My Year Of Everything

In honor of “Sweater Quest: My Year Of Knitting Dangerously,” I put myself through my own endurance test last weekend by going to the Warped Tour twice. 

There’s a selfish reason: my boyfriend’s Irish punk band The Mighty Regis is on the tour this summer, and not only do I genuinely like watching them, I love seeing people try them out and stick around. They’re taking off, and it’s a thrill to watch. 

And then they get offstage and suddenly I’m a grown man at an emo festival, surrounded by thousands of people who were born in a year when I was legally able to purchase alcohol, and there is nothing to do but make observations. Here are some: 

• Just as the energy industry is reaching the stage of “tough oil,” we in the English-speaking rock world are just about out of band names. We’re using punctuation and text-speak acronyms (3OH!3, LMFAO*), we’re randomly putting our finger into the dictionary twice (Breathe Carolina and Breathe Electric!), we’re yanking whole lines out of our morning pages (Bring Me The Horizon, I Can Make A Mess Like Nobody’s Business)**. I propose an emergency stopgap measure: let’s hit the reset button and put all band names back in play. You want to be The Kinks? Great- that name is now available again. Maybe we’ll add an asterisk or a v2.0 to avoid confusion, but otherwise, the playing field is wide open. It is the ANWR of band-name scarcity: it will work just fine until we find ourselves in the exact same predicament 50 years from now, but by then we’ll be dead so who cares? Drill, baby, drill***. 
• There was a time when I was able to suppress my YEESH upon seeing an unfortunate tattoo or a painful-looking piercing, and apparently that time quietly ended sometime in May. Truly, there is a level of body art after which you can only be referred to as “wounded.” 
• It is crucial that we as a society re-evaluate our kettle corn portions. Kettle corn seems to come in two sizes, of which “king-size pillowcase” is the smaller. We all see the kettle corn cart, we all get a craving for something sweet and a little salty, we buy a bag, we have the requisite two handfuls, and then we all- young, old, white, black, tattooed or seersuckered- recoil at the sheer amount of kettle corn that remains. It’s what unites us, really. A man with a huge bag came up to Ben’s bandmate Brett in the beergarden and said: “I’ll trade you some kettle corn for a cigarette.” I replied: “You’re really trading kettle corn for the opportunity to carry around less kettle corn.” He shrugged and nodded. And then he dropped his bag because he was drunk. 
• Pretty blonde women in distressed denim micro-shorts are having a much worse time than you’d imagine, and literally thousands of them have formed bands so they can sing about it. 
• Ultimately, The Vans Warped Tour is very much like the Gay Pride Parade, in that you spend a whole day getting congratulated for being in a marketing segment. ”You’re extreme, and so are Cherry/Fruit Punch Wonka Kazoozles” is the same as “You’re fabulous, and so is the introductory APR on the Chase Freedom Card.” The kernel of truth (music is good, you should like who you are) is there, but it’s smothered by so much pandering, you have to dig for it.**** 

* LMFAO are not actually on the Warped Tour, but that “Shots” song was played at several of the corpo-tents. Wherever two or more youths are gathered, “Shots” will be there. Also you might not have known to come down here for a footnote, because unless you’re familiar with them, LMFAO* is just as plausible a band name as LMFAO. See? Problem.

** And if we can use whole paragraphs as band names now, how has nobody jumped on “Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?” Do I have to do everything around here? 

*** Be sure to check out Drill, Baby, Drill on the Monster Energy Drink Stage at the Vans Warped Tour 2011. 

**** To fully extrapolate the Warped Tour is Gay Pride analogy: tattoos are pectoral muscles, Monster Energy Drink is ecstasy, and Agent Orange is CeCe Peniston.