In Matthew Rosenburg & Tyler Boss’s upcoming Image title “What’s The Furthest Place From Here?” a group of teens each pick an album to represent themselves, to give themselves meaning, long after they are gone. Now, they can’t actually listen to the albums but that’s beside the point. With the book coming out next week we asked the writers of ComicsXF what album they would choose to represent themselves at 18.
Cori – Linkin Park Meteora
The year is 2003. I was a senior in high school, and three days before Christmas in 2002, my mom kicked me out of the house for an absurd reason. I was living with my aunt, getting ready for AP Exams and about to head out of state for my first year of college. Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory was already getting heavy play on my CD player, their lyrics and music both cutting deep into a hurt teenage soul. Meteora came out in March, right around the same time Linkin Park announced that they’d be coming to my smallish town for a show. The show would be April 26, 2003 – the same day as my senior prom. As a single 18 year old with no real prospects at the time, I didn’t really want to go stag to my last prom; I’d had a fun enough time with a friend the year before, but I knew I could still do after parties with all my friends regardless if I attended the event or not.
Over the month leading to the concert, I connected with Meteora more than I’d even done with Hybrid Theory. The lyrics to “Numb” especially hit home with my situation with my mother.
Can’t you see that you’re smothering me
Holding too tightly, afraid to lose control?
So by the time the concert rolled around, I made my decision. I was forgoing the prom for the concert, two events held in separate rooms of the same building. Prom was in a ballroom while the concert was in the arena. As such, it was a memorable concert for both me and the band. For me, it was my second concert ever, and my first of a band not past their prime. I crowdsurfed for the first time. I moshed for the first time. I had a blast. For the band, it was memorable because there were people that did not make the same decision I did, and decided “Why not both?” and the band noticed the plethora of people in ball gowns and tuxedos, and Chester Bennington even pointed it out.
There was a time after this where I became too good for Linkin Park, where I put on airs that my tastes had gotten more sophisticated, but I was young and stupid, and I’ve since circled back on how much they’ve meant to me, and how they got me through an extremely tough year. They’ll always be important to me, and I have no shame in saying that I’ll still spin Meteora when I feel particularly angry at the world.
Corey – Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
For as much as 2010 was a great year musically, it was a rough year for me personally. Depression was hitting me hard, all of my routines and schedules were out of whack, I was away from all of my friends, and on top of everything else, I had started getting chronic Cluster Headaches multiple times per day. At a certain point it was all just too much to deal with, and the only refuge I had from constant pain and sensory overload was drowning it all out with music, so when Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy dropped in November, it was a welcome outlet.
West has always been, shall we say, a contentious public figure. The man does not seem to have a filter, and that’s blown up plenty over the years, from his (entirely accurate) remarks about George W. Bush post-Katrina, to his (entirely indefensible) support of Donald Trump over the past few years. But when it came to his music? God damn. By that point I’d been listening to tracks from 2008’s much more subdued 808s & Heartbreak damn near daily, but when MBDTF hit, after his memetic interruption of the 2009 VMAs, at what seemed like his lowest point (at the time), it wasn’t just a return to the braggadocious “fuck y’all” attitude of his previous albums, it felt like a sign that I could get through my own problems. The opening track, “Dark Fantasy,” included the line “me found bravery in my bravado,” and it’s not an exaggeration to say that that attitude got me through the next year.
While ‘Ye’s self-confidence was something I found inspiring, the thing I loved most about the album was honestly all of the other artists involved. West has always been big on collaboration and sampling, which makes his work a great entry point into other music. I know I’m not the only person who was introduced to King Crimson through “Power,” or to Nicki Minaj through her undeniably iconic verse in Monster. At a time when music was what I needed most, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was the gift that never stopped, a veritable matryoshka of songs to lose myself in. 808s is still my favorite album he’s put out (sorry, Yeezus), but it’s hard to deny that MBDTF is the best.
Zack – The Gaslight Anthem The ‘59 Sound
As I’ve gotten some distance from my highschool years, I think back to just how big everything felt. There was a purity to every raw emotion. And The Gaslight Anthem’s The ‘59 Sound was that dream of teen love wrapped in a punk energy with a reverence for the music of the past. It’s hard not to draw comparisons to fellow Jersey icon Bruce Springsteen in more than just the arena ready rock sound. There’s an anti-ironic passion here and a belief that if you try just a little bit harder, push a little bit more, that better days are ahead.
From the buzz of the record spinning up that opens “Great Expectations” you know this is a band filled with nostalgia for an idealized time that never was. A time where crusin’ to the dinner to get sweet with a Mary or Maria was the most important part of your week. When Miles Davis & The Cool played you to sleep. It’s a dream of a time when working class families, their hands calloused from long hours on docks or in factories, could provide a better life for their children. Where teenage love was the most powerful thing in the universe.
