DVD Special – R30: 30th Anniversary World Tour, by Rush

Released November 22, 2005

122 min, 32 sec

Rush was the first band I ever saw in a live setting. June 15, 2007, the then-Sound Advice Amphitheater, just the second date of the Snakes & Arrows Tour. My dad took me – I don’t quite recall why, or what the occasion was. Maybe he wanted to go and he dragged me along because he was preparing to move out of state, an action I interpreted as me being abandoned at the time, which was very obviously stupid of me in hindsight. Maybe I was already entering my Rush era at the time, found out they were touring, and begged to go. It’s all ancient history, and despite my knack for meticulously documenting pointless bullshit in my life, this show predates that compulsion, and thus is a little bit of a black hole for me in terms of memory.

Two things I do remember – the South Park “Li’l Rush” interstital segment before “Tom Sawyer,” and that my dad and I had lawn seats for the show. You know what amphitheaters are like – big covered section in front of the stage, then a big, tall hill behind that for poor bastards to take a seat on. Thinking on it now, Rush touring amphitheaters in 2007 seems kind of odd, but basically the entire tour was outdoor venues of similar sizes, so maybe it was just the vibe they wanted back then. You wouldn’t catch this band dead in arenas now, and they wouldn’t be touring them for much longer back then, either.

Maybe that’s a little morbid.

We stayed in those lawn seats for most of the show, but my dad got a little bold, and pulled me up to the seated section, where he smooth-talked his way past the security guard and managed to get us a lot closer for the encore. My knowledge of the catalogue was pretty weak back then, so a lot of songs were going over my head, but my ass knew “YYZ” the moment it hit, and closing the show with that feels like it was a formative moment for me, cementing that I really, truly loved rock music, and loved seeing it live. It took until college for that to become even a semi-regular occurrence, and it took until deeper into early adulthood after that for things to really stabilize, but now attending concerts is a regular, joyous affair, primarily reserved for the bands I care most about.

Mercifully, Rush is once again going to be one of those.

*Ignore the Kon keychain and Akatsuki wristband and focus on the shirt.*

I know what you’re thinking – this post is about R30, not the fucking Snakes & Arrows Tour or my humblebragging about getting to see a show on this brand-new Fifty Something Tour. We’ll get there, alright? But it’s all connected, you see, because I wouldn’t even be bothering with this post about a random Rush DVD I still have in my collection if not for that upcoming show in November, if not for the miracle of Rush returning from the de – er, from retirement in the first place. Let me work! We’ll get to the disc in a bit, because it’s a vitally important album for me, funny as that is to say.

We’ve talked about the nature of and reasons for bands reuniting, particularly after declaring their break-ups as a deliberate, managed affair before, in the case of LCD Soundsystem’s goofy reunion in 2016 after James Murphy brought the band to a weepy, sentimental end and promptly regretted it. Rush had a longer, more drawn out landing than that in the mid-2010s, and their reasons for hanging it up were pragmatic and straightforward – these motherfuckers were old and tired. They came off the R40 tour and immediately said they would never mount another large-scale tour again. A couple of years of inactivity brought about a more definitive note to talks of playing shows, where Neil Peart let slip that he, at least, was retired, something that Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee were then left to do some half-assed damage control on, before finally giving up the ghost in 2018 and admitting to being done for good. Maybe they could play a show here or there, but Neil was ready to spend his time primarily with his family, Alex’s hands were giving out, and Geddy, well, Geddy needed those two to tour, so he turned to other projects instead.

The promise implied in that door left cracked open, the idea of doing a show here or there, went away in January 2020, when Neil Peart died of a previously-undisclosed brain tumor. The final years of his life, thought by fans to be in a comfortable blanket of peace and quiet, were instead spent fighting off one of the most aggressive forms of cancer the human body can endure, robbing the man of the hard-earned peace he’d worked so hard to attain, and the weight of that struggle was evident in an interview Geddy did a year after Neil’s death, when more of the details of Neil’s illness were divulged as Geddy reflected on Rush’s legacy and the loss of their titanic drummer. That seemed to be that – Neil was gone, the door was closed. Rush was over.

Unless…

Alex and Geddy started getting back out there. Not as Rush, mind you, just as Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee from Rush, making guest appearances for special occasions with other artists, always with a drummer that was there for another reason and not explicitly to back up the Rush boys. They attended the memorial concert for Taylor Hawkins following his death in 2022, performed a song at a South Park anniversary concert before that, and mainly constrained themselves to playing a song or two or three, only at memorial events or special occasions that warranted their time. They resisted the urge to find a new drummer and slap together a proper tour, insisting as late as 2024 that a reunion and tour simply wasn’t in the cards, that the guest appearances were just for fun, just to get the blood pumping and bring some excitement back to their lives. Rush was history, and they were just engaging in a bit of epilogue work.

Unless…

It’s not especially clear what the spark was in 2025. Maybe it was Alex’s health issues clearing up enough for him to endure the rigors of playing shows regularly. Maybe it was a jam session that turned into developing song ideas, and from that the idea of having to promote new music. Maybe a long break was all they really needed to get those batteries recharged. Whatever the case, last year, Rush emerged back out of the history books, a fresh face in tow behind the kit (and a dedicated keyboard guy, even), ready to write a new chapter. For it to be without Neil still feels strange, and, though my opinion obviously doesn’t mean anything at all, I can’t help but feel that it’s just a touch sacrilegious. There are ways to easily argue around that, namely that Neil wasn’t Rush’s original drummer, and they had toured without him, putting out their debut album before Neil joined the band. And I’m a big fucking hypocrite on that point anyway, because I’m still a dedicated fan of the band that’s moved on without their lead singer who, well, you know what I’m talking about. But it still feels weird. Just a little.

But Anika Nilles can play those fucking drums, man. They knew that in order to make this work, they needed a drummer who wouldn’t just attempt to poorly fill in Neil’s spot. They needed a drummer with the confidence to play the songs with just a bit of a personal touch, enough that it’s not a Neil Peart cosplay behind Alex and Geddy. From the footage I’ve seen of this tour (not very much, in order to not spoil the novelty for myself), she is fucking killing it. She’s out there doing that shit, man. Not every drummer would be able to just come in and take control that way, and fewer still would be able to do it with such conviction. She’s got the juice.

Alright, alright, that’s enough circling the drain, beating around the bush, whatever you want to call it. What about R30, man? What about the fucking DVD I’m supposed to be talking about today?

My pathway into becoming a Rush fan was mainly that of borrowing my dad’s CDs and deciding after a listen if I gave a shit about what I’d just heard or not. Plenty of bands didn’t really stick – Metallica’s been in and out, Rage Against the Machine was fine, I bounced hard off of Sublime. But he had 2112 on that shelf, and I was fascinated by the sounds coming out of my shitty little boombox when I first played that album. Captivated, utterly and completely, by this freaky 70s prog rock band that was doing things no other band in my circle of intrigue was even coming close to. I was hooked right away, and I found myself flailing about trying to find the right conduit into the rest of the catalogue. My dad offered a solution in the form of Gold, a 2-disc greatest hits compilation that in reality was just a repackaging of the earlier Retrospective I and II compilations, spanning only the 70s and 80s albums. I don’t have that album any more, but that jumping-on point was exactly what I needed, and I began trawling around for more, more, more, any bit of Rush material I could get my hands on. And that, finally, led me to the DVD section of Target, where they had a selection of music DVDs, documentaries and live shows, that kind of thing.

And there it was, right there on the shelf – R30, a document of the band’s 30th anniversary tour, featuring a show recorded in Germany. 22 songs, many of which I had no familiarity with because they were from the 90s and 2000s, a pitch-perfect documentation of Rush’s meticulously-structured live shows, filled to the brim with loop and sample triggers, strange percussion, and Geddy’s big keyboard, to ensure the songs sound as close to their studio arrangements as possible. I’d been wowed by how the band sounded on CD, but seeing them actually play all this shit – Neil’s hands flying across a thousand drums at mach speed, the insane pace of Geddy’s strumming fingers, the ease with which Alex taps his way through “The Spirit of Radio”’s main riff – was a revelation. I had been trying to pick up the bass a little bit myself at that time, and I wanted nothing more than to be Geddy Lee, even if I was a million miles away from being able to play even a single Rush bassline myself. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen, and it made me a fan for life.

I think it was fortuitous that R30 was the most recent DVD release at the time that I started rabidly looking for Rush material to consume. An anniversary tour unbound from promotion for any given album means that the setlist can be wide-ranging and diverse, and indeed the R30 tour’s standard set stretched from Rush to that weird Feedback EP, a healthy mixture of standards and deep cuts that provided me an ideal crash course for learning about the various permutations of Rush’s sound over the previous three decades. Funnily enough, for the longest time I didn’t know that this album wasn’t even the full show – eight songs were cut from R30 in deference to the Rush in Rio live album from the year prior, covering the Vapor Trails tour, to avoid too much overlap between the two albums.

That’s something that highlights a trend I noticed in Rush’s album releases at the time, wherein, prior to the 2000s, the band would punctuate every batch of four studio albums with a live album (2112, for instance, being followed by All the World’s a Stage, while Hold Your Fire was followed by A Show of Hands), but after the release of Vapor Trails in 2002, the pattern inverted, where Rush’s last three studio albums were each followed by two live albums (Snakes & Arrows, for instance, being followed first by Snakes & Arrows Live, then by Time Machine 2011). It reflects the change in the band’s sensibilities and focus in the 2000s, slowing their pace down, taking their time between albums, enjoying the process of touring. The band’s last three albums have five-year gaps between them, when previously the band was loathe to allow more than two years to pass without a studio album. In a way, it makes those live albums more important, allowing them to stand as documents of individual tours, rather than having to synthesize and summarize the sound of the band over the previous several years, weaving in between the four albums preceding it.

What it all comes down to, ultimately, is that R30 is a fantastic listen with a great song selection, both for the tour itself and for the live document at home. As I said before, it’s a good mixture of Rush standards like “Subdivisions,” “Tom Sawyer,” the “2112” overture and “Temples of Syrinx,” and album-closer “Limelight”, alongside some deeper cuts that I find myself greatly endeared to like “Force Ten,” “Dreamline,” “Mystic Rhythms,” and the gorgeous acoustic rendering of “Resist.” The Feedback covers EP was freshly released for this tour, and four songs from it – the Who’s “The Seeker,” Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul,” Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues,” and Cream’s “Crossroads” – make the cut, bringing the novelty of Rush playing covers during their own shows, something they basically never did before or after this tour. But let’s be honest. You know what the centerpiece of a Rush live release is, particularly the later-era shows, and it’s not any of the shit I mentioned previously.

It’s the damn drum solo.

“Der Trommler” is indescribable in any way that matters. I certainly don’t have the vocabulary for how it makes me feel. It’s not about the technical marvel of Neil’s playing style or sequencing, it’s not about the spectacle of his various tricks and stunts over the course of the song. It’s that the man is so powerful, so revered, that he can do a nine-minute drum solo at the two-thirds point of any Rush show and immediately be the most memorable part. It’s that the solo isn’t just him banging out random shit that comes to his mind as he’s playing – it’s got movements, movements that are composed and sequenced in a deliberate manner. It’s that the fucking guy stands up halfway through to switch from the more electronics-focused side of the kit to spin around and bang on the acoustics the rest of the way. It’s not any one part of the song. It’s all of it.

