Homesick, Joe

I had an extremely visceral reaction when I finally got around to starting my first listen of Homesick last Sunday morning. Forget visceral, it was practically violent. I went in thinking I had never heard this band or this album in my entire life, but about ten seconds into the first song, with its half-mocking gang-chant vocals, I realized that not only had I heard this album before, but the moment that I first heard it had been recorded, with audio and video, and subsequently archived, somehow, on our rapidly crumbling internet.

Okay, video first, then explanation, and then I'll attempt to shoehorn all of this into some kind of album review.

I've explained—probably too many times at this point—that my best friends from my hometown weren't on the same musical discovery path as I was during our formative years. As I've also already explained, my kneejerk reaction when presented with something that doesn't immediately match my own tastes is mockery and contempt. So was the case when my friends got really into emo/hardcore/post-hardcore/pop-punk and all the subgenre hybrids. I mocked.

This video is a snapshot of one such mockery. Specifically, I used to spoof the idea of some young whiny white men spontaneously falling into ridiculous-sounding cookie monster metal breakdowns, the spoof being that I would actually "sing" a sarcastic rendition of such a breakdown. It's worth exploring why I thought this sounded ridiculous—more on that in a second—but suffice it to say at this point that I thought this post-hardcore bullshit was dumb. I didn't like the idea of it, and I often set out to take my friends' proclivities down a peg as a result.

Now, that's not to say that my friends and A Day to Remember are the butt of the joke in this video particularly. Just the opposite, in fact. Here we have a drunken, sweaty, shirtless, hairy, disgusting 20-year-old coerced into performing a joke that only he thought was funny, clearly being laughed at and not with, preserved via a 2009 flip phone. I'm not complaining—we were at Warped Shore, I was outnumbered by the Warped Tour crowd—but these are the facts. I look ridiculous, and it's embarrassing.

(Sidenote: I can't believe I am wringing yet another Record Club review out of the same fucking weekend of Warped Shore. There's something to be said about a group of friends who, while in the same cramped room drinking the same Miller High Lifes, can find such joy in both A Day to Remember and Martha and the Vandellas.)

The funny part is that my opinion of this type of music hasn't changed at all. I think this shit sucks hard, and I think it sucks especially because of what I would now call metal stylings ("breakdowns" are only like half of the equation). This is a pop punk band that is trying to act hard, and looking stupid in the process. There are moments when A Day to Remember suddenly become a band worth listening to—sometimes they sound like, I dunno, Saves the Day, or Jimmy Eat World, or maybe something more like My Chemical Romance, all bands that I really like, and all bands that slide up and down the emo scale. But then the fucking faux-metal bullshit comes in. This isn't who they really are, and this isn't the mode in which they succeed. The costume doesn't fit. The mockery is deserved.

What's not particularly funny is that my secondary reaction—i.e. the reaction to this video of my drunken buffoonery—has changed wildly since the end of the '00s. I'm finally reaching the point in my life where the dumb drunk shit that I used to do as a teen and as a young 20-something makes me pretty uncomfortable. I did enough of it that the reputation lingers, and it's not really the type of reputation you can shake off easily (especially given the fact that I occasionally still indulge in the drunken shenanigans, though the frequency has been reduced by like 98%).

My point isn't to ask for pity. My point is that, well... maybe A Day to Remember are feeling the same way these days. I don't have any desire to listen to their most recent album (apparently released only seven months ago), but I can't fucking imagine that it's as embarrassing as Homesick. There has to be some sort of looking back and thinking, "That's not who we are anymore." Right?

Because this shit sucks. This pseudo-hardcore bullshit is as embarrassing as some ignorant kid drunkenly playacting pseudo-hardcore bullshit for a gag. I can't possibly hold the shittiness of Homesick against them, though, if I'm going to claim in the same breath that I had a lot to work on since 2009 as well.

Really, this whole ordeal—the terrible album, the anti-nostalgia for the blackout days, all of it—amounts to one question: Who is the real you? Are you a loyal, fun-loving friend, or are you an alcoholic loser who turns into a drunken puddle every weekend and takes cheap shots at friends and their musical tastes? Are you an emo band whose music has somehow stood the test of time and possibly even gotten better during that span, or are you some wannabe metalhead hack who growls to act tough and ends up sounding like an idiot with a tiny penis?

Or can it be both? Maybe that's the real answer. It could be that the question isn't either/or. You can be both. You can be a lot of things. You can be an amalgam of good and bad.

Grappling now with the fact that 2009 Joe could be a terrible fucking person, I find myself with enough sympathy for 2009 A Day to Remember that I can't dismiss the album outright. I take the good with the bad. So what if the bad is here on display for all to see? So is that loser making fun of them all those years ago, still, right now, playing via YouTube on this very blog. I feel their pain.

I don't know how my friends feel about 2009 Joe. It can't be as negatively as how I feel about 2009 A Day to Remember, because it's 2021 and I'm still hanging out with those friends when I can. They are still inviting me to any gatherings that parenthood will allow. For that, I am thankful. I am thankful that 2009 Joe wasn't so bad (i.e. wasn't as bad as Homesick) that ties were completely cut.

We still have the memories—some in our minds, and some unfortunately documented on video—and that sucks sometimes. I might not be laughing as hard at those memories as I once did. My friends are still laughing, though. Graciously, I might add. There's more laughing with than laughing at. I think.

In any case, I didn't find much to laugh about this week. (Except maybe thinking about all the other shit that happened that weekend down the shore, which I'm sure everyone is pretty thankful wasn't documented as thoroughly as the fucking breakdown. But we'll save that for the next Record Club review.)

GRADE: 1 puke out of 5