Ciara Moloney Music

Seven Ages of Pop Punk

This article is part of In Defense of the Genre, a series of critical and personal essays in praise of pop punk. Previously, Ciara wrote about listening to ‘December’ by Neck Deep on repeat and thinking about ex-friends.

The history of pop punk is something this series frequently gestures towards but has never really sketched out in any detail. Partly this is because discussing pop punk’s relationship to punk itself is usually aimed at dismissing pop punk as punk’s poser kid brother, and the founding concept of this series is taking pop punk seriously when no-one else will. Partly it’s because – even if Green Day’s ‘Basket Case’ is as old as I am – pop punk still feels like a baby of a genre, so that it kind of takes me by surprise that it has history enough to be worth explaining. Partly it’s because it never occurs to you whether someone might need or want a map to your hometown. Isn’t everyone born knowing those particular twists and bends, the shortcut to the cinema and the best place to cross the street? 

We are in the midst of an improbable pop punk revival. It’s incredibly exciting. But too many people who try to write about that revival don’t have that bone-deep sense of the genre’s history and themes and conventions. “Today’s pop punks go to therapy,” The Guardian writes in the latest of their triennial articles on how a new generation of pop punkers break new ground by writing songs about feeling shitty. It makes me feel insane. It betrays a depth of knowledge that doesn’t extend to the biggest bands’ biggest singles. Today’s pop punks might go to therapy, but pop punk has always been about being depressed.

So: I’ve invented seven eras of pop punk from whole cloth and made playlists for each of them. I hope they can guide you through the history of the genre, but as more of a sketch map than a satellite photograph. Each playlist is somewhere between ninety minutes and two hours long, and, hopefully, acts as a launching pad, and at the very least, a fun listen. These are my playlists, so are informed by my own blind spots, biases, and tastes. So, you know: sorry to Bowling for Soup for not including you, maybe try sucking less next time.

I don’t want to grow up

the blueprint: 0-1993

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Dean Buckley Music

I Miss You More Than I Did Yesterday

This article is part of the In Defense of the Genre series. Previously, the interplay of spite and insecurity in Fall Out Boy. 

When I was thirteen and fourteen, I’d go to the next town over, my mother’s hometown, to hang out with friends I’d made primarily through a common interest in the kind of contemporary alternative rock music played on music video channels like Kerrang and Scuzz: broadly punk, metal and indie rock, and specifically, in our case, nu metal, industrial rock, hardcore and, of course, pop punk. I’d get the bus in the morning, meet my friends, loiter in public spaces for however many hours, argue about whether Rammstein were selling out or something, and then go to my grandmother’s house until my mother came in to pick me up. Sometimes, I’d ditch my friends early to hang out with her longer.

My grandmother always took a genuine interest in whatever mattered to me, whether it was the pages upon pages of superheroes I’d draw in sketch books as a child or the loud, angry music that was my overwhelming passion for most of my adolescence. She shared my love of music, if not of genre: her home was filled top to bottom with shelf after shelf of cassettes and CDs, mostly country, though she wasn’t altogether averse to rock music. We talked about music a lot, and though there were occasions where we could meet in the middle – I still have a DVD she gave me of thirty years of Meat Loaf music videos – mainly each of us talked to the other about what we liked and why we liked it.

When I think of her now, my strongest memory is the late summer day I came in clutching a CD I’d just bought, Good Charlotte’s The Chronicles of Life and Death, only four years too late to help it chart in Ireland. Though I’d told my grandmother lots about the music I liked, she’d never actually heard any of it, and she insisted I put it on for her. I wasn’t altogether thrilled with the idea, but I did as I was told and played the title track. The song isn’t subtle. It opens and closes with a beeping heart monitor, it goes from cradle to grave in two verses, and the chorus climaxes with Joel Madden shouting “you come in this world / and you go out just the same”. I really liked the song and I really wanted my grandmother to like it too. When it was done playing, she turned to me and said “you’re here one day and you’re gone the next, sure isn’t that the truth”. She liked it.

I never saw my grandmother again. She died suddenly a few weeks later on September 18th, 2008.

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Dean Buckley Music

Car-Crash Rhetoric

This article is part of the In the Defense of the Genre series. Previously, a selection of pop punk albums that aren’t the best, the most essential, or even our favourites, but are very, very good.

Cars have been a part of American pop culture pretty much since they became a mass-produced and mass-marketed product, but they became particularly central in the 50s and 60s as the post-war economic boom lifted more and more families into the middle class. Americans owned about one car for every three people in 1960: at a time when one third of the population were children thanks to the post-war baby boom, and around seventy percent of adults were married, that meant most families had a car and some had two.

That second car is very important to the story of cars in American popular culture because they were the cars of older teenagers, or at least ones they could borrow. Most US states then, and now, issue driver’s licenses from the age of sixteen, and the car presented teenagers with a rare opportunity for independence and autonomy. Even if it was just for a few hours, they could decide where to go and what to do, and could take their friends, or their date, with them. They were free from the supervision and surveillance of their parents, able to put more space between them and their family in less time than on foot. They could explore their little piece of the world, stray off the beaten path and find secret places all their own.

Teenagers were obsessed with cars, and pop culture reflected it. Archie and the Gang in his rickety old jalopy, Wally buying his first car on Leave It to Beaver, the Beach Boys cruising up and down the coast. Tom Wolfe describes the saturation of car culture in his seminal essay “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmm)…”: “Thousands of kids are getting hold of cars and either hopping them up for speed or customizing them to some extent, usually a little of both. Before they get married they pour all their money into this…Even the kids who aren’t full-time car nuts themselves will be influenced by which car is considered ‘boss.’”

