The Dangers of Inventing a Guy to Be Mad At (You)

Thinking about "ten-year anniversary tours" (hey, that's the name of this thing!) is probably only for the well-adjusted. I'm not one of those people. Anyway, let's take the tour. One last time. No smoking unless you're gonna share.

The last time I wrote about this shit, I swore it was the last time. I remember being clowned by a friend about "continuously milking the same two events in my life," as if this person's entire deal hadn't been solidified, repackaged, and re-sold for about fifteen years. We're all telling the same stories, making the same art, just with new angles if we're lucky to zoom out for a second. Most of us don't.

The stairs leading down into the First Unitarian Church basement are fucking abysmal. There's nothing you can do about that—do I have the right to be annoyed at a venue's accessibility if it's, like, not fully one? I just found the whole thing ironic: a benefit for United Cerebral Palsy? In this? That's nice, dear.

In 2013, I sent several pieces I had written for The Cavalier Daily, UVA's student paper, to two websites: Modern Vinyl and PropertyofZack. MV responded, and after explaining that the snapshots of my records were blurry because my hands couldn't stop shaking, I began writing reviews like they were paid content. Eventually, I started premiering tracks, interviewing bands, and building a sturdy portfolio—and I met Eric and Emily. A girl I met on Twitter because of being annoying about Modern Baseball made a PowerPoint presentation to ask my parents she could drive my stupid ass around the East Coast for their second headlining tour, and my parents, because they love my stupid ass, said yes. Lame-O and James-O (J-O did not look right, folks) got Tac-Os in West Philadelphia, and I ended up at some house show while I was introduced as "James from the Internet." Six months earlier, I had mailed to Lame-O HQ (read: somebody's apartment) a copy of Heavyweights (I vaguely remember their Bandcamp banner was the kids holding up the sandwich from the box art) and some comp called Essential Punk Rock. Not sure if it's any good, but hey.

I think I also posted on my personal Instagram early professionalization of the Lame-O mission: when they got ADA distribution via WMG, went to the FEST...shit, man, I was so Lame-O. I interned at WMG the previous summer and evangelized about Philadelphia dork shit (this was the summer MoBo toured Sports and leapfrogged headliner You Blew It!). This was something I found cool to commemorate on fucking Instagram like it was an actual Modern Baseball song, which is sometimes about Instagram. Fuck.

I was not the first person to write about Modern Baseball, but according to Jake Ewald's quote in this JUMP Philly article, "James was one of the first people that really cared about our band...[they] want to spread the things that [they] care about." Lame-O was releasing heaters in their early catalog, like Pretty Many People, a glassy and gorgeous album still in my heavy rotation, and had just signed Birmingham, U.K.'s Johnny Foreigner, their first pickup not from Pennsylvania. They'd release an album called You Can Do Better in the U.S. that lovingly was "robbing drum intros from blink 182 [sic]." Lame-O has now become an archive of a different Philadelphia Sound and a label with an ear for the weird and the wonderful, perhaps like the Our Noise-defined Merge Records. (Current bangers that are proof: Slippers' Do You Like Slippers? and Golden Apples' Bananasugarfire, alongside its remix EP.)

Then PropertyOfZack responded. I wrote a piece about being disabled and liking pop-punk (?) named after a popular song by The Wonder Years (gotta get them clicks) on the front desk computer where I swiped student IDs. I was so excited that I kept minimizing the gym's access program and typing on Notepad, much to the chagrin of everyone stuck in line. After Zack bought back his site from Warped Tour Mr. Burns, he published Re-done, a monthly column named after a song on Sports, Modern Baseball's best and debut full-length album. Just read the BrooklynVegan piece I wrote in 2022 for that tenth anniversary.
I just did: ugh. I'm normal now and don't put easy shots in writing. That's for athletes, or more specifically, the heroic road taken by Kendrick.

Instead, you could read Maria Sherman's Stereogum one. There is a lot of overlap in the narrative but she actually interviewed people, like a journalist would do. I am simply vibing off memory plays like Tennessee Williams.^[1]

I re-read Re-done (the POZ run, not The Book, lol), and it's survivable. I'm definitely more proud of weird upstairs, which is definitely Re-done: The Book as memory play, because I deleted all proof of that thing before moving to Philadelphia, so I just re-hashed bits I remembered when I felt like I could do it in a slightly different tone. That whole manuscript was done and it was probably annoying. I shudder to think about some Twitter discourse about how unnecessarily some White Guy^[2]'s mild problems are especially when soundtracked by songs that can be, and often are, reduced to "waaaaaaah girls don't like me." I deleted weird upstairs before leaving Philadelphia, so maybe I'm not proud of anything? What's the deal?

