The Midweek Weather

I am going to go back to my roots of organic, off-the-cuff writing once per week. While I am having the time of my life diving deep into the realms of religion, technology, and pop culture, I miss the times I would open up Blogger, dash off a (witty to me) explosion of thought, hit submit, and move on.

Ideally, these entries will post sometime on Wednesdays, lending credibility to their name. Longer, fully thought out essays will come on the weekends, when time lends itself more fully to the careful cultivation of thoughts.

Currently listening to: Yellowcard. It's been in regular rotation for a couple of months now, leading up to the concert I went to with Emily and into the weeks following it. My wife was already a big fan; I remember her talking about them a lot when we first met and talked to each other in that new-relationship find-out verbiage common to fledgling couples. The only other band I remember her talking about more was Illenium, but in retrospect, the passion was always for the punk.

I hadn't really exposed myself much to them. You can think of them in the same pop-punk vein as The All-American Rejects, which was about as much experience as I had with 2000s-era punk before the concert. If we give the genre a bit more license, I suppose my 2003 obsession with Fall Out Boy fits the punk label, though I really think they were more emo-punk.

The tour was given the name of The Up Up Down Down tour, and that admittedly piqued my interest. (If you know, you know.) Again, this was a concert for Emily, so I didn't dive deep or even visit their website. Had I done so, I surely would have found their branding suspicious, to say the least.

Accompanied by the Plain White T's and New Found Glory, the show was full of forty-somethings and their teenage children. What an eclectic group. I really enjoyed people watching as we walked around Arizona Financial Theatre. Given that the show started around 7pm, many of the attendees were clearly just off work, wearing whatever corporate uniform gave them the means to pay for the concert. But there were also the ones who bathed themselves in the chance to relive their past by wearing the hard-edged staples of youth: Converse, leather, denim, battle jackets, and whatever band merch they had stashed in the back of their closets.

Yellowcard found themselves inside a wonderful niche of music that outlives its own moment; good rock music tends to do that. So I was not surprised that one of our 15-year-olds at home was fairly jealous when they discovered we went to the show.

I became suspicious as Yellowcard revealed their set after NFG closed theirs. They pregamed their music with a band member dressed up as a Ghostbuster chasing the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man around the stage. After a few minutes of dark silence, a single spotlight fell on a solitary figure: the lead guitarist playing the soaring and memorable "Top Gun Anthem."

They're pandering to me, I thought. Why are they pandering to me? It's working.

When the full stage was revealed, I saw familiar '80s-era logos. A backdrop suspiciously similar to an NES controller. A mid-concert state reset revealed the band members sitting on sofas in that hand-me-down palette of harvest gold and avocado green plaid, several movie posters in the background. The Goonies. Top Gun. The Karate Kid. Back to the Future. At this point, I might as well have been on stage with them beside my childhood friends, black cables snaking the carpeting toward the Super Nintendo as we whiled away our teenage years.

The music was undeniably not my generation. In high school, the years when most of us carve out our own musical tastes, my listening was dominated by Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, et al. But everything on that set was speaking to me as if it were torn out of the pages of 16-year-old me's journal. I couldn't handle the discrepancy between what I had lived and what I was seeing. I did something that no one should do during an amazing concert.

I started Googling. And while I was doing so, someone on stage was holding a boombox up above his head, a la Lloyd Dobler outside Diane's bedroom window in the 1989 movie Say Anything.

I quickly found my answer. Yellowcard's lead singer, Ryan Key, was born in 1979. He was almost exactly my age. He hadn't peeked inside my journal; his memories were my memories. Ryan was the one holding the boombox. Ryan was me. He watched that movie at 11 years old, too.

I didn't listen to Yellowcard in high school because Yellowcard was still in high school. The six-year gap between my wife and me was all it really took for "my music" and "her music" to stand apart in contrast, then all of a sudden fuse together in middle-aged angst.

I can't remember the last time I enjoyed anything more. Like going to see a movie you have no great expectations for, I walked into that concert with little more than the enjoyment of being with my wife, doing something I knew she'd treasure.

I walked out more appreciative of Yellowcard's style of punk music, likely because psychology had done its job and broken through all of my natural defenses by playing the nostalgia card. But it wasn't soulless and vapid sentimentality, like we see all too often from faceless corporations trying to cash in on an aging population's wistful memories.

This was real nostalgia with bite, carved out lovingly by five men on stage having the time of their middle-aged lives, speaking love through imagery and music to their generation. Meanwhile, a group of 16-year-olds in attendance saw that maybe, just maybe, their parents had been cool once upon a time.