The End! (And Jeff Rosenstock’s Continuing Solo Career)

Well, that’s it for me! Thanks for reading all (or even some of) my fawning over Bomb The Music Industry! I hope you enjoyed it and that it encouraged you to check out the band! And if you like them, it’s also worth hearing the Arrogant Sons of Bitches’ Three Cheers For Disappointment, as well as the stuff from Jeff Rosenstock’s solo career. I’ve listened to almost all his solo albums at least once, and my favourites so far are probably We Cool?, POST-, and last year’s No Dream. I hope he keeps doing what he’s doing; he’s a true talent, and in a world that often seems increasingly dominated by commercialism and selfishness-posing-as-virtue, we need singers and songwriters like him.

Here you can find all of this week’s post in chronological order.

(Image source: The Future Is Unwritten)

Never Get Tired: The Bomb The Music Industry! Story

As I mentioned, there was a BTMI! documentary directed by Sara Crow, released after they broke up. Titled Never Get Tired, it follows the band from their early days to the end of the Vacation tour and does a good job of summing up Jeff’s vision for the band. There’s a lot of great concert footage in it, and I was shocked (and envious) to learn that Jeff is one of those songwriters for whom every part of a song comes together at once in his head before he writes/plays it. Never Get Tired can be seen for $5 here: http://www.nofuturefilms.com/

Vacation

There’s a lot of clichés about artists burning out just as they come through with their brightest work, and in some people’s version of this story, that might be the frame for Vacation, BTMI!’s final album before breaking up. Personally, I’ve never bought into those monomyth-esque narratives about bands’ inherent career arcs, and so I’m not inclined to view the album this way. I will say that while I absolutely love it, I don’t think it’s necessarily the band’s best album. It’s also just not accurate to think that this was a point of “burning out” for BTMI!, since Jeff started writing for his solo career almost immediately following the band’s dissolution.

Still, Vacation does hew eerily close to a lot of these rock ‘n’ roll archetypes. It was a momentous album, it was probably the most publicized release the band had seen, it represented a new musical direction that seemed to present itself as the summary of Jeff’s experimentation with genre and songform over the rest of the band’s career, and the band very much did break up after its release (although, as with ASOB, it took a few years for that to become official).

About that publicization: while I’m somewhat sad that I missed out on most of BTMI!’s career (being, you know, too young to go to shows or even think much about punk for the first 5-ish years), I’m still glad I found them when I did, because the build-up to the release of Vacation was a really interesting time to be a fan. In 2010, almost a year before the release, the band began a roll-out of singles to get people excited about the new material, and it worked like a charm on me: the boisterous first single “Everybody That You Love” seemed like a sign of great things to come if its electrifying lead guitars and dizzying vocal hook were any indication. “Hurricane Waves” and “Can’t Complain” showed even more diversity to look forward to when the band released them in 2011 ahead of the album. In addition to that, Jeff launched a whole new label to sell Vacation (and much of the other stuff released through Quote Unquote) through, Really Records. Clearly, he was trying to communicate something about the step forward he wanted Vacation to represent.

And fans like me, despite knowing that “Side Projects Are Never Successful” and that Jeff was never in it for the fame, had reason to believe not only that this might have been the band’s big shot, but that they might actually make it big – or at least to become big enough to continue to exist as a full-time touring band that played music for a living. The Vacation singles were getting media coverage like no other previous BTMI! release had, and they marked a direction for the band’s music that, while retaining the punk integrity and musical ambition of the earlier albums, also proved more melodic, cleanly-produced, and accessible to a broader audience. While previous albums got recognition in the punk scene, Vacation looked like it had “crossover potential.” And when it finally arrived, there were even more positive signs: within half a year of the release, “Can’t Complain” made an appearance in “The Office.”

Of course, for all this to work, the album had to be good, and thankfully it was better than that – despite what might have sounded like my talking it down, it definitely represents a new high for the band. It’s Jeff’s own favourite BTMI! album, and I can see why: its complexity is something to be proud of. He had always been influenced by artists falling outside of the punk spectrum, but here those influences are more pronounced than ever, and the band finally breaks free of its ska-punk chains with a sound wholly its own. Brian Wilson-esque harmony arrangements and multi-part songs abound, and in a similar fashion to To Leave Or Die In Long Island, a couple motifs from individual songs (“Campaign For A Better Next Weekend” and “Sick, Later”) turn up in multiple places on the album for thematic cohesion. If SMiLE was Wilson’s “teenage symphony to God,” Vacation might be Jeff’s “adult symphony to punk rock.”

