How Blue Neighborhood Changed My Life...

Everyone has one album that changed their life. Open your eyes to the world of music, define your taste and aesthetics, and creates this time capsule of emotion from your teenage years, the heartbreak, the anxiety, the friendships, and the wide-eyed optimism about the world, and the infinite possibility of what the rest of your life could be like. For me, that album was Blue Neighborhood by Troysivon, and I believe it to be one of the greatest and most underrated pop albums of all time. There is no other body of music that better encapsulates what it feels like to be a closeted teenager. Pining for love, the fears of rejection, struggles with religious trauma, family acceptance, and yearning to escape that small, closed-minded suburbia that you grew up in. This album changed my life. It created me. Troy is the artist that I listened to most in all of my Spotify and 10 years later from the first time that scared, closeted, teenage Nikki listened to this album. I dedicated my entire life and career to starting this show where I talk about music and get to interview my favorite artists. You could say it takes 10 years to be an overnight success. And none of that would have ever happened without this album. So I wanted to take a moment to explain what it means to me and hopefully convince you that it is in fact one of the most underrated pop albums of all time. So with that, welcome back to Nikki at night. I'm your host, Nikki Rareden. And it has been a long time, please gentlemen. I took a little like one month break, I guess. Honestly, I just had a lot of life going on. Also was doing so many things. And I'm going to be honest, I was in this very creative drought for a while. It just felt so hard to be excited about making anything. I don't know. But thank you guys so much for the response to the Slater interview. Oh my God, you have no idea. We filmed not in like February. So I feel like listen to this album in full. Sit on it. I was not able to tell anybody about it. Had to film the interview. I was not able to tell anybody about the interview. And yeah, the response to it couldn't have been better. It was like by far our most successful ever in the show. And she's just so cool. Like such a real person. And you can tell that she's so genuine and just excited about what's happening to her. And I couldn't believe that she wanted to do this. And I don't know, I feel like we're on this precipice of greatness. I really feel it in my soul. I just feel like people are really paying attention over the first time. And I don't know, it's just so surreal. I feel like I've been doing this for so long. I've been on the internet for four years. And in the span of six months, so many lifelong dreams of mine have come true. And thank you. That's all I want to say. And I'm sorry that I took them with off. But I love you and I miss you. And I'm very excited. We have more great interviews coming up. And I have many solo episode ideas now that I'm very excited about. I want to get back to the video essay vibes. In this episode topic, literally spawned out of nowhere, like Spotify posted. They just added some new feature today where they were talking about their 20-year anniversary. So everybody got to see who their most streamed artists of all time were. I don't know what their most streamed songs were. And mine was Troy. And I posted about it. And then I started talking about this picture that I had from when I went to the Blue Neighborhood tour, which is my first tour. The first time I ever bought a concert ticket. And so many people swiped up and were talking about it and talking about with the album into them that I realized like, you know what? Yeah, this album's over 10 years old and it's literally not at all like a culturally relevant topic at this exact moment in time. But like, I just want to talk about it. So it is what we're going to talk about, you know? Also, I'm going to try and include like a small snippet or like three to five seconds of each sound for this song because the album came out 10 years ago. So a lot of people might not know or might not remember. But also YouTube does copyright strike your videos when you do that. If you don't see them, that's why I had to cut it out. But I'm going to try my best. So getting into like my lore with this album and why it is significant to me before I talk about the specific songs. My lore starts with YouTube. Like my gateway into stand culture and into loving music and just all the pop culture was through YouTube. You know, I think a lot of people as kids like saw a music video and were like, oh my God, I want to be Lady Gaga. But like I was watching YouTube and like, oh my God, I want to be Jenna Marbles. Those are my heroes. That generation of YouTube when you think like, Tyler Oakley and Hannah Hart and Connor Frank, that class of YouTuber was so much of where my identity came from. It's where I was my first chronically online teenager. It is what made me like discover my sexual identity. It is why I wanted to move to California from Virginia. Like it is my entire life trajectory is shaped off of falling in love with YouTube in like 2012. So my gateway into music culture is through YouTube culture when one of my favorite YouTubers decided that he wanted to become a pop star and release his first album. Will you release an EP before this? Shout out to those who are there for TRX-Y-E. But that was it. Like that is what got me there. And it's very interesting, you know, at least for me, in this experience of being like a closeted teenager, I, there were so many elements of my youth of like things I pretended not to enjoy because like that would be gay. You know what I mean? It's like a very interesting experience. Like when I was like 12 and like, you know, I didn't come out so I was like 16, 17. So like a lot of my elementary teenage really high school years are very like I wasn't enjoying things that I would later go on to enjoy