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Soundtrack to Your Geekout – Volume #1, Track #6

By | June 12th, 2010
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This week’s soundtrack as well as this week’s geekout aren’t quite as much of a perfect symbiosis as I’ve claimed the last few week’s pairing’s have been. To be perfectly blunt, these two pieces really don’t work all that well together at all, structurally or otherwise. One is a grandiose, arena ready anthem and another is, despite its fantastical cast of characters, a rather downplayed, more or less low key and frankly kind of dark piece of comic book fare. Rather, “I Was a Teenage Anarchist”, the newest single from Gainesville, Florida’s Against Me! and Avengers Academy #1 occupy the same general cultural space as they both celebrate youth in all its terror and glory as well as provide a warning both to those still young and those who have, whether intentionally or not, grown up.

Despite leaking way back in March, Gainesville, Florida’s Against Me! formally released their fifth full length, White Crosses, this past Tuesday. Their second release on Warner Brothers subsidiary Sire Records, these former folk punk ruffians decided to show their own personal growth this time around, releasing 10 very cleanly crafted arena rock anthems that, despite very much taking their cues from their former folk-punk ways, very much propel the band in a much more radio friendly rock direction. A few years ago, the band taking a very obvious stance with this direction (that stance being “we are going to write and produce the music we want to hear and to hell with any and all preconceived notions”) would have been an unforgiveable sin in my book (as, indeed, it is to a few small minded souls on punknews.org.) However, at this point I am able to look past things like what label the record was released on or how slick the production happens to be and take the songs for what they are: ten tracks about growing up, realizing the folly of your youth and growing past them to a new, brighter tomorrow. No track on the record exemplifies this feeling more than Track #2, “I Was a Teenage Anarchist.” It would take more space than this column realistically provides to recount the band, and particularly frontman Tom Gabel’s connection to the North American anarchist community and then their separation from it, so instead I will clarify that his song manages to sum up Tom’s years as a self-proclaimed anarchist (included in this period are Against Me’s first few releases including their eponymous track “Baby I’m an Anarchist”) as well as his realization that actual, lasting change doesn’t come from throwing bricks through starbucks windows or “setting the world on fire.”

Near as I can understand, most mainstream comics fans did not immediately gravitate towards Cristos Gage and Mike McCone’s Avengers Academy when the recent Avengers relaunch was announced. However, I did, and here’s why: I’m a big fan of teen super hero teams, especially ones starring new or mostly new characters. It pains me that Teen Titans is written so badly these days, but in recent years books like Runaways, New X-Men and Young Avengers continually found their way to the top of my “to read” list and it’s because of this that Avengers Academy #1 was probably the book I expected the most from out of all the new Avengers related #1s that came out recently. I’m thankful to say the book succeeded on all fronts. It not only set up the status quo perfectly (though, granted, “a bunch of super-powered kids in a school-like situation learning how to use their powers” is a hard concept to portray or grasp), but introduced the largely new cast of students and gave us the current headspace of the establish instructors in a compelling and realistic way. All of these students were first seen this issue except for Reptil, who was introduced last year in the dearly departed Avengers: The Initiative series and gained a modicum of fame on the Marvel Super Hero Squad cartoon, and while I admit a lot of my understanding of their nature (especially in the case of Mettle) was provided by the short blurbs in the back matter of the issue as opposed to within the story itself, I trust Gage to flesh them out and make each of their stories relatable and engaging. Also, that ending, while not completely ground breaking or particularly hard to see coming, actually poses the age old question and tunes it more to the task at hand: “is it nature or nurture that makes a successful super hero?” I have every bit of faith that this book will answer that question with gusto in the months and (hopefully) years to come.

So there you go, two pieces that in their own way portray two very looks at the teenage condition but at the same time pose a few similar set of questions, first and foremost being “do the conditions a person is exposed to as a teenager truly affect the person they become?” Is truly growing up even possible? As a teacher and relatively youthful young adult, I ask myself things like this all the time. It’ll be interesting to see how the ongoing stories of Against Me! and the Avengers Academy goes about answering them.

Joshua Mocle is a tired, tired man. To read his rants about things not explicitly related to comics (AKA punk rock politics and the Boston Red Sox), check out thoughtgrenade.


//TAGS | Soundtrack To Your Geekout

Joshua Mocle

Joshua Mocle is an educator, writer, audio spelunker and general enthusiast of things loud and fast. He is also a devout Canadian. He can often be found thinking about comics too much, pretending to know things about baseball and trying to convince the masses that pop-punk is still a legitimate genre. Stalk him out on twitter and thought grenade.

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