I don’t think I have ever been the first person to discover anything that ends up becoming cool. The closest I can even think is maybe way back in the day when I used to watch 120 minutes on the music television and I saw the video for Smells Like Teen Sprit. But if I’m being honest with myself if it was being featured on that TV station it was most likely already not cool. I just remember being so excited to get to school the next day and tell all the people I sat with about this awesome song I heard the night before. Shortly after that you could not turn on the radio without hearing song by them or se someone sporting one of their shirts. But there were those few hours where I felt like I had truly found something magical. It supplemented an early taste for my music taste.
In the early nineties I used to get rides to high school with this guy that lived around the block. On the way to school one day he played this tape. The music that came off this tape intoxicated me. Every lyric that was yelped out of the speakers whined of the pain and agony that I was going through. It was in those early morning rides that I was introduced to what I would come to consider Punk Rock music.
This was my version of punk. Some may call it pop punk or something else. But for me it opened a whole new world to me. Suddenly the music they played on the radio wasn’t cool enough. The music I liked wasn’t even played on the radio. I could go to a rock and roll show almost 3-4 times a week. I cold buy tapes made by all of these bands that I would grow to love. I would become friends with people based on what music they liked. It was so awesome. If you saw someone wearing an Oblivion shirt there would be that sense of community you both were in on a musical secret. I could go into a mosh pit and go crazy. Literally, crazy. I could kick all my appendages in all directions while screaming out he lyrics to Veronica Hates ME!!
All of my cash went to buying CDs. I would lug them around in a backpack and play them all in heavy rotation.
Then I feel like it died out a bit. My friends started liking the heavier metal sounds of thrash but I still wanted my punk music. Then came the kids who made everyone LOVE pop punk. It became more playful. Which was cool but it was kind of the beginning of the end. When the preppy kids started rocking out to green day and blink 182 the secret was no longer there. Suddenly it seemed like it was harder to find shows. Maybe it is a case of if you are not submerged in it you don’t hear about the shows. Now I look to see if the bands I used to love are playing “special shows” I have missed a few. But now I battle with the fear of going and see my idols of back in the day sing songs about love lost, smoking way too many cigarettes, and drinking too much.
Right now I’m into bands that have banjos Mumford and Sons, Avett Brothers to name the ones that I have heard recently. But if I am just hearing them on the radio that must mean that they have been out for years and will most likely start not being good anymore. But I love what I have been hearing from those guys. Perhaps I’ll go out and buy their CD. Do bands even make cassettes anymore?
Be careful out there this St. Patrick’s Day Weekend, to those not married, CONSTANTLY talk to strangers. PLEASE
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