My Energy's There but Wasted

A pleasant part of the recent... renewal... of interest... in ska? (trying my hardest to not say revival) is that a lot of new media about ska has accompanied it. I was a message board rat during the 2000s, which I would say was the height of that culture, and during that time it felt like there was a lot of cool internet stuff and communities focused on ska that were both fun to read and helped really expand my understanding of the genre. As the 00s moved into the 10s, it felt like there was a lot less of that, though I guess I could also chalk that up to me becoming more focused on exploring other genres of music for a little while.

On one hand, I agree with the current view that saying ska died from like 2007-2019 unfairly glosses over the contributions of bands like the Fad, We Are the Union, and labels like Community Records.* On the other hand though, I think the generalization that the vast majority of ska shows were either headlined by Less Than Jake (still making good records then!), Reel Big Fish (vomit emoji, especially in 2010), or Streetlight Manifesto (opinion changes daily), or featured bands trying to be them, was correct. As sad as it is to say, I think that it's also fair to add the Johnstones to that list, specifically in Canada. I kept trying to find new bands, and I never got tired of listening to the genre, but shit did get pretty dark there for a bit and there was slim pickings.

*An interesting wrinkle is that this is also when Bomb the Music Industry's popularity began to really take off, but also when they began to feature less and less ska on their records, which I don't think is unrelated.

This is all to say that I am once again writing about happy I am with the current generation of new ska bands, all creating interesting music and none dressing like a caricature of a 90s cartoon character the way white kids from the suburbs did in 2012. Along with these new bands have come a bunch of new internet stuff  around that, and I'm thinking of the In Defense of Ska podcast in particular. It's not always great, but I really appreciate that it always focuses on the bands and how important they are, which is not something that often happens with ska. More so than any genre of music I can think, ska bands seem to be subservient to the genre norms.

 A recent episode of In Defense of Ska featured Dave McWane from Big D and the Kids Table, who were one of the most influential bands on me during my adolescence and legitimately played a gigantic role in shaping both me as a person and my outlook on the world. I've written about them and their effect on me before on here and I was about to say that I won't do that again, even though that's exactly what I'm about to do.

I haven't actually read that many interviews with Dave, who seems to be the main creative force in the band and is (I think) the only remaining original member, so I found his take on the history of the band interesting. In particular, McWane mentioned antagonism as a key part of the early days of the band, which was something I was always trying to name, but never really could. He mentioned that they never really enjoyed headlining shows because that generally meant that the audience was already on their side and was there to see them, whereas when they opened for other bands, whether that was the Dropkick Murphys or even bigger, but less punk ska bands, their was more of a friction with the crowd that the band thrived off of.

 

That sense of antagonism was palpable and was also a huge part of what drew me into the band. As much as they were still a ska band, they really did push back against other bands, labels, and trends in a way that, in my eyes, legitimated them as a punk band too. It felt like everyone in the band were actually punks, so that when they played fast parts or hardcore parts, it seemed completely natural, as opposed to the hackneyed "clean verse, kick on distortion pedal for the chorus" model that all bad ska-punk followed. A big part of that was me being young and impressionable and this being the first time I had heard the "fuck everyone else" message given in such an emphatic way. But even though I was a naïve teen who was inspired to take on the world from this record, that still matters.

A memory that sticks with me that kind of sums this sense of connection up is something that happened to my friend Pat in high school, who was just as into Big D as I was. It was definitely not cool to like ska at the height of third wave emo and Pat was wearing a Big D hoodie to school that had a checkerboard pattern across the front. In the halls, a guy we knew who was a hardcore kid, without even acknowledging or speaking to Pat, just said "ska sucks" under his breath. It felt like all the people who were into punk, in whatever way, hated ska, but Big D made it feel cool to say "Fuck them anyways."

Because Big D were "My Band" for a stretch of like three years, Good Luck, The Gypsy Hill EP, and How It Goes were all in my walkman on the way to and from school, something that seemed like a gigantic deal to me in like 2007 was the band starting to get a little bigger and also changing their sound slightly. From my perspective, on the band's new album Strictly Rude, which was released on the comparatively bigger punk label Side One Dummy, it felt like the antagonism was now clearly gone, though others didn't find the change as jarring as I did. 

