Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

In the world of blogging, there are certain perils. One of them is having a great idea for a post that you feel really good about, only to write half of it and leave it languishing in your drafts folder. It’ll be there when you have time to finish it, right?

The peril, of course, in missing your shot. One day, you’ll be tooling around your Google Reader, only to come across a blog post that makes every single point you had been trying to make, and a few more that you would have made if you had actually finished your own damn post in the first place, although probably not as eloquently, so it’s probably for the best.

In that spirit, here’s Eric from Pitchers and Poets on expanding the Baseball Hall of Fame.

. . . but I think it’s time to hand the reins over to our dolphin overlords and pray for mercy.

While our elected leaders have trouble even counting to the number 60, these half-fish/half-mammal killing machines have devised a hunting system so intricate that I had to watch the damn video twice to figure out how it worked. And if you’re reading this, dolphin masters (and I have no doubt they’ve already mastered all of the world’s languages), please don’t lump me in with the rest of those devils who have polluted your oceans and ensnared your brethren in tuna nets. I’ll name names!

It used to be that I read this satirical Onion article and laughed. Now, I can only marvel at its prescience, and weep for humanity’s fate.

This might be a bit of a spoiler for old friends of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, so if the end of this list being a surprise is important to you, feel free to skip this post. I can’t imagine that anyone out there in Internet land actually cares the much, but I figured I would alert anyone that does.

Basically, Brand New’s Your Favorite Weapon isn’t Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s Favorite Album of the Decade, and I thought it would be nice to explain why. Since, as those aforementioned old friends of DD&U can attest, Your Favorite Weapon not only got me into the whole emo/pop punk scene, but it’s probably the seminal album of my late-teen/young adult life.

There was about a two-year period while I was in college for which Your Favorite Weapon provides an almost perfect archaeology. At one point or another, each track held profound meaning for me. Jude Law and a Semester Abroad. Sudden Death in Carolina. Failure By Design. Soco Amaretto Lime. And, of course, Seventy Times 7. There was something in all of these songs that I deeply identified with. I won’t bore you with the details, but feel free to listen through and try to piece together a psychological profile.

You might ask, precious reader, how I could leave off the list an album that came the closest an album can come to changing my life? It may sound anticlimactic, but that part of my life is over. I’ve made my peace with the cast of characters who gave that part of my life, and hence the album, the meaning that it had. I wish I could give you a better explanation than the water has flowed under the bridge, but thems the facts. I’ve grown up, and mellowed out. Your Favorite Weapon has become less a description of my life than a relic.

This post, characteristic of the music it’s describing, is tending toward melodrama, which leads to the larger point I wanted to make. See, I still listen to Your Favorite Weapon. Consistently. I love it. So if I feel like I’ve grown up, how come I still find myself drawn to this type of music?

The biggest knock against emo/pop punk bands like old-school Brand New, Dashboard Confessional, Taking Back Sunday, and their ilk is that the music is flamboyantly maudlin at best, and dangerously self-indulgent and immature at worst. There are too many gravely important things going on in the world, too many people with actual real-life problems, to take seriously some indie-acoustic troubadour on stage complaining about how another girl broke his precious little heart. People who have criticized my taste in music have almost all, to a man, brought up this navel-gazing conceit. That shit might fly for high school girls, but not for grown-ups.

There’s a way in which I shouldn’t even really have to mount a defense. I like this music. I just do. Taste in art in general, and music in particular, is one of the most subjective things there is. This is why I try not to be too critical of what I might think is someone’s bad taste in music, because they might think the same thing about me, and would I be able to conceive of an adequate and persuasive argument if that were the case? Probably not!

But I do think the critique about emo music being self-indulgent is salient and worth at least going a little deeper into. It’s a true fact that if your best friend dating your ex-girlfriend, or your girlfriend cheating on you is your biggest problem, then you’ve probably got a not so bad life, relatively speaking. Which is true! The emo critic goes on, though, to imply that the emo fan shouldn’t waste his time with such whiny dreck. Or, at least, that he has bad taste for wasting his time with such whiny dreck. And, if the criticism goes to its conclusion, the emo fan has a warped set of priorities because he likes music about guys lamenting their broken hearts while there’s actual, real suffering going on in the world. I’m not setting up a strawman here; I’ve heard this kind of thing!