Adults!!! etc.

(Fun fact: there are nine different versions of the cover art for this EP!)

As I said, To Leave Or Die In Long Island isn’t really an “EP” – the 8 songs that make it up flow together so cohesively that it feels much more like a proper album release, plus that’s a little long for an EP anyway. So strangely enough, Adults!!! (sometimes referred to it by its full title Adults!!!: Smart!!! Shithammered!!! And Excited By Nothing!!!!!!!) was both BTMI!’s second-last release of new material before breaking up and their first-ever true EP.

And even though it’s a lot more disjointed than, say, To Leave Or Die and feels more like a collection of songs than a cohesive whole, it doesn’t matter because for the most part, they’re great goddamn songs! I feel like everyone who knows Adults!!! has their personal favourite; mine is probably “The First Time I Met Sanawon,” one of the band’s most straightforward punk songs (and the source of the title for the documentary on the band – another post on that later).

But you can make a pretty defensible case for most of these songs being the best on the EP, which is a testament to its consistency. I’ll just single out the other three that interest me the most here: “You Still Believe In Me?” sounds, in hindsight, a lot like a test-run for the kind of new direction the band would take on its next and final album, Vacation. “Slumlord” is a raucous, shuffling punk number with a self-explanatory title, providing a cathartic release from the stress of dealing with bad rent situations: “We deserve to be happy, / Fuck this lease, / We're living in a dead city.” And finally, “Struggler” wraps a simple, sing-song melody around terror-inducing anxiety, leaving Jeff too worried to even get outside for some air. It also ends with a hilarious parody of the “big rock finale,” complete with deliberate aping of the riff from a certain 80s hair metal song I’m sure you’ll recognize.

Some fans love Adults!!! as much as any other BTMI! album, and with this many great songs on it, I find it hard to blame them. It’s never had the same revelatory quality to me as some of their best work, but as a stopgap between the peaks of Scrambles and Vacation, I think it does a damn good job of being what it is.

Scrambles

To me, at least, this is the big one. I originally listened to BTMI!’s discography in chronological order, but if I was trying to get someone into them right away, I would probably tell them to listen to Scrambles first. As a collection of great songs, as a coherent album, as a testament to what BTMI! could achieve, it’s my first pick by...well, not a long shot, considering I love a few of their other albums almost as much, but I will say that it always comes out on top in my rankings.

Of course, there’s a lot of personal bias here; Scrambles came to define my high school experience in part because of its regrettably-relatable lyrics that convey an all-consuming anxiety and frustration with the world around you. That might seem like a strange thing to experience nostalgia for, but for better or worse, that is exactly what it invokes for me.

It’s a cliché that high school is a stressful time – though I think people who say that tend to be thinking about the pressures of trying to “find yourself,” “fitting in,” gaining autonomy from parents, etc. I’m not saying that those things didn’t concern me, but for some reason my anxiety about the future was running something like a decade ahead of me. And so I found myself imagining a future in line with fears about what might happen if I followed Jeff down the path of “Stand There Until You’re Sober” – unable to move forward in life “’cause I can’t grow up.” The songs on Scrambles took this kind of stress one step further, and I found myself identifying with the chorus of the Springsteenian anti-anthem “Fresh Attitude, Young Body”: “If you don’t find a steady job now, / If you don’t find someone to love now, / Oh, you will die freezing cold and alone.”

Is that ridiculous, for a high school kid to be thinking that far ahead? I still don’t know. Capitalism puts an absurd amount of pressure on people to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives from what feels like a young age, and I was facing a serious dilemma that a lot of musicians face: I wanted to try playing in a band for a living, but I also wanted to have some kind of stable future...and unfortunately, these two things rarely go hand-in-hand. So I worried a lot over whether I would be able to make the right choice for myself; would I move on with my life and get a job that I probably wouldn’t like, forever resenting the fact that I didn’t choose music? Or would I choose the music and watch my life fall apart because I wouldn’t be able to earn enough to gain any kind of independence, still living with my parents like the narrator of “25” (which is, by the way, one of BTMI!’s catchiest-ever songs) at 25 years old? Many of the songs on this album perfectly capture that tension, which I think extends beyond my own specific situation – anyone who’s felt the crushing pressure of a hegemonic system coming down around them, whispering threats of a future spent scrambling to catch up with their peers in their ears when they can’t sleep at night can probably relate to the lyrics of this side of Scrambles.

