"Some Say" by Sum 41

Once a week, from the ages of thirteen to sixteen, I went to the band room after school and spent thirty minutes learning how to play guitar from a man named Jason whose hair hung down to his ass. My mom made me pay Jason his $20 with a check I handwrote from the bounty of my summer job as a sandwich artist at Subway. Jason was a classically trained metalhead and every week I would plug my iPod shuffle into the speakers and ask him to transcribe the three power chords of whichever 2000s pop punk song I couldn’t find on Ultimate Guitar that week. Suffice to say, he deserved much more than $20.

Jason did his duty with aplomb and good humor. We talked about video games, Star Wars, and Queen, and he didn’t bother trying to teach my arrhythmic, musically-illiterate ass what a sixteenth note or a triad was. The only time I ever shook his even keel, was asking him to teach me Sum 41’s, “Some Say.” The song opens with Avril Lavigne’s best Ex-Husband, Deryck Whibley, sneering into his microphone as usual, accompanied by an acoustic guitar and some tape deck sound effects straight out of Revolver.

Jason grimaced and said, “What is this wannabe Wonderwall bullshit?”

To which I said, “What’s Wonderwall?” Neither of us, I think, were in the wrong here.

I’ve never met someone whose favorite band is Sum 41. Not even at a sold-out show in Detroit where we all knew every word. If asked, I bet you $20—a whole Jason guitar lesson—anyone in that audience would tell you they actually prefer Green Day or Rise Against. Sum 41 shares, I think, some stigma akin to the band of Avril Lavigne’s worst Ex-Husband, Chad Kroger and the dreaded Nickelback. A band that we can all poopoo publicly while secretly bumping their big hits alone in the car, far from civilization. Even my dentist says she hates Nickelback.

Fine, some of Sum’s stuff is all filler, no killer. Whibley insists on rhyming couplets in almost every song, and has twice used the turn of phrase “lost the human race” like he was really doin’ something. “Some Say” does not escape the gravitational pull of a straitjacket rhyme scheme: “fall” rhymed with “all” and then, yes, “all” again. It is, however, an absolutely laser accurate portrait of apathy in America during the Bush years—and they’re from Canada! It clarifies a feeling familiar to emo/punk/alt fans. One becomes so disillusioned by the institutions of governance that we turn our frustration on those closest to us. On ourselves. We believe we need no one because no one seems to need us.

It’s a lie—that we’re alone. Our own suffering is so seductive, and Whibley knows it. That sneer? He’s looking in the mirror. We don’t actually hate other people, we hate our inability to help them, and to help ourselves. Caring is hard when it doesn’t seem to make things better. When warhawks wage wars on foreign countries, and capitalism’s war on wages rages, who gives a shit what some snot-nosed kid thinks? Why should that kid give a shit about themselves? Whibley’s delivery here is as powerfully sarcastic as the quotation marks around the title of Bowie’s “Heroes.” Apathy isn’t honesty, though Whibley admits it’s so easy, after all.