I’m further from 18 than I am the age my parents were when listening to The ‘59 Sound was the most emotional 41 minutes I could spend in a day. What’s important to me now isn’t what was important to me then. But there’s still a small, but strong, part of me that believes the promise from the closing track of the album.
And if you never let me go
Well, I will never let you down
Adam – Sonic Youth A Thousand Leaves
I noticed it immediately when I started my Freshman year of art school: I didn’t know anything. Everyone around me was immensely talented, or at least claimed to be. They had read books I’d never read, and listened to bands I had never heard of in my NJ suburb. To survive in this new environment, you had to be able to claim a certain amount of “indie cred.” And if there was one “indie” thing I knew about more than anyone, it was Sonic Youth. The band had just released A Thousand Leaves that May, and I had spent the summer comparing each track to the SYR recordings from the previous year. I had just seen them live on tour that Summer. It all felt meaningful because Sonic Youth was going through a shift too.
Leaves was the first album recorded at their new studio, Echo Canyon, and Thurston and Kim were relatively new parents balancing home and band life. Leaves is a weird album filled with spoken-word weirdness (Contre Le Sexisme), groovy introspective jams about Allen Ginsburg (Hits of Sunshine), and even a catchy could’ve been a hit (Sunday). But the popularity of the alternative age was starting to wane, and SY were experimenting, trying to figure out who they wanted to be. What better symbol for a kid who just wanted to draw better trying to complete bizarre conceptual art assignments and survive in a new city without a familiar face in sight? Over the next three years, as I tried my hand at oil painting, sculpture, and who knows what else, Sonic Youth would add a fifth member and release a double album that featured them nailing a piano shut key by key. We were both just trying to figure it out. So when the local record store stocked an enormous seven foot tall poster featuring Leaves’ cover art, I couldn’t resist, and that goofy little hamster kept me company until I graduated.
Jude – Erykah Badu Mama’s Gun
I am in my dorm room, lights off, looking out of my window towards the long eclipsed epoch of midtown Atlanta skyscrapers, amber and fluorescent reminders of where my heart lay.
She lives there. Well, near there. I’ve been there once. I’ve seen her twice. I remember her eyes. My god her eyes were so big and bright and amber and warm and…
I am in my dorm room, lights off, listening to Erykah sing.
Time’s a wastin’
Don’t you take your time young man…
She is the girl of dreams I have yet to dream. She is the answer to a prayer my lips have not yet begun to motion.
I think of her every time I see that amber skyline. I see her every time that album plays. I wonder what she’s doing. I wonder if she’s happy. I wonder if she’ll ever think of me. I wonder if she ever did; I wonder if she ever does.I still do.
I always will.
Keep on Drifting
Ain’t no telling where you’ll land
Stephanie – Buzzcocks Singles Going Steady
Look back one way and I was a fantasy and science fiction, dragons and spell-casters, take-me-to-space-with-you kid with my head full of Rush and Yes (I still like Yes).
Look forward and I was trying so hard, too hard, to be indie, au courant, part of the Riot Futurrrre, a Riot Allllly, since I was too old– and, so I thought, the wrong gender– to be part of Riot Grrrrl. I was the right gender– there are no wrong genders, and also I am 99% girl, but at 18 I did not understand that yet.
What I understood was that I liked songs with melodies, songs that felt well-written and well-made; that I had outgrown, or something, those floppy opuses by rock musicians who wished they were Wagner or Brahms; and that I needed a band that would let me in and let me change: a band that sounded not like who I was, but more like who I wanted to be. Ideally a band whose songs were revved-up, and ready to go, and– I’ll say it– as queer as I knew I could be.
That would be Pete Shelley’s Buzzcocks. I discovered them not quite randomly in a review (yes, some kids make discoveries through reviews) in Washington, DC’s venerable alternaweekly CITY PAPER, where venerable rock critic Mark Jenkins explained (I can still hear the words) that when Shelley sang “Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have)?” “he wasn’t talking about falling for the wrong girl.” There was queer punk rock out there. I needed it. And soon enough, thanks to a store in Durango, CO (because I had no idea what was common and what was rare) I had it.
Who stirred my natural emotions? Who had to realize that we were the same? What was up with all the other, almost equally catchy, non-gender-specific love songs? Would there ever be harmony in my head? Why did I nod my head so fast to that bass line as it sawed up and down and up? Where had (as the closing track put it) something gone wrong again? Did I want– could I imagine– “Autonomy,” the way Shelley spaced out the single word, with three syllables on the “meeee”? What did autonomy even mean, when I was eighteen? What does it mean today?
