Even Better Asks: Back to School
Even Better Asks: Back to School
We asked our colleagues to come clean about embarrassing high school music.
You’re reading Even Better Asks, a recurring series where the head honchos at Even Better come up with an open-ended question for our extended web of pals to answer in blurb form. Last time, we asked about opening acts who really stole the spotlight. This week’s prompt is at least partly inspired by recent online chatter about favorite high school music — and some skepticism about those carefully curated picks seeming a little too tasteful to be totally honest:
What's an album (or artist or song) you loved in high school that you're at least a little embarrassed by now?
Much like last time, if you’re reading this and at least kinda know us and think it might be fun to contribute, don’t be afraid to get in touch. Without further ado, here’s what the people said:
In eighth grade, I fell in love with In This Light and on This Evening by Editors, the British post-punk revival band trying to bring in a little of anything else to make sure they stand out from the rest. It's the first proper indie rock album I discovered on my own. I don't remember where I heard "Walk the Fleet Road," but I was so taken by its drama that I embraced the album in full; over my early high school years, I fell hard for the title track, "The Boxer," and "You Don't Know Love" above all else. When Editors announced their 2022 album EBM, I went back for the first time since before college; I couldn't get through one listen. In all fairness, I can still get into "You Don't Know Love," but their high-goth drama delivered with post-punk disaffection no longer makes any sense to me.
I’m glad we’re kind of calling bullshit on everyone’s extremely selective memory of their high school musical taste. I felt like I was taking crazy pills. I listened to plenty of good music in high school and definitely felt an air of superiority. But that was misguided, because my high school iPod was full of a lot of mid ‘00s white dude reggae like Pepper, Slightly Stoopid, Rebelution and all of the terrible bands that copied them. The Limewire era allowed for a lack of discernment. I have absolutely no remorse for the (many) ska bands on that iPod. And I’ll maybe even still go to bat for a few Pepper songs, but by and large, I look back on my island lifestyle in Central PA with a (forgiving) cringe. I didn’t even smoke weed that much. Also at this time my friends and I were evangelical about RHCP, parsing lyrics like Swifties do now. I don’t regret that much, though, either. At least I was never one of the Central PA kids whose summers revolved around Dave Matthews at Hersheypark Stadium. See? There’s that misguided superiority.
Ludacris’ 2010 album Battle of the Sexes was originally advertised as a collaboration with Disturbing tha Piece labelmate Shawnna. But when Shawnna left the label, the ladies forfeited the fight, resulting in an uneven album that was a battle in name only. Still, the heavy beats, undeniable singles (“How Low,” “My Chick Bad”) and killer features (including Nicki Minaj, Trey Songz, Gucci Mane, and Lil’ Kim) hit for a white girl from the exurbs who needed a blast of confidence before the homecoming dance. My favorite, bonus track ‘Sexting,” intersperses three-letter abbreviations with voicemail pleas for Luda’s sidepiece to take her name off her voicemail greeting before his girl calls. “I’m fearful for my life, and I think you should be fearful for yours,” he rasps in the song’s final moments. It isn’t a perfect album, but it’s a perfect time capsule of my 2010.
As a child raised on Weird Al Yankovic, Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits and jazz compilation albums my mom bought for me at TJ Maxx, I didn’t grow up with a Pitchfork Review tucked under my shoulder. So in high school, my “going against the grain of my household music” was basically learning the guy from Community — a show I watched entirely on an iPod nano — was also a *GASP* rapper. I had no idea about the Pitchfork pans or the cringe. Instead, my 17-year-old dumbass thought I was listening to some underground alter-ego. I thought it was SO COOL that Childish Gambino name-dropped Goku. Whatever, the 30 Rock episodes he wrote still bang. And I frankly enjoy this eye-roll-inducing stuff on a level much more than his pivot to ARTISTIC SWINGS that pass as elevator music.
