“Playback ‘99” (Burn the Cassette Deck) by The Juliana Theory (reworked repost), Wednesday, May 22, 2024

In 2020, The Juliana Theory signed to Equal Vision Records. After releasing the singles “Can’t Go Home” and “Better Now” and a collection of rerecorded classics from their Tooth & Nail and Epic Records discography, the band released  Still the Same Kids, Pt. 1 in May 2022. According to the band’s page on Equal Vision’s website, Still the Same Kids is a three-EP project, though we have yet to see parts 2 and 3. We’ve been waiting for a while; however, it seems that Brett Detar and crew never rush the band's music. Long-term fans of The Juliana Theory have suggested that the band's post-2005 Deadbeat Sweetheartbeat music doesn't fit with the band's direction, and while many fans like it, they suggest that The Juliana Theory isn't still the same band. But that argument could be made for any band that stuck together consistently, updating their sound into the '20s music landscape.

SHIT, I GET NOSTALGIC. I've heard that the Germans consider nostalgia as a kind of illness. If that's the case, the film, television, music, and fashion industries are sick. The pandemic reunited lots of bands to play reunion shows. Extra time at home had us revisiting the music of our past. Even teenagers felt homesick for a time they never had as they discovered classic rock albums for the first time. While Brett Dettar had been writing film scores and country music, The Juliana Theory was on hiatus. Today's song is blatantly nostalgic for late '90s culture, namedropping technology and Oasis's "Don't Look Back in Anger," and talking about things the speaker did in high school. When the speaker says, "I'm just living on borrowed time," he suggests that we think of our own prime. Usually, a band's listeners will be younger than the band members, for Dettar and The Juliana Theory, the bandmates came of age in the early '90s and formed in the late '90s with their peak arguably 2000's Emotion Is Dead, when emo started going mainstream. While The Juliana Theory may not be first in the conversation of mainstream emo bands, hipsters both admire The Juliana Theory for their contribution and call them a sell-out for turning to a pop rock/alternative sound, as a recent video on emo the YouTube channel Trash Theory suggests. 

DON'T LOOK BACK IN ANGER. DON'T LOOK BACK IN ANGER. The music video for “Playback ‘99” (Burn the Cassette Deck) imagines a post-apocalyptic world in 2033 after the world presumably ended at Y2K. A lone survivor in a hazmat suit searches for relics of the past, and in the basement level of what appears to be a nightclub in the basement of a mall, he finds a VHS of a Y2K-themed Juliana Theory concert. The video gets dark at the end, depicting the death of all concertgoers in the band, signaling the alternative universe of if Y2K had ended humanity. Going back to the line, “I’m living on borrowed time,” reminds the millennials and Generation X of the absurdity of living in the early decades of the twenty-first century. We think about the bands we were listening to as teenagers when the world felt so uncertain after 9/11. The evangelical kids may even have been told that they wouldn’t make it to 2020 because of the rapture or the New World Order. The music video metaphorically connects the Y2K generation with the COVID-19 lockdown generation. Time feels precocious as it slips away adding years to our faces. We can’t rewind it like a cassette tape, we just have to watch it play.

Read “Playback '99 (Burn the Cassette Deck)” by The Juliana Theory on Genius.