Listen, I’m not naïve. I wholeheartedly believe that Neil Peart is and always will be one of the greatest rock drummers in history, but I’m not out here saying that no one can even lick his boots. There are a lot of drummers who reach similar levels of spectacle, of technical mastery, of notoriety. He’s not a singular drummer in any of those regards. But it’s the way he goes about it all, his specific marriages of technique and flair, that make him my GOAT. It’s that the fucking solo changed every tour, dude. It’s the Neil Peart difference, and the Neil Peart difference is the thing I was so scared to miss when Rush announced that they were giving it another try with a new drummer. She’s doing a great job, but Neil really is irreplaceable, man. It’s alright for that to be true, while it’s also true that this new iteration of Rush is putting on passionate, exciting shows in big 2026.

Rush is one of my longest-favored bands. I’ve gone back and forth over the years about them being an all-time top 5 on my list, because there have been long periods of time where I frankly didn’t give much of a shit about Rush. I stupidly passed on the opportunity to see the R40 tour while I was in college, thinking that I wouldn’t get much out of it, that they would tour again eventually even if they were already making noise about it being the end. And just like with Linkin Park, just like with Chris Cornell, I will never again get to see the version of Rush I was first introduced to, the version of Rush that captivated me on the R30 DVD, that dazzled me on my dad’s old, beat-up CD copy of 2112. But I love this band in any form, man. I adore Rush, and I recognize now what that means to me. R30 was a formative concert DVD, and the corresponding CD to this day gets tons of spin from me, even if I know all the stage banter back to front by heart by now.

I don’t know what to expect for myself when I go see Rush this November. I trust Alex Lifeson, I trust Geddy Lee, and hell, I trust Anika Nilles and Loren Gold, too. I trust this band to deliver a show that Neil would be proud of, because they’ve been doing it all summer already. It won’t sound quite the same. It won’t be the same. But sometimes, man, sometimes it doesn’t have to be the same. Sometimes it can be a little different, and still give you that same feeling of pure, unfiltered wonder at what’s playing out before your very eyes. Ultimately, there’s only one thing I ask of Rush, as a wide-eye pre-teen in 2006, and as a proud fan coming back to the show in 2026.

Capture my thoughts, and carry them away.

More Rush: All the World’s a Stage | Counterparts | Different Stages: Live | Neil Peart’s Anatomy of a Drum Solo | Clockwork Angels

Box Set Special – American Idiot 20, by Green Day

Released October 25, 2024

252 min, 38 sec

Original album length 57 min, 12 sec

I can hear it now – you, certainly an avid reader of this blog since the sepia-toned innocent days of 2014, looking at the title of this column, puzzled. “American Idiot?” you ask, maybe stroking your chin or something. “Didn’t you already do that one like, way way back at the beginning? In young 2014? Why are you doing it again? Are you finally out of ideas? And when are you going to take your medicine about Linkin Park coming back which you insisted in 2022 was never happening when in reality it had already secretly happened?”

To that, I offer you these three points:

This column is (ostensibly) for the 20th anniversary box set of American Idiot, and therefore is distinct from the dinky little write-up I did of the original album back then.
I never take my medicine on any inaccurate takes. Who do you think I am?
This is my fucking blog and I do what I want.

With that out of the way…

I’ve been listening to American Idiot a lot more lately. It’s not even really a political thing – though, well, isn’t it appropriate for this moment? – it’s just one of those things that comes with age, listening to an old favorite and kind of rediscovering it all over again. I loved this album as a young teenager – it felt like it really, really spoke to me, even though I was giving it a mostly surface reading back then. It’s pretty much the whole reason I considered Green Day one of my absolute favorite bands in the early days of my musical discovery period – had a poster on my bedroom wall and everything. It’s an extremely well-crafted, deeply considered pop-punk record, an absolute standard of the genre, and I would go so far as to say that it basically has no low points across its runtime. Sure, back in the day, I would maybe skip over tracks like “Are We the Waiting,” “Give Me Novacaine,” and “Extraordinary Girl,” to get to the “real” gems behind them – “St. Jimmy,” “She’s a Rebel,” “Letterbomb.” Now, though? Delete that skip button, we’re going cover to cover like God intended. Because it’s a rock opera, man.

It’s something Green Day had never done before, writing an album built around a central set of themes, a narrative, rather than being a loosely connected collection of songs. Billie Joe Armstrong has always written from a personal place, as he tells it – Dookie and Insomniac in particular read a lot to me like journal entries put to music. American Idiot is much in that vein, but then abstracted and wrapped around a proper character, distinct from Armstrong himself, crafted into a narrative about a lost, disillusioned teenager and the things he did to try and find himself. It’s remarkable to me how crystal clear the album’s narrative arc is, how vivid and descriptive the lyrics are. Every song is so evocative of a turbulent time in an American teenager’s life, the weight of expectation and the failure to live up to them, the harrowing experience of realizing that you have no idea where you’re going. Despite the ultra-high-end production values of this album, it feels very much embedded in the California punk scene Green Day emerged from, describing the puttering around of teenagers from their home town, maybe even just their own teenage puttering around.

This is something I didn’t appreciate when I was a teenager myself, the craftsmanship involved in putting this album together. I feel like I, somehow, didn’t think the story told here was cohesive, when in fact it is – an American teenager, calling himself the Jesus of Suburbia, desperately gropes around for meaning in his young life, raging against the political hell he sees on his TV, crying out for companionship. He finds that in an alter ego, St. Jimmy, embodying all the things he wishes he could be on his own – confident, charismatic, supremely convinced of his ideals, his opponents and enemies be damned. He falls in love with a girl in his orbit, Whatsername, and though they try to make it work, the misery of Jesus’s dual existence between himself and Jimmy drives her away. Having lost the only thing he’s ever truly cared about, Jesus exorcises St. Jimmy from his soul, reconnects with the friends he’s made, and reminisces about the times, good and bad, in the rear view mirror. See? Nice and clear. No wonder the band rather easily turned it into a Broadway musical down the line.

Now, sure, that narrative is rather compressed in the album’s runtime – Whatsername isn’t even introduced until the eighth song on the album, and by the tenth song she’s on her way out. Looking at the tracklist and poring over the narrative progression of the album, I wonder if “She’s a Rebel” shouldn’t have come earlier in the album, maybe after “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” or even ahead of it, after “Holiday.” In that play order, she’s introduced, but Jesus continues to feel somewhat aimless, trudging his way through “Boulevard” and “Are We the Waiting” before Jimmy makes his appearance. That way, you have the narrative tension of the relationship with Whatsername simmering in the background of the album’s middle section, leading up to “Extraordinary Girl,” where the cracks in the foundation are clear, and then “Letterbomb.”

There are complicating factors about this – “She’s a Rebel” sounds to me like a Jimmy song, not a Jesus song, which ties into the idea that the confidence Jimmy grants Jesus is what leads to the relationship with Whatsername in the first place. The dates for each song in the liner notes also indicate that the album’s narrative takes place over the course of ten months, with a month and a half between “She’s a Rebel” and “Letterbomb,” so the relationship is presented as a whirlwind one, there and gone in practically the blink of an eye, something that would be blunted if the start of it takes place earlier in the album’s timeline. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter, anyway – musically, “She’s a Rebel” feels kind of perfectly placed, contributing to a dizzying stretch of up-down-up-down songs, tempo-wise, running all the way through to the end of the album. Who am I to quibble about this? No one at all.

The structure, though, really is kind of bulletproof to me. With a full appreciation of the story the album is telling, it’s got a great structure. There isn’t quite an Act 1 closer track – the closest thing is probably “St. Jimmy,” leading into an Act 2 open of “Give Me Novacaine,” implying the gap in time between those two songs – but the rest of it really does feel like a ready-made Broadway musical. “American Idiot” sets the stage for the classic musical opener in “Jesus of Suburbia,” introducing the protagonist and the stakes of the album. You’ve got the rising actions in “Holiday” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” leading into one last call to action in “Are We the Waiting,” then the aforementioned first-half curtain drop of “St. Jimmy.” The mess of Act II is contained in “She’s a Rebel” through “Letterbomb,” and in a way the album has a pair of climaxes sandwiched around “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” in the aforementioned “Letterbomb” and the album’s other nine-minute suite, “Homecoming.” In the context of that narrative arc, maybe my favorite part of the album as a whole is “Whatsername,” acting as a coda to the album’s narrative, Jesus looking back on the strangest, most turbulent year of his life. The liner notes indicate a date of January 1, implying on its face that Jesus is looking back on the following New Year’s Day at the wreckage of his previous year, but to my eye, this song could be five, ten, even fifty years in the future from that moment. Maybe it’s every New Year’s Day, for the rest of Jesus’s life.

I don’t know, man. It’s a lot of narrative analysis to put into a pop-punk record. I do think that it’s the kind of thing that Armstrong encouraged in the way the album is written – he talks about how the band wasn’t really sure how the story would or should resolve, leading to the narrative kind of collapsing around the point of “Letterbomb,” but to me the through-line feels nice and crisp. It reads to me like maybe Armstrong wasn’t giving himself enough credit for his own storytelling prowess – yeah, it’s a simple story, but it’s a story in a pop-punk album that’s both cohesive and unbelievably catchy. Beyond being catchy, American Idiot is full of songs with heart, that truly affect the listener beyond being good pop songs. That’s the kind of trick that not many lyricists can pull off, and I don’t think anyone really would have expected it from “the Green Day guy.”

This is the kind of thing I’ve been thinking about, lately, when it comes to this album. American Idiot is a statement album, a firm re-assessment of Green Day’s bona fides in the pop-punk world and a bold new assertion of relevance at the same time. Green Day was back, and Green Day was not fucking around – they were here to make some noise, make a record that felt vital in the uneasy days of 2004, when liberals thought that maybe things couldn’t really get any worse, where bumblin’ old Dubya was the worst thing the Republicans could put out on the national stage. God I wish they still paraded out dudes like that for their tickets.

Anyway.

The thing to me about American Idiot is that it wasn’t the band’s first choice of a follow-up to Warning: – it’s something that presented itself to the band late in the process of their original next album, the much-mythologized Cigarettes and Valentines, the story of which has steadily shifted away from the sheer spectacle of stolen master tapes and closer to what the truth probably always was, which is that it was a fine album, decent, back-to-basics Green Day, probably too basic. The band stuck to the idea, for the first couple years after American Idiot’s release, that Cigarettes and Valentines was mostly finished, when the master tapes suddenly vanished, stolen from their studio. Confronted with the loss of the material and having to re-record it, the band sat down with producer Rob Cavallo, who asked them if it was really their best foot forward. Realizing that it wasn’t, the band pivoted, and out of that pivot came American Idiot, a much more remarkable product than they’d been making. That tape thief saved Green Day’s career. It’s serendipity, right?

The thing about that, though, is that it’s not the picture that’s been painted in more recent years. The band chipped away at the mythology slowly, breaking out the old album’s title track in 2009, revealing in 2016 that there had been back-up copies of the master tapes for Cigarettes and Valentines that they could have worked from, pointing out that several American Idiot outtakes were Cigarettes and Valentines originals. The biggest breaking of the wall came from Mike Dirnt, in an interview conducted nearly six months before American Idiot even came out, in which he states that Cigarettes and Valentines had in fact been submitted to the band’s record label, fully complete, in 2003. The band had a couple of other song ideas kicking around after submission, however, and in working on those, it became clear that they had stumbled across a much stronger album concept – so, they pulled Cigarettes and Valentines from release, and out came American Idiot instead.

