Music Review: Avicii & Aloe Blacc "Wake Me Up!"

Avicii

Wake Me Up!

Album: TRUE

Year:  2013

            Aloe Blacc struggles with an unknown future in the rattled “Wake Me Up!”

                  Clear synths open the single, setting a coddling tone. He backspaces the last sentence he wrote. The screen on his phone is blank again. Not answering seems to be the right thing to do now. The bell rings, signaling the start of class and he puts his phone away. He’ll figure out what to say to his friend later. The hallways of his high school enclose him in a safe bubble, keeping the outside world at arm’s length. Lately, the bubble has been oozing and even though he has tried to block it, it still continues to come back. In June, it will break and he will plummet to somewhere he doesn’t know. He can only follow his instincts. He is pressed to look forward 5 years ahead: career, family, home. But the images are shadowy silhouettes and he doesn’t know which one is him. The adults in his life try to fill in the picture for him, zooming in and giving him a strict interpretation of what they see. It’s up to him to make sense of the shadows. Right now, he’s okay with not knowing what it’s supposed to mean. (“Feeling my way through the darkness/Guided by a beating heart/I can't tell where the journey will end/But I know where it starts/They tell me I'm too young to understand/They say I'm caught up in a dream/Well life will pass me by if I don't open up my eyes/Well that's fine by me.”)

               In the chorus, he would like to skip ahead to being 30 or 40 years old. By then, he will be past the confusion. He will have learned from his mistakes and have time to repair them. He’s been figuring out who he is in a temporary place. Leaving was eventual. However, he didn’t envision it sneaking up on him, scaring him to think of an escape plan. (“So wake me up when it's all over/
When I'm wiser and I'm older/All this time I was finding myself/And I didn't know I was lost /So wake me up when it's all over/When I'm wiser and I'm older/All this time I was finding myself/And I didn't know I was lost.”)

              Throughout high school, his nerves were steady. Worry slipped out of his fingers and onto the floor. Between homework, friends and activities, he had enough of a load. By 35, he would’ve liked to have backpacked throughEurope. He doesn’t know where to go college or who to date. If it were up to him, he would be frozen at eighteen, peering into a future he would like to have. Stepping into the future would likely crush the picture he has in his mind. There are many choices and he isn’t guaranteed to find the perfect person to support him along the curves. (“I tried carrying the weight of the world/But I only have two hands/I hope I get the chance to travel the world/And I don't have any plans/I wish that I could stay forever this young/Not afraid to close my eyes/Life's a game made for everyone /And love is a prize.”)

               The chorus is sung again.

              Blacc sings “I didn’t know I was lost” four times to end the single.  

             Blacc’s green, imperative vocals are shaken, explaining what he knows and has seen to others. It has been told to them several times.  No one seems to believe that he can’t see anything in his future. He’d rather not know than risk the disillusionment of a scarred life ahead.

          Avicii’s visceral arrangement has each element feed into the other and change as needed. The synths begin blissful. However, Blaac’s vocals shade the light and the synths become anxious. By the second verse, Blaac is insistent, attempting to overcome the dread in the lyrics.

           The intellectual “Wake Me Up!” comes-of-age, navigating its way through the newly discovered grey.