Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary turned 20 this past Saturday without much incident—no Deluxe repackaging, no exhaustive oral histories, no live-action restaging of the “Seven” video. We are living in an age when even the guys who sang "Flagpole Sitta" are getting the nostalgia treatment, and yet only the occasional, lovingly written reminiscence accounted for the anniversary of what is widely considered the greatest emo record ever made.
Maybe there are reasons. Diary has the unfortunate luck of sharing its May 10, 1994 release date with Weezer’s self-titled “Blue Album”, a record that soundtracked many more people's high school humiliations and romantic futility. But maybe it's a good thing that Diary hasn't been subject to the same treatment given to its Class of '94 peers like Live Through This and Crooked Rain, Crooked, Rain. It’d run the risk of becoming a monument, something meant to be stared at and admired rather than engaged, subject to breathless and embarrassing encomiums about How Much It Mattered.
And I would know, because I wrote one of them.
This was in 2009, when Diary actually was reissued, to much less fanfare than it likely would’ve received now. It’s been my experience that people who grew up on emo and now find themselves in indie rock circles have a protective instinct, and perhaps rightfully so; in our recent interview with Courtney Love, she called Sunny Day Real Estate’s 2009 reunion the point of no return for the indie nostalgia circuit. ("And I'm like, 'How did Sunny Day Real Estate do a reunion tour?'") Diary, though, is the proverbial slingshot against that kind of elitism. When I wrote about Diary five years ago, I was trying to advocate for an entire genre rather than an album, stressing its influence, arguing for its place in the pantheon an dusing the current regime as a foil. It was like I was folding my arms and saying, "Yeah, take that, Pavement fans. We matter too." But I don’t think any of it makes a convincing case to actually listen to Diary.
Diary stood the chance of becoming emo’s Illmatic: the platonic genre ideal evolving from precocious genius, commercially viable but not overexposed, almost entirely sexless and astoundingly earnest—and a constant source of admonishments about its realness and purity. Which makes it borderline impossible to be enjoyed by people born after 1994 without some kind of lecture about what it meant to be there, man.
But that does a tremendous disservice to not only Diary, but Sunny Day Real Estate. The only thing I wouldn’t change about that review is the score—Diary is an outstanding album and massively influential, but as it stands in 2014, it’s probably the one I find to be the least interesting. While few people will vouch for LP2 as their favorite, it’s an inscrutable, fascinating work that will likely never be fully understood by even the members of SDRE that aren’t Jeremy Enigk. If How it Feels to Be Something On isn’t nearly as influential as Diary, it’s because it’s harder to emulate—I’d say it’s SDRE’s true masterpiece, teasing out Diary’s latent spirituality and its grandiose ambitions, but excising the nervy punk and adding something implacable and irreplicable.
But really, it seems like a lot of younger bands have the closest connection to its arena-ready, bombastic follow-up, The Rising Tide. Despite being considerably older, I’m in that group because it’s the SDRE first album my sheltered, unaware ass bought with my own money—and it happened because I came to Plan 9 in Charlottesville with the intention of buying White Ponyand I decided to double-dip because liked what I heard playing over the PA.
Which to say that there’s no substitute for personal experience, and the instinct towards canonization seems at odds with a genre that never could or would support a Rock the Bells-style nostalgia circuit. But now... we’ll see about that won’t we? American Football added two more Webster Hall shows in New York after selling out the first in three minutes. Then again, considering the enrapt but modest-sized crowds I saw Promise Ring, Pedro the Lion and Knapsack play to just a year or so ago, I don’t exactly expect Mineral or Braid to have a Neutral Milk Hotel-sized victory lap.
But while most people agree that it’s nice for those bands to play to bigger crowds than they likely ever drew during their heyday, focusing on reunited bands detracts attention from the fact that their progeny are making music that’s equally and often more exciting and fresh than what preceded them. Fortunately, there’s no cross-generational turf war: Mineral is touring with Into It. Over It., Braid is doing shows with Pity Sex and both will be at Fest 13 as elder statesmen overseeing a 1983 NFL Draft-style roster of future Hall of Famers who are making someone’s Diary right this minute. Bands like the Hotelier, Foxing and The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die don’t sound like Sunny Day Real Estate at all, but they honor the ambition, emotional resonance and invention inherent in Diary, the things that lead people to call it the greatest emo album ever made without hesitation 20 years later. And that’s worth celebrating.