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In the late '90s and early 2000s (and today still, to some extent), pop-punk and emo was created in large part by young, straight, white, suburban males whose lyrics tended to be preoccupied with the opposite sex. Some of these bands—like Blink-182, pop-punk’s global poster-children if there ever was one—doled out toilet humor and sensitivity alike. Others on a more subterranean level, like the Promise Ring, took a more artful approach to heartache, their songs riding on exuberant—if cryptic—self-deprecation and geographical metaphors. Along with contemporaries like Jimmy Eat World and Saves the Day, they found moderate success during pop-punk and emo’s second wave, even though much of the mainstream familiarity with the genres came via Drive-Thru Records.
Founded by siblings Richard and Stefanie Reines, Drive-Thru played a distinct role in linking pop-punk and emo together in the minds of casual music fans, despite them being, in many ways, drastically different. Although none of these traits were mutually exclusive back then (and the definition of each genre still varies depending on who you ask), generally speaking, pop-punk thrived on bratty humor, where emo aimed for more of a literary sensitivity. Pop-punk tended to be simpler musically, while emo was more complex in its chord progressions. But for all the differences, Drive-Thru—by marketing both genres’ music right alongside each other—made it apparent that there were similarities, too, most notably in the high currency on lyrics. Pop-punk and emo acts seemed to pen words that were custom-built for scrawling in notebooks and doubling as AIM away messages. Drive-Thru stars like New Found Glory, Finch, and the Starting Line may not have sounded all that alike, but they shared a hyper-emotional writing style that appealed to young listeners around the world.
When Drive-Thru went on indefinite hiatus in 2008, it felt like the end of an era for the second wave. Even with the lingering popularity of genre titans like Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and Paramore, the type of mid-level, mall-marketed band promoted by the Reines was, to borrow a phrase from MxPx, slowly going the way of the buffalo. Yet over the past few years, emo and pop-punk bands have experienced a resurgence, with Philadelphia’s Modern Baseball being one of the most popular acts.
On the surface, Modern Baseball has something common with the kinds of bands that populated the Reines’ roster. Their music is driven by pogo-ready chords, hyperactive vocals, and lyrics that—at least in the band’s early days—centered around girls, or, more accurately, not getting girls. But where many second-wave pop-punk and emo songwriters would respond to romantic rejection by shaming the opposite sex, co-frontmen Brendan Lukens and Jake Ewald strive for something more even-handed.
“Hours Outside In the Snow,” from Modern Baseball’s 2012 debut Sports, finds Lukens smarting because a young woman named Erin—a real person who inspired many early Modern Baseball songs—hasn’t reciprocated his attraction. But he stops short of neckbearding and ultimately accepts her decision: “I guess I’ll spend the next few lines hoping and wishing, yet thanking appropriately,” he resigns. There’s a sadness there, but never cruelty. Two years later on You’re Gonna Miss It All, “Rock Bottom” places the romantic hesitation not on the girl, but Lukens’ own self-doubt. And on Modern Baseball's recently released third LP, Holy Ghost, Lukens and Ewald (both 23) tether routine coming-of-age topics to Big Ideas like mortality and mental health. When the two songwriters reflect on the formation of Modern Baseball—now rounded out by bassist Ian Farmer and drummer Sean Huber—they remember aiming for this more thoughtful lyrical approach, even when they were still in their teens.
“There were a lot of people doing pretty cookie-cutter pop-punk,” Lukens says of the music scene in Frederick, Maryland, where he and Lukens started writing songs together in high school. “A lot of ‘I’m drunk in my band’s basement, and this girl just broke up with me and I’m not going to break down what’s emotionally happening to me—I’m just going to shit on her.’”
While this desire to strip pop-punk of its immaturity comes from Lukens and Ewald not wanting to repeat the past's mistakes, it’s likely also the product of a more progressive time period. We still have a long way to go with regards to the treatment of women in the music industry (both as artists and song subjects), but a misogynistic slur in a rock song rightfully raises a brighter red flag today than it did back in 1999, even when accounting for the emotional petulance that often accompanies young men writing about heartbreak. Throughout high school and college, I never gave much thought to shouting along with a lyric like “What if I told you that you’re a stupid whore?” at a show, just as Rx Bandits frontman Matt Embree didn’t give much thought to writing it.
“I would never write that song now,” says Embree, who has since graduated from Drive-Thru to more ambitious prog-rock. “And the main reason is because of that word. I wrote it when I was 17 years old. It came from a place of teenage anger.”
New pop-punk and emo bands are, for the most part, still comprised of guys in their late teens and early twenties, but something else has shifted. Some of the scenes' most promising young bands now make it a point not to use terms that are derogatory towards women, even if they’re not meant in a spiteful context.
“I think the biggest mistake we’ve ever made as a band—and Jake still thinks about it all the time—is releasing “It’s Cold Out Here,” says Lukens, referencing an early song where Ewald describes himself as a “bitch.”