I guarantee you I listened to worse music in high school than every other contributor in this series, and Abandon All Ships are a good indication as to how low my brows were at 16 years old. This Canadian crabcore band were essentially a more overtly Christian Attack Attack!, and this utterly absurd song drops Cascada-tier electro-pop singing in the middle of an otherwise boilerplate metalcore upchuck. The vocals are horrendous, the production sounds like what it feels like to have chlorine in your eyes, and the refrain is a beautiful dose of mixed-metaphor gibberish: "God is your captain/Change your direction/Abandon all ships." So if god is the captain, he wants you to change the direction you're sailing in, but also...abandon your ship? What the fuck are you saying? I don't know, and I certainly didn't care back in 2011. This shit whipped, and honestly still kind of does. But oh yeah, embarrassing as fuck.
Here's something that sounds impossible in 2024 but in 2004 was absolutely true: Muse used to fucking rip, brother. 2004 was right around the time I started to learn to play guitar and this motherfucking hobbit-looking guy had what looked like an Etch-a-Sketch built into his guitar (it's called a Kaoss Pad ... get a grip). As a 15-year-old, seeing that told me, to quote Kevin Garnett, anything is possible. Flashforward 20 years and it probably should have been more than a little predictable these geeks would make the least listenable music of all time on their last handful of records. What the fuck. It's so over. I'll never forget listening to their 2007 Wembley set but I wish I could forget listening to the album ... The 2nd Law. Good grief.
Eric Bennett
Picture it: Summer of 2009, and I’m a month from the start of my freshman year. My friends Ashley and Kaelan and I are hanging out all night, roaming our tiny upstate New York town, hanging out on the gazebo in the park, spending what little money we had on dumb shit at the Dollar General. Our soundtrack of choice? Cobra Starship’s Hot Mess. We played it off of my LG Env3, a phone I would return to in a heartbeat. The only song anyone knows from this album is “Good Girls Go Bad,” the dance-pop hit that featured Leighton Meester, for whatever reason. Looking back, I’m mostly embarrassed that I felt like these songs about clubbing and drinking were a great match for all the sitting around and drinking Mountain Dew we were doing at the time. They pressed this to vinyl for Fueled By Ramen’s 25th anniversary and I bought it while drunk and nostalgic. Make of that what you will.
Elliott Duea
I'm far from the first to shed my Mumford & Sons fandom as I've grown older, but what remains most embarrassing is a specific moment of that fandom. Travel back with me to 2012 — I’m 17, it’s a school night and approaching midnight. I was capital B Blaring my Sigh No More vinyl, cranking that shit up when it hit “The Cave." The music was so loud that my mom came from the other side of the house to bang on my door, ordering me to turn it off and go to bed. I spent countless school nights listening to my records too late and too loud in high school, but Sight No More was the only one that ever awoke and then summoned a parent to plead me to shut it off. Not my Led Zeppelin or AC/DC records, but fucking Mumford & Sons. Not John Bonham's thundering drums nor Angus Young's earsplitting licks, but the violent banjo plucks of the Antifa-hating/Jordan Peterson-loving disgraced ex-bassist Winston Marshall.
I was walking around a store the other day when I heard a Lumineers song playing on the speaker and had a high school flashback. You remember the Lumineers, the peak of stomp-clap folk music designed to be used in a movie trailer. Their first, self-titled album came out in 2012 when I would've been 17. At that time, I listened to a lot of adjacent music like Mumford and Sons (a less embarrassing band, though stronger amounts of cosplay). Their songs are designed for people who commented "I was born in the wrong era!" on YouTube videos of The Beatles. All their songs are about WWII or the Great Depression even though they're written by two millennials from New Jersey. This album features "Submarines," a stomp-clap song about seeing a Japanese submarine. The most genuinely offensive song on the album is "Classy Girls," which is about how "classy girls don't kiss in bars." It's music for people who had a Tumblr that loved reblogging that one photo of the couple kissing in Times Square on V-J Day. And yes, sometimes in high school that was me.
