Scenestory: Boiling frogs
“I heard they all went to college. I heard they all have degrees. Isn’t that weird?”
Previously.
Over a month ago, I mentioned in the introduction to this series the English post-punk movement that started in the late ‘70s and lasted through the mid-’80s. Many post-punk acts were art-school graduates or self-taught bohemians who embraced musical influences that punk shunned — reggae, disco, and glam rock — while rejecting the punk approach to politics, which they considered blunt and preachy.
A similar pattern happened with emo re: hardcore. Bands like Rites of Spring and Embrace critiqued the scene from within the scene, but others struck out in a totally different direction.
Flyover country
American Football is twelve songs and a house in Illinois. It was more of a stop-gap art project, a reason to keep hanging out and making music, than a serious band. Those twelve songs sound like the music that would be playing in the Bronze at the end of a self-reflective Buffy episode — a twinkly, chilled-out kind of indie rock that inspired the nickname “Midwest emo” and would be aped by emo bands throughout the next decade.
“When we started playing together, we definitely had a desire to sound a bit different than what was around us. Those guys were into the hardcore stuff coming out on Dischord records, but we didn’t want to sound like that,” drummer Steve Lamos told Vice. “We were determined to be quieter than that, more post-rocky and jazzy than loud and aggressive.”
American Football’s self-titled album was put out by Polyvinyl Records, a label based in Champaign, Illinois, at the end of the band’s three years together. Polyvinyl founder Matt Lunsford asked the guys if they wanted to record something as American Football basically on a whim, and there was no touring or promotion to support the release. Rifts had already formed between the band members, and singer/guitarist/bassist Mike Kinsella recalled in Vice’s oral history that the process wasn’t very fun.
“We finished the whole thing in a week and handed Matt the mastered tapes and broke up. No press, no record release show, no supporting tour or anything,” guitar Steve said. “Like a lot of punk and indie records, it was a document of a band that no longer existed.”
After the band members went their separate ways post-college, American Football was physical evidence of American Football as it existed in 1999 — but not the only physical evidence. There was also the house, 704 W. High St. in Urbana, Illinois, that appears on the American Football album cover.
Urbana, which hosts the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois, is rich with music history. REO Speedwagon first practiced together in the university dorms, and Sleater-Kinney supposedly played in the yard behind the house that would become synonymous with American Football and the Midwest emo genre as a whole. People still make pilgrimages to visit 704 W. High St. and take pictures outside — “easily two or three a week,” according to the resident as of last year.
I don’t know if anyone, even the band itself, knows why American Football became a posthumous phenomenon, but Mike Kinsella told Vice his theory: The album connects with young people because it captures the emotion they feel in their high school-college transition years, and the kids who fell in love with it in the early 2000s kept its memory alive. Polyvinyl founder Matt Lunsford calls it the “frog in the boiling water effect” — “it was such a slow burn for so long that no one noticed this was burning for 15 years.”
“The magic is right there, in a no-name house in a nowhere town, waiting to be discovered,” Cooper Fleishman said, describing the American Football house in MEL magazine.
Compared to everything else that was going on in music at the time — especially what Fleishman calls the “gussied-up pre-Napster cash-to-toilet maximalism” of mainstream rock — the sound and visual style of Midwest emo was stripped-down and accessible. It was driven by the do-it-yourself philosophy that was now accessible to anyone with an amp and a pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop 3.5 to design album art.
Midwest bands like American Football, The Get Up Kids, and The Promise Ring drifted away from the hardcore sound and gave emo music a new reputation as what author Andy Greenwald calls “boy-driven, glasses-wearing, overly sensitive, overly brainy, chiming-guitar-driven college music.” They weren’t the only ones shaping the emo template, though. When American Football got together in 1997, emo had already touched the mainstream, even if no one realized what that meant yet.
1-2-3-4 who’s punk what’s the score
In the early ‘90s, the California hardcore scene defined a decade earlier by bands like Black Flag was still churning away. Then, in 1994, a group of Bay Area babies dropped their major-label debut, Dookie. That’s when everything changed for California punk.
“All of a sudden everyone was getting courted by the majors. Everyone was looking for the next Green Day,” Jawbreaker drummer Adam Pfahler told Pitchfork.
If you’re looking to capitalize on the alternative music market, who better than the relatively unknown band who just got back from opening for Nirvana on tour and who Green Day cites as an influence?
Enter Jawbreaker.
After eight years of playing together, the three-person outfit signed to a major label in 1994, and that was the beginning of the end. The band had built a following — not just in their home, San Francisco’s Mission District, but across the country — on what Pitchfork calls “hyper-literate heartbreak,” by which I guess they mean sadboy punk that references Kerouac.