That’s kind of mind-blowing to me! But it makes complete sense, a lot more sense than the admittedly more entertaining stolen masters story. This kind of myth-making is something Green Day usually does in a more physical manner – see things like releasing an album as The Network in 2003 and claiming that the guys in The Network – who were absolutely not Green Day and Friends, by the way – had beef with Green Day, going so far as to shit on their own side project to keep kayfabe. They did kind of a similar thing with Foxboro Hot Tubs and The Coverups in later years, though the barrier between those projects and Green Day was much more malleable. The point is…well, I’m not sure, honestly, lol. It could have been an attempt to make the creation of American Idiot feel more ethereal, more magical, having come as the product of a crime-fueled retool in the studio, rather than making a mid album, coming up with a couple bangers at the tail end, and realizing that you should make an album centered around the bangers instead. It could also simply be the case that both parts of the story are true – the master tapes were stolen, but the band soldiered on with the backups, submitted the album, and then found the kernel of American Idiot afterwards.

But, you know, it’s not like it really matters where American Idiot came from, which of these disparate origin stories is the right one. The bottom line on this is that American Idiot is a meticulously made album, put together with a level of care not previously seen in Green Day’s work, and they were rewarded for it by getting put on the road to becoming the Metallica of pop-punk. Maybe you’d quibble with that characterization, but come on, be serious here. Green Day still sells out stadiums, can still tour with bands like Fall Out Boy and Weezer and clearly be the headliner among the three, still can prop up nostalgia-fests like When We Were Young single-handedly if they want to. They can…release expensive box sets of their biggest albums, for suckers like me to buy and reminisce about the old days.

See? See? We got to the box set. Trust me to light the way next time.

The chronology of Green Day’s biggest releases, to me, feels like it probably causes a bit of a headache for whoever at Reprise Records is responsible for smacking peoples’ nostalgia buttons about landmark albums. Dookie and American Idiot came out ten years apart, almost exactly, which puts all of their milestone anniversaries in the same year, ten years apart, every time. Now that Green Day is firmly in legacy box set territory, they rushed to get those reissues out, and it resulted in Dookie getting booted up a year to 2023 while American Idiot got to sit pretty in the year of our lord 2024. Which of those two albums is the more “important” one probably depends on how old you are – we wouldn’t get American Idiot without Dookie breaking the pop-punk glass ceiling first, but Dookie might not have been seen as quite so legendary now if Green Day hadn’t made lightning strike twice on its tenth anniversary year to extend their careers indefinitely. But we don’t need to pit two bad bitches against one another here. We’re looking at American Idiot, man. Dookie can come later, or something.

I’ve become a bit of a snob about box sets. It’s frightening to me that I’ve reached an age where the artists I grew up listening to are shitting these things out left and right – what do you fucking mean Hybrid Theory is 20 years old? What do you mean Moving Pictures is FORTY YEARS OLD? I’m only 31 and I already feel like my fucking bones are creaking and turning to dust, man, and all these retrospective boxes that I’m honor-bound to buy ain’t helping! Especially when sometimes they suck ass! Looking at you, Signals 40! What do you mean there’s no live show in the box? I’m buying a big-ass box of shitty Hugh Syme art and pointless 7’’ singles?? Alex and Geddy won’t even promote the thing because they sold their catalogue and they’re old as balls and don’t care any more? Fuck!

Sorry, sorry. Another time.

At least this one’s good, then – nice and beefy, consisting of the album itself on a fresh vinyl cut, the top-shelf b-sides of the era (a couple of which were outed a few years ago as Cigarettes and Valentines tracks, as previously mentioned), a whole stack of demos that reveal just how tightly curated this album was outside of those b-sides, and the live show the band played the night of the album’s release, featuring the entire album start to finish (crazy), “Minority,” and the live staple cover “We Are the Champions.” It’s not really a representative show from the era, but it’s a fun document of the moment in Green Day’s history where the rocket strapped to their back fired a second time, and that’s pretty cool, man. And not only did the original American Idiot documentary Heart Like a Hand Grenade make the cut, there’s a second retrospective documentary on there that’s also two hours long. Plus, your very own emo Green Day tie! Yippee!!!

Particularly valuable to me among the b-sides and demos, beyond the secret Cigarettes and Valentines refugees “Governator” (about good old California governor Schwarzenegger, who was a bad active politician but has become a relatively reasonable elder statesman somehow) and “Too Much Too Soon”, are the component demos of “Jesus of Suburbia” and “Homecoming,” in particular “Everyone’s Breaking Down,” which became part 4 of “Homecoming,” and “Lowlife,” which was rather drastically retooled into part 4 of “Jesus of Suburbia.” That these both originally were full songs is kind of eye-opening – I understood that those two medleys were sewn together from song fragments that didn’t really work on their own, and certainly these two demos feel a little light on their own, but I wasn’t aware before this that full songs had contributed to those medleys.

Similarly fascinating is the ten-minute “Homecoming” demo, which is a rather highly-produced Armstrong diatribe about being alone in the studio and having to work on his shit all by himself. It really does feel like Armstrong spent a lot of time fucking around until he stumbled onto the structure that eventually turned into the final “Homecoming” medley, and while it’s certainly playful and probably light-hearted in nature, it also feels like it speaks to the tension in the studio around this time, where Armstrong’s perfectionism and perception of himself as the band’s “leader” nearly caused Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool to simply overthrow him and call it quits on the band. Sure, that story in itself is probably another bit of exaggerated mythmaking, but it still feels like it comes through on this demo – and some of Armstrong’s random, enraged screaming ended up making it onto the final song, even, stripped of its original context. I wonder if Mike and Tré ever listen to “Homecoming” and think about that. Probably not.

It’s a great box, on the whole – I think it’s aided in that regard by the extremely strong art direction of American Idiot, centered around Chris Bilheimer’s heart-shaped hand grenade cover art, which seeps into the graphic design of the entire box, the way it did for the original album. Dookie, by comparison, I felt relied a little bit much on novelty items in its own box, which is kind of strange because it also contained more demos than American Idiot, and more music overall as a result. I think the more restrained package design of American Idiot is a strength in that regard, and the box captures the feeling of the era without feeling like it just kind of spreads out in too many directions.

I love American Idiot. This is an incredible album – it is Green Day to me. It feels like it was Green Day to Green Day, too – a natural sentiment to have, I think, considering the new heights of fame and relevance the album brought them, pulling together an entirely new generation of fans for the band and certainly cementing their Hall of Fame case, to the chagrin of the real punks down in Cali that the band left behind in the 90s or whatever. Green Day is in some ways a very different band now than they were back then, and in some ways exactly the same. It’s kind of the same story about their popularity – though they’ll obviously never sell an album to the level of American Idiot or be in the public zeitgeist to that level ever again, the Green Day of today is a legacy act for multiple generations that’s still capable of putting out good albums (besides the trilogy which should’ve just been one album). It makes the tickets pretty hard to come by, and I’m not especially convinced that watching a band in a stadium is really a good experience for anyone involved, but hey, they can sell ‘em out, so there’s that.

It’s really funny to look back on my own original write-up for this album, just a week removed from creating this blog for a college project. It’s so focused on summarizing that era of the band that it almost reads as AI generated to me, which is an extremely unkind thing to say about my past self’s writing. But hey, look, I didn’t delete any of that guy’s work, alright? You can go back and read the horrible write-up for Lights’s Acoustic album, for instance, and I’ll stand up for the asshole who wrote that. Look, I even linked to it, against my own better judgment. That guy, I think, was afraid to be a glazer, afraid to show just how much he loved any given album. I’m glad, in that regard, that I’m not that guy any more. Green Day might not be one of my Fave Five bands any more, but they’re still one of the biggest cornerstones of my musical foundation, and American Idiot is the key ingredient there. Unwrapping that CD for Christmas, spinning it in my shitty little CD player almost every day…

It seems like forever ago.

More, uh, American Idiot since I haven’t written any other Green Day articles I guess: American Idiot | American Edit | Bullet in a Bible

Neighborhoods, by blink-182

Released September 27, 2011

49 min, 12 sec

Neighborhoods feels, in a lot of ways, like an album that everyone would rather forget. The main product of blink-182’s first reunion with Tom DeLonge, the atmosphere surrounding the album before its release and in the wake of Tom’s second exit from blink feels like it massively overshadows the album itself. Nobody talks about Neighborhoods, they just talk about how the band wasn’t meshing in the reunion era and how, despite coming back together, they were still quite separate, an uneasy re-marriage that ended in disaster nearly ten years to the month after it failed the first time. I would like to instead posit that Neighborhoods is a great album, a pilot episode for a version of blink that we didn’t – and likely never will – get, if only because of the egos involved. (in this essay i will-)

blink-182 broke up for the first time in 2005, when Tom DeLonge essentially said “I’m fucking tired of all this shit, I don’t want to tour any more, I want to just vibe, let me just vibe” and Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker responded with “just vibe on the tour dude” and Tom said “absolutely fucking not, I hate you both, goodbye.” They called it an “indefinite hiatus,” and yet by mid-year the two sides were sniping at each other in the media, Tom proclaiming his next project to be essentially the second coming of music itself, while Mark and Travis repeatedly said “we’re fine we’re fine we’re fine” while writing weepy electronic breakup songs about how Tom abandoned them. The two offspring of blink – Angels & Airwaves and +44 – felt like curious parallels of each other to me. Despite the clear bad blood and friction between the two sides of the breakup, the two bands feel like they’re exploring different aspects of the same musical concepts. Both moved in an electronic direction, though +44 backed off of that as the album developed while AVA continued to dive headfirst into it. The biggest divergence in the two projects beyond that was the subject matter – Tom aimed high, wanting to make sweeping, grandiose, ultimately uplifting music about the power of love. +44, meanwhile, created bitter, grimy music full of heartbreak. You can really tell, from the two bands’ 2006 albums, who left who.

I’m certain that blink would never have reunited if not for Travis’s horrific plane crash in 2008. Mark and Tom hadn’t spoken to each other since the breakup, AVA was thriving, and +44 was at least gearing up for a second album. Most likely, the two sides would have continued on these separate paths indefinitely, or at least until Coachella or some other festival offered them a fuck ton of money to reunite and headline ten or twenty years down the line. (You know, like Rage Against the Machine.) Instead, the crash, and Travis’s harrowing recovery process, broke the tension, as Tom and Mark met up at the hospital with Travis, leading to a more formal sit-down to hash things out and discuss the prospect of getting back to blink. The reunion was announced at the 2009 Grammys, and the trio toured through 2009 and 2010 to drum up interest in the reunion and the inevitable new album. Despite the good feelings being outwardly projected about blink getting back together, however, internally, there remained tension and friction that had yet to be resolved, dating back to the reasons the band broke up in the first place.

Tom, by public perception, is far more willing to experiment and engage in new, weird shit than Mark. Tom was the one who released a side project album while blink was still active, recruiting Travis and causing the first round of real problems within the band by leaving Mark out. AVA was the band that continued after blink’s reunion, as Mark and Travis immediately shelved +44 and never returned to it, the band apparently no longer having a purpose in their eyes. In fact, a new AVA album came out before blink’s big comeback record – LOVE Part One was originally released on Valentine’s Day in 2010, a year and a half before Neighborhoods, and LOVE Part Two came out just two months after Neighborhoods. Despite blink-182 being back together, Tom clearly had no desire to let go of his projects outside of the band, foreshadowing how it would all fall apart in 2015.

This was the undercurrent as blink worked on Neighborhoods over the span of two years, with initial writing sessions being conducted in mid-2009 before the reunion tour, and the bulk of the work done throughout 2010 and 2011. Things were much different than the last time the band was together, recording an album – Tom self-produced every AVA album, and blink’s previous long-time producer, Jerry Finn, died in 2008, leaving the band to produce the album themselves, learning the process as they went. The album was recorded mostly in pieces, as Tom, Mark and Travis all frequently worked separately, in their own studios. The band’s initial breakup resulted in miles of red tape to cut through, as well – different managers, different lawyers, different engineers, all of whom “needed” to be involved. Though Tom characterized this as “the absolute diarrhea of bureaucracy,” I suspect that he found it either convenient or comforting, as reports came out after the fact that Tom and Mark would go months without speaking directly to each other, only communicating through their respective managers.

