Throwback Thursday: Reset – Why?

Flashback to the early, early 2000s. Mp3 downloading is spreading like a wonderful plague across the digital landscape. Napster is at the height of its power and infamy. I’m just out of high school, where I consumed a healthy amount of radio pop-punk, and was only starting to expand my knowledge of the music world. I didn’t really know shit.

Napster started opening up the world to me. With its free promoted downloads from new bands, and access to older songs by bands I loved which I had never heard, I was grabbing everything I could find by my favorite bands. Well, some savvy groups out there were counting on that.

At some point, I downloaded the song “Why?”, labeled as a rare or unreleased blink-182 song. At the time, this seemed entirely possible to me. I had no idea what was out there and available. And once the track was on my computer, I listened and was stumped. The high, somewhat nasally vocals and lyric delivery was reminiscent of Tom Delonge, but just…wasn’t…quite…him. It didn’t stop me from listening to the track a ton, memorizing the lyrics and burning it onto a CD.

Decades go by, and I’m a knowledgeable music guru (sort of) doing a little bit of TikTok scrolling. Up comes the page of a dedicated pop-punk fan, listing ten underrated bands of the genre. Soundtracking the video is “Why?” by the band Reset. I instantly recognize the song, and the memory of my discovery of it comes flooding back. So the mystery of who actually sang the song was finally revealed to me.

Released on the band’s 1997 album No Worries, it perhaps would not have been such a mystery if I was Canadian, as the band was apparently more significant there in their home country. Reading about the group, I was shocked to learn its singer was Pierre Bouvier, who would later find greater pop-punk success with Simple Plan. Reset was his previous band, and members of it would go on to form that multiplatinum pop-punk group. Listening to “Why?” now, Bouvier’s vocals are far more recognizable, but lyrically it is a different beast than Simple Plan.

What made “Why?” stand-out so much to me at the time was that it was an indictment false bravado, of pretending to be someone tougher and more violent than you are. A story about a young man who grows rich through a life of crime:

“Your parents house compared to yours looks something like a shack. In your thirty seven guns, the bullets painted red, a simple stare is all it takes to fill ’em up with lead.”

The song’s narrative finds its protagonist eventually facing justice for his bad decisions after stealing a car:

“Your little friends the cops caught you, you’re sentenced for a long time. Now tell me what you’re gonna do?”

Definitely a far more raw and adult perspective than Simple Plan would tackle in their early albums. And the song still slaps hard twenty-six years after release. Get some nostalgia going with me and throwback to this old school pop-punk jam here.