because I told myself I wasn't allowed to enjoy that. And I feel like for some reason this was one of the first ones to really like break through that armor for me. One of the big reasons being, choice of odds YouTube was my sexual awakening. (laughs) The reason I find out I was gay was like being 12 on YouTube and scrolling and thinking I had crushes on girls in middle school, but then like I found his YouTube channel and started washing him and it was like, "Oh, this is what this feels like." Like this is how people are supposed to make you feel. And like literally like I watched one video that turned into 10, that turned into 20, that turned into years of me realizing that that's who I was. And that is the beauty of the internet. It is why, so it is this all encompassing platform for creative expression and individual expression. And that was just so cool. And again, like when I talk about my war with YouTube, it's just all of me is created from YouTube. So let's get into Blue Neighborhood, the album itself. So this releases December 4th, 2015. So I'm like a sophomore in high school around this time for context. And the 2010s wave of sad girl pop was unmatched. We go 2012 born to die. 2013, pure heroin. 2014 ultraviolence. 2015 Blue Neighborhood. 2016 was just the greatest year of music across every genre and then Melodrama 2017. Like we were eating and we were being fed. And I'm just gonna say it. Maybe we need the girls to get just a little bit sad again. Okay, just a little bit. Just like one or two small life altering experiences that compel you to write an album. Okay, album and all that. But also this, okay, I'm happy that you're happy. But like, if you wanna make me happy, you get a little sad. But my point being, there was a large emerging subculture of pop here. And while many of these albums actually had immense appeal to queer people, Troy was kind of the first one who was actually gay, right? Like we all love Lana and Lord, but like he was the only one that's like, I am a boy singing about being with a boy. And him and Sam Smith, I would say at this era of pop and like emerging artists and pop at that time are some of the, really the only two that I remember. Which I think is also what made it feel so grand, right? Like this is just like the first time I feel like culturally in America, like gay acceptance is really getting big, right? We are in the Obama administration. Glee was on TV. Like there's this era of all the YouTubers like making their coming out videos, right? There was this very large like cultural swing towards like a sad girl pop sound, but also this like very large in global cultural of like being gay is okay publicly now. And you should do that on the internet and actually it will be celebrated and rewarded. Like that was never a thing before. And that's why I think a lot of the writing from this album like really speaks to that. At least to me and the age I was at that time. Like it felt like all of these things were happening and I was like, whoa, like this is how this feels. Like why aren't you so good at articulating, articulating this thing that I felt for so long? Like maybe I'm also this way. So when I get into a lot of the songs, I think a lot of them were somebody saying something that I knew in my heart for a long time but didn't know how to put into words. And then once I heard it, I realized, wait, I also feel this way. So getting into the songs. There is one line from this song that I have thought about every day for the past 10 years. The song is called "Suburbia" and it's Troy singing about the hometown he grew up in where he describes this "Suburbia" as quote, "The place where dreams go to die while having fun." And the idea of a suburban neighborhood actually being this graveyard of unfulfilled dreams is so. so compelling to me. A lot of the times in life we think that our dreams are gonna die from some big rejection and that we're gonna audition for something and they say no, and oh no, it's over. But actually, it's never really like that. I would say as a creative, rejection is one of your greatest motivators. Like very often when people tell me, I can't do something or I'm not good enough. My response is, oh, I'm gonna do everything I can to prove you wrong, right? Like rejection is not the death of the dream. I think complacency, comfort is really where dreams go to die. A place like suburbia, being this graveyard of unfulfilled dreams, right? Each house being its own tombstone of all the things they didn't accomplish in life because they were happy. Ambition can die with a smile on its face, you know? Where you went out in your 20s, you went out into the world wanting to do all of these things and expecting all of these things, but then life took you different directions and different ways and you met people and you moved out and you're happy now, but you also didn't achieve all the things you said you would achieve. And I think about suburbia and when I go home this way a lot, right, of like, I could have been so happy there. It could have been this place where my dreams died while having fun, but I knew in my soul, like I had, there had to be more for me. There had to be more than this, where I was from in suburban Virginia. Like I just, I could, my life could not be there. Whether it was worse somewhere else was almost fine to me because I just needed it to be the next thing. And I'm very grateful for this feeling of eternal dissatisfaction that I feel like I have with myself. I think it's almost this weird side effect of ambition of any ambitious person is that no matter what you do, you always want to look at yourself or the thing as like, the best it can be or how to take it to the next level. And I don't know, I just think about this quote all the time of like, suburbia and the song being this place where dreams go to die while having fun. And oftentimes in my life when I feel my career stagnating, we're slowing down or I don't feel good about