My taste was barely formed when I started high school in 2005. Besides Limewire, Napster, and Rhapsody, which I only used occasionally, my digital listening habits basically consisted of just checking out 30 second snippets on the iTunes store. The rest of my taste at the time was just listening to what my friends liked. In midaughts West Michigan, that meant a lot of terrible screamo, post-hardcore, and nu-metal. While I’m grateful I had the taste then to love bands like Broken Social Scene, Modest Mouse, and Radiohead, I also went to a ton of shows I wouldn’t dare find myself at in 2024. While I could say that the reason I attended these gigs is that Grand Rapids was not an indie rock destination, that’d be a lie. I willingly went and had a great time seeing bands like The Used, Dance Gavin Dance, Hawthorne Heights, and more. I think one of the cringier ones was either Mindless Self Indulgence or Avenged Sevenfold, the latter of which I’m embarrassed to admit is the reason I found out who Hunter S. Thompson was thanks to their song “Bat Country.” It’s all part of learning what your taste is so I don’t regret my “white studded belt from Hot Topic” era.
Gianna Cicchetti
When I initially saw this question from Shawn and Elliott, there were a bunch of different avenues I immediately knew I could go down. I went to high school from 2015-2019, when embarrassing musical subcultures were at their peak (or so it seemed), but one of the bands I feel most devoid of nostalgia for and confusion as to why I even enjoyed their music is Mom Jeans. I have never smoked weed in my life so I already knew I was outside the band’s target audience, but after stumbling upon their album Best Buds while introducing myself to quote unquote DIY emo in high school, that ridiculously angsty whining somehow ended up resonating with me. After a solid year of turning to that record in moments of overdramatic unrequited love and depression, I now shudder at the thought of how poorly that band aged. It’s very much music you connect with at age sixteen and then never need to listen to again.
I liked plenty of respectable music in high school, but I was disproportionately obsessed with mashups; any concoction that laid rap vocals over a pop song had my attention. (Not a mashup, but my most-played song on iTunes was Mac Miller rapping over “Fireflies” by Owl City.) While Girl Talk — the obvious big dog of the genre with his intricate jam-packed explosions of adrenaline — holds up pretty well, most of the YouTube links I was passing around on Facebook in the early 2010s are somewhat embarrassing relics. I was especially high on an album of Disney-rap mashups by djDOYOU called Stuntin Like Mufasa. While the premise is far from the coolest thing in the world, the title track still kind of amps me up after all these years: the effortless swagger of Wayne and Birdman slides in nicely over the soaring “Circle of Life” foundation. The subsequent tracks are more novelty and less memorable but there’s something about this musical maximalism that really had its claws in me.
Shawn Cooke
I listened to my share of critically maligned music — Kings of Leon, Muse, Jet — early in high school, which led me to finding Pitchfork pans of their biggest records on Wikipedia with flared nostrils. This helped me migrate to the greener pastures of tasteful indie rock, but if there was one band I wholeheartedly believed deserved the acclaim of their peers, it was Fitz and the Tantrums. Woo boy. Their debut, Pickin’ Up the Pieces, slotted right into the blue-eyed neo-soul revival of the moment, with its pleasures more aimed at the suits and fedoras public radio set rather than pop fans. I was a sucker for flashy live crowdwork — most 2012 phrase of all time incoming at a one-day festival organized by Sweetgreen, in this case — and hadn’t heard the classic soul records, so of course I ate it up. I turned my back as they waded into far more heinous car commercial synthpop and made heaps of money (truly, “Out of My League” has more Spotify streams than all but one post-2008 Beyonce song). But few records sound more curdled in 2024.
The closest thing I can think of is a momentary connection with The Police but only their second album (especially Bed's Too Big Without You) - and I still stand by most of Regatta de Blanc and consider it their peak. I couldn't care less about the rest of their output. Otherwise, I was that Gang Of Four, Siouxsie, Public Image Ltd., The Clash, Joy Division, Raincoats, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Young Marble Giants, Bad Brains, Parliament, Sugar Hill Gang, James Brown, Brian Eno, Ornette Coleman, Glenn Branca, Miles Davis, Dennis Brown, Bob Marley, Lee Perry, David Bowie, and Jimi Hendrix-loving high school kid of myth and legend.