Keeping Up Disappearances

Notoriety comes at different levels, from the kid with the fanzine to the guy on TV. But how does growing up as a hardcore kid prepare you—or leave you unprepared—for being perceived?

My other day job also requires being seen. Thursday, live at The Worcester Palladium. Worcester, MA. January 23, 2022. Photo by Adam Parshall.

I.

Back in the first few months of Anti-Matter, I ran a short-lived interview series called Unlikely Sources. If you weren’t there for it, it was a special feature where I invited hardcore kids who wound up in ostensibly “non-hardcore” places to choose and discuss three songs from our community that still have personal meaning to them. Friendly Fires frontman Ed Macfarlane chose to chop it up about Youth of Today, Kiss it Goodbye, and Amebix. Celebrity chef and TV personality Graham Elliot joined me to talk about Christie Front Drive, The Promise Ring, and Texas is the Reason. I did not receive an ounce of ire from speaking with either of them. But in September of 2023, when I brought on Max Bernstein—a New York hardcore kid, much-loved in our local scene, whose current job has taken him around the world as the guitarist for Taylor Swift—one anonymous reader left a comment that has been somewhat stuck in my craw ever since.

“What the fuck is this, honestly?” he asked. “The Eras Tour is an abomination that has highlighted how disconnected musicians and touring are from your average music fan. I was so excited for [Anti-Matter], but this isn’t it.”

I let it go at the time because, obviously, we are all entitled to our opinions. But whether or not I simply disagreed with the premise of his objection isn’t what actually bothered me. It was just how far this reader missed the point. So what the fuck is this, honestly? I thought I should tell you.

For one thing, I didn’t ask Max about his day job. Just like I didn’t ask Ned Russin from Glitterer to go deep inside the retail jobs he uses to make ends meet or how I didn’t ask Andrew Kline from Strife to wax poetic about his career in real estate. There are certainly moments when I will choose to talk about a person’s job in an interview, but most of the time, a job in and of itself is not really the most interesting part of a person’s story to me. In Max’s case, simply presenting the fact that he plays guitar for Taylor Swift felt like enough. And that fact was only salient in this context because I have always been fascinated by the way our lives in hardcore have a tendency to bring us to wildly different places, and Max’s trip is one of the most extreme I’ve ever seen. Our conversation was not about the destination, then, but the journey. (His journey just also happened to include a love for Nausea and Dag Nasty.) So if you’re going to tell me that you read the original print version of Anti-Matter, and that it made you “so excited” for this iteration, then I’d have a hard time understanding how you could have missed the fact that these are the kinds of stories that I have consistently aspired to tell. My version of hardcore has always been in its capacity to be a zero-fucks instigator for adventure, not an impediment to experience. When all is said and done, I’d like to believe that people will remember this work for being about tracing these experiences, wherever they go, and sharing these stories to provide a more human understanding of hardcore culture and each other.

It’s for this reason, I suppose, that I have always been so radically inclusive in my view of hardcore, and it is only because I am writing this now that I realize how this particular example fits into that view: At some point, whenever someone from our community reaches a certain level of notoriety or proximity to fame, we have a tendency to disconnect that person from their ability to feel. We somehow lose empathy for them. We talk about them as if they didn’t grow up with the same hardcore ways of being that we did, as if hardcore’s ways of being are factually incapable of moving our lives in more than one direction. Max only bore the brunt of this tendency in a single stray comment, but it still left me agitated. Because gatekeeping, to me, is as much bullshit when you’re trying to kick people out as it is when you think that you personally wield the power to decide who gets in.

II.

I’ve always suspected that my readers were intuitive, but when I announced Anti-Matter’s upcoming hiatus, I was surprised by how many of you understood that there was also a mental health component to this decision—in spite of the fact that I never actually mentioned one. Out of quite literally hundreds of comments, DMs, and emails that I received from well-wishing readers, I’d estimate that a good 40 percent of them included some reference to the importance of “taking care of myself.” It was heartening because it showed that we are, in fact, capable of empathy for people who are in, what I’d call, at least a semi-public position. Your kindness to me did not go unnoticed.

I have always struggled with a fact of my life that I call “being perceived,” on some days more than others. Interestingly, I’ve noticed more recently that other people have begun using this phrase—Kat Moss from Scowl was the first to use it here, in a conversation with me last year—but my first brush with “being perceived,” as an idea, came from my exposure to the work of 18th-century philosopher George Berkeley. In Berkeley’s view, “being perceived” is, on one hand, proof of existence. “To be is to be perceived,” he famously said. At the same time, Berkeley also suggested that perception itself is inherently flawed. This is because “being perceived” only demonstrates the existence of something; it does not pledge to accurately describe it.