Depression Is No Fun / I Don’t Love You Anymore

In addition to “Bike Test 1 2 3,” BTMI!’s album Get Warmer also has two of their most up-front internal/personal struggle songs, “Depression Is No Fun” and “I Don’t Love You Anymore.” The former features a great chorus line that bluntly sums the problem up: “Got a lot of shit in my head, / You know we got to pull it together, / ‘Cause it’s not gonna stop until we’re dead.” But its bigger triumph, I would argue, is a musical one. In that chorus, the opening chords begin the song in a major key, but by the second line, the key unexpectedly shifts into a minor one, throwing the listener for a loop in terms of the kind of harmonic change they’d typically expect from such a ska song. Interestingly, this is not how the song starts – the minimal organ-and-voice part that opens the song with its first chorus uses the more common chord change under the same melody and proceeds largely as expected aside from perhaps its ominous final chord. Only then does the song proceed into the first chorus in which the trick minor modulation is pulled. It’s disarming and destabilizing, which works pretty damn well in conveying the song’s evocation of discomfort and frustration with depression. The same goes for the sudden bursts of hardcore punk noise that punctuate the verses. It’s a song about dealing with difficult emotions that you have to confront anyway, which could be why Jeff made it hard to ignore on a musical level.

“I Don’t Love You Anymore” is not, of course, a breakup song about any relationship with a real person – for their lyrical bluntness, BTMI! is still rarely that straightforward. And so in this case, the breakup is between Jeff and alcohol. I don’t want to be too presumptuous about Jeff’s relationship with alcohol, but if this song and some other lyrics are to be taken as reflective of his personal life, I think it’s fair at least to say that he’s struggled with it. And while he may not have quit alcohol forever after releasing “I Don’t Love You Anymore,” I hope this song was at least therapeutic for him and helped a lot of other people out there. Above all, it’s fucking awesome. It opens with a blatant rip-off of Otis Redding’s “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” but like most BTMI! songs, it keeps changing and developing in its shifting intensities. The rhythmic accents change dramatically between sections of the song, reaching their peaks with the repeated phrases that mark the end of the pre-chorus (“I get increasingly sick, and I stop thinking quick, / And I act like a dick, like a dick, like a dick...”) and the straight-eighth shout of the title phrase that caps off the chorus: “BABY, I DON’T LOVE YOU NO MORE!” 

Not only is this an excellent song to pump yourself up to when listening alone, it’s practically built to be a live powerhouse, too. There’s something about that bridge (“Get off your ass and work this out, / Don’t be such a bastard to yourself”) that demands a communal sing-along, as well as the ensuing call-and-response “Yeah” section that gradually builds the tempo back up to its starting point after a brief slow-down. Quitting drinking is a thing that a lot of people struggle with, and I’m sure that trying to do it alone is no easy feat. The “we do this together” sentiment of “I Don’t Love You Anymore” (ironic for a song that has a personal relationship as its pretext, but it’s definitely there) might help those people to feel that they’re not alone, and that these things can be easier when you work on them together with others.

Bike Test 1 2 3: The Power of a Phrase

One of Jeff’s great songwriting strengths is his ability to pick out a key phrase in a song that’s both catchy and succinct in conveying meaning and turn it into a powerhouse of a hook. That was evident in “Side Projects Are Never Successful,” but I also like the way he handles the hook phrases of “Bike Test 1 2 3” from Get Warmer. The song already starts in a “high gear,” so to speak, ramping up the intensity until it reaches what seems like its climax. That’s where the repetition kicks in: reaching its peak, Jeff screams about riding his bike “at the top, at the top of a hill, / At a very very rapid speed, / There is one, only one place to go!” And in a sudden permutation of the phrasing, Jeff reveals “there’s nowhere to go but down!”

