The Alternative Number Ones: Cracker’s “Teen Angst (What The World Needs Now)”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

Camper Van Beethoven never made music for teenagers. I'm sure plenty of teenagers liked them, but it seems unlikely that teenagers were that band's target audience. They were one of the prototypical college rock bands of the '80s -- the flighty absurdist quasi-punks who were too giddily intellectual for their own good. (Granted, plenty of college kids are still in their teenage years, but you get what I'm saying.) Cracker, the band that former Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery started after the end of CVB, probably didn't really make music for teenagers, either, but they happened to come along with a song called "Teen Angst (What The World Needs Now)" at the exact moment that American teenagers were starting to embrace the messily defined thing known as alternative rock en masse. I wasn't even a teenager yet, and I thought "Teen Angst" was awesome.

"Teen Angst" is a funny phrase because the first word trivializes the second. Everyone who has been a teenager can remember the stage of life when everything seemed way too heightened, when everything mattered so much. But plenty of people have a tendency to look at other people who are going through that stage and dismiss it. In early-'90s alt-rock, bands publicly grappled with what it meant to become avatars of teen angst. About a year and a half after Cracker released "Teen Angst," Kurt Cobain opened Nirvana's third album with this: "Teenage angst has paid off well; now I'm bored and old." With that line, he essentially wrote off both his teenage audience and himself as trivial clichés. This was the alt-rock way.