Marcel Winatschek

Uh Huh Her

I was going to write something glowing about Metro Station, their whole Seventeen Forever emo moment, but Miley Cyrus showed up in the video and it was obvious her dad was bankrolling the whole thing, and suddenly the performance fell apart. She’s not emo. She never was. The contradiction was too big.

So here’s Uh Huh Her instead, which is the thing that actually held up. Two girls in a video with a tiny unicorn and colors flying all over the place, and it works because they’re not performing. They’re just doing it. The song’s older now, but I let it play on repeat on the subway enough times to know every second of it. Not because I was forcing it to matter, but because it was genuinely good—easy to listen to, not asking anything of me, just there.

That’s the thing about Metro Station and everything it represented: emo became this product you could consume and perform. Metro Station understood that perfectly. Uh Huh Her didn’t seem to care about the performance at all. Two girls, a weird video, a song that works because it’s not trying too hard to work. That’s all they needed. That’s what made it real.