Imitation Piece: A Lesson In Being Sad Forever Taught By Finn Wolfhard Wannabes
by Sam Flick
The Snapping Turtlenecks is a midwestern style emo punk band from Virginia with a fan
base in the low hundreds. They exist, like the majority of local bands playing any basement or
garage that will have them, by word of mouth alone. Other than audience size, they’re
indistinguishable from any other band in the genre. All the members have the same discount
Timothee Chalamet look; a collection of skinny white boys with messy long hair, chipped black
nail polish, and a piercing or two to let their audience know they’ve rejected all forms of toxic
masculinity. With their scratchy vocals and lyrics about getting the hell out of whatever small
town the listener finds themselves in, they fit right in with the likes of American Football, Mom
Jeans, Modern Baseball and every other band with two-worded-adjective-noun based names that
flood the market. They sat snugly into my Spotify playlist. I too was a midwest kid dreaming
about fleeing the corn fields that surrounded me. My path to this genre had also been part of a
long winded falling out with emo bands of a more punk rock variety. After listening to bands like
Say Anything and Pierce the Veil all of Junior High, I found myself tired of the monotonous
forced rage. However, I was still a teenager that needed lyrics to scrawl in my notebooks.
Midwestern emo offered the role of goofy boy-next-door who would buy me pizza if I was
feeling down and would never call me a bitch, at least not to my face.
My senior year of highschool, my friend Luke introduced me to the band after he met
their frontman while trying to find a college roommate. The Snapping Turtlenecks lead vocals
are only tolerable, which is saying something for a scene based on it’s unpolished sound. Their
lead singer misses notes by a wide margin, causing words to awkwardly jab out of the song
surrounding it. While the singer tends to awkwardly struggle through the songs, the instrumental
and lyrics are on par with the reverb-heavy punk music I had been playing non-stop at the time.
For a few weeks, I used their album Grass Fed Kids as angsty white noise to get through the
school day. This was how I most enjoyed listening to midwestern emo; it was just the
background soundtrack to my own incredibly mundane indie teen movie. It’s because of this
passive approach that I hadn’t fully picked up on what it was I was listening to. Sure, there were
a few songs I knew all the words to and would scream along with after a long day, but it’s the
songs that were played at low volumes as I walked from class to class that pose an issue.
I liked the album's intro song “This Town Is Killing You”; it’s chorus was easy to blast
out of rolled down car windows as I drove past all the abandoned barns that filled my route to
school. It was probably because I was too busy replaying that song that I didn’t pay much
attention to the later songs in the album like “It’s Time to Move On”. It’s a song about a breakup
that ended badly, a theme not at all uncommon within the genre. It has a slow and quiet build
with the lead singer telling his ex that he knows she can grow from this relationship. The
sentiment seems well-intended at first, but the song takes a turn when the second line cries out
“We were just high school lovers, now I’m gone and you’re a serial cutter.” This drastic tonal
shift carries for the remainder of the song. For the next two and a half minutes the singer
continues to shake this girl off like she’s nothing but a stray cat following him home. Every now
and then the singer tries to give words of encouragement to his ex, but they are almost always
followed by a poorly executed joke at her expense. It all comes across as belittling and
insensitive to the struggles of managing mental illness. I want to stress that my concerns are not
because of the subjects brought up in the song; for better or worse mental illness and self
destructive tendencies are what makes emo music emo. My problem with this song is the way it
talks about these issues and the hypocrisy of it all. Because emo music is about concentrating on
all the flavors of agony that come with life, it’s easy to get lost in one’s own under-dog storyline.
