After the Party
Where Are We Going To Go Now That Our Twenties Are Over?
Two days ago, I turned thirty. When you write it out using the word it is somehow less shocking.
Two days ago, I turned 30.
See, isn’t that scarier?
Shattered Knees, Shattered Dreams
You’re never getting a big-money contract as a football player if you’re over 30, unless you’re a goalkeeper. And who wants to be a goalkeeper? It’s the position I was relegated to at the end of my football career, which was about fifteen (15!) years ago, when my persistent knee injuries finally proved too much of a barrier to running up and down the wing. Putting paid to any chance I might have had of getting that big-money contract.
I’ll never make it onto a thirty under thirty list, and they don’t do thirty over thirty lists.
I can’t work out if I’m actually bothered by this fact, or if I just think that I should be bothered. Genuinely, the comparison that gets to me the most are the ones involving professional sportspeople, even though that was never a relevant comparison, even when I was younger.
Andy Murray won his last Wimbledon title when he was 29, for example. And now I’m older than that. A completely meaningless observation, sure, but one of those things that emphasises the passing of time, which is the real villain here, rather than any arbitrary mark on a calendar. There is no inherent meaning to the flipping from one decade to the next, but it is shocking to think that I was 20 when Andy Murray won that title.
Since 2017, I have had an event in my calendar for September 7th 2025, which said ‘Listen to 'After The Party' by The Menzingers’.
So I did, and I remembered why I created that event in the first place. Remember Tumblr? Well, in 2017, while I was doing an internship in Kuala Lumpur, I became obsessed with the aforementioned Menzingers album, and wrote a gushing essay which I posted on Tumblr. I also submitted it to The Quietus, I think, but they didn’t fancy publishing it.
Reading it back, I can see why, but I’m still going to share it here, with some additional commentary from a now-30-year-old man.
Tellin’ Lies
Punk is dead, or that’s what they’d have you believe. According to them, punk has been dead since two minutes after someone coined the term. If you weren’t personally at the Manchester Free Trade Hall for the opening chords of that Sex Pistols gig, then you have no right to apply the label to yourself, or even to have it applied to you by some punk-ass music writer. True punk existed for about three and a half weeks, and if you missed the boat then you’re fucked.
I get what I was going for here, but the language is very fluffy, and even now I don’t think I know enough about punk to be making such strong assertions.
I’m not sure about all of the suffixes and prefixes, and how they stand in the pantheon of music history. Is the “pop” in pop punk sufficiently focal that it puts a big enough layer between it and pure punk? I’m not sure, but the Menzingers are ostensibly “punk-pop” anyway, so I’ve got no idea what the situation with that is.
Again, decent try, but the reference to the musical pantheon feels like I’m trying too hard to be profound.
But I’m going to try and not make any references to genre (fucked that one up already) or other bands (fucked that one up too, although the Sex Pistols weren’t really a comparison) because while its great fun to describe a band as ‘Muse, but if they’d been raised on Jupiter and a diet of Eastern European Bear Metal’, its a lazy shorthand that puts too many thoughts in too many ordered boxes for the readers.
Seeing a band described as ‘A different band but with this one aspect modified’ gives a twisted image to the listener and isn’t at all helpful.
This is where the essay starts sounding more like me. The voice is my own. I’m not trying to sound like a music journalist, which ironically means that I sound a lot more like one than in the opening paragraphs. Hefty use of the word fuck, though.
This happens with just one band reference, or even a comment about genre, especially if it’s a superbly niche genre invented by the writer to constrain the readers’ imagination as much as possible, but you read some music criticism and see tiny components of a band being compared to three different bands within one paragraph.
This provides you with a composite, paint-by-numbers ear image that stops you coming into a piece of music clean, or colours your listening if you’ve already heard it.
The whole essay is a bit of a dig at the Pitchfork style of reviewing, which is full of this style of comparison.
Obviously, lots of artists sound like other artists, and it’s probably the easiest and clearest way to get your own thoughts onto the page, but this very specific idea of what they sound like is something that might only apply to you and no one else.
It’s very difficult to describe the experience of reading a book, but if someone were to tell you that the main character of a book was like Harry Potter but without the magic or the glasses, you’d go in thinking of the main character in that way.
And of course, there’s the possibility that you’d have come to that opinion anyway, but maybe you wouldn’t, and even if you would have, it’s far more exciting to come to that conclusion yourself.
A bit wordy, but the idea is good. Not sure why I’ve italicised the word ‘experience’.
There are plenty of such comparisons I could make about the Menzingers, having noticed all sorts of similarities to a bunch of other artists while I’ve been listening.
But that’s just me. Maybe you’d hear them too, and maybe you wouldn’t. And every simile I’d use would just serve to crunch down the box you’d naturally put them in.
“Punk-pop”. The box gets smaller based on your idea of what pop punk is. “The lyrics are like Band X”. The box gets smaller. “The smashing guitar hooks invoke images of the early work of guitarist Y, the drum fills are like classic Z, with production reminiscent of what Mr W did on the Viennese albums of Band K”. The box is tiny, and you haven’t even listened to them yet.
I would have liked more specific references to real bands here, but maybe that would have defeated the purpose.
The point in art is the way it makes you feel. You. Individually. And everything makes everyone feel different things. So when these box-decreasing descriptors are used, and posed as insightful objectivity when they’re nothing more than lazy subjectivity, they aren’t very helpful as pieces of music writing for the most part.
So I’m not going to try and write about the Menzingers like that, except that I will say that they are what I’ve always thought Surf Rock is, mainly because I have basically no idea what actual surf rock is...
What I imagine it to be, and what I see when I listen to ‘After the Party’, is a band playing music while riding the crest of a wave. And I’m there with them, on a surfboard even though I can’t surf, and I’m dancing on this surfboard even though that’s practically impossible, and we’re all having a great time, and this wave goes on for forty-five minutes.
We’re surfing, baby!
This is an acceptable use of the term Surf Rock, because I don’t think this is what was meant in relation to the early Beach Boys albums that were pretty much exclusively about surfing, with the word ‘surfin’ in the title.
Anyway, the point of this whole thing is that I have set a Google reminder to listen to this album on my 30th birthday because I think I’ll love it even more then than I do now, which is saying something, and that if I’d just told you that they sound a bit like if Green Day were your mates from Uni you might have a completely different idea of what that means to me.
I can’t decide if this is me undoing the whole no comparisons bit, or if it’s simply excellent trolling.
They’re playing Glasgow on the 1st of February, and if you don’t already have tickets, I feel sorry for you.
I was 22 when I wrote that review. I’m 30 now. I listened to the album two days ago and it still slaps, but I don’t think I love it any more than I did then. I love other things, because I’m 8 years older. I am not the person who wrote that line, but I was him, and in some ways I miss him. I wonder what he would think about me taking the piss out of him. He’d probably be mad about it, the snot-nosed kid.
Get over yourself.
Get over yourself, too.
Happy Birthday to me...