it, it's because complacency, it's because of comfort. It's because I did silly things with my friends and I loved doing them, but also is not building the future I want. Is it building the future you want? I don't know. Then I want to take it to what I think is like, the saddest song on this album, which is called Heaven. Heaven encapsulates what it feels like to grow up in a Christian household and always being told that you are never gonna go to heaven. You are sick, you are a sinner. There is something wrong with you. There is a piece of you that's wrong. And how traumatizing that is to hear as a child and how you are spoon-fed, like, that is the truth. You should be this way, the way you are is wrong, the way you are is not normal, the way you are is different from me. And if you want to be like us, if you want to go to heaven, you're gonna have to change. You're gonna have to rip out this piece of your soul. And his lyricism on this song is amazing. I just want to read it, honestly, where he says, "Trying to sedate my mind in its cage and numb what I see. Awake, wide eyed, I'm screaming at me. Trying to keep faith and picture his face staring up at me. Without losing a piece of me, how do I get to heaven? Without changing a part of me, how do I get to heaven? All my time is wasted, feeling like my heart's mistaken. So if I'm losing a piece of me, maybe I don't want heaven." And wow, do I relate to this experience a lot? I grew up in a very Christian household. Very Christian conservative household is how my dad was. Like the full starter, like literally a meme starter pack. Red Ford pickup truck, loved Trump on it. Like he booked, like love, like I literally imagine it. Like I need to, don't try not on me license. Like the whole nine, you know? And he would say that, even before he even knew I was gay, even before I told him like he was very public and open about his, why he thought that was wrong. And it tore me apart. I spent so many years of my life crying in my bed alone out for he said something. And I felt like I couldn't react to it in the moment because I was like, oh, if you get mad at what he's saying, then he's gonna know that you're gay. So like you can't, he's pretend like that it's funny, you know what I mean? Or whatever. And when he says like trying to sedate my mind in its cage and know what I see, that is how it felt to be with my father. And what's crazy is I also love my father. Like he was in many ways a great dad to me still too. You know, like he, it's such a weird thing when you love someone and they do love you, but also they don't accept you. So there's this piece of them that you know kind of hates you and you hate them for hating you, but also you feel that they love you. Especially when the times when he didn't know, you know what I mean? Like I, it was weird because I would get to know what he really felt about gay and like queerness and stuff because I knew he wouldn't say it to my face if I told him that. But also like, doesn't that make it so much worse? You know, like doesn't that make it like, how do I ever believe a word you're ever gonna say to me now? And it's like just the writing when he talks about like trying to keep faith and picture his face is like, how do I maintain this religion that I was told I have to be a part of or I am a terrible person and I'm going to hell. While also I cannot, you can't turn off love. We don't choose who we love. We don't choose what, how we feel like none of us do. So you're constantly just like being ripped apart from two completely different sides of yourself and emotions of yourself. And the conclusion of this song is like, if I have to rip our out a piece of my soul and who I am to get to heaven, then maybe I don't fucking want heaven. Like how can heaven be this perfect promise land that you say it is with your all loving God? But I have to suppress and rip out a part of my soul to appease you, some stranger to appease what you deem as acceptable. Like there's just no way that's what heaven is. There's no way that that's what this perfect all encapsulating happy place is, right? And this is also when at least for me, Lord drop, like really I start to like break away from Christianity. I want to say around like 15 or 16 because I just keep having these thoughts and like this internal dialogue in my head about things like this of like, it's gotta be this like logical fallacy, right? Like either God does exist and he is all loving and he doesn't give a shit that I'm gay 'cause he loves everyone or he's not all loving and not all good and not all nice 'cause it's, you know what I mean? Like I don't know, I just like that was really but turned me off different. Nikki's religious trauma can be a different episode although it was very tied to a lot of themes of this album. But I don't know, it's just something that I had never, again, when I talk about somebody articulating these ways that I had felt for years is like, maybe I don't want heaven either, you know? And now we gotta talk about the Blue Neighborhood trilogy. The blue neighborhood trilogy changed fucking lives. Okay, the way it starts, three part music video with them as two young kids falling in love. Oh, so cute, right? And then as they get older, we see these scenes of intimacy of them on the bed kissing but then cutting back and forth to his father beating the shit out of him on that same bed for being gay. Watching the highest and lowest of emotions in tandem. And like as a closet gay person, that is both your biggest dream and biggest fear at the exact same time, right? Like these two spectrums of the emotions you will have been bottling inside of you, bottling this like desire to finally experience real love and connection with this fear of like, everyone's going to hate me and my family's going to hate me and nobody's going to view me, all my friends are going to view me differently and like just the existential dread combined with this existential yearning. And the