Emotional Motion Sickness and a Semester Abroad
An odd thing happened to me when emo bands began reuniting in the mid 2010s. I went to most of the shows alone; my adult friends had not grown up as emo-obsessed as I did, and I’ve always liked doing things alone. And at every one of these shows, from American Football to Desaparecidos, I was, for the first time, keenly aware of the fact that most of the people surrounding me were men. (And, of course, white, but that’s a whole other essay.)
I did not have this sense when I was a teenager. At sixteen, all I wanted was to fling myself into the crowd and feel the pit surge around me, and gave no thought whatsoever to the sex or gender of the people around me. Had I been oblivious to the male-ness of the scene around me as a girl? Was it some “I’m not like the other girls” crap? Or was it because, as a young teenager, I was privileged enough to not have yet experienced male gendered violence in any significant way?
Whatever the reason for the shift, I couldn’t stop noticing just how male every crowd was. I began to think more critically about the lyrics of the songs I loved, about the attitudes that defined emo. From Alkaline Trio to Bright Eyes to Dashboard Confessional to Saves the Day, I listened to so many of my old favorite songs and thought For fuck’s sake, dude, she just doesn’t like you! Get over it! What once read like romance suddenly felt like harassment. And in 2017, allegations broke about Jesse Lacey, the singer of one of my favorite bands, Brand New. A man roughly ten years older than me, he had preyed on teenage girls in his twenties, when the girls were my age.
When I first heard Brand New’s “Soco Amaretto Lime” as a teenager, I immediately felt a sort of perfect proto-nostalgia, a vague knowledge that one day, I’d look back on this song and it would remind me of right now—and I was right. 15 years later, if I listen to it and close my eyes, I’m 17 or 18, in a friend’s car, listening to that song, late at night, mid-July, heat still radiating off the pavement below us. Walk around this town like we own the streets, stay awake through summer like we own the heat. My hair is damp and smells of chlorine and I’m wearing a denim skirt I made from a pair of old jeans and a Saves the Day t-shirt and pink Converse, bracelets stacked up the wrist of a hand trailing a cigarette out the open window. And as we get to the top of the hill above my high school, you can look down at the glittering map of highway lights, a stretch of golden lines that all seem to converge on the horizon at the New York City skyline. “I’m going to live there one day,” I think, as we cross the intersection and begin to coast down the hill, “but I’m going to miss this.”
I never saw Brand New live, but I did go to a Jesse Lacey solo acoustic show at the Bowery Ballroom. I was 23 or 24, starting out my brief career in music, before the bottom fell out of that industry. My boss, who was great, was friends with his manager or something, and we went to the show I think sort of just to schmooze. I wasn’t expecting much—with my electroclash mullet, I was, like, so over that emo shit by then. He closed with a few Neutral Milk Hotel covers and then “Soco Amaretto Lime,” and in the final lines, changed the lyrics of “You’re just jealous ‘cause we’re young and in love” to “I’m just jealous ‘cause you’re young and in love.” His voice broke repeatedly as the crowd sang along with the original lyrics. Tears streamed down his face, and most of the faces around me. It was genuinely one of the more moving concerts I’d been to. A little more than ten years later, I’m probably about as old as Jesse Lacey was at the time.
What does it mean to reckon with the fact that someone who did terrible things to other girls also somehow played a part in some of the more quietly magical moments of your young life? What does it mean to look back on lyrics and see within them a disturbing violence, or to reckon with the ways in which the scene you loved was so deeply misogynistic? What does that say, morally, about me as a person, about us, so many of us who felt the same?
First: I don’t think we should beat ourselves up about it—a reaction I’ve seen and don’t think is productive. I think it’s deeply sad to blame ourselves for relating to songs that, viewed through our adult eyes, now seem toxic, written by men who, viewed through our adult eyes, are also toxic.
Do you remember what it felt like being a teenager? A bad grade on a math quiz, an unreturned phone call, a passive-aggressive AIM away message—it all felt like the end of the world. The pain of your first broken heart does indeed feel like, as Brand New would put it, the devil and god are raging inside you. I felt that these songs spoke to the depth of my own teenage tortures, the violence of my own confusion. It did not occur to me, at the time, that these were songs written by adult men, men who had experienced many broken hearts, men who may have done terrible things to women and girls, men who sometimes wished, in their lyrics, for the deaths of the women who had spurned them. (“Even if her plane crashes tonight / she’ll find some way to disappoint me / like not burning in the wreckage / or drowning at the bottom of the sea.”)
And while the intensity of teenage emotions may parallel those of angry men, their impact is a different thing entirely. A teen girl screaming I HATE YOU at her folks and slamming the bedroom door is very different than a grown-ass man telling his friend to “have another drink and drive yourself home / I hope there’s ice on all the roads / and you can think of me / when you forget your seatbelt / and again when your head goes through the windshield.” The intensity of these emotions resonated with us as teenagers; in turn, Jesse Lacey (and, I don’t doubt, other men) preyed on the teenagers who worshipped him. We thought we saw ourselves in those lyrics, but we weren’t there.