It’s a revved-up, compulsively hummable, sometimes achingly juvenile bag of short takes on teen angst and frivolous lust and the deep wish for connection that hits most of us sooner or later, but (I think) hits differently if none of the other love songs hit you just right. “Ever Fallen In Love?” hit me right, even though I didn’t know why– and now I know. I’m a girl who’s into girls, of course, and the girls I liked back then were also into girls, but they thought I was a boy, because I thought so too, because it was still the 1980s and no one knew better. And now I know. Ever fallen in love?
Dan – Ben Folds Five, Naked Baby Photos
I was a late adapter to CDs, not getting my own player till 1998, but this was the first album I’d bought for it with my own money. Ben Folds Five was the band I got really into when I started to develop my own musical tastes, as opposed to just listening to whatever second-generation grunge band was on the radio or MTV at the time. The piano melodies harkened to my dad’s love of Billy Joel, but there was a darkness, a sadness, a too-smart-for-anyone’s-goodness in Folds that spoke to me as I was preparing to leave the nest and figure out who I was as a human being.
Naked Baby Photos was a collection of early tracks, live cuts, B-sides and rarities meant to kill time between 1997’s Whatever and Ever Amen (one of my top 10 albums of all time) and 1999’s The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. It’s a lot of the band basically just dicking around (See “Bad Idea,” a song that is as advertised, and “For Those of Y’all Who Wear Fanny Packs,” which is white middle-class Southern nerds doing hip-hop), but you also get glimpses of the songs that would become hits like “Jackson Cannery” and live versions of then-new classics like “Song for the Dumped” and “Philosophy,” which was good for someone like me who wouldn’t get to see Ben Folds live for another four years (I tried to see them live in 1999, but that’s a story for another time and a lot of alcohol.)
Ari – Cruel Youth +30mg & EDEN, i think you think too much of me
Five years ago at 18, in the middle of my first relationship, I was caught up in a storm of emotions I did not think I had the capacity to feel and desperately wanted to keep feeling. Unfortunately with all of the newness surrounding me came an inability to communicate any of what I still couldn’t describe at the time. There were probably many reasons why that relationship didn’t last, by my inability to describe and communicate what I was feeling was by far the biggest, and I swore I’d never let that happen again.
Amidst all this turmoil were two EPs, one that told a story of experience I never had and was determined to never have and one that so poetically and distinctly described the entire range of emotions that I felt as I transitioned from love and its elixir of emotions back to my standard numbness.
EDEN’s i think you think too much of me, in many ways, goes through the five stages of grief over past relationships, music, and his self-image. Each song is an entire journey through over-anxious thought processes I would and still have in my head. I had never heard the experience of grappling with whether or not to admit to yourself or someone else what you’re really feeling described so well. The EP sampled conversations I was too afraid to have yet constantly replayed in my head all while screaming in frustration at the sky over dirty guitar riffs and a crackly synth line. EDEN was in a state of musical transition from an EDM-based sound to a more pop sound, and I too was in a state of flux. EDEN asks so many questions to himself about his relationships, his music, and who he wants to be, and as I started my freshman year of college, I was asking myself those same questions. I’ve returned to the EP many times since 2016, whenever I’m feeling stuck in between where I was and where I feel I’m supposed to be with no idea how to get from point A to point B. Each track is raw, powerful, and evergreen and still has a profound impact on me.
Cruel Youth’s +30mg is a substance-obsessed roller coaster through highs and lows of a relationship that I was and am confident I will never experience. It is HBO’s Euphoria for music as it takes a hyper-surrealist look at the passion and intensity of youth and fills it to the brim with drug-use and sex. I was already pretty in-tune with how little I felt on a day-to-day basis and made the decision that substances could affect me in one of two ways: Either they would make me more numb, feeling less than I already did, or they’d make me feel more, in which case my only ticket to the stronger and more lasting emotions I longed for would lie in the hands of foreign substances. Both options still seem dangerous and frightening. Nevertheless, +30mg fascinated me. The sheer emotional power of Teddy Sinclair’s voice was one of the most penetrating I had experienced despite not being able to relate to any of the songs at all. I felt the pain, tragedy, anger, passion, and artificial happiness even if I didn’t and still don’t completely understand it. I don’t listen to every song on the EP anymore, but it will forever stick with me as the first piece of art that made me realize that I could feel something very intensely without relating to it, and that was a major breakthrough for me.
Pierce – Trophy Scars, Alphabet. Alphabets.
It’s 2006 – my freshman year of college. I’m in a forced triple roommate situation with two guys I don’t know that well but we’ve become fast friends. They’ve already seen me through a really intense situation that included my ex banging on the door of our room at 4am after she got arrested for carrying a fake ID following a very public breakup that we had on Main Street in our town.