I don’t need to tell you that this level of fragmentation is probably not healthy for a band that comprises a grand total of three guys. It’s certainly not conducive to recording a pop-punk album, where every instrument should ideally be locked tightly together. The disunity and struggle to reconcile made the album take absolutely forever to come together – that initial writing session in 2009 produced basically nothing but the album’s lead single, and it took so long for Neighborhoods to come together that the band had to push back their second European tour an entire year to accommodate the album’s delayed release, resulting in a blow-up that necessitated the involvement of the band’s label, setting a hard deadline of July 31 for final masters in order to just get the shit finished already.

But Neighborhoods did come out, and let me tell you something: this is a great album. It strays further from blink’s raw punk roots, completely eschewing the usual smattering of sophomoric humor in favor of a sincere, conflicted record. The disparate elements of classic blink, AVA, and +44 all swirl around in the pot together, sometimes mixing into something truly great, other times congealing separately and resulting in AVA or +44 songs masquerading as blink ones. “Ghost on the Dance Floor” is an electric opener, with haunting electronic tones creating a bed of sound under Tom’s meticulous riffs and Travis’s driving, intricate beat, keeping the momentum through “Natives” and “Up All Night,” a trilogy of songs much darker than anything blink had made to this point, a reflection of the band’s growing maturity and the adversity the three had experienced since the band’s breakup in their personal and professional lives. “After Midnight” is a big standout for me, with a fantastic Travis beat, beautiful guitar tones from Tom, and wistful, energetic vocals from both Tom and Mark.

“Snake Charmer” puzzles and intrigues with its subject matter, led by Tom, while both parts of “Heart’s All Gone” serve as the first full-on +44 songs on the album, followed up with an outright AVA song in “Wishing Well.” “Kaleidoscope,” “This is Home,” and “MH 4.18.2011” do a better job of melding the trio’s various influences and interests, while “Love is Dangerous” and “Fighting the Gravity” both feel like they break new ground for blink, slower and more methodical, exploring dark, pessimistic subject matter, while incorporating novel sounds and musical elements for the band – “Fighting the Gravity” in particular is anchored by rumbling, ominous samples of a drum machine being run through Mark’s bass amp, vibrating the entire recording studio. Album closer “Even if She Falls” is an uplifting, persevering love song, a counterbalance to the dark recesses Neighborhoods frequently explores throughout its runtime, ending the record on an optimistic note.

It’s worth noting here that this is the “Deluxe Edition” track listing – Neighborhoods was one of those albums that fell prey to a trend in the early 2010s of releasing a neutered “standard edition” of the album, stripping out tracks from the track list to save for a more expensive version of the album that was clearly always meant to be the definitive one. Bonus tracks don’t usually get sprinkled into the middle of the album, do they? You can’t fool me, you bastards. I’m so glad this trend died a quick death.

Anyway.

When you listen to Neighborhoods, I don’t think the band’s disunity is evident. To my ears, especially when I first listened to it in 2011, it feels like blink firing on all cylinders, a strong, worthwhile advancement of their sound, the foundation for a successful, lucrative reunion. As outlined above, there are a few songs that feel like they fall on one end or the other of the AVA-+44 spectrum, but on the whole, the trio incorporated their various musical influences and preferences into a cohesive product. This is even more impressive when you consider that they spent maybe two weeks together in the studio, recording the album in individual components, not speaking to each other for months at a time, and Tom in particular having long stretches of being completely detached – “MH 4.18.2011” doesn’t even feature him at all, as Mark recorded the guitar parts for it, and Travis alleged after Tom’s 2015 departure that Tom “didn’t even care about Neighborhoods. He didn’t even listen to mixes or masterings from that record.” If that’s the case, then kudos to Mark and Travis for the final sound of the album. Travis expressed displeasure with the recording process after the fact, and Tom conceded that recording as separate units “didn’t work” and “led to a loss of unity.”

That loss of unity had a cascading effect on the band. They toured behind the album for two years, left their label, and self-released a five-song EP that also absolutely slaps, but Tom’s other commitments were increasingly becoming a problem for scheduling time for blink. AVA wasn’t the roadblock in this regard – a new album, The Dream Walker, was released in 2014, but AVA ceased playing live in 2012 and did very little otherwise while blink was active. Instead, Tom’s time was becoming devoted more and more to his pursuit and investigation of UFOs, something that sounded absolutely ridiculous, up until they straight up got the U.S. Government to admit to the existence of and release videos of alleged UFO sightings in 2019 and 2020. Looking back, it’s hilarious to think that I used to believe Tom was putting all his effort into blink over AVA in the early 2010s, when in fact all of his time was being spent on chasing aliens instead.

As important as that work was to Tom, however, Mark and Travis simply wanted to tour, record new music, and focus on consistently keeping the blink machine going. They tried scheduling studio time over and over, and Tom repeatedly shot it down, even reportedly quitting the band for a day in the middle of 2014, before things finally came to a head in January 2015. Studio sessions were booked, and a new deal with a label had been finalized, but when it came time to start work on a new album, Tom officially quit a second time, igniting another firestorm of sniping back and forth between the two sides in the media as blink, rather than folding again, chose to move forward with Matt Skiba as Tom’s replacement, intent on delivering on the original promise of the band’s reunion. Skiba-era blink released two albums, California in 2016 and Nine in 2019, as Tom balanced his research with AVA, releasing two EPs in 2015 and Lifeforms in 2021. Tensions cooled between the two sides as the years went on, with Tom reconciling both publicly and privately with Mark and Travis, engaging in social media banter about revisiting Box Car Racer or rejoining blink altogether. The teases amplified greatly in 2022, as Skiba began to publicly wonder whether or not he was still in the band, getting his answer that October when blink announced that Tom had returned once again, leading into a new album and a 2023 tour.

With all of this context, where does that leave Neighborhoods? To blink, probably dead in a ditch somewhere – those 2023 setlists are most likely going to ignore the entirety of the intervening years between 2003 and 2023, save for perhaps “Up All Night.” The album clearly left a sour taste in the mouth of everyone involved, and while I understand that, I can’t help but feel let down by this album’s legacy. Maybe that’s my personal bias rearing its head again – Neighborhoods is in the same realm as Wasting Light for me, a formative album of my college freshman year that I look back on as being extremely consequential to my development as an adult, and maybe I can’t separate that from the objective reality that it’s a mid blink-182 album with too many disparate parts in it, that nobody in the band wants to revisit. That’s alright, though – it’s not like that’ll keep me up all night.

One More Light, by Linkin Park

Released May 19, 2017

35 min, 19 sec

It’s July 20, 2017.

I’m at work, alternating between actually doing work and scrolling through Reddit on my phone to pass the time because the work doesn’t actually fill the day from end to end. I open r/all to see what’s happening, and notice that the top post is from r/music. Now, if you’re a regular on reddit (and you shouldn’t be), you probably know that r/music only makes it to the top of r/all when someone dies. Knowing this, I look at the post, and it takes a few seconds for me to register what I’m seeing.

Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington passes away aged 41.

I almost drop my phone in shock. What? Huh? Chester Bennington? Dead? How?

I need to confirm what I’m seeing. I open Rolling Stone – nothing yet, though it would only be a few minutes before their initial article is up. I go on Twitter – tons of talk, but nothing concrete, just RIP over and over. I need to go to the sources I know will be on the up and up – LPLive and LPAssociation, the top two Linkin Park fansites.

Both are down. Servers absolutely cooked. Now I know it’s true, and now I’m starting to feel empty.

I turn off my music and grind through the rest of the workday. I go home, having seen Mike Shinoda’s horrifying confirmation tweet. I sit down, still utterly unable to process the news. By now, the word is coming out – Chester committed suicide at home that morning. No one knows why, and no one ever will – not publicly, anyway. I put on Linkin Park, and I write this post.

My relationship with Linkin Park fundamentally changed that day, the way that it likely changed for every fan, diehard, lapsed, casual. By 2017, I was long past the phase of my life where Linkin Park was the #1 undisputed king in my heart, and I paid attention to what they were doing mostly in passing. One More Light – we’ll get to it, promise – had been out for about two months. I’d listened to it once, and was unimpressed. The hard pivot into pop music – true pop, radio pop – was jarring and bizarre, especially following 2014’s The Hunting Party, an album best described as “fucking heavy.” Especially when you consider that Mike spent the entirety of The Hunting Party’s press cycle decrying the state of rock music, how there were no real rock bands any more (uhm, ackshually Mike, we’ve established that Foo Fighters still exist and are the only real rock band, checkmate), and how Linkin Park was gonna bring the heavy back. And they did! The Hunting Party is fucking awesome. One More Light was something different, and prior to July 20, I thought it was, as the kids say, mid.

I don’t know why I’d transitioned to this lapsed fan state. I was elbow-deep in the shit for years – as I’ve chronicled before, the height of my fandom stretched from Minutes to Midnight through Living Things, an easy six years. But I think as my music taste continued to diversify, and I morphed as a person through college, I felt that I could move on from Linkin Park. That time was over – I listened to Frank Ocean now, I’m an evolving member of the species. It’s dumb, in retrospect, to act like you can ever really outgrow an artist so formative in your life, that you even need to do that. When you’re a music fan, when music is as important to you as it is to me, every single era of your musical life stays with you forever, whether you like it or not. That Kanye phase, for instance, is still in me, and I can never get rid of it. Yeezus still slaps, even as Kanye continues to do…whatever the fuck he’s been doing since 2016. You can’t outrun the past, and you shouldn’t have to.

So that’s July 20, and that’s the time immediately preceding it. After that? One More Light hit different, to say the least.

The album has a significant, substantial weight to it with the context of Chester’s death added to it. It’s a context that, in fairness, shouldn’t apply to an album that was released prior to it, but it simply does. Linkin Park has obviously always been a band about dark emotions and feelings, and finding ways to reconcile and manage those feelings. Oftentimes, that consisted of simply feeling those things to the max, and seeing where it takes you. One More Light’s exploration of death is both fascinating and haunting in retrospect. The album wades through these concepts with a maturity that you could probably say was previously unseen – the outbursts are controlled, softer, more articulate. The pop song structure is a major contributor for this, to be sure, but it also represents an evolution in the lyrical work of Mike and (to a lesser extent given his smaller writing contributions) Chester. They’ve grown up in this band, 17 years removed from Hybrid Theory, and while it’s shown before, it feels to me that One More Light is the epitomizing statement, the ultimate indicator of that growth.

The growth and evolution of the band’s sound is further reflected in the way the workload is split between Mike and Chester vocally – Mike has two full showcases of his massively improved singing voice in “Invisible” and “Sorry for Now,” two of the strongest songs on the album. Never has he sung as cleanly and confidently as he has on One More Light, and it further emphasizes the ways in which Mike’s musical palate has grown and diversified during his time in Linkin Park. In fact, his original calling card – his rap verses – is dealt exactly once across the entirety of One More Light, as the opening verse of “Good Goodbye.” It’s the least he’s rapped on any Linkin Park album by far, and it’s something that put me off significantly on that first listen-through. But it makes sense, given the nature of these songs – One More Light is a cohesive, focused pop album, and there’s basically no room in it for more hip-hop oriented tracks, leaving Mike’s verses on the cutting room floor. You could quibble with the features of Pusha T and Stormzy, both of whom certainly take up slots that would’ve gone to Mike instead, but, for one, it’s fucking Pusha T, and for two, it’s elevating a young new artist in Stormzy (something that’s done again later on the album with Kiiara duet “Heavy”). If we’re losing Mike verses for this, that’s fine by me.

