I think my main issue with all of this is “King for a Day” is fucking tremendous.
In short, I have not slept well since first seeing the music video for Pierce the Veil’s “King for a Day” a few months ago.
For context, my friend and I began an emo podcast in 2016 with modest expectations — to reconnect after a few years of drifting apart and to discuss some of the emo and pop-punk bands we listened to in high school. Thus began our relationship with emo Twitter, the memes that come with it, and the start of my familiarity with Pierce the Veil, a late-scene 2010s Warped Tour act that I completely missed.
That was my perception of them — an unknown from Warped Tours that weren’t mine, ones that I did not care for. (Old man yells at cloud, et al.)
After leaving for college in the fall of 2009, there were a few reasons I drifted from emo. Vampire Weekend’s self-titled and Kid Cudi’s “Man on the Moon” did a lot of the heavy lifting, and I didn’t mind whiffing on solid efforts from the bands I loved like MCR’s “Danger Days” and Paramore’s “Brand New Eyes.”
There was also the elephant in the room, some of the real problems that existed within those 2000s emo and pop-punk scene, some of the reasons we make an effort to mention bands like Brand New a little as possible on the show.
As far as I knew, bands I was too square to be into in real-time — acts like Modern Baseball and the Front Bottoms — were championing an emo revival, but were avoiding rites of passage like Warped Tour.
For a long time, all I knew about Pierce the Veil was that, somewhere on the Internet, there was an amusing photo of Jason Derulo wearing one of their T-shirts. The shirt is bright blue with neon green text, like a ghastly relic from the late 2000s “neon” era of emo, a time when scene hair got weirder and the album covers became vibrant.
But then, one day, YouTube’s algorithm changed that. I was introduced to Vic Fuentes, Kellin Quinn (not a member of Pierce the Veil, but someone who features on the track and in the music video), and a fictional bank manager named Hubert Smalls.
A few minutes later, I’d heard my first Pierce the Veil song.
I think my main issue with all of this is “King for a Day” is fucking tremendous.
So I watched it again. And again. I bet you’ve never had a Friday night like this.
“King for a Day” may not have been the final nail in the coffin of 2000s pop-punk and emo, but it carries the weight of a wooden stake, one that was around for the — technically undead — final few years of Warped Tour; years I made a point to ignore.
What jumped out about the “King for a Day” video immediately was how anti-1 percent it was. In the video, Fuentes and Quinn work for a crooked bank manager who appears to be hiding money in offshore accounts. They coordinate a fake bank robbery, one that would hopefully end with a big payout for their friends and coworkers, perhaps allowing them to imagine living like a king one day.
Without any disrespect whatsoever to The Hotelier, who do a fine job of making it clear how much they’d like to spit into the faces of billionaires, band members literally hold a bank manager at gunpoint in the “King for a Day” video, causing him to wet himself where he’s sitting.
But this wasn’t Jaret Reddick or Tom Delonge sitting on a toilet in a fart punk video from the early 2000s. It was silly but it wasn’t funny, a video from a new decade, a decade that came after one of the worst financial crashes in U.S. history. There was still a punk desire to stick it to the man, but it was more — perhaps appropriately — sinister.
Another 2000s pop punk/emo trope molded and perfected in the image of “King for a Day” is Quinn’s feature. On our show, we’ve been on an ongoing search for the “emo voice,” hoping to one day give it as much credit as the NPR crowd gave vocal fry way back when. The main example of this, we feel, is how nevershoutnever pronounces the word “it” in the chorus of “Can’t Stand It.”
In the song, Quinn provides a quick, high-pitched-but-not-too-pretty pre-chorus, informing a lover that enough is enough, we’re done. “Done,” in this instance, is sang in the emo voice if we’ve ever heard it. But again, this isn’t a list of things that went wrong in the making of “King for a Day,” but rather a list of things that went almost upsettingly well.
How, in the fuck, had I missed this.
Then comes the sundae’s cherry, the breakdown. Normally a song’s bridge, this was an essential part of songwriting for anyone within earshot of a Midwestern VFW hall from 2003-2012. Like Babe Ruth calling his shot, some 2000s emo bands decided to add lyrics before a breakdown, using that time to inform the crowd that, soon, there would be few chuggy, gnarly bars where they could attempt to fucking kill each other.
In “King for a Day,” it goes as such: “Hail Mary, forgive me. Blood for blood, hearts beating. Come at me. Now, this is war. (Fuck with this new beat).”
While pop punk/2000s emo aren’t genres that mind using a softer reprise of the hook or chorus in place of a proper bridge (sans for, notably, several Mark Hoppus efforts), everything about this breakdown/musical bridge works, which is terrible news for anyone who wasn’t paying attention in 2012 when the song was released.
For these reasons, and probably many more, I have not stopped listening to “King for a Day” and watching its music video since finding it years after I should have. If an FBI agent is tracking my online activity, he or she is very aware of this. It is ruining my life, and for that I am grateful.
If Pierce the Veil didn’t start a new revolution, they, at the very least, shook the earth underground. “King for a Day” has since gone platinum, which is really pretty fucking remarkable.
In the process, emo Twitter made a point to tell me to think about it. Well, I did.
Now I don’t want to feel a thing anymore.
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