#in all honesty i’m just as guilty of bias as the people who won’t listen to the Broadway album

[a-clockwork-justice]

You mentioned you have a long story as to why lgow is your fave joe iconis song and I am invested in that story. Only if you want to, of course!

Hoo boy, strap in mate. I’ve told this story quite a few times to people on Reddit as well as my friends here on Tumblr, but here it is, laid out in full - Loser Geek Whatever or: How My Perception Of Be More Chill Was Flipped In Six Minutes Or Less.

Summer of 2019, I was getting back into musicals through Dear Evan Hansen. In my fandom consumption, I got wind of the musical Be More Chill and its standout song/gateway drug, Michael in the Bathroom. (It’s worth noting that the reason I got back into musicals in the first place was because I watched a video called Top 10 Broadway Songs that Make You Ugly Cry. Michael in the Bathroom was #9 on the list and Words Fail was #5).

After reading up about Be More Chill and informing myself on the plot and characters, I felt like I had a decent impression of the fandom - Michael was everyone’s favourite character, MITB was the best song, Michael Mell Protection Squad all round and Jeremy was totally wrong to abandon his one real friend. I decided to give the original Two River soundtrack a listen, because I didn’t yet know about its history and that there were two versions of the soundtrack. I got as far as Be More Chill Part 1 before losing interest.

Then, February 2020, I was listening on the free version of Spotify and had ran out of skips, but because I was listening to DEH, algorithmic osmosis caused Spotify to suggest Loser Geek Whatever, I think it was the single version. I recognised it as a Be More Chill song and I had no more skips so I gave it a listen.

And

I

Was

Shook.

In six minutes, my entire perception of the story and characters had been flipped on its head. Jeremy wasn’t a selfish asshole who abandoned his loyal best friend with anxiety for popularity. He was a deeply insecure kid who hated himself so much that he believed every possible instinct he had was the wrong one - including the one telling him that he’ll be failing Michael. The amount of pain and desperation in Will Roland’s vocals definitely added to that too.

And I could sorely relate to that. Feeling inherently defective and wired all wrong and unable to change or fit in no matter what I did or how hard I tried. I would’ve KILLED for an external, omniscient source that would tell me the “right” way to speak and act. And I had a best friend then! I loved her to pieces and I’ve since never had a friend like her, but I still felt lonely on the regular and it was, indeed, “stupid tough.”

I’m far from the only person in history to have felt like this, as a teenager or otherwise, but the amount of people talking about how relatable MITB was vs likewise for LGW was a pretty steep difference. Later, I found out about the history of BMC, how it ran for a short time at a tiny theatre in New Jersey before it surged in popularity online over a year later. LGW wasn’t part of the OCR - it came after the BMC fandom peak and didn’t generate as much Jeremy feels as corresponding Michael feels. I still wonder what the fandom perception would’ve been if LGW had been part of the OCR.

Even though the comparative lack of fandom response was disappointing, this also helped LGW feel much more personal than MITB. Michael in the Bathroom may belong to everyone, but Loser Geek Whatever is mine. That song deserves the same status as Michael in the Bathroom, Words Fail and Burn and all the other huge, dramatic, emotional musical solos.

And that one Spotify suggestion threw me down a rabbit hole of Will Roland love that led me to most of my current friends. Almost enough to make me miss the free version of Spotify. Almost.

(So you can imagine my ire when I found out that the London production of BMC decided to cut LGW in half and tacked the latter half of Upgrade back on. I've made a whole post about why I REALLY don’t think this change works from a storytelling and character perspective, but from an audience perspective, I can see why they went that route.)