Music Review // Nameless Friends "I'm Afraid of Failure"

  Following the release of "There's a Rapist in the White House" (which I note because he's still there), Nameless Friends return with "I'm Afraid of Failure" which I feel is a subject that needs to be talked about much more in society and also from an early age.  As someone with a middle school aged son, I feel like a lot of what we're taught and what we're shown is the success people can have.  They show you those events in history books where someone did something that changed the world- like the birth of flight for example- but they don't talk about all of the times that those experiments failed and how that failure lead to success.

There is a fast paced punk rock way about this song which feels familiar.  I cannot place it with any one band, but rather a time when a band that was on Fat Wreck Chords, for example, might have made this and then another band such as Green Day might have made a similar sounding song on one of their big label albums.  This takes me right back to a place that I think of as being the late 1990's but was probably closer to the early 2000's and I just felt better back then.  Nameless Friends also takes this into a slow down with a trumpet at one point and this such a sign of those times.

As much fun and energy that this song can provide musically, it follows through with just as much insight and discussion on both failure and fear, two of the biggest things which seem to hold us back from doing what we love.  There is a line in here that says: "What if there's a freak accident" and I think about that a lot because even if I'm just going a half hour away I think about these things.  But then I'll go places without problems and so it is just that sense of fear which holds me back.   We need to learn to let go of that fear and accept that it's going to be what it must, which hopefully through this song as well can take us there.

The most important thing I think about failure is that it is necessary for success.  Someone may have failed a hundred times but then that one time they didn't is when we learn about them in school.  This is the mixed bag of it because we need to teach children it's okay to fail, but at the same time, we won't be rememebered for our failures if we have that success.   But as the song says, about being afraid of failure, you must not be afraid but rather feel as if failure brings you one step closer to success.   We simply should not let things such as fear and failure hold us back from doing what we want and hopefully this anthem-like song helps enforce that feeling more.