This is Crestwood.

It’s a tiny, suburban town maybe a forty minute train ride into New York City. We only have a tiny train stop in between our more esteemed neighbors Tuckahoe and Scarsdale, and our claims to fame are that Robert Pattinson shot Remember Me back in 2008 and that Norman Rockwell did a sketch of our train station.

We are not talking about exciting here. I mean, I’m pretty sure the same kids I went to school with are living in the same houses that they lived in when I was in the eighth grade. The same people go to church at the same hours every week and the same priest is giving a variation of the same homily every Christmas.

In one word: BORING

So, keep all of this Beaver Cleaverness in mind when I begin to tell you how a small music scene tried to thrive in his rather deprived little town.

(Spoiler: Said music scene withered and died before it sprouted its first chest hair.)

Crestwood is like most towns in lower Westchester, NY. It’s small, it’s family oriented, kids are in sports, dance, scouts, and art programs that typically take up every waking moment. It’s the kind of community where almost every child is going to go on to college, probably a top 100, and will more often than not end right back up in those wood lined streets.

There is a set formula for life in Crestwood. You are born; you have a nanny or your mom becomes a stay at home mom for a while, joining other stay at home moms for their morning power walks with their bright colored strollers, whining about the trivialities of diaper changing and comparing the consistency of spit up; you go to Asbury Nursery School (thank God my parents were weird and sent me some place where I did other things than just finger painting; a waste of formative years, that); you end up at Annunciation Elementary for Kindergarten through eighth grade (again, thank the Lord I didn’t end up there until third grade); then off to some fancy, Ivy League prep school; college; 9–5; back to Crestwood with your spouse, 2.5 kids, and a dog.

All incredibly scintillating, right?

Well, my friends were a little different.

Under the totalitarian regime of nuns and Roman Catholic education (honestly, it’s not all that bad, but when you’re thirteen, you have entered the ninth layer of Dante’s Hell), we grew longer limbs and our voices changed and, God forbid, our hormones went all out of whack. While still being pressed into pleated uniforms, we all struggled with identity and sexuality.

It wasn’t the best time, let’s just say that, and there was always this need to assert yourself as different because who really wanted to belong to the tartan wearing, tie pulling masses?

So, 2003 came along and there was an influx of music played by guys with tattoos and black painted nails and kohl rimmed eyes. Suddenly, our eyes and ears and minds were latched onto TV screens in the morning and after school periods, listening, learning as guys with spiked hair sung about nonconformity while playing the same four chords over and over and over…

Well, that was the case for most of my classmates. Me? I already had early forays into the world of delinquents- The Rolling Stones, Sabbath, Howlin Wolf were all played by my father so men testing the hetero norm and questioning the bourgeois mindset was nothing new to me- but my friends were just starting to find those new ways of thinking. They were just starting to really pick up on the different, the “other.”

And they loved it.

Sum 41's “Fat Lip” was the song that changed things for a lot of my friends. They heard that song, they heard the lines, “I don’t want to waste my time, become another casualty of society…” and something inside them clicked.

They wanted to do that.

So what did they do? They found instruments and started playing in basements and tried to play out. And they did. And they played and they played and they practiced and I even went so far as to let them play at my Sweet 16.

But then life happened and they drifted.

This is the narrative for most suburban bands- college starts, members drift, and that’s it, curtains.

Suburbia is no place for music.

Life has had other plans for kids in suburbia since the moment their parents budgeted enough for their conception and rearing. Music has no place in it.

In all honesty, bands from suburbia don’t normally make it because the hunger isn’t there, the need to be on a stage because that’s it, that’s all they have. Most suburban kids have athletic skills or decent grades or something, something more socially acceptable to latch onto that they can peddle in the world.

Those guys that make it big in bands? They didn’t really come from affluential areas with more talents shoved into pockets than they could dream of. Most of them had one thing- music- and they hungered for it and needed it and that was the drive to say, “fuck it,” to basketball games and tutoring sessions that cost mom and dad $200 an hour. Mom and dad probably didn’t have $200 an hour to pay for tutoring sessions.

So, suburbia, with its trimmed lawns and Sundays spent either in a gymnasium or on a field, has no room for music.

There’s also the unfortunate fact that there are no places for teen bands to perform. They have to pray that they have friends who will let them play at their parties, hope that they can make it to Battle of the Bands, or it’s curtains. The ideas of a Gilman Street seems almost mythical, something out of some punk rock fairy tale.

No, suburbia is no place for music, music that defies the mainstream. Music is pushed to the back burner, allowed to stew too long until it’s nothing but mush and unsellable.

Music dies in suburbia.