i've truly grown up (the McCafferty stuff)

about 4 years ago, i stumbled upon a band that i became instantly obsessed with and loved so much. that was band McCafferty. up until today i hadn't listened to them since early 2020 when all the shit happened. i just want to tell a little story today.

i first found the band from a sally face tiktok. the song Trees was used, and later Beachboy and Trees both became very popular on tiktok and increased the band's popularity. me, as a young emo queer mentally ill 13 year old, very quickly became obsessed. i thought that they were the best band ever, on par with MCR and TFB - side note, i found tfb from a sally face tiktok too! and glass animals,, sally face cosplay tiktok really made my music taste what it is now. basically i was enamoured and wanted to inject Yarn and Dead Bird into my bloodstream.

and as a young and impressionable and depressed teenager, i was obviously feeling a connection to them and having a parasocial relationship. what made it worse was that whenever i'd tag them on my instagram story, they would always reply and answer me and generally be great! that's why i was so personally heartbroken when all the awful shit Nick Hartkop had done and what a terrible person he was came out.

yes it's stupid looking back on it now, but back then McCafferty was really one of the main things that i enjoyed in my life. my family situation was terrible at that time and my mental health plummeted due to dysphoria and illness and just a whole bunch of shit, so yeah having a band that wrote about shit like that and that i felt understood my feelings was very important to me!

after everything was exposed, i couldn't listen to their music without legitimately feeling sick. i didn't want to be supporting someone like that, no matter how much i adored their music, so i removed all their songs from my playlists and basically vowed to never listen to them again. and i didn't for nearly 3 years, until i decided to get nostalgic a few days ago and listen to all the music i was obsessed with when i was 13.

i thought i'd hear Beachboy or Clementine start playing and immediately feel such a sick melancholy that i could no longer listen to this band i once loved because the lead singer is a prick. i thought i'd be filled with that same sense of rapture i was whenever i used to listen to them. but all that happened was i  realised that i don't like them anymore.

i've spent all this time wishing and hoping to find another band that sounds like them but aren't led by a bad person, or just wishing that Hartkop wasn't an asshole so the band was still going. but i needn't do that anymore, because i genuinely do not enjoy their music now!

sure, Yarn still fucking slaps, and Beachboy will always be good, but i found myself thinking "wow, how did i like these guys so much?". that's crazy to me. i found Trees needlessly aggressive and cringey, and found Clementine just plain boring. 

it really hit me how much i've grown up. sure, i still love a lot of bands i did at 13. i listen to The Front Bottoms literally every day, and you don't grow out of MCR or FOB. i still think Hollywood Undead are fucking GOATed (i really should not have been listening to them at 12 years old but whatever) despite how disgusting them and their songs are. Jon Bellion and Anthony Amorim shaped me as a person and fill me with nostalgia now. but somehow, in my now 17 year old still queer and mentally ill brain, McCafferty sounds like shit.

i'm glad i don't like them now. i can stop pining for a different timeline and just enjoy the music i love now! my taste has really fucking developed too. no one asked and no one cares, but i am gonna give a few music recs:

The Front Bottoms, Magdalena Bay, Sonic Sea Turtles, Orville Peck, PUP, Joyce Manor, Hot Mulligan, Charly Bliss, Indigo De Souza, Jeff Rosenstock... a lot of these artists are pretty different from each other so bare that in mind!

anyways, thanks for reading if you read this, let me know your thoughts on listening to problematic artists! stay jepic scraz fans.