Even As We Get Older: Youthful Trappings and the Development of Set Your Goals

It's exceedingly rare that my friends introduce me to music I don't like.  During my 6 year tenure as a sales associate at Hot Topic, one of my co-workers introduced me to a band called Set Your Goals.  This was shortly after Mutiny!, their first full-length, was released.  I had noticed the album sitting on the shelves, as its large swashbuckling font and treasure map cover art stood out.  "Dude, it's a pirate pop-punk album," my co-worker said as he handed me a copy of it.  I said it sounded pretty cool.  He smiled as he chirped, "I know, right?"

I was floored by this record.  As one of my earliest forays into pop-punk/hardcore hybrid acts, I didn't expect anything like what I had heard.  The speed, the hooks, the catchiness, the gang vocals - everything put a smile on my face.  But what struck me more than any of that were the lyrics.  Matt Wilson and Jordan Brown's vocal tag-teaming and utterly surprising lyrics (for a modern offshoot punk band) worked together seamlessly to create a message of unrefined positivity.  Given the nature of some of the songs, like the unrepentant post-modern individualism of "Work In Progress/We Do It For The Money, Obviously":

My life is a constant work in progress/And I wouldn't have it any other way

Who are you to say what is real and what is fake

and who here matters anyway?

It's nothing that I haven't heard

We're all sellouts in your eyes, that's no surprise

Well, we never tried to disguise

Everything we want to be

But, honestly,

Who cares what you have to say?

More examples show in the next pair of tracks "Dead Men Tell No Tales/Mutiny!" in which they harpoon the music industry that had been trying to force them to compromise their creative vision:

I told you so doesn't do it for me anymore

(gang vocal) Our music we will shine

Take back your discipline now. This is a genuine revolt.
I am far from, so far from romanced.
There's too much business in this; I'm going back to my garage.
I have been completely disenchanted.
Turn my amp up to eleven; six nickel wound strings have saved me again.
Suits and ties are not to congregate in my sanctuary,
judged only by my hands.

(spoken) In this vast network of sharks and minnows,
where the minnows outnumber the sharks a million to one,
why is it that we have yet to converge?
To take on the upper hand?
Why have we been so scared?

Well not today, not anymore.
This is us growing up, still young, but no longer impressionable.
We have come to pillage!
We have come to burn!
We have come to incite the riot!
We have come to take it over!

In an interview with Scene Point Blank, Jordan Brown discussed the bands desire to express themselves freely through their music.  In regards to their song "An Old Book Misread," a song about their views on organized religion, Brown said, "We don't want to upset people with what we talk about on the album, but we want to discuss subjects that we feel are important."  This is an idea that carried over into their second full-length release, This Will Be The Death of Us, in songs like "Look Closer":

Plugged in, tuned out?
We all need to wake up 'cause we've been
Detached for too long.
We need to deprogram from
Shifting with the public eye.
We have a right to question why.
See through the lies,
Re-sensitize, and look closer.

And "Gaia Bleeds," speaking against man's destructive treatment of the environment:

Make way
A failed culture makes its mark existing only to destroy what came first
With no regard for creation, men play God, drop unstoppable bombs
All institutions are wrong, but none of them will ever stop!

This second album introduced a theme that was not touched upon in the first album, aside from the line "still young, but no longer impressionable."  A couple of the songs serve as reflections on the band's past and celebrations of their youth.  In the song "Summer Jam," they recount some of their tour stories and learning experiences they've had, celebrating their individual freedom of experience:

Even as we get older
We can do it all over.
Make our own plans and score the music to our own lives.
Looking into the future,
There is more room to move here.
Invincible as we score the music to our own lives.

My way has only got to work for me

In the song "The Fallen" they make their point of youthful exuberance a bit more directly:

Some stop feeling love for all the places they come from.
A person I will not become.
A jaded liar, unforgivable.

Some stop feeling love for every word that they once sung.
May I never lose my youth and If I do, may I be forgettable.

Here we see the validation declared for those that stay true to who they have been and where they have come from, a tenet long held in the punk and hardcore scenes; the perception of authenticity is a big deal.  Given the care taken by Set Your Goals to write about what matters to them, it isn't unreasonable to see such material pop up in a song, but it is somewhat uncharacteristic of them.

In the Scene Point Blank interview, Brown pointed out that the band wanted to steer away from the introverted lyrics of other bands, and while they succeed in steering away from songs about girls, they take a dip into songwriting territory that is all-too-familiar.  Songs about youth and summer tend to be a dime a dozen, particularly after the pop-punk wave of the early 2000s when bands like Good Charlotte and Simple Plan were pumping out songs like "Anthem" and "I'm Just A Kid."  Some fans today, including my friend that introduced me to Set Your Goals, had complaints about about these songs.

 I initially wrote off such complaints, as I was more concerned with the overall quality of the music.  But with the recent release of new songs from Set Your Goals' upcoming album, Burning At Both Ends, those sentiments seem a bit more substantial.  The first song that was released from the album, "Start The Reactor," makes them more clear:

It's just the way I feel
I wanna break things, I wanna break rules
I don't do this to fit in or feel cool
I do this because it's what I love
I always want to feel this young!
(Oh oh)

C'mon guys.

