Mogwai – The Hawk Is Howling

One thing people must understand is that while these guys are a Scottish good time gal soundtrack for football (meaning soccer) games playing in the background while everyone gets knackered (meaning drunk) and a wee (meaning small) bit sad (meaning sadness), in America they’re the soundtrack to a prom night afterparty that never, ever ends. Prom night is very important to people, even people who hated the whole idea of proms, or went to alternative proms, or never went to the prom.

There’s an emotional attachment to the whole concept, except maybe in all-boy Catholic schools, but priest-bait training grounds probably have their own soundtracks and “edgy” literature provided by G. K. Chesterton. For the rest of the normals, proms are a kind of last hurrah, perhaps one of the last surviving transitional ritual spaces left in American culture, where boys become men and girls become women, even though it’s still just children dancing in the dark to whatever is floating in the musical atmosphere at the time.