My take on the changes in the band's sound were that it was partly due to member changes. The liner notes to How It Goes featured notes from the members about the writing process of each of the songs (the best) and something I noticed was that saxophonist Dave Bush, who left the band between How It Goes and Strictly Rude, had lots of notes and seemed to figure into the writing process in a major way. When the band left their harsher ska-core sound for something that sounded a lot closer to regular ska-punk on Strictly Rude, my take was that Bush's absence was the reason for less interesting music. I've never heard anyone else mention this, but it's one of those takes that I'll probably carry for the rest of my life.*

*Another note on member changes: Guitarist Sean P. Rogen, who is maybe my favourite ska-punk guitarist, left the band somewhere after Strictly Rude. I think he was similarly integral to the band making good music and I feel like his absence is glaringly obvious on later stuff.

I had never heard the band, or I guess more accurately McWane, talk about this period of the band, aside from the usual puff pieces in music publications that always come out during an album promotion cycle, so when he started discussing the writing period of Strictly Rude, my ears perked up and I was eager to hear about it. He actually did echo what I thought about the songs, saying that they're happier or more positive compared to their earlier stuff, but he attributed that to the fact that it was a generally happy time in the band's existence. They were signing to a bigger label, touring all the time, and were still young enough to just bask in the fun of being a band and fucking around. When he phrased it that way, it made a lot of sense to me and softened the record a bit to me.

In hindsight, they didn't really sell out in the way I thought they did, but I also think it's fair to say that they did a little. There was a tone of political hope on the record, as I guess they were now done being morose about the Bush administration, but even then (and more so now) that type of political outlook didn't jive with me. Getting the band's perspective on the record made the context of the record a little more in focus, but I still think that 17-year-old me picked up on something real, so I've got to commend myself for that.

First We Run, then We Laugh til We Cry

 I recently saw somebody on Twitter mention the "third year of COVID" and that knocked me on my ass a bit. As much as it's possible to mark out the things that I've accomplished and remember events that show how long it's been, it also feels like no time has passed at all. Pierre has turned into an old dog during this pandemic, but I don't feel like I've aged at all (I have, dramatically).

One of the ways that I'm able to recognize the passage of time has been the TV shows that Rebecca and I have watched. In general, we've erred on the side of caution with COVID, which has resulted in a lot of TV watching. It goes through cycles, where sometimes I feel couped up and stircrazy and another night on the couch makes me feel like a personal failure, and sometimes watching TV is the only thing that feels normal. Behold the TV COVID calendar:

True Detective: The first week of the pandemic, when staying inside felt good

The Wire: Rebecca working support in people's homes and COVID weighing the heaviest it ever did

The Mandalorian: Rebecca working overnights and me being home alone on Saturdays

Sex Education: Vaccines being handed out and things starting to feel normal

There's many others that I'm missing, but this was all just a prelude for me to mention that Becks and I's current watch is Game of Thrones, which I'm coming to well after it was one of the biggest phenomena in TV history. We're now halfway through the show (shoutout to the Free People and Brotherhood without Banners) and I have some thoughts on the progression of the show.

Mostly, I've been thinking about the balance of adapting a series of novels while still bowing to the conventions of Peak TV. Game of Thrones moves fast and has already killed off a bunch of characters who I thought would be around for the long haul, so the natural reaction is to guess what the next major plot event will be. The show is pretty conventional and straight forward, so often conjecture is pretty easy, because a character will have said exactly what they were thinking and going to do on episode prior.

However, what I find interesting is that the events of the show have to follow the book. For example, when Tyrion was sentenced to death, I would have normally said that there was no way he could possibly die because Peter Dinklage was the breakout star of the show and was one of its most-loved character. Normally, killing off a character like that would be the absolute biggest move that a show could do (Stringer Bell), but what about if the character Tyrion died in the second book of the series? Must suck to be the writers have to say goodbye to the guy who's carrying the show, right? An added wrinkle to this is that the series started after the first bunch of books were published, but then ended before the last book came out. The production of the two entities are braided in an interesting way.

I guess that in this case, it's to my benefit that I haven't read the books, because the surprises are still fun. This will be the one time that I support TV over the book, due to fantasy books being very much not for me.