The album’s brisk length and track list – the shortest album both by number of tracks and raw length in Linkin Park’s catalogue – feels like a mission statement. There are no segues – every song stands alone from the rest, each an individual statement within a thematically cohesive whole. I’d say there’s not really a bad song in the bunch – probably the weakest for me personally are “Talking to Myself” and “Halfway Right,” but neither one is an instant skip, either. It’s curated sharply, and I think that was the right decision. If nothing else, even on that very first listen, I could tell that there was a goal in mind when putting together this track list, this album, a clear through line in both the style and the lyrical content. What’s that through line?

Grief, and coping. How fitting.

The album, in my view, has three heavy hitters that hit that much harder in a post-Chester context – “Nobody Can Save Me,” “Sharp Edges,” and the centerpiece of the album, the title track “One More Light.” These three songs are what this album’s about, to me, though as I said before, pretty much every song on the album feeds into its core concepts. “Nobody Can Save Me” sets the tone, distorted vocal samples forming the backbone of the song’s rhythm, Chester’s breathy, airy vocals hovering, then soaring, over the instrumental, as he declares that only one person can figure things out for him – himself. He has demons, demons that are hard to face, that threaten to pull him under – but he can’t take that helping hand reaching out, because there’s only one way to snuff out those demons, and it’s for him to do it himself. A haunting message in a gorgeous opening song, one that doesn’t fuck around, that gets straight to the album’s thesis statement.

Bookending the album is “Sharp Edges,” a song that’s straightforwardly about the need to experience things on your own, in order to understand the consequences. The acoustic guitar lines throughout this song are gorgeous, giving the song a comforting, bouncy air to it that dovetails beautifully with Chester’s vocals. It’s an uplifting note to end the album on, encouraging you to take chances, even when those chances could result in you getting hurt, because that’s what life is really about – you do things, and sometimes it goes well, sometimes it doesn’t. But you learn, every time, and you get something out of it.

Then there’s “One More Light.”

It’s straightforward, too – a lament for lives lost, for the loved ones who aren’t with you any more. You carry the torch for them, you keep their memory alive, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else says or does, because you’re doing it. The song’s origin stems from an executive at Warner Records that the band was close to, who died of cancer a couple of years before the album was released. It’s a gorgeous elegy, universal in its subject matter, expertly crafted. The instrumental is so delicate, so quiet, and you can feel anguish in every note, both of the instrumental and Chester’s strained, haunting vocals. It’s one of Linkin Park’s crowning achievements, a song that can be applied to anyone, by anyone. The band themselves saw that in the wake of Chris Cornell’s tragic death, where the band performed the song on Jimmy Kimmel, a performance that was clearly difficult for Chester to manage, though he insisted upon performing it for the show in tribute. It’s eerie how fitting a eulogy the song is, given what would happen just two months after its release, and the weight of that can be a lot, to say the least.

These three songs were the ones that stuck with me the most when I first revisited this album, and they’re the ones that still get me to this day whenever I give it a listen. It’s safe to say that I did a complete 180 on One More Light after Chester’s death, and I think that’s a relatively common sentiment. The album was easily the most polarizing one within the fanbase, with one side committed to the idea that Linkin Park could – and should – branch out to whatever genre they felt like, that they owed nothing to the fans with regards to making albums within their original wheelhouse, while the other side felt that – regardless of the quality of this album, itself a fiery talking point – diving over to the pop realm was antithetical to what Linkin Park was about, what fans had come to expect from their music. The divide was stark, and occasionally heated, as I observed from a distance. I felt that it was fine for Linkin Park to move in whatever direction they pleased, that it was something they’d earned over the 17 years since their initial breakout, but at the time of release, One More Light just wasn’t for me.

Critics, predictably, were split along the usual lines. Linkin Park has never been a critical darling, and their move to conventional pop did nothing to assuage that notion. This was nothing new – what was new, however, was the way Chester reacted to the critical reception for the album, which could be charitably characterized as “extreme.” The way the core fanbase reacted seemed to be a particular pressure point for him, and the way he conducted himself in interviews around the time of release felt uncharacteristically aggressive. I’m not out here to psychoanalyze a musician, especially given the circumstances here, but it struck me and a lot of other people as very odd. Chester’s reactions were so drastic that Corey Taylor of Slipknot – not the most level-headed man himself – took it upon himself to try and publicly cool Chester down, imploring him to appreciate the fact that Linkin Park was still prominent and important enough to garner such negative reception, and that Chester needed to give it “more time” for the climate and discussion around the album to improve, to which Chester agreed and rolled back his previous anger. People didn’t forget, though, and Cornell’s death the same month as the album’s release seemed to simply amplify everything, Chester publicly grieving a man he described as a mentor to him. Even so, no one anticipated what would happen on July 20, and the shockwaves ripped through the fanbase, leaving us all to figure things out ourselves, the same way the band now had to.

To date, One More Light is the most recent Linkin Park material to be formally released. The band held a memorial concert the October following Chester’s death, where Mike premiered a song he’d written immediately prior to the show, “Looking for An Answer,” that put to words the feelings he struggled with in the wake of Chester’s death. The band officially went on hiatus afterwards, and remain in that hiatus as of July 2022. Mike has done his own thing, touring behind an excellent solo album in 2018, jumping into the streaming space in 2020 during the early stages of the pandemic, and, unfortunately, morphing into a crypto bro. The rest of the band remained mostly out of the spotlight, their lives no longer under the microscope of the Linkin Park fanbase. Hybrid Theory received a substantial, extensive 20th anniversary reissue in 2020, cracking open the vault for high-quality versions of demos both circulating and rumored, unearthing additional songs and versions that even this insane fanbase had no knowledge of. I haven’t reviewed it here because I’m a coward and I didn’t feel like it.

Mike asserted, throughout the first couple of years following Chester’s death, that Linkin Park was not over, that the band needed time to figure out the right way to continue on without him. I believed, in the immediate wake of Chester’s death, that this was simply not going to happen, and I continue to believe that. I trust Mike’s word that the band has thought about and talked about what to do, but I have never seen a way forward, and I think that, ultimately, the band will come to that conclusion, as well. Chester Bennington was a singular force in rock music, with a unique voice, incredible range, and a talent and fire that simply cannot be replaced or replicated, especially not in the context of Linkin Park. There is not a single singer in rock that I could see carrying the torch for Chester’s vocals, and anyone who tries would be eviscerated for it, simply put. By contrast, a Linkin Park led by Mike and Mike alone isn’t enough. Mike is an incredible musician and has become a lovely singer since he first tried it out on Minutes to Midnight, but his voice is nothing like Chester’s, and he cannot carry the load himself. The math doesn’t work out, and I, personally, think the band knows that. Though Phoenix said that, around the start of the pandemic, the band had been working on new music, Mike in 2022 emphasized that there was no tour, no album, no music on the horizon. I anticipate that this will be the case forever. It’s not what I want – like I said in that post in 2017, I expected Linkin Park to simply go on forever, until everyone in the band dropped dead at 85 or something. That’s what I wanted. I didn’t want this. No one did. But this is the timeline we’re in, and I think it’s a timeline where Linkin Park ended in 2017, One More Light standing as their final creative statement.

I came back hard to Linkin Park after July 20, and I’m still there. I’ve recontextualized what this band means to me – the band of my childhood, the first fixture of my musical awakening, the one that started it all for me. I loved Linkin Park, I love Linkin Park, and I always will love Linkin Park. Losing Chester made it clear just how important this band is to me, and I’m fortunate that I’ve been able to reconnect with the music that drove me through middle and high school, that fostered a community that I’ve flitted in and out of over the years, and still always have felt welcome in. It’s sad that tragedy is what it took for me to really see Linkin Park for what it is to me, but there are times when an external catalyst is needed for you to look inside and understand what’s been there all along for you.

I guess that I had to find out for myself.

Wasting Light, by Foo Fighters

Released April 12, 2011

52 min, 6 sec

Never have I really been a Foo Fighters guy.

I don’t mean that in any smug contrarian way – “I just don’t get Foo Fighters, you know, I really just don’t get it” – I just mean that I’ve never been a hardcore, dedicated fan, the way I might have expected to be, given the way I was introduced to popular music. I’ve tried, honestly – there was a time in college where I was trying very hard to be a Foo Fighters guy, but for some reason, it just never fully locked in. That said, I’ve got some leftovers from that era, namely Sonic Highways on vinyl (Washington Monument cover), and Wasting Light, fresh off the shelf at Target back in the old days of 2011.

As a result of not being a Foo Fighters guy, this isn’t going to be a eulogy for Taylor Hawkins, though his passing is obviously the reason I thought about doing this post. Nowadays, it seems like I only come back here when I’m either angry or sad, but sometimes, man, it’s just nice to reflect on an album I’ve been listening to for a very long time, you know? Sue me.

If I were to be a Foo Fighters guy, I think Wasting Light would be the album I carry water for day in and day out. The way I read popular opinion of the band, it seems like the consensus is that either The Colour and the Shape or There is Nothing Left to Lose is the band’s best album, with Wasting Light or maybe In Your Honor as dark horses in that race. Me, though? Wasting Light is the one. It’s a remarkable summation of the essentials of Foo Fighters – in my view, it’s the Foo Fighters album, the one you hand someone when they ask you “what’s the deal with this band, anyway?” The Platonic ideal of a Foo Fighters album. The Born to Run of Foo – you get the picture. I’ll stop.

Okay, one more – when you think of Foo Fighters, when the average person thinks of Foo Fighters, what song do they think of? That’s right, “Everlong.” But what about when you ask them again, and then a third time, and then maybe a couple times after that? Once you escape Colour and the Shape, it’s probably “Walk,” right? It’s up there, at least. And it’s because “Walk” is a quintessential Foo Fighters song, the most prominent and recognizable of an album full of them. It’s the album where Foo Fighters reached their final form, basically – Pat Smear was fully back in the fold to create the band’s three-guitar assault, and later-official member Rami Jaffee is on several songs, too. If you ask Dave Grohl which album encompasses the form of Foo Fighters he’d been looking for for years and years prior to this, he’d say Wasting Light. Probably. Maybe. I don’t want to put words in the dude’s mouth.

This album is just rock, straight-up. Rock as a genre means basically nothing now, and it meant very little in 2011 still, but for some reason, whenever I think to myself “what band could you simply call “rock” and be relatively correct?”, I think of Foo Fighters, and I think of this album. From “Bridge Burning” all the way through that Japanese bonus track “Better Off,” this album does very, very little wandering off the straightforward “rock” path, and the little wandering it does is pretty much in direct service to the album’s mission statement of being a hard-hitting, no-frills rock record. And, of course, that extends to the way it was recorded.

You know the deal if you know anything about this band and this album, but in case you don’t, this was the first album where Dave Grohl began to wander into the territory of “what if digital recording is evil actually,” and he responded by having this entire album recorded on analog tape, like it was being recorded in 1990 instead of 2010. That tape was cut up when the album was finished, and each first-run CD copy has a snippet of tape included – probably less than a second of music, but very cool nonetheless. (I’ve always wondered what my snippet is from, if it’s from one of my favorite songs, or if I got stuck with part of “Back & Forth.”) The band was committed to not doing any sort of digital editing until the very end of the process, from recording all the way through to mastering. He did approximately fourteen million interviews about this during my “Foo phase,” as we’ll call it, lamenting the state of modern music recording and how it allowed musicians to cut out even the tiniest imperfection, encouraging them to fix errors digitally rather than locking down and getting the songs right, living with whatever slipped through rehearsal, deliberately allowing human error to enter the picture. The end result sounds pretty damn good, and – though this might cut against the intent – feels indistinguishable, quality-wise, from their previous albums.