Did she want me to pay the fine she got? Yes.
Did I? Yes.
Did I have some delusion that we would get back together even though she cheated on me? Again, yes.
Did we ever? Well, you likely know the answer to that.
Everyone has those records they listen to as teenagers that are about things they couldn’t possibly understand in a very nuanced way because they lack the experience but you certainly feel like you know exactly what that singer is going through. The swells of music behind the singer’s voice feels like heart songs designed specifically for you. And sometimes that record comes around when you least expect it but need it most.
Trophy Scars was my roommate Josh’s favorite band and despite the fact that he always played them in his car and we shared a lot of similar musical interests, I was always hesitant to jump in. If I was going to reinvent myself in college, shouldn’t I be listening to Philip Glass or something rather than add another screamo band to the pile I already listened to?
Turns out, reinventing yourself is overrated.
Alphabets… opens with “An Introduction. All Introductions.” Trophy Scars makes a pretty direct acknowledgement of where they are as a band and hints at the themes inherent to the record:
We’ll cut an album, right?
And if these critics want to fight I’ll fight
Even though I got my hands tied tight
It makes my wrists so itchy and it’s hard to write
And I know my alphabets
I said all the right words, but I still have regrets
These scarlet letters man
Ambiguous accomplishments achieving anthems
So I said…
I said…
I said…
I said…
Before launching out of their ordinary world and into something I can only describe as Scarlet Letter-tinged, Lynchian melodrama as soundtracked by New Jersey post-hardcore. You’re reading this on a site primarily known for comic book criticism and this record feels like the first time you get to the “I can see you!” page in Grant Morrison’s Animal Man. It careens between heartfelt earnesty and something so much stranger than fiction that it feels hyperreal in that moment. It feels a little bit like falling in and out of love.
But maybe that’s just because of when I was listening to it.
It was 4am. I was sitting up awake in my dorm room. I was contemplating what was surely one of the top ten breakups in the history of romance. And I was looking for something.
I had heard the songs in Josh’s car. But I decided to take the plunge from start to finish without his enthusiastic singalongs beside me. I torrented it. I threw it on. I was transported. Not to make another comics reference but (Trophy Scars did on an earlier EP so it feels appropriate) I was Little Nemo and this was Slumberland – as terrifying as it was awe-inspiring.
That night, I started writing. I wrote probably 10 or 15 pages in Microsoft Word. Just absolute gibberish. Prose? Poetry? Prosetry? Who knows. But I felt compelled. Every single lyric walloped me with meaning. Maybe with purpose? I don’t know. When Josh woke up, I told him how obsessed I was with the record. We’d go on to see them together about 15-20 times over the next four years. Hell, I’d go see them without him.
It’s silly. And it sounds pretentious. But it was serious in that dorm room. And it’s serious everytime I listen to that record. Some things set you on a path. Maybe somewhat subconsciously.
We keep chipping away at some existential marble when we’re 18 – hoping that we’ll have something to show for it when all is said and done. I’m 32 and I still don’t know if I’m any closer but I still take a lot of solace in this record and in these words from “Apple. Apples”:
You love it or you hate it
And it’s somewhat the same
You’re living and dying like everything
Everyday
We got problems
Yeah we got cancer
We lose our girlfriends
Our mothers our brothers
Then we gain some friends and we love them for them
And we’ll be great parents great uncles, cousins
Our hearts are little clocks screaming “tick tock
Tick tock!”
Yeah, we all tick tock, tick tock.
Yes, it's Cori McCreery—strange visitor from DC fandom who came to Xavier Files with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal critics. Cori, who can leap tall buildings in a single bound, race a speeding bullet to its target, bend steel in her bare hands, and who, also works as an editor for a great Eisner winning website, Women Write About Comics, fights a never-ending battle for truth and justice.
Lex Smith
Lex Smith is probably tired right now. They're definitely trying not to think about everything they have to write! When they're not staring at a blank Word document, odds are they're tweeting, playing Pokémon or wondering how they ended up with such a smart-ass kid.
Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.
Adam Reck is the cartoonist behind Bish & Jubez as well as the co-host of Battle Of The Atom.
A proud New Orleanian living in the District of Columbia, Jude Jones is a professional thinker, amateur photographer, burgeoning runner and lover of Black culture, love and life. Magneto and Cyclops (and Killmonger) were right.
Find more of Jude’s writing here.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids. Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
Dan Grote is the editor-in-chief of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Winston Wisdom.
Ari Bard is a huge comic fan studying Mechanical Engineering so he can finally figure out how the Batmobile works.
Pierce Lightning is a longtime comics journalist and critic, singer for a band called Power Trash, and staving off the crushing heel of capitalism with every fiber of their comic book loving being.