Retrospective writing about Jawbreaker (and there’s a lot of that) tends to focus on singer/guitarist/lyricist Blake Schwarzenbach as the key to the band’s intense following. In an oral history of the band published by Alternative Press, tour manager and friend of the band Christy Colcord said, “Most of [the fans] hovered around Blake because he was, like, this poet to them. It was all these people who really wanted their heartbreak validated by someone who could understand.”
“Alienation never sounded so good,” according to Spin’s 1994 review of 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, the album that got Jawbreaker the Nirvana gig.
Many of the band’s songs, like “Condition Oakland,” paint detailed portraits of life in SoCal that segue into literary imagery: “I rode down to the tracks / Thinking they might sing to me / But they just stared back / Broken, trainless, and black as night.” However, Jawbreaker is particularly noted for a brand of self-reflection that positioned the band within a scene, but also against that scene, as in their signature song “Boxcar”: “You’re not punk, and I’m telling everyone / Save your breath, I never was one.”
They were already being called sellouts for playing Nirvana’s In Utero tour — even though the other bands traveled in giant tour buses and Jawbreaker arrived at venues in the same van they’d always used. Once Jawbreaker’s first major-label album, Dear You, arrived in stores, longtime fans also criticized the band’s new sound, which was shaped by Dookie producer Rob Cavallo.
Side note: Despite Jawbreaker’s close proximity to Green Day, the two bands were very different. Bands like Green Day and Blink-182 came from a lineage that diverged from the hardcore scene around the same time as emocore — a poppier, snottier, brattier alternative to hardcore. These early pop punk bands could be introspective, sure, but their lyrics lacked the emotionally desolate navel-gazing that makes emo emo.
Dear You lost Jawbreaker a lot of long-time fans and didn’t win many new ones. It only sold about 40,000 copies. (Nirvana’s Nevermind sold 374,000 copies during the week of Christmas 1991 alone, and Dookie sold 8 million in a little under two years.) The production doesn’t work as well — something about the album feels sludgier and heavier than the band’s previous work — but the standout tracks are still catchy and memorable.
The band only survived for about a year after Dear You flopped. It wasn’t the album’s fault, although the backlash probably didn’t help. If you ask Jawbreaker, they’ll tell you that they were growing apart, with varied levels of being a drama queen about it.
“Being in Jawbreaker, there was no way to figure my way out of it. I was consumed by the projected identity of who I was as a member of Jawbreaker,” Blake said in an interview reflecting on 24 Hour Revenge Therapy. “I just couldn’t be that person — that person is a lot more romantic than who I am in my real life. My life was so empty at that time that I just felt like I had to completely restart it.”
In the ‘90s, Jawbreaker wasn’t really considered emo, despite all the warning signs, but the band has been posthumously grouped under the same sub-heading as earlier acts like Rites of Spring and later bands who name-dropped Jawbreaker as an influence. According to Adam, years later Rob Cavallo still had bands reference sounds from Dear You during production, like the distinct guitar tone in “Accident Prone.”
The myth of Jawbreaker was propagated by word-of-mouth for a long time, setting a template for later generations of emos: the raw emotionality, the intimate devotion to a larger-than-life hero figure, the self-conscious lyrics, even the backlash and accusations of selling out. For better or worse, emo music got its grubby little fingerprints on the mainstream, and the bigger impression was still to come.
I’ll leave you with this 2003 cover of the opening track from Dear You as a little nod to the future, which I dug into the archive of my old Tumblr from high school to find (lol). Apparently I spent my summer work-study bumping this version of this song one year, which I completely forgot about until I heard the original last week and it took me out like Anton Ego tasting ratatouille.
I had downloaded the garbage-quality mp3 from Tumblr and put it on my parents’ broken iPod Touch so I could listen to it while scraping tape residue off the inside of people’s lockers. Things were simpler back then.
Also, in honor of Rep. John Lewis’ passing this weekend, I want to take a moment to recognize the importance of organizations that fight for voter rights and education — like Spread the Vote, which helps get IDs necessary to vote for those who need them, and Common Cause, which campaigns for election protection and modernization — as well as the importance of doing the dang thing, “demanding civil rights not tomorrow, not next week, but today.”
Next time in Scenestory: Satan is our only hope.
Offline sources
Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo by Andy Greenwald
“If you hear this song a hundred times it still won’t be enough: The oral history of Jawbreaker” by Trevor Kelley for Alternative Press
Sells Like Teen Spirit by Ryan Moore
Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 by Simon Reynolds
Header collage images from Wikimedia Commons (Jawbreaker logo and cross-section of a Jawbreaker candy) and by Chris Strong for Polyvinyl records (American Football album cover).