Neapolitan

Is that story a personal re-adaptation of the movie The Mysteries of Pittsburgh?

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butthead aka 216

I am risking the removal of my sac by admitting this, but I have cried or come close to crying because of a girl before. To sound less like a pussy, I will start this shindig off by saying that I am anti-crying and probably haven't cried in 5 years with the exception of the time my dog got unexpected lung cancer and I had to put the ole boy down. But if you don't cry over putting a pet down, then you are likely an empty, soulless, cadaver of a human being. Back when butthead aka 216 was merely a young boy, he did not have the gargantuan coconuts dangling between his legs that he has today. No sir, he had small raisins which produced feels and emotional instability. These are all accounts of my teenage and early college years, when my testes actually fit comfortably in my briefs.


1) Archie Star - Let's Get Married



Back when I was 17ish, I ditched everything that my older friends told me, and turned a casual friends with benefits situation to a real relationship over a few months. My naive self wasn't content enough to be balls deep several times a week with no commitment or obligations, apparently. In the way that most storybook romances begin, I put it in her butt, then swigged MD 20/20 with her for a few hours before telling her I loved her and passing out in her basement. Thus, a relationship was born.

So, she had an athletic scholarship roughly half way across the country, which I knew going into the relationship. I figured I would just do what I had always done: Refuse to plan ahead and mentally block out the fact that she would someday be moving to the midwest and I wouldn't. I had always been the type to think about crossing bridges only when there was nowhere else to walk. Plan worked well until the day before she was set to board a plane to out-of-my-life-ville and then an avalanche of feels rained down on me with the force of a thousand monsoons. Myself and a handful of friends went to this festival where buffalo wing companies competed for top prize. On the way home, my friend Tara was driving with me in the passenger seat. We had a summer mixtape in the CD player and this song came on and I teared up like a wittle beebee... Tonight, I say let's just get outta this town, lets go to Seattle, watch rain fall to the ground... We had kinda jokingly discussed during pillowtalk about how cool it would be to someday just pack up and move to wherever together. But it's like getting older: When you're young, you have all these dreams and plans that you know will never happen, but the fact that there is still time left in the hourglass gives you some sort of weird false hope that you allow yourself to feel. But then the hourglass starts running out and you no longer have time on your side - the dreams are officially deceased.


I tried to do the tears-running-stone-face-wow-i-look-stoic-and-tough thing but the lip quivered and it was all over. I nearly drowned in my tears. Nobody in the car understood why I was crying so suddenly, but it was a combination of having a great night with my best friends and the realization that tomorrow I'd likely never see my girlfriend again, and we had never really talked about it. Planning wasn't my best feature.



2) Bush - Swallowed



So the next day, she leaves for wherever-the-fukc. I drive to her house one last time and it's a total wahhhhh-fest between myself, her family, her, etc. I start up the car to leave and this song comes on. Her favorite band was Bush so we listened to them a ton, and this particular CD happened to be in my stereo system... I'm with everyone and yet not... Gotta get away from here, gotta get away from here... I miss the one that I love a lot... Miss the one that I love a lot... There was a feeling of uncertainty and I had that feeling in my stomach where you kinda wanna barf but there's nothing there to vomit.

I took the back roads home and parked up the street from my parents house in this little indentation in the woods and just sat there sobbing for awhile. Partly because I didn't want my step-dad thinking I had a twat and partly because once I entered the house, I knew my weekend would be spend throwing a 1 person pity party in my room. I pretty much sobbed all weekend to the Razorblade Suitcase and Sixteen Stone albums.

3) Incubus - Stellar



If you are wondering why this is mainly involving the same girl, it's because following this relationship I learned how to deal with relationship issues like an adult: Heavy drinking with drunken shouting matches followed by apologetic yet bitter voicemails messages. So that girl ended up moving far, far away but she planned on transferring colleges once she found a match that was closer. In the meantime, I arranged to travel east to one of her away matches that was closest to home. We had a mutual friend at the college she was playing at, so I made the trip to see her. They lost the game.

