Happy International Youth Day: 6 Songs For The Young

Kenneth Freeman

​Rocks Off has become obsessed lately with finding playlists to celebrated some of the more obscure holidays on the calendar, and thankfully the United Nations is just great at providing those. Today is International Youth Day, a holiday that started in 2000 and is designed to bring international focus on problems faced by the young like delinquency, health and employment.

At the ripe old age of 30, it's difficult for Rocks Off to really get a handle on the kind of manic energy that makes up a lot of your teenage and young-adult years. It's a time when it takes nothing more than a good song to really make you raise your fist and yell. So while the UN takes care of all the boring, important stuff, we thought we'd track down a few songs about being young, wild, and free in order to remind the adults that they should help the children... because they're coming for you, one way or another.

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Few artists have been able to consistently capture the hormonal Chernobyl that is growing up better than Alice Cooper. No matter how far he gets away from the days when he himself was just a lad, he tapped into something most of us lose after high school. "Department of Youth" is an underrated track from the legendary Welcome to my Nightmare. Enjoy.

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When people talk about hair-metal bands that were something more, something deeper, they usually talk about Guns N' Roses, and with good reason. Maybe it's just because "18 and Life" is the first metal song of any kind we ever remember hearing on the radio, but we always thought Skid Row had more behind their music than the decade and genre would have you believe. "Youth Gone Wild" from the self-titled album always got our blood pumping.