There’s a time and place for self-serious, vaguely emo music about escaping your hometown. Early spring… can be that time?
When a band at the basement show last Saturday begins to play the opening riff of American Football’s “Never Meant,” I, along with a handful of Carhartt-and-flannel-clad comrades in the crowd, let out a good-natured groan. We are engaging in a time-honored tradition, signaling to each other that we understand references and memes and connotations. This is secret code for the insufferable; we all know which songs to roll our eyes at.
“Midwest emo” is an easy target. Unabashedly theatrical and very frequently whiny, it suffers from a mostly-accurate association with juvenile melodrama, shitty beer, and — yes — sweaty indie shows in basements. Go figure. Yet there’s something so undeniable about it, something so frustratingly infectious about its particular shade of gray-green Americana. I listen, indulgently, and find myself relating vividly to experiences that couldn’t be further from my own. I do not live in an Ohio suburb or feel like an outcast at my high school or craft grand plots with my misfit friends to run away and start a band. It shouldn’t work; imagery so niche shouldn’t be accessible to everyone, at least not on such a personal, lifelike level. But somehow I’m convinced that this picture of adolescence could resonate, at least in some small, nagging way, with everyone who has been a teenager in America.
When partying was new and exciting for me, when cigarettes were not mundane and hangovers made me feel like a movie character, I would listen to “Joe Gets Kicked Out of School” by Car Seat Headrest (Midwest Emo for the next generation?) every Saturday or Sunday morning heading home from wherever my crash pad had been the previous night. I fancied myself a whole lot more daring and precarious than I was, pretending to be unstable, to be teetering on some edge of lawless abandon rather than engaging in banal teenage revelry on a semi-regular basis. I was perfectly, underwhelmingly fine; but in my head, I got to try my hand at being the disheveled, messy-sexy fan favorite of some cult teen film, the bad influence I never was, the problem child.
As I got older and it all got a bit more real, as I was introduced to consequences and what was once so thrillingly uncommon became routine, the movie magic faded. (Ironically, that feeling is what “Joe Gets Kicked Out of School” is actually about: “Last Friday I took acid and mushrooms / I did not transcend, I felt like a walking piece of shit / in a stupid fucking jacket.”) Perhaps, though, this desensitization was just the next flavor of my dramatics, the second season of the show I was starring in; the one where my choices worsen and their payoff decreases, where I try to recreate all of the intrigue and excitement and end up exhausted or (even better) damaged. As long as there’s a soundtrack!
I would be a better person if I could stop looking at myself from a bird’s-eye view. If I could find a way to come down. I’ve struggled in unoriginal and pathetic ways and forced — encouraged? allowed? — myself to view them as unique, beguiling, and cinematic. I have spent so much time in my head singing so many of the same songs. I’ve filmed and re-filmed my fake scenes; I can play these parts perfectly now, to a tee; and absolutely no one is watching. I am not a Sally Rooney protagonist or Effy Stonem; my entanglements and relationships and all of my mistakes are not things that people care to see. There is nothing aspirational or surprising here; and there never was, not for these characters, either, had they not been artfully framed and filmed and packaged to young female viewers like myself as pre-made icons of transgressive, tortured hotness. All of the black eyeliner and bad nights in the world can’t color my utterly unoriginal, all-too-frequently self-inflicted problems meaningful. No matter how thin I am. No matter how little I speak.
Let me be clear: this is more than a comfort to me. It’s a lifeline. It’s the coming of spring.
“April is the cruellest month.” I am on an empty trolley, alone in the early hours of what promises to be another rainy, green-tinted Sunday. I’ve spent most of my life claiming to hate springtime; I always said that it was my least favorite season, taking the opportunity to wax poetic about autumn and snow and all that is moody and intense and cold. But this year, spring comes quiet and steady for me like a godsend. I am a half-dead body covered in cold dirt, layers of it crushing against my chest and soaking deep into my brittle bones; March rain, gentle and lovely, washes it away. I am desperate for warmth in a way that I have never been. I am dried-out and numb, lips chapped and hands shaky; I am sick and crawling across the ground.
Maybe we’re all seventeen in Ohio. Maybe we are all drunk and crying in the kitchen by the keg after the football game. We are searching, desperately, for recognition. That’s all we know how to ask for — we can’t yet fathom being understood. We are all actors. We’re all directors. We find playing along to be quietly, deeply exhausting in ways that we can’t even put to words. So we dream of starting over as someone else, of boarding morning trains with hastily packed bags and leaving whoever it was that we used to be behind so very flippantly, letting it all go to Hell without a glance in the rearview mirror like some cathartic “fuck you” to everything that ever made us feel so watched, so analyzed and on display, that we were forced to put on such a grueling show. A few of us will really do it; a few more will never even get the chance. Most of us will make it halfway, land somewhere in the middle and build a house by the highway and plant an oak tree and try our best. There is nothing unique about this. It is mundane and heartbreaking and it is beautiful and it is growing up.
There are crocuses in my garden now. Daffodils strain against their buds, waiting for their cue to douse the yard in yellow. The air in the city smells like lilacs and rubber. I notice that I can breathe.
"Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice." F. Scott Fitzgerald