The Boogieman is Real, I Saw Him Outside

Even though I don't post selfies of me in costumes at home in my apartment, I love Halloween about as much as anyone. It's my favourite holiday by a wide margin and even though it's corny, I will cop to getting warm feelings once the decorations come out and you start seeing people in costumes. Similarly to how I went through all the times I went to Warped Tour, I figured I would do a quick shot of all of my Halloween:

First Halloween out with my class. We all met in Andrew's basement and there were girls there too, which was exciting, but I was obviously so nervous about that. I had my worst costume ever, which was "Scream the Thug" wearing a ghostface mask with a toque over it.

Smoked a joint in the ravine while all of us were dressed up as Magnum PI. We didn't have a plan and mostly just roamed around the neighborhoud, eventually starting to stop on the way to get candy because we were high. An old lady got mad at us and told us that we were too old to trick or treat and didn't even have costumes. We told her we were Magnum P.I., but she just said that we had vandalized her lawn. (We didn't)

Dressed up as the MC Bat Commander, with a homemade mask and belt over my dad's windsurfing wetsuit. Went to hang out with Erik in East York. Some guy talked shit to us and said he was from the Dawes Road Crips before eventually jacking our candy. 

Blacktop Manhattan played a Halloween show and I dressed up as a hair metal guy. For some reason, I wore a sweat band under my wig and lost it that night.

In first year university, I re-did my hair metal costume with Brian joining me in it. Because I was now free to drink as much as I wanted and had unlimited booze available to me, I carried around a bottle of Jack Daniels all night and drank it straight. I got way too drunk, was hungover for three days, and had trouble swallowing food. Shortly after this night, I converted to skinny jeans full-time.

I made a Skeletor costume out of a hoodie I bought at Value Village and did my own makeup. It looked super shitty, but I liked it. Smoked a joint in a very fancy SUV.

Started to think of my costumes early in the year. Pat, Brian, and I went as B4-4 at Logan Street. Everyone still asks me to send this photo to them.

Started to watch old WWF Coliseum Home Video tapes and went as the early 90s WWF as a group. I was Macho, with Hulk, the Ultimate Warrior, Roddy Piper, and Bret Hart. Brian and I won a game of beer pong on the last shot and Brian ripped his shirt open as he sank the winning shot. I threw a necklace in celebration and it hit a girl in the face.

Went as Finn the Human while in the deepest part of my Adventure Time obsession, which I've already talked about here. Pat as Darth Vader in a fedora is the best costume that ever has or will exist. The two of us were the only high ones at the party and that was very funny to us.

Thought of going as Riff-Raff on the day of a Halloween cover show. Drew the cornrows onto a bald cap and did the tattoos with a sharpie. The Decay as the Misfits, Congratulations as Taking Back Sunday, Teen Violence as the Ramones, and Mighty Atom as the Stooges. Rebecca went as Lil' Debbie in our only ever couples costume. 

Couldn't think of a costume all day. Vanja taught his class as a monk, and Coni hers as Andy Warhol. I held up a piece of paper that said I was "too po-mo for a costume" which is actually maybe my worst costume. Almost went to Abstract that night and was scrambling at the last second. JK suggested I wear a Jays jersey over a Raps jersey over a Leafs jersey and go as the Toronto kid. I ended up wearing a satin jacket that said "Alberta" over a lifeguard pinnie as "Chad the Lifeguard from Alberta", which was good for the last second, I think.

We hosted a party at our apartment and I dressed up as Pierre, while he dressed up as me. It was cute, though there was probably a better way to do the face makeup.

First Halloween in Montreal and I decided to just make a basic skeleton costume my go-to moving forward. Went to a concert at a goth bar and it was fun. A guy drank a bottle of beer through a straw, under an open umbrella indoors. 

Anecdotes! Anecdotes! Part 2007

The latest in the torrential downpour of bad news over the last two years? Club Super Sexe burned down!

I kid. 1. It's been more than 10 years since I've been to a titty bar and I've never gone to Super Sexe and 2. The club has been closed for ages (I don't care enough to look up how long).

Still, Club Super Sexe is a hilarious integral part of Montreal history and the city's weird-ass identity. I remember driving by the club on a coach bus while coming into the city for New Year's Eve in grade 12 and just thinking "What the fuck is this place?" When I heard the news about the club, I was reminded of the story that Super Sexe always reminds me of, so I guess that warrants an A! A! post.

