A friend shared a meme the other day that hit home. “If you spend all day browsing memes about being sad, depressed, and alone,” it read, “all you’re doing is normalizing your antisocial behavior. You’re surrounding yourself with people who want you to fail like they have instead of trying to help you be better.” It rang true for this Millennial (and other post-whatevers). For us, digital echo chambers of ironic gloom provide the only bulwark against a world gone wrong. The meme also piqued my aural sense. I thought of the boundless trap-beat whines spilling out through teen’s first subwoofers and into bedroom-earbud soundscapes.
Lil Peep (may he rest in peace) took the current fashion of emo-heartthrob-whiteboy rappers to its soulful extreme. Unlike the joyful noise of such black emo revivalists as Princess Nokia, Peep proffered a Percocet-fueled “feels” binge. At its core stank a deathly solid desperation. In 2017, he died of a fentanyl overdose at his talent’s height. He became a sordid folk icon of post-Millennial despair. Less talented upstarts like Juice Wrld have since overtaken Peep’s prime position in young America’s playlist (often replacing junkie soul with pubescent woman-hating). But though memory wanes, Peep stoops giant-like over his progeny. With invisible finger he traces the genre’s doleful epigraph: “Better Off (Dying)”.
I don’t remember my adolescence being so damn serious. We nodded our emo hair-mops to shitty corporate bands. Now the fashion seems literally nodding out to an opiated Soundcloud haze. A democratization (in race and recording practices) made possible Peep’s fertile cross-genre pollination. But it’s also laid commercial waste to callow genres like pop-punk that older Millennials once used to groove out their angst.
Think-pieces proclaiming “Rock is dead” get endlessly paraded about. They’re often from white males demonstrating they’re down with the Cause in their woke fondness for XXXTentacion. But receded dominance isn’t death. Saying so smacks weirdly like some alt-right musical cultural displacement. There’s ways to avoid the resentment of , say, Morrissey (of “black pop conspiracy” fame). Andrew Savage, of Parquet Courts, has said that being out of the cultural limelight allows you to do things you couldn’t otherwise. With pop-punk, what maturing listeners didn’t actively repress out of memory was supplanted by changing taste. Still, pop-punk lifers are refining those once-maligned sounds under the blinkered shadows of good taste.
Without the austere capital-Punk rep to prove, pop-punkers prove remarkably gregarious. A Midwest girl caught my eye with her seemingly endless lineup of festival-won band tees and sweatshirts. Their style was clean lines and spry declarations such as “Comin’ Out Swinging” and “Champions of Pop Mos.” (I don’t know what that means) No Gothic bubble lettering or dull Hot Topic gloom. You’d almost peg it as square—but for her tasteful piercings hinting at an amiable edge. Though I lean towards noise-rock and scag-rappers, her energy enticed me.
We exchanged songs—I scrounged my memory for musical correlatives to prove I was hip. My sweet-ish post-hardcore choice cuts were perhaps too high-falutin’. She replied, “I like it. It’s got that pop-punk feel.” That “feel” cordially forgave my eagerness to please but also hinted at the real thing beyond. Reader, don’t blink if I espied a hunger for something akin to Dylan’s “thin, wild mercury sound.” I sensed a search for clean, clanging electric guitars propelling a nasally whine into that perfect, secret place.
That pep’s heightened verve feels like the clean wince of an Adderall binge. Where Peep and co. embrace the primordial gloom, pop-punk zooms on past. Psychologist Jamie Webster writes that stimulants are a way to “slip past both the pangs of conscience (for, say a missed deadline on a piece of work [read: fears of school]) and the fear of failure (because the work was late and also judged inadequate [Millennial fears of eventual career oblivion]). Or to put it in other terms, ADD medication creates a false ego-boost, a momentary halo of self-esteem.” I think the musical/medical comparison is revealing. I’d also say, though, that pop-punk isn’t so merely Webster’s denial of anxiety. It’s also an attempt to solidify that speedy, weightless state into a persistent ways of being.
My adolescent, corporate pop-punk got icky quick because its prepackaged angst cloyed atop lowest-common-denominator hooks. Then, we ate it up as MTV’s only apparently counter-cultural fare. Now, far from the limelight, bands on the pop-punk festival circuit rock to a more idiosyncratic beat. Free to choose their forbears, they make real pleasure out of those instantly recognizable riffs. When cultural stakes are high, the emulation of the influenced gets profoundly anxious. Modern pop-punker’s lineage feels more joyfully contingent.
Shows in medium-sized cities bring out small-town kids from hours’ distance away. The community feels akin to those based around big Dead cover bands. People come out to enjoy what they like and meet others who do the same. There’s little of straight Punk or indie shows’ hostile vibes and pretentious posturing. Everyone’s here with the object in mind.
The community has its assholes. In particular I’m reminded of one dude always bragging about shows he’s been to and constantly, alarmingly air-guitaring at direct crotch level. But in such a down-to-earth scene it’s rare to find such assholes itching to spill their reputational seed.
As with Beatlemania, the females perhaps are the real heroes of the scene. Guys just come afterwards and emptily posture. The big hooks certainly attract empty-headed teeny-boppers who’ll move on to Tame Impala and Bon Iver in college years. And the bands are shamefully over-saturated with males. But their angst also attracts a certain kind of girl developing a serious interior life. In days past she may have been limited in outlets for adolescent female angst. Now, with a collector’s zeal, she’ll track down latest releases, go to shows (asking off months in advance from her shit jobs), and recommend hot tracks to the curious. Disregarding censuring glances, like some punk-rock Gloria[1] she’ll keep alive the search for that clean, wild sound.
Cleveland’s Cloud Nothings were the band I originally traded in pursuit of the pop-punk pay dirt. They’re admittedly more a very melodic post-hardcore band. But they’re also my connective point to this music so many working kids love. Their earlier stuff like “Wasted Days” moshed out to such (seriously) essential realizations as “I thought I would be more than this.” 2017’s Life Without Sound slowed down the head-banging a bit. The lyrics made a case for existential pop-punk as viable genre. “I believe it’s time for coming out/ No use in life without sound/ Patiently waited alone but now/ Follow a line and sort it out.” It’s their 2019 song “In Shame,” though, where I most clearly feel pop-punk’s conflicted stakes. Frontman Dylan Baldi’s lyrics psychotically regress from the past album’s growth:
Don’t care about lying
If it’s what I like and it feels right
Don’t care about hurting
If it’s what I like and it turns to light
Just wanna have power
And feel like I’ve done it right
Just wanna be stronger
Than anyone on any night
It’s disturbing, but with the chorus’s sweet musical shift comes the truthful clincher: “They won’t remember my name/ I’ll be alone in my shame.” Baldi wraps his mouth deeply around each word with his distinctive glottal style. The word “shame” is delivered with delight like some long-awaited return of the repressed. But it’s not Peep’s perverse pleasure in self-harm. The clean, angular guitars allow Baldi a momentary release from conscience’s pangs. Speedy yet sober, the music’s swell occupies two contending poles. Baldi reaches arm-deep into the torrent. In doing so, the veil and furor inexplicably subside. It’s a fleeting few seconds on an overwhelmingly angry album. But when my pop-punk Virgil first described to me the feel, I think moments like that fueled her eye’s hungry fire.
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