There's a scene in Cabaret, where a decadent threesome, leave their villa and go fro a ride into the country. After endless scenes of sex, boozing, dark clubs and almost incestuously small rooms seeing a scene outdoors is purifying. The scene ends when a perfect Aryan lad sings "The Future Belongs to Me", clearly and beautifully. It becomes the erotic core of the film, where the choice between decadence collapsing and the future belong to this strapping youth is an untenable choice. The film moves quickly between agreeing that the children are out future, that the future is one of nihilist thugs, and that there is something seductive about an ideology of purity. In Cabaret, all of the clatter and noise ends with that Horst Wessel. Spring Awakening takes that one young Nazi and expands his interior life. He becomes a chorus expressing nihilism, anger, beauty, hatred, faith, kitsch, and a youthful desire for righteousness. It becomes an extended opus about what it means to be an adolescent caught in the middle of political turmoil, with limited choices.
The album starts smoothly with some pop numbers that talk of the isolation of early adulthood. They go through the usual posturing, a distrust of authority, a desire for independence, some Oedipal energy, and some excellent examples of anti-clerical sentiment. One of these, "A Bitch of Living" about fucking as a tool of liberation could be "Tommy" by the Who or "LaLa" by Ashlee Simpson. Duncan Sheik, who wrote the book, talks about wanting to make a pop record, and he does so. But it is also all of Cabaret in 5 minutes or less. The false languor leading to cheap nihilism and ending with polymorphous perversity has Joel Grey's minstrel leer abiding over it. Musically as opposed to lyrically, this intertextuality can be fond in "My Junk", an almost perfect ballad, which begins as a slightly cold anthem slowly adding aural noise until the purity of the original soloist is lost. These two, suggest that the central theme of the musical is the erotic, and there are a number of songs that make the act holy.
Like Cabaret is as much about queer codes in the 70s, this musical is about teenagers' negotiating the theocratic abstinence only education models. The claiming of pleasure as a moral good seems subversive, and can be found most strongly in "The Word Of your Body". The title sounds like something from a catholic folk mass, but the song, filled with bells, glockenspiels and strings, is almost too intense to listen to. It has a layer of menace and mutually agreed on physical destruction that leads to questions like: How do you respond when 17 year olds sing: "O, I'm gonna be wounded, I'm gonna be your wound/I'm gonna bruise you, You're gonna be my bruise"? Is it a more honest or real message than "the future belongs to me"? If we had to choose blind, what choice would the listener make, about which was more dangerous.
From here the songs ratchet up the intensity. What is assumed to be a kind of moral rigor collapses into psychosexual sadism? The text becomes a terrifying melodrama, with songs like Mirror Blue Light sounding like Kraftwerk at their most menacing. I Believe, has lyrics that suggest an optimistic, pastoral simplicity, but they are trying to convince us. You want to sing along with the chorus, where the whole cast harmonizes lines like "I believe there is love in Heaven" or "All is forgiven." The disingenuousness of the song reminds us of the sexualized violence that came earlier. The claiming of purity as a way of giving up decadence is even more chilling then the boy in the meadow, because it comes from within, the belief in rewards outside the earth becomes a way to justify sins on it.
This point is made more clearly, in the lovely hymn "Blue Wind". It is a lonely and formal song that anthropomorphizes the wind, discussing it as sad as it moves through the thick corn. The song threads the needle between: There's a bright golden haze on the meadow/There's a bright golden haze on the meadow The corn is as high as an elephant's eye" and "The branch of the linden is leafy and green/The Rhine gives its gold to the sea." "Blue Wind" is the clearest example of where the text razors the politics of youth into an impossibly thin filigree.
The difficult moral relativism of some tracks is so delicate and often just gets torn to shreds, like in the song "Totally Fucked", a classic anthem that is as much Clash as it is musical theater. The chorus is so humable that one can imagine a legion of baby theater queens screaming: "Yeah Your Fucked/all right and all for spite/you can kiss your sorry ass goodbye/Totally Fucked/Will they mess you up?" Spring Awakening doesn't know what to do with itself, it becomes amass of binary contradictions: Pastoral/Rural/Urban vs Rich/Poor, vs. Nihilism/Hope or Youth/Adulthood or even Life/Death. Having "Blue Wind" and "Totally Fucked" on the same soundtrack is a good example of how this musical makes Cabaret seem to be a simple and overly moral lesson. But as an abstraction of cabaret, a document on the finding of youth, an explicit deconstruction of desire and a piece of theater with fairly relevant rock/punk songs, it almost completes the impossible.