The way I see it, I can afford to identify with and find meaning in this type of music, and I count my blessings every day for that fact. See, I’m a grown man: I’m not so naive as to believe that my problems, and the problems that are the fodder of emo songs, are the worst things ever. Listening to emo and pop punk music, far from being an exercise in woe-is-me self-indulgence, actually offers me perspective as to how good I’ve actually got it. It makes me thankful for the opportunities I’ve been afforded, and appreciative of people who have faced obstacles that I’ll never have to. As I said, if the worst that can happen so far is I have a spat with a pal, then things must be going alright.

Am I overthinking this? Of course I am! It’s just emo music, guys. And for those of you who think all of this is BS and want to continue to poke fun at my lame tastes, check out Emocapella, George Washington University’s all-emo acapella group. I assure you that they’re everything you could possibly imagine.

If you haven’t already heard, Scott Brown, the Republican candidate for Senator from Massachusetts, just won the special election to replace the late Ted Kennedy. You heard that right. Massachusetts, which hasn’t elected a Republican to the Senate since 1972, just voted for a Republican to replace Ted Kennedy. Of the Kennedy family.

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun can surmise how I feel about all this. And if you want to read some informed commentary about the implications of this vote for the country, you can check it out here, here, here, here, and here. Suffice it to say, this is a big deal.

And look, I’ll probably be fine tomorrow, and if not then, then the next day. But right now, I have a hard time having any faith in the Democratic party. Which is nuts, right? They still control 59 seats in the Senate, which is a bigger majority than either party has enjoyed in years. This should be a drop in the bucket. But let’s not talk about how arcane and despotic procedural rules in the Senate mandate a 60-vote supermajority to get anything done, except to say that James Madison and Alexander Hamilton are no doubt joining Senator Kennedy in grave-spinning tonight.

My buddy is fond of saying that the voters get what they deserve. I’m not really sure what else to say. After eight years of allowing George Bush to enmesh us in two wars, let financial institutions leverage themselves beyond all logical comprehension based on the seemingly unassailable notion that housing prices would keep going up forever and hence miring us in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, enact unfunded mandates (No Child Left Behind), pass deficit-crippling entitlements (the prescription drug benefit), and drag our country’s good name through the mud (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay), the voters of my beloved Commonwealth of Massachusetts were ready to send a message to the Democratic party that, you know what? You guys had all of a year to turn the ship around, and you only sorta kinda started to succeed. We’re ready to put the guys that ran the ship aground in the first place back in charge. Whatever. At the most fundamental level, I’m a believer in representative democracy. I think that the people that just elected Scott Brown are wrong, but this is the system by which we hold our elected leaders accountable. This was clearly an accountability moment for the Democratic party, and they only have themselves to blame.

Paul Krugman wrote about this in a column in the New York Times on Monday, and I’m about to quote liberally from it.

It’s instructive to compare Mr. Obama’s rhetorical stance on the economy with that of Ronald Reagan. It’s often forgotten now, but unemployment actually soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Reagan, however, had a ready answer for critics: everything going wrong was the result of the failed policies of the past. In effect, Reagan spent his first few years in office continuing to run against Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Obama could have done the same — with, I’d argue, considerably more justice. He could have pointed out, repeatedly, that the continuing troubles of America’s economy are the result of a financial crisis that developed under the Bush administration, and was at least in part the result of the Bush administration’s refusal to regulate the banks.

But he didn’t. Maybe he still dreams of bridging the partisan divide; maybe he fears the ire of pundits who consider blaming your predecessor for current problems uncouth — if you’re a Democrat. (It’s O.K. if you’re a Republican.) Whatever the reason, Mr. Obama has allowed the public to forget, with remarkable speed, that the economy’s troubles didn’t start on his watch.

