A melody, a guitar riff, a drum break, are all simple auditory elements that can instantly transport a listener to another place and time. A set of 10 or 12 songs can embrace a generation of kids, adults, or even teenagers, reminding them of a place in time. Great bands do this easily. Mediocre bands can too, if on a smaller, less life-changing scale. Jimmy Eat World has this year for the 207-person strong graduating class of Ypsilanti High. Everyone I know owns their self-titled, essentially their breakout record, and has at least one song inextricably wrapped in memory.

Jimmy’s is a band that binds us. I usually consider myself a unique individual, at least taste-wise, so I should despise all Jimmy Eat World output by rights. Simplistic, no-duh pop-rock? J-14 lyrics and melodies that rip off Weezer like it’s going out of style? The indie-nerd in me withers and dies when I say this, but I don’t hate it. It’s not half as original as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, or as intriguing as British Sea Power, or as innovative as just about anything from the last ten years, of course. My love affair with this sound has almost nothing to do with the sound—it’s about shedding all sensation of being an individual, or unique or different or independent. It’s feeling part of a generation, a part of my class, c/o 2006.

Jimmy Eat World songs are my high school years. Sophomore year, when I was slowly but surely losing my best friend to his Courtney Love of a girlfriend and he refused to dump her ho-ass and see that she was blatantly screwing him over—”Get It Faster” fueled my revenge fantasies, which all interestingly enough involved eggs and parked cars. He was a bastard, and damn it if Jim Atkins didn’t understand that. I was totally the jilted protagonist/antagonist of that song, and it will forever be the tune I hark back to when I am feeling cynical and jaded and bitter. It’s misguided angst, pointless anger. It’s what we feel.

These are the high school memories that we all share, even if we experienced them separately. We all remember the tune behind each heavy dance with that boy or girl we were crazy about, right? That was “A Praise Chorus,” conjuring up that spinning sensation of dancing your life away and thinking “yes! I can tell them how I really feel!” There were the hyper-intense football games shouting ourselves crazy, and late-night joyrides around a muffled city with the radio up. Whenever I was feeling particularly splendiferous (and in the mood to use such words as “splendiferous”), I’d pack my CD player full of new batteries and take a walk downtown with “The Authority Song,” full of a quite smug sense that I, at 16, could do whatever the hell I wanted (at least, what was possible without a driver’s license).

Will the songs fade with the passing of time, and all its sickening crimes? Hopefully not. If I lose the mixtape backing these four years of crowded thoughts, there won’t be much of me left to take to college.

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