If every teenager is to some extent defined by the music they love (a premise embraced, I think, by a lot of teens), then I was an emo/pop-punk kid.
It was a genre that, like MySpace, was at the height of its popularity in the early-to-mid 2000s. I never went all-in on the look, but I embraced the attitude and the vibe (to the extent I could while still being a goodie-goodie). The music was noisy and punk-ish and screamy and angsty, but it was also upbeat and often intentionally silly, immature, or tongue-in-cheek (Exhibit A: the album cover for Sum 41's All Killer No Filler; Exhibit B: Green Day and Blink-182's dedication to potty humor). The aesthetic was thrift stores and t-shirts under baggy zip-up hoodies and checkerboard patterns and eyeliner and hair dye, skater-culture Vans and west coast slacker accents. Most of the time, song lyrics lived firmly in the land of Teen Stuff: how difficult/amazing it is to be young, how the adult world is bullshit, what it's like to disappoint your parents or have them disappoint you, how difficult/amazing it is to be the only one who understands, how sad it is when a friend dies in a car crash or commits suicide, how much you love your crush, how your crush would be so much better off with you than she is with her current boyfriend, how heartless and cruel and in retrospect super annoying your ex-girlfriend is, how your ex-girlfriend deserves to be poisoned or maybe die in a car crash. Lots of juvenile irreverence and big feelings.
Perhaps implied: This isn't exactly a genre you would turn to for political art or commentary.
And yet: circa 2002-03, "pop-punk artists process 9/11 in song" became a thing. On albums otherwise fully devoted to teen angst, you would stumble on one track -- just one -- that was a sincere meditation on the attacks on the World Trade Center. It seemed strange at the time, and the existence of these songs continues to cross my mind approximately twice a year.
So, humor me. Let's revisit some of the most memorable tracks together. I've ordered this list roughly from worst to best. (My ranking methodology is scientific and I will hear no objections, thank you.)
The Innocent (2001)
by Good Charlotte, Mest, and Goldfinger
Sample lyrics:
For their religion or their skin
But hate can't solve the problem it began
Everyone is angry
People are afraid
And no one knows what decisions will be made
And we don't know why (don't know why)
The innocent die (don't know why)
Will this world ever find a way to change?
Maybe we can forgive this song for being the worst of the bunch, since it was released as a free-floating "tribute" single just nine days after the attacks. Musically, the song is cookie-cutter pop-punk: there's even a flashy guitar slide after the first chorus that is repeated identically after the second. The lyrics manage to be both clunkily literal ("We know it's not right / We don't know why so many had to die") and irritatingly vague (who's angry? everyone! who's afraid? people! what needs to change? the world.). It's not that it's objectively terrible as much as it sounds like the kind of song an Earnest Pop-Punk Music Generator app would produce if informed about 9/11.
Skylines and Turnstiles (2002)
by My Chemical Romance
Sample lyrics:
And in this moment, we can't close the lids, on burning eyes
Our memories blanket us, with friends we know, like fallout vapors
Steel corpses stretch out towards an ending sun
Scorched and black, it reaches in and tears your flesh apart
As ice cold hands rip into your heart
That's if you've still got one that's left
Inside that cave you call a chest
And after seeing what we saw
Can we still reclaim our innocence?
Weirdly, I think this song has the opposite problem as "The Innocent." Whereas "The Innocent" bashes you in the face with HELLO THIS IS A 9/11 SONG, I suspect the main reason we recognize "Skylines and Turnstiles" as a 9/11 song is because the lead singer/songwriter gave interviews saying so. Like a lot of early MCR, the song is a rambling/warbling mess. (I disliked this band until their songs got tighter and more structured, at which point I loved them.) Lyrically, it's possible to listen to this track and assume it's generically about being a corporate drone in the big city and feeling dead inside ("We walk in single file, we light our rails, and punch our time / Ride escalators colder than a cell") and even the more obvious imagery (the lyrics I copied/pasted above) isn't that different from what you'll find in a typical MCR song. That said, when it comes to Art Cred, oblique is better than too obvious.
