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.

Take This to Your Grave

7) Fall Out Boy, Take This to Your Grave (2003)

So Fall Out Boy is a pretty big band nowadays. So much so that they have a greatest hits album.(?) I mean, I’ll buy it. (The idea, not the actual album. I have all those songs already.) It’s just weird to have a band that you’ve been following for a while to not only put out a greatest hits album, but for said album to include tracks from an album that came out just six years ago.

Oh well. All of this is inconsequential. What does matter is that before Pete Wentz was opening bars that played host to Real World casts, Fall Out Boy put out a lil album called Take This to Your Grave, a venomous, spite-filled, heartfelt emo punk tour de force that, quite frankly, the band has yet to replicate. The band’s second studio album, it has more polish than their debut, Fall Out Boy’s Evening Out with Your Girlfriend, and more fire in the belly than their subsequent records.

There’s an urgency of genuine emotion on this album, and you know how I feel about that sort of thing. To this day, I still re-use the chorus to “Dead on Arrival” in everyday conversation: “This is Side One. / Flip me over. / I know I’m not your favorite record. / The songs you grow to like never stick at first.” (To say nothing of the delightful wordplay in the first verse: “This conversation’s been dead on a / Rivalry goes so deep / Between me and this loss of sleep over you.”) Ditto for “Homesick at Spacecamp”: “My smile’s an open wound without you / And my hands are tied to pages inked to bring you back.”

Why I like Fall Out Boy, and this album in particular, is they manage to get away with saying things that I could never bring myself to say as a songwriter. (And I’ve tried my hand at the songwriting thing. What, you’ve never heard of Wait for Summer? North Jersey Emocore since 2005?) I wrote a story a few years ago about Craig Finn, the lead singer for the band the Hold Steady. Finn said, w/r/t songwriting, that he oftentimes invents characters and scenarios to write songs about. “No one thinks Quentin Tarantino kills people. The characters are a way for me to remove myself from [the songs] in some way, to tell a story that has a cinematic quality or a good story arc without people saying, ‘He’s crazy.’ Especially my mom.” This sounds brilliant on paper, but in practice it’s extremely difficult to pull off. The reason I’ve only written like, two and three-quarters songs is that there’s only so much compelling stuff that I can cull from my autobiography. I’m just a crummy inventor, as it were. And even when there is good stuff to write about, I’m often too timid to commit it to paper, let alone song.

All of this is to say, I’m not sure if the guys in Fall Out Boy practice Craig Finn’s technique, or if they’ve all just been fucked over really bad and don’t give a shit who knows, but hoo boy, are there some potent lines on this album. Just look at the track listing. You’ve got “Sending Postcards from a Plane Crash (Wish You Were Here).” You’ve got “Reinventing the Wheel to Run Myself Over.” And then you’ve got our signature track.

Signature track: “Tell that Mick He Just Made My List of Things to Do Today”

Hopefully my Irish American readers can get over the title of this one (it apparently comes from the movie Rushmore.) This particular video includes lyrics, which should drive the point home that this is an intense song. Like, the chorus: “Let’s play this game called ‘When You Catch Fire.’ / I wouldn’t piss to put you out.” Or, hell, the opening line: “Light that smoke, that one for giving up on me. / One just ’cause they’ll kill you sooner than my expectations.” There’s a strain of pop punk that’s moroseful and whiny, there’s a strain of pop punk that’s mushy, and there’s a strain of pop punk that’s just downright nasty. “Tell That Mick” is the archetypal example of that final strain.

Now, I wouldn’t say that I condone lighting people on fire, or wishing them to be in a horrible car accident, or anything like that. Maybe Pete Wentz does. Or maybe he’s just capable of imagining a situation where he feels that way. Either way, I’ve always been impressed with the courage it takes to write songs that really let loose with intense emotion, whether it be sorrow or longing or rage. I know for a fact that I’m not capable of opening up that much, or even making up a persona capable of opening up that much.