The mentality easily shifts between “I am broken and this is all I’ll ever be” to “Maybe everyone
else is the asshole.” Grass Fed Kids shows this cognitive switch numerous times. “December” is
a pity filled lament about how the lead singer is still madly in love with a girl who's not
interested in him, and how he’s now in a deep depression over the ordeal. They use this theme
again in their songs “Broken Record” and “Felicity”. Unrequited love is part of growing up, and
I take no offense with these songs existing. I do find myself rolling my eyes when the song is
followed by ones like “Time to Move On”, in which they ridicule their ex for experiencing what
they spent a quarter of the album singing about with lines like “Stop crying to pictures of me,
you’re the reason you’re not happy.” To clarify, I don’t think this band, or anyone writing the
same kind of hypocritical lyrics, are a bunch of jerks with no perspective. This selfish kind of
pain is one of the many forms of ignorance that comes with young adulthood. My main problem
is what happens when the music becomes more than boys venting during a jam session. I’ve
been managing an assortment of mental illnesses for several years now. I’ve had a handful of
past relationships that were built on unhealthy dependencies, masochism, and loneliness. When
lyrics start lining up with my therapist list of warning signs for manipulation, I become
concerned with the message these songs are putting out. It becomes an even bigger issue when
the songs that aren’t about bashing their toxic ex instead choose to romanticize their own
problematic behavior. This creates an illusion of emotional vulnerability that puts the idea of
“suffering together” on an insanely unhealthy pedestal. An album that I once thought of as my
favorite is almost exclusively comprised of these lyrical red flags. Best Buds by Mom Jeans
dances from an insecure plea for unconditional love in songs like “Vape Nation” to “Edward
40hands,” where they compare their love interest to a self destructive nicotine addiction. One of
the aspects of midwestern emo that attracted me to it was it’s potential to give men a space to
feel vulnerable. All these musicians show an honest self-awareness of their own flaws, but offer
nothing past that except a catchy chord progression.
It’s been nearly a year since I called myself a fan of this type of music. After several
bands like McCafferty, Brand New, and Sorority Noise were outed for members being abusers,
bigots, and pedophiles targeting young girls, I started asking why I continue to listen to music
that has made it their mission to constantly remind me of why I’m just a burden. I was starting to
realize why this genre was gaining the new title “Male-Manipulator Music”. Much like how I
was tired of being angry, I was now tired of being broken. My taste for punk music is by no
means dead and gone. My weekly Spotify playlist are still full of plenty angst, but now it’s from
queer femme voices; artists like Destroy Boys and Dazey and the Scouts, who even have a few
songs ridiculing how women are treated in the punk scene. It’s possible I have just traded in my
sorrow for a new kind of anger. There is truth in that, but after 18 years of men treating my body
like it’s nothing but a prop in their standup comedy routine, of men more than twice my age
hitting on me at my minimum wage job, and men fetishizing my relationships that have nothing
to do with them I think I’ve earned the right to scream along to some angry music.
Analysis
I don’t really consider myself a writer, so instead of trying to imitate Abdurraqib’s poetic
analysis of the topics he writes about, I put more focus towards his essay structure and tone. For
my imitation piece, I chose to do a hybrid of Hanif Abdurraqib’s essays “I Wasn’t Brought
Here, I Was Born: Surviving Punk Rock Long Enough To Find Afropunk” (Abdurraqib 53-58)
and “The Return Of The Loneliest Boy’s In Town” (Abdurraqib 70-75). I found both the essays
relatable and easy to make personal connections to. Like Abdurraqib writes about in “I Wasn’t
Brought Here, I Was Born: Surviving Punk Rock Long Enough To Find Afropunk”, I too was a
fan of punk and emo music despite how it tends to exclude it’s queer, POC, and/or female
audience. I have been the “teenage girl shoved out of the way so that a teenage boy her size, or
greater, could have a better view of a stage…”(Abdurraqib 54) that Abdurraqib harks back to.
My relationship was more distanced though; I had only been to two in person shows in my life so
far. The extent of my small town's music scene was one guy who would randomly whip out a
guitar at a party and whatever show my highschool theatre department was running. When I was
old enough to go to shows and have a means of getting to them a pandemic happened, so my
experience stays limited. Because of this, I felt like it would be a struggle to imitate a piece that
takes place predominantly in downtown venues. While “The Return Of The Loneliest Boy’s In
Town” is also about going to a live performance, the majority of the essay is a critique on the
spiteful misogyny plaguing the emo punk community. This format seemed easier to emulate
since it wasn’t so much about navigating the terrain of punk shows both literally and figuratively.
My essay follows the same introduction as “The Return Of The Loneliest Boy’s In Town”;
introducing a band and some background on the genre they derived from(Abdurraqib 70). To
differentiate my piece from Abdurraqib’s essay, I decided to talk about the emo punk subgenre
“midwest emo”. I had been listening to midwest emo since the 8th grade, and had plenty to say
about it. I had fallen in love with it’s softer sound and sense of humour, and then out of love
when I grew tired of every male singer both obsessing over and belittling their hypothetical
manic pixie dream girls. While both Abdurraqib and I’s essays were both about misogyny in the
punk emo scene, the arguments slightly differ between the two subgenres being discussed.
