RX Bandits - Progress (2001)I remember the first time I was called "emo".
I was heavily into the Drive-Thru Records roster in high school, bouncing from New Found Glory to The Movielife to Midtown and back again. When I heard that New Found Glory and RX Bandits were touring together and hitting Tempe's now defunct, Club Rio, I exploded. Buzzkill? It was on a Monday night. The rule in our house was that I could only go to concerts on weekends and if my brother was going. My brother was in fact going, but I knew this would be a hard one to get by the parents.
I did everything I could though, finishing all of my homework over the weekend, assuring there were no exams/quizzes/anything the following Tuesday at school. But they stood their ground. No go. Their consulation was that RX Bandits were doing a signing at Karma Records the afternoon of the show, but that just wasn't the same for me. I was fifteen, awkward and hormonal and I lost it. I ran into my bedroom and took the flyer for the show I had gotten a few weeks prior, tore it up and threw it all over my floor. I cried as many tears as I could and my brother came in a few hours later to check in on me. He looks at the yellow paper all over my floor and says, "Dude, you are SO emo!" After finding out what "emo" meant, I agreed, and surrendered to simply shaking Matt Embree's hand instead of seeing him rock on a school night.
I eventually did get to see the band live, although I can't remember when or where because I followed up dozens of other times. I was so upset because I had burned their album Progress into my brain. While I was busy crying and tearing up flyers, they were actually writing music about social change, way more than I could grasp at the time. Like The Desaparecidos, their music was lined with commentary against gentrification and largely against war and injustice. There were a few misplaced love songs like "Anyone But You" and "Infection" between heavy political tunes like "Babylon" and "Nothing Sacred". They teetered the line between ska, reggae and punk rock (as most third wave "ska" did) and found themselves either gaining or isolating their fans by not ever really embracing any genre, to this day.
This record was about as pop perfect as you could get, one of the smarter rock records I can remember from high school. Their live shows would sometimes spiral out of control as they spent about 25 minutes jamming new songs, only really engaging the "ska" audience when they brought out old 3:30 type tunes. The last time I saw them was when I was interning in NYC after my sophomore year of college. I guess even then I felt like I needed to defy "the man" since I had been deprived of their show all those years back. But that doesn't really clear up me being "emo", no matter how hard I try.
My first REAL concert (meaning not Spice Girls, Nsync or some country act) was RX Bandits at the Nile. I remember my mom dropped me off and I went by myself. I was in the front row and it was the craziest experience ever for me at the time. I was also very heavy into Drive Thru at one time. I remember being into RXBandits, New Found Glory, Halifax and others. I will always remember that show. That show is what started me going to tons and tons of shows in high school, even if I did go by myself, which I did 99% of the time!
ReplyDelete(This is Lisa from AZ by the way:) )