I Don't Have to Realize

 I recently had a student reach out to me because they were thinking of applying to grad school and they wanted to learn about the process and hear what my experience had been so far. These types of moments are always exciting to me, because I love school so much and I’m always willing to try to bring someone else into the fold. Since she hadn’t had tonnes of experience in speaking with faculty members, this was one of the main processes she had questions about. Who should I talk to? How do I start? How do I get a letter of reference? What if they don’t want to do something for me? This made me think about the following:

I think that an integral part of the university experience is having a professor that you have a personal conflict with. It’s unfortunate that it’s true, but you form weirdly personal relationships with professors when you’ve been taking their classes for four years and by the end of your program, you know them on a first name basis, and they have a weirdly intimate knowledge of you as a person through reading the work that you submit to them. When you get to know people that well, it’s natural that there will be a few who you don’t vibe with and vice-versa. 

I had a professor multiple times in my undergrad who seemed to just not get me at all. Most of my peers didn’t have as much of a problem as I did, but my learning and writing style just didn’t fit with her teaching style at all. I did badly in her classes and there were times where it was hard for me to not believe she wasn’t being vindictive. I had multiple interactions with her that I, now someone with university teaching experience, think were handled badly and borderline unprofessionally. Maybe our conflict wasn’t as bad as it seemed at the time, but I think that you should learn to be compassionate when you are the one who has all the power in a relationship.

One of the things that other students and I loved to laugh about was that she had an accent that would sometimes disappear while she was lecturing. I don’t know specifics about her story, but I do know that a lot of it came off as phony and that I wasn’t the only who thought so. In particular, my Salvadoran classmate found her accent pretty silly.

At the end of my first semester as a master’s student, the Art History department had a party at the house of one of the professors. The hosts rented a karaoke machine and we all had a few drinky-poos over the course of the night, blurring the lines of professional decorum. Everyone’s karaoke performances got more and more ridiculous as the night went on and it was fun.

At one point, one of the students chose Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca” and put my arch nemesis on the spot to perform it. She was a quiet person in groups but couldn’t back down because of how many people were there, and instead got up and did it. Her performance of the song was a train wreck and it was clear that she didn’t know a lot of the words that were in it. As she butchered the song and struggled through the Spanish lyrics, I had to leave the room because I was beginning to laugh really hard. 

This wasn’t the end of our relationship and there was much bigger conflicts that happened down the line, and even some cordial interactions to go with them. It felt so good to be vindicated that night. In general, I get along with people easily and am a non-confrontational person, so whenever I do conflict with people, it seems all the more intense to me. Might seem shitty, but boy does it rock to your enemies lose.

You're All a Bunch of Little Wieners

In 2008, New Found Glory released an EP called Tip of the Iceberg that featured three original songs on the A side where they tried to do “back to their roots” thing, playing more aggressive and nominally “hardcore” pop-punk music, and three covers by Lifetime, Shelter, and Gorilla Biscuits* on the B side to prove their scene cred. This release followed their uber-soft album Coming Home that saw them at their most mainstream-oriented pop-rock, and I think the EP was them trying to right the ship. Basing this on nothing other than my own experience and view of punk/emo/rock at the time, Coming Home seemed like a big swing to try to fix themselves in the radio rock circuit and see if they could get a song on a WB show. That didn’t work, so they decided to return to pop-punk, their bread and butter, and attached themselves to the pop-punk/hardcore (or popcore, or easycore) thing that was just starting to really take off with Set Your Goals, Four Year Strong, and A Day to Remember. I was heavy into that scene of music at the time (ADTR not so much) and this EP is actually what turned me into a fan of the band. I was obsessed with Lifetime at the time and New Found Glory covering them was interesting to me.

*I hadn’t listened to GB in ages and recently revisited Start Today. I was shocked at how much I still really fucked with it.

What stood out to most people about Tip of the Iceberg though was that it was accompanied by another EP called Takin’ it Ova! by the fictional band the International Superheroes of Hardcore, which was New Found Glory under pseudonyms with guitarist Chad Gilbert singing. The EP was all joke songs about being super heroes in a world bound to the rules and scene politics of hardcore music and it was pretty funny. There was lots of references to both the history of hardcore music and world of comic books and it was light-hearted enough that it was easy to laugh. It was obvious that New Found Glory was keenly aware of their status as a wimpy pop-punk band and that made the joke a lot better. It also helped that the Comeback Kid/Ten Yard Fight/Youth Crew Revival style of the songs was played surprisingly capably. 

