What The Kid Laroi Taught Me About Teenage Melodrama Through The Eyes of a Growing Adult

AKA why I like "WITHOUT YOU" when I probably shouldn't

Last week I graduated college and earned my undergraduate degree, which is usually someone’s first real step into adulthood. From here I have a lot of choices to make. Should I pursue the career I spent four years of my life studying for? Do I step back for a second and just work until I find the motivation to go to grad school or find a higher-paying job? Do I spend the next decade of my life in my parent’s house because finding affordable places to live is hell and just do what I love while getting paid pity change at a dead-end job? It’s a lot to take in, and what I end up doing with my life is up for fate to decide.

But that’s just the financial part of growing up. What about the emotional part? My relationships, my mental health, my satisfaction with the life I have now? That’s a lot trickier. You’re expected to at least grow up a little after high school. Your teenage and early adult years are where you learn from whatever mistakes you’ve made and allow yourself to grow into a different person. Now with experiences behind you that you can either grow from or let them infect you into your adult life.

But growing up doesn’t mean that what you felt in your younger years is no longer valid. I used to hear a lot of sentiments that your first breakup isn’t the end of the world, or that what’s important to you in high school won’t matter when you eventually graduate and move on to different schools or lifestyles. While that’s technically true, I don’t think it’s all that productive to imply that none of those feelings “matter”. We kind of have to go through those cringy, regrettable moments of our past if we want to grow from them and become a better person in the immediate future. We should let that first breakup feel like the end of the world. We should feel that heaviness in our hearts after a really bad fight with a friend or a test that stresses us out to the point of exhaustion. I made a lot of immature mistakes in my past, especially throughout high school. I alluded to it a lot in last year’s favorite songs of the year list. But my real mistake was letting them affect me so much to the point where I convinced myself I had already grown past them. I didn’t let myself wallow in my feelings enough because I didn’t think that was the “mature” thing to do. Getting all sad and mopey over a girl and trying to act like I wasn’t doing that. I resented myself whenever I got jealous of her dating someone else because I was “supposed” to be happy for them. Why can’t I move on, I thought. Why do I keep letting this one person completely dominate my mind when we should have closed the book on this long ago?

I started writing about music in late 2015, but my first full year was in 2016. That year, I ended up gravitating toward one specific artist and constantly berating him for what I considered at the time to be toxic, abhorrently immature lyrics. That was Sam Hunt. He was starting to be crowned the prince of country for being the only artist during the post-bro country drought to have songs with pop crossover that weren’t total flukes. Sam Hunt’s debut album, Montevallo, was pretty explicitly about Sam Hunt’s breakup with his high school sweetheart. A lot of songs on the album exhibited really bitter, passive-aggressive sentiments framed through the lens of a hopeless romantic who just wanted his girl back. I’ll be honest, it’s hard to look back at some of my reviews from 2016. I know exactly where I was when I wrote them. This was year two of me after getting rejected by the girl I liked and since then she’d started dating one of our mutual friends and our friendship was kind of fractured by my awkwardness and inadvertently bringing attention to the fact that I was still into her. I ended up doing a lot of projection against Sam Hunt and his music, especially since some of his feelings and his fractured relationship with his ex mirrored what I was going through at the time. But I knew Sam Hunt’s concern trolling and borderline spite against his ex was toxic when you look at the bigger picture, so I got really angry at songs like “Make You Miss Me” and “Break Up In A Small Town” for wallowing in self-pity and guilt-tripping this girl into taking him back. I was literally going through the exact situation described in “Break Up In A Small Town”, and I was worried that I was acting exactly like that at the time (I was).

In all honesty, I don’t think I should have pushed back against the song. There’s nothing actually wrong with the lyrics, a lot of it is mostly just Sam Hunt feeling bad about letting this girl go and realizing how much he genuinely loved her once she ends up in someone else’s arms. But I guess since I saw myself in that journey of self-pity and regret that I rejected it on the spot. Not helped by critics and friends I admired at the time considering Sam Hunt’s heartache to be bullshit. I latched on to this idea that Sam Hunt is just a full-on shitty person who kept pestering exes who have already moved on to fulfill his feelings with no regard to the other person’s hesitance and outright avoidance. Which… okay, songs like “Make You Miss Me”, “2016”, “Breaking Up Was Easy In The 90s”, and especially “Take Your Time” and “Drinkin Too Much” do not help, but it bled into me hating other songs for similar reasons like “Amnesia” by 5 Seconds of Summer and “Blue Ain’t Your Color” by Keith Urban when they really don’t have the same problems that Sam Hunt does. Don’t even get me started on the projection and white knighting I used against XXXTentacion. In general, I ended up with a reputation for being really harsh against this kind of self-pity heartbreak anthem, and for the most part, they really don’t deserve it.

