Musical Calendar Eras ft. Guest Host Zac Little! - #POGOBAT
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Intro by Rob Scallon
http://www.youtube.com/user/robs70986987
Metadata by Pat Graziosi:
http://www.youtube.com/user/PatDoesIt
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Rough Transcript:
I was thinking about the band
Midtown the other day. They were a pop-punk band in the late 90s and early aughts maybe most famous or infamous for spinning off into
Cobra Starship-you know, that joke rock band with the-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRYNYb30nxU no, the other guys. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV24FN4rDzE
Right, them. But the less said about
Cobra Starship the better.
Midtown was a band formed by three dudes at
Rutgers, and they made two PERFECT pop-punk records:
Save The World,
Lose The Girl in
2000 and
Living Well Is
The Best Revenge in
2002. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_on46G1ybI
Even as an eighth grader with mostly terrible taste I was discerning enough to realize that most of the bands of that era--this is right after
Blink-182 got huge and a rising tide lifted a lot of boats that all had like, a bass player with pink hair--most of the bands of that era were basically derivative of
NOFX. I don't know what the age demographics of this channel are--so maybe I should find a contemporary analogue. I guess it is like how
Justin Bieber and
One Direction are fundamentally derivative of
Usher. I think that analog works-- NOFX to Usher? Just remove all body hair and jump nine socioeconomic brackets. Midtown was different. There was some
Green Day in there, sure, but they stood out against the horde.
Thick sounding chords, thick-sounding voices. Like a voice that came from a thick neck, you know? And as a haver of a thick neck I appreciated it
. None of it sounds surprising or original now, but I'm telling you 13 years ago it did. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-5VaygBX8E
A few years ago, I realized that the early-aughts
Pop Punk world was divided into two eras: Before
Deja Entendu, and After Deja Entendu.
It's june 2003--exactly ten years ago--and a sixteen year old Zac
Little (that's me by the way) A sixteen year old Zac Little catches the tail end of a music video on
MTV2 (back then, they still played videos on MTV2!) for a song called "
The Quiet Things That
No One Ever Knows." And it knocks his fucking head off of his shoulders. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgtkPKZ2OPk
Deja Entendu was a game-changing record. It swapped out the candy-colored, funny and vulgar Blink-182 aesthetic for something dark and portentous and
EPIC. That's like, right when we started using the word epic so often.
Coincidence!? I
THINK PROBABLY, yeah. But honestly, this record was huge. My friends and I obsessed over it, my girlfriend and I pretentiously dry-humped to it, and the pop-punk universe re-aligned itself around it. And a lot of bands broke apart against the force of its gravitational pull. Like MIDTOWN. They released a pale imitation of Deja Entendu in 2004, called
Forget What You Know, which I think was what they told themselves as they entered the studio. It wasn't awful but it wasn't great, but it effectively ended the band, and the remains that washed ashore slouched toward
Bethlehem and became Cobra Starship. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV24FN4rDzE
Deja Entendu is probably the most important record of my life, but it is not the most important one because it is my favorite.
Far from my favorite, really. It's just the one that I understand everything else in terms of. I do still listen to those Midtown records, but I understand them differently than I once did. It's fitting that there's an astronaut on the cover of this record because that is kind of what it was like for me--being an astronaut. You go, and then you come back, but you're different. One way that you are different is that you are kind of an asshole for a while. Definitely true for all of us who were held too hard in the sway of Deja for too long. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3YVKTxTOgU
But I realize this might be only specific for like, a hundred people. Or maybe just me. After all-- I was 16 at the time. And that is a very dangerous time in your cultural life, you know?
You have to step carefully, or you'll come across a book or a movie or a band that will completely alter your entire life.
Maybe we all have our own calendar eras--there are people for whom
Rilo Kiley's "
More Adventurous" realigned their cultural universe.
For some, maybe it's
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. There are probably a few people left for whom it was
Weezer's
Pinkerton, but most of those people have killed themselves by now, to be honest. So what was your musical birth of christ? What record realigned your world? Was it
Brand New fir you, too? were you and i pretentiously dry humping at the same time? Do you feel like it is happening to you right now?
Talk to me about it.