(Image source: The Hard Times)

From here, there’s a sudden break. The song grinds to a halt – but only for a moment. Just as soon as he’s caught his breath, Jeff comes back in at an even faster tempo than before with a refrain of “And it gets easier,” repeated between descriptions of the surroundings that blur by him as he descends the hill at breakneck speed. As a person who also happens to be a regular cyclist, I can attest to the fact that this song’s structure and lyrics absolutely capture the therapeutic thrill of racing down a hill, feeling the wind on your face, leaving your feet off the pedals, and letting gravity do the work for you. But it’s also a great metaphor for the song’s implicit theme, that sometimes the momentum of life can keep you going through struggles you thought you’d never make it through. As the song ends, “And it gets easier, / And it gets easier, / As time goes, things can only get better.”

Side Projects Are Never Successful

Goodbye Cool World might be my least-favourite BTMI! album, but it still contains this absolutely brilliant highlight from their discography. Jeff claims the song was a result of “trying to write a Hold Steady song basically and failing,” and I can hear it in the vocal delivery and lyrical style to some degree, but it transcends that description on many other fronts. Riding a cheap-sounding (in a good way) faux-hip-hop beat, Jeff rants-more-than-sings about a heat wave making his back stick to the car seat, panic attacks, working in shitty conditions, being surrounded by advertisements, and, just when you think you’ve escaped from the capitalist rat race into the freedom of underground punk rock culture, being dragged back into the commercialism of it all when you realize that you, too, are just trying to create more products to sell to people – all interwoven with a refrain that frantically repeats “Staten Island traffic in the summer, baby.” This, while the song jumps stylistically between the aforementioned beat, a brief burst of hardcore punk, a monumentally anthemic chorus, and a disarmingly muted outro vamp.

More than the Hold Steady, it reminds me of a lighter take on the Dismemberment Plan’s weird hip-hop punk fusions. Jeff isn’t “rapping,” just raving quasi-rhythmically somewhere in between speech and singing (“Sprechgesang,” if you will), at least until that colossal sing-along chorus hits and then IT’LL BE NIGHTTIME, BABY and WE’LL DRINK, DRINK, DRINK, WE’LL GET DRUNK, DRUNK, DRUNK, and then WE’RE FUCKING THE WORLD, OH YEAH, WE’RE FUCKING THE WORLD! It’s so difficult to explain how much the musical phrasing adds to the impact of those words that I’m not going to even try – you just need to hear it in the context of the song. The cynical outro lyrics, however, are easily understood when read off the page, and I’ll end by quoting them in their entirety:

“And when I finally got to work today, I ate my Subway sandwich, and I drank my Coca-Cola Classic, and then I ate my Sunchips and I thought about the weekend when I'd fill up my Ford van with Mobil brand gas and drive to the Clear Channel venue and I'd drink myself a Budweiser and play my Fender guitar through my Fender amplifier and tell the kids with a straight face through a Shure microphone and JBL speakers that corporate rock is for suckers.”

I don’t want to suggest that this is necessarily the “epitome” of BTMI!, as their next three albums (and an EP) would prove that they were capable of even more – but this really does feel like one of the biggest achievements in their catalogue.

An Interview With Bomb The Music Industry!

Here’s an amateur interview with Jeff and Rick from 2008 I remember watching back when I got into them in 2010. It’s worth a watch if you want to hear what these guys were about straight from the horse’s mouth. Intercut with snippets from some of their live shows, it’s pretty entertaining too, since they’re funny guys! (“You kids are idiots, it’s free! Stop downloading our album off of iTunes!”)

Part 1:

Part 2:

Some Context

I keep referring to BTMI! songs’ critiques of the “punk scene,” and I realize that I should give some context on what that meant at that particular moment in time. My account is going to be a little muddled because I didn’t actually live through most of what I’m about to recount (well, OK, I lived through it, but I was too young to understand it until I became a teenager at the very end of the era), so I apologize if this comes across as inauthentic or second-hand – the best I can say is that even if I wasn’t “there,” I felt the ripples and aftershocks of the tensions within the punk scene throughout my teenage years and beyond.

I don’t want to sound like I’m idealizing the past too much, so I’ll say that if my study of the genre’s history reflects any kind of reality, we can safely say that punk rock, for all its rebellious posturing, has always had a commercial aspect to it. Hell, everyone knows the story of how Malcolm McLaren assembled the Sex Pistols as a kind of “anti-boy band” specifically to make money. But it wasn’t until the 90s that punk became a business institution. And this turn of events revolves largely around the rise of a “sub-genre” of punk that has now become the first thing most young listeners think of when they hear the word: pop-punk.