Which takes us to “WITHOUT YOU”. An acoustic ballad from rising star The Kid Laroi that just recently hit the Top 10 thanks to a remix with Miley Cyrus. A song that by all accounts I should hate with every fiber of my being. It’s a whiny breakup song that villainizes his ex and dramatizes his angst to an unbearable level. I haven’t had a good impression of The Kid Laroi up until this point either. It’s so obvious that the industry wants to push him as Juice WRLD’s protogé, and he’s suddenly getting tons of big-name collaborations and a constant album push that screams of throwing songs at a wall and seeing what sticks. Which I wouldn’t mind if his music was any good, but it isn’t! I can’t stand this kid! Aside from being the physical embodiment of Call of Duty sponsored Doritos and Mountain Dew, he has a grating voice that’s stuck in the worst parts of puberty and he has such an inconsistent production style that reeks of playlist baiting. I find myself rooting against him all the time because I hated the mere idea of this snot-nosed brat as not just a big new artist, but being marketed as a protogé of an artist whose death was tragic, unexpected, and being used by an industry who refused to help him. Everything about this guy’s career is skeevy and privileged. They’re LUCKY that this song managed to catch on and finally be the hit they were looking for. And given my hatred for melodramatic, misogynistic bullshit like this, every sign points to me considering this one of the worst hit songs of the entire year.

I kind of like it.

At the very least I get this song. I get why this is the one that got popular without the need for an industry push. It’s the kind of teenage melodrama that Gen Z is very high on right now. Honestly, the first thing I noticed in the song is that the hook is genuinely fantastic. It’s a melody that sticks in your head, and with the passion belted out by Kid Laroi on the hook, it’s absolutely the kind of song you can belt out in the car with friends. Especially the very not problematic totally not immature line, “Can’t make a wife out of a hoe”. That line reminds me of the “Devil in the form of a whore” from Post Malone’s “I Fall Apart”. Honestly, both songs have a lot in common with each other, but I think what puts “WITHOUT YOU” ahead is that the production is a lot cleaner and Kid Laroi has more of an excuse to be an immature crybaby. And like, let’s be real, the song itself isn’t all that deep or lyrically complex. To be fair, I don’t think it needed to be. The lyrics do a fine job painting someone struggling between being grief-stricken and angry over his ex leaving him. For once, his obnoxious scratchy voice actually enhances the relentless angst of the song. His voice is annoying, but I’m not really expecting clean singing over a raw, heartbroken song like this.

This isn’t even something that took a couple of listens to get here. I felt this way on the first listen. I knew I had to feel some type of way for the song’s flagrant immaturity. There’s no reason for me to go easy on it. But I dunno, I guess I do enjoy this song for what it is. It’s not among the absolute best hit songs of the year. In terms of breakup hits from this year, “Heartbreak Anniversary”, “my ex’s best friend”, “Save Your Tears”, “drivers license”, “Calling My Phone”, even “Wasted On You” do what this song does a lot better. But that’s because my connection with these kinds of songs has changed in recent years. All of these songs add a bit more to the story than “WITHOUT YOU”. “Heartbreak Anniversary”, for instance, centers itself around the narrative device of remembering the day it all fell apart, and how even a year later you still feel affected by the hurricane of emotions that one moment brought you. I can directly relate to this because I literally have a heartbreak anniversary of my own. December 11th. I still reflect on where that day took me, even it’s been almost seven years. “my ex’s best friend” is immature like “WITHOUT YOU”, but in a very different way. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, it follows its reckless impulses and causes even more dumb drama by sleeping with her best friend. It takes the pain of the breakup but leads it into a more fun, ridiculous direction. “Calling My Phone” relies on the atmosphere of sinking into those late-night thoughts and emphasizing the frustration of someone latching on to you and harming you even after you thought it was over. All of these songs take different approaches that connect more to me, whether it’s something that I can more directly relate to as a young adult or tackling a different angle that makes the story more fascinating.

