deftones - white pony

The webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal put it best: "Pop music peaked at the exact moment when I was most emotionally vulnerable to trite love songs."

Every decade or so a new legion of rock writers emerges to compose heartfelt defenses of their favorite teenage albums, in an effort to justify their love for music that is fueled solely on nostalgia and almost certainly wasn't as good as they thought it was, all because of that very idea.

We don't want to believe that we listened to shit music in our younger years. It was just more simple then. More pure. Reflections of the beauty and innocence of youth, such that the old-fart record review Nazis just couldn't get it. It was different and unique, just like we were when we were 16. Right?

And then there's White Pony. A nü-metal album through and through, but somehow the kind of nü-metal album it's okay for guys my age to still like. You could see a copy in your buddy's record collection, laugh at it ironically, but still really wanna throw it on because "Korea" and "Passenger" still get you pumped up and angry like you were 14 again.

It's just arty enough to be critically relevant, but really it's just loud, angsty music that somehow sticks with you years after the angst has given way to the crushing realization that life is pretty much shit 75-80% of the time and yelling rock 'n' roll lyrics at the top of your lungs doesn't change that in the slightest bit. But it harkens back to a time when you still thought it could.

And that's what this music journalism shit is all about, right? Trying to convince people that rock music can change the world? Or at least fucking change something?

Maybe we're just trying to convince ourselves that we weren't naïve and stupid for putting as much passion into loving these albums as we did. Maybe we want to convince ourselves that somehow we were right. The world didn't win after all, because those albums didn't suck like you told me they did, they were fucking amazing and they still are and that hazy blur of made-up feelings and misguided energies that turned out to be high school wasn't a total waste after all, it gave me this, and you can't take it away from me because I just rewrote the rules and you're fucking wrong now, not me.

I think that makes lazily defending an overrated nü-metal album worth it. I can only imagine this is the same way Tommy James & the Shondells clawed their way out of the gutter of late-60s sappy guitar pop, so maybe twenty years from now we'll get to hear "Back to School" in some idealistic movie about pre-9/11 youth in America, somewhere in the midst of a montage full of bleached hair, saggy Jnco jeans, and a world that wasn't fueled by hate. That'll be sweet.