Music Monday #21: Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs! by Hellogoodbye

"I like where we are, When we drive in your car, I like where we are, Here"
- 'Here (In Your Arms)' - Hellogoodbye

'Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs!' was released in 2006 little over a month before I started University and it was the first album I was introduced to by the same friend that introduced me to The All-American Rejects.  Hellogoodbye was a band fronted by Forrest Kline who defined her musical taste at that moment in time.  I fell in love with their music right from the start, the song that had the most emotion for me was 'Here (In Your Arms)' - a song I have seen covered a few times since and still smile even the alternative versions remind me of that time in my life.  My favourite track on the album however was 'Touchdown Turnaround (Don't Give Up on Me)' a track that was fun, upbeat, and had EDM influences although the genres most used to identify Hellogoodbye are pop punk and emo pop.

Emo culture was something that I was completely oblivious to until my time at University, I owe explanation of this to the fact that we didn't have an internet connection at home for the years prior.  'Emo', short for 'emotional' or 'emotionally unstable' more colloquially is a genre of music with many sub-genres and forms part of the wider emo culture that primarily centres around emotional expression which can be upbeat, or downbeat although the latter is what most people associate with it.  Often conflated with Goth culture, the two share some similarities but not many, their styles are distinct and their origins worlds apart although a few bands bridge the two taking influence from both cultures notably My Chemical Romance.

Emo culture passed me by in my ignorance of a wider world, but in hindsight if I had discovered it at the time in my life when I would have needed it most I could easily see myself falling into it pretty deep.  My artistic and creative endeavours, the poetry, the fiction, the drawings, and even to an extent the music I was exposed to would have bled into the culture quite easily and had I been able to connect with others who felt the same I might not have felt so alone in the world. 

I do look at technology and the apparent effect of shrinking the world that it seems to have and I wonder how different my life would have been had I grown up with access to it on the same scale that I do now.  On the one hand I argue that having this technology now doesn't make it any easier despite the feeling that it does, I still haven't connected on a larger scale with people who share my mindset and that often leads to contemplation of the possibility that people who do share it might be in a very small minority.  On the other hand I look at the state of the internet today and argue that in its nascence it was much easier to connect with other people.  I used to moderate an LGBT forum which I spent 3 years doing almost every single day and I met a lot of people through it one or two I am still in contact with today even though the forum closed several years ago now.  The dominance of social media has ironically made it harder to make social connections online, instead reinforcing the connections you already have, or destroying them when you see some of the things posted by people you thought you knew.

Hellogoodbye is a reminder for me of fleeting connections, despite the depth of the friendships that I developed at that time, in particular the one with the girl who shared her music with me, much of that connection was formed through circumstance, we were people that otherwise probably would never have met, never crossed paths, and if it wasn't for the fact life put us together we probably would never have even spoken to each other in University.  That's not a judgement passed on either of us, it's just a reflection of the diversity experienced when you are put in a melting pot and mix with people outside of your bubble.  The trouble is, once you're tipped out of that pot at the end of the process those connections are tested and the commonalities or lack thereof are brought to light.  In this case beyond University itself we had very little in common when it came to our lives beyond it so we drifted apart and eventually lost contact.  Things ended amicably, there was no ill feeling, and we still have a means to contact one another, but like the lives we lived before we ever met there's nothing to bring us together. 

This disconnection is something that is true of quite a few friendships I have had over the years, I'm quite easy to talk to, easy to get along with, I'm not contentious, and I'm inoffensive in person, all of that means that I get along with 99% of the people I meet.  If you judge your perception of me purely by what I write however you'll have a warped view of what I am actually like in person.  I don't speak the way I write, I don't share as much of the thoughts I document on here in everyday conversation for the simple reason that the bulk of the posts on this blog are things that don't come up in everyday conversation and most people never broach the subjects.  In essence this is hidden depth that only the people who get to know me well and get close enough to me actually get to see, and complete strangers like you who read it online on this blog with no actual connection to the person behind the keyboard.

This is something I have struggled with in life though, and given the emo nature of Hellogoodbye it seems fitting to mention it here.  Their music like most of the emo genres touch on emotions that we feel but don't express openly or that few people take any interest in trying to understand when we do.  What I struggled with wasn't the expression of those emotions, I have always been able to find creative outlets to let those out when I need to, no the struggle came from the isolation and the inability to find people who were going through the same thing.  I don't know how different my life would have been if the first 12 years of my education had been in mixed sex schools, but from an all male school environment the definition of toxic masculinity is plain to see, the view of any expression of any emotion other than anger as a sign of weakness is something that you learn very quickly, you learn not to express your emotions in that environment and for me personally that led to 12 years where I formed only a few connections to the people around me.  The fear of falling is amplified when you feel there is no-one there to catch you, and the ease of making a mistake that trips you up is amplified by the lack of support and the few things that exist that keep you upright.