Marina: The Family Jewels era that defined a generation of teens
Exploring the perils of celebrity culture, relationships and female sexuality, The Family Jewels was the album that launched Marina — formerly Marina and the Diamonds — into international stardom.
Photo: Press
It’s 2010. I’m sat at home, mindlessly flicking through TV channels in a time before the invention of Netflix made this pastime somewhat redundant. I flick onto 4Music and stumble across the music video for Hollywood by Marina and the Diamonds. As a ten-year-old child whose music taste predominantly consisted of The Saturdays and Taylor Swift, I’m somewhat perplexed by the unique, almost androgynous quality of Marina’s voice, especially when paired with the electric, indie-pop backing music. After watching for a minute or so, I switch channels, promptly forgetting about the experience.
Fast forward a month or so and Oh No! comes on the radio on my car journey to school. Soon after, I chance across the music video for I Am Not a Robot on another scrolling spree through TV channels. When I’m flipping through the stacks of CDs in HMV and happen to come across The Family Jewels, I take the plunge and splash out.
At this point in my life, Marina’s music was unlike any other music I’d listened to before. The melodies were unpredictable; complemented by her effortless, sweeping transitions from a gravelly chest voice to a sickly-sweet head voice. To this day, I’m often unsure if the lyrics to many songs from The Family Jewels are more complex than my brain can comprehend or simply John Lennon’s I Am the Walrus-style nonsense.
The Family Jewels quickly became one of my favourite albums, despite the fact that I was entering my emo phase and would be denouncing any music that wasn’t pop-punk for the next few years. Unlike a lot of the music I had on repeat as a preteen, it has stood the test of time and remains an album I listen to regularly nowadays. It is innovative, theatrical and weird in all the right ways; there are very few debut albums that are quite as iconic.
The album consists of thirteen tracks, most of which were written before Marina was signed to her label. Combining traditional pop with more experimental techniques, it contains lyrical themes of, in Marina’s words, “the seduction of commercialism, modern social values, family and female sexuality”.
Beginning the album is Are You Satisfied?: a somewhat passive-aggressive track that hints at the battle between Marina’s longing for success and her disdain for celebrity culture. The song sees Marina challenging her listeners to refuse to settle for others’ expectations. She kicks off the album with a declaration of independence, control and confidence, even in the face of unhappiness, a paradox that can be summarised in the line: “It’s my problem if I have no friends and feel I want to die.”
Next up is one of the more purely ‘pop’ songs on the album, though not without its own unique twists. Shampain explores when vices, namely alcohol, transform from a source of entertainment into an unhealthy coping mechanism. Since its release, Marina has confessed to not being a fan of this track, and, while I appreciate the eloquence of such lines as “Savour the taste of fabricated wealth”, I will admit that it is my most ‘skipped’ track on this record. It lacks something that is a strong characteristic on The Family Jewels — there’s less drama, somehow: less attitude.
I Am Not a Robot allows us our first glimpse into Marina’s emotional and vulnerable side, shown through the initially stripped back piano instrumental and the lyrics, which discuss emotional detachment.
Then we have Girls — potentially the most controversial song on this tracklist — which exemplifies how feminism has progressed over the past ten years. While her intention was to express her frustrations with how women are forced to behave in the public eye, the message comes across in hindsight as slightly misogynistic.
In a blog post shared in 2008, Marina provided insight into Girls, explaining how she was tired of being “uninspired” by women who “aspire to be some footballer’s wife”. This sentiment was undoubtedly shared by many during this time, in which feminism emphasised that women should break free of patriarchal expectations by aspiring to be less stereotypically feminine. Nowadays, the fight for female liberation is more open to allowing women to be anything they choose to be, whether that’s playing football or posing in a bikini. With this in mind, the implication behind lyrics like “Girls they never befriend me / ‘Cause I fall asleep when they speak / Of all the calories they eat” seems outdated, and Marina has since admitted that the song makes her cringe. The evolution of her attitude is clear when listening to her recent music, which contains lyrics like “Women are violets coming to light.”
Photo: Press
We see more of Marina’s reservations about fame in Mowgli’s Road, in which she debates whether to take “the unforsaken road” into stardom. One of the album’s ‘weirder’ tracks, it is regularly interspersed with chants of “Cuckoo!” and features themes of cutlery. This is juxtaposed with Obsessions, the album’s slowest and saddest offering. On first listening, it appears to be a song about a relationship, but a deeper dig into the lyrics uncovers themes of mental illness. The second verse, which sees her stressing over “what packet of crackers to pick?” hints at the presence of obsessive-compulsive disorder. We see her submit to the superstitious nature of the illness in the line “The crackers were probably bad luck anyway”.
Hollywood is a critique of American celebrity culture and a comment on how easy it is to be brainwashed by the media. This is followed by The Outsider, a darker song that contains an underlying sense of danger and recklessness. Given her open scorn for commercialism, it’s fair to assume that this song recounts her experiences with what she describes as “manufactured pop auditions”, which made her feel “like a real outsider”.
My favourite track from the album is Hermit the Frog, a slightly bizarre song that I can only assume is about a relationship, the loss of virginity, or is complete gibberish. It seems to speak on the expectations thrust on women, challenging the perception of female sexuality in the line “I never knew you had such a dirty mind” while questioning men’s desire for female submission in the line “Did you find your bitch in me?”.
Marina has said that Oh No! acts as a part II to Mowgli’s Road, expressing her fear of failure as she navigates the music industry. The last three tracks are slightly weaker than the rest, Rootless lamenting a lack of identity, Numb discussing the sacrifices of success and Guilty being a lyrically confusing track, supposedly about a dream Marina had in which she murdered a dog.
Marina performing in 2010 (Photo: Press)
The Family Jewels is primarily an album about the rise to fame, and about what it takes to become successful in the music industry, particularly as a woman. Its unique blend of pop and avant-garde has made it timeless, so much so that eleven years later it sounds just as fresh and original as it did upon its release. The longevity of the album is illustrated by the fact that several of the songs, including Hermit the Frog and Are You Satisfied?, have found a new lease of life over the past year in the form of popularity on Tik Tok. The Family Jewels remains an album of great significance in my life, as it was my introduction to indie-pop music, and I’m glad that a new generation of young listeners have the opportunity to break into the genre the same way that I did—through the weird and wonderful music of Welsh superstar Marina Diamandis.
