Matthew Litchfield
November 20, 2012
A Poetry of Song
The feeling of nostalgia is often captures most accurately in music. In the case of “Apartment” (Young The Giant), and “The Old Apartment” (Bare Naked Ladies), nostalgia is caught in their respective filters of sadness and anger.
Both songs deal with the dark emotions surrounding buried memories in old apartments. They give a sense of defeat and mourning over failed relationships through their dejected imagery and somber diction. There is a resonance between the songs; in “Apartment” the narrator “hide[s] in a raincoat when things are falling apart,” and in “The Old Apartment” the narrator says there are “broken hearts and broken bones.” These two passages demonstrate the hurt one can feel when they’re displaced from familiarity through their respective use of figurative emotional and physical brokenness.
Noteworthy are the tonal difference between the two songs. “The Old Apartment” talks about the narrator’s anger, describing his emotions through his actions, as when he “tore the phone out of the wall.” Conversely, “Apartment” shows the narrator’s ‘exile’ from his apartment, and makes use of subtle symbolism of rain to indicate the end of an era. Where “The Old Apartment” expresses the narrator’s anger at his former partner, “Apartment” describes the narrator’s sadness that his relationship has ended.
“Apartment” and “The Old Apartment” share a room filled with painful memories and emotions. The narrators tell their stories and characterize themselves as sad or angry (respectively) by describing how they interact with and remember their old apartments. The old conflicts of their now ended relationships are palpable in their acts of leaving and breaking into these places of their past.
