Maybe Pop-Punk's Not Such A Bad Thing To Be: "Constant Headache" by Joyce Manor
Maybe Pop-Punk's Not Such A Bad Thing To Be: "Constant Headache" by Joyce Manor
Drumming Upstream #3
Welcome back to Drumming Upstream! We’re now three songs into the 484 track playlist that I started with. After subtracting the song that Joni Mitchell removed when she took her catalog off of Spotify last week I’m down to 480 songs to learn. If any other musicians, particularly those with difficult drum parts, would like to take their music off of Spotify in the near future… well, I wouldn’t complain about it!
Now, let’s talk about Joyce Manor’s minor pop punk anthem “Constant Headache”.
Side A
“Constant Headache”
By Joyce Manor
S/T
Released January 11th, 2011
Liked on July 14th, 2014
Do you remember Tumblr? It was a social media site. Maybe you heard about it from the news or from someone you knew who used it. Maybe you used it yourself, or maybe you have strong opinions about the people who did. Maybe the only reason you looked at Tumblr was to gawk at it. Like any sufficiently massive social media website Tumblr means many things to many people. There’s a credible case to be made that it is responsible for the popularization, misuse, and eventual banalisation of at least a baker’s dozen of academic terms. It was powerful enough to launch or destroy a music career of a not insignificant size. It was home to weird teenagers the world over given free reign to be as weird as they wanted. Tumblr was primarily good at one thing: vibe curation. What made Tumblr distinct from its competitors at its peak was its flexibility. Twitter was text based, and short form to boot. Instagram was still photos only. Facebook was crawling with coworkers and relatives. On Tumblr your medium was anything, your audience anyone. Photography, illustration, video, audio, text, comics, gifs, all fair game. You could curate a vibe that was legible, a mess, or, in the case of the best Tumblrs, alchemically both.
Given that Tumblr’s users were by and large young, one of the most common ways that they represented themselves was through lyrics to popular music. The more dramatic the better. I can’t tell which happened first, whether the bands showed up to fill the demand for Tumblr-able verses or if Tumblr users searched them out and elevated them on their own. In either case, by the time I started using the site in the early 2010s it was stuffed with selected stanzas from emo bands, ripped from their original context and repurposed to signify something profound and heartfelt about their poster.
This is how I first heard Joyce Manor, as the band that wrote “Constant Headache,” and whose lyrics adorned pastel backgrounds and grainy VHS screenshots. I must have seen the phrase “Maybe human isn’t such a bad thing to be” on Tumblr at least as often as Homestuck gifs or allusions to Spiders Georg. Joyce Manor were still a pop punk band during Tumblr’s peak. Had they come around a decade earlier they might have been a very successful one. But pop punk in the early 2010s was in something of a liminal space. The days of TRL were long over, the days of TikTok were yet to come. Paramore had grown up and dropped the punk from their pop. Olivia Rodrigo was still in elementary school. Caught in the valley between these twin peaks Joyce Manor and their ilk were relegated to something of an indie rock side-show (not unlike Twin Peaks, or Twin Peaks).
The lines blurred both ways. My friends who played in indie rock bands started getting lumped in with emo bands that had little if anything to do with the music they were making because there were kids who listened to both without drawing a distinction. I have some personal experience with this. When I was playing drums in Sharpless we thought of ourselves as a high energy indie rock band, but in the context Chicago’s vibrant emo and math rock scene we, by comparison, came across as a slightly eccentric pop punk band. All the songs about summer probably didn’t help our case. Despite a dearth of fond memories for anything resembling Blink-182, my middle school bands of choice hewing closer to Tripp pants than Dickies shorts, it was in my best drumming interest to warm up to the idea of falling in love at the Rock Show.
This might make it sound like my taste was beholden to the trends of the day, but I had personal reasons to soften my view on pop punk. I was, as I’ve described previously, in the process of getting over myself. Being the kind of person who disliked things for the sake of the disliking wasn’t appealing to me any more. On reflection my criticisms of pop punk, that it was juvenile, overly commercialized, and prone to scumbag predation, could just as easily be leveled against the scenes a lot of my favorite music came from. And just when I started to think this stuff over, here came a wave of bands that sounded more like my favorite local acts than the soundtrack to a 00s teen comedy. Even my obnoxious East Coast elitism was melting away, as I was romantically inclined to think of Southern California with an open mind when I Liked “Constant Headache” on Spotify. Why not learn how to enjoy the lingua franca of suburbia? After all, who cared about all of this scene stuff as long as the tunes were good?
