Wow, do you guys still check this blog or is it obsolete now?
Music is forever and so is our passion for it. I certainly hope it’s never going to be obsolete!
The archive is here for everyone to read up on hundreds of takes on our collective musical passions and stories of fandom.
But it's been (oh god) five years since the last regular entries, so it is difficult to argue against this blog being inactive. Sorry! I wish it were "2012 on Tumblr" forever, but (music) blogging is almost entirely not a thing anymore, (music) writing is on life support, and social media's never been less social. But at least the Dow hit 50,000 points for the first time ever!
Maybe one day the empire of dirt that the internet was turned into will collapse upon itself and we'll feel like getting together to have fun on here again. Until then, keep the music playing. x
Hello, don’t know if this page’s admins are still active or around, but I really had to say this.
Found your page when I was reading some lyrics a couple of days ago. I’ve read all your Strokes’ post. Biiig fan of the strokes and I must say I’ve enjoyed each post and I’d like to thank you :)
I miss feeling like someone shares the deep feelings towards The Strokes like mine.
Hey, thank you so much!
Really appreciate you taking the time to write in; that is so lovely to hear. We are not dead, we're just… perma-napping. The archives are still around for people to dig in and read more about music & fandom.
And whenever someone's excited to talk in detail about a particular musical passion, we're still here and happy to offer a platform. Just get in touch.
The End! (And Jeff Rosenstock’s Continuing Solo Career)
Well, that’s it for me! Thanks for reading all (or even some of) my fawning over Bomb The Music Industry! I hope you enjoyed it and that it encouraged you to check out the band! And if you like them, it’s also worth hearing the Arrogant Sons of Bitches’ Three Cheers For Disappointment, as well as the stuff from Jeff Rosenstock’s solo career. I’ve listened to almost all his solo albums at least once, and my favourites so far are probably We Cool?, POST-, and last year’s No Dream. I hope he keeps doing what he’s doing; he’s a true talent, and in a world that often seems increasingly dominated by commercialism and selfishness-posing-as-virtue, we need singers and songwriters like him.
Here you can find all of this week’s post in chronological order.
Never Get Tired: The Bomb The Music Industry! Story
As I mentioned, there was a BTMI! documentary directed by Sara Crow, released after they broke up. Titled Never Get Tired, it follows the band from their early days to the end of the Vacation tour and does a good job of summing up Jeff’s vision for the band. There’s a lot of great concert footage in it, and I was shocked (and envious) to learn that Jeff is one of those songwriters for whom every part of a song comes together at once in his head before he writes/plays it. Never Get Tired can be seen for $5 here: http://www.nofuturefilms.com/
There’s a lot of clichés about artists burning out just as they come through with their brightest work, and in some people’s version of this story, that might be the frame for Vacation, BTMI!’s final album before breaking up. Personally, I’ve never bought into those monomyth-esque narratives about bands’ inherent career arcs, and so I’m not inclined to view the album this way. I will say that while I absolutely love it, I don’t think it’s necessarily the band’s best album. It’s also just not accurate to think that this was a point of “burning out” for BTMI!, since Jeff started writing for his solo career almost immediately following the band’s dissolution.
Still, Vacation does hew eerily close to a lot of these rock ‘n’ roll archetypes. It was a momentous album, it was probably the most publicized release the band had seen, it represented a new musical direction that seemed to present itself as the summary of Jeff’s experimentation with genre and songform over the rest of the band’s career, and the band very much did break up after its release (although, as with ASOB, it took a few years for that to become official).
About that publicization: while I’m somewhat sad that I missed out on most of BTMI!’s career (being, you know, too young to go to shows or even think much about punk for the first 5-ish years), I’m still glad I found them when I did, because the build-up to the release of Vacation was a really interesting time to be a fan. In 2010, almost a year before the release, the band began a roll-out of singles to get people excited about the new material, and it worked like a charm on me: the boisterous first single “Everybody That You Love” seemed like a sign of great things to come if its electrifying lead guitars and dizzying vocal hook were any indication. “Hurricane Waves” and “Can’t Complain” showed even more diversity to look forward to when the band released them in 2011 ahead of the album. In addition to that, Jeff launched a whole new label to sell Vacation (and much of the other stuff released through Quote Unquote) through, Really Records. Clearly, he was trying to communicate something about the step forward he wanted Vacation to represent.
And fans like me, despite knowing that “Side Projects Are Never Successful” and that Jeff was never in it for the fame, had reason to believe not only that this might have been the band’s big shot, but that they might actually make it big – or at least to become big enough to continue to exist as a full-time touring band that played music for a living. The Vacation singles were getting media coverage like no other previous BTMI! release had, and they marked a direction for the band’s music that, while retaining the punk integrity and musical ambition of the earlier albums, also proved more melodic, cleanly-produced, and accessible to a broader audience. While previous albums got recognition in the punk scene, Vacation looked like it had “crossover potential.” And when it finally arrived, there were even more positive signs: within half a year of the release, “Can’t Complain” made an appearance in “The Office.”
Of course, for all this to work, the album had to be good, and thankfully it was better than that – despite what might have sounded like my talking it down, it definitely represents a new high for the band. It’s Jeff’s own favourite BTMI! album, and I can see why: its complexity is something to be proud of. He had always been influenced by artists falling outside of the punk spectrum, but here those influences are more pronounced than ever, and the band finally breaks free of its ska-punk chains with a sound wholly its own. Brian Wilson-esque harmony arrangements and multi-part songs abound, and in a similar fashion to To Leave Or Die In Long Island, a couple motifs from individual songs (“Campaign For A Better Next Weekend” and “Sick, Later”) turn up in multiple places on the album for thematic cohesion. If SMiLE was Wilson’s “teenage symphony to God,” Vacation might be Jeff’s “adult symphony to punk rock.”
