The never-ending conversation about whether rock music is “dead” tends to hinge on the absence of a certain kind of rock star in contemporary pop music. This mythic person resembles a hybrid of Kurt Cobain and Axl Rose — a guitar-slinging, truth-speaking, drug-taking outsider who takes over the culture. A bad boy, with extra emphasis on boy. Because that sort of figure doesn’t seem to be prominent right now, rock must be flatlined, goes this line of thought.
If you subscribe to this theory, you’re missing the real story, which is that more and more of the best and most exciting rock bands are composed of people who were once marginalized in the genre — women, gay and queer voices, lesbians, transgender people, and those of non-binary gender. Anyone who still expects a rock star to look and sound like an emaciated white guy with a junked-out voice is bound to be disappointed. For everyone else, these are exciting times of hope and renewal, in which the best young rock songwriter on the planet is Courtney Barnett, the most charismatic young rock singer is Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes, and the reigning punk icon with Joe Strummer/Joey Ramone-level gravitas for the current generation is Laura Jane Grace of Against Me!
Enter one of the best young live rock bands in the world right now, the Brooklyn pop-punk duo PWR BTTM (pronounced “power bottom”). Composed of Ben Hopkins (who is queer) and Liv Bruce (who identifies as queer, non-binary, and transfeminine), PWR BTTM formed four years ago when Hopkins, 25, and Bruce, 24, met as students at Bard College in upstate New York. From the beginning, the band’s concept co-mingled high with low culture, intellectualism with party-hearty fun, humor with pathos, and the expressly personal with the broadly political. (“We reek of liberal arts,” Bruce confessed drolly to The Fader.)
On their 2015 debut album, Ugly Cherries, PWR BTTM played a style of bubblegum punk derived from the ’90s that is currently in vogue among a wave of millennial-aged bands (including Charly Bliss, Waxahatchee, Rozwell Kid, and Oso Oso) whose members were born around the time that the first Weezer and Blink-182 records came out. Lyrically, however, Hopkins and Bruce write about things that never occurred to Rivers Cuomo or Mark Hoppus — the pitfalls of traditional masculinity and the need to dismantle gender paradigms that have become outmoded in society in general, and rock music in particular.
PWR BTTM’s splendid new album, Pageant, opens boldly with one of 2017’s best side 1/track 1’s, “Silly,” an exploding piñata that contains everything that’s lovable and sort of revolutionary about them. In the verses, Hopkins reflects on how his childhood behavior was often dismissed as diminutive. “I cannot sit still!” Hopkins sings. “Never have and never will! Always running like a kid! So afraid of what I did!” But what’s most arresting about “Silly” is the guitar riff — it sounds uncannily like “Thunderstruck,” the classic-rock radio staple by the genre’s most overtly macho band, AC/DC. In the context of “Silly,” that distinctive, relentlessly chiming arena-rock guitar sound is both post-modern and utilitarian. PWR BTTM is borrowing from AC/DC as a way to snark on rock-dude posturing, and also because, duh, it rocks.
“Silly” sets the tone for the rest of Pageant, which manages to pull off the considerably difficult task of delivering the goods as a pop-punk record (there are fuzzy guitar hooks all over the place) while also subverting many (mostly heterosexual male-centric) conventions of pop-punk in witty and insightful ways. As lyricists, Hopkins and Bruce prefer miniaturist narratives about unanswered texts and unfulfilling late-night hookups. But they’re also explicit about pressing the larger cultural significance of these stories. Pageant concludes with “Stryofoam,” a song about Bruce’s gender dysphoria that wraps an otherwise triumphal record on a brutally lonely note. “I woke up and my body was my body / It looked like candy and it felt like Styrofoam,” Bruce sings. “And if I could, I’d take it off / And take a walk around the block / But since I’m stuck here, I guess I’ll call it home.”
Before then, Pageant settles into a warmly conversational rhythm between PWR BTTM’s songwriters that resembles the dynamic between Bob Mould and Grant Hart in perhaps the greatest queer-punk band ever, Hüsker Dü. Hopkins works in the Mould role as the thoughtful brooder, balancing ecstatic rockers like “Now Now” with more ruminative numbers like “LOL,” which features one of the album’s most striking lines: “I know that I’m naïve / When you are queer you’re always 19.” Bruce meanwhile is the poppy one, specializing in gooey tunes with unexpectedly serrated edges. “Cuz I’m a big bad sissy,” Bruce sings in “Sissy,” the album’s catchiest chorus. “And I’m gonna make you listen when I say.”
My only complaint about Pageant is that it can’t quite top PWR BTTM’s celebratory live show. On stage, Hopkins and Bruce enliven their songs with ample doses of theatricality — flourishes from the glittery traditions of glam rock and drag abound. Between songs they dispense one-liners and advice while tuning guitar strings and adjusting dress straps. Anyone who longs from the swaggering rock gods of old should look no further. Even better is the audience — the normal power dynamics of a rock show are flipped, with the beefy guys pushed to the margins in order to yield the best spots on the floor to PWR BTTM’s core queer constituency. But ultimately everyone is welcome at a PWR BTTM gig — the band’s critique of masculinity is so generous it can even soothe straight guys.
Pageant‘s best song is Hopkins’ “Big Beautiful Day,” a broadside set to furiously strummed power-chords that rails against “Men in every town who live to bring you down.” But Hopkins has enough empathy to reach out to those guys, too. “Within those men / There are boys / Who have never had the choice / But to grow up / And be scared to be your friend / (Jesus Christ, let’s help them!)” For anyone who values rock and roll as a venue for self-discovery and shelter, “Big Beautiful Day” will feel like an evolution, and sound like the future. And, duh, it also rocks.
Pageant is out this Friday, 5/12 via Polyvinyl. Get it here.