I guess it was an important one or whatever, because after the game she was not nearly as happy to see me as I was to see her. My heart sunk like a battleship and I am pretty sure I lost the color in my face. When I regained color, it was probably a bright red, half due to pure anger and half due to embarrassment that I drove several hours alone for what amounted to a quick hello. Ok, it was a little more than that, but I remember her being really short with me and kind of in a hurry to get out of there. In hindsight, she was probably cheating on me with some guy named Jamal in St. Louis and felt shame in looking me in the eye, but anyways... I hopped into my car and drove 100 the whole way home. Again, the mixtape got to me when this song came on. By this time, my large sac had begun to grow so I no longer had the capability to cry like a bitch. I did the angry-teeth-grinding-cry on the drive home. As I approached my parents' driveway I felt my tear ducts glue themselves shut to preserve my penis. That was the last time I cried over a girl.

Dr_Rez

Keep it going, I love reading this journal.

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*Best chance of losing virginity is in prison crew*
*Always Checks Credentials Crew*
*nba > nfl crew*
*Shave one of my legs to pretend its a girl in my bed crew*

butthead aka 216

butthead aka 216, why would you write anything about Taking Back Sunday? They haven't been popular in like 10 years and aren't you a tough, hung stud who shouldn't be listening to whiny teenager music? That all may be 100% true, but they are also one of my favorite bands and I have a general bone to pick with emo fans about them.

As usual, I will keep this less about their Wiki entry and more about my personal connection and kinda tell a story about the band. Let's start for the beginning.

I'm 16 and just kinda getting into music that isn't Korn, Linkin Park, and Staind. Girls are becoming a central part of my life and I have a constant 15 inch erection that destroys everything in it's path. A fat girl named Amanda has a locker next to me all through high school and she is always decked out in Spill Canvas, The Academy Is, and Taking Back Sunday shirts, headbands, etc. I develop a general disgust with 3rd wave emo bands because of this, and start a blog specifically to pretentiously trash my emo peers.

But then TBS's 3rd album, Louder Now, gets released. I'm hanging out in my buddy Jeff's basement listening to some friends play acoustic guitar and try to record some crappy indie stuff. In between takes we think we are cool by drinking his Mom's wine coolers and spinning random albums when someone throws on the Louder Now album and I'm pretty taken aback. As an avid late-night-MTV viewer of music videos I remembered seeing the This Photograph is Proof video, but never really followed up in checking them out. In an ironic twist, the baseball team seems to adopt the Louder Now album as a soundtrack to our workouts and I hear the album everyday and everyone seems to be digging it. God, our coach must have cringed so hard at the group of pussies that took the field every day.

So fast forward to later in the year, and by this point I've went back and listened to their first 2 albums, which surprising to me are actually way better than Louder Now. Before I go on, let me get to my beef with emo fans in general. I get this sense from various message boards, quotes from older emo artists, and talking with people, that alot of 'real' emo fans don't consider TBS to be emo, or don't like them, or both, or whatever. It's pretty well known that a lot of the 1st and 2nd wave artists tried to disassociate themselves from the 3rd wave emo bands because they didn't represent the same ideas or have the right sound or whatever. And I get that, and I can certainly see the difference between Sunny Day and Hawthorne Heights, but I just don't see how people don't see TBS as a premier, classic 3rd wave emo band who are largely to blame for the mainstream success of emo for that mid '00s era.

Their first two albums are exactly the progression I would imagine emo fans wanting the direction of the genre to go. Maybe a little more uptempo than expected, but the Get Up Kids were certainly known for their uptempo songs and that wasn't a problem (or when they went synth-heavy). Or maybe this point is all moot, because given their success, some fans obviously did dig it. I don't get it, and I guess these thoughts stem from the Emo Album Club Thread for the Brave Bird album where I replied earlier tonight to Maaanky about how exactly emo was supposed to progress moving forward. And maybe it's because of the fanbase or general disapproval of 3rd wave emo, but I don't believe a lot of fans have ever gave TBS a real chance and listened to their first 2 albums from start to finish.

Their debut album, Tell All Your Friends, really introduced me to this dual vocal thing that I hadn't really heard used that much by other bands I'd listened to, and certainly not even close to the frequency to which TBS uses it. During their first album, John Nolan (who went on to start Straylight Run) did the backing vocals, and him and Adam Lazzara are constantly either trading off vocals line-to-line or singing over one another, which sounds awesome. But for a debut album, the songs are incredibly intricate. I will compare them to Brand New, since they are entangled in a lot of different ways. I wrote before in this journal how Brand New was the first band where I understood the growth of a band through their albums, and Brand New's first album, Your Favorite Weapon, was a really simple but awesome one and the follow up was noticeably more intricate and developed. But TBS had that from the start in my opinion. They could have probably went verse-chorus-verse-chorus and made popular, solid albums but they didn't. There's so many peaks and valleys, it's kinda of a controlled chaos to me with such an energy that it's just awesome.