Many of my favourite songs off Vacation stand completely alone in the BTMI! catalogue, with little stylistic precedent. “Why Oh, Why Oh, Why (Oh Oh Oh Oh)” is a brash, thunderous fusion of Elvis Costello’s melodic sense and Bruce Springsteen’s maximalism, with a wealth of memorable melodies and lyrics that are all Jeff’s own. “Can’t Complain” is that rare song that manage to “rock quietly” – it’s both hushed and urgent in its muted acoustic chords and slide guitar lines, panicking at the pace of everyday life while simultaneously realizing how much there is to be thankful. And of course there’s the glorious, dynamic opener that slowly builds from a nostalgic piano riff accompanied by subtle, emotionally-charged chord changes into an explosive hardcore-punk charge, with vocals ranging from Jeff’s cleanest, quietest-ever singing to his more characteristic shouting to a group chant at the end.
But even when Vacation retreads familiar territory, it still feels like it’s moving forward. “The Shit That You Hate” stands in a long line of 3/4 5-6-minute slow-burn songs appearing on BTMI! albums, but it feels like a perfection of that particular type of song rather than a simple revisiting. Jeff’s weak, warbly falsetto note when he sings “Hold onto your hope” always gets me a little choked up. “Hurricane Waves” might recycle a melody from To Leave Or Die In Long Island during its bridge, but the rest of the song is all new, providing that melody with a fascinating recontextualization to great effect. The aforementioned “Sick, Later” has a zig-zagging riff in an unusual time signature combination that still manages to be incredibly hooky, as well as some of my favourite lyrics on the album:
The first time that I took you to the hospital,
I was tired and you wanted to die,
I drove off, and I couldn't understand at all
Fuck, I didn't even walk you inside,
I thought we all wanna die, we all wanna die,
And I thought that was fine, I thought that was fine.
One of the album’s most instantaneous joys comes from “Vocal Coach,” the shortest true song on the album. Jeff’s vocals were probably the most consistently difficult factor in terms of getting listeners outside of punk to take BTMI! seriously; they’re somewhere in between the traditionally-expected “bad” vocals of classic punk and the cleaner, more melodic style of singing dominant in pop-punk. Either way, they definitely don’t play to mainstream ears (perhaps this is why “Campaign For A Better Next Weekend” starts the way it does, and for that reason, Vacation might be the best place for a listener that’s not well-versed in punk to jump into the band’s discography). On “Vocal Coach,” Jeff takes on this problem with a healthy dose of irony, penning an ode to the imperfections he loves in music, the “dirty covers, dusty grooves and deep scratches.” But with a melody reminiscent of Pinkerton-era Weezer, he also expresses his own frustration with his inability to transcend the ugliness of his own singing: “I get embarrassed when my voice pops out and it’s not like in my head, / If I got a new vocal coach and I could hit the notes, you’d fall in love again.”
I understand that frustration – I’ve sung in more than one band, but before I even started playing in a band, I never thought I could be a singer because I thought I wasn’t good enough. But over time, I slowly realized that the reason I thought that was because I was comparing myself to singers who were already considered to be superhumanly-gifted, and that not every singer needs to be that way; there are thresholds of “good-enough,” and realizing where you fall in that can be a very freeing experience. I learned to sing by imitation Johnny Rotten and Billy Corgan, singers with definitively “bad” voices that nevertheless managed to communicate pretty much exactly what they wanted to in their songs. And Jeff Rosenstock was another big inspiration to me in that respect: he was a “bad” singer who nevertheless sang his songs defiantly, against popular tastes, because who else was going to do it for him? (Not to mention that as a “rock ‘n’ role model,” Jeff seems like a much better guy than Johnny or Billy.) But like Jeff, I know that there are times when singers wish we could do more with our voices than what seems to be within our natural ability, and we start wondering if it’s just a matter of putting in the right amount of work to “perfect” that voice. “Vocal Coach” brilliantly captures the nuances of this feeling in under two and a half minutes in an unforgettably catchy tune.
It couldn’t last, though. Even Jeff seemed to know it, as he sang on “Vocal Coach”: “ I'm aware that I'm kind of getting scared the love that I thought had no bounds is coming to an end.” Vacation proved that BTMI! could be made more accessible and reach a wider audience, but there were limits to that growth. Just what reasons lay behind those limits will always be a bit obscure, but after a while, it became clear that despite being their most successful album to date, Vacation wasn’t going to be a true “commercial breakthrough.” To be fair, I don’t even know if that’s what Jeff wanted. I haven’t been fully clear on why the band broke up, and strangely, Jeff even seemed a little vague on it in this interview, citing one member’s moving to Australia as part of it. It didn’t have much to do with a lack of commercial success (Jeff claims the band wasn’t even on as much of an upswing in popularity as fans had come to believe at the time), and I doubt he would have soldiered on with his solo career the way he did if it had. In fact, I suspect his solo career is probably more well-known by now than BTMI! was even at their peak.
In the end, I’m just happy the band go to do what they wanted to for as long as they did, and that BTMI! brought so much to my life and the lives of other fans like me. I’m also incredibly grateful I got to see them at least once, on their last tour before they broke up in what turned out to be my first real punk show. It was, in some ways, kind of a fluke: I was 16 and the band had planned some tour dates in Canada, including Ottawa, which was truly shocking, considering that almost no one big (outside of the Wu-Tang Clan – look that one up, it’s a strange story) comes to Ottawa. But it was even flukier than that, because it turned out that my parents had planned a road trip to Toronto for our family over the date BTMI! was playing! Of course, I checked the tour dates and sure enough, they were coming to Toronto too, so I got the tickets for that show instead and saw them for the first and last time at the loft above Sneaky Dee’s with my sister. It was an amazing experience, and I can’t think of a better way to have been introduced to live punk. I was caught off-guard by the mosh pit, but it was a friendly one, and I ended up spending most of the show in it. The band played almost every song I could have hoped for (“25”! “I Don’t Love You Anymore”! Every great song on Vacation!) and I ended the night a sweaty, dehydrated mess. As Jeff came down from the stage into the crowd after the show, I gave him a big hug and told him how awesome I thought it was. And while I hadn’t brought a blank t-shirt for the band to spray-paint their name on (a tradition from the early days they were still doing at that time), I bought one of their special “bilingual shirts” that I assume were made specially for the Canadian leg of the tour. I still have it:
(Fun fact: there are nine different versions of the cover art for this EP!)
