Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

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.

Tags: Brand New, DD&UFAOTD:AMIMIFE, emo, self-indulgent navel-gazery, Your Favorite Weapon

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 11:49 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.