Forbidden Love #1: Does This Look Infected?

True story: I desperately wanted to purchase Sum 41′s Does This Look Infected? upon its initial release in 2002, hooked by the metallic crunch of “The Hell Song” and intrigued by the cool cover art. But I was too embarrassed to walk into a store and throw my money down on the record; what would the employees at Circuit City think? I was eighteen years old, and I passed. Fast forward another two years, and I was still nagged by the feeling that, if even half of the songs on the disc were as good “The Hell Song,” DTLI had the potential to be a favorite album. So I had my then-girlfriend walk into the store and purchase it for me while I waited, sweaty-palmed and nervous, in the car. This is not behavior that I’m proud of, but I fancied myself a true connoisseur, interested in only the finest and most sophisticated music available. When I look back at the stuff I considered “fine” and “sophisticated” now, it makes me feel like a moron. Also: like I should’ve spent a lot more time listening to Sum 41.

Sum 41 broke with the song “Fat Lip,” a chunky, exuberantly Canadian update of the Beastie Boys’ “Fight For Your Right (To Party).” It was the kind of song that Mr. 51% and I would download with our friend Becki’s Napster (we didn’t fully understand the internet yet, so our musical HQ was a suburban house with DSL two blocks over from my parents’ residence) and then include on epic mix CDs featuring equal amounts of Akinyele and Elton John. We would then take these mix CDs to random suburban locations, blast the shit from my ’88 Grand Prix, and sit on lawn chairs drinking Sprite and smoking Swisher Sweets. (Yet I was worried about being too “mature” to purchase a pop-punk CD from a faceless retail chain a mere one year later.) Anyways, Sum 41 was never the most erudite band – they were funny in the most sophomoric way possible, and most of Derek Whybley’s rhyme schemes followed a simple “AABB” pattern. (This can be heard on DTLI’s first single “Still Waiting“: “So am I still waiting / For this world to stop hating / Can’t find a good reason / Can’t find hope to believe in.”) They were not subtle. They didn’t worry about subtext, or veil their real feeling in elaborate metaphors. They just wanted to drink beer and trash your house, and while that sounds like a phenomenal mission statement to me now, at the time I was more concerned with “valid artistic expression.”

Which begs the question: Isn’t that what Sum 41 is doing all over this record? The first track (“The Hell Song”) is about a friend of the band that contracted HIV, and it employs hard-charging metalcore riffs (before metalcore was really a thing) to express the anxiety and self-doubt the dudes experienced after hearing the news. “My Direction” tackles teen suicide, mixing bright pop-punk hooks, shouted verses, and snatches of spoken-word statistics; it also has a couple wicked breakdowns, and this is all crammed into two minutes and three seconds. When I listen to Sum 41 now, it seems like they do everything that I want bands to do (write catchy songs, sing about real shit, stretch themselves to the absolute breaking point of their musical abilities, and, most importantly, shred on guitar), and they do it very quickly and without any filler. Their output since this record has been spotty (Chuck got serious and heavy, forgetting the hooks; Underclass Hero is to American Idiot what my senior-year essay about The Plague is Camsus’s actual book), but for thirty-one brilliant minutes in 2002, Sum 41 totally nailed it.

Dave "Brownsound" Baksh

The album really pwns balls in the back half, when guitarist Dave Baksh gets to indulge every nutty idea he ever had while listening to Iron Maiden. “All Messed Up” staples squeaky fills to simple riffs, elevating the song to banger status. “Mr. Amsterdam” starts like a Metallica song, but it doesn’t have time for any classical gas – the palm-muted riffs on the verse stab hard, there’s a glorious hardcore breakdown (this stuff played fabulously live, BTW; the band’s light show accentuated every double-kick hit), and, once again, we find the band mixing three or four different strains of pop-punk into something infectious, fun, and very nearly original. DTLI closes with the brutal one-two punch of “Billy Spleen” (an excellent cocaine jam) and “Hooch,” which slams you for two and a half minutes with a breakneck tempo and enthusiastic gang vox, and then moves from epic guitar solo to a dreamy, fuzzed-up outro. This breathless second-side stretch cements, for me, Does This Look Infected? as a modern masterpiece; it’s as if NOFX made an entire disc filled with songs as good as “Soul Doubt” and didn’t waste my time with half-hearted stabs at lounge and reggae.

I re-discovered this record last week while moving stuff from my old place to my new apartment; Does This Look Infected? was the only disc I could find that hadn’t been packed up, and I needed something to jam on while driving my mom’s van around for eight hours. At no time did I get bored or want to listen to something else; I literally listened to Sum 41 all day. And I loved it. I don’t care if it’s music for bored teenagers – most of the time I still feel like a bored teenager. This is the best possible soundtrack for sitting outside and crushing Milwaukee’s Best; it has the hormonal adolescent charge of ’80s hair metal without any of the unfortunate misogyny; it’s hard but hooky, meaning you choose whether you want to bang your head or sing along (or, if you’re really talented like me, you can do both). This is awesome, genuine music – it’s the best that four young guys could do. Sum 41 put themselves on the line with this shit, and it’s a shame that they’ve faltered in important ways since (Baksh left the band after Chuck, which hurt; Whybley married [and was subsequently divorced by] Avril Lavigne, which is just kinda sad). Recently I hear tell that the boys are back in the studio, banging out a new record, and there’s a secret chamber in my heart that really, really wants the end result to be amazing.

But even if it’s not, I have my battered old copy of Does This Look Infected?, and I can listen to it all day.

(Forbidden Love is Assault’s bi-weekly look at albums whose appeal defies all logic and reason – the musical art that the general critical society deems inferior and unsophisticated, but that we just can’t stop listening to anyway. It’s not a guilty pleasure, because we don’t feel guilty about the relatively harmless act of liking things, but rather a matter of culturally inconvienent taste.)

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One comment “awaiting immediate, obnoxious rebuttal”

1. tim says:

   February 19, 2010 at 1:36 pm

   It’s almost as if your musical tastes went in reverse–as opposed to most people who like the high brow shit after they’re used to the Fat Lip’s and Panteras. Instead you like them more now–so you’re kinda like the Benjamin Button of the musical critique world.