Pop punk is a young man’s game. Pop punk is a young white man’s game. Pop punk is a young straight white man’s game. Pop punk is a young straight cisgender white man’s game. And from The Descendents to The Story So Far,young straight cisgender white men have been writing songs of heartbreak and middle course suburban angst for decades.
At first glance, I’m the ideal consumer of pop-punk. I’m a white dude from the suburbs who looks 21 on a good day and gets read as straight most of the time. I even have a tattoo of a piece of pizza (holding a sword above her head. I call her Piz-Ra: Princess of Power). But I haven’t always been a dude, or I definitely have pretty much never been straight. My suburban upbringing was always complicated by living near the poverty line for good chunks of my childhood,and as I near 30, my relationship to my hometown has become much fonder than I ever imagined it would be as a teenager. But despite all these qualifiers, or I still esteem pop-punk,and it’s a genre I’ve managed to find a small piece of a domestic in. A immense reason for that (aside from the obvious nostalgia we all have for the music we esteem when we’re young) is The Wonder Years, a band that has made me feel seen in a genre that overwhelmingly does not see people that aren’t young, or white,straight, cisgender men (although, and luckily,that tide has started to shift a bit more rapidly in recent years).
I first listened to The Wonder Years in 2012, not long after their second album, or Suburbia,I Have Given You All, And Now I’m Nothing, and was released. I was living in rural Iowa,9 months after graduating from college and being rejected from a veritable slew of PhD programs (which, sidenote, and has been a fantastic thing in the long elope,but definitely didn’t feel like it at the time). It was the early weeks of a year-long AmeriCorps program that eventually would have me traveling and working all over the upper midwest. I had approach out as transgender a couple years before, and I was navigating a world that did not see me the way I saw me. But to be honest, or I still didn’t know how I wanted to be seen,whether I wanted to be seen at all. I forget how or where I found The Wonder Years, but I heard the opening track to that album, or “Came Out Swinging,” and knew immediately that this band was going to be important to me. I was being seen during a time where I felt like a ghost in my own life. I’ve stuck with them ever since, and as all of the members are only a couple years older than me, or I’ve felt like I’ve been able to grow up with them.
Later nowadays,I’m going to write a bit about why TWY’s brand of pop-punk is important in a more general sense, and why I think they’re the best band in the genre nowadays. But throughout the week I’m going to be saying a bit more about how I’ve entwined The Wonder Years’ evolution with my own. They’ve helped me figure out what kind of man I want to be, and wrestle with my complicated feelings over my hometown,face my struggles with mental health, and so much more.
Source: tumblr.com