This is the website of Joey Arak.

Artist: Cap’n Jazz
Song: Que Suerte

In 1998 I was at an all-ages hardcore show at Club Q in Davie, Florida, the redneck pool hall that doubled as ground zero for the South Florida hardcore scene. The shows also served as punk rock swap meets, with various vendors selling records and patches and the like. I don’t remember what bands were playing that night (probably Hot Water Music, whom I saw four or five times at Club Q in some of the rowdiest shows ever), but I remember walking up to a guy with a huge beard selling CDs out of milk crates. I had just really started getting into indie music, and I was looking for something to take home to expand my education. He recommended Analphabetapolothology by Cap’n Jazz, mostly because it was a double-disc for $10. A value buy! I had heard about Cap’n Jazz from a friend, so I bought the CD and listened to it on the way home. And on the way to school the next day. And pretty much every day for two years straight. The CDs were the complete collected discography of the band, a bunch of Chicago-area high schoolers who released only one proper album before breaking up in 1995. The Delaware-based emo powerlabel Jade Tree compiled that album and all the band’s 7″ and compilation tracks on Analphabetapolothology, which was released in 1998 and is probably the best-reviewed emo album in Pitchfork history.

I could go on and on about my favorite band of all time (sorry, Modest Mouse)—about birthdays spent wishing for a reunion over cake candles (I’m a loser), the album-art poster that was on my wall in college, the letter I gave to lead singer Tim Kinsella (a story for another day)—but meh. In hindsight, the band’s breakup was the most obvious band breakup in band breakup history. High school bands never stick together. Tim Kinsella was a singer who couldn’t really sing, whose primary focus was cramming puns and wordplay into heart-wrenching lyrics (just check out the lyrics to Que Suerte). One guitarist had a more pop sensibility and harbored his own frontman desires. The other was way more experimental and didn’t really mesh. The drummer was Tim’s little brother. Etc., etc. The family tree of bands that sprung from Cap’n Jazz is a good enough expression of all this conflict.

As far as this particular video is concerned, I have a history with it. In college, I bought a copy of a live Cap’n Jazz show on eBay. It was a show filmed at the Daily Grind in Kansas City in 1995, and at the time it was constantly popping up on eBay, the only known live video document of Cap’n Jazz. Until last week. On February 7, someone uploaded a couple of live Cap’n Jazz videos from an undated show “allegedly in the Chicago area” to YouTube, including another performance of this same song. I still like the one above more, though. They look so young, and Tim Kinsella is at his awkward and spazzy best. His Reese’s T-shirt is burned into my brain after years of repeat watching. I remember the first time I popped it into my TV/VCR, wondering how these scrawny little kids could write music that would eventually change my life forever. Such is the power of emo, friends! The whole Kansas City show is up on YouTube in bits and pieces, so nary a tear need be shed over my long lost VHS copy. Perhaps you’d also like to take check out “Yes, I am Talking to You,” featuring the most emo lyrics of all time (”I’M DYING TO TELL YOU I’M DYING!”)? Every now and again I still hope for a Cap’n Jazz reunion, but it would probably be a little depressing to see dudes in their 30’s singing these types of songs, like a more embarrassing Blink 182. And imagine what the crowd would be like. Yeesh.

Bringing it all back to the broader topic of the emo genre, the stereotypical emo trait to watch for here is an easy one to spot if you ever attended to these kinds of shows: the bassist never looks at the crowd.

Cap’n Jazz [joanfrc.com]
An Emo Video Every Day This Week: Day 1 [ja.com]