When it comes to low-information voters, narrative is the most important thing. I’m a junkie, so I read about politics every day. I represent a tremendously small fraction of the electorate. I know many, many smart, capable, respectable people who just don’t keep up with politics. Plus, there are scores of just blithering idiots who still happen to vote. For these people, overarching narratives are key. And the sad truth is, the narrative was stacked against Democrats in this election. Massachusetts voted for Barack Obama by a 62 to 36 margin in 2008. Did his brand, objectively, become so odious in a year since his inauguration? Or did the perception change. Deep down, you know the answer.

Which is why I find the scapegoating of the Coakley campaign to be insidious. She was a lousy candidate, for sure. But guess what? Irregardless of Scott Brown’s “People’s Seat” talk, Martha Coakley is a Democrat. In Massachusetts. It’s unseemly to say that a certain party takes a certain seat for granted. But please be honest with yourself. This is Massachusetts we’re talking about here. A Kelly’s roast beef sandwich should be able to get elected if it has a (D) next to its name. So I don’t want to hear anything about Coakley taking her win for granted.

The fact is, she should have been able to take it for granted. The national Democratic Party had as much skin in this game as Coakley herself. We’re talking about President Obama’s agenda here, to say nothing of the votes that various fringe Democrats stuck their necks out for in the hopes of the health care bill passing. So to hear about backbiting and infighting taking place before the polls even closed is sincerely disheartening.

There are two possible scenarios. Either the national party and the White House gave Martha Coakley all the support she needed, and they failed miserably. That would be pretty bad. What would be worse is if they barely gave her any help at all. That would represent a level of arrogance, gall, and incompetence that’s almost unforgivable. Either way, to lay the blame at the feet of Martha Coakley, who had the opportunity to become the first female senator that Massachusetts has ever elected, is to focus on all the wrong sort of details.

I’m reminded of the sad tale of Trey Junkin. Many of you are no doubt perplexed that I’m about to make a long-snapper analogy, but the Giants fans among Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s readership should know exactly what I’m talking about. It was the wild card round of the 2002 playoffs, and the Giants were facing the 49ers. The Giants were able to jump to a seemingly insurmountable 38–14 lead with four minutes left in the third quarter. Only one team had ever come back from a bigger deficit in the playoffs: the Buffalo Bills trailed the Houston Oilers 34–3 in 1993, only to come back and win 41–38. You can see where this is going.

San Francisco led 39–38 when New York was about to attempt a 41–yard field goal with seconds left on the clock. But Junkin, who came out of retirement for the sole purpose to long snap for the Giants in this game, botched the snap, leading to an incomplete pass from the kicker as time expired. Game over, Giants lose.

Trey Junkin is a presence of folkloric proportions in the annals of Giants history, but until I just looked up that link up there, I couldn’t remember the name of the kicker who, because it was a third down play, could have spiked the botched snap and bought the Giants another opportunity for points. (Matt Allen, btw.)

Point being, everybody remembers the very memorable Trey Junkin fuckup, but far fewer probably remember the guy that could have made that fuckup moot. And barely anyone cares to pore through the game and look at the myriad different defensive stops that could have been made, offensive plays that could have been executed, or schemes that could have been drawn up that could have prevented San Francisco from scoring just two additional points. Junkin is a convenient patsy, so he gets remembered. Martha Coakley is going to be the Trey Junkin of this election. She bears responsibility at the end of this election, but there are a host of factors that went completely and utterly wrong in order to put her in a position to lose. Whatever.

There’s a special election in Massachusetts tomorrow to fill the Senate seat held by the late Ted Kennedy. As per this blog’s tradition, I’m encouraging all of my Massachusetts readers to get out there and vote tomorrow. It’s an incredibly important election. I’d love nothing more than to tell my more Republican-inclined readers to just stay home and stay dry, but that wouldn’t be very sporting of me, would it?

I’ll be voting for the Democrat, Martha Coakley, and if being represented by someone that opposes perpetual war, believes that people shouldn’t be sentenced to die for want of health insurance, supports women’s reproductive rights, and supports marriage equality is important to you, I suggest you do the same.

