The Used's Bert McCracken, Image via @TheUsed
The Used performed at Liberty Hall, on Gadigal Land, on Tuesday 19 August.
If you were an uncharitable person – or just someone who doesn’t know the genre very well – you might describe an “ageing emo” as a paradox in terms. After all, the hyperbolic and unfailingly sincere punk rock subgenre has always found a particularly devoted fanbase among teenagers.
And that makes sense. The Used, for instance, make music concerned with very, very big feelings. Just take a song like “I’m A Fake,” which opens with a piece of spoken word poetry that tackles both self-harm and love, and then somehow gets even more intense once the music kicks in.
Yet to dismiss such a band and the genre they operated in as exclusively adolescent is to make a grave and snobbish mistake. We never really grow out of the extremity of feeling that defined our teenage years; we just get better at hiding it. And it’s not just teenagers who get subsumed with emotion, or who need to play The Used’s magnum opus, In Love and Death, at such a loud volume that it blasts their brains clean.
The Used performed that album in full at Sydney’s Liberty Hall, and there were a lot of “ageing emos” in the house. The Used’s lead singer, Bert McCracken, is one of them – deep into the gig, he ushered his young children onstage. Clad in earmuffs, they headbanged away, while McCracken sang a song that he introduced as being about “sexual intercourse.”
But listening to The Used’s songs played with extreme technical skill, to the delight of an audience that sang along to every word, it was clear that these tracks are so expansive and complex that saying they are about just one thing is to do them a disservice.
“All That I’ve Got,” the standout from the record, had beauty and heartache and goofiness in it, all at once. McCracken hopped about onstage, one hand clad in a black glove, and gave it his all, ratcheting up the emotional tenor of the evening to near unbearable levels.
At one point, McCracken announced that the day after the gig, he’d be celebrating 13 years of sobriety. A cheer went up across the crowd. After a pause, McCracken told them, his voice trembling with feeling, that he had only reached such a milestone because of the support of the people in the room – and because of the music he had made.
It was classic The Used: emotional, open, a declaration totally free of irony. You can side-eye that kind of simplistic, open-hearted way of making art if you like. Many have. But it has a power entirely of its own – a power that’s undeniable whether you’re a 40-something, a teenager, or a kid standing next to your dad onstage, listening to the songs that saved him.
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