned as they should be by the state of things.
“All Too Well” says none of this—but that is no matter. The voices of our generation speak for us in ways they could never intend, which is part of the point.
Taylor Coe 