For a Paramore fan, I’m pretty optimistic

When asked, I like to tell a mean tale of redemption. As a scarred youngling, I once launched myself onto the jugular of an older kid in a moving school bus. I wore short pants, my kneecaps exposed to the nippy air, dew and rain, which came down and peeked through windows at this showdown. If we had money to bet we’d have something more illegal going. After seating myself on this poor kid’s torso, I lunged back my tightened fist and brought it down, my eyes closed and heard skin slapping skin. And then it’s gone, replaced by a song in my recollection. “If you have an opinion…” Guitar riffs in stereo, a smattering of drums in the eponymously titled ‘This Is Why’ from Paramore’s latest album. “...maybe you should shove it.” Smack, smack, smack. This will teach you to not mock stutterers, man, and this will teach you to pick fights with people who at least wear long pants. I don’t think it hurt all that much. I was a kid, for crying out loud.

College is the coolest. You encounter dilettantes who have listened to Arctic Monkeys their entire lives with not a trace of irony. You dine with aesthetes who cut, nay, serrated their teeth on English music, not with contemporary pop on VH1 but with their parents waxing eloquent about oddballs like Elton John, David Byrne and Robbie Williams. Every time someone dyes their hair cyan, mauve or burnt sienna, which happens a lot, I wince at the missed opportunity to paint it auburn or ochre or to flame your locks with orange. If I ever bleached my hair, I’d be in a real pickle. Glowing vermillion hair just screams obnoxious self-confidence, and I don’t have that. Maybe Hayley Williams, Paramore’s frontwoman, does. In interviews across time, she drinks deeply from the rich character of her Southern US upbringing, consonants flayed on undulating stone, a characteristic timbre that is pleasing to croon even to yourself. My obsession with the band is apocryphal. Some years ago, I was watching a version of Twilight (2008), with audio commentary from the director, Catherine Hardwicke, and the lead pair (Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson). Pattinson at one point seems to say, “Hayley… of Paramore… likes garden burgers.” Gaaah-den burgers. The next time I was at a deli, I asked for a gaah-den-variety burger and a Coke, thank you very much. It’s a veggie burger by any other name, man, I said, to raised eyebrows and a threatening fist.

The celebrated soundtrack for the film also featured a Paramore song. My blinkered memory suggests it was in the running for the same music award as AR Rahman’s ‘Jai Ho’. But maybe I’m wrong. ‘Decode’, the first true Paramore chartbuster, by my account anyway, scores the ending credits of Twilight atop miscible clouds and pond, dancing through blotted ink reflections of pines and firs. It is the coda, the ember of a passionate moment of fury. It picked the Ship of Theseus-like band (because the more the bandmates change the more they remain the same) and hurled them into stardom. At the same time, I was having to put up a fight in my teeny shorts, ankles scratchy and calves lined in grooves where the socks hurt them. For a couple of years, I had been bestowed with a quaint sobriquet which would translate to a parrot, courtesy of the educational regimen that cajoled students like me into rote learning, and quite masterfully at that. I was at the top of the class, every class. My sister says I was a nerd. One of the great tragedies of life is unrecognised genius. Look at any of the child prodigies around me, who, underappreciated, wilted and floundered. Not me: I didn’t care! I continued to spin the merry-go-round at our school, monkeying around fragrant eucalyptus trees, filling my pockets with cones and arboreal furballs, scraping my knee every other week, getting kicked out of football practice because I, well, sucked, and meandered on the field’s shoulders too much. Of that time, I’d say I was actually woefully heartbroken.

Will today’s kids garner the muster to sucker punch another brawny loser? For the dusty few years I endured in the musty claptrap, I stared out of the window. At home, I gleaned my cousins’ English-language playlist through Bluetooth and dreamt. ‘Brick By Boring Brick’ was a favourite. What surfeit of sugar: “Nothing compares to / A quiet evening alone / Just the one two of us who's counting on / That never happens / I guess I’m dreaming again / Let’s be more than / This now” (from ‘crushcrushcrush’). Pleasant also was their cover of Foo Fighters’ ‘My Hero’. You better believe that whenever I felt a little stifled I was playing this on my mental turntable. Later in the winter, amidst chants of parrot parrot parrot, I did it. I came into my own. What song? “That’s what you get when you let your heart win, whoa / I drowned out all my sense …” Whimpering smack amidst chuckles. “…with the sound of its beating.” Looking back, I feel ashamed. Two days later, I played cricket with the kids and him and lost pretty handily.

