Six Songs That Sound Like Middle School

Listening to certain songs can take you back to a time or feeling. Today, The Atlantic’s writers and editors answer the question: What song reminds you of middle school?

“Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’),” by T-Pain

It was the year of “Buy U a Drank”—a good year, I imagine, for T-Pain. Unfortunately, it was a very bad year for me. I was in sixth grade, at a new school, trying desperately to ingratiate myself with a friend group that didn’t want me. I could tell the song was having a moment—I heard kids singing it in the hallways—but I wasn’t in on it. It was only a reminder that I had no one with whom to snap my fingers or do my step.

Then, in seventh grade, my life changed. I gave up on the mean girls and befriended people I actually liked. (We’re still close now.) By the time bat-mitzvah season rolled around, “Buy U a Drank” was still in rotation; every weekend, I danced my tween heart out, screaming “I’ma take you home with me” (that wasn’t happening) and “I got money in the bank” (I didn’t).

A few months ago, I heard the song live for the first time, at T-Pain’s concert in Central Park. He later told the crowd, plainly emotional, about canceling his 2019 tour because ticket sales were so low—and how grateful and surprised he feels to be here now, surrounded by love and support. You and me both, T-Pain.

— Faith Hill, staff writer

“Steal My Sunshine,” by Len

“I was lying on the grass of Sunday morning of last week” … still wondering what this song is about, even though I wore out the album You Can’t Stop the Bum Rush, by the Canadian one-hit wonder Len, in the summer of 1999. “My mind was thugged, all laced and bugged, all twisted, wrong and beat,” rasped Len’s co-lead singer Marc Costanzo, in one of many lines of slacker-Shakespearian nonsense he traded with his sister, Sharon.

As with a lot of ’90s rocker-pop, Len’s verbal density induced lightheaded euphoria, but the production here was particularly blissed out: disco hiccups, spaceship synths, loose chitchat. The only lyric I really understood was about drinking Slurpees in the sunshine—incidentally the highest pleasure of my seventh-grade existence.

— Spencer Kornhaber, staff writer

“Babylon’s Burning,” by the Ruts

Britain, 1979: Oh, glorious hour of miserableness and realism, when the Ruts—the Ruts!—were pop music. The Ruts: anti-racist punk rockers. The Ruts, who played with a chugging, mobile, reggae-fied low end (they coolly out-Clashed the Clash in this respect) that would recur nearly 10 years later, on an evolutionary tangent, in the music of Fugazi.

“Babylon’s Burning,” their most apocalyptic single, reached No. 7 in the U.K. charts in the summer of 1979. Which meant that we got to see the Ruts perform it on TV, on Top of the Pops, I and my brothers and our horrible little short-trousered friends. Trapped, immured in the grayness of our Catholic boarding school, we loved Top of the Pops above all things: It was color, madness, the outside world, the unknown. It was salvation, really. And on July 5, 1979, it was the Ruts. It was Malcolm Owen, with his beautifully hoarse and prophetic punk-rock voice, singing, “Babylon’s burning / You’ll burn the streets / You’ll burn your houses / With anxiety …” Cluelessly, devotedly, we watched.

— James Parker, staff writer

“Graduation (Friends Forever),” by Vitamin C

In my Toronto school board, there was no middle school. Elementary school spanned kindergarten to grade eight, then you went to high school. Thus, grade-eight graduation was the most momentous occasion of a tween’s little life. So when “Graduation (Friends Forever),” by the one-hit wonder Vitamin C, reached Canada in 2000, I was indignant. That year, I was only in grade seven: The most perfect graduation song ever written would never belong to me.

Every time I hear the opening bars and Vitamin C’s completely unironic sampling of Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D, I recall the defining experience of being 12: feeling like I would never be as cool, as lucky, as cosmically aligned with the music charts and the turn of the millennium, as the kids in the year above. I attended their ceremony in our elementary-school gym, and when “Graduation” played, I believed that only they would ever talk all night about the rest of their lives, that only they would stay friends forever. But I spent the next year proving myself wrong, and when I received my diploma in that same gym the following June, “Graduation” played once more.

— Yasmin Tayag, staff writer

“Denis,” by Blondie

Samuel was so gone on Debbie Harry. It was Blondie’s U.K. hit single “Denis” that did it. The year was 1978, and Samuel was in the year below me in middle school. Because I aspired to the glorious sophistication of adolescence, I felt a little sorry for him—though we teased him for weeks about his tween pash. The song seemed corny, saccharine, silly. And the girl: absurdly pretty, peroxide blond … too obvious. The song itself was about a crush, for Godsakes.

At the time, I had no notion that “Denis” was a subtly corrupted cover of an early-’60s doo-wop band’s hit, “Denise.” Nor did I know about CBGB, the Bowery club that became the center of New York City’s punk-rock scene, from which Blondie had emerged. That would have taken some actual adolescent sophistication, whereas my pocket money that year went to the 45 of “Song for Guy,” by Elton John.

It was only years later that I came to appreciate Blondie’s sly genius with “Denis,” its perfection of the very bubblegum pop that it mocked. Samuel had been right all along; now I’m the one with the crush.

— Matt Seaton, senior editor

“Everytime We Touch,” by Cascada

“Everytime We Touch” was released when I was 11 years old, which means that I have countless memories of dancing awkwardly to it at bar and bat mitzvahs. But for whatever reason, the most indelible memory I have of the German dance-pop single is when a group of girls crowded around a desk in my sixth-grade classroom, listening to the song play from somebody’s phone (presumably a flip phone, maybe an LG Chocolate, although I can’t be sure); the boys in our class sat at the other end of the room, somewhat bewildered by our obsession.

My friends and I, who all attended a modern Orthodox Jewish day school in Brooklyn, weren’t exactly familiar with the kind of electric romance that the singer Natalie Horler describes with her Britney Spears–esque vocal inflections. But the slow build to the chorus and the infectious melody were enough to keep us coming back—many of us probably wondering, as we jumped up and down to the beat, if love and loss would one day feel like this.

— Isabel Fattal, senior newsletters editor

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