SPEED READING: Say The Quiet Part Out Loud Vol. 1 - A Book On 2000s Emo
Say The Quiet Part Out Loud: Vol. 1
William Ramsey
Self Published
Review by
Lauren Parker
Welcome to Speed Reading, our fast, occasionally flippant, review column where we attempt to spread the love of a recent new release in a very short amount of time. We’ll take the time to find some incredible books, you spend your time reading some incredible books.
So, what’s Say The Quiet Part Out Loud about?
The creaking of your knees that results from realizing the music that changed your life at 14 is now history. As are the arches in your feet from wearing Vans. It’s a chronological essay collection on the evolution of Emo from the year 2000.
And, who’s the author?
William Ramsey is a writer, musician, and enthusiast for the heavily maligned music that pickled the youth of the aughts.
What’s their deal?
Ramsey is the sort of organically made authority on emo and alternative culture that comes from devotion and chronic cataloging. Devotion from the cheap seats.
What’s a single reason to read Say The Quiet Part Out Loud?
We are all sticking to the venue floors of every pit we ever survived, every pinprick of a patch we clipped on with a safety pin, and Ramsey will, with an Margot Adler eye, take you back to appraise the weird history you witnessed to better understand it.
What are a couple more reasons to read William Ramsey?
Music history and analysis is the act of writing a love letter to what humans make for each other. There is no isolation in art. And Ramsey’s book is a plea to record the strain of the Bush years.
If you’re a fan of these books, you should give Say The Quiet Part Out Loud a chance:
Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall / Tim Mohr
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk / Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain
Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution: An Oral History / Various
A little more from Lauren Parker:
I wrote a love poem every day of my sophomore year of high school. I kept them in an old suitcase I had picked out of a Goodwill free pile. A year’s worth of poems all for her. My handwriting was hideous, a quarter of them have Taking Back Sunday lyrics in the corners. Some of them I wrote on lined notebook paper I soaked in tea to make them look ancient and ragged, like my fragile words of devotion felt. All of them scrawled with the urgent chicken scratch of inspiration and hormonal saturation, ink dying halfway through S’s and U’s and G’s because I wrote with whatever dead tool I found in the bottom of my bookbag. I left the print of my Converse on one when we had to do a school shooter drill, scrambling to corners and turning off the lights pretending we weren’t there in the middle of the day. I felt humiliated as I put it in the suitcase, convinced I had ruined it and every word on it. I pretended I was older, seasoned with bitterness and drunk on being forlorn. I was tragic, you see, listening to the low end of the dial college radio station. My ears and head filled with Sugarcult, Say Anything, and Trendy. By the end of the year, my crush was over, but I was just as crushed as when I began with a heavy suitcase full of love I had to lug around. The feel of the hardcase hitting my shin, the sound of Dear Diary, My Angst Has a Body Count, and the smell of every single teenager’s body odor as we all crowded into partitioned rooms for Battle of the Bands?
Ramsey made me remember that.