I had a job doing layout and ad design for the Boston Haitian Reporter during my senior year of college. It was a small outfit (I also did layout and ad design for sister publications the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston Irish Reporter), but it was valued by Boston’s Haitian immigrants. (Apparently, the Boston area has the third largest Haitian community in America. Who knew?) It was an exciting time to be around, because the first elections since the 2004 rebellion that ousted then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide were taking place in the beginning of 2006, so there was a lot of news coming out of Haiti that was of great interest to immigrants here in Boston.

I learned a lot at that job, in particular about just how difficult it is to run an election in a country so gripped by poverty, corruption, and violence. And, in general, just how gripped by poverty, corruption, and violence Haiti really is. Eighty percent of its people live in poverty. The literacy rate is around 53 percent. It ranks 149th among 182 countries in the United Nations Human Development Index. It’s cruel and counterproductive to have a pissing match about which country is the worst on earth, but Haiti is certainly in the argument.

It seems like it’s been that way forever. Which is why this latest tragedy to befall Haiti seems so cosmically cruel. Natural disasters on this scale are always bad, of course, but Haiti is a country that was uniquely postured to be affected in an outsize way should a terrible disaster occur. And outsize is probably the most delicate way to put it, with the death toll still indeterminate but with estimates in the tens of thousands, most of the capital city of Port Au Prince in ruins, and barely a semblance of law and order in the streets. You can’t read a description of the devastation without imagining hell on earth. And this was a place that could have been classified as hell on earth already.

It’s all just incredibly sad, especially given Haiti’s history. In 1804, Haiti became only the second state in the Western hemisphere to throw off the yoke of colonial oppression. (Guess which was the first.) That’s a fact which, at least in my limited and tangential experience, Haitians (rightfully) wear like a badge of honor. These people are our sisters and brothers in revolution and independence. And I won’t get into how Western meddling has tipped the scales against the people of Haiti for years.

Suffice it to say, they need our help. My friend Sam, who researches this type of thing far more than I do, recommends giving to Partners in Health, which apparently has a lot of people already on the ground and a fair amount of infrastructure in place (or as much infrastructure as a nonprofit can have in a disaster area.) I’m going to throw a few bucks their way. I won’t twist any arms, but every little bit helps. And if you want to express your own self-determination, the Globe has set up a good fact sheet about various global and local nonprofits that are helping out. And as usual, if prayer is your sort of thing, say some words to the close and holy darkness for the people who have been affected by this disaster.

Stay What You Are

2) Saves the Day, Stay What You Are (2001)

When I was in grammar school and high school, I was obviously into listening to music, but not really in a way beyond listening to what was on the radio. (For Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s younger readers, a radio was an electronic box that received signals through the air and transformed them into music. [For Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun's older and well, my-aged readers, did anyone else always have a blank tape in the stereo, and go home immediately after school and listen to the radio until dinnertime, and record all the songs you liked {except you'd always have to time it so you didn't include the insipid DJ chatter at the start, so even though you had eight tapes and they all had Blink 182's "Dammit" on it, none of them had the guitar riff in the intro. Does} anyone remember] that?)

Long story short, I listened to plenty of music, but none of it was stuff that wasn’t at or near the top of the alternative rock charts, so I never had the type of punk-rock, emo outcast, let’s-go-to-a-local-band’s-concert-at-the-American-Legion-hall musical youth that a lot of people I know had. Which is a shame, because I would have loved to have checked out a Saves the Day show in some dingy parish center in Bloomfield, plugged in, playing tunes from Can’t Slow Down, maybe dancing next to some skinny Northern Jersey emo chick with dark eyeliner and some metal in her face. Who knows how things would have turned out!

