I'll Bet You Want To

 Is poptimism over?

I mean obviously it is, but I was thinking this earlier while I revisited the albums that I was into during the phase of all snobby music fans getting extremely into major label pop music in the first half of the decade. I gave Teenage Dream, 1989, and weirdly Little Machines by Lights a lot of spins from like 2013-2015, as all of a sudden it seemed like a veil had been lifted from my eyes and I realized that mainstream pop music is actually fun to listen to. It was similar to when you grow up a white rock music fan and realize that you were actually so so wrong about rap music. Poptimism even leaked into other parts of my listening habits, as revisiting those pop albums made me think of West Coast Babes by The Canyon Rays, which I thought was awesome at the time because it merged Katy Perry and the Cars, but in hindsight is a lot closer to average.

Another weird thing was that I actually hadn't seen the music videos for a lot of the songs I was into at the time, because I am a serious white music fan. Watching them today made them seem like they were from 20 years ago, even though it doesn't feel like that long. I guess that 7 or so years is enough time for style to change and everyone to stop rolling up the sleeves on their t-shirts, wearing thick-rimmed glasses, and "cute" animal onesies to go out of style. Also a surprising amount of teased male hair?

In hindsight, I think that Carly Rae Jepsen's E•MO•TION was the crest of this whole thing. Even though I never listened to it, not for any sort of reason, it was catnip for dumb music snobs like me and the narrative of her being known for a dumb single but then putting out a "serious independent album" seemed to drive people, but especially men, crazy. 

Maybe men listening to pop music was the reason the whole thing happened? Taylor Swift and Katy Perry had been around for ages already, but pop was finally good because rock was dead and white guys had nothing else to listen to. Maybe we'll ruin something else next.

What a bad ending! Wow! Don't know bro, I just wanted to write and don't have anything else to say!

Unloading Our Minds

Apologies if you're tired of me speaking about my experience moving to Montreal, but I don't really have much else going on these days.

It might just be my Ontario education bias, but I feel like the conflicting cultures of Ontario and Québec make up a huge part of Canadian history and identity. The differences between living in Ontario and in Québec are basically the only thing you learn about in elementary school history classes, so it's something I've thought a lot about since moving here.

There are obvious big differences that go without saying, like the language and not turning right on red lights, so we can skip over those. The biggest cultural difference, as far as I can tell, is that Ontarians deeply love rules and precautions and rarely deviate from them, whereas the Québécois tend to just do whatever and hope it works and ignore rules that they don't feel like following. Both tendencies have their advantages and drawbacks and I'm a little torn between the two as a bilingual anglo who lives in Hochelaga.

The weirdest thing about living here now is that differencing coming out in small ways too. I'm being hyperbolic, but the thing that sums up Québec the best to me is that at the grocery store everyone just leaves the carts unchained and doesn't link them up so that you need a quarter to use them. The lock is still there on the cart, but nobody ever uses it. In Ontario everyone is so anal about people breaking the rules that I've seen people link carts together even it's not theirs, but here everyone just says "No, I refuse this.'

Alright, time for a classic IMU swerve in the middle of a post to another subject. We're po-mo baby.

One of the weirdest things continues to be that the ska-punk band I was obsessed with in early high school turned into one of the biggest and most influential figures in punk over the last decade. I was reminded of this when I searched for Jeff Rosenstock guitar tabs on good old UltimateGuitar.com the other day and found multiple pages of options. Not even Bomb the Music Industry!, just solo Jeff! That in turn reminded me of writing bass tabs of Arrogant Sons of Bitches songs in high school and my submissions making up the majority of the content on their page. They're still there!

Anyways, Jeff Rosenstock put out an EP (I guess?) this year and I find it to be much better than his last couple of albums. It was initially four songs, but he's since added two more and it seems like it will be a collection of songs that grows bigger throughout the year. He's also kept it off of streaming services, so the only way to listen is to use Bandcamp or, as always, download it as a .zip file for free from his website. I think that him purposefully recreating the experience of me downloading Goodbye Cool World and then reading the lyrics in my bedroom is a big contributing factor to me liking it, but I also find that the songs feel more like "classic Jeff" to me, even though I can't really place why.

This is my favourite song on the release, and looking up a bass tab to it was why I ran into the above thoughts in the first place. There wasn't one yet, obviously, and I couldn't learn it by ear because I'm tone-deaf. Such is life.

Tour Water

An embarrassing thing about me is that I went to more editions of the Vans Warped Tour than pretty much everyone I know. I wish I could say that I stopped going once I left high school, but it turned into a weird thing that I kept doing long after that. Here is a list of each time I went, described through the short memories that I have tied to each time.