way that the music video is shot, cutting these scenes together back to back on the exact same like physical bed where these events would occur and have occurred for me. Like oh my, it's just, it's unreal, it's magical. And then the last music video is a funeral for his father, that same father that used to beat him for being gay. And I relate to this so deeply because my dad died five years ago. It's also something I've like talked about on the internet ever. Oh my God, wait. It's just weird, like, because me and my dad had a very up and down relationship. Like when I do know that he loves me and then many ways there was times when he was a good father. But also he was a hateful man. He was racist and homophobic and had views about the world that I very much disagree with and made it a point to try and instill those values in me as a child. And I had to spend years of my life hating myself and thinking I was a bad person because of that and then to unlearn all of that and then, you know, we. he had this big confrontation. I come out around 16, 17, didn't tell him. Kind of slowly cut him out of my life. My parents were divorced also, by the way. So I lived with my mom. So it was easy to kind of not see him. If I didn't see him, I didn't see him. So I pretty much just completely stopped seeing him until one day, I don't even know how. I think he stalked me or chucked my phone, I don't know. And just confronted me about it that he knew. And we had this long fight about it. And his own way told me that he loved me still. But it was also caked in this years of trauma that I experienced, of just never feeling like I was enough and having to always feel like shit and repass not being able to fight back against this very hateful dialogue that was happening all the time. So it ends in this big fight. And I was just like, dude, I just couldn't deal with him. And I couldn't deal with him. And he has also just lots of lore of terrible things he did to my mom also that I don't want to talk about. But so because of that, I cut him out when I turn 18. Like I stopped talking to him. Then when I was 21, he died. He just got a heart attack and died randomly. Like that woke up one day in the 56. And just young. And I never got to talk to him about any of this. He never got to see me with a boy. He never got to see me graduate college. He never got to see me move to California and like achieve a lot of my dreams and become a person that I'm very proud of. And I'm so sorry, this guy's so dry, so quiet. But yeah, you know, like it's just this eternal what if of my life. And this eternal, like every time I get older, I always think it's gonna be better 'cause it's like more distant from when it happens. You know, like you think like loss is very hurtful those first few years that they die. And then as you get older, you come to peace with it. But strangely for me, it's been the opposite. It's as I get older, I feel, I just think about how much life has happened and how my kids will never have a grandfather. And you know what I mean? So yeah, sorry for trauma, but getting back to the end of the video, the music video ends. Like the trilogy ends where the boy that Troy isn't loved with is walking away with his girlfriend at the funeral and there is like flashbacks of all this time that they spent together and he realizes like, this boy is just never gonna accept himself and they won't ever be together. And it ends, that's it. There's no happy ending. The ending is super fucking sad and traumatic. And I love that it ended in sadness like that. I think that's what made the trilogy so magical and compelling because that's what that experience is like. Like there's so many times that you meet this person. You're like, I know that you feel this way. Like I know it like we've, we've popped. Like, you know what I mean? And they can never accept that part of themselves and you're never gonna be able to make them. Nor should you want to. Like, and you're just gonna move on? You just, that's just, it's just what happens. And it's like such a unit, like a classic queer experience. Like so many people have done that and felt that. And I felt like the music video just encapsulates it perfectly because you're like shocked that it ends. Like it just feels like it should be the end of it. And that's also the point, you know what I mean? And I thought that that rolled out for that album, especially at that time. Like this is the peak of YouTube era. And doing, he was a YouTuber and having these three, like a three part story music video series was just perfect. And then they released sort of like a director's cut version where it was like all of them together. So you could see it actually. It's like 12 minute intended, like short movie, almost. And yeah, again, like when I talk about, I feel like I'm repeating myself. But it's just like so deeply encapsulated the ways that I felt. And then I want to talk about like my favorite, second favorite song on the album. Maybe this is going to sound weird. Like my favorite song to listen to, not my favorite lyrics. Do you know what I mean? Suburbia is my favorite lyrics. And is my second favorite song to listen to. Lawson Boy is my favorite song to listen to. Second favorite lyrics. But essentially this song is about the feeling of wanting so badly to be in love and experience love. But also knowing you are so young and have so much life left to give. Right? Like he talks about, he says, yeah, we knew from the beginning that this was never ending. Shouldn't stay too long because we're both too young to get into forever. I say I want to settle down, build your hopes up like a tower. I'm giving you the run around. I'm just a law's boy, not ready to be found. I very much felt this. And again, it's like one of those weird, like queer experiences where I feel like you experienced so many firsts in life, so late. Like I am fortunate and lucky. You know, I came out at like 17 publicly. And had a boyfriend when I came