Stay What You Are is a bit of a departure from Saves the Day’s first two punkier albums. The lyrics and melodies are a little more subdued. (I say this, but then you listen to a song like “As Your Ghost Takes Flight,” with such lyrics as “The last time that I saw you, August of ‘99, / I should’ve had my hammer and a few rusty spikes / To nail you on a wall and use bottles to catch your blood / And display you for the neighbors so they know your time had come.” So, you know, take my judgment with a grain of salt.) The first track, “At Your Funeral” (which includes my favorite bassline in all of rock music), sets the tone for the upbeat nature of the album. I say “upbeat” in a strictly musical sense, as the lyrical content sways from angry (the aforementioned “As Your Ghost Takes Flight”) to depressed (”See You”: And I’ll wear glass shoes and plastic wrap. / No, I’ll just wear my insides. / You want to know who I really am? / Yeah so do I) to ecstatic (”Firefly”: We’re up and we’re out and we’re yelling through the streets / and I’m out of my fucking mind) to despondent (”All I’m Losing Is Me”: The moon hangs like the blade of an axe tonight, / And it’s poised to drop sometime soon enough / On this dump truck where I lie mixed up with the morning’s trash) to whistful (”Nightingale”: I’ll have to walk a thousand miles just to find the ground deserving of your feet). It’s all couched in (relatively) peppy melodies, the value of which can’t be overstated: no matter what mood you’re in, there’s a song on this album that’ll make you feel better, or at least validated. (And if you’re just in the mood for some good tunes, then you’re in luck.)

Signature track: “This Is Not An Exit”

One time, I asked my ex-girlfriend what her favorite color was. (I don’t mean to keep bringing her up on this blog, because Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun is most certainly NOT that kind of blog. It just so happens that this particular anecdote that includes her as a foil is the best way for me to introduce a point I’d like to make about Saves the Day.) Anyway, she looked at me like I had 10 heads. “What do you mean, favorite color,” she asked. “I like a lot of colors.” My favorite color is green. I figured everyone had a favorite color. Everyone had favorite colors when were kids, right? It’s how you knew what ball to pick when you played mini golf, or which kinds of M&Ms to save for last when you had a whole handful. I was left feeling like I had missed the boat on opening my heart to new colors.

And then I wondered if people feel the same way about songs. They have to, right? If a person can’t commit to a color (and I’m limiting “color” here to like, the rainbow and its reasonable offshoots. I don’t want to hear any “I like #F600FF” nonsense in the comments), how could they possibly commit to a song? I don’t know how it works. But I do know that “This Is Not An Exit” is my favorite song.

Not my favorite rock tune. Not my favorite song of the decade. My favorite song. It’s not that other songs aren’t good. It’s just that I like this one the most. That’s why you’re reading about this album, plain and simple. All of its songs are very very good, and one of them is my favorite. And, at the end of the day, if the hook sets in the bottom of our lungs, we’ll rip it out and lick the blood off with our tongues.

Actually, this is a great idea NOT in action, but it should be!

Think of any generic bar you’ve ever been in, and think about the thought that went into designing it. If you’re a bar owner, you’re going to focus on the bar. You’re going to focus on the places where people are going to sit down and eat and drink. You’re going to focus on the dance floor, or the Big Buck Hunter Game, or the mechanical bull, or whatever. These are the things that make your bar what it is.

But in any physical space, there are forgotten areas. The corners. The spaces along the wall between tables. The surface underneath the bar. My question is, why aren’t these spaces filled with coat hooks?

This might not apply to my loyal readers in San Diego and Fort Lauderdale who can leave the house any day of the year in culottes and flip flops, but up here in the Cradle of Liberty, it gets COLD. In the winter half of the year, there’s no getting around going out to the club wearing your heaviest coat. There’s a fair number of places you come across that have a coat check, but in my experience, that’s less than half. So you get there, ready to hoist some brews or dance with some fly tinies, but before you can get down to business, you have to figure out a place to stash your coat. Which leads to an entire evening of anxiety, as you wonder whether Tommy from Saugus is going to pull what he thinks is his coat—it’s not his, it’s yours!—out of a huge amorphous blob of wool and nylon in the corner, and even if he does find his coat, he’s either spilled the rest of his gin and tonic on yours, if he hasn’t already knocked it onto the ground into a not-quite-yet-dried-up puddle of Bud Light because let’s be honest, you’re not out dancing at a place that’s particularly diligent about mopping up spills as the course of the evening progresses.

