1999: The Dismemberment Plan, Emergency & I

By Maddie Schwappach

The music we obsess over as teens incorporates itself into our bloodstream in a way few things can. At that period of my life, I had a four gigabyte iPod Nano on which I meticulously curated every kilobyte of storage each Sunday as a sort of grounding ritual. Though there was a smart phone in my pocket and Spotify was a household name, I held an incredibly unpretentious attachment to that outdated piece of technology. I liked having a finite number of songs at my fingertips, I liked that long bus rides let me get to know them deeply. By this time, I had developed an intense obsession with finding new music, always sifting through blogs, and it was a regular opportunity to impress no one but myself with my ability to maintain a perfect rotation. As I downloaded new releases and kept them moving in and out of my tiny library, some albums never left. They became the tidy core of music that I’ll forever tie to those years of my development, the ones I turned to without hesitation when I needed reliable comfort. For as long as I can remember, The Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I was one of those albums. 

Emergency & I opens with “Life of Possibilities,” a deceptively positive title that builds a metaphor about the feeling of being suffocated by the idea of limitless options. A bright, whirring guitar underscores Travis Morrison’s lilting voice pushes the listener into the scenario of digging downwards, crafting a tunnel with no direction, deeper than the light of the sun can assist. A particularly pertinent fear in my young adult life came in recognizing the expansiveness of time and how many paths can be worn into the earth just by setting out in a chosen direction. It seems obvious, but as the structure of school and family life began to loosen their hold on my time, it became increasingly overwhelming to wrap my head around the sheer volume of choices there were to make, and how few of them could be boiled down to a simple right or wrong. It’s a feeling I hadn’t heard tacked down with words before, and as frightening as it can be, knowing it’s shared felt like the first step to hearing footsteps above and beginning to scrape back up towards the surface.  

There’s a difference between the anxiety that consists of rational worries while being alive in the 21st century and the clinical sort, even though in English they share the same word. The linguistic shortcomings are almost fitting, considering how difficult it can be to differentiate the two when you’re living with them both. Those of us who’ve read the glossy three fold pamphlet while atop a sterile examination room desk can find everyday strife spiraling beyond control and just as easily see completely nonexistent issues lay a heavy weight across our chests. It’s not a feeling I’ve sought to understand better through music. The chaotic rhythms and frenzied feel of songs that typically get ascribed the word “anxious” tend not to provide any relief from that sensation. It wasn’t until years after Emergency & I had comforted me on high school bus rides that I recognized it as a mirror for the feelings I didn’t yet have words for. 

At the core of anxiety, in this record and more broadly, is a feeling of disconnection. Disconnection from yourself, rationality, from those around you, from a greater, disorienting world. It’s watching the seams holding things together begin to unravel, constantly pumping a leaky tire full of air. It’s reaching towards something in the top cupboard you can’t quite wrap your fingers around. As these distances expand they become harder to traverse, harder to mend and easier to get stuck inside. Anxiety lives in these gaps, and this very awareness is what’s made my joints feel stiff and chest tighten up my whole life. Emergency & I possesses the same awareness, but, importantly, it does so with a refusal to submit to it. 

“You Are Invited” represents these gaps through a narrator facing the unthinkable problem of being welcomed by “anyone to do anything.” Bouncing around parties and social situations, our narrator finds himself feeling out of place; a needling guitar loop and endlessly monotonous snare drum underscore the increasing sense of unease. He eventually finds relief and in a brief moment of real connection when relinquishing his good fortune to his lonely neighbor. 

There’s specific tension in the way technology perpetuates worry in this album. “Memory Machine” describes a dystopian convenience of being able to erase painful memories, a stress that reverberates in the opening lyric of “Spider in the Snow,” where Morrison proposes that: “The only things worse than bad memories / is no memories at all.” Emergency came out in the final breaths of the 20th century as the coming millennium threatened humanity with promises of a digital age. The album hit shelves at a critical transition between a time when the human relationship to the physical world was rapidly evolving and the social sphere was on track to be similarly optimized. Morrison puts it plainly: “If they can make machines save us labor / someday they’ll do our hearts the very same favor.” His articulation of this impending “optimization” attributes The Plan with a refreshing sort of uncoolness; math-y guitar licks and attempts to connect over the universal experience of freaking out.

The Dismemberment Plan recorded this album in a period of great wide-scale transition, yet focuses on a sort of individual level period of transformation. So much of this record finds itself stewing on the specific listless crisis that seems to come in waves during young adulthood and settles in once the newness of independent life has turned into the weight of knowing it’ll last forever. It’s about watching those formative late adolescence friendships warp and change even though you swore they never would. There’s a certain melancholy for me tied to lines like, “From the ages of 20 to 22 I had five friends / none of whose names I can recall,” which had been burning in my brain since before I’d entered my twenties, and continue to haunt me (though I’ve lived through them). The awkward and uncomfortable period when young adulthood loses it’s qualifier and simply becomes adulthood isn’t often the plot of feel-good movies. The gradual narrowing of social circles and accumulating stresses of this chapter doesn’t look like the type of milestone like senior prom that John Hughes can fit into a neat ending. I’m grateful that I connected with Emergency & I at an earlier period of my evolution because it seemed so specifically ready to help carry me through this slightly more nebulous one. 

No single song embodies the panicky ethos of Emergency & I quite like “8 ½ MInutes.” The song interrogates the listener in second person, asking them what they did with the moments in a theoretical apocalyptic world where the sun was extinguished and for 8 ½ final minutes it’s rays still travelled to earth. Living with anxiety often feels like existing in these minutes; when there is a grave urgency and finalty during moments where the sun still appears to be shining overhead. In true Dismemberment Plan fashion, posing this very literal lapse to the listener offers a glimpse of reconciliation with the recurring question: “Did you realize you’re sorry and that you love them?” Even in the most drastic hypothetical disaster there’s still a reach towards connection, an attempt at keeping everything together. The Dismemberment Plan got their name from a line in the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, but if you take it at face value, “dismemberment” sums up the essence of this album: holding yourself together in spite of external forces plotting to pull you apart. 

Maddie Schwappach is a writer and radio promoter living in Brooklyn by way of Minneapolis. She's always crafting playlists, cracking jokes, and talking about music on Instagram and Twitter: @fettyschwapp.