While 16 will forever be saddled with a sweet image, even if the song is about sullying that very innocence, 17 is pure angst on wheels. To hear the songwriters of the last 40 years tell it, to be 17 is to be miserable, angry, depressed and quite possibly suicidal. Songs celebrating the free and easy side of 17 are very much in the minority. Boyd Bennett, an unheralded rockabilly player who reckoned Bill Haley had ripped him off, had one lone hit in 1955, with a rocking number called “Seventeen.” It went, “Seventeen, hot rod queen/Cutest girl you’ve ever seen/Tell the world I’m really keen/On my hepcat doll of seventeen.” A charmingly dated scenario, to be sure, but not the true 17. In “Sexy + 17,” the Stray Cats looked backward to the ‘50s—as they did in all their musical endeavors—to find something unthreatening to admire about the number. The dearth of positive 17 songs certainly stems from the fact that the number has become inextricably associated with its age equivalent in human years.
The most joyous moment in pop 17-ness has to be the opening couplet of “I Saw Her Standing There.” “Well she was just seventeen/and you know what I mean” is as much a part of the rock vernacular as “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Maybe if that crooked number had been part of that ecstatic song’s title, things might have turned around for 17. But the Beatles went for “I Saw Her Standing There” and henceforth, 16 out of every 17 “17” songs have been sung from the point of view of someone extremely miserable.
Janis Ian, who had an unlikely hit in 1966 with “Society’s Child,” at the precocious age of 15 (and that’s pre- Tiffany and TRL) scored an even bigger hit nearly a decade later, with “At Seventeen,” a first-person chronicle of that age’s particular pain, with details that we may never see the likes of again. Lines like, “To those of us who knew the pain/Of valentines that never came/And those whose names were never called/When choosing sides for basketball” will always send douche chills shooting up the spines of people who lived through the era when this song was all over the radio. Winning a sort of Oscar in its field, “At Seventeen” has earned a hallowed place in I Hate Myself and I Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You’ve Ever Heard by Tom Reynolds, which I highly recommend, and a cursory Google search reveals that many people feel share the belief that the song reaches dangerous levels of moroseness. Because of its ubiquity on the airwaves during the singer-songwriter-friendly ‘70s, “At Seventeen” had a virtual lock on the number for several years, successfully withstanding a gob of spit and an elbow jab by the Sex Pistols, whose “Seventeen” declared “I’m a lazy sod!” but alas, the only number Mr. Lydon utters in the song is actually12 more than 17 (“You’re only 29/Got a lot to learn”). Pistols contemporaries The Cure went for “17” glory with “Seventeen Seconds,” the catchiest song ever written about the last 17 seconds in the life of a person who has just committed suicide. Tracey Ullman obviously saw the appropriateness of 17 for her song “You Broke My Heart in 17 Places” (a pretty nifty song, the chorus of which adds to the titular phrase, “Shepherd’s Bush was only one.”) Unsung Chicago rocker Ike Reilly has a sleazy masterpiece called “Hip Hop Thighs #17,” but it gets disqualified for numerical arbitrariness. Jimmy Eat World’s “Seventeen” gets disqualified for never mentioning the number. Tim McGraw’s “Seventeen” gets disqualified for being by Tim McGraw. Ditto “Seventeen” by Winger.
Rising from some strange, pillowy planet, “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” by Broken Social Scene is a favorite song of robot geishas worldwide, as well as one of mine. Sadly, and I do mean that, there is no mention of the titular number, although the line “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me” gets said 13 times in a row. There is no justice. Ladytron’s “Seventeen,” which is as icily cool as one would expect from this gelid Liverpool outfit, decadently declares, “They only want you when you're seventeen/When you're twenty-one you're no fun.” With its throbbing dance-floor beat, this one really gives my winning choice a run for its money.
Keren Ann, the exotically heritaged singer songwriter who cannot seem to garner any negative press, comes close to seventeen-ly sublimity with the stately “Seventeen,” sounding something like what a young, alto-voiced Leonard Cohen might have written. A beautiful song, but the sophistication of the arrangement and the singer’s knowing perspective serve to belie the song’s central plaint, “Look at me/I’m only seventeen,” rendering it an odd choice for the quintessential “17” song. For that distinction, a song really must embody the whole seventeen-ian ethos. And that’s why there’s only one real choice.
Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen” from 1982’s Bella Donna has the quaking, feverish intensity of a very confused, very sexy teenager, on the cusp of adulthood. It announces itself boldly in a spray of 16th notes (16th notes—that has to be significant) and Ms. Nicks delivers a whomping vocal that I defy you not to respect in the morning. Even Joan Cusack’s campy performance of the song in School of Rock only serves to reinforce Eo17’s iconic status. Here’s a song that’s embraced by the once and future nerds and the whirling ingénues among us, as well as those of us who fall somewhere in between.
Stevie Nicks - "Edge of Seventeen"
* Random fact about “Edge of Seventeen” – The title comes from a mishearing of the phrase, “the age of seventeen,” reportedly drawled by Mrs. Tom Petty, in response to Ms. Nicks’ query as to when she had first met her husband.
by David Klein, via http://www.merryswankster.com/ Thank you to everyone who made my birthday awesome, love you kids! :)
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