That same New Year's Eve trip I just mentioned was organized by the high school that all of my friends went to. It almost felt like a class trip, except that we were all out on our own and, being 17, were looking to drink constantly.* Having this amount of freedom was so new and exciting to us. After seeing the façade of the club on the way in, the idea of actually going there became a topic of conversation for the rest of the weekend, even though none of the people I was hanging out with had fake IDs to get in.

*This trip was the first time that I got too drunk.

However, a room of jocks from the school that we were hanging out with did have fakes and decided to go there the first night of the trip. At the time I felt so insecure because it seemed crazy to me that they were going to a strip club at our age, but in hindsight they were definitely such an awkward group of tiny boys in there.

The next day we were all hungover and everyone did a circuit through the hotel to visit everyone's rooms and talk about what they had done the night before. Chris and I went to go see Damien, who was staying with these bros and while we were there they filled us in about what it was like going to Super Sexe. One of the guys, Tom, had this very low, monotone voice that made most things he said sound funny.* His recap of the night was"

"Man, I was sitting there and the girl's pussy was right in my face. It was awesome."

His voicing of that will stick in my head forever and it still makes me laugh

*I got to know Tom a little better later because we both worked at Ontario Place, albeit in different departments. A fantastic dude.

Watched Dune last weekend and it rocked. I don't really have the eternal bond to the book that most fans do, but it is a great piece of sci-fi and does have the "it" factor that makes books stick with you. My dad has mentioned that when he was younger and both sci-fi and fantasy were still decades away from being mainstream cool, that Dune and Lord of the Rings were the two books that were these word-of-mouth interesting things you would hear about and have to read. For whatever reason, I really like that and it informs my enjoyment of both books a lot. Anyways, the movie rocked.

The other day, I was linked to the short Nicole through the Humourism newsletter. It's super funny and hits this exact sweet spot of great comedians making shorts as they emerge. Hard to describe why I like that so much, but I do. Please enjoy this very funny short film.

Nicole from edy modica on Vimeo.

Anecdotes! Anecdotes! Part 4: The Final Chapter

 With Halloween, my favourite holiday of the year, approaching and the word "undertaker" being mentioned on a podcast today, I was reminded of a story from when I younger.

One Halloween, my sister, two boys from my neighbourhood Chris and Vito, and I were playing in our street's park before we would go back to our houses to get our costumes ready. I'm not sure how old I was, but I do know that I was old enough to go trick or treating by myself that night, and to hopefully to fulfill my obligation as a suburban preteen boy by causing light mayhem*, but also still young enough that I was in my neighbourhood park.

*My friends and I always acted like we were crazy, but the only thing we ever egged was a moving GoTrain.

My sister would be trick or treating with my dad, but the rest of us were trying to plan out our night. Vito's house would be hosting a haunted house in their garage, which we knew would be fun, but we also wanted to make sure we got out and walked around, both to see and be seen and to get candy, which I guess was also a mark of how young I still was, as I was definitely looking forward to eating candy constantly for the next week. We were especially excited by the fact that Vito had bought a replica Freddy Krueger glove, which seemed like the coolest costume prop in the world, even though none of us had seen any of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.

As we were hanging out, this random kid walked down the street and approached us. He had long hair covered by a David Foster Wallace bandana, a plain black t-shirt with the word "undertaker" spelled out in cut-out white paper and taped on, and talked like Dooley from King of the Hill. We talked for a little bit and then he tried to get us to guess what his costume. I assumed that dressing up as the wrestler the Undertaker by wearing a shirt that just had that word taped onto it was too impossibly stupid so we tried other things. After a few minutes, he said "I'll make this a little more obvious" and took out a pair of aviator sunglasses and put them on Caruso style, which didn't help us at all. I eventually asked "Are you the Undertaker?" and couldn't believe that I was right.

This has to be the worst costume I have even seen. A bandana, a pair of sunglasses, and a t-shirt with the person's named taped to it. Unbelievable. For this reason though, it also just the best. I feel like I love shitty Halloween costumes, and in my opinion any homemade costumes trumps every store-bought one. Probably my favourite Halloween costume of all-time is the time my friend Pat wore a cheap sequined silver fedora on top of a Darth Vader mask and went as "Darth Vader in a fedora".* Maybe this guy is where that interest started?