Straylight Run

8 ) Straylight Run, Straylight Run (2004)

Now we’re getting into the nitty gritty. Straylight Run is a band formed by former members of Taking Back Sunday, frontman John Nolan and bassist Shaun Cooper. If you’re familiar with TBS, you’ll realize that these two bands couldn’t sound more dissimilar, and that’s a huge part of Straylight’s allure. Here, you’ve got a guy in John Nolan capable of screaming his larynx out on Taking Back Sunday’s Tell All Your Friends, but then weaving soft, soulful melodies on Straylight Run’s opening track, “The Perfect Ending.” Nolan isn’t the greatest technical vocalist, but the range that he can bring to a track more than makes up for it.

But then again, the fact that he isn’t the smoothest vocalist is another part of the allure. Nolan’s presentation, as a singer and a lyricist, reeks of earnestness. Take the album’s single, “Existentialism on Prom Night.” In a typical pop punk band, you’d hear lyrics like “Sing like you think no one’s listening” and you’d roll your eyes. But in Nolan’s hands, delivered with passion in front of pianos and violins instead of screeching guitars, the words have a sincerity that would have been unavailable to him in a band like TBS. Then there’s my favorite track on the album, “The Tension and the Terror.” From the sensuous lyrics that start the track (All the boys, voices cracking. / Oh, the moaning half tones. / Come summertime, we’re all the same age here. / All the tension and the terror, / Thin-limbed gorgeous green eyes smiling, / And I’m going straight to hell) to the confession that ends it (A look, a laugh, a smile, a second / Passes by and I regret it. / Words just aren’t right. / Sometimes I just can’t explain / All the ways you devastate me. / Always on my mind), the words aren’t sung as much as it would have been impossible for them to not burst forth out of the song. Maybe you don’t hear it that way, but I do.

And let’s not forget the beautiful Michelle DeRosa nee Nolan on background vocals (not to mention the lead on “Toolsheds and Hot Tubs” and “Now It’s Done”). Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun understand how I feel about girls who can rock. For the uninitiated, I’ll put it simply: they’re the best! There’s really not a ton of ways to eff up a song with the addition of female accompaniment, and Michelle really smooths out her brother’s rough edges.

Signature track: “Your Name Here (Sunrise Highway)”

I admitted up above that “The Tension and the Terror” is my favorite track on this album, but that’s inconsequential at this point. This album is important because of “Your Name Here.” The song is a follow-up to this Taking Back Sunday song, which in turn is a response to this Brand New song. I won’t go into the details of the East Coast/West Coast style feud that marked those bands’ early days, suffice it to say that at a time in my life when I actually WAS emo instead of just being an emo fan, “Your Name Here” helped me to realize that no matter what the conflict is, it’s important to reconcile with the people closest to you if you’ve been driven apart. You just can’t take grudges to the grave.

And then there’s the matter of the chorus: “Go east on Sunrise Highway. / Turn left on Carmans Avenue. / Go right at the first stoplight / And I’ll be outside, waiting for you.” The lyrics are meant to be directions, from John to his estranged pal Jesse, to John’s house on Long Island, ostensibly so they can peace things up. Of course, you can’t put driving directions in a song without diehard fans actually following them, which is what myself, my pal Caitlin, and my buddy Joe, Official Bandmate of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, did one July afternoon. Here’s a picture of me, driving east on Sunrise Highway.

My other hand is at 10. What form!

Now, of course, unless you’re crazy, you wouldn’t put the EXACT directions to your house in a song that, who knows, could become a number 1 hit. So there’s really no such thing as “Carmans Avenue,” but there is a Carmans Road in Massapequa. And you can’t actually turn left onto it; rather, you’ve got to make a U-turn and then turn right. And at that point, if you go right at the first stop light, you’re really only hooking back up with Sunrise Highway. Here’s a photograph of your hero, this blog’s protagonist, me, at the final destination of the chorus to “Your Name Here.”

Womp womp

So, you know, did we learn anything? Is there some sort of didactic moral to this sad tale of a wasted afternoon? Absolutely not. Except, every time I go to a Straylight Run show and this song gets played, I get to nudge the dude next to me and say “Hey, I did that!” Ah, memories.