Vienna

 What does Billy Joel know about being a teenage girl? Enough, it turns out, to have written one of generation Z's favourite anthems: Vienna, a song nearly half a century old that's been adopted by many under-30s to describe their feelings of ennui.

On TikTok, young women craft their identities around the song. One content creator said she booked a trip to the Austrian capital because of it; others have tattoos of the lyrics.

"I want  to name my child Vienna but everyone says it reminds them of sausage," reads one comment on a clip of a young woman lip-syncing the tune.

"Every teenage girl has their unexplainable emotional attachment to this song ... it's just a pinnacle part of girlhood," read one comment, liked 195,000 times. "No one understands a woman in her 20s like Billy Joel did when he wrote Vienna," reads another, with 424,000 likes...

Ennui
Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942)
Photo Credit: Ashmolean Museum Oxford 

Despite critics' tendencies to dismiss Joel's work as hokey or cringe, gen Z takes no issue with the sentimental lyrics - fitting for a cohort that likes to wear their emotions on their sleeves.

Joel has said that the song reminds listeners that "you don't have to squeeze your whole life into your 20s and 30s trying to make it, trying to achieve that American dream, getting in the rat race and killing yourself. You have a whole life to live."

The refrain of "slow down, you're doing fine" soothes a specific kind of gen z malaise, reminding kids raised on social media to take a step back.

In 2018 Joel attributed the song's success to 13 Going on 30, a romcom from 2004 in which a girl pines to be an adult, only to grow disillusioned after she wakes up as a high-powered editor. Vienna plays as she flees to the comfort of her childhood home.

"That's a movie that was popular with girls, and girls are who most of the enthusiasm for the song comes from," Joel said. "It's a coming-of-age song: 'Slow down you crazy child.'"

(Alaina Demopoulos, The Guardian, 2024) 

So is being bored and mentally tired because of there being nothing interesting or exciting to do  the fate of some young women who also, as it happens, like to wear their emotions on their sleeves? Forget everything about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness because Vienna waits for you!