Thanks For The Memories: One Woman’s Reflection On Growing up With Pop Punk
Growing up as a woman anywhere and wanting to love something means you might have to figure out how to love it even though it might hate you. Especially when that thing is music, and even more so when it’s emo and pop punk music, genres built on the angst of teen hormones and men who have been sent to the friend zone.
I grew up in a small, rural town in Northern California, which only picked up nine different radio stations (five of which played country), where boys often came to school with guns because they’d been on an early morning hunt. The other radio stations were two oldies station, a numetal/“punk” station and a top hits station that is now also an oldies station. It was hard finding music that I could identify with. Sure, some country music addresses feelings, but when have you ever heard a country singer belt at the top of their lungs that they’re not okay (they promise), or that they need help?
Even though we all had Internet connections, music was still a communal thing, with songs and bands being passed around and talked about in class and in the backs of cars during lunchtime. Needless to say, when my friend Jared handed me The Starting Line’s “Best of Me” one day at school, I was hooked. Finally, a band was singing about something I cared about, not about drinking beer and loving a woman, or a tractor, something that sounded like the Fall Out Boy I heard on the radio. This band, like me, loved people deeply, was afraid of ruining things because of their own stupidity, worried about breaking up and getting back together and longed for someone who wasn’t available anymore, but who maybe would be. I immediately fell in love with pop punk. Blink-182, Paramore, New Found Glory, Good Charlotte, Brand New, Taking Back Sunday, My Chemical Romance, you name it, were all on rotation on my limited edition red U2 iPod. Finally, music about being fucked up in the same ways I thought I was fucked up. These bands understood, they figured it out, and maybe sometimes they fixed it, but thank goodness they sang it.
Through this music, I started to distance myself from the “other girls.” I hung out with dudes because girls were too dramatic, too much work, too shallow and uncool. They listened to pop and country and didn’t get it. I cut my hair short and played video games and wouldn’t be caught dead in a skirt. I was unbearable. I was Hayley Williams in Paramore’s “Misery Business” video and everyone else was the girl she totally shits on throughout the whole song. I was Avril Lavigne in her “Sk8rBoi,” video — fearless, unflinchingly one of the boys, and completely comfortable believing that she was the best kind of girl. I internalized misogyny without knowing it.
At its best, female-fronted pop punk encouraged combative female relationships over a boy, while male-fronted bands sang about how their girl wasn’t good enough, how they would die without her, or worse, how they would kill her if they found themselves without her. I would argue Taking Back Sunday’s infamous song, “Cute Without the E (Cut from the Team)” is a song about how, without a girl’s love, Adam Lazzara will kill himself, unless she kills him first.
When everything you’ll get is/
everything that you’ve wanted, princess/
well which would you prefer/
My finger on the trigger, or me face down, down across your floor.
Or Brand New’s “Jude Law and a Semester Abroad,” for example, with its lyrics “I hope the next boy that you kiss has something terribly contagious on his lips” from the perspective of “the American boy back in the states who would do anything you say.” These women are painted as the root of all evil, and even though we don’t know who they are, I assumed they were “the other girl.” The girls I’m not supposed to be, because those girls didn’t treat him right and did her own thing.
There’s no gray area for these women, it’s the virgin-whore dichotomy from the get-go. These women are sex objects that are either saviors or sinners, the singer’s dream come true or the reason the singer can’t go on with life. They simply don’t get to be individuals. A woman is an object keeping someone alive, whether he kills himself without her or she does the killing herself (presumptively, because she leaves him).
During a time when you’re busy discovering your body, imagine what it’s like to do so while also being told your body is a possession and can kill someone if you don’t love them the way they want to be loved. It’s a lot of pressure, but as a teen, I loved it.
Once I realized what was happening — listening to and supporting a music genre that actively encouraged people to hate women — I started to feel very guilty, and pushed it away almost completely. How could I love music that is so steeped in white boys whining about how hard it is to find love because girls are so terrible? Especially when I frequently and passionately refer to myself as a feminist. Was I wrong in loving these songs?
Working through it, I came to terms with pop punk in the same way feminists come to terms with a lot of things that are problematic, but that they still love. I learned from why I thought the way I had, and grew from it. For all the misogyny and slut shaming thrown our way in these songs, there was a lot in there that helped me in middle school and high school. Brand New, My Chemical Romance, Blink-182, as cliche as they were (and may still be), sang songs about life that I still relate to today. Sometimes, I just say “fuck you” to a song when I have to, and “I love you” when I can. It’s sometimes about picking and choosing how much male whine I can listen to, and for how long.
