‘Pills’: St Vincent’s prescient view of capitalism’s impact on mental health
When a song becomes a hit summer song, you usually expect its subject matter to be light. With ‘Pills’, therefore, St Vincent was surprised at how its gritty themes hooked deep into an entire generation.
You can’t predict when or how a song will be deemed the song of the summer. One of the biggest conversations this year is that there isn’t one. Unless we’ve all collectively succumbed to the fate of Jess Glynne’s ‘Hold My Hand’. In which case, we’ve really let ourselves become a TikTokified generation, haven’t we?
But when ‘Pills’ came along and took off, it did so in a different way from other so-called upbeat mood-boosters. The melody itself is sort of tongue-in-cheek, coming from a playful moment when St Vincent took a sleeping pill after suffering jet lag. “I looked down at [the pills] and was like, ‘pills to wake, pills to sleep. pills pills pills every day of the week’,” she told Billboard.
But a seemingly harmless quip sparked a bigger analysis of being so disturbingly flippant about something that was actually quite serious. She’d hummed the words and the melody as though they were straight out of an ad, a jingle for some sort of medication people might take regularly. And thought about how that might turn into a reliance, a one people too often view as casual when it represents something deeply wrong about American society.
“I’m using the language of advertising to talk about a very personal story and also a very uniquely American macro story about capitalism run amok on mental health, and an opioid crisis as a result,” she went on, criticising the way its depth conflicts with its popularity: “So how’s that for a hit song of the summer?”
Interestingly, that line of thinking proves why the song became such a hit in the first place. St Vincent talks about it with a self-aware, darkly comedic tinge, which is exactly how the song comes across. Particularly the part where she repeats, “Pills to wake, pills to sleep,” like she was actually creating a commercial jingle about some magical pill that will solve all problems.
But in doing so, she commented on how the American system is so deeply flawed, particularly with the pharmaceutical industry and how it pushes people to manage stress. In this world, the song spotlights how people get stuck in an endless cycle, thinking everything’s fine, when really, they’ve fallen victim to one of the biggest lies in the book.
This ties to capitalism and pandering to commercialism, which also harms art. In St Vincent’s eyes, art is at its worst when people overthink it. Which she captures on the lyrics: “I heard the tales, fortune and blame / Tigers and wolves defanged by fame / From the chains to the ranks to the vein / To the brain, anyway there’s a day / And I’ll pay it in pain.”