Spoiler for Bike Scene:

Their second album, Where You Want To Be, is much of the same, but with some stronger vocals. John Nolan left to lead Straylight Run and Fred Mascherino stepped in on lead guitar and backing vocals. In my opinion, Fred was awesome and gave a stronger voice than Nolan, but honestly most people probably didn't even notice the difference because the format stayed pretty much the same. The second album was just as great as the first and played much in the same way: peaks and valleys to every song, high energy and tempo, and a whiny angst - but there was an added ballad-feel with stronger choruses in my opinion... It's also awesome and if you don't listen to these albums in their entirety, you're just shorting yourself. Don't come in here talking smack on ole butthead aka 216 if you haven't actually listened to it.

Spoiler for One Eighty By Summer:

Where they really started switching gears was with the Louder Now album. It is great in it's own way, but just... different. It's not the same jump that Brand New made when they released TDAGARIM but it's a noticeably different sound. It's hard to articulate, maybe you just have to listen. It didn't immediately resonate with me like the others did, but it didn't take months to appreciate either. I guess it's just more mainstream, because at this point TBS were pretty much the face of the genre and the pop-punk/emo-pop genre in general had a revival with a lot of bands that never had lasting power (Hawthorne Heights, Armor For sleep, etc), plus some other kinda similar bands like Sense Fail, Bayside, etc. Also, Paramore was getting big at the time and was making music that was a lot different than what they do now (plus Dashboard was kinda there too, selling a ton of albums). I hold TBS's first 2 albums in the highest regards, 10/10 and their 3rd album 9/10. It's a notch below, but still awesome.

Right around that time, I went to a lot of TBS shows, and they usually weren't a great live band because of the vocals, but it introduced me to a lot of other bands along the way which was cool. I guess I got kind of off-track in this entry from my original plan and pretty much just said how much I like TBS, but it's my journal so blow me. I am also going to just end this kinda abriptly cause I am tired.

Isbjørn

That reminds me of how I should totally listen to TBS's debut and analyze the crap out of it.

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butthead aka 216

You really should. Whatever you haven't listened to, you need to. In my head, when I think of perfect emo music, this is it. Ahead of it's predecessors and over a decade later, still ahead of current music too.

Full Album:

Tell All Your Friend (YouTube)

Not sure why that video doesn't appear to be working, but you can copy the URL if you want to.

Isbjørn

Maybe I can find a space for them in my new journal section, Essential Emo Albums I Have Never Heard (Trollheart's Classic Albums I Have Never Heard is *cough* unrelated).

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Anteater

butthead, if you ever want to hear music that has a lot of great emo touches yet isn't emo at the same time, check out my fellow Texan buddies The Panic Division. Similar melodic sensibility to the best 3rd wave bands, but with an 80's synth/alternative rock blended aesthetic (think Tears For Fears). I have a feeling you'd love 'em, but its hard to know...I'll leave you a few songs here and see how they strike ya.

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Anteater's 21 Fav Albums Of 2020

Anteater's Daily Tune Roulette

butthead aka 216

...does porn. Her name is Belle Knox, and she's an 18 year old freshman at Duke. I'm not exactly sure how or why this became semi-news considering Arizona State coeds have been choking down meatswords since the beginning of time, but this story crept it's way onto my radar recently. The story is that she does porn to help pay her tuition. Because a lot of what I am about to say relates to the garbage she wrote, here is a link to a piece written by her. I don't make it a habit to respond to complete strangers, especially when I know they will never read my response anyways, but I view her article sort of like a microcosm of thoughts of all the people I loathe: Social Justice Warriors, /srs/, Tumblr users, extreme feminists, etc.