out. Like that's why I came out. I know people who didn't come out until they were 25. Imagine having never like never really experienced real connection. No first kiss, no like handholding that was like meaningful. No, no love that was like meaningful or even like crush it. You know, like it's like so much that happens so late. Later in the timeline for somebody who had to spend years in the closet. So so much of life becomes like wanting to rush all these things and experiencing all these things. And you've been planning for them for so long. But also you're like, wait, what the fuck? I like just became me. Like I just became the person that I realized who I am. And I don't know, like I can't commit to something like that. Cause I feel like yeah, I'm 25. But it also feels like I'm a baby. Like this is the beginning of like that. Me experiencing this thing for the first time or whatever, right? And I just remember relating to that so much as a kid and like, having been so excited to finally like have a boy or whatever, you know, but then also being like, oh, I have to move out and go to college next year. And I'm going to go and try and move to California. Because like I can't be in Virginia. Like this is not the way for me. It just this cannot be it. And that song spoke to me so deeply because it's like I had to choose between this complacency of suburbia, if you will, and love and safety with my ambition and my desires as like a creative person to like be able to do something like that. Like that's there's none of that shit where I'm from. There's a music program. There's a film program. There's no like nothing. Like I can't really know connections. Nothing at all. Like I just had to like figure it the fuck out. I only was in California. I moved here for one year when I turned 18, came back, had to go to school for three years, then moved back to California because I was like that determined. Like I will fucking leave my hometown and do what I am meant to do. That was just this turmoil that I always felt. Especially it's like I have a single mom and like I don't want to leave her there alone, you know. And I felt like in many ways this song was kind of like an antithesis to youth, which is the most popular song from this album. But you know in youth he's very like my youth is yours. Like it's about like it's like tee he happy like we're in love. Like oh like I love that we're doing this, we're as in this song. It's a lot more like I want my youth to be mine. Like I am this lost boy, right? A lost boy from Peter Pan is someone who is eternally young. But also he it is they are lost and a boy right is very much how you feel when you're that young and have no direction or have no idea who you are yet. You just want to experience. And that again is like why this song spoke so deeply to me. But you know like when you think of like the big songs from this album, it's like youth and why old were really the two big songs and big at the time. And hot take those songs are very mid to me. Even at the time I remember not particularly loving them as much. I think he's another incredible song on this album that I wish I would have had more time to talk about. You should really listen to it. But I also think Troy said one time in an interview that like if he could pick one song from this album that he would play on tour, it would be ease. And I think I would love for Troy to find his way back to this style of writing. I think this album is so young in like the themes of it in a way that I'm not sure would be the same for him now. But he had like a big transformation with the sort of this last album, something to give each other. He had rush and like a lot of the big songs and he did sweat tour and blah, blah, blah, but like Troy to me in my heart of hearts and my soul like when I think he is at his best as an artist is this very like singer songwriter vibe. It's a little sad. It's very poetic. He has this way of articulating emotion and the turmoil of that emotion like the lack of clarity around it that spoke to me so deeply and has continued to speak to me for 10 fucking years. Like this album was my first concert. It was my first everything is my first concert. I saw him. Did you know that Duolipa opened for Troy to bond on this tour, which is so fucking crazy that she opened for him. This is like five years before she goes on to win like best new artists and everything. And now that they have a song together and it's like you see the lore, how cool it is and how beautiful like the genuine kinship and friendship is there. And this is something I admire about Troy as an artist is like you really know who he fucks with and rides with and like what he's only to do with for his friends, you know like him and Charlie like the fact that rush was as big as it was he had like the three biggest singles of his life back to back to back and then intentionally waited a year. so that he could go on tour with his friends. Like, that's so cool to me. You know, like, I just like, you really see it. And it's one of the many reasons I've always admired him. And this album changed my life, dude. Like, seriously, I don't know how else to articulate it. I hope it, like, spoke you in some way. I'm sorry that I like cried and also ran an episode topic. But, hey, shout out to that Spotify future that reminded me, Troy is the person that I spend more and more minutes listening to than anyone in my entire life. And he probably always will be. Like, there's just nothing that I'm not sure anyone's ever going to be able to, like, speak to me the way he spoke to me at that time, you know? And I hope that one day I get the chance to meet him and thank him because, like, this is my life now. Like, this is my job. Like, it's Tuesday at 2.30 p.m. And I'm sitting here talking about music that I love. Like, my life is everything I wanted it to be. So thank you. And thank you guys for listening to watching. And I love you, and I'll see you next week. Bye.