On the Record: Professor Lucy De Souza and Paramore’s Riot! (The ‘Non-Performative Answer’)

On the Record is a column about getting to know our professors through their music taste, built around a deceptively simple question: What’s your favorite album of all time?

For this third installment, I spoke with Assistant Professor of Psychology Lucy De Souza ’16 MA ’17. When I asked about her favorite album, she didn’t hesitate, but she did qualify her answer.

“I’m gonna go with the non-performative answer,” she said. “Paramore’s Riot!”

It’s the kind of answer that cuts against the grain a little. No deep cut, no carefully curated pick, just Riot!, an album that lives somewhere between foundational and, for some, vaguely embarrassing. De Souza is aware of that tension. There’s a kind of self-consciousness that can creep into how people talk about pop punk, especially in spaces like the University, where people tend to think carefully about taste and how they present it. As she put it, students here can be “very heady” about music. But for her, the choice isn’t ironic or apologetic: It’s direct.

Part of that has to do with timing.

Riot! came out in 2007, when De Souza was a teenager, or, as she puts it, a “pop punk emo kid.” The album, she explains, is inseparable from the images of that moment: Warped Tour, Bamboozle, being out in parking lots with friends, the first stretch of independence when concerts meant freedom as much as music. Before streaming was the main source of music for teenagers, radio was king, and according to De Souza, Paramore was everywhere in the pop-punk scene.

“It was just really fun,” she said. “It makes you want to…jump.”

But what stuck wasn’t just the energy, it was the perspective. In a pop-punk genre largely dominated by male voices, like Panic! at the Disco and Fall Out Boy, Paramore—fronted by Hayley Williams—offered something that felt different.

“It’s basically her diary,” De Souza said, describing the album’s confessional quality.

Even now, she recognizes its flaws—songs like “Misery Business” come with baggage—but she frames them as part of a specific moment: teenage feelings, unfiltered and sometimes messy. At the time, that emotional intensity wasn’t something to critique, it was something to relate to. As De Souza put it, she was “a teenager… with big feelings.”

Looking back now, that relationship has shifted, but it hasn’t disappeared. De Souza still returns to Paramore, in part because the band itself has changed. Williams has grown, and the music has grown with her—something that, for De Souza, makes the connection feel continuous rather than frozen in adolescence. It’s not just nostalgia; it’s a throughline.

There’s also something broader going on in how the music lives now. De Souza pointed out the way Paramore found lasting resonance in spaces you might not immediately expect, especially within the Black community. What might seem, on the surface, like a very specific mid-2000s pop-punk moment has taken on a different kind of cultural afterlife, one that speaks to the flexibility of the sound and the way it carries across contexts.

That resonance isn’t as unexpected as it might seem.

In her 2018 Nylon piece “Yes, Black People Love Paramore, Here’s Why,” Taylor Bryant argues that Black listeners’ connection to Paramore is part of a much longer musical lineage. Rock, punk, and emo—genres often coded as white—have roots in Black musical traditions, from the blues to early rock ’n’ roll. As Bryant suggests, the appeal of Paramore isn’t a crossover so much as a continuation; it’s an extension of forms of expression that have always been there, even if they haven’t always been recognized that way.

At the same time, the connection is emotional as much as historical. Bryant points to the band’s vulnerability—their focus on heartbreak, frustration, and intensity—as something that resonates across audiences, especially in traditions where feeling is central to the music. There’s a directness to Paramore’s sound, and to Hayley Williams’ voice in particular, that feels less like genre and more like expression. In that sense, the band’s afterlife isn’t just about nostalgia: It’s about recognition.

And for De Souza, part of what keeps Riot! alive is much simpler. It’s catchy. It builds. It makes you want to move. When I asked her to sum it up in a sentence, she didn’t overthink it: She loves the album because “it makes you jump up and down.” That simplicity feels important. Riot! doesn’t ask to be over-explained—it just connects.

And maybe that’s also why it makes sense as her answer. Not because it’s the most “impressive choice,” as she puts it, but because it says something more useful. It points to a version of De Souza that isn’t that far removed from the students she teaches now—someone who remembers what it feels like for everything to feel big, urgent, and personal all at once.

“Everything feels big,” she said, reflecting on that time.

When I asked her to sum up her love for the album in one sentence, she circled back.

“Like I said, it just makes you wanna jump up and down,” De Souza said.

To conclude the interview, I asked what she hopes students might understand about her through this choice, and she kept it just as simple.

“I can still relate!” she said. “I understand the experiences that students are having on campus…the stress, the dynamics. I get you. I get you guys!”

For De Souza, it’s less about the album itself than what it represents—a way of recognizing that version of yourself, and, in turn, recognizing it in others. A way of saying: I’ve been there. I get it. I get you because I get me. 

Have a professor you’d like to see featured for their music taste next? Shoot me an email!

Griffin Abdo can be reached at gabdo@wesleyan.edu.