For those of you too lazy to read the article I just linked (AKA all of you), the rundown of the piece is this: Over Christmas break some frat guy at Duke saw her in a porno, told his buddies, news spread around campus, she got harassed online, and now she is explaining herself. It's a pretty well-written article, but it kinds of reads like a Martin Luther King Jr. speech. At parts during my reading, I imagined her on a stage with a microphone with scores of minions beneath her, gradually moving from head-nodding in agreeance to clenching their collective fists, and at the end of the speech storming the castle of the patriarchy with their bloody tampons to avenge the oppression they have suffered at the hands of the evil penises.

I do agree that nobody should be sending death threats or whatever to her, or anyone for that matter. I think society is basically a bunch of whimpering pussies when it comes to online bullying, but I do recognize that certain lines shouldn't be crossed and certain things can be serious matters. But there's also something to be said about people who know what the reaction will be to their actions, do the action anyways, and then complain about the reaction they already knew was coming. I wouldn't park a brand new Mercedes on a Detroit street corner, leave it unlocked with a roll of $100 bills on the passenger seat, leave for a few days, then be shocked and outraged when I came back and saw it stolen. Would it still be wrong of the scumbag who jacked my ride? Of course. Should I have expected that to happen? Yep. I think you see where I'm going with this.

I don't have a beef with sex workers, but let's just call a spade a spade. They do a job that requires little-to-no skill, credentials, qualifications, etc. In short, pretty much anyone could be a sex worker. I believe the lack of respect has less to do with a 'fear or womens' sexuality' (lol), and more to do with the lack of skill required to do that job. When I see a woman in porn, I assume she isn't smart enough to do anything else with her life. The assumption that they are dumb is a legit one, considering they are doing a job that requires no intelligence whatsoever. But sex workers and sluts in general, I find super insecure. Like they will overcompensate for their whorish ways by really celebrating their lives in the way an ex would exaggeratedly show off with her new boyfriend to make an ex angry.

For those of you reading this who want to argue that beauty or whatever is a 'qualification' for sex work, I will direct your attention to Facial Abuse, a rough (understatement) porn site that this Belle Knox chick shot for. I've watched tons of videos from that site, and trust me, about 10% of those girls are remotely attractive. That estimation might even be a on the generous side because there are truly some warthogs and crack whores on there.

I guess part of why the story got big is because she responded with her own interviews and articles pretty quickly and a group of idiot feminists tagged along at her heels to make sure they could yell "empowerment!" at anyone within ear shot. If licking a toilet bowl or barfing on yourself in an internet video is empowerment to you.... umm good for you. Again, it's the insecurities coming out. They know it's not, but what else can they really say or do other than admit they just disgraced their family and whored themselves out so they could get $200 for blowing a guy 3X their age.


The part of the article that made my jim jims a little bit rustled, was when under a bolded headline that said "Patriarchy fears female sexuality," she wrote: I am well aware: The threat I pose to the patriarchy is enormous. So, I guess men are actually just scared of women's sexuality and it has nothing to do with her throating a 48 year old on film??

Whatever, I'm done writing. I feel like I had more to say but got tired and now don't really care. Feminists blow. Later.

14232949

You know what?
I'm going to start reading this more often.
Really liked the piece about your relationship with the girl who moved away, I imagined the sport she played was hockey. It seemed right.

It's odd to think that you only cried three times when certain songs hit, if I had written that journal post, it would probably have never ended. I now have four different "crywank" (my term for trying to make my sad playlists seem ironic, they're not) playlists. I think we live in a world now where it's cool to cry and it's interesting to read about your experiences. I've always found it hard to place you as a person in the world outside of Music Banter. I guess sometimes it's hard to remember that everyone here is a real person and has a life outside of the forum.

I also enjoy that you can look back at yourself with honesty and a sense of self humor. Really well written piece.
I also like Taking Back Sunday, I just f*ck with the debut album though. Some really big songs on that record. I'm not sure I'd classify them as emo. I never saw Brand New as emo either. I don't want to call them pop rock or pop punk either because they're not really.
Hmm, alternative rock? But then that's far too vague.
The lack of wanting to associate them with emo probably comes from their douchey teenage girl fans who think painting your nails black and getting angry at your parents is embodying the spirit of emo.

The vocalist left after the first album you said? Shame. The vocal delivery is, as you pointed out, a definite highlight. I might listen to their second album, if it's close to the debut, I'll enjoy it.
I know they've just brought out a new album. I assume they're alike Weezer or Jimmy Eat World in that they just lost the spark they had as they got older? Or would it genuinely be worth a look in?