I
Putting a lot of thought into what shirt to wear and choosing Black Flag. The Casualties being scary. Deville being the best band in the world. Caring so much about seeing Bad Religion.

II
Investing all of my happiness in seeing Big D and the Kids Table play "Little Bitch" and asking them to do so before the set. The only time I saw The Offspring and Dropkick Murphys.

III
Being absolutely over the moon to finally see NOFX. Sheepishly going to buy an Aiden shirt as a fully dekked-out teen ska boy for a girl I liked. Less Than Jake ending the day and being the best band by a mile.

IV
The crew shrinking to just Chris, Pat and I. Gallows hype being at its height. Spending the entire day at the Union Stage watching Ontario ska bands. Being so confused that everyone loved All Time Low.

V
Switching to Arrow Hall in Mississauga instead of driving up to Barrie. Easycore ascending and Set Your Goals, Four Year Strong and A Day to Remember all playing being a "thing". 

VI
Crabcore being so big and obnoxious and bad. Pennywise playing in the rain. Streetlight Manifesto ending their set by saying "Steal our record because fuck our record label". Having nothing to do and trying to give watching A Day to Remember a shot. Them sucking, and leaving to watch Shad by myself.

VII
Starting to get really over going to Warped Tour and being annoyed at the crowd. A guy in line saying "Wouldn't it be crazy if the Chili Peppers came out and played 'Can't Stop'?" Sum 41 putting a really embarrassing easycore breakdown in "Fat Lip". The aftershow by Polar Bear Club at the Bovine being so much better.

VIII
Buying a ticket and thinking "I don't care how much it sucks, I know it will be bad, I'm only coming to see Less Than Jake and it won't be sod bad if I know that going in" and then it being so much worse.

It Means Nothing, Nothing is Changing

 Today (I started writing this on Friday and am now finishing it on Saturday) marked the tend of the podcast blink-155 and I have to admit that I didn't expect myself to get as emotional as I did. This was yet another example of me repeating to myself that something is "just a podcast" or "just a TV show" and for that reason, doesn't carry the emotional heft that real life event does. I was a fan of the show from day 1 and never missed a week of listening, but I wasn't actively engaged in the crazy Twitter community that formed around it and I didn't join the livestreams on Twitch. It was just something I liked, at least until the last episode started and I found myself getting wistful immediately.

blink-155 (yes, their name is subject to the same formatting principles as blink-182) was a good podcast because it was not like any other podcast I have listened to. It wasn't finely produced with interstitial music and heavily edited dialogue, and in fact they often mocked this through the format. It was long and meandering and it was about a lot of things, like media criticism, identity, aging, and evaluating online pop culture, while also managing to be about the band blink-182 most of the time. I think it's silly for me to try to explain the importance of the show any further because I'm underqualified, but I guess just know that it was really funny, endearing, smart, and unique.

I don't know that I can place my relationship to show alongside any other changes in my life (except for moving to Montreal and not knowing people here), so it's a little tough to think of exactly why the show hit the way it did, with my intense interest in the band it was about notwithstanding. Regardless, here's an attempt to do that:

As you aged as a blink fan, the band became this embarrassing from your past that you still carried with you. They were so big that everyone you knew had a frame of reference for them, but knew them as that juvenile fake punk band that everyone in class liked in 2001, rather than the identity-defining thing that you still loved. It was okay to pass off that love when you were 21, but with each passing year, it became less and less okay to still like them so much. Nobody would judge you to your face for it, but you could tell that everyone was taken aback by how much you knew about the members and how you clearly still kept tabs on what was going on with the band. The band wouldn't help your cause either, of course, as they either put out embarrassing radio rock or even more embarrassing attempts to reclaim their Southern California punk credibility in "return to form albums". To pile onto their awful later albums, they would also do sponsorship deals with Doritos and T-Mobile and all have terrible haircuts that signaled just how desperate they were. Then you would go see them, even though you knew that it wouldn't be as good as watching the "What's My Age Again?" video on your family's TV in the basement. They were play badly, as they always do, and it would seem embarrassing instead of charming, because they were almost 40, instead in their mid-20s. The new songs would always suck and you would be surrounded by bros and normies who wouldn't be friends with you while you were in high school, and they would all go crazy for the flying drum solo Travis did to dubstep. You would think about how much money you spent on tickets and how it wasn't really worth it. Then, Tom would start the distorted intro riff to "Dammit" and the band would play it insanely fast as their last song and you would remember exactly why you liked the band and it would feel like they were playing the song directly to you and you would remember that blink-182 was actually a gateway to lots of cooler things for you and that they are fun and they made you feel cool. Somehow blink-155, and especially the last episode, captured that feeling exactly.