*We were high both when we thought of this and when he wore it. No one else thought it was funny. At this party, I made my own Finn the Human costume and before we got there everyone said another guy had dressed up as him as well. When we got there, his was some fancy one he had bought at a store and mine was made out of a bathroom towel. It ruined his night and made me laugh so much.

When I got home that night, my sister told me that she had seen this guy again that night when she stopped by the haunted house at Vito. The guy just held out the glove and said "Freddy Krueger." He loves naming characters!

Benadryl Submarine

This past weekend, Becks and I went drove to their parents' cottage for the Thanksgiving long weekend. While seeing them, the house music is always one of our priorities as they will play a combination of generic classical, CBC news, and choir music continuously when left to their own devices, and that drives us up the wall. They are amenable to our music choices when we put them on, but seem averse to any sort of pop music otherwise. Weird right? 

 We went through our usual choices for them, like 60s folk and soul music, but eventually ran out of choices and just searched for a "Family Thanksgiving" playlist on Spotify. Unsurprisingly, a few came up right away and were basically exactly what we were looking for, giving a mix of gentle 70s and 80 pop and soul stuff that is more or less amenable to everyone. White middle class people are nothing if not predictable. 

 One of the songs that was deep in the playlist, past when everyone was paying attention to what was being played, was a cover of the Foo Fighters' "Everlong" by Mac DeMarco, which I enjoyed and made me reflect on the song. I loved the Foos when I was just getting into rock music as a preteen, but mostly fell out with them as I got more streamlined in my punk taste. I kind of hate their current status as the last big rock band and the more gimmicky stuff they do (like Dave Grohl playing on a throne) doesn't do anything for me. Really, I guess this dislike is also around Grohl being worshipped as this rock god by their fans. It's weird? 

 Anyways, amidst all this I've still really liked "Everlong". It's basically a perfect rock song. It's got a bit of a second-wave emo vibe to it and I think it's the only song of theirs that reflects the fact that two of the members came from Sunny Day Real Estate. My friends and I were introduced to the band through their "All My Life" video being in rotation on muchmusic, so "Everlong" was this really cool older song that was fun to discover after the fact. And the video! It's probably one of my favourite music videos and is the perfect compliment to the song, even if I don't really know why. 

 Since I apparently have this long relationship with "Everlong" by the Foo Fighters, here are three episodes in that story:

 

One of the highlights of my teenage years was Cardinal Newman High School's yearly Talent Night, when pretty much every person I knew would group themselves into bands so that they could play two or three covers at the show. One of the most fun bands every year was (Party) Pat, one of my very best friends, playing with Nick, Dave, and James.* This group covered "Everlong" at the show, with Nick singing, and it kind of became his thing, so much so that when we were at a Supernova show to see our friends and saw one of the other bands cover the song, we were all like "You guys are biting Nick's style!"

*I think their band name was Captain Destruction and the Bunsen Burners? If not, that pretty close.

I met my friend Brian during my first week at Guelph and we instantly bonded over our interest in music. The vast majority of our nights in residence involved the two of us hanging out in his room listening to and sharing music and those are memories that I really value. His favourite band at the time (maybe still) was the Foo Fighters and he was on a quest all year to track down every song, b-side, and rarity that he could on blogs. "Everlong" was his favourite song and whenever anyone had a guitar at a party, he would immediately say "Play 'Everlong'." The Foo Fighters toured Canada during the spring we were at school and a group of guys all went to Brian's hometown of London to watch them play and stay at his house.

During the summer of 2017, one of Rebecca's friends got married in Italy, so we organized a trip to Europe for the two of us around the wedding. Surprisingly, probably the most fun part of the trip was spending time in the small-er Italian city the wedding was taking place in, Pescara, and seeing a very non-touristy part of the country. One night, we discovered a punk bar called POST and had a great time hanging out there. It felt comforting to spend time somewhere that equally reminded you of the parts of home you're familiar with, but also is different enough to be a new experience.

The bartender, who I assume was also one of the owners, was playing music that night by putting on Youtube videos on the bar's TVs and one of them was a 1997 live performance of "Everlong" on Letterman. When the owner overheard me doing my white male duty and talking about how the original Foo rhythm section came from Sunny Day Real Estate, he came over and gave us a free round of shots. Never underestimate the value of obscure emo knowledge. I think about this night all the time, especially because after "Everlong" he pivoted to a full-album video of Sixteen Stone by Bush (Bush X if you're nasty) and when I saw a METZ sticker on the bar and tried to engage with him about how they were from Toronto, he said their new album sucked. Basically everything I could ask for from a European exprience.

