Don't get me wrong, I actually liked the aesthetic (still do... sorry) and some of the music. But in trying to be different and proud I wound up eschewing the things which actually made me different. I narrowed my focus and my tastes to only those things that were cool within the uncool crowd. If anyone hinted that they knew of my secret love of mellow music with tight harmonies, or my preference of tense thriller movies over the gruesome shock factor movies everyone seemed to be boasting, I would swear up and down that it wasn't true. I was scared that my interest in or love of some things would negate the validity of my status in others. That I would get the dreadful label of "poser" if I didn't preemptively inform everyone that "No, really, I was wearing my Dad's ties before Avril did it in that cheesy video" (that I secretly loved). And even though it was true I stopped wearing them when she started because she was making a mockery of our subculture with her badly written lyrics and bubblegum infused style. I didn't want to be associated with it... at least not publicly.
I also wouldn't admit to knowing all the lyrics to my parents Simon & Garfunkel albums, or the songs on the country radio station we always had playing in the family home and cars... If you asked whether I enjoyed playing board games or putting together puzzles with my parents I would definitively tell you no. Mission trips and family vacations? I did those because I had to! Totally sucked. I basically didn't like anything... liking things, being enthusiastic wasn't cool, unless of course it was stuff that creeped "normal" people out. In fact I went so far as to pretend I liked spiders for something like two years... in which I actually picked them up with my bare hands to carry them outside and save them from being squished, all while my stomach was tying itself in knots and I was desperately attempting to not hurl the thing at the nearest hard surface and run the other way! All to prove what a bad ass I was. Seriously. What could be more lame?
Things started to change as I began to heal from some of the bad decisions alluded to earlier... in the midst of the healing process, while I was just vulnerable enough to be open to it, I was introduced to a band I would likely never have listened to during my rebel stage. To this day I am not one to loudly endorse a particular musical group, mostly out of fear that they won't stand the test of time and I will look back on my enthusiastic writings about them and feel the same way I do when I crack open one of my high school diaries. Embarrassed. Because I really don't know that much about music, except for the way it makes me feel and the impact it has on my life as a result.... but Bleed American by Jimmy Eat World was a saving grace to me at that time in my life. I think most people found themselves uplifted and comforted by the single The Middle. I was no exception. And I still feel that way when it comes on, but I hadn't yet heard that song (if I remember correctly) when the album made it's way into my hands and then made it's home in my car stereo, where it for the most part stayed on repeat for years. It was energetic and mellow, challenging and comforting. Something about it felt like home. I could listen for hours, days, weeks on end without growing tired. I would change the CD only because I felt like at some point I should, only to return to it shortly thereafter. It was cathartic. I fell for it. And for once I wasn't afraid of what the rest of the rebels might say. They were already talking about me in much worse ways so what did I have to loose? I wore Jimmy Eat World Tshirts to school and sang along at the top of my lungs with the windows rolled down regardless of who I might pull up next to at the next stop light. I cried through Hear You Me more times than I can count. And I resolved over and over to not spend my life wondering, standing in the back just looking around...
A Praise Chorus is what I think of immediately when I think of that album, that band, but most importantly that time in my life. A time when I freed myself up to like what I like because I liked it, and that's it. A time when I decided to re-inhabit my own body and do everything I could to be the person that I wanted to be. It's no surprise it felt like home... the chorus of it with things, snippets, of songs I didn't even know that I knew. A reminder of a childhood spent listening to and learning things about other people's lifetimes... not just mine. Not just my high school bubble of black clothing ripped apart and put back together with safety pins while Korn songs played in the background as I snuck another cigarette hanging out my parents bathroom window. It subtly reminded me that I was more than the stage I was in. I was a whole person, not just an image of one.
And so all that being said, I did something I've always been a little leery of... something that felt like giving too much importance to a fleeting thing. A lyric. I tattooed a lyric on my skin.... well technically I didn't do it, a very talented artist did ... but still. I got a lyric tattooed on me in permanent ink. But if there was ever any lyric it was this one... because it is the opposite of fleeting. It has already lasted the test of time. And while it reminds me of the feeling a particular album gives me first and foremost, it also reminds me that there is more to me than one genre. I can and do love Tommy James and the Shondells, Joan Jett and Jimmy Eat World. And that is more than ok in my book.
Over and over... and over... and...
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