Believe (2003)
by Yellowcard
Sample lyrics:
Thank you for giving up your life that day
Never fearing, only hearing voices calling out
Let it all go, the life that you know
Just to bring them down alive
And you still came back for me
You were strong and you believed
There are two jarring aspects to this otherwise perfectly palatable, laudatory ode to 9/11 first responders. The first is the part in the bridge when the then-unmarried, 21-year-old front man sings, "Want to hold my wife when I get home / Want to tell my kids they'll never know / How much I love to see them smile." (Wife? Kids? Why? Granted, this isn't the only Yellowcard song in which the singer assumes the voice of a character. In "Gifts and Curses," the speaker is Spiderman.) The other jarring thing is when the song straight-up samples speeches from the one-year memorial for the WTC attack, including parts of Mayor Bloomberg's remarks and NY Governor Pataki quoting the "little note nor long remember" line from the Gettysburg Address. I like the music -- Yellowcard's violinist consistently classes up their songs -- but those audio samples take this song from "endearingly earnest" to "cringingly earnest."
Elevator (2002)
by Box Car Racer
Sample lyrics:
The concrete looks too thin to break my fall
The sunset stretched across this nighttime scene
I counted people as I neared the street below
I saw it all, I saw it all go down
The shadow grew as he approached the ground
The sunset stretched across this nighttime scene
I turned away as he came near the street below
In a twist no one would expect, Tom DeLonge's solo project is the most specific and ambitious entry of the bunch conceptually, even if it's in dubious taste. Rather than trying to comment on 9/11 as a whole, the song focuses on a single person forced out the window of one of the WTC towers, with alternating verses taking the perspective of the person falling, and then a person on the street watching him fall. The lyrics are fittingly queasy and sparsely poetic (I know! From the Blink-182 guy!). The lengthy outro repeats the line "Let's forget this all, move on," which is an interesting contradiction of the "Never Forget" vow associated with the attacks. The biggest problem is the music: it's typical Box Car Racer, with DeLonge bleeting over quick-paced drums and strum-strummy guitar. It doesn't really suit the lyrics.
Truth (2002)
by SR-71
Sample lyrics:
All the fears
All the lies
They were here
All the time
The mouth of New York City talks
Spitting dust from streets to sidewalks
Pictures soaked in gasoline
Twisting through the steel and concrete
The smoke has cleared but I can't breathe
"Truth" succeeds the most by avoiding the pitfalls I complained about in the previous songs. The subject matter is clear without being groaningly obvious, and the metaphor of a mouth talking/spitting/breathing is vivid imagery that gives the song focus. The messaging avoids simplistic "terrorism is bad and sad" or "heroes are good" themes, though it's hard to know in which direction to interpret the references to "fear," "lies," and "truth." The thing that nudges this song to the top of my list is that the music suits the subject matter: SR-71 offers the hardest-rock track on this list, and they break out metal bass riffs and air-raid-siren-y guitar wails, which complement the lyrics' descriptions of destruction. There's a moment right at the end of the song, when the music is rocking the loudest, where the entire band cuts out and there's a split second of silence before the final line crashes in.
To address a possible elephant in the room: With
the exception of "Believe," all of these songs were written and released by 2002, which means they predate, for example, the invasion of Iraq. In subsequent years, some emo/pop-punk artists would begin dabbling in anti-war/anti-militarism sentiments (see for example the Rock Against Bush compilations, Green Day's American Idiot, Yellowcard's "Two Weeks from Twenty," Thursday's "Friends in the Armed Forces," etc.).
But the songs I focused on here aren't War on Terror songs; they're tribute songs, strictly about mourning and memorializing the events of 9/11. I think that's why this bubble of pop-punk tracks has fascinated me for so many years: the peculiar subgenre of "earnest 9/11 tributes" is perhaps most strongly associated with country music artists, but the emo/pop-punk contingent (unsurprisingly) strikes a different tone -- less rah-rah-America and resiliency, more anguish and horror. It's a weird but, I think, mostly welcome contribution.