Do you know The Simpsons started as a show about Bart and then became a show about Homer? Modern Baseball began as a band about girls, continued as a band about girls, and then became a band about disillusionment, whether by endless feedback about their music or the terrors of continuing to live on this planet. People live, people change, and in between 2014's You're Gonna Miss It All (Quirky Song Critical Mass) and the end immortalized by 2016's wall-of-sound Holy Ghost (Weatherboxxx/No Love for Bro), the MoBo people became masters of a different basement: the cobwebbed-one, filled with dread and dust.

"Alpha Kappa Fall of Troy The Movie Part Deux" (Perfect Cast EP version shared above for your perusal) debuted on Strength in Weakness—alongside early versions of Hurry's "Shake It Off," a full-band rework of Marietta's "Joe," and exclusive offerings from Spraynard and The (Super)weaks. I am intentionally skipping over the sixth participant but I'm sure you can find a Replacement for that one. The version is slightly less caustic than its final cut but retains the track's huge stakes—the instrumental breaks cut through Ewald's staccato-slurred delivery and bruise harder. It's a good one. "Shake It Off" wins the comp, though. Teenage Fanclub (U.S.) knows how to do the Teenage Fanclub (U.K.) thing so well I'm sure there's a Coyote vs. Acme-style legal thriller about it being deleted at Warner Bros. right now.

Could you stop hitting me? I didn't curate this thing. That hurts; could you stop it? I know this is all pasty dude-adjacent, and I may be hot, but I'm also not earning terrific vitamin D labs. I am being cute about this because it's not my release, but the hubris that early- to mid-2010s emo had about being ignorant to their choosy inclusivity despite droning on and on about being "a good one" is something that I didn't exactly subvert by being one of a few disabled people in a scene. Maybe it's the proximity to the difference that makes people warm up to you until you're either not the different they expected or just, like, too different, like an asshole.

I milked being disabled, man: milked it so hard a colleague of the band Finch walked back a "funny story" about faking limps for preferential treatment (Simpsons did it first, buds); milked it so hard the night Whirr imploded after being transphobic and ableist in my mentions ("lol guy is scared to say retard" - most likely the guy who's being image-rehabbed into "spellbinding" 'Gum coverage); milked it so hard I quit writing for my dream, Alternative Press, because they put a guy who said "retard" on the cover, and realized just because you're hired to like, write shit about "safe spaces" and being a better person in a scene stuffed with songs about hating women, this damn town, fucking whatever, wastes of breath like that Trophy Eyes guy will still send a girl to the hospital after stage diving onto her, you'll never live stream your sets if it proves too expensive, and so many people will bystander effect their way past checking people on "retard," because at this point, we're all running out the clock on America until Canada swallows us. Or Mexico! Good with whatever.

There's no money in music; Spotify flattened the value of your craft to nothing. But you can't say that live music is the only way to try and make things work if you're leaving out an entire population of people who want to engage with your art, pay for it even, but can't find themselves in that room. Your attempts at revolution are missing one more wrinkle.

Lame-O raised $14,000 for UCP Philadelphia. That's the tagline here. Lame-O are heroes. I accept that I had my shot at making a platform work, creating one that felt less insidious than just writing for writing's sake, which always feels so hollow and selfish. But writing about yourself at all, even if people see themselves refracted there, is still just as vacuous. I'm in that hole. Maybe I won't get out.

The scene MoBo departed from differs: far less male, far less white. The world that I departed from doesn't exist either. I kept up on Twitter, and that blue check would've evaporated, and a crash-out would've come no matter what.

Somebody loved what I did enough to do this for me. I wish I had loved myself enough to not punish myself for it.

This is true, no matter the punishment: while MoBo played through Sports in full one final time in 2017, before they trolled the Union Transfer throng with three "Your Graduation" encores, "Re-done" entered its final verse with an epigram: "This is for James." The same thing happened ten years ago today.

And now, this is for me. No start from the top. Just the next thing.