Abdurraqib’s piece was more about male rage and revenge, exposing that “The theme, in these
albums and beyond, revolved around summoning “the girl”, and then wishing for ill to befall her
as a punishment for heartbreak.” (Abdurraqib 71). Midwest emo doesn’t really follow this theme
as closely as it’s emo predecessors. Instead, I argue that their common take on heartbreak and
unrequited love decided to take a more manipulative route. Midwest emo replaces the revenge
porn plot lines with guilt-throwing pity parties that turn the responsibility of the singer's
misconduct and sorrow onto their partners. Again drawing my foundation from Abdurraqib’s
essays, I quoted song lyrics and bands histories to back up the arguments I made. As I go through
my points and reach closer to the end of my essay, I start referencing more from “I Wasn’t
Brought Here, I Was Born: Surviving Punk Rock Long Enough To Find Afropunk.” I had
mentioned at the beginning of my paper my road from punk rock to midwest emo, and wanted to
reconnect to that point near the end. I wanted to make a similar story progression like in
Abdurraqib’s essay about finding a space to exist in the punk scene that wasn’t constantly trying
to push me out of it (Abdurraqib 56). I continued my train of thought about how I had grown
tired and increasingly disgusted with another genre that I once loved. Like how Abdurraqib
migrated to Afropunk, I traded out my past problematic favorite artist for queer punk bands that
were born from other women and LGBT punk fans that no longer wanted to the musical
orchestration of gaslighting.
Abdurraqib, Hanif. They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us. Two Dollar Radio, 2017.
Mom Jeans.. “Edward 40hands.” Best Bud, Honey TV LLC, 2016. Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/2M85m6zeSzUCOHfHsvzLcy?si=EnIiGxSBTUig8a69LsPcZA
Mom Jeans.. “Vape Nation.” Best Bud, Honey TV LLC, 2016. Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/2nsTrOpuvS2btKluxJQLtA?si=pWFi8nMXQFSpeFW7HyhZ0A
The Snapping Turtlenecks. Grass Fed Kids, 2019. Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/artist/7Hl5Rg5AHgmFZMPLfpeTSZ?si=cAZo-FyLQBu65FUvWGi7Nw
The Snapping Turtlenecks. “Time to Move On.” Grass Fed Kids, 2019. Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/1qvkLjqRf1YrrbPCP52ajX?si=CGV9Hco8QDKZv9_5SoWk-Q
base in the low hundreds. They exist, like the majority of local bands playing any basement or
garage that will have them, by word of mouth alone. Other than audience size, they’re
indistinguishable from any other band in the genre. All the members have the same discount
Timothee Chalamet look; a collection of skinny white boys with messy long hair, chipped black
nail polish, and a piercing or two to let their audience know they’ve rejected all forms of toxic
masculinity. With their scratchy vocals and lyrics about getting the hell out of whatever small
town the listener finds themselves in, they fit right in with the likes of American Football, Mom
Jeans, Modern Baseball and every other band with two-worded-adjective-noun based names that
flood the market. They sat snugly into my Spotify playlist. I too was a midwest kid dreaming
about fleeing the corn fields that surrounded me. My path to this genre had also been part of a
long winded falling out with emo bands of a more punk rock variety. After listening to bands like
Say Anything and Pierce the Veil all of Junior High, I found myself tired of the monotonous
forced rage. However, I was still a teenager that needed lyrics to scrawl in my notebooks.
Midwestern emo offered the role of goofy boy-next-door who would buy me pizza if I was
feeling down and would never call me a bitch, at least not to my face.
My senior year of highschool, my friend Luke introduced me to the band after he met
their frontman while trying to find a college roommate. The Snapping Turtlenecks lead vocals
are only tolerable, which is saying something for a scene based on it’s unpolished sound. Their
lead singer misses notes by a wide margin, causing words to awkwardly jab out of the song
surrounding it. While the singer tends to awkwardly struggle through the songs, the instrumental
and lyrics are on par with the reverb-heavy punk music I had been playing non-stop at the time.
For a few weeks, I used their album Grass Fed Kids as angsty white noise to get through the
school day. This was how I most enjoyed listening to midwestern emo; it was just the
background soundtrack to my own incredibly mundane indie teen movie. It’s because of this
passive approach that I hadn’t fully picked up on what it was I was listening to. Sure, there were
a few songs I knew all the words to and would scream along with after a long day, but it’s the
songs that were played at low volumes as I walked from class to class that pose an issue.
