The Return Of The Loneliest Boys In Town
Cute is what we aim for is a band from emo’s mid-2000s boom, when any kids who met in high school and had long hair were getting signed to Fueled By Ramen after Blink-182 and Fall Out Boy and a handful of other bands made good enough for there to be a run on groups that might be able to cash in on a hit album or two. Their name is clunky and embarrassing, but it’s mostly because they listened to too many emo albums that had exhaustingly long song titles and thought they’d cut out the middleman. They weren’t as endearing and fun as some of the other mid-2000s bands. Hellogoodbye also had a corny name, but at least they had the good sense to play synthesizers and bring beach balls to their concerts. That particular era of emo was all about kids who were self-aware enough to know that they were the joke. Cute Is What We Aim For pretended to think they were the joke, but they seemed to want to be taken seriously with their sprawling songs about heartbreak and distance. Their first album, 2006’s The Same Old Blood Rush with a New Touch, had no depth and felt entirely contrived, like a band trying on a bunch of clothes that someone told them they should be wearing, even though all of the shirts are too big. Still, I sang along to “Curse of Curves” at enough house parties in 2006 to make the record a worthwhile purchase in the sea of emo albums that flooded the summer of 2006, but were forgotten by winter.
After another album, a handful of lineup shuffles, and a lengthy hiatus, Cute Is What We Aim For returned in the summer of 2016 to tour, playing the full Same Old Blood Rush album in its entirety, honoring its tenth anniversary. This was an odd choice, and felt explicitly like an attempt at a money grab. The album carried no memorable hits, peaked at a meager #75 on the charts, and was critically panned. Still, my fascination getting the best of me (and my deeply uninterested partner out of town), I made the trip to see them when they came through Hamden, Connecticut, a college town filled with early-20s kids who, in most cases, wouldn’t be able to pick the band out of a lineup. The venue, which I entered about ten minutes before show time, was close to barren.
The problem with Same Old Blood Rush is the problem with a lot of emo albums from its era, and why most emo bands don’t drag out their old albums in their entirety. One of the first lines you hear on the album is: “in every circle of friends there’s a whore,” courtesy of the song “Newport Living,” and the album builds around a single common theme: bitterness, most commonly aimed at an imagined woman who has wronged the band in some way. This is a common trope in all music, of course, but it took on a more visceral tone in the second and third waves of emo. In the early 2000s, the first albums by bands like Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, and Fall Out Boy, while stunning in many ways, also acted as revenge fantasy. The theme, in these albums and beyond, revolved around summoning “the girl,” and then wishing for ill to befall her as a punishment for heartbreak. Punishment rarely doled out by the man dreaming it up, but by some other circumstance: a car crash, choking on a meal, being attacked by an animal. It was, for me, very in the moment—something that I did myself in my teens from behind the security of a keyboard or behind a pen. It’s in the spirit of male loneliness to imagine that someone has to suffer for it.
Same Old Blood Rush takes this approach, but with less direct and explicit violence, and more of an angle that feels like the band is in a high school hallway, spreading rumors about the girl who slept with them and didn’t call the next day. This leads to incessant binary moral judgements based more on gender than actual judgements. The hook before the first chorus in “Newport Living” is “If you lie, you don’t deserve to have friends,” repeated on loop. “Curse of Curves” bemoans attractive women who just can’t keep up with the band’s intellect. So does “Lyrical Lies.” So does “There’s A Class For This,” with a hint of even more boastful arrogance (“I may be ugly / but they sure love to stare”), the kind of lyrics that sound like things you tell yourself after rejection. “The Fourth Drink Instinct” is a messy narrative about a young girl being taken advantage of by a man while drunk, but quickly turns into a song blaming the girl for drinking in the first place. In the place of explicit bursts of violent fantasies, the album instead opts for a low and consistent hum of violences, the ones that seem more logical to someone who might also be sad, who might also want to turn their loneliness into a weapon without having it actually look like a weapon.
In Hamden, the crowd has filled out a bit more, but barely. The band is stalling, waiting for more bodies to get into the room. You can tell, because it is easy to see them shuffling backstage, a member poking a head out every now and then. This is, in part, no fault of their own—Hamden is not New York City or even Pittsburgh. I wouldn’t have crossed state lines for this show, and was amazed to see that it was happening at all. For a 15 minute drive and a 10 dollar ticket, I could be easily convinced to see if there was any residual magic that my desire for nostalgia could drag up.
