How The Get Up Kids and an Xbox Demo Disc Changed My Life
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #181. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Ruminations on the power of the riff.
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Back when I was in high school in the early 2000s, my family’s internet connection was too slow to reasonably download music, and I was vehemently against burning CDs (and no, I don’t why I was in favor of file trading in theory but against making hard copies in practice). However, I was also a voracious music listener, always searching for new bands anywhere I could find them. This is how an Xbox demo disc, of all things, changed the course of the rest of my life. One afternoon when I had nothing else to do, I popped in a sampler of the snowboarding game Amped, and discovered a couple tracks from The Get Up Kids.
By the time I turned off the console, the sun had gone down, and I realized I’d been replaying the same level for two hours because I couldn’t stop listening to this vaguely pop punk-sounding band on the soundtrack. I didn’t understand why I was so hooked on this demo, because the game wasn’t that good, and I was also a metalhead who wasn’t usually into anything as light and catchy as these songs. They were just so good that I kept going back down the game’s mediocre virtual slopes just to keep listening on repeat.
The story of how I got into The Get Up Kids is like the story of how a lot of people got into The Get Up Kids. In his recent memoir Red Letter Days, the band’s vocalist and guitarist Matt Pryor (himself a metalhead-turned-punk in his younger years) explains that getting their songs onto skateboarding videos played a massive role in growing the band’s popularity. Pryor also recalls that when the band sent their first 7” to every record label they could, the only legitimate offer they received was from a hardcore label, despite saying, “. . . the hardcore scene, if we’re being honest, is not for us. The heavy music that I grew up on was more experimental in nature, more motivated by noise than anger.”
As I read through Red Letter Days, I felt like I finally understood why The Get Up Kids appealed to me when I was younger, and why they’re still one of my favorite bands to this day. I stumbled upon them at a time when I was looking for something different than the nu-metal CDs that lined my shelf at the time, having grown tired of their simplistic rage. Pryor himself got into the more melodic side of punk rock after growing up listening to metal, and so it makes sense that there’s something about his songwriting sensibilities that can appeal to metalheads and hardcore kids, even if their own music is far from heavy.
When my wife and I went on our first date, she picked me up at my house and had the band’s second album Something to Write Home About playing when I got in the car (she’d later share that this wasn’t an accident). When I flipped through her vinyl collection, she had a deep collection of punk and hardcore records, a little bit of classic country, and The Get Up Kids debut record Four Minute Mile. Years later, I’d recreate the whole setup for our first date, except this time I picked her up from work and made sure I had my copy of Something to Write Home About (the same one I bought in high school) in the CD player.
The Get Up Kids recently wrapped up a tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of Something to Write Home About. While it feels like every other emo and hardcore-adjacent band from the 1990s and early 2000s have been doing similar anniversary tours, this one felt different. While I eventually outgrew most of their peers, The Get Up Kids never left my listening rotation, and they made a lasting impact on my musical and personal development. This was the album that showed me how punk could be vulnerable without being soft, opening the door to discovering tons of other indie and emo bands, and expanding my musical tastes beyond metal and ’90s radio rock. It became part of the story of how my wife and I started dating. When I say it changed my life, as hyperbolic as it sounds, I mean it literally.
One night not long ago, when I turned on my car, the CD player started acting up and sounded like it was struggling to switch between discs. I forgot my car had a CD player (I drive a modest 2007 Hyundai Sonata that’s going to outlast gas-powered cars as a concept at this point), let alone that it still had CDs in it, and so I hit the eject button to see what was inside. What came out was the same copy of Something to Write Home About that I had bought in high school, the same copy that I put in my car the night I proposed, and one of the very few CDs I still own after I purged my collection several years ago. I let it play the whole way home, and took the scenic route too, so I could put my favorite tracks on repeat.
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Ben Sailer is a writer based out of Fargo, ND, where he survives the cold with his wife and dog. His writing also regularly appears in New Noise Magazine.