As I said, To Leave Or Die In Long Island isn’t really an “EP” – the 8 songs that make it up flow together so cohesively that it feels much more like a proper album release, plus that’s a little long for an EP anyway. So strangely enough, Adults!!! (sometimes referred to it by its full title Adults!!!: Smart!!! Shithammered!!! And Excited By Nothing!!!!!!!) was both BTMI!’s second-last release of new material before breaking up and their first-ever true EP.
And even though it’s a lot more disjointed than, say, To Leave Or Die and feels more like a collection of songs than a cohesive whole, it doesn’t matter because for the most part, they’re great goddamn songs! I feel like everyone who knows Adults!!! has their personal favourite; mine is probably “The First Time I Met Sanawon,” one of the band’s most straightforward punk songs (and the source of the title for the documentary on the band – another post on that later).
But you can make a pretty defensible case for most of these songs being the best on the EP, which is a testament to its consistency. I’ll just single out the other three that interest me the most here: “You Still Believe In Me?” sounds, in hindsight, a lot like a test-run for the kind of new direction the band would take on its next and final album, Vacation. “Slumlord” is a raucous, shuffling punk number with a self-explanatory title, providing a cathartic release from the stress of dealing with bad rent situations: “We deserve to be happy, / Fuck this lease, / We're living in a dead city.” And finally, “Struggler” wraps a simple, sing-song melody around terror-inducing anxiety, leaving Jeff too worried to even get outside for some air. It also ends with a hilarious parody of the “big rock finale,” complete with deliberate aping of the riff from a certain 80s hair metal song I’m sure you’ll recognize.
Some fans love Adults!!! as much as any other BTMI! album, and with this many great songs on it, I find it hard to blame them. It’s never had the same revelatory quality to me as some of their best work, but as a stopgap between the peaks of Scrambles and Vacation, I think it does a damn good job of being what it is.
To me, at least, this is the big one. I originally listened to BTMI!’s discography in chronological order, but if I was trying to get someone into them right away, I would probably tell them to listen to Scrambles first. As a collection of great songs, as a coherent album, as a testament to what BTMI! could achieve, it’s my first pick by...well, not a long shot, considering I love a few of their other albums almost as much, but I will say that it always comes out on top in my rankings.
Of course, there’s a lot of personal bias here; Scrambles came to define my high school experience in part because of its regrettably-relatable lyrics that convey an all-consuming anxiety and frustration with the world around you. That might seem like a strange thing to experience nostalgia for, but for better or worse, that is exactly what it invokes for me.
It’s a cliché that high school is a stressful time – though I think people who say that tend to be thinking about the pressures of trying to “find yourself,” “fitting in,” gaining autonomy from parents, etc. I’m not saying that those things didn’t concern me, but for some reason my anxiety about the future was running something like a decade ahead of me. And so I found myself imagining a future in line with fears about what might happen if I followed Jeff down the path of “Stand There Until You’re Sober” – unable to move forward in life “’cause I can’t grow up.” The songs on Scrambles took this kind of stress one step further, and I found myself identifying with the chorus of the Springsteenian anti-anthem “Fresh Attitude, Young Body”: “If you don’t find a steady job now, / If you don’t find someone to love now, / Oh, you will die freezing cold and alone.”
Is that ridiculous, for a high school kid to be thinking that far ahead? I still don’t know. Capitalism puts an absurd amount of pressure on people to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives from what feels like a young age, and I was facing a serious dilemma that a lot of musicians face: I wanted to try playing in a band for a living, but I also wanted to have some kind of stable future...and unfortunately, these two things rarely go hand-in-hand. So I worried a lot over whether I would be able to make the right choice for myself; would I move on with my life and get a job that I probably wouldn’t like, forever resenting the fact that I didn’t choose music? Or would I choose the music and watch my life fall apart because I wouldn’t be able to earn enough to gain any kind of independence, still living with my parents like the narrator of “25” (which is, by the way, one of BTMI!’s catchiest-ever songs) at 25 years old? Many of the songs on this album perfectly capture that tension, which I think extends beyond my own specific situation – anyone who’s felt the crushing pressure of a hegemonic system coming down around them, whispering threats of a future spent scrambling to catch up with their peers in their ears when they can’t sleep at night can probably relate to the lyrics of this side of Scrambles.
There’s the personal angle, but then there’s a social/political one (which wasn’t entirely without personal meaning to me – but I’ll get to that in time). “9/11 Fever” mocks the ultra-patriotism-turnted-opportunistic-exploitation that so many American engage in for the anniversary of the terrorist attack. And while that’s the most overtly political song on the album, plenty more go for the throat on issues in the politics of the punk scene. “Stuff That I Like” rides a killer riff as Jeff skewers the “fucking cocaine parties” that “fucking freak him out” (another gem later on: “I gotta take a piss in the cocaine room, / What is this? The line for lines? / It’s a long line for lines.”), as well as the “booming bass and the shitty DJs” of the clubs. The song ends with a condemnation of the limited possibilities of “going out” to “have fun”: “The gates rise up like / ‘What’s up? You’re in prison, confined by alcoholism / And lack of better decisions for having fun on the weekends.’” “Gang Of Four Meets The Stooges (But Boring)” attacks bands that purport to be on the “cutting edge” but have no respect for the other bands they share a bill with.
Best of all is “(Shut) Up The Punx!!!”, a mile-a-minute monologue from Jeff on the fucked up “holier-/hipper-than-thou” attitudes that make the punk scene look bad from the outside set to one of the band’s most frantic ska-punk freak-outs. The lyricism in this song is really on another level – take just the second line in: “When we all march to the beat of the same different drummer, / The steps start to come off like clockwork.” And for all this wordiness, Jeff somehow manages to make the phrasing fit rhythmically into the song, using the intensity of the music to emphasize key parts, eg. the swelling of horns leading into the descending breakdown that matches “I’d rather be vomiting and I despise vomiting and BLECH!” The chorus sums it up: “This non-conformity feels like conformity, / Why should anyone believe in our community? / This organization doesn’t feel like anarchy ‘cause / We’re suiting up to have the same identity.”
