The first time I saw Citizen was at Warped Tour, where I bought Youth on CD and they all signed it for me, as well as a sticker with their name on it. It wasn’t just that I came across gifs reciting the lyrics of their hit “The Night I Drove Alone” that captured the unbridled depression that would soak the internet for the rest of eternity: “I should’ve crashed the car / The night I drove alone.”Īfter school, I took the bus to my minimum wage job washing dishes at a bakery where I would put earphones in and blast music until my eardrums hurt while I wielded a sponge over an array of culinary utensils for hours. Somewhere in the mess, the artwork of Youth caught my eye: The title spelled out in all roses, looking like a design on a Brandy Melville shirt or a piece of Lana Del Rey merchandise. I was graduating from my attachment to third wave emo bands like My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy, easing into alternative indie (or as Tumblr called it, “soft grunge”) groups like Arctic Monkeys and The Neighbourhood. It immediately solidified their place in the scene amongst bands like La Dispute and Neck Deep, who I got into as I started high school by traversing through Tumblr. I'd venture to guess the first-gen college student paying their own way to campus was not tearing down lamp posts.Īsk me how many Storrs students failed their courses for using Chat GPT on finals (hint: the number is STAGGERING).Unveiled on Jten years ago this weekend - via Run For Cover records, Youth was the strongest a debut record could possibly be. The campus is filled with entitled kids whose mommy and daddy gave them everything and think they have oppression because of self-diagnosed anxiety. this was her last semester as she got tenure-track elsewhere. My wife taught in Storrs for something like 6 or 7 years. I expect you'd see better decision-making from a community college. At the end of the day, that only gets you so far. Getting into Storrs doesn't mean you aren't an idiot-it means you have basic school skills. Grabbing a phone to post on tiktok is like a reflex to them.Īnd I think you vastly overestimate the intelligence of your average 18-21-year-old, no matter what school they got into.

Kids don't understand the implications of everything (everything) being recorded. Knowing vandalism is a crime =/= thinking you won't get caught. Hopefully, they learn from this and all the other students at UConn learn as well.

It's sad that kids will be expelled for celebrating. Why? Because we wanted that person to host again (so we could do dumb things). When I was their age, the biggest football players would kick the crap out of someone trying to mess with the host house. Tearing down lamp posts that fall on fellow students, using that post as a battering ram to destroy school buildings, flipping cop cars? My kids in high school don't have parties to go to anymore because their class mates destroyed the house every time. Of course, it was dumb, but it seems different now. We burned stuff, but it was generally our own stuff and it was remarkably controlled in a quad.

That being said, this current generation doesn't seem to understand controlled chaos. Quite frankly, I don't know how people beat us to the punch because I remember being out there seconds after the ball hit the floor. I was one of the first to drop a couch on a bonfire after Tate's shot. I did dumb things at UConn (and before and after).

Punch mosh pit gif