They’d know I’m thinking of you…

Seriously, though, what I’m getting at includes a joke about mind-reading and I can never seem pass up an opportunity to quote the Vandals.

We’ve all probably seen the commercial for satellite radio where the spokesman appears from nowhere to explain that they are not actually reading your mind to know exactly what music to play, it just seems like they are.  C’mon, just admit that you watch TV enough to know what I’m talking about… Okay, now that we’ve got that out of our way, ever since I wrote about being a musical dinosaur and commented on the Clash no longer being the only band that matters I have heard, I shit you not, Armagiddeon Time (twice), Clampdown, Career Opportunities, Clash City Rockers, and Should I Stay or Should I Go.  Not to mention a deep track from the Mescalero’s last album, and about enough RHCP (other than Dani California) to fill a greatest hits album.  I would make a joke about the local independent rock stations being the ones who should assure us that they aren’t reading our minds to know what to play, but I’m convinced that they couldn’t be because in between each of those songs was Youth.  How many times can two independent rock stations play the same novelty single?  Not that I have anything against Matisyahu, he’s not bad, but why so often?

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I was raiding my brother’s CD collection last night just to check and see what ratio of listenable music (CD’s I’ve given him over the years) to crap (i.e. Nelly- Country Grammar, Pussycat Dolls- Don-Cha, etc.) and was shocked to find a quite unexpected array of good music.  He had Red Hot Chili Peppers (even if it is just Californication), some Beastie Boys (even if it is To The 5 Boroughs), all the stuff I’ve forced into his collection,  and lots of unobjectionable new bands.  I actually listened to Pretty Girls Make Graves instead of writing them off for having a name that worked as a Smiths song but not as a band name and they’re pretty good.  Their early stuff sounds like early AFI minus the nascent vampirism and their newer stuff sounds interesting (all of these opinions are offhand thoughts upon first listen).  I had heard of Tegan & Sara, but written them off as just another clone of TATU (this, of course is exactly why my brother bought the album in the first place, but that is neither here nor there) and maybe they do cash in on their lesbianism to some degree, but their music isn’t bad.  Okay, their voices do sound like the kids signing Guns of Brixton and Bankrobber on Sandinista!, but once they grow up a little, and maybe rough up their vocal chords with a gallon or two of whiskey, they’ll sound like little Lucinda Williamses in training.

Other than my brother’s CD collection, there’s the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, the Strokes, I haven’t heard Decemberunderground yet, but Miss Murder sounds (to quote myself) vampirically delicious, Gnarls Barkley is great, slow things down a little and there’s West Indian Girl, if you don’t mind covers there’s Nouvelle Vague (their Guns of Brixton cover makes me wanna cry) and Sun Kil Moon (a whole album of Modest Mouse covers; odd but good), then we can’t forget Modest Mouse, and this is just my short list.  What I’m working towards, is that there is a ton of good new music which does more than its share of outweighing the crap on MTV.  And where that leads, is into the disclaimer that what I’m about to say is in no way meant to imply that I don’t like new music.  This is not meant as a rant about the bad old days when music was good and the kids appreciated it.  It might sound like that, but I swear it’s just an aging punk lamenting his acquiescence to being an aging punk.

Whether I like it or not,  I have become a musical dinosaur ahead of my time.  What I didn’t realize when I formed my self-identity around the music of a generation slightly older than myself was that I was signing away the end of my time as somebody who was hip to the music scene.  If I were ten years older, it would be perfectly acceptable for me to feel old standing in line to get into a concert wondering how many of the kids around me can even name half the members of the Clash.  Gone are the days when the only band that matters were important to people.  Billy Idol has become an 80’s novelty act, and most kids don’t even know he was in a punk band at one time let alone realize that anybody ever took him seriously.  Bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam are coming out with new albums and radio DJ’s are wondering out loud whether these bands haven’t climbed over the proverbial hill.  None of the kids you see at the Belly Up, or Cane’s, or 4th and B, or to move up the coast, at the Whiskey, or the Key Club, or the Knitting Factory know who Layne Staley was anymore, or if they do, only enough to ask “isn’t he the guy from Pearl Jam that died a few years ago?” and it seems like the only kids who care about Kurt Cobain anymore only care because they have fun trying to blame Courtney Love for murdering him as a part of some grand conspiracy theory.

To shorten things up a bit, the names and sounds that I have come to identify myself by are no longer current music news, they have become answers to questions in the MTV version of trivial pursuit; a history lesson, at best.  It’s not that I have much of a problem with this.  Time goes by, and things change; that is not what my gripe is.  I just don’t like it when people make me feel old.  I’m only 23 dammit.  I’m old enough to know that dammit should be spelled damnit, but I’m young enough not to care because my way is how Blink-182 spelled it and maybe Tom Delonge is already on his third or fourth new band since they called it quits, but I remember when people hated Enema of the State because it “wasn’t as punk” as Cheshire Cat, paving the way for Unwritten Law and AFI fans across southern California.

Anyway, excuse an aging punk and his eccentricities, just watch out for my elbows in the pit.

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