The picture is very different nowadays. The rate of teen licensing in the US has plummeted over the past few decades and become ever more stratified along class lines. The AAA Foundation found in 2012 that while, overall, seventy percent of 18-to-20-year-olds had a license, less than fifty percent of those with a household income under $20,000 had one, compared to almost ninety percent of those with $100,000 or more.

But the decline in licensing and car ownership among teens hasn’t eliminated the car from teen pop culture, just changed it. Cars are one of the most common and prominent lyrical motifs in pop punk, that most teen of genres, even though pop punk rose precisely as the decline began. I’m fascinated by pop punk’s use of car imagery for a whole host of reasons, particularly how it is deeply embedded in the history of popular music and yet also develops an approach to cars that is very much its own. Not different exactly, but unique in how it joins two warring tendencies in the portrayal of cars in popular music: cars as a source of freedom and cars as a source of tragedy.

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Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Music

I Know I’m Not Your Favourite Record

This article is part of the In Defense of the Genre series. Previously, Motion City Soundtrack and the inadequacy of language.

In Defense of the Genre is about celebrating a much-maligned genre, which frequently takes the shape of in-depth personal reflections on songs, albums or bands. But we also want to zoom out a bit every so often, and take a more sweeping look at this music that means so much to us. So here are some of our favourite works in pop punk, ranging from concept-driven rock operas to gag songs about masturbating. This isn’t a list of the best pop punk albums ever, or a primer on getting into pop punk, or even a list of our definitive favourites. But it is a list of albums that we love and wholeheartedly recommend.

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Ciara Moloney Music

Never Be Afraid Again

This article is part of the In Defense of the Genre series. Previously, Paramore and demanding the time and space to deal with emotions that we’re shamed for expressing. 

My Chemical Romance existed to save lives.

It’s hard to talk about with the uninitiated. It’s not unlike talking about faith to unbelievers: when you have to describe it out loud, you can hear how bizarre it is. A believer can hold their faith and their knowledge of their faith’s absurdity together without contradiction, but an unbeliever cannot understand that. CS Lewis wrote about faith as completely derived from reason, and sure, he was a lot more educated about theology than me, but that’s nonsense. Faith isn’t rational, and it wouldn’t matter if it was. “No one could have in a billion years of their gripping testimony or by showing me a radiant life of good deeds or through song or even the most beautiful of books brought me to Christ,” Nicole Cliffe (from The Toast, now sadly defunct) wrote about her conversion, “I had to be tapped on the shoulder.”

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Dean Buckley Music

You Can’t Tell Me to Feel

This article is part of the In Defense of the Genre series. Previously, The Wonder Years as a band for your twenties in the post-recession era.

Like most people my age, the first Paramore song I ever heard was “Misery Business”.

“Misery Business” is a great song, but its lyrics haven’t aged well. They’re pretty nasty towards the other woman, e.g. “she’s got a body like an hourglass / it’s ticking like a clock” and other comments shaming her appearance or sexuality. That’s not terribly surprising given half the band were still minors when their sophomore album, Riot!, was released, but that hasn’t stopped people from making lead singer and lyricist Hayley Williams spend the past ten years apologising for “Misery Business”.

Except Hayley Williams won’t apologise, not because she doesn’t understand the misogyny of a lyric like “once a whore, you’re nothing more / I’m sorry that’ll never change”, but because she refuses at twenty-eight years old to beat up on her teenage self for being a teenager, for having ugly feelings or dumb thoughts. As she wrote in a Tumblr post two years ago: “those words were written when i was 17… admittedly, from a very narrow-minded perspective. it wasn’t really meant to be this big philosophical statement about anything. it was quite literally a page in my diary about a singular moment i experienced as a high schooler.” Even if it wasn’t a shining moment, it was a necessary step to work through the hurt she felt at the time, and she’s not about to martyr herself over not already being a mature adult when she was still in the process of growing up.

We live in a world that demands we schedule our emotions around the convenience of others. No feelings at work, at school or in polite company. We are expected to be perpetually pleasant in public and limit any displays of emotion – particularly emotions that might make other people feel uncomfortable – not just to the private sphere, but to our most private selves. We’re constantly told it’s unhealthy to bottle up our emotions, but let even a little pour out and we get strange looks. We’re told to pull it together, not because it’s harmful to express ourselves, but because it’s bad manners.

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Ciara Moloney Music

The Agony of Suburbia

I don’t fully understand music criticism. When I read (good) criticism about a book or a film, I feel like I learn something – either about the book or film itself, or books or films in general, or about politics or culture or the world. Most of the music criticism I’ve read either validates my opinions without helping me learn anything about them, or else it makes me feel stupid. A huge amount of music criticism is underpinned by a dichotomy between what is Good and Okay to Like and what is Dumb and Bad that Only Dumb and Bad People Like. What falls into each category is supposed to be obvious to the reader, because it’s never explained. (Robert Christgau is one of the most acclaimed music critics in America, and he operates on a bizarre and complicated system combining letter grades and emojis.) Declaring something good or bad is the critic’s job, of course, but even when I disagree with a film critic, they’ll still be interesting to read if they’re any good. Roger Ebert was wrong about Midnight Cowboy, but he was wrong in a way that made me think more deeply about the film.

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