Alex writes about Sia, Modern Baseball, pop punk, and doing your taxes.<\/em><\/p>\n

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You are in a dark room. You are alone, sitting at a table, pondering your next move. You know you could get to the door at the far end of the space, if you could just get up from your seat. You can\u2019t quite see the door\u2019s outline in the faint light, but you know it is there, existing amidst the darkness.<\/em><\/p>\n

And yet you will not get up. You will not exit, even though you know it is the only place to go.<\/em><\/p>\n

You are here, and you will remain here.<\/em><\/p>\n

As a small business owner I occasionally have to do small business things, like file a tax return that I do not have the mental capacity to compile on my own. When I last met with my accountant to talk about my taxes, we began the process by talking about how different we were from the people we were when we met. Since this is a person who I sat next to in Grade 12 accounting class, we are both cognizant of how much the other has changed. I once saw this skilled and ultra professional accountant jump out of his chair – over another seated classmate – in order to tackle a friend two seats down for seemingly no reason at all. He surely has some equally horrendous memory about me lurking in his brain that I hope he never reminds me of.<\/p>\n

We both know we are not the people who met each other in 2002, and we never will be again. But we know we have reached a point where – for the most part – we will remain who we are now for the rest of our lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt some point,\u201d he said late in this discussion, \u201cYou are who you\u2019re going to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then he told me that I can write off my movie tickets and everything in the world was momentarily perfect.<\/p>\n

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As one ages, there become fewer opportunities to change, most of which are tied to your abilities to accept the closing off of various pathways of how to live your life. You become logical, realizing you never had all the possibilities society claimed to be offering you as a youth, and you quietly begin to sort this out. You get older, and certain things become clearer about yourself. Doors close, and you deal with it. You are who you are, and at some point that becomes more set in stone than it had been in the past. You settle in for the long haul, thinking that you know yourself.<\/p>\n

This does not always end up being the case.<\/p>\n

Over the past couple of weeks, I have realized something about my tastes in music, specifically that my tastes have started to align with things I could have never anticipated liking. In short, I have found myself taken with the screaming of Sia and the pop of the punks in Modern Baseball. Now, me enjoying the wigged-out former should not come as a surprise; throughout my decades of existence I have always shown a penchant for enjoying the work of a solo singer or two. My Kelly Clarkson fandom is well documented, my overlong theories about the Since U Been Gone\/Behind These Hazel Eyes corollary oft-repeated. Even though Sia\u2019s tendency to scream semi-constantly seems like something that would rub me the wrong way, it makes enough sense. This is not an entirely illogical jump. But my interest in Modern Baseball makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.<\/p>\n

In the early 2000s, as pop punk was at its most visible as a genre, I fucking hated all of it. Despite the fact that I was squarely in Yellowcard\u2019s target audience – and was friends with countless people that counted themselves as dedicated fans of this garbage music – I couldn\u2019t stand it. As a suburban white teenager, I was surrounded by the sounds of the Warped Tour at every party I attended during high school, and I was always comforted to find my Nikes amidst the piles of Vans when I could finally escape it all. In researching this piece, I got hit with a very specific form of party-based PTSD when thinking about Taking Back Sunday\u2019s Cute Without The \u2018E,\u2019 a song that would be loudly performed by a handful of friends at seemingly every basement party I attended in my teen years.<\/p>\n

I disliked pretty much everything about this genre. The vocal stylings of the singers were repugnant, the overabundance of earnestness vomit-inducing, and the musicians\u2019 sideburns were indicative of idiocy. The song titles were insane. All of this was silly to me. There were notable exceptions to my gag reflex \u2013 specifically songs by Brand New about Prohibition-era murder weapons \u2013 but they were few and far between. All of the songs sounded like they were written by people that so desperately hoped I would scrawl their lyrics on the back of my media studies notebook. I preferred my guitar-based music to be eleven-minute lyric-less post-rock jam sessions, so I had no time for all these short songs about heartbreak.<\/p>\n

And then, a decade-plus later, I came across the work of Modern Baseball. When I listen to their music now, I hear all the things I used to hate, and yet the youths in MoBo now charm me incessantly. The music is good, and the vocals no longer bother me. Even though I still can\u2019t really relate to the idea of sharing your feelings in such a shroud-less manner, the earnest emotion doesn\u2019t make me roll my eyes like it used to. There\u2019s just something about Brendan Luken and Jake Ewald that I can\u2019t shake. I have listened to their 2012 record Sports at least ten times in the past week – while working, while beating my officemate by six goals in an out-dated copy of FIFA, while walking to What a Bagel for happy hour chicken wraps \u2013 and yet I still can\u2019t quite wrap my head around it. I remember who I was when I was supposed to like this music, and yet I cannot conflate this with the person I am today, the person who walks a bit faster when Tears Over Beers starts playing through his headphones.<\/p>\n