I liked the album's intro song “This Town Is Killing You”; it’s chorus was easy to blast
out of rolled down car windows as I drove past all the abandoned barns that filled my route to
school. It was probably because I was too busy replaying that song that I didn’t pay much
attention to the later songs in the album like “It’s Time to Move On”. It’s a song about a breakup
that ended badly, a theme not at all uncommon within the genre. It has a slow and quiet build
with the lead singer telling his ex that he knows she can grow from this relationship. The
sentiment seems well-intended at first, but the song takes a turn when the second line cries out
“We were just high school lovers, now I’m gone and you’re a serial cutter.” This drastic tonal
shift carries for the remainder of the song. For the next two and a half minutes the singer
continues to shake this girl off like she’s nothing but a stray cat following him home. Every now
and then the singer tries to give words of encouragement to his ex, but they are almost always
followed by a poorly executed joke at her expense. It all comes across as belittling and
insensitive to the struggles of managing mental illness. I want to stress that my concerns are not
because of the subjects brought up in the song; for better or worse mental illness and self
destructive tendencies are what makes emo music emo. My problem with this song is the way it
talks about these issues and the hypocrisy of it all. Because emo music is about concentrating on
all the flavors of agony that come with life, it’s easy to get lost in one’s own under-dog storyline.
The mentality easily shifts between “I am broken and this is all I’ll ever be” to “Maybe everyone
else is the asshole.” Grass Fed Kids shows this cognitive switch numerous times. “December” is
a pity filled lament about how the lead singer is still madly in love with a girl who's not
interested in him, and how he’s now in a deep depression over the ordeal. They use this theme
again in their songs “Broken Record” and “Felicity”. Unrequited love is part of growing up, and
I take no offense with these songs existing. I do find myself rolling my eyes when the song is
followed by ones like “Time to Move On”, in which they ridicule their ex for experiencing what
they spent a quarter of the album singing about with lines like “Stop crying to pictures of me,
you’re the reason you’re not happy.” To clarify, I don’t think this band, or anyone writing the
same kind of hypocritical lyrics, are a bunch of jerks with no perspective. This selfish kind of
pain is one of the many forms of ignorance that comes with young adulthood. My main problem
is what happens when the music becomes more than boys venting during a jam session. I’ve
been managing an assortment of mental illnesses for several years now. I’ve had a handful of
past relationships that were built on unhealthy dependencies, masochism, and loneliness. When
lyrics start lining up with my therapist list of warning signs for manipulation, I become
concerned with the message these songs are putting out. It becomes an even bigger issue when
the songs that aren’t about bashing their toxic ex instead choose to romanticize their own
problematic behavior. This creates an illusion of emotional vulnerability that puts the idea of
“suffering together” on an insanely unhealthy pedestal. An album that I once thought of as my
favorite is almost exclusively comprised of these lyrical red flags. Best Buds by Mom Jeans
dances from an insecure plea for unconditional love in songs like “Vape Nation” to “Edward
40hands,” where they compare their love interest to a self destructive nicotine addiction. One of
the aspects of midwestern emo that attracted me to it was it’s potential to give men a space to
feel vulnerable. All these musicians show an honest self-awareness of their own flaws, but offer
nothing past that except a catchy chord progression.
It’s been nearly a year since I called myself a fan of this type of music. After several
bands like McCafferty, Brand New, and Sorority Noise were outed for members being abusers,
bigots, and pedophiles targeting young girls, I started asking why I continue to listen to music
that has made it their mission to constantly remind me of why I’m just a burden. I was starting to
realize why this genre was gaining the new title “Male-Manipulator Music”. Much like how I
was tired of being angry, I was now tired of being broken. My taste for punk music is by no
means dead and gone. My weekly Spotify playlist are still full of plenty angst, but now it’s from
queer femme voices; artists like Destroy Boys and Dazey and the Scouts, who even have a few
songs ridiculing how women are treated in the punk scene. It’s possible I have just traded in my
sorrow for a new kind of anger. There is truth in that, but after 18 years of men treating my body
like it’s nothing but a prop in their standup comedy routine, of men more than twice my age
hitting on me at my minimum wage job, and men fetishizing my relationships that have nothing
to do with them I think I’ve earned the right to scream along to some angry music.
