This post is one of two posts I’m writing about pop-punk. The next one will be about “Black Eye” by Vernon. Thank you for reading!
I have this memory of when I was a teenager, sitting at a neighborhood park, listening to music on the loudest volume my ears could handle. I had just gotten into a fight with my mom and left the house fuming. I brought along my phone, my iPod Touch and earbuds, and my journal and pen.
My journal was a pocket-sized Moleskine and the leather cover made me feel like a proper writer, someone to be taken seriously. If I really wanted to, I could probably find the entry from that day, though it’s faded from memory. I don’t remember the argument or the circumstances. As time passes by, most of my teenagehood has blended together like this, eventually fading into a feeling rather than concrete events.
That feeling is largely anger. Anger and resentment, that frustration reserved for when you feel like no one understands you and all you desire is to run away, reinvent yourself into someone new who is untouchable.
I think about anger a lot. About the times I feel angry, how quick to anger I can get. I think about how anger is often the source of violence, physical and emotional. I’m often brought to tears with the magnitude of my anger. Anger feels ugly, a shameful and embarrassing feeling. I resent people who are angry at me and I resent myself for being angry in the first place.
As I’ve grown up, I’ve learned to accept my anger for what it is, rather than push it away. These days, I try to sit with it, feeling it but trying to not let it consume me.
But back then, my anger felt like the biggest part of me, except I couldn’t bear to sit with it. Anger is seen as a taboo emotion, and depending on who you are, thought to not be taken seriously. I felt silly when I was angry, that I felt so strongly about things and opinions that it made me mad. Like I’m being melodramatic.
And you know what’s melodramatic right beside me? Pop-punk songs.
That day at the park, through my earphones (the same model I still use to this day), I blasted All Time Low, my favorite band at the time. “Weightless” came on, and the chorus goes:
Maybe it's not my weekend,
But it's gonna be my year,
And I'm so sick of watching
While the minutes pass as I go nowhere.
And this is my reaction
To everything I fear,
'Cause I've been going crazy
I don't want to waste another minute here.
There was this moment of listening to it where I found myself actually believing the lyrics, processing my anger in a new light.
In pop-punk songs, the lyrics often have this honesty and directness to them, from “Perfect” by Simple Plan (“‘Cause we lost it all / Nothing lasts forever / I'm sorry / I can't be perfect”) to “What a Catch, Donnie” by Fall Out Boy (“I got troubled thoughts / And the self-esteem to match / What a catch, what a catch”). If you didn’t relate to these songs, you would write them off as dramatic or too much.
But that’s exactly what I needed at the time. At an age when I was feeling so much, having a song express the things I was feeling, at the same intensity I was feeling it, brought validity to my emotions. I didn’t have the self-awareness to know how to sit with my anger, so this is how I processed instead. Simple Plan was right. I’m just a kid and life is a nightmare!
I’m not as engaged with the genre as I once was, but recently, nostalgia got to me and I found myself re-listening to a lot of the groups I used to love. And the one band that has always stood the test of time is Paramore.
As a teen, my favorite Paramore song was “Ignorance,” off their third album, Brand New Eyes. It’s loud, angry, and unrelenting, with lyrics like: “Yeah, we used to stick together / We wrote our names in blood / But I guess you can't accept that the change is good.” My favorite Paramore album was Riot!, the album that gave us the icon, “Misery Business.” When talking about the album, Hayley Williams said, “For us, the title ‘Riot!' literally means an unbridled outburst of emotions. When we were writing, it seemed like our thoughts and emotions were coming out so fast that we couldn't control them. It felt like there was a riot within us." It’s filled with raw energy, imbued with anger and angst.
Paramore’s latest album, This Is Why, is, understandably, a departure from that sound of 2007, but it’s not less raw or emotional. The album is so much about frustration at the world, at yourself, at feeling left out and finding ways to process this feeling of impending doom that is a constant nowadays. But in the bridge of “C’est Comme Ça” (a French phrase that translates to ‘it is what it is’), there’s an acknowledgment of emotional growth: “I know that regression is rarely rewarded / I still need a certain degree of disorder / I hate to admit gettin' better is boring / But the high cost of chaos, who can afford it?”
Riot! is for when I’m 16 on a park bench, wanting to seethe in my anger, music blasting at a nearly painful volume. This Is Why is for when I’m 25 and knowing that damn, I’m not a kid but life is still a nightmare, but I can’t let that feeling consume me anymore.
The ten-year anniversary of Paramore’s self-titled album just happened earlier this month. In one of the interludes, Hayley Williams sings, “I’m not angry anymore / Well, sometimes I am.”
And aren’t we all?
Some recs:
Beef
In a post about anger, I’d be remiss to not mention Beef, the latest Netflix show dominating the streaming charts. Much of the show is about anger, and subsequently, catharsis.
This scene from Little Women (2019), where Marmee talks to Jo about her anger
Thank you for reading! Stay tuned for my related post about “Black Eye” by Vernon (finally!!). You can find my previous post here: March Wrapped.
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