There’s a strip of highway in my hometown in Western Iowa that I used to drive with my bright red Geo Prism when I was bored. I wasn’t the only one. Everyone did it. We called it The Drag. You’d leave the gas station on one side of the town, cruise down Highway 30 (which cut through the heart of the city), trying to time it just right so you’d hit all the lights when they were green. There were, I think, seven or eight lights. Maybe nine. Hell, maybe even ten. I don’t really remember. But what I do remember is that if you drove exactly 23 MPH, you’d run straight greens, and it was so fucking awesome when that happened. Sometimes, you’d pull into the local Kum N Go about halfway down The Drag and get yourself a Big Gulp of Mountain Dew for 99 cents. Maybe you’d get some candy, or some chips, or something else beyond horrible for you. But it didn’t matter because your 16-year-old metabolism worked on the same level that Michael Jordan played basketball in the NBA Finals. Then you’d get back in your car, hop back on The Drag, and turn on Taking Back Sunday.
Walking into the Best Buy Theater in Times Square last night for Taking Back Sunday’s first of three sold-out shows in New York City, I expected to see teenagers—lots and lots and lots of teenagers. Screaming teens. Teens dressed in all black. Teens wearing black eyeliner. Teens sporting Vans. Teens with tattoos they’d eventually regret once they hit college. So many teens it would look like a Hot Topic advertisement. They would be everything I associated with the word “emo” in the year 2002, the year Taking Back Sunday released their debut (and classic, I might add) record, Tell All Your Friends.
Videos by VICE
Instead, I saw the opposite. Everyone looked like me: mid-20s, tight jeans, interesting haircuts, and a whole lot of nostalgia spread across excited faces. I went into the night wondering what it would be like to see Taking Back Sunday as a 26-year-old in the year 2014. I left understanding that none of that matters. Age is just a number. Time is a flat circle. Watch more True Detective.
Taking Back Sunday made music for driving. You were alone. You could scream. No one heard. It didn’t matter if you hit the notes, because the notes didn’t matter. It was what was behind them. The shameless emotion Adam Lazzara and John Nolan put on display through their vocals was everything you ever needed in your life. Everything you wanted. “And you will tell all your friends, you’ve got your gun to my head,” you would yell. “This all was only wishful thinking, this all was only wishful thinking.” You were upset about a girl. As you passed through the next light, taking another sip of your Mountain Dew, you thought that if you sang loud enough, she would hear you. She would hear you. She would change. She would change.
When you’re a teenager, nothing else in the world matters except the way you feel. That’s a simple fact about the narcissistic American society in which we live. No teenager gives a shit about anyone else, and if they do, it’s because it makes them feel better about their own problems. It’s not a bad thing—and hell, there’s probably some child development psychology theory somewhere that backs this up—but the miniscule problems you felt when you were 16 were the Most Important Problems That Have Ever Faced Mankind. That person said something mean? Worse than a car accident. That friend didn’t invite you? Worse than a tsunami. That girl dumped you? Worse than a god damn terrorist attack.
No band tackled the purity of these teenage emotions like Taking Back Sunday. And, even last night, 12 years after I first shouted along to “Cute Without the ‘E’ (Cut From the Team),” the audacious anthem of love lost, I found myself, again, shouting along, louder now. And so did everyone else, because everyone else felt like me. It didn’t matter. No one cared. Everyone just wanted to be 16 again. Going through life has since taught us that those problems we felt when were 16, the ones that were the biggest issues in the history of the world, were so small. So small and tiny that we weirdly miss that age because that age felt like eternity; it was simpler because I just wondered if she liked me—not if I would make this month’s rent.
Before the last song of the night, Lazzara took a moment, stopped swinging the mic, and bantered with the crowd a bit. Through his sweaty long hair, he joked with a girl in the front row about her dancing. Identifying himself as a New Yorker, he told her “that’s just how we do it in New York,” and that she should hit the Lower East Side with him later that night. Every person in the crowd wished he was talking to them. He laughed, because he knew this room of people in their mid-20s—these were his people. His music was their music. Their youth. “This is the last song we’re going to play,” he said. “We’re Taking Back Sunday, and this is ‘MakeDamnSure.’” The crowd erupted. Strangers probably kissed. I put my fist up in the air. “I just wanna break you down so badly, well I trip over everything you say,” I screamed, just like I did in my tiny Geo Prism driving down The Drag. “I just wanna break you down so badly, in the worst way.”
Eric Sundermann is a great romantic of the 20th century. He’s on Twitter — @ericsundy
—
Want more?
Taking Back Sunday: Notes from the Past
More
From VICE
-
Screenshot: Treyarch -
(Photo by andykazie / Getty Images) -
Screenshot: UEL -
Illustration by Reesa