Of the songs mentions earlier, the one closest to “WITHOUT YOU” in terms of concept and overall “maturity” is Olivia Rodrigo’s “drivers license”. This song takes a few more steps to make it stand out, whether that’s the production that takes cues from actual car noises to simulate the feeling of driving slowly down a neighborhood or the very specific premise that’s as precise as it is universal. But for the most part, they’re similarly immature in their treatment of breakups. It helps that both artists are close in age, so their brand of heartbreak connects the most with teenage melodrama. If you ask me, I think “drivers license” is a contender for song of the year. Olivia Rodrigo is already proving herself to be a tremendous songwriter, hitting that specific whirlwind of Gen Z angst and tragedy that’s as sincere as it is wildly overdramatic. But how the hell can I relate to it? I’m twenty-two years old to Olivia’s eighteen (seventeen when she wrote this)! I got my driver’s license long ago, and I’m not really thinking about the lost chances I had to experience driving with a partner for the first time. But still, I get it. I get how it feels to have something attached to a previous love that you can’t bring yourself to enjoy because it reminds you of them. I get the pain of realizing some of the happiest years of your life so far was bullshit. I don’t need to still be a teenager to realize that, just like I don’t still need to be a teenager to understand The Kid Laroi lashing out at an ex for breaking his heart, yet still feeling that deep inner sadness that comes from realizing it’s over.

Taylor Swift’s rerelease of Fearless also gave me a lot to think about. Taylor is much older than I am. She just released two critically beloved albums with folklore and evermore, both dealing with more adult topics and relationships. And yet, it’s still humbling to me that she’s willing to revisit and relive the feelings she went through on Fearless when she was nineteen. It’d be easy to look at some of the songs on Fearless and make fun of them, particularly stuff like “Fifteen” and “Love Story” that are intensely twee and naive, but Taylor still sings them with the same passion and love she felt in those first recordings. Because you don’t have to be embarrassed about your old teenage emotions. In fact, sometimes it’s okay to embrace them. Because that rush of emotion can remind you of how far you’ve come as a person, and none of that would have happened if you didn’t allow yourself to at least be a little immature. Obviously, there’s a limit to how immature you can be. I’m not sure “Can’t make a wife out of a hoe” is going to work as a mantra when Kid Laroi turns twenty-five. But sometimes you need that song to belt at the top of your longs when you’re at your most vulnerable.

Thinking back to past years, I did this all the time. I had plenty of songs that helped me process my own grief and made me wallow in my self-pity all the time. Probably the most obvious example, especially when we’re looking at songs that are maybe “immature” or “selfish”, is Happier by Ed Sheeran. This song came out a month after I found out my high school crush and one of my best friends had started dating. To say this song hit close to home is an understatement. I think what really made this song burn in my heart was the idea of Ed’s ex being happier with someone else. That realization that they’re perfectly fine with this new partner, and maybe even happier than when they were with you. You were happier with them in your life, but they clearly weren’t. That’s why you two broke up in the first place. Probably the thing that hurts the most wasn’t that they moved on, but that this is on you. They probably gave you that chance to be your best self. And for whatever reason, you couldn’t do that for them. Of course, they’re happier with this new person. They’re giving them the energy and love that you couldn’t properly give yourself. Based on Ed’s binge drinking in the second verse, his vice was probably his alcoholism, and being too far gone in his depression to give his ex the support they needed.

I held a lot of resentment in my high school self for a reason. It wasn’t just that I was clinging on to someone who already told me they weren’t interested. It was testing their patience because I couldn’t keep my selfishness in check. I was never ready for a relationship in high school. I didn’t have the emotional stability, nor the understanding that relationships are a two-person effort to build a healthy relationship with someone. But when you experience love for the first time, those feelings get to you. They overwhelm you and you try to find the spark that was once there. And when you see that spark move on to other people… that breaks you, dude. It took me a while to accept that “Happier” validated me because I didn’t want it to. The song ends with the hope that Ed’s ex breaks her heart so she can come running back into his arms. Which is an irrational and selfish thing to say, but does that have to be a bad thing? When you see someone you love in the arms of someone else, content with their head on the other’s shoulder, holding them close as an expression of their love… wouldn’t you feel kind of shitty about it too?

It was a humbling moment realizing that I liked “WITHOUT YOU”. I don’t exactly relate to it, nor does it speak to me in the same way something like “Happier” does, but I don’t hate it or think it sets a dangerous precedent in how Gen Z views women or whatever. It’s just a good breakup song. A few years ago, this review would have likely been a line-by-line analysis psychoanalyzing Kid Laroi as an abusive misogynist. Instead, I wrote an essay about how the “Can’t make a wife out of a hoe” song is a sign of my growth as a person. This is why I get no pussy.