The second to last Bomb the Music Industry show was the most awkward of breakups. We knew it was coming and had been anticipating it for about a year. Now, saying our final goodbyes was right around the corner, but it wasn't quite time yet. Do you get really drunk and cry now or wait until Sunday? Do you even get drunk or do you try and stay sober because maybe you'll want to actually remember this? Is it ok to embrace strangers and sob? Or do you try and keep your shit together and play it cool, sippin' your beer with your arms crossed? Will the band even be sentimental? Because technically they still have one more show. Technically, no one really has a reason to be sad yet. The general mood at the Warsaw in Brooklyn on Friday, January 17th at the second to last Bomb the Music Industry show supposedly ever, was definitely weird.

My night started leaving immediately from work and taking the train to Greenpoint, during which I cried while listening to "Even WInning Feels Bad" while unintentionally making eye contact with a woman obviously enjoying a very funny podcast. Despite that I haven't listened to Bomb in about a year and a half, thinking about my relationship with the band's music was making me nostalgic and weepy. Yes, Bomb, I would like you if you stayed forever young. Please stay, I thought, while quickly averting my eyes to the subway floor and feeling really, really silly.

I met up with friends from Maryland, DC and Philadelphia, as well as my little sister, who introduced me to BTMI, for dinner, and immediately started asking people how they were feeling. Emotionally, you know? "Let's not talk about it," someone said, and the subject was dropped. My sister turned to me and whispered, "It's not a night to be sad, it's a night to be happy."

I started listening to Bomb around 2007 or 2008, just before Scrambles was released. When I moved to NYC and started grad school in 2009, Scrambles was pretty much < my life line. Last year John Roderick, musician and frontman of indie rock band The Long Winters, wrote an article for Seattle Weekly magazine titled "Punk Rock is Bullshit," in which he talks about how some Gen X-ers are still "clinging" to punk rock and it starts to get sad once you've reached your 40s and can't punk rock just go away already. (It's obvious this man thinks punk music stopped being produced in 1993). He then attempts to bring down the whole genre, citing that one of the hardest arguments for him to refute is the cliché claim that "Punk rock saved my life." Punk rock hasn't saved my life in that I wanted to kill myself and this music prevented me from doing so (although I'm aware that that's the type of relationship many people have with music), but Scrambles was the closest I ever got to understanding what "Punk rock saved my life" means.

Bomb put on a great show. Their setlist was perfectly planned – a mix of "hits" and songs they rarely play live. The crowd was energetic, but kept their shit together; no one seemed to get badly injured aside from a few pairs of broken glasses. I cried three times: during "The First Time I Met Sanawan," "Even Winning Feels Bad" and "25!" The band was gracious yet goofy, and aside from thanking everyone for their support, you wouldn't have really thought it was the second to last show.


Bomb never really made it big. They weren't even all that punk famous. I think if I were to sum up Bomb's career in a few words, it would be "kind of but not really," which is both sad and yet entirely appropriate. Still, at times it felt like Bomb was the biggest band in the world, like during many of their recent Fest sets that were packed to the point of the crowd being nearly immobile.

Reunion Prediciton: Do I think these final shows are really curtains for Bomb the Music Industry? No way. Give them five years and they'll be reuniting at Fest.