I thought I was past this. I had moved on. Listening to Modern Baseball feels like I\u2019m finally giving up on a fight I had already won long ago.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Sia\u2019s existence is well documented now, even though she was not particularly well known to North Americans until she showed up on David Guetta\u2019s Titanium. Sia Furler has been a part of your life for a full decade if you watched Six Feet Under through to its infamous montage ending, or even longer if you are a long time Zero 7 fan. If you\u2019re reading this from the other side of the world, though, the owner of the wigs was old hat by the time Titanium hit the American charts in 2011.<\/p>\n

I like a lot of Sia\u2019s modern songs, but I am not without my reservations. When listening to her music, I don\u2019t know that I actually like listening to it, or if I am simply impressed by the performance of it. The degree of difficulty in the final bridge vocals for Alive seems bananas; I have no idea how she can ever perform Chandelier live. While so much other pop music is made simply to be ignored, Sia makes songs that make sure you know she\u2019s putting in effort. The vocal gymnastics are omnipresent, but there are also a comical number of sound effects throughout her songs, many of which are… ill-advised. The two drum hits leading into the chorus on Alive are batshit insane, and sampling the Thong Song is never a wise choice. Sometimes, though, these bizarre decisions work perfectly in concert with the vocals: the sounds of a xylophone late in Fair Game is a wonderful addition, and the climactic piano thrashing in Fire Meet Gasoline is too. Between those two songs and Bird Set Free, though, there really aren\u2019t any Sia tracks I can make it through without rolling my eyes somewhere in the track\u2019s duration. The majority of her modern songs feel like they\u2019re overflowing with ideas, ideas that simply couldn\u2019t be tamed.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s most interesting about Sia, however, is that she thought she was done recording her own music by the time she had a bona fide hit stateside. Even Titanium was written for Alicia Keys, but when Guetta got a hold of it he used Sia\u2019s demo vocals instead (without actually checking with Sia beforehand to see if she was cool with it). Sia had retired because of some health issues, planning to only write music for others. She had decided what her life was, until the meddling fingers of David Guetta gave her the opportunity she had just about given up on trying so hard to attain. Gasoline finally met fire.<\/p>\n

There is always something interesting about a celebrity who is able to achieve the high point of their fame as they are reaching middle age, or at least the second half of their thirties. It\u2019s the Jon Hamm Principle. The general charm of it comes from the idea that – particularly in a business that strongly favours youth – the celebrity in question is able to achieve success in their craft through simple persistence to the thing that they love. Sia falls squarely into this category, herself now a forty-year-old pop star. The older celebrity gives their fans hope: this person can find their greatest success as they approach forty, and so can you. (I\u2019m sure there are many aging movie fans that find a similar kinship in Mark Rylance.) A combination of cultural structures and her own personal struggles shaped Sia into somebody that could write a song like Chandelier in a cultural environment that was willing to make a hit out of a pop song about the follies of partying. And only time could have made this happen.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Listening to Modern Baseball at this point is like watching 21 Jump Street and finding yourself strongly relating to Jenko: I see a familiar formula around me, tackling ideas that I\u2019m now too old to properly understand. As my new pop punk icons go on about various elements of modernity that I never lived with in my teens \u2013 ignoring the person you\u2019re hanging out with to have a Twitter conversation with some girl named Chloe, say \u2013 with a type of emotional position that I can mostly recall. I understand the idea of these being seen as problems, even though the concerns themselves seem idiotic in my (comparably) advanced age. This is a band that is decidedly young and – despite the fact that Brendan Lukens alone has been through more serious struggles than I have – Modern Baseball is a band that feels like a group of youths with promise. I remain curious about the views of these people I can no longer understand, using technology I never got to experience at their age, even while they experience these new things in the same old environments I was in.<\/p>\n

When I see YouTube videos of Modern Baseball playing basement shows, with a gaggle of fellow youths earnestly singing along at the top of their lungs, I get flashbacks to being sixteen and rolling my eyes in similar situations, wishing I had just stayed home to watch Memento again instead. But when I listen to these MoBo songs now, I hear something I find interesting. I hear an age group that has long since left me behind. I can be a fan of Modern Baseball now only because I couldn\u2019t possibly be a member of their core fan base. I am an outsider now, but I had privileged access before, access I never really wanted at the time. I had to age out of the club before I could want to be a member. I felt trapped at these parties only because I could not understand my own freedom until it had already left me. I had to wait until Deryck Whibley went through a divorce to see it, or until Blink-182 stopped speaking to Tom Delonge because he wanted to graduate into being the pop punk Coldplay.<\/p>\n

There is a certain persistence required to attain true success in your professional life. You have to understand what it is you hope to achieve, and you have to do this at a young enough age that you can work at it to get good enough at it to succeed. You need to put in your 10 000 hours before you can make your 1000 Forms of Fear. Modern Baseball are kicking around some youthful problems now because they\u2019re still too young to know any better. But the macabre parade of aging will get to us all.<\/p>\n