My love for this song is intimately connected with my feelings on the state of punk rock circa my time in high school (and the first couple years afterwards). Jeff mentions in the notes on Quote Unquote that this song is about “a very small portion” of the punk community that he’s met, and I believe him, but to this kid who spent his adolescence stuck in the Canadian capital Ottawa, an unsurprisingly hostile environment to the development of a healthy punk rock scene, it feels like this song was about every second band I’d heard of. The too-cool-to-care hipsterism of the early 2010s was in full swing at that point, and many kids I knew had fallen into that attitude. And the musical tastes and scenes followed suite. There was a bizarre amount of implicit pressure to identify a band with a specific sound or scene, adopt a particular fashion sense or way of performing that played to audience expectations within a certain genre. But in spite of all this, I felt like I couldn’t just sit and stay angry about it; the dismal state of affairs was also a cry for help, a call to action to change the way things were. That’s why I love the fact that “(Shut) Up The Punx!!!” is more than just a stream-of-thought criticism – the lyrics were inspiring to someone like me who felt disillusioned with the very scene they aspired to be a part of: “Smile big, hug bigger, talk big, act bigger, / Stop judging do something, shut the fuck up do something!”
There’s the personal anxiety angle, and there’s the sociopolitical angle, but some of the best songs on Scrambles just do a great job of capturing specific feelings. The lilting “Wednesday Night Drinkball” (which feels a bit like a sequel to “Stand There Until You’re Sober” both musically and lyrically) starts with a great example of this: “There’s nothing less fun than being exhausted / From hours of not doing a damn thing at all.” “Saddr, Weirdr” is a reflection on the loneliness of moving, which, while packed full of wacky percussive noises and bells, also contains a rather poignant observation that always gets me: “I just threw out another gift, / I know it had a bit of thought but / Mary we won’t talk soon, / I have no use for Crocs now, / And I have no use for gifts.”
“Sort Of Like Being Pumped” closes out the album by putting one of those feelings that can be hard to describe into words. On a quiet, muted guitar accompanied by a rather beautiful (if you can believe it) banjo riff that phases in and out of the mix, Jeff describes one particular moment at the end of a workday when he watched the sunset from the train home. In addition to the simple but important sentiment conveyed about appreciating brief moments of happiness, the song also once again demonstrates Jeff’s knack for the killer phrase, the one line you can repeat until exhaustion: accompanied first by Laura Stevenson’s harmonies, then exploding without warning into a blistering punk outro, we hear over and over again the chorus that stresses that one brilliant instant, a seemingly never-ending build-up to the climax as if Jeff is trying to drag it out as long as possible, maybe make it last forever: “When I saw / When I saw / When I saw / When I saw / When I saw / THE SUNSET!”
In addition to “Bike Test 1 2 3,” BTMI!’s album Get Warmer also has two of their most up-front internal/personal struggle songs, “Depression Is No Fun” and “I Don’t Love You Anymore.” The former features a great chorus line that bluntly sums the problem up: “Got a lot of shit in my head, / You know we got to pull it together, / ‘Cause it’s not gonna stop until we’re dead.” But its bigger triumph, I would argue, is a musical one. In that chorus, the opening chords begin the song in a major key, but by the second line, the key unexpectedly shifts into a minor one, throwing the listener for a loop in terms of the kind of harmonic change they’d typically expect from such a ska song. Interestingly, this is not how the song starts – the minimal organ-and-voice part that opens the song with its first chorus uses the more common chord change under the same melody and proceeds largely as expected aside from perhaps its ominous final chord. Only then does the song proceed into the first chorus in which the trick minor modulation is pulled. It’s disarming and destabilizing, which works pretty damn well in conveying the song’s evocation of discomfort and frustration with depression. The same goes for the sudden bursts of hardcore punk noise that punctuate the verses. It’s a song about dealing with difficult emotions that you have to confront anyway, which could be why Jeff made it hard to ignore on a musical level.
“I Don’t Love You Anymore” is not, of course, a breakup song about any relationship with a real person – for their lyrical bluntness, BTMI! is still rarely that straightforward. And so in this case, the breakup is between Jeff and alcohol. I don’t want to be too presumptuous about Jeff’s relationship with alcohol, but if this song and some other lyrics are to be taken as reflective of his personal life, I think it’s fair at least to say that he’s struggled with it. And while he may not have quit alcohol forever after releasing “I Don’t Love You Anymore,” I hope this song was at least therapeutic for him and helped a lot of other people out there. Above all, it’s fucking awesome. It opens with a blatant rip-off of Otis Redding’s “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” but like most BTMI! songs, it keeps changing and developing in its shifting intensities. The rhythmic accents change dramatically between sections of the song, reaching their peaks with the repeated phrases that mark the end of the pre-chorus (“I get increasingly sick, and I stop thinking quick, / And I act like a dick, like a dick, like a dick...”) and the straight-eighth shout of the title phrase that caps off the chorus: “BABY, I DON’T LOVE YOU NO MORE!”
Not only is this an excellent song to pump yourself up to when listening alone, it’s practically built to be a live powerhouse, too. There’s something about that bridge (“Get off your ass and work this out, / Don’t be such a bastard to yourself”) that demands a communal sing-along, as well as the ensuing call-and-response “Yeah” section that gradually builds the tempo back up to its starting point after a brief slow-down. Quitting drinking is a thing that a lot of people struggle with, and I’m sure that trying to do it alone is no easy feat. The “we do this together” sentiment of “I Don’t Love You Anymore” (ironic for a song that has a personal relationship as its pretext, but it’s definitely there) might help those people to feel that they’re not alone, and that these things can be easier when you work on them together with others.