When the band finally comes out and plays through “Newport Living” and “There’s A Class For This,” it becomes obvious that they aren’t invested. The crowd of maybe 25 tries; a guy next to me nodding along to “Risque” and trying to sing all of the words stops himself in the middle of the “Medically speaking you’re adorable / and from what I hear you’re quite affordable” that opens the chorus. He looks around my age, both of us at the start of our 30s. We were perhaps both heartbroken a decade ago, at the dawn of our 20s, and looking for somewhere to place our pain. I feel this, the way I’ve aged and the loves and losses I’ve suffered in that aging, hanging over the room. It makes the display of dragging this particular album back out of the closet at first fascinating and then comically uncomfortable. There are endless ways that we have found and will find to blame women for things, particularly when it prevents us from unraveling our own unhappiness. But with Cute Is What We Aim For, all of its members either in their 30s or late 20s, standing on a stage and weaponizing decade-old bitterness doesn’t exactly echo to the corner of nostalgia that I thought it would. Even in the album’s catchier moments, like a very sharp performance of “Curse of Curves” and a slightly warmer acoustic version of the album’s best song, “Teasing to Please,” watching the show feels like being a senior in college and going back to hang out in the high school parking lot. Halfway through the show, I ask myself what I expected. I think I was hoping for the band to come out and play revised versions of their old songs, less bitter, less explicit in their hatred of the women they’ve built out of thin air and been broken by.
Twisting anger over heartbreak into something, well, cute, is easier for some genres than others. In emo, particularly during its heyday of attractive frontmen who fancied themselves poets, the misogyny was seen more as process than problem. Who among us, regardless of gender, hasn’t scrawled something in the silence of a notebook about an ex-someone? It’s a part of the coping, at least to a point. The problem is one of audience, though. The problem is the one of the notebook becoming public, sung to thousands. The problem is one of men being, largely, the only ones doing the singing. And, ultimately, the problem becomes when those men don’t age beyond the adolescent heartbroken temper tantrums that we all have before we learn better and start to know better. It’s not a measure of being morally superior to this band on stage, or not failing in my own politics around sadness, gender, and anger. But it’s the difference between trying to chip away at the emotional debt one has accrued versus piling on top of it. At moments in the show, I felt like I was exiting my current body and watching myself from through my younger eyes, wondering if this is what it was always going to come to. Returning to the balm for an old wound, ashamed that I once decided to wear it.
Though I didn’t know at the time I arrived at the Cute Is What We Aim For show in Hamden, a few days earlier, lead singer Shaant Hacikyan made the news for weighing in on Brock Turner, the Stanford rapist who got a decidedly light sentence for his crime. “Rape culture isn’t a thing, for real,” Hacikyan wrote on Facebook. “Playing the victim seems to fit
the narrative,” he said. “In my 29 years I’ve yet to encounter a human who is looking to rape someone […] Look into the actual statistics & get back to me.” It was a terrible and ill-informed take, one that came from someone who seemed to have very little understanding of the world. It was slow to pick up news, in part because it was a Facebook comment, and in part because the band’s fading relevance made it so that few people cared. When I found out about it, googling the band in the dark of my office after the show, it was both stunning and not. It was a stance that directly echoed the band’s entire history. By the time the story gained traction, Hacikyan already issued a toothless apology, thanking people for educating him on the topic of rape culture before taking the stage to sing a song about a young girl, drinking so much that the men around her just can’t help themselves.
Before the encore, most of the crowd leaves, but I stay, the guy who gave up on singing lyrics still sticking around next to me. As the break before the encore stretches out, we look at each other, and he says the first words that he’s said to me all night.
“Shit, man. I dunno. I got a wife and a daughter now. This ain’t like it was when we were young, is it?”
I smile, and shake my head. No. No, it isn’t.
Brief Notes On Staying // No One Is Making Their Best Work When They Want To Die
I don’t mean sadness as much as I mean the obsession with it. Once, on the wrong edge of a bridge, a boy I knew who played songs let his feet slip off. I found a tape of his after he was gone, and the music sounded sweeter, or at least I told myself it did. What I really want to do is say that life is impossible, and the lie we tell ourselves is that it is too short. Life, if anything, is too long. We accumulate too much along the way. Too many heartbreaks, too many funerals, too many physical setbacks. It’s a miracle any of us survive at all. I know that I stopped thinking about extreme grief as the sole vehicle for great art when the grief started to take people with it. And I get it. The tortured artist is the artist that gets remembered for all time, particularly if they either perish or overcome. But the truth is that so many of us are stuck in the middle. So many of us begin tortured and end tortured, with only brief bursts of light in between, and I’d rather have average art and survival than miracles that come at the cost of someone’s life. There will always be something great and tragic to celebrate and I am wondering, now, if I’ve had enough. I am, of course, in favor of letting all grief work through the body and manifest itself creatively. But what I’m less in favor of is the celebration of pain that might encourage someone to mine deeper into that unforgiving darkness, until it is impossible for them to climb out. I’m less in favor of anything that hurts and then becomes theater, if that theater isn’t also working to heal the person experiencing pain. I, too, am somewhat obsessed with watching creations that feel like work. I am less drawn to the artist who at least appears to make it look easy. But our best work is the work of ourselves, our bodies and the people who want us to keep pushing, even if the days are long and miserable and even if there are moments when the wrong side of the bridge beckons you close. All things do not pass. Sometimes, that which does not kill you sits heavy over you until all of the things that did not kill you turn into a single counterforce that might. No matter what comes out of a person in these times, the work that we make when we feel like we no longer want to be alive is not the best work if it is also not work that, little by little, is pushing us back toward perhaps staying, even if just for a moment.
