Thursday, February 10, 2011

We are all going to die.

My friend Phil wrote something on the internet that actually shocked me a little. He said that people who talk about the 90's now are the same as people in the 80's who talked about the 60's. Oof. But it's true. Here's a picture of me talking to a friend about the first Snapcase album:


As soon as I got home yesterday, there was another artifact of the past on the doorstep. A record had arrived in the mail of some of those "great songs we used to groove to back then". And while it wasn't Freedom Rock, it was a record that is older now than the music being sold on the Freedom Rock compilation was when it was first advertised.

I'm referring to the MTS Records re-issue of The Age of Quarrel by the Cro-Mags. It's a good record, and you should go and buy a copy right now. (Collector scum footnote: I got the second most limited pressing, the red/black swirl. I could have gotten the limited-to-100 black pressing, but I'm a sucker for colored vinyl.)


So much of the music I listen to now is a total nostalgia trip. I'm okay with this, I guess, because I have a choice to listen to modern music, and I don't (well, I do, but not as often as I don't). There's something that I could write, and it's a thing that I actually started writing before I changed it to what you're reading now about how I got to the point of thinking about music basically all the time. And I'll write it sometime and it'll bore the hell out of you because it'll be just another hippie droning on about how there's no way you could understand the groove of Woodstock because you weren't there man.

In the song "Clenched Fists, Black Eyes" Kevin Seconds sings that "we're aiming for a different goal / succeeding where the hippies failed". Did it work? I don't know. That's up to the next generation to decide, just like it was up to old dudes like Kevin Seconds (and me) to decide that the hippies had failed. I've got a feeling that my son will be able to reference a song that speaks pretty bluntly about the failures of old people like his dumb old dad. That's as it should be. I can't wait to hear it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great. Now I feel OLD. Better go take my Geritol and put on one of them there vinyl records.

Philip Lee said...

Yeah!

Also, to really hammer the point home, uh, to myself, i guess, tonight I am seeing a pantera tribute band, as well as "black garden," who only does sabbath and soundgarden songs. Also, a band doing immortal covers. It might as well be strawberry alarm clock and the mysterians.