Suburbia I Keep Giving You Pieces of Myself

As I see it there are two ways to get yourself reviewed positively these days (at least in music and this is discounting having your record label pay Rolling Stone to give it a minimum of three stars): 1. Do something wholly original, or at least “original.”  or 2. Do something that has been done countless times before but do it with as heaping helping of an ineffable quantity of “panache.” And, at the most basic level, what determines which of those two groups a type of music will fall in to is time. Obviously, I guess, but I just want to make the terms within which I will be working clear at the outset.

For what it’s worth, at some point this piece is going to contort itself in to something resembling a review of The Wonder Years’ record Suburbia I’ve Given You All And Now I’m Nothing. It’s an excellent album, FYI.

For an additional element of worth: The Wonder Years are most assuredly a part of the second group I have presented, if that isn’t already wildly apparent based on their name (a television show about which the members of this group are likely nostalgic since they’re probably too young to have been very aware of it when it was first on and that was itself a nostalgia affair about the late 1960s and early 1970s).

The longer I think about it, the harder it gets for me to consider groups in the second designation to be totally absent of a nostalgic motivation (no one is saying it’s the only reason they exist, call off your dogs). There is little reason to play a type of music that has already been done outside of an attempt to invoke not only the older music itself but also the environment in which it was initially created. It’s basically a truism to say that music communicates emotion beyond language’s communicative ability, and one of the most salient elements that it communicates is that of memory. Music has a unique ability to latch on to a certain time in our lives and snake its tendrils backward through time regardless of when we heard it first. I mean, I feel fairly certain (though I’ll concede that there is, as far as I can tell, no way to know for sure [and you know what, that brings me up against probably one of the most fundamentally important concessions I'm going to have to make in this piece, that a majority of what I'm about to say is more or less anecdotally extrapolated conjecture. I'd hope this is understood, but I feel like I'm making a disproportional number of assertions thus far and I'd like to say that while I firmly believe everything I'm saying, I've got little beyond logical reasoning and gut feelings to back me up. Which, in a way is sort of poetic since I'm basically going to be discussing a bit of logical reasoning and a whole lot of gut feelings]) that this is something most people implicitly understand, but again, I want to make sure to get all of my assertion ducks in a row before I get going in earnest.

Thus, nostalgia is among the most fundamental building block of roughly half of all recorded music. The problem though is that nostalgia is about the most subjective thing you can imagine, it’s vague, and in many ways it’s pretty much meaningless beyond its fundamental feeling (and what, I beg of you, is more subjective than a feeling?). Take as an example pretty much any type of music that relies on nostalgia (or induces it). For instance, The Wonder Years’ and their name. The name invokes nostalgic memories for a television show from the late 80s and early 90s- a time that the member’s of this band (who are, based on context clues in their lyrics, about my age i.e. 22-23) don’t actually remember all that well because they were around four or five years old. They’re nostalgic for something that they didn’t actually experience the first time, which, at first blush seems to render their nostalgia at least partially nostalgia because what’s the point of nostalgia if its fake? This is, however, not my way of dismissing nostalgia like this as invalid as a feeling but rather an attempt to point out that it’s a constructed, fraught, and highly subjective feeling (like most of them, I know) for not just those people who are looking back and feeling nostalgic for things they didn’t experience the first time around but for everyone.

Take another example, a more glaring one. The Gaslight Anthem seem to be in love with 50s America. They sing about Miles Davis, Elvis Presley, and countless other contemporary subjects. Further, they sound like Bruce Springsteen did in the 70s. At the same time, the guys in this band are no older than their late 20s meaning that they were in no way culturally aware or even alive for either of these periods. That being said, I would probably die in defense of my argument that they are perhaps the greatest peddlers of nostalgia in all of popular music. The fact that I am 22 years old and would do this is vital to the point I would like to make namely that nostalgia in popular music is ultimately a complicated ontological re-positioning of regret, regret either for missing something altogether or regret over the fact that there is literally no way to “go home again.”

(There is, of course, another element of this nostalgia/regret pair that involves the connection of popular culture items irrespective of when they were originally conceived with particular elements in a person’s own life. This type is a great deal more personal/specific, is less unversalizable, and is therefore a bit more difficult to talk about in an effective way since it hits every consciousness differently. That being said, it’s essentially analogous to the type of nostalgia that I’m yammering about i.e. it deals with an idealized and constructed past. It’s just that in this case the past is part of one’s own timeline instead of a greater cultural one).

The problem however with a lot of emo music (and music in general that plays with nostalgia) is that it does not “ring true.” That is, regardless of whether we lived in an era or not we’ve got a pretty good idea of the way that era “felt” or, at least, we’ve got a pretty good idea of how we think it felt. There is a need for this type of honesty (or at least a feeling of honesty) in any music that tries to foist nostalgia on its listeners, otherwise it’s going to just sound like empty fronting to most listeners, which no one wants to hear. This honesty is probably a synonym for “panache.”