While this is only a single sample of what the new record holds, it is not a promising one.  Overall, this is another song about looking back as you get older while still clinging to your youth.  For a band that tends to present a forward-thinking, positive attitude, this seems to be a bit regressive.  They appear to be a little too eager to romanticize their youth while they are still living it.  It feels like a contradictory message - "We're really progressive and open-minded, but we don't like change!"  I may be jumping the gun on this one, though.  I cannot speak as to whether or not the overall message of Burning At Both Ends or the messages of the other individual songs on the album balance things out in a more mature fashion.  As this is the band's third full-length album, and their popularity is growing more and more, I would hope to see them display their personal growth more.  The album drops tomorrow, and hopefully soon after I'll have a verdict on that.

All lyrics taken from the Set Your Goals section on www.plyrics.com.  All lyrics shown written by Jordan Brown and Matt Wilson.  All rights to the lyrics cited and the music associated with them belong to the member of Set Your Goals.

It's appropriate that this is being written in a coffeehouse

Welcome to the party.  My apologies to anyone that is upset about the lack of beard in the title; I thought "Informalism" was a bit more appropriate.  Simple yet elegant, in that its meaning can shift about and still be applicable to what I want to do with this blog.  The initial inspiration for starting this project was for me to have a space in which to practice analysis (as I know it as a college graduate with a B.A. in English Studies), and I think the best way to build up those skills is to do it in a relatively informal manner - also, I dislike Formalism, but that's something I'll likely get into some other time.  Furthermore, this blog affords me the opportunity to inform people as to how critical analysis apply to the world around them.  See?  I feel like it's a fitting title.

Yes, I know I'm an awful nerd.  I wear it proudly.  Moving on.

Time to lay down some of the ground rules for this blog.  First and foremost, while I will occasionally don an academic tone, I will largely be keeping things around here - wait for it - informal.  By this I mean that I will regularly insert humor and casual language into whatever I choose to write.  Fair warning: I occasionally work blue, and will do so when I damn well please.  You're welcome to do the same in your comments, should you choose to leave any.  This blog will also be informal in that it will not simply focus on "literature" as one might expect from an English student.  This might raise the question, "Well then what the hell are you going to be talking about and why should I care?"

To answer this, I'll have to get a bit academic.

You'll notice on this page's header that I use the phrase "textual/cultural critique" as opposed to "literary critique."  As you may suspect, there is a reason for this.  While I will certainly be delving into what some may call "literature," I will be discussing a much wider range of subject matter, encompassing film, music, cultural phenomena, television, video games, art, theater, and books.  The whole of these things, and anything I may have missed, fall under the heading of "text."  You see, we in the world of English Studies prefer to use the term "text" as opposed to "literature" because it more accurately describes the breadth of material that we cover, and it lends our endeavors a bit more credence and applicability in the world outside of our nerdy little bubble (thank you Dr. Mike Sell for the rationale; "nerdy little bubble" was mine, though).  So while most of what I'll be discussing on here is going to come somewhere from the world of textual critical theory, there will be tinges of psychology, sociology, politics, economics, and whatever else could be appropriate for my subject matter at any given time.

And I just went and opened another academic can of worms by invoking the word "theory" in the above paragraph.  This is one of the points in English Studies that is disputed, and in some instances used to single English Studies out as a bunch of nonsense. Essays have been written with the expressed purpose of discrediting theory.  In her essay "The Race for Theory," Barbara Christian asserted that critical theories are "prescriptivist" and often "elitist and traditionalist," even if they are trying to represent some disenfranchised entity.  Authors Knapp and Michaels go on to claim theory is generally flawed because it is fundamentalist and those involved in it are incapable of stepping outside of their own ideology, language, culture, and so on and so forth, in their essay "Against Theory."

I disagree with everything I just summarized.  In the case of Christian's argument, the idea of theory and criticism as "elitist and traditionalist" is derailed when you take into account an idea put forth by T. S. Eliot.  Eliot said that as new works (texts) are released, the "tradition" makes room to accommodate them.  I feel this means that any ideas and texts out there, regardless of what theories may apply to it and what canon it may or may not fit into, are worthwhile subject matter for enjoyment and critical thought.  Theory does not marginalize nontraditional viewpoints and texts, but gives them an opportunity for recognition.  In the case of Knapp and Michaels' argument, I feel theories are being viewed as rigid ideological structures that cannot be altered or toyed with.  This is contrary to the evolution of the various theories as we know them.  Russian Formalists and Liberal Humanists were both considered Formalists for different reasons and each had different aims, and the theories that proceeded them - literary Marxism, Feminism, Modernism, Post-Modernism, New Historical, Psychoanalytic, etc. - took their methods as a basis and built on it in some fashion.  I feel that the ideas of each style of critical theory is a tool at our disposal to help broaden our view of texts and the world around us.  Furthermore, to say that a theorist cannot step outside of himself or herself is asinine; if that were true, then what would be the point of a white theorist to analyze a black text? A heterosexual critic a homosexual text? A male critic a female text?  In this sense, Knapp and Michaels' claim is limiting and kind of insulting.

Also, in the same way that atheism is a sort of religious belief, their anti-theory approach is an exercise in theory.

So there you have it.  Throughout the lifespan of this blog, which I hope to be long, I will be analyzing a wide variety materials in a wide variety of ways, and I will try to make it entertaining and educational for those of you interested enough to dive in.  I don't have any sort of set schedule for how I'm going to do things, but I hope to post at least one new update a week.  To start things off, I will likely be looking at the first book of Stephen King's The Dark Tower and the music of Set Your Goals.  If you have any suggestions for things for me to look, leave 'em in the comments.  'Til next time.