20th anniversary review: Brand New – “Deja Entendu”

This review is part of a series looking back at significant albums on their anniversaries. Through the benefit of hindsight we will be viewing the album not just as it was released, but how it stands the test of time, as well as its place in the band’s discography and the genre in general.

Triple Crown Records – 17 June 2003

Every line is about what I don’t want to write about anymore

Let’s start this off with the most important and obvious statement on this… Jesse Lacey is a gigantic piece of shit.  Additionally, his bandmates, who could not possibly have missed his disturbing antics, are also colossal pieces of shit.  Before we found out what steaming piles of excrement the lads in Brand New were though, there were countless legions of us in 2003 pretentiously prattling and obsessively waxing on about how this record changed the music world. Looking back now, we were all very right, this record is solid… but fuck, we were all so wrong in not paying attention to what we were supporting.

The album is amazing and pretty influential. As a storyteller, Lacey was an empathetic narrator; very relatable to growing up in northeast suburbs trying to navigate life, love and faith. No amount of allegations will diminish the impact the record had immediately on the entire scene, but the album is also chock-full of lyrics that project and/or glorify unhealthy attitudes toward sex and none of us seemed to notice until it was too late. 

I’ve written quite a few of these retrospective reviews and usually I focus on the impact of the album and how it stands up against the artist’s discography but none have caused the personal consternation that Deja has. I have no intention of covering the hugely influential record and how it quite literally helped the scene grow in 2003, because I personally find it fascinating to examine the reconciliation of the record’s themes in light of what we know now.

In 2003, the sophomore album from the Long Island outfit built on their strong, yet generic pop-punk found on Your Favorite Weapon and crafted some of the greatest loud/quiet moments in the genre, and we ate it up.  In 2023, every lyric on Deja feels like the inner monologue of a predator stalking its prey.  Probably because, as it turns out, that’s exactly what Deja Entendu was.  

Deja Entendu translates to “already heard,” and despite how shocked we say we are as fans, when the allegations and truth came out, we were shocked, even though we’d already heard what Lacey was doing.  A confession on wax that we couldn’t wait to scream along with it.

The whole thing shouldn’t have surprised us, Lacey spelled everything out and instead of seeing the disturbing truth, we gleefully sang along and emboldened the behavior.

We know what this all says about Brand New, but what does our love of the album say about us? When we sing along to the date-rape narrative in “Me Vs Maradona Vs Elvis” are we complicit in Lacey’s behavior?  Were we intentionally missing the lyrical admission in lines like “Call me a safe bet, I’m betting I’m not?” Jesse Lacey told us he was “paid to make girls panic” and we raved about how brilliant that stance on the music industry was. We put on our blinders and revered every confession as an innocent turn of phrase and now we have to reconcile those choices within us.

The flip side to all of this though, we were young and inexperienced finding solace in the lyricism, completely missing the narrative revolving around unhealthy relationships and toxic sexuality.  The majority of the fans felt the power of the music, the way it related to our young adulthood and how it served as an outlet (better and worse) to the apprehension of our young sex lives.  But does the understanding that hindsight is 20/20 excuse our complicity in Lacey’s actions?  These are the questions that haunt us 20 years after the album’s release, and it sucks.  The record is still so fucking good now; the content is so fucking gross now.

How much of the blame do we deserve? How much did our cheers and sales encourage and embolden what was being done between sets?  Thanks to the douchebaggery, the manipulative and traumatic nature of Lacey’s exploitation of his time center-stage, those questions will always play into the legacy of this record.