Reclaiming the 90s: The Get Up Kids’ Something to Write Home About
By: Chris Polley
Please excuse me for a post while I get all Klosterman-confessional on you, but I simply cannot help myself. Next weekend I am getting married. That sentence is so loaded and massive that I have basically no clear understanding (yet anyway) of how it can elegantly segue to today’s musical topic. Let it just be known that more than any other record in my collection, I have been associating (and almost definitely always will associate) my wedding with the 1999 classic LP (or as classic as emo gets anyway) Something to Write Home About by The Get Up Kids. But rather than delve into the cans of worms that are the subjects of marriage and emo (not to mention how they awkwardly complement each other), let’s focus on the album at hand, shall we?
“Holiday”
For me, these twelve songs acted as a swan song to a large part of my life that I haven’t really accepted until recently. In actuality, I didn’t even hear the entire album (save for “Close to Home” and “Valentine”, thanks to Napster) until 2000 rolled around a few months later, so if STWHA doesn’t adequately embody the 90s as it’s been discussed in this feature thus far (Better Than Ezra, Gin Blossoms, Third Eye Blind), then think of it instead as a marker of the strange yet essential transition between two decades of youth, the former marked by the faux-rebellious commercial alt-rock explosion and the latter by the widespread democratization of indie rock via the internet. In between these two more well-defined fits of self-actualization by way of counterculture guitar-based expression there were The Get Up Kids and their most successful and well known collection of songs. And these songs weren’t just part of a gawky progression between the brash and the pretentious. They encompassed a bloated yet profound feeling of hopeless romantic love (forget it, I’m not bringing the “e” word back up) that I hadn’t quite understood was possible until the height of teenagedom that I was enduring around the time of hearing it for the first time.
”Action & Action”
These wild and messy throbs of inner awe and wonder were never truly reciprocated by a member of the opposite sex, of course, until I met my fiancée, but dammit they felt real regardless of my seemingly never-ending term of solitude as I breached the threshold of adulthood. And just as incapable as I was of understanding, articulating, or even acknowledging the depth and breadth of the feelings derived from listening to STWHA, they were formed nonetheless. They blossomed in a way that allowed my childish characteristics to still simmer lightly in the background, from jump kicks in mosh pits to sentimental lullaby melodies, while a person more in touch with the importance of relationships and time (past, present, and future all on equal terms) bursting through in bright strides across the mind and heart started developing. It seems silly to watch the above video for a song so brimming with adolescence and say it was partly responsible for my growth, both musically and literally, but it’s true. In fact, I think its triviality in the wide spectrum of things is what makes it so monumental to me, because it becomes a tangible object I can hold in my hand and more than a photograph, more than a lost journal entry, I can look at it and say “that’s who I was and I would be different if I got here without it.”
”Valentine”
The vocals are rough but fragile, like powdery bits of gravel, the pop-punk instrumentation is predictably taut yet colorful, and the rock rhythms are unchallenging yet full and powerful, and these are all reasons why they’re called The Get Up Kids. These are young men who have been knocked down by the behemoth that is love, and despite its clichés, have managed to continually shove themselves up off the floor every time and make a new case for why the concept of love is not something as easily categorized into the binaries of adoration and heartbreak. They’re not stupid; they strum and shout with confidence throughout the record as if this is not a topic that has been tread before. And in all honesty, that’s the only way they could have ever approached a theme such as this with candor, authenticity, and energy: to let fly all the anxieties and discomfort, all the rousing positivity and chilling astonishment in one epic ball of musicality as it happens, not after letting it sit and stew until you’re old and wise. A different kind of love will happen when we’re old and wise. Right now, and for the past ten-ish years, I have been an amateur in this arena, and it’s clear that TGUK were as well when they loaded into the studio and recorded their amateurish set of ballads and anthems inspired by the trials and tribulations of a stirred heart.
”Ten Minutes”
Now it may be unfair to ascribe ten years leading up to my impending nuptials to a single album that clearly has more to do with the grappling of the unknown rather than a cohesively linear narrative that leads its protagonist to understanding the meaning of love, growing up, and entering into marriage. First of all, I never said I liked cohesively linear narratives, and I certainly never said my life or anyone’s life followed one, like I woke up one day after a series of uniquely progressive steps toward my becoming a man and decided yes, now is the time I shall propose. Hell no. If that happened to you or someone you know, my hat’s off to them, but if I’m going to spend three pages writing about how an album full of lines like “the mistakes I made I couldn’t have made without you” and “I trusted misleading promises worth repeating” enacted within me a chaotic windstorm of speculation and admiration of the love between people, you’ve gotta know there’s still a confused kid inside me as well, feeling the punches of the world but also striving to pull some punches of my own, never following a straight line (or even one with an inclining slope of any kind) but rather getting lost in albums, movies, and relationships until I either want to scream or hug, or both. It’s been messy since I heard this album and has stayed messy since I fell in love with it and my fiancée; it’s just that I’m ready to dive in and embrace it all now.
Really, if there’s any kind of evolution from first to last track on this record, it’s that by the time the listener gets to the end of it, it demands an embrace. And the most beautiful part of this is that the listener doesn’t get a choice in the matter. Its closer literally calls out that we shouldn’t worry, that lead singer Matt Pryor will catch us. Yeah it’s a paltry and syrupy way to remind us that behind all our neuroses there lie the people that love us, but it’s also made effective by everything that precedes it. Here we have an assortment of verses and choruses that, while patterned into infectious phrasing, bleed with internal turmoil over the agonizing presence of uncertainty. It plows us over, especially in those stages leading up to our first apartments, our first overdrawn checking account, and our first long-term loves, and regardless of where we sit as a social class, race, religion, or gender, we all experience the claustrophobia and/or bewilderment of getting older amongst a sea of friends, family, and lovers. So we thrash in the water like a bird with newly clipped wings, but we adapt. We let ourselves to be caught by the surroundings we’ve allowed ourselves to decorate the walls of our lives with and slowly but surely we take deep breaths and quit freaking out about the ending and start smiling about the beginning.
So if this re-occurring column (thanks to its creator Daniel Wipert, once again, by the way) is about the ways in which us twenty-somethings had the gracious opportunity to live through in the haziest moments of our early lives and struggling to come to terms with its significance, then let this entry serve as a bookend of sorts. Something to Write Home About may not resemble the 90s, but it certainly doesn’t resemble 2010 or even the 00s. It’s a lost collection of tunes that will forever be close to my heart and it’s in those nooks and crannies of my life that I find the most invaluable connections between the world and music. “It’s like I’m falling in love while I just fall apart” sings Jim Suptic (on his only lead vocal on the record) on “Ten Minutes”, my second-favorite song on the record next to the closer, a sentiment that best encapsulates everything about the distinct acceptance of the mess that is love. It sounds insane, but once you get past the two ends of the spectrum that are more often sung about you get the brutal truth: it’s all part of the strong force that is love, whether it works out or not. The Get Up Kids taught me, very bluntly, how to survive it and how to thrive on it. I am ready.