"My head has thoughts. What a ridiculous place to start."

This week, Cara DuBois has some thoughts on the misogyny that feels like the price of admission to so much music. What do we do when we love songs that do not love us back?

They chose to donate their honorarium to the National Network of Abortion Funds. If you have the means, consider contributing.

Carl

TW: Sexual Assault

by Cara DuBois

The solstice has just passed, and I’m completing the same summer rituals I did in high school—wearing the darkest sunglasses I can find, applying copious amounts of sunscreen, and listening to the self-titled record by The Front Bottoms.

I associate these songs with the heat, with driving a Volvo station wagon down the county roads where I grew up, windows down and music blasting. The freedom of summer without responsibility. Dancing in a crowd of sweaty bodies, adolescent angst bursting in my chest. I’m not the same person I was when I started listening to The Front Bottoms—so much has changed in the material conditions of my life, in who I am—but there are parts of myself and times in my life that feel accessible only through the music I used to listen to.

I loved The Front Bottoms, enough to make my brother listen to the band in the car with me. The music is not particularly to my sibling’s taste, but they knew some of the lyrics anyway, a testament to how weird and disjointed and sometimes uncomfortable the stories are. (They’d always change the lines “I am not a dirty god / and I don’t have a dirty body” in “Legit Tattoo Gun” to “I don’t have a dirty lobster.” I still, to this day, do not understand what prompted it, but it sure was fun to confuse people at shows by singing that.)

Lines that spoke to me when I was seventeen, like

made my brother roll their eyes. And that’s fair. To me, it doesn’t matter if the story’s true, because it gets at the emotional truth of having a crush. It’s absolute torture—and sometimes we contort ourselves into other shapes, other people, for love. It takes time to learn how to accept love for who we are. I certainly didn’t know how to do it at seventeen. I’m still learning how to do it now, ten years later.

I spent the first eighteen years of my life in New Jersey, and The Front Bottoms are a quintessentially New Jersey band. It’s part of the reason I loved them so much. They’re from Woodcliff Lake, which is about as North Jersey as you can get without being in New York. My mom grew up a half hour and a generation apart from the band, and strangely enough, my uncle knows frontman Brian Sella’s uncle. Though Jersey is the most densely populated state in the nation, it somehow makes sense to me that I’m not too many degrees of separation away from The Front Bottoms.

I grew up in South Jersey, but their lyrics transcend the North–South cultural divide. In “Mountain,” a song about getting high, they sing:

The fireworks are a metaphor for drugs, which I never really noticed, but the metaphor works only because of the geographical specificity of the song. Fireworks are illegal in our state, but take a short trip across the border to Pennsylvania and you’ll find all of your firework needs met. My dad worked in PA, and he would sometimes bring them home for special occasions. We had to be careful, though, because growing up I always heard that Jersey cops would lie in wait at fireworks stores in PA, hunting for folks with Jersey plates to follow back into the state and arrest.

I lived vicariously through songs like this because I was (and to some extent, still am) too scared to take those kinds of risks. I’m a deeply anxious person, neurotically dependable and obsessed with all of the ways something could go wrong. Much of this record concerns drugs, sex, and alcohol—three things I actively avoided for many years. What I identified with, rather, was the deep yearning at the heart of this record—I heard the mismatch between what I had and what I desired, between what I desired and what I repressed. As they say in “Legit Tattoo Gun,” “I am alone only half of the time, / The other half, I am only hiding.”

Not until I was many years older did I discover that “front bottom” is a crude term for a vagina. I used to wear tee shirts for the band all the time—never second-guessed wearing them to class or around my family, took selfies to post on my tumblr. I don’t know if I would have worn the merch as often or as proudly had I known what I was wearing.

The context also feels different to me now knowing that there have been sexual assault allegations leveled against a former member of the band. According to this account (which, if you know anything about me, you know I believe), other members of the band were complicit in hiding this behavior in order to further their careers.

So much of my anxiety stems from a fear of being hurt. I modify the way I move through life in order to reduce the likelihood that I will come into harm’s way. This is misguided. If someone wants to hurt me, they will find a way to do it. And sometimes, being hurt is part of life, it’s unavoidable. Though I heard myself in these songs, the melody also hid what I was running from.

Much of growing up has been an exercise in bravery, learning to turn toward the things that have scared me most, to grant myself the freedom that I was once too timid to take. I return to these songs to remind myself how far I have come.

Cara DuBois is a production editor by day and tired by night. They have an MA from Brandeis University and one excellent, wiggly dog. They think writing is terribly scary.