"....Some of them were deeply into drugs, others were unbelievable workaholics. Some were going to singles bars every night. You could see it played out in twenty different ways, but it's the same thing."
A sommelier can, from a single sip of wine, tell you where the grapes were grown. Not just a general idea, but often a specific vineyard, and, with some potentially dubious cases, the exact location within that vineyard. The wine is truly a product of its birthplace, and it carries within itself the qualities of that place, a marker of the place of time from which it sprung.
In the same way, I think, certain musicians carry markers of where they're from - not necessarily their place of birth, but where the grew up, and where they truly found their home.
So there's a new Fantastic Four movie coming our way. The casting news released a few months ago caused a typhoon of nerd outrage on the internet, with the African American Michael B. Jordan cast as the not-traditionally African American Johnny Storm, a.k.a The Human Torch. Teeth were gnashed, garments torn, and the online comics community proved, once more, why no one takes it seriously1
. All that said, I too was generally disappointed in the casting for the Fantastic Four, though my problem is not that Michael B. Jordan is black. The problem is he's too damn young.
I'm finding, more and more, that adult life gets rough: it's important to keep in mind the things that make it worthwhile. The things that bring you joy, peace, or satisfaction. To do anything else is to descend into cynicism and pessimism, to fall victim to the default setting of work-eat-sleep-repeat. As the Hold Steady said, it's important to start things with a positive jam.
Off the bat, this isn't a new song by any means. In fact, it's a decade old at this point, released back when I was a mere Freshman in High School. And it's a song that would have spoken volumes to insecure little Freshman-me, alive with the glory of punk and teenage rebellion. But 10 years and several doses of reality later, I can't get this song out of my head. For starters, it's just plain good: catchy as hell, with a slow build to a final verse that feels triumphant and cathartic. I've never been a massive Say Anything fan, but "...is a Real Boy" is an absolute classic, one of the hidden gems of the early 2000s, lost among the mess of Fall Out Boy, Good Charlotte, and My Chemical Romance.
But good songs don't necessarily stick with you. I like to think that things get stuck in your head for a reason greater than chord progressions (though, who knows, maybe I'm looking for meaning in all the wrong places). But I think what gets me about this song is the simple, emotional honesty of it all. It's in the first line - "Here I am, laid bare, at the end of my rope". That kind of honesty is hard to come by in all the posturing of modern music - it's certainly not something that comes naturally to me. But maybe it's something that should.
It's a punk rock anthem about how he knows that the simple act of writing this song will ruin his chances with Molly, but he goes ahead and does it anyway. Because what else would he do? How could he be anything other than himself?
