2010s Pop-Punk: The Legacy [patreon preview]
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Well, there’s no way around it: the years of pizza, high-tops, and snap-backs are over, and they’ve been over for a long time. Although it seems like only yesterday that I was reblogging desaturated black-and-white pictures of rivers and forests with angsty lyrics super-imposed over them in brainflower typeface, it’s time to face facts and admit that those glory days are gone and I’ll never be able to return to them. But is that really the worst thing?
June 14th marks the 10th anniversary of Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing by the Wonder Years, which is, perhaps, the benchmark by which all pop-punk of that era would be measured; I wrote about the album at length in this piece, as well as about its cousin, All I Have to Offer Is My Own Confusion by Fireworks, here. These are albums that I hold near and dear to me, but at the time, I thought of them as simply standouts within an ocean of, well, pretty good bands. And the older I get, it’s not that that statement necessarily becomes less true— many of that crop of bands were, in fact, pretty good!— but my interest in returning to them continues to wane. While several records still get my heart pumping and help to strap on those nostalgia goggles, others feel something like lost in time. Victims of time, of place, of circumstance, maybe; but undeniably more difficult to revisit.
And why wouldn’t they be? Outside of a precious few, these acts don’t feel like they’ve surfed the wave of relevance or cultivated a dedicated-enough fanbase to stand that test of time. In a world where the zoomers seem increasingly ready to re-embrace pop-punk and mall-emo— as interpreted through the lens of TikTok— you’d maybe expect some of these bands to be experiencing a resurgence in popularity. And while some of their immediate predecessors have (did anyone expect 2020 to be the biggest year in All Time Low’s career?), I was expecting the Tumblr nostalgia wave to have hit already. Given that people don’t really think about Tumblr anymore (and everyone I know who still has one uses it pretty much exclusively to look at pretty pictures, which is objectively the best way to experience that website), maybe it never will. So let me take this opportunity to A. attempt to force one and B. maybe understand why so much of this has been left in the past.
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-xoxo, Ellie
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