We’re pushing 80 miles per hour on the Mass Pike, in a Jeep Gladiator which I can no longer afford, en route to a JV cross country meet, in the middle of a pandemic.
While that’s one too many qualifiers for a proper lede, it is apropos of 2020, itself a year burdened by an endless tumbledown of tangentially related run-on modifiers, each of which makes the former just a little bit worse.
It’s just me, my oldest son Tommy, the family pup and the first So-Cal-tinted strains of Blink-182’s “Dumpweed.”
I’m a replacement-level musician socially distanced into a life as zoom-monitoring chauffeur; he’s a burgeoning offensive lineman who substituted cross country for a postponed football season. Needless to say, we’re both quite out of our depth here within the realities of a COVID-19 world. It’s been a quiet ride thus far.
But, as Travis Barker’s drums frenetically barge into rolling power chords, air drumming commences in the shotgun seat. Both he and I take full advantage of the anonymity afforded by a four-lane highway and Pioneer speakers. And thus commences an album-length, sing-a-long conversation with my son about all the things that are hard to talk about.
For twelve songs and 35 minutes, we briefly exist on the same plane of the father-son multi-verse. It’s pretty great, in a Cameron Crow sort of way. (Side note: if there’s ever been a better physical manifestation of the emotional milieu of adolescence than eight months of quarantining, I’ve yet to make its acquaintance.)
Pop punk is supposed to be a guilty pleasure. Not in my world. Enema at the State was released in 1999, two years before I was asked to take a break from Boston University (due to posting 0.0 GPA for the fall semester). I found the record just before those grades - or lack thereof- were mailed home to my parents.
As context, I had lost my academic scholarship before the start of the year under just-dicey-enough circumstances that I felt empowered to share the blame in self-destructive ways (note to BU: competing with Harvard by deflating grades is pretty self-defeating). I had broken up with my longtime girlfriend (who, in a stroke of good fortune, ended up as my future wife). I was in a bad way. And here was a record that was as well.
(Full disclosure, I’m not qualified to be a music critic. I’ve long trafficked solely in the dark arts of popular music. I am not, never have, and never will be, cool. Tommy - who may be a spontaneous clone - was likewise doomed from the jump.)
In eighth grade I shared a locker space with two girls. I’m fairly certain they didn’t even know that my locker was also there; I was just always in the way (which — in and of itself — accurately illuminates my social status). For the protection of my ego, I’ll have you suspend disbelief and pretend like I still don’t know their names, because, you know, that would be weird.
It was 1997 and their lockers were adorned with posters of Eddie Vedder. They shared breathless conversations about something called grunge music in between classes. I was clueless. It was between those classes, while trying to not be in the way, that the opposite sex became inextricable entwined with music as my personal twin mysteries: figure out one, understand the other. Music, I supposed , was the better bet.
But I lacked the guitar and the necessary disposable income to do it right, so I was left to the taping of songs off the radio and fighting out chords on a hand-me-down Sears-and-Roebuck acoustic. My musical influences at that time were a hodgepodge of circumstance: high school dance DJs, KISS 108FM, and soundtrack of Singing in the Rain. It’s the kind of thing your critical bonafides never recover from.
As a result, though, I never thought of the music I liked as an art form. In some ways, those girls’ breathtaking conversations about Pearl Jam and Candelbox struck me as not dissimilar from the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC posters and conversations a few lockers down. I didn’t see myself in either. I would have been as out of place in flannel as I would be in a choreographed song-and-dance (which is saying something, given my proclivity for dance-related foibles). I would never be able to mimic what either was selling.
In some respects, I think I’m just as jaded as my indie-loving friends; I just didn’t have the means or access to find anything cooler. I sorted through the music that was available to me and used it for my own purposes. (Tommy has subscriptions to Apple Music and Spotify, which any barstool psychologist would rightly identify as a clear-cut form of overcompensation).
But as I related the details of this particular drive with Tommy to my aforementioned former girlfriend (and current wife), I realized I’m starting to see things a little differently.
Let’s face it, growing up kinda sucks. One minute, you’re playing at the park with your little siblings and the next you are on the couch with your family awkwardly stifling laughs at phallic jokes on sitcoms. (Also, there are way more phallic jokes on sitcoms than you would think; my daughter is slowly closing in on understanding them by plotting actor’s dialogue against my son’s laughs). That’s where Enema of the State came in for me. I needed it because its walking contractions felt so damn familiar. Now, as I try to parent a remarkably awesome kid, I feel incredibly lucky that Tommy also has these songs, particularly during this time of isolation and separation.
I loved this record because it acknowledged all the parts of who I was. It trades deeply on self-deprecation and self-loathing, but there is also hope underlying. Hell, there is an intrinsic value in the very fact that they survived those years, thoughts, and bad decisions and lived to make a record about it.
As I’m trying to figure out how to parent Tommy, I see tremendous value in a record that reads like my late high school inner monologue.
And that’s where the art is, I think. From the narrator of “Going Away to College” wondering if his girlfriend kept his picture in her high school locker while skipping class to watch the girls’ college soccer team, to the explicit self-awareness of turning on the TV at the wrong time (and promptly getting dumped) during “What’s My Age Again,” the album nails the contradiction in terms that is the adolescent male.
There’s moments of failure (“Dysentary Gary”) and moments of latent clarity (“The Party Song” earns its explicit label, but sneaks in some excellent advice about what matters in a relationship). It by turns conspiracy theorist (“Alien’s Exist”) and super serious (I’m infinitely grateful that “Adam’s Song” exists). The commitment to the truth — no matter how ugly — trades in the exact currency that many unfettered teenage males brains exist in. I know that I would have been embarrassed if people knew everything I thought of back then. I can only imagine how much that has been ratcheted up among millennials raised by Siri (my imagination was more than enough).
The majority of my time with Tommy is planned. We wake up, drive to and from places and events. I battle with his siblings to eat dinner and try to find a new ways to make a living while he does his homework. We don’t always have time to dig into things. I also know, from experience, that there are things bouncing around his head that he can’t (or won’t) verbalize.
I’m glad that he has this record and knows how much I love it. I’m glad he knows how important it was to me. As he works his way through its (and his) more morally ambiguous moments, I hope he knows I’m co-signing on the struggle. I hope that when he can figure out what he wants or needs to talk about with me, he’ll know it’s OK, because if I — by the transitive property — like this record, I must have been conflicted about this kind of stuff too.
I never asked my music to be art. I asked it to be my companion as I figured out my life.
Twenty-some-odd years later, watching my son do the same, I’m realizing I had it all wrong. I never had to ask.