On Oct. 8, Twenty One Pilots played the big time: Saturday Night Live.
This doesn’t come as a shock to anyone, in fact, it’s a natural progression for the duo. It comes on the heels of their two pop-radio smash-hits “Stressed Out” and “Ride” not to mention the catchy track “Heathens” that they penned for the Suicide Squad soundtrack. But to me, it still felt strange and sudden.
I’ve been a TOP fan since July, 2014 when I saw them play a two-song set at the Alternative Press Music Awards. I had heard buzz of the Columbus natives around my Ohio high school, but never bothered to look them up because I figured that if other kids were into them, they must not be very cool. I think that is the most wrong I have ever been in my entire life.
I remember watching front-man Tyler Joseph climb up the framework of the stage to prance around 50 feet above the crowd rapping about kids trying to kill themselves in “Guns for Hands” and how thinking too much can lead to your destruction in “Car Radio”. I remember the crowd lifting up Josh Dun, drum set and all, as he pounded with a rhythm few people possess. I was in shock; it was a spiritual experience that I never could’ve anticipated.
A few months later, I met the band before a show they played at one of my favorite Cleveland Venues, Jacob’s Pavilion at Nautica. They were just two down-to-earth-twenty-somethings that wanted to share their music with anyone who needed it. I saw it then; they were different.
It wasn’t in the ski masks, skeleton costumes or prerecorded music of their own design. It wasn’t in the fact that Joseph switched from an acoustic ballad about his mother to a chilling, suicidal rap faster than you could blink. It wasn’t in the typical demographic of alternative music fans, teenagers with colorful hair, dark clothes and a rebellious piercing or tattoo. No, it wasn’t in any aspect of the show. What made Twenty One Pilots different was the fact that their art cut deeper than any piece of work I had ever come into contact with before.
I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety my entire life. I was diagnosed when I was 6 years old, and I’ve been through it all. Either oddly perky or eerily calm doctors trying to gain your trust. Your family worrying about you at every turn. Feeling alone in a room full of friends that love you. Questioning if you will spend your entire life alone, and if you deserve to. Wondering what it feels like to be happy, wondering if that is even a possibility for someone like you. People that have never had the disease, thinking they understand it better than you do. Pills that don’t work, pills that do work, but at a price. Everyone wanting you to be something you’re not. Disappointing them, disappointing yourself.
Every word that Joseph wrote reached a place of my soul that I didn’t even know existed. This man truly understood. There were other people out there like me, and he was one of them. It takes incredible strength to talk about something that everyone else tries to disguise with fake smiles and lies. It is unbelievably courageous to put something out there other than filtered Instagram photos, or complaints about relationships that didn’t go as planned. Joseph defied the unspoken rule that songs should be about love or world issues or something everyone cares about or has been through. He wrote about the most personal battle a person ever wages; the one with their mind.
So, I’ll admit it, when “Stressed Out” went to number 2 on the Billboard charts, it felt like a betrayal. I always hate when artists I like become mainstream prodigies because that usually leads to sellout albums, as they begin to sound like everyone else, and fail to create anything special again, but this time it hit harder than usual. This was personal. It was more than an underground band suddenly becoming trendy. It was more than my fellow Ohioans gaining a worldwide audience. Their popularity just didn’t seem plausible; it didn’t make sense.
I felt like moms in mini vans with no jobs and intact marriages or little children playing outside didn’t really deserve to be exposed to this kind of creation. In “Message Man," an album cut from their newest, Blurryface, Joesph straight up says “These lyrics aren’t for everyone/only few understand.” So why were all of these people singing along? Who did they think they were?
I get it, I really do. Joseph is a rare, multi-talented musician that can compose pretty much any kind of sound, so obviously he knows the formula for a hit. “Stressed Out” is a relatable song. I can understand how it could become somewhat of a “millennial anthem” (yes, I cringed as I typed that). “Ride” and “Heathens” have more depth, but they are catchy and that’s all the masses seem to care about, these days.
Joesph and Dun want to be successful at what they do, just like the rest of us, but it really did get to me. Hearing a band that had been therapeutic to me for a long time being called “the next big thing” and appearing all over the sort of platforms that are destroying what’s left of the music industry bothered me a lot. I hated every second of it, but then I realized how selfish I was being.
They were special. They saved lives. That didn’t change, with their fame among a new type of people. Sure, it felt less personal. Sure, the tour I went to this summer didn’t have the same family feel as the one that promoted their first major alternative album Vessel, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the art.
If people are into them for the wrong reasons, that is their own business; it shouldn’t change my appreciation of them. Anything that makes you feel understood is rare; never let go of those things. And to “the few the proud and the emotional:" keep fighting, and as Joseph once wrote, “stay alive, stay alive for me.”
Halle Weber is a freshman studying journalism with a focus in news and information at Ohio University. How do you feel about Twenty One Pilots? Let Halle know by emailing or tweeting her at hw422715@ohio.edu/@HalleWeber13, respectively.