Do it next time you’re out. Go to the bar, look around, and count all the different places where there should be a place for one to hang one’s coat. There’s enough for everybody!

Tell All Your Friends

3) Taking Back Sunday, Tell All Your Friends (2002)

Part of what turns music you like into music you love is sharing it with other people. Tell All Your Friends is one of those albums that me and my high school crew all love. It’s tough to come across records like that, even among people who like the same type of music. As a consequence, every track incites Proustian remembrances of some kind of a good time. That’s a good album right there!

Tell All Your Friends is the debut album of the Long Island emo/pop punk outfit Taking Back Sunday. The band has put out several more albums since, with different lineups, and they’re all pretty good. None, however, matches that first album with Eddie Reyes on guitar, Mark O’Connell on drums, Shaun Cooper on bass, John Nolan on guitar and backing vocals, and the inimitable Adam Lazzara on lead vocals. That particular lineup only lasted one album, with the aforementioned Nolan and Cooper leaving to form Straylight Run. Oh well, right? Can’t complain about that turn of events, since it produced two of my favorite albums of the decade.

There’s a number of things that make TBS the band that it is. One is the superhuman pipes of Mr. Lazzara. Like a running quarterback that refuses to learn how to slide before getting laid out by a 250-pound linebacker, Lazzara treats his vocal chords as recklessly as if they weren’t the instrument through which he makes his living. Witness his transition from one-marble-in-the-mouth warbling to lung-busting screams to larynx-shattering wailing and back again on tracks like “Bike Scene,” “Timberwolves at New Jersey,” and “The Blue Channel.” I dunno how long the guy can keep it up.

The vocals would just be window dressing, of course, if they weren’t delivering great lyrics. Of all the albums on this list, Tell All Your Friends is by far the most quotable. If you’ve ever heard Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun say that you’ve got this silly way of keeping me on the edge of my seat; that if we go down, we go down together; that September never gets this cold where I come from; or that I’ve got the mic, and you’ve got the mosh pit, you have Tell All Your Friends to thank. And of course, this album gives us the most archetypically emo lyric in the history of emo music, the line that I would present were I asked to present one example that typifies the conceit of the genre, from “You’re So Last Summer”: “The truth / is you could slit my throat, / and with my one last gasping breath I’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt.” Gives you chills, don’t it?

Signature track: “Cute Without the ‘E’ (Cut from the Team)”

Ah, those four chords. I don’t want to harp about the scene, but among connoisseurs of this genre, those four chords are positively iconic. “Cute Without the ‘E’” is just one of those pantheon songs. The jukebox at Mary Ann’s (the worst bar in America, in sunny Cleveland Circle, the Times Square of Brighton, Massachusetts) had this track, and I would play it EVERY time I went there, in the vain hopes that some wicked emo chick, with a choppy haircut and some metal in her face, would should me a knowing glance and mouth the words “The only thing I regret is that I never let you hold me back.” Alas, it never happened. (And for the record, the lyrics that get bleeped out up there are “And will you tell all your friends / you’ve got your gun to my head?” The prudes at MTV need to figure out that there are far worse things on the Intertubes than reference to guns.)

This song encapsulates what I think is the best feature of Tell All Your Friends: the vocal interplay between Lazarra and Nolan. Later incarnations of Taking Back Sunday have featured perfectly capable background vocalists. On the first album, though, there are a fair number of tracks where John Nolan is more of a co-vocalist. The back and forth makes for a real dynamic tune, especially the harmonies toward the end. Also, if you think myself and the Official Bandmate of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun weren’t belting out this tune during our now-infamous trip to Long Island, well, you’re just fooling yourself.

It all started when the Official Girlfriend of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun decided she no longer wanted to be the Official Girlfriend of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun any more. Then my beloved home state of New Jersey punched civil rights directly in the solar plexus. And finally, I had to watch, in the bitter cold, in the den of ultimate evil, as the hated terriers of boston university vanquished the heroic Eagles of Boston College in a Hockey East matchup.

I've got my eye out for you

Blech. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if I slipped on a banana peel or got my foot stuck in a bucket or something. Let’s try to make next week a better one, ok guys?