Sheri

its worth fighting for 🌷

Writer of word both truth and tale. Video producer, editor, artist, still human. Hire me?

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Slowly making a visual novel called We Will Not See Heaven, demo is free. Sometimes I stream, or post adult things. Boys' love novel enthusiast. Take care, yeah?

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Sheri
@Sheri

there is so much happening in the world right now! but! i wanna talk about something nice, the james who's eating it

i wanna talk about late 90s-mid 00s punk rock bands! i do it a lot!

Jimmy Eat World have touched so many genres over the years and still make music today, if you can believe it, and tbh? they're underappreciated as fuck.

like many trans folk, i def got some Feelings from The Middle when i was younger, though that was years after it charted; having a dad in radio gets you a broad taste in music

for those not familiar, here's the song, and some lyrics:

Hey, you know they're all the same
You know you're doing better on your own
So don't buy in
Live right now
Yeah, just be yourself
It doesn't matter if it's good enough
For someone else

It just takes some time
Little girl, you're in the middle of the ride
Everything, everything'll be just fine
Everything, everything'll be alright, alright

i mean. it aint exactly subtle. jim adkins, née jimmy, said in an NME piece that he wasn't all that confident in "The Middle" at first, but learned to push past those feelings when he realized it just felt right. which- is also kind of the point of the song itself, so good job listening to your own advice!

he then goes on to drop some FACTS vis-Ă -vie punk:

Back in the day when [The Middle] was written… …there was a girl
who was at a junior high age, maybe like 13-14? …she wrote
something [to us] about how she didn't feel like she fit in with
the punk rock crowd at her school, cuz she wasn't like-
'punk enough' for them? And I just thought about…
that's kind of odd.

The tenant of the punk ideal, or the alternative kind of 'outside
the mainstream' kind of ideal… …is, you think yourself
being more accepting. So?

I guess the tune was kind of a reaction to that, you know? Like-
don't with those people, you don't wanna be friends with them anyway.

     -Jim Adkins, 2014

the idea of rejecting someone for not being 'punk enough' is completely antithetical to what punk is supposed to be, so i hope that girl knows she helped inspire a song that helped inspire many others

but- get this!

Did you know they made other songs too?

Jimmy Eat World on stage in 2018.

not to be too cynical, but i get really sad when i see "one hit wonders" with absolutely incredible discographies be boiled down to one track. i mean- tears for fears is more than Everybody Wants To Rule The World, no?

not only does Jimmy Eat World have 10 studio albums, but plenty of their other songs are relentlessly queer-coded. take Cut for example:

If it's your name in lights
And if the time is yours
You'd be on your back
You'd be on this floor
It's the kind of night that I'd always hoped
And he's the kind of guy worth waiting for

the song ends with,

I'm sorry, boy
I'm not cut for this no more
Yes, I loved you, boy
I'm not cut for this no more

sadly, i can't find anywhere they've talked about this song. people have speculated it could be written from a femme perspective, but the rest of Invented is laced Courtney Marie Andrews' singing, and yet she's on vocalization instead of vocals for this one. that feels pretty deliberate to me!

more recently, Delivery reads like a closeted trans woman's musings with the electronic style of an openly trans woman's bandcamp mix (non-derogatory):

Sold on a lie
A lie old as time
You search until you die
Only partially the truth
Someone’s out there for you
But not everyone’s ready to be found
No, you may not be ready to be found

i don't want to speculate on jim's gender identity here but like- if you're reading this, it's never too late to ask yourself those questions! even if the answer is no, who knows what you'll learn along the way?

and on that note, i leave y'all with my fav road-trip bop, Coffee & Cigarettes:

(also available in acoustic flavour )



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in reply to @Sheri's post:

As someone who was a very “awkward” suburban pop-punk listening teen at that time, The Middle is one of those anthemic songs that’s permanently etched into my brain, and just reading one line of the lyrics you posted sets the whole thing off in my head - thank you for posting.

With everything else you point out in relation to Jimmy Eat World - particularly the queer/trans coding - I can’t help but reflect on how much has changed and how much we’ve learned since those days. Looking back now, it feels like there’s a whole language that many kids like me just didn’t know back then, and had no (or very little) effective means to learn, to help us describe and illuminate and explore these areas of self-discovery. I was just… “awkward”… or “weird”…

If the internet age has done anything for us, I hope it’s helping a lot of young folks find themselves and each other more easily.

perhaps my favourite thing about music (maybe art in general?) is how an artists' feelings may not be fully realized when they're put in the work. but they're still put in there.

so someone else who is also Going Through It could see themselves in the work, lack of Clarity and all, along with some new creative input which might help them give those feelings shape and form.

'someone with the same anxiety as me made this?'