For teenagers coming out of a similar, middle-class childhood, Paramore characterised a goody-two-shoes strain of rioting and angst, represented, at least in their early years, not by drunken shebang but staying up well past your bedtime, or reading a book when you’ve been told not to. So “frickin’” bad. Raised Christian in a conservative US state, Paramore released albumsthat, until 2017, credited God on their sleeves. They never swore. They never drank. In 2007, as teens, they were interviewed by Tom Bryant (he later wrote a wondrous book on another iconoclastic American rock band, My Chemical Romance) and he said Hayley was the unquestioned leader, the unspoken wielder of the baton, preening everyone else’s clothing, not held back, bursting at the seams. She and her revolving cast of bandmates have broken apart, mended and regrouped across the years. Sure, everybody loses friends. Few people have an entire band, acting contemporaneously, orchestrating a Greek chorus around it. I lost my first tweenage best friend at 13. We just had nothing in common anymore. To my suggestion of ‘The Boys are Back’ from High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2008), he caught only back and boys, and recommended to me the mid-’90s boyband that gave us hit lines such “Am I original? (Yeah.) Am I sexual?” Um. Not my type, dude, do you get me? “You see a flood-lit form, I see a shirt design” (from “No Friend”). I’m having a hard time. Paramore had also parted ways with their drummer and guitarist Farro brothers two years previously and were wallowing in the fallout. This was a stage of murderous metamorphosis.

In later years, I would begin to detest schooling. I guess all industrious students are either preternaturally gifted or have to burnish their brains with pursuits of paltry praise. People get used to brilliance, you know, and if your drive is founded in this quicksand of hearing sweet nothings, you’re in for more than a ride. It was a period of chilling darkness. A piece of evidence is that I took to Zayn’s discography, screeching the opening notes to ‘Dusk Till Dawn’ (2017) at a moment’s notice, gallivanting in the shard-like lines from ‘Like I Would’, almost contemplating adopting the amusements talked about in ‘Still Got Time’ (ft. PARTYNEXTDOOR). It leaves a bad taste in my mouth even if I elected to brush my tongue against steel combs. I had always liked writing for pleasure but now the words flew out of the open window. It was writer’s block of a carceral kind and searing finality. I waited. I went back to the Twilight soundtrack and listened to tracks by Muse, Mutemath and Radiohead. And refound Paramore. At the same time, Williams was going through a terribly rough patch. As she separated from her longtime partner, she went on record to say that it was the pits. She stopped eating and had panic attacks, often having to avail the services of healthcare providers. The band announced a hiatus that same year, largely due to reasons of exhaustion and the dearth of mental stability, mired by disquieting quandaries. A year later, after graduating from school, I took a break from studying and stayed at home. Paramore, unmoored by my personal history and freaks of choice, went on touring.

I had a glimmer of success with exams and joined a law school for my further education. It has been bollocks! If I was a schmoe or a schmaltz, I would call it a joyride, I think. Writing is easy to come by. I read and envied Susan Sontag and Sohini Chattopadhyay and Christian Lorentzen and Baradwaj Rangan and Adam Gopnik and Iris Murdoch and Edward Said. And Philip Roth. During evenings, I daydreamed about articles in The New Yorker, Harvard Law Review, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Vogue, GQ and The Paris Review. On the other side of the earth, Williams was working on herself and released a solo album, titled Petals for Armor in 2020. Such majesty: “Eat my breakfast in the nude / Lemon water, living room / Home is where I’m feminine / Smells like citrus and cinnamon” (from ‘Cinnamon’). Sundry ostentation: “Little wrinkle by your eye / I never noticed ’til right now / Little vicious tiger stripes” (from ‘My Friend’). It felt weird, eerie, to have a virtually telepathic system to one’s idols. This grain of serendipity was truly incredible, I tell myself, and a bit delusional. But one has to have one’s totems, one’s blades of grass to hold on to while staring into the fathomless abyss of the sky.

Last year, I wrote about the political nature of film censorship for the London School of Economics’ blog. It was condemnatory of many parties that have ever held power in India. Some smug fops like me find it a laughing matter when contemporaries assail you with tidy aphorisms like: academic writing should be apolitical! You want to take it easy. But can academia be free of a political slant? Can writing ever be squeaky clean and not rich with personal missives? Isn’t the personal… political? I think about that. With their latest album, This Is Why, Paramore comes together and bandies around a pennant of incredible tensile strength: they’ve gone political. They say it was always there. The album art has them pressing their faces against the skein of the glass casing that barely contains them. Simmering in the broth of the lockdown years and Trump, they have anthems and quizzes, introverted lines of query and slapstick throwdowns. In the throes of lines like “Better have conviction / ’Cause we want crimes of passion” (from ‘This Is Why’), “You know it’s a lie / There was a fire (Metaphorically) / Be there in five (Hyperbolically)” (from ‘Running Out Of Time’), and “I am attracted to broken people / I pick ’em up and now my fingers are bleedin’” (from ‘Thick Skull’), yours truly can luxuriate in the idylls of hyperspecific tales of probable triumph, bask in emo varnish, maybe plan further takedowns of losers, David-and-Goliath style. It feels good to be back.

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