Man, it's pretty crazy how good of a performance that is, eh? The drumming! The back-up vocals! Them not being a stadium rock band!

Somehow Don't Seem to Matter Much Anymore

You ever think about how weird it is that I've consistently written here, even though people saying anything back to me about it happens like once every two years? I feel like it's fair to quantify 10+ years of me blogging here as yelling into the void, but is it? I don't think that I treat this like a diary though, where it's just me ejecting my feelings and emotions out into the internet, which is I guess the purpose of writing into the void? In my mind that seems like the purpose of a diary blog, but that's also open to interpretation too. I don't necessarily advertise this place, but I don't hide it either. So it's somewhere between a diary and a public website? I thought of this as being a short nothing post, as they used to make up a huge portion of the entries here. Almost no text and no substance. Mission accomplished!

But Here I Am

 Feasting on music seems to come and go. Some weeks, it feels like all I do is listen to podcasts as I finish work or do chores and this, for some reason, makes me feel extremely guilty? If I'm such a huge music fan, then why am I not constantly consuming new records? I have lots of time to listen while I work from home and Spotify now puts basically all of the history of music at my disposal, so by my logic it is a gigantic failure of mine and a glaring sign of hypocrisy and weakness that I am not more of an expert.

Fortunately, I'm in a feast phase now and all of those feelings are gone until next week. We're riding high baby!

Mo Troper recently released a single from his forthcoming album and the story about it made me go back and check out some of his older material, both because of the namechecking of Guided by Voices, an IMU fav, and the Expendables reference.* Turns out it rocks! The aesthetic is pretty perfect, both visually and sonically and the songs really hit this need I have to hear a jangly major key chorus about people being stupid that I have at all times. The discography has been a joy to get into so far, so rather than the new tune, here is a fav from the old stuff:

*Look, we're not getting into here, but the Expendables might be the most underrated film franchise in history.

It turns out that when I read music blogs, I often end up finding things that I really like!

Pop-punk is something that I feel very conflicted about liking. It was such a huge part of me finding my own musical identity as a young boy and then I loved the first wave of easycore bands so much (in hindsight, sigh). That being said, the pop-punk revival during the last decade really didn't click with me at all and a lot of the bands I liked in 2009, I really started to hate in 2015. Also, like 90% of the bands who played pop-punk were fucking shitty creeps. Could we have just traded in 2014-18 for another Fireworks record?

That all being said, sometimes a pop-punk song hits me in a way that I just can't get anywhere else. I know most of the genre truly sucks, but the highs satisfy this crazy hunger I have for the genre and it drives me to just pump a song on repeat, which I almost never do. Cue this Heart Attack Man song. I had been meaning to check out their 2015 record Fake Blood for a minute, but I think this is what I really want from them. The video also makes me so hype on the song and I can't think of why. Maybe it's the Sugar shirt? 

Lastly, one of my favourite bands from my Southern Ontario heyday was Windsor's Shared Arms. Probably the most skatepunk of all of them, and the most shreddy, but they were so melodic and fun. Shoutout to Kyle's welcome home show in Guelph with them, Junior Battles, the Decay, and Wayfarer. A superbill if there ever was one. Their guitarist Jesse now makes solo guitar pop like Supercrush or Young Guv. It rocks!

Shouldn't Let This Get to Me

 Duff came through big rec in our music exchange this week, giving Crash of Rhinos' second album Knots.

We've recently been focusing on emo, which started a few weeks ago when Duff remarked that he had re-visited Braid's Frame and Canvas for the first time in a while and was pleased to see it hold up as well as it did.* Emo is one of our biggest overlaps in music and in a genre that is hard to define sonically and has so many different parts and eras, we tend to agree more than we disagree, being picky about 2nd wave, missing the 3rd wave, and gravitating towards the fourth wave. I think it's also important that this overlap in emo taste was a huge contributing factor to the way that we wrote songs together in Beat Noir. We had the same vocabulary when it came to putting parts together, especially on Sovereignties.