I’m not a musician – that’s self-evident – so I’m not necessarily qualified to weigh in on Dave treading the line of boomerism with his complaints about modern recording methods. It did always feel a little bit performative, though, and though the band really did just go ahead and record on tape with this album, since the entire recording process was pretty meticulously documented in the contemporaneous documentary Back and Forth, it felt – and still feels – like a gimmick, the same way that Sonic Highways had the gimmick of every song being written and recorded in a different city. Gimmicks are fine, of course, but it struck me as a little weird to take the gimmick and make it, like, the whole point of the album. I don’t know.

But the songs are incredible. It really is just bangers from start to finish – “Bridge Burning” is a breakneck opener, a fiery, defiant tone-setter for the rest of the album, and the pace is kept up admirably by first single “Rope,” the triple-guitar arrangement front and center all throughout. “Dear Rosemary” is a fantastic collaboration with rock legend Bob Mould, written with his vocals in mind, bringing an almost operatic contrast to Dave’s high-pitched, scratchy vocals, occupying opposite ends of the pitch spectrum. The album reaches its peak heaviness with the blistering, chaotic “White Limo,” which feels like it was written based solely on the challenge of “how fucking fast can we go?”, and the album settles more firmly into alternative territory from that point on, all the way through “Walk.” “Arlandria” has a steady, consistent pace as it seems to relate both to Virginia, the place, where Grohl spent several years in the middle years of Foo Fighters, as well as a theoretical person, while “Back and Forth” and “Matter of Time” are higher up on the alternative scale, lighter in tone and subject matter while still being satisfying rock tracks. “Miss the Misery,” by contrast, brings the pitch back down, skirting the edge of grungy guitar tones as it leads into the emotional climax of the album

Foo Fighters albums, in my view, tend to not necessarily have central themes, but Wasting Light does, and that central theme is death, and concepts adjacent to death – what it means to live, what to live for, what to do when a life is extinguished. “Bridge Burning” even opens with the line “these are my famous last words.” Grohl, of course, is intimately tied to these concepts in popular culture, given that he was the (last) drummer for Nirvana, and, well, you know the deal with Kurt. Thirty years on, he still gets asked about the impact of that on his life and career, and every single time, you can still see and feel the impact when he answers that tired question. Wasting Light feels like it has several direct contemplations of that question, of the questions that surround death and life, and while “I Should Have Known” is the most explicit musing on that subject, the question seeps into “Dear Rosemary,” “These Days,” and “Walk,” creating a through-line of perseverance and making the most of the time you have on this planet.

“These Days” is a declaration that pain is pain, and each person’s pain is their own, not meant to be presumed or trivialized. It’s a song with a back and forth structure, and in some ways, it feels like a response to the idea that death’s inevitability is meant to be a comfort to those who are left behind. Despite the dour subject matter, it’s absolutely anthemic, the kind of stadium rock that you can picture tens of thousands of people screaming along to as the song bursts into its fierce, aggressive chorus of “easy for you to say.”

“I Should Have Known” is a notable, landmark track for Foo Fighters in a couple of different ways, a song about loss, about feeling like there were signs you missed about a loved one’s impending demise, that there were things you could have done differently to prevent their fate. Grohl states that the song is about everyone he’s ever lost in his life, and I believe that, because he was 42 by this point in his life, he’d certainly lost his fair share of people. But it’s inescapable that, in the mind of the public, the song would be about Kurt Cobain, and that thematic connection is made explicit by the presence of Krist Novoselic on the song, contributing the opening accordion chords and an absolutely filthy, muddy-ass bass line over the bridge, a bona fide bass solo that continues into the final chorus, Novoselic’s plucking as prominent as the song’s other guitar lines all the way to the end.

“I Should Have Known” was one of the first – and easily the most prominent – public collaborations between Novoselic and Grohl since their final work as Nirvana. Novoselic deliberately stayed away from Foo Fighters, he and Grohl agreeing that his presence would have been outsized due to the Nirvana connection, embarking on a weird political career instead. Okay! Sure. You do you, dude. But what this song did seem to do was break the dam of collaboration between the former members of Nirvana, including late-era second guitarist Pat Smear, who did make the leap to Foo Fighters back in 1995. Two years later, for the excellent Sound City documentary soundtrack, Grohl, Novoselic, and Smear teamed up with fucking Paul McCartney, who will just do literally whatever’s put in front of him, on a new song, “Cut Me Some Slack,” which led to several more performances as a three-piece with guest vocalists throughout 2014, surrounding Nirvana’s induction into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Though Novoselic and Grohl clearly remained friends and had no qualms about collaborating, it does feel to me like “I Should Have Known” was a watershed moment of sorts, a tacit admission that the remnants of Nirvana could freely collaborate and honor the band and Kurt.

Album closer “Walk” feels like a follow-up to “I Should Have Known,” documenting the next steps after a loss, figuring out how to get back into the things that used to bring you joy, learning how to do those things again without them feeling alien or foreign. In a lot of ways, it feels like a Foo Fighters origin story, a record of how Dave picked up the pieces of his young career and found a way to fit them together in a new shape. It’s a triumph in an album full of them, one final reinforcement that continuing to live after tragedy is something you can and need to do, to live life to the fullest and not be chained down by the weight of past pain. I never wanna die, I never wanna die, forever, whenever, forever, whenever.

Even though I am, once again, not a Foo Fighters guy, Wasting Light feels like a cornerstone album for me. It came out right before my nightmarish first year of college, when I was going through a great deal of change in my own life, and it was on repeat pretty much constantly. Hell, I even learned a bunch of Nate Mendel (is he still a nutty AIDS denialist? Don’t think for a second I didn’t know or forgot about that) bass lines so I could play along – only the easy ones, though, because I’m not a musician and bass is hard. Maybe that colors my perception of this album, maybe it makes it bigger in my head than it should be, but it feels like the peak of Foo Fighters, the culmination of everything the band had espoused and worked towards. The ideal lineup, the ideal sound. Quintessential Foo Fighters.

They’ve done more since this album, obviously – the aforementioned Sonic Highways, the weird tease of an indefinite hiatus that turned out to be maybe six months at best, Concrete & Gold, Medicine at Midnight, Dee Gees, Studio 666. The calculus of the band was permanently altered last week when Taylor died, and I really don’t know if we’ll see Foo Fighters again, in any configuration. Grohl and Taylor were about as close publicly as two musicians could be – they projected forward an authentic brotherhood, as the two primary representatives of the band, brothers in arms and drums. Grohl has said before that when Taylor overdosed in 2001, it nearly caused him to quit music altogether, and I can’t imagine that 20 additional years of friendship would dull that feeling. But music is in Dave’s veins, inextricable from him. For his public persona, so is tragedy, as dark as it sounds. Whatever he and the band do next, it’s going to be great. But that void behind them may always be there.

Learning to walk again.

The Rising, by Bruce Springsteen

Released July 30, 2002

1 hr, 12 min, 52 sec

I’ve always wondered about the level of truth to that Springsteen 9/11 story.

Bruce Springsteen is not the kind of performer that regularly comes up with myth-making bullshit. All along the road of an artist’s history, there are parts that are smoothed out for the narrative, like how Rush, the quintessential power trio, featured several randos cycling in and out of their lineup in their first year, at one point even expanding to four members, before settling on their self-titled album lineup on the way to the Lifeson-Lee-Peart trio that went the rest of the way. Springsteen himself acknowledges the contradictions in his music and his persona, summing it up as his “magic trick” during the opening of his one-man Broadway show. He’s a man who last did anything but music as a job when he was an early teenager, who has sung the song of the working man from a position of extraordinary wealth at least since the Born in the U.S.A. tour. His songs are not, and never have been, about him – they’re about his family, the people he grew up around, the regular American. There are exceptions to this, like how the subject matter of Tunnel of Love alludes to the relationship troubles brewing up in his life, or the whimsy of the first two albums only a little bit removed from his own experience, but for the most part, Springsteen puts on his persona and tries to keep open the eyes of those at the top of the food chain, forcing them to see what’s going on in regular America. And he doesn’t really just…make up shit.

But that 9/11 anecdote. The story goes like this – Bruce is in Asbury Park, shortly after September 11, 2001, on his way to the beach. In the car next to him, a passenger recognized him, rolled down his window, and shouted “we need you now.” He says, in that moment, he was inspired – called upon, really – to put together The Rising, an album widely recognized as a triumph of his career, his grand return to the mainstream consciousness after a decade of swimming around in legacy territory. That’s superhero origin story stuff. It’s the kind of thing that, if anyone else told you it happened, you’d just be like “yeah okay buddy, have another drink.” And I’m tempted to do that here, too, because it’s just – it’s too poetic. It’s the exact kind of thing that is completely unverifiable, and yet, if you’re out here questioning it, you’re a cynical asshole. And that’s fair! If you question that anecdote, in the wake of one of the greatest tragedies in American history, you probably are a cynical asshole.

So I’ll just keep wondering about it, but quieter. I don’t think it matters how true it is, or not. What matters is that, ten months later, Springsteen came out firing. He’d had enough, he’d seen enough. Three years after being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – usually a pretty good signifier that the end is near – he went out and made one of the best albums of his career, an album that stands as a time capsule of the post-9/11 energy in America, with nuance and depth to it.

The Rising wasn’t crafted from whole cloth entirely in the wake of 9/11 – potentially up to half of the album was written in various years preceding 2001, and it’s not all that difficult to spot them, because their subject matter is so much more vague in terms of relating to the terrorist attacks – “Nothing Man,” “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day,” “Further On (Up the Road).” A song that generally feels quintessentially 9/11-responsive, “My City of Ruins,” was, in fact, written about Asbury Park in 2000, because the city was basically falling apart, and Springsteen premiered it that December, long before it took on the additional meaning it has now. Other songs have vaguer timelines, but relate more clearly to 9/11 either way, like “Lonesome Day.” But the core of the album – its emotional core, and the actual core set of songs that make up The Rising’s track list, were all written in direct response, and it’s extremely evident. “Into the Fire” and “The Rising” are about the perspective of the firefighters that climbed the towers trying to rescue whoever they could, the former from the perspective of loved ones and the latter directly from the firefighters’ perspective. “Empty Sky” captures the feeling of waking up in New York in the days after, where the twin towers no longer stood.

Like the rest of Springsteen’s catalogue, the album focuses on the people on the ground, the ordinary citizens watching things unfold on television, staring up into the sky in Manhattan, wondering what was coming next. There’s no room for rage on this album, no room for vitriol – Springsteen isn’t angry, looking for revenge. He’s somber, worn down, shaken, like the typical working man would have been. Rarely had his voice ever lined up as cleanly with his listeners as it did on this album.

And then, on top of that, he tried to see the other side. “Worlds Apart” features Qawwali singers throughout, a form of Islamic devotional singing primarily practiced in India, though the intention here is obvious – Muslim-Americans would suffer just as much, if not more (given the rampant racism that would unfold in the wake of 9/11 towards anyone who ‘looked Arabic,’ with no nuance nor any real critical thinking applied by the kind of person who would engage in this) than their compatriots in this country, to speak nothing of the long tail of aftermath for numerous Middle Eastern countries, as the American war machine went straight into overdrive for the next twenty years, waging campaigns fueled primarily by smoke, mirrors, and jingoism. “Paradise” has a lot of perspectives in it, but you could argue that at least one or two stanzas of it could apply to the perpetrators of the attacks, attempting to perceive their mindset, take a step towards understanding. These two songs have always felt like they cut to the album’s other core – while the dominating theme is, of course, mourning, and the steps towards healing, there’s another message there, one of attempting to defuse the rage, the pain, and try to simply understand an incomprehensible act.