The biggest pop-punk bands of the 90s (Green Day and Blink-182 being the most notable examples) enjoyed a steady rise to mainstream popularity from the time of their origins until many reached the kind of “superstar status” previously reserved for what were known in the 70s and 80s as “arena rock” bands. This was largely unprecedented, and it fundamentally changed how punk as a genre was approached from a musical and political standpoint. By the mid-2000s, punk became an opportunity to make big money, upping the stakes for anyone trying to get a piece of the pop-punk pie.

To Leave Or Die In Long Island

Of course, BTMI! was just getting started. Less than a year after the release of the debut, Jeff came out with a second album (well, at 8 songs, it’s more of an EP, or mini-album, or, in Jeff’s words, a digital “10-inch”). Though To Leave Or Die In Long Island is shorter in length than Album Minus Band, that only seems to have helped to focus the sound and songwriting on it. In some ways, it’s more conceptually ambitious, too – the album begins and ends with the same melody in a kind of parallel structure. Almost everything that was great on Album Minus Band is honed to a finer point here. (Strangely, according to this interview, this is apparently Jeff’s least favourite BTMI! album; while I understand his reasoning why, it easily ranks as one of my favourites.) As on that album, for example, Jeff continues to criticize the state of the 2000s punk scene. But instead of simply lashing out at obnoxious trend-chasers, his targets get more specific and his lyrics more potent as a result: opener “Happy Anterrabae Day!!!” takes aim at the overly-violent culture that can still be observed at hardcore shows. Between the first verse to the second, Jeff moves from jeering at the guys who threaten “some fourteen-year-old” to suggesting ways to improve the situation: “If I kissed you on the nose or offered you a hug, / How could you possibly still wanna fight?” He ends with a reminder of the positive possibilities of punk rock: “Think about the reason you went to shows at twelve years old, / We all felt alone, it was not to kick my ass!”

Whether it’s the inside-joke about a bandmate’s ladder-climbing career offer to join a more successful band (that didn’t work out in the end) on “Congratulations, John, On Joining Every Time I Die!” or the under-a-minute hardcore punchline of “Showerbeers!!!”, the album really shines on the lyrical front even when it feels like Jeff isn’t trying (which he admits he wasn’t on “Showerbeers!!!”). Then there’s the more serious stuff: “Dude, Get With The Program” is one of Jeff’s best songs about the paper-thin quality of that bullshit facade upper-management types put on when trying to soothe class antagonisms in their workplaces. Inspired by an experience he had at a job in which a company’s managers started lecturing workers on being part of their “family” right before the paycuts and firings began, he vents his frustrations: “You’re working on your first million, / I’m on my first thousand, / And bills are due tomorrow.” There’s the emptiness of the rhetoric fed to those who get the short end of the stick under capitalism: “You didn’t get fired, you’re ‘laid off.’” The chorus clears it all up: “You could have figured out a way to help us out, / But you just said: / ‘Hey, go ahead and get fucked!’”

Future 86

Content warning: suicide

Oddly enough, the last song on the first BTMI! album technically predates the band itself, as Jeff recorded parts of “Future 86” with the Arrogant Sons Of Bitches. Probably the saddest song on the album, “Future 86” has a similar structure to “Sweet Home Cananada,” but it drops the ska rhythm for a different strum pattern more commonly associated with solo ukulele music. Lyrically, however, it’s far more devastating than anything on an Eddie Vedder solo album. “Can I stop my life so I could jut be with you?” the song begins, as if it’s going to be a tender, romantic moment; but just as life goes on, the song continues, refusing to paint any kind of oversimplified pretty picture of the consequences. Jeff jokes about embezzling his band fund, admitting that this would “destroy what he has made” – a melancholy reflection on what you might leave behind as the price of a stable relationship. Even then, there’s no guarantee things will work out: after he sings of moving to New York, he imagines: “We’ll start to fight when I start to resent you, / And we’ll both agree the thought was nice, but I should not have stayed.” In classic BTMI! fashion, this is juxtaposed with humour, as begins the verse that kicks of this rhyme scheme: “Say the word, and I’ll put my guitar down, / I’ll be sad, but at least we’ll both get laid.”

