Last Resort

Have I told you about how I loved Papa Roach when I was like 15? The suburban dejection, willingness to communicate the most intense feelings as if they were children having tantrums. Like, lets write a song about divorce and then howl the words “broken home” over and over, and oh yeah, let’s do it after we’ve rapped—RAPPED!—about divorce. It’s wildly corny, embarrassing to listen to now, but there’s something noble in their dedication to capturing the basic essence of a feeling. When you’re a 15-year-old dude and your parents just got divorced you’re not going to talk to them about it and you’re certainly not talking to your friends so you look anywhere else. You listen to music to try to find something that tells you that the alienation you’re feeling is allllll good, that it’s going to get better, that pretty soon you’ll be like 20-something and chilling in your big city apartment and you’ll laugh about everything. And then you grow up and really don’t care anymore and where are Papa Roach left? What’s going to last longer? Your love of shitty nu-metal or your teenage insecurities? Turns out teenage insecurities last longer, and Papa Roach turn into a kinda embarrassing footnote on a part of your life you remember better than you should. So I loved Papa Roach for less than a year, but really dug into the album because that shit cost like 13 dollars, walking around in dark green cargo pants, Black Label sweatshirt worn long after I was done with skating, four dollar headphones shielding my ears. It’s like: yeah I feel you dudes, I FEEL YOU but what is it like to be an adult and feel these things? Do you actually even feel these things?

No one can tell, and you’ll never let on. How crazy is it to make fragile feelings your career? To make money on making teenagers feel better about feeling bad. It’s less a movement up and out, and more a movement down and in. The deeper you go into your own mind the more you understand about your teenage pain and when you can’t find the words to get it out there, some dude with black spiky hair and a pair of Dickies will scream them out for you and it’s all good because he gets it until he doesn’t get it anymore.