The song I chose to defend as poetry is "American Candy" by The Maine from the album American Candy. This album came out in 2015 and a lot of the songs were responses to different parts of a person's life.
"American Candy" is a response to the bubble that society tries to put people into. The band used the term "American candy" as a metaphor to the bubble of happiness that society tries to force people into. The song goes deeper into that, with examples of how the this bubble and pressure from society hurt people and make them compromise themselves. An example of this is "Try to think back to, back to a time when/You loved what you loved because you loved it/Before the sugar/And all the sweetness/Filled up your lungs now,". This is telling people to think about times when they liked things just for liking it and not because society told them to like it. The pressure can take over a person's life and make them see and feel things that they should not. The feelings can tend to take over every aspect of a person's life.
"Even if you wanted to/You couldn't stop it's just too sweet/But this American candy/it'll rot your teeth,". This specific line really catches the meaning of the song. Even if a person thinks that they are not giving into the pressures of society, they most likely are in some ways. A person can give so much of themselves until it eats away at their self and mind. It makes them change themselves and ends up doing more harm than good.
Another line that fits in with the prompt is "Sometimes I feel as if I'm going mad when/I get a touch of saccharine on my lips". Using a word like "saccharine" really helps the reader understand what they mean in this song. Saccharine is an artificial sweetener. The usage of this word shows that a person can really tell when they have something that is not truly great or sweet, but a lot of times, people will just go along with it. The songwriter is denying this fake sweetness and not letting it become a part of his life.
The song ends with the line "I don't fancy American candy". This line is telling people that it is not necessary or does it feel good to give into all of the pressures of society, even if it does mask itself as something great and sweet. Most of the time, people know that they are hurting themselves to fit in, and the songwriters want these people to know that they should not do that. As hard as it can be to try not to give into the societal pressures that America pushes on young people, it really does hurt a person more than it does help a person to give into them.
Nice defense of the song! One striking line for me is "You're sweet and sated,so sedated/For the american kids/You're hooked and baited,annihilated". I think this line shows how all the artificiality that floods society is specific to American culture, and the problem is rooted in the teenage population.
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