One of Jeff’s great songwriting strengths is his ability to pick out a key phrase in a song that’s both catchy and succinct in conveying meaning and turn it into a powerhouse of a hook. That was evident in “Side Projects Are Never Successful,” but I also like the way he handles the hook phrases of “Bike Test 1 2 3” from Get Warmer. The song already starts in a “high gear,” so to speak, ramping up the intensity until it reaches what seems like its climax. That’s where the repetition kicks in: reaching its peak, Jeff screams about riding his bike “at the top, at the top of a hill, / At a very very rapid speed, / There is one, only one place to go!” And in a sudden permutation of the phrasing, Jeff reveals “there’s nowhere to go but down!”
(Image source: The Hard Times)
From here, there’s a sudden break. The song grinds to a halt – but only for a moment. Just as soon as he’s caught his breath, Jeff comes back in at an even faster tempo than before with a refrain of “And it gets easier,” repeated between descriptions of the surroundings that blur by him as he descends the hill at breakneck speed. As a person who also happens to be a regular cyclist, I can attest to the fact that this song’s structure and lyrics absolutely capture the therapeutic thrill of racing down a hill, feeling the wind on your face, leaving your feet off the pedals, and letting gravity do the work for you. But it’s also a great metaphor for the song’s implicit theme, that sometimes the momentum of life can keep you going through struggles you thought you’d never make it through. As the song ends, “And it gets easier, / And it gets easier, / As time goes, things can only get better.”
Goodbye Cool World might be my least-favourite BTMI! album, but it still contains this absolutely brilliant highlight from their discography. Jeff claims the song was a result of “trying to write a Hold Steady song basically and failing,” and I can hear it in the vocal delivery and lyrical style to some degree, but it transcends that description on many other fronts. Riding a cheap-sounding (in a good way) faux-hip-hop beat, Jeff rants-more-than-sings about a heat wave making his back stick to the car seat, panic attacks, working in shitty conditions, being surrounded by advertisements, and, just when you think you’ve escaped from the capitalist rat race into the freedom of underground punk rock culture, being dragged back into the commercialism of it all when you realize that you, too, are just trying to create more products to sell to people – all interwoven with a refrain that frantically repeats “Staten Island traffic in the summer, baby.” This, while the song jumps stylistically between the aforementioned beat, a brief burst of hardcore punk, a monumentally anthemic chorus, and a disarmingly muted outro vamp.
More than the Hold Steady, it reminds me of a lighter take on the Dismemberment Plan’s weird hip-hop punk fusions. Jeff isn’t “rapping,” just raving quasi-rhythmically somewhere in between speech and singing (“Sprechgesang,” if you will), at least until that colossal sing-along chorus hits and then IT’LL BE NIGHTTIME, BABY and WE’LL DRINK, DRINK, DRINK, WE’LL GET DRUNK, DRUNK, DRUNK, and then WE’RE FUCKING THE WORLD, OH YEAH, WE’RE FUCKING THE WORLD! It’s so difficult to explain how much the musical phrasing adds to the impact of those words that I’m not going to even try – you just need to hear it in the context of the song. The cynical outro lyrics, however, are easily understood when read off the page, and I’ll end by quoting them in their entirety:
“And when I finally got to work today, I ate my Subway sandwich, and I drank my Coca-Cola Classic, and then I ate my Sunchips and I thought about the weekend when I'd fill up my Ford van with Mobil brand gas and drive to the Clear Channel venue and I'd drink myself a Budweiser and play my Fender guitar through my Fender amplifier and tell the kids with a straight face through a Shure microphone and JBL speakers that corporate rock is for suckers.”
I don’t want to suggest that this is necessarily the “epitome” of BTMI!, as their next three albums (and an EP) would prove that they were capable of even more – but this really does feel like one of the biggest achievements in their catalogue.
Here’s an amateur interview with Jeff and Rick from 2008 I remember watching back when I got into them in 2010. It’s worth a watch if you want to hear what these guys were about straight from the horse’s mouth. Intercut with snippets from some of their live shows, it’s pretty entertaining too, since they’re funny guys! (“You kids are idiots, it’s free! Stop downloading our album off of iTunes!”)
I keep referring to BTMI! songs’ critiques of the “punk scene,” and I realize that I should give some context on what that meant at that particular moment in time. My account is going to be a little muddled because I didn’t actually live through most of what I’m about to recount (well, OK, I lived through it, but I was too young to understand it until I became a teenager at the very end of the era), so I apologize if this comes across as inauthentic or second-hand – the best I can say is that even if I wasn’t “there,” I felt the ripples and aftershocks of the tensions within the punk scene throughout my teenage years and beyond.
I don’t want to sound like I’m idealizing the past too much, so I’ll say that if my study of the genre’s history reflects any kind of reality, we can safely say that punk rock, for all its rebellious posturing, has always had a commercial aspect to it. Hell, everyone knows the story of how Malcolm McLaren assembled the Sex Pistols as a kind of “anti-boy band” specifically to make money. But it wasn’t until the 90s that punk became a business institution. And this turn of events revolves largely around the rise of a “sub-genre” of punk that has now become the first thing most young listeners think of when they hear the word: pop-punk.
The biggest pop-punk bands of the 90s (Green Day and Blink-182 being the most notable examples) enjoyed a steady rise to mainstream popularity from the time of their origins until many reached the kind of “superstar status” previously reserved for what were known in the 70s and 80s as “arena rock” bands. This was largely unprecedented, and it fundamentally changed how punk as a genre was approached from a musical and political standpoint. By the mid-2000s, punk became an opportunity to make big money, upping the stakes for anyone trying to get a piece of the pop-punk pie.