In Joyce Manor’s case the tunes were very good. The songs on S/T and Never Hungover Again are short. They don’t waste much time getting started and end just as quickly. Some of their best songs sound like they were carved out of a longer, worse song, the best parts extracted and amplified and everything else tossed. Their playing was simple, always putting melody first. They took the right stuff seriously, but didn’t sweat the small stuff. Joyce Manor were breezy. Fun, but not mindless. Earnest, but not overblown. If I were curating an alternate version of myself, the kind of person who listened to Joyce Manor didn’t seem like such a bad one to be. Which of course brings us to “Constant Headache.”
“Constant Headache” is Joyce Manor’s calling card. It is the final track on their debut album. It’s a live staple, a guaranteed sing along where anyone paying attention can sing along after two lines. Everything about the song, its slower tempo, melancholy lead guitar parts, the past tense of Barry Johnson’s lyrics, and its ultimate placement on the track order, gives it a weight absent from the rest of the album. If S/T was a fun day at the beach, “Constant Headache” is the long, sunset lit ride back home when you’re too tired to be anything be honest. As I’ve tried to make clear, Johnson’s lyrics accounted for more than a couple toes in Joyce Manor’s digital footprint. “Constant Headache” offered their fans a two-tone palette of crushly admiration and self disgust in equal proportion. Depending on your mood, or who else you thought was online, you could swap between the two with no friction. The lyrics don’t give the audience any set up, leaving them to add their own details about the night before and the next day on either side of Johnson’s snap shot. Apparently some people found the song so open ended that they assumed it was being sung from the perspective of a dog.
But “Constant Headache” wouldn’t have meant any of these things to anyone if it didn’t have that vocal melody. Verse or chorus, first line or last, Johnson delivers every lyric in the song with the same melodic cadence. The chords underneath the vocals shift from part to part but Johnson drives straight through them, hammering those 11 notes over and over. Social media sites rise and fall, relationships end, emo is revived every three years, but that melody cannot be stopped. Every time I think I’ve outgrown this tune, that it is time to drop it from my Liked playlist, the melody stays my hand. No, not this time.
On Side B we’ll talk about a less consistent part of “Constant Headache” that is nonetheless inseparable from its appeal.
Side B
“Constant Headache”
Performed by Kurt Walcher
95-100 bpm
Take a look at that BPM. That range is an approximation and a generous one at that. The tempo on “Constant Headache” changes moment to moment, and not with any real deliberation. Walcher, who did not last in Joyce Manor long enough to play on Never Hungover Again, slows down during the busier verses and speeds up on the simpler chorus groove. Even the song’s opening guitar chords are at a completely different tempo than the one the band plays when they kick in a few seconds later. By any professional metric this recording is an absolute mess, the kind of thing all of my drum teachers tried to steer me away from.
Does this make “Constant Headache” a bad performance? How can we determine that? One metric is whether the performance matches the rest of the song. In this case, Walcher fits right in. None of the composite parts of “Constant Headache” are locked to a grid. A tempo perfect version of “Constant Headache” on drums requires us to reimagine how the entire song sounds. The question then becomes whether this version re-recorded from the ground up would be any better than the version we know and Liked. My opinion? Probably not! This band’s whole charm comes from how off the cuff and raw their performances are. The reblogged refrain about the benefits of being human might not have registered the same way over perfectly even playing. Sure a quantized and pitch corrected “Constant Headache” might be easier to pitch to the playlist makers, but it wouldn’t have appealed to me as much. And then I wouldn’t have this drum cover to show you:
Turns out that it isn’t that easy to precisely play along to a song that shifts around this much. If you listen closely you might notice that I don’t reeeaaally lock into the groove until about halfway through the first verse. Otherwise, the drums are straightforward. The chorus is a big, loud rock beat. All of the fills stick to single stroke rolls. The verse groove is easier than it sounds, but that might just be because I spent three months learning a set of Blink-182 songs back in 2019 and internalized a few pop punk drumming habits. That little hi-hat splash that happens at the end of every other bar in the verse? Travis Barker as hell.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
How does “Constant Headache” stack up against the first two selections on Drumming Upstream? Well, as fondly as I remember the peak of my Joyce Manor enjoyment, Johnson has nothing on Springsteen when it comes to wistful recollection. And no matter how much I learn to love the better angels of pop punk, four chords and the youth have nothing on heavily distorted synthesized kick drums. Sorry “Constant Headache,” for now you will rest at the bottom of the leaderboard.
“Constant Headache” by Joyce Manor
I have to devote my “learning songs on drums” time to a paid gig for the rest of the month. But don’t fret, there are a number of songs on my Liked list that have nothing close to drums on them. For the next few weeks I will tackle those, and then once my schedule clears up again we’ll return to kit-friendly material.