“We would play it at house shows and people would sing along,” Ewald says. “They knew that the song was [about] ragging on yourself. But as we started playing bigger venues around the country, I started realizing there were a lot of people who didn’t really get what it was about and were just jumping on top of people and screaming ‘bitch’ and pointing their fingers. Somehow, that really vulnerable moment ended up being the most macho moment in our set every night. It was just really uncomfortable because that was the opposite of what it’s supposed to be.”
Deciding to retire “It’s Cold Out Here” from Modern Baseball sets was influenced in part by the band’s friend and former tourmate, the Hotelier’s Christian Holden. “He educated us on proper language,” Lukens says. “He has that [lyric] in ‘Housebroken’: ‘We must keep our bitches in line.’ And when he lands those words, the music cuts out. He makes a big effort to be like ‘Yeah, I’m using this as a don’t-use-this.’” But this stuff is so tricky, it turns out Holden feels the same way about “Housebroken”—a song praised by critics—as Ewald does about “It’s Cold Out Here”: it was a misstep in his songwriting.
“The [dog] metaphor straddles the line too closely to being about domestic abuse that happens between two people of equal power,” Holden says. “But for me, that song is about police abuse. People interpret it both as a song that is gross and bad, and as a song that’s really helped them. For the people that have interpreted it as gross and bad, I agree with them and feel like the song has some trouble living up to the way we interact with our friends, which is to not invalidate someone’s abuse.”
As the Hotelier gears up for a more expansive third album of their own, Holden now sees “Housebroken” as a valuable lesson. “It was just a wake-up call that songs I think are going to be nothing maybe turn into something that I always have to own up to. I comb over my writing and now take it much more seriously.”
This idea of considering the feelings of others even when going for the gut seems to grow with each new wave of musicians in the latest pop-punk and emo renaissance. It’s especially true of Nick Bairatchnyi and Jackson Mansfield, the two 19-year-olds who make up the Obsessives. The duo not only lives, writes, and records in Modern Baseball’s old Philadelphia residence, Michael Jordan House—they’ve also adopted the empathy that’s prevalent in the flourishing Philly punk scene.
“Writing about relationships in a nuanced way just comes from having respect for the people that inspire you to write music,” Bairatchnyi says. “The thing that I dislike the most about emo or pop-punk bands are when the songs are just trashing people.”
When Brand New comes up as an influence, he’s quick to point out that, although he and Mansfield draw inspiration from the musicality and the soft/loud pull of Jesse Lacey and Vincent Accardi’s vocals, they find a lot of his earlier lyrics to be unnecessarily nasty. “It’s really struck me that so many people could love lyrics that were that rude. [‘Seventy Times 7’]—that song’s insane to me.”
None of this is to say that there isn't still sexism in these genres. The long-running Warped Tour continues to be a rite of passage for many young people interested in pop-punk and emo, often hosting Drive-Thru legacy acts alongside the kinds of bands who tour with Modern Baseball (like the Wonder Years and Knuckle Puck). And yet, despite Warped Tour’s comprehensive scope and increasingly girl-dominated audience, founder Kevin Lyman gets accused of misogyny year after year for some of the booking choices at his wildly successful festival.
Modern Baseball shows aren’t immune from unsettling behavior, either. “We’ve had women come up to us and complain about being groped at our concerts: ‘I was stage-diving and someone was touching my breasts,’” Ewald recounts. It’s telling that, when asked about the lengths Modern Baseball takes to establish a live setting where everyone feels comfortable, Ewald doesn’t list Warped Tour or any bands within the pop-punk and emo wheelhouse as role models. Instead, he mentions two acts that fit more comfortably under the wider umbrella of—for lack of a better word—indie rock.
“Bands like PWR BTTM and Speedy Ortiz are setting precedents like hotlines for [fans] who feel like they’re being harassed during a show,” he says. “[That’s] something we’re putting in place for our Holy Ghost tour. Another thing is PWR BTTM doing gender-neutral bathrooms. I feel like a lot of bands now are doing work to create the most positive environment for enjoying music, and to change things the best that they can.”
Ewald admits that this perspective also comes from having more resources available, something that Rx Bandits’s Embree claims his generation didn’t have. “The internet was nothing compared to what it is now,” Embree adds. “We didn’t carry it around in our pockets. We just didn’t have that scope.” Modern Baseball, however, has the benefit of social media to keep the conversation going, to keep the pop-punk and emo scenes—as Lukens puts it—“properly moving forward as a community.”
“You have really distinct moments where you start to realize how many people you’re affecting every night and how they process what you’re saying to them,” Ewald says. “My mom and dad would always remind me of that when we first started playing, and I was like, ‘Haha, nobody’s listening to my dumb band.’ But then we’d get halfway through a tour and I’d see, ‘Oh wow, this is actually kind of real.’ It’s a matter of realizing how many people are listening to you, and subsequently saying things that are more valuable.”