It’s a typical Wednesday night: taking out the trash has inspired a raccoon-like hunger in me, so I’m pillaging the kitchen for scraps. I’m also listening to “Say Anything (Else)”, a song (by the band Cartel) my friend just enthusiastically texted me about and insisted I listen to. It starts with the crackle of a needle being placed onto a record, the singer’s sweetly strained stylings given a bit of edge through what can only be described as an old-timey filter. Then the drums kick in, the old-timey effect cast to the wayside, and the song gets going. Deliberately-strummed power chords, followed by some palm muting during the verses; it’s classic pop punk, a genre I know all too well.
Maybe knew is more accurate: I’ve actively tried to distance myself from the scene since the end of my freshman year of high school, although this habit of mine peaked during middle school. This great push to stop listening to emo/pop punk was shorthand for a desire to become something other than the violently shy, bright-red-haired box I’d painted myself into during my first year of high school, and three grueling years later I can say it worked like a charm! Going cold turkey on this genre has cleared my skin, defrizzed my hair, and expanded my fashion sense beyond black hoodies and ill-fitting skinny jeans. Three years later, I’m also fully aware that that is entirely untrue: my metamorphosis was possible because I made certain decisions to change who I surrounded myself with and what I did with my free time, but putting space between myself and that music was a necessary first step.
I can count on one hand the moments throughout high school when I’d try to listen to the music I used to know so well—Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, and All Time Low were high on the pecking order along with indie darlings like MGMT, Phoenix, and Passion Pit—but quickly realized it could conjure up precise emotions and memories that I didn’t necessarily want to relive. Fall Out Boy’s third album, Infinity on High, never failed to make me sad and angry; I still can’t listen to Enema of the State without being reminded of how completely exhausted I was all of freshman year, and how that exhaustion was only exacerbated by the hour-and-a-half-long drive to school every morning in the back of a cramped van.
But something about living through a worldwide pandemic and seeing what were supposed to be the best days of my high school experience turn to dust has put me in a musical rut, and the solution to said rut seems to lie in my middle/early high school music taste. I remember early April: neither my body nor brain could handle a mere two hours of Zoom classes per day, and for the first week or so of online classes I’d pass out immediately afterward, weirdly drained. I got sick of this quickly, and after a few days was determined to stay awake. One day, I chugged iced coffee as soon as class ended and decided to listen to a Fall Out Boy album I would’ve metaphorically sat in a tree with in middle school: American Beauty/American Psycho. I became a woman possessed: jumping around my room with calculated abandon, wishing for the first time in my life that I could’ve experienced those songs live in a mosh pit.
The album eventually came to a close, but I still felt the aftershocks of hearing those songs for what felt like the first time. That was the album that got me into Fall Out Boy—it’s always held a special place within their oeuvre for me, even and especially because it’s the black sheep of their discography. In the words of Whitman, I sang the body electric.
This feeling stayed with me for the next few days, when I found myself waking up to listen to “Out of My League” by Fitz and the Tantrums as I admired how beautiful the weather was. That month, I cycled through the All-American Rejects, Jimmy Eats World, and Vampire Weekend, the likes of which I hadn’t voluntarily heard in years. I discovered two things—that I used to listen to straight-up bangers, and that consuming a controlled amount of nostalgia during the scariest and most unpredictable event in my life has many beneficial side effects.
Now that I have more experience with writing and consuming poetry and music, I have an even deeper appreciation for my musical tastes of yore. I could only make out some classically-cryptic Pete Wentz lyrics— “Welcome to the new deja vu / I can almost see the wizard through the curtains”—in the Fall Out Boy song “Alpha Dog” yesterday after having listened to the song for years; “The shadow of a ghost in an old haunt / With a lease on life, ’cause I can’t afford to own” from “Outlines” by All Time Low struck me the other day as so cheesy they were clever, or vice versa. I’m not planning on listening to every single song I was bumping on my iPod Classic in the early 10s, but I’ve concluded that it can feel comforting to revisit this music I know so well with fresh eyes.
I’ll speak for myself when I say that it’s hard to feel grounded when the news gets worse by the day and there’s no precise end to all this. What’s helped me is making sure I have daily distractions from the world at large, and what better way to do that than through music? My challenge and suggestion for you, dear reader, is to find the songs that made you feel the most emo, the most misunderstood, the most seen—the music you held onto through the hormones—and blast it, preferably through something you have to physically plug in (hello, Skull Candy earbuds!). Dance around your room, sing along, and, for a few precious minutes, allow yourself to get absolutely lost in the sauce.