The song ends on a kind of plea for some sign that can help him make his decision to stay or go: “Tell me something awesome, / That can last my whole life sentence in the van, / ‘Cause I’m on the SS Bullshit Dreams to nowhere, / And I’ll probably never see your face again.” And the first repetition of this plea signals the count-in for a roaring wall-of-sound barrage of distorted bass, guitars, a horn section and more, ramping up the cathartic tension between indecision and finality carried by the song’s simple-yet-unforgettable melody. It all comes together with a chorus of “around 100” (according to Jeff’s notes) kids repeating that chorus in unison at the finale. It’s an arresting moment, and I’m not sure if there’s a better last song on any other BTMI! Album. In fact, it worked so well as a final song that this was chosen as the last song the band played at their last-ever show before breaking up in 2014.

In many ways, this song has followed me throughout my life. After listening to it obsessively when I finished Album Minus Band for the first time in 10th grade, it returned to me at the end of high school as I began to reflect on what would happen to the bonds between me and my friends if we moved to different cities in the future. I learned the guitar chords to it at some point and haven’t forgotten them (well, maybe I need a little prompting sometimes) since – it’s become a bit of a sing-along among my friend group from that time. I played it at the end of a relationship with a girl in university, which I can see in hindsight was really cringe-y; but I can’t say it didn’t help me get my feelings out. I played it again at what I thought was going to be the end of another relationship – but thankfully that one has worked out OK so far!

Last year, a friend of mine from those high school days who was also a big fan of BTMI! killed himself. At a memorial gathering in his backyard with a few other friends from those days, I brought my guitar and we sang a bunch of songs from that time in our life, including Wingnut Dishwashers Union’s “Fuck Shit Up!” and, of course, “Future 86.” And now that song has one more layer of resonance for me.

Album Minus Band

I didn’t actually discover BTMI! until the last couple years of their career, around 2010. Nevertheless, once I had read a little online of what they were about, I decided to dive into their discography at what seemed like the most natural starting point with their first album, 2004’s Album Minus Band. As a big fan of Green Day and hardcore punk that had just discovered ska-punk a couple summers prior, I loved it pretty much instantly. From the political opening barrage of “Blow Your Brains Out On Live TV!!!” (addressed to Bush) to the chiptunes-on-steroids synths of “FRRREEEEEEEEE BIIIIIIIRRRRRRD!!! FRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEE BIIIIIIIIIRRRD!!!!” (a collaboration with Laura Stevenson against the men who harassed her when she played live), it was pretty much everything teenage me could have wanted from a modern punk album.

It’s hard for me to listen back to it without some kind of cloud of nostalgia for those days at this point (which is probably true for most of BTMI!’s music). That being said, even if I try to be as objective as possible in my judgment, I’d say Album Minus Band holds up pretty damn well. It feels like more than just another ska-punk album: there are songwriting flourishes that keep listeners on their toes, like the constant flipping between lo-fi minimalism and maximalist distortion on “I’m A Panic Bomb, Baby!”, the electro-skanking verses of “I’m Too Cooooool For Music”, or the 3/4 stomp of “Big Plans Of Sleeping In.” “Ready... Set... No!” is pure adrenaline rush, with racing synth melodies and call-and-response scattered throughout the chorus at a hardcore punk tempo, plus brief passages of harmony popping out in the verses and bridge where you least expect them (the way Jeff layers harmonies is something he uses to hilarious effect on his next album). And even though the chorus of “It Ceases To Be ‘Whining’ If You’re Still ‘Shitting Blood’” ends with “Write a song without a hook, /  Remember why you wrote songs in the first place!”, this album is packed with hooks – that song even has more than one itself! On a purely musical level, Album Minus Band feels like the work of a guy with incredible talent but limited recording means throwing all his ideas together in a flurry of creative passion.

But it wasn’t just the music that grabbed me; the album’s lyrics are just as compelling in their satires of punk’s “scene” (more on that later), the music industry in general, American politics, and more. It gets personal, too; I’ve always been impressed by Jeff’s ability to balance more serious issues with the absurd in his self-interrogation: “I never was a drinker, / Now I’m an alcoholic” gives way to “I never cried at movies, / Now I cry at The Simpsons.” As a child who had been passed through the hands of a number of psychologists to virtually no noticeable effect, “Panic Bomb” feels especially cutting to me. Judging by the story of the quack Jeff describes in his notes to this song on Quote Unquote, I was lucky to have never had any experiences as bad as his, but I could still relate to lyrics like “And I know that you're all just trying to help, / But I really think you're all just trying to get rich, / I don't need to be addicted to anything else.” Then there’s the poignancy of the quieter songs, like “Sweet Home Canada” and the album’s closer, “Future 86.” That last song, by the way, has such personal significance to me that I’m going to have to give it its own post separate from the one for this album.

