RAMBLE ON: "Alive with the Glory of Love" by Say Anything

“i have a really long, beautiful infatuation about this song. so i've been grounded. for about two months. and this boy i've been snekaing out wiht sends me snippet sof this song in texts rather often. i am his bonnie and he is my clyde. i am the belle to his serbastian. and i told him im on the holocaust diet (lots of soup) and so we always play up the nazi camp story, how was the soup today, the factory was rather cold, etc. and i love this song for it. and it describes my situation perfectly." 

--User boroaskitur, Songmeanings.net, February 24, 2006

Max Bemis’s grandparents actually did survive the Holocaust, is the first thing. “Alive with the Glory of Love,” the first and biggest single from his emo band Say Anything, is not exactly their story but it’s inspired by them. It’s not subtle or indirect about it either; the song is literally about fleeing the Nazis, with lots of dark loaded imagery – jackboots, work camps, executions, corpses looted for the fillings in their teeth. The most specific historical namecheck is Treblinka, an extermination camp in Poland where between 700,000 and 900,000 people were killed.

Which is all to say that, no, it does not at all “perfectly” describe the situation of a sheltered high schooler who’s angry at her parents. Hell, no, no. It seems that user boroaskitur, understandably, eventually deleted that tasteless comment, but you can still read it quoted in the comments of other SongMeanings users giving her a thorough dressing-down (“ARE YOU F*ING KIDDING ME? YOU’RE ALL OF 17? WHAT THE HELL DO YOU KNOW ABOUT ANY OF THIS?”).

In defense of that teenage girl, though: The song itself is arguably very tasteless. We get through a full half of verse before we get to the parts about the Nazis; that verse is mostly about fucking. “When I watch you / Wanna do you / Right where you’re standing,” is the opening line, set to a jaunty riff reminiscent of “Last Nite” or “Are You Gonna Be My Girl.” The second verse, incidentally, is also about fucking. The whole song’s about fucking; it’s a fuck song. It’s not *only* about that, but sex is extremely important to it. I’m sure Bemis would say it’s also about celebrating love and life during dark times (joy as an act of resistance, you might say), inherited from his family’s actual history. If so, he chose the callowest, most juvenile way he could describe it. “This war is crazy.” “Love me so good.” “Our city, vast and shitty.” “They won’t hear us screw away the day.”

I remember very little about Say Anything beyond this one song, which is kind of funny since I had this album. What I recall of them was that they were an emo band in the Fall Out Boy/Panic! At the Disco mold: arch, wordy scenesters with a lot of cutting barbs about petty grievances. That isn’t *entirely* accurate, I realize upon relistening to this album for the first time in years, but it’s true enough -- enough to be exactly the kind of band that shouldn’t be tackling genocide as a song topic. Bemis himself was either in his teens or just barely past them, much like the protagonists of his song. To me he seems ambitious beyond his means; the record was originally intended as a rock opera before the pressure and effort drove him into a mental breakdown (Bemis has struggled with mental issues and drug use all his life). Large elements of that aborted concept still exist in the record; it’s written in character, from the perspective of a spiralling lead singer of a mid-level punk band, an idea whose obvious connection to reality forced Bemis to clarify many times that the songs were fictional. The Holocaust romance “Alive with the Glory of Love” is probably its most ambitious moment of all, especially compared to his peers whose teen dramas were mostly suburban.

It’s certainly possible that the narrator of this song seems like a dim teenager because Bemis was one himself; only the tone, not the text, says that the couple are kids. But I think on some level the song’s dissonant adolescence is deliberate. Bemis has to know he’s pushing buttons with lines like “Our Treblinka is alive with the glory of love.” I can think of two songs he might have been inspired by; the first is “Heroes,” David Bowie’s all-timer anthem about a single fleeting moment of love and joy transcending an awful world that will eventually tear them apart. There’s elements of that in “Alive with the Glory of Love,” but more relevant is the song’s other predecessor, Tommy James’s “I Think We’re Alone Now.” Written during a time of teen rebellion against the sex-negative older generation, “I Think We’re Alone Now” is a throbbingly horny song about how the olds and squares won’t simply let them love and fuck and be free. “Alive with the Glory of Love” is basically that song, except instead of parents it’s literal jackbooted fascists. There’s a reason this song still makes me think of a teenager’s typo-ridden, long-deleted comment and her silly lovers-in-a-dangerous-time fantasy. The other commenters may have roasted her for it, but I think on a deeper level she had it completely right: For the purposes of this song, being grounded for a month is exactly like being persecuted by the Nazis. She can have that fantasy. The song itself is a fantasy, a grand tragic historical romance, "Titanic," "Casablanca," "Romeo and Juliet." They won’t get us. But if they do our love will last forever. But they won’t. I won’t let them take you. Hell no, no.

A lot of the credit has to be given to the band – they shred all over this song like it’ll be the last thing they ever do. It starts with an epic drumroll, barbershop harmonies open the curtains; we hear the drummer counting off the intro; the guitars start bright and bouncy and then kick into life on the chorus, the beat dramatically slows down, suddenly speeds back up; Bemis audibly struggles to catch his breath between lines. It seems to be on the verge of falling apart at any moment – the band chants “Alive!” with the intensity of people for whom being alive is not at all taken as a given. Their more famous peers sound like sterile studio creations by comparison.

But it’s Bemis who’s the star of the show. As a vocalist, Bemis has a fratty college boy affect; he sings with the forced tenor of someone for whom both singing and projecting sincerity do not come naturally. Bemis says he sensed early on that this song would be one of his signature achievements – arguably it wound up his only one – and you can hear him battling to reach his goals; it’s a strained performance, and it absolutely works. He sounds like a dumb kid over his head, and it’s a jarring reminder that many of the people who fled the Nazis were also probably just innocent kids with little on their minds except sex and romance. Perhaps Bemis thought the overheated emotions of teen romance was the only thing that could capture something as profound as the worst crime in human history. Or maybe he thought that only a threat as terrifying as the Nazis could capture and justify the intensity of being young and in love. Either way, “Alive with the Glory of Love” works in the way that all the best emo songs did – it makes every emotion feel like the end of the world, and in this case it’s because it actually is the end of the world, or the closest thing to it in living memory.

Say Anything never really broke through; they remained a cult act, and nothing they did ever reached the heights of “Alive with the Glory of Love,” the closest thing they ever had to a hit. Ambition got the better of them again on their next record, a messy and uneven double album loaded with guest stars; it has its fans and defenders but it likely ended their chances of blowing up (along with the decline of emo as a mainstream genre, of course). They released what Bemis said would be their final album last year. Like most emo bands, their music still evokes powerful memories for a certain number of people of a certain age; I was never really one of them. Except for this one song; a stray mention of it a couple weeks ago led me to blast it on repeat until the neighbors complained. I’m sure user boroaskitur is still out there too, still listening to this song, and how it made her feel to be young and in love and totally unfairly punished by her parents. What are one's teen years for, if not making literally everything about yourself?