Snowing - So I Shotgunned A Beer And Went To Bed/It’s Just A Party
Snowing broke up a few months ago, about six months after I saw them for the first and only time. This is footage from their final show, in a church basement in their hometown of Philadelphia, PA. It’s always made me feel sad to contemplate the fact that a vast majority of the great bands I discovered through my two decades in the underground hardcore/punk/emo/whatever scene have a pretty much nonexistent profile in the larger music world—the fact that most people that I talk to about music don’t know who the hell Angel Hair were is a tragedy to me. And of course, the fact that it’s really fucking hard to get past the level on which underground bands exist, to go from having a few hundred hardcore fans and only 1000 or so people who’ve even ever heard of you to actually attaining even a small measure of widespread fame, makes it correspondingly hard to keep tiny underground bands going. For a band to survive long enough in that scene to make a second album is extremely rare. Snowing were no exception, which makes me sad.
On the other hand, something that’s impossible to miss when watching a video like this is the fact that really tiny bands often connect extremely intensely with the local scene in their hometown. In this video, the church basement where Snowing is playing is fucking packed—notice the multiple rows of kids who’ve crowded onto the stage because there’s nowhere else for them to stand. Notice the way that, on the quieter parts, the kids in the crowd are singing along so loudly that you can hear them more clearly than the singer. Even in Philadelphia, not that many people probably even know who Snowing were. But for the kids who went to their shows regularly, they probably seemed like one of the biggest bands in the world. And in a decade or two, when these kids are grown to middle age and live in the suburbs with their families or whatever, they’ll probably still treasure their Snowing LPs and their memories of screaming along with the chorus of “It’s Just A Party” at their last show. And that is fucking beautiful.
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