Quote Unquote Records

Radiohead gets all the credit for releasing In Rainbows for pay-what-you-want download online, but BTMI! were doing it before it was cool, man. Along with the release of Album Minus Band, Jeff launched the site Quote Unquote Records, “The first ever donation based record label,” on which all subsequent BTMI! (and Jeff Rosenstock solo) albums have been posted. All these albums are available for free download on the site, with a suggested donation option on each page. As I had grown up in the midst of post-90s jadedness with the music industry and skepticism as to how musicians could survive in the wake of competition with online piracy, I thought this was revolutionary and pretty much the coolest idea ever.

But that wasn’t all. On most* BTMI! album pages from Quote Unquote Records, Jeff was kind enough to do what music nerds like me often wait years for: he annotated each song in detail with descriptions of the inspirations for the lyrics and the process of making the music, complete with hilarious anecdotes and rants. If you have any interest in this band and Jeff’s writing process, please go back and read these – they make for incredible liner notes to albums which (in many cases) didn’t even exist in a physical copy to begin with. In fact, to be up-front about my sources, a lot of the more specific information I reference in these posts comes from the QUR site. It’s a real treasure trove!

Here’s the link to the page for Album Minus Band: https://quoteunquoterecords.com/qur003.htm

*Adults! and Vacation boast only smaller blurbs.

“ASOB BROKE UP”

As I said in the first post, BTMI! was technically a side project offshoot from Jeff Rosenstock’s better-known (at the time) ska-punk band The Arrogant Sons of Bitches. After they went on a hiatus starting in 2003, BTMI! gradually became Jeff’s main songwriting outlet, and by the time ASOB released their final album Three Cheers For Disappointment in 2006, BTMI! had effectively eclipsed them. The band broke up that year...for the first time, at least, since it seemed to take them a few tries: they reformed for a couple reunion shows in 2007 and 2012. It’s hard to blame them for putting it off when Three Cheers For Disappointment is at least as much fun as the average BTMI! album and must have packed just as much of a punch live.

I never got to see ASOB, but a couple of my high school friends managed to in their last year. I remember the shirts they brought back from the show as souvenirs: “ASOB BROKE UP” stencilled across the front in blocky capital letters, making the band’s ending seem like more of a defiant declaration than any admission of defeat. Come to think of it, that’s something else Jeff’s songs have often communicated so well.

One-Man-Band?

Bomb The Music Industry! started out as what was basically a “one-man-band,” with Jeff Rosenstock playing (or, in the case of the drums, programming) nearly every instrument on the band’s first album. This isn’t a situation entirely unique to BTMI! – plenty of other projects have begun with a single person writing and recording all the music, and they tend to go out and pick up a backing band of fellow musician friends or hired talent for when they tour. Only Jeff Rosenstock didn’t always do that last part – for at least some early BTMI! shows, he showed up with just his guitar, his friend (and Mustard Plug member) Rick Johnson on bass, and an iPod containing all the backing tracks for the songs he was going to play. He’d then plug the iPod into the sound system and he and Rick (or, at other times, Matt Kurz) would play along with the tracks he recorded, in true two-person-band fashion.

Over time, the project would evolve into a full-fledged band with (semi-)regular members, some (such as Laura Stevenson) prominent solo musicians in their own right. But during those early two-person songs, Jeff would boost the band’s lineup through audience participation at shows: in the true anarchic spirit of punk shows, if you had learned BTMI!’s songs yourself, you could get up there and play along with the band.

I was lucky enough to witness the return of this practice at a show of theirs in Toronto, 2011, which was both my first real punk show and one of their last on their final tour. By that point, it seems that BTMI! had a pretty steady lineup of five members, all of whom were present that night, and when someone in the audience started shouting something about joining them, Jeff claimed that “they didn’t do that anymore” – though it was hard to tell how serious he was being. It can’t have been all that serious, because after a few more shouts were exchanged and Jeff confirmed that the guy had actually learned the guitar part to their song “Stuff That I Like,” he promptly handed over the guitar and brought the guy on stage to play the whole song with them. 17-year-old me was in awe.