What I’m mostly saying, friends, is that I’ve lost too much. And everything sounds good when you know it was the last thing a person would ever make. All of the words sit more perfect on the page when they are the last words. What I’m mostly saying, friends, is that I am sad today. I am sad today, and I may be sad tomorrow. But I watched a video where rappers hung out of the roof of a car and threw money in slow motion, and it made me briefly consider another type of freedom. I am sad today, but I held, in my hands, a picture of me on a day where I was not sad. In it, the sunlight leaked over my face in a city I love, and my eyes were wide and eager. I am sad yesterday, and I might be sad tomorrow, and even the day after. But I will be here, looking for a way out, every time. Staying is not always a choice, and I have lived and lost enough to know that. But the way I think about grief is that it is the great tug-of-war, and sometimes the flag is on the side you don’t want it to be on. And sometimes, the game has exhausted all of its joy, and all that’s left is you on your knees. But, today, even though I am sad, my hands are still on the rope. I am making my best work when my hands are on the rope, even if I’m not pulling back. Life is too long, despite the cliché. Too long, and sometimes too painful. But I imagine I have made it too far. I imagine, somewhere around some corner, the best part is still coming.
Searching For A New Kind Of Optimism
“It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands.”
—Zora Neale Hurston
My friends and I were wrong about a whole lot of things in 2016, and I imagine you and your friends were, too, if the concert of all our cages rattling in unison in our respective corners of the internet is any indication. I was once content with being wrong about the big things, as long as I could cloak myself in hope for something better. But at the end of a year in which I was wrong about almost everything, nothing about that felt worthy of praise, so I opted for silence. A few days before Christmas, I drove to Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the very tip of Cape Cod. A beach town consumed by tourists in the summer months, it is largely silent in the winter. You might see a few committed locals, a handful of artists, a small mass of people shifting from bar to bar and tripping down Commercial Street, swaying and drunkenly singing into the calm. It gets dark early there, on the very northeastern edge of the country. On the day I arrived, it was the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year. At 4 p.m., it was pitch black. There’s a particular kind of darkness that hangs over a space that’s surrounded by nothing but an ocean—a vast, swallowing darkness. It’s the kind that makes the memory of light seem hopeless, impossible.
In a Cape Cod record store two days before Christmas, I picked up a copy of the 1977 Richard Hell and the Voidoids album Blank Generation. Richard Hell holds open a leather jacket on the album cover, the words “YOU MAKE ME ________” scrawled across his chest. I thought about the old Lester Bangs profile, from shortly after this album came out, in which Hell prattled on about how much he wanted to die. Later, rereading that profile, I found that Hell wasn’t searching for death as much as he was looking for a way to halt feeling entirely. I find myself personally far removed from such longing, and I also find it worth pointing out that Hell is still alive in 2017. In his more recent writings, he seems resigned to the wisdom that can come with age. So does Pete Townshend, long after he hoped to die before he got old. But even if I don’t long for destruction the way these men once did, I understand how it feels to desire that kind of longing.
All emotion, when performed genuinely and facing an audience, can be currency. Sadness and fear are, perhaps, the two biggest bills in the billfold, and what was haunting about both Townshend and Hell in their youth is that their death wishes seemed believable. They didn’t sound like friends of mine joking on social media about wanting an asteroid to take us all out; theirs wasn’t a hope for human extinction, just the extinction of the self, the feelings that come with having to exist in uncertain times. There is plenty of rock optimism to counter this, of course, from Bruce Springsteen’s insistence on overcoming through labor to Tom Petty’s slick nostalgia as a survival tool. But when you grow up with punks, the kind of kids who listened to Richard Hell records and then found more like that, it’s easy to feel some distance from the kind of optimism that we’re taught to lean into during difficult times. Even now, I’m not as invested in things getting better as I am in things getting honest. The we
ek of Christmas, I drove alone into the dark, and I did that, in part, knowing that the dark was going to be there when I arrived, knowing that it would still be my work to find something small and hopeful within.
My friends say that I’ve gotten too cynical, and I suspect this might be true, judging by how quickly many people get exhausted when talking to me about the future. I am working on it, truly. A therapist tells me to challenge my “inner cynic,” but when I do, I simply find another inner cynic behind that one. I am, it turns out, a nesting doll of cynics. There is no evidence to suggest that humans are going to become any more kind this year, or more empathetic, or more loving toward each other. If anything, with our constant exposure to all of one another’s most intense moments, the bar for what we seem prepared to tolerate gets lower with every second we spend screaming into each other’s open windows. Yes, without question, 2016 was a year that dragged on more heavily than most before it. It felt exhausting, and like it would never end. But all past logic was pulling us toward that breaking point: a year that finally pushed us to the edge. And all logic in this moment points to another year that might not feel quite as long but will surely be just as trying.
I have been thinking, then, about the value of optimism while cities burn, while people are fearing for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, while discourse is reduced to laughing through a chorus of anxiety. A woman in a Cape Cod diner the day after Christmas saw me eyeing the news and shaking my head. She told me that “things will get better,” and I wasn’t sure they would, but I nodded and said, “They surely can’t get any worse,” which is the lie that we all tell, the one that we want to believe, even as there are jaws opening before us.
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