Because Springsteen is a patriot, in a more classic sense – he loves this country and all that it has given its people, but he remains keenly aware of our flaws, both collective across the entire population, and those concentrated at the top of our political power structure. He’s an old Democrat, not one for much in the way of truly radical, far-left thinking, but it’s always seemed clear to me that if he grew up in modern times rather than the 60s, he would absolutely be a socialist. It’s hard to lean that far left when you’re a rich old man, but he goes as far as he can, and that’s worth appreciating. Springsteen took a while to grow into understanding the power of his position and his music when it comes to political matters, but Ronald Reagan showed him the ways in which he could be wielded as a sinister weapon in the hearts of otherwise-ignorant Americans, and he’s spent the last thirty-plus years doing everything he can to ensure that people understand that going blue is the right way, whether that’s been successful or not. The way he approached his “9/11 album” – the biggest chance he would have in the later stages of his career to put a powerful message into the world – exemplifies this. Springsteen chose mourning and understanding, not rage. Not war.

Musically, The Rising is a strong evolution of the “E Street sound,” modernizing it and deploying its idiosyncrasies in ways that elevated the band’s unique aspects. It’s a very modern-sounding album overall, with a sharp drum sound, a somewhat surprising amount of samples and looped beats complementing the bedrock laid by Max Weinberg, Garry Tallent, and Roy Bittan. Newcomer Soozie Tyrell steps into a featured role, with her violin suddenly becoming part of the band’s core sound. Clarence Clemons, by contrast, takes on more of a “special guest” role, elevated into a spot where the saxophone doesn’t hit very often, but when it does, it hits you. The result is an album that feels, in 2021, like it really hasn’t aged all that much, exemplifying how it deserves to be talked about in the upper echelon of Springsteen’s extensive canon. A 70s classic it is not, certainly – if nothing else, the accumulated inertia of those albums means that nothing Springsteen can make now will ever come close. But in that second tier? The Rising leads the pack, easily.

I brought into question that 9/11 anecdote earlier, and how it supposedly catalyzed the form this album took. But I do think there are elements of truth to that. Springsteen had last released a studio album in 1995, the mostly-acoustic Ghost of Tom Joad. That’s a dour album, one that engages with America in a significantly different, much more cynical manner. It feels underrated, trapped as it is in the mire of Springsteen’s strange 90s era, where the E Street Band was split up, reformed for a Greatest Hits album of all things, and then sent packing again so that Springsteen could kind of just putter around, doing a long, drawn-out solo and acoustic tour across three calendar years, appearing ready to settle into the home stretch of his career. The 1999 Reunion Tour re-energized the Springsteen faithful, and people expected an album in the immediate wake of that tour, the big E Street return that The Rising ended up being. But that wasn’t in the cards, originally – Springsteen conducted solo sessions in late 2000, and then in early 2001 he did record with the E Street Band, but essentially nothing is known of these sessions, if they would have led to a new album or just another small collection of tracks, like the Greatest Hits sessions in 1995. Instead, it seems like it truly took a national tragedy to really jump-start the E Street engine.

National tragedy. If you’re here on the day of publication, you know what this is about. It’s September 11, 2021. I’m 28 years old. Here’s my 9/11 story: I’m in Florida, I’m in school. A month into third grade. We’re sitting in class, just vibing, when some kid from another class bursts into the room. “A building in New York got hit by a plane!” he shouted. The teacher, a no-nonsense woman, shooed him out, but she was unsettled. She turned on the TV, where we could get the local news, and as we all took in whatever the fuck was going on on the screen, the principal hops on the intercom, announcing that everyone was being sent home. Living down the street, I walked home by myself. (Can’t imagine letting a kid do this today, but it was 2001.) I opened the door, and my mom is staring at the TV in absolute disbelief, watching the chaos unfold. I started to get freaked out at this point – we had family in New York, and I couldn’t perceive the fact that they were all in western New York, in the Buffalo area, while the twin towers were in New York City, basically another state. My dad came to pick me up that night so I could hang out with him, and we continued to just sort of absorb the news coverage.

And that’s that. I remember ribbons, tributes, constant news reports. I didn’t understand any of it. I was eight, dude! Eight year olds can’t conceive of the magnitude of shit like that. I didn’t know that America had just fundamentally been altered, that we would be thrown down a path of no return. Of course, as I’ve gotten older, the nonsense has simply continued – escalated, really. 9/11 feels like a flashpoint to me, where the collective lives of Americans took a turn for the worse, but I don’t know how true that is. All I’ve got is my own personal experience.

What I do have perspective on, however, is how this country seems so determined to bastardize this day, and what it symbolizes. Military fetishism has been a huge problem in America for basically forever, but it never feels worse to me than when it’s deployed on September 11th. Jingoism, and blind patriotism, get tangled into that, too. We’re implored at every turn to “Never Forget,” and the secret message underneath that is “Never Recover, Never Move On, Never Forgive.” It encourages people to stay mad, to continue feeding into our “leaders” and their desire for endless war. It was the banner that these ghouls rode to twin wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, used to justify tearing the Middle East to shreds for two decades for…what, exactly? Certainly not weapons of mass destruction. Not retribution. Nothing we do will bring back those 2,977 innocent lives. Nothing will bring back the 340 firefighters, 72 police officers.

Even more infuriating is when these three parties are conflated together. You cannot put together a proper tribute for all of them at once, because they occupy fundamentally different roles in this. We call them all heroes, but the people on those planes, in the towers, in the Pentagon, they didn’t ask to be “heroes.” They didn’t ask for anything. They’re victims. They need to be treated that way, mourned properly, not propped up as avatars of American resilience. Not even those on Flight 93 that fought back against the hijackers – heroic actions, yes, but they should never have had to be in that position. They were burdened with it, and they died anyway. It’s horrible.

You can treat the police officers and firefighters as heroes. They did their jobs, they stepped up, they did what they could. But don’t go around acting like 9/11 is anything more than one of the worst tragedies in American history. It shouldn’t be a rallying point, it shouldn’t be fodder for filthy bastards in politics to pander to the constituents, it shouldn’t be the subject of a red, white, and blue ribbon in the fucking Dunkin’ Donuts Twitter profile picture. Anyone who evokes 9/11 in any context besides a historical one, a personal one, or “this was a really awful thing that happened” is an asshole. Pandering to jingoists who want us to live in perpetual fear of the brown man overseas in order to continue justifying a rapidly-ballooning defense budget is how we fucking got here, the sad state of this country and the political landscape in 2021.

On the radio yesterday, a sports executive that had just received a contract extension paid his mandatory lip service, honoring the victims of 9/11 who made the “ultimate sacrifice.” Are you out of your fucking mind? Are you kidding me? Jesus Christ. Those 2,977 didn’t make the ultimate sacrifice, they were fucking murdered, every last one of them.

You might be wondering why this post stopped being about The Rising. It’s because I’m angry. It’s because I know that all weekend, we’re going to see tons of people – always politicians or pundits – spewing out toxic waste about the “resilience of America” and how “the terrorists will never win,” conflating the innocent victims and the public servants who did actually sacrifice their lives in the recovery efforts, invoking the imagery of American military completely inappropriately, and probably trying to relate the current state of the country to the way we responded to 9/11, as asinine as that is. It’s because these people have lost all perspective – they’ve taken a tragic event and twisted it into an unrecognizable shape, fetishizing fear and confusion and using it to justify whatever idiotic bullshit they want to peddle. The NFL will be one of the worst offenders in this regard, because sports always do it The Worst when it comes to patriotic masturbation.

I feel for the families of the victims, because while plenty of them undoubtedly appreciate the attention given to 9/11 and the victims on the anniversaries (and that is 100% their prerogative, we’re not here to go after anyone personally affected, let me make that crystal clear), I’m certain many of them hate it. Absolutely hate it. Their lives were changed, ruined in many cases, by a tragedy they had no control over, and their reward was witnessing this country politicize all 2,977 of those victims pretty much instantly. I don’t know how you wouldn’t simply be angry all the time. I think I would be.

This went off the rails a little, but here’s the thesis, the TL;DR you weren’t looking for: The Rising was the right album for a scary, uncertain time in American history. It’s a shame, then, that the people in power, the Bushes, the Cheneys, the Rumsfelds, the Powells, every last one of those motherfuckers, didn’t take a single lesson from Springsteen’s measured, somber response, and instead made today about American exceptionalism, yet again.

Try and do it a little differently, today. Do some quiet reflection. Don’t buy into the politics, the brands and their performative patriotism. Think about what 9/11 means to you, and hold onto that. Maybe, someday, the people at the top will learn to have a little more class about it all. But don’t hold your breath.

Reprint Special – Reflecting on (ten) years without the Big Man

Ten years is a long time for anything. I was a very different person ten years ago – fresh out of high school, anxious and excited for a next chapter of my life that I was desperately hoping would be better than the first. When I first wrote this post, nine years ago, I was again a different person, having struggled through a first year of college that was far more challenging, and far less fun, than I’d anticipated. I did a lot of growing up (sorry) that year, and much of it was soundtracked by Bruce, and, therefore, by Clarence. I’d like to think that I’m a better person than I was then – a better writer, a better friend, a better appreciator of Bruce’s music. The first point, at least, is objectively true – reading this original post back is, as always, a horrendous experience. The focus on Gaga in the last paragraph is so 2012 me – the man worked with her for a total of one week, on two songs, and she gets a whole paragraph. If this post made it into the hands of anyone who gave a shit, they’d be like “what are you doing?”

But ten years is a big, round number, and it’s a good time for reflection. Bruce has done far more than anyone probably anticipated in the decade since Clarence’s passing, releasing four studio albums, conducting three E Street tours, writing an autobiography, performing in a one-man (“CRITICALLY-ACCLAIMED!”) Broadway show. Clarence remains in everyone’s memory, immortalized at every single one of Bruce’s performances, whether it’s on the road with E Street or on that big Broadway stage. “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” is an elegy and a celebration at once, the centerpiece of Clarence’s lasting legacy. Ten years down the road, the hole he left is still there, but the edges have been patched up and reinforced, and all around it are tributes, reflections, and the next chapter.

Spin up Jungleland tonight. Sit back and take in the solo.

Rest in peace, Big Man.

iTunes, A to Z

I wrote this four years ago today, which feels like a lifetime ago. Today marks five years since the death of Clarence Clemons, one of the most iconic pieces of Bruce Springsteen’s 1970s and 80s output, the cornerstone of the E Street Band. Raise a glass and give Jungleland a spin before it hits midnight.

—

So, as of today, June 18, 2011, the E Street Band has been without Clarence Clemons for one entire year.

Now, I’ve only been a serious fan of Bruce for about a year and a half now. But the one thing I learned upon immersing myself in his music and everything that surrounds it was that there are only two people that are immortal in the eyes of the E Street Nation: Clarence, and Bruce himself. Sure, Steve’s probably hovering right below there, and the rest of the core band a bit…

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Apple Music Special – The Black Parade, by My Chemical Romance

Back from the dead, huh…

iTunes, A to Z

as01-theblackparade

Released October 23, 2006

51 min, 53 sec

I have a month of Apple Music because of Frank Ocean (thanks asshole), so I figure that I should go ahead and make it useful for the rest of the month. Spotify will be back whenever. Who cares?

Man, remember emo music?

In the mid-2000s, as we established in the last article, I was a young, impressionable middle schooler, finally discovering a world of music outside of Hillary Duff and Aly & AJ. By 2006, I was soliciting music recommendations from everyone I knew, and it frequently led to choices that I look back on and question.