After a decade of the band being the easiest punch line about how much pop-punk sucked, I think that Takin’ it Ova! did a lot to win the band a bit of respect. It was less fun to make fun of them when they were in on the joke. At some shows, New Found Glory would do short sets as the ISHC in silly costumes and everyone seemed to enjoy it. They even got bookings on a few of the marquee pop-punk festivals of the time, like the Bamboozle, and released another EP, the Harry Potter-themed HPxHC, that also pretty funny.

In an interview that must have been 2009 or 10, Gilbert, who was the member that spearheaded the whole thing, was asked about the future of the ISHC and if there were plans to do another record and responded that he was planning to do a “serious” ISHC record. The ISHC making “serious” hardcore music sounded like the dumbest thing ever and made it clear that maybe he wasn’t as in on the joke as everyone else. This immediately spelled the death of the ISHC, as an earnest hardcore record from them seemed like the most embarrassing thing in the world.

All Your Artists Are Just Servants of the Status Quo

I was recently thinking about a particular moment in punk music, as a result of the album exchange with Duff. in late 00s, it seemed to me like the identity of "used to be (or be in) a hardcore" carried a huge amount of cultural cache, and was a primary talking point album reviews and music news. This came up because we were talking about Crime in Stereo, specifically the album The Troubled Stateside, and how they seemed to benefit from moving from playing melodic hardcore, or popcore as Duff erroneously labelled them, to a more experimental and moodier emo sound.*

*I remember people saying that Crime in Stereo is Dead was their Deja Entendu at the time, as I guess that album became shorthand for a band making a leap in "seriousness" in their music and the two records aren't far off sonically. TBH, I always liked ...Is Dead more than that record to begin with and that opinion sure has aged well now.

Beyond Crime in Stereo, and bands like Cold Cave, this cultural capital extended to other types of music too. When Frank Turner was exploding in the Fest scene, it felt like no one could go one second discussing him without mentioning the fact that he used to play in Million Dead. Thousand Dead? I'm not going to waste time looking up libertarian-ass Frank Turner's old band that probably sucked. Anyway, I'm pretty sure I did this very thing here on IMU. I guess it's sort of a way to claim cred? To make it sound like you know about their entire musical backstory and how it contributes to the current narrative around their music.

Duff thought it represented a reversal of opinion on selling out, and I guess that's true as well. It's no longer wack to stop playing hardcore (cool) and start playing butt rock (lame), like No Warning did, but is instead a sign that the butt rock you're playing is even better because you used to play in a hardcore band (always cool). 

And when you think of the biggest punk bands of the 00s, this opinion actually makes a lot of sense. Against Me! went from being about as anarcho as you can get to playing major label rock music (I like New Wave and White Crosses a lot) and this transition was the fulcrum of mainstream criticism of the record. I remember the review of New Wave in Vice saying "Against Me! went all Bruce Springsteen on us." Ditto for Rise Against, who similarly benefitted from their past in Chicago area hardcore and skatepunk bands in making their political message seem more legit.

For the record: Against Me! kicks ass and Rise Against has never been for me. At their best they are a way, way worse version of Strike Anywhere and at their worst they are punk Nickelback. Everyone loved them so much when I was in high school, but I never understood the appeal.

I think this is all a result of punk music working its way into mainstream culture in a major way between the mid 90s and mid 00s. On one hand it was great because seeing blink-182 on MuchMusic was exactly how I found out about punk, but it also meant that most people coming to bigger punk shows were not punks at all. They liked to mosh and thought the music was cool, but I don't think would have cared about selling out in a million years. 

It seems crazy to think about it now, but there were legitimate high school, popped American Eagle polo collar bros at screamo shows in Southern Ontario. I guess there were parts of the subculture that appealed to them, meaning they wanted to hook up with the girls, but there's no way they were really into any of the bigger political and social ideas informing the music. But you could say to them that X bass player was in a heavy band before this and they would think that was... something?

I remember talking to a kid at my high school about how bands make a living. He had gone to see the Dropkick Murphys the past weekend and couldn't believe how cheap the tickets were. I thought that $35 for a punk show was too expensive, but he thought the bands should be charging even more so that they could make more money. The next year, he went to Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario and I never saw him at a punk show ever again.