I am not “famous.” But to the extent that I live in public—by playing music, by existing on social media, by publishing Anti-Matter and reminding you that I exist at least twice a week—I open myself up to constant perception, accurate or not, and I have felt the accumulating results of these perceptions for my entire adult life now. Whether or not these perceptions are positive (“he’s a legend” or, God forbid, “he’s a role model”) or negative (“he’s a narcissist” or “he’s a navel-gazing prick”) bear no weight on the overall effect of how it feels. The reality is, sometimes, I get overwhelmed. And I do need to protect myself from that. Almost everyone I know in a similar position that I’ve ever talked to about this understands that feeling. It’s visceral and it affects you and we all respond to it in our own ways. Whether it’s someone in a hardcore band acting out and/or saying something regrettable, whether it’s someone going above and beyond to do something good, or whether it’s someone (as has been the case with me) who just seems to disappear for years on end, what you are seeing is at least in part the result of that weight of perception being pressing down.

There were moments early in my life where I was able to spend time with friends from the hardcore scene who had become legitimately famous for one reason or another, and even with a second-hand experience of their lives, I knew I didn’t want that for myself. They struggle with a kind of unrelenting perception that can truly alter your sense of self in ways that I could never handle. I know that. But there has never been a time when I’ve wanted to tell them they “asked for it” or that “this never would have happened… if.” Life doesn’t work that way. The substance of our lives today is the result of dozens, if not hundreds of small decisions—and there are at least as many possible outcomes. Some of the hardcore kids I grew up with became doctors. Some became construction workers. Others run businesses or crunch numbers. A few of them became world-famous. It would be easy to forget that we all come from the same place, but I’ve made it a point to remember because I don’t believe that empathy is an optional feature of our culture.

Pete Wentz in the 1990s. Photo credit unknown.

III.

Imagine, if you will, this perfectly feasible scenario: As a kid in the ‘90s, you came up in your local straight-edge hardcore scene. You loved this community more than anything, because it gave you an opportunity to be heard and to feel seen. You contributed by going to every show, making fanzines, and eventually, playing in as many bands that would let you play with them—bands with names like Extinction, Racetraitor, and Firstborn (often stylized as “XFIRSTBORNX” because, again, it’s the ‘90s). You played bass, you played guitar, you sang. You did what needed to be done.

As the decade came to an end, you decided to start a new band for fun. Something less apocalyptic and more melodic. In the early 2000s, there was nothing more fun than pop-punk, so you found a bunch of like-minded hardcore kids and went in that direction. And it was fun. You named your band after a Simpsons character and wrote songs with titles like “Sending Postcards from a Plane Crash (Wish You Were Here).” You still played all your local venues—basements and bowling alleys—and it was all business as usual, until one day, it wasn’t. Month after month, the band gets bigger, until the fire marshals start shutting down more shows than they don’t. The pace continues until you find yourself on the radio, on TV, and, at its peak, in the tabloids. You are still only in your twenties when your life becomes unrecognizable. There’s a lot more to this story, but this all happened to Pete Wentz and Fall Out Boy.

“On one level, we worked so hard and so counter-intuitively, and we were told no by so many people, that we felt validated,” Pete tells me about the experience, in a conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “All my memories are so compressed because we did so much, but it was maybe that next year where it started: You couldn’t leave your hotel. You would [have to] go in through the kitchen. That level? That was the closest level our band would have to a boy-band or something like that. That level, I was like, I don’t like that. I have an appreciation for the love that people have for the art. But to get to the point where it’s like, I don’t leave my hotel room… When you don’t leave your hotel room, there’s a lot of loneliness.”

While so many of us can relate to the first half of Pete’s story—some of us, perhaps, even frighteningly so—the second half is an experience that the majority of us will never have. Bringing those two pieces of his life together into one cohesive narrative is one of the reasons why I felt compelled to speak with Pete. I wanted to understand how growing up as a hardcore kid prepares you—or leaves you unprepared—for being perceived at such a high level. 

“Being at the level where you can just call a restaurant and get a reservation, that’s a great level,” he laughs, but then adds, “Anything beyond that is excessive. What you gain is not worth what you miss out on.”

IV.

In full transparency, I am sad about the impending (and quite possibly indefinite) hiatus of Anti-Matter, but I am also already feeling a sense of relief. As many of you suspected, the kind of constant exposure and vulnerability that this project demands of me isn’t always the best thing for my mental health. Working with these demands for as long as I did, however, did help me understand how much I need to reclaim a certain amount of time for myself—for composing songs you’ll never hear, writing journals you’ll never read, and building relationships you’ll never know about. It’s been so long since I did something just to do it, and that’s what I’m looking forward to most of all.

Back in 2009, when Fall Out Boy went on a hiatus, Pete famously said, “I think the world needs a little less Pete Wentz.” There’s a certain amount of self-awareness in that statement that I always appreciated, and I think that, especially in the scope of everything that had happened to him in that first decade, simply disappearing seemed like an incredibly hardcore thing to do. I imagine some people thought he was crazy for pulling the brakes on one of the most popular bands of the 2000s—as there have been people who have challenged my decision to pull the brakes on this. But endings are often about reconnecting with your own sense of self and rediscovering who you are outside of the strange realities we are often thrust into. They’re about remembering we’re only human. Whether you’re a Fall Out Boy or a fanzine editor, sometimes we all need the same things—and we’re all better off when we see ourselves in each other. That’s what the fuck this is.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy.

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