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The original column was published on February 10th, 2019 and can be found below.

And the record begins with a song of rebellion

Here we go. I've been putting off writing this one for a while. I'm going to try to keep the gushing to a minimum here, but Say Anything's ...Is A Real Boy has been called my favorite record more often than not over the last 6 or so years. I could go on about how "Alive With The Glory Of Love" is a perfect song, or how one of the best songs to cover with my high school band was "The Futile," with it's intro of SHIT, NOTHING MAKES SENSE. Or even how neither my wife nor I hesitated to say "I Want To Know Your Plans" had to be the first dance at our wedding. So instead of just talking about how flawless it is, I'd rather talk about why I've been listening to it a lot lately. I don't plan on getting into the songs that mean the most to me, but what the record is trying to say as a whole. As an aside, you gotta admit it doesn't get more precious than this, captured by Flying Machine Network host, Elle Riccardi.

So if this record is such an important part of my narrative, why am I writing about it now? This month, I'll be doing a two part column about Say Anything's first major release, the aforementioned ...Is A Real Boy, and their most recent and allegedly final record, Oliver Appropriate. I'll save most of the Oliver talk for next time, but the premise is that it's a concept album that extrapolates the character set up in ...Is A Real Boy and follows up on where that character would be 15 years on. So let's take a look at that guy's beginnings.

The general idea behind the record is that our narrator, an angst-ridden, entitled, suburban asshole has been cursed that everything he feels and thinks just pours out of his mouth in a dramatic, musical way. Definitely not how I see myself in any way, I swear. But this character isn't supposed to be our hero. I've been thinking a lot about the problematic lead style of storytelling and what it lets us explore. I'm a big fan of following the, I don't want to say villains, but the characters we aren't supposed to agree with, to help illustrate the flaws we all have. Seinfeld, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and Rick & Morty are prime examples of cautionary tales of letting your pettiness and ego get in the way of being a real human being. We also have characters like Han Solo, who we see develop from problematic asshole to hero in their own right. That growth is what makes them fan favorites. But I've also been thinking a whole lot about the role that these characters play when the wrong lessons are learned by the audience. Rick & Morty's fanbase is one of the most toxic places around and they worship at the feet of a character that's supposed to be the villain of the series; taking his narcissism as an ideal to strive for instead of seeing the damage he brings to the rest of the cast. People look up to Joker and Harley Quinn, a couple that was literally created to bring domestic abuse and mental illness to the forefront of the already traumatic and messy world of Batman. But does that mean we should abandon work with problematic characters, regardless of authorial intent? Personally, I think it's more important than ever to showcase the problems these characters work through and help show their motivations and the impact they have. Fiction is a safer place to explore the problems of society, than let people just like our characters exact more harm on the people around them and get surprised by the fallout. But by bringing voice to problematic views that people define themselves by, are you doing more harm than good? As Vonnegut said, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be," after all.

So how does that relate to ...Is A Real Boy? Max Bemis, the writer behind Say Anything's catalog, has openly spoken about how often the themes of ...Is A Real Boy were misinterpreted. Our character was never supposed to be Max, but the manifestation of what drives an angst-ridden, entitled, suburban asshole who can't control his own impulses.

Full disclosure, I completely missed this in high school and couldn't stand his vocal delivery and writing style until years later when it finally clicked. I thought it was celebrating his ego and lust for sex and acceptance (mostly the former), but it wasn't. It was projecting what this guy, who was a hell of a lot more like high school Ryan than I'd like to admit, wanted more than anything in the world, but it wasn't supposed to make you feel good and empowered. Revisiting it years later, it made a hell of a lot more sense why his style was so... sarcastic.

When I read Catcher In The Rye in middle school, it was on the recommendation of my 8th grade English teacher, two years before we read it as an assignment. She pulled me aside after class and said "You really should read this now. If you wait to read it with a class, you'll hate it." I don't know what she saw in me at 13, but she was right. When I first read it, I was in disbelief at how much of myself I found in Holden Caulfield. I read it over and over again, every winter for the next several years and my feelings towards the book changed significantly every time I finished it. My senior year of high school, I realized, yeah, I was Holden and Holden really sucks. I was also convinced that the whole book serves as a farewell message to his therapist before an inevitable suicide. And, being an angst-ridden, entitled, suburban asshole struggling with my own depression, I knew, deep down, that if I didn't make a significant change to my cynical, spiteful, implicitly misogynistic self, I would end up there, too. I hated everyone around me and what did I have to show for it? A lot of hate. And nothing else. So I worked on it, went to college, and reinvented myself as a romantic optimist. Desperately trying to escape Holden Caulfield.

I still adore Catcher, don't get me wrong, but much like ...Is A Real Boy where I once took it literally, I finally realized that it's supposed to make me uncomfortable. It's supposed to challenge me to rise above this character. In "Every Man Has A Molly," we have a break up song with more vitriol than you can believe. It's about how his emotional honesty has pushed his girlfriend away and now he'll never "have rough sex with Molly Connelly again." Max has openly spoken about how he was a virgin till college and how there never was a real Molly. But in this character's mind, there should have been one. In "Admit It," a diatribe against the exclusive nature of liberal hipster culture, we see that same rage directed at "the same superiority complex shared by the high school jocks who made your life a living hell. And made you a slave to the competitive, capitalist dogma you spend every moment of your waking life bitching about." It's pretentious, it's pissed off, it's what I felt like as a teenager. All I wanted to do was scream at everyone I thought I was better than, which, of course, was everyone. But luckily, I used characters like this to address and start the process of exorcising the parts of myself that I see in these characters.

So what happens when the audience learns the wrong lessons from a cautionary tale? What does Holden Caulfield look like 15 years later? What kind of person grows out of someone like this if they never learn how to be better? I'll be back later this month to talk about the sequel, 2019's Oliver Appropriate.