I think, if anything, the fact that we as teenage girls loved this music so much speaks more to our underrepresentation in the scene. We were forced to project ourselves into those songs, and it’s a testament to our creativity that we were able to do so. The feeling it gives me really isn’t guilt: It’s a dull sadness, sadness that we had to find ourselves in songs that were mostly about hating women, sadness that we gave those dudes the benefit of the doubt when they were nothing but entitled and angry.
I think now of some of my other favorite bands of the era, some of the only girls at the party. During the same era, Rainer Maria and Rilo Kiley both wrote songs about the same topics the emo boys covered: heartbreak, rejection, infidelity, sadness, mental illness, bad behavior. But these songs conspicuously lack the violence of so many of their male counterparts. Even the songs about infidelity and anger are tender and self-aware, and any punishing is usually of the narrator.
In Rainer Maria’s breakup songs, couples talk about “the last time it felt right to make out” or admit that their relationship felt like a first marriage. Even the titular knives of 2003’s “Long Knives Drawn” are kind of sweet: “We took the whole world on / back to back / long knives drawn,” it recalls. In Rilo Kiley’s “Does He Love You?”, Jenny-as-mistress holds some contempt for her lover's wife, but bitterly concedes that of course he’ll never leave her and that her prison is of her own making. Nobody wishes plane crashes or car crashes or electrocution or anything on anybody, other than occasionally themselves. Nobody brags about getting chicks at bars drunk enough to fuck. Nobody even feels really all that sorry for themselves: Goddamnit, I’m not talking about my heart / like it’s something you can break.
When I first heard Brand New’s “Me vs Maradona vs Elvis” as a kid, I thought it was brilliant in the same way I thought Rainer Maria was. I thought it showed massive vulnerability to air one's own dirty laundry like that: Here I am, all of me, disillusioned and dark, warts and all. “Who will cast the first stone? / You can sin or spend the night all alone” seemed to me terribly poetic, because I read the “sin” as just casual, consensual sex or maybe at absolute worst infidelity—some kind of faintly romantic, glamorous and grown-up sort of dysfunction that I had yet to experience. It’s hard to see that angle now, as an adult and within the context of Jesse Lacey’s actions. “MvMvE” now reads less like a nuanced elegy about tragic romance and more like a date rape instruction manual written by an adult man who should have known better. It’s a song about deliberately deceiving a woman, and I resent it, because it, in turn, deceived me.
So where do we go from there? I’ve sat on versions of this essay for years now, read permutations of it from others, but it was Zan Romanoff’s essay about Adrienne Miller reckoning with David Foster Wallace that first offered me a potential solution. In discussing Miller’s memoir, of which DFW’s abuse is part, she says that “the most powerful thing” Miller does is “make Wallace nothing more or less than a character in the story of Miller’s life.”
Just a character. Just someone who was there, just someone whose art was around. “That’s an effective strategy for dealing with the art of profoundly compromised men, it seems to me: to tell our own stories about them, solely and insistently from our points of view,” she continues. “To ask that they exist in relation to us for a while, instead of believing that we are required to exist always, and only, in relationship to them.”
What if that initial contradiction—Jesse Lacey did terrible things / Brand New songs happen to be part of some of my favorite memories—doesn’t have to be a contradiction at all? What if it’s not a reflection on me or my moral character that those songs meant something to me, might still mean something to me? What if I can let Jesse Lacey’s bad actions, and the entitlement and bad actions of any other bitter, childish men, just be their own goddamn problem to atone for?
What if my memories can be just that: my own memories, just soundtracked by a guy who turned out to be crappy? Maybe that scene I described earlier, the summer night in the car gazing out towards the city listening to “Soco Amaretto Lime,” is a story about me, and my hometown, and my ambition, and my friends, and the great breadth of what a teenage girl’s beating heart can contain. So what if that song just happened to be on the stereo?
I think also of Phoebe Bridgers, who dated Ryan Adams, a man twenty years her senior, and was among the women who came forward to speak of his abusive, erratic, and manipulative behavior. I won’t lie—while not emo, Heartbreaker was another of my favorite albums as a teenager. And yet, “Motion Sickness,” Bridgers’ song about their relationship, from one of my favorite albums of the past few years, is worlds better than “Come Pick Me Up.” It’s nuanced, messy, complicated, smart, beautiful, self-aware, angry, reserved. “I’ll be glad that I made it out / and sorry that it all went down like it did,” she sings.
Of course, emotional maturity aside, we’d be remiss to not point out that the song is also just a sick fucking burn. Every verse contains a subtle, let-him-hoist-himself-upon-his-own-petard style insult—about Adams’ affected accent, her faked orgasms, the fact that he’s old enough to be her father—sung in her high, sweet voice. I admit to feeling a sick little thrill at how quietly brutal it is, so much more so than any trite rhymes about ex-lovers and plane crashes.
And though I’ll concede that I find the reserved vengefulness deeply satisfying in its own way, it’s not really what I love about the song. It’s the last line of the final verse that gets to me and maybe presents another way to cope with everything we’ve discussed here: “You know I’m never going to let you have it, but I will try to drown you out.”
And what if it really is that simple? What if we don’t have to let these men and other bad people have it, or feel badly that we ever liked or loved them, or carefully snip them from the snapshots of our memories? What if instead, we can just dismiss them as minor characters in the full expanse of our own stories, and then, quietly and confidently, decide to drown them out?