Boys for Florida

In hindsight, the summer of 1997 all the way into July of 1998 stands out as probably the toughest year of my life for a number of reasons that could serve to help this little tribute to Boys for Pele turning 20, but I’ll skip all of that stuff and get to the good part.

Going down a mental checklist of music I listened to during that year, Avail’s Dixie, a cassette with a bunch of Discount songs on it, The Day the Sun Went Out by Boysetsfire, a lot of Neurosis, Do You Know Who You Are? by Texas is the Reason, and Fuel for the Hate Game by Hot Water Music all come to mind. Those albums all had a lot of screaming, lyrics like “Silence kills the revolution” and “Hold on tight to your fears,” loud guitars, crashing drums, and other sounds that echoed a lot of the anger and sadness I was feeling for so many things that felt so wrong. That was my soundtrack, but Boys for Pele was really my life. It took me away from all of that and let me in Tori’s world for as long as I wanted to listen to it, and I wasn’t the only one.

There’s this weird phenomenon that I don’t think will ever quite get a proper study, how so many punk and hardcore kids in the late 1990s who spent their days listening to stuff like Snapcase or some other band with a name surrounded by Xs would listen to Tori at night. You’d go into a Tori chat on AOL only to find screen names like PUNKSFORPELE or somebody with a Minor Threat quote in their profile, and on the flipside, go into the Straight Edge chat and you’d be sure to find some nod to Little Earthquakes in there or somebody asking if anybody was going to see Tori when she was playing nearby.

I got into Tori around the same time as I started skateboarding and rubbing the Dead Kennedys DK logo into my arm with a pencil eraser, so I can’t really say why exactly both things worked for me or anybody else, but by 1998, with my 18th birthday approaching and what I assumed would be all of the troubles of my life put behind me as I officially–supposedly–entered adulthood, my entire life was listening to punk and Tori. And as high school finished up, and I was preparing for the unknown, I met somebody else who shared those two interests. We started talking in a chat room, then moved on to IMs, then emails, then phone calls, and with a few weeks left until school was out, making plans for me to visit her — in Florida.

Since this is the condensed version of my story, I’ll just say that once I stepped off the plane with my backpack filled with a few changes of clothes, some vegan snacks, a copy of HeartattaCK, a notebook, a Discman, and my copy of Boys for Pele, things went sour really fast. The girl had met another guy in the two weeks between me buying my plane ticket and me arriving at Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport, but for whatever reason didn’t tell me until that first night, adding that he was on his way to visit her in a day or so, but I could crash with her friend at her house if I needed to.

Yeah, I needed to, I told her. So without a mode of transportation, no friends, and no way to dialup the Internet so I could talk to my faceless friends, all I had was the heat, my notebook, and Boys for Pele on constant repeat, often playing “Hey Jupiter” four or five times in a row. For a whole week I just walked around the neighborhood where the complete stranger I was staying with and never talked to lived, and just listened to that album, wondering if my life was totally fucked or if things would change. I became so attached to that album, more than any record before or since, clinging to it like it was the only friend I had for thousands of miles, because until my flight back to Chicago, it was really all I had.

We tend to put a lot of emphasis on how important music can be to us and while I think there are bands that maybe helped shape me and my view of the world, Tori, and especially Boys of Pele, was really always there at just the right time. She was a click of the play button away from taking me out of where I was, and yesterday, while reading Niina Pollari’s own wonderful remembrance of living in Florida and listening to the very same album as a teenager, I was reminded again of what makes her music so special and so important to so many people. She is one of the most perfect examples of an artist you either totally get and love or totally don’t, her music can be the soundtrack to your greatest love or most awful heartbreak, and for some reason she lends herself really well to being stuck in Florida and just wanting to get out.