Something Corporate (Plus Client Wins)
My favorite band from high school.
At a recent formal dinner, my fellow guests began discussing their favorite bands from high school. I shared the name of my all-time favorite group: Something Corporate! My table mates looked mostly confused: No one had heard of them.
My immediate reaction was one of sadness–no one there could share my love for one of the most under-appreciated emo groups of the early 2000s. Another feeling flashed through me, though, and I caught it. It was a certain smugness, a satisfaction at having avoided being a little more known by this group of people. It was almost like relief. What a perfect reaction to a conversation about high school!
I first became aware of Something Corporate in 2004, when my next-door neighbors–kids who always purchased the newest and latest music–flipped through a huge plastic-coated binder of CDs and handed me theirs. Emo music was wildly popular at that time. Picture young, mostly male frontmen, with long pasted-down cereal-bowl haircuts covering their eyes, sing-screaming into mics about the extreme emotions provoked by, you know, being alive. Heavy on black eyeliner and electric guitar, this genre often had its own emotive style of pronunciation. “You” sounded like “Yoooww,” and “sorry” like “saaahhhrr-eeyyyeee.” Famous emo bands of the early 2000s included Taking Back Sunday, blink-182, Yellowcard, and many others.
It’s easy to make fun of emo music. Yet, to use my Gen-Z patois, some of these songs really do still “slap.” This song and that one, by the Starting Line and Dashboard Confessional, respectively, hold up really well even now.
Unlike their peers, Something Corporate–nicknamed SoCo–was an emo band with a lighter, alt-rock touch, thanks to its highly piano-forward, melodic sound. Frontman Andrew McMahon–himself the pianist–was an intellectual, principled guy. His eyebrow piercing seemed tasteful and fetching to me. He lived in Southern California and sang about teenage love and loss, and he felt relatable to me.
When you are introduced to something as a teenager, the forces of pressure around you are often so strong that you’re not even sure how you yourself feel about that thing. For me, Something Corporate represented that experience well: I was initially socially influenced to like the band, but over time I grew to genuinely love them.
I went to an all-girls’ high school, and my class was deeply divided into social cliques. By senior year, it felt as if I had a presence in many of these little groups. Being friends with everyone really means that you’re not actually friends with anyone, in a way, and many years later the anchorlessness of that experience suddenly hit me.
Occupying different cliques, I learned that high school is very difficult for a huge number of people, whether that struggle is outwardly visible or not. The most popular girl in your class can produce some of the most searingly sad, cynical things you’ve ever heard anyone say, as much or more so, I wager, than the biggest loner.
Something Corporate felt as clued in as anyone to the experience of teenage personhood and loneliness. The members of Something Corporate, in particular McMahon, had a perspective. The band’s name itself mocked the music industrial complex, the concept of edgy band names, even the idea of a band itself. It also mocked the corporate-feeling system into which teenagers are constantly being shuffled. Teens are forced into institutions while being trained for future ones. If you act out, adults might institutionalize you, as many former child stars found out in the early 2000s. Teenagers should question institutions, and Something Corporate was doing that.
Teens also miss some key information because their brains and selves are still developing. Something Corporate and their fans had an air of teenage music snobbery and conviction: You had to be a certain type of person to have even heard of them. I think that gets at the heartbreak of being a teenager: You’re curating and cultivating and obscuring various facets of yourself, but you also really want people to notice you in the way that you want to be seen. In all the social posturing, there’s a certain poignant sincerity. The whole experience is so, well, emo.
During the early 2000s, the litmus test for a band’s breakthrough into the wider teenage consciousness was whether or not the group had been featured on The O.C. soundtrack. The O.C. was a soap opera about rich kids with hard lives in Orange County. I was certain that SoCo never made it onto the show, but while writing this newsletter I learned that their music had indeed been featured. I felt thrilled by this discovery.
So often in high school, restrictions hold us back from having the experiences we feel so ready to start having. Something Corporate’s lyrics indicated that the members of this band were already living. One of their more popular songs, “I Woke Up in a Car,” features the following lines:
I’ve never been so lost/
I’ve never felt so much at home
Starting a business in New York City many years later, I find that these lyrics hit a newly personal chord for me. Maybe that’s the point of emo music: to give you words for experiences that you’ll one day have.
Funnily enough, after all the social pressure and academic competition of high school, it ended in an oddly relaxing manner. Long pent-up tensions suddenly unspooled and released themselves in a languid, entropic manner. Formerly strict social boundaries were silently dissolving; girls were finding more common ground and friendships were becoming much more mixed. I found myself hanging out with other kids from neighboring schools, public and private, and I didn’t even know how I’d met them.
That summer, I saw a band called 311 play. It’s not an emo band—it blends ska, reggae, and rock—but it certainly shares many fans with Something Corporate. Based in LA, 311 also has that unique Southern California energy. That night, rapper Snoop Dogg—of all people—headlined for them. Seemingly everyone was bemusedly, happily in cahoots during this transitional moment.
311 recently played a live Tiny Desk concert with NPR—there’s one more surprise collaboration I didn’t see coming. The band concludes their concert by encouraging fans to “stay positive”: They are still cool kids with big hearts. If you have fifteen minutes, I encourage you to pour yourself a cocktail–maybe there’s something in your parents’ liquor cabinet–and enjoy this nostalgic performance.
Despite my inner teenager’s reaction during dinner the other night, I sincerely want Something Corporate to have as many fans as possible. Here’s “I Woke Up in a Car.”
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