This one both is and isn’t one of them.

My Chemical Romance had a fascinating arc as a band. Forming in 2001, in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, by the release of their second album Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge in 2004…

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2019

Yeah, this format again.

Felt strange to write a new post, considering it’s been almost an entire year since the last one. There’s a lot that goes into that – the Insta is rolling, for the most part, and that partially accounts for the absence, but the biggest reason this blog has been inactive is that, frankly, I don’t think I need it any more.

Let me explain. When this blog began, it was a school project: one post a day, for at least a week, which I managed to parlay into four months of daily posts. When that schedule finally gave out, I still had a great interest in maintaining the blog, so I gave it a shot, posting irregularly throughout the rest of the year. After that is when the wheels really fell off – I had a lot of personal stuff to handle, and I just didn’t have the time or mental energy for this blog. I kept coming back, though, and over the past six months, deep into the unintentional hiatus for this blog, I finally realized what was driving me: creativity.

What I mean by that is that I kept this blog going because I just wanted to write something, anything, and in 2016 and 2017, all I could muster the energy for was writing about music. I was completely burnt out on creative writing, slogging through a years-long bout of writer’s block that crippled my ability to do anything that required abstract thought. So I leaned on this blog and did my best to keep it going, even as my posting habits dwindled down to three or four posts a year. The horrific, deeply upsetting deaths of Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington in 2017 didn’t help matters, either, as I couldn’t muster up the desire to write about music for a long time after that.

Instagram has helped, substantially. Writing in short bursts removed most of the mental barrier I’d developed against writing and posting regularly, and I managed to keep a pretty hefty schedule for most of the year, at least twice a week. I let it slide towards the end of the year, and had to take a couple months off from it, but the Insta is back in action this year, and this time maybe I’ll make it over the finish line with a consistent schedule.

More importantly than the Insta, however, is the fact that, this year, I finally conquered the writer’s block that had been smashing my kneecaps over and over since 2014. I did NaNoWriMo, made it over the 50k word mark in 28 days, and am currently doing a second pass on the novel that resulted. That’s sucking up nearly all of my creative energy, but that energy has been stronger and more consistent than it’s been maybe ever, resulting in daily work on a schedule I never imagined I’d be able to keep. It’s been a wonderful feeling the past several months, and I’m doing all I can to hold onto it as long as possible.

Unfortunately, that means I have pretty much no room for anything besides the Insta, and that includes this blog. The Chris Cornell compilation caught my eye and shook me until I wrote about it, but other than that, I can feel that this blog has run its course in my heart. I’ve done more with it than I ever figured I would when I first started it so long ago, and I’m extremely proud of how my writing and criticism has developed as a direct consequence of hammering away at this blog. But I think it’s time to stop promising posts, stop trying to adhere to a schedule that I know will never work. It’s time, basically, to say goodbye.

Now, that doesn’t mean I’m closing the doors for good. “Never say never” is a common refrain among members of a broken-up band when they want to string their fans along a bit, and don’t want their comments in the media to bite them in the ass in the future, but it serves the purpose I need it to in this case. I’m sure I’ll be motivated to write a post once in a while, and I’ll want an outlet for that. But don’t expect it any time soon, because there’s no schedule. There shouldn’t be any expectations, either.

We took the long way around, to be sure. And I’m not particularly sure where we ended up.

But here we are.

Chris Cornell

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Released November 16, 2018

4 hrs, 59 min, 19 sec

Chris Cornell’s tragic death in early 2017 inspired a wide array of tributes and memorials, and had a cascading effect across the remnants of his professional and personal lives. A sustained Audioslave reunion never materialized, Soundgarden went into a hiatus for months while the remaining members figured out how best to end the band, and Cornell’s wife spent several months in the public eye attempting to reconcile the events that led to Cornell’s death. Once the dust began to settle, those in charge of Cornell’s legacy turned an eye towards memorializing him via his deep library of music, spread across Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog, Audioslave, and his solo career. The first product of that memorialization is the self-titled best-of compilation Chris Cornell.

As a compilation, Chris Cornell is straightforward and doesn’t overthink things, mostly sticking to a greatest hits-type format, emphasizing singles while occasionally tossing in a deep cut or curveball track. What I like about the way this is formatted is that the album doesn’t segregate Cornell’s various projects; instead, the track list for the first three discs goes in strictly chronological order, weaving solo tracks in with band projects, split by the three “eras” of Cornell’s career – Soundgarden and Temple of the Dog on disc 1, Audioslave and 2000s solo tracks on disc 2, and Soundgarden revived and late-era solo tracks on disc 3. Each major album Cornell was involved with is represented here, even if only with one song. And yes, that means Scream is accounted for here, with not just one but two tracks, probably more than what that album deserves.

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I’m not especially familiar with Soundgarden, admittedly, so disc 1 was the most interesting listen for me at first glance, given that I’d only listened to most of the songs on it once or twice. Of course, there are the heavy hitters like “Black Hole Sun,” “Outshined,” “Spoonman,” etc. But though this early section of Cornell’s career is obviously dominated by Soundgarden, two songs stand out in the track list – the solo track “Seasons,” Cornell’s first solo release, originally from the soundtrack to Singles, and the Jimi Hendrix cover “Hey Baby (Land of the New Rising Sun)”, recorded with three other former members of Temple of the Dog, forming a pseudo-reunion that was never repeated. These two songs are an example of the drawbacks of the album’s strict chronological sequencing, breaking up the grunge-fest and feeling a little incongruous as a result. Both of them, however, represent early examples of Cornell’s flexibility, and hint towards what was to come in his career.

Disc 2 is pretty straightforward, representing Euphoria Mourning, Carry On, Scream, and all of Audioslave, with a random featured track thrown in at the end to account for Disc 3’s length. The selection sticks mostly to singles for each album, though “Sunshower” and “Sweet Euphoria” are inspired choices from Cornell’s debut solo album in lieu of “Preaching the End of the World,” and Carry On is done a disservice by only including Cornell’s dour, unpleasant cover of “Billie Jean” as opposed to, say, literally any other track from the album (“Arms Around Your Love”? “Scar on the Sky”? Did Cornell say at some point that he hates this album?), remarkably losing out to Scream in terms of sheer numerical representation. Naturally, however, Scream’s representation is hedged by using the rock version of “Long Gone” (vastly superior) and the bizarre choice of the Steve Aoki remix of “Part of Me.” The remix, simply put, is bad, and doesn’t warrant a place on this compilation. The best I can say about it is that including it is a brave decision, exploring exactly what this era of Cornell’s career entailed.

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I’ve already talked at length of my love of Audioslave, as mediocre as the music may be in retrospect (and it continues to age pretty poorly). The selection is self-evident, all singles, though “Shape of Things to Come” being thrown in over “Original Fire” or “Wide Awake” is a choice I would love to hear the reasoning behind, given that it’s the only non-single given any due in this section of the album. Taken together, the album casts the Audioslave era as a curious blip in Cornell’s career, three albums and six years sandwiched between eras of Soundgarden and solo releases, a marriage that seemed arranged from the start, that took too long to grow into its own and disappeared before it could truly explore the ramifications of that new, merged sound that began to emerge on Out of Exile and Revelations.

Disc 3 is all late-era Cornell, kicked off with a couple of interesting (but inessential) features, and then diving headfirst into Songbook, the utterly fantastic live album that heralded Cornell’s return to the acoustic rock sound his solo career never should have foregone. From there, we get a couple of reunion-Soundgarden tracks, and some well-deserved due for the wonderfully folky Higher Truth, before entering the period where Cornell became a bit of a hired gun, producing single after single for movies and television series, all the way through to the last track released in his lifetime, “The Promise.” If nothing else, this album represents a good way to grab all these tracks and bundle them together, giving them a proper home in Cornell’s discography. I always appreciate that, because I hate having single tracks from random soundtracks in my iTunes library. It looks ugly and stupid. Yes, I know that’s petty. I don’t care.

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Before moving onto the rarities disc, the career retrospective ends with an unreleased new song, “When Bad Does Good.” I wish I could say that this song is essential, a window into Cornell’s psyche, a beautiful farewell to the artist, but to me, it just feels like another song in the vein of the soundtrack songs immediately preceding it. But that’s fine – Cornell’s catalogue is so deep, and so full of meaning already, that one slight miss at the end is more than alright.

Disc 4 is sort of like a compressed version of the preceding three discs, timeline-wise. It contains a selection of live tracks from across Cornell’s career, spanning Soundgarden in 1992 all the way down to solo shows in 2016. The selection avoids the hits, instead covering blind spots from the previous three discs – live renditions of songs like “Jesus Christ Pose,” “Wide Awake,” and “All Night Thing” – and providing high-profile covers Cornell favored throughout his career, like “Redemption Song” and “Thank You.” The selection is eclectic and engaging – a Black Sabbath cover and two deep cuts represent early Soundgarden, Audioslave gets its due with a single from “Live in Cuba,” Temple of the Dog’s iconic “Reach Down” appears in live form alongside a beautiful Mother Love Bone cover, and Cornell’s solo career covers some really wild outliers, like the Beatles cover “A Day in the Life” and the wonderfully left-field “Wild World” with Yusuf/Cat Stevens. (Keep an ear out for Cornell’s expression of admiration for Stevens at the start of that one – such a wonderfully human moment.)

There’s plenty to unpack in this selection, which, almost by itself, makes the entire collection worthwhile. Something that immediately stood out to me was that the album pulls three songs from a solo acoustic performance in Sweden in 2006, a concert that has been circulating as a bootleg for over a decade. I was pleasantly surprised to see this, and to get selections from this concert in high quality, as I’ve been listening to it since long before the Songbook concert tours, a relatively early indicator of the power Cornell’s voice held even with backing as sparse as a single acoustic guitar. The rendition of “Redemption Song” is a touching, if slightly off-kilter, duet with Cornell’s daughter, and the joy in his voice is evident from the start. “One” is an interesting mash-up of the U2 and Metallica songs of the same name, a musical trick Cornell was excited to trot out during his 2015 solo shows. Overall, disc 4 provides a sampling of what made Cornell such a great and deeply revered artist – his versatility and ability to adapt his voice to any situation, either live or in the studio. He sounds just as at home next to Cat Stevens as he does when backed by the grunge tones of Soundgarden, able to carry an eleven-minute odyssey just as effectively as a song a third of the length. Closing out the album with “Thank You” is an interesting choice, one that I don’t fully agree with, given that it’s a cover, but the idea of closing out with a song beloved and frequently played by Cornell, in an arrangement that puts his gorgeous voice to the forefront, is one that I can at least get behind.

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Chris Cornell left behind a long, diverse legacy in death. He had his highs and lows, peaks and valleys that highlighted his commitment to making music the way he wanted, no matter if it was commercially viable or even that good of an idea at the time. He rose out of the Seattle grunge scene to become a world-renowned voice, and the middle period of his career helped to exorcise demons that had accumulated during his Soundgarden tenure, ensuring that he remained healthy for a while longer, even if it wasn’t enough in the end. And he redefined himself as a well-respected solo artist towards the unfortunate end of his life, juggling Soundgarden, solo work, and reunions with Temple of the Dog and Audioslave effortlessly, an ever-spinning carousel of work that any artist would kill to have even a fraction of.

This compilation only scratches the surface of Cornell’s catalogue. And that’s fine – that’s what it’s meant to do. Give it to a friend, a colleague, someone unfamiliar with Cornell’s work. Show them the artistry, the brilliance, the heart of this artist, one of the greatest rock musicians of our time. Show them what the world has lost.

And I’m lost / behind

The words I’ll never find

And I’m left / behind

As seasons roll on by

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