I’m thinking of, for example, Fall Out Boy, a band that I have got no amount of hate for, but that doesn’t really ring emotionally true in the way that I feel emo/pop-punk usually sets out to. For one there is a preoccupation with being clever (and out of this we were given the gem “Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends” which is absolutely and unerringly fantastic, unlike pretty much everything else they’ve ever produced) and sort of smarmy that tends to envelop any honesty in poorly integrated irony. I have a hard time taking any sort of romantic or personal assertions seriously when they’re coming from a singer who can’t stop winking every couple of lines and practically demanding that you acknowledge how clever he is at turning a phrase. On the other hand, you got bands like The Wonder Years, The Gaslight Anthem, and The Hold Steady (all of whom I feel are of similar ilk and are just approaching vaguely related ideas from different generic angles) speaking in straight forward and declarative terms about, yes, their feelings or the way their characters feel about things (the fact that Finn and Fallon rely more on characters is less, I tend to think, a result of their own predilections lyrically and more a result of their chosen genre).

This type of refusal to obfuscate your point in layers of irony and double meanings can be uncomfortable for reader and listener alike. I would like to confess here and now that despite my unbridled love for The Wonder Years, I still hear the clank  of a corny declaration in the lyrics from time to time. That being said, I think this type of willingness to expose one’s self in a simple and direct way takes a type of bravery, and, in the case of this group, it works more often than it doesn’t. It reminds me of John Darnielle, who we all know can turn a beautiful phrase when he wants to, settling on “I used to live here” in “Genesis 3:23″ because of the strength of emotion that simple repeated phrase could convey over any amount of poetic pussyfooting.

All the layers of obfuscation and jokiness in groups like Fall Out Boy inevitably bring about the question of “what’s the point” to the top of my mind. It’s an odd relic perhaps of emo’s crossover into pop music that it has become less and less the purview of catharsis seeking twentysomethings. Which is lyrically what makes The Wonder Years so refreshing. On the coda of “Came Out Swinging” we hear, “I spent the winter writing songs about getting better/ and if I’m being honest, I’m getting there.” This is not how I expected the line to go the first time I heard it- I expected to end with self pity (e.g. “I’m getting worse”). This is why the lyrics feel so honest, they admit that things are bad, but they could be worse, and furthermore that they can be made better through musical catharsis. This is the self-awareness that I’ve so often longed for in Dashboard Confessional (who I persist in liking in spite of myself) and Fall Out Boy (who I am pretty roundly annoyed by).

What’s more, and this is the real crux of everything, The Wonder Years aren’t looking back at things with rosy colored glasses, indeed in many ways they don’t seem to be looking back at all but rather critically inspecting the present and looking for the latent threads from the past and toward the future. Here’s what I mean: almost every pop-punk band I can think of ride this awkward line of being in their twenties or older but continuing to sing about high school. Blink-182, Fall Out Boy, Green Day, MxPx. In fact, I’m having trouble thinking of a commercially successful pop-punk band that didn’t (doesn’t) manipulate memories of high school for gain. That is, aside from The Wonder Years (and based on some of the production on this record I wouldn’t say that they aren’t quite commercially successful yet, though their recent AP will probably help them get some much deserved servings of success in the demographic that reads/takes AP seriously). Their lyrics don’t speak of experiencing the school dance for the first time, but of coming back to the room where you had the dance several years ago and realizing how much your mind had distorted it over the years. I submit that The Wonder Years are engaging with and complicating the idea of nostalgia for high school in their music. Suburbia has brought the narrator of the album’s title to nothing because it is a false idol, and The Wonder Years are subtly exploring that notion in their music.

Of course this isn’t all that ‘original’ or ‘avant-garde’ itself, but if you come to emo/pop-punk expecting avant-gardisms I would argue that you’re in the wrong game. The Wonder Years play an invigorating variation on a theme that always (even in high school) left me wanting a little more. The Wonder Years, I am firmly convinced, are one of those bands that will hold up for the kids who like them now as high schoolers. They are more Blink-182 and less Sum 41, more (from personal experience) Catch-22 and less Five Iron Frenzy (except for Proof that the Youth are Revolting and on certain days All of the Hype that Your Money Can Buy both of which, I would argue, hold up reasonably well).

This type of consideration re: what holds up and what doesn’t brings me to a final point I would like to make, namely that for some reason this type of music invariably appeals more to middle and high schoolers than any other age group. It seems pretty simple that it has a lot to do with the whole thing I presented at the top here i.e. the two-fold path toward success relative to music critics. When you’re thirteen years old pretty much everything seems “avant-garde” and “original” because you haven’t developed layers of experience and cynicism through listening and emotionally realting to music for most of your adult life. If you hear The Wonder Years playing this style of music you’re liable to think they invented the style since you can’t hear the litany of reference points that are like so many sore-thumbs to older listeners It doesn’t sound weird and off-kilter to hear a 22 year old singing about the prom because from where a thirteen year old is standing, there isn’t that much difference between 18 years old and 22 years old (the underlying assertion here is that there is a pretty big difference, I feel like this is true, if only from anecdotal evidence about myself. I mean,I think I’m pretty different now than I was then, though as I think this essay has borne out, it’s pretty difficult to look at things from any perspective outside of your own). The Wonder Years then have a capacity to be revelatory to thirteen year olds and those of us who have graduated high school because they simultaneously (and with a great deal of “panache”) appeal to the forward and backward lookers in pop music fandom. The Wonder Years have a broad appeal, but not in the usual “broad” sense that pop music generally has but in a more ontological sense with respect to the way that music listeners construct their reality. They can give younger listeners the pit-of-the-stomach feeling you get when looking forward to the future with joyous anxiety while also giving older listeners a different pit-of-the-stomach ache that comes when reflecting on how things irrevocably change and how that informs out going forward. That, I feel, is something exceptional.