At the same time, pop-punk began a fragmentation into increasingly stratified subgenres that attempted to alter what some saw as a disappointingly formulaic approach to counter-culture. Thus we got emo*, metalcore, and, of course, ska-punk. The irony of this genre stratification was that the subgenres proved to be just as restrictive and formulaic as pop-punk, if not more so: metalcore bands must have tuned-down guitars and screamed vocals, ska-punk bands must have a horn section, downbeats on the 2 and 4, and sections that alternate between ska and hardcore, etc. And with these subgenre divisions came further divisions of punk fans into cliques that frequently fought amongst each other for the spotlight, each claiming to be the true successor to the iconoclasm of the original punk movement. On top of all this, some punks with noisier/avant-garde leanings that could smell the stagnation coming found solace in rejecting any kind of commitment to pretty much anything, adopting a cheap irony to shield themselves from the self-parody they might otherwise be accused of. But instead of opening up new creative avenues, this stance tended to lead only to a callousness that encouraged making fun of almost anyone who claimed to take what they were doing seriously, creating a race to the bottom for who could appear to care the least.
This is the scene I imagine Jeff grew up through; I merely grew up in the midst of it. This was already the state of punk rock by the time I started listening to it in the late-2000s. Naturally, Jeff had a lot to say about it. His music and lyrics in BTMI! frequently challenged the apparent incoherence of playing punk rock in the 21st century. Perhaps the fact that he started from a position in it considered (by the mid-2000s, although Propagandhi had already released “Ska Sucks” in 1993) to already be deserving of mockery, that of the much-derided ska-punk scene, is part of what gave him the vantage point he had. BTMI! started with songs in a genre already considered to be obsolete, and Jeff sounded like he was fully aware of this from the start; he sings and plays with irony, but it’s a different kind of irony than that of the callous hipster types that had started to dominate the scene at that time. BTMI!’s sense of irony feels like it’s laughing both at and with itself, like a person who knows exactly how ridiculous they look in doing something but goes ahead and does it anyway. And there’s a freedom in this, the freedom that comes from both self-awareness and shaking off the chains of shame simultaneously.
Granted, BTMI! didn’t just play ska-punk – over time, their sound grew more and more diverse as they branched off into different experiments and new arrangements. This was another challenge to the punk scene of the time: a refusal to be pigeonholed and restricted to a single genre. Jeff mentions in some of his notes how much he was inspired by music that falls pretty distinctly outside of the realm of punk, like Neutral Milk Hotel and the Beach Boys, and his own music reflects those influences. BTMI! was more than a ska-punk band, and, against the limited measure of what a punk band could be at that time, more than a punk band as well.
In addition to its ironic malaise, BTMI!’s lyrics also tackled the punk scene’s in-fighting problem and general hostility to anyone perceived to be coming from outside of the culture. Jeff decried gatekeeping and violence at shows, pushing instead for a community based on kindness, positivity, and recognition of what members of the scene have in common. Punk rock is still angry and political in his vision – during the Bush years, how could it not be? – but that anger is also therapeutic, helping to lift up those who come to punk seeking some kind of release from mainstream capitalist drudgery. And even those that don’t care about punk deserved respect; Jeff was a big proponent of not being cruel to the “boring nice people” who weren’t a part of the scene.
One final note for context that doesn’t inform BTMI!’s music as much as my own understanding of it: by the late 2000s, another development occurred within punk, once again to its detriment. The worst aspects of the emo and metalcore movements came together into something that would become known as “the scene,” populated by “scene kids.” Though rejected by most “traditional” punks, this quickly became the most popular subculture of its time, and is likely how the majority of kids in the last couple generations ended up learning about punk as a culture and musical form for the first time. BTMI! didn’t necessarily explicitly address this development (though there are hints of some recognition of it in their lyrics), but their music did stand out in stark contrast to most of the “scene” music of that time. This is partly what attracted me to them so much: they were a punk band that had nothing to do with “the scene,” independent thinkers with a musical vision of their own, willing to mock anything (including themselves) but still seriously committed to what they did because they knew that was what they wanted.
*Yes, I know that the roots of emo reach further back, but I’m talking about when it began to solidify into what we recognize to be “emo” today – let’s face it, Rites Of Spring is a far cry from My Chemical Romance, or even, I don’t know, Cap’n Jazz.
Of course, BTMI! was just getting started. Less than a year after the release of the debut, Jeff came out with a second album (well, at 8 songs, it’s more of an EP, or mini-album, or, in Jeff’s words, a digital “10-inch”). Though To Leave Or Die In Long Island is shorter in length than Album Minus Band, that only seems to have helped to focus the sound and songwriting on it. In some ways, it’s more conceptually ambitious, too – the album begins and ends with the same melody in a kind of parallel structure. Almost everything that was great on Album Minus Band is honed to a finer point here. (Strangely, according to this interview, this is apparently Jeff’s least favourite BTMI! album; while I understand his reasoning why, it easily ranks as one of my favourites.) As on that album, for example, Jeff continues to criticize the state of the 2000s punk scene. But instead of simply lashing out at obnoxious trend-chasers, his targets get more specific and his lyrics more potent as a result: opener “Happy Anterrabae Day!!!” takes aim at the overly-violent culture that can still be observed at hardcore shows. Between the first verse to the second, Jeff moves from jeering at the guys who threaten “some fourteen-year-old” to suggesting ways to improve the situation: “If I kissed you on the nose or offered you a hug, / How could you possibly still wanna fight?” He ends with a reminder of the positive possibilities of punk rock: “Think about the reason you went to shows at twelve years old, / We all felt alone, it was not to kick my ass!”
Whether it’s the inside-joke about a bandmate’s ladder-climbing career offer to join a more successful band (that didn’t work out in the end) on “Congratulations, John, On Joining Every Time I Die!” or the under-a-minute hardcore punchline of “Showerbeers!!!”, the album really shines on the lyrical front even when it feels like Jeff isn’t trying (which he admits he wasn’t on “Showerbeers!!!”). Then there’s the more serious stuff: “Dude, Get With The Program” is one of Jeff’s best songs about the paper-thin quality of that bullshit facade upper-management types put on when trying to soothe class antagonisms in their workplaces. Inspired by an experience he had at a job in which a company’s managers started lecturing workers on being part of their “family” right before the paycuts and firings began, he vents his frustrations: “You’re working on your first million, / I’m on my first thousand, / And bills are due tomorrow.” There’s the emptiness of the rhetoric fed to those who get the short end of the stick under capitalism: “You didn’t get fired, you’re ‘laid off.’” The chorus clears it all up: “You could have figured out a way to help us out, / But you just said: / ‘Hey, go ahead and get fucked!’”
