Remembering with Regret: Rise Against

            Recently while driving home from work one day a song came on the radio that took me back to a time and place. It was familiar but hadn’t traveled through my mind in a long time. So long in fact that I welcomed it as one would a long lost ex-girlfriend. Lyrics long forgotten welcomed sweet memories for a few songs before a creeping sensation came back from the dead: “this is so…whiny…”. A long lost ex-girlfriend has many reasons why she was lost and an ex, it only takes a short while to remember all the bad parts once you get past that rush of nostalgia. With the story set before you, I look to the past and remember with regret one of the many bands of my teenage years: Rise Against.

            Remembering with Regret isn’t so much a series about kicking old bands, movies, books and etc. while its down but looking back with a older perspective at some part of our life that makes us cringe. Recently I gave serious thought to getting a Twin Peaks tattoo as a tribute to a show I love as well as a flag I can fly for the rest of my life. With the Rise Against song playing on the radio, I couldn’t help but think of how I had given consideration to getting a band logo tattooed during that era of my life as well. Ouch. Maybe this is why I don’t have tattoos. If you have one or five, great and good for you. Me? I don’t want to get something inked on me that in five years will mean nothing more than a design I can show off with a bad story. Don’t think these things we remember unfondly have to be things we hate but just something that makes us grimace, chuckle a little and maybe even write a blog article about a part of life associated with something. Time heals all wounds they say; maybe it gives us a reason to laugh a little too.

            Picture a 19 year old Tyler Daniels sitting in his car driving around the small town he grew up in. His first car had been a hunk of junk that couldn’t play CDs but now he had something better. Inside the CD player was an album purchased at a re sell music store for five dollars even. That album was now blaring through the stereo as loud as possible while the silver Chevy Impala sped past a house he had been at many times in the past. He planned it so the chores of a song called “Audience of One” would play right as he barreled past his ex-girlfriend’s house. “ I brought down the sky for you and all you did was shrug!” came from the lead singer, punctuating in Tyler’s mind the events that had played out with his first relationship long ended but now revisited with his visit to town and the ex in question coming back from a long extended vacation overseas. He felt like an Audience of One when he thought back to that relationship and like every dumbass male or female, “the words spoke for him.” 19 year old Tyler gripped the wheel and turned down another street and pressed the repeat button on the stereo. She was fast asleep and no one in the house could hear a god damn thing but he didn’t know that. He would do it two more times before going home.

            So clearly we have teenage (and later 20 to 22 years old) emotion clinging to all kinds of music in the hopes of finding some kind of soundtrack that speaks to the listener. I’ve got a few bands that fit that bill ( oh boy just wait till we cover My Chemical Romance and you get to see emo pictures of Tyler Daniels) but Rise Against stands out to me for a lot of reasons. Rise Against did not age well in my option. Re listening to that album and the sporadic random songs that fill my ITunes, I feel so fucking old and bitter. Sitting here now I imagine my younger self coming into a bar and putting on “The Strength to Go On” while the older version of myself sits in the corner and shakes his head. “Appeal to Reason” by Rise Against came out in 2008 and became the go to album for yours truly. These songs all revolve around change but lack some kind of hard edge.

This album came out around the time we hit peak “Fuck Bush” and by god they push the attitude at the time with almost every song. So many of the tracks invoke the idea of standing up against adversity and revolution while just sounding like a bunch of angry college kids who think they can change the world via song. Nothing has punch or a real semblance of heart; sounds great, gets you feeling good and motivated but won’t carry you past the finish line. If you can ever remember taking a poetry class when in High School/College and creating the “perfect” poem, then chances are you’ve written at least one Rise Against song; fancy, drawn out words to sum up a point that could easily be made straight forward.

            I imagine a group of well to do college students listening to Rise Against in a dorm room and discussing how to put one over on “old man Bush” before eventually chickening out of any spray painting plans and writing a blog. It’s the equivalent of an artistic painting that the creator tries to explain shows the suffering of children in some third world country. He/She uses fancy words, dramatic pauses in the conversation and raises their voice to convey how much suffering and anguish is presented in this painting presented before you. You like the painting a lot but it is the farthest thing from harrowing and serious you can recall even though it tries so hard.

            Hard to believe but I still enjoy Rise Against. This whole blog post might convince you otherwise but it isn’t about hating the music but recognizing it for what it is. Rise Against is an alt rock punk band that takes itself too seriously and tries too hard. In a later album, one song includes spoken dialog about how it is better to die on your feet then to live on your knees. This is trying way too damn hard to be the tough kid on the block when everyone knows you couldn’t smash a grape in a fruit fight. Change only happens when the symbol or message can get enough force behind it to do something. Rise Against will always be part of the sound track of my life and I might end up putting it on tonight as I sip some whiskey. Appeal to Reason will take me back to community college and put a smile on my face with good memories, but I’ll never take a song seriously ever again.