*Duh

This all being said, we've both drifted away from the genre recently, as I don't think either of would say that any emo releases from the last five years have really stuck with us. The last one I really liked was probably Oliver Houston's Whatever Works? I feel like emo, pop-punk, and orgcore have slowly merged into one genre that kept some of the fans of those genres, but in my opinion lost everything that appealed to me from each of them. I also just grew out it too. I still love emo music and will check out new stuff, but I'm also too old for the GothBoiClique stuff and pretending I'm into it would just be posing. I don't want to be a 35-year-old who still deeply relates to American Football, but at the same time, a lot of emo music was super important to me for a long time and I can respect that.

Anyways, Crash of Rhinos was great, if a little long. IMO, if your punk album is over 35 minutes, it better be extremely ambitious and have a lot of stuff holding it together. BUT, the main thing that I thought about while listening to it was that since the 4th wave of emo is now over, I feel like I can say with hindsight that it was absolutely the best iteration of the genre. From my perspective, it took all the best parts of older emo, the DIY hardcore ethos of the first wave, the open-tuning guitar riffs of the second, and the hooks of the third, while (mostly) doing away with the over-the-top corniness that plagues the genre.

As always, the ending is the ending.

Anecdotes! Anecdotes! Part 48

Original beginning to this post:

As I said in my last post, I've been reflecting on Ontario Place a lot lately.

New, updated beginning to this post:

Two weeks ago, I was thinking about Ontario Place a lot and the draft for this post was still here!

Really though, I think this anecdote is really about the school year starting and new students doing their orientation, so maybe it's actually more relevant now than the time when I wrote down a few notes.

At Ontario Place we would have a wide variety of groups that would have their "days" at the park. Caribbean groups would come through during Caribana. Muslim groups would come through for, I think, Eid. Etc. Etc. In hindsight, there were actually few days during the summer that didn't have a special theme or group coming. I think that it might have been because the park was run so badly, and management was scrambling to get as many people into the park as possible. Did Canada's Wonderland have themed days every summer? Were they successful enough not to?

One that I happened to remember and that gave me a full body cringe when I did was when the University of Toronto's Engineering School (*deeply sighs* I hate that I know about Skule) came to do its Frosh activities at the park. I was standing at the back of the splashpad when a group of like eight new students led by a senior walked by and decided to use the area to do one of their challenges. 

Having lived with an engineer at Guelph for two years and being close friends with another at UofT during my youth, I feel like I have a deep knowledge of what most engineers are like, which is to say that I know why they suck and are annoying. There's this strange duality instilled in them by those older than them that engineers are not only smarter than everyone at the university (they're not), which makes them the most important people at the school, but they also party very hard (they don't). On one hand, they believe they are these crucial people that make everything that matters in the world happen, but on the other they truly see themselves as the same as the bros and jocks at the school. They believe that everyone wants to know them and be them, but in my experience no one wants to do either. So, even though they're dorks, they believe that everyone sees them as the cool bros at the school, because they have no self-awareness. 

On this day, the challenge that they had to do was, I think, take a video of them singing in public. Wow! Isn't that crazy! Can you believe how cool engineers are? The senior gave the camera to a younger student, got up on a bench with water jets on it near me on the splashpad, and then sang a rendition of "I Want It that Way" by the Backstreet Boys.* At the time, the song was having this moment of being an ironic thing with bros. They would sing it because they totally weren't gay bro. And being sensitive is also gay bro. It was super obnoxious 

*This is the first I've listened to this song what's gotta be ten years. Is it good? The chorus is undeniably cheesy, but the rest kind of fucks. I legit can't tell how I feel about it. Also who is the coolest one? Like, AJ is obvi the "cool one", but can any other member challenge him for the title? I don't think so.

What was weird though was that it was obvious that to some degree this senior didn't even want to do this. He was clearly doing it because he knew that's how cool loud bros acted and not because he actually thought that him doing an overly sincere version of "I Want It That Way" was funny. Masculinity, it's a hell of a drug.

Onto to good music. For some weird reason, I've associated these bands with each other even though, from what I can tell, they have nothing to do with one another (aside from both being on Run for Cover Records). Pairing two bands like this is something that I've done in the past, so I guess I'm just continuing that trend here. Both are post-hardcore, I guess, though two very different permutations of it. One a lot closer to hardcore like Turning Point, the other more Revolution Summer, but sounding contemporary. Excited for both of these records.