By contrast, the less-oppositional “Stand There Until Your Sober” has been a long-running fan favourite possibly due to its confessional quality. It’s a song about drinking too much, feeling like you’ve fallen behind in life, like you’ve missed your chance to grow up, and being generally miserable with nothing to look forward to except the awesome party you have planned for your friends at your funeral (because “mourning is for suckers!”). Over a relatively sparse 3/4 groove with some nice musical flourishes (those backmasked acoustic guitar chords that open the song always get me), Jeff sings about the city’s ambient lights blocking out the stars, making out with a stranger on a boat, and earning only “a hundred and ten bucks for twenty hours” while watching his friends achieve a comfortable stability in life that always seems out of reach for him. It’s the ultimate loser’s anthem, and maybe some of the most poetic stuff to come out of BTMI! Even in the midst of the despair, a ray of positivity breaks through near the end of the song: “You’ll finally know that life’s okay, / Even when the bad things happen.”
The music, too, takes a giant step forward on To Leave Or Die. Though Album Minus Band already showed signs of breaking free from the confines of ska-punk, Jeff signals his ambitions to fuck with the formula as much as possible right off the bat with the cheesy fake-out synth-rock intro to “Happy Anterrabae Day!!!”, gradually revving up the tempo until it reaches the hardcore intensity that kicks off its first verse. Remember what I said about Jeff’s harmonies on Album Minus Band? Here’s the thing: he might not be a great singer (something he’d address directly on the band’s final album), but he sure knows how to layer his voice in his wall-of-sound production to trick you into thinking he is. Of course, he pulls back the curtain at the end and mutes all instruments for the final chorus’s last couple “na-na-na” sections, revealing a chorus of Jeffs screaming vague harmonies and polyphonies at the top of their lungs, barely staying in time with each other, let alone in tune. He knows exactly how absurd it sounds and works that to his advantage perfectly – it never fails to make me laugh out loud. I actually first got my sister into this band by showing her this part of the song, which she couldn’t believe would be left in an actual studio recording. It’s both incredibly funny and incredibly punk; what could be more so than a guy going “Yeah, I can’t sing, but how about I make a whole goddamn choral arrangement out of my voice anyway?”
The peak of the album’s musical ambition arrives at its climax and final song, “Syke! Life Is Awesome!” A tour-de-force of multi-section songwriting, Jeff describes it relatively accurately on Quote Unquote as being composed of “20-second blasts of different genres whether it be alt-country, post-punk, reggae or synth pop.” What that description doesn’t quite capture is the progression of the song, from an acoustic-strummed folk-punk intro into a kind of freak-folk chorus strung out on its own silliness, from there to a classic hardcore punk tempo interspersed with a couple bars of ska, building to an unstoppable outro with a horn section that sounds like a Motown track’s backing dialed up to light-speed. That excellent “na-na-na” vocal melody from “Happy Anterrabae Day!!!” is reprised here through the horns at the end of the song, a motif for the observant listener to enjoy. Lyrically, too, this might be one of my favourite BTMI! songs; Jeff says this one was about a time he got to talk with the lead singer of Squeeze and realized how cool it was that his life had turned out in a way that such a thing could happen. It’s the end of the song that really gets me: sprinting across the album’s final stretch, Jeff begins a long, uninterrupted phrase following an instrumental break that details all the weird things that happened in his life in the chain of events that got him to where he was at the time of writing that song. It evokes a sense of wonder at the simple mechanism of cause-and-effect: “And if I knew how to throw a football, / I would have never played any music, / And if never got my heart broken, / I would sing ‘blah blah fucking nothing.’” It’s a celebration of the uniqueness of the timeline that makes your life unequivocally yours, as it could never be any other way. In philosophy, we might call that a “haecceity.”
Oddly enough, the last song on the first BTMI! album technically predates the band itself, as Jeff recorded parts of “Future 86” with the Arrogant Sons Of Bitches. Probably the saddest song on the album, “Future 86” has a similar structure to “Sweet Home Cananada,” but it drops the ska rhythm for a different strum pattern more commonly associated with solo ukulele music. Lyrically, however, it’s far more devastating than anything on an Eddie Vedder solo album. “Can I stop my life so I could jut be with you?” the song begins, as if it’s going to be a tender, romantic moment; but just as life goes on, the song continues, refusing to paint any kind of oversimplified pretty picture of the consequences. Jeff jokes about embezzling his band fund, admitting that this would “destroy what he has made” – a melancholy reflection on what you might leave behind as the price of a stable relationship. Even then, there’s no guarantee things will work out: after he sings of moving to New York, he imagines: “We’ll start to fight when I start to resent you, / And we’ll both agree the thought was nice, but I should not have stayed.” In classic BTMI! fashion, this is juxtaposed with humour, as begins the verse that kicks of this rhyme scheme: “Say the word, and I’ll put my guitar down, / I’ll be sad, but at least we’ll both get laid.”
The song ends on a kind of plea for some sign that can help him make his decision to stay or go: “Tell me something awesome, / That can last my whole life sentence in the van, / ‘Cause I’m on the SS Bullshit Dreams to nowhere, / And I’ll probably never see your face again.” And the first repetition of this plea signals the count-in for a roaring wall-of-sound barrage of distorted bass, guitars, a horn section and more, ramping up the cathartic tension between indecision and finality carried by the song’s simple-yet-unforgettable melody. It all comes together with a chorus of “around 100” (according to Jeff’s notes) kids repeating that chorus in unison at the finale. It’s an arresting moment, and I’m not sure if there’s a better last song on any other BTMI! Album. In fact, it worked so well as a final song that this was chosen as the last song the band played at their last-ever show before breaking up in 2014.
In many ways, this song has followed me throughout my life. After listening to it obsessively when I finished Album Minus Band for the first time in 10th grade, it returned to me at the end of high school as I began to reflect on what would happen to the bonds between me and my friends if we moved to different cities in the future. I learned the guitar chords to it at some point and haven’t forgotten them (well, maybe I need a little prompting sometimes) since – it’s become a bit of a sing-along among my friend group from that time. I played it at the end of a relationship with a girl in university, which I can see in hindsight was really cringe-y; but I can’t say it didn’t help me get my feelings out. I played it again at what I thought was going to be the end of another relationship – but thankfully that one has worked out OK so far!
Last year, a friend of mine from those high school days who was also a big fan of BTMI! killed himself. At a memorial gathering in his backyard with a few other friends from those days, I brought my guitar and we sang a bunch of songs from that time in our life, including Wingnut Dishwashers Union’s “Fuck Shit Up!” and, of course, “Future 86.” And now that song has one more layer of resonance for me.
I didn’t actually discover BTMI! until the last couple years of their career, around 2010. Nevertheless, once I had read a little online of what they were about, I decided to dive into their discography at what seemed like the most natural starting point with their first album, 2004’s Album Minus Band. As a big fan of Green Day and hardcore punk that had just discovered ska-punk a couple summers prior, I loved it pretty much instantly. From the political opening barrage of “Blow Your Brains Out On Live TV!!!” (addressed to Bush) to the chiptunes-on-steroids synths of “FRRREEEEEEEEE BIIIIIIIRRRRRRD!!! FRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEE BIIIIIIIIIRRRD!!!!” (a collaboration with Laura Stevenson against the men who harassed her when she played live), it was pretty much everything teenage me could have wanted from a modern punk album.
It’s hard for me to listen back to it without some kind of cloud of nostalgia for those days at this point (which is probably true for most of BTMI!’s music). That being said, even if I try to be as objective as possible in my judgment, I’d say Album Minus Band holds up pretty damn well. It feels like more than just another ska-punk album: there are songwriting flourishes that keep listeners on their toes, like the constant flipping between lo-fi minimalism and maximalist distortion on “I’m A Panic Bomb, Baby!”, the electro-skanking verses of “I’m Too Cooooool For Music”, or the 3/4 stomp of “Big Plans Of Sleeping In.” “Ready... Set... No!” is pure adrenaline rush, with racing synth melodies and call-and-response scattered throughout the chorus at a hardcore punk tempo, plus brief passages of harmony popping out in the verses and bridge where you least expect them (the way Jeff layers harmonies is something he uses to hilarious effect on his next album). And even though the chorus of “It Ceases To Be ‘Whining’ If You’re Still ‘Shitting Blood’” ends with “Write a song without a hook, / Remember why you wrote songs in the first place!”, this album is packed with hooks – that song even has more than one itself! On a purely musical level, Album Minus Band feels like the work of a guy with incredible talent but limited recording means throwing all his ideas together in a flurry of creative passion.
But it wasn’t just the music that grabbed me; the album’s lyrics are just as compelling in their satires of punk’s “scene” (more on that later), the music industry in general, American politics, and more. It gets personal, too; I’ve always been impressed by Jeff’s ability to balance more serious issues with the absurd in his self-interrogation: “I never was a drinker, / Now I’m an alcoholic” gives way to “I never cried at movies, / Now I cry at The Simpsons.” As a child who had been passed through the hands of a number of psychologists to virtually no noticeable effect, “Panic Bomb” feels especially cutting to me. Judging by the story of the quack Jeff describes in his notes to this song on Quote Unquote, I was lucky to have never had any experiences as bad as his, but I could still relate to lyrics like “And I know that you're all just trying to help, / But I really think you're all just trying to get rich, / I don't need to be addicted to anything else.” Then there’s the poignancy of the quieter songs, like “Sweet Home Canada” and the album’s closer, “Future 86.” That last song, by the way, has such personal significance to me that I’m going to have to give it its own post separate from the one for this album.
Radiohead gets all the credit for releasing In Rainbows for pay-what-you-want download online, but BTMI! were doing it before it was cool, man. Along with the release of Album Minus Band, Jeff launched the site Quote Unquote Records, “The first ever donation based record label,” on which all subsequent BTMI! (and Jeff Rosenstock solo) albums have been posted. All these albums are available for free download on the site, with a suggested donation option on each page. As I had grown up in the midst of post-90s jadedness with the music industry and skepticism as to how musicians could survive in the wake of competition with online piracy, I thought this was revolutionary and pretty much the coolest idea ever.
But that wasn’t all. On most* BTMI! album pages from Quote Unquote Records, Jeff was kind enough to do what music nerds like me often wait years for: he annotated each song in detail with descriptions of the inspirations for the lyrics and the process of making the music, complete with hilarious anecdotes and rants. If you have any interest in this band and Jeff’s writing process, please go back and read these – they make for incredible liner notes to albums which (in many cases) didn’t even exist in a physical copy to begin with. In fact, to be up-front about my sources, a lot of the more specific information I reference in these posts comes from the QUR site. It’s a real treasure trove!
Here’s the link to the page for Album Minus Band: https://quoteunquoterecords.com/qur003.htm
As I said in the first post, BTMI! was technically a side project offshoot from Jeff Rosenstock’s better-known (at the time) ska-punk band The Arrogant Sons of Bitches. After they went on a hiatus starting in 2003, BTMI! gradually became Jeff’s main songwriting outlet, and by the time ASOB released their final album Three Cheers For Disappointment in 2006, BTMI! had effectively eclipsed them. The band broke up that year...for the first time, at least, since it seemed to take them a few tries: they reformed for a couple reunion shows in 2007 and 2012. It’s hard to blame them for putting it off when Three Cheers For Disappointment is at least as much fun as the average BTMI! album and must have packed just as much of a punch live.
I never got to see ASOB, but a couple of my high school friends managed to in their last year. I remember the shirts they brought back from the show as souvenirs: “ASOB BROKE UP” stencilled across the front in blocky capital letters, making the band’s ending seem like more of a defiant declaration than any admission of defeat. Come to think of it, that’s something else Jeff’s songs have often communicated so well.