Analysis
I don’t really consider myself a writer, so instead of trying to imitate Abdurraqib’s poetic
analysis of the topics he writes about, I put more focus towards his essay structure and tone. For
my imitation piece, I chose to do a hybrid of Hanif Abdurraqib’s essays “I Wasn’t Brought
Here, I Was Born: Surviving Punk Rock Long Enough To Find Afropunk” (Abdurraqib 53-58)
and “The Return Of The Loneliest Boy’s In Town” (Abdurraqib 70-75). I found both the essays
relatable and easy to make personal connections to. Like Abdurraqib writes about in “I Wasn’t
Brought Here, I Was Born: Surviving Punk Rock Long Enough To Find Afropunk”, I too was a
fan of punk and emo music despite how it tends to exclude it’s queer, POC, and/or female
audience. I have been the “teenage girl shoved out of the way so that a teenage boy her size, or
greater, could have a better view of a stage…”(Abdurraqib 54) that Abdurraqib harks back to.
My relationship was more distanced though; I had only been to two in person shows in my life so
far. The extent of my small town's music scene was one guy who would randomly whip out a
guitar at a party and whatever show my highschool theatre department was running. When I was
old enough to go to shows and have a means of getting to them a pandemic happened, so my
experience stays limited. Because of this, I felt like it would be a struggle to imitate a piece that
takes place predominantly in downtown venues. While “The Return Of The Loneliest Boy’s In
Town” is also about going to a live performance, the majority of the essay is a critique on the
spiteful misogyny plaguing the emo punk community. This format seemed easier to emulate
since it wasn’t so much about navigating the terrain of punk shows both literally and figuratively.
My essay follows the same introduction as “The Return Of The Loneliest Boy’s In Town”;
introducing a band and some background on the genre they derived from(Abdurraqib 70). To
differentiate my piece from Abdurraqib’s essay, I decided to talk about the emo punk subgenre
“midwest emo”. I had been listening to midwest emo since the 8th grade, and had plenty to say
about it. I had fallen in love with it’s softer sound and sense of humour, and then out of love
when I grew tired of every male singer both obsessing over and belittling their hypothetical
manic pixie dream girls. While both Abdurraqib and I’s essays were both about misogyny in the
punk emo scene, the arguments slightly differ between the two subgenres being discussed.
Abdurraqib’s piece was more about male rage and revenge, exposing that “The theme, in these
albums and beyond, revolved around summoning “the girl”, and then wishing for ill to befall her
as a punishment for heartbreak.” (Abdurraqib 71). Midwest emo doesn’t really follow this theme
as closely as it’s emo predecessors. Instead, I argue that their common take on heartbreak and
unrequited love decided to take a more manipulative route. Midwest emo replaces the revenge
porn plot lines with guilt-throwing pity parties that turn the responsibility of the singer's
misconduct and sorrow onto their partners. Again drawing my foundation from Abdurraqib’s
essays, I quoted song lyrics and bands histories to back up the arguments I made. As I go through
my points and reach closer to the end of my essay, I start referencing more from “I Wasn’t
Brought Here, I Was Born: Surviving Punk Rock Long Enough To Find Afropunk.” I had
mentioned at the beginning of my paper my road from punk rock to midwest emo, and wanted to
reconnect to that point near the end. I wanted to make a similar story progression like in
Abdurraqib’s essay about finding a space to exist in the punk scene that wasn’t constantly trying
to push me out of it (Abdurraqib 56). I continued my train of thought about how I had grown
tired and increasingly disgusted with another genre that I once loved. Like how Abdurraqib
migrated to Afropunk, I traded out my past problematic favorite artist for queer punk bands that
were born from other women and LGBT punk fans that no longer wanted to the musical
orchestration of gaslighting.
Abdurraqib, Hanif. They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us. Two Dollar Radio, 2017.
Mom Jeans.. “Edward 40hands.” Best Bud, Honey TV LLC, 2016. Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/2M85m6zeSzUCOHfHsvzLcy?si=EnIiGxSBTUig8a69LsPcZA
Mom Jeans.. “Vape Nation.” Best Bud, Honey TV LLC, 2016. Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/2nsTrOpuvS2btKluxJQLtA?si=pWFi8nMXQFSpeFW7HyhZ0A
The Snapping Turtlenecks. Grass Fed Kids, 2019. Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/artist/7Hl5Rg5AHgmFZMPLfpeTSZ?si=cAZo-FyLQBu65FUvWGi7Nw
The Snapping Turtlenecks. “Time to Move On.” Grass Fed Kids, 2019. Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/1qvkLjqRf1YrrbPCP52ajX?si=CGV9Hco8QDKZv9_5SoWk-Q