It’s very difficult digging up Lifetime videos on YouTube. At first. Plug in “lifetime” and you get flooded with live Talking Heads and at least one Tay Zonday song. Narrow your search with “hardcore” (genre), “emo” (subgenre), and/or “New Jersey” (location of band’s origin in the ’90s) and you do a little better. But Lifetime never made a video video–unless you could this promo clip for their not-bad 2007 comeback album, which mostly just bummed me out because while I can accept a buncha middle-aged Jersey boys taking it back to the festival barns, seeing them listlessly “play” to a buncha kids on Decaydance’s dime… yeccch–so YouTube’s Lifetime haul is naturally restricted to live cameraphone clips or (worse!) squinty (there’s that word again) transfers from zine-traded vids. But!
If you can get past the grungy sound quality, here’s an entire show (from ‘05, following the band’s extended hiatus) caputed in relative fidelity in Philly. Anyway, as an East Coast twentysomething who found life and love (LOL) at the basement shows they so sentimentally chronicled, it’s easy for me to get all “omg lifechanging whoa” about this band, which is accorded an almost scary level of respect from its progeny, but while I will no doubt concede as our “12 Days Of ’90s Emo” countdown rolls on that you had to be there to appreciate the bananas melodrama of many of these bands, the tight, fast, minute-and-change, female-friendly, pop-hardcore brodowns on Lifetime’s Hello Bastards and Jersey’s Best Dancers really were/are all that. Also I am fully aware that Lifetime would probably give me a stern talking to for calling them “emo” and not just “hardcore,” but hey, if you sign to Jade Tree and then make a fan of Peter Wentz, you’ve made your genre-classification bed.
Lifetime Live In Philadelphia [YouTube]
Lifetime [MySpace]
i prefer kid dynamite if you’re going for 90’s jade tree pop punk (really? “emo”?? ack)
I love me some Lifetime, but I can’t help but think they’re unfortunately responsible for what “emo” has devolved into. Saves the Day aped Lifetime’s sound on their first two records (especially Can’t Slow Down), and for me Saves the Day was the beginning of the end. Still, Jersey’s Best Dancers and Hello Bastards are fantastic.
Here’s the difference: Unlike Lifetime, Saves the Day never had a stripper ex-member arrested for illegally owning human body parts …
Excellent band, pulled off a pretty perfect unification of medium and message. Shit moves so fast and threatens to fly off the rails because it’s so emotionally urgent. I personally think the 2007 one is underrated. There aren’t any straight up classic songs on it, but I like the album as a satisfying whole slightly better than “Bastards” or “Dancers.”
@Jfrankparnell: link please?
prawnf**k:
[www.pitchforkmedia.com]
or the paper of record:
[www.nytimes.com]
@futurehorse:
what “emo” has devolved into
the beginning of the end
Or in other words, “Emo was so much better back when I was in its target demographic!”
I’m as big a fan of Idolator’s nineties love-ins as an 80s baby can be, (and I don’t want to get in over my head defending en masse what, like any genre, has its standouts and its awful followers) but really? Can we just retire the “artistic decline of emo” trope at this point?
seeing them live in boston at the ICC was incredible, though suffocatingly hot. they closed with “ostrichsized”. my prayers had been answered.
@lastclearchance: No. In other words, emo was so much better back when the band members were still able to change the blown-out tires on their tour vans.
Oh please please show the west coast some emo love and give us Knapsack for one of the days.
@futurehorse: Fair enough! Sorry for the kneejerk misinterpretation.
@romannose: cosigned
this whining about the decline of “emo” in 1998 is laughable.
so you’re from NJ?
let me hear some stories about seeing still life in jon hiltz’s basement
or
seeing frail play with ink & dagger @ 67 handy street
maybe hot water music’s first east coast shows back in 96
–or if you want to wax more nostalgic –
perhaps catching jawbreaker with jawbox @ brownies (now a little bar called hifi sits in it’s old spot)
–
and also.
look at the discography of jade tree.
four walls falling
swiz
universal order of armageddon
damnation a.d.
not really an “emo” label
tim just signs bands he likes.
always has,
maybe you recall his bid of trying to put out a morrissey LP years ago.
anywho
just saying.
@ihatethekids: Sounds like you’re the one I should have targeted with the comment I directed at futurehorse.
P.S. Even I know that hi-fi used to be Brownies. It only closed in the fall of 2002. Hell, if you google “hi-fi bar” browniesnyc.com is the first hit (as opposed to hifi169.com which goes to the same site).
Braid tmmrw, plz??
When I read the headline I definitely thought you were talking about Lifetime Television for Women.
@kaate: I think that every single time I